Finally, we will look at the dynamics of supervision and motivation as a way of bridging into the last segment of the survey of organizational behavior, the individual level. And now we come to a part of the course where the focus is on developing the skills to have impact. These can be summed up as developing your communication skills but it is much more complex than that easy phrase suggests. Furthermore, you need to learn how to gather information that others may not think to communicate and discover ways to check your interpretations of what may be happening around you. All this information then is combined with your own view of what needs to happen for the organization to move forward and you then have an approach that you want to persuade others to follow.
Persuasion is a particularly important component of communication.
These are all components of a good communicator's skills. Diversity issues and intercultural situations of all kinds are a particular test of these skills. Peter Vaill has made the excellent point that in today's society formal education is something that must be built on if it is to be useful for any length of time. That is certainly doubly true in the case of organizational behavior and theory because organizations and their environments are constantly changing. The purpose of this class will be to assess the usefulness of this course to prepare you to continue to learn in this field and to identify strategies for doing that.