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Introduction

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Managing Social and Human Capital

University of Pennsylvania

4.5 (1,376 ratings) | 21K Students Enrolled

Course 3 of 6 in the Business Foundations Specialization

People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change your organization’s architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization.

Skills You'll Learn

Decision-Making, Change Management, Human Resources (HR)

Reviews

4.5 (1,376 ratings)

5 stars
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AA

May 26, 2018

The case studies in the course are exemplary. For an MBA student to understand the decision making process at the highest level and to gain right decision making approach this course is a must .

NT

Sep 27, 2017

Top course! I genuinely enjoyed this course. Both lecturers, but especially Mike Useem, are very good speakers, which bring across their expertise and enthusiasm for the topic. Well done!

From the lesson

Motivation and Reward

In this module, you'll learn how motivation affects an individual's performance and how to use that motivation to drive performance. You'll explore how incentive systems are designed and how psychological concepts such as behavior modification, imitation, conformity, and compliance influence and shape these systems. You’ll also examine the current process of hiring employees using technology, tracking systems, and outsourcing. And you’ll learn how you can provide valuable feedback to your employees, and make performance appraisals productive. By the end of this module, you’ll be able to apply what you've learned to best motivate, hire, and evaluate your employees.

Introduction4:32

Motivation10:46

Motivation: The Agency Theory Examples6:51

Designing Incentive Systems17:09

Managing Performance13:32

Taught By

Michael Useem
Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management
Peter Cappelli
Professor of Management, Director, Center for Human Resources

Transcript

>> Hello folks, my name is Peter Cappelli and I'm a professor here at the Wharton School. I've been here for a long time. When I first got here, there was a Republican president in office and it wasn't a Bush, so that gives you some sense of how long I've been here at the Wharton School. We're going to talk about managing human capital in this program. We're going to talk about a bunch of different parts of that that are fundamental, no matter where you are around the world, these issues play out in more or less the same way. We're going to start out talking about motivation, how to get people to do the kinds of things organizations or employers need them to do, how to reward people is a part of that. Hiring practices, how to do that the right way, managing performance and particularly, the issue of performance appraisals. We're going to talk about designing jobs, how to do a better job creating work that is meaningful and improves people's motivation. And work systems that improve performance, fit with the strategy of an organization and make everything better off. So that's the list of topics we're going to work our way through. We're going to start out with some thoughts about employment in general. That is, when you are hiring people, how do we think about that. The first thing to remember is we're talking about people here. Particularly for folks who have more of a technical orientation or an economics orientation, it's easy to think about factors of production and imagine that they're all the same. But they're not, were talking about employment, were talking about hiring and managing. We are talking about people and the reason that's different, just from a practical concern, is that people have legal rights. In most countries of the world, those rights include unionization, the ability to bargain with the employer and basically, it means force the employer to do things the employees want. The ability of management is not unlimited, depending where you are around the world, those legal restrictions can be quite constraining. The U.S. has, probably among the developed countries, the most favorable legal environment for employers. They can do more things the way they want to do them than they could in other countries but even in the U.S., there are lots of constraints on what you can do. Most of the constraints have to do with discrimination against protected groups. In the U.S., you see this legislation in the European Union, other countries as well. Basically, that means you can't discriminate against women, minorities, that means ethnic minorities, religious groups, people because of their religious orientation and in a lot of countries now, age. So that means in the U.S., people over 40, different countries, maybe a little higher. What that means in practice is that you can't take employment actions, hiring, pay, promotions, anything that affects people materially in ways that have a particular impact against those protected groups. And depending what country you're in, the burden is on you to prove that you're not doing that. If it turns out that most of the people laid off are women, for example, the burden on the employer is to show that that was done in a way that was fair and was not intended to be discriminatory and instead was based on something that was objective. In addition to laws, we have social norms that matter as well, And those norms are really ones concerning questions of fairness. And that means the leaders of businesses, political leaders of government, are held accountable to the way they treat their employees independent of whether they're violating the law. This is all by way of a caveat to the things that we're going to talk about. You don't have unlimited power as a manager, as an owner, the way you manage your people, the way you might with how you buy computers or how you assemble parts or something like that or deal with vendors. Employees are not vendors, usually, they're not contractors, they've got a bunch of different rights. Let's bear that in mind when we start talking about the important issues around managing people.

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