I have a complicated and deeply affectionate relationship with MGMT 610 (you can read my earlier post about how I fell in love with teaching Research Methods. If you haven't read that post yet, go ahead - I'll wait!).
The official course description of MGMT 610 calls it "the study and application of diagnostic and quantitative methods for problem diagnosis, implementation, and evaluation of the organizational development process and human resource management practices." Accurate, but sounds exactly like the kind of sentence that makes a student's eyes glaze over before the semester has even started.
In reality, beneath the verbiage, it is a
course on how to figure out what is really going on in an organization using
data! Data, carefully collected and honestly analyzed. It involves statistics, but
goes well beyond statistics into the messier, more interesting territory of
research design, data collection, and the art of presenting findings to decision-makers.
And best of all, this is not a course about talking about using research and
thinking about good research design; instead, students can actually get
involved with doing real research.
Here is a problem I spent several semesters
trying to solve. It is difficult to compress applied organizational research
into a college semester. Doing real organizational research properly takes time
that a semester simply does not have. One has to find a partner organization
willing to be studied, identify a problem that is both meaningful and
researchable, design a survey, gain Institutional Review Board approval (which takes
more than a few weeks), collect data, and then actually analyze it. It would essentially
be a full-time job. Something had to give, and I was not willing to let it be
the learning.
So, I built GPV Inc.(If you're curious about GPV Inc., drop me a note - I'm happy to share more.)
(image Generated by Gemini, 2026)
GPV Inc. (named after a little someone, the most significant person in my life) is a fictional multinational
consulting firm, with organizationally messy problems. Not quite the firm you
would want to work in, but definitely one that you want to study. Rising turnover. A culture that worked
beautifully when the company was small, but has become increasingly uneven as
it has scaled. A workforce spanning four generational cohorts with very
different relationships to work, flexibility, technology, and career
development. And hovering over all of it, the specter of the
Tech-Whose-Name-We-All-Dread.
The case is structured as a
choose-your-own-adventure. Students read through the organizational context and
then meet the HR analytics team. I designed these characters deliberately- reflecting the diversity students are likely to encounter in actual workplaces
across gender, background, and professional orientation. And each one pushes
against stereotype rather than confirming it. Each member of the team is
investigating a different people management problem, and each problem becomes a
potential research project. Students choose the one that genuinely interests
them and spend the semester pursuing it.
I chose the contemporary tensions embedded
in generational conflict, AI anxiety, questions of psychological safety, and
manager effectiveness because these issues are showing up in real organizations
right now. Students, with or without workplace experience, tend to recognize
them immediately because they are not invented for pedagogical convenience.
The assignments of the course are also designed
to scaffold the research process from beginning to end, so that by the time
students sit down to write their final white paper, they have already done
every component of it - defined their research question, conducted a literature
review, built a survey instrument, collected and cleaned data, and run their
analyses. The white paper is where it all comes together into something a
decision-maker can read and act on. The fictional audience for that paper is
Celia Hargrove, GPV's Chief People Officer, who wants findings grounded in
data, not intuition, and recommendations specific enough to actually follow.
I wanted GPV Inc to deliver a consistent
thread running through the entire semester in the form of a single
organizational story that grows in complexity as students grow in capability.
That way, every new technique they learn has some context. I hope my students
learn about the process of research- in its messy, frustrating, annoying glory!
And I am hoping they also find GPV Inc.
genuinely interesting, because exploring how organizations understand their own
people and what it takes to get that understanding right is something I have
never stopped finding fascinating myself. And I also hope they enjoy the
course, even the assignments and research paper, because I certainly had a lot
of fun building it.
