Instructors:
Dr. Jurgen Willems
Displayed in timetable as:
23-37.509
Language of instruction:
English
Min. | Max. participants:
10 | 41
Comments/contents:
<Important: The full course will be in English (teaching, exercises, course material and examination)>
THE EXAM WILL BE A WRITTEN EXAM IN THE LAST SESSION ON 7 MAY 2019
If you are interested to follow this course, please register at STiNE, in order to receive further updates and additional information.
Objectives of the course
This course focusses on the management of voluntary resources. Managing paid employees in traditional settings has been studied and taught from many perspectives and for different contexts. However, when we look at situations where it is not always possible to incentivize people with tangible rewards, often more creative and interpersonal management approaches have to be applied. Therefore, it is interesting to look at volunteers in nonprofit organizations to get a better insight in how people can be managed and motivated beyond the ‘traditional’ impact of tangible rewards.
Nonprofit organizations have very often to deal with complex management challenges, because many nonprofit organizations (1) have multiple goals, (2) share goals with other organizations, (3) have subjective outcomes, and (4) involve various stakeholders with different interests. In addition, they can rely on voluntary resources which require a special management approach.
As a result, we will start in this course from this nonprofit and volunteer complexity to get insight in several multifaceted management challenges. However, learning points go beyond the strict boundaries of volunteers and nonprofit organizations. By discussing specific challenges in these domains we will touch upon several practical themes:
How are people motivated for voluntary action (e.g. when no salary is given)?
How are expectations of different types of stakeholders adjusted towards each other?
How are expectations of collaborators managed and dealt with?
How do the mission, vision and strategy of an organization attracts (or pushes of) new people?
How can group cohesion in teams be managed
… and other issues.
No prior knowledge is necessary regarding statistics or mathematics.
Content
The content of the course will be divided in two parts. The first part focusses on creating a strong mental reference framework for students on the complexity of the respective management challenges. With this reference framework students will be provided with the most relevant elements to make sound management decisions in this area. For example, we will dig into the psychological, sociological and economic perspectives of volunteering, and with the complexity stemming from multiple goals or multiple stakeholder groups.
With this general background, we will in the second and major part of the course deal with some particular management challenges. In this context we will deal with:
Attract people to engage them in voluntary action and in pro-social behavior.
Managing and building group cohesion for better team performance.
Optimizing an organization’s talent management strategy towards volunteer collaborator?
Volunteer satisfaction improvement to enhance volunteer commitment and efforts.
Necessary conditions that should be fulfilled in order to keep people motivated (avoiding volunteer burn-out)
Rewarding and recognizing volunteer efforts beyond financial incentives
Examination
Examination will happen with a written exam (60~90 minutes).
Looking forward to see you all in class! And please contact me for further questions (jurgen.willems@uni-hamburg.de)
With the best regards,
Jurgen Willems
