Subject areas you need to know
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When doing program evaluation, you need to have some knowledge in a
variety of areas. Programs take place in organizations, so it
helps to know something about organizations. Programs also
involve people working together, so social psychology is
useful. And so on.
Organizations
Organizational Theory: Determinants of
Structure http://www.analytictech.com/mb021/orgtheory.htm
brief
introduction
to
some concepts used in describing and understanding organizational
structure. More notes are here http://www.analytictech.com/mb021/handouts.htm
brief
introductions
to
various organization topics.
Formal Organizations. http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/
See
the
class,
then class notes. Has some class notes with some basic info on
organization behavior.
Overview of Organizational Change http://www.managementhelp.org/org_chng/org_chng.htm
Assembled
by
Carter
McNamara, MBA, PhD . Links to resources, and some basic overviews by
Dr. McNamara.
Smith, M. K. (2001) 'The learning organization', the encyclopedia of
informal education, http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm
summary
of
some
theories of the learning organization, and links to other summaries
related to learning orgs (some of which don't work).
Performance Management http://www.opm.gov/perform/
see the Overview for a very
brief guide to effective organizations, well, the 'official' version
of what an organization needs to be effective. A few other
guides are here too.
UNESCOs Participatory Adult Learning, Documentation and Information
Networking http://www.unesco.org/education/aladin/paldin/
see
class
content, course 2, unit 14 is Organizational Behavior, and unit 15
is Dynamics of Working Together.
Organizational behavior lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkmt6yuze14
by
Don
Wicker, also links to other lectures
Organization change and
resistance to change
Managing Successful Organizational Change in the Public Sector.
Sergio Fernandez, Hal G. Rainey. Public Administration Review
Volume 66 Page 168 - March 2006. http://www.aspanet.org/scriptcontent/index_par_t2p_archives.cfm
There are also commentaries here by Mary Tschirhart, and by
Patrick E. Connor and Fred Thompson, which offer a very brief
summary and discussion.
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2000 Mar–Apr; 7(2): 116–124. Managing
Change, An Overview. Nancy M. Lorenzi and Robert T. Riley. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC61464/
says, for example, "Human beings do not necessarily resist
change automatically; however, many people do resist being changed,
i.e., having changes imposed on them." and "change always requires
the effort to learn the new, which is a loss in terms of time and
energy that could have been used elsewhere."
Teams
Team Diagnostics http://team-diagnostics.com/
has
some
research
and theory, and explanations of team behavior. This site
is from Richard Hackman, Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and
Organizational Psychology at Harvard University, and well known
expert on organizations. This page http://www.team-diagnostics.com/the-model.php
has brief info about what makes a team effective. There
is also a little more info in this technical description of the
survey here http://www.team-diagnostics.com/our-survey.php
and
see
some
pages from Dr. Hackman's book here http://www.leadingteams.org/
The
first
couple
of pages from each chapter are available here.
Characteristics of effective teams and characteristics of
ineffective teams http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/teams.shtml
from
a
management
class. This is for students to develop effectvie student
teams, but gives a few basics on team work that should apply to
anyone.
Welcome to Managing for Quality http://erc.msh.org/quality/index.cfm
has
sections
on
Building Teams http://erc.msh.org/quality/map.cfm#team
A "Sweet 16" Of Rules About Teamwork http://appel.nasa.gov/ask/issues/07/overview/7_resources_letterfromtheeditor.html
also
has
a
full article of 99 rules of teamwork.
Social Psychology
Social psychology is important because it deals, in general, with
groups, how people interact with groups and how people interact with
each other. These are some of the theories.
Social Psychology basics http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/socpsy.html
brief chapters outlining some basic concepts in social
psych, including social learning, persuasion, social economics
(making decisions about social activities, etc), conformity.
Social psychology network http://www.socialpsychology.org/
also
links
to
links
Susan Losh's home page http://mailer.fsu.edu/~slosh/
lists a class:
Social psychology http://mailer.fsu.edu/~slosh/SocialPsychOverview.html
with
topics
like
attitudes, personality, groups
also a class about groups http://mailer.fsu.edu/~slosh/GroupsOverview-2009.html
with
lots
of
group topics.
Behavior or behavior change
These are pretty brief reviews, but can give you some ideas of what
to look for.
Icek
Ajzen's theory of planned behavior http://people.umass.edu/~aizen/index.html
click
on
"TpB" then the model.
Behavior Change Theories and Models http://www.csupomona.edu/~jvgrizzell/best_practices/bctheory.html
very
brief
review
of theories.
Center for Health Communication Research http://chcr.umich.edu/
click
on 'how we do it' and then 'health behavior theories'.
Theory at a Glance https://cissecure.nci.nih.gov/ncipubs/details.asp?pid=1302
This
is
about
health promotion but also reviews theories of behavior.
Changing Minds http://www.changeminds.org/index.htm
"the
largest
site
in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think,
believe, feel and do. " An interesting approach to how to
change minds.
Self Efficacy
Information on Self Efficacy http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html
has
definitions,
articles,
chapters, the place to start.
Self efficacy http://www.positivepractices.com/Efficacy/SelfEfficacy.html
brief
discussions
of
definitions, history, etc.
Other stuff about
organizations
Personality and ability predictors of the "Consequences" Test of
divergent thinking in a large non-student sample. Adrian Furnham,
John Crump, Mark Batey, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Personality and
Individual Differences 46 (2009) 536–540. http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/furnham_batey_etal_09_PAID_conseq.pdf
This
is an article about predicting creativity, or divergent thinking.
The critical conclusion is "Together sex, intelligence and
personality accounted for 12% of the variance." and "The MBTI, Big
Four, accounted for only five percent of the total variance."
They call that meaningful. But, well, that means that 88% of
variance was unaccounted for by these variables, which means that,
well, almost all of creativity cannot be predicted by these tests.
page last updated 9/26/11
last checked 9/26/11
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