4.4.1 Introduction to Assignment 4 of the MOOC

Course subject(s) Module 4. From networks to organisations

This assignment (you can only do the assignment on the Edx platform) is based on a story of a large organization in which leaders and department heads try to decide about a proposed central standard. Such a standard is not in the interest of the department heads, because they prefer to remain autonomous. The central leaders depend on the cooperation of the department heads, who have unique knowledge about their departments. At the same time, the department heads depend on the central leaders because of their formal authority. You will be asked to answer some questions in the context of this story.

On January 1, 2015, a new Board of Governors took office at Edison University. The Board consists of three executive officers and is the highest administrative body in the organization of the university. The university has about 13,000 students and about 5,000 employees.

The University has four faculties:

  • Natural Sciences
  • Social Sciences
  • Law
  • Computer Science

The Board allocates the budget provided by the government. This is a bit of a hassle every year, because the departments all claim more money than can be offered. That’s why the Board proposes a new budgeting system, called PAD (Perform and Deserve). The system is fairly simple. The budget would be allocated on the basis of three factors:

  • The number of staff at the faculty (input indicator; 50%)
  • The number of publications (output indicator; 25%)
  • The number of degrees awarded to students (output indicator; 25%)

At a first meeting the Deans of the four faculties respond as follows:

Creative Commons License
Influencing Stakeholders: Dealing with Power and Dynamics in Teams and Networks by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/influencing-stakeholders-dealing-with-power-and-dynamics-in-teams-and-networks/.
Back to top