Daniel Kahneman- Econ 490

When I saw this prompt for team organization and success, there was one specific team that I was a part of that came immediately to mind. In high school, I was part of a choir that achieved an immense amount of success due to the leadership and organization of our directors. As described by Bolman and Deal in chapter 5 of the textbook, our choir ran under dual authority, although selection was not democratic and our choir director had been tenured at our high school for 25 years. Our main choir director, Mrs. Tobison, had the final word on all matters but we also had an assistant director that worked under Mrs Tobison and influenced the decisions the choir made. Mrs. Tobison handled the chamber choir, which was also our competition choir, and the select ensemble women’s choir, while Mrs Spurling handled the freshmen and sophomore choir and the all girl freshmen choir. In terms of logistics, Mrs. Tobison arranged all of our concerts, picked our music, ran rehearsals, and acted as t...

In my current line of work, opportunism has presented itself more in the past year than in any other job or experience I've had in my life. At the bar I work at we have a tip out system that is based on highest sales made, this was pushed by our owner to increase total sales of the bar and to encourage bartenders to bring their friends out to the bar. Now there are two distinct ways that I have seen opportunism present in the workplace. The first one would be serving someone who is clearly ordering for an underage patron. While technically legal since the purchasing party is 21 and with clear incentive to take the sale to receive the extra sales, this opportunity presents itself a staggering amount on most nights and for 95% of cases, I do not serve them. Although the chance of getting caught is not exceedingly common, the risk of getting fired and fined by the Champaign police department are enough deterrents for me to avoid the situation completely. The other case of opportunism ...

Throughout my high school and college career, I have found myself part of many different organizations that operate quite differently from each other. The main two that come to mind are the retail store I worked at in high school and the campus bar that I work at currently. The retail store that I worked at was different from the traditional retail store due to the manner in which they went about purchasing inventory. I worked for TJ Maxx, which prides itself in providing brand name fashion for a fraction of the price.  I was only a cashier/sales associate, however, I still got a very good look at the organization of the store due to my extended time of employment. There were three managers: the store manager, the hiring manager, and the floor manager. Underneath them were the co-ordinators which served as a middle link in rank between the starting associate and the manager. The scheduling was all handled by management and you would have up to three weeks of scheduling at a time....

Daniel Kahneman, born on March 5th of 1934, was a very influential character in the world of economics due to his application of psychological analysis to economic behavior. Kahneman began his career as professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After becoming a distinguished professor, he travelled to America to further his research at several well known universities. On his visit to Harvard, Kahneman joined fellow Hebrew University alum Amos Tversky and began work on research which involved human decision making. Kahneman was one of the first to publish work on prospect theory, which explained that when faced with decision that deal with economic risk, humans tend to make less rational decision. These papers dispelled the common theory that humans made economical decisions without bias or clout, which led the building blocks to the study of behavioral economics. Kahneman later received the Nobel Memorial prize in economic sciences for his discoveries. These discov...

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