MGMT1003 Management, People and Organisations
The Complete Exam Bible · S2 2026MGMT1003 Overview
- Level 1 undergraduate course
- Semester 2, 2026
- Research School of Management
- Weekly lecture and tutorial
- Four assessment components
What the course is about
Management, People and Organisations at the Australian National University is a first-year survey of the theories and practices that prepare you to manage and lead.
- Assessed by Tutorial participation, three closed-book in-tutorial quizzes, a group presentation and an in-person final exam with mixed question formats.
- Hardest step Moving from recognising a theory to applying it: the tutorials ask you to diagnose a case with named concepts, propose changes and say how each could fail.
- How to prepare Learn each theory's author, structure and evidence well enough to answer without notes, then practise applying it to a short case.
How MGMT1003 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorial participation | 10% | Attend 10 tutorials in Weeks 2 to 12 and post in the weekly Canvas discussion; up to 2% may come from the ANU SONA research scheme |
| In-tutorial quizzes (3 × 10%) | 30% | Closed book on Canvas in your registered tutorial, Weeks 3, 8 and 11; 20 questions in 20 minutes, one attempt, no late submission |
| Group presentation | 25% | Groups of 4 to 5 from one tutorial, formed in Week 7; 10 minutes plus 5 minutes of questions, Weeks 11 and 12 |
| Final exam | 35% | Sat on campus in the official exam weeks; true or false, multiple choice, short answer and essay |
All four weights come from the assessment slides of the Week 1 welcome lecture and total 100%. The Canvas schedule table describes participation as 1% each week from Week 2 to Week 12, while the lecture and the Week 2 tutorial give 10%; the SONA option is described once as an extra 2% and once as a substitute for participation points, capped at 2%. The welcome lecture places presentations in Week 10 or 11, while the Week 6 materials and the schedule say Weeks 11 and 12. Check the Canvas assignment pages for your tutorial.
Assessment structure
What MGMT1003 covers
Twelve chapters follow the teaching from Week 2 to Week 6: motivation, personality, groups and teams, new ventures and cross-cultural management.
Motivation, Reward and Punishment
Direction, intensity and persistence, ability and opportunity, forced ranking, incentives and the three limitsMotivation is inferred, not seen
The second week of MGMT1003 defines motivation as a force that moves a person to behave in a particular way, read from three signals: the direction of a choice, the intensity of effort and how long it persists.
- Direction, intensity and persistence as signs of motivation
- Ability, motivation and opportunity as separate inputs to performance
- Forced distribution at IBM and General Electric
- What research shows about punishment and forced ranking
- Autonomy, mastery and purpose once pay is adequate
- Incentives on simple versus complex tasks
Needs, Self-Determination and Two-Factor Theory
Maslow's hierarchy and prepotency, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the undermining effect, motivators and hygiene factorsThree content theories
This chapter covers the theories that ask what people want from work. Maslow orders five needs by priority; the research keeps the list but not the strict order.
- Maslow's five needs and prepotency
- What the evidence supports in the hierarchy
- Intrinsic and extrinsic sources of motivation
- Autonomy, competence and relatedness
- The undermining effect of expected tangible rewards
- Motivators versus hygiene factors
Goal Setting, Expectancy and Job Design
Specific, challenging, accepted goals, side effects, the VIE model and the job characteristics modelGoals, calculations and the work itself
Goal-setting theory, the best supported in Week 2, says specific, challenging and accepted goals with feedback raise performance up to the limit of ability, and it comes with side effects.
- Four conditions for an effective goal
- The goal difficulty curve
- Side effects of goals, including unethical behaviour
- Expectancy, instrumentality and valence
- Limits of expectancy theory
- Job rotation, enlargement and enrichment
Self-Concept, Self-Awareness and Perception Bias
Individual differences, self-aspects and self-complexity, the better-than-average effect and the fundamental attribution errorKnowing yourself first
Week 3 starts with individual differences: stable, measurable attributes that differ between people and survive training, only some of which matter for a given job.
- Five assumptions about individual differences
- Self-concept and self-schemas
- Self-aspects and self-complexity
- The better-than-average effect
- The fundamental attribution error
- Rating behaviour rather than character
The Big Five, HEXACO and Job Performance
Lexical origins, scoring the ten-item inventory, conscientiousness and emotional stability, and the limits of testingMeasuring personality
The Big Five emerged from the lexical hypothesis rather than a theory, and every person sits on all five continuous factors. HEXACO replaces it with six factors, adding honesty-humility.
- The lexical hypothesis and the origins of the Big Five
- Five factors as degrees, not types
- HEXACO and honesty-humility
- Scoring the ten-item personality inventory
- Hurtz and Donovan's correlations with performance
- Traits that predict specific outcomes
Situational Strength, Fit and Dark Traits
Weak and strong situations, person-job and person-organisation fit, job crafting, locus of control and the Dark TriadWhen personality matters
Situational strength theory explains why personality shows in some jobs and not others: clarity, consistency, constraints and consequences make a situation strong and different people behave alike.
- Weak and strong situations
- Clarity, consistency, constraints and consequences
- Person-job fit and person-organisation fit
- Task, relationship and cognitive job crafting
- Internal and external locus of control
- Authoritarianism and Machiavellianism
Group Norms, Conformity and Social Loafing
Asch's line experiment, descriptive and injunctive norms, pluralistic ignorance, Ringelmann and the three-to-six ruleThe unwritten rules
Week 4 moves from the individual to the group. Norms are shared standards that are rarely written down and are enforced by disapproval.
- Why teams outperform individuals
- Groups, norms and how norms are enforced
- Asch's line experiment and conformity
- Descriptive versus injunctive norms
- Pluralistic ignorance and perceived norms
- Ringelmann and social loafing
Diversity, Teams and Team Creativity
Costs before benefits, multicultural experience and creativity, team cohesion, four team norms and equal participationDiversity has a timeline
Diverse groups pay costs first, more conflict and slower communication, and collect benefits later, better decisions and more creative ideas.
- Costs and benefits of group diversity
- Multicultural experience and creativity
- The difference between a group and a team
- Positive synergy and team cohesiveness
- Four norms worth establishing early
- Team creativity versus team innovation
Entrepreneurs, Start-Ups and Social Ventures
Start-up versus small business, founder types and myths, the survival gap, AI-era ventures and social enterpriseWho starts what, and why now
Week 5 defines entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs and start-ups, sorts founders by motivation and tests three myths against evidence.
- Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs and start-ups
- Types of entrepreneur by motivation
- Three myths about founders
- Why small firms can win now
- The survival gap in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor
- Where AI enters a new venture and what stays scarce
Launching, Financing and Growing a New Venture
Validation and pivots, the Business Model Canvas, debt and equity, dilution, legal structures and growth stagesFrom idea to funded venture
The chapter follows the lecture's five launch steps: start with an idea, validate it with real customers, write the plan, choose a legal structure and arrange finance.
- Five steps to a launched venture
- Validation, minimum viable products and pivots
- The business plan and the Business Model Canvas
- Sole trader, partnership and company
- Debt and equity financing
- Dilution across funding rounds
National Culture and the Hofstede Dimensions
The iceberg model, layers of culture, Hofstede's study, power distance, individualism and uncertainty avoidanceCulture you cannot see
Week 6 opens with competent managers abroad who broke rules nobody had written down.
- Why cross-cultural management matters
- Culture defined and the iceberg model
- Six layers of culture and three rival explanations
- Hofstede's IBM study and the six dimensions
- Power distance at work
- Individualism, collectivism and perceived norms
Communication Context, Critique and Cultural Intelligence
High and low context, monochronic time, the ecological fallacy, the four CQ capabilities and negotiation stylesBeyond the scores
Hall's high and low context communication and monochronic versus polychronic time account for more everyday confusion at work than a national score does.
- High-context and low-context communication
- Monochronic and polychronic time
- GLOBE and universalism versus particularism
- Six critiques of national culture frameworks
- The ecological fallacy
- The four capabilities of cultural intelligence
It starts from the claim that no single quality makes a good manager: effective management combines technical competence, judgement, integrity and, above all, the ability to work with people. Each theory is taught with the evidence behind it, often a meta-analysis, so you learn both what the theory says and how far the research supports it.
How the weeks build
The teaching widens its field of vision week by week.
Week 2 covers work motivation: why punishment and incentives disappoint, then Maslow, self-determination theory, Herzberg, goal setting, expectancy theory and job design. Week 3 turns to personality: the self-concept, biased self and other perception, the Big Five and HEXACO, what personality predicts at work, situational strength and the dark traits.
Week 4 moves to groups and teams: norms and conformity, social loafing and team size, diversity and team creativity. Week 5 looks at start-ups, financing and growth, and Week 6 at cross-cultural management through Hofstede, Hall, the critique of national scores and cultural intelligence.
Later weeks cover social responsibility, communication, decision making, leadership and organisational culture.
How it is taught and assessed
A weekly lecture is followed by a tutorial built around discussion, a case and a short Canvas post.
Assessment combines tutorial participation, three closed-book in-tutorial quizzes, a group presentation in the later tutorials and a final exam held in person during the exam period, with true or false, multiple-choice, short-answer and essay questions.
Worked example · free
How much of a start-up do founders keep after four equity rounds?
- 1Set up the rule: selling 20% leaves the existing owners 80% of what they held, so each round multiplies the founders' stake by 0.8.
- 1Rounds 1 and 2: 100% × 0.8 = 80%, then 80% × 0.8 = 64%.
- 1Rounds 3 and 4: 64% × 0.8 = 51.2%, then 51.2% × 0.8 = 40.96%, about 41%.
- 1Compare with one half: 51.2% is still above 50% after Round 3, so the founders first hold less than half after Round 4.
Key terms
- Expectancy Theory
- Vroom's model in which motivation depends on expectancy, instrumentality and valence: whether effort raises performance, whether performance brings an outcome, and how much that outcome is valued.
- Two-Factor Theory
- Herzberg's view that motivators in the work create satisfaction while hygiene factors in the setting only prevent dissatisfaction, so the two lie on separate scales.
- Self-Determination Theory
- Deci and Ryan's account in which autonomy, competence and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation, the drive that comes from the task itself.
- Goal-Setting Theory
- Locke and Latham's finding that specific, challenging, accepted goals with feedback outperform vague or easy goals, up to the limit of ability.
- Job Characteristics Model
- Hackman and Oldham's model linking five core features of a job, from autonomy and feedback to variety, identity and significance, to three psychological states and to motivation, quality and satisfaction.
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- The tendency to explain other people's behaviour by their personal traits while underestimating the situation they are in.
- Big Five
- Five broad, continuous personality factors: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience.
- Situational Strength
- How far clear, consistent cues, constraints and consequences in a setting override personality, so that different people behave alike.
- Social Loafing
- The drop in individual effort that happens when a person works as part of a group rather than alone, driven by perceived inequity and hidden individual input.
- Injunctive Norm
- A shared belief about what group members approve or disapprove of, which carries the threat of social sanction for breaking it.
- Pluralistic Ignorance
- A group's incorrect perception of its own norm, which leads members to conform to a standard that few of them actually hold.
- Power Distance
- Hofstede's dimension for how far the less powerful members of a society accept that power is distributed unequally.
- Ecological Fallacy
- The error of using a group average, such as a national culture score, to make a claim about one individual in that group.
- Cultural Intelligence
- An individual's capability to function effectively in culturally diverse settings, made up of metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural parts.
MGMT1003 FAQ
How is the grade made up in this management course?
Four components make up the mark: tutorial participation worth 10%, three in-tutorial quizzes worth 10% each for a total of 30%, a group presentation worth 25% and a final exam worth 35%. The weights come from the Week 1 welcome lecture. Participation counts both attending tutorials and posting in the weekly Canvas discussion.
What is the final exam like?
According to the welcome lecture it is sat on campus, in person, during the official exam weeks, with various formats including true or false, multiple choice, short answer and essay. Late submission is not accepted. An early Canvas page title still says the format was to be decided, so confirm the arrangement on Canvas and use the Week 12 exam review.
How do the in-tutorial quizzes work?
There are three, in Weeks 3, 8 and 11, each worth 10%. Each is closed book, taken on Canvas in the tutorial you are registered in, with 20 questions, a 20-minute limit and one attempt. Leaving the quiz window is recorded and treated as an integrity breach that scores zero. Quiz 2 covers Weeks 4 to 7 and Quiz 3 Weeks 8 to 10.
How are tutorial participation marks earned?
The Week 2 tutorial splits the 10% into half a mark for attending each of ten tutorials and half for each weekly Canvas discussion post, which closes at 5pm the day before your tutorial. The welcome lecture also mentions up to 2% from taking part in ANU SONA research studies before 5pm on Friday of Week 11.
What happens in the group presentation?
Your Week 7 tutorial is where groups of four or five are set up; if you are absent, your tutor assigns you at random. Each group chooses an issue from a list and presents an analysis and solutions using a specific framework, theory or concept. Talks run ten minutes plus five minutes of questions, and the examiner stops you at ten minutes.
Which parts of the course do students find hardest?
The breadth of named theories is the first challenge, because the quizzes are closed book and test exact recognition of authors, factors and conditions. The second is application: the tutorials ask you to diagnose a case with named concepts, propose concrete changes, say how each could fail and argue the opposite case, which is harder than defining a term.
Which textbook does the course use?
The course text is Management by Samson, Daft and Donnet, seventh edition, published by Cengage in 2021; the eighth edition is also fine and both are held in the library. Each week links to a chapter, for example Chapter 16 on motivating employees for Week 2 and Chapter 4 on managing in a global environment for Week 6.
Questions students ask in each MGMT1003 chapter
- Why do managers infer motivation instead of measuring it?
- Because motivation itself is invisible. What a manager can observe is the direction of a choice, the effort put in and how long it is kept up. Describing a change in those three signals is more precise than calling someone unmotivated, and it points to which part of the job to look at. Chapter 01 · Motivation, Reward and Punishment
- Is Maslow's hierarchy still accepted?
- Partly. A review by Wahba and Bridwell found little support for the fixed order or for one need activating the next. A study across 123 countries found the five needs do predict wellbeing, but people meet them in no fixed sequence. The lecture advice is to use the needs as a checklist rather than a staircase. Chapter 02 · Needs, Self-Determination and Two-Factor Theory
- Why does a vague goal like 'do your best' underperform?
- It gives effort nothing to be measured against. Goal-setting research shows specific, difficult goals reliably outperform it, as long as the goal is accepted, supported by feedback and not beyond the person's ability, where performance falls away as the goal is abandoned. Chapter 03 · Goal Setting, Expectancy and Job Design
- Why does the lecture say self-ratings are not accurate?
- Because of the better-than-average effect. People think flattering traits describe them better than unflattering ones, rate themselves above others and above how others rate them, especially on vague traits such as generous and on traits they care about. A manager should treat a self-rating as one input and collect ratings from several sources. Chapter 04 · Self-Concept, Self-Awareness and Perception Bias
- How do you score the ten-item personality inventory?
- Rate the ten items from 1 to 7, reverse-score five items (numbers 2, 6, 8, 9 and 10) by taking each rating away from 8, then average each trait's pair: extraversion from items 1 and 6, agreeableness from 2 and 7, conscientiousness from 3 and 8, neuroticism from 4 and 9, and openness from 5 and 10. Chapter 05 · The Big Five, HEXACO and Job Performance
- What makes a work situation strong?
- Four components: clear cues about duties, cues that are consistent with each other, constraints on individual freedom to decide, and important, clearly understood consequences. When all four are high, employees act on the organisation's rules rather than their personality, as airline pilots do with checklists and standard procedures. Chapter 06 · Situational Strength, Fit and Dark Traits
- What did Asch's line experiment show?
- That people often go along with a unanimous wrong answer they can see is wrong. In the lecture's figures, 37% of responses conformed, 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% never did. The pressure comes from fear of being disliked or rejected, even when the stakes are trivial. Chapter 07 · Group Norms, Conformity and Social Loafing
- Does living abroad really make people more creative?
- The studies cited in the lecture link time spent living abroad, not travelling, with creativity. People asked to imagine living in a foreign country solved more creativity items than those imagining travel, a hometown day or a supermarket trip. The proposed mechanism is adaptation to another set of norms, which raises openness to experience. Chapter 08 · Diversity, Teams and Team Creativity
- What is the difference between a start-up and a small business?
- A start-up is built to find a repeatable, scalable model and could serve twice the customers without doubling its people; a small business, such as a cafe or consultancy billing by the day, looks for a steady income. Growth capital suits growth and serial founders, not survival or lifestyle ones. Chapter 09 · Entrepreneurs, Start-Ups and Social Ventures
- What counts as evidence that customers want a product?
- Commitments rather than compliments. Money paid up front, a signed intention to buy or a crowdfunding pledge counts as evidence; saying an idea sounds interesting does not. Ask how customers handle the problem today and what that costs, instead of asking whether they like your concept. Chapter 10 · Launching, Financing and Growing a New Venture
- What did Hofstede's original study measure?
- More than 88,000 IBM staff in 72 countries completed over 116,000 surveys collected between 1967 and 1973. Holding the employer constant let him argue that country differences reflected national culture. Four dimensions appeared in 1980, long-term orientation in 1991 and indulgence versus restraint in 2010. Chapter 11 · National Culture and the Hofstede Dimensions
- What is the difference between high-context and low-context communication?
- In low-context communication meaning sits in the words, so messages are explicit and directness is a courtesy. In high-context communication meaning sits in the relationship and setting, so messages are indirect and a phrase such as 'that will be difficult' may mean no. Misreading that row causes a great deal of international project failure. Chapter 12 · Communication Context, Critique and Cultural Intelligence
How to study for the exam
Build two layers of preparation, because the assessment tests both. For recognition, make a one-page sheet per week that lists each theory with its author, year, structure and headline finding: Maslow 1943, Herzberg 1959, Vroom 1964, Hackman and Oldham 1976, the Big Five factors with Hurtz and Donovan's correlations, Hofstede's six dimensions.
Test yourself without notes under a one-minute-per-question clock, since that is the quiz pace. For application, take one short case each week and run the tutorial routine: name two concepts that explain it, propose three specific changes, say how each could fail, and state the strongest argument that the problem is something else. Post a version of that answer in the Canvas discussion, which also earns participation marks.
Before the exam, plan essay answers that connect weeks, for example motivation theories that assume the individual is the unit and why they travel badly across cultures.
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