Term Paper Guide
Psychology 360
Introduction to Organizational Psychology, University of Michigan
Introduction to the term paper assignment  
Good writing skills are essential for success in any academic work.  This is particularly true for organizational psychology, where writing is the major way we communicate our ideas.  Good writing is a skill that requires practice to perfect.  The two steps of your term paper are designed to give you practice at writing and to provide you with critical comments so that you will know how to improve your writing.  
How to do well.  
While there is no “cookbook” formula for doing well on writing assignments, there are certain norms that lead to success.
1)	Write clear, jargon-free prose.  Read what you have written to make certain it makes sense.  It is also a good idea to let someone else read it before you hand it in to make certain it also makes sense to someone other than yourself.
2)	Think critically about your subject.  We are interested in description (who, what and where) to understand the background of your ideas.  But we are particularly interested in your ideas.  We want to know “why.”
3)	Use the writing guidelines organizational psychologists follow.  Refer to the concluding section of any  January issue of the Academy of Management Review for the past five years for a style guide.  For example, a style guide is on page 67 of the January 1994 (Volume 19, Number 1) Academy of  Management Review.  The Academy of Management Review is available in the Business School Library.  Contact your  GSI for access to additional copies of the Academy of Management guidelines.  
4)	Don’t Plagiarize!  In academia, one of the worst sins you can commit is to plagiarize.  To plagiarize means claiming someone else’s ideas or writing as your own.  When you don’t acknowledge that you are using someone else’s ideas or writing, that is plagiarism.  In academic writing you acknowledge the ideas of others by citing them in the body of your paper and in the bibliography.  Please see the Academy of Management writing guidelines referred to above for the proper citation format.  The use of unacknowledged ideas or writing is plagiarism.  This includes published works, but also includes using term papers written by other students.  
5)	Pay attention to spelling, grammar and sentence construction.  This is not a writing course, but we do care about details.  
6)	Ask for help if you need it.  Professor Finholt and the  GSIs are available to assist you during their office hours.  There is no penalty for asking for help!  
Deadlines and grading.  
The combined worth of the first and final draft of your paper constitutes 40% of your grade!  
The first draft of your paper is due at the beginning of section during the week of  March 10 - 14, and is worth 10% of your final grade.  
The final draft of your paper is due at the beginning of section during the week of April 14 - 18, and is worth 30% of your final grade.  
You will be penalized one grade for each day your writing assignments are late, including papers handed in late the day they are due.  
The Assignment.  
Please choose a familiar organization.  Preferably this will be one in which you have recently participated.  You may choose a work organization, a service organization, a professional association, and so forth.  Since you will be relying solely on your knowledge, make certain you are adequately familiar with the organization you choose.  
In the first draft of the paper, you will be asked to take an initial step toward a critical examination of your chosen organization.  You will do this by using relevant organizational psychological theories to explore a research question related to your organization.  For example, if you worked in a social service agency last summer, you may have observed that many social workers had little patience with their clients.  You might feel that a theory about occupational burnout provides a good model for explaining your observations.  Therefore, in your first draft you would want to describe the agency setting, identify your critical research question related to burnout, document research findings relevant to burnout using 10 to 15 citations from the psychological literature, and then show how the research literature addresses the issue of burnout among the social workers at your agency.  The first draft should be from 15 to 20 typed pages in length, double spaced, and written according to the Academy of Management guidelines.  You will receive written critical comments from us on the first draft, as well as a grade.  As much as possible, you should aim to make your first draft a complete statement about your organization and about your research question.  
In the final draft, you will be asked to revise your first draft based upon the comments we will provide and upon additional thoughts you might have as the course progresses.   
Hints on getting started
Don’t procrastinate!  The due date for your first draft will arrive rapidly and it will coincide with other demands in this course, such as the mid-term exam on February 24, as well as demands in your other courses.  Use these hints to save effort and contact Professor Finholt or your  GSI in office hours if you are stuck.  
1)	Describe your organization: What is the nature and purpose of the organization (what does it do, and why)? How large is it?  How is it organized (how does it accomplish its tasks)?  What is your role in, or relationship to, the organization?  How does your organization relate to other people and other organizations?
2)	Determine what about your organization interests you: Are you interested in the whole organization, or some part of it (a division, factory, work group, supervisor, co-worker, families of workers, etc.)?  What roles do people have in the organization and what are the factors affecting their performance (training, stress, gender, social attitudes, etc.)?  How well does the organization seem to accomplish its tasks?
3)	Think about what your organization does well and what it does poorly: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the organization?  What observations and data can you think of that justify your claims about your organization?  How do these data and observations relate to the psychological literature?  
4)	Apply the lessons you learned in the first homework assignment where you observed an organization, framed a research question, and then used that question to define a literature search.