Week 6 — Overall Study Guide

Week 6 is titled Global Talent Management, and it asks a question the rest of the course has been building toward: once an organization has recruited, selected, trained, and measured its people, how does it hold that culture together when it grows, when it crosses borders, and when its choices affect people well beyond its own payroll? Chapter 17 supplies the international lens — how national culture shapes what talent management looks like once an organization leaves its home country. Chapter 18 supplies the ethical lens — how an organization designs and implements a genuine organizational responsibility initiative rather than a cosmetic one. Together they are the last two chapters of Cascio and Aguinis, and Week 6 is the last full week of graded work in the course.

The week carries real weight. The Final Presentation alone is worth 23% of the course grade — more than every other single assignment in the term — and it closes out a three-part Amazon case arc that began in Week 4. In Week 4 you built Amazon's recruiting and selection strategy; in Week 5 you designed the implementation and measurement plan behind it; in Week 6 you address the hardest question of the three: how does Amazon reinforce and sustain its culture as it keeps growing, and what does organizational responsibility look like once that culture crosses into the rest of the world? Treat this week's work as the capstone it is.

Overview Table of Deliverables

The table below reproduces the Week 6 Overview page's deliverable table exactly. Three assessments carry weight this week, totaling 29% of the course grade — nearly a third of the term in a single week.

The Canvas Overview page lists three Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs). They are reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Read the three outcomes as one continuous argument. WLO 1 and WLO 2 together establish that culture is not a soft, background variable — it is a namable, measurable set of dimensions that changes what "good" talent management looks like from one country to the next. WLO 3 shifts from analysis to strategy: once you understand what organizational responsibility is, the course wants you to actually design the mechanism that builds it into an organization's talent practices. All three converge in the Final Presentation, which is graded against all three WLOs simultaneously — the single deliverable this week that cannot get away with addressing only one of them.

The required text for the course remains Cascio, W. F., & Aguinis, H. (2019). Applied Psychology in Talent Management (8th ed.). SAGE Publications, available in full text through the Ebook Central database in the UAGC Library. Week 6 assigns the final two chapters; the Canvas Resources page describes each and ties it to specific deliverables.

For a full walk-through of each chapter's frameworks, key terms, and closing questions, see the dedicated Chapter 17 and Chapter 18 deep-dive study guides on this site — this overview does not repeat that material, only where it lands in the week's work.

Articles, the Edmans Video, and the Webpage

Beyond the two textbook chapters, the Resources page names three articles, one video, and one webpage that anchor the week's discussion and presentation work.

• Caldwell, C., Al Asmi, K. R., AlBusaidi, Z., & Esmaail, R. (2024). People, processes, systems, and leadership — Keys to organizational performance. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 17(1), Article 8. Covers the essentials for effective organizational performance and the importance of integrated organizational factors; assists the Walmart Case Study discussion forum.
• Lewis, B. (2023). How do you solve a problem like quitting? Amazon has committed to expanding workers' upskilling opportunities and is encouraging other employers to do the same. TD Magazine, 77(2). Covers Amazon's commitment to employee upskilling and how skill-development focus keeps companies ahead of the market; assists the Final Presentation.
• Masood, H., & Singh, P. (2023). The post-pandemic work-life initiatives across cultures: Recommendations from human resource management. SAM Advanced Management Journal, 88(2), 64–74. Covers how the COVID-19 crisis forced a review of work-life balance policies and practices; assists the Organizational Social Responsibility discussion forum.
• TEDx Talks. (2015, July 9). Alex Edmans: The social responsibility of business [Video]. YouTube. Edmans discusses the long-run impact of social responsibility and challenges the idea that helping society costs a company profit; assists the Organizational Social Responsibility discussion forum. Video available on Canvas (closed captioning and transcript provided).
• Bishop, T. (2021, February 21). Amazon's new approach to 'human capital' is a telling takeaway from its annual regulatory report. Geekwire. Covers how Amazon's workforce grew sharply in recent years and how the company invests in its workers to nurture talent; assists the Final Presentation.

Recommended Resources

The Resources page also lists two recommended (not required) articles: Bozma and Karcioğlu (2023) on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and talent management, useful for the Organizational Social Responsibility forum, and Rockwood (2022), The Right Mix, on workplace culture ownership and remote-work challenges, useful for both discussion forums. Neither is required reading, but both are efficient, on-theme sources if you need a third citation.

Chapter 17 makes the case that talent management is not culturally neutral. A recruiting, feedback, or compensation practice that works well in one country's cultural context can backfire in another, and the chapter's central tool for reasoning about that difference is the Hofstede model of national culture dimensions — a framework you will apply directly in this week's Walmart Case Study. The chapter picks up a thread that has run through the whole MBA program: you built a hypothetical international Walmart location in BUS 621 (Leadership and Teamwork) and a global marketing plan for it in BUS 622 (Global Marketing). Week 6 asks you to bring the same fictional company or location back a third time and reason through it using this course's specific lens — human capital and talent management.

Chapter 18 closes the textbook by turning from what talent management does inside an organization to what it owes the world outside it. The chapter frames organizational responsibility as something an organization must actively design and implement — a program with intent, structure, and follow-through — rather than a set of good intentions or a mission-statement line. This is the chapter's sharpest edge and the one Discussion Forum 2 and the Final Presentation both test: can you move from defining organizational responsibility to actually strategizing how an organization builds it into daily talent practice?

Week 6 has three graded deliverables, and each has a dedicated study guide that takes the prompt apart in full. The summaries below orient you and point you to the right companion document.

6.1 Discussion Forum 1 — Walmart Case Study

Tagged to WLOs 1 and 2 and CLOs 1, 2, and 3, worth 3%. Building on the Walmart-in-a-new-location scenario you developed in BUS 621 and BUS 622 (or an alternative company, if you prefer), you explain and support which Hofstede dimension your chosen country most likely falls under, then explain how that dimension and cultural sensitivity would shape talent management practices as you expand there. The initial post runs 200 words minimum, due Day 3; two peer replies of 100+ words each are due by Day 7. See the Week 6 Discussion Forum 1 Study Guide.

6.2 Discussion Forum 2 — Organizational Social Responsibility: Human Resource Management's Response

Tagged to WLO 3 and CLOs 2 and 3, worth 3%. After reviewing Chapter 18, the Masood and Singh (2023) article, the Bozma and Karcioğlu (2023) article, and the Edmans TEDx video, you explain the answer Edmans reaches to his own profit-versus-purpose question and why, discuss the approach HR should take toward organizational social responsibility, and cite one real-life example of a company implementing social responsibility that is not already mentioned in the video or the textbook. The initial post runs 200 words minimum, due Day 3; two peer replies of 100+ words each are due by Day 7. See the Week 6 Discussion Forum 2 Study Guide.

6.3 Final Presentation — Amazon: Reinforcing Culture Through Human Capital Development

Tagged to WLOs 1, 2, and 3 and CLOs 1 through 4, worth 23%, and due Day 7 — this is the course's capstone deliverable. Assuming the role of a consultant hired by Amazon to reinforce its culture, you assess Amazon's current culture, propose improvements, forecast changes through growth, and design a plan for sustaining cultural longevity through employees, delivered as an 8-to-10-slide PowerPoint presentation using at least three outside sources beyond the course text. The presentation must also draw on Week 4's contemporary human capital topic and predictive analysis work, completing the three-part Amazon case arc that began with recruiting and selection in Week 4 and continued with implementation and measurement in Week 5. See the Week 6 Final Presentation Study Guide.

Every deliverable this week is, underneath its specific prompt, an argument about organizational culture. The Walmart forum asks how national culture, measured through Hofstede's dimensions, should reshape talent practices abroad. The Organizational Social Responsibility forum asks how HR builds and sustains a culture of responsibility toward employees, customers, and society — and the Edmans video supplies the evidence that this kind of culture drives long-term financial performance rather than costing against it. The Final Presentation applies both lenses at once to a single real company, Amazon, at the scale where culture is hardest to hold together: rapid growth and global reach.

Treat the two textbook chapters as a matched pair rather than two unrelated topics. Chapter 17's cultural-dimension framework explains why the same HR practice lands differently in different countries; Chapter 18's organizational-responsibility framework explains why a company should design deliberate practices — not just avoid violations — in the first place. The Final Presentation is where both frameworks have to work together: Amazon's global expansion (Chapter 17) and its responsibility to the employees it is scaling around (Chapter 18) are the same design problem viewed from two angles.

BUS 623 has built, week over week, from the legal and psychological foundations of talent management toward increasingly integrated, applied skill. Week 6 is the final week of new content and the week that asks you to demonstrate the whole arc at once: legal and ethical grounding (Weeks 1 and 6), recruitment and selection (Weeks 2 through 4), performance and development (Week 5), and now the international and ethical dimensions that determine whether a talent strategy holds up at scale and across borders.

The Final Presentation is deliberately the heaviest-weighted single assessment in the course. It is designed to force integration — a strong presentation cannot simply describe Amazon's culture; it must connect recruiting, training, retention, team development, and organizational responsibility into one coherent, evidence-supported plan, while carrying forward the Week 4 predictive-analysis thread. Treat the rest of the week's reading and discussion work as direct preparation for that single deliverable, not as separate, disconnected tasks.