Organizational Behavior and Change

Leadership is a critical role in any global, technological organization. This course explores how the concepts of creativity, entrepreneurial and critical thinking, emotional and self-awareness, passion, diversity, communication, and ethics inform and affect leadership practice. The course considers a variety of contemporary leadership challenges including how leaders work effectively across cultural, technological, and disciplinary boundaries, how leaders foster new ideas and bring them to fruition, how they communicate effectively and persuasively to diverse stakeholders, and how they make decisions that are both ethical and effective. The course is designed to 1) increase students’ awareness of their own leadership styles, 2) examine the responsibilities of leadership, and 3) determine best practices in leadership.

This course focuses on the basic knowledge and processes required of managers to understand behavior in organizations and to apply this knowledge to organizational change. Topics include communication and trust, power and leadership, group and intergroup processes, conflict and conflict management, and work and organizational design. Students apply their knowledge of organizational behavior to the analysis, implementation, and leadership of organizational change. Lectures, video presentations, case studies, group discussions and mini-projects are employed to introduce and illustrate the basic elements of organizational behavior and change.

This upper-level course invites students to consider the importance of ethics, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility for leading global enterprises effectively. Students will be asked to reflect on their own leadership styles and to engage the complex, ethical dimensions of leadership in modern organizations. The course will engage students using lecture, video presentations, case studies, guest speakers, fieldwork, and mini-projects.