“I liked this class and really felt challenged. After learning more, I realized these were challenges I was excited about and knew I could handle by pushing myself out of my comfort zone (in a good way!).”
Undergraduate student, Spring 2021
Leadership
in a
Changing World
This course is designed to help you become a more effective leader in a complex and rapidly changing world. Effective leadership— developed over time through practice, feedback, and self-reflection—is crucial for organizational success. While engaging in effective leadership practices can be rewarding, it is also a significant challenge for most people.
This course aims to equip you with the knowledge and tools necessary to improve your leadership capabilities and confidence based on evidence-based practices and leadership theories. Through interactive sessions, we will explore various aspects of effective leadership, assess where you stand in your leadership development journey, and hone your leadership skills.
By the end of the course, you should be able to recognize the importance of interpersonal relationship skills and abilities in effective leadership, discuss key leadership principles and practices in organizational settings with peers, colleagues, supervisors, and mentors, identify your own leadership strengths and areas for development, propose evidence-based solutions to real-world leadership problems, and develop a leadership philosophy based on your personal values and evidence-based strategies.
Managing People In Organizations
We spend most of our lives in organizations: from schools, to sports, college, community activities, internships, and work. Although we spend a lot of time working with, in, or for organizations we rarely stop to think how organizations work and what role we play in them. The ability to manage an organization, its groups, and its people is equally important for organizational success as skills in finance, accounting, marketing, operations, and strategy. Regardless of the field you go into after you graduate, you will need to depend on people to do your job. You will need to work for other people, work with other people, and supervise other people. In order to do so, you must understand the human side of management to complement the technical skills you are learning in other courses. The purpose of this course is to help you (1) understand how people and organizations function based on social science research on work, workers, and organizations, (3) provide you with an opportunity to apply OB concepts to real-world problems and (2) develop skills that will improve your ability to be a valuable organizational member and future manager.
Organizational Behavior PhD Seminar
The purpose of this course is to survey the landscape of theorydriven research in Organizational Behavior (OB). This research seminar will cover foundational and contemporary research. You will gain an in-depth understanding of these topics and develop the scholarly skills needed to critique and develop organizational research. Over the course, you will read and assess research in various areas of organizational behavior; actively participate in seminar discussions; identify and develop your own research ideas; and practice writing and providing feedback. Although we will cover a considerable amount of ground, the vastness of this field means that many areas of current and relevant inquiry must be omitted. Hopefully many of the topics will spark interest to understand the phenomenon at a deeper level on your own. The primary focus of the readings, and the in-class discussion, will be on the theoretical nature of the research as it currently stands in the field. That is, our goal is to understand the theoretical contribution of the current research and to explore how further theoretical contributions can be made. The class structure also allows for you to integrate your own interests with the topics covered in the course to provide support in advancing your own research identity and program.