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This course is designed to increase students' conceptual understanding of leadership in organizations. The course is highly experiential. It is designed to help students discover insights about themselves as leaders, fostering the development of a self-awareness regarding strengths and opportunities for personal growth. In addition the course provides a context for enhancing the skills and competencies that enable a student to become an effective leader in today's highly dynamic, diverse and adaptive organization.
With the plethora of recent high-profile corporate scandals and the financial crisis being blamed in part by the unethical behavior of Wall Street, it is increasingly important to understand how to be an ethical leader. Leading with Values (MO 620) is aimed to help you develop insights about your own values and to understand how to overcome human tendencies that often disconnect our values from our behaviors. Throughout this course we will focus on what is means to lead with values—so the focus is not about being a good follower but rather how to be an ethical leader.
A common complaint about organizations today is that there is not enough leadership. Organizations spend millions developing it and new managers want to understand and develop it. Indeed, leadership is an increasingly important skill in today's flatter, more amorphous organizations. These kinds of organizations, in turn, may demand new and more artful forms of leadership. This course offers an extensive examination of the nature of leadership in organizations, with an emphasis on self-understanding and learning with an emphasis on both a theoretical and practical understanding of leadership.
This is a course about theory and theorizing, and particularly about theoretical “mechanisms.” Mechanisms are theoretical “cogs and wheels” connecting people (on the one hand) and groups, organizations, states, or societies (on the other). Mechanisms can run from macro to micro (e.g., explaining the effects of organizational socialization practices or compensation systems on individual actions), micro to micro (e.g., social comparison processes), or micro to macro (e.g., March and Simon’s theory of how cognitively limited persons can be aggregated into a smart bureaucracy). Theoretical explanations are rife with mechanisms, but they are often implicit. In this course, we seek to make those explanations explicit. The ultimate goal in all this is to improve our thinking and theorizing capabilities.
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Teaching
Management & Organizations Departmental Web Page
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