Organizational Management and Leadership course descriptions

ORG-501: FOUNDATIONS OF LEADERSHIP MANAGEMENT (6 credits)
This course concentrates on understanding the challenges faced by today's leaders. Participants compare and contrast management and leadership and discover a natural approach to the leadership style that works for them while at the same time exploring techniques to develop leadership skills in others. The focus of the course is to bridge the distance between leadership theory and management practice. Students examine the outlook, skills and behavior essential to successful leadership. Topics include leadership theory, motivation, group dynamics, communication, stress management, status, power and politics as well as organizational culture, ethics and applied leadership. Students will leave the course with a clearer and stronger understanding of their own leadership style and gain an appreciation for seeing its potential in others. Note: If students have already taken ORG-500, they may not earn credit for ORG-501.

ORR-510: ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH (3 credits)
This course will equip students with the skills to conduct and complete the type of research and information-gathering projects that become a significant part of organizational life of most managers. The course also provides knowledge and techniques students will find helpful in researching questions and problems encountered in other MSM courses and especially in their Thesis/Applied Project (TAP). With the use of pertinent literature and practice exercises, students are led through major steps of the research process: framing the research problem or question; identifying suitable information sources and planning the information search; collecting the needed information and analyzing and manipulating the information to yield appropriate results; and, especially, assembling and presenting, orally and in writing, the outcomes of research in an audience-friendly fashion. In covering primary and secondary sources of information, the course will consider questionnaires, interviews, and manual and electronic library and index searches. Commonly used statistical tools and techniques will be presented, but not with the intent to make students experts in statistical analysis. With statistics, as with questionnaires, the goal is that students be able to read and evaluate questionnaire-based research using statistical analysis. Students will not be expected to imitate or replicate the more complex of these studies.

EIO-520:  ECONOMIC ISSUES IN ORGANIZATION (3 credits)
In the larger (macro) sense of economics, the purpose of this course is to interpret economic concepts and theory so that students can read some of the economic signals, know some of the key variables and make sense of their organizations' economic environments, from a management point of view. The course will provide a brief review of national income accounts as background for understanding such variables as GDP, GNP and personal income. Highlights of the banking and Federal Reserve System will also be reviewed to gain insight about fiscal and monetary policy, and interest rates and their movements. Some consideration will be given to economic forecasting, but in this, as in other topics, the emphasis will not be in creating forecasts or analysis, but in being able to use and appraise them, and in knowing where to find needed information. A second portion of this course concerns itself with the micro aspect of economics, relating to the operations of individual organizations. Here the emphasis will be on applying certain tools developed by economists which managers have found useful in capital budgeting analysis, investment analysis and estimating rates of return, product (and process) costing and pricing, and again, economic forecasting at the level of the individual organization.

HRM-530: HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT (3 credits)
In the interest of policies and practices which effectively employ an organization's human resources toward the accomplishment of organization goals, this course focuses upon such processes central to Human Resources Management (HRM), as staffing (including job analysis), employee training and development, appraisal and reward, and career planning. The functions of a human resource department are outlined, but the emphasis of the course is on every manager's responsibility to manage human resources staff reporting. In discussion of the elements of the HRM process, the course will cover, through the use of case studies, exercises and articles, such issues as employee motivation, conflict resolution, performance management, negotiations, leadership, management and leadership styles, and labor relations.

FAM-540: FINANCE AND ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERS (3 credits)
In the context of protecting investor funds and (for business organizations) applying these funds to produce a return on investment, this course considers the issues involved in managing an organization's financial resources and accounting for their applications. Among these issues are the selection of the firm's financial structure and the management of its financial assets, financial planning and budgeting for capital projects and continuing operations, reporting to shareholders and other stakeholders, and providing managers with the financial and accounting information necessary for the execution of their roles and responsibilities. While finance is the most visible focus of this course, accounting and its processes are treated as indispensable providers of the information employed by financial and other managers. The course provides a theoretical background for dealing with the above issues and processes, but its principal concerns are the day-to-day, year-to-year decisions and problems encountered by operating managers as they strive for judicious employment of the organization's financial and other resources in pursuit of organization goals. The emphasis on operating managers implies that the course does not pretend to equip students to be financial managers and accountants, but intends rather to equip “other-function” managers to work effectively with managers of finance and accounting and within the systems that they have developed. The learning materials of the course, in addition to texts and articles, include case studies and problems, and simulation exercises. Where applicable, software commonly used by accounting and financial managers will be introduced.

OML-610: ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP I (3 credits)
Part I introduces the concept of leadership and the differences between leadership and management. Students are introduced to research on leadership, including studies of traits and leadership styles, contingency and situational models of leadership, charismatic and transformational leadership, women as leaders, followership and emotional intelligence as it pertains to leadership. Students evaluate their own leadership styles and skills and, through case studies, analyze the leadership in various organizations. Finally, in a comprehensive term paper, students evaluate the leadership in their organizations and their own leadership qualities and goals.

OML-620: ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP II (3 credits)
With an emphasis on group behaviors, this course covers specific dynamic of units, groups and teams; the development and the consequences of informal customs, behaviors and norms in work groups; good and/or bad examples of group problem solving/decision making; the emergence and consequences of informal power, authority and leadership; dealing with diversity in the work group; when change comes to the work group; patterns of communication in the work group; formal and informal incentives and motivations of the work group; and empowering the work group. Work on these topics will draw from the theory and understanding gained from previous courses taken. Seminar coverage of these topics is not intended to be comprehensive; it will be selective and applied. Students will be required to examine and relate elements of theory and principles gained from other organizational management courses to the perceptions of their experience and to practice in their employer organization or organizations with which they are closely familiar.