Organizational Behavior

Employers seek leaders who possess not only the technical acumen to be proficient at their job task, but also the emotional intelligence necessary to build relationships and lead others. In this course, we will provide students the ability to discover their base level of emotional intelligence across a set of 12 learned capacities for recognizing their own feelings and those of others. We will also provide specific techniques and practice opportunities such that students can improve how they manage the emotions of themselves and others to contribute to effective performance at work.

In this course we focus on illuminating aspects of the role of values in commerce through several case studies. These cases include a company that did not adhere to laudable values and failed catastrophically; a company that navigates legal, ethical, and public relations challenges created by adhering to a certain set of values; and a company that reaped benefits socially and financially from a values-driven approach. Each company experienced a crisis, which highlighted the values employed within the company. We also discuss our own professional-personal mission and giving voice to our values. We conclude the course with an articulation of our institutional and personal mission and values.

This course focuses on designing and conducting breakthrough negotiations in context, using the healthcare context as an example. It introduces a dynamic model and illustrates how negotiators should consider characteristics of a specific context in formulating and executing their negotiation strategies. The course uses a variety of exercises and simulations in the healthcare context to facilitate students’ understanding and internalizing of the framework and to sharpen their skills in contextualizing their negotiation strategies.

Collaboration lies at the heart of why we have organizations. Understanding how to motivate and shape collaboration lies at the core of leadership in organizations. Foundational to collaboration is shared understanding: Individuals and teams can only effectively work together when they have the same understanding of what they are trying to achieve, how they will do so, and what the roles of different individuals and teams in that process are. In this course, we explore the importance of such shared understanding for successful collaboration and how leadership can build shared understanding for high-quality performance.

In the modern workplace, work is primarily completed as a part of a team. Thus, it is essential that managers learn how to effectively lead and work within teams. This course will teach students the psychology of teams and effective practices for managing teams in the workplace.

A manager’s primary purpose is to use power to influence subordinates and create an effective organization. This course will teach students how to build power, how to influence people, and the proper use of power in the modern organization through lecture, discussion, and experiential activities.

Study of the nature of creativity, creative thinking skills and ways to encourage, promote, and effectively manage creativity and innovation in complex organizations.

This course explores how processes at the individual, group, organizational, and societal levels intertwine to shape diversity, equity, and inclusion at work. We will discuss how to improve our ability to work within and lead diverse and inclusive teams, and will discuss how to design an equitable workplace.

This course gives students the opportunity to apply their MBA learnings to address an opportunity and/or challenge in the diversity, equity and inclusion space faced by a client organization. Clients represent a variety of industries and will challenge their student-managed teams to address a focused, high-priority DEI-related business issue. The lab is project-centric and student-driven, with regular check-in meetings with the team’s assigned coach and the full class.