3
Course Hours Per Week:
15
Course Overview
This course explores theories, concepts, and behaviors of effective leadership necessary to address the challenges of organizational change within higher education and training environments. Students investigate a wide range of related topics including:
- Organizational functioning and culture
- Models of organizations
- Leadership theory and strategies that help facilitate change
- Requisites for sustainable organizational change
In the course project, Organizational Change Plan: Leading a Team Through the Change Process, students lead a small team in proposing or making a change in a higher education institution or corporate training environment. Beginning with an initial assessment of the need for the change, students establish a plan, complete reflections on leadership issues and successes, and plan for long-range assessment of the project.
Course Learning Objectives
- Describe basic models of organizational functioning and behavior that can be employed to help understand the operation of higher education institutions in an ever-changing society
- Critically analyze basic differences in ways higher education institutions are organized and how learning organizations are different from other kinds of institutions
- Describe models and theories of leadership and how they relate to various organizational contexts
- Critically analyze issues of power, politics and change and their influence on administrative leadership and organizational structure
- Identify social, cultural, demographic, economic, political, and technological components of the higher education system external environment to determine the most important changes affecting the system over the next decade
- Use information and concepts about leadership and change in higher education to make leadership decisions within an organizational context
- Describe how higher education systems are able to react, adapt or influence “change events”
- Identify leadership positions within a higher education or corporate training setting and describe how those roles function within the organizational whole
- Develop strategies to assess leadership skills and the ability to facilitate change
- Create a portfolio-ready professional synthesizing project
