Specialized Tracks

Breadcrumb

Multiple Ways to Customize Your Degree

The MSOL is customizable to fit your career. In addition to the six core courses, you can choose to focus your studies on one of four specialized tracks, or to pursue a general, broad-perspective Organizational Leadership track.

Specialized Tracks

This track is ideal for students who wish to enter or advance a career in Human Resources or who want to focus on enhancing employee satisfaction and organizational performance as they assume increasing management and leadership responsibilities. Courses include:

Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (ORGL 5105)

This course introduces students to theory and research behind negotiation and conflict resolution as they relate to professional experiences in the workplace. Students will learn necessary information for understanding how negotiation can be used to resolve conflict. Students will also apply knowledge about negotiation and conflict resolution through addressing negotiation problems that are commonly faced by managers and professionals.

Human Resources Law (ORGL 5110)

This course provides an overview of employment and labor law, regulations, and emerging issues. Covered topics include: proper classification of workers and pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act, civil rights (race, color, gender, religious, disability, age, and national origin discrimination), family and medical leave, workplace torts and contracts, privacy rights, OSHA, workers' compensation, and the National Labor Relations Act.

Total Rewards Strategies (ORGL 5115)

This course studies the total rewards provided to employees in return for their contributions to an organization. The principles of modern compensation and benefits are considered from legal, practical, and theoretical perspectives. Students examine how compensation and benefits can add strategic value by aligning total compensation with organizational goals.

Training and Development (ORGL 5120)

This course provides an understanding of the knowledge and skills required to assess employee training needs, design and administer employee training and development programs, and evaluate both the efficiency and effectiveness of such programs. Training and development is based on the premise that people are the most valuable asset of an organization.

This track is geared to students who want to hone their ability to think, plan, and operate strategically, lead personnel in the allocation of organizational resources, and accomplish organizational objectives in a deliberate and systematic manner. Courses include:

Strategic Planning in Organizations (ORGL 5205)

This course addresses theories, techniques, and challenges associated with strategic planning. Students are exposed to the processes and tools that drive organizations to create a framework for developing, adapting, and aligning organizational vision, mission, values, and goals to achieve and sustain a strategic advantage. Students gain the knowledge needed to facilitate, formulate, execute, and monitor strategic planning for any organization.

Competitive Analysis & Positioning (ORGL 5210)

This course discusses how to perform a formal competitive analysis to understand better a company’s brand, the brand's position in the marketplace, and the role the brand’s competitors play in shaping the marketplace. The course addresses product positioning, Integrated Marketing Communications, markets (realized and potential), and company/brand strengths and weaknesses and how those may become threats. Students learn how to create Buyer Personas, conduct SWOT analyses, and establish Communication Objectives.

Organizations and the Law (ORGL 5215)

This course provides an overview of business law and the legal environment. Students examine contracts, torts, sales, employment law, property, forms of business organization, and government regulation, and how they impact managerial decision making.

Operations and Designs of Organizations (ORGL 5220)

Students learn to use processes and tools that contribute to the competitiveness and survival of an organization, develop an understanding of how organizations affect and are affected by their environments, and learn principles of organizational operations and design that can be used to improve the match between an organization and its environment.

The Leading Innovation track explores leadership at the intersection of business and innovation and helps students learn to drive strategic organizational transformation. With change as a constant, uncertainty increasing, and technology dramatically progressing, innovation is key to progress. Leading companies are moving beyond a focus on products and services categories to pioneer innovation in business processes, distribution, value chain, business models, and even the functions of management. Yet leading and managing such initiatives are often far more challenging than most executives imagine them to be. This program addresses the gap that exists between the aspirations of executives to innovate and their ability to execute. It focuses on the question: why and how should leadership, innovations, and technologies be leveraged to shape and support strategic and entrepreneurial initiatives in the global competitive landscape.

Courses include:

Leadership and Intrapreneurship (ORGL 5305)

Intrapreneurship is the discipline of behaving entrepreneurially within a large organization. An intrapreneurial leader champions innovative ideas from their inception, through their design, and into the market. This course teaches the student how to build intrapreneurship through the use of motivational techniques characterized by risk-taking, knowledge-sharing, and empowerment.

Design Thinking (ORGL 5310)

Design thinking provides the tools to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there. This course provides an overview of design thinking and work with a model containing four key questions and several tools to help students understand design thinking as a problem solving approach. It also looks at several stories from different organizations that used design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.

Strategy and Innovation (ORGL 5315)

This course is about the issues and challenges of running a firm in a competitive environment. It is an integrative course emphasizing a total organizational perspective as opposed to a functional viewpoint (accounting, finance, marketing, information technology, etc.). The emphasis is on the use innovation as an integral part of business strategy. Furthermore, it gets deeper in studying sustaining innovation enhancements for traditional business models, as well as disruptive innovations for radical new technological models.

Building and Leading Innovative Work Teams (ORGL 5320)

In a business world of increasing complexity, creativity often comes from the synergistic efforts of innovative work teams. In this course the student will first learn how to build innovative work teams, with a special focus on promoting cohesion among groups that are inclusive and diverse. Students will also learn how to diagnosis low-performing groups before they reach the point of failure. The course will then turn its attention to the use of “tight-loose” leadership, which controls the process while giving free rein to diverse thinking. Special attention is paid to specific managerial tools, such as brainstorming, the nominal groups technique, devil’s advocacy, and dialectical inquiry.

Organizational communication is not just about sending messages and exchanging information, or simply concerned with advancing managerial interests. Instead, communication is the key social process that creates and sustains all features of organizational life – including assumptions about power, knowledge, diversity, culture, and teamwork that shape the practice of leadership. We should understand organizations as communication and leadership as fundamentally communicative. Accordingly, the Organizational Communication track offers a perspective that puts communication at the center of our understanding and explanation of all organizational and leadership phenomena.

Courses Include:

Diversity & Organizational Communication (ORGL 5405)

Examines social identity as a communication practice and reframes identities like gender, race, and sexuality as something consequential that we do through ongoing communication at work, rather than as something we are or have and merely bring to work. Students learn to practice reflexivity regarding their own contributions to routine practices of identity and power and to lead others in organizational practices conducive to meaningful diversity.

Dynamics of Group Communication (ORGL 5410)

Focuses on aspects of group communication leaders need for success in a variety of organizational contexts. Topics include decision making, creativity and innovation, conflict management, technology and virtual environments, difference and diversity, systems and institutions, group development and socialization, negotiation, identity, and interaction design. Organizational work often occurs in groups, and communication is essential to effective group work. Therefore, organizational leaders need to understand the dynamics of group communication and improve their group communication skills.

Organizational Culture (ORGL 5415)

Focuses on concepts, theories, and skills that enable individuals to shape their organizational cultures reflectively through designing, performing, and sometimes resisting related communication. The course considers perspectives on: studying and enacting organizational culture (e.g., as a control system), various material and symbolic forms (e.g., stories, rituals, artifacts, etc.), ethical and political issues such as whistleblowing and "managing" diversity, and the challenges of leading organizational culture in the contexts of globalization and continuous change.

Knowledge Management (ORGL 5420)

Discusses how Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives typically define knowledge as a commodity that is easily stored and transferred and explores how technological advancements and claims to knowledge ownership constitute management in KM. The course focuses on alternative conceptions of knowledge and management that increasingly characterize KM, whereby knowledge is understood as a component of ongoing activity, and management is portrayed as the construction of communities of practice that share responsibility for continuous innovation and adaptation.

This is a great track option for those who want to customize their degree to obtain broad exposure to the field of organizational leadership. Students select any four track courses from the offerings available under the other tracks (Human Resources, Leading Innovation, Organizational Communication, and/or Strategic Leadership). With pre-approval, students also have the option of transferring in up to three relevant graduate courses from other programs and colleges.

Search

Other ways to search:

Specialized Tracks

Breadcrumb

Multiple Ways to Customize Your Degree

Specialized Tracks