Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular term. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the MyBU Student Portal for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• QST MO 838: People Strategies to Drive Performance
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTMO712 OR QSTMO713) - Using readings, case studies and outside speakers, this course focuses on the perspective of the general manager and looks at the utilization of human capital to drive business and organizational performance. The ability to diagnose and improve the alignment between people strategy and business strategy is highly valued in today's economy. Leaders need to not only be able to think strategically and systematically about different aspects of managing an organization's human assets but also the development and implementation of policies and programs to achieve competitive advantage through people.
• QST MO 842: Power and Politics in Organizations
  This course is about getting things done in the real world, where power and politics might be obstacles in your way. This course aims to build students' intuition for understanding power dynamics and using them effectively to analyze their organizational environment and achieve their goals. Both power and politics profoundly impact how one perceives problems and opportunities and, subsequently, decides upon courses of action. In this course, students will work to unearth their implicit theories and feelings about power and politics, test underlying assumptions they hold, and over-write outdated scripts about gaining power and influence so as to develop a more accurate and realistic point of view. Learning how to navigate, wield, and yield power effectively is like learning any complex skill--it rarely comes naturally and usually takes a lot of practice. This course creates the conditions for this type of learning to occur.
• QST MO 844: Managing Organizational Change
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTMO712 OR QSTMO713) - The premise of this course is that because change is the only constant in today's global business environment, the ability to create meaningful and sustained change through organizations is essential for your effectiveness as a leader. In this course, you will hone your ability to identify the need for change and then how to execute organization change with an emphasis on specific skills such as managing resistance, effective communication, and influencing others. The course has a large student-led component where students will put their change skills to work in analyzing change challenges from fellow students. This course is particularly relevant for those wishing to develop their leadership and consultation capabilities.
• QST MO 847: Managing High Performance Teams and Project Groups
  This course introduces the challenges of leading and participating in teams and project groups. It emphasizes the role of leadership in composing teams, motivating members, and creating an environment in which teams and their members grow in capacity over time. This course will use cases, experiential exercises, and group projects to help students gain both knowledge of team dynamics and the skills to shape them.
• QST MO 848: Leadership Challenge
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTMO712 OR QSTMO713) - This course examines the essence of leadership; its relationship to managing; and the behaviors, attitudes and perspectives that distinguish leaders. Leadership is considered in a variety of ways: leadership in crises, at the top, in the middle, and in groups. Case studies, students' past experiences, instruments, and other learning activities provide opportunities for students to assess and develop their leadership talents.
• QST MO 853: Negotiations
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTMO712 OR QSTMO713) - Negotiations are part of daily life inside of organizations and out; yet, effective strategies for negotiation are elusive. Across a variety of negotiation contexts, you will learn different frameworks for thinking about negotiations and best practices. Intellectually, there is an emphasis on the tensions and strategies around claiming and creating value. Practically, there is an emphasis on skill-building through hands-on exercises entailing both individual and team-based negotiations. Students are expected to gain confidence as negotiators through experiential learning.
• QST MO 856: Mediation and Conflict Resolution
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTMO853) - Conflict is an integral part of human interaction, and the way organizations approach and manage conflict between people impacts employee morale and attrition, and influences productivity and business outcomes. In order to manage conflict effectively, managers need to understand what causes conflict, how people behave in conflict, and how their responses influence outcomes. In this course students will learn how to identify conflict, assess its impact and respond accordingly. Students will compare different systems of dispute resolution and how to best apply them in the workplace. The course seeks to simulate this process by combining conceptual and experiential approaches, involving exercises, case studies, lectures, videos, feedback, and group work. This course qualifies as basic mediation training, consistent with the requirements of the Massachusetts court systems and Mediator's Confidentiality Statute.
• QST MO 858: Necessary Conversations
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTMO712 OR QSTMO713) - This course focuses on building your capacity to engage effectively in conversations that are necessary for you to thrive, professionally and personally, across a variety of roles and contexts. Each of us needs to be effective in providing and receiving feedback and help in our relationships with peers, subordinates, leaders, family members, friends. Amidst different power dynamics, we need to address interpersonal conflicts, dysfunctional team dynamics, destructive situations, and perceived injustices in ways that strengthen both outcomes and our relationships with others. As managers, we need to use conversation as a primary tool for clarifying and maintaining roles, task boundaries, and scope of authority when delegating to subordinates and working with peers. As leaders, we need to use conversation to navigate the inevitable fallout from significant leadership transitions, painful organizational events, strategic shifts, and larger societal issues that impact organizational life. As partners, we need to move into and through conversations that enable our relationships to grow rather than stagnate. The course integrates theory and practice to enable MBA students to develop knowledge, insight, and skill in conducting such necessary conversations.
• QST MO 860: People Analytics
  This course focuses on developments in People Analytics, an evolving data-driven approach to employee decisions and practices. Managers must decide how to lead people in the context of new technologies, management practices, empirical methods, and increased collaboration with external stakeholders (e.g. software vendors, consultants, academic researchers). The goal of the course is 1) to provide an overview of the people analytics field, 2) to develop skills in research design, and 3) to understand how to implement people analytics projects in an effective and responsible manner. The course covers theory, practice, and methods that are critical for addressing people- related challenges at companies, such as hiring, retaining, evaluating, rewarding performance, and managing teams and social networks, to name a few. While a background in statistics, analytics and regression methods is helpful, it is not required for success in the course. 3 cr.
• QST MO 895: Action Learning Directed Study in Management and Organizations
  ALDS: MGMT&ORGS
• QST MO 898: Directed Study: Management & Organizations
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - Graduate-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST MO 899: Directed Study: Management & Organizations
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - Graduate-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST MO 917: The Craft of Theorizing Research
  Research projects are like gems that need polishing and the craft of polishing them to uncover a theoretical contribution can partly be learned. This intensive course is designed to help participants polish their gems-in- the- making and sharpen their emerging contributions. The seminar is primarily designed for doctoral students who have already collected and/or analyzed data. The common denominator for participants is that they be engaged in research projects reliant on qualitative or quantitative data (e.g., archives, interviews, field observations, and surveys) and be willing to share with the class a draft analytical memo, paper, or chapter from their research.
• QST MO 919: Seminar in Macro-Organizational Behavior
  This course examines theory and research about organization design, relations between organizations and environments, and inter-organizational relations. The emphasis is on the behavior of organizations as systems themselves and on their relations with the larger context in which they are embedded. The course examines topics such as: organizations as open systems, as institutions, as elements in ecological systems and other perspectives on large scale organization theory and dynamics. The course is a basic survey of theory and research on macro-organizational theory.
• QST MO 923: Field Studies Seminar
  This doctoral seminar is designed to introduce students to the process of qualitative research and provide them an opportunity to enrich their understanding and cultivate skills required for collecting, analyzing, theorizing and writing up qualitative data. By the end of the course, they should be more sensitive and skilled researchers, better readers, and/or more informed gate keepers of qualitative research. They should also be better, e.g. less fearful and more knowledgeable, writers of research. To enable this, we will focus on core practices of observation and listening, discovery and validation, theorizing, and writing and re-writing as applied in the context of qualitative research projects. We will combine practical, hands-on experiences (e.g., conducting an interview, analyzing a piece of text, writing our way to clarity) with readings about research methodology and examination of articles using qualitative research. The course assignments primarily involve the practical application of a qualitative method or approach as informed by the practice, readings, class discussion and students' deliberation and integration of the various materials.
• QST MO 990: Current Topics Seminar
  For PhD students in the Organizational Behavior department. Registered by permission only.
• QST MO 998: Directed Study: Management & Organizations
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - PhD-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST MO 999: Directed Study: Management & Organizations
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - PhD-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST MS 650: Career Foundations
  
• QST MS 660: Career Skill Building