Management & Organizations

• 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 SI 839: Design Thinking and Innovation
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTSI750 OR QSTSI751) - This class will examine how managers and leaders can create the conditions for innovation at the individual, team and organizational levels - and how those conditions differ for startup and mature organizations. Managing innovation includes the generation of ideas; the integration of ideas into new product concepts; and the commercialization of ideas. While core strategy courses address the questions of what innovations to pursue and whether and when those innovations will bring value, this course addresses the question of how managers can create organizations to deliver innovations of value. Thus, the course will focus on the practices and processes that mangers need to put in place to enable organizations to execute on an innovation strategy. In doing so, students will evaluate how to balance the challenges of organizing, managing and leading innovation with the need to produce concrete, routine and expected outcomes within the organization. To be innovative, any new idea must resolve the innovation paradox - introducing enough novelty to appeal to new markets while retaining enough familiarity to tap into existing behaviors. Because design and innovation are frequently inseparable in managing this paradox, the class will assess how design contributes to innovation in product, process and business models across industry sectors. The course will also consider the role that all sources of innovation play - including communities, networks, brokers and other forms of open innovation. Students will be asked to reflect upon innovations that have been critical to their lives, and how these innovations were produced and gained market traction. Final group projects will explore how to "rescue" innovations in trouble with turnaround teams.
• QST SR 841: Fundamentals of Nonprofit Management
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTAC710 OR QSTAC711) - The purpose of this course is to teach students about the distinctive challenges of managing high-performing organizations in the nonprofit sector. The course will cover a broad range of topics and it is intended to be a gateway course to the sector and to potential electives and pathways of future learning. The two major projects in the semester (one is individual, one in a team) offer students the chance to choose an area of interest to explore in depth. Other assignments challenge students to identify and analyze key indicators of nonprofit performance and to communicate effectively about those issues to selected stakeholders. A strong grounding in nonprofit accounting and financial management is extremely valuable and so we devote considerable attention to those topics. The course also addresses nonprofit marketing, evaluation, fundraising and revenue generation, growth strategy, impact investing, and the confluence of charity and commerce. The course is oriented to practice and will engage experts in the field.