Leadership Across Cultures. 4

Catalog description

The purpose of this course is to explore, experience, and understand the influences of globalization and societal culture on leadership and help students to develop leadership knowledge, skills, and mindset for leading across the cultures. Leaders of organizations today face many types of challenges. These challenges include the need to design organizations that are capable of coping with rapid change and the greater complexity created by globalization and our increased interconnectedness, the need to understand and shape organizational cultures and to motivate employees, the need to understand and manage politics and conflict between individuals and organizational units, the need to understand and manage diversity, and so on. By exploring the ways in which specific characteristics are valued differently by different cultures, the students acquire frameworks for assessing how to approach a work assignment in a culture that is not their own. This course also explores convergences and divergences of leadership theories and practices. It investigates the cultural roots of leadership across cultures and approaches the rich cultural aspects (both ancient and modern) from the viewpoint of how their philosophy, religion, intellectual traditions, and social/political structures form an integrated society. It analyzes various theoretical frameworks to identify culture's effect on attitudes and behaviors, as well as on approaches to ethics, motivational practices, negotiation patterns, strategic decision making, and change.