Leadership and Organizational Strategy

Students begin their journeys as scholar-practitioners in this doctoral management gateway course. Students will learn what it means to earn a doctorate and a Walden PhD degree. No organization can succeed without being led and managed. Students will graduate with a unique perspective on organizational success. They will develop a personal navigational tool, the skills development and an assessment plan (SDAP) to identify their goals, assess the skills they will need to develop, and begin to consider the importance of managing their time as they deepen their journey into the program. Through this course, students will then be prepared for the journey that will take them from absorbing knowledge to becoming creators of knowledge. During this orientation course, students will grapple with some of the biggest questions facing the management profession. While engaging in these and other questions regarding the future of management, students will be introduced to the full spectrum of Walden resources and become familiarized with Walden's academic support systems. Designed to make them better critical thinkers and scholarly writers, these resources include the Writing Center, the Walden Library, the Academic Skills Center, and the Center for Research Quality. Students also focus on beginning their development of critical reading, writing, and questioning, and reflective skills, all of which are needed to succeed as scholar-practitioners.

A desirable trait of modern managers and leaders is the ability to assess multiple perspectives and the confidence to assert change, if needed. Leaders are also influenced by the function of power. Students will consider the full spectrum of leadership behavior from autocracy to emergent consensus and how rights and powers are distributed to people to achieve their responsibilities in an organization. The power structure also challenges conventional views of organizational structures and influences leadership behaviors.Students in this course are provided with the opportunity to diverge from conventional leadership ideology and behavior through exploration of alternative models and lessons related to power and authority structures. Students will explore ways to reinvent the leadership and organizational structures based on unconventional organizational models. Students analyze and develop new and promising methods, principles, and systems about how new structures and leadership can support the needs of a global environment.

Socially conscious leadership involves the use of widely diverse psycho- and sociographic sensibilities regarding stakeholder interests and those of the larger society. In this course, students learn how to harness such awareness and examine the pursuit and distribution of profit, the mission of the organization, the methods of management, and organizational growth and restructuring to achieve new strategic objectives. They explore the nature of sustainability management including environment, supply chain, social justice, and profit. They also study the nature of formal and informal relationships among people and between an organization and the supply chain in which the organization does business. Students are presented with the opportunity to gain skills necessary to understand the motives as well as the impact of organization and leadership failure.

Leadership in a global context with transnational organizations requires an understanding of the differences that exist among people as employees, colleagues, and customers. Students in this course are introduced to advanced research topics in leadership and organizational behavior as well as ways in which leaders respond to change within an organization as they relate to the challenges of leading in internationalized, cross-cultural, and diverse contexts.Students analyze theories of cross-cultural practice, diversity in thinking, culture and belief systems, and stakeholder management as well as strategic and change management theories. Students also use traditional leadership methods and strategies to explore how the need for change is perceived, understood, and managed, and how change manifests itself from external and internal sources. They actively engage in identifying potential research topics for their dissertation and explore the behavioral and strategic dimensions of the topics under study.