Human Resources (HRCM1-GC)

Globalization has redefined the landscape for managing across borders driving both change and competition. The transnational, a new corporate form, emerged to meet these challenges. From scaling efficiencies globally and creating organizational flexibility to developing worldwide learning capabilities, the transnational must continually evolve to remain competitive. The pace of change and its attendant complexity place significant demands on the international firms ability to grow and execute. Technology, deregulation and economic threats augment this already challenging business environment for the transnational firm. This course will explore the characteristics of the transnational, its development, its operations and its strategic execution on the global landscape. At the end of this course students will be able to identify, analyze and resolve the issues inherent in managing across borders.

In today's business environment, corporate executives and leading professionals must continuously analyze strategic business situations and at times feel limited in their ability to choose appropriate courses of action. In these situations, the executive is expected to utilize sound critical decision making in order to initiate action and move the organization forward, using creative problem solving. The purpose of this course is to provide students with a sound conceptual understanding of the role that Management Science plays in the decision making process. The course will be taught in an applied fashion and whenever possible the "problem scenario approach" will be used. Particular attention will be given to problems, opportunities and decisions facing a manager in today's business world. More specifically, we will discuss and extensively analyze the topics of descriptive and inferential statistics and decision-making. The course will primarily consist of lectures, outside readings, problems, and case studies designed to provide the student with the tools and techniques required to manage processes efficiently and make decisions effectively. At the completion of this course, the student is expected to have gained a working knowledge and understanding of the mathematical models used in Management, how they are constructed and used in practice, and the important contributions they have made to the success of managerial decision-making.

This course introduces the student to the strategic financial and accounting methodologies required to aid the non-financial manager in decision-making. In addition to examining the relationship between finance and the other strategic functions in the organization, particular emphasis will be placed on the impact that finance has on shaping technology-related decisions. At the end of the course, students will be expected to have learned the fundamental financial tools and techniques necessary to be an effective strategic manager.

This course examines the roles of information and computers to facilitate the specification, development, implementation and maintenance of information technology for supporting organization decision-making and strategic planning in today's information age. Topics include: the role of information within organizations; overview of modern hardware and software platforms; systems development architectures; planning, developing and managing IT systems.

This course is the introduction to the MS in Human Capital for all students. The foundations component is designed to provide an overview of all disciplines within Human Capital practice. The disciplines covered are Human Resources Benefits, Compensation, Organizational Change, Training and Development and all aspects of talent management. The immersion component is designed to build community among the entering students and to provide a foundation for the “flow through” skills (skills that apply in all disciplines of Human Capital Management). The objective of Immersion is to introduce skills student can apply to all of their course work and will help students to succeed in the program. The flow through topics includes critical thinking skills, global considerations, understanding, framing, researching and evaluating challenges in practice.

This course will help students understand the basic components of organizations. These components include: culture, structure, motivational influences, group processes, change management initiatives, workplace interactions, and communications within organizations. Students will explore, through written case studies, reading of classic organizational texts, faculty lectures, and video, the basic elements of organizational life. At the successful completion of this course, students will be able to integrate the various theoretical perspectives of leadership and motivation into a coherent understanding of organizational life. In addition, students will be able to understand how the disciplines of psychology (individual and group), sociology, cultural anthropology, human resource management, and social systems theory impact organizations.

This course focuses on how classic strategy paradigms are linked to a sustained competitive advantage. The course examines how changes in the competitive landscape are creating both problems and unique opportunities. Particular emphasis is placed on the ethical dilemmas that confront managers due to advances in technology, greater access to information, and more collaborative ventures that break down traditional proprietary boundaries. Throughout the course, students become proficient at business strategy analysis, creation and implementation within an ethical framework. They review classic and innovative strategy paradigms and how to formulate and implement them under ethical guidelines and gain knowledge of competitive landscapes and the critical alignment between business strategy and human resources strategy.

This course prepares HR professionals to articulate their thoughts clearly, concisely, and accurately to management, employees, and other stakeholders. Topics include: targeting your intended audience, identifying and clarifying your message, writing strong subject lines and headers, organizing your written communications, creating sentences that are readable, and editing your writing.

This course affords the student the opportunity to thoroughly explore a specific area of human resources as it relates to business. Research is a complex undertaking with formal processes, methodologies and design. A successful manager needs not only to be able to research opportunities and/or problems as they present themselves, but also evaluate research produced by others. To do so, s/he must be fully cognizant of acceptable research techniques, data collection, research design, internal and external validity and statistical methods for hypothesis testing. This course equips the student with the required research skills that are necessary to successfully conceptualize a research topic with original ideas and subsequently develop a proposal for researching that topic. Upon completion of the course, students are expected to have learned: how to conduct a literature survey, the hallmarks of scientific research, the hypothetico-deductive method, how to develop a theoretical framework, data collection methods, analysis and interpretation, and how to evaluate a research report. Students will also be introduced to methods for correctly citing references and quoting other works without plagiarizing, infringing upon copyright or violating the rules governing proprietary information. Upon successful completion of this course, students will have completed a research proposal containing all the required, formal elements.

Upon approval of a proposal the student works with a qualified faculty member to research and write up a thesis on a topic in his/her selected concentration area. The finished thesis must demonstrate the students ability to conduct comprehensive research and articulate original ideas and thought processes that make a practical contribution to the existing body of knowledge in the field of human resources. All final papers must be of an academic and research standard that is consistent with the requirements of current journals and publications. In order to successfully complete the project, the students advisor, one other reader from either academe or industry, and the department must approve the thesis.

Today's workplace is increasingly global and representative of many cultures, belief systems, and values that often come into conflict. Knowledge workers who build inclusive and collaborative relationships across organizations enable themselves, their teams, and their organizations to respond quickly and efficiently to new market opportunities, new competitors, acquisitions, shifting market demographics, new technology, and changes in employment regulations. Successful professionals need to understand how their own behaviors and beliefs, intentionally or otherwise, impact others. Whether an organization is primarily domestic or international, the potential for internal conflict increases with the expansion of differences within. In this course, presentations, interactive discussions and dialogues, assigned readings, video, case studies, and student projects are used to explore dimensions of diversity, inclusive approaches, cross cultural models and theories, assessment tools for self, individual, and organizational audits, actions and behaviors that model best practices, and the integration of the knowledge and skills facilitated by diversity to proactively improve cross-cultural relationships. Students will be encouraged to actively apply these concepts to their own past, present, and prospective professional circumstances. Upon successfully completing this course students will have mastered the basic fundamentals of, and perspectives on, diversity and inclusion, various aspects of building trustworthy teams, as well as their impact on inclusive activities and other organizational activities. Students will also be able to integrate their understanding of cultural diversity and its relationship to other core workplace challenges.

This course is designed for students to develop overall competency in designing, constructing, analyzing and interpreting the metrics necessary to position Human Resources as a vital and strategic business function. Upon successful completion of the course, it is expected that students will have developed expertise in the following specific competencies: aligning HR metrics with strategic corporate objectives to drive business results; creating recruiting metrics to reduce costs and improve candidate pools; quantifying employee productivity and customer satisfaction through metrics; integrating compensation and performance metrics to maximize pay for performance effectiveness.

Organizations in every industry and sector increasingly recognize the opportunities that result from a `boundary-less (transnational) perspective. This course will provide students with the opportunity to identify the implications of linking the global marketplace with human capital strategies while searching for world-class solutions. Major topics will include: outsourcing/off-shoring, the role of a core competency approach to organizational development, staff planning, talent training and development in the global learning organization, expatriate issues for employees and their families, cultural diversity, international implications of total compensation/benefits strategies; ethics; and governance. Highly interactive sessions will prepare students to face global human capital challenges in their organizations from a strategic perspective (combined with a sensitivity for the uniqueness of their own environments), allowing them to creatively resolve each and every global issue from the broad spectrum of HR functionalities as they arise at their workplaces.

This course is designed to develop skills for students to deal with managing and resolving workplace conflict. Emphasis will be placed on alternate dispute resolution methodologies, including mediation, and negotiation strategies.

This course will provide students with both the underlying concepts (that include state-of-the-art thinking) along with the latest practices so that they will quickly comprehend the myriad of factors that need to be addressed to ensure an effective total compensation program.

This course provides an overview of the strategic needs of an organization, students explore topics that include, but are not limited to: thinking strategically about staffing issues, selection issues, developing internal talent, succession planning, integrating staffing activities with diversity and equal employment opportunity initiatives, employment tests, and successful employment interviewing.

This course will allow students to specialize in the areas of law governing labor relations and employee rights in the workplace. Special topics will include: collective bargaining; union organizing; de-certification of the union; laws against discrimination; disability law; privacy; and employment litigation. Other subjects will include handling EEOC complaints and working with legal counsel on the resolution of those complaints. 

Today's managers must act as leaders who build collaborative enterprises to enable organizations to respond quickly and efficiently to new market opportunities, new competitors, acquisitions, shifting market demographics, new technology and changes in government regulations. Effective professionals must understand modern leadership and management strategies, and the best ways for working together with others. A key leadership activity is implementing actions that match their organization's people behaviors to the organization's strategy. New strategies might require incremental changes, or sudden metamorphoses into completely new entities, to meet market challenges and/or opportunities. Leaders, working with and through highly trained teams, must guide organizations through these changes. A necessary corollary leadership activity is energizing teams to carry out the transformation processes throughout the organization. In this course, lectures, discussions, assigned readings, case studies, and student projects are used to explore effective leadership, leader-team relations, and successful implementation of organizational transformation. At its conclusion the student will have mastered the basic fundamentals of, and perspectives on, leadership; various aspects of the relationship between leaders and teams, and their impact on transformational and other organizational activities; application of these concepts to the student's own past, present, and prospective professional circumstances.

The focus of this course will be to manage change, and recognize how individuals, teams, and organizations so do. Presentations, interactive dialogues, assigned readings, video, case studies, and student projects will be used to explore structural, process, technological, and human change dynamics. Topics include (but are not limited to) dimensions of change, organizational development/change models and theories, success factors, readiness and assessment tools for self, individual, and organizational audit, culture, actions and behaviors that model best practices, using metrics to benchmark progress, complacency conflicts, competencies, successfully leveraging change and developing initiatives to foster positive attitudes among workplace professionals toward change management

This course is designed to help students understand the basic concepts of organizational theory by studying the impact of the social sciences upon organizational life. By closely examining the processes and interactions within organizations and the theoretical bases upon which they are predicated, students will be able to better understand the problems facing today?s complex organizations. An extensive cadre of case studies and presentations will be used to conduct an in-depth exploration of topics such as individual and group motivation, the learning organization, and leadership stress. Upon successful completion of the course, students will be expected to have developed an appreciation of the importance of the culture and context of organizations, gained insight into the impact of individual behavior upon the functioning of organizations, and analyzed the various components of group processes upon issues such as power, conflict and organizational politics.

A well-performed organizational assessment provides leaders with vital information for improving their organization's operating effectiveness. It also sets the stage for better alignment of a critical resource - the people in the organization - with the organization's current and future strategic directions. Students can expect that this practical, application-oriented course will give them an overview of the primary principles, processes, and practices used to discover an organization's key attributes and opportunities. Students will master the material through use of cases and assignments based in the real world, with an emphasis on immediately applying their learning to real-life situations. Specific topics include (but are not limited to): assessment and analysis planning; typical areas of inquiry and data gathering methods (such as interviews, focus groups, surveys, among others); quantitative and qualitative data analysis; various data reporting formats; and different ways to present results. Critical considerations for each stage of an assessment will be discussed, such as sponsorship; stakeholder analysis; and the benefits and drawbacks of using internal employees versus external consultants. Upon successful completion of this course, students are expected to have mastered the assessment and analysis material in a manner that will allow them to immediately applying their learning to real-life situations. They will also be expected to have acquired the requisite knowledge to help them distinguish between the different kinds of sample interventions that might follow their analysis.

This course is designed to introduce students to the various organizational interventions available to leaders and others who are responsible for improving an organization’s ability to achieve results. Topics include (but are not limited to): prior and future trends in OD; an overview of popular, effective OD tools and techniques; assessing and choosing the right intervention for a particular situation; managing the intervention; overcoming common implementation issues; and evaluation of an intervention’s impact. 

This course will focus on fundamental innovation in human resource management, and in general management as well, in response to the rapidly changing external environment. The course will focus on new ideas, processes, and programs, as opposed to looking for new ways to deliver the same old ideas. This course will encourage innovative ways of thinking about business challenges. 

The course is a foundational course for the practice of organizational coaching. Topics include contracting, establishing trust and intimacy, developing goals, strategies and action plans, managing coaching conversations, managing progress during an engagement, creating awareness, and ethics. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be expected to have developed the ability to apply course content to real-world coaching situations and understand how to use coaching to deepen an individual’s self-awareness in order to promote action and accountability.

Coaching is more of a spoken language than a set of theories, thus it is important that students develop high-level delivery skills for all types of coaching, ensuring that they are able to structure coaching conversations well and work within the theories and frameworks established in the previous module. Using a combination of presentations, challenging live exercises, coaching assignments, guest lecturers, readings and live assessment of skills, students will therefore be prepared for coaching other people in many situations, by applying a range of coaching tools and processes. Topics include contracting, establishing trust and intimacy, developing goals, strategies and action plans, managing coaching conversations, managing progress during an engagement, creating awareness, and ethics. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be expected to have: developed the ability to apply the theories learned in the Foundations course to real-world coaching situations, gained an appreciation of the various techniques used to engage people in a coaching dialogue, learned how to establish a coaching interaction, understood how to use coaching to deepen an individual?s self-awareness in order to promote action and accountability.

Coaching is a learning tool that can be utilized to drive almost any learning and development function in an organization, from induction and general skills training, to transition, succession planning and leadership development. This course provides students with the frameworks and systems for all ways in which coaching can be applied, including looking at a broad range of models and approaches in the field today. Through a combination of presentations (teacher, student and guest), case studies, research, and written assignments, students will develop an understanding of global trends and best-practices in the use of coaching in the workplace. Topics include: life-coaching; internal coaching programs; induction coaching; transition coaching; learning and development initiatives; manager as coach; and developing coaching with respect to cultural considerations. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be expected to be able to design a wide range of coaching programs ready for delivery to an organization, either as an internal or external HR/OD professional or consultant.

This course is designed for individuals who are interested in establishing and growing a small business as a professional coach. This course will cover how to build, maintain and sustain a thriving coaching practice. Students will be presented with and develop ideas, strategies and techniques focusing on best practices for small business development. It will focus on how to build and maintain their own coaching business by exploring the following: business models, income streams, financing strategies, accounts payables, cash flow, investing in your business, developing new billable services and products, pricing and marketing/sales strategies and techniques, and social media presence. Students will also learn how to coach entrepreneurs and small business owners who are looking to start or expand their own practices but are having challenges, facing obstacles or wanting to achieve extraordinary results.

Succession management involves anticipating the strategic leadership needs of the corporation, from the C-Suite to pivotal emerging leadership positions, and identifying and developing a pipeline of high potential leaders to fill those needs. Succession planning is conducted from the perspective of the organization’s interests as opposed to the career development goals of an individual employee. As any organization evolves and changes, there is a continuous need to translate the organization’s strategic direction to a talent value proposition and move people into new positions and experiences that are aligned with this value proposition. Succession planning enables the organization to identify the right candidates for strategically significant positions and to help them successfully transition into these roles.

When organizations invest in talent management and assessment, they are really investing in identifying, measuring and developing those strengths that will allow their workforce and their leaders to execute the business strategy successfully. Talent management and assessment is more than administering assessment instruments and acting on the results. The organization must first be able to translate its strategic goals into organizational capabilities that drive goal attainment. Second, it must be able to translate organizational capabilities into leadership and workforce strengths that will build the required organizational capability. Only then can the organization’s HR group decide how to use assessment to select for, manage and develop the leadership and workforce strengths that matter. Finally, once an assessment strategy is built that is demonstrably aligned with the business strategy, then different assessment tools and practices can be evaluated against it, and investments into talent assessment can be managed as a strategic portfolio.

As an organization grows from domestic to international to transnational, its ability to attract and hire the best talent becomes increasingly challenging. While few organizations currently hire on a truly global basis, many companies are moving closer to this goal. Their ultimate success depends on their ability to identify competencies required across global markets, develop tests and assessments that are valid across cultures, and compare employee skills, abilities, and competencies across business units and regions. This course will address concepts, best practices, and global trends in personnel recruitment and selection.

In order for organizations to succeed in today's volatile, global marketplace, three key strategies are needed: Business/Organizational Strategy, Workforce Strategy and HR Strategy. This course examines the research, issues and best practice technologies for aligning Workforce and HR Strategy to the Organization's Strategy, using rigorous, data-driven analytical frameworks that take guesswork out of the equation.

Companies with the best chance of prospering are those that continue to modify their organizational structure on an ongoing basis to navigate the ever-changing dynamics of the competitive, technological, and environmental landscapes. This course is designed to offer a wealth of applicable industrial and organizational psychology theories, best business practices, and winning techniques to guide companies through the often difficult processes of mergers, acquisitions, downsizings, and other transitions. Topics will include: identifying organization needs and objectives; developing adaptive design strategies and transition stages; managing resources allocation and employee re-grouping and layoff; designing workload reorganization, redistribution, and outsourcing; handling employee behavioral reactions with supportive actions; effective communication strategies; and, metrics for success. By course completion, students will be able to analyze, plan and implement organization resizing in the workplace to help organizations to maximize gains and reduce operating costs, while simultaneously boosting productivity.

This course is designed for today’s managers to understand the strategic rationale, stages, and legislative framework of M&A. This course will emphasize the people-related activities and issues involved in the pre-deal, due diligence, integration planning and implementation stages of M&A. Upon successful completion of this course, students will have the skill sets of key business partners in an organization’s M&A activities and will be able to help organizations develop key strategy, manage soft due diligence activities, provide input into the process of change, advise top management on new organizational structure, create transition teams, oversee communications, manage learning and integration processes, and identify and develop new employee and organizational competencies.

In this course, students explore effective leadership practices that promote the development and engagement of organizational talent at all levels of the system. At its conclusion the student will have mastered the basic fundamentals of, and perspectives on, leadership; various aspects of the talent pipeline and implications and practices of programs and practices on talent effectiveness.

Internships provide students with the opportunity to acquire professional experience and add a real-world perspective to their studies. The course consists of on-site work at a corporation, nonprofit or governmental organization, educational institution, or small and medium sized company that provides an educational experience for the student, under faculty supervision. Students apply the knowledge acquired through their coursework to industry practice and explore career options. This course has GPA and credit completion requirements.

This seminar will enhance curriculum by identification, analysis and application of special topics pertinent to the Human Capital Management degree. The specific titles and content of each seminar will change to reflect emerging areas of interest, which can only be determined at the time of offering. The course may be used to satisfy the elective degree requirement. Applicability to specific concentrations will be noted in the course schedule and is at the department’s discretion

This course is designed to examine the various aspects of individual identity and their implication for the larger organizational system including its impact on performance. Additional emphasis will be placed on the interaction of different identities as they relate to power dynamics and equity in organizational decision making, the talent management process and organizational performance. Topics will include leader subordinate relationships, team dynamics, equity as it relates to diversity in the organization and strategies to promote inclusion across identities.

This practical, application-oriented course gives students an opportunity to learn and apply leading processes, tools and techniques to provide high quality consulting services for individuals, teams and organizations. Throughout the course, students learn processes for client arrangements and contracting; problem definition and analysis; data analytics; planning & designing solutions. They also use tools and techniques for proposing and planning, analyzing, designing, implementing, and for continuously improving business performance.

This requirement will consist of an intensive exploration of the applied aspect of human resource strategy. In the real world, managers must make decisions without perfect information, under conditions of uncertainty, and under time constraints. Students will be assigned to teams each of which manages an organization that competes against one another in an HRM Simulation. This affords them the unique opportunity to make decisions, see how the decisions work out, and then try again. Thus, players get a 'hands on' experience with manipulation key human resources variables in a dynamic setting. The simulation can be programmed to simulate a profit or nonprofit organization that is in manufacturing or service. Teams are expected to establish objectives, plan their strategy, and then make the required decisions dictated by these plans. Typical decision variables involve wages, replacing employees, hiring, promoting from within, training cost for promotions, fringe benefits, budget for other activities, safety, employee participation programs, grievances, human resources information systems, performance appraisal programs, affirmative action program, production levels, overtime, employee morale, turnover, and absenteeism. It is anticipated that this course will be team-taught so that the student will learn to understand and appreciate the many different facets of the strategic role that HR occupies in an organization. In order to expose the students to diverse, real-life situations, industry experts representing the various HR functions in an organization will present actual problem scenarios for the students to analyze, solve and present their findings. Subsequent discussions will introduce the students to how these situations were actually resolved. Finally, students will be required to submit a detailed, written report on a case study analyzed over the course of the semester.

This course parallels the Special Projects: Applied Human Resource Capstone in that it will consist of an intensive exploration of applied aspects of Human Resource Strategy. This course requires students to identify and work on an organizational project in an organization that they are currently a part of or in an organization that has granted approval for the capstone project. The course will be completed under the supervision of the instructor and organizational sponsor. Students are expected to establish objectives, plan their strategy and then make decisions dictated by these plans. Typical decisions variables involve wages, replacing employees, hiring, promoting from within, training cost for promotions, fringe benefits, budget for other activities, safety, employee participation programs, grievances, human resources information systems, performance appraisal programs, affirmative action program, production levels, overtime, employee morale, turnover, and absenteeism.