RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP
2 credit hours
This course centers on the ethical and moral aspects of leadership. The goal of the course is to stimulate you to understand ethical concepts and frameworks and how they apply to leadership situations you will encounter in business. The course does not presume to dictate what is right and wrong. Rather, the course offers different perspectives relevant to responsible decision-making, moral reasoning, and incorporating values into how you conduct yourself as a business leader, a member of society, and the kind of person you aspire to be.
Throughout the course, we will use cases, scenarios and experiential activities that will engage you in recognizing the ethical aspects of business situations, diagnosing the ethical dilemmas and tensions embedded in these situations and developing action plans that best fulfill the ethical principles at hand. In this sense, we want you to go beyond the role of a passive observer and evaluator to project yourself into the situations we consider, analyze the ethics of these situations drawing from frameworks we develop and your own system of values, propose solutions you are willing to implement and defend, and receive feedback from your fellow students. We will ask you to work actively with others in class to sort out ethical issues, debate different courses of action, and present your views. Your active engagement will bring to life the ethical principles covered by the course and allow you to work through ethical situations like those you will experience in your career.
In summary, the overall objectives of the course are:
- To explore the various ethical issues that underlie leadership in business settings
- To learn and apply frameworks that can be used to guide ethical decision-making
- To understand barriers to making effective ethical decisions
- To assess and articulate your personal value system and recognize the challenges of being true to your own standards of integrity
- To think critically about numerous psychological, organizational, and cultural processes that complicate ethical decision-making
- To sharpen your ability to develop and implement action plans that integrate ethical, organizational, and business considerations and take into account the affected stakeholders
Explore how you can customize your degree by selecting from wide-ranging concentrations of study that focus on specialized disciplines. You can also request information to learn more.
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