The course focuses on leadership in complex organizations, with a particular interest on: (i) the relationship between complexity, leadership, and innovation, (ii) the importance of open collaboration networks inside and across organizations; (iii) the challenge of cultural/knowledge diversity for new human resource management approaches. It will provide students with foundations of adaptive complex systems theory and will discuss the challenge of this approach for leadership and management.
The course aims to provide students with capabilities of thinking organizations as complex systems and appropriately managing and operating in complex organizations where diversity, internal/external innovation, and peer-to-peer relationships are essential.
The course will integrate theoretical and modelling aspects with case-studies. It will include standard lecture with home/group work and student presentations. Real time online polls to engage students in rich communication and student satisfaction online anonymous questionnaires will be performed each lecture.
The final examination consists of a written text with six open questions (5 points each one). Upon voluntary base, agreement with the teacher and during the course, attendants could perform home/group work on specific topics by writing shorts reports and presenting/discussing them in the class during the last lectures. In this case, the final evaluation will be 50% on the home/group work and 50% on the text (here reduced to 3 open questions, whose composition will vary depending on the topic studied) with an average of points.
There is the reading list:
Goldstein J., Hazy, J. K., and Lichtenstein, B. B. (2010) Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership. Leveraging NonLinear Science to Create Ecologies of Innovation, Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Kupers, R. (2001) What Organizational Leaders Should Know about the New Science of Complexity. Complexity, 6(1), pp. 14-19
Ulh-Bien, M., Marion, R. and McKelvey, B. (2007) Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting Leadership from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), pp. 298-318.
McKelvey, B. (2010) Complexity Leadership: The Secret of Jack Welch’s Success. Int. J. Complexity in Leadership and Management, 1(1), pp. 4-36.
The articles will be available as pdf in the online course materials.
