Organizational Behavior and Leadership (OBL)

The Organizational Behavior and Leadership (OBL) major will prepare you to assume leadership roles essential to meeting the challenges and uncertainty that confront today’s organizations. Globalization, cultural diversity, technology advancement, keen competition, constrained resources, seemingly instant communication, and a profusion of information are some of the factors that influence the effectiveness of organizations. The OBL program is structured to equip you with the skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and tools that will allow you to facilitate both your success and the success of the organizations where you serve.

Program Goals

As an OBL major you will pursue the following goals:

• Develop a fuller awareness and appreciation of self, others, society and the world through the Jesuit educational values of moral and ethical leadership, social justice, academic rigor, and service to others.
• Analyze and synthesize how cognitive, behavioral, and emotional outcomes contribute to sustain organizations.
• Demonstrate competence in relevant skills appropriate to professionals.
• Apply concurrently organizational behavior and leadership theory to practice in the classroom, organization, and society.
• Work effectively with diverse individuals and groups through a broad, interdisciplinary liberal arts foundation.

Program Objectives

The curriculum presents theoretical frameworks for exploring and explaining human behavior in the workplace. With a focus on the organization's social and intellectual capital, the OBL program provides a broad perspective that allows students to go beyond their own accepted ways of interacting and working with others. Through classroom emphasis on critical thinking and independent judgment, students learn to be active investigators of organizational life. By applying and examining theoretical principles in the workplace, they become active participants in their own learning. In this way, students develop the conceptual and problem-solving skills that an organizational leader needs to plan, organize, and lead a group or an entire organization.

Program Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the Bachelor of Science in Organizational Behavior and Leadership, a graduate will have acquired:

• Apply the theory and research of organizational behavior and leadership to practice.
• Relate structure, context and communication patterns to organizations to the development of social and intellectual capital.
• Appreciate the role of analytical and research methods in the systematic study of organizational problems and issues.
• Choose communication strategies that best fit emerging organizational challenges.
• Link the theories of organizational leadership to systems and organizational learning.
• Understand the characteristics of effective and ineffective group dynamics.
• Recognize the complexity of leading successful change initiatives.
• Reconcile the financial tradeoffs in the pursuit of desired organizational outcomes through the use of financial analysis and budgeting.