GROUP INTERACTION AND LEADERSHIP
Program
Updated A.Y. 2020-2021
Course Description
Course aim is to develop a cognitive approach apt to promptly understand and elaborate on leadership issues, starting from small group dynamics up to the strategic leadership level, key for governance of complex systems. Leadership is a vital function of the collective action. It has originated in the ancestral human groups and was molded by hunting and survival needs. The basic leadership mechanisms are hence related to the small group and are largely based on emotional interactions. The need to extend leadership from the small group to complex organizations gives way to great challenges, still very often unresolved. Such extension demands specific cultural and cognitive skills, needed especially for leaders at the strategic level, who must operate on ample domains, up to far away time horizons, with great value at stake. The course will therefore touch upon small group leadership, useful to lead at the supervisory level and base of the dynamics of the collective action, to expand to complex organization dynamics and to strategic level leadership, with special reference to the strategic thinking needed in our volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and rapidly changing world. Systems thinking, including the ability to orchestrate ecosystems and a systemic view of sustainability, is a course fundamental. Conflict management and negotiation concepts and techniques are also addressed as enablers of effective collective interaction.
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