Strategic Human Resource Management - Curriculum

The MBA core course curriculum provides students with a broad grounding in the functional areas of business - including accounting, finance, management, marketing, economics, and operations - while additional courses target business skills and practices in ethics, data analysis, and decision making. The specialization in Strategic Human Resource Management builds upon this foundation by providing specialized knowledge in the strategic management of human resources - including compensation, staffing, employee and labor relations, and negotiations. Strategic thinking and quantifying the impact of HR decisions on business performance are also emphasized. Classes are taught by world class faculty, including individuals who are highly sought after as advisors by other universities and businesses.

Students entering Fall 2009 or later will typically follow a sequencing of courses similar to the degree plan below:
 

Descriptions for the Strategic Human Resource Management specialization courses include:

Strategic Human Resource Management
This introductory course is designed to help students develop an understanding of how human resource decisions contribute to business performance. No business strategy can be successfully executed unless the right people are in place and are given the opportunity and incentive to contribute to executing the strategy. Specific learning objectives include: creating alignment between human resource strategies and business strategies in a cost-effective manner; designing work systems and roles that allow employees to contribute to organization performance; identifying, selecting, and developing the competencies that allow individuals to contribute to organization performance; using compensation and other HR systems that provide rewards and incentives to attract and retain employees and to encourage them to contribute to organization performance; understanding how an employment relationship is like a contract and how the nature of this contract is evolving and taking different forms; making human resource decisions that are legal and ethical; and learning how to use quantitative tools and information where appropriate to support decisions.

Personnel Staffing and Evaluation
This course is designed to help students develop an understanding of the HR processes used to acquire and deploy a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts on organizational effectiveness.  Students who successfully complete this course will have acquired the knowledge, skills, and abilities to understand and manage the human resources staffing process.  The domain of knowledge covered in the course includes staffing models and strategy, legal compliance, staffing planning, job analysis, external recruitment, internal recruitment, measurement, external selection, internal selection, employment decision-making, finalizing the match, and staffing system management.  Special topic issues are also addressed throughout the course.

Compensation: Theory and Administration
The Compensation course focuses on how managers can utilize compensation to attract, retain, and motivate qualified employees.  It is intended to give students both an understanding of the theories underlying pay system design, and substantial hands-on experience.  Much of the course focuses on application of principles to a case wherein students design all aspects of a compensation plan.  The course provides students with the skills and understanding necessary for employment as entry-level compensation specialists, as well as a valuable knowledge base for those individuals who choose to work in other areas of human resource management or in general management.  The course also empowers students by providing an understanding of how their own pay is determined.

Bargaining, Negotiating, and Dispute Settlement for Managers
Much managerial activity involves bargaining, negotiation, and settling of disputes. Managers bargain with superiors, peers, and subordinates, suppliers and customers, competitors and allies. Effective negotiation can improve outcomes for everyone involved. In contrast, ineffective negotiation usually leads to poor outcomes for those who negotiate poorly, may lead to poor outcomes for others, and sometimes result in failure to agree even when agreement is possible.  The goal of this course is to improve students’ negotiating skills by providing a theoretical underpinning that will help them to understand the sources of effective and ineffective approaches to negotiations. Much of the course will be devoted to applying course concepts in practice through negotiation exercises. Ensuing discussions will focus on the ways in which concepts and theory inform practice.

Labor - Management Relations
This course is designed to develop students’ understanding of the relationship between employers and their workers. Attention is given both to collective representation of workers’ interests through unions, and to management of the employment relationship in settings in which workers are not collectively represented.  In both types of settings, students consider the connections between employment issues and product markets, labor markets, and business strategies. Specific learning objectives for the course include: (1) an exploration of the reasons that employees, employers, and society may or may not desire unions, and how these views are related to deeper assumptions about markets, rights, and workplace conflict; (2) how union representation affects workers, the workplace, the performance of firms, and society and the economy as a whole; (3) the connections between labor and employment relations, business strategies, and organizational performance; (4) the ways in which laws and public policy in the United States affect the practice of labor and employee relations; further serving as a basis for comparison with other countries’ practices; (5) how to carry out effective human resource management in a variety of environments, including workplaces in which workers are collectively organized into unions and workplaces in which workers are not organized; and (6) ethical approaches to labor and employee relations.

HR Capstone
The HR Capstone course is designed to serve two main goals. Students seek to gain an understanding of research in 'strategic human resource management,' by focusing on both substantive discussions of the research itself and on the implications of that research for practicing managers. Students also seek to develop an understanding of current issues in the profession of human resource management, as well as what it means to approach practice in that profession strategically.