Management, M.A.

Program Overview

Degree Program Overview

The MA in Management (MAM) is an 18-month lockstep cohort program completed in four consecutive semesters (including summer sessions) to earn 36 credits to graduate. 

The MAM’s holistic and transformative educational process expands students’ professional knowledge and skills while they develop new mental models and practical wisdom rooted in global thinking and sustainable principles. It explores management not through the lens of a single discipline but through recognizing that many areas of knowledge and practice must intersect when we want to make constructive, real-world impacts. These areas include organizational behavior, international business, economics, management, talent management, knowledge management, workplace systems, and information systems.  Undergirding this examination are global studies, organizational systems, social entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Central to the MAM is developing skills to analyze social systems in an integrative way. Professionals advance their career in organizational management while becoming a visionary change-agent leader through MAM’s variety of courses and the residential conferences, practical projects, research essays, case study analyses, journal reflection activities, peer-to-peer dialogues, and mentoring.

The MAM fosters management development in a peer learning network so students continuously engage with peers and instructors to critically explore business and organizational concepts, practices, and issues. This aspect of our holistic process support continuous student progress in the following key areas.

• Developing cutting-edge perspectives and professional practices,
• Honing systems analysis and decision making skills,
• Expanding ability to work through complex issues and decisively respond with viable solutions,
• Increasing capability to design engaging workplace environments and the critical trust-based workplace relationships foundational to them,
• Leading dispersed team members and facilitating effective social networks, and
• Expanding professional confidence and socially responsive business vision.

As a result, students in the program develop such cutting-edge knowledge, skills, and professional qualities as:

• A global mindset to be a cross-cultural professional,
• Innovation leadership to be an organizational change catalyst,
• Integrative social systems analysis to be an innovative systemic solution builder,
• Knowledge network development to be an engaging collaborative manager,
• Organizational technology design to be a cutting-edge virtual workplace facilitator,
• Sustainable business principles and professional integrity to be a socially responsive leader.

Distinctive Features

For our graduates to achieve such a range of essential qualities, the MAM incorporates distinctive approaches that, taken together, support the professional results today’s organizational careers demand.

Practitioner-Scholar Instructors: Courses are led by professionals with both practical organizational experience and an understanding of innovative management approaches.

Adaptable Learning Processes and Activities: Students pursue professional areas of interest within assigned learning activities to explore issues and challenges they face on the job. 

Your Workplace as Your Classroom: Each course helps students treat the workplace as a learning laboratory, and equips them to daily observe their organization and workplace operations for increased critical analysis and action on the job.  

Team Projects:  Team assignments are used strategically to enable students to critically explore the issues and challenges related to managing at a distance and across cultures, to develop core abilities to enable others to work in a telework environment, and to expand skills in leading virtual teams.

Multi-Dimensional Leader-Manager Development Model:  The MAM program uses its own contemporary management model so professionals expand their competencies across three critically-connected areas: Innovation Leadership, Collaborative Management, and Socially Responsive Entrepreneurship. This Leader-Manager Development Approach prepares professionals to increase their effectiveness in their current organizational roles even while they are in graduate school.

Capstone Project:  Each of the three components of the culminating capstone develops and demonstrates learning and knowledge in product forms with utility for a variety of the student’s professional goals and career advancement: (1) Global Management Perspective, (2) Organizational Case Study Analysis, and (3) Professional Skillset Portfolio and Career Plan. (See the MAM Program Guidebook for more information.)

MAM Program Learning Outcomes

At degree completion, students will be able to:

1. Perform as a cross-cultural manager able to establish dynamic globally distributed organizational cultures, management practices, and collaborative workplace systems that incorporate:   
   1. Cultural sensitivity and global interdependence,
   2. Diverse human resources and collaboration processes,
   3. Human-centric technology and information systems,
   4. Strategic knowledge management and innovative decision making, and
   5. Organizational integrity and civic responsibility.
2. Perform as an innovative problem-solving professional who critically applies scholarship and best practices related to global management to develop one’s own approaches to organizational workplace operations and their issues and challenges.
3. Perform as a collaborative manager using collaborative management skills to lead culturally diverse teams that know and use best practices.
4. Perform as a virtual networking facilitator by using designs for organizational technology and social media that create dynamic organizational communication systems, productive social networks, employee work relationship-centric telework environments, and knowledge sharing processes in distributed organizations.
5. Perform as a socially responsive leader with a professional ethical code and leadership style rooted in professional integrity, conducting organizational operations in a transparent and sustainable manner, and fostering the mutual benefit of stakeholders.

Degree Program Policies

Transfer Credit Policy: Up to 6 graduate semester credits (generally 2 courses) may be transferred if they are (a) awarded by a regionally accredited university, (b) outside of an already-awarded degree or certificate credential, (c) earned at the grade level of B or better and (d) evaluated by the Department Chair as equivalent to an MAM course for which a substitution is appropriate.

MA to PhD: Students who complete the 36 credit MA Management can apply for doctoral studies. Upon acceptance into the PhD Managing Organizational Systems program, 15 credits of their Saybrook master’s work towards their doctoral program, thus not needing to take electives. Students take the required core foundational and research courses.

Students can either a) be accepted into and complete the MA in Management program and then apply to the PhD in Managing Organizational Systems program, or b) they can at the start of their graduate studies indicate interest in linking their MA in Management program with the PhD in Managing Organizational Systems program. In the later, the actual linking does not occur until a student’s graduate studies are successfully completed and the student is officially accepted into the doctoral program.

Program Requirements

Residential Requirements: Participation in all three 5-day residential conferences is required: (1) before the first semester of enrollment, (2) during the middle of the degree, and (3) before the final semester.  Dates are announced well in advance so students give top priority to the required participation.

Course Requirements:  The 12 courses are taken in a prescribed sequence. All courses are 3 credits, comprising the 36 credits required to graduate.  Coursework must be evaluated as equivalent to B or better at the graduate level to earn credit. 

Course Participation: Satisfactory “class attendance” in online courses requires students to log into the University’s online course site multiple times during the week to participate in discussions and other learning activities. Course syllabi indicate their specific participation requirements.

Semester and Course sequence.  The prescribed sequence for the M.A. in Management with its four specializations is as follows.