Take My Liberty PSYC 648 Class

Two books divide the term. Northouse's Leadership: Theory and Practice is read through week four, moving from what leadership is to the major approaches that try to explain it.

Week two covers the trait, skills, behavioral and situational approaches, the older theories that ask what leaders have, what they can do and how they should adapt to followers.

Week three covers path-goal theory and leader-member exchange, which link leadership directly to motivation and to the quality of the relationship between a leader and each follower.

Week four covers values-based approaches, such as transformational, authentic and servant leadership, along with adaptive leadership and leadership ethics.

From week five, Latham's Work Motivation takes over, tracing the field's history and its major theories: needs and values, goal setting, expectancy, social cognition, organizational justice and the ways leaders can apply them.

Every week has a summary and a group forum. Cases fall in weeks two, three and four, the assessment project in week five, the intervention in week seven and the final exam in week eight.

Leadership ethics closes the Northouse half, asking how leaders' character and choices shape what followers will do.

Justice research in the Latham half shows why fair procedures matter to motivation as much as fair outcomes.

Latham's later chapters bring in social cognitive theory, showing how self-efficacy and role models shape what employees believe they can achieve, and how leaders can build that belief through coaching and early wins.

The two books are read in sequence, so the final weeks ask students to connect leadership styles from the first half with motivation theories from the second.

Every week has a short presentation as well.

PSYC 648 is carried week by week, since each summary and forum follows the week's chapters and the cases follow Northouse's chapters directly.

Each weekly summary captures the reading in at least 250 words, lists five to ten takeaways and cites the textbook and a journal article; it then serves as your thread in the group forum, where you also respond to teammates and, in your assigned week, lead the discussion.

Each case answers the three or four questions after a Northouse case with the week's theory. A case about a new manager inheriting a struggling team, for instance, might be read through the situational approach, matching leadership style to each employee's competence and commitment.

The leadership assessment project uses questionnaires from Northouse with a leader you know. You give the questionnaires and send the results; the report summarizes the leader's situation, explains why those tools were chosen, presents and interprets the scores and recommends ways to lead more effectively, in three to five pages.

The intervention paper creates a scenario in which a leader must motivate employees and designs a response grounded in one of Latham's theories, with five to eight research articles.

You post and submit everything; the final exam is yours.

The leader you assess can be a supervisor, a pastor, a coach or a volunteer leader, as long as they hold a leadership role.

The writer for this course is an I/O psychologist or leadership coach who builds motivation programs for organizations.

That experience shows in the leadership assessment, where scores are read in context rather than as labels, and recommendations are specific enough for the leader to try the next week.

It shows in the intervention, where a theory is chosen because it fits the problem: goal setting when work lacks direction, justice theory when employees feel treated unfairly, expectancy theory when effort no longer seems to pay off.

The weekly summaries benefit from knowing the research well enough to choose a journal article that genuinely extends the week's reading.

Every piece passes a colleague's review, and one coach covers your term.

They also handle the course's Christian perspective with care, connecting servant leadership and stewardship to the research rather than treating them as separate topics.

First comes the weekly digest, which never lets up and must also carry the group forum.

The reading is the second. Week four alone assigns five Northouse chapters, and Latham's research history is dense.

The cases are the third, falling in three consecutive weeks from two to four.

The assessment project is the fourth, since it depends on a real leader completing questionnaires in time for week five.

The intervention paper is the fifth: four to five pages and five to eight research articles, due just before the final exam.

Many students also struggle to keep summaries analytic rather than descriptive, which is what separates a strong takeaway from a restated heading.

A summary and a group forum fall in week one, so help is most useful from the first day.

Each weekly summary arrives early in its week, ready to post as your thread, with replies once teammates post.

Cases arrive before weeks two, three and four close.

The assessment report arrives before week five closes, a day or two after you send the questionnaire results.

The intervention paper arrives before week seven closes. The motivation plan and the leader study cost most per item; the digests, taken together, form the largest share.

Students who join partway send any graded summaries or cases, and later pieces follow the same style.