Business Leadership and Change Management

Course Description

Business Leadership and Change Management is a course on Leadership and Change Management to prepare students to respond to the needs of a dynamic global business climate. UWF states it prepares students to take responsibility to work collaboratively with others in developing change management strategies in bringing about change and overcoming resistance.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MAN is the Management prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Business Administration, College of Business. It is offered at approximately 4 Florida institutions.

⚠ This course requires 60 completed hours rather than the 45 most MAN courses ask for, placing it deliberately late in a degree. That is appropriate: the material assumes some organisational vocabulary and, ideally, some experience of having been on the receiving end of a change someone else designed.

The most useful reframing this course offers is that resistance to change is usually rational. It is routinely described as an obstacle to be overcome, but people who resist a change frequently understand something about the work that the people designing it do not — or are correctly anticipating a real cost to themselves. Treating resistance as information rather than as an obstacle produces better changes and fewer failures.

⚠ Be sceptical of the leadership literature while you read it. It is a large, popular and unusually weak evidence base: much of it is retrospective study of successful firms, which cannot distinguish the practices that caused success from those that merely accompanied it. The trait, style, contingency and transformational traditions are worth knowing as intellectual history and should not be mistaken for settled findings.

The widely repeated claim that "70% of change initiatives fail" is worth treating as a case study in itself. It is repeated constantly and its empirical basis is thin. A course that examines that claim rather than reciting it is teaching you the more valuable lesson.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe major theories of leadership and their historical development.
• Distinguish leadership from management and describe how they interact.
• Describe trait, behavioural, and contingency approaches to leadership.
• Describe transformational and transactional leadership.
• Describe servant, authentic, and ethical leadership approaches.
• Evaluate the strength of evidence behind leadership claims.
• Describe followership and its role in leadership outcomes.
• Describe power, influence, and their sources in organisations.
• Influence outcomes without formal authority.
• Describe organisational culture and its relationship to change.
• Describe drivers of organisational change, internal and external.
• Describe planned change models including Lewin and Kotter.
• Evaluate the evidence base for popular change models.
• Diagnose the need for change in an organisation.
• Develop a change management strategy for a defined situation.
• Describe sources of resistance and treat resistance as information.
• Describe stakeholder analysis and engagement in change.
• Describe communication planning in change initiatives.
• Describe the human costs of change and the ethical obligations they create.
• Describe leading in a global and cross-cultural context.
• Describe measuring and sustaining change after implementation.
• Work collaboratively to develop and defend a change strategy.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a real organisation or case study.
• Work effectively in a team with defined roles and deadlines.
• Present and defend a recommendation to a business audience.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify their output.
• Build a portfolio artefact suitable for showing an employer.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Theories of leadership and their development
• Leadership and management distinguished
• Trait, behavioural, contingency approaches
• Transformational and transactional leadership
• Servant, authentic, and ethical leadership
• Evaluating leadership evidence
• Followership
• Power and influence
• Influence without authority
• Organisational culture and change
• Drivers of change
• Lewin, Kotter, and planned change models
• Evidence behind change models
• Diagnosing the need for change
• Developing a change strategy
• Resistance as information
• Stakeholder analysis and engagement
• Communication in change
• Human costs and ethical obligations
• Global and cross-cultural leadership
• Measuring and sustaining change
• Collaborative strategy development

Optional Topics

• Applied case studies and live organisations
• Team practice and role definition
• Presenting to a business audience
• AI-assisted tooling and its governance
• Portfolio development

Resources & Tools

• The text the instructor assigns — Northouse's Leadership: Theory and Practice is the most widely used and is honest about the state of the evidence; Yukl is the more research-heavy alternative.
• Kotter's Leading Change — the most influential practitioner model; read it alongside the critiques rather than instead of them.
• Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review — through the UWF library; where the practitioner conversation happens.
• Pfeffer's Leadership BS and Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect — the two best correctives to the leadership literature, and worth reading even if not assigned. Rosenzweig in particular explains why studies of successful companies mislead.
• Free 360-degree and self-assessment instruments — useful for reflection and not to be over-read; many popular personality instruments have weak psychometric support, which is itself worth knowing.
• Your own experience of a change you lived through — free, and the most analytically useful material you have. What was communicated, what was not, and what you did in response.
• The UWF library's business databases — included in enrolment; industry reports and practitioner sources sit behind paywalls a student already has access to, and most never find out.
• LinkedIn Learning — frequently free through UWF or a Florida public library card; strong on specific tools, weak on judgement.

Career Pathways

• General and operations manager (SOC 11-1021) — the broadest destination, and the one most graduates reach through a functional role first.
• Human resources specialist (SOC 13-1071) and human resources manager (SOC 11-3121) — the specialist role is the normal entry point; the manager role follows experience.
• Training and development specialist (SOC 13-1151) and compensation and benefits analyst (SOC 13-1141).
• Project management specialist (SOC 13-1082) — and note that project work is entered from every discipline, not only from business.
• Logistician and supply chain analyst (SOC 13-1081), purchasing agent (SOC 13-1023), operations analyst (SOC 13-1111, management analyst).
• Management trainee and rotational programmes — ⚠ these recruit on a fixed annual cycle, often a year ahead. Students who wait until spring of their final year have already missed most of them.
• ⚠ Florida employer landscape: healthcare systems (AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola) are among the state's largest employers and run substantial HR and operations functions; hospitality and theme parks (Disney, Universal, and the cruise lines out of Miami, Port Canaveral and Tampa) are operations-intensive at enormous scale; defence and aerospace (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and the Navy presence around Pensacola); logistics and distribution around Jacksonville and Central Florida; agriculture and food processing; and state, county and municipal government.
• Small and family business is a genuine Florida destination, not a fallback — the state has a very high rate of small business formation, and the SBDC network at Florida universities, including UWF, provides free consulting.

AI Integration

Management is being changed by AI in two distinct ways, and they need separating. The first is AI as a tool a manager uses. The second is AI as something a manager must govern — deployed in hiring, scheduling, performance evaluation and forecasting, where the consequences fall on people.

• Where AI tools genuinely help managers: drafting documents and correspondence, summarising long material, preparing meeting notes and first-draft plans, analysing survey and operational data, and rehearsing a difficult conversation before having it.
• ⚠ Where they fail: they fabricate confidently — including citations, statutes and figures; they do not know your organisation, your people, or your context; and they produce fluent text that reads as considered when nothing was considered.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Employment decisions are the highest-risk application, and this is not hypothetical. AI screening tools have been shown to reproduce and amplify bias present in historical hiring data. Under United States law the employer is liable for discriminatory outcomes regardless of whether a vendor's tool produced them, and disparate impact does not require intent. The EEOC has issued guidance specifically on this.
• ⚠⚠ Regulation is arriving and it is not uniform. Several jurisdictions now require bias auditing or candidate notification for automated employment decision tools. Where your employees and applicants are located determines what applies — not where your office is.
• Never put employee or applicant personal data into a public AI tool. Personnel records, medical information, disciplinary matters and compensation data must stay in controlled systems. This is a common and serious early-career mistake.
• ⚠ A human must own every consequential decision. "The system flagged it" is not an explanation you can give an employee, a regulator, or a court. Keep a person accountable, and be able to state the reason in plain language.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, and disclose what you used when asked. In a course teaching judgement, outsourcing the judgement defeats the purpose — which is a practical point, not a moral one.

Special Information

⚠⚠ A standing requirement — 60 completed hours — not a course prerequisite

• UWF publishes: "Completion of 60 hours of college course work is required prior to taking this course." That measures how far through a degree you are, not what you have studied.
• ⚠⚠ UWF uses more than one threshold in this prefix. Most MAN courses require 45 hours; MAN4280 and MAN4441 require 60; MAN3802 requires none. Do not assume the number carries across courses — read each entry.
• These are easy to overlook because they name no course and so never appear in a prerequisite chain.
• ⚠ Transfer students should confirm how their credit counts toward the total. Accepted transfer hours normally count, but dual enrolment, credit by examination and developmental coursework are treated differently by different institutions. Ask College of Business advising rather than assuming.
• Business colleges commonly layer further gates on top — admission to the major, a minimum grade point average, and a minimum grade in each core course. Confirm all of these against your own catalog year.

⚠⚠ The statewide title and the UWF title differ — read the description, not the name

• Statewide inventory title: Organizational Development. UWF publishes it as: Business Leadership and Change Management.
• These are overlapping traditions rather than the same subject. Organisational development is a specific field with its own history — planned intervention, action research, process consultation. UWF's course pairs change management with leadership, which is a common contemporary packaging. ⚠ Note also that UWF places organisational development content inside MAN4341 Performance Management as well, so a student needing OD specifically should discuss both courses with an advisor.
• ⚠ The practical advice is the same in every case of title drift: carry a syllabus, and search on the number rather than the name when looking for equivalents at other institutions. SCNS equivalency runs on the number and the content.

⚠⚠ Resistance to change: the reframe worth carrying

• Resistance is usually rational from where the resister stands. Loss of status, loss of competence in a system they had mastered, added workload, or a well-founded belief that the change will not work.
• ⚠ The people closest to the work frequently know something the designers do not. Objections raised early are cheap information; the same objections discovered after implementation are expensive.
• ⚠⚠ "Overcoming resistance" is the standard phrase and it encodes an assumption — that the change is correct and the resister is the problem. Sometimes true, and not reliably. UWF uses the phrase; this guide notes what it presumes.
• Participation in design reduces resistance, and the mechanism is not psychological trickery: people who helped shape a change generally got a better change.
• Changes impose real costs on real people. Restructuring means someone loses a job, a routine, or a team. Treating that as an implementation obstacle rather than as an ethical matter is a choice, and the choice should be conscious.

Certifications and credentials worth knowing about

• Human resources: SHRM-CP (Society for Human Resource Management) and PHR (HRCI) are the two entry-level credentials. ⚠ SHRM-CP can be sat by students in their final year at SHRM-aligned programmes, and student membership is inexpensive — ask the College of Business whether UWF's HR curriculum is SHRM-aligned, because it changes your eligibility timing.
• Project management: CAPM is designed for people without project experience and is the realistic student credential; PMP requires documented leading experience and comes later. PMI student membership substantially reduces the exam cost.
• Operations and supply chain: APICS/ASCM CPIM and CSCP, and ISM's CPSM for purchasing. Six Sigma Green Belt is widely recognised in manufacturing and healthcare operations.
• ⚠ A degree and a certification do different jobs. The degree is durable; certifications are current, specific, and expire. Employers ask for both and neither substitutes for the other.
• Experience beats both for most of these roles. An internship, a student organisation officer post, or a real project you can describe outperforms a certification with no practice behind it — and SHRM and PMI both run student chapters worth joining.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — which matters in this prefix, where MAN2021 and MAN3025 both introduce management and only the second is upper division.

⚠⚠ Business programmes add a layer SCNS does not. Many Florida business colleges are AACSB accredited, and AACSB programmes commonly limit how much upper-division business coursework may transfer in — frequently requiring a substantial share to be taken in residence. A course can articulate under SCNS and still not count toward the major. Check the receiving programme's residency rule before relying on a transfer.

⚠ UWF states of its BSBA capstone that it "must be taken at UWF." Residency rules of that kind are common in business programmes and are worth checking early, because they cannot be worked around late.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with case analysis, team project work, and written and oral reporting. ⚠ Management courses are graded substantially on communication, which surprises students who expected a quantitative business course.
• ⚠ No fee notices appear anywhere in the MAN prefix, and no "permission is required" marking except on the BSBA capstone. Enrolment is gated by standing and by MAN3301.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision in the College of Business, and an online section of a team-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. A course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed — confirm with the department.

MAN4280 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.