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University of Hartford

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University of Hartford
U. of Hartford (Barney)
 200 Bloomfield Avenue
West Hartford, CT, 06117
United States
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Demographic Information

Number of full-time MBA students (2011): 

39

Number of part-time MBA students (2011): 

120

Total duration of full-time MBA program: 

22 months

MBA faculty (Fall 2010): 

58

Females as percent of student body: 

9%


Description of MBA Program: 

The Barney School of Business prepares individuals to be leaders and decision-makers who are globally aware and socially responsible by:

  • Creating a student-focused learning environment that emphasizes effective, high quality teaching and learning.
  • Engaging in a broad range of scholarly activities that enhance and strengthen our teaching and provide intellectual stimulation to our faculty.
  • Maintaining strong relationships with business, non-profit and government entities to facilitate their interaction with our students and faculty in a wide variety of activities.


Academic Department

Course Name: Applied Financial Analysis and Investments
Instructor: Stephen Mulready, James Hogan

This course provides an applied financial analysis and investment opportunity for both undergraduate and graduate students. Students obtain hands-on experience in establishing, managing, and reporting on an actual investment fund set up with the University. Students review the overall economic operating environment, review selected industry trends, and understand the global/political impact of investment decisions. Topics include applying a risk-based approach to identify investment opportunities, conducting investment research and analysis, establishing performance benchmarks, selecting individual investments for acquisition, executing actual trades, reviewing investment results, and evaluating monthly and final portfolio performance. Students also examine the tax implications of investment decisions and the necessary oversight controls to comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

At the inception of the course in September of 2008, two student run investment funds were created from a donation of $250,000, a Green Fund and a Global fund. After its first year of student investment stewardship, both funds increased in value and exceeded their benchmarks by over 20%, a remarkable achievement given the severe market losses suffered by most in that year. Each year, new students to the course learn about criteria for Green and Global funds and how to apply them in choosing investments.

Course Name: Bargaining and Negotiations
Instructor: John Ogilvie

The skills, theory, and processes used in a variety of negotiation settings are addressed. Topics include negotiating styles, power, coalitions, conflict, distributive versus integrative bargaining, representational negotiations, mediation, intecultural bargaining. Discuss the ethics of information disclosure during negoitiations along with utilizing a SINS scale -Self-Assessed Inappropriate Negotiating Scale.

Included is a project that incorporates all three components of service learning: enhanced academic learning, community service, and civic engagement. The activity involves a negotiation between a job candidate and a hiring manager. The graduate students play the role of the manager, and the job candidates are students in the undergraduate negotiation class. The graduate students have a greater academic learning experience by dealing with young people who are about to be job candidates rather than simply negotiating with their classmates; they develop a greater sense of community (in this case the community involves students and future alums of our program); and the role of socially responsible leadership is reinforced through the focus on mentoring. The graduate students are assessed on the quality of the feedback they give to their job candidates and also submit a reflection assignment on the experience.

Course Name: Business, Law and Society
Instructor: George Generas, Karen Gantt

This course helps students understand how business decisions affect and reflect society. Because the decisions of managers not only influence but also are influenced by public policy concerns and moral issues, students will learn how to integrate economic, social, legal and regulatory, and moral considerations in decision making. Specific topics include the role of law in society, business regulations and antitrust policy in the global environment, ethical and social values in different cultures, and employment and labor relations.

In this course Ethics is covered in approximately 2 ½ classes. We approach ethics first from the philosophical point of view with discussions of Aristotle and virtue ethics, Kant and the categorical imperative and the concept of rights and responsibilities and Bentham and Mills and the concept of utilitarianism and then a discussion of the more modern such as Rawls. From the philosophical we proceed to the application of the various doctrines in modern business and the discussion of the ethical decision making process. This includes discussion of individual student issues and the use of case studies.

Later in the course we spend approximately one class discussing modern issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR) both in the U.S. and the more formal approach in the EU countries.

Course Name: Cases In Business Ethics
Instructor: Farhad Rassekh

This course offers an advanced study of ethical concerns in business. By studying the writings of the leading scholars and examining contemporary real cases and issues in business ethics, students will learn how to integrate business and managerial decisions with social and moral considerations. Specific topics include theories of ethics; cases in corporate social responsibility; ethical issues and cases in investment, in marketing, in the environment, in employment and global business.

Course Name: Economic Analysis for Managers
Instructor: Farhad Rassekh

This course covers economic principles applicable to managerial decision-making problems. Additionally, the course provides tools of analysis and concepts which are used in the graduate program's functional fields. The objectives are to expose students to the wide range of business decisions to which economic theory can fruitfully be applied, and to introduce the modern theory of the firm. The modern theory of the firm encompasses a set of contractual interrelationships among its owners, managers, customers, and suppliers and integrates business environment and strategy with organizational design and managerial decision-making processes. Specific topics include supply and demand analysis; market structure; production and costs; organization of the firm; contracting, incentive compensation, and the principle-agent problem; information problems and uncertainty; outsourcing, vertical integration, and business reengineering; and international issues in managerial economics.

Ethics and Social Responsibility: The course applies economic models of behavior to ethical conduct in the workplace. The model shows how managers can promote ethical behavior or minimize dishonesty. About 3.5 hours are devoted to the discussion of ethical conduct based on the economic model of behavior. The issue of ethics also arises in coverage of profit maximization and market structure. Discussion throughout the course focuses on the issue that businesses operating on greed and arrogance do not do well in the long run and usually engage in self-destructive behavior.

Course Name: Entrepreneurship
Instructor: Irina Naoumova

This course contains two semester long projects: a consulting project for local small businesses and a business plan writing project. Business planning software will help students to get through the procedures of business plan creation as well as the refinement and potential selling of the business plan. Specificity of the entrepreneurial environment and the complexity of decision making are addressed through the standard elements of business planning. A global perspective will be brought into the class through discussions and guest speaker presentations

Consulting (market and company assessment) project (40% of the grade): The idea of the consulting project grew from a long-term partnership of the Barney School of Business with a not-for-profit organization, the Connecticut Economic Gardening Group http://www.ct-egg.org (CT-EGG). This project offers unique opportunities to students for deep understanding of small business development and management. Students will be involved in the analysis of opportunities and demands for entrepreneurial businesses, and the crafting of better roads to success for them. This project is a part of the University of Hartford’s contribution to the community. Students provide free of charge consulting to the small local companies, including non-for-profit organizations.

Course Name: Leadership and Management
Instructor: Deborah Kidder

MBA710 is a required class on leadership. In keeping with our mission to develop socially responsible leaders, the focus of the class is on socially responsible, ethical behavior. Every instructor uses Kouzes & Posner’s The Leadership Challenge, which is grounded in transformational leadership theory. Instructors differ in how they approach the topic, but a specific example of the reinforcement of the topic is a team research project, where each team selects an industry and determines which company is the best example of the influence of socially responsible leadership on firm performance.

Course Name: Managerial Skills
Instructor: Ralph Braithwaite

The major focus of the course is on managerial skills with an emphasis on how to be an effective manager. The topic of ethics is interwoven in various classes with the use of a video "Ethics 4 Everyone." Included in the process is a discussion on personal ethics, business ethics and social responsibility from a managerial perspective.

Course Name: Strategic Management
Instructor: Steven W. Congden

Broadly integrative course that considers the strategic leadership of organizations as a whole within ever-changing and increasingly global environments. Course frameworks and concepts build on previous course work to develop students’ abilities to analyze complex situations, identify issues, and provide specific solution plans and steps for implementation. The course relies heavily on class discussions of concepts and cases.

Ethics and Social Responsibility: 2.5 hour class meeting (meeting 11) on the topics of Corporate Performance, Governance, and Business Ethics, including a film on TOMS Shoes for a discussion of Social Entrepreneurship. In addition, one case discussion (1 hour in meeting 2) is devoted to strategic planning in a not-for-profit company.

Course Name: The Global Business Environment
Instructor: Irina Naoumova

MBA 760 is an integrative course that will give students a clear understanding of how to use their skills and knowledge from the other courses in international business environment. This course focuses on cultural aspects in international business, strategy formulation and implementation on international level. Cultural and legal foundations of ethical behavior are covered also. The emphasis is done on teamwork and case analysis

Ethics related material:

Chapter 5 “Globalization and Society” is devoted to the foundations of ethical behavior. Relativism and Normativism are discussed among cultural foundations for ethical behavior. Extraterritoriality and Legal justification are the legal foundations for ethical behavior. National, Regional and Industry initiatives against corruption and corporate bribery will be discussed in class. Students will have 3 short case studies (from the casebook) illustrating the chapter concepts.

Pages

Type of Offering

Ethical Business Leadership Program
Date: February, 2011

United States Army Major David O’Hearn, whose current job is to prevent fraud in military contracting in Afghanistan, will speak at the University of Hartford on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011. O’Hearn’s presentation, part of the Barney School of Business Ethical Business Leadership Program….

Barney School alumnus O’Hearn will discuss ethical challenges in the private and public sectors and share insight and anecdotes from his professional experience. Since the summer of 2010 he has been stationed in Afghanistan with the National Guard where he oversees a unit of warranted contracting officers whose responsibilities include preventing fraud in military contracting. The unit manages construction for the Afghan public infrastructure, life support services needed for bases and outposts to function, and programs that help military organizations get supplies they need on short notice.

O’Hearn has an MBA in finance (’99) and an MS in accounting and taxation (’06) from the Barney School. He also holds a BS and MS in structural civil engineering from UConn.

The Ethical Business Leadership Program is presented by the Barney School’s Beta Sigma Gamma honor society.

“Lectures such as this one are essential for young entrepreneurs and business professionals to learn at the outset that ethical business is good business," said Peter Tedone, CEO of VantisLife, which is co-sponsoring the program." This event is one step in making ethics an acceptable -- even routine -- topic of conversation, helping build ethical behavior into all processes of business organizations."

Ellsworth Lecture series
Date: April, 2010

The annual Ellsworth Lecture series is sponsored by University of Hartford’s Barney School of Business. It brings in outside speaker to address students.

Blake Mycoskie, the founder and "chief shoe giver" of TOMS Shoes, Inc., discussed his unique business model of Social Entrepreneurship. In TOMS’s “one-for-one” model, a free pair of shoes is given to a person in need for each pair sold. This business model is sustainable because it turns customers into donors rather than depend on fundraising. Mycoskie hopes to extend this model to other products and partners.

Attitudes toward corporate responsibilities in Western Europe and in Central and East Europe
Author(s): Irina Naoumova; Furrer, O., Egri; C.P., Ralston

Participants in Western European countries had significantly different perspectives on the importance of these corporate responsibilities (CR) than those in Central and East European countries. Within each country, environmental CR is perceived as most important in both CEE and Western European countries. Across countries, Western European respondents accord more importance to social CR and less importance to economic CR. CEE countries are not homogenous, e.g., CR attitudes in the Czech Republic are closer to that of Western Europeans, possibly triggered by the accession to EU. Work experience (managers vs. business students) influences social and environmental orientations more than the economic orientation for only some countries. Generational differences were found as well: business students attribute more importance to environmental CR and less importance to social CR than managers.

Journal Title: Management International Review Volume: 50 Edition: Page Numbers: 379-398
Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: a 41-society study
Author(s): Irina Naoumova

With a 41-society sample of 9990 managers and professionals, we used hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the impact of both macro-level and micro-level predictors on subordinate influence ethics. While we found that both macro-level and micro-level predictors contributed to the model definition, we also found global agreement for a subordinate influence ethics hierarchy. Thus our findings provide evidence that developing a global model of subordinate ethics is possible, and should be based upon multiple criteria and multilevel variables.

Journal Title: Journal of International Business Studies Volume: 40 Edition: 6 Page Numbers: 1022-1045
You've been tagged! (Then again, maybe not): Employers and Facebook
Author(s): William Smith; Deborah Kidder

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, have exploded on to the cultural and business landscape. Not only can firms use social networking sites to present organizational information to interested parties, but also perhaps gather information regarding job applicants. As an employer, checking out an applicant's Facebook page—much like Googling a candidate's name—is very tempting. It is understandable that managers would like to know as much about a candidate as possible. Facebook pages can provide a wealth of information beyond, or even possibly contradicting, an applicant's submitted documents. While this may represent a potentially useful tool, there are several reasons for caution. For instance, an organization's selection process may be biased if an applicant's Facebook page contains inaccurate information, if some applicants do not have Facebook pages, and/or if legally protected demographic information ends up being part of the selection process. Facebook's own policies suggest that an organization may face legal challenges if it considers an applicant's Facebook page as part of the selection process. Just as importantly, there are ethical issues—in particular, an individual's right to privacy—which must be considered. We wish to encourage organizations to develop guidelines regarding the use of social networking sites in the application process, based on the practical, legal, and ethical issues covered in this article.

Journal Title: Business Horizons Volume: 53 Edition: Page Numbers: 491-499