Doctoral Program in Organizational Psychology
Organizational Transformation and Leadership Focus

Building on its long-standing, residential doctoral program in organizational psychology The Professional School of Psychology (PSP) is pleased to offer a tutorial-based doctoral program in organizational psychology that focuses on leadership and organizational transformation in the 21 st Century. Employing a very old mode of graduate instruction (the tutorial) in a new manner, PSP enables learners from throughout the world to participate and interact on a continuing basis with one another and with a senior tutor (William Bergquist).

Programmatic Themes

The Organizational Transformation and Leadership tutorial is distinguished in its emphasis on three fundamental ideas. First, we are living in a globalized environment that has shattered boundaries and created the opportunity for new alliances. The second focal and distinctive emphasis of this program concerns the nature and dynamics of appreciative organizations. The third focus concerns the nature and dynamics of collaboration among members of a single organization and among members of several organizations as they seek to be appreciative in a global business setting.

Globalization

In this global environment, men and women must lead newly emerging intersect organizations, which blend private and public, profit and nonprofit, independence and government control. They must also manage organizations that have been designed in new ways to address the unique issues of globalization. These new designs range from the hollow organization, to the matrixed organization and the virtual organization. As Kenneth Boulding, the eminent economist and business analyst noted several years ago, traditional programs are ill equipped to prepare managers for these new challenges. New concepts regarding organizational design, strategic planning, human resource development and the “art of leadership” must be introduced and mastered for the 21 st Century leader to be successful.

Appreciation

As a newly-emerging organization development (OD) strategy, the process of appreciative inquiry has revolutionized the way in which organizational leaders and OD consultants frame their understanding of and work with the 21 st Century employee. Attention in the appreciative organization is directed to release of the rich human resource potentials that reside within the organization. This process of appreciation and human capital release is based on the identification and analysis of distinctive strengths and competencies in the membership of the organization and on the creation of settings in which these strengths and competencies are fully deployed.

An appreciative strategy is also based on the identification and analysis of notable successes that have been achieved in the organization. This process involves profound organizational learning regarding ways in which these successes can be replicated—in new ways and in new settings that take into account the constantly changing challenges being faced by the organization. The leaders of an appreciative organization are always leaning into the future—discovering ways in which to move forward while also acknowledging and honoring the organizational foundations and history from which emerges their distinctive charter (mission, vision, values, purposes) and distinctive strategies. Traditional M.B.A. M.P.A. and D.B.A. programs do little to prepare men and women for employment in an appreciative organization. New forms of education and new concepts must be introduced that are directly aligned with this innovative perspective and organization development strategy.

Collaboration

There is a third focus that is distinctive in this doctoral tutorial program and required of anyone wishing to master “the art of leadership.” Both globalization and appreciation require collaboration. No one can go it alone in our complex, unpredictable and turbulent 21 st Century environment. The eminent Harvard University professor, Rosabeth Kanter, writes about the shift from competitive advantages to cooperative and collaborative advantages. She recognizes and persuasively documents the advantages inherent in the sharing of resources, information and business operations among departments within an organization and among partnering organizations.

New leadership perspectives and strategies are needed to break down the organizational silos that block communication between departments and the distrust and competition that prevents organizations from taking advantage of mutual or complimentary strengths. The Professional School of Psychology is offering a new kind of graduate program that not only talks about collaboration—it also embeds collaboration between student and tutor and among students in its educational program and in the ways that students learn and complete their degree requirements.

Distinctive Program Features

The Professional School of Psychology believes that the Organizational Transformation and Leadership Tutorial provides its students with a unique opportunity to take their places at the forefront of this fundamental, yet evolving, area of human enterprise. This doctoral tutorial program offers five distinctive features that place this program at the cutting edge of graduate education and uniquely prepares students for the new directions in which contemporary organizations are moving:

Distinction 1: Firm Interdisciplinary Grounding

This tutorial program provides firm grounding in the cognitive and neurosciences, as well as organizational behavior, social psychology, postmodern philosophical and social/critical analysis, sociology, and cultural anthropology. The core courses in this graduate program expose students to a wide array of knowledge, applications, and approaches, with three core courses focusing on the individual aspects of leadership, three on the group aspects of leadership and three on the organizational aspects of leadership. In each case, one of the three courses concerns theory, with the second focusing on assessment and the third on intervention. Students also take courses (with a neuro-social-cognitive orientation) in adult learning, decision-theory and attitude theory. Doctoral students deepen their consultation skills and understanding of organizational dynamics through their internships and small group case conferences.

Distinction 2: American, British, and Continental Perspectives

The students and senior tutor in this program are committed to the examination of the American, British, and Continental perspectives on leadership and organizational transformation. Students are involved in a probing analysis of all three schools of thought, preparing them to operate in an increasingly global social and organizational environment.

Distinction 3: Small Classes and Close Student/Faculty Relationships

By design, PSP classes are limited to a small size. The Organizational Transformation and Leadership program is particularly defined by its small class size—which is essential in maintaining a tutorial format. Small class size facilitates an intimate collegial atmosphere between student and tutor.

Distinction 4: Alternative Opportunities for Dissertation Work

Students enrolled in this doctoral program are given the option of completing a “doctoral project” in lieu of an empirical dissertation. These projects are scholarly works that may include authoring a book, developing a treatment protocol, or writing a grant proposal for a nonprofit agency. The purpose is to provide opportunities for doctoral students to take on a project that is personally meaningful, yet at the same time make a direct contribution to their community and/or help launch the new trajectories in the student’s career.

Distinction 5: Alternative Modes of Program Planning and Assessment

Students enrolled in this doctoral tutorial program are given the opportunity to participate in preparation of a “portfolio.” This highly innovative process of program planning and assessment is specifically geared toward the adult learner and is engaged by organizational students in lieu of a formal internship or comprehensive examinations.

Program Philosophy

There are several general principles that underlie the Organizational Transformation and Leadership program. These principles—or broadly based philosophical perspectives—concern the new epistemologies of the 21 st Century. The desired educational outcomes of the Organizational Transformation and Leadership program are based on these perspectives.

During the 20 th Century many disciplines grew increasingly autonomous and with the rise of logical positivism and related empirically oriented perspectives, practitioners in many physical and behavioral sciences tended to divorce themselves from all but the most seemingly “scientific” of disciplines. Using the so-called “scientific methods” of physics, astronomy and chemistry, practitioners in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics and political science confined themselves to rather trivial questions and constrained their observations of the world in order to remain “objective,” “detached” and “analytic.” These biological and behavioral science practitioners not only divorced themselves from the humanities and many of the professions, they also tended to be suspicious of one another, seeking to join physics, astronomy and chemistry at the top of the disciplinary pecking order.

Now, at the beginning of the 21 st Century, there is an epistemological revolution that brings many of these estranged fields back into conversation with one another. This is occurring not only because many of the behavioral and biological sciences have themselves come to the end of the road with regard to the confining “scientific method,” but also because epistemology is itself undergoing profound change. There is the revolution of chaos and complexity in the physical and behavioral sciences, the introduction of radical concepts regarding time and causality in cosmology, the shattering of the analytic (“smashed rat”) tradition in the biological sciences, and the postmodern challenging of interpretative traditions in the humanities and behavioral sciences.

Through its innovative Organizational Transformation and Leadership program, The Professional School of Psychology offers a pedagogical door into this new world. As a portal, PSP exemplifies an optimism about the future and a turning to appreciation and images of success and accomplishment when faced with the challenge of profound personal, organizational and societal transformation. As Martin Seligman notes in the opening article of the first issue of the American Psychologist in the 21 st Century, this new century is a time for psychologists to investigate and grow wise about not only the fears and delusions of humankind (the primary task of 20 th Century psychology), but also the hopes and dreams of humankind that enable men and women to sustain their efforts and search for a better life, despite their individual and collective fears and delusions.

This graduate degree program of The Professional School of Psychology is intended for motivated mature learners who wish to expand their own conceptual horizons and to integrate greater self-understanding with a more profound appreciation for the complexity, unpredictability and turbulence of our contemporary world landscape. This is not “university without walls” Rather it is a “university with moveable walls.” It is the intent that those enrolled will design, in company with select faculty members, a specific program of scholarship, research and practice that is aligned with each participants own shifting career goals and life purposes.  

Desired Educational Outcomes

The PSP doctoral degree program is usually completed in 3 ½ to 4 years. Upon completion of their program, participants receive a Doctor of Psychology degree. The doctoral program at PSP is not intended primarily as a vehicle for professional advancement or career shifting—though PSP students are often in transition in their life and career.

Twelve outcomes are fundamental to the Organizational Transformation and Leadership program of The Professional School of Psychology:

• An understanding of the full range of normal developmental processes of humans and how these influence leadership behavior and functioning across the life span.
• The capacity to influence community life through multiple leadership roles and functions, including those of teacher, learner, scholar, researcher, interventionist and advocate.
• An understanding of both traditional and nontraditional research methods that illuminate the human condition and the ability to comprehend and appreciate literature about leadership coming from many different disciplinary perspectives.
• An ability to work with other leaders and professionals from different disciplinary backgrounds and an appreciation of the methods and scope of other disciplines, particularly as related to the study of leadership.
• An understanding of the ethical issues associated with leadership practices and of the principles of effective and ethical performance in a professional role.
• An ability to relate knowledge about leadership to the social and cultural context of those individuals and organizations that are being served by this leadership.
• An attitude of ongoing and critical self-evaluation, including the ability to know when and where to get consultation, coaching, and other forms of assistance.
• A broad familiarity with the disciplinary foundations of humanknowledge: biological, social, cognitive, and affective, and the capacity to appreciate, integrate and apply knowledge about leadership in a wide variety of social and cultural settings.
• Understanding of the critical/reflective process, based on personal experience, and an understanding of the relationship between scholarship, research and application.
• Dialogical skills, including the skills of hermeneutic and phenomenological inquiry.
• An understanding of an array of intervention models and the strengths and limitations of each, as well as an integration of other models and empirical information into a personal model that provides a basis for informed practices regarding the development and engagement of leadership in a postmodern society.
• Flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity, and commitment to ongoing professional development and learning.

Program Venues

As a program that makes exclusive use of tutorials, the Organizational Transformation and Leadership program is comprised of two venues:

Venue One: attendance at a four day (weekdays) tutorial that will be held in Maine near home of senior tutor

Venue Two: attendance at a four day (weekdays) tutorial that will be held near the home of one of the participating students

Some courses will be conducted through a blending of the first and second venues, with students traveling to Maine for one half of a course (along with a second half of a second course) and the location of one of the participating students for the second half of this course (and first half of another course). In each case the tutorial will be held for four days. Other courses will be completed in a single session of four days.

Senior Tutor: William Bergquist, Ph.D.

An internationally-known coach, consultant, trainer and educator, William Bergquist is a widely-published author, researcher and scholar, and serves as President of The Professional School of Psychology.

Author, Researcher and Scholar : as author of 38 books and more than 50 articles, William Bergquist writes about profound personal, group, organizational and societal transitions and transformations. Dr. Bergquist has conducted research and scholarship in North America, Europe and Asia to establish the foundation for his written work. His publications range from the personal transitions of men and women in their 50s and the struggles of men and women in recovering from strokes, to the experiences of freedom among the men and women of Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. His book, The Postmodern Organization, has been identified as one of the 50 classics in organizational theory and has been translated into both Italian and Mandarin. In Our Fifties (with Klaum and Greenberg) was featured on Good Morning America and in several metropolitan newspapers. The Vitality of Senior Faculty (with Carole Bland) received the annual research award in 1998 from the American Educational Research Association. The Four Cultures of the Academy, Designing Undergraduate Education (with Gould and Greenberg), and A Handbook for Faculty Development (three volumes) (with Steven Phillips) have been widely acknowledged and cited as seminal publications in the field of higher education.

Coaching, Consulting and Training : William Bergquist has served as a consultant, coach and/or trainer to leaders in more than 1,000 corporations, government agencies, human service agencies, college and universities, and churches over the past 35 years. Having consulted, trained and coached in organizations throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, Dr. Bergquist has written extensively about consulting, coaching and training strategies in more than two dozen publications, and has co-founded the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations. William Bergquist also helped to co-found the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations, which is a major, collaborative initiative involving very senior level executive coaches from countries and diverse institutions throughout the world. As President of The Professional School of Psychology, William Bergquist has initiated The Coaching Alliance. This charter organization of PSP is a multi-program initiative that provides training, coaching, consulting, and research services throughout the world, and has published Executive Coaching: An Appreciative Approach, Executive Coaching: Resource Book 2000, and Performance Coaching: Resource Book 2002.

Educator : Dr. Bergquist has served as professor and educator in the fields of psychology, management and public administration, organization development and public policy in more than two dozen colleges, universities and graduate institutions. The postsecondary institutions in which he has taught range from the University of California in Berkeley, California to the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute in Tallinn, Estonia, and from Dominican University in San Rafael, California to College One, an experimental liberal arts summer college held for three years at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.