Psychology of Leadership: Power, Motivation & Influence

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

This course examines leadership as a psychological, relational, and organizational process. Students will move beyond surface-level leadership advice to analyze how power, identity, motivation, influence, and resistance shape the behavior of leaders and followers.

Analyze the Psychological Forces That Shape Leadership, Followership, and Organizational Life

Leadership is frequently presented as a collection of strategies, personality traits, and communication techniques. However, every leadership decision is also influenced by psychological forces that may remain invisible unless leaders deliberately examine them.

Power changes what leaders notice, how freely employees communicate, and whose knowledge influences organizational decisions. Leadership identity affects how people interpret authority, criticism, status, and disagreement. Motivation determines whether employees genuinely commit to the work or merely comply while supervision and rewards remain present.

Throughout this course, students will examine leadership through doctoral-level concepts presented in a practical and understandable format. The course combines psychological theory, organizational analysis, realistic examples, animated teaching graphics, and a continuing case involving Meridian Health Systems.

Students will explore leadership as a social process before examining different sources of power and their effects on organizational relationships. They will analyze how leadership identity develops through identity claiming, social recognition, reflected appraisal, and experience.

The course then introduces self-determination theory and its three central psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Students will apply these concepts to employee engagement, organizational change, professional identity, accountability, and resistance.

The final lecture integrates the entire course through an examination of influence, resistance, and responsible leadership. Students will learn to distinguish influence from manipulation, recognize resistance as diagnostic information, and evaluate how leaders preserve agency while exercising legitimate authority.

By the end of the course, students will possess an integrated framework for examining what leadership does to individuals, relationships, and organizational systems. They will be prepared to ask not only whether leadership produced an outcome, but how that outcome was achieved, whose knowledge mattered, who carried the consequences, and what the leader became while exercising power.

This course uses AI-assisted voice, visual, captioning, and video-production tools under the instructor’s direction. All instructional arguments, course design decisions, explanations, and academic interpretations were developed and reviewed by the instructor.