Ashley E. Hardin - Teaching

Ashley has experience teaching across undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs, as well as in non-degree executive education. She currently teaches courses about informal leadership, power, and politics, writing new cases and drawing upon prior work experience as a management consultant to bring the content to life. Ashley utilizes many types of teaching approaches to ensure students are able to understand the content and apply it to their lives – this includes audio and video cases, class role playing, extensive discussions, and personal application activities.

Degree Program Teaching

Organizational Behavior within the Firm

While proficiency in technical skills is essential for success in the workplace, your ability to understand and manage the human side of an organization will be what ultimately sets you and others apart. This course will provide you with concepts and tools that help you understand and manage human behavior in complex organizations.

Politics and Power

The use of power and politics is inevitable in modern organizations - and the higher one goes the more of it one encounters. Therefore, the development of real competency in managing power and influence can materially enhance career progression. The objective of this course is to develop such competency using learner-centered instruction.

Business & Leaders: The Positive Difference

Businesses and their leaders coexist with society and are both influenced by and influencers of societal issues. In this course, we explore the competing tensions of how business practices and leaders impact organizational performance as well as broader social outcomes across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors.

Doctoral Seminars

Organizational Field Research

This course immerses students into the discipline and practice of research on organizations in the wild. This is accomplished through readings, class discussions, and—most importantly experiences embedded within an organization throughout the course. Students use reflective memos and feedback from faculty and classmates to develop an initial mental model of what it means to develop and advance research projects that are grounded both in theory and in how real organizations operate today.

Postive Organizational Scholarship

This course invites students to explore reserach in Positive Organizational Scholarship. This field investigates collective and emergent processes of optimal functioning, at the levels of individuals in organizations, groups in organizations, and organizations as a whole. Thus, there is a focus on the generative dynamics in organizing that enable individual and collective resilience, thriving, creativity, compassion and other indicators of human flourishing.

Non-Degree Teaching & Workshops

Influence and Informal Leadership

Unlock the power of informal leadership and become a catalyst for impactful change. More than developing worthy goals and good ideas, effective leaders at all levels must deftly exert influence beyond authority. Develop practical skills to leverage power structures, navigate politically charged situations to overcome resistance, and empower meaningful change.

Compassionate Healthcare

Compassionate care is critical for the effectiveness of healthcare organizations; yet, self-care and care between colleagues can be challenging to achieve in a fast-paced, resource constrained environment. This workshop outlines the research-backed benefits of prioritizing compassion and provides practical tips for implementation.