LATROBE, PA – Every Tuesday and Thursday, as dusk settles over the quiet streets of Latrobe, Dr. Michael Urick—a mild-mannered professor at Saint Vincent College and dean of the Alex. G. McKenna School of Business Economics and Government—unleashes his academic superpowers.
Urick, professor of management and operational excellence, is teaching a unique and popular course, “Leadership for Jedi, Wizards and Superheroes: Exploring Influence and Decision Making for the Common Good through Popular Culture.” The class is based in part on some of Urick's books and journal articles that explore how leadership can be understood through fiction.
Courses and books about leadership often are dry and unappealing to non-business majors. Urick’s class seeks to make the topic accessible to everyone. “I designed this course to be fun,” he said. “It's an approachable way to learn about leadership and leadership theories.” The course counts towards credits in the College's Core Curriculum as well as the McKenna School’s Organizational Leadership Certificate program.
When it comes to leadership, Urick’s an expert. He recently was featured among the Pittsburgh Business Times’ “20 People to Know in Higher Education,” a list of influencers, key leaders and up-and-comers in academia in southwestern Pennsylvania.
It’s impossible to grasp what makes leaders effective, Urick said, without first understanding leadership theories. His course illustrates those theories using characters from “The Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter,” “Star Wars” and movies based on the superheroes of Marvel Comics and DC Comics.
One common theory of leadership, developed in in 1959 by social psychologists John R.P. French and Bertram, identifies ways leaders can gain influence over others in their groups. These five bases of leadership are coercive power, reward power, legitimate power, referent power and expert power.
Thousands of pages in dusty, old textbooks have been devoted to dissecting French and Bertram’s theory. Urick does the job for his Gen Z students by breaking down Bilbo Baggins during a viewing of film clips from “The Hobbit.”
“Bilbo has referent power—he’s likable,” Urick said. “He's not really good at much that helps the dwarves on their quest, but he builds expert power through his likability. He provides the group with the things that they want and he’s able to withhold things, too, so he gains reward and coercive power.”
When discussing the importance of mentorship, Urick focuses on the teacher-student relationship between Luke Skywalker and Rey in “The Last Jedi” and “The Rise of Skywalker.”
To explain the stages of team development model published by researcher Dr. Bruce Tuckman in 1965, Urick and his students discuss how the Avengers superheroes grow, adapt and become a high-functioning group and how leadership relates to this process.
“We see the theories through fictional characters,” Urick said. “At the end of every class, I say, ‘What was meaningful to you? What did you learn about leadership today that you can apply in the future in your own context?’ It’s very much not a lecture. The students identify what they saw and discuss it.”
This is the third semester Urick has taught the course, but it is the first time the classes have been held at the Robindale Energy facility in downtown Latrobe. Students are ferried from campus to class by bus. The auditorium’s setup has the feel of a movie theatre, so students get an immersive experience when watching the film clips. Because the class is offered in the evening, Saint Vincent provides dinner from the nearby Carmine’s Pizza & Pasta restaurant.
The Robindale-Saint Vincent collaboration was sparked by the Be My Neighbor Committee, a group of local leaders who are working to revitalize the region and strengthen ties between the College and the Latrobe community. The committee is backed by a grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
“Because of this unique cooperation [between Saint Vincent and Robindale], I think there’s been more of a connection between us about employment opportunities and those types of things, too,” Urick said.
Dr. Michael Urick
Dr. Michael Urick teaching his “Leadership for Jedi, Wizards and Superheroes” class
