Associate Professor of Business
Staging - People and Culture Management(V2)
Minor
What Is People and Culture Management?
People and culture management is the work of building a workplace people can do their best work in hiring, developing, motivating, and leading them, and handling it well when things go wrong between them.
The People and Culture Management minor at Goshen College is an 18-credit undergraduate minor, open to students in any major, that builds exactly that skill set. You’ll study how individuals and groups actually behave inside organizations, how people develop and change across a lifespan, and how social structures and cultural context shape what a workplace feels like from the inside. You’ll build the practical tools too which include the third-party skills to sit in the middle of a conflict and move it toward resolution instead of escalation.
You declare it with your academic advisor, and the course catalog lists the current requirements.
What the work looks like
- Understand why people do what they do. Motivation, development, group dynamics and the actual mechanics under “they’re just not a team player.”
- Build the culture on purpose. Hiring, onboarding, feedback, and the daily practices that decide whether people stay and whether they do their best work.
- Sit in the middle of conflict. Practice the mediation skills that turn a stuck disagreement into a workable outcome, without taking a side or papering it over.
Every organization you’ll ever join runs on people. Very few people are ever actually taught to lead them.
If you’ve ever been on a team with a good leader and a team with a bad one, you already know the difference this makes. This minor turns that instinct into something you can name, teach, and do on purpose.
Why Study People and Culture Management at Goshen College?
Because managing people well means managing conflict well, and there is no better place in the country to learn that than a college that has spent its whole history taking peacemaking seriously.
Most management programs teach conflict resolution as a two-week unit. At Goshen, you’re minutes from a peace and conflict studies program with its own faculty, its own scholarship, and a hundred years of institutional conviction behind it, and the People and Culture Management minor draws directly on it. You learn mediation and workplace conflict resolution from people who study and practice it, not from a chapter summary.
That’s paired with the management half: how people develop, how teams function, how you hire, retain, and lead well, and how power, culture, and difference shape who gets heard in a room and who doesn’t. The result is a manager who can read a workplace accurately, including the parts nobody says out loud, and who has the tools to actually do something about it.
And it’s paired with a conviction. Goshen doesn’t treat employees as resources to be optimized. The people in an organization are the point of it. That shows up in what you’ll be asked to consider: not just how to raise performance, but what a workplace owes the people inside it.
What sets it apart
- Mediation from a real peace program. Goshen’s peacemaking tradition isn’t branding. It’s a discipline on this campus, and this minor pulls from it.
- Social science, not slogans. Human development, group behavior, and how social structures and difference shape workplace experience so you’re managing what’s actually happening.
- People as the point. You’ll be pushed to ask what an organization owes the people in it, not only what it can extract from them.
- It goes with everything. Nursing units, classrooms, congregations, startups, nonprofits, athletic programs, family businesses anywhere people work together, which is everywhere.
The technical skills of most jobs can be taught in a few months. Leading people well takes longer and is worth more. Whatever you end up doing, this is the credential that says you can be trusted with a team and that the team will be better for it.
Common Questions About the People and Culture Management Minor
No. It’s built for students in any major, and it’s often most valuable to students who aren’t in business — the nurse who’ll run a unit, the teacher who’ll chair a department, the pastor who’ll lead a staff, the coach who’ll build a program.
Three things. You’ll understand the strategies, methods, and tools that make an organization effective through its people. You’ll be able to analyze how individuals and groups behave at work using developmental, motivational, and systems thinking then use that to lead and decide better. And you’ll be able to evaluate how social structures, cultural context, and dimensions of diversity shape workplace experience and organizational culture.
Almost any of them, because every field is run by people. Business, sport management, nursing, education, social work, the arts and sciences — anywhere you’ll manage a team, build a culture, or handle conflict.
No, students completing the People and Culture Management concentration within the Business major aren’t eligible for the minor, since the two cover overlapping ground. Your advisor can help you decide which is the better fit for your plan.
Eighteen credit hours. Most students fit it alongside a major without adding time to graduation — map it with your academic advisor. You’ll need to meet the minimum grade standard in the courses that count toward the minor.
Scholarships make up a large portion of Goshen financial aid packages, which average almost $26,000 per student, not counting work-study or loans. Enrolled business students may also qualify for endowed awards including the Sauder Scholarship and the Gorsline Scholarship. Run the net price calculator to see your own number, then talk it through with a real person in the financial aid office.
Jason Harrison
Assistant Professor of Business
Andrew Hartzler
Professor of Accounting
Michelle Horning
Professor of Accounting
Program Director
Department ChairAlysha Liljeqvist
Associate Professor of Business
Jorge Montenegro Martinez
Assistant Professor of Business
Jerrell Richer
Professor of Economics
Carl Kreider Chair and Co-Director of Global EngagementEyob Zeleke
Assistant Professor of Information Technology
