1st Essay: Successful Leadership:Status Structure, Empowerment and Social Benefits in Work Groups 2nd Essay: MANAGING CHANGE:Managers as Change Agents
...and the ability to serve.” Leaders must also become followers to allow partnership with other individuals to occur. By creating partnership environments as the status structure and empowering those partners at the skill levels associated with those individuals, social benefits can be derived allowing for psychological intimacy, such as nurturing, support, and openness, and integrated involvement that is achieved by task performance and self-definition activities. Work group cohesion could easily occur just from these elements in mature work groups. Successful leadership allows partnership of all work group participants, lets individuals fail and succeed as well as accept responsibility, manages things rather than people, and accrues mental and emotional bonding within the team. All of these elements help to create successful teams where all team members can provide leadership within their group. 2nd Essay MANAGING CHANGE: Managers as Change Agents Nancy K. McBeth The University of the Incarnate Word Organizational development is all about change management. It is a methodical approach to planned change. It diagnoses and analyzes problems and opportunities, applying knowledge to them. According to Nelson and Quick, change management acknowledges that, in order “for organizations to change, individuals must change.” Change management and individual change requires courage: the courage to fail, interpersonal courage, and moral courage. Change agents need courage to be effective and successful managers of change, in particular, to support those who need to learn to behave differently and influence change. Organizational development is “a systematic approach to organizational improvement that applies behavioral science theory and research…to increase individual and organizational well-being and effectiveness .” The process of change is challenging and is often met with resistance. Resistance to change can take many forms, including: fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of failure, disruption of interpersonal relationships, personality conflicts, internal politics, and cultural assumptions and values. People demonstrate their reactions to change through disengagement , disidentification , disenchantment , and disorientation . Overcoming these obstacles requires courage and change management skill. Change management requires communication (details and rationale of change), participation in the change process (ownership and commitment), and empathy and support. The change agent, along with integral courage, must be trustworthy, have expertise with change, and be similar to those engaged in the change process. Adrian Furnham argues that “three things determine the success or otherwise of the change-focused manager…their level of courage,…skill in dealing with underperformers, and…sensitivity in managing their customer-facing staff.” In addition, there are three types of courage required to be successful change agents. The courage to “fail, try something new, to experiment, buck the trend, to take risk.” Interpersonal courage allows the change agent to deal with other emotions, to show emotion yourself, yet be able to confront others who may be making life miserable for others. This kind of courage is often needed during the change process as people experiencing change are frequently upset, anxious, and full of fear. Moral courage is crucial as managers are confronted with ethical issues daily. Moral courage in managers is essential to ensure fairness, to not remain silent when something needs saying or intervention is needed to “confront colleagues blocking change.” These three aspects of courage are integral to change management: “to fail, to confront, to uphold principle.” Many organizations do not look at courage as a core competency. One company’s discussions led to characteristics they wanted in their culture r...