Questions And Topics We Can Help You To Answer
PLEASE SEPARATE EACH SECTION:
SECTION 1:
The SLP for this course involves making a personal inventory of your management skills, and constructing a plan for improving those skills. In each module, you will complete an assessment of a relevant set of skills, focusing on your strengths and identifying any weaknesses that may have been revealed through the assessment and your personal experience. You will then be asked to create a plan by which you can "grow" your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. By the end of the project, you will have a personal management profile and action plan.
Your values and attitudes interact with your personality to create a strong effect on your work life. The fit between an individual's personality and a company's "style" is essential to job satisfaction. Someone who is risk-averse, for example, would probably be very unhappy at 3M, a company that has a strong reputation for innovation and risk-taking. Understanding the impact of your own personality on others is also essential to building productive work relationships with coworkers, bosses and subordinates alike.
Required Reading
Refer to the required and optional readings for this module, and any other readings which will help you in understanding personality styles and how they affect organizational effectiveness.
Click on the link to access the Jung Typology personality test. Be sure to click on the interpretive links when you have finished so you can interpret your score.
Assignment
Prepare a 2- to 3-page essay that addresses the following question:
How does my personality type affect my career and effectiveness at my job?
Keys to the Assignment
The key aspects of this assignment that should be covered in your paper include:
Complete the assessment according to the guidelines and interpreting the results.
Include the actual results.
Review the sections on Self-Awareness and Personal Growth, as well as Career Choices and incorporate this information in formulating your responses.
What did the test reveal about you?
What can you infer from this test about your strengths and weaknesses?
How does what you know about your personality type affect your motivation? Is this specific to a limited type of situation?
What specific steps can you take to increase your strengths and build up areas of weakness?
SECTION 2:
In this module, you will be assessing your own personal conflict style and considering the situations in which the style might be helpful, and when it might be less than optimal—or even dysfunctional. Begin by logging on to the website below and completing the Conflict-Management Style Survey. Be sure to read the accompanying material that follows the survey.
Required Reading
The Leadership Center At Washington State University. (n.d.) Conflict-Management Style. http://www.afc-ispi.org/Repository/Conflict-Management%20survey.pdf
(Note that you need to have Acrobat Reader to be able to "read" this document. Acrobat Reader is available for free download from www.Adobe.com.)
Assignment
When you are done, compose a 2- to 3-page essay that addresses the following questions:
What is your primary conflict management style? What is your least preferred style?
In what types of conflict is your primary style likely to be appropriate? In what types of conflict situations is it likely to be dysfunctional? Explain why.
What types of conflict situations are best handled by your lesser preferred styles?
What steps can you take to increase your use of your lesser preferred styles in situations where they would be most beneficial, and decrease the use of preferred styles when they are likely to be dysfunctional?
Keys to the Assignment
The key aspects of this assignment that should be covered in your paper include:
Complete the assessment according to the guidelines and interpret the results.
Include the actual results.
Based on your results, explain how you could improve your conflict management behaviors and under what conditions.
Based on your results, explain how improving your conflict managment behaviors might translate into actual behaviors at the workplace? And what might be the results of such an improvement?
SECTION 3:
Most of what is written about leadership has been written by western scholars and practitioners – mostly from the United States. Thus, what we have studied in this module so far reflects western assumptions and values about how to improve leadership performance.
But leadership quality, we know, is mostly about perception. If the followers perceive that a person is a leader, that person will be treated with respect and the followers will grant him the power and authority to guide their actions. These perceptions can vary across cultures, and successful global leaders know that leadership is viewed differently in different cultures and modify their behaviors to align with culturally diverse expectations. This is what is called Cultural Intelligence.
(If this is a topic that particularly interests you and you would like to increase your capacity for cultural intelligence, you are encouraged to enroll in LED520: Cross-Cultural Communication and Leadership. This course can serve as an elective in several degree programs.)
Required Reading
The following reading discusses the importance of cultural awareness in increasing organizational effectiveness:
O’Reilly, C. (2013). Why is cultural intelligence important? Retrieved from http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/topic/soft-skills/why-cultuiral-intelligence-important/181942
Assignment
Click on this link to Kwintessential Language and Culture Specialists. The site may take a moment to load, so be patient. You will find a selection of 20 or so cultural awareness quizzes. Choose one or two that look interesting to you. (Hint: You will learn the most if you choose a general quiz, or one that concerns a country with which you are not familiar, and then choose a quiz that tests your knowledge of a culture with which you think you are highly familiar.) After completing the quiz(zes), address the following questions in a 2- to 3-page essay:
Which quiz(s) did you take?
Were you surprised at your score?
What strengths do you think you have in the area of inter-cultural awareness?
What weaknesses are you able to identify?
Create a plan of specific steps you can take to build on your strengths and improve areas of weakness.
Why is it important for managers to increase their levels of cultural awareness?
Keys to the Assignment
The key aspects of this assignment that should be covered in your paper include:
Complete the assessment according to the guidelines and interpret the results.
Include the actual results.
Discuss BOTH strengths and weaknesses. If there were gaps between your assessment results and your own thoughts about your level of cultural awareness, why they do these gaps exist?
Discuss concrete actions you can take to improve your cultural awareness.
SECTION 4:
For the Session Long Project for this Module, you are expected to explore some aspects of your organization's culture, at least as you see it. Since the concept of organizational culture is open to many interpretations and classifications, this assessment offers a slightly different approach from your background reading on organizational culture.
Required Reading
Debra Woog McGinty and Nicole C. Moss have compiled a short corporate culture survey aimed at identifying characteristics of workplaces. It is scored in pencil-and-paper fashion. The categories of workplace description that it generates are fairly self-explanatory.
Assignment
When you have completed the assessment think about it for a minute, and how it compares to the Academy, Baseball Team, Fortress, and Club cultures described by McNamara in the background reading. Then prepare a 2- to 3-page paper discussing:
Your organization's scores on the McGinty/Moss assessment and whether the results fit your general expectation or constitute a surprise in some ways.
Your assessment of your organizations culture "type" according to McNamara's categories.
The degree to which these two assessments seem to be telling you similar or dissimilar things about your organization.
Anything that you can infer from these assessments about how your organizational culture fits or doesn't fit with you, and what (if anything) you might be able to do to make your interaction with the culture more effective. Be as specific as you can in the interests of getting the most value from the exercise for yourself.
Your overall opinion of these typologies as a means of understanding the organization and how you cope with it - what they measure well and anything that you believe they do not measure well or at all.
Your paper should be short (2-3 pages, not including cover sheet—references not generally required) and to the point. You are expected to deal with these issues in an integrated fashion, rather than treating them as a series of individual questions.
Keys to the Assignment
Your completion of all the steps in the exercise.
Your inclusion of the actual instrument or results.
Your understanding of both approaches to culture "types," both in terms of similarities and differences.
Your ability to interpret the results of the assessment in terms of your own experience, either to confirm or to question the results.
Your ability to derive from the exercise ideas about improving your managerial understanding and/or skills.
The clarity and quality of your writing.
