ASSIGNMENT 2

Assignment 2



Assignment 2

Introduction

In a dynamic changing world, the top leaders of organizations must be flexible and employ sense making while implementing change. Rigidity and inflexibility in leaders stuck with traditional management styles could lead to organizational failures. Pye, the chief executive in the case study 'Leadership and organizing: sensemaking in action' is one example where traditional preeminent leadership lead to the CEO's termination.

Discussion

In order for managers to effectively manage change and continuity, stability should be viewed as a dynamic phenomenon. However firm's heads are usually perceived as a kind of stability of a static situation in which the firm freezes in place, or worse, resisting change, is moving in the opposite direction. Continuity Management is to understand the forces ensuring stability in the volatile conditions in order to move forward effectively and efficiently. Because the organization is a social institution, leaders must know the propensity of people to to ensure continuity in a changing environment.

Building on past experience does not lead to regression, as historical figures may serve as a benchmark for future change. For example, the proposed changes to working conditions or restructuring will likely cause more support and confidence, if they will be reflected in the history of the firm. In this case, fear and anxiety of the employees will be scattered - workers will be able to personally verify the consistency, organic, and historical necessity of change.

Leaders need to be good sense makers. The organizational change they are introducing can feel like a journey into unknown distance. Leadership Center at MIT compares the ability of leaders to bring the meaning of sensemaking. Similarly, in his article, Pye says the organization as a cognitive map.

Leaders who combine past, present and future through change management and succession act as sensemakers. Questions of "where we are," and "what we have to look" are based on the principles of continuity, while searching for an answer to the question "where and why we go to" spur the organization to change. It is the leaders that govern these two phenomena to bring meaning to the organization.

In studying leadership we should the study the mechanisms that decision makers use to develop consensus (Grint, 2005:1492). This has resonance with Pye's (2005) reframing of leadership as having more in common with 'organizing' than with social influence processes, amongst which it is said to be insufficiently differentiated, and her contention that 'to understand leadership as a sense making process helps illustrate more clearly what happens in the daily doing of leading' (Pye, 2005:31). Particularly interesting in relation to the issue of contextual leadership is her observation that:

'leadership has a dual role: in part, helping to extract appropriate cues (i.e. shaping key sensemaking reference points) and in part, providing a crucial cue (i.e. being a key reference point) for others to extract. (Pye, 2005:45)

There is a strong stereotypical image of associating the top management team. According to Pye, having the opportunity to obtain the views from different participants helps broaden the top-management dominated ...