Week 10: Leadership processes and organisational change

This week’s lecture covers two parts of leadership and change. For leadership, it is important to understand the organisational context as leaders play a central role in the management of organisational symbolism. It is a process for guiding individuals and groups or even the entire organisations in establishing goals and sustaining action to support goals. Leadership communication provides vision of organisation that directs and redirects all organisational activities; it is a process of influence where leaders attempt to convince followers to attain specific goals or outcomes. Leaders are required to know how to say the right things and have a strong commitment to stakeholders. They are also needed to pay attention on the way message is being delivered as leaders should be able to frame their language during interaction; it is a way to manage meaning. These are the few things that are required in order to become an effective leader.

Organisation change is often natural whether it is planned or unplanned. Individual behaviour, organisational processes and strategic direction would be the few types of change. Typical problems identified in organisational change process would be lack of management support, top manages forcing change, inconsistent action by key managers, unrealistic expectations, lack of meaningful participation, poor communication, unclear purpose of the program and responsibility for change was not properly identified. There are some employees react negatively towards change in organisation such as resistance where behaviours intended to prevent the implementation or even ignorance of the change initiative and uncertainty where stress and heightened anxiety among employees. Some of the strategies to communicate change are spray and pray, tell and sell, underscore and explore, identify and reply and withhold and uphold. Unplanned changes usually happen upon crisis such as natural disasters, ethical violation and etc. It is something unpredictable with major threat that can have a negative effect on the organisation, industry or stakeholders if it is not handled properly.