The Process of Change, Creativity and Innovation - the Key Dimensions of Organisational Change. Which one Do You Think Is the Most Important?

...

Traits associated with effective leadership:

- Drive

- Desire to lead

- Honesty and integrity

- Self-confidence

- Intelligence

- Job relevant knowledge

Behavioural Theories

- Three styles identified by Lewin and Lippit, 1938, Lewin 1939

- Autocratic

- Democratic

- Laissez-faire

- Researches Kahn and Katz, 1960 identified two dimensions of leadership

- Employee-orientated: Emphasise interpersonal relationships by

- Focusing on subordinates’ needs

- Acknowledging individual differences between work group memebers

- Production-oriented: Stress task aspects of job, viewing group as a means to achieving objectives

Contingency Theories (Path Goal)

- Main job of the leader is to assist their subordinates to achieve their goals

- Leadership behaviours (House, 1971):

- Directive leadership

- Supportive leadership

- Participative leadership

- Achievement-oriented leadership

Contemporary Approaches

[pic 2]

Explain the leadership approach that is conducive to change, creativity, and innovation

- A democratic-participative style

- Are a key influence on the context of work within which employees come together to tackle challenging tasks (Amabile, 1998)

- Influence culture, structure, and resources, that are likely to affect the generation and implementation of ideas within an organisation (tushman and O’Reilly, 1997)

- Responsible for developing a system that nurtures and rewards employees’ creative efforts towards innovative work processes and outcomes

- Qualities

- Expertise and technical skills

- Ability to create and articulate a vision

- Ability to set the direction

- Powers of persuasion

- Communication and information exchange

- Intellectual stimulation

- Involvement

- Autonomy

Identify the challenges that contemporary leaders face in creating and sustaining these processes in organisations

- Companies that grapple with both exploratory and exploitative innovation have to adopt an ambidextrous leadership style whereby leaders focus on (Rosing et al, 2011):

- ‘breaking up of routines and thinking in new directions’

- ‘streamlining and narrowing down’

The Internal Environment: Orchestrating Structure, Systems and Resources –

WHAT DOES AMABILE MEAN BY THE NOTION OF THE ‘THRESHOLD OF SUFFICIENCY’?

Understand how structure, systems and resources can support organisational change, creativity and innovation

[pic 3]

[pic 4]

Three situational factors can affect the decisions on organisational structure:

- Corporate strategy

- The match between organisational strategy and structure influences the organisation’s attempts to remain ahead of competition

- The structure facilitates effective use of organisation’s strategy

- Organisation size

- Small orgs tend to adopt more informal structures

- Large orgs become complex, tend to adopt more formal structures and use high degrees of specialization, a large number of departmental groupings, and formalized ruled and procedures

- Environmental uncertainty

- Pressure of change created by increasing complexity and dynamism of external environment

- Organisation operation in highly uncertain and high-velocity industries tend to adopt structures that accept and endorse changes within the work setting

Outline the six key elements that managers need to consider when they design the organisational structure

- Work specialization

- Critical factor in determining employee productivity

- Creative companies try to broaden employee scope by involving them in different activities

- Departmentalisation

- Profuct

- Geography

- Process

- Chain of Command

- Formal lines of authority which span different hierarchical levels

- Organisations need to maintain a hierarchy of authority

- Span of control

- Number of people reporting directly to a manager

- Flat versus tall structure

- Companies have adopted flatter structures to avoid:

- Problems of co-ordination

- Distortion of information

- Problems of motivation

- Centralisation/decentralization