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This submission contains FOUR QUESTIONS
Answer ONE from Section A and ONE from Section B
SECTION A
Question 1:
There is now a considerable body of research focused on the advantages and disadvantages of organisations appointing diverse senior leadership teams. This shows that while there are considerable, potential benefits, the approach can be risky. Highly diverse teams can sometimes be dysfunctional in the way that they operate.
What potential advantages can accrue for an organisation when its senior team is made up of people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse characteristics and what practical steps would you recommend are taken by organisations looking to ensure that a more diverse senior leadership team operates functionally and not dysfunctionally?
Question 2:
Research on change management demonstrates that a fundamental problem for managers is the strong tendency that most people have to be suspicious of significant change when it is first proposed. They also tend to be resistant to its introduction and sometimes to try to prevent this.
Explain why employees often resist change when it is introduced in a workplace, and recommend ways in which managers can reduce the extent of such resistance and its effectiveness.
SECTION B
Question 3:
You attend a business seminar at which a speaker argues that all the major change management models that have been published (Lewin, Rodgers, Kotter, CIPD etc) are fundamentally flawed because they assume that change is something that organisations can plan for and control. She thinks this is ‘rubbish’. In fact most change in organisations is unplanned. Things continually happen which are neither expected, nor planned for or even desired, but a response is required nonetheless.
Explain how far you agree with this critique of mainstream research into effective change management and the models these researchers have published. Draw on examples from your reading, experiences and observations to justify your argument.
Question 4:
Strategy in relation to business performance relates to the long-term direction and scope of an organisation. The ultimate purpose of strategy is to secure and sustain the competitive advantage of an organisation, where the ‘rational’ and ‘emergent’ models of strategy are the two dominant approaches to the process.
Drawing upon research describe and analyse what is meant by the ‘emergent’ approach to strategy and critically review it in an organisational context.
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