Developing Leadership for Organizational Life Cycles and Maintaining Employ Engagement

Week 2

Developing leadership for organizational life cycles and maintaining employ engagement

Samual Ingram

MSM 620

9/8/2016

Discuss what you think of the statement, "A corporation must change learning and leadership as it moves through the different challenges of the different stages of organizational life cycles."

I would agree with the overall statement.  As pointed out in this week’s presentation, there are different approaches for organizations depending on their character make up.  There are benefits and negatives that go along with the organizations characteristics, which may dictate how they handle the changes but I think there are three main points of interest that an organization must take in before it attempts to make changes with its leadership.  1) what stage is the organization at in its lifecycle, 2) what is the organizational characteristic index at that point and 3) at what stage of change is the organization in. Without the proper evaluation of the organizational position with regards to these 3 points, any development aimed at shaping leadership and learning will have no basis and may change the organizations characteristics to something that is less than favorable for the life stage that it is in.  Because, as prefaced in the early part of Phan, T. N., Baird, K., & Blair, B. (2014) the organizational life cycle (and the individual stages that make up that cycle) shapes the “structure, strategy, situation and decision-making style” for that stage.  By evaluating the organization and its position within its own life cycle, the organization can evaluate what it is doing and compare it with what it should be doing to maximize efficiency for whatever stage it finds itself in.

How do you keep employees engaged while the company is changing around them?

Well, to start off with, this week’s course materials cited that one of the best ways to build a passion for work is to give people a sense of meaning beyond simply building a profit.  This importance of employee engagement is argued for in  Kumar, V., & Pansari, A. (2016) because “84% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect the quality of their organization’s products, compared with only 31% of the disengaged who believe this.” How is that done? I think you have to go back to the organization life stages.  Correctly identifying where an organization is at will allow you to address how you can utilize employees in such a way that they contribute to the culture of the organization and not just the budget.  Jha, B., & Kumar, A. (2016) covers increasing employee engagement by training, appraisals regarding organizational targets, matching pay conditions to those found for comparable working standards and a clear channel of two-way communication. Though before developing these engagement activities, they must be calibrated for the organization’s life stage and the current capabilities of the organization. By tailoring the employment engagement activities for those factors (Size and life stage), it is proposed that an organization will see a greater success in the level of employ engagement than if it did not tailor those programs.