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Format APA

Volume of 13 pages (3575 words)
Assignment type : Coursework

Description
Critique of theories and concepts
In this activity you are required to examine and critically evaluate change theories and concepts in terms of their value to an organisation or industry you are familiar with or one you would like to become more familiar with.
Themes to examine may include:
• the nature of the external environment facing your organisation or industry and forces acting upon it
• the dominant culture or cultures within it
• the nature of leadership demonstrated and required

1750words.

Personal Leadership, Personal Change
Looking back across the whole module, examine and analyse the following themes and the inter-relationships between them. Also, identify and explain the implications of this analysis to your own professional development, and future changes:
• changes you wanted to go through and those you had to go through, and your roles (Leader, change agent, follower, other) in those changes(include previous work experience and the decision to enrol on the MBA)
• your levels of engagement with other students and the tutors
• the process by which you learn
• how you have gone about getting support through any challenging periods since the start of the MBA.
Module Assessment Details

The assessment will require the application of leadership and organisational change theory and concepts to real organisational contexts and include reflection on how it does/should occur in practice.

1 Format

You must produce a portfolio which is appropriately presented and includes the following tasks. Tables, diagrams and headings are excluded from the word count.

2 Tasks

Suggested Reading (key texts)

The full reading list is provided through ‘Resource List On-line’ , in the ‘Support Reources’ part of the Blackboard site, and in the reference lists at the end of the presentations.

You should also make use of a range of other reading material including Journals such as:

• Journal of Change Management
• Journal of Organizational Change Management
• Harvard Business Review
• Management Today
• Leadership Quarterly
• Leadership

These all contain useful and accessible material and most are available . You should also pay attention to newspapers such as The Times and The Guardian that have a regular supply of excellent articles on strategic issues.

We recommend that you make use of the databases available through the Learning Centre for additional materials, e.g. Emerald and Business Source Premier.

Some further thoughts and guidance on evidence for your portfolio

Academic writing and critical appraisal/evaluation

Here are some general pieces of guidance on some specific aspects of what we expect from students in assignments and exams.

What is academic writing for?
Students sometimes seem to think learned articles and their assignments are almost unrelated. Not at all. The purpose is the same, even if the audience is different. Academic writing – and your assignments are examples of this – share one especially important feature: they are intended to convince the reader by force of argument. (Or at least to convince the marker you understand the material, which is not so very different in principle.)

This is not the place to try to set out everything which you need to do to mount a credible and convincing argument, but broadly, if you make a significant point in your assignment, you should support it with an argument, an example or illustration, and/or a reference. It’s a matter of judgment which you use in each case, or indeed whether you use one, two or all three.

There are three main “sins” in academic writing which undermine the persuasiveness which is its main goal. If you commit them, you lose marks.

The three sins are:

(1) The unappetisingly named “regurgitation”. This means quoting or paraphrasing theory out of the literature with no critical appraisal or application (example or illustration).

(2) “Description”. This means merely reciting facts, eg like a case study written for class comment, without using theory to analyse it or make sense of it.

(3) “Prescription”. This involves asserting a point – a recommendation, say, or some important conclusion – without supporting it with argument, example or reference.

These sins do not stop a piece being interesting in itself or good “journalism” (writing which fails to fully supply the evidence a reader needs), but good academic writing aims to be more than just interesting: it aims to convince the sceptic by the force of argument. It is good academic writing which gets the marks.

Academic Culture: what tutors expect
It is very important indeed to note here that in UK academic culture tutors do not expect students to repeat to them in assignments what they have said in class or in articles or books. We expect students to develop their own arguments. Students show they have learnt about the subject by how effectively they answer the questions the examiners set.

We see ourselves as trying to produce post graduates who can think for themselves, who know how to learn and to present an argument without having to be supervised by someone else, who can be trusted to exercise initiative: “autonomous – and lifelong – learners”. This is what employers tell us they want – autonomy is not just a narrow academic requirement. In other words, we academics and employers want students who can themselves deal with new learning in new situations. One way you show that is by learning from the course. Not “just repeat what tutors and books say” – but learn so you understand, internalise and use the material.

What we want you to do in assignments, then, is for you to answer the questions we ask – not just to quote out of books or from lecturers, and least of all to cut-and-paste from the web. Of course we also want you to support your arguments with material from the literature because that is based in research – but what we are really trying to establish in assignments is what you have learnt in terms of how to handle strategy management.

Critical Appraisal

“Critical appraisal” or “Critical Evaluation” is fundamental at level 7 (Masters Degree). It means comparing and contrasting, and evaluating, theory, and how it can be applied. The academic literature contains many differing views of how the contemporary world works, and it changes with time (it would be very strange if it did not). The jargon to explain this is that knowledge is “contested”. Students are expected to be able to deal with contested knowledge, i.e. the many different ways of looking at management issues found in the literature: critical appraisal is fundamentalat this level of business and management study.

“Evaluation” means identifying the good and bad points of a theory (or whatever) – and its alternatives. It is very hard to say how important one thing in a situation is, without comparing it to other things. Suppose your favourite team in your favourite sport loses too often. Someone might ask: “Is the most important reason we lose that the goal keeper is bad?” If you tried to answer this question you would certainly look at the goal keeper’s performance, but in order to say whether this was the most important reason you would also have to look at all the other factors which might have contributed – poor defence, poor training, a poor manager, bad tactics, a penny-pinching chief executive who won’t buy the best players, poor morale due to bad leadership, and so on and so forth. To say that one thing is the most important factor – to evaluate it – is to compare and contrast it with other factors.

So, if we ask a question like “Evaluate the contribution of managing culture to strategic management”, what we are expecting is not only that you will explain the significance of managing culture (if that is possible), but that you will also compare it to other factors in managing strategy – stakeholders, the environment (and its components), choice, change, and so on ad infinitum (and you make the choice of which items to deal with).

You must include critical appraisal in your assignments. It is one of the most important assessment criteria.

There is further support for students around academic writing, critical thinking and much more via the My Study Skills Toolkit on Blackboard site. This is set up for undergraduates and postgraduates and if it has been some time since your studies it could be an excellent refresher!

Appendix 1- Marking Grid with Assessment Criteria

Note: The marking matrix provides guidance as to marking criteria for this module, referring to the different parts of the portfolio which will be used as the basis for the assessment, and the Learning Outcomes to which the criteria cross-link. The criteria are equally weighted. The tutors also take a holistic view of the assessment process and award additional marks where the work demonstrates originality, creative thinking and deep personal learning.