The Management of Innovations - Essay Example

Instead of thinking about leadership as a set of mysterious personal qualities that some individuals just seem to possess, it is perhaps more interesting to think of leadership as a set of skills and practices. In other words, understanding leadership as a form of everyday work. Work that is done, not just by college principals and senior managers, but by people, systems and technologies working together across organizations and institutions. Explicating the concept of leadership is a difficult job. For, it includes understanding, documenting and unpacking all the ordinary and often taken-for-granted work that goes into accomplishing sets of tasks that are framed as 'effective' leadership. To explicate, therefore, is a process of describing in detail what we observe over a prolonged period of time shadowing principals, senior and middle managers, administrative and teaching staff as they go about their everyday work. This project attempts to investigate the nature of leadership and the everyday challenges of leading. It focuses on what leadership is and how it has become an ever-changing process. The text will be central to revealing the nature of leadership, relations between leaders and the led, risk-taking and entrepreneurship. In doing so, it would draw upon Richard Daft's text, Organization Theory and Design and apply his concept of the complexities of globalization (as in Chapter 6) in aiding managers design their organizations to be more effective on a global scale. As educational institutions in the word embrace new managerial and business approaches, they have simultaneously adopted a range of new technologies. This research summary reports on how information and communication technologies (ICT) are used to support aspects of educational leadership. This paper explores two particular aspects: 1. How such technologies are utilized to support decision-making and the practical difficulties of obtaining, manipulating and representing data. 2. How such data is turned into credible and verifiable accounts of everyday practice and organizational performance for the benefit of a range of stakeholders. Richard Daft makes it clear that no organization can stand still in today's reality - managers and workers have to think constantly of better ways of doing things, learn from every source, which bears knowledge, and can give the organization a better competitive advantage. Things have never moved so fast and threats and opportunities have never been so immense. Competitors have to be efficient and different to survive and stay on the top. Daft continues and presents the most recent developments in organizations' design - structures and management methods that have only emerged lately in response to the turbulences in the environments and competition worldwide. The rise of an emerging managerial philosophy of efficiency, system, and process is, according to Daft, reflected in the forms of internal communication that serve as mechanisms for managerial coordination and control. These have developed as a product not only of changing organizational needs but also of the technologies available to support them. Forms of organizational communication can thus be organized into specific and recognizable 'genres' such as letters, memorandums, meetings, agendas, proposals etc. These technologies as used by principals and senior managers within colleges not only to account for, but also to promote and disseminate, specific leadership visions and objectives. The overflow of more general managerial philosophies into the realm of globalizations in recent years has included the need to demonstrate competence, compliance and effectiveness to a variety of audiences. Going with Daft's idea1, the purpose of my study would suggest that this need for visible competence is now a dominant theme, driven by external inspection, funding and governance mechanisms as well as the service culture expectations of users and other stakeholders. Such 'audit cultures' (Strathern, 2000) are increasingly common in both public institutions and private enterprise, reflecting the need to perform a new kind of accountability based around the twin goals of economic efficiency and good practice. The concept of the audit, previously constrained within financial applications, has now expanded to become a ubiquitous element of daily life, with the learning and skills sector being no exception. The result is a raft of 'technologies of accountability'. The pan-national corporation, with its inherently complex structure, is the organizational form most severely affected by globalization. It is therefore important for the management of such corporations to improve the control and coordination of the corporations' spatially dispersed subsidiaries. Information technology (IT) has been hailed as an important tool in changing traditional control and coordination processes in complex environments. IT is being used for changing the nature of the relationship between headquarters and subsidiaries in a manner that makes the pan-national corporation more global in orientation. This is occurring as operations and decision-making processes in subsidiaries are redesigned in order to improve global management and local responsiveness Technology serves to shape the manner in which leadership work is delivered. Certain technologies, with their particular capabilities and limitations, can be seen to determine the format of what is made visible and what is accepted as evidence. For example, lesson observation forms and formats are computer generated; funding criteria are linked to the categories of learner for which data can be gathered, and visible proxies (e.g. schemes of work and lesson plans) are substituted for qualitative assessments of the standard and relevance of curriculum provision. In this sense, users of technology can be seen as valuing what can be measured rather than measuring what should be valued. At the heart of these 'technologies of accountability', or 'technologies of leadership', is the calculation work undertaken in making leadership work visible to a range of audiences. It is through this performance that organizational information and accounts of everyday practice are rendered visible. Much of what counts as everyday leadership work within UK FE colleges appears to consist of producing, sharing and manipulating accounts of events, producing a number of subtly different versions designed to accomplish different work or to satisfy different audiences. These versions of events are constructed to conform to the new accountabilities of audit. At the same time, they can also serve as forms of organizational communication and accountability that allow other kinds of 'ordinary' work to be done within the college. For example, the components of a successful Ofsted inspection may be recycled as the justification for a Beacon Status/premium funding application. The same material might also be used as an indication of quality provision to entice students to apply to the college, an opportunity for the public praise of staff and as the motivational basis for exhortations to further achievement. In each case, the mode of delivery and the specific choice of content will serve to construct a version or account suited to the leadership work it is required to perform. In focusing on the complexities involved in the use of ICT in the provision of management information, our interest is on documenting the actual work that leaders do. Meeting the practical difficulties of determining which figures are required for which purpose and knowing how to manipulate and present them. The leadership work here consists in the selection and calculation through which activities on the ground, as understood through the management information collected concerning them, are made to visibly fit the requirements imposed upon the organization by external agencies. Daft claims that leadership decisions, despite the proliferation of technology and the proliferation of "hard" data, are the products of socially organized accounting work and as such are 'accountable'. The calculations and documents on which decisions are based are available as objects of debate and re-interpretation. Decisions are effectively 'displays' of the methods used to produce them - leaders must keep in mind exactly what others might make of his or her interpretation of the information. Thus, the documents produced and the accounts that underpin them to represent 'gambits of compliance'. The process through which decisions are made can be seen as "extending to the rule the respect of compliance, while finding in the rule the means for doing whatever needs to be done." (Bittner, 1965)2 Giraldo's research (2003) summarized two models as a mechanism to understand corporate evolution and the complexity of global markets. The first model intended to explain corporate growth from a local perspective. The second model focused on the design of entry strategies for international markets. In summary, Greiner's research identified developmental phases that companies tend to pass through as they grow. The major contribution was identifying main characteristics that described evolution for global companies. One of the main disadvantages of his model, it is that he did not clearly analyze the impact on international markets. In Summary, Root's research provided an analytical framework that defined a set of activities that a corporation must perform in order to enter international / global markets. In addition, it highlighted the need to incorporate external factors and internal factors when deciding which foreign market needed to be addressed. As main disadvantages for this framework, Giraldo (2003) found that evolution stages were rigid and not always predictable, which bring disillusionment from or attempt to develop a very precise and "accurate" strategy for global corporate evolution, as opposed to a more general and plausible theory of strategic actions (Weick, 1995). These concepts can be depicted in the next paragraph contains the following ideas that strategic planning assumes simple linear relationships between leadership behavior and organizational outcome. In reality, organizational structure and behavior are the products of complex, interactive dynamics, and relationships between cause and effect are often nonlinear and recursive. Things change suddenly rather than gradually; events cause each other; phenomena result from convoluted, interactive networks of cause and effect. Consequently, the above premises suggested studying a dynamic non-linear framework for strategy development. In accordance to Daft's claim, Giraldo (2003) suggested that organizations should be treated as complex social learning systems. To enhance the previous perspectives on global companies, it is necessary to analyze them from an organizational learning perspective (Croswell, 1996). The concept of organizational learning or learning organizations has been evolving for more than two decades that stress the criticality of this issue in organizations that are becoming global. First, change is more rapid and ever more intense. Second, global competition forces companies to face the knowledge resources of the world's best companies. To understand and deal with the issue, McCuiston, V.E., Ross-Wooldrigde (2003) summarize seven key paradigm shifts that make a learning organization different from the traditional organization. It is clear that these paradigm shifts stress a whole mindset and way of perceiving organizations and the interplay between "work / performance" and "learning". Schwandt's (1996) approach provides a counter argument to present strategic management practices that deal only with performance change that demands all organizations activities "add value" to their products, as opposed through performance and collective learning. Schwandt focuses in explaining an alternate explanation of change by thinking of organizations as dynamic social systems being formed, reformed, and consuming energy in states of punctuated equilibrium with periodic movements between order and disorder. In his research, he defines the collective (organization) as an amalgamation of actors, objects, and norms and is characterized by social phenomena that are more than the sum of individual behaviors and attitudes of the individual actors. The use of the term "dynamic" refers to the social system's patterns of continuous change or growth characterized by complex relationships among actors and between actors and their environment. Schwandt's model represents a complex synthesis of four distinct disciplines set in the context of society and Parson's general theory of action systems (Croswell, 1996)3. As a result, the construct presents a framework for social systems designed by actors to attain goals or reach objectives. Figure 3 depicts the relationships among and focus of the four prerequisite functions that any system must accomplish in order to continue to exist. This prerequisite relationship allowed Parsons to describe the purpose of each action subsystem as it relates to the total system. The operational model of a social system as a learning system may be represented by four components of subsystems, which interdependently create a system of social action, paralleling the general theory of action by Talcott Parson described in Bluth (1982). The four learning subsystems do not function independently - they are non-linear and interdependent. Each subsystem is responsible for carrying out vital functions for the organizational learning system to adapt to its environment. They are (1) Environmental Interface, (2) Action/Reflection, (3) Dissemination and Diffusion, and (4) Memory and Meaning, The acquisition of resources subsystem provides the organizational performance system with the adaptation function. It is responsible for screening, obtaining, and putting into service organizational resources in an effort to respond to the needs of the internal collective as they perform goal attainment actions. The production/ service subsystem provides the organizational performance system with the goal attainment function. This subsystem is complex because it incorporates all of those actions and processes that the organization must perform to produce a product or reach a goal. The reinforcement subsystem provides the organizational performance system with the pattern maintenance function. IT is comprised of those elements that contribute to the maintenance and management of tensions regarding the standards, norms and values that the organization uses to reinforce the organizations performance. Lastly, the management and control subsystem provides the organizational performance system with the integration function. This subsystem includes management of control processes, job design, training, organizational development, and operational and strategic planning. Like the Schwandt framework, this model results in an innovative way to measure organization performance from a systems point of view. Thus, we can say that leadership global village is less about the work of a few talented individuals and more about the successful organization of a complex network of distributed leadership practices involving staff from across the organization. Leadership is neither mystical nor heroic, but consists of relentless attention to relatively mundane tasks and much of leadership is management. Leadership depends on doing the 'grunt work' before any form of vision kicks in. matters. In this way, the work of leaders and even senior managers in the corporate when they engage in decision making and analysis of management information involves a continuous (and often ingenious) struggle with the technology and the data. In the process, information is not so much 'uncovered' or 'given', as continuously reconstructed. The principals and senior managers in our study appear to view the construction of such accounts, and the manipulative role they themselves play in the application of the management information available, as an integral part of the leadership work required to achieve organizational goals. Thus, we find that leadership generally consists of complex, but ultimately mundane and ordinary, practices. The practical accomplishment of educational leadership work is crucially supported by the utilization of an array of technologies. Traditionally Leadership and technology have remained separate fields of study and yet, as this paper has demonstrated, their consideration in combination has much to contribute to an understanding of the social organization of educational leadership. Our discussion illustrates the ways in which leadership work and technology are inextricably linked in the doing of the everyday calculation and accountability work which leadership entails, and how specific technologies such as ICT play a central role in its practical accomplishment. Works Cited 1. Bittner, E. The Concept of Organization Social Research, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. 2. Burns, T., and Stalker, G.M., The Management of Innovation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1961. 3. Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2000 4. Croswell, Clyde V. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding complex systems, New York, NY: Routledge, 1996 5. Daft, R. and Weck, K. Toward A Model Of Organizations As Interpretation Systems, Academy of Management Review, (1984): Vol. 9 No.2, 284-95. 6. Den Hartog, D.N., Van Muijen, J.J., Koopman, P.L. Transactional Versus Transformational Leadership: An Analysis of the MLQ, Journal Of Occupational And Organizational Psychology, (1997): Vol. 70 No.1, 19-29. 7. Drath, W.H., Palus, C.J. Making Common Sense: Leadership as Meaning-making in a Community of Practice, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, NC, 1994 8. Eden, D. Pygmlion in Management, Lexington Books, New York, NY , 1990 9. Fiedler, F.E. A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1967 10. McCuiston, V.E., Ross-Wooldrigde, B. Leading The Diverse Workforce. Profit, Prospects And Progress, The Leadership & Organization Development Journal, (2003): Vol. 25 No.1, 73-92 11. Strathern, M. (ed.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Routledge, London, 2000. 12. Schwandt, T. A. Three Epistemological Stances For Qualitative Inquiry. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. 2000. 13. Trice, T.M., Beyer, J.M. Charisma and its routinization in two social movement organizations", in Staw, B.M., Cummings, L.L. (Eds), Research in Organizational Behavior, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT. 1986. 14. Weick, K. (1995), Sense Making in Organizations, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, 1995. Read More