Organisation Management Individual Reflective Assignment

By studying Organisation Management Course, the subject primarily provokes me to reflect on myself and my experience of working with others along with the concept of managing people in the organisation. The lecture and material within this course assist me in my personal and professional development and my development within the learning team group. I am provided with learning frameworks that aid interpersonal understanding, communication and relationships. With the multiple personality tests given in the course provided me knowledge on how individual differences affect interpersonal behaviours/ interaction between people. (e.g. from MBTI, Belbin, Political Skills Inventory Test). Not only this course gave me the notion of my personality, leadership skills and interpersonal development. The course also concerned a lot on the organisational level with the aim on giving insights and to put into practical use of the sociology of organisations and management (e.g. organisational politics and organisational value) where I learnt about the nature of organisation and how to adapt myself to fit in the core value of the firm. For instance, I can categorised that my past firm’s organisation culture is Task Culture (based on Charles Hardy’s theory) as it was a client-focused advertising agency in which I worked in a team to complete on certain tasks for the clients. With this underlying concept of organisation’s culture, I can occupy myself with the right mix of skills, leadership, personalities and flexibility which can be productive and creative to the company. As for the organisational politics, I learnt that there are uncountable sources of power for an individual to exercise in the organisations which might not always come from the traditional source of power which for instance, authority power from a person's title in the organisation, or from specialised knowledge and expertise. In the lecture, we were asked to select the most valuable source of power that we’d preferred to use, possessing knowledge would personally be my best pick as opinions and decisions of knowledgeable people are held in high regard by others and hence greatly influence their actions. The test allows me to understand more about myself, my own behaviours, to further develop my strengths and rectify my weaknesses. Throughout the class, we have been given out a test on the MBTI which is the assessment to how an individual perceived the world and make their decisions. I am typed as an INTJ, Introverted, Intuition with Thinking which can often be identified as being insightful, future-focus, rational, firm-minded and calm. One of the aspect of being an INTJ personality that is best fit with my personality has to deal with the fact that an INTJ generally has an organised approach to structuring tasks in order to meet overall goals and objectives where they usually dislike being inefficient or disorderly and are often looking for new ways to do things. This trait perfectly synchronised with my personality in a way that I tend to feel more confident in everything I do whenever I know that there is a plan led in advance for me to follow. I perceived advanced planning as a reaffirmation, having clear-objective and being well prepared is very vital prior to whatever decision I make in life. Whenever I am working in a team, my role as described by being an INTJ is that I tend to place my own high work standards on others and become frustrated with team members who do not finish their assigned jobs or focus on some irrelevant details. It is also true that most of the time I would prefer to work with individuals that perceive to be knowledgeable. With all these aggressive values combined, it allows me to behave in more considerate ways to others and avoid being judgmental on others idea and opinions that are different from my point of views in order to broaden my horizon for new knowledges outside of my blind spot barrier. Another assessment given in the class was called BELBIN Team Role Test, the test believes that everyone of us possesses a pattern of behaviour that characterise our behaviour in relationship to another in facilitating the progress of a team which categorised into 9 main roles which ones matter most depends the circumstances, each person has a number of roles which they can manage comfortably if they cannot operate in their most preferred role. In this test, I scored very high on the following three team roles: Monitor Evaluator, Specialist and Co-ordinator, respectively. As a Monitor Evaluator, I tend to possess a high critical thinking ability but slow in making decisions by preferring to think things over, this attribute is considerably accurate to how my thought process works, as in general I am likely to overly-plan things and think very thorough before I make any important decision regarding work or study. As a Specialist, my attribute by this role concentrates on highly technical subjects which others might perceive as being aloof, isolated, theoretical but impractical. Personally, I see myself as a very dedicated professional who would provide whatever how much knowledge I have to the team in which sometimes some ideas might too dependent on theoretical study but were not feasible in practical use. Sometimes, I may be seen as isolated because of lack of social interaction. As a Co-ordinator, my shared ability with the role is my ability to guides team to achieving its objectives, summing up at team discussion and to pull team together in moment of crisis. Every and now then, I may be recognised as manipulative or offload works to others when I am only trying hard to persuade other members to follow the team’s objective. With all these attributes combined, my team role strengths are that I am more likely to see all options objectively and to do job requiring careful judgement. I am proven best suited to work where I can delve into a specific subject. And at last, my approach in working as a team member would be to maintain a broad overview while leaving the details to others. However, my possible weaknesses are that I might not tend to explore or originate new ideas and can be overly critical and manipulative to certain extent. I recognised the time when we had to work in a learning team and I found myself being too overly concern on the coursework given and focusing too much on the bigger pictures that as I do not appear to have the characteristics of someone who attends to the details I can also be too occupied by the theory I learnt to give out any opinions to the group members for having afraid that I would made some mistakes, hence, these test result has proven to accurately describe my involvement behaviour within the team. To overcome these weaknesses, the most important lesson I have learnt so far from the course is that I have realised my potential by knowing what I am good at; Calculating, I particularly enjoy analysing when and how expertise can be beneficially adopted. Forming Strategies, I am able to offer discerning advice and direction when devising strategies or making decisions as a group. Project Managing is also another role that I am capable of, I found my great joy by offering my expertise and knowledge to my team. However, I also need to take account of the role that I am least suited if I know how to work with someone who has these complementary qualities then it is very likely all these traits of me could gradually be fixed. Throughout the semester, my learning team and I have successful team collaboration. The key of the success is to have an effective communication. Most of the time, we thoroughly ask questions and actively listening to the members of the team instead of making assumptions before we began any work (e.g. our statistic coursework). We all agreed that it is more efficient working in this manner by speak out what we were good at instead of having just one individual delegated the work to others. Being able to provide creative criticism is also one of the crucial elements contributing to the success of our teamwork as criticism helps giving us a new perspective and expands our view to things we may have overlooked or never considered. Nonetheless, disagreement happened once in a while, I took my role as a Co-Ordinator by facilitating in team problem-solving by exploring the issue from all sides, uncovering the root causes of the problem we had by having my team members to team members to share their views and voice concerns. Next, we move into brainstorming and once we agreed on a path forward, we finally developed our action plans. For instance, during the course, we were asked to prepare a short group presentation to explore the motives and factors that influenced Kewku Adoboli’s behaviour in particular. Our team started off the project efficiently by sitting altogether and brainstorming for all possible influential factors and from then we wrote down the list on what we would be presenting. And, each of us chose on the topic based on what best represent our own ideas. In the end, we separated into two groups and we delivered good and satisfying presentation that went straight to the point and answered to all the objectives needed. In the upcoming semesters of my MSc, in order to become a better team member, I aim to take an open-minded and curious stance in understanding others’ opinions as opposed to my own. I should not set too low expectations on my team members and place more believe that they can also deliver flawless works without lowering my standards. And, more importantly, I will speak up and ask more questions in discussion so that my opinion will be heard and boost my visibility be becoming better self-expressed. And for myself as an individual, in order to become a better and well-equipped person, attending this course helped me identified various areas of myself where I may need improvement. One of them is to be honest in acknowledging my limitations and to exercise some area of discipline on a regular basis. And, when facing a problem, I should practice divergent & creative thinking and brainstorm multiple alternatives rather than one solution to the problem and not based on the theory I knew. Pushing myself outside of my comfort zone is also another essential change I should be able to overcome as it will widen my knowledge boundaries and maximise my potential which will positively impact my overall performance. Overall, by studying Organisation Management, I learnt that whatever role and responsibilities I have within an organisation, I should be able to work with other people and within teams in which it relies on how well I understand the links between organisation behaviour and management topics and most importantly how well I understand their behaviour and myself. I felt fully equipped with all the essentials skills mainly in the areas of personality, leadership, teamwork and negotiation skills as well as guidance to apply those areas in good practice.