Leadership and Organization Politics
March 19, 2018
Management 501 Case 5
The case for this module calls for you to look at an exercise in “leadership” and then analyze it in terms of its context, its execution, and its consequences. As we noted in the introduction to the module, leadership is not often considered to be a political problem, but it certainly makes sense to consider it in this context, since the political environment of the organization constitutes the critical background within which any leader’s efforts must be conducted. Leadership is a political effort, and mobilizes in its service all the formal and informal resources available to those charged with it. For elaboration on these observations, please see:
Leadership and organizational politics.
In order to place this within a larger political context, however, is most useful for you to start by reviewing this excellent summary of issues in organizational politics:
Wilf Ratzburg, Defining Organizational Politics [Obnotes.Htm: available at http://web.archive.org/web/20080216010425/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/1650/htmlpolitc01.html
You’re going to need access to some of the vocabulary of leadership analysis, both for this case and for your future work. The following is an adequate general summary, cast in a largely nonacademic frame but still reflecting the academic analysis of leadership. (The optional readings and supplementary material contain considerable additional supporting material on leadership analysis if you would like to dig further into this aspect of the case.)
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