115.764

Leadership and Teamwork

COURSE PROFILE

MBA Online

March 2022

WHAT IS THIS COURSE ABOUT?

COURSE PRESCRIPTION

Applied and experiential study of leading and working in teams, and the interpersonal communication skills required to be successful.

SUMMARY OF THE COURSE

This course explores foundational concepts and processes involved in teamwork along with a range of key challenges that teams routinely face. It also explores foundational ideas about the nature of leadership, recent developments  in thinking about  leadership and a  range of  issues associated with  leadership  practice.  In examining both of these main topics the course seeks to bridge theory and practice by drawing on students’ lived experiences.

Unlike some of the other courses you will encounter in your MBA journey, the issues we explore in this course are less objective and more subjective in nature. They are open to interpretation and contestation. Just in the same way that there isn’t one ‘best way’ to be a human being, so too there isn’t one ‘best way’ for how to interact with others, for a team to function, or for leadership to be practiced. Because people are complex and circumstances vary, figuring out the right approach is really a matter of ongoing navigation, paying attention to what is possible, desirable and relevant in a given situation.

However, because teamwork and leadership are both  key  issues for modern organisations and because leadership, in particular, is often seductively cloaked in both glamour and mystery, a lot of people are out there trying to sell you their favoured ‘recipe for success’ . This course should arm you with insights that make you less vulnerable to those selling a ‘snakeoil’ which claims to provide a ‘best practice’ formula for teamwork and leadership that guarantees success. There aren’t any guarantees — however there are valuable insights and principles that can be drawn from research that offer powerful guidance for practice, and we will be exploring some of that in this course.

We will be exploring teamwork first, as learning how to work collaboratively with others is a necessary precursor to learning how to lead others. However, our interest in leadership does, nonetheless, span the whole of the course via our focus on reflective practice, which enables greater awareness of how our patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving affect ourselves and our interactions with others. This self-knowledge is widely seen as foundational for leadership effectiveness, hence we begin working on that from week 1 through to your final assignment.

COURSE STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES

On successful completion of this paper students should be able to:

1. apply theory to analyse and inform improvements in leadership and teamwork practices

2. critically discuss the structural, cultural and political factors that influence leadership and teamwork change interventions

3. critically reflect upon their own approach to leadership and teamwork, including issues of communication

4. discuss the impact of cultural differences in leadership, including Māori and other indigenous models of leadership

5. develop an ongoing personal development plan in relation to their own teamwork and leadership practice.

RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER COURSES

The teamwork techniques that you will learn in this course will assist in study groups throughout your MBA journey,  as  well  as  providing  valuable  transferable  lessons  that  you  can  apply  to  your  workplace.  The knowledge you will gain about leadership will help to guide your own development as a leader, both within and outside of the MBA. The knowledge gained in this course hence has relevance to other courses in your MBA.

COURSE ROLE IN DEVELOPMENT OF PROGRAMME COMPETENCIES

The  115.764 course in the  MBA exists to contribute to these overarching themes in the  MBA Graduate Attributes (the full details of which are located on the MBA Community Hub site):

• Strategic thinking

• Leading with integrity

• Cultural competence

OVERVIEW OF THE TOPICS COVERED

The course is organised into nine topics as follows:

TOPIC               NAME

1                       Foundations of team work, virtual teams and reflective practice

2                       Processes of teamwork

3                       Conflict, power, social influence and decision-making in teams

4                       Leadership, problem-solving, creativity and diversity in teams

5                       Leadership as a relational, group process

6                       Being/becoming a leader

7                       Leadership, culture and gender

8                       Dysfunctional leadership: individual and systemic issues

9                       Leadership, change and decision-making

HOW IS THIS COURSE ASSESSED?

COMPLETION REQUIREMENTS FOR THIS COURSE

In addition to achieving 50% overall, you  must achieve at  least an average of  50% across all  individual assessments to pass the course requirements. All grades awarded by the lecturer are subject to review and moderation by the School and do not become final grades until approved by the School.

While  not  all  of your teamwork  is  formally  assessed,  online  class  sessions,  team  meetings  and forum participation are an integral part of your online MBA experience. You are expected to contribute to discussions and debates — and failure to do so will likely affect your competence to complete assessed work at a high grade level.

NB. Due to the potential of unforeseen pandemic developments, please refer to the course Stream site for updated information regarding lectures, assessments, etc.   This information will be regularly updated if the situation changes.

THE ASSESSMENT AT A GLANCE

ASSESSMENT	LEARNING OUTCOMES	PERCENTAGE WEIGHTING	DUE DATES
1: Group project/assignment: Team presentation	1	10%	Sunday 27 March, 11.59pm
2: Group project/assignment: Team analysis	1, 2, 3, 4	20%	Sunday 10 April, 11.59pm
3: Essay (analytic): Workplace problem or opportunity	1, 2, 3	30%	Sunday 24 April, 11.59pm
4: Reflection: Reflective essay	1, 2, 3, 4, 5	40%	Sunday 8 May, 11.59pm

Detailed  instructions  and  guidance   in  relation  to  each  assignment’s   requirements  are   located  on  the Assessment page in Stream. Make sure that you read these carefully as soon as possible.

Files should be submitted in Word format at 1.5 line spacing in a legible font size (e.g., 11-12 pt). Insert page numbers and either indent the first line of each paragraph or provide a blank line between paragraphs for clarity.

Assignments to be submitted via Stream, not later than 11.55pm on the due date.

FOR STUDENTS WISHING TO SUBMIT ASSESSMENTS IN TE REO MĀORI AND NEW ZEALAND SIGN

LANGUAGE

Massey University recognises the status of Te Reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) as official languages of Aotearoa New Zealand, and particularly recognises the status of Te Reo Māori as a Taonga with respect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The  Massey  Business  School  supports  the  right  and  opportunity  of  any  students  who  wish  to  submit assessments in Te Reo Māori and will seek to equitably support students who use NZSL2.

It is preferred that students wishing to submit an assessment in Te Reo Māori alert the relevant teaching staff ahead of time.   While permission is not required, advance notice that an assessment will be submitted in Te Reo will be helpful in terms of identifying and accessing the specific expertise needed; this will help avoid delays in the marking process and provision of feedback.

Teaching staff who have been advised a student assessment will be submitted in Te Reo or who have received a Te Reo assignment will work with the Associate Dean Māori in the first instance to discuss the nextsteps.

ACADEMIC HONESTY AND PLAGIARISM

For all course assignments it is acceptable (and helpful) to discuss the issues with other students. You may

freely ask and answer questions that promote learning. However, it is NOT acceptable to:

• Copy another student’s work, in part or in total, or an official/model answer from either the current class or from a previous class.

• Allow other students to copy your work, in part or in total.

• Copy your own work if it has already been submitted for assessment elsewhere.

• Provide students in future years with copies of your assignments.

• Copy and paste sections from internet sourced documents or pages.

• Post assessment questions and request answers – or copy someone else’s answers – from any online ‘learning’ or ‘ homework’ website (these are cheating sites)

• Have another person prepare and/or write your assignment (or parts of your assignment) on your behalf.

A link to the Student Guide to Academic Integrity at Massey University is here. Please make yourself familiar with the Code of Student Conduct available here

APPROACH TO TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE COURSE

This course covers a 7-week period. Each week will focus on one topic. Topic readings (including the relevant textbook chapters) provide important content and need to be read each week. The online classes give you an opportunity to clarify issues raised by the readings. There is a wealth of different work and life experience in the MBA classroom, and I will be encouraging you to share insights and questions through active participation. Through this discussion, you will gain the insights necessary to move from knowledge to application in your own work contexts.

This course draws heavily on your own prior workplace experiences, as well as on the experiences you will have throughout the course via the various individual and team-based learning resources and activities that it involves. In this course your lived experiences are treated as pivotal, shaping your interaction with scholarly ideas.  This  is  quite  different  from  simply  reading  and  memorising  ideas  to  then  regurgitate  them  in assessments, which is most definitely not what this course involves!

Instead, this course invites you to draw connections between your experiences and the scholarly literature, thereby giving you a richer basis for making sense of those experiences. It also invites you to explore how you can adopt ideas from the literature to enhance your practice. By using practice to help make sense of theory and using theory to inform. and guide practice, this approach bridges the gap that often exists between theory and practice.

This approach also means that your interaction with the literature will be subjective rather than objective: we simply cannot but help to interpret things through the lenses of our own experiences and beliefs. However, to help overcome the barriers to learning that subjective interpretation alone creates, extensive use of discussion activities gives you the chance to hear and learn from other people’s interpretations. The course thus takes seriously the notion that you are now part of a community of learners, to which each of us is expected to contribute. You are also asked to consider what the ideas we explore offer by way of new insights and new ways of doing and being — which involves being willing to question and challenge your pre-existing beliefs and patterns of behaviour.

This philosophy, and its associated strategies and practices, offer the potential to transform the learning experience from one oriented to the acquisition of technical knowledge (which is a legitimate approach for some other courses, but not this one) to instead being a process of self-discovery, self-reflection and personal development done within a supportive community environment.

Such transformative experiences typically have an unfolding, uncertain and unpredictable quality to them. They can be simultaneously frustrating, unsettling and exhilarating. They can change the trajectory of our lives, giving us greater clarity about who we are, who we wish to become and what impact we wish to have in the world. They require, importantly, a concern to ensure that you and those around you feel safe, respected and valued throughout this experience. This comes through  listening carefully, suspending judgement, being curious about perspectives and experiences that differ from our own and demonstrating an ethic of care and respect for others in our interactions.

To help unleash this transformative potential, the course involves the following practices:

• Limited use of traditional lecturing

• Students will be asked share their thoughts on the reading materials — so make sure you come to class having done the reading!

• There is no such thing as a ‘dumb question’ and usually there is no one right or best answer to the issues we are exploring

• We will negotiate over what we need and expect from each other to create a safe space for learning

• Teams are formed to provide a live, ongoing experiment in teamwork and leadership practice

• Discussion and other activities* will experiment with applying ideas raised in the readings

• All experiences create a platform. for subsequent reflection, to help make sense of ‘what happened’ and ‘why’

• All the assignments seek in some way to bridge theory and practice via your own lived experiences

All this has significant implications for your role in this course and how you should approach your learning. Your previous tertiary education experiences may have relied on you primarily working in isolation from, perhaps even in competition with, other students. However, in this course trying to act alone or compete with others is actually harmful to your own and others’ learning. You simply cannot undertake the experiential learning activities that are foundational to this course without engaging with others, most especially your assigned teammates, while drawing out the key insights to come from those experiences involves engaging with both your teammates and the lecturer.

Initially, do  not  be  surprised  if you find this  quite  challenging, especially  because these  interactions are happening in an online environment such as Zoom or Skype. It will be very tempting, especially if you are not overly confident, to hold back in such discussions but please resist that and share your thoughts. The more interactive are your team meetings and our online classes, the more experiences you have to analyse, reflect on and learn from. Even if you feel nervous, please grit your teeth, show some leadership and share what is on your mind. Given all this, when attending the online classes please ensure you keep your camera on: for both the lecturer and other students talking into a blank space is very off-putting and undermines the chance to build meaningful relationships, whereas being able to see who you are talking with makes things flow more easily.

Ultimately, the impact this course has on you will depend to a large extent depend on how open you are to the material we’re exploring and how willing you are to experiment with new ideas and new ways of doing and being. The course gives you multiple opportunities to actually demonstrate teamwork, by showing up and supporting others, and to demonstrate leadership, by showing up and sharing your perspective. The choice to seize these opportunities — or not — lies with you.

*ACTIVITIES

The ‘activities’ resources you will find under each topic page on stream comprise both ‘individual activities’ and ‘team meeting activities’ that you are expected to complete in order to be in a position to contribute to your team and to the class as a whole. They provide important opportunities that help you to explore, discuss or practice applying key ideas from the readings. ‘Optional activities’ provide further ways of extending your learning.

Individual activities primarily constitute some structured tasks that will help to guide your reflective practice efforts throughout the course, creating a platform of personal insights from which you can develop your re- flective essay. Rather than leave you wondering ‘what should I be reflecting on’, these activities give you some specific issues to explore. Of course, if there are additional issues or experience that you want to use reflective practice to explore then by all means go ahead.

Team meeting activities furnish your team with an agenda of tasks that it needs to work through. Please note, however, that your team will need to determine its own agenda in terms of how you go about completing your team-based assignments — and that task is above and beyond the ‘team meeting activities’ set for you.   The design of many team activities involves you completing some task together, aspects of which you will then be asked to reflect on collectively and/or individually, i.e. the learning will often times come as much, if not more, in the reflective analysis of how you completed the task, rather than from simply carrying out the task itself. That is the nature of experiential learning: we have the experience first, then we stop to draw outwhat we can learn from it. In that sense the ‘team meeting activities’ all function to create experiences that you can then reflectively analyse in developing your second assignment. These experiences may also prompt individual reflections, which feeds into your fourth assignment. More generally, the interactive experiences that you have with your teammates are necessary to complete assignments 1 and 2 and will help with your thinking for assignments 3 and 4.

Optional activities give you the opportunity to explore, discuss or practice applying even more ideas from the readings.

The time estimates provided for each activity are the average taken by groups, but please feel free to spend more time exploring the issues raised in more depth if you can.

Overall, the key message we want you to grasp about this course is that your role as a student in this course is not simply to read what’s given to you and then write some assignments. Yes, you will do a solid chunk of reading and write assignments and there is no getting away from that. However, your chances of doing well in those assignments materially rests on your interactions with teammates and the lecturer. Fundamentally, the chances of you having personal experiences and insights that generate real improvements in your team- work and leadership skills depends on you accepting the requirement to play this active, engaged role. We recognize this may at times be challenging but ask, nonetheless, that you accept this as your responsibility as a member of the learning community that this course constitutes.

NOTIONAL HOURS OF LEARNING

According to the New Zealand Qualifications Framework, ‘notional hours of learning’ refers to the learning time that it would take an average learner to meet the learning outcomes defined for a particular course. The credit value for this class (15 credits) offers a guideline not only concerning the number of credits you earn towards the degree or diploma for which you are enrolled, but also concerning the total amount of time you might reasonably expect to spend on this course in order to complete it.

A 15-credit course is defined by the Tertiary  Education Commission as 150 hours of student workload, so you can expect to allocate  to  this  course about  ten study hours outside  of  classes per  week,  although  of course everyone works differently. Expect some weeks to be busier than others, especially when assignments are due, but you should be working on your coursework regularly, every week.

You can find a great tool to help you plan your timeline for completing an assignment, here: Assignment planning calculator.