Analysis: The Tempered Radicals

Heifetz believes that the leader’s most important role is to promote adaptive work. Adaptive work requires followers be challenged and even face hardships (Heifetz, 1994, p. 239). This proves to present its own challenge to leaders since people have mixed feelings about change, they desire change to happen without any casualties, and they look to their leader to make change happen. However, Heifetz demonstrates that in order for change to truly happen and maintain permanence, adaptive work must be achieved (Heifetz, 1994, p. 239).

When conflict arises, professionals have the opportunity either to affect change by taking action or do nothing and maintain the status quo. This choice puts us in a powerful position to assist or obstruct the negotiating process and thereby expand or diminish our own potential.

Golensky (2011) also underscored that some of the transformational leaders may go into extremes and become too focused on their own self-serving agenda and “foster unquestioning obedience and dependence in followers” (p. 74). In addition, they may also become “almost intolerant of stability and may exaggerate organizational deficiencies or even manufacture crises to keep up the level of

Leadership and authority have been two debated ideas. Leadership is management by persuasion and inspiration, rather than direct or implied coercion. Leadership is an influence process, where a leader influences people toward shared goals, mutual respect, and mobilize others in a positive way (Schafer, 2005, p.231). A leader is an individual who takes the initiative, risk, or assist the group or individual towards goals or a more beneficial place. Within taking the initiative, a leader must have a vision, communication skills, trust, and respect. Over time, studies have shown that is less important who makes the decisions, but how they are made, what they are, and how they are put into place (Walker, 1993, p.230). This paper examines a leader’s role in conflict, decision-making, and problem and providing a rationale through strategies for roles taken by leaders.

In today’s organizations conflict and power are important elements to the success of any company but can also create negative long term impacts if not addressed. Organizations require enough power within the leaders to get through conflict and enough conflict within individuals to create new innovations. Not all conflict is bad but when there is conflict individuals with power must assist in aligning conflict resolution to assist in understanding for everyone involved in the conflict. The need for successful conflict resolution is vital for employees so that they are capable of moving on and understanding why the conflict was overcome.

The contingency theory (Browning, 2007, p. 190) suggests that leader’s effectiveness depends on how well the leader’s style fits the context. This means effective leaders in this era have the ability to distill their complex messages into accessible ones. In other words, an effective leader is aware of his/ her client’s informational needs and values and thus, creates information to suit their needs. Therefore, leaders tend to regulate and control expressive activity in and around the workplace from legal, managerial, and ethical perspectives (Barry B, 2007). This trend tends to work for organizations that try to cover massive change by creating as little impact on their employees as possible without doing anything ethically wrong in their business.

Personal experience regarding organizational conflict as a result of leadership will act as the example for this paper. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, workplace conflict as a result of leadership tends to occur when new staff, or staff persons in new more authoritative positions, use management styles different from their predecessors. For my example, a new property manager was hired at a building where I served in management for a different, though interrelated department.

This article discusses the pros and cons of advocating change within the workplace. It also discusses the reason (s) individuals are said to resist change because of habit and inertia, fear of the unknown, absence of the skills they will need after the change, and fear of losing power. OD approaches to organizational change presents a solid consensus that change and resistance can and should be "managed" by developing a strategy for change and using the OD tool kit of interventions such as training and communication programs, confrontation meetings, stakeholder

Failure to change the current issues will result in keeping the “elephants in the room” and continued friction by not “sharing responsibility for the organization,” which directly contribute to the two identified adaptive challenges. Heifetz et al. (2009) suggest that every immediate encountered problem is an opportunity to not only fix them, but to institutionalize new norms. Therefore the top leadership needs to acknowledge the challenges and take action by creating urgency. Kotter and Cohen (2002) states that “without enough urgency, large-scale change can become an exercise in pushing a gigantic boulder up a very tall mountain” (p. 15). Indeed, change cannot happen without identifying the issues or creating

Change that is frequently unanticipated and is forced on the organization. In a research conduted by Helfat, C. E., Finkelstein, S., Mitchell, W., Peteraf, M., Singh, H., Teece, D., & Winter, S. G. (2009). Modifications in government and alterations in the economy can occur on the spur of the moment. Responsiveness to sudden change requires sacrifices made by the employees for the benefit of the organization. Both arranged and unplanned types of progress in organizations require leaders to be well-equipped to adjust accordingly.

Organizational transformations are challenging, even under the best of circumstances. During times of uncertainty, people are hungry for information and leadership. When these things are not provided, associates become agitated and disengaged in their roles. One of the toughest tasks is to maintain employee peace, engagement, and motivation in the midst of uncertainty created by wide scale organizational change. Preventing conflicts is all about communication and without information and communication, people assume the worst and react based on that.

Change isn’t a matter of well, we’re gonna change, you can like it, or leave. This my way or the highway type of leadership can become extremely painful to the attendees. How change is presented can often determine if it’s accepted or rejected. On many occasions change has been wrapped in statements that are maybe partially true, but not completely true. Covering a personal agenda with palatable words of enticement can quickly bring folks into the arena of accepting change, but over time agendas are revealed and opinions change.

Individuals when faced with any major change will be inevitably resistant and will want to preserve the status quo, especially if they think their status or security within the organization is in danger (Bolognese, 2010). Folger and Skarlicki believe that organizational change produces skepticism in employees which make it problematic and possibly even impossible to contrive improvements within the organization (as cited in Bolognese, 2010) Therefore, management must understand, accept and make an effort to work with resistance, since it can undermine even the most well-conceived change efforts (Bolognese, 2010). Furthermore, Coetsee states for organizations to achieve the maximum benefits from change they must effectively create and

Conflict or disagreement over the range of issues has become inherent aspect of modern organisational life. People from different cultural and education background work in an organisation. People working in an organisation may possess different goal and interest. People working in organisation may tend to different over a range of issues including organisational politics, organisational procedure, personal preference or political preference. It is also argued that conflict is essential characteristics of organisational life. Role of manager is paramount with regard to negotiating the conflict that arises in organisational life (http://www.sagepub.com/). Often lack of

Conflict is an occurrence in virtually any organization, regardless of how large or small it may be. It is exceedingly difficult to get people to agree with one another about everything all the time, especially when they are competing for the same resources (Tsang, 2012, p. 84). This difficult is naturally exacerbated when there are stratifications between people, which frequently occurs in organizations. Organizations may have different categories of employers such as those in sale, marketing, finance, human resources, etc. The three main views of conflict which also play a significant part in the resolving of conflict are the traditional, the human relations, and interactionist views. There are points of similarities and differences between all of these views.