Authentic Leadership II: Managing Relationships

Thank you for your submission, Noa. It was nicely written with many interesting insights and personal anecdotes. Regarding your answer to Q1, you mentioned the main areas in which leaders can strengthen relationships through fluid communication, focus on long-term goals, and leading-by-example. You could, though, have mentioned many other elements here such as developing trust and other social norms (relational capital), creating learning opportunities, making employees feel a sense of emotional attachment, encouraging knowledge sharing, and so forth.

Regarding your answer to Q2, you touched upon how leaders can build effective teams across countries/cultures e.g. by being mindful of different communication styles and learning about cultural intelligence. However, you could have written much more here about how these aforementioned communication styles differ in different cultures e.g. by using Hofstede or Hall, that we discussed in class. For example, communication may be more direct or low context in certain societies than in other cultures. You could also have used the cultural map or the learnings from the Sun Microsystems case to elaborate and exemplify.

Regarding your answer to Q3, you discuss the nature of conflicts and that they may be seen as normal states of affairs - though very time-consuming. You describe the need to see conflicts as a process (Pondy). You describe how conflicts within teams can be managed through creating clear channels of cmmunication, being transparent, assigning clear roles, etc. You could, though, have benefitted from discussing other factors such as aligning incentives (from princiapl agent theory), joint problem solving (mutual planning, socialization practices, personnel exchange), strengthening relational norms (conveying shared expectations of behaviour), trying not to make decisions personal, putting formal systems in place, engaging in leadership coaching, getting people to think of the team rather than their own self (you mentioned this, but you could have used the public goods game or prisoners´ dilemma to illustrate this)

Overall, it was a good effort, but your answers could have benefitted from integrating more in-course discussions, models and frameworks, and learnings from the various cases.

Stephen Rosenbaum