Leadership
Pick a case that has been covered in the media or literature, so you have references to draw on when describing the case. Don’t pick any of the cases previously discussed in this course except for the case featured in your leadership intervention video (you may pick that one if you wish).
As explained below, the paper is supposed to resemble a traditional research paper that integrates journal articles and uses theory to identify broader patterns when analyzing an
empirical case.
This is not a group assignment, but if you want, you can work jointly with one classmate on this assignment. If you do, then one submission per student pair with both names on it is sufficient (each student pair will receive one grade).
Instructions
Submission: Submit one MS Word file (doc or Docx) through Turnitin.com via Canvas.
Formalities: The paper should be between 1,500 and 2,000 words (not counting figures, tables, references, and appendices). Format the paper following the general APA guidelines (Links to an external site.). Do not copy and paste from sources. Instead, paraphrase and cite using APA (Links to an external site.).
Recommended Outline:
The percentages I provide next to each section give you an idea as to how much space you should devote to the different parts.
Introduction (10%)
Briefly introduce the case of leadership failure. Why is studying this case important?
Explain the paper’s purpose and outline what follows in the remainder.
Leadership Theory (35%)
In this section you lay the foundation of the leadership theory that will be used later for your analysis
Pick one of the leadership styles* covered in this course and explain how it works and what we know about it. Specifically, focus on elements relevant for the case analysis in section #4
If you want to make the argument later that there was too much of leadership style A and not enough of B, then it will make sense to cover and contrast both styles in this section
Writing this section will require identifying relevant literature (integrate 10 additional journal articles) beyond the studies discussed in this course or listed in the syllabus. I recommend searching through Google Scholar (Links to an external site.). To have access to the full text of most journal articles, you need to be logged on through FIU’s VPN (Links to an external site.).
* Transactional, Transformational, LMX, Situational, Horizontal/Distributed, Ethical, Servant, Authentic
Case Description (10%)
Describe what happened in the case you selected. Presenting the events in a chronological order often makes the most sense.
Clarify why you think this is a case of leadership failure and not a problem mostly unrelated to leadership.
Draw on references (news articles etc.) when describing the case but write your own paraphrased summary.
Case Analysis (40%)
Use the theory put forward under #2 to analyze the case described under #3
How does leadership theory help us understand what happened? What does leadership theory suggest for fixing the problem?
Create an analysis table with three columns: 1) listing the three core elements of the problem, 2) summarizing strategies to address each of the three elements, and 3) citations of literature to back up the strategies.
Why are the suggested strategies a good fit? How exactly could they be implemented?
Create an implementation table with two columns: 1) adverse effects – when implementing your strategies, what could go wrong, and how could such adverse effects be mitigated? 2) context factors – what are factors unique to the case? How would your strategy have to be adapted if implemented in a different context? Provide examples. Explain the table.
Summary (5%)
Summarize the entire paper in one paragraph.
References
Provide a least two double-spaced pages of references. Each reference should have been meaningfully included into the body of the paper.