Assessment 1
Your frst assessment requires team work. Please arrange yourself into a team as soon as possible, and ideally no later than Week 3. This assessment will centre on the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) process that is discussed in Unit 2. One organising key concept for your assessment will be the six As of EBM. In the assessment, we will focus on the frst four elements of asking, acquiring, appraising, and aggregating.
Summary
Managers make decisions about every aspect of an organisation such as strategy, structure, control systems, responses to the environment and human resources. Decision-making is therefore a critical aspect of management. Effective managers are able to incorporate evidence-based decision-making capabilities into their practice to optimise outcomes. A hallmark of high-quality decision-making is the ability to combine critical thinking with an evidence-based approach. Assessment 1 will focus on evidence-based decision-making, which is discussed in Unit 2. The assessment will focus on the frst four elements of Evidence-Based Management (Key Concept in Unit 2): Asking, Acquiring, Appraising, and Aggregating.
Assessment 1 is a team-based assessment. We recommend teams of no more than 5 or 6 members. Learning how to contribute to a team environment and how to manage team-based projects are critical skills for managers. This assessment provides your team with the opportunity to practise effective Teaming (discussed in Unit 5). As a team, you will prepare a report that provides a relevant recommendation for or against implementing a specifc management initiative, practice, or policy.
Your team’s objective will be to get to that recommendation, having completed a rigorous search for and evaluation of the available evidence. Your team’s recommendation may be to a specifc organisation (perhaps one where a team member works) or as a more general recommendation to a type of organisation. What is important is that the team demonstrates the application of the EBM/EBDM process (Unit 2) and incorporates relevant evidence to substantiate and support the recommendations made.
The Task
As a team, identify a management practice or policy that is promoted as performance enhancing for either employees or the organisation . It is important that you select a policy/practice that your team is really interested in and wants to learn more about. Examples of a management practice or policy you could consider (but are not limited to) are:
a. Forced ranking performance appraisal
b. Team diversity for increasing creativity
c. Diversity for increased performance
d. Working from home and telecommuting
e. Holacracy
f. Activity-based working
g. Four-day working week
Details
Evidence-Based Management Process
Asking:
Having found the broad practice/policy you are interested in exploring, your team will need to formulate a'focused question'. This will enable you to develop an appropriate recommendation (based on the evidence that your team will subsequently collect). Please see Readings 2.2 and 2.4 on asking critical questions. Use the PICOC framework (key concept in Unit 2) to help you formulate the focused question.
Make sure your team starts with using minimal search terms (i.e. the most important key words). Reading 2.4 provides helpful details on this stage. Look carefully at the focused question and then identify key words/terms from the focused question and use them as search terms. To fnd 'meta-analysis' or 'literature reviews' or 'literature surveys' (i.e. higher quality academic evidence), try adding such terms (separately) into your search terms and see what results come back.
Your team will need to fnd 10 good-quality sources of evidence that can be used to answer the focused question. However, in order to fnd 10 good (i.e. usable and useful for assessment purposes) sources of evidence, your team may have to skim through about 50 articles (share this evenly among the team members - so skim through about 10 articles per person).
At this stage, the team is learning how to search for evidence and trying to fnd relevant articles to help your team answer the focused question. In reading a piece of academic or practice-oriented evidence: look at the title and then read the abstract. If the title and abstract seem relevant for your team’s purposes, skim through the introduction and conclusion. If at the end of this, you and your team decide that it looks promising, then you may need to devote time to do a thorough reading.
Note: Please use an appendix to list the 50 or so articles you have skimmed through. These do not have to be in your reference list. The 10 articles your team uses to build arguments and answer the focused question should be in the assessment reference list together with course notes and course readings that have been used.
Appraising:
The next step will be to assess the quality of the evidence. Not all peer-reviewed articles are the same quality in terms of providing evidence, and non-peer-reviewed material ranks even lower in this scale.
Reading 2.4 explains how to judge the quality of the articles. Remember that good decision-making requires managers to use the best available evidence from a variety of different sources.
Note: While working towards completing the ‘appraising stage’, each of you will need to conduct a degree of independent research. It is a good idea to fnd a process to share the results of your search and also decisions to 'keep/discard' articles so as to reduce doubling up.
Aggregating:
Once you have identifed about 10 good sources, as a team you will aim to 'aggregate' the evidence. Your team is now ready to analyse the problem, answer the focused question and reach a recommendation.
Note: At this stage, check if your team’s focused question needs to be tweaked, based on the evidence your team has found.
What does the evidence say? Is it a good or poor management policy or practice? What are the associated risks and benefts identifed and backed by evidence? What does the evidence say about what it would mean for the organisation if it were to choose to go ahead or fail to adopt this practice/policy? Take a critical approach and present strong arguments backed by the research to make your team’s recommendations.
Structure-related notes:
The assessment is maximum eight pages long (one-page Executive Summary and seven pages of text, double spaced, Times New Roman, 12pt font, 2.5cm margins). Please make sure that your team follows the details provided in the Assessment Submission section, and uses the Harvard referencing system consistently in your report.
In presenting the report, your team can either use a linear process, where the report culminates in the recommendation, or present your team’s recommendations up front and then justify these recommendations, using the EBM process. Both structures can work well for this assessment. However, the second structure is usually preferred when writing reports for your bosses and is a valuable skill to practise.
References and appendices are excluded from the page limit. Tables/diagrams can be placed in an appendix, but please ensure that your team has clearly introduced, integrated, and referred to them in the main text of the report. Don’t expect the reader to look at your appendices and make sense of them, if you have not properly introduced and explained them in your report.
Peer Evaluations:
Peer evaluations are voluntary. If you do not submit an evaluation, your Class Facilitator will assume that all team members made an equal and valuable contribution. If, however, a team member strongly feels that another member of the team did not contribute fairly, they can choose to fll out the peer evaluation below. These evaluations will be kept confdential.
Please note that marks will only be adjusted if there is substantial evidence (i.e. most other team members made a similar evaluation, or other sources of evidence such as emails) that the team member’s mark deserves the adjustment.
Criteria for peer evaluations:
1. Quality of contributions (completed tasks on time; made genuine and concerted efforts at all times; accurate and relatively error-free material presented; highly imaginative or creative).
2. Contribution to team (helped create a positive atmosphere in meetings and in communications; made suggestions; had good ideas; active and constructive in meetings; sorted problems, smoothed diffculties; helped make decisions and kept to them).
3. Quantity of contributions (frequency of attendance at meetings; number of team tasks taken on; size/complexity of the tasks undertaken or participated in; amount of time spent on tasks).
Completion of the peer-evaluation form:
Copy and paste the table below into an MS Word Document or into the body of an email that you forward to your Class Facilitator.
Write your name in the frst row and underline your name. Write the names of the other team members in the rows below.
Allocate a mark for each team member (including yourself) from a starting position of 100 points per member. If you decide that a team member did not contribute equally, you could award that member say 80 marks. You would then have to allocate the extra 20 points to other members of the team who contributed more. If you allocate a mark other than (i.e. less than or more than) 100 to any team member, please provide your reasons (e.g. member X did extra research, or member Y did not attend meetings regularly). You may set up an electronic version of the table below and use as much space as required.
Assessment 2
Summary
The purpose of this assessment is to give you the opportunity to apply the concepts learned in this course to your own organisational life.
Specifcally,
1. you will analyse a specifc incident that you (or someone you observed) could have handled more effectively,
2. explain the organisational context within which the incident happened, and
3. logically derive from your analysis specifc actions you will take to improve your management practice next time you encounter a similar event.
You should aim to draw on concepts from two to three Units of the course in your organisational action learning review (OALR).
Details
Please present each ALR under the following four headings:
Specifc incident: Provide a very brief description of a specifc incident that you (or someone you have observed) could have handled more effectively. Be clear about what was said and done, but don’t get lost in the detail of the event. Include only as much detail as is necessary to create a platform for the analysis in the next section of your ALR. Please note that this refers to a "specifc" incident that happened. Examples of specifc incidents may involve a discussion or a meeting that went awry with your manager, staff, or a peer; a reaction you have performed in response to an event that happened at work (that you later came to regret) or similar.
Organisational Context: Conduct an analysis of the organisational context. Drawing on relevant data, describe the external and internal environment of the organisation. This may include an analysis of the changes in the PESTEL characteristics that have an impact on the way the organisation and employees within are behaving, a careful articulation and analysis of the strategy, structure, culture, and various policies and systems of the organisation. Grades will not be given for using lots of different ideas/concepts, but rather, for presenting a tight and well-argued analysis of the organisational context. As such, you should draw on relevant data in order to justify your diagnosis. This data could be from public records, any company documents you have access to, observations of the organisation, and/or interviews with managers.
Analysis: Explicitly draw upon relevant course concepts to illuminate why you (or another) did not think and act as effectively as you might have. Do not provide defnitions for concepts. Instead, demonstrate your understanding of relevant concepts by the way you apply them to analyse how the event was handled.
Improvement planning: Logically derive from your analysis some specifc, conceptually driven actions that you, personally, will take to manage similar situations more effectively. Here your plans for actions should refer back to the specifc incident and other incidents like that one rather than a general development plan that you could have written with or without the specifc incident having happened. State how you would evaluate your effectiveness at applying the steps or initiatives you identify. Describe any obstacles that are likely to occur (e.g. emotions, lack of time, insuffcient resources, unsupportive colleagues) and how you will address them.
Guidelines:
The best OALRs are produced in accordance with the following guidelines:
• Focus on a specifc incident. Without a clearly focused beginning, it’s virtually impossible to produce an adequately focused analysis and improvement planning section. ALRs with incidents described in any more than four to fve lines rarely, if ever, have suffcient focus to be of high quality.
• Focus on concepts. In your analysis section especially and throughout the report, demonstrate your understanding of every concept you use by showing: (i) exactly what the concept reveals about why you did not act as effectively as you might have; and (ii) in your improvement planning section, precisely what you will do (not just remember or keep in mind) to apply the concept to act more effectively in future.
• Try to focus on you! Strong ALRs focus on events that you, rather than other people, could have handled better. While it may be relevant to analyse the actions and reactions of others in the situation, focus as much as possible on how you contributed to the challenges you encountered (including ways you might not have brought out the best in others). Also provide concrete plans about how you will act more constructively next time you encounter a similar predicament.
• Make your improvement planning section Smarter+ (Unit 7).
• In ensuring that your improvement plan is Smarter+, avoid indicating this in the form: ‘My plan is specifc because …’ Your plan will be Smarter+ if it makes explicit precisely what you plan to do, when, etc.
• Be coherent, succinct, and logical. Your review should have a coherent argument or set of points presented within the length limit.
• Be sure the recommendations in your improvement planning section logically follow from your analysis. Similarly, the issues raised in your analysis should all be addressed by specifc steps in your improvement plan.
Thus:
• Avoid detailed descriptions and narratives that contain minimal application of relevant concepts.
• Avoid using the ALR as a place to explore your feelings about work. This kind of exploration is a useful exercise that you can do at another time.
• Whenever you use a course concept to make a point, provide enough descriptive detail or concrete evidence to show that you understand the concept and that it applies in the way you claim.
• Avoid listing multiple concepts within a sentence. Only use a concept when applying it to make an analytical point about the event or about an improvement step. If concepts are presented adjacently, they are typically just being listed rather than applied in an adequately evidence-based manner.
An overarching principle to keep in mind is that because good management is evidence-based, it is important to provide evidence for the statements you make in all assessments.
Structure-related notes:
The assessment is maximum seven pages long (one-page Executive Summary and six pages of text, double spaced, Times New Roman, 12pt font, 2.5cm margins). Please make sure that your team follows the details provided in the Assessment Submission section, and uses the Harvard referencing system consistently in your report.
References and appendices are excluded from the page limit. Tables/diagrams can be placed in an appendix, but please ensure that your team has clearly introduced, integrated, and referred to them in the main text of the report. Don’t expect the reader to look at your appendices and make sense of them, if you have not properly introduced and explained them in your report.
