Culture, Climate, and Ethical Decisions annotated bibliography, PowerPoint presentation and memo

An annotated bibliography for four (4) of your resources; a 15-minute, 9 – 10 slide (including cover page and reference page) narrated PowerPoint presentation, and a memo of no more than three (3) pages written to indicate the findings to a superior.  

A summary of the project’s requirements follows:  

 STEP 1:  Organizing Your Work: This step contains the elements of the project that are needed to complete the project.

Step 2: Collect and Analyze Resources: This step provides many important preliminary readings that you will need to be able to address the requirements of Project 3.  Culture, Climate, Ethics, the primary elements of Project 3 are among the essential factors that define organizations and the actions of their employees. These aspects of organizations have been extensively researched and published in a panoply of articles and books by scholars and practitioners alike.  Accordingly, the portion of the project that deals with defining the aforementioned concepts is expected to be drawn from authoritative, credible high- level sources.  A number of significant academic works are included in this step for your reference.  These academic sources represent authoritative, credible and high-level sources. You may later utilize some of these sources in to complete the project.

 Step 3: Independent Research:  This step requires you to Independently research additional articles and sources other than those provided in preceding steps.  The concepts of organizational culture, climate, and ethics are the focus of your attention.  You are to determine the consequences of organizational culture, climate, and ethics to your organization’s operations.  You will find the attached Project 3 Final Deliverable Template and its suggested questions for analysis very helpful in guiding your project to conclusion.  The research performed in Step 3 should produce the references needed to complete Project 4 in its entirety, including the four (4) sources you will use in Step 4’s Annotated Bibliography requirement. Please read the requirements of Step 4 and Step 5 and review the attached Final Deliverable Template before completion of Step 3.  This effort will save you considerable time and enable you to stay on point to complete the project in a timely and expected manner. 

As students and working professionals, you have an obligation academically and professionally to use the highest-level authoritative and credible sources available to you to support your research and analysis.  See my comments below for Step 4.

Step 4: Annotated References Due–See attached description and example):  After you complete your analysis of the materials in Step 3 of Project 3, Step 4 of Project 3 requires you to develop an Annotated Reference list. Four (4) references are to be annotated.  It is suggested that these references be significant academic references and researched from the academic sources embedded in the steps and other repositories for academic sources, such as the UMUC library database.

Annotating a reference means that the full APA cited reference also includes an explanatory notation about the reference and a brief critical analysis of its relevance to your writing.  In general, an annotation requires a focused analysis of each reference selected by you.  An Annotation example is embedded in Project 3, Step 4, along with the submission template for your annotated references.  A description of what is included in an Annotation follows:

Each annotation will consist of a descriptive portion, generally not exceeding a few paragraphs and an analytical portion, generally not exceeding a few paragraphs.  In the descriptive portion, you will summarize the author’s purpose, major points, and conclusions.  In the analytical portion, you will discuss the author’s contribution to the issue you are addressing (e.g., culture, climate, ethics, motivation, and so forth) and the relationship of the author’s contribution to your purpose.  Since you are expected to establish the quality of your research to buttress your analysis and conclusions, it is customary and expected that you will note the author’s qualifications and expertise, as they pertain to the information you are referencing to develop your memo and PP presentation. The citation for your 4 references must be in APA format.

 You should also distinguish between primary and secondary resources. A primary source is written by the author directly.  For example, if you read something on culture written by Edgar Schein (an icon in the field of cultural studies) and use it in your paper, that reference is considered to be a primary source since the source of the information is Schein himself.  A secondary source, on the other hand, is a source from which you extract content or information that was developed by that source but is based on the work of someone else —which, in our example, is Schein.  For example, if you are reading a textbook by Jones, who may be an acknowledged expert on culture studies herself, where she cites, explains, or uses ideas that originated with Schein, that information about Schein and Jones’ textbook is considered a secondary source. 

Keep in mind that an annotated reference is NOT a short book report. An annotated reference highlights but does not delve into the level of detail a book report strives to communicate.

Keep in mind, too, that there is a hierarchy of sources for all research purposes. I have suggested a hierarchy below:

Hierarchy of Sources:

Referred Journal articles.

Books by reputable authors in the field they are writing, which are grounded in documented research, that is referenced in detail.

Textbooks.

Certain specialized publications (WSJ; Fortune) but you need to be very conscious of the author’s point of view (biases).

Generally available news information from everyday sources (e.g., newspapers).

Publications that are pitching an approach that fixes everything and offer consulting services toward that end.

NOTE: Not everyone would agree with the exact order of the list or that it is all inclusive. I think, however, there would be a general consensus that a hierarchy along the lines I am suggesting does exists for all research purposes.  As students and working professionals, you have an obligation academically and professionally to use the highest-level authoritative and credible sources available to you to support your research and analysis.

A 3-page memo to a supervisor in your company and a 15-minute narrated presentation are due.  It is expected that the project’s PP and memo will comply with APA in-text citation and format requirements.

You are strongly encouraged to review the Project 3 Step 1 Final Deliverable Expectation/Outline/Key Issues & Questions. This document will help you proceed in a logical sequence through the project and ensure you address key issues of the project.  These key issues are addressed by the answering with your own work the following questions:

What is organizational culture? How does it relate to my organization?  How would I describe the culture of my organization?  Does the culture need to be changed? How can that be accomplished? If not, why not?

What is organizational climate? (Do people enjoy working here? If so, why? If not, why not? Are our motivation, evaluation and reward system perceived as fair and equitable? What effect do such measures have on climate? Do we do climate surveys? What do they indicate as key concerns? If we don’t measure climate, should we? Why or why not? How?

What is our ethics like? Do we employ fair practices? Are we provided clear ethical guidelines? Do we receive ethics training? How do we measure compliance? Do our leaders shape ethical decision making? If so, how? If not, why not? Do we ask employees to do certain things we would not?  Have there been any scandals to overcome? If so, how were they dealt with? Are they gone? What steps have been taken to ensure they do not recur?

Based on the above what are your recommendations you would make to the COO, as the assignment requires. I have provided some context and substantive guidance in my thoughts above in the prior week’s highlights regarding the various issues your Project 3 might consider for inclusion or discussion.  Below is an example that integrates some of the major issues that apply, in general, to Project 3.

 Project 3 Example: Think for a moment about the scandal at Wells Fargo Bank. What gives rise to an unethical culture involving hundreds of employees? What must the climate be like to drive individuals to such extremes? Does unethical behavior become so commonplace — that it becomes acceptable, overlooked, or an integral part of the value system? What was CEO Sloan’s value system? What type of climate and culture did he establish and what were his views on human motivation?

The looming issue for Wells Fargo (and all organizations), is how does leadership, when required, change the culture to a more desirable one? Perhaps, current leadership forecloses that option! Think about what a changed culture means for Wells Fargo in terms of the possible effects for organization structure, reporting lines, reward systems, bonus structures, business income replacement, and so forth. How will successful changes in culture, climate and ethics be measured?

Thank goodness it is your job and not mine to examine these daunting issues: :). But, if I were thrown into the fray, I might start my examination of culture, behavior, climate, and ethics with a good general source of information on these topics. In addition to the references for the readings in class, one such work is Organizational Behavior by Robbins and Judge. This text is in its 16th edition. Any of the last 5 editions would be fine. Of course, there are many, many fine textbooks on the same topics.

A seminal work on the concept of organization culture, Organizational Culture and Leadership (1983), was written by a founder of the discipline of industrial-organizational psychology, Edgar Schein, of MIT’s Sloan School. Schein examines culture in the same manner a psychotherapist works to understand a patient. He argues that culture manifests itself in organizational artifacts, stories, myths, legends, and behaviors. The types of individuals hired by an organization are indicative of what the organization values. At different stages of an organization’s culture, different types of leadership are needed to effectuate necessary changes and to keep the organization thriving and healthy. Schein views organizational leadership and changing culture as “two sides of the same coin.”

On the matter of organizational ethics, we can see opposing viewpoints stretching from 16th century Florence, Italy, as detailed in Machiavelli’s book, The Prince (circa 1510), which captured the realities of a treacherous and scheming 16th-century Florence bureaucracy, to modern-day morality-focused writers such as Harvard Professor Joseph L. Badaracco. Where Machiavelli’s ethics advocated, as often as needed, that a surreptitious, devious, and ruthless pragmatism was necessary and justified (i.e., the “ends justify the means”) to achieve desired outcomes, Badaracco’s methods for solving ethical dilemmas acknowledge the critical need for morality to underpin solutions to ethical issues that arise in organizations. In much of his writing, Badaracco acknowledges and discusses the inevitable ethical dilemmas that arise in modern organizational life stressing that these dilemmas more often than not have imperfect solutions. Often solutions to ethical dilemmas, which he labels “Defining Moments,” in his widely used and critically praised 1997 book, Defining Moments, force a choice between “two rights.” He has published extensively on the topic of “ethics.” His publications can be accessed by using the UMGC library databases. 

Badaracco, J. (1997). Defining moments: When managers must choose between right and right. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.

Machiavelli, N., & Bondanella, P. (2005). The prince. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

As with any project, it is good to begin by creating an outline. This will help you determine how many slides you will need to develop and how much information you will need to present on each slide. It should also help you determine a logical order in which to present your material.

Now you are ready to begin work on your slides and your script. You may find it easiest to create a slide based on your outline and then write the script for that slide. Or you may decide to create all of your slides and then write your full script. Another alternative is to write a full script first and then create your slides.

Here are some recommendations for your slides:

• Keep slides uncluttered by using very brief bullet points—only a few key words each.
• An easy way to make your presentation look more appealing is to use one of the designs provided within PowerPoint.
• Adding images and/or clipart is another good way to add some visual interest to your presentation, but don’t overuse these.
• When you are citing your sources of information on a slide, use a small font size so the citations don’t detract from the primary points you are making.
•  Be sure to proofread carefully: Any errors on a slide will be particularly noticeable because of the relatively small number of words.
• When you record your audio for each slide, a loudspeaker icon will appear in the middle of the slide. You can drag this icon to a better position (often the bottom right corner of the slide) so it doesn’t interfere with the bullet points you have included.

Presentation Script

The script for your presentation can be a complete word-for-word documentation of what you intend to say as each slide is displayed, or it can be a much briefer set of notes that you will use as a reminder while you are recording to ensure that you cover all the points you intend to make. The latter approach is preferable, because this makes it less likely that you will sound rushed or overly scripted when you are speaking. Keep in mind that if you were making your presentation in person, you would not want to be reading your comments; instead, you would want to make eye contact with your audience.

Here are some additional recommendations for your script:

• Try to keep the amount of narration to less than two minutes per slide. If you find that you need to say more than that, it is probably a good idea to create another slide so your audience doesn’t get bored.
• Make sure your script and what appears on your slide are closely related so your audience can easily follow what you have to say.
• Don’t simply read the material on your slide—add value by providing additional information.

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