Sunday, February 16, 2020

Leadership - MBA Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Leadership - MBA - Essay Example Thus the only thing that will be found common between various leadership styles will be the â€Å"social influence† (Robert K. & Angelo K., 2004). This factor is the key in leadership. There are a number of leadership styles that are proposed in various books journals, periodicals and the internet. In this paper, only some of them are discussed very briefly as it is not possible to discuss each and every leadership style also these are discussed briefly so that these can be applied to the selected organization in much more detail. But are these styles of leadership actually followed in the organizations today? To look into the practical application of the various leadership styles, a company that specializes in the manufacturing of computer hardware components, Softech Company is selected and leadership styles followed at two different levels of management are discussed and analyzed. There is an in-depth analysis conducted on the style of leadership that these managers follow and the way they deal with their subordinates and what influence their subordinates have through their personalities. For the purpose of analyzing the application of leadership, Softech Company was selected. The company background and rationale for selection is discussed later in the paper. Two levels of the organization were focused for the analysis of the leadership style possessed by the leaders. One top level executive was chosen for the purpose of analysis and another middle level manager’s leadership style was studied. The names and complete designations are kept confidential as the respondents didn’t want to disclose this information. The styles of these managers vary broadly in terms of their approach to the tasks and subordinates. Unlike the trait theory, the behavioral aspect of leadership focuses on the behaviors of the leaders which largely influence their followers (Sadler, P., 1997). In this respect a number of

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Positions of Individual versus Society in Terms of Cognitive Essay

Positions of Individual versus Society in Terms of Cognitive Development - Essay Example This concept leads to several questions. Piaget saw the child as a solitary learner and discoverer, and on the contrary, Vygotsky emphasized on the social and cultural nature of the development. According to Vygotsky, a child's psychological development happens within social interactions, not through the unfolding of the innate structures. Development is a phenomenon that cannot be separated from its social and cultural contexts. Therefore as per his theory, individual is a part of the sociocultural matrix, where social interactions play important and fundamental roles in the development of cognition. It can said that not only the genetics and the environment, cognitive development is a manifestation of the influence of a mix of social forces surrounding the individual. The environment and individual change continuously, rather not in a staged fashion as prescribed by Piaget, and with these qualitative changes, the individuals produce new developmental accomplishments and mark new developmental milestones. If one compares these two paradigms, it will be evident that Piaget believed that the child him or herself is the most important source of cognitive development. ... Piaget relied upon the clinical method where he used probing questions to discover what the children understood, and Vygotsky on the contrary was concerned with the historical and social aspects of the human behavior that is unique for human nature. By his theory of genetic epistemology, Piaget studied the mechanism of acquirement of knowledge and was interested in errors that children make and suggested that these were nonrandom. He was on the look for a systematic pattern in the production of these errors and worked towards providing a logical and internally consistent explanation of these errors. In Piaget's view, development is a natural process with extension of the child's ideas from the child to the world with an invariant sequence of mental development in stages. On the contrary, as has been mentioned earlier, Vygotsky was concerned with the historical and social aspects of unique human natures. His theory suggested that social and cultural factors contribute to the developme nt of intellect, and speech is a tool of thought, and in that sense, development of speech carries culture in that it stores the ancestry of experience in the social context. Human being, in that sense, is unique because they use these tools to create artefacts to change life conditions. Thus, according to Vygotsky theory, ideas originate as a dialectical process of social, cultural, and historical factors in an unending and orderly pattern. Piaget believed that intelligence arises in a progressive fashion in a child's repetitive activities, and the child developmentally acquires concepts of space, time, causes, and physical objects and begins to have fantasy and symbolism right in the infancy. These can be interpreted by