Introduction
In the case study of personal leadership experience, the issue of discrepancy between the organization’s executives’ opinion regarding the primary gender policies and the company’s decision was precisely discussed. The reason for the challenge is the corporative view of numerous concerned individuals who felt that their organization became influenced by modern perspectives toward the mentioned issue, while the company demonstrates a keen interest in it.
Therefore, the gender dynamics shifting made part of the community members assume that focusing on advancing women’s agenda is a potential detriment to the male counterpart. The case study supports the organization’s decision to change tack on how to approach the issue, in conjunction with the inefficiency of the preceding strategy. The case study also describes another reason to agree with the shifting of the politics, which is mental models development, stating that an individual’s perception tends to change the attitude towards any issue with the flow of time.
The case study focuses on the discussion of the primary leadership, with its different styles of explanation, from which derives that the particular community-based organization has the participative one. The outlined issue of the firm’s direction absence is complicated with additional difficulties such as inadequate feedback mechanism and lack of a deliberate blueprint for the future of the company discussion. All issues together significantly contributed to the mentioned above challenge occurrence. This analysis will examine the case according to the Structural and Human Resources frames to determine their potential efficiency or notice the irrelevance in understanding the challenge faced by the organization.
Structural Frame
It is necessary to provide an accurate explanation of the term “frame” to create a comprehensive understanding of the approaches intended to enable discussing the challenge from different perspectives. According to Bolman and Deal (2017), “a frame is a coherent set of ideas or beliefs forming a prism or lens that enables you to see and understand more clearly what’s going on in the world around you” (p. 43). The structural frame is the primary method of examining an organization, which presents the series of hierarchy and job responsibilities levels, shaping a firm in the form of a pyramid (Bolman and Deal, 2017).
Every employee’s efforts should be properly integrated into the cooperative working direction to optimize the general understanding of the strategy and avoid potential miscommunications, which might result in various disagreements between the company’s decisions and employees’ assumptions and opinions (Bolman and Deal, 2017). As had been already mentioned, the organizations had a problem with communication between the structure’s levels resulting in the feedback mechanism’s inadequately functioning.
It is possible to state that within the discussed frame, the organization of the firm was not formed properly. Six assumptions undergird the structural point of view, which enables us to evaluate the existed negative tendency in the discussed company that resulted in cooperative resistance against the idea of the new gender-based strategy. According to Bolman and Deal (2017), “Organizations work best when rationality prevails over personal agendas and extraneous pressures” (p. 48).
It implies that it is necessary to disregard subjective opinions, focus on rational premise, and consider impartial outcomes and consequences to evaluate the impact discussed changes might bring. As the case study derives that there was an issue with the deliberate blueprint for the future of the company forming, it becomes more explicit that the reasons for the challenge rising lay in the incorrectly built structure.
On the other hand, as the organization used a participative leadership style, it is vital to emphasize the necessity of accurate information providing to ensure employees’ ability to vote based on valid premises and clear goals of their company. The Structural Frame enables us to consider a set of dilemmas, which may explain certain dependencies related to the company’s functioning. Goal-less versus goal-bound is the issue that implies the necessity to decide to what extent an organization’s employees are aware of the provisions of all goals their company intends to achieve (Bolman and Deal, 2017). To a company with a participative leadership style structure, it is an appropriate state of affairs that workers know the goals precisely.
Therefore, it is possible to claim that taking into consideration an inadequate feedback mechanism and lack of accurate planning and information providing respectively, it is predictable that opinions regarding the issue were divided aftermath of the unclear strategy of the company and its consequences outlining.
Presumably, the concerned individuals were not completely aware of all nuances, and this situation conceived the misunderstanding. Arguably, the difficulty with providing women with additional benefits may not affect the male counterpart. To conclude, the Structural Frame examination enables the transformation of the understanding of the case from focusing on particular disagreement solving to the various disadvantages of the current structure finding as they had influenced the challenge occurrence and their elimination may facilitate the problem overcoming. The frame can be considered the useful one, as certain of its provisions proved themselves to be suitable to the situation. However, to obtain an accurate view, it is necessary to distinguish appropriate concepts, which might be complicated because of a set of approaches and statements, which are not universal and valuable to a particular issue.
Human Resources Frame
This frame enables us to evaluate the functioning of a company from the perspective of what a company and its employees do to and for one another. Bolman and Deal (2017) state that one of the Human Resources frame’s core assumptions is: “Organizations exist to serve human needs rather than the converse” (p. 48). It implies that there is a dependency between the strategy the company intended to follow to their advantage, financial or any other, and compliance with its employees interests. In the discussed case, the company tends to decide regardless of many workers’ opinions, despite them considering that they will be deprived of certain privileges because of the chosen direction. It is possible that taking the decision, the company did not evaluate the influence it would have on its workers and the potential consequences of it, or the employees overestimated the possible negative effect and cause irrational resistance to the changes.
The Human Resources frame enables obtaining a different point of view regarding the challenge due to considering the company’s and its employees’ interests. However, it is complicated to find the balance between these two sides, and the frame does not definitively state the established tendency as a positive or a negative one, which leads to the conclusion that it is not as useful as the Structural one.
Central Inquiry Questions
It is possible to determine several questions, which would be useful to research further, taking into consideration the outcomes of the Structural and Human Resources Frames. What potential proximate implementations of both frames’ discussion can facilitate the organization’s problem solving and future challenges preventing? How can other perspectives assist in the analysis of the case to complement the conducted examination and provide additional details regarding the described issue?
Reference
Bolman, G. L., & Deal, E. T. (2017). Reframing organizations (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass.