This morning, I was reading the Guardian news, and there is an article “Mike Pence used his AOL email for state business as governor – and was hacked” astounding me. Basically, the governor of Indiana state Mike Pence was using his personal email discussing about state business with multiple top advisers, but his email account was hacked, and the money, bank account information and phone numbers were all lost. Right now, his own personal email is under scrutiny. Furthermore, Indiana law does not prohibit public officials from using personal email accounts discussing state business as long as they can backup those information to state servers.

I was really shocked to read this article, and thinking about the consequences this will bring to Mike Pence himself and his contacts in a social context. To me, this piece of news doesn’t just affect Mike Pence and his contacts in political fields, but also the general political activities within Indiana state. I assume that Indiana state from now on will definitely prohibit public officials dealing with state business in personal emails by legitimate laws.

In Chapter 1 of the textbook, organizational behavior this concept is described as “the study to investigate the impact of behaviors on individuals, groups, and structure within an organization; and its purpose is to help improve the performance of such an organization by knowledge application”. What this section doesn’t tell me is what categories or by how those organizational behaviors affect individuals, groups, and structure within an organization.

The other topic related to organizational behavior course is the organizational change in Chapter 14. Specifically, there is a concept called driving force which refers to any forces or factors directing away from the status quo. In this case, the information leakage incident is definitely a big warning for Indiana state, and acts as a driving force to change the law regarding public officials’ use of personal emails for information security. Law, by definition, is a collection of rules composed by authorities upon the society, so the change of any law is certainly an organizational change, which impacts on all individuals in the large scale society.

I can imagine that organizational change such as changing some law gets resistance since everything especially a large-scale organization or mechanism tends to stay in constant state. However, organizational change often helps promote progress and improvements. I believe Indiana state from now on will surely have a more developed and regulatory law regarding to public officials’ use of emails.

Word count: 439

Reference:

Smith, D. (2017, March 02). Mike Pence used his AOL email for state business as governor – and was hacked. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/02/mike-pence-personal-email-hacked-aol-governor

Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition.

In my classmate’s Katie’s blog, there is a blog post titled “The Future is Friendly” very interesting to me. Katie summarizes the general ideas from the article  “The TELUS Leadership Philosophy: a collaborative, engaging and open leadership framework for 35,000+ team members”, and talks about what challenges TELUS company is facing, and how TELUS initiates the TLP (known as TELUS Leadership Philosophy). In the end, Katie points out the importance of consistency of common values and leadership in large companies and even in the course group projects.

After reading this Katie’s post, I can’t help opening up the linked article and reading further about the leadership ideas of TELUS. Particularly, the ideas of increasing employee engagement and tight-loose culture are very insightful for me to see the organizational culture and enterprise values of TELUS.

Although Katie mentions that the article relates chapter 7: communication, chapter 11: leadership, and chapter 3: values and diversity in the workplace respectively, I would like to see how she applies concepts from each of the 3 chapters to explain the context in the article in detail.

Since I’m the most interested in ideas of increasing employee engagement and tight-loose culture in the organization. I would like to talk about how I connect ideas to chapter 8: power.

In the TLP, it says “The TELUS leadership philosophy is about creating an environment where team members, regardless of title, level or experience, feel that they have a responsibility to take a leadership role, and understand that they can add value and make a difference in our organization.”, and this reminds of the empowerment concept in chapter 8. Empowerment means describes the freedom and capacity of employees to make decisions and commitments. Therefore, the empowered employees have a better sense of meaning and impact in the organization since they feel the importance of the jobs they choose and get respect on their ideas by others, which exactly matches the idea of increasing employee engagement in TLP.

In general, in my opinion, TELUS is making a correct move to introduce employee engagement in the leadership philosophy since Canada is a county with low power distance. However, since Canada still has a significant amount of Asian population from their home countries with high power distance. While dealing with Asian employees in the company, TELUS should be very careful with empowerment, or lack of clear instructions in command of chain would be considered as weak sign of the manager.

Word Count: 456

Reference:

Pontefract, Dan. “Story:The TELUS Leadership Philosophy: A Collaborative, Engaging and Open Leadership Framework for 35,000+ Team Members.” The TELUS Leadership Philosophy: A Collaborative, Engaging and Open Leadership Framework for 35,000+ Team Members | Management Innovation EXchange. Management Innovation EXchange, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. <http://www.managementexchange.com/story/telus-leadership-philosophy>.

Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 299.

The Future is Friendly