Today when I was reading the news online in the morning, there was a piece of American political news astounding me: “Trump Completes Repeal of Online Privacy Protections From Obama Era”. This piece of news also mentions that experts claim this change will allow broadband and telecom providers to collect consumers and users’ browsing history and other personal information and data without any restrictions from governments or industries and sell them to advertisers or any other third parties for commercial purposes. Since telecom services are worldwide necessities nowadays for almost everybody, we can’t imagine how terrible it would be if personal information can be commercially traded worldwide from telecom suppliers.

In Chapter 12: Decision Making, Creativity, and Ethics, there is a concept called corporate social responsibility, and it’s defined as “the organization’s responsibility to consider the impact of its decisions on society”. In this case, I hope all the telecom provider companies in the U.S. can take the corporate social responsibilities and obey the ethics as much as possible.

Although I don’t know both why Trump completes the repeal on privacy protections and why telecom providers need to collect personal data and information, I definitely have my understanding of the clear lines in the ethics. If the companies are providing users’ personal information and data for governments to help with nationwide research for public projects or keep track of criminal suspects, the behaviors are not only ethical but also rewarding since it serves the interests of majority of individuals; if the companies are purely commercially trading with exchange of users’ personal information and data for profits, then it should be unethical since it serves for the self-interests of a few competitor companies in telecom industry and harms the privacy rights of majority of individuals. I wish journalists should also act more actively to catch and expose the unethical behaviors of telecom companies who are able to take advantage of collecting users’ personal information.

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News Post:

Reference:

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

Last week, I read Colleen Sharen’s blog post titled “Political Skill & #Leadership” in my free time. Colleen is an associate professor doing organizational studies in University of Toronto, and her blog is rated as one of the top organizational behavior blogs to read.

This blog post addresses most of people’s common misunderstandings that effective player of office politics often manipulate others to achieve their self interests, and it gives the facts from research that effective leaders with strong political skills actually always experience much better relationships with others. Those effective leaders and their supporters always perceive better performance evaluations mutually.

What is particular interesting to me is the different definitions and understandings of political skills in my textbook and the blog. our OB course textbook defines the political skills as “the ability to influence others in such a way as to enhance one’s objectives”, which leads to the traditional and common misunderstandings that political skills are used to manipulate or detriment others for self interests. However, in this blog post, the author defines the political skills as “the ability to identify and understand the motivations and needs of others to influence others to ensure the attainment of individual, group and organizational goals”.

First of all, although both definitions are about to influence others in order to achieve goals, the definition of political skills in the blog post suddenly appears to make political skills stronger, more powerful, and more positive when it is based on the consensus and mutual understandings of groups and organizations.

Second of all, the OB textbook definition says political skills are aimed at achieving one’s objectives while the definition in the blog post says that political skills are aimed at attaining goals at both the individual and organizational levels for a win-win purpose.

This blog post really gave me some fresh ideas on political skills. I also used to consider of political skills as nasty as the blog author Colleen and majority of others did, and I never liked reading anything about them. However, the new definition of political skills makes me imagine that leadership styles incorporating the “political skills” could manage organizations, run business, and do any other activities involved at an organizational scope much more efficiently and make greater impacts.

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Blog Post:

Political Skill & #Leadership

Reference:

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

In this blog post, Prithvi summarizes the failure of Zappos implementing Holacracy management style, the definition of holacracy, and the problems of it. The content in the article and the wring structure are really clear and coherent, and making me feel fresh.

Prithvi Khanna’s blog post titled “The Cracks in Holacracy” gets my attention by its title. Before reading this post, I have never heard of the term “holacracy” yet. Once I start reading, the introductory paragraph doesn’t help define this term and leaves me puzzled and curious until I start reading the 2nd paragraph. I would like to say this writing strategy is really unique in a way to keep getting readers’ attention on the rest of the article.

Besides my satisfaction, I do have a couple suggestions to improve this blog post:

1. This article mainly talks about the issues or problems of holacracy as the title “The Cracks in Holacracy” also suggests, so the blog should not cite the article “Despite Its Flaws, Holacracy Is Saving The Future Of Business”. Although the original article does mention some challenges from adopting holacracy, it is more centered around how some companies are doing well under holacracy.
2. Although we know this blog post is related to concepts in Chapter 13: Organizational Structure in OB course, Prithvi still should mention them in the blog post so that we can see the conceptual applications from the course.

In Chapter 13, organizational structure is defined as “how tasks are divided, grouped, and coordinated”. Within organizational structures, bureaucracy follows rigid chain of command and hierarchy; flat organization has almost no level in the hierarchy between staff and executives. I personally think holacracy is between those 2 structures because it does have clearly defined roles and tasks for different positions but evenly distribute the power and decision-makings to the locals as much as possible with goals to increase structural agility and remove bureaucracy.

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Hansen, Drew. “Despite Its Flaws, Holacracy Is Saving The Future Of Business.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 22 June 2016. Web. 05 Feb. 2017

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

The Cracks in Holacracy