TASKS

7 Tasks

7 Tasks

Task 1

Leadership is the process by which individuals' effectiveness is increased, while at the same time maintaining, if not increasing, motivation, job-related satisfaction and other forms of psychological well-being. (Parry 1998, 88-99) It is the only way in which the government's multifaceted objectives for the public sector can be achieved. But this is not the only reason why leadership is so desperately needed in organisations. There is little shared understanding of the qualities required for effective leadership in today's organisations. Leadership theory is riven by conflicting interpretations (Belbin 2004, 12-18), in a full spectrum from those which emphasise the primary importance of personal qualities to those who say systems are all-important. Leaders themselves often do not understand the reasons for their own effectiveness. Fundamental to improved leadership is a clearer shared understanding of what leadership behaviours work in delivering today's services.

One other crucial reason relates to the levels of stress being experienced in the public sector. One recent major study of levels of stress in the NHS concluded that stress levels were so high that probably below 50% of staff in the NHS are minor psychiatric 'cases' (Borrill et al. 1998). Equally, the realisation that my job, or indeed my organisation or department, is under threat of takeover or reorganisation if the range of challenging performance targets are not met leads to potentially highly stressful environments populated by highly stressed staff. Whilst threat of job loss might be a normal feature of life in most private sector companies, this is a relatively new experience for the public sector. A major difference between the two organisations Sky Travel Ltd and NHS is, however, that resources needed to cope with the increased demands have, typically, been far less readily available in the latter. So public sector managers have to manage with what they've got. This also means that staff should be provided with the highest levels of support from their managers to enable them to cope with the pressures of the complex challenges they face. Managers, in turn, need to be aware of the potentially positive, as well as negative, effects of their behaviour on their staff.

Task 2

Dr Meredith Belbin studied team-work for many years, and he famously observed that people in teams tend to assume different “team roles”. (Belbin 2004, 6-11) He defines a “team role” as a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a meticulous way and named nine such team roles that underlie team success. Belbin suggests that, by understanding your team role within a particular team, we can develop our strengths and manage our weaknesses as a team member, and so improve how we contribute to the team. Team leaders and team development practitioners often use the Belbin model to help create more balanced teams. Teams can become unbalanced if all team members have similar styles of behavior or team roles.

If team members have similar weakness, the team as a whole may tend to have that ...