Welcome to class i'm Dr. Bethany Flora, I'm here to begin a very probably
segmented series about organizational theory. if you recall from the course
introduction and overview
I'm taking the first section that relates to the Bowman and Dill reading so
those four frames as well as a little bit about higher education in general as
organizational units for your study. Welcome, I hope that this is informative
and bear with me because i'll try to stick to script but as if we were in a
face-to-face classroom you know Im a professor, and we go off script that's
what we do.
So bear with me but let's begin this section of an intro to organizational
theory to talk briefly about what you think when I say the word theory. What
kind of connotative thoughts come into your mind.
it could be something like this that you're seeing there on the screen. i hope
by the end of this brief presentation you'll be more excited about studying
theory and the way i want to present the study of organizational theory to you is
using a trick that I've learned along the way. highly educated people like
yourselves really appreciate what we call the Golden Circle model and so
often we will start with the what instead of the why, but it's better to
start with the why. So in order to convince you of why it's so important and so fun
to know about organizational theory i'm going to use the Golden Circle models,
I'm going to begin with why then moved to how, and then last finish up with
what
in this brief presentation. So why do we study organizational Theory, well it
really is to improve your practice as leaders. All of the reading all of the
work that you'll do in this course does not matter if you don't translate
that into your professional practice. So the real reason we study organizational
theory is to build and improve our leadership practices. you know Bowmen and
Dill say this and it's worth repeating that organizations must be viewed
through multiple realities.
and part of the reasons we use these four different frames is to take those
four different multiple realities to view organizations, in particular
organizations of higher education, post-secondary organizations. Now this is
my thought not Bowmen and Dills thought but in general people are kind of irrational if
you study psychology, if you observe people, if you are reflective, and know
yourself.
we can be irrational and so the study of organizational theory and the
application then of organizational theory to our leadership practice helps
irrational people become more rational leaders and then certainly helps us
create more rational organizations, doesn't say that organizations behave
always rationally but, the use of some of these tools that you'll learn in this
class
the hope is that you will help make the organization's where you work more
rational places and I think this will come to light as we work through this
slide set today.
another reason is that we want to train leaders in my department in particular
where I train higher education leaders, I train future university president and
provost and vice presidents and Dean's and i'll tell you more about the
research related to this but, both in business education and well education
and Industry, the ability to match certain frames to certain situations is
a gift and it's also a developable skill, so you can develop the
skill set to do this and so the study of theory allows you and helps you and
equips you to do that and as everything else that you've probably discovered
when you take these inventories, for instance leadership inventories or the
myers-briggs inventories, we tend to have a dominant frame preference which can
influence our reactions and responses as leaders and so classes like this allow
us to take risk to expose us to opportunities, to readings, to papers
and to each other who encouraged us to do this frame switching.
There is a lot of research related to the use of multiple frames. Here is one
scholar in particular ben simon who has studied college presidents and found
that multi-frame president's, those who can switch between these four different
frames are viewed as more effective by those who follow them. now she also found
that presidents who are typically new in their roles tend to rely on one frame,
the structural or the human resource frame and those who rely on a single
frame were particularly likely to be seen as ineffective leaders. you know we
have to give these folks from grace because as you all probably would do the
same way that I would do if I were a new president one of the first things i
would want to wrap my brain around would be the structures of the organization in
which i lead the strategic plan the goals and the objectives of the
organization that I'm leading and so the reliance for newcomers to use that
structural frame and then the human resource frame is a very natural
tendency. so we shouldn't beat ourselves up that we do that the purpose and the
point of me bringing this to your attention is that I don't want us to get
stuck there and so it's very important that we began to see the use of multiple
frames to view organizations as a skill set that we all want to develop. the
scholars the authors of your book are also scholars who conducted their own
research and so here on presenting some studies that then confirm what you just
saw that's not just president's not just academia but also in business and
industry their research went across business and education and they also
found that those leaders who use multiple frames on the studies
consistently correlated the use of multiple frames with effectiveness as a
leader. now this is interesting we all probably thought about differences
between being a manager and being a leader.
I'm sure you do that a lot in your roles. it's interesting that the structural
frame the gift of that or the use of the structural frame is effective or is what
people view is to be correlated with effectiveness as a manager and the use
of the political and symbolic frames are what people find to be highly correlated
to the effectiveness as a leader. again just research to really draw out
the fact that the use of these frames and the ability to then translate what
you're learning in this class into your practice will indeed help you
become a more effective leader that is the goal that is my goal at least. so
moving away from why, why should we study organizational theory which I hope
you've gathered to make yourselves better leaders in practice. to the
question in the Golden Circle model one level out is how, how do we study theory
well in a nutshell theories are experiences and ideas that have been
empirically tested over time and proven over time but when I say the word proof
go back to your scientific method,
remember those hypothesis testing and those classes that you took in science
and keep in mind that we can never really prove anything to be true we only
prove alternatives to be false. not trying to confuse you there but theories
in general are things that have been proven but what's been proven is that
there are alternatives are highly likely to not be false or does that make sense
I hope so. so theories are built and tested through empiricism and empiricism
contains both observation and measurement. so you probably actually
have some of your own personal theories about people about athletes about
universities that you have experientially developed. so through observation but
also you have used data I have no doubt that many of you in this class are using
data to make decisions as leaders and that's more of the measurement side of
theory and keep in mind that theories are windows they are very intentionally
comprised of very unique and specific constructs. so when you read the
literature and you are reading about a theory often that theory is broken down
into several different constructs that then comprise the theory. one way to
think about it is in quantitative research those constructs often can
become variables that you are measuring to comprise a study or to develop a
model. so this sounds kind of esoteric I think maybe in a way but I want just to
show you that you do
this all the time, you use theory all the time whether or not you recognize it so
this is the example I use in the research classes I i teach a lot, we
cognitively use theoretical constructs all the time so if you look at this
picture of a fruit salad and I told you to pull out the blueberries your eyes
immediately go to the blueberries. so there's some sort of cognitive
scaffolding going on in your brain when i do that that allows you to pick out
the blueberries. that scaffolding are the constructs of a blueberry, you have a
theory about blueberries in your mind that allows you to think about the
constructs or what makes up a blueberry in order to look at this mess and
identify the blueberries. right so you think small round blue whatever you're
using in your mind small round blue those are the constructs of a blueberry.
what we'll be doing in this class is taking constructs of bowman and dills
structura,l human resource, political and symbolic frames each of those four have
unique constructs within them and we'll use those constructs to look at higher
education organizations. so we can learn to do this in higher education
scholarship and in leadership scholarship and a reminder that if you
were in a doctoral program in educational leadership if you were in a
doctoral program in business you would be doing this and now in your doctoral
program in global sport leadership you'll be doing this. so the study of
organizational Theory really does go across many broad disciplines. so how do
we study theory, really two ways we test it we tested either through research or
we tested in practice and in this class you'll be doing both, some of your papers
will be research-oriented if you recall the literature critique is more of a
research type oriented paper and the paper where you write using different
roles on campus to respond to a case that's more of a practical application
of the theories that you'll be learning. so we do test theory all the time
through research and in practice. now just to finish up here before we move on
to the next session we want to
study the theoretical perspectives and keep in mind these are kind of broad
general frames for looking at organizations will be understanding the
constructs those very unique specific things that go to make up the frame. so
we'll begin with the structural frame and it's constructs and then go through
human resource, political and symbolic so that's an introduction an overview of
what you'll be doing in the course and kind of a intro to why it's important to
study theory i will see you here soon
thanks for your attention take care.