Essays On Leadership, Policy, Innovation, Sustainability and Change

Grades and Graduation Sep 2009

2009-10-27T16:07:00.002+08:00

As of Sep 2009, my grades ('D' for Distinction and 'HD' for High Distinction) for the essays of all my modules are as follows:

On 10 Sep 2009, I graduated from the Monash University's Master of Education (Leadership, Policy and Change) Programme.

Reflection on Personal Learning

2009-09-11T11:18:00.003+08:00

This is an essay I have written to reflect on the learning I have gained during research.

Reflection on Personal Learning

The kind of academic research I have done for this project is not something I would do in my normal daily life. Although there are many questions I may want or like answered, given the many priorities in my life, most are forgettable or easily satisfied by simply visiting the Internet. For these questions, I do not carry out the same amount of reading and degree of reflection which I had done for the project.

This research project had called away a significant amount of my time and effort. There is an opportunity cost in this. Ever since I have committed to this project eight months ago, I have felt a burden on my shoulder and it has become stressful.

The source of this burden is not from the shortage of time and energy to conduct the literature research and data collection or to analyse the data and write the report. There is sufficient of practice for these from all other modules in this academic programme. Also, I had adjusted my lifestyle to make the time and energy for the endeavour.

The source is in the fear that my effort comes to nothing. I am worried that the research questions turn out to be frivolous. I am worried that the literature suggests that it is a waste of my and everyone else's time to pursue what Î want to know. This fear is always at the back of my mind because I always suspect there are some articles hidden somewhere in some journals which I have missed that say that I am wasting my time. I am worried that at the end of the eighth month I would find out that I have not created anything new and I have not expanded the current body of knowledge. This is the struggle I have encountered throughout the research. Even now, I am not absolutely sure that this research project has ended well and is enough a contribution to improve the society at large. This is the cost of 'what if’s'.

Still, with doubts abound, I am more confident now than eight months ago. I have learnt the process of research and reflection. I have learnt that for every article that has sent me to a wild goose chase, there is another that beats an enlightened path to something exciting. I have learnt to be patient. Also, I have learnt to let the knowledge and data speak, and to believe that they will point me to something that is important or lead me to somewhere brighter. I just need to listen and the answers will come. Life has a strange way of showing itself.

More importantly, I have bunch people whom I have read and who could have carried similar notions as mine to inspire me on. Through their writing, no matter how subjective they may sound, I could hear their willingness to share what they have suspected and discovered, and to suggest the ways for other researchers who are interested in our field to follow so that the knowledge grows and gets deepened. I am not alone. I have the shoulders of these researchers to stand on and this has lessened my fears. I am very glad for having such an experience in my life time.

This reflection was first written on 27 Jul 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Research Project Report - 'Do emotions of the coach impact his athletes’ race performance?'

2009-09-11T10:38:00.004+08:00

This report was graded by Dr. Amanda Berry, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Monash University, and here are her comments:

'Please find attached your Project that has now been marked. You gained a grade of Distinction. Your work clearly distinguishes your potential as a PhD candidate.'

Research Project Report

Do emotions of the coach impact his athletes’ race performance?

Tracing the History of Sports in Singapore

Sports have a long history in Singapore. Prior to Singapore’s independence, sports were leisure pursuits of the rich and privileged few. Today, sports are accessible to every resident in the country and have become an important source of national identity and pride for the nation. In addition, sports have been identified by the Government as a new growth engine for the economy and efforts have been made to develop Singapore into a sporting hub in Asia.

Sports were only strategically developed and systematically cultivated in Singapore after her separation from Malaysia in 1965. The Government at that time understood the significant role sports played in bonding Singaporeans from different cultural backgrounds into members of a rugged society. She saw sports as a means to tame the ethnical and social tensions that existed during the period of the separation. So, the Sports Division was created in the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1966 (Aplin, Soucie, Quek and Oon, 1996) with the specific aim to achieve these objectives. In the same year, the foundations of the National Stadium were laid in Kallang. Eventually, the National Stadium Corporation was formed to operate the stadium when it was officially opened in 1973.

Five years after the formation of the Division, the Singapore National Sports Promotion Board was established to further provide emphasis in promoting sports as a way of life in Singapore. Its mission was "to promote, assist and organise international competitions in consultation with the national sports associations and the Singapore National Olympic Council, and to manage and maintain sports facilities and sports stadia" (Wok, 1973). In order to streamline their efforts in promoting sports to the masses, the amalgamation of the Singapore National Sports Promotion Board and the National Stadium Corporation took effect in October 1973, and the Singapore Sports Council was formed in their place in the Ministry of Community Development and Sports.

Taking Sports in Singapore into the 21st Century

In September 2000, the Committee on Sporting Singapore was set up to envisage a new vision for sports in Singapore. The Committee’s report was presented to the Senior Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, in July 2001 and it contains forty broad suggestions which lay out the roadmap and pathways for bringing sports and sports development in Singapore into the 21st Century (Tarmugi, 2001).

In consequence to these recommendations, the Singapore Sports Council has redrawn its purpose to include the development of sports champions and cultivation of a sporting culture that creates enjoyable sporting experiences in Singapore. It plans to attain these outcomes through sports excellence and the creation of a vibrant sports industry.

Flowing from these recommendations were some very significant developments in the sports community in the next 8 years. These included the commitment of S$500 million that year for developing sports in Singapore for the ensuing five years and the opening of the Singapore Sports School in 2004. Singapore had also sent off to Beijing in 2008 the largest contingent of Singaporean athletes ever to any Olympic Games. She had hosted of the Junior World Hockey Cup and inaugural Asian Youth Game in 2009, and will be hosting the first Youth Olympic Games in 2010. There are the on-going preparations of Singapore’s top athletes for the 2012 London Olympic Games as well. On top of these were the 2008’s inaugural Formula One Night Race and the HSBC Women’s Golf Championship. Later in July 2009, the Liverpool Football Club will play against the Singapore National Football Team at the National Stadium, and Formula One Night Race will come back to the country for the second consecutive season in September. The plans to replace the National Stadium with the Singapore Sports Hub in 2011 and to set up the Singapore Sports Institute that year have also already been announced.

Developing Coaches in Singapore

The Singapore Sports Council understands the influences the coach has on his athletes’ perception of their sports. It also comprehends the impact the coach has on his athletes’ performance during training and in competitions. In addition, it sees the connection between the size of the pool of talented home-grown athletes in Singapore and the number of qualified coaches in the nation.

Towards this end, the Singapore Sports Council created the Coaching and Technical Development Division in 2006 to systematically develop coaches through three enabling strategies, and training and development is one of these. One of its key initiatives is the National Coaching Accreditation Programme (NCAP), which is the national standard for coaching in Singapore.

The programme has two broad syllabi. The first is a series of lectures on the principles of coaching and sports science. The modules include the role of the coach and sports science, growth and developmental cycles of the athlete, analysis and development of skills in sports, athlete’s physical preparation, sports nutrition and mental skills development, planning and periodisation of training and competitions, and safety in sports. These lessons are conducted by sport science practitioners engaged by the Singapore Sports Council. Besides the theoretical and generic aspects of coaching, the technical elements of coaching are taught as well. Here, aspiring coaches will attend workshops or lectures on the strategies, techniques and tactics of teaching the sport to their athletes, methods for developing their sport fitness, and understanding the rules in sports. These sessions, which are sports specific, are organised by the National Sports Associations. The coaches will also undergo hands-on attachments at their respective National Sports Associations to learn the best practices of coaching from expert coaches in their respective sports.

The National Coaching Accreditation Programme is an important step towards entry into the National Registry of Coaches (NROC). This is a fraternity of certified, competent and professional coaches, who subscribe to the Coaches' Code of Ethics. It has a database of nationally certified or accredited coaches who hold valid certification in Standard First Aid and Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR).

To ensure that this is a mark of quality in coaching for the general public, the coaches, who are members of the National Registry of Coaches, are expected to keep their coaching knowledge and skills updated. They do this continuously by participating in various upgrading activities offered by the Council through its Continuing Coach Education (CCE) Programme.

Sensing the Limitations in Coach Development

I am one of a handful of Laser sailors in Singapore who had sailed competitively on a standard rig in the past ten years. I had sailed in the waters of Singapore and around the region. It is natural that I would want to be a sailing coach when I have retired from competitive sailing in 2007. I have aspired to play a role in preparing the next generation of high performance sailors for the nation.

I had attended the lectures and workshops that are mentioned in the preceding section of this report. I have found that the knowledge, skills and attitude imparted in the programme to be useful. However, I am deeply concerned by the focus of the programme. It is heavily skewed towards learning about the enhancement of human performance through only biomechanical and nutritional means. While some mentions are made about the importance of good relationship between the coach and his athletes, very little is said about the emotive aspects of coaching.

This research project is my attempt to empirically establish that there is a relationship between the emotions of the coach and the performance of his athletes in sports. I have also postulated that the athletes may possess mitigating capabilities that may help them negate the impact their coach’s negative emotions may have on their performance during sailing. Since I was a dingy sailor, the context of this study is confined to sailing in Singapore.

I will try to establish the importance of coach and athlete relationship in sports performance. Also, I want to find out if the emotive aspects of coaching are determinants of coaching efficacy in sports. In addition, I wish to determine if the athlete is capable of mitigating the emotive impact from their coaches to reduce its effects on their performance during sailing. I will also examine how self-regulation affects the athlete’s emotions and look at the role of self-talk as a skill in self-regulation to influence personal cognitive processes.

This exploratory study will provide in-roads to a more in-depth research to understand the levers that drive these emotions and as well as to establish a reliable means to measure these mitigating influences. My specific aim is to create an instrument or instruments, using the definitions and descriptors uncovered in this and the new study, to help me predict sports performance in the field where coaching that could be influenced by the effects of emotions. My goal is to inform and influence the leaders in my sporting community on what are the right things they should be doing when developing their coaches in Singapore so that they could achieve greater coaching efficacy to support their interaction with their athletes.

Given these, I had embarked on a literature research on these topics for the past eight months. There are a total of sixteen sections in this research report. The first two sections of the report trace the history of sports in Singapore and explain why they continue to be important to the island state. The following two sections provide a description of the approach the National Sports Council has taken to develop coaches in Singapore and the research questions which answers I am trying to locate. After these is the main bulk of the report covering the findings from the literature research and the survey. Included here is a segment that talks about the methods of data collection. Towards the end of this document is a discussion about the research and the limitations inherited in the research design. The references and evidence of the research, and a reflection on my personal learning arising from carrying out this research project are found at the end of the report.

Appreciating the Nature of Coach-Athlete Relationship

Studies done in the area of sports performance have widely reported on the association between the coach and his athlete (Jowett and Lavallee, 2007), and the importance of this relationship in the development of the athlete in the sport (Jowett, 2003; Jowett and Cockerill, 2003).

This relationship is not merely built on a series of transactions where the coach points out to the athlete his blind-spots, or dishes out advice, or gives instructions during training or competitions. According to Kelly, Berscheid, Christensen, Harvey, Huston, and Levinger (1983), when the coach works with his athlete, he is creating and building an interpersonal relationship in which ‘two people’s behaviors, emotions, and thoughts are interrelated’. In this description, the coach is not viewed just as someone who helps the athlete to perform. It is more complex and complicated than this. There are characteristics of a principal-agent relationship (Lagzdins, M, 2007) in this association where the athlete looks up to the coach as someone who he could trust and whose judgments which he could respect (Dieffenbach, Gould and Moffett, 2002). Effective, fruitful and long lasting coach-athlete relationship requires both parties becoming aware of one's self and the others' to avoid causing psychological and affective damage to each other. This means that each stakeholder needs to co-ordinate their ‘respective skills by appreciating each other’s technical and dispositional attributes’ (Schinke and Tabakman, 2001). The quality of this relationship has significant impact on the intrinsic motivation of the athlete and could influence his interest in the sport and decisions to stay with it over time (Hollembeak and Amorose, 2005).

Examining Emotions in Coaching

As the coach-athlete relationship involves emotions, I cannot avoid conducting a more detail examination of the role of emotional intelligence in this relationship and its implications in sports performance. This is especially so because the preceding paragraph hints that a fruitful coach-athlete relationship seems to hinge on the athlete’s and coach’s ability to perceive, integrate, understand and manage their own emotions and those emotions they experienced from others (Salovey and Mayer, 1997). By being able to discriminate emotions, one is able to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action (Salovey and Mayer, 1990; Mayer and Salovey, 1995). This shows that coach-athlete relationship has both feedback and feed-forward components. The emotions of the coach could influence his athlete’s sports performance as much as the emotions of the athlete could do similar to the quality of coaching efficacy of the coach.

In addition, in domains outside of sports, the applications of Emotional Intelligence have been widely studied and links have been found to positively chain Emotion Intelligence to relationship (Goleman, 1995; Goleman, 1998) and performance (Goleman, 2000). A number of sports psychologists have predicted that similar outcomes may be observed in sports (Botterill and Brown, 2002; McCann, 1999, Meyer, Fletcher, Kilty and Richburg, 2003; Zizzi, Deaner and Hirschhorn, 2003) if more studies in this particular area are conducted in the community.

The study of Emotional Intelligence could be traced from two main branches. One of these involves the understanding the personalities and mental abilities of individuals to inform on Emotional Intelligence. This trait and state characterization of Emotional Intelligence is called the mixed model and the leading proponents in this field are Goleman (Goleman, 1995; Goleman 1998), Bar-On (Bar-On, 1997) and Schutte (Schutte, Malouff, Simunek, McKenley and Hollander, 2002). The other branch is the Ability Model. It suggests that Emotional Intelligence is a set of abilities that could be learnt and developed with time. As abilities, individuals are able to decode information that is encoded in emotions to direct cognitive processes and motivate behavior to attain performance (Mayer and Salovey, 1997). This latter definition makes the study of Emotional Intelligence in sports a worthwhile cause as it is described as a set of skills that could be effectively taught and learnt through formal training, and could be sharpened and perfected through experience (Meyer and Fletcher, 2007). This is unlike the formal definition, which is given and static with time.

Understanding Coaching Efficacy

I have mentioned coaching efficacy several times in the previous segment of this report. Let's explore this topic further. Coaching efficacy measures the belief the coach has about his capacity to influence the development and performance of his athletes (Feltz, Chase, Moritz and Sullivan, 1999).

There are four types of coaching efficacy (Thelwell, Lane, Weston and Greenlees, 2008). These are the efficacies in game strategy, techniques, character building, and motivation. Game strategy efficacy studies the confidence the coach has in guiding his athletes during competitions and leading them to victory. Techniques efficacy looks at the belief that the coach holds about the quality of his instructions given during training and competitions, and the confidence over the diagnostic skills used to assess the performance of his athletes. Character building efficacy examines the coach’s perception of his capability in influencing the personal development of his athletes and their attitude towards the sport. Efficacy in motivation is described as the confidence the coach possesses in molding the psychological states and skills of his athletes. A deficit in any of these aspects could have a debilitating effect on the coach's quality of coaching.

It has been found in a study conducted by Thelwell, Lane, Weston and Greenlees (2008) that there is significant correlation between the overall coaching efficacy and the ability of the coach in appraising and regulating his own emotions. In the same study, this significance has been extended to include the coach’s ability to appraise the emotions of others. This seems to validate a separate study by Fung (2003). In this earlier research, the importance of emotional intelligence has been found in all the coaching efficacies except in the game strategy efficacy. These studies strongly suggest that emotional intelligence plays a significant role in coaching and the performance of the athletes in their sports.

Mitigating the Emotive Impact of Coaches

Does this mean to say that the athlete will always be under the influence his coach's emotion during training and competitions? To answer this question, I now need to look for the kinds of mitigating mechanisms that the athlete may used to reduce the impact.

Self-regulation is a self-directed and self-controlled process of using a set of cognitive, behavioral, emotional responses to achieve a goal in a given environment (Heatherton and Ambady, 1993; Schunk, 1004; Zimmerman, 1989). This implies that through self-regulation, the thoughts, affects, behaviors and attention could be modulated (Karoly, 1993) by the athlete. This process is conducted fairly independent of external reinforcements and punishment exigencies (Kanfer, 1970), and Emotional intelligence has been identified as the meta-cognitive skill required in the self-regulation process (Behncke, 2005; Frohlich and Kuhl, 2003; Schneider, Bos and Rieder, 1993).

Self-Regulating with Self-Talk

One common technique used by athletes to direct their cognitive processes in self-regulation is self-talk. When an athlete talks to himself he is said to be engaging in self-talk. Here, the athlete has the opportunity to express his feelings, verbalise his perceptions, and regulate and revise his thoughts to facilitate skill learning and enhance skill execution (Zinsser, Bunker and Williams, 2001).

There two kinds of self-talk. Self-talks that motivate are found to increase motivation (Hardy, Gammage and Hall, 2001) and build confidence (Landin and Hebert, 1999). This kind of self-talk could increase the athlete's effort in controlling arousal and anxiety during the execution of skills. In sports, a good execution of skills could differentiate between gaining grounds and losing them altogether in the game. The other kind of self-talk is instructional in nature (Gould, Eklund and Jackson, 1992). The athlete focuses his attention in collecting and reading useful technical information, and in making the appropriate tactical choices (Chroni, Perkos and Theodorakis, 2007) to improve his performance in the pressures of the game. The quality of these decisions has significant impact in sustaining the athlete's performance throughout the duration of the competition.

The athlete does these kinds of self-talk to think more appropriately about his performance and direct his actions to reach a desired outcome. However, some research suggests that there is no direct association between self-talk and performance. The association is found between self-talk and self-efficacy (Hatzigeorgiadis, Theodorakis and Zourbanos, 2004) and self-efficacy has been found to be positively linked to task performance (Sandri and Robertson, 1993; Treasure, Monson and Lox, 1996; Moritz, Feltz, Fahrbach and Mack, 2000). Self-efficacy refers to the strength of the confidence in acting out the behaviour competently (Bandura, 1986). When the athlete conducts positive self-talks on himself, he is able to reduce the interfering thoughts that may affect self-efficacy, which improves his confidence for receiving vicarious experiences, managing his emotional arousal, conducting verbal persuasion, and achieving performance (Hardy, Hall, Gibbs and Greenslade, 2005).

Through this cognitive-focussed coping mechanism, the athlete is able to regulate his emotional responses by changing the meaning he attaches to a given situation (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). This is the mental toughness some studies talked about. It is about being clear about what they need to think about and what to focus in without being affected by others (Bull, Shambrook, James and Brooks, 2005). This means that it is not the type of self-talk that matters but how the athlete interprets its nature, content and delivery (Seligman, 1991; Rettew and Reivich, 1995). Therefore, the personal interpretation patterns of an athlete have an important impact on how he will perceive and response to his coach criticisms (Hamilton, Scott and MacDougall, 2007; Goodhart, 1986; Van Raalte, Cornelius, Brewer and Hatten 2000). How a person feels plays a substantial role in human experience and this is essential for our understanding of sport excellence (Doell, Durand-Bush and Newburg, 2006). This shows that self-talk is a core competency of emotional intelligence. It can assist in effectively manage one’s feelings and emotions about a given situations.

Conducting the Survey

The literature research came to an end towards the last week of June 2009. The research project went into its second phase. A survey was conducted to examine whether what has been informed in the literature could be found in the behaviours of sailors in Singapore.
The audience from which to select the target respondents for this research are sailors from the Singapore Armed Forces Yacht Club. The choice is related to the ease of obtaining the contact information and reaching the sailors since the researcher for this project is also a member of the club. Only sailors who are currently training at the Changi Club House and competing in Singapore’s waters under the guidance of their coaches are selected. Sailors who have recently retired from competitive sailing and who had trained with their coaches are also included in the study. A total of twenty sailors who meets these requirements are identified as potential respondents for this survey but at the end of the survey period, only eight had actually responded.

Of these eight, two have already retired from competitive sailing for about three years. The ages of these eight sailors are between fifteen and thirty-five. In Singapore, sailors rarely sail competitively beyond eighteen years of age. They have sailed with their coaches for about two to eight years. Half of these sailors are females with the rest being males. All the respondents are Bytes class sailors except for two who were Laser class sailors using Radial rigs.
The permissions to conduct the survey and approach the target respondents were sought and received from the Ethics Committee at Monash University, the General Manager of the Singapore Armed Forces Yacht Club, and the parents of the target respondents who are under eighteen years old.

All respondents were provided with an email describing the purpose of the research, criteria for their selection, methods for protecting the data collected and their identities, and the ways the information will eventually be used. The electronic address to the survey and the password to assess to the questions were also included in this email. All respondents who had participated in the survey did so voluntarily and there were no payment, gifts or other inducements provided to encourage their participation.

The purpose this research project is to study the effects of the coach’s emotions on the performance of his athletes, and to uncover the existence of mitigating capabilities the athletes may possess to negate the effects. There are six key categories of information to be collected through the survey to inform me of these. The survey has employed questions to find out whether the respondents conduct self-talk during sailing, identify the common self-talk triggers, determine the kinds of self-talk used and whether the respondents believe in the effectiveness of their self-talk in improving self-efficacy, measure the quality of the coach-athlete relationship and identify the typical emotions their coaches had displayed during training and competitions, and uncover whether the respondents mitigate negative feedback using self-talk.

Instead of printing the survey and distributing it in hardcopies, the questions were launched onto the Internet using SurveyMonkey. This is an on-line application that makes this kind of survey more easily managed. There are configurations in the application that protect the identities of the respondents and features to secure the questions against uninvited guests.
The survey was conducted in the first week of July 2009 after been delayed by the priorities related to the local Influenza A H1N1 epidemic at the schools where the sailors studied at and at the club they sailed from. The period of the survey was to last for a week but this was also lengthened to 2 weeks because the sailors were busy participating in the Asian Youth Game during the month. Given these unexpected events, the survey was only closed in the third week of July 2009.

Findings from the Survey

It is found that all the eight respondents had been triggered in a number of ways to engage in different kinds of self-talk when they sailed under the guidance of their coaches.
All the respondents believe that self-talk has improved their self-confidence and helped them perform more consistently in their race. They have attributed this self-confidence to their belief that their self-talk had helped them judge their sailing performance objectively throughout the race. Also, they believe that their reliance on self-talk had directed their attention towards executing specific skills and making specific choices and decisions that had helped them effectively dominate their opponents at critical moments of the race.

While they have acknowledged the importance and usefulness of self-talk for these reasons, half of them feel that their own self-talk had increased their anxiety levels when they were using it during a crucial moment of the race. Such a moment could determine whether a sailor would tactically gain control over other boats and stay ahead of them or lose tactical control and end up falling behind. One such moment is the overtaking of their opponents during a leg in the race. Still, all the respondents have indicated that self-talk is an important self-regulatory mechanism that has managed their cognitive processes when they sailed.

As for of the kinds of trigger that have activated the respondents into conducting self-talks, all of them had self-talked when there was a need to choose and decide on the strategies to adopt to make gains during the race. Three-quarter of them inform that they had self-talked when tactical issues were their main preoccupations. However, only half of the respondents do so when they had encountered challenges in maintaining their optimum boat speed.

It is found that the respondents have engaged in both positive and negative self-talks. However, they are slightly less likely to engage in negative self-talks than positive ones. When they do engage in negative self-talks, they do so when they were ineffective in the ways they had handled their boats, or had lost positions because of tactical errors or went the wrong way because of mistakes in strategies. When they self-talked positively, they had tended to do so to encourage themselves to put in more effort, or to look at a bad or disadvantaged situation more optimistically.

All the respondents have reported that they had confidence in their coaches’ ability to help them perform better in their sport. They have contributed this observation to their coaches’ willingness to share their sailing knowledge, help them become aware of their blind spots, teach them the ropes to leverage on their strengths, and be clear about their expectations before the sailors hit the waters. In these observations, the respondents have indicated a higher propensity for their coaches to talk to them about their strengths and showing them the ways to leverage on these strengths than to point out their blind spots and showing them methods to correct these weaknesses. Still, given these positivism about their coaches, only 50% of the respondents trust that their coaches will do their best to make them better sailors.

This may have caused to some respondents to report the lack of empathy in their coaches even though, by and large, most of the time they feel their coaches come across as supportive and motivational. There are reports of coaches usually seen by the respondents as being critical and angry with their charges during sailing. A quarter of the respondents feel that their coaches had come across as hostile, blaming and ignoring when they had trained under them.

An interesting part of the survey reveals the way the respondents deal with the negative feedback or scolding from their coaches because of poor performance. It also informs about the way respondents react to their coaches when their coaches ignored them during sailing.
When the coach scolded them about their performance during sailing, the reactions of the respondents displayed tend to be mixed. Half of them became angry with themselves after receiving the scolding. A quarter of the respondents ignored the criticisms and continued to do what they normally will do. Seventy-five percent of the respondents feel that the mood of their coaches has nothing to do with them and were the coaches’ problems. They are also able to brush these negativities aside and negate their effects they brought to their sailing. The rest view such inputs as a challenge their coaches had placed on them to do better in the next race or next round of training. Half of the respondents also tend to engage in less self-talk when they feel that their coaches had ignored them during training or during competition than being scolded. Still, the moods of the coaches do trigger the athlete into self-talking but they are more likely to self-talk positively when their coaches were negative about their performance. As for the complements from their coaches, they were treated as happy experiences and they had motivated them to do even better.

Discussing the Findings Of The Survey

The purpose of this study is to determine if the athlete is capable of mitigating the emotive impact from their coaches to reduce its effects on their performance during training and competitions. To establish this, the link between the coach and athlete relationship and sports performance needs to be explored. Also, there is a need to find out if the emotive aspects of coaching are determinants of coaching efficacy in sports. Finally, the role of self-talk, as a skill in self-regulation, is examined to understand the mechanism the athletes use to mitigate the emotive influences of their coaches.

Sailing requires both brawn and brain. To do well in the sport, the sailor has to have good seamanship, could create a number of remarkable choices, and make a few calculated but risky decisions. He has to have the ability to configure the boat so that she is sailing at optimal speed. Otherwise, she would be overtaken by other boats or late in reaching the most favourable side of the race course to grab the opportunities the weather has to offer. In addition, the sailor is never alone in a race. He has to contend with boats around him and each of these boats has the capability of derailing his plans and interfering with his goals of winning the race. On top of these, he has to consistently look ahead, behind and around him so that he could collect and interpret the signs that may indicate changes to the direction and power of the wind, shifts in the flow and strength of the current, and the effects of nearby land mass on these elements. These are the skills of boat handling, boat tactics and race strategies, and any sailor has to constantly do these well throughout the sixty to ninety minute-race in order to perform.

The data from the survey inform that all the respondents have used self-talk as a self-regulatory mechanism when they sailed. However, they have engaged in less self-talk for boat handling than for boat tactics and race strategies. Zizzi, Deaner and Hirschhorn’s (2003) study on baseball players may provide an explanation for this. In their study, they have found that emotional intelligence is more strongly related to pitching performance where the player could dictate the pace of the game than to hitting performance. This is because the player does not have the time to process emotional states, initiate self-talk and direct behaviours to cope with the very reactive situation of hitting the ball. This is similar to sailing. The wind shifts and wave forms could appear suddenly and the sailor needs to be very intuitive when he makes adjustments to the boat’s configuration to keep it upright and at an optimum speed. There is very little time to think here. This is unlike boat tactics and race strategies, which could be developed and fine-tuned over a longer period of time.

The literature states that a positive coach and athlete relationship is important to the athlete’s performance. However, it is by no mean conclusive that this is the sole determinant of performance. The respondents in the survey are capable of understanding the criticisms, anger, and hostilities exhibited by their coaches, which indicate a less than positive coach and athlete relationship, as their coaches’ problems and not to let these affect their sailing.
The literature seems to support this observation. A task-involved athlete, who is also adaptive in his self-regulation patterns, tends to display a higher sense of personal control and perceive a greater level of personal improvement even when the coach is critical about his performance (Gano-Overway, 2008). Perhaps, it is not a surprise that the respondents in the survey are more likely to do positive and motivational kinds of self-talks than negative and instructional kinds of self-talks when they had encountered challenges when sailing. They seem to belong to this group of task-involved athletes. Also, the respondents have reported that they had perceived such criticisms as challenges given by their coaches to do better (Hamilton, Scott and MacDougall, 2007). Horn, Lox and Labrador (2006) suggest that such athletes see themselves as more competent when their coaches criticised them than those individuals who received neutral responses for poor performance from their coaches.

However, while the respondents are able to self-talk the negative emotions of their coaches away, it does not mean that the emotions of their coaches do not impact their performance at all. The data collected from the survey hint that positive emotions expressed in the form of praises and complements do make the respondents happy and drive them to work even harder. These show that the emotive aspects of coaching are still important determinants of coaching efficacy in the sport (Gould, Greenleaf, Guinan and Chung, 2002).

An interesting point about the data is the way the respondents deal with their coaches when their coaches had ignored them. While further studies are required to understand this phenomenon, a possible explanation could be due to the way sailing coaches are assigned to the athletes. In Singapore, owing to the shortage of sailing coaches and the increase in the number of aspiring sailors joining the sailing clubs, several sailors are assigned to a coach. On some occasions, there could be up to fourteen sailors training under a coach. Sailors do not react strongly to the lack of attention from their coach given this condition. This may suggest that the respondents are less likely to self-talk when they were ignored by their coaches.

Up to this point, the data observations are very telling. It strongly indicates that the respondents are not totally helpless to the emotive influences of their coaches. They are capable of engaging the competencies of emotional intelligence to interpret the contents of the encoded emotions expressed in the coaches’ criticisms or negative feedback to self-regulate their thoughts and behaviours. Still, this cannot mean that the athlete is totally unaffected by their coaches’ emotion. It is the type of emotions that counts.

Concluding the Research Report

It is unfortunate that the period of data collection has taken place during the school holidays. This, together with the Asian Youth Games and prevailing Influenza A H1N1 epidemic in Singapore, has restricted my access to a number of respondents who could have participated in this study. Given the small number of respondents, I have to caution against extrapolating the findings in this study to the whole sailing community in the nation. Also, I cannot suggest that the findings in this study could be used to inform on other types of sports in Singapore. A more comprehensive study, where more sailors and athletes from other sporting fraternities could be included, may expand this body of knowledge. Nevertheless, given these limitations, this research has unveiled some interesting information.

When I was designing the research, I have not differentiated sailors who had received formal training in self-talk from those who had practiced self-talk because they had discovered it accidently and used it a matter of fact. It is possible that sailors who were formally trained may understand the impact of self-talk on their sailing performance and could be more capable in using it. With this awareness, they could be more adept in translating negative self-talks into positive ones and leverage them for better sailing performance. The findings in this research may not be true for sailors who lack this kind of mental skill development.

The competitive nature of racing may sometimes be simulated by the coach under training conditions. However, while the simulated racing conditions may be close to the real sailing regattas, they are not identical since the set up of the full racing course is constraint by logistics, and sailors training frequently together may breed familiarity. This means, I need to suspect that the triggers and frequency of self-talks used for self-regulation may differ between these two sailing conditions. A similar finding has been discovered by Barkhoff, Heiby and Pagano (2007) when they studied the self-regulation skills of ‘competitor type’ and ‘training champion’ athletes in artistic roller skating. This particular difference needs to be explored further.
In addition, studies in other domains on the application of emotional intelligence have informed about cultural differences. These studies have suggested that gender types may play an influential role in the use of self-talks for self-regulation (Goleman, 2000). Also, recent studies have reported that male coaches are more efficacious than female coaches (Short, Smiley and Ross-Stewart, 2005). I have not taken these into consideration when I designed the research.
Finally the focus of this study is the use of self-talk as a mechanism for self-regulation. Self-talk is one of many methods use in managing cognitive processes in self-regulation. Although self-talk has been widely studies, it does not means that this is the only method used to regulate oneself (Behncke, 2004). Other approaches may need to be investigated and compared to self-talk. It is interesting to know whether self-talk works independently from these other mechanisms in self-regulation or whether it has a catalytic effect to these mechanisms. By addressing these limitations in studies of similar nature as this research project will further enhance our understanding on this subject.

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This report was first written on 27 Jul 2009.

The orignial text was kept without further changes after grading by the University.

Grading of Essays by the University

2009-04-03T15:45:00.004+08:00

Currently, my grades, as of 31 Mar 2009, for the essays are as follows:

Effects of Coaches’ Emotional Competencies on Athletes’ Sporting Performance - Literature Research

2009-01-28T12:10:00.002+08:00

Introduction

Goleman (1998) defines emotional intelligence as the capacity for recognising one’s own feelings and those of others for the purpose of managing our emotions and the emotions of others whom we are related with. As a national sailing coach in Singapore, this is of utmost interest to me as much has been written about the importance of coach-athlete relationship and the factors influencing its quality (motivation, Jowett (2008); leadership styles, Trzaskoma-Bicserdy, Bognar, Revesz and Geczi, (2007)), and its ultimate impact on the athlete’s performance (Cross and Lyle, 1999). It is surprising to learn that coaches are not familiar with the concepts of emotional intelligence and they largely operate to maintain unilateral control or power over the athletes (Drury, 2007). If the relationship between the coach and athlete is so important, how does emotional intelligence of the coach supports his athletes in sustaining a positive coach-athlete relationship and in creating opportunities for better performance in his athletes. In another words, what is the impact of the coach’s emotional competencies on the career success of his athletes?

Annotated Citations

During the keyword search for literature that may shed light into my research interest, 36 articles are found and seven of these are discarded as they are later found not relevant. The reminder is grouped into seven broad categories. These categories include Emotional Intelligence and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and Coaching, Coach-Athlete Relationship and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and Definitions, Use of Emotions in Sports, Application of Emotional Intelligence in Coaching, and Impact of Coach’s Emotion on Performance of Athletes. The list of 29 articles is presented in the bibliography.

The following five articles are selected from five of these categories and they represent the more influential studies and record the most recent development in their respective fields. Collectively, they provide five different perspectives, each adding to enlarge my understanding of emotional intelligence, and its impact of the coach on his athletes. An extended critical review of the fifth article can be found towards the end of this article.

Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to identify high potential: a metagcompetency perspective. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal, 28(8), 749-770.

The authors have observed that the competency frameworks used by organisations to identify their high potentials is derived from the competencies of past and current cohort of successful executives rather from those competencies of future executives dealing with future challenges. They argue that the inclusion of emotional intelligence components into the frameworks may re-orientate this approach of identifying high potentials and enhancing the job performance and commitment of these future executives in the organisations.

They have proposed the use of Emotional Intelligence Personal Factor Model (Dulewicz and Higgs, 2004) and Meta-competency Model of Continuous Learning (Briscoe and Hall, 1999) as the key concepts underlining their study. They believe that by uncovering the executives’ meta-competencies, which is their ability to self-correct in response to new and unfamiliar demand of the environment and to self-reflect and assimilate what is learnt; executive potential could be better predicted and managed.

The research, which examines the emotional intelligence-high potential link, and the relationships between job performance and career commitment, involved 102 managers from three organisations from the financial, insurance and telecom industries in Belgium.

While assertiveness, independence, optimism and a few other elements appear to be ‘covert’ high-potential identification criteria, it is problematic to generalise these across the population because of the small sample size and the self-enhancement bias fostered by the self-reporting nature of the instrument used, which may skew the findings. These limitations are acknowledged by the authors.

The research was carried out in a few industries and in a Dutch-speaking region. It is also difficult to discount the possibility of industry-specific influences and cross-cultural differences from the findings. Still, the research provides a gleam into the possibility of strengthening the current approach of high potential identification with the knowledge from emotional intelligence.

The key weakness in this study is in the instrument – EQ-i. It was used in the study as a proxy for Briscoe and Hall’s meta-competency model (1999), and the authors have acknowledged that the correspondences between the elements in the instrument and those in the model are tentative and they ‘merely serve to demonstrate the probability of a connection between emotional intelligence and the potential for continuous learning’.

There is a discussion of EQ-i in the article which includes a segment on its criticisms. A similar discussion was presented by Livingstone (2001) where she queried about EQ-i measures and what they predict. Her study suggests that EQ-i greatly co-relates with the Big Five personality dimensions and accounts for both job and life satisfaction after controlling for the influence of demographic characteristics and personality. This may further suggest an inherent validity problem in the findings of Dries and Peperman’s research because they may not have been aware of this limitation and have not conducted the controls.

This study seems to indicate that the emotional intelligence of the coach may not have a significant impact on the performance of his athlete if the athlete has the ability to learn from past experience and to control his stress level effectively. These metacompetencies prevent the athlete from having negative effects on his sailing career-related attitudes. This awareness is important in my research because ignoring it may inject errors into my findings – coaches’ impact on their athletes’ performance may be misread because their athletes are able to negate the effects on their own.

There could be a certain degree of ‘us-verses-them’ sensitivity in the research as without the confidentiality, the job morale and commitment of those classified as non-high potential may severely be affected. The authors had deployed a series of measures to protect the identities of those involved in the study.

Depape, A.R., Hakim-Larson, J., Voelker, S., Page, S. and Jackson, S.L. (2006). Self-talk and emotional intelligence in University students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 38(3), 250-260.

In this study, the authors bring two bodies of knowledge together – self-talk and emotional intelligence. Self-talk is the reproduction of the perspectives of others in an individual’s private speech. It is a strategy one adopts to solve his social and emotional problems, and in the process develops his self-concept.

In this definition, the authors uncovered a bridge that may link these two concepts. The literature indicates that inner speech positively correlates to private and public self-consciousness, and the authors believe that by attending to these inner thoughts frequently, one is more able to attain higher self-awareness and better at regulating one’s emotions. The authors conclude that certain aspects of self-talk are subsets of emotional intelligence since it includes the ability to recognise, express, regulate and harness emotions, which are terms familiar to self-talk enthusiasts. For these, they want to examine this link and argue that when one engages more in self-talk, he tends to exhibit higher levels of emotional intelligence. They also want to include developmental and gender differences in emotional intelligence into the study.

The study involved 126 participants between the ages of 18 to 42. They were recruited through the Psychological Department of a mid-size, ethnically diverse University in southern Ontario, Canada.

The research empirically suggests that some aspects of self-talk are found to predict emotional intelligence but there are several limitations in the study that make it difficult to extrapolate the findings to the general population.

Besides working with a small sample size, the research is too broadly based. The ages of the participants are too dispersed and ethnically they are too diverse. There could be over-reporting because of the self-reporting nature of some of the instruments used and credit points were awarded to participants. The possibility of under-reporting could not be discounted since previous studies highlighted that participants may not be aware that they were engaged in self-talk (Winster and Naglieri, 2003). In addition, there seems to be a problem with the triangulation carried out in the study. The global Self-Verbalisation Questionnaire score predicted emotional intelligence but not the Self-Talk Scale. This calls into question the reliability of these instruments and the authors’ understanding of what they truly measure (Livingstone, 2001).

One key weakness the authors did not acknowledge is that they have not included the developmental differences in self-talk - practices, familiarity, social setting and task difficulties, which they mentioned in their literature research, in the study. One is not sure how the findings may change when these were factored into the design of the research.

This research reminds me of an article written by Tischler, Biberman and McKeage (2002). They have attempted to link spirituality and emotional intelligence to workplace performance. They suggest that, while the concepts begin from separate areas, they appear to lead to similar attitudes, behaviours and skills. It is currently unknown if empirical studies have been conducted to establish this link but this shows that there is interest in several quarters in the academia to link their field of study to emotional intelligence.

Depape et al.’s article is relevant to my sphere of study because it suggests self-talk is most likely to occur when there is a difference in perspective within one self and between one self and others. Self-awareness is enhanced when it is accompanied by positive affect and constricted when accompanied by negative affect (Morin, 1993). This provides the first strong indication from the literature I have gathered that the emotional intelligence of the coach could affect the performance of his athletes.

There are several questions that kept occurring in my mind as I read this article – Is there harm in making the participants aware that they are engaging in self-talk? Would this awareness makes self-talk ineffective to the participant as a strategy in dealing with complex tasks? These are not addressed by the authors. Also, there could be ethical issues with not informing the participants of the purpose of the research before administering the instruments.

Saury, J. and Durand, M. (1998). On-site study of coaching in sailing. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 69(3), 254-266.

The authors believe that the coaching methods used during training are bounded by a specific set of constraints. These constraints are defined by the task and its range of possible and acceptable work strategies, and by the coach’s behaviours, diversity of operating strategies he possesses, and his knowledge of the sport. Given the task and its constraints, the coach has to use all his means to create the appropriate physical and social conditions to achieve the training objectives and for helping his athletes reach their performance goals.

The authors see this as an important study because it directly relates to the athlete’s performance in the sport, and improving this body of knowledge ensures the design of better reason-based coaching methods and schemes for educating and licensing current and future coaches. They have also observed that there were no studies specifically oriented towards describing the constraints inherent in the coaching activity.

They argue for the study of expert coaches recognised as most effective in their field (Martens, 1987) and further state their suspicion that sailing coaches face a unique set of constraints that is different in other sports.

This was a study to analyse the practical knowledge of five expert sailing coaches of the French team preparing for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Games.

The study has uncovered a set of complex rules that govern the design of coaching activities. However, there are some challenges in generalising these, even in the sailing community. Besides the small sample size, the participants were not randomly selected. As the participants were all male, based in France and were coaches to Olympians, the findings may be valid for coaches sharing a similar space in this universe.

Perhaps the biggest weakness found in this article is that the study is mainly carried out through observations and recalls. As the training sessions took about 3 to 4 hours, fatigue may prevent proper observations and the lengthy duration may degrade recall accuracy. Also, due to weather, there were too much of variables in the study to constitute a valid observation and conducting the study through only five training sessions makes the internal validation more difficult.

In Perlini and Halverson (2006)’s study of emotional intelligence in the National Hockey League, they have found that years-since-draft is the strongest predictor of performance and draft rank is the weakest. This is interesting as it calls into question whether the degree of agility the coach exhibits in implementing coaching activities may be influenced by the years of experience his athletes had withjthe sport.

This is a study regarding coaching in sailing. It lists a set of constraints unique to sailing because of the ‘open’ nature of the sport. In an environment that is unpredictable and uncertain, tactical and strategy component play a important role in the athlete’s development for the sport, and the coach’s ability to ‘see things from the athlete’s point of view’ and ‘attempt to feel what the athlete feels’ suggest the importance of in-depth knowledge about the sport and high level of awareness and monitoring of the self and his athlete by the coach. This means emotional intelligence is an essential skill of the coach to enable joint control of the coach and his athlete over the training session and its coaching activities.

The coaches may not want to reveal much during the study because of the ‘secrets’ in their trade. Their discovery may affect the competitiveness of the coach when a job opening becomes available. This could be an ethical issue. Also, the athletes may be disturbed by the observations conducted by the researchers and these may impact their preparation for the Games.

Lafreniere, M. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G. and Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in Sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 30, 541-560.

The authors argue that harmonious passion of the coach in coaching may cause situational positive emotions that improve the quality of interpersonal relationship between the coach and the athlete, and increase their subjective well-being in the dyad. They also argue that obsessive passion creates no or opposite effects.

They reason that when the coach and his athlete are passionate about their sport, their love for the sport and devotion to reach higher levels of performance could lead them to develop positive coach-athlete relationship.

The authors recognise the dualistic nature of passion and believe that with harmonious passion, the coach autonomously internalise the coaching activity into his identity and become willing to accept it as important but will not allow this urge to come into conflict with other parts of his life. This desire to engage coaching freely and with openness is favourable in creating a positive experience (Hodgin & Knee, 2002) for his athletes.

They see obsessive passion the opposite of the harmonious one because the values and regulations related to coaching are only partially internalised in the identity (Vallerand, 2008). This creates uncontrollable urge to constantly engage in coaching activity at the expense of other parts of the coach’s life, which runs the risk of experiencing negative consequences during and after the passionate activity.

Two studies were conducted to investigate the role of passion in the quality of coach-athlete relationships. The first study consisted of 157 British college athletes comprising of about equal number of the two genders pegged at difference performance levels. The second study included 106 French-Canadian coaches with different levels of coaching certifications. There are only 6 female coaches in this study and both studies took participants from different popular sports.

While the two studies suggest that there is empirical evidence to support the arguments, the difficulties in generalising this across the population are many folds. Like in the previous three articles, the small sample size and the self-reporting nature of the instruments could introduce biases into the findings. At most, the findings may be applicable in Canada, and maybe only to the French-speaking parts of the country. Since this is a study about the coach and passion in coaching, the study should account for gender differences. This, the authors have acknowledged as a weakness in the studies.

It was not mentioned in the article but if my assumptions are correct, then it is strange to conduct two related studies with English-speaking students and a seemingly different group of French-speaking coaches. The studies could be strengthened if the coaches of these English-speaking athletes were invited to the study and the two studies were carried out with matching sport certifications of the coach and athlete performance levels.

The studies ruminate well with the essay on the role of the coach in the coach-athlete relationship (Short and Short, 2005). The authors talked about the coach needing to be the athlete’s friend and mentor and the positive effects of doing this role well on the feelings and satisfaction of the athlete with his coach.

These two studies are important to my research topic as they suggest mitigation elements that may affect the coach’s level of emotional intelligence on the performance of his athletes. If the coach has a harmonious passion for the sport, naturally he tends to create a positive relationship with his athletes. Based on these two studies, the opposite is true as well. So, the disposition of the coach has a say in the nature of his emotional competencies.

These studies may look like an exercise of conducting a 360-degree feedback on the coach by his athletes, which may be sensitive for the coach if his performance and remuneration is based on the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. It is not mentioned in the article how this was been addressed.

Rozell, E. J., Pettijohn, C. E. and Parker, R. S. (2002). An empirical evaluation of emotional intelligence: The impact on management development. The Journal of Management Development, 21(4), 272-289.

The authors wanted to use Goleman’s 137-item emotional quotient test as the basis for assessing the efficacy of using emotional intelligence as a predictor of academic success of 295 undergraduate business majors from a mid-western university in the United States of America. They believe that the emotional intelligence of these students may be positively correlated to their academic performance.

However, they suspected that there are variances in the results and argue that the differences in the emotional quotient scores between groups of business undergraduates may be attributed to the academic majors they had specialised in, the extra-curriculum activities they were affiliated to, and the student status they currently holding to. The study was set up to identify these driving differentiators as well as to validate the properties of Goleman’s five dimensions of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998) and the capacities of his measurement in identifying these properties.

They have provided four reasons for conducting this study. They hope that their effort could inform on the enhancements to current high potentials identification systems, appropriate management development programmes that human resource practitioners should create to train and develop these potentials, cultural differences in using emotional intelligence, and scale for measuring emotional intelligence of prospective managers in an expeditious manner. They argue that their findings could be extrapolated from academic success into workplace performance and career success of potential and current cohort of business executives.

There is no mention of the 137-item emotional quotient test in the references the authors have provided in their bibliography. Besides describing the five dimensions and 25 competencies, Goleman (1998) has not directly presented the instrument although there are clues that he had conducted some studies on his own or assisted in the conduct of some studies with other collaborators who had use his competencies as the framework for analysis. Also, this instrument is not included in Livingstone’s (2001) literature review when she set about to conduct an assessment of emotional intelligence measures. Given the importance of Goleman’s work and the frequency the dimensions are cited by other academics, I find the silence on the instrument strange and I am suspicious about the origins of this test.

Even if the emotional quotient test could be traced to Goleman, the factor analysis the authors had conducted on the 137 items may have caused validity problems in the instrument. The regrouping of these items into six factors, reducing these to five, and forcefully aligning them to Goleman’s five dimensions of emotional intelligence is problematic. With phrases like ‘maybe viewed’, ‘most closely related to’, ‘very similar to’, ‘seems to be’ and ‘perceived as being’ found in the same passage where the authors were describing the factor analysis process suggests that to a large extent, they are not fully convinced that there is a total fit between the emotional quotient test they had created and Goleman’s dimensions.

I have also found one important weakness in the instrument. On examination of Factor 4 – ‘Customer satisfaction focus’, of the authors’ emotional intelligence scale, I find the word - ‘customers’, appearing in five of the six statements in this category. I think this set of statements may not be respondent friendly as almost 80% of the participants are undergraduates and may not have work experience. Even for those who had accumulated hours of outside employment, they may not be in professions they were studying at the university at that moment. They may have difficulties relating to ‘customers’ in Factor 4. This may have skewed the findings and conclusions made about the emotional intelligence of accounting majors. Of course, using only 15 accounting majors to reach this conclusion is already a challenge.

Interestingly, the article mentions about Cooper and Sawaf’s (1997) EQ MAP test in the article. While it is not validated, it could be used for the study since it measures emotional intelligence at the executive level and this is a study about predicting career success at the workplace.

Besides these potential design flaws, the study was conducted at a mid-western university in the United States of America and on 295 business majors. The size of the sample and its source make it difficult to do significant generalisation on academic success, other than for those campuses and individuals who share similar characteristics. The assumption that business executives come from business majors may be a bit difficult to accept, and their inclusion into the study could produce strong reasons for wider generalisation.

I have uncovered other weaknesses in the findings. There is no evidence to suggest that the authors had controlled the study for gender and developmental differences. Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (1999) have found evidence for gender differences in emotional intelligence. They have found females to outperform males by about a 0.5 standard deviation on these emotional intelligence tasks when consensus agreement scoring is used. There were 126 females and only 97 males in the current study and this may push the mean forward given the unique features of females in emotional intelligence. Schutte and Malouff (1998) also report that upper level university students had higher emotional intelligence scores than did their freshmen counterparts. This seems to resonate with Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) framework of psychological processes in emotional intelligence. They claim that people obtain higher levels of emotional and intellect growth once they have taken time to gain mastery of the previous levels. In the current study, the mean age of domestic students was 23 while their international counterparts were averaged at 25. It may be difficult to suggest that these two groups share the same predictors in the emotional intelligence scales given these earlier studies.

Furthermore, the authors have not acknowledged the contradictions found in the findings of international student affiliated with extra-curriculum activities and the positive correlation they have established between emotional intelligence and affiliation with extra-curriculum activities. While the international students scored lower than their domestic counterparts, there are significant differences within each category. International students who engaged in extra-curriculum activities did better than other international students who are not affiliated with any sorts of club. These differences are significantly higher than those found the domestic group. This may suggest that there was emotion work (Opengart, 2005) carried out by the international students to ‘fit’ into their clubs. In addition, more interesting information could be revealed if participants were asked about their membership in informal groups. This requirement was excluded from the study. This portion of the study is also intriguing because it contradicts with Smart’s (2004) conclusion that there is no significant association between university athletic participation and emotional intelligence levels of university students of either gender. Another suspicion I have about this piece of finding is whether there is discrimination in the university that prevented international students from being affiliated with their clubs or becoming fully functional in them. The authors have not included this in their discussion.

Towards the end of the article, the authors conclude from the findings that certain factors in the emotional intelligence scale may predict academic success. Although much were written to inform management development practitioners about the care they need to exercise in recruiting and managing foreign students, nothing is said about the emotional intelligence predictors for them, especially they are being differentiated from the domestic ones.

The study was set up to conduct a study that determines the emotional competencies for achieving academic success and they used the institution-specific GPA and cumulative GPA as measures of academic success. The authors wish to use the findings and conclusions drawn from the research to describe the emotional competencies that management development professionals should look out for when identifying high potentials, and that business executive need to acquire to create workplace performance and career success. I think the reason posit by the authors creates problems in the study.

In establishing this connection, they have down played Goleman’s (1998) contention that such measurements lack the predictive ability for academic and career success. They have acknowledged the limitations of using these ‘surrogates’ but do so in return for expediency in the research. The authors are quiet about the link between successful intelligence and emotional intelligence. According to Sternberg (1996), individuals possessing successful traits are able to translate academic success into success in the workplace. The authors suggest successful intelligence ‘parallels’ emotional intelligence but they have not explain the ways they could overlap each other. This is another black box that needs further exploration by the authors to make their argument of the connection more powerful. Finally, the authors have not provided any information to explain the means workplace success could be potentially predicted by academic success. Without these in the open, the justifications for the alignment are quite dubious.

All in all, I have some strong doubts about the vigour and credibility of the study.

The study suggests that individuals are pre-disposed for workplace success and there are several drivers that shape this disposition.

Sailing has been classified a SPEX sport in the country. Given this national status, there is pressure in the sailing community to identify coaches with the right dispositions to coach sailing (Martens, 1987). The availability of a tool that could predict workplace performance and career commitment (Dries and Pepermans, 2007) is extremely useful. This study provides clues into the derivation of the authors’ five-factor Emotional Quotient Test from Goleman’s original 137-item scale (Goleman, 1998) as well as the problems the authors subsequently encountered.

An effective coach is capable of appreciating the constraints imposed on coaching (Saury and Durand, 1998). The knowledge of the general disposition of his athletes helps him modify his coaching behaviour and operating strategies to create the best physical and social environment for his charges to train in.

The authors have described the drivers for the disposition and I found them to be relevant since coaches are beginning to see sailors of foreign origins coming into their coaching teams. Also, sailor who participates in extra-curriculum activities other than sailing may demonstrate a fuller integration of the values and regulations (Lafreniere, Jowett, Vallerand, Donahue and Lorimer) of sailing into his identify. It is interesting to know if this could be a mediating factor for positive emotions in the coach-athlete relationship. As some sailors are currently undergraduates of the local universities, the authors’ suggestion of academic majors having an influence on the quality of the emotional competencies is intriguing and it is worth further examination in the context of the coach-athlete relationship. These variables need to be accounted for in the scope of my research for without them, they may skew my analysis and render my findings invalid.

In the article, the authors have articulated the purpose of this study on several occasions. They wanted to advice management of the variables that may create differentiators between individuals exhibiting high and low emotional competencies and their links to workplace performance. They have found that the academic field the individual had majored in, his membership of extra-curriculum activities, and his foreign status at his university as these variables.

As this article was published in a management development journal, readers may use these as heuristics to develop their human resource policies without fully appreciate the scope and limitations of the study. They may end up labelling all individuals who possess similar academic background as having low emotional competencies. Some forms of discrimination may develop in the management of these foreign executives and this selection perspective of emotional intelligence (Dries and Pepermans, 2007) may cause the high potential executive identification system to become ineffective and it could deprive deserving executives of their developmental and growth opportunities in their organisations.

Conclusion

These articles continue to show a major gap in the body of knowledge in coaching, not just in Singapore, but also in the rest of the world (Drury, 2007). This awareness merits further exploration of the affective state on coach on his athlete’s sports performance and outcome (Turnbull and Wolfson, 2002). Since I am a member of sailing fraternity, I will like to be the first to this study this arena.

This essay was first written on 26 Jan 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Bibliography

Briscoe, J.P. and Hall, D.T. (1999). Grooming and picking leaders using competency frameworks: Do they work? An alternative approach and new guidelines for practice. Organisational Dynamics, 28(1), 37-52.

Cooper, R. K. and Sawaf, A. (1997). Executive EQ: Emotional intelligence in leadership and organisations. Grosset:Putname:New York.

Depape, A.R., Hakim-Larson, J., Voelker, S., Page, S. and Jackson, S.L. (2006). Self-talk and emotional intelligence in University students. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 38(3), 250-260.

Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to identify high potential: A metacompetency perspective. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal, 28(8), 749-770.

Drury, L. (2007). Coaches’ perceptions of emotional and social intelligence. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, (ISBN No. 9780494394922). Canada: University of Toronto.

Dulewicz, V. and Higgs, M.J. (2004). Can emotional intelligence be developed? International Journal of Human Resource Management, 15(1), 95-111.

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. Bloomsbury:London, 317.

Hodgins, H. S. and Knee, R. (2002). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions. The American Psychologist, 56, 218-226.

Jowett, S. (2008). What makes coaches tick? The impact of coaches’ intrinsic and extrinsic motive on their own satisfaction and that of their athletes. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 18(5), 664-673.

Lafreniere, M. K., Jowett, S., Vallerand, R. J., Donahue, E. G. and Lorimer, R. (2008). Passion in Sport: On the quality of the coach-athlete relationship. Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology, 30, 541-560.

Livingstone, H. A. (2001). Assessing emotional intelligence measures: Do they predict work and life outcomes? Saint Mary’s University:Canada.

Lyle, J. (1999).Coaching principles and coaching behaviour. In Cross, J. L. and Lyle, J.(Eds.), The coaching process: Principles and practice for sports. Butterworth:Heinemann:Oxford, 25-48.

Martens, R. (1987). Science, knowledge and sport psychology. The Sport Psychologist, 1, 29-55.

Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D. and Salovey, P. (1999). Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence. Intelligence, 27, 267-298.

Mayer, J. D. and Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence. In Salovey, P. and Sluyter, D. (Eds.), Emotional development, emotional literacy, and emotional intelligence, Basic Books:New York.

Morin, A. (1993). Self-talk and self-awareness: On the nature of the relation. The Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 14, 223-234.

Opengart, R. (2005). Emotional intelligence and emotion work: Examining constructs from an interdisciplinary framework. Human Resource Development Review, 4(1), 49-62.

Perlini, A. H. and Halverson, T. R. (2006). Emotional Intelligence in the National Hockey League, 38(2), 109-119.

Rozell, E. J., Pettijohn, C. E. and Parker, R. S. (2002), An empirical evaluation of emotional intelligence: The impact on management. The Journal of Management Development, 21(4), 272-289.

Saury, J. and Durand, M. (1998). On-site study of coaching in sailing. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 69(3), 254-266.

Schutte, N. S. and Malouff, J. M. (1998, May). Developmental and interpersonal aspects of emotional intelligence. Presneted at the Convention of the American Psychological Society, Washington:DC.

Short, S. E. and Short, M. W. (2005). Essay: Role of the coach in the coach-athlete relationship. Medicine and Sports, 366, 529-530.

Smart, R. C. (2004). Exploring the link between Canadian university athletics and emotionally intelligent leadership potential. Unpublished master thesis, (ISBN No. 0612990214). Canada:Ontario:Ottawa: Carleton University.

Sternberg, R. J. (1996). Successful intelligence: How practical and creative intelligence determine success in life. Simon & Schuster:New York.

Tischler, L., Biberman, J. and McKeage, R. (2002). Linking emotional intelligence, spirituality and workplace performance: Definitions, models and ideas for research. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17(3), 203-218.

Trzaskoma-Bicserdy, G., Bognar, J., Revesz, L. and Geczi, G. (2007). The coach-athlete relationship in successful Hungarian individual sports. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 9(4), 458-495.

Turnbull, M. and Wolfson, S. (2002). Effects of exercise and outcome feedback on mood: Evidence for misattribution. Journal of Sport Behaviour, 25(4), 394-406.

Vallerand, R. J. (2008). On the psychology of passion: In search of what makes people’s lives most worth living. Canadian Psychology, 85, 756-767.

Winster, A. and Naglieri, J. (2003). Overt and covert verbal problem-solving strategies: Development trends in use, awareness, and relations with task performance in children 5 to 17. Child Development, 74, 659-678.

Effects of Coaches' Emotional Competencies On Athletes' Sporting Performance

2008-11-23T21:02:00.014+08:00

Rising Affluence of South East Asia Nations

Countries in South East Asia have become more competitive as their economies are subject to less trade restrictions, and more of their people are connected globally. The number of newly rich [i] has grown in these emerging economies and this expansion is found mainly in the middle class. With raising aspirations and broadening wants, their needs are found to be better served by a more open and competitive market that is linked to the rest of the world. These activities have attracted foreign direct investments and it becomes a zero-sum game when multinationals pull out of Singapore to relocate their operations to lower cost nations with growing affluence. To sustain Singapore's economic prosperity and social progression beyond her 43 years of independence, her Government has to look for and experiment with new engines of growth [ii]. To compete, Singapore will have to find new ways.

Sports as New Engine of Growth

To face up to these challenges, the tiny nation is looking for other niche areas as new mechanisms of growth. Sport is one such area. Singapore is using sports as an agent to integrate the influx of new immigrants with the contracting indigenous population. It is also deployed to tap into the global market for talents that could help realise and enhance her potential as the centre of athlete development and sports entertainment. Singapore wants to become a sporting nation and sporting hub in the region.

The recent Formula One Singapore Night Race and Barclays Singapore Open are testaments to the Government’s commitment and efforts to the latter. The nation is determined to provide world class sporting experience to both the athletes and spectators. The country-wide upgrading of stadiums and sports facilities ahead of the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics Games and the drive to complete the new 55,000-seat Olympic-size National Stadium (picture to the left) in Kallang in the same year are epitomes of its political will to succeed in this new endeavour.

In sports, the nation has moved away from sending participants to regional and international sport events to expecting performance and medals from these athletes. There is also raising aspiration and expectation of local sports associations to produce home grown athletes for the 2010 Youth Olympics Games and the 2012 London Olympics Games.

To meet and support these demands, the Singapore Sport Council has recently reorganised their priorities and functions. It has introduced policies that encourage sports associations to systemised and professionalise the way they manage their talent pools, and to industrialise their operations so that they could grow in a coherent and sustainable manner. To empower and enlarge this asset, the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, the Singapore National Olympic Council and the Singapore Sports Council started Project 0812 [iii] in 2006 as the nation’s quest to win the next Olympic Games medal.

The Council also established the National Registry of Coaches [iv] in 2007 with the aim to produce competent coaching personnel and leadership that delivers quality sports development and coaching at the national sports associations, sport clubs and schools. The Council has also instituted a training and development roadmap, and started incentive schemes in the following year to encourage existing coaches to upgrade their skills and to systematically groom the next generation of coaches for the country.

Gaps in the Body of Knowledge in Coaching

My interest in coaching begins after I have retired from competitive sailing and completed several certifications in coaching in October 2007. I believe that I have much to contribute to the sailing community and it is always a delight to see young budding sailors doing well in the sport. However, I am looking for an area where my experience as a sailor and my knowledge in scientific inquiry could be of use. I want to contribute in a different way to help more young sailors meet their aspirations and to fulfil my needs for self-actualisation.

After several weeks of observing the workings of the local sailing community, I found a breakthrough. Most literature in Singapore examines the biological, physiological and psychological requirements needed to produce an exceptional athlete. Only a handful of studies emphasise the importance of the coach, particularly the effects of the coach’s emotions on the performance of his athletes.

The results from a search in the Singapore Sports Library seem to yield a similar pattern.

It is a good starting point for the Singapore Sport Council to recognise [v] the roles a coach play in the development and performance of their charges. However, this recognition must be substantive. It is meaningless to the sports community to applaud coaches for producing star athletes but who are doing the wrong things. Rewarding coaches for the number of years they had committed to coaching and the amount of medals their star performers had brought for the nation only perpetuate this contradiction. These cannot be the only criteria as they do not further and deepen our knowledge in coaching. Coaches should be elevated to role models only for their dexterity in maintaining positive coach-athlete relationship and applying appropriate coaching behaviour that benefit all types of athletes. It is important that we have a language capable of describing, communicating and building the emotional competencies of a skill coach to achieve this but the common jargon for transmitting this coaching knowledge is missing.

I have also noticed that much of the knowledge and practises of maintaining positive coach-athlete relationship and applying appropriate coaching behaviour in Singapore are generated through experience and this body of knowledge is traditionally handed down from coach to coach. What constitutes as best practice is based to what works, which may be helpful to some coaches but may not be universally useful to all. Many of these rules of thumb are not validated or supported by research and new coaches have to endure long gestation periods before they could coach effectively.

This means that there is an obvious knowledge gap about the impact of coach’s affective state on the athlete's sports performance and outcome, which merits further exploration in Singapore given our aspiration of becoming a sporting nation and hub in the region.

Role of the Coach on Athletes' Performance

In his book, Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goldman reports that conventional measures of intelligence, or IQ, only account for 20% [vi], of a person’s success in life. He further suggests that some of the missing ingredients for success lie in emotional intelligence, which is the capacity to acquire and apply emotional information to a person’s surrounding. In Working with Emotional Intelligence, he presents the five dimensions of emotional intelligence and the twenty-five emotional competencies [vii] for outstanding performance. These five dimensions are presented in the box to the left of this page.

In Leadership That Gets Results, Goleman informs that though his research he has found direct casual relationship between leadership styles and organisational performance. He says that ‘leaders with strengths in critical mass of six or more emotional intelligence competencies were far more effective than peers who lacked such strengths’ [viii]. He went on to describe the six styles and how these impact the drivers of organisational climate, which in turn affects the overall performance of the organisation. Goleman's own research compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions and found that nearly 90% of the difference in their performance profiles was attributable to emotional intelligence factors.

While Goleman’s work in Emotional Intelligence is in the field of education, work and organisational life, I strongly feel that Emotional Intelligence is application in sports, particularly in the success of the coach in helping his athletes reach their full potential.

Key Research Question and Its Subsidiary Inquiries

As such, I am interested to know the types of emotional competencies and dimensions of emotional intelligence that coaches, who produce high performance sailors, display. With this knowledge, it is my hope that the Singapore Sports Council could introduce learning modules on Emotional Intelligence in the training and development roadmaps of coaches to enable to them to coach more professionally.

Guiding me is a set of subsidiary questions, which I will use to investigate the literature. These are:

Are there newer definitions and further clarifications on Emotional Intelligence since the mid 90’s?
What the literature has to say about coach-athlete relationship and coach leadership models?
What has been written about this relationship and the athlete’s performance?
What has been revealed about the use of emotions in sports?
Has anyone reported on the application of Emotional Intelligence in sports? Is the application for coaches? What are the outcomes?
Has anything been said about the impact of a coach’s emotion on the performance of the athlete?

Investigating the Issue

About a week was spent searching the databases and electronic journals for articles that may be useful in constructing the knowledge. As I am only looking at coach-athlete relationship and the impact of the coach's emotion on athlete's performance, I was restricting the search to databases and electronic journals covering sports, psychology, coaching, and sport performance. To the right of this page is a print screen of the databases that I had consulted.

The following words were initially keyed into the Monash Library’s search engine and it produced the following results:

performance and EQ - 0 Hit
EQ - 0 Hit
emotion - 5 Hits
emotional intelligence - 158 Hits
coaching - 26 Hits

Due to the long list of potential titles generated, the subsequent searches became more sophisticated, which I had combined several keywords:

coaching and sports - 26 Hits
psychology and coaching - 5 Hits
emotional intelligence and coaching - 6 Hits
coach and relationship - 1 Hit
Relationship - 21 Hits
emotional intelligence and sports performance - 0 Hit
emotional intelligence and coaching and sports - 0 Hit

As this is an initial effort, my focus was to hunt for the appropriate articles which could answer or point me to more information that could answer the key and subsidiary questions. Much time was spent reading the abstracts, and where possible the conclusions, to identify the key words that may suggest that the article is a good one to print out for extended reading. I will use Endnotes to record key points from the reading.

Challenges Encountered in the Search

Of course the investigation was done with some difficulties. These includes requests from webmasters to sign-up and pay fees to access the on-line articles. I have encountered several occasions where the browser is unable to recognise the security certificate of the portal housing the electronic journals and I am too coward to enter into them fearing virus attacks and illegal intrusions.

However, it is more challenge locating the right articles. It seems that the literature in this area of study is small. While there is plenty of material in the Internet on sports coaching but they are mostly promotional or self-help materials, which credibility I deeply suspected.

The Literature Reveals......

Nevertheless, by the second week my search had produced some results. While there were 158 hits for the keyword 'emotional intelligence', only 6 came up when 'coaching' was combined with the original keyword. These are some of the potential articles found:

Andrew M. Lane (ed) (2007). Mood and human performance: conceptual, measurement, and applied issues
Clements, M. (2005). Emotional intelligence: could it be the answer to the age-old problem of emotions impacting on athletic performance? Sports coach (Canberra, Aust.); Vol. 28, Issue: 3; 2005: 24-25
Facilitating emotional intelligence in elite sport. Preview New Zealand Journal of Sports Medicine Summer 2002: Vol. 30 Issue 4. p. 102-105
Mark Beauchamp and Mark A. Eys. (Eds) (2008). Group dynamics in exercise and sport psychology: contemporary themes
Meyer, B.B., & Zizzi, S. (2007). Emotional intelligence in sport: Conceptual, methodological, and applied issues. In A.M. Lane (Ed.), Mood and human performance: Conceptual, measurement, and applied issues. London : Nova Science Publishers.
Meyer, B.B., Fletcher, T.B., Cashin, S.M., Davis, N.W., Cole, M.E., Parker, S.J., Kilty, K.A. (under review). Emotional intelligence in sport: A comparative study of athletes and coaches. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology.
Meyer, B.B., & Fletcher, T.B. (2007). Emotional intelligence: A theoretical overview and implications for research and professional practice. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology
Paul Morgan (2001). Emotional intelligence and performance: why do the most gifted athletes often fail to be the best performers? Preview Morgan, P., Coach Spring 2001: Issue 5. p. 27-30

Although only a few articles are found, collectively they suggest that the:

Quality of the coach-athlete relationship has a long term impact on the athlete’s sports performance.
Athlete's ability to manage his emotions at the time of the competition seems to have an impact his sports performance in that event.
Coaches may be able to manipulate the emotions of their athletes to improve their performance at competitions.

Here are the summaries of two articles, which I find relevant to my research interest.

Trzaskoma-Bicsérdy G., Bognár J., Révész L., & Géczi G. (2001) The Coach-Athlete Relationship in Successful Hungarian Individual Sports. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 2(4), pp. 485.

The study indicates that the characteristics and needs of the individual athlete define the coach-athlete relationship more than the characteristics of the given sport discipline. It reconfirms the importance of the coach-athlete relationship and coaching behaviour on the performance of the athlete in elite sports. It shows that emotional interdependence has an impact on the emotional tone of the relationship that the coach and athlete experience, and it indicates that this is one reason why some coaches are more effective and efficient than others.

This study is relevant to my research interest because its findings strongly suggest that ‘without first establishing respect, esteem and love, the coach and athlete working relationship is at a dead-end. These three key components, which are the defining elements of closeness, have strong emotional connotations, and I will have a keen interest in establishing the emotional competencies driving this construct in the coach-athlete relationship.

Vargas-Tonsing T. M. & Guan J. M. (2007) Athletes’ Preferences for Informational and Emotional Pre-Game Speech Content. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 2(2), pp. 171-180.

The coach has a unique and final opportunity to influence his athletes immediately prior to a competition through the effective use of a pre-game speech. Previous studies highlighted that this coaching technique of providing informational and emotional content in the speech is believed to be beneficial to performance as it is capable of increasing athletes’ feelings of efficacy.

In this study, it is found that athletes preferred differing amounts of information and emotion according to the situation. Athletes’ and coaches’ perceptions of the emotion arising from pre-game speeches differed as well. Gender differences are also detected; female athletes placed higher values on the amount of information than do their male counterparts. No gender differences were found on the amount of emotional content.

This literature is relevant to me because it suggests that coaches may need to possess high emotional competencies to enact the emotions according to the demands of the situation. It is interesting to know the emotional competencies for enabling this enactment.

Conclusion

I will continue to pursuit this line of inquiry as the previous two weeks’ of searches and reading revealed some very interesting insights into the use of emotions in sports. What I really need is a breakthrough. That is to locate specific articles that directly mention the affective state of the coach on the athlete’s performance.

[i] Banerjee A. V. and Duflo E. (2007) “What Is Middle Class About The Middle Classes Around The World”, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[ii] Tan, K. Y., Wu, F., Toh, M. H., Seah, K. W., & Thia, J. P. (2002) “Singapore’s Engines of Growth: A Demand-Side Perspective”, MTI(February): 1-16.

[iii] Teo, C. H. (2007) Speech By Mr Teo Chee Hean, Minister For Defence, President Singapore National Olympic Council at The Singapore Sports Awards 2007 on Thursday 21 June 2007 At 8 PM at The Padang/Collyer Ballroom, Swissotel The Stamford.

[iv] National Registry of Coaches. Singapore Sports Council. http://coaches.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Coaches/home/national_registry.html.

[v] Coach Recognition Awards (CRA). Singapore Sports Council. http://www.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Coaches/home/thanks_coach0/coach_recognition.html.

[vi] Goleman, D. (1995) “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”, Bantam, pp. 34.

[vii] Goleman, D. (1998) “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, Bantam, pp. 26-27.

[viii] Goleman, D. (2000) “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review, 78(2):78-90.

This article was 1st written on 21 Nov 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Coaching Behaviour and Coach-Athlete Relationship on the Athlete's Sporting Performance and Outcome

2008-10-31T00:09:00.007+08:00

Research Poster Presentation

After 43 years of economic growth, Singapore is now turning to sports as her new agent for nation building and growth. She wants to become a sporting nation and the sporting hub in the region.

Attesting to the Government's commitment in this area is the recent Formula One Night Race held in Singapore in September 2008, launch of the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore, completion of the new 90,000-seat national stadium by 2011, and preparations for the 2012 London Olympics.

In sports, the nation has moved away from sending participants to regional and international sporting events to expecting performance and medals from these athletes.

To meet and support these new expectations and aspirations, the Singapore Sport Council has established the Coaches Register in 2007 to regulate the quality of coaching at the National Sports Associations, sport clubs and schools. The Council has also instituted a training and development roadmap and introduced incentive schemes in the following year to encourage existing coaches to professionalise their skills and to systematically groom the next generation of coaches for the country.

However, there is an obvious knowledge gap about the impact of coaching behaviour and coach-athlete relationship on the athlete's sporting performance and outcome. Most literature in Singapore examines the biological, physiological and psychological requirements needed to produce an exceptional athlete. Only a few studies emphasize the importance of the coach but the coach-athlete relationship merits further exploration in Singapore, particularly, the effects of coaches’ emotions on the performance of their athletes.

Here are the Research Poster Presentations showing the intial research strategies taken and desk research carried out in the past week on this research interest.

Coaching behaviour and coach-athlete relationship on the athlete\'s sporting performance and outcome

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: coaching behaviour)

This article was 1st written on 31 Oct 2008.

Research Poster Presentation

2008-10-23T22:23:00.012+08:00

The genesis for this article can be found from the following research poster presentation:

These posters were 1st created in July 2007 and blogged on 23 Oct 2008.

Summarising and Evaluating an Argument

2008-10-19T17:43:00.001+08:00

Learning from Attempts to Improve School:
The Contribution of Methodological Diversity
By Stephen W. Raudenbush

This article provides an interesting read. It presents itself as a thought piece for education policy makers on the perils in the process of finding what works in improving learning outcomes amongst students.

It proposes two seemingly unconnected claims of policy of what ought to be done in education research. The association becomes obvious when the author cleverly rehashes the statement - ‘questions should drive methods’ several times in the article.

Raudenbush claims that instructional regimes and interventions, not resources, accountability and governance, should be conceived as the causal agents for instructional improvements, and they should be the central themes in education research.

He justifies these by highlighting the marginal impact of resources, accountability and governance on learning outcomes, and warrants that ‘effective instruction is not likely to flow from the exertion of policy levers’. He provides several reasons to permit this linkage. He observes that resources, governance and market forces do not remove the knowledge gaps of educators in conducting professional development for teachers, and in selecting, organising, co-ordinating and enacting effective interventions for improving school-wide learning.

This means that the return of investment on the policy levers may show up when the research questions are about the implementation of instructional regimes and interventions, and keeping others as complementary elements that enhance the intensity of the outcomes.

This points us to the primary argument by Raudenbush. He says that systematic experiment is a better way to evaluate claims about casual effects of the interventions deployed in improving teaching and learning in the classrooms. He suggests complementing randomised experiment with mixed or multiple research methods because randomised experiment, while is the best way to discern causal effects, is not enough to verify these effects alone. He indicates that given the cost and the finite amount of funds available for randomised research, there is a need to identify the instructional regimes and interventions that ‘hold the greatest promise in achieving those outcomes’.

This means that education researchers need to known how an instructional intervention could be implemented prior to a ‘randomize trial of effectiveness’. More importantly, they need to be informed if the selected intervention is the most promising one. Therefore, the author warrants that they need to use a variety of research methods, including small randomised research, to conduct descriptive and correlation studies that could suggest that the intervention will work well with the target students in the given learning settings.

In conclusion, I agree that education researchers need to be aware of two blind spots when conducting randomised experiments, and these are deeply ingrained in the statement - ‘questions should drive methods’. Researchers should establish the true causal agents and identify the right target group and settings for the investigation. All else will inform incorrectly, and Raudenbush has used a number of examples in the article to illustrate the use of methodological diversity to avoid this phenomenal.

This report was 1st created on 24 June 2008.

Grading of Essays by University

2008-08-21T16:48:00.003+08:00

Currently, my grades, as of 21 Aug 2008, for the essays are as follows:

The Dynamics of Change

2008-06-24T20:53:00.007+08:00

How Complexity Could Derail Planned Change

Drucker (2008) informs that a business exists only for the purpose of creating and keeping a customer. The conception of its vision and mission statements, goals and strategies is a manifested attempt to fulfil this purpose. The business needs an internal organisation capable of amassing and positioning the resources necessary for the delivery of its purpose through its strategies. The design considerations for this internal organisation of social structures, systems and order are influenced by the business’s relative position to its external environment (Porter, 1998). The organisation has to be modified regularly, and at times transformed, when this relative position is shifted by the turbulence in the environment.

Organisational scientists have suggested a number of approaches, like culture change, self-design and organisational learning (Waddell, Cummings & Worley, 2007), for planned change. While the management vocabulary and jargons used in these approaches may differ, they do follow a general pattern. There is the process of entering into a psychological and financial contract with the change practitioners and agents, determining the actual problem, gathering and processing data to validate and scope the problem, providing findings, conclusions and recommendations to the change agents, designing and implementing interventions for change, and finally evaluating the outcomes of these interventions and determining if the change has successfully taken place and in the intended shape.

Businesses could engage in two different magnitudes of planned change (Waddell, Cummings & Worley, 2007). When social mechanisms, such as assumptions, values, norms, and artefacts, are adjusted, we said that these businesses have successfully conducted a transformational change. Transformational change goes beyond fine-tuning the status quo or making the existing organisation better. It shifts the core business philosophy and model, makes alterations to its strategies, and reorganises social arrangements by introducing new forms of organisational behaviours to shape current ones. These actions change the orientation of the business.

Businesses are more inclined to transformational change when they face severe threats to their survival. Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986) have identified three types of disruption that make the likelihood of such a change a potent option for businesses. These are the industry discontinuities that are caused by the reconfiguration of environmental elements, shifts in product life cycle as products and services mature in the consumer market, and changes in the internal politics of the business as different social actors engaged in activities that mobilise the support for or opposition against goals, policies, and rules to create new means to get a stake (Lawler and Bacharach, 1983) of the capital (Thomson, 1999) in the organisation.

Those businesses that are only capable of adjusting and modifying some of these social mechanisms to meet external environmental requirements but leaving the paradigm of perceiving the environment, thinking about strategies, and behaving in the organisation largely intact are incremental in nature. In this instant, big developmental efforts are usually restricted and limited by those with vested power, sentience, and expertise in the existing organisational arrangements. The members in the social order are more predisposed to fine-tune the social structures and morale code to protect their own personal power and influence, and to avoid the erosion and curtailment of the length and depth of their managerial discretion (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987) than to change them drastically.

However, the central theme for most successful businesses is their ability to make use of their external environment as agility drivers (Sharifi, Colquhoun, Barclay and Dann, 2001) to create the necessary internal strategic capability and capacity to stay ahead of the competition. To do this, they have to constantly reconfigure and reconstitute their internal structures and social mechanisms to give each of their businesses their unique character and competitive advantage. Also, they need to do this as anticipatory as the uncertainties of the change and as fast as the pace of these changes to be effective.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to contemplate the idea of an external environment comprising of political, economical, social and technological elements working independently from each other. According to Frenkel (2003), an organisation should be seen as a structure embedded in three force fields (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Force Fields of an Organisation

This diagram was conceptualised by the author using the ideas of the 'Three Force Fields' proposed by S. J. Frenkel in his 2003 article on 'The Embedded Character of Workplace Relations'.

The Meta environment is driven by global events and the availability of new technologies. When the global economic-competitive environment changes from one of optimising performance around quality and cost to creating products and services specifically for the needs and wants of the customers, new manufacturing paradigm will have to be invented and the complementing technologies will have to be found and introduced to the organisation (Sharifi, Colquhoun, Barclay and Dann, 2001) to make the paradigm work. Disruptive innovations (Christensen, 1997) are also capable of displacing industries. Dominant businesses have let their guards down through ignorance or arrogance and were incapable of sensing the extent new businesses, operating with new technologies, could shape the terrain in the industry and displace the incumbents eventually. They have not anticipated how these new businesses, which produce lower quality products and services, could rapidly learn to rivalry the dominant players with products and services of far superior value (Kim, 2005).

The Meso environment is driven by elements that impact the business’s value-chain, which comprises of structures and processes that are distributed Transnationally to fully account for the comparative advantage each of these nations has to offers. The value-chain is essential for the acquisition and translation of raw materials and work-in-progress from different parts of the world into the final products and services that are stored for and delivered to the global consumer. The application of new technologies in the value-chain will change the task and labour processes in its structures (Taylor, 1998), displacing people, and making the business more effective and efficient.

The Micro environment is driven by the local conditions in which the business resides and operates, by the market structure of labour in that country, and by the work that needs to be carried out in that business for that country. While the change may call for adjustments in the labour processes, their actual execution and implementation may have to be adapted to local conditions because the embedded institutional structures are unique in each location where the business operates (Woywode, 2002).

The examples listed above show that these drivers are interrelated and they interact with each other in some kind of a cause and effect order, and at times seem to be hierarchically arranged. Not only do the drivers affect the structures within their own force field, they affect the corresponding drivers in other force fields as well, much like the earthly tectonic plates that are constantly expanding onto their own and at the same time encroaching into their adjacent pieces. Clegg, Courpasson and Philliops (2006) point out that the birth, grow and demise of organisations is a result of ‘economic agents calculating, miscalculating, and constructing the historical accumulation of capital’ that obtained from and grew out of its environment. However, while the organisation is a historically produced object, they indicate that 'its existence is not necessary determined by anything nor is it freely constructed'. Otherwise, we will not be capable of introducing any kind of planned change if the potential growth trajectory of a business is pre-determined by its environment. Nevertheless, this freedom to reorganise is restricted by the influences of the drivers from the various force fields. These make things a bit more challenging as we cannot be sure which environmental element is actually the driving mechanism in the industry, especially if we are to read each of the force fields individually. It means that we are required to look at change not just by its parts but through its dynamics as well so that the 'whole' story could be told through the relationships and interactions of the drivers in all of the force fields. By catering to the parts and dynamics of the total environment, we could continue to keep the missions, goals and strategies of the business aligned to its purpose and vision.

Lewin (1947) suggests that when the forces for change and forces for status quo are equal, the behaviours in the social system will exist in a quasi-stationary equilibrium state. To change in such a circumstance, one has to increase the forces for change or diminish the opposing forces that prevent change from happening. For me, this is a simple way of describing how change could be initiated but its execution is less straightforward for a business wanting planned adaptations and transformation with its external environment. This notion of upsetting the balance is problematic. It presents a view that businesses are capable of accurately predicting and forecasting the emergence and ascendancy of internal organisational and external environmental triggers, and capable of offsetting and adapting ingrained social forces and arrangements to these changes with will and ease. This may not be that evident since emotions and behaviours of specific individuals, groups or networks are not that clearly read and easily instrumented as compare to the ease of manipulating systems and processes.

The main reason for these challenges is that the quasi-stationary equilibrium only opens a temporal access where the change practitioners are barely given the time to accurately read the business's condition and health. There will always be pressure from the economic agents' calculated and miscalculated acts to cause the rearrangement of the social order and elements in each of the external environment. These actions shift and change the current social and environmental climate, policies, structures and maturity level. As the social structure and environment adapt within, its interfacing elements will interact and realign with their counterparts in another environmental system, all in a struggle to create and hold onto some sort of temporal internal and aggregated homeostasis again. Thus, most of the time change practitioners are only able of producing a bounded reality (Simon, 1996) of the social and environmental conditions of the business useful in deciding the best type of 'force' to apply, the amount of 'force' to apply, and the amount of time the 'force' should be applied to enable the change to reach a self-sustainable state.

We know that the organisational change is successful when each member in the business is found to have modified his or her behaviours and acquired new habits as a result of the interventions. However, all these could be just good acting (Fineman, 1993) and a matter of executing effective impression management. Those who eventually come under pressure to perform will crack down and private feelings of irritation, anger and rebellion will come forth resulting in him or her not able to 'survive' the change. The knowledge why and how these survival strategies are used are useful lessons to the change agents, who want a successful implementation of new strategies in a changing environment. However, the information on the casual mechanisms that produce individual change is unavailable and it makes designing, monitoring and controlling the change over a period of time a challenge.

Figure 2: Meaning Making Replacing Reality

This diagram was created by the author, who is deeply influenced by the concepts of psychodynamics as discussed by organisational writers like S. Fineman in his book 'Organisations as Emotional Arenas' in 1993.

One reason for this missing piece of knowledge is the complex nature of the social order in an organisation. Because we have a tendency to view the organisation mechanically rather than organically (Thaw, 2002), we see organisations as being rational and objective. This denies us to opportunity to perceive the organisation as a meaning making (Fineman, 1993) machine (Figure 2) comprising of people with emotions and feelings. Emotion and cognition is intertwined. Ideas are laden with feelings, and feelings germinate ideals in a culturally contextualised environment. The social order and structures that influence the organisation are of human creation and they are at same time influencing the process of creating new structures and meanings. When combined, they produce trajectories that lead to different kinds of outcome from that single point of origin. By factoring this aspect of organisation into the mechanical equation, the quasi-stationary equilibrium makes the reading of the organisation even more difficult if the change practitioners only examine the parts and not the dynamics. When the observable rational part of the system is seemed to be in temporal homeostasis, the invisible irrational meaning making portion could be largely in disarray and keeping the overall social systems in the organisation from ever reaching a state of equilibrium and order. The change practitioners could be misled by what seemingly to be stable on the surface.

The social order evolves when resources that oppose policies and create access to existing and new capital are mobilised. New morale codes of shame and guilt are drawn up (Fineman, 1999) as well. These are carried out, between social actors, through micro agreements, deals, compromises, and trade offs conducted out of the perceived fear of uncertainty and chaos that may impact their relative status in a socially constituted world (Fineman, 1993). These actions could rearrange power positions and order in the hierarchy, and the actions are asserted through strict emotional control and suppression to maintain an appearance of sanity and stability that are dominating and mutually exclusive in nature. The need to be detached emotionally from the organisation is to maintain personal control and power. This attempt to control the private personal realm while claiming the wish to unleash it with change appears to provoke strong resistance from employees (Taylor, 1998). Why is there so much of resistance? People see their organisation as themselves. In it, they find meaning to their own identity and existence. There are deep fear of nothingness and being in an organisation and supporting a culture of self-deception is to avoid acknowledging the 'truth of one's own powerlessness' to a change that is constantly giving them difficulties. To be in control is to survive by maintaining and protecting themselves organisationally, and this strategy can be seen as a resistance to change (Fineman, 1993). This results in other social actors wanting to avoid true personal change even in the midst of the social rearrangement. When such emotional dispositions are kept below the surface and unable to be authentically addressed, people become resigned, passionless, defensive and hostile towards the organisation and the people in and around it. These are energy draining and the actors become withdrawn emotionally from the organisation to avoid having to feel about the things that are happening around them (Beatty, 2000). When these emotions are politically driven and limiting, they will suppress ideals and feelings (Beatty, 2000). If change practitioners (Waddell, Cummings and Worley, 2007) ignore these dynamics in the emotional realm of change, the unresolved emotions and feelings could ‘re-enter the process by the backdoor’ (Beatty, 2000).

Perhaps, it comes as no surprise that planned change tends to be seen as a rationally controlled mechanism that operates in an orderly fashion. However, because emotion and cognition is intertwined at the workplace, planned change takes on a more chaotic quality. It is characterised by shifts in goals, appearances of discontinuous activities, and occurrences of surprising events. These, whether as a single event or combined occurrences, are capable of affecting the mood and motivation of the change agents who are calling for and leading the change. Emotion and cognition are entwined (Fineman, 1999). Emotion could get in the way of rationality even though the emotional process can serve rationality.

These indicate that by looking at the pieces of the change is to discount the synergistic and multiplier effects of the interactions between pieces in the whole system as it works towards an unstable equilibrium. This is further complicated by the process of creating the change itself. In causing the organisation to move with its shifting environment, it is injecting new forces that upset the social structures and order, which introduces even greater uncertainty to the relationships and interactions amongst the pieces. We need to examine the parts and the whole in tandem. The change itself as well as its scalability throughout the system is important studies as it is the ripple effects of change that produce unexpected outcomes that usually caught organisations unaware and unprepared for their new challenges.

This is where the difficulties of using the approaches of planned change become more apparent. These approaches have mostly discounted the situational factors that demand modifications in the methodologies at the generic level. Also, there are deficiencies in the current body of knowledge on how the stages of each planned change approach may vary across all change situations since there are differences within the same industry that saddles across a number of nations. Even within the industry, there could be sectional differences (Woywode, 2002). This makes the adoption of best management practices from other leading businesses without consideration of their unique institutional settings dangerous. Even when these practices are a good way of reducing environmental complexity for managerial decision making, of reducing the risks of been criticised since the best methods are followed, and of increasing efficiency because they contain valuable managerial wisdom (Woywode, 2002), they may lead change agents into a false sense of being right about the appropriate sequence of change for their organisations.

So, what is this 'dynamics' that has been mentioned in much of this essay? According to Bourdieu (Thomson, 1999; Beatty, 2000), change takes place when social actors struggle with each other and differentiate themselves into dominant and subordinated positions played out based on the type and amount of capital they hold. The field where these games are held is made up of networks of social relationships, social spaces and topology of power. In this structured space, players, having subscribed to its rules, adopt behavioural strategies of conservation, subversion and succession to improve the social positions they currently held in the pecking order and increase the amount of economic, symbolic, cultural or social capital they already accumulated. It is these acts of increasing self-worth, personal influence and power, and social ranking that make the playing field fully dynamic and ever changing (Thomson, 1999). Since these networks of social relationships, social spaces and topology of power are by-products of human interactions in the organisation, the field which the social actors operate in is a kind of emotional arena (Fineman, 1993) where cultural labels are applied to specific constellation after their appraisal of the situation, changes to their bodily sensations, and exhibiting their freedom or inhibition to express certain gestures (Beatty, 2000) to one another. In fact, in the name of granting the feeling of autonomy and empowerment in the new workplace to encourage talent retention and performance, it has been found in reality that the introduction of these changes is in itself injecting more emotions and they demand the deployment of emotional labour (Taylor, 1998) amongst the personnel as their prime survival strategy in their organisation.

Given this dynamism, we cannot accurately predict how the tectonic plates will move and the effects their drivers have on the total environment. For where change could be anticipated and planned, there will be unplanned change that we must respond and react to. One could view organisational transformation as being ahead of it environmental changes. The other sees organisational adaptations as akin to 'just-in-time' adjustments coming just behind the arrival of the change in the environment.

To conduct 'just-in-time' adaptations, businesses need both the capability to respond as the change occurs and the capacity to change once the direction is decided. This calls for another perspective about organisational change, one which is more strategic and responsive as compare to the simple planned tactical approach of upsetting the balance of various force fields to effect progression.

We may conduct planned interventions for changes that are easily identified and anticipate. The business may create contingency or 'drawer' plans that could be rapidly deployed and executed by using existing resources or resources that were acquired for their flexibility for multiple uses to deal with these predictable changes. This means the organisation needs to position spare or flexible resources or mechanisms for calling on external capacity ahead of the change to enable the initiation these drawer plans. This is a capacity based solution to change.

While these management concepts are globally diffused, they do call for local adaptations because of institutional differences. 'Isomorphic and idiosyncratic' tendencies have been observed at the same time when such concepts are implemented. Thus, it is not wise to look at best practices as if they are the Holy Grail for everything (Woywode, 2002). The resilience of national cultures will persistently cause variations in businesses across countries and even for businesses operating in the same industry. These external influences will take the organisation towards different paths and consequences even when the organisational practices are the same.

Figure 3: World of Knowns and Unknowns

The ideas used by the author to conceptualise this diagram can be traced to the Department of Defence (USA) News Briefing conducted by the Secretary of Defence, Donald H. Rumsfeld, in 2002.

A similar version of this body of knowledge has been found in works produced by Meyer, Loch, & Pich (2002) and Chapman & Ward (2003).

However, not all events fall into this category. There are many unpredictable and unprecedented events (Figure 3), which could dislocate business operations and disable its ability to survive. This requires a different strategy which calls for the business to use its capability rather than capacity to reconfigure the organisation in a reactive but responsive way. This means business must be able to respond by been inventive and innovative on-the-go with what they already have as the change occurs outside normal expectations caused by the dynamics from the various environments.

When the science of change is not fully understood and grounded by empirical research, doing planned change in a highly dynamic environment becomes formidable task. This may suggests that planned change has not totally account for dynamism in change and calls to question the sustainable qualities of planned change on the adaptation and transformation of the organisation to its new environment.

References

Beatty, B. (2000) The Emotions of Educational Leadership: Breaking the Silence, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 3(4): 331 – 357.

Chapman, C. and Ward, S (2003) Project Risk Management: Processes, Techniques and Insights, Wiley

Christensen, C. M. (1997) The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business School Press.

Clegg, S. R., Courpasson, D., and Phillips, N. (2006) Power and Organisations. London: SAGE Publications. Chapter 11, “Power and Organisational Forms’, pp. 320-340.

Drucker, P. F. (2008) The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (Paperback), Collins; Reissue edition (July 22, 2008).

Fineman, S. (1993) Organisations as Emotional Arenas, in S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in Organisations, London: Sage: pp. 9-35.

Fineman, S. (1999) Emotion and Organising, in S. R. Clegg & C. Hardy (Eds.), Studying Organisation: Theory and Method, London: Sage: 288-310.

Frenkel, S. J. (2003) The Embedded Character of Workplace Relations, Work and Occupations 30/2: 135-153.

Hambrick, D.C. and Finkelstein, S. (1987) Managerial discretion: a bridge between polar views of organizational outcomes in Research in Organizational Behaviour, Vol 9, Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press: 369-406.

Kim, C. W. (2005) Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, Harvard Business School Press.

Lawler, E. J. and Bacharach, S. B. (1983) Political Action and Alignments in Sociology, Research in Sociology of Organisations, 2: 83-107.

Lewin, K. (1947) Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change. Chapter 6, "Human Relations in Curriculum Change" In Readings in Social Psychology by Theodore M. Neweomb and Eugene L. Hartley, Co-Chairmen of Editorial Committee, Henry Holt and Co., pp. 340-44.

Meyer, A. D., Loch, C. H. and Pich, M. T. (2002) Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation to Chaos, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2002:Winter.

Porter, M. E. (1998) Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Free Press.

Rumsfeld, D. H (2002), DoD News Briefing Secretary of Defense, Donald H.Rumsfeld, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636.

Sharifi, H., Colquhoun, G., I Barclay, I. and Dann, Z. (2001) Agility Manufacturing: A Management and Operational Framework, Processing Institute of Mechanical Engineers Vol 215: 857-869.

Simon, H. A. (1996) Models of My Life, The MIT Press.

Taylor, S. (1998) Emotional Labour and the New Workplace, in P. Thompson & C. Warhurst (Eds), Workplaces of the Future, London: Macmillan, pp. 84-103.
Thaw, D (2002) Stepping into the Rivers of Change in M. Edwards and A. Fowler The Earthscan Reader on NGO Management. London: Earthscan: 146-163.

Thomson, P. (1999) Reading the Work of School Administrators with the Help of Bourdieu: Getting a “Feel for the Game”, Paper presented at the AARE and NZARE joint conference (Melbourne).

Tushman, M. L., Newman, W. H. and Romanelli, E. (1986) Convergence and Upheaval: Managing the Unsteady Pace of Organizational Evolution, California Management Review, 29(1): 22 - 39.

Waddell, D. M., Cummings, T. G. and Worley, C. G. (2007) Organisation, Development and Change, 3rd Edition, Asia Pacific, Australia and Singapore: Thomson.

Woywode, M. (2002) Global Management Concepts and Local Adaptations: Working Groups in the French and German Car Manufacturing Industry, Organisation Studies 23/4: 497-524.

This report was 1st created on 24 June 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

The MINDEF Innovation Programme

2008-06-03T20:51:00.003+08:00

A Report on the Strategies
that Built an Innovative Ministry of Defence, Singapore,
and the Singapore Armed Forces, 2002 to 2007

Abstract

The Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has long been recognised as a forward looking agency that leads change in the public sector. In 2001, the Ministry decided to embark on her biggest transformation to meet the demands of the 3rd Generation Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) or the ‘3G SAF’. The Ministry had identified innovation as the key enabler in this transformation and aggressively pursuit its application to achieve her new goal. The MINDEF Innovation and Transformation Office and the MINDEF Innovation Programme were conceived to realise this single objective.

In three phases, the programme uncovered the big picture, searched for the missing pieces, and prescribed the key approaches for change in an organisation of about 60,000 strong. The programme was able to identify the propensity to innovate in the way the Ministry organised, managed and renewed herself, and used these as leverages to initiate and manage the change in a planned fashion through ‘Jumpstart’. The change was strategically driven at the top but left significant space at the ground for emergent innovations to reach the support structures created by the Innovation Resourcing Framework called ‘RACE’.

This report is a record of the activities that had taken place between 2002 and 2007, during which the programme was been executed by the author.

Only all figures presented in this report are falsified to protect the organisation.

Afternote

Throughout 2001 to 2007, I have been challenged by many people from different quarters of the organisation on the science behind the MINDEF Innovation Programme and its abilities in delivering the intended outcomes.

This effort has recently been validated by my lecturer:

Dr Deanna De Silwa, Department of Education, Monash University, wrote:

"This is an extremely well executed strategic plan to implement and filtrate innovation within an organisation. It is extremely pleasing to see that you have integrated a wide range of literature on leadership and innovation with the practical issues of the defence force context."

This report was 1st created on 1 May 2008.

Grading of Essays by the University

2008-03-31T15:10:00.002+08:00

Currently, my grades, as of 31 Mar 2008, for the essays are as follows:

Distributed Leadership - A Substitute For The Conventional Notion of Leadership

2008-03-02T22:12:00.001+08:00

People are seen as working in groups when they organise and operate along a common set of values, beliefs, and norms, and their relationships and interactions are explicitly and implicitly defined in ways where the behaviour of one person has consequential effects and impact on another's ability for task performance and goal attainment (Gibb, 1968).

These close task and relationship-oriented interactions (Gronn, 1999) provide the leader and his followers their cognitive structure for personal identity with the group and the temporal stability for social satisfaction to arise from the relationships and task activities at the workplace (Brown & Hosking, 1986). These make being in groups meaningful for them, which in turn keeps the groups intact; much like in a marriage (Gronn, 1999).

Conventional Wisdom of Leadership and Organisation

We identify the leader from his followers by observing the frequency a group member engages the acts of leadership (Gibb, 1968). These acts could be discerned from the process in which the individual exercises influence over others and steers them towards the direction of the goals faced by the group (Bryman, 1996).

The study of the leader could be traced back to the 1940's when researchers believe that leaders are borne and the variations in personal traits between individuals could explain why an effective leader is different from those who are not. However, the inconsistent conclusions arising from these studies have been problematic in empirically placing this notion as a possibility for leadership (Gibb, 1968).

The efforts to define the leader continue into the 60's. The focus of these later studies is on the behaviours and styles of the leader. By describing and naming the various leadership styles, organisations are able to select and hire their leaders base on how best their behaviours and styles fit the socio-technological circumstances of the hiring organisations. These definitions also introduce the notion that people, who may not display the traits of leaders, could be trained and developed to a way where their behaviours and styles could be modified to 'pass-off' as leaders.

However, there has been one nagging problem in this new formulation of leadership. Leadership styles are unable to explain why on some occasions the acts of leadership do not usually produce positive organisational performance and outcomes. Contingency studies in the 80's are introduced in an attempt to address the situational variables that may interfere with leadership. Researchers argue that leaders, who gain access to positional power, and are capable of ‘instrumenting’ task-structures and maintaining positive leader-member relationships, are said to be in ‘situation control’ and more able to function as effective leaders.

After the 80's, leaders are seen as ‘manager’ of meanings (Bryman, 1996), and vision is pivotal in the process of leadership. This notion views leaders as trying to make sense for others, developing social consensus around the resulting meaning and purpose, identifying what is important, and organising and directing their followers from vision to reality.

Distributed Leadership as a Substitute for Conventional Leadership

For much of the past six decades, leadership has been examined from many different facets, but there is a long standing tradition linking most of these studies, that is, the leader is a solo, stand alone, individualistic heroic person, who holds positional power at the highest echelon of the organisation, and capable of engaging his subordinates through task or relationship based interactions (Gibb, 1968; Krantz, 1989; Stewart 1991; Doyle & Myers, 1999; Gronn, 1999; Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2000).

Some researchers criticise these leadership studies for analysing the strength of the connections between the superior and his subordinates and not the forms of connection members in the group enjoy, exploring the mind of an entity and not the mind as an activity, and conceptualising the group mind and not the collective mind which arises from the patterns of interrelated activities of many people (Weick & Roberts, 1993).

Also, by focusing these studies on individual or focused leadership (Gibb, 1968), the academia has ignored the possibility of other key sources of social and organisational power (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001), other forms of leadership, and the possibilities of substitutes to task and relationship based leadership, such as substitutes that are defined by the characteristics inherited in the task, or based on personal attributes of the subordinates, or driven by the processes used in the organisation, (Gronn 1999, 2002). The newer studies of 'superleadership', ‘real team’, 'liberating individuals to leading themselves' and 'leadership as a practice' (Bryman, 1996) signal the growing inclination to respond to these criticisms.

Gronn (1999) suggests that substitutes could cause task and relationship oriented leadership impossible to make a difference, thereby rendering leadership unnecessary in the organisation. However, substitutes could also augment the relationship between leadership and organisational outcomes or contribute to the efforts of the subordinate's performance without cancelling out or augmenting the leader's direct effects on the outcomes.

One such substitute that enhances leadership is distributed leadership. The idea is not new as Gibb (1968) suspects that when we are witnessing the practice of focused leadership in groups, there is a possibility that we may also be observing distributed leadership in action.

Occurrences and Benefits of Distributed Leadership

The literature informs that when leadership is collective and there is ambiguity in the distribution of authority amongst members in the group (Denis, Langley, & Cazale, 1996), distributed leadership is the preferred form of task organisation and labour division at the workplace. According to Elmore (2000), in a knowledge intensive enterprise, where knowledge and skills are in the hands of those delivering the outcomes and not with those who manage them or when the knowledge and skills possessed by these individuals are not equal to the problem they try to solve, distributed leadership is helpful in these occasions. Weick & Roberts (1993) suggest that when an enterprise needs to response to the complexity of its environment and these responses have to result in fewer errors, distributed leadership gives the enterprise its access to its smart systems to manage these challenges.

The literature also informs that while distributed leadership does not safe time since it is needed for discussions and co-ordinating collaborative responses from the conjoint leaders, the introduction of this form of leadership has it benefits. It improves decision making, provides models for co-operative endeavours for the staff, allows for sharing of responsibilities, and enables stand-ins of one during the absence of the other (Doyle & Myers, 1999).

Characteristics of Distributed Leadership

Distributed leadership is not collaborative leadership where leaders share responsibilities with a single leader holding ultimate power. The acts of leadership is shared and is more like what Doyle & Myers (1999) describe as co-principalship, where two leaders are in some kind of structural arrangement that is supported and legitimised by values, beliefs and ideas (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996). This allows for a degree of temporal stability (Brown & Hosking, 1986) for the emergence and evolvement of a constellation of leadership roles (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996) in the team of leaders.

This constellation involves the ‘division of emotional labour’ (Stuart, 1991) through a process of specialisation, differentiation and complementarity (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996). In specialisation, group members adopt roles that require relatively narrow areas of expertise and could be easily mastered by these individuals. To avoid overlaps in the activities members have to carry out, these roles are differentiated across all activity domains but they stay interlocked and well complemented so that the group behaves in an integrated and concerted way (Hodgson, 1965).

To appreciate the workings of the 'team' phenomenon of distributed leadership (Denis, Langley, & Cazale, 1996), we have to understand the actual mechanics of work practices in organisations. Division of labour describes a form of organisation where the total tasks of a job and technological capacity for completing them are divided among workers in the organisation (Gronn, 2002). The leader and his followers could be seen as a manifestation of a form of division of labour but its actual work practices are far from this clear cut and are much more dynamic and complex.

There are two dimensions in the division of labour. Changes in the division begin when additional new tasks and new task requirements are introduced into the organisation. These technical side activities kick-start a wave of change at the social side of the labour division as well. Based on their values and interests, individuals and their groups will negotiate (Brown & Hosking, 1986) and decide on their preferred task arrangements and configurations. With time, tasks get proliferated, get quantitatively changed, and some will become redundant, and the technical side starts the process of task specialisation to differentiate itself. The pace and form of these technical changes will be influenced by the psychologically and sociologically based decisions (Brown & Hosking, 1986) made by members in the group about the appropriate and desired ways of reorganising and reconfiguring the tasks that are found in the job, and a new social order comes into being in the organisation.

Besides additional new tasks and new task requirements, the adoption of new technology also causes change to both dimensions of the labour division (Hutchins, 1990). Technology has always been seen as an intelligent device that is involved in the performance of the task and as a capability and capacity multiplier for processing information. Rarely has it been seen as an enabler for co-operative work. When new technology is adopted, the group's ability to transform what is normally a difficult cognitive task is extended. What is used to be difficult has become easier (Hutchins, 1990). With this extension, the current organisation and configuration of work in the group become less efficient and reliable (Weick & Roberts, 1993) in delivering performance and outcomes. The social arrangements in the group will be forced to change to enable it to tap into the advantages offered in using the existing tools in a new way or new tools that provide better techniques to co-ordinate work activities and to process and distribute information gathered by the system for enhancing the collective mind of the group and in keeping the system robust enough to avoid individual component failures. Therefore, technology should not be noticed for its inner workings but as a device capable of rendering an important problem easy to solve (Hutchins, 1990). This need for task reorganisation and then reintegration of labour is the source for an emerging form of interdependency and co-ordination, which leads to the distributed patterns of leadership (Gronn, 2002).

This need for interdependency and co-ordination calls for the practice of collective actions amongst members in the group. In distributed leadership, there are three such forms of actions. These are the collaborative modes of engagement, intuitive understanding arising from close working relationships, and variety of structural relations and institutionalised arrangements which constitute attempts to regularise distributed action (Gronn, 2002).

These actions create conjoint agency relationships that are sustained by the understanding that one has to co-operate when he cannot do the task himself or one needs someone else to help him become more effective at work. In other words, the exercise of authority needs the reciprocity of accountability and availability of resource capacity to delivery the outcomes (Gronn 2002). The co-operation and learning will arise not from authority but from the differences in expertise (Elmore 2000). This notion runs dead against the conventional wisdom of what we typically think of as the labour division of leaders and followers since conjoint agents synchronise their actions with each other by having regard to their own plans, those of their peers, and their sense of their unit membership. This is similar to the proposition make by Weick & Roberts, (1993), who state that when each group member's conduct and behaviour is produced with the mindfulness of interpreting the feelings of others and predisposed for heedful actions, which are characterised by attentiveness, alertness and care, the group is said to be operating an aggregate mental process and the group has a collective mind. These are the signs of a smart system (Weick & Roberts, 1993).

This makes the conception of the leader as an individualistic person operating from the highest echelons of the organisation doubtful as an actual work practice. It also suggests that the dualistic view of leadership and followership, whose roles and functions are mutually exclusive though they are related by power, maybe an inaccurate depiction of leadership. Leadership should not be role based but recognised as distributed (Elmore, 2000).

In such a distribution, different individuals contribute on the bases of their diverse functions, roles, and duties (Elmore 2000) to manage relationships and mobilise support at the workplace (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001). Their experience and learning grew not from differences in formal authority but out from differences in expertise (Elmore, 2000). Therefore, they focus their efforts on tactics and organisational actions instead of being fixated on those powers arising out of special personality, cognitive and demographics.

Comparing Distributed Leadership with Traditional Notion of Leadership

Unlike the traditional stand-alone leaders, distributed leaders work in collective teams and they are regularly challenged by a collection of elements that works in tandem to destroy their constellations and their effectiveness as leaders to create and sustain change in their organisations. The very ingredients that make distributed leadership possible in organisations are the same stuffs that cause its demise. According to Denis, Langley & Lemothe (2001), there are three instances where the distributed leadership team can fragment. There are occasions where competing 'internal organisational aspirations' can present unresolved disagreements and conflicts between members in the team and these challenges can upset the team's internal harmony. In other situations, a member performing key roles in the constellation is involved in a political turnover and the team becomes detached from its power bases and loses the support of its key organisational members for the change. Also, the team can face difficulties in obtaining consensus and agreement from its external stakeholders, who may hold views that are diverse from those held by leadership team. This forces the team to detach itself from its environment, and the resultant poor performance provides these external stakeholders their opportunities to impose political turnovers in the leadership team to dispose the leader and constraint the constellation.

When the leadership constellation is persistently endangered by differing organisational aspirations, competing preferences of the incumbent leaders, and politically driven environmental pressures, the nature of change in the organisation of collective leadership is more likely to be cyclical than constant. These opposing forces can become intensive enough to dismantle the constellation and change will not take place under such circumstances until the same forces reconcile sequentially to unify the collective leadership to provide it the conditions for working harmoniously again. When this happens, the members in the team are able to play out their distinctive roles effectively to afford the pluralistic organisation its major substantive change.

In a separate but earlier study, Denis, Langley & Cazale (1996) found that besides the positive relationship between the fragility of the constellation of leadership roles and the 'See-Saw theory of collective leadership', the lack of a certain structural levers essential only to collective leaders can also reinforce this 'start-stop' nature of change in organisations. Denis, Langley & Lemothe (2001) elaborate these levers as slack resources, internal social embeddings, and the opportunistic nature of the constellation members. When leaders have access to organisational capacity and resources that help them build credibility and respect internally in the organisation, or the leaders acquire tacit knowledge about how things are done through their involvement in the organisation's richly interconnected social networks, or the constellation members are able to identify environmental pressures that can be reframed as opportunities and find a plausible means to connect these opportunities to the variety of organisational aspirations and capability, the leadership team can increase the chance for change to gain sufficient momentum to survive in the organisation even when the constellation collapses and is finding its new equilibrium.

Denis, Langley & Cazale (1996) also inform that the change tactics executed by the collective leadership is the other 'motor that drives' the cyclical nature of change in the organisation. Because these tactics change the perception of the power bases of the leaders' credibility and respect, the 'mood' these power bases can affect the pace of the change in the organisation. There are times where the leaders' tactics endear their organisational bases to the leadership team and widen its scope for action in the organisation. However, there are occasions where the tactics are questionable and unpopular with the organisational masses and they alienate the team from their power bases and threaten the formal position of the members in the collective leadership. Similar to the solo executive and his latitude of managerial action (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987) but different in degree, this process of 'credibility enhancing' and 'credibility draining' effectively causes their 'roles to be constructed and reconstructed over time' which can enhance or undermine the leader's political position, threaten the leadership role constellation, and slow the momentum for change.

Brown & Hosking (1986) suggest that distributed leaders will need several key skills to build the social order described in the earlier part of this essay. Effective leaders are adept at building relationships collusively. They use such social interactions to exchange information to prevent the order from 'been conned' or 'getting into difficulty' or mislead by 'misinterpretation' of information. In doing so, they influence the thoughts and choices of others, and the process shapes the interactions and social structures in the organisation. These assist the leaders in facilitating the integration of capabilities of his dependents with the demands of the task.

Distributed leaders are capable of helping others who they are interdependent to deal with the demands and challenges of mining for and interpreting information. For these leaders, they understand the networks give them an access to the world where they can make sense and identify the opportunities and threats that may exist in the environment and explore them for the good of the organisation.

A further skill of distributed leaders is their abilities in handling dilemmas. They seem to be able to maintain a sufficient degree of stability in the social order to provide it the foundation for action and not letting its values overwhelm itself at the same time. They are aware that when the order operates in a self-serving mode, it is likely that opportunities and threats will be passed unrecognised and new resources are prevented from being created. The leaders fully comprehend that the social order has its own built in mechanisms for self-preservation and are able to protect itself and pursuit values and interests that seems to be at stake. However, they are sensitive to the potential disintegration of the entity when it becomes too ordered, too overly self-consuming and too rigid in its structures, which alienate its members (Brown & Hosking, 1986).

Implications of Distributed Leadership on Traditional Notions of Leadership

To see what could be the implications of distributed leadership on the traditional sense of leadership, we need to recall how the literature defines leaders. The leader is largely described as being a solo, stand alone, individualistic heroic person, who holds positional power at the highest echelon of the organisation, and capable of engaging his subordinates through task or relationship based interactions.

However, this does not seem to be an appropriate conception for leaders and leadership found in the field of distributed leadership. Neither does it describe the way how leadership practices are actually carried out at the workplace (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2000). Here, distributed leaders are seen as builders of social orders in organisations, and the success of the order depends on the 'skilled performance' of not a single leader but a team of leaders which effectively links the demands of the tasks to the capabilities found in the organisation, and understands the opportunities and threats that confront its system of values and relationships. By recognising and acting accurately on key dilemmas associated with the achievement and maintenance of the values and interests of the order (Brown & Hosking, 1986), these leaders are able to protect and avoid the dissolution of the order and the demise of the organisation.

In addition, the idea of a single leader doing incredibly heroic deeds that create far-reaching change in the organisation may seem a bit far-fetched when we factor in the impact the coupling within the leadership team, between the team and its power bases, and the team with its external stakeholders (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001) has on performance and organisational outcomes. These can derail his efforts. Their alignment with each other is equally important, much like planets aligning themselves to produce an astronomical phenomenon. In fact, according to Weick & Roberts (1993), when the system is in motion, it will have a mind of its own and no individual or group can undo it on their own. They will have to work with, for or against each other to change it. This observation introduces the view that no single leader is capable of heroically change the organisation. He has to depend on the constellation of leadership roles and the influences it exerts over its power bases to initiate and lead the change in the social order in order to kick-start and manage the change in the organisation (Hutchins, 1990).

However, this dependence on the members of the constellation for change invites the cyclical nature of change in the organisation. Members must trust each other to cope with the feeling of dependency and this can be the source for 'deep seated anxieties' (Krantz, 1989) amongst members. There are two outcomes in these, one is mutually stimulating, productive, creative, and evolving but the other can be mutually punishing, where members held out in rigid stalemates, manifesting into excessive conflicts, debilitating dependencies and numbing detachments. There are no guarantees that the collective leadership stays intact over a period of time and when it does not, the momentum for change is lost (Denis, Langley & Cazale, 1996) until the next alignment.

Moreover, the leader could not be seen operating alone when we begin examining the kind of expectations his power bases will have of him from the day he arrives at the job. There are two main responses from these bases when they lost a significant object and faced with an incoming replacement figure (Hodgson 1965). One response is the idealisation of the departed leader and focuses an inappropriate amount of hatred and aggression towards his successor while the other is the devaluation of the previous figure and focuses an excessive amount of love for, hope for the future and anticipation of positive change from the new leader. Both of these act as pressure points on the new-comer and drivers on the power bases to wanting to address their cognitive dissonance with their new leader by evaluated his trustworthiness and credibility constantly. This highlights how leaders are unable to unilaterally using task or relationship-based interactions and operate them from the highest level in the organisation.

All these call into question our current understanding of leaders and their roles in organisations, and their styles and skills sets, and leadership practices. There is a need to re-look at leadership selection, development, and succession in an environment where knowledge, skills, authority, power, and accountability are distributed.

A Gleam into the Leadership Theories and Practices of the Future

At this point, researchers are responding to the needs of the knowledge community by looking into several aspects of distributed leadership. These emerging studies may lead the way and provide us a gleam into how leadership theories and practices can evolve with time.

Researchers are starting to take distributed leadership as a unit of analysis (Gronn, 2002) and look directly at how leaders think and act to determine what constitutes leadership practices on a daily basis (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2000). These studies have move away from examining leadership as a function to exploring how leaders interact with others in the process of leading in a collective manner. This is an attempt to peel out and look into the black box of what they do and the moves they make at the micro-level.

Other studies include the understanding the orientation and workings of pluralistic organisations (Denis, Langley & Lemothe, 2001). Researchers are beginning to comprehend the dynamics of dyads (Steward, 1991) and triads (Krantz, 1989), and uncovering how these forms of leadership create change in organisations, further adding to the growing body of knowledge on constellations of leadership roles (Gronn, 2002) and how they function to create and maintain social orders (Brown & Hosking, 1986) in organisations.

I think the study of distributed leadership will continue to yield surprises and new insights as more literature on the fragility of the collective leadership and the types of organisational levers that maybe effective in deferred the demise of the constellation become available. Another area we should keenly look out for is the exploration into the workings of the collective mind and the use of social networks to give organisations their access to their expert systems.

While I should not expect a unified theorem of distributed leadership any time soon, these fragments of knowledge will definitely work towards building a new science of a largely ignored but progressively important field of leadership study.

References

Brown, M.H. and Hosking, D-M. (1986) Distributed leadership and skilled performance as successful organization in social movements, Human Relations, 39(1): 65-79.

Bryman, A. (1996) Leadership in organizations in Handbook of organization studies, London: Sage: 276-292.

Denis, J-L., Langley, A. and Cazale, L. (1996) Leadership and strategic change under ambiguity, Organization Studies, 17(4): 673-699.

Denis, J-L., Lamothe, L. and Langley, A. (2001) The dynamics of collective leadership and strategic change in pluralistic organizations, Academy of Management Journal, 44(4): 809-837.

Doyle, M. and Myers, V. (1999) Co-principalship: a different approach to school leadership, Learning Matters, 4(2): 33-35.

Elmore, R.F. (2000) Building a new structure for school leadership, Washington: The Albert Shanker Institute available from http://www.shankerinstitute.org/Downloads/building.pdf [date accessed 27/9/2007]

Gibb, C.A. (1968) Leadership in The handbook of social psychology, Volume 4, 2nd Edition, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley: 205-240; 241-282.

Gronn, P. (2002a) Distributed leadership in Second international handbook of educational leadership and administration, Dordrecht, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers: 653-696.

Gronn, P. (2002b) Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis, Leadership Quarterly, 13(4): 423-451.

Gronn, P. (1999) Substituting for leadership: the neglected role of the leadership couple, Leadership Quarterly, 10(1): 41-62.

Hambrick, D.C. and Finkelstein, S. (1987) Managerial discretion: a bridge between polar views of organizational outcomes in Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol 9, Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press: 369-406.

Hodgson, R.C., Levinson, D.J. and Zaleznik, A. (1965) Executive succession and the emergence of a role constellation: the coming together of a top management team in The executive role constellation: an analysis of personality and role relations in management, Boston: Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration: 245-286

Hutchins, E. (1990) The technology of team navigation in Intellectual teamwork: social and technical foundations of co-operative work, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum: 191-220.

Krantz, J. (1989) The managerial couple: superior-subordinate relationships as a unit of analysis, Human Resource Management, 28(2): 161-175.

Spillane, J.P., Halverson, R. and Diamond, J.B. (2000) Investigating school leadership practice: a distributed perspective, Educational Researcher, 30(3): 23-8.

Stewart, R. (1991) Chairmen and chief executives: an exploration of their relationship, Journal of Management Studies, 28(5): 511-527.

Weick, K.E. and Roberts, K.H. (1993) Collective mind in organizations: heedful interrelating on flight decks, Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(3): 357-381.

This essay was first written on 2 Mar 2008.

Leadership and Leadership Styles: Taking Which Perspective - Sociological or Psychological?

2007-12-13T23:19:00.000+08:00

Introduction

I believe leaders are important to organisations. They are the people who get new things done, and it is the new things or innovations that help organisations achieve positive financial outcomes and nations obtain good economic performance (Ralston, 1990). However, the study of leadership, particularly, leadership styles, is highly complex. The notions of leadership styles will evolve and the debate over styles and organisational performance will continue as new perspectives become available. This essay attempts to address some of these arguments and I will offer some insights arising from the literature review I had conducted as I am preparing to write the article.

What does it mean to talk about leadership styles, or patterns of thought and action?

The meaning of leadership styles is defined by my understanding of leaders and their styles, the reasons for indulging in leadership styles studies and what theorists have to say about them. In this section, I will attempt to address these, and conclude by stating my views on leadership styles and raising several points in support of these views, which are drawn from the leadership styles literature that I have reviewed.

Ralston (1990) reveals that our views about leadership have changed with time. Prior to the 70s, leaders are described by Schumpeter (1951) as individuals who ‘do things not generally done in the ordinary course of business’ while Zaleznik (1977) believes that leaders are capable of ‘shaping ideas, altering mood, and evoking images’. Their enactment is leadership in practice. These leadership qualities are markedly different from those of managers. Schumpeter differentiates these from leaders as individuals who ‘repeat combinations that had been carried out before’ and Zaleznik adds that managers are those who ‘respond to ideas, need to co-ordinate and balance, and act to limit choices’. However, Kets de Vries (1977) redefines leadership by including ‘co-ordinating & management functions’ into the existing definition. This gives rise to a wealth of literature on leadership that regularly interchanges leadership styles with management styles, which has become problematic for me as I am not sure if these are studies of leadership or management since I perceive that the competency set for leaders is different from that of managers. Ralson has challenged the redefinition and talked about its impact on the expectations of leaders, and Walter (1980) cautions that we should not become ‘unrealistically disillusioned, forgetting their real gifts in the disappointment of our hopes’ if leaders fail.

Leadership style is more than just patterns of thought and action. Mazzarella and Smith (1989) refer to leadership style as the manner a leader leads - how he or she communicates leadership, exercises power and authority, and the effects these have on others. Ball (1987) and Evetts (1994) agree that a style is the ‘cognitive, emotional and behavioural elements’ that define a way or method of working, ‘enacting diverse levels of control and authority’, and using leadership power.

There are many frameworks on leadership styles. While they address different perspectives, their underlying principle remains the same. They describe the relationship between leadership styles, culture of the organisation, and the demands of its environment, and how their fit impacts the performance of the organisation (Inglis, Cray and Freeman, 2006). The latter is the main reason why leadership styles study and research is important.

The literature that I have reviewed produces classical theories like Likert’s four systems model that depicts the four basic styles of management that are laid on a continuum (Paisey, 1992), and the Blake and McCanse’s (1991) leadership grid which clarifies the dynamics of leadership along concerns for production or results, concern for people, and the motivation behind the leader’s behaviour.

There are the situational/contingency models, which emphasises the influences of situational factors and characteristics of subordinates on leadership styles. The earlier one includes Fiedler’s (1967) contingency theory of changing the situations to enable the practice of specific leadership styles, Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s (1973) leadership continuum on various approaches of influencing followers, the Hersey-Blanchard’s (1977) situational theory which identifies four leadership styles where there is no one effective style for all situations, the Vroom-Yetton’s (Vroom and Jago, 1998) normative contingency model which posits that a leader should behave in certain contingencies to enhance effectiveness, and the path-goal leadership model (Okumbe, 1999) which proposes the consideration of the followers characteristics and demand of the task when deciding on the choice of leadership styles. The study on styles continues with the transactional leadership style that is based on exchanges between leaders and group members (Bass, 1998), and the transformational leadership influence that encourages followers to emerge as leaders of their own rights (Norris, Barnett, Basom and Yerkes, 2002) in the course of getting things done.

The current leadership literature on styles is massive and complex, and I believe this body of knowledge will continue to enlarge but will remain fragmented and niched. The recent study by Sinclair (2005) on the role of the body and body performance in leadership supports this point. There will be other 'taboo' subjects on leadership and styles that have yet to be explored. It is unlikely to see a unified and holistic representation of leadership styles in the foreseeable future. The list of reading provided on this topic by the faculty reveals that the examination of leadership styles will continue to go beyond the classical models and this is how I arrive at this view and those mentioned in this paragraph:

Many of the empirical evidence on leadership styles are gathered from privately held companies and public listed organisations. Ramamurti’s (1987) article provides a fresh perspective. He has justified the study of styles of leaders in state owned enterprises by comparing the common operating paradigms between these two kinds of entities. By incorporating ‘the bureaucratic and political forces of the institutional environment’ into his research, he hypotheses a new typology of leadership styles that may exist in state owned enterprises. Inglis, Cray and Freeman (2006) have conducted a research on leadership patterns in small, non-profit arts organisations and suggest that leadership styles is as related to the ‘context in which leadership takes place’ as to the functions of individual traits and behaviours. These works seem to indicate that there are niches of leadership styles yet to be explored, which may add to the fragmentation of knowledge of what we already understand of leadership styles.

Gronn (2000) has described leadership studies as currently polarised around two foci: transformational leadership, and managerial leadership. He suggests that the former places undue emphasis on agency and the latter on structure. This suggestion mirrors Schumpeter and Zaleznik’s differentiations of leader and manager. I cannot help but to wonder, when I read articles on leadership styles, whose styles are been articulated - are the theorists and researchers describing the styles of leaders or are these for managers, or are they for the kind of individuals that fits the form mentioned by Kets de Vries. This lack of clarity and preciseness is problematic since I perceive the roles and functions of leaders as been very different from those of managers.

While there are significant differences in styles but ‘clear linkage of style with gender is more problematic’ because ‘quantitative testing procedure ….. have found few significant differences between male and female’s’ perception of their styles even though qualitative studies suggest gender differences (Evetts, 1994). This claim is supported by Oplatka’s (2001) work with 25 Israeli primary school women head teachers and Coleman’s (1996) work on the management styles of female head teachers in the UK. Although their female candidates exhibit masculinity in their leadership styles, the identification and the meanings attached to its characteristics are very different from those held by their male counterparts. These may suggest that the ‘maleness’ in the workplace (Reay & Ball, 2000) and the stereotypes it holds ‘makes it particularly difficult for women to overcome its expectations, stereotypes and preconceptions (Schwartz, 1989), so much so, the woman leaders appear to ‘surpass the standards that might be expected of male candidates’ (Coleman, 1996). This also suggests that we may not have uncovered the true nature of feminine leadership styles since the styles used by women are products of what are allowable in the male hegemony. Without power, women have devised survival tactics (Rosener, 1990) to get things done and to get to the top. Thus, we may not have observed the real feminine leadership style in this state of suppression, done in the name of good management practice (Coleman, 1996).

De Roche (1994) caution readers against adopting simplistic analysis of leadership styles and being overconfident about the ability of leaders in manipulating cultures at will. Rather than to generalise the effects of styles on organisations, he calls for micro level analysis that examines the interactions between the leaders and their followers, and to explore the structural and environmental variables that could influence the relationship between these players. Also, Engel (2001) seems to indicate that the link between leadership and organisational performance may not be that direct. While the leadership style many be effective with the staff, they could still have a say over the outcome of the organisation. This view is supported by Berg (1996) when he identifies that the patterns of communication could either enhance or inhibit the followers’ acceptance of the leader’s espoused intent. In addition, Goleman’s (2000) research gives me an inclination that the leader uses his style to influence the drivers of organisational climate than the followers in order to get outcomes in the organisation.

On another front, following the earlier argument about socialisation and stereotyping of women leaders and the effects on their ability to practice their feminine style of leader, this could restrict the diversity of leadership styles in the organisation at the macro level and lower its flexibility as an organisation to call on these styles when the environment changes (Rosener, 1990). This is similar to Goleman’s (2000) suggestion that when leaders have a repertoire of leadership styles at their disposal, they are more capable of switching styles according to the needs of the organisation. This flexibility makes leaders more successful with their followers and effective in achieving positive organisational performance.

How important are these notions to the success or otherwise of so-called ‘leaders’, and the functioning of their organisations?

I have to go back to Schumpeter and Zaleznik’s combined definition of the leader when I consider the importance of styles to the leaders and the organisations they serve. I believe that as long as the leader can ‘get new things done’ (Ralston, 1990), the study and application of leadership styles will continue to be important. To know if new things could be done, leaders need to assess the organisational variables that affect their discretion, flexibility, and choice in using a preferred style in a given environmental setting. The literature review uncovers four broad strokes (Figure 1) of variables that may enhance or impede the leaders’ ability to get news things instituted, and therefore the determination of how important styles are to the leaders and organisation. I will briefly describe them in this section of the essay.

Figure 1: The Broad Strokes to Determine the Importance of Leadership Styles

Stroke 1 – Characteristics of the Organisational Environment

Life cycle of the organisation

Ralston (1990) concludes that entrepreneurship is likely to be undertaken by people who are more suited to leadership role than managerial role. Schumpeter (1951) describes entrepreneur as a special breed of leaders who not only take on leadership roles but also innovation functions as well. Miller (1989) identifies seven life stages in organisation which are strongly correlated with the nature of leadership in the enterprise. At the fourth stage, the dominant leadership style is that of the Synergist, who is capable as a leader in creating new and improve products, services, and methods of production and selling, and in serving the stakeholders with the creation of new wealth. This kind of work is similar to those described by Schumpeter. Ralston (1990) proposes that certain leadership styles maybe ‘relevant to certain stages in the lifecycle of the enterprise’. This suggests that certain types of leaders may not be suitable for this stage in the life cycle of the enterprise. It also suggests that leaders have to adjust their styles as the organisation progressively ages or adopt the right style in order to age the organisation so that new things could be done.

Alexithymic Disposition

Kets de Vries (1989) describes Alexithymic organisations as being defective in their affective and cognitive functions. These organisations are capable of fostering and encouraging alexithymic behaviours in the form of detected executives who either behave as a system person or work as social sensors. They are capable of using policies, structures and systems to reinforce these behaviours throughout the organisation. In such depressive/compulsive organisations, leaders do not have the choice to other forms of leadership styles but to those that support and reinforce the alexithymic norms and behaviours. Styles that do not contribute to these efforts could be seen as foreign and leaders are likely to be ejected from the organisation. Such a strong compliance makes leadership and styles in getting new things done irrelevant.

Shared fantasy

When groups form, some type of collective mental activity will take place to cause common perceptions and desires that are shared and acted out amongst the members in the group. Ket de Vries (1984) calls these shared fantasies. He has identified three kinds of shared fantasies in groups – the flight/fight group, dependency group, and the utopian group. He informs that each type of fantasy can blind the leader to other potential leadership styles, styles that could lead the group towards getting new things done. Similar to the effects of depressive/compulsive organisations, the exercise of an inappropriate style may result to the ejection of the leader from the group. In the post-founder stage of the dependency group, the members in the group can conduct themselves through the visions and values for their founder, and these derive the policies and rules that guide the members forward, in effect doing away the need for leaders entirely. In this situation, leaders and their styles have no value in the group.

Gender

Schwartz (1989), Rosener (1990), Coleman (1996), Reay and Ball (2000), and Oplatka (2001), talk about the need for organisations to explore and exploit the transformational nature of feminine style of leadership to broaden the diversity of styles in the organisation. When leaders continue to keep, reinforce, and enhance the male construct of organisation, there will be few roles for women leaders, and as indicated by Schwartz, they will ‘plateau or to interrupt their careers in ways that limit their growth and development’. Women leaders cannot get new things done when they cannot exercise their true feminine leadership styles freely.

Stroke 2 – Characteristics of the Leaders

Hambrick and Finkestein (1987) have spoken much, in their article, about managerial discretion and its impact on the choice of leadership styles. They posit that ‘people agency’s management style is influence by emergent properties’ and these are anatomic, cultural, and social in nature. These properties influence the task environment, internal organisation and manager’s characteristics, which serve to enlarge or restrict the leader’s latitude for managerial action. They define latitude as ‘multiple courses of action’. The emergent properties will restrict their freedom and they may end up as any one of the six leadership positions described by the authors. This suggests that leaders may not have as much freedom to exercise strategic choice and do new things as one would expect. In some cases, leaders are reduced to nothing more than just managerial leaders (Gronn, 2000) or administrators.

Stroke 3 – Characteristics of the Follower/Leader Relationship

Patterns of communication

Berg (1996) informs that the exercise of style needs not necessarily lead to new things been done or getting positive organisational outcomes. There are contextual issues that need to be considered. Patterns and regularity of communication between the leader and his or her followers, symmetry of the relationship between these two players, belief about power by the followers, followers’ perception of instrumentality by the leader, and grudging acceptance by the followers may distort the followers’ perception of the leader. This observation is parallels Fondas’s (1994) description of how the role set communicates its expectations about its manager’s performance in the job during its interpersonal encounters with the manager. When the manager’s actions and performance comply with the role set’s expectation, the manager is judged to be effective, and his ‘reputational effectiveness’ is translated to better performance appraisals, merit increases, and promotion (Tsui, 1984a, 1984b).

Confidence in the leader

The eventual organisational outcome following a action made by the leader has an impact on the followers’ confidence in that leader, which can predispose the leader towards more or less power in getting other new things done. Adapting the idea of the ‘zone of acceptance’, which was developed by Barnard (1938) and Simon (1945), and by mapping the favourable or unfavourable eventual outcome to the actions taken with or without managerial discretion, Hambrick and Finkestein (1987) are able to articulate four types of CEO actions and the resultant enhancement or reversal of influence the CEO has on his followers. The matrix suggests that the adoption of appropriate leadership styles have bearings to the amount of power the leader will received later on.

Stroke 4 – Characteristics of the Followers

Role enactment

In role enactment, Fondas (1994) indicates that leaders are capable of ‘intentionally initiate opportunities to shape the role expectations’ of the role set so that there is ‘automatic feedback and mutual adjustment’ of expectations and compliance. This means the leader is seen not just responding to the will of his followers but actively and deliberately creating an environment where win-win outcomes are possible for all parties. The characteristics of the followers here matters as they could perceive instrumentation of the leader and this could impede the intention of the leaders, and preventing new things from being completed.

Is there any causal relationship between how leaders think and act, and organisational outcomes; or are organisational results independent of how any individual leader operates?

To respond to this question, I have to bring in the two schools of thoughts on organisation. From the psychological perspective of the strategic choice theorists, they believe that the leader are able to control the destiny of the organisation and because of this, the study of and the application of leadership styles in organisations become important. However, from the sociological perspective of the population ecologists, they think that the environment determines that nature of the organisation and there is no role for leaders or their styles.

These two schools could be seen as mutually exclusive in their thoughts but according to Hambrick and Finkelstein (1987), they believe that managerial discretion is one way to bridge the divide. Even bounded by the internal consistencies of organisations, leaders are still capable of intentional organisational change. This proposal is supported by Gupta (1984) when he ‘asserts that both leaders and situations determine organisational performance’ and he concludes that ‘the greater the available discretion, the greater should be the GM’s expected impact on organisational performance’.

Following this line of thought, Ramamurti (1987) suggests that state owned enterprises are similar to private and public listed companies and have access to managerial discretion as well. While his paper require ‘validity in the real world’, it provides us an awareness that even state own enterprises are capable of controlling their destinies.

There is other evidence in the literature to suggest that there are indeed some causal relationship between styles and organisational outcome. Oplatka (2001) indicates that head teachers do change their perspectives and behaviours during the course of their career and the need to do better and the drive to produce positive outcomes are drivers of this change, Coleman (1996) reveals that transformational leadership style of women head teachers has engendered warmer climate in their schools, Rosener (1990) speaks about interactive leadership style of women leaders and that this style has been observed to create a positive environment in the organisation, Engel’s (2001) study of patrol sergeants and lieutenants shows that supervisors with supportive styles are more likely to be relationship oriented than the other three supervisory styles, Hambrick and Finkelstein (1987) mention that the unconstrained manager has the most latitude for action and propensity for positive organisational performance than the titular figurehead, Ralston (1990) tells of an academic entrepreneur who inspires but was bog down with managerial functions that undo what he could have achieved, and Ramamurti (1987) suggests that social welfare maximisers are capable of enhancing organisational performance because they are sensitive to the needs of the market and their political masters.

However, the strongest proponent of leadership styles having impacts on organisational performance comes from Goleman (2000). He informs though his research that he has found direct casual relationship between styles and organisational performance. He says that ‘leaders with strengths in critical mass of six or more emotional intelligence competencies were far more effective than peers who lacked such strength’. He went on to describe the six leadership styles and how these styles impact the drivers of organisational climate, which in turn affects the overall performance of the organisation.

Thus, there is both empirical and anecdotal evidence to suggest that there are some casual relationship between styles, organisational climate, and organisational performance.

Conclusion

Nevertheless, this does not mean that the casual relationship is tight. There are several things in the reading that interest me. In Oplatka’s (2001) research, she claims that changes in gender roles do not necessarily lead to changes in management styles. This could mean that women leaders may not switch to their feminine styles even when their workplace allows them to switch their gender roles. In the same vein, Goleman’s (2000) suggestion of the ease of switching between styles may need some examination. Shouldn’t we contemplate the switching of styles in his model may have to call forth changes in the configuration the leader’s emotional intelligence competencies? According to Inglis, Cray and Freeman (2006), ‘there is considerable debate on the extent to which individuals can change their own styles’ and Oplatka’s (2001) study indicates that women head teachers change their leadership styles 8 to 14 years into their career, and the change are not caused by their sensitively to their followers or the environment in the schools.

Nonetheless, putting these questions aside, leadership and leadership styles will continue to intrigue and interest researchers even though the results from their studies may continue to be problematic for the readers. By expanding this knowledge, we continue to access the window into how leaders works and how they use their styles in getting new things done in organisations, and in doing so, improve the performance of entities they lead.

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This essay was first written on 13 Dec 2007.
Copyright 2007. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Sustainable Futures: Predisposition of Innovative Enterprises to Engage in Practices of Sustainable Development - Firm-Level Evidence

2007-11-05T15:34:00.000+08:00

Research Proposal

Sustainable Futures: Predisposition of Innovative Enterprises to Engage in Practices of Sustainable Development - Firm-Level Evidence

Research Interest

In September 2002, I led a small team on an overseas tour to study and understand the mechanisms that made an individual creative, and a group and an organisation innovative. We were looking for methods that could help public entities in Singapore, which were steeped in the culture of continuous improvement, to innovate.

The trip took us from the east to the west coast of the United States of America. We visited government agencies, like the Pentagon and the US Navy Strategic Studies Organisation; Universities and research centres like the Harvard University, MIT's Sloane Business School, George Washington University, Berkeley University, and Cap Gemini Ernest and Young's Centre for Business Innovation; and global companies, like Solectron, General Motors, General Electric, and 3M.

Although a large number of entities we visited were practicing innovation, had innovative cultures, or were creating innovative products and services, these entities were at lost in describing and explaining how they reached this state of development. They were unable to advise aspiring organisations on how they too could be innovative.

At about the same time I was overseas, the body of work on innovation that I had studied were found to be fragmented and overly specialised. They covered the peripheral elements of innovation but none was able to provide a complete articulation of what made entities innovative and how this effort could be sustained.

Five years have since past. My interest has not changed. However, as I gained a deeper understanding of the concepts sustainable futures, sustainability, and sustainable development, my interest in innovation now includes the capability and capacity of innovative enterprises in supporting sustainable development and growth.

Research Purpose

The objective of this research is to find out if enterprises that are innovative are also more predisposed to engage in practices of sustainable development.

If there is evidence pointing to this, it may confirm that enterprises that are innovative do develop along some pre-determined lifecycles, and it also suggests that after becoming innovative enterprises, in their next stage of growth, they are more likely to adopt sustainable development strategies to achieve favourable but balanced financial, social, and environmental bottom-lines.

This knowledge may encourage practitioners of organisational development and transformation to focus their efforts in making enterprises innovative than sustainable, and let the natural lifecycles of enterprises push these entities toward sustainability.

More importantly, I hope my efforts could help me uncover, describe and explain the relationships between innovation and sustainability. If the hypothesis of innovative entities having higher tendency to engage in sustainable activities could be established, it may provide the motivation to invest efforts into studying how these entities made the switch. Methodologies could be developed to replicate these switching actions in the innovative entities currently looking for new avenues of growth.

Researchable Questions

To do this research, I need to look for answers for the following related questions. I hope that by answering these, I am able to explore the inner workings of innovative enterprises, describe the organisational dynamics at work, and explain why these make them more likely to engage in practices of sustainable development. These questions are:

Is there such a thing as an innovative enterprise?
What are the unique attributes that make these enterprises innovative?
What does the literature inform on the lifecycles of enterprises?
Are innovative enterprises more predisposed to engage in practices of sustainable development?
Why are innovative enterprises more inclined to do so?

Literature Review

Several researchers, following the likes of their peers in biological sciences, have proposed that the development and growth of enterprises follows a generic life cycle, which starts with birth and ends with death (Chandler, 1962; Greiner, 1972; Miller & Friesen, 1984; Smith, Mitchell & Summer, 1985; Hanks, Watson, Jansen & Chandler, 1993).

A stage in the life cycle, as defined by Hanks, Watson, Jansen, and Chandler (1993), is a 'unique configuration of variables related to the organisation’s context and structure'. The context includes the enterprise’s age, size, growth rate, focal tasks, or challenges, while the structure relates to its operational levels, horizontal integration, and vertical differentiations. One of the earliest researches in this field is conducted by Chandler (1962), who identifies four stages of ‘development’, ‘growth’, ‘maturity’ and ‘decline’. Others, like Smith, Mitchell, and Summer (1985) have revealed three stages while Adizes (1989) reports ten. Although there is no agreement on the number of stages in a life cycle, a study by Miller & Friesen (1984) establishes the prevalence of complementarities and differences among variables between stages.

However, all the literature agrees that the enterprise adopts different strategies and structures as it moves from one life stage to another. Miller (1989) identified seven life stages, which are strongly correlated with the nature of leadership in the enterprise. In the fourth stage, the dominant management style is that of the Synergist, who is capable of escaping his own conditioned tendencies towards one style, and unifying all the styles of leadership in the life cycle into a single leadership framework. The two principles followed by the Synergist are creativity – the creation of new and improve products, services, and methods of production and selling; and purpose – the creation of real wealth by serving its stakeholders, which is a function of leadership in instilling and reinforcing social purpose in the enterprise.

Enterprises Are Compelled To Move Along Their Life Cycles

It is interesting to know that Miller & Friesen (1984)’s study does not show that enterprises went through the life stages in the same sequence. One could conclude that the life cycles of enterprises are unique and they seem to be influenced by some common denominators, which compel the enterprise to innovate its strategies and structures to move from one life stage to another. These influences include:

The life cycle of an idea and the life cycle of technology. Davenport & Prusak (2003) describe the P-cycle of a idea within an enterprise to begin with ‘progenitor’ through, ‘pilot’, ‘project’, ‘program’, ‘perspective’, and conclude with ‘pervasiveness’, while the life cycle of the idea after market introduction is ‘discovery’, ‘wild acceptance’, ‘digestion’, ‘decline’ and ends with ‘hard-core’. They suggest that the external cycle drives the internal cycle, and sometimes to the detriment of the internal one. UNIDO, in their manual on Technology Transfer Negotiation (1996), presents the technology life cycle, which consists of life stages of ‘research and development’, ‘ascent’, ‘maturity’, and ‘decline’. The document indicates that enterprises respond differently to the management of their technologies, patents and trademarks, which create and protect their products and services, through time. The life cycle of the enterprise is seen entrenched in the P-Cycle and technology life cycle, and they influence the lifespan of the enterprise.

The S-curve. Through the use of sustaining and disruptive innovations (Christensen, 1997), enterprises have been found able to side step the bell curve cycle of ‘growth’, ‘maturity’ and ‘decline’ to develop and expand beyond their natural life expectancy into new growth (Keyes, 2006). These enterprises found a way to stay pristine.
The parameters that are already tightly pre-defined. An enterprise is made up of a configuration ‘words already spoken, routines and procedures already formulated’ (Fonseca, 2002). They work together to cause the enterprise to function and fulfil its purpose. However, this ‘whole’ is not complete or finished because an enterprise is required to respond to gestures made by other enterprises. The ‘whole’ is also not complete because of the ethical dimension of human action requiring them to constantly negotiate and justify their action to each other. Furthermore, any stability in those patterns will be temporary because this ‘whole’ is both formed by and forms the individuals participating in it at the same time. The ‘whole’ is both stable and unstable, and constraining and liberating at the same time. This indicates that enterprises may have a choice in how they operate, developed and grow, their linear innovation models, and the path-dependencies and trajectories in the prevailing techno-economic paradigms of the industry will distinct the life cycle of one enterprise from another (McLoughlin, 1999).
The number of enterprises in the market. Organisational ecology looks at the founding of a new enterprise and its death as organisational growth. It predicts that the rates of founding and rates of mortality are dependent on the number of enterprises in the market (Barnett and Hensen, 1996, Barnett, Carroll, Hannan, 2002). Here, the central mechanisms are legitimisation - the recognition on that group of enterprises, and competition. Legitimisation generally increases (at a decreasing rate) with the increase in the number of enterprises but so does competition (at an increasing rate). The result is that the competitive process will prevail (Carroll & Hannan, 2000) and the founding rate will first increase with the number of enterprises, due to an increase in legitimisation but will decrease at high numbers due to competition.
The evolution of innovation in the industry. Rothwell (1994) describes five known generations of innovation in any given industry. The life cycle of the industry seems to have an impact on the nature of the life cycles of those enterprises in it. These generations are:

· In the first generation, the focus is on pushing innovation into the market.

· The second generation looks at the needs of the customers or the market to pull innovation from the enterprise.

· At the third generation, the need to push technologies into the market and the need to pull them from the enterprise according to customers expectations are considered

· During the fourth generation, there is tight coupling of research and development, and marketing activities, together with strong supplier linkages, the industry makes efforts to establish close coupling with leading customers.

· Finally, in the fifth generation, the enterprises in the industry are built for system integration and modelled for networking. Here innovation is a product of strategic partnerships with suppliers and customers, the use of expert systems, collaborative research and marketing arrangements, with an emphasis on flexibility and speed in development, and a focus on quality and other non-price factors.

These indicate that it is unlikely to observe two enterprises share similar strategies and structures while they share the same life stage. It also confirms earlier observations that the enterprise need not have to go through the same life stages as other enterprise. There driving factors are outside the control of the enterprise. They regulate how they move about in their life cycles. These studies seem to say that enterprises are compelled to move along their life cycles in order to stay competitive and survive.

Enterprises Need to Age Innovatively to Do Sustainable Development

Traditionally, economic growth and environmental activities have been seen as 'contradicting and incompatible' (Johnson & Turner, 2003). The key driver for the divide is the lack of a 'commercial edge' (Charter & Clark, 2007) that motivates enterprises to engage in efforts of sustainable development.

Towards the 1990s, the birth of ecological modernisation (Johnson & Turner, 2003) saw enterprises adapting capitalism to environmental challenges. Enterprises have learnt that by balancing their economic continuity with social welfare and natural capital protection, they are creating conditions to operate and grow (Keijzer, 2005). This has taken the views on environment from the margins of politics and society in the 60s through the think-tanks and conferences of the 70s into mainstream discourses on how enterprises should acquire and secure their rights to exist in their markets.

The change sees the rise of Technocentricism (Johnson and Turner, 2003), where emphasis is placed on innovation and technology to deliver both growth and environmental benefits. Sustainability driven innovation is defined as the ‘creation of new market space, products and services or processes driven by social, environmental or sustainability issues’ (Arthur D. Little ,2004).

Many scientists regard innovation as a complex process of components interacting with each other, constantly adjusting with each other (Turina, 2004). Nevertheless, Charter & Clark (2007) have prescribed four straightforward levels of sustainable innovation that can be defined in the context of environmental improvement. These are:

Level 1. Consist of small but progressive incremental improvements to existing products and services.
Level 2. Involved major re-design of existing products and services but limited to those
levels of improvement that are technically feasible.
Level 3. Alternatives, in terms of products or functions, are introduced as substitutes.
Level 4: The enterprise is designing products and services for an sustainable society.

They have found that few enterprises have reached level 4 although there is pressure from the government and society for them to reach this level of sophistication. This pressure for change could be traced to the ascendancy of long term stakeholders (Keijzer, 2005). Unlike the short term ones, who are concerned about the immediate goals of protecting the reputation of the business and keeping the status of 'business as usual', long term stakeholders look at sustainable development of the society and continuation of the business over time.

They are aware of the need for enterprises to move beyond co-efficiency and into resource productivity. They understand that the dynamics in the eco-system have to be protected to enable the reuse of its stocks of natural capital. While recycling and reusing of exhaustible resources could be brought back into the production cycle, this is not the case with fossil energy, biodiversity and land, which are non-renewable. As these are also auxiliary resources in the recycling of exhaustible and renewable resources, and for the cleaning of polluted environments, the preservation of these key stocks, which is a limiter of growth, needs political attention.

In order to survive, enterprises must adapt to radically new and emergent technological and market conditions (McLoughlin, 1999). Enterprises have to adjust their production-consumption system to meet these expectations. Any change to the systems will require technological ‘know how’. Enterprises have to innovate in the ways they are managed (Braungart & McDonough 2000) to absorb these ‘know-how’ in order to keep their rights to exist in their markets. This means they need to go beyond the traditional networks of organisation and supersede traditional competitive relations. The resource based theory stresses the need for enterprises to maintain a flexible internal organisational architecture capable to adapt to these changing needs so that there is an innovative capacity to sustain the new production-consumption system. In other words, the enterprise has to age innovatively in its life cycle to accomplish this.

Damper On Ecological Modernisation

Successful innovative enterprises use innovation management as the core of the competitive strategy. Zirger and Maidique (1990) researched 330 cases and identified major themes characterising successful innovative enterprises. These include excellence of management – careful planning of all phases and the coordination and integration of departments, value for customers, strategic focus, management commitment and market pioneering. Similar conclusions are drawn from studies by Johne and Snelson (1990), Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1988), Gupta and Wilemon (1990), and Crawford (1991).

The Economist and Nikkie Research (Riederer, Baier and Graefe, 2005) found that 80% of the 456 CEOs interviewed said that their primary goal has shifted from cost-cutting to revenue growth. Two third expect growth to come from new products and services that have to be developed within 5 years. To achieve the new growth objectives, 90% of the CEOs would expect to transform their enterprises within 5 years, to become more responsive, particularly to customer demands. Over half expected the transformation to happen within 2 years. This shows the special role innovation plays in these enterprises.

However, from a historical perspective, established innovative enterprises have been found to be not successful in making radical shifts into new technologies and production systems (Keijzer, 2005). There are numerous obstacles preventing enterprises from undergoing the change and exploiting the new environment. Their inablility to appreciate and understand conceptual arguments for sustainability, physical and situational factors, matters surrounding markets and concerning organisation and financial arrangements, policy and regulatory constraints, and decision making systems, and the lack of practical experiences and information (Charter & Clark, 2007) have conspired to prevent enterprises from moving into the next phase of growth.

These show that enterprises encounter inertia to change easily and often (Barnet, Carroll & Hannan, 2002; Carroll & Hannan, 2000; Hannan & Freeman, 1977). Companies with enduring competition are better at surviving (Barnet & Hensen, 1996) but their need to be reliable and accountable creates a high degree of inertia and a resistance to change. This makes changes to the 'company blueprint' (Barnett & Hensen, 1996) more disruptive than changing their executives. It is doubtful if the resistance would fall when the risk is shared and reduced when environmental improvement becomes a centrepiece for industry as a whole (Ashford, 1994).

Moreover, globalisation raised two potential dampers on ecological modernisation. These are:

The use of pollution haven and the race to the bottom. Instead of moving to the next stage of their life cycle, enterprises avoid the change by shifting their operations to countries with less stringent environmental standards thereby forcing countries with higher standards to lowers theirs to retain the jobs that may have been lost with the shift. Medalla & Lazaro (2005), among many others, have indicated that this hypothesises do not exist for most industries.
The Environmental Kuznet Curve (EKC). The hypothesis says that at low incomes, environmental impact per dollar DGP increases with increasing GDP per capital, while at high incomes it declines (Benedict, 2003). In the beginning of economic development, little weight is given to environmental concerns, raising pollution along with industrialisation. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, which reverses the trend. Now, the society has the funds, as well as the willingness to spend on innovations that reduce pollution. This relation holds true for a few pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide (Deacon & Norman, 2006), but there is little evidence that the relationship holds true for non-local effects, like greenhouse gasses. Some evidence shows that a particular innovation is likely to be adopted preferentially in high income countries 1st with a short lag before it is adopted in the majority of the poorer countries. However, emissions maybe declining simultaneously in low and high-income countries over time, though the particular innovations typically adopted at any one time could be different in different countries (Stern, 2003). Energy, land and resource use, or ecological footprint, do not fall with rising income. While the ratio of energy per real GDP has fallen, the total energy use is rising in most developed countries. The status of many key services provided by ecosystems, like freshwater provision and regulation, soil fertility, and fisheries, have continued to decline in developed countries (Harbaugh, Levinson and Wilson, 2002). Levinson (2000) even point out that there is no evidence to suggest that environmental quality deteriorates steadily with economic growth.

In this confused state, it seems that income growth is not enough to make enterprises innovate to practice sustainable development in their operation. Improvement of the environment with income growth is not automatic but has to depend on policies and institutions (Yandle, Vijayaraghavan and Bhattarai, 2002).

According to Sigurdson and Cheng (2001), the innovative capability of institutions and companies can be supported by national and corporate innovation policies. They also concluded that a national innovation system should have elements that stimulate the innovativeness of its organisations, stimulate the innovative competence of a nation’s commercial firms, and link institutions and firms into a coherent national innovation system.

In a study that covers a 16-year period (Bossink), also found that sustainability can be developed within the framework of a national innovation system, as long as industry and research institutions are in the centre with the government in the peripheral of this system, and the firms that are not cooperative are be forced by law to adopt a set of sustainable standards.

25 Most Innovative Enterprises Also the Most Sustainable Organisations

In 2006, the Business Week and Boston Consulting Group unveiled a list of 25 most innovative organisations in the world (McGregor, 2007). They were recognised for being able to develop breakthrough products, rewiring their operational processes and coming up with new business models, and capable of sustaining innovation.

Cross referring these 25 enterprises with the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (http://www.sustainability-indexes.com/) reveals a surprise. They are also equally successful in conducting sustainable development activities and have been recognised for their effort. Here are some additional examples:

Starbucks Coffee Company received the 2005’s World Environment Center Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development. Starbucks innovative Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices Program – an initiative that provides incentives worldwide for suppliers who meet high quality, transparency, environmental, and labour standards was singled out as the reason of this award (The World Environment Centre, 2005).
In the ninth annual survey of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, BMW topped the automotive index for the third year running as the World's Most Sustainable Companies (GreenBiz.Com., 2007).
Business Ethics magazine recently ranked the Intel third among the 100 most ethical companies and for the fourth year in a row, the chip-maker was named the technology sector leader in the 2004’s edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (Klimley, 2005).
American Honda Motor Co. has opened its 211,000-square-foot prototype "green" facility in Gresham. The parts distribution and mechanic training centre is American Honda's first step into the realm of energy-efficient, low environmental impact, occupant-health-conscious construction – a host of building design considerations typically lumped together as ‘green design’ (Vesbach, 2001).

Why Are these 25 Enterprises Special?

At this juncture, three recurring themes are observed from the literature under review:

After becoming innovative, enterprises may not necessarily embark on sustainable development as their next development. However, the 25 most innovative enterprises have done so. Does this mean that there is indeed a natural transition for innovative enterprises to become sustainable organisations or is this a result of national policies and institutions?
The 25 most innovative enterprises are first and foremost innovative before been recognised as sustainable organisations. Does this mean that innovative enterprises are more pre-disposed to activities of sustainable development because of their innate capability and capacity to innovate?
Many researchers concluded that enterprises are unlikely to make radical changes that would rewire their ‘company blueprint’, yet these 25 enterprises are able to do it and make substantial contribution to the society and environment. Is there something special about these enterprises or are the researchers incorrect in their conclusions?

Research’s Conceptual Framework

I am thinking about using the triple bottom-line framework to resource management (Figure 1) as the conceptual framework for the study.

Figure 1: Triple Bottom-line Framework to Resource Management

In this viewpoint, sustainability is examined from an integrated manner (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):51). It takes on a more inclusive approach of using creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship as a means to address all the concerns relating to organisational, human/societal and ecological sustainability. The start point is not exploitation or trade offs, but a genuine attempt to develop a sustainability framework where all interest groups co-exist. Organisations have the personal, collective and corporate capabilities to achieve this. The strategies and plans for resource management are developed together with the formulation of the business model to avoid development as an afterthought or ‘at the end of the pipeline’.

In this study, I like to use this framework to guide me:

In finding out the human and ecological challenges championed by the long term stakeholders in these 25 innovative enterprises. The origins of the stakeholder concept can be found in management theory. It analyses the behaviour of the enterprise in terms of the interests it affects, or that are affected by the activities of the enterprise. I like to identify the identities of these stakeholders and the pressure they assert to compel these 25 enterprises to transit from being innovative enterprises into sustainable organisations (Achterkamp & Vos, 2002).
Into uncovering the unique attributes that cause these enterprises to stay in the ranking table of the world’s 25 most innovative enterprises and later becoming sustainable organisations. To sustain organisationally, the enterprise has to ‘keep up with technological change, cherish the people who makes up a company, and be flexible enough to change markets and change products as and when necessary’ (Doig, 1999). I am keen to find out where these innovative enterprises excel in organisational sustainability, how these are leveraged to propel these innovative enterprises to become sustainable organisations and are leverage in practices of sustainable development.

Research Methodology

I think this study should use a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional survey design to determine if innovative enterprises are more pre-disposed to practices of sustainable development.

A questionnaire, containing no more than 50 questions, should be distributed to all the 25 most innovative enterprises, which are also listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes. The number of questions is restricted to 50 to prevent survey fatigue. A return of 80% of these questionnaires from these enterprises is deemed good spread for making the analysis fairly accurate.

As the information collected from the enterprises could be sensitive, I may comply to sign a non disclosure agreement to assure that no specific information that could be trace to the respondent would be released to the public. To avoid thieve, espionage, and lost of questionnaires, all returned questionnaires should be encoded with a reference number and the names referenced to these codes will be securely kept away from the site of analysing the data.

The strength of the proposed methodology come in the fact that it is straightforward but follow up may proof to be difficult when there is a need to uncover more information when the data from the questionnaire reveals interesting trends. Unless, I could identify the respondents, conducting a follow up interview could be difficult.

Conclusion

This proposed research will add on to the existing body of knowledge on sustainability. It will provide some insight into the factors that compel an innovative enterprise to adopt practices of sustainable development and eventually becoming sustainable organisations itself.

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This research proposal (1st Draft) was first written on 1 Nov 2007.

ThinkInnovation - A Business Plan for Sustainable Development in Singapore

2007-09-04T00:04:00.000+08:00

Purpose

1. In the 2006-2007 Global Competitiveness Report[1], Singapore is ranked the 5th most competitive and the 9th most innovative nation in the world. However, Singapore is behind other innovation-driven economies, like Japan (1st), Israel (8th), Taiwan (9th) and Austria (12th) in the quality of innovation factors necessary in sustaining this level of competition in the long run. These factors include company spending on research and development, availability of scientists and engineers, intellectual property protection, and capacity for innovation. At 15th, Singapore is 7 places ahead of Malaysia with just a difference of 0.10 point between them.

2. ThinkInnovationTM likes to see Singapore becoming the most innovative nation in the world and sustains this leadership position over a long period. To obtain this position, we want to make Singapore the showcase of sustainable development in ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific. This is our purpose.

Vision

3. To fulfil this single purpose, we have to bring to life the following three interrelated visions:

Small and medium-size enterprises (SME) in Singapore attain sustainable performance through innovative management practices,
Singaporeans have the capability and capacity to sustain high level of personal productivity and well-being in the workforce, society, and community, and
Singapore continues to harbour a rich biosphere that adds to and renews the biological integrity of the planet.

Mission

4. We want to pride ourselves as the leading learning and research centre for sustainable development in the region. We are in the business of Training and Education, Advisory, Facilitation and Coaching, and Consulting (TAFCTM). Our learning specialists and intervention experts will provide these engagements to enterprises, groups, and individuals who want to work towards realising their sustainable futures.

5. ThinkInnovationTM assists these stakeholders by:

Influencing their mindsets and attitudes for a more sustainable economy, society and ecology through the adoption and diffusion of innovations that sustain development,

Shaping the behaviours of organisations, groups, and individuals by publicly acknowledging and recognising their work and contribution in creating sustainable futures,

Building creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial capability and capacity in sustainability oriented organisations, groups, and individuals,

Providing pathways for ideas of sustainability to mature into innovations for commercial adoption and diffusion,

Bringing commercially viable innovations to the market in a effective and efficient manner, and

Developing an innovation process, which organisations, groups, and individuals could adopt and benchmark for driving sustainable development and growth.

Values

6. We recognise the need for cooperation and collaboration by many different entities and stakeholders bring these three visions into existence, and therefore, we encourage parties undertaking in this venture to ascribe to the following values:

We do not do anything we do not want others to do on us.
When we feel it is not right, it is not necessary the same for the rest.
Openness is in the space of the listener. Feel free to speak your mind.
We help. We do not sell. Not everyone wants us and it is alright. There are always other ethical ways to help.
We do not give up when we did not get it right the first time. We will try again because we are fighting for a future for ourselves and for the children of our children.

Goals

7. Our goals in the next 5 years are to:

Establish Singapore as the centre for learning and research on sustainable development in Asia-Pacific,
Create the Singapore chapter of the Sustainable Development International [2], culminating to the organisation of the 1st Asia Pacific Sustainability Conference in Singapore in 2010, and
Create an on-line community of learning specialists, intervention experts, and practitioners of sustainable development from different parts of Asia-Pacific for the purpose of exchanging knowledge, sharing best practices, and benchmarking performances.

Objectives

8. To start meeting the requirements of the 5-year goals, ThinkInnovationTM has the following objectives for this financial year, starting from September 2007 and ending on 31st August 2008:

Form the Community of Practice (CoP) of learning specialists, intervention experts and practitioners who advocate the use of enterprise, social, and personal innovations for sustainable development,

Introduce the Sustainable Development Framework in Singapore (SDF@SGTM), and through this framework, launch of the first wave of learning and intervention services for individuals, teams and enterprises for business, societal and community, and ecological sustainability. and

Create a platform that generates and showcases innovations in sustainable development in Singapore.

ThinkInnovationTM’s Boarder Environment

9. By analysing the political, economical, social and technological issues surrounding sustainable development and sustainable futures, we are able to unveil several pivotal considerations for ThinkInnovationTM. I will highlight only the key elements in this essay. The header at the beginning of each section in this segment of the essay is the summary of the key elements presented in that section.

Need for Sustainability is Gaining a Political Voice and Will

10. The democratisation of technology, information, and finance [3] has helped raise the concerns of global warming and its impact on societies. Increasingly, these concerns have moved into the public domain and mainstream debates.

11. The sciences surrounding global warning have went past arguments on whether the planet is in a state of entropy struggling for homeostasis or the change is irreversible. Scientists have recognised the debilitating effects of erratic climate on ecology and societies. They are lobbying for businesses to restraint practices that hurt these entities, and calling governments to prepare their populace for the impact of the change.

12. As people are becoming aware of the change and learning there is no escape from its impact. They are making their governments responsible for the past and present policies that caused the mismanagement their natural resources, which brought them calamities. Constituents have moved from rhetoric to voting for management practices and industrial regulations that enable progress and growth in the long run.

13. This voice and will of the people, as shown in the recent massive turn out of supporters at the 24-hour Live Earth, the Concerts for a Climate in Crisis [4], that was televised globally and streamed over MSN, has been acknowledged by the politicians and they are using sustainability and sustainable futures as their political ticket [5] into government.

Evidence of Business Economies in Sustainable Development

14. Increasingly, studies have shown that management practices [6] that are friendly to her workforce, society, community, and ecology help deliver profit performance in businesses. In some industries, like the energy sector, best practices are shared and performances are benchmarked through sustainability dashboards at the industry level.

15. Business leaders in various industries are either making sustainable development their signature management process [7] or deploying technologies that promote sustainability [8]. Their involvement is expected to have multiplier effects within their immediate business community and catalytic influence on adjacent industries as well.

16. Developed countries and their corporations, which had depended on traditional sources of energy, are facing nationalistic third world countries willing and wanting control over the exploration, exploitation, and distribution [9] of their natural resources. Faced with this supply squeeze, developed nations are keen to work with friendly countries to generate alternative energy sources to rebalance their bargaining power with these nationalistic countries. To sustain the new balance, these governments have instituted regulations and incentives to encourage their multinationals to adopt operational models that exploit the use of these new energy resources. Given the cost of maintaining the old practices, it makes business sense to move into production methodologies that are sustainable in nature and come with lower operating costs.

Effects of Global Warming are Felt Everywhere

17. The weather system has changed significantly to affect crop production and yield [10]. This impacted the distribution of wealth in the region. Countries have to face cyclical rounds of early or late seasons, frequent and stronger tropical storms, rising temperature and melting ice caps, and drying rivers caused by the disappearance of glacial. The droughts, floods, hunger and diseases have devastated lives, even by those far removed from these events.

18. There has been a significant change in the way people see corporate performance, social well-being and global warming. Instead of making third world nations culpable for the destruction of their rainforests, people in the developed nations are taking to lobbying their own governments to recognise that capitalism is equally culpable in this vicious cycle of change [11].

Rise of Eco-Innovations for Sustainable Development

19. Many technologies useful for sustainable development have matured. Either their production technology has attained a certain level of economies that drives production costs down, thereby allowing for mass adoption and diffusion of the technology, or the performance of the technology has reached an acceptable level of efficiency to rival the current ones, making the cost of switching to alternatives sensible [12].

20. The early success in the adoption and diffusion of these technologies in the market has attracted many investments [13] into creating alternative ways of organisation and capitalism [14]. These economic benefits motivate corporations to continue the use of these eco-innovations. Government regulations and incentives have made their commercialisation conduced at greater ease.

ThinkInnovationTM‘s Immediate Environment

Industry Analysis

21. According to the general household survey conducted in Singapore in 2005 by the Department of Statistics (Ministry of Trade and Industry), as of June that year, Singapore’s population was 4.35 million. This represents a 1.6% growth per year since 2000. The resident population has grown older and about 1.2 million are between ages of 25 and 44 years (Table 1), which is 33.7% of nation’s total population. This represents an average annual growth of only 0.2% since 2000.

Table 1: Resident Population by Age Group
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

22. The survey also shows that the nation’s total labour force is 2.37 million (Table 2) with more female joining the workforce in the last 5 years (an average annual growth of 2.3%) and more males becoming economically inactive (an average annual growth of 4.4%) in the same period.

Table 2: Persons Aged 15 Years and Over by Sex and Activity Status
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

23. In these numbers, those with secondary and upper secondary qualifications (Table 3) have a higher tendency to continue their education, and males are more likely to do this than females.

Table 3: Proportion Who Acquired Technical, Commercial or Vocational Qualification Among Resident Non-Students Aged 15 Years and Over By Highest Academic Qualification and Sex
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

24. The survey also found that younger adults in their twenties and thirties (Table 4) have a higher propensity to advance their education.

Table 4: Proportion Who Acquired Technical, Commercial or Vocational Qualification Among Resident Non-Students with Upper Secondary or Lower Qualification by Age Group
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

25. The survey reported that the occupational groups with the largest employment gains are from the higher skilled managerial, professional and technical occupational groups (Table 5).

Table 5: Occupations with Largest Increase in Number of Resident Working Persons Between 2000 and 2005
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

26. In these occupational groups, 63% are male while the rest are females (Table 6)

Table 6: Resident Working Persons Aged 15 Years and Over by Occupation and Sex
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

27. In addition, 61% of the workforce between ages of 25 and 34, and 48% of the workforce between ages of 35 and 44 held these managerial, professional and technical positions (Table 7).

Table 7: Resident Working Persons by Age Group and Occupation, 2005
(Source: General Household Survey 2005. Statistical Release 1: Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Release date: 14 Jun 2006. © Department of Statistics, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Republic of Singapore)

28. This data and information leads us to conclude that:

Singaporeans, who are economically active, male, between ages of 20 and 34, and in high growth managerial, professional and technical occupational groups, are suitable target audience for the TAFCTM services. This is because they have the discretionary income to advance their education after joining the workforce.
However, the population growth for this age group has almost stagnated (an average annual growth of only 0.2% since 2000) and coupled with a deficit in growth rates for the under 15’s in the last five years, the market is unlikely to grow in size in the foreseeable future.
While the number of female managers, professionals, and technicians entering the labour market has increased and this growth is 3.4 times more than their male counterparts, they tend not to invest in their own education after joining the job market. Therefore, we have a potential market that is increasing in size which demands less of the TAFCTM services.

Competitor Analysis

29. After analysing the demand side of the industry, we will now look at the supply side and the nature of the competition there. According to the Singapore Yellow Pages [15], there are 81 TAFCTM sole proprietors and companies providing design and development services for training. Unlike the medical and legal services, there are no regulatory bodies administrating and enforcing ethical and service standards on these TAFCTM practitioners. This caused the industry to be highly unstructured and fragmented. Sole proprietors and companies providing these services tends to operate less professionally and eschewed towards servicing the public sector, which is the key spender of TAFCTM services of every nature in Singapore.

30. There are several key operating characteristics that define the competition:

There is a gestation period between the acquisition of an intervention methodology or technology to its local commercialisation. The purpose of this delay is to ascertain their usefulness, and to determine the ability of the learning specialist and intervention expert in delivering the outcomes under local conditions. Since their reputation is largely based on their successful delivery of the promised outcomes, should they fail, the reputation of the TAFCTM companies and future of the product in the market will be affected. Only larger TAFCTM companies which are more professionally run are able to create product and service portfolios to spread their reputation and financial risks.
As most TAFCTM services have to be delivered personally by the learning specialist or intervention expert, there will be limitations as to where the service could be delivered and frequency the same service could be delivered by the same provider in a given period. This is a problem of time, space and location. If they choose not to licence the methodology or technology, the TAFCTM companies will have difficulties using the product to penetrate the market quickly.
TAFCTM companies depends on the learning specialists and intervention experts to provide their time and service. Their earning abilities depend on how efficient this capacity is deployed. This discourages companies’ and subject matter experts from putting aside time to acquire knowledge beyond their current specialisation. This reduces their flexibility to move to other more profitable branches of management science.
With low start-up and maintenance costs, these learning specialists and intervention experts can easily enter the market. However, they do not have access to a variety of pricing schemes, like cross pricing and subsidising, which are available to larger TAFCTM companies. They will have to compete mainly on price. This creates intense rivalry among TAFCTM companies in the market. As the services and quality of the delivery are undifferentiated, buyers face very low switching costs when moving between different TAFCTM companies, and are highly price elastic.
There has been flux of outsourcing since 2000 in both the public and private sector. This has concentrated human resource functions, include training and development, to a few key players in the market, and they are able to negotiate for better prices for the TAFCTM services given the volume of the purchase they now command.

31. There have been some recent developments that begin to cause the development of some structure in the industry. There developments are:

SMEs in Singapore have absorbed many of the unemployed workforce caused by the scale down of operations in multi-nationals in Singapore. However, SMEs contribute only 14% of the nation's GDP. There is a renewed interest in upgrading their productivity, and recently, funds have been set aside by the government for training and development.
As more private sector companies progressively developing temporal and contractual based working arrangement with their workforce, and organisations in the public sector shift from long term employment to employability, we are seeing more people entering the TAFCTM industry to either supplement their income or to stay permanently to continue serving their previous organisations in a different capacity.
With more Free Trade Agreements concluded and favourable immigration policies to reverse the nation's declining and ageing population, we will see an influx of TAFCTM providers from overseas entering the supply chain.
The economies of regional countries are growing phenomenally. China and Vietnam reported double digit performance, and even Cambodia are benefiting from tourism and the rise of the middle class. The demand for TAFCTM services will rise exponentially. This prompted a governmental effort to sell Singapore's brand of effective and efficient resource management philosophies and methodologies in these developing countries. This has led to foreign businesses and foreigners coming to Singapore to provide and receive training and development.
With lower start-up and operating cost, the Internet has been used to overcome the constraints of time, space and location. It has provided wider reach of the TAFCTM products and services beyond the shore of the nation.

32. These have forced the TAFCTM providers in Singapore to organise themselves into loose networks and tight alliance to better position themselves to ride the business opportunities arising from these developments. The market has begun to structure along these lines (Table 8) in the past 12 months - ‘level of specialisation’ and ‘level of generalisation’:

Table 8: Structure of the TAFCTM Market

ThinkInnovationTM‘s Internal Environment

33. While looking at the internal environment of ThinkInnovationTM, the following strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are uncovered. Again, like in the previous segment, the headers describe the conclusions drawn from the sections in this analysis.

An Unlocked Position to Experiment

34. ThinkInnovationTM is not locked in any kind of old management paradigms, legacy practices, or expired operating architectures that restrict her from organising herself in the most effective and efficient way to meet the needs [16] of the industries.

35. The founding members are eclectic but they have the passion, commitment, knowledge, capabilities, and competencies to help individuals, groups and enterprises to adopt sustainable practices to attain their own sustainable futures. Given their diverse background, they are able to bring together a unique blend of organisational and social capital from various sources from which the knowledge could be brought to the industries.

Challenges of a Start-up

36. Being a new start-up enterprise, ThinkInnovationTM does not have the advantage of being a brand known and recognised for educating and intervening for sustainable development.
37. While there are some funds brought together by the founders to begin basic operations like marketing and generating leads, the need to meet regular financial demands like client and product development to day-to-day operations beyond the three months after the start-up continues to be a challenge.

Demand for Business Performance Sustainability

38. The local government will continue to lead, regulate, and mandate [17] businesses to operate in a sustainable way. Already, criteria for sustainability are imbued into the national certification programmes like Singapore Quality Class [18]. Tax breaks have been given to businesses with socially responsible and environmentally sound practices. Companies have been recognised for having human resource practices that are pro-family [19].

39. These government level interventions have resulted in the demand for the know-how in kick starting sustainability in enterprises [20].

Dangers of Subnormal Profits

40. The more established TAFCTM companies in Singapore could leverage on their pool of TAFCTM providers, current level of market penetration, and brand reputation to conduct product and service extensions to enter and skim this niche market. Given the low entry barriers, sole proprietors could enter the market at ease. ThinkInnovationTM has to operate between these two kinds of competitors. There is a possibility that we could earn subnormal profits within 6 months of operation if we do not have any anti-rivalry strategies.

41. As there are not many local consultants capable of delivering in depth solutions for sustainable development, the competition for the supply of these kind of intervention experts will increases the cost of hiring them and this either reduces the profit margin or put the tender price out of reach of many clients..

Key Success Factors

42. To succeed in the TAFCTM market, we must have control of:

Production. We must have the capability and capacity to create, customise, develop, and deliver the methodologies and technologies of intervention in the local market. This mastery helps us to avoid the pitfalls of overly relying on the learning specialists and intervention experts. This reduces their bargaining power.
Source. We have to control the sources from which the unique vehicles of intervention are created. This assures the company an uninterrupted supply of intervention vehicles over the long run. It also restricts the flood of competitive products and services in the market. We seek to collaborate with the source to co-create interventions that are adapted to location conditions, and in the process acquire the rights to exclusively use the. This can be carried out through dealership, establishment of representative offices, acquisition of their intellectual property rights, or licensing agreements.
Reputation. The company has to fulfil all her delivery promises, and value-add her clients. Besides quality of delivery, reputation can be established through serious attempts to associate ThinkInnovationTM with regional and international organisations already known for researching, developing, and creating sustainable futures for organisations, groups, and individuals. The company will establish itself as the leading learning and research centre for sustainable development in ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific in the next 5 years. We should also lobby for the regulation of TAFCTM professionals to increase the barriers into the industry. We should co-opt our competitors into our operations to reduce the rivalry in the industry.
Mindspace. We should create social platforms for the exchange of ideas and knowledge between researchers, policy makers, practitioners and lobbyists of sustainable development and futures so that we can be positioned as the voice in this branch of organisational, social and ecological development.
Blue Ocean. We will make every attempt to adopt blue ocean strategies to create new uncontested markets for the TAFCTM of sustainable development and futures. In doing so, we can enlarge the scope of the market, which will increase our flexibility in repositioning ourselves should the current market becomes heavily competitive.

Market Entry Strategy

43. The market can be segmented by the types of entities (enterprises, groups, or individuals) in sustainable development and the types of sustainable outcome (business productivity and profitability, societal and community well-being, or ecological stability and growth) these entities are striving to achieve.

44. Along these lines, we can divide the market into nine distinct groups and each of these is described in the table (Table 9) below:

Table 9: Nine Distinct Segments of the Sustainability Market

45. In thinking about the ambitious goals and objectives to be achieved in the next five years and within this financial year respectively, ThinkInnovationTM will springboard from the ‘Business-based Groups’ segment of the market. Given the time horizons, this is the best place where our resources could be combined in a way that gives us the best multiplier and catalytic effects in penetrating the segment, gaining a foothold, and building enough of strength to launch effectively and efficiently into adjacent market segments.

The Business Strategies for ThinkInnovationTM is withheld for confidentiality reasons.

This article was first written on 24 Jul 2007.

References

[1] 2006-2007 Global Competitiveness Report, http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Global%20Competitiveness%20Report/index.htm

[2] Sustainable Development International, http://www.sustdev.org/

[3] Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree

[4] Live Earth, the Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, http://www.liveearth.org/event.php

[5] President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/ 20010611-2.html

[6] Hargroves & Smith (2005), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability

[7] BP sustainability assessment could blaze a trail. CIMA-funded research highlights a BP model that could lead the way in calculating sustainability. By Liz Murby, technical issues manager, CIMA. , http://www.cimaglobal.com/cps/rde/xchg/SID-0AAAC564-4401A18/live/root.xsl/Insight051888_2578.htm

[8] Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, http://www7.nationalacademies.org/sustainabilityroundtable/Sustainability_Roundtable_Homepage.html

[9] Energy Dreams and Energy Realities, Stephanie Cohen, The New Atlantis The Journal of Technology and Society NUMBER 5 ~ SPRING 2004, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/5/cohen.htm

[10] Will Global Warming Improve Crop Production? Science Daily, September 19, 2002, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/09/020919065913.htm

[11] Capitalism and Global Warming, Feature Article by Jacob Middleton, November 2005, Socialist Review, http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9583

[12] Hart SL. 2005. Capitalism at the Crossroads: The unlimited business opportunities from solving the world's most difficult problems, Wharton School Publishing, Pennsylvania. Wharton School Publishing, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005.

[13] Government support for sustainable innovation and environmental technologies, http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/advice/business/innovations.htm#innovation

[14] James P. Walsh, Alan D. Meyer, Claudia Bird Schoonhoven, A Future for Organization Theory: Living in and Living with Changing Organizations. Walsh et al. ORGANIZATION SCIENCE.2006; 17: 657-671, ORGANIZATION SCIENCE Vol. 17, No. 5, September-October 2006, pp. 657-671 http://orgsci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/5/657

[15] http://www.yellowpages.com.sg/newiyp/yp/jsp/index.jsp

[16] Keynote address on "Major trends in sustainable energy in Asia" by Guest-of-Honour, Dr Amy Khor, Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, at the Sustainable Energy Asia Congress and Exhibition on 12 June 2007 at 9.25am, MEWR News Release: 28/2007
Date of Release: 12/06/2007, http://app.mewr.gov.sg/view.asp?id=CDS5456

[17] Singapore Retailers Go Green, 11 stores join campaign to use fewer plastic bags, JOINT NEA-SRA-SEC PRESS RELEASE, NEWS RELEASE NO: 42/2002, DATE OF ISSUE: 29 November 2002
http://app.nea.gov.sg/cms/htdocs/article.asp?pid=2068

[18] Singapore Quality Class, http://www.spring.gov.sg/Content/WebPage.aspx?id=891ae682-fca7-4645-b868-3538d0e09902

[19] Singapore Unveils Scheme To Accredit Pro-Family Businesses, EnterpriseOne, Thursday, 26 October 2006 http://www.business.gov.sg/EN/News/Oct2006/20061026Singapor.htm

[20] Singapore to invest in 'clean energy' industry, Sustainable Investment Research Platform, 16 March 2007, http://www.sirp.se/home/news.asp?sid=933&mid=3&NewsId=15379&Page=5

A Folio Presentation - Research Interest & Researchable Questions

2007-09-04T00:02:00.000+08:00

Research Interest

Innovative enterprises are more predisposed to engage in practices of sustainable development.

1. In this research, I am interested in finding out if enterprises that are innovative are more predisposed to engage in practices of sustainable development.

2. If this hypothesis is true, it may confirm that enterprises that are innovative do develop along some pre-determined lifecycles, and it suggests that after becoming innovative enterprises, in their next stage of growth, they are more likely to adopt sustainable development strategies to achieve favourable but balanced financial, social, and environmental bottom-lines.

3. This knowledge may encourage practitioners of organisational development and transformation to focus their efforts in making enterprises innovative than sustainable, and let the natural lifecycles of enterprises push these entities toward sustainability.

Research Purpose

Methodologies could be developed to replicate this switching action in innovative entities currently looking for new avenues of growth.

4. In September 2002, I led a small team on an overseas tour to study and understand the mechanisms that made an individual creative, and a group and an organisation innovative. We were looking for methods that could help public entities in Singapore which were steeped in the culture of continuous improvement to innovate.

5. The trip took us from the east to the west coast of the United States of America. We visited government agencies, like the Pentagon and the US Navy Strategic Studies Organisation; Universities and research centres like Harvard, MIT, George Washington University, Berkeley University, and Cap Gemini Ernest and Young's Centre for Business Innovation; and global companies, like Solectron, General Motors, General Electric, and 3M.

6. Although a large number of entities we had visited were practicing innovation, had innovative cultures, or were creating innovative products and services, these entities were at lost in describing and explaining how they reached this state of development. They were unable to advise aspiring organisations on how they too could be innovative. I believe this research could inform on the changes to this situation six years on and provide the answers to my research questions, which I will present later in the essay.

7. At about the same time I was overseas, the literature on innovation that I studied was found to be fragmented and overly specialised. They covered the peripheral elements of innovation but none was able to provide a complete articulation of what made entities innovative. At the end of the trip, the team was able to postulate that entities that wished to be innovative had to build, manage, and sustain through time at least ten critical cultural factors. I like to find out, through this research, if our findings in 2002 remain valid after six years.

8. More importantly, I hope my efforts could help me uncover newly published research works on innovation that describe and explain the relationships between innovation and sustainability. If the hypothesis of innovative entities having higher tendency to engage in sustainable activities could be established, efforts could be carried out later to study why and how these entities made the switch. Methodologies could be developed to replicate this switching action in innovative entities currently looking for new avenues of growth.

Researchable Questions

Explain why these make them more likely to engage in practices of sustainable development.

9. To do this research, I need to look for answers for the following related questions. I hope that by answering these, I am able to explore the inner workings of innovative enterprises, describe the organisational dynamics at work, and explain why these make them more likely to engage in practices of sustainable development. These questions are:

Is there such a thing as an innovative enterprise?
What are the unique attributes that make these enterprises innovative?

What does the literature inform on the lifecycles of enterprises?
Are innovative enterprises more predisposed to engage in practices of sustainable development?

Why are innovative enterprises more inclined to do so?

Research Information Type

10. The research will engage two main types of information. These are:

Primary Information. I will use the original and first hand presentations of speeches, interviews, surveys, memoirs, autobiographies, articles, and books that describe an event to enable me to 'return' to the past to get a closer look at the historical events or time periods that are of interest to this research.
Secondary Information. Most of the literature used in this research will fall in this category. These are reports, analyses and commentaries which are second-hand interpretations of the actual events. I will use this collective wisdom to examine the phenomenon of innovative entities to draw my own conclusions about what I am searching for.

11. I will access these two types of information through the university’s wide collection of databases available on the on-line library (Picture 1). I have been using ERIC and ProQuest for most my searches and they will continue to be predominantly applied for the rest of the assignment. I have found that the Endnote Programme is useful and it will be the only referencing tool engaged for this piece of research (although I hope that the developers come up with the PDA version given how mobile Singapore students are). The initial keywords used for the searches will be – ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’, ‘innovative’, ‘enterprises’, ‘organisation’, ‘organizations’, ‘characteristics’, ‘non-innovative’, ‘lifecycles’, ‘life cycle’, ‘sustainability’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainable practices’. Picture 2 shows an example of a search carried out with ERIC using some of these keywords.

Research Information Strategy

12. From this body of knowledge, I like to look for information that:

Provides evidence that innovative enterprises exist as a separate management category. I will do a count of the number of literature written on innovative enterprises. The count will be sliced according to the prestige of these journals and the accumulated number of literatures on innovative enterprises found in these publications. I will limit my initial search to five journals to get a sense if this search needs to be widened. Picture 3 and Table 1 show the results of this search.

Informs on the unique attributes of innovative enterprises. I will look for literature that informs on the characteristics of innovative enterprises, like organisation cultures, group norms, and work preferences. During the search, I will try to uncover if there are commonalities and differences in these characteristics among enterprises of varying sizes, organisational arrangements, industrial categories, and economic systems. Picture 4 and Table 2 are the outcomes of this phase of the research exercise.

Expounds the lifecycles of enterprises. I will need to study the sciences behind business or enterprise lifecycles. It will be interesting to find out the propositions and oppositions of this management theory. Picture 5 and Table 3 provide a record of the work done for this section.

Shows innovative enterprises are more predisposed to adopt practices of sustainable development. The availability of empirical evidence in explaining the reasons for this tendency will be extremely useful. I have to inspect their methodologies to determine if their conclusions are believable and cross references will be made to determine their reliability. Picture 6 and Table 4 provide evidence of the preliminary work carried out for this stage of the research.

Conclusion

More information is needed before the exact wordings of my researchable questions could be fixed.

13. The initial work I have conducted suggests that there are many gaps in my knowledge about my research interest. There are many other questions arising in the process of collecting information from the databases, like, ‘why are innovative organisations different from the non-innovation ones?’ and ‘is it important to study the factors that drive enterprises to adopt sustainable practices?’ More information is needed before I decide if I wish to stick with the current set of research questions or rework them.

14. Also, there is a need to re-examine and narrow the research interest as the initial literature review suggests that there are several kinds (technological, social, and organisational) of innovation driven enterprises. My sense is that I may not have to generalise the research.

15. Finally, I have to accept that there may not be sufficient information and evidence in the literature to suggest that innovative enterprises has a higher propensity to adopt sustainable practices and eventually become sustainable organisations. I may have to go beyond desk research to establish the link.

Reflections

……. but nothing is wasted as I am building on the shoulders of others and those of my own.

16. I feel that the assignment and the associated deadline provide me the space to think about my research interest. It forces me to examine the body of knowledge and the collective wisdom found in the literature, and to question what exactly I am trying to do through my research. It is objective because the facts present the options but is it also heart wrenching because after struggling to get the words onto paper, I realised that I may have to put all these 3,000 plus words aside to start afresh as clarity refines the research interest and the researchable questions.

17. It is this danger of having to go back to the drawing board that really excites me because I have, in the process, not just acquired knowledge but also created new ones. It is from these offshoots that my eventual research may begin. However, nothing is wasted as I am building on the shoulders of others and those of my own. I like to thank you and the University for creating the experience and motivation in me to think critically about these.

This initial research proposal was first written on 4 Sept 2007.

The Key Sustainability Arguments Underpinning the Triple Bottom Line Approach to Resource Management

2007-09-03T23:41:00.000+08:00

Background

1. I am required to write an essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words to describe and analyse the key sustainability arguments that underpin the triple bottom line approach to resource management. I have to draw on an organisation, which I am familiar with, to provide examples and evaluate to what extent the organisation is planning and developing sustainable resource management.

Introduction

2. Drawing on recent research, I will:

a. Highlight the key aspects of sustainability, sustainable development, and the triple bottom line approach to resource management,

b. Make the relationships of these elements in creating sustainable futures the focus of the essay,

c. Examine the issues arising from these relationships from a number of perspectives, and

d. Evaluate an organisation and using the insights from my readings to critically demonstrate my knowledge on sustainability.

3. Given these objectives, the essay will be developed in the following manner with these sub-headers:

a. Definitions – Understanding the Terms. Here, the generic descriptions of sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable futures, and sustainable corporation are provided,

b. Relationship – The Triple Bottom Line Approach to Resource Management and Sustainable Futures. In this segment, the relationship of resource management, sustainable futures, and triple bottom line is discussed and ascertained,

c. Sustainability – The General Argument. Towards the middle of the essay, a layman view for sustainability is presented to provide an access into a more in-depth and insightful discussion of the issues at hand,

d. Issues – Looking from Different Perspectives. Three key perspectives - self interest, instrumentation, and integration, on the arguments for sustainability are presented to provide a deeper appreciation of the complexities of the issues involved, and

e. An assessment - Organisation X[1]’s Triple Bottom Line. A critical evaluation of Organisation X’s planning and development approaches to sustainable resource management.

f. Conclusion – Putting It All Together. At the end of the essay, I will round off with a summary of all that have been presented.

Definitions – Understanding the Terms

‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’
Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987)

4. While I agreed with Diesendorf (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):22) that sustainability, sustainable futures, sustainable development, and sustainable corporation may not be as accurately defined as ‘the standard metre’ but for the sake of presenting my ideas in the essay, I will take the risk of doing so by drawing on recent research on sustainability. These four terms could be viewed in the following ways (Figure 1):
[1] The identity of Organisation X is not exposed owing to the sensitivity of the information to be revealed.

a. Sustainable futures are futures that have attained sustainability through the process of sustainable development. Achieving this end goal is not an overnight occurrence but an event that is developed through a number of phases, which begins with rejection, to compliance, and to the final phase of ideological commitment (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):15). The general attributes of these futures include the:

i. Understanding that the economy and society will depends ultimately on the integrity of the biosphere and the ecological processes occurring within it. These futures are not off-springs of competitive trade-offs but of synergistic co-existence,

ii. Balancing of the intra-generational and inter-generational aspirations and needs of the organisations, human beings and communities, and ecology, and

iii. Co-operating and collaborating organisational, human and ecological resources to enhance economic performance and promote social well-being while protecting and renewing the ecology at the same time.

b. In order to reach these sustainable futures, we need sustainable development. The Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987) describes sustainable development as not allowing the current generation, in the process of meeting their needs, from depriving the ‘ability’ of future generations from ‘meeting their own needs’. It does not say that the current generation has to sacrifice itself for the future. However, it does strongly suggest the need for creativity in finding ideas, innovativeness in creating solutions (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):41), and entrepreneurship in bringing the solution to where they are needed in the spirit of building a inclusive ‘us’ and ‘them’ future than resolving the conflicts and tension arising from the exclusive divide of ‘us’ or ‘them’. In addition, Diesendorf (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):23) stated that any economical and social development that does not protect and enhance the environment and social equity is not sustainable development. His definition includes, in the process, the role of protecting and enhancing the natural environment and social well-being. Therefore, sustainable development is the process where these missions are carried out in ensuing that there is equity between current and future generations, and that today’s practices of sound environmental management, just society, and healthy economy are installed to ensure that future generations continue to enjoy economic, social and ecological well-being. In doing so, both intra-generational and inter-generational aspirations are given equal considerations.

c. In the end, sustainability is a state of affairs, where the process of sustainable development allows the earth, corporation, and society to reach homeostasis (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):6). In this equilibratory world, the biosphere is protected and renewed, human capability and skills are built for community and societal well-being, and organisations are able to continue high level of economic performance.

d. Corporations, besides the government and society, is now the most powerful establishment in the world to affect change (Spiller (2000)). Sustainable corporations are those establishments capable of infusing the concepts of sustainable development into the management consciousness (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):272), organisation and structures for resource management, and processes and operations of resource deployment to reach sustainable outcomes.

Relationship – The Triple Bottom Line Approach to Resource Management and Sustainable Futures

‘Firms……, will perform better in the long run than those that are not able to achieve this synergy between exploitation and creation’ Connor (2002:p309)

5. Traditionally, I would define a resource as a factor of production that is tangible but scarce. In my recent readings, this view of resource took on a dramatic change. Products and services, and the material used to create them are no longer seen as resources capable of creating sustainable value themselves (Connor (2002)). Factors that are capable of producing catalytic and multiplier effects on any other given set of resources have become the new strategic resource in today's fast changing economical, social and ecological environment. They are characterised by their ability to uniquely bind traditional resources together and have the capacity to affect their catalytic and multiplier potential as an entity. The lead component that constantly and consistency appears in the readings are the ability of humans (Connor (2002)) in combining and recombining these resources to produce beyond their capacity. This knowledge-based and intangible resource is not necessary naturally endowed by the size or the quality of the land, but arrived through long term policies of nation building. With the world in acute globalisation, this production unit is highly transportable even though the competency and skills embedded in it may not be transferable. Securing this production unit is the new competitive advantage of the 21st century.

6. This is crux that differentiates the popular model of fitting organisation to the environment (Porter (1997)) from the resource based view of looking internally at what the organisation has to offer as resources and applying them creatively and innovatively to the environment to make them work for the organisation. As employees take over from the organisations the rein of value creation, we also see the switch in the bargaining power from the buyers to sellers. Employees can now choose to withhold value until the right environment exists (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):100), just like organisations can choose to withhold products and services from the market. It is therefore important that they are encouraged to stay loyal and committed to their organisations in order that the organisations are capable of maintaining high performance through their productivity and contribution.

7. However, in the search for productivity and profitability, organisations in the past decade had engaged in measures of mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, and outsourcing to maximise shareholder value, which has eroded the traditional relational and transactional based psychological contracts with their employees. In a resized and restructured organisation, the employer is no longer able to guarantee long term employment and offer promotions as incentives in return for commitment and personal output. The reactions to these developments have been vast for both the ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’ (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):108) of organisational restructuring. They have begun withdrawing their loyalty, commitment and productivity from their organisations (Connor (2002)), and there is a ‘battle’ to regain the trust of the employees that is lost to the employers because of these changes. While there are attempts to replace the old psychological contracts (Maguire (2002)) with a more relationship based version, the transition between the two may take some time as Baby Boomers and Generation X are still not acquainted with the reality they are facing in the new age of Click and Go. In the meantime, these employees will choose to survive with the incentive-based transactional aspects (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):93) of the contract while letting go the relational component in order to re-establish the equity between rewards and contribution. It is here that the dilemma begins. We know that human is the most important part of the productivity and profitability equation in any organisation but the business environment calls for the break up of the psychological contracts, which destroys the old relationship human has with their organisations. The challenge to organisations is the establishment of a new social compact with their employees that could bring their loyalty and commitment back to the table so that management could continue to meet their shareholders expectations.

8. On another front, the very ecology that keeps humans alive is falling apart. Industrialisation and it scientific exploitations have pushed out traditional practices of working in harmony with the natural environment. Not only resources are taken from nature, it also becomes the buffer that absorbs the wastes arising from consumption and accumulation of wealth. As a result, species have extinct and others are in the process of doing so. The democratisation of finance, information and technology (Friedman (1999)) has enable globalisation, which make the world flatter (Friedman (2005)). The ecological impact from global warming in one region affects others and the hardship of surviving as a human race has became more difficult, especially in developing and third world countries. There have been calls from environmentalists for investments in natural resource management to make development sustainable. These requests are made on the awareness that when the environment can support the societies and communities, there will prosperity and this is translated into higher living standards, income, and purchasing power for the products and services of the organisations.

9. The few paragraphs in this section of the essay show that organisations cannot make the economic bottom line the main focus of the business. Business leaders have to include human sustainability and ecological sustainability into their business model. Only organisations that consider these in totally have the capacity to be sustainable corporations.

Sustainability – The General Argument

10. There was plenty of media hype and numerous public education programmes at this year’s International Earth Day in Singapore. The objectives were to dispel the notion that infinite economic growth and consumption is sustainable and that the earth’s finite resource base means some activities of organisations and humans have to be limited in order that the planet continues to be habitable for future generations.

Issues – Looking at Different Perspectives

11. While the argument in the preceding paragraph may come across as simple and straightforward, the underlying issues of sustainability are not. There are also contextual considerations. Matters become more complex when activists choose to stand on different contexts where their differing interests and needs clash and compete with each other for attention. The readings suggest that we could view sustainability from three broad perspectives:

a. Self Interest. The general focus in this perspective is 'me' – How could I, as the owner of an organisation, employee in the workforce, leader of a local community, or activist against deforestation in the region, promote and sustain my cause? (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):45) In this world, you are either with me or against me. In such a polarised world, each entity justified their need for sustainability at the expanse of others. This frequently results in verbal and physical clashes that in some occasions led to deaths and imprisonments. In this world of self-interest, ones birth right is more important than the other, and it is from this stem, the differences in ideologies create stove-pipe like separations that prevent understanding and complicate communication. The lack of platforms for different stakeholders to get together to exchange ideas further enhances the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality. These are how things worked out in the self-interest world:

+ It has been accepted that the only reason for organisation is to configure factors of production in such a way to make them productive and return profits for its investors. In this view, management's key responsibility is exploiting its capacity to generate value for the shareholders in order to sustain the business over time, even if it is at the expense of the well-being of its customers, workforce, and environment.

+ There have been calls from the government and trade unions for businesses to adopt non-discriminatory human resource practices – employment of older workers, maintenance of minimum wage for semi-skilled workers, protection of unskilled labours, equal portion of local and foreign talents hired, equal opportunity for women employed, and attainment of balanced work life . Recent proposed revisions to the Employment Act and proposed extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act show that the government chooses to take a more hard-line approach to correct these imbalances since businesses are slow in responding to the changing requirements. She has ignored the insistence by businessmen that such interventions would increase operational costs and reduce competitiveness

+ It has been reported that the number and magnitude of natural disasters will continue to rise. It is very clear that in this century we, as humans, will see an escalation of climate change, which had killed many animal species in the last century. This time, we maybe occupying the centre stage as the banner of extinction is passed from animals to humans. This is Century Zero and the people living the land are feeling the impact. This caused the formation of local interest groups, which some have gained an unprecedented international appeal and become highly politicised.

b. Instrumentation. There is empirical evidence to suggest that sound human resource and environmental practices help organisations sustain their economic performance over the long run (Spiller (2000)). Managers recognise that the well-being of the workforce (Raiborn & Payne (1996)), ecological environment, and communities has an impact on the purchasing power of the goods and services produced by the organisation. Complying with environmental standards (Raar (2002)) help organisations avoid the potential dangers of legislation, bad publicity, and law suites that may turn away customers. While this is a better perspective than the 'me' view, it views other entities as something to be use for the further promotion of the self. In this perspective, the human and ecological bottom line is seen as leverages that can be manipulated and instrumented for continuing organisational productivity and profitability. The intent here is not exploitation but creating a situation where no one is to lose too much. The settlement is transactional in nature and containing a number of negotiated trade-offs. While this perspective of sustainability is less confrontational when compared to the self-interest one but, I will show towards the later part of this essay that there are issues in this kind of settlement where people is able to detect the instrumentalism (Iles (1997)) in the practices. It also rises ethical issues of what is consider as right behaviour when management leverages on the well-being of others for the preservation of the self (Spiller (2000)).

c. Integrated Perspective. In this viewpoint, sustainability is examined from an integrated manner (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):51). It takes on a more inclusive approach of using creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship as a means to address all the concerns relating to organisational, human/societal and ecological sustainability (Figure 2). The start point is not exploitation or trade offs, but a genuine attempt to develop a sustainability framework where all interest groups co-exist. Organisations have the personal, collective and corporate capabilities to achieve this (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):129). The strategies and plans for resource management are developed together with the formulation of the business model to avoid development as an afterthought or ‘at the end of the pipeline’ (Dunphy, Benveniste, Griffiths, & Sutton (2000):170).

An assessment - Organisation X’s Triple Bottom Line

‘This demands the transformation of corporations along with other social institutions. However, none of this will be possible without the transformation of human consciousness.’ Dunphy (2002:p272)

12. Organisation X, which has more than 500 employees, is a strategic service provider to a large public sector enterprise in Singapore. Since 2000, the organisation has been adopting management practices in anticipation of a leaner government and in preparation for the rise of the knowledge worker. These practices intend to decentralise authority and accountability to the frontline, operationalise new human resource policies to encourage employability of the workforce, and increase her transparency and responsiveness to her community.

13. I will describe three practices that resemble the efforts of triple bottom line approach to resource management. After which, I will talk about the true nature of their planning and development strategies and the resulting impact.

Internal Job Market - Instrumentation of the System

14. The organisation launched an electronic job posting system onto their Intranet in 2000. The system allows the managers to advertise job vacancies, which internal employees to search for these jobs and apply for them. Usually, these jobs are kept on-line for two weeks before advertisements are placed in the national papers. The objectives for the launch were to decentralise hiring decisions to the frontline managers, pass the responsibility of professional development and growth from the Human Resource Department to the employees, and promote a market of skills and competencies to increase staff employability and deployability, and thus mobility within the organisation.

15. On the whole, the initiative is commendable as Organisation X chooses employability as the new operating paradigm while most organisations at that time were struggling to stay afloat after the 1997's Asian Financial Crisis, which caused three years of lacklustre economic performance, bankruptcies and unemployment. However, in reality, it has caused distrust and cynicism amongst staff because of the lack of transparency in the process and the instrumentation of the process by the management.

16. It was uncovered that the managers, in many ways, have decided who they wanted to hire before posting the job on-line. Some did this in order to recognise the contribution of their current staff. Others justified their actions on the tedious process one has to take to bring suitable candidates into the departments. The worst that was witnessed was in the use of the job posting system as a means of removing staff or blocking staff from being transferred because of political or economical reasons. As such, there has been a rise of exceptions that were exempted from the posting requirements. These restricted the flow of labour and caused unhappiness in the internal workforce, who believed that they were victims of unfairness and policy manipulations.

Paper Consumption - Power of the office

17. In 2005, a government-wide programme was introduced to control operational costs. Cutting waste is a key leverage in the programme and the control of paper consumption becomes the focal point. Active-base costing methods are introduced to 'float' the cost of paper consumed in the departments instead of accounting it at the Central Purchase Office. The change has motivated departments to include their expenditure on paper into their cost centres.

18. Staff is conscious of the expenditure and attempts have been made to control unnecessary consumption. There are even attempts to transfer reams of paper between different parts of the department to rationalise usage. When such measures failed, rationing of paper has been implemented.

19. On the surface, the approach, while contains an economic agenda, does seemed to have positive ecological benefits. However, it causes several unintended social consequences. It creates tension between units within the department, as well as between departments. This impacts the social capital and in turn constraints the workings in the organisation. One such 'battle' to contain paper cost is in the production of hardcopies of meeting materials (drafts of policy papers, minutes of the last meeting, and print outs of presentations). The usual practice of sending digital version of these documents has continued with the change but because the receiving end is also subject to the cost restrictions, they employ the political power of the office to pass the responsibility of printing back to the issuing units instead of letting the value-adding process to flow through the value chain. This has led to inaccuracies in accounting the use of paper and wrongful application of control measures on issuing units, which causes rising stress in the workforce.

Organisational Climate Survey - From a Mechanism for Development to Control

20. Another human resource practice that was introduced in the same year was the organisational climate survey. This is a 360° feedback mechanism which allows the staff to provide senior management information about the leadership and organisational abilities of their middle managers. The purpose of the mechanism is purely for managerial development.

21. However, since its inception, the search for indicators that could define performance of middle management and differentiate the better performing departments from their lesser able counterparts, has caused the climate survey to degenerate into an instrument to help senior management decide how organisational rewards, like accolades, bonuses and increments, are to be distributed. Now, the organisational climate is broken down according to departments, and these are compared with the organisational averages and against each other to create a list of ranked departments.

22. Together with the middle management’s perception that they are in the mercy of their staff and the erosion of their traditional authority, power, and control, the outcome has been devastating. Managers decide to close ranks and create several schemes to encourage staff to speak well of them. As middle managers have power and control over the ways rewards are distributed in their departments, they are able to use these to ‘buy’ their staff into keeping quiet about the ways managers mismanage of their workforce. For those ‘errand’ individuals who are welling to speak up, there are informal social sanctions imposed on them. This has led to disenfranchised staff using the climate survey as a tool for revenge, thereby, negating the true intended purpose of the organisational climate survey.

23. All in all, each of the human resource practices of Organisation X were introduced with foresight. There was a genuine awareness among policy makers that the economy will change and preparations had to be made in anticipation of the change in order that the organisation continues to function as a key partner to the public sector enterprise.

24. All the three bottom lines seem to be given equal attention by management. However, the key driver of the strategies and plans for the management of resources is economical in nature. This bottom line actually takes precedence over the others. Human and ecology are seen as leverages that can be manipulated to sustain the organisation. As the workforce only experienced the form but not the substance of triple bottom approach to resource management, it is able to easily and quickly detect the instrumentality behind these practices and it turns sceptical, intransigent and hostile towards these transformational efforts. The aspirations of the senior management are not widely shared among the middle managers, who feel threaten by the erosion their traditional power bases through the introduction of these new management practices. In defence, they introduce new social norms and constraints to protect their current power structures and social capital, which increase the level of conflict between different interest groups. The struggle that is observed in the hierarchy is a 'war' to avoid the trade offs and to keep the power bases intact. This is an example of instrumentalism and a failure to take an integrated approach to resource management.

Conclusion – Putting It All Together

25. There are many drivers for sustainability. Only a balanced approach to the three bottom-lines provides a longer lasting performance outcome for the organisations, well-being of humans and their communities, and protection and renewal of the ecology as we are looking at the beginning of the pipeline, where we are more flexible in meeting the needs of different interest groups. If not, at best we get a positive rub-on effect but in the long run, people will see the instrumentation and stop supporting the management in its transformation efforts (Gowen & Tallon (2003)) and the organisation could come out worst off than before.

[1] The identity of Organisation X is not exposed owing to the sensitivity of the information to be revealed.

References

Connor, T. (2002). The Resource-Based View of Strategy and its Value to Practising Managers, Strategic Change, Vol.11, p307-316

Dunphy, D., Benveniste, J., Griffiths, A. and Sutton, P. (ed.) (2000). Sustainability – The Corporate Challenge of the 21st Century, Allen & Unwin, NSW, Australia

Friedman, T. (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalisation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA

Friedman, T. (2005). The World is Flat – A brief History of the Globalised World in the 21st Century, Penguin Group, London, England

Gowen, C.R. & Tallon, W. J. (2003). Enhancing Supply Chain Practices Through Human Resource Management, The Journal of Management Development, Vol.22, Nos. 1/2, p32-44

Iles, P. (1997). Sustainable High-Potential Career Development: A Resource-Based View, Career Development International, Vol. 2, No. 7, p347-353

Maguire, H. (2002). Psychological Contracts: Are they Still Relevant?, Career Development International, Vol.7, No. 3, p167-180

Porter, M.E. (1979). "How competitive forces shape strategy", Harvard Business Review, March/April 1979

Raar, J. (2002). Environmental Initiatives: Towards Triple-Bottom Line Reporting, Corporate Communications, Vol. 7, No. 3, p169-183

Raiborn, C. & Payne, D. (1996). TQM: Just What the Ethicist Ordered, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 15, No.9, p963-972

Spiller, R. (2000). Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 27, No. 1/2, p149-160

World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987). Out Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford

This essay was first written on 17 Jun 2007.

Critical Incident Analysis - Deadly Barriers - Bicyclist Didn't See Them in Dark (Full Article)

2007-09-03T23:31:00.001+08:00

Introduction

1. The treatment for this completed essay will be the application of Tripp's technology of critical incident analysis on my chosen incident - DEADLY BARRIERS - Bicyclist (from here onwards will be referred to as cyclist) didn't see them in dark (Teh (2005)) to demonstrate its power of revealing the drivers that renders the incident critical, in showing the difficulties of policy development, and providing potential responses that may settle it.

2. The presentation of this article will contain the following five key headers. These are:

a. Outline of what I understood as ‘critical incident’,
b. Describe the incident under review,
a. Brief on the specific context of my workplace and broader political context within which the incident occurred,
b. Suggest the dilemmas for policy making evidenced by the incident, and
c. Present ways in which these dilemmas might be ‘settled’ under the notion of ‘policy settlement’.

Outline of What I Understood As ‘Critical Incident’

3. To understand the requirements for this activity, I believe I first must attain a degree of insight into what 'critical incident' is about. My original thought about ‘critical incident’ is just as it was - an incident of critical proportions.

4. However, on reading Burgum and Bridge (1997)'s article on their application of 'critical incident' as a tool for professional education to develop the skills on reflection and critical thinking amongst midwives, I discover that 'any event could be analysed to create a critical incident'.

5. My thoughts on the term achieve even greater clarity when I refer to Tripp (1993:24-25). He describes critical incidents as 'mostly straight forward accounts of very commonplace events that occur in routine professional practice which are critical in the rather different sense that they are indicative of underlying trends, motives and structures. These incidents appear to be 'typical' rather than 'critical' at first sight, but are rendered critical through analysis.' [I added the emphasis].

6. The stylised portion of the statement suggests that it is not how critical the impact of the event has on the stakeholders that makes it a 'critical incident'. It is the underlying currents of the incident as well as their ability to replicate and continue impacting others in future interactions that makes it critical. In order to understand these, we need to examine the occurrence, practices and discourses reflectively and critically.

7. By applying interpretation to the circumstances surrounding the incident and obtaining their broader meanings, I can learn from the occurrence, and with practice, the technique also creates a space (Tripp (1993):125-129) that withholds me from reacting instinctively to the event for its face value as it occurs. Metaphorically, this is like giving breathing a thought before inhaling the air.

8. In slowing time, I am helped to uncover options that are not available to me before, thereby increasing my flexibility in delivering a more comprehensive response and equitable settlement to an underlying need in a world of conflicting interests.

9. These suggest that the application of 'critical incident' analysis could:

Enhance Reflection. The need to analyse incidents provides the motivation to search for structures, which encourages better methods of looking at the incidents habitually, dedicating time for recalling the incident, and running through the sequence of the event reflectively. Tripp (1993:26) has advocated such an approach, which is what are asked for in this assignment.

Improve Critical Thinking. The most enlightening thing about Tripp's statement is that I don't have to wait for a critical incident to apply the analysis. Any ordinary incident is as good an item for analysis as long as we look at it critically through its contexts - political and social dimensions, to uncover its 'trends, motives and structures'.

Establish Positions. What is useful about the analysis is that the incident provides me an opportunity to determine a new stand on how I view the world, which I could apply in the future. The push to shift and establish new positions can challenge my long held values and beliefs systems, thereby encourages my professional development and growth.

Develop Strategies. From these new positions, more comprehensive and effective strategies and solutions could be developed to correct the errors in judgement, applied onto future events of a similar nature, and provide case studies for learning.

10. However, there is need for caution when using the technology:

a. The application of critical analysis does not lead to objectivity (Tripp (1993):30). The exercise may yield several meanings, which the practitioner must make a decision about choice. Therefore, we may have experienced the same incident but I could deliver a different set of intervention from you because of the differences in the space we operate from. Context is the king when applying 'critical incident' analysis.

b. The application of 'critical incident' analysis in practice must be carried out consciously. There are opportunities for me to understand the underlying currents, adopt a position, and introduce an intervention, which through time becomes routines, which could be problematic (Tripp (1993):14-15) itself.

Describe The Incident Under Review

11. Tripp ((1993):32:Figure 3) proposes the use of a diagnostic teaching cycle, which examines both the discourses and practices in teaching, as the strategy to observe an occurrence in order to describe it, and continue to analyse, interpret, act and evaluate it as an critical incident.

12. Burgum and Bridge (1997) demonstrates that the technology can be used beyond the field of education to training and development. I believe its application could even be more extensively applied to many other industries as long as it is related to the development of skills in reflection and critical thinking.

13. Bounded by the requirements of producing a detailed and systematic description of the incident, and ensuring that the details encompass properties of focus and enlargement (Tripp (1993):32-33), I decided to use a widely publicised incident that occurred in July of 2005. I will structure the description to meet the specifications of what deems as a good introduction to the incident for this assignment.

Deadly Barriers Incident

14. The metal barriers were installed to make the often used overhead bridge safer - by forcing cyclists to dismount and push their bicycles across the bridge. However, this did not happen in July 2005.

15. The contractors constructed the barriers on one side of the bridge, and a 40-year-old cyclist, who was on his way to a temple the next morning, came from the other side of the bridge and smashed into them. He, who reportedly didn't see the inverted U-shape metal frames, was badly injured and was paralysed from his neck down. The father of two young children frequently went down the ramp on his bicycle at about 6.30am every day.

16. News of the accident spread quickly in the neighbourhood, and here are the some of their reactions and responses as reported in the media:

a. Mr Ng, who was on the bridge at the time of the accident, said: 'There was an 80-year-old man who was going very fast. If I hadn't stopped him, he would have been hurt.

b. 'The authorities shouldn't do this. In the early morning, it's too dark to see. There should be flickering lights and warning signboards,' said Madam Ngoh, who uses the bridge daily to get to Pasir Ris Park for her morning exercise.

c. Another resident, Mr Goh Peng Hoon, 63, said he could easily have become a victim. 'My friend asked me to talk to him at the coffee shop, if not, I would also be cycling past here early in the morning,' said the retiree, who has been living in the area for 10 years.

d. Mr Ong Kian Min, the MP for Tampines GRC, said: 'They [the barriers] won't be put back up until LTA convinces us that it's safe.' He added: 'They rammed straight into the metal frames before even getting on the bridge. This is the stupidest device I've ever seen. It's right at throat level, it's suicidal. It may kill someone who is not aware [of its presence].'

e. Said Mr Tay: 'Such a serious thing has happened yet no action has been taken except by MP Ong Kian Min. What about those who approved of the barrier? I've only seen people taking pictures and making measurements.'

f. The LTA said: '[the contractor] did not follow the procedure of submitting a method statement on how they planned to install the barriers before starting work. They also did not complete the installation of the barriers on both ends of the pedestrian overhead bridge within the day, as he had planned to do. Had he done so, cyclists would have been forewarned of the barriers when they got on the pedestrian overhead bridge.'

g. As an immediate measure, the LTA will be improving the visibility of the barriers and installing signs to forewarn cyclists and pedestrians of the barriers. So far there have been no other incidents or any adverse feedback on the design. But the LTA said: 'We are sorry to learn of the cyclist's accident on 13 Jul.'

Brief On The Contexts Within Which The Incident Occurred

17. With the incident described, I will spend some time developing the infrastructure from which I start my analysis of the incident in the specific context of my workplace, which is the community that I live and work in.

18. Tripp (1993:124-141) mentions four kinds of judgement in professional teaching; namely, the practical, diagnostic, reflective, and critical judgement. While the given impression is that these are judgements made exclusively by teachers during their teaching practices, I believe they could have relevance in other professions even they may not be as necessary as in teaching or that there could be more than four judgements in professions outside of teaching.

19. Since this is the first time I am doing critical incident analysis, I will apply what Tripp (1993:27:Figure 2) introduces in teaching to guide me generate the questions to find the explanations and meanings within the immediate context to inform my judgement. From which, a position can be established to suggest ways that may cause a settlement.

20. Here is a list of questions to ask, information to acquire, and perspectives to draw on from the people involved:

Practical Judgement. The answers sought here relate to those judgements leading to instantaneous decisions and actions taken during the design, funding, installation and inspection of the barriers. Thus, the questions asked are very much procedural in nature:

§ What should the various stakeholders involved in finalising the design, funding, installation, and inspection of the barrier do?

§ What should be the specifications and standards in all these activities?

Diagnostic Judgement. Here, construction-specific answers are to be uncovered to look for information that could 'recognise, describe, understand, explain and interpret' (Tripp (1993):140) the practical judgements employed around the incident. These question are:

§ Descriptive

· What had happened?
· Who was mainly involved?
· Who was subsequently involved?

§ Causal

· What made it or could make it happen?
· Who acted or/and had not acted that could have caused the incident?
· What acted or/and had not acted that could have caused the incident?

§ Effectual

· What does it do immediately after incident?
· What does it do as an aftermath following the incident?
· For whom?

§ Affectual

· How does it immediately feel like for each type of participant involved in the incident?
· How does it feel like for each type of participant involved in the incident as an aftermath?

§ Semantic

· What does the incident mean to different stakeholders at different timeline?
· What does the incident mean to non-stakeholders?

Reflective Judgement. While both practical and diagnostic judgement looks at the facts of the incident, reflective judgement look at the reasons why I make it mean something a specific way. The information to uncover here relates to the values, mores and beliefs systems that are engaged before, during and after the incident.

§ Do I like what is unveiled in the diagnostic?
§ Is it a good or bad thing?
§ Why so?

Critical Judgement. This is what makes an ordinary incident critical. This is done by challenging and evaluating the values, judgements, and justifications revealed during reflection. This provides the information and stepping stone to determine the position I will take, from which all decisions can be made as planned respond to the given need.

§ What is it an example of?
§ Whose classification?
§ Is it just?
§ From whose perspective does this justice apply or does not apply?

Specific Context Of My Workplace Within Which The Incident Occurred

21. Armed with these questions, I will begin by offering, with the immediate context of the incident in mind, some of my initial explanations before suggesting the possible meanings.

22. There are several mindsets in operation that kept the stakeholders focused on one specific aspect of the issue and not the other. These unfocused components were not the kind the stakeholders habitually think of, which caused them to miss the 'implicit contradiction' (Tripp (1993):15) and opportunities to critically think about them when they were making professional judgements and decisions. I will list five of these below:

a. Deterrence-Safety Mindset. The objective of the barriers is to warn the cyclists against crossing the bridge while mounted on their bicycles. In order for the deterrent to work, it is important that the designers make the deterrence effective. The deterrent must present some elements of risk - potential injuries, restrictions to freedom of movement, or/and imposition of fines. Since handicaps are not the target of the barriers, the designers are willing to consider the feedback from the Handicapped Welfare Association and incorporate elements that do not impede their movements into the final design. For the handicaps, the barriers do not deter since there is little perceptible risks. The contradiction is that there must be a potential for harm in a given deterrence. Given this focus, safety of the mounted cyclist was not likely considered into the final design or deemed to be a priority of importance.

b. Legitimacy-Constituency Mindset. The Town Council, which represents the interests of its constituents, also funds the construction and installation of the barriers. Immediately, the contradiction is obvious. Cyclists, who cross the bridges like roads, are publicly frown at and socially sanctioned. Given this social stigma and status, the needs of cyclists' are largely unspoken, kept silenced, and ignored. They are not given the legitimacy to use the bridges as ordinary pedestrians, and the Town Council is keen to oppose them and have the matter resolved quickly. This is problematic because the Town Council focuses on protecting the legitimacy of the pedestrians over the rights of having all her constituents heard.

c. Exception-Responsiveness Mindset. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) is the agency that creates and responsible for the policies regarding the design, construction, installation, maintenance and inspection of these barriers. Their chosen mode of operation, which is management by exceptions, is problematic. Under such an arrangement, status quo is maintained until there are enough of complaints. This conflicts with responsiveness. While the contractor is blameworthy in the sense that the drawings were not submitted for approval prior to installation, LTA may not be freed from the responsibility of accepting a design that was not responsive to the realities of the kind of traffic on that bridge, and for not being responsive in ensuring closure in the approval process.

d. Cost-Quality Mindset. For the contractor, this was a piece of work that was of little difference from all others government tender projects. The pressure for efficient resource deployment, cost containment, and timeliness of completing the project may have kept contractor's focus on the installation and not on the users, who look for quality of the entire installation process..

e. Completion-Uncertainty Mindset. The need to establish policies that is complete and integral in an uncertain world saddled with diverse and ever changing viewpoints is problematic. This incident had led to a public outcry that strangely came not just from the community of cyclists but also from pedestrians and other motorists. This suggests that:

§ The pedestrians want their safety ensured but do not condone the use of instruments that hurt others. The designers took it on themselves to introduce barriers with strong deterrence attributes.

§ There was no universal agreement about the rights of mounted cyclists using the bridge. There are sympathisers but the Town Council chooses to respond to the more influential pedestrians lobby to complete the policy making exercise. LTA's mode of operation acerbated the situation.

23. So, what do all these undercurrents mean? They show that some deep seated values and beliefs are at work, which affected the judgements and decisions of the stakeholders. Let me point out five meanings detected during the analysis of the incident:

a. As long as we are doing something that is considered legitimate, generally accepted, and even celebrated, our rights will be recognised, protected and championed. We will continue to be heard, attended to, and cultivated. In the incident, the mounted cyclists are assigned no rights once they are on the bridge. Since their presence is considered a danger to the pedestrians and themselves, it has to be sanctioned, regardless whether they are constituents and have the same rights as pedestrians to have their needs considered into the final design of the policy.

b. The general accepted view is that cyclists are considered road users and should not be on the overhead bridges. There are a few high profile cases of cyclists injuring others, which caused many to perceive cyclists as a danger to themselves and irresponsible to others when on the bridge.

c. When there are good justifications against deviant behaviours, the deterrence used to discourage these tend to be effective and sometimes appear overkill. The incident showed that the barrier can kill as long as we choose to behave in a manner that is socially unacceptable.

d. There are also evidence suggesting the dependency on the government of the accepted constituent. Pedestrians left the problem to the authority to resolve; giving them full authority over the specifications relating to design, criteria for funding the project, methods of installing the barriers, and approaches of inspection and for obtaining feedback. The pedestrians left it to the authority to make all the judgement and decisions without asking if their demands are right, the barriers are safe, and if the cyclists should be given a fair opportunity to be heard.

e. As this is not a matter of national importance, LTA relegates the policies and their implementations to management by exception instead of active governance and community involvement.

Broader Political Context Within Which The Incident Occurred
2
4. To appreciate what the incident meant in the wider political context, I beg for the answers to four questions:

a. Why it matters to place barriers at the bridges in Singapore, and why the bridges matter to the mounted cyclists?

b. Are there dilemmas that caused such shortcomings, which are not attributable to the Town Council and LTA?

c. Are there non-events (Tripp (1993):24) that caused the incident?

25. I was surprised with the outcome after apply the 'Why Challenge' (Tripp (1993):46) to locate possible answers to the first question. It seems that the barriers are there not for the pedestrians but for winning of votes and taking of constituencies. These are what I came up with when the challenge was applied to 'Why it matters to place barriers at bridges in Singapore?'. It matters because:

a. The bridge is meant only for pedestrians.

b. The bridge is the least dangerous option available for circumventing the barriers installed at the road dividers. Others come with fines and accidents.

c. Afraid the pedestrians have another excuse for taking to the roads again, thereby causing pedestrian accidents and deaths.

d. This may cause an public outcry and gives the transport Minister, the Ministry of Transport and her statutory boards bad publicity and negative image.

e. For a performance based public service, this may signal that the Minister is not effective, and this affect his status and influence in the cabinet.

f. The opposition may pick this up as an issues in the next election, which may affect the Prime Minister's position as a politician and standing of political party in the country.

26. When I applied the same challenge to 'Why the bridges matter to the mounted cyclists?', I received another interesting outcome. Unlike cyclists in Japan, China and Australia, who are licensed road users, their counterparts in Singapore are not recognised as road users and accorded no rights and protection on the road. Given the obstructions laid at the road dividers, bridges become the only safe means to cross the roads for the cyclists.

27. By putting these two outcomes together, I observe a key contradiction (Tripp (1993):49) at work, which is cyclists are neither pedestrians nor motorists in Singapore, yet bicycles are designed as a steady mode of transportation but the roads are not made safe for their use. When there are no rules of engagement for cyclists when they are on the roads or on walking paths, they could only exist as a grey economy.

28. Since it is not clear if cyclists have their right of way, motorists and pedestrians alike do not know how to respond to cyclists when they are in their way. This poses a danger on the cyclists and other road and path users. The cyclists must have done some calculation about these risks and their needs travel, and concluded that between pedestrians sanction and motoring death, the use of pedestrian pathways is a safer option. It is this web of judgement and decisions that caused the injury and not the shortcoming of the policy itself, nor that of the Town Council and LTA.

29. There is some kind of ideology (Tripp (1993):56-57) in force. It suggests that the interests of pedestrians are protected. The protection created contradictions over the rights of different stakeholders, and bring them into conflict with one another other. The cyclists, who are the subordinated group, resist the rules that are imposed on them, which led to a public outcry from the dominated groups, which chastises the authorities for turning a blind eye on the cyclists. The pedestrians and motorists feel socially guilty for the incident and the tension is discomforting, which calls them into action. This demonstrates that the dominant group continues to seek ways of protecting its interests by speaking up for the subordinated cyclists.

Dilemmas For Policy Making Evidenced By The Incident

30. The analysis continues to reveal new dilemmas for policy making. The choice the current policy makers seem to take is to discourage the use of bicycle as a transportation device and relegate it to the sports. In doing so, they avoided the need for new discourses and practises that demand new resources. Considering the cyclists in the policy making process could opens new dilemmas which are problematic and is uncomfortable to the policy makers. These dilemmas are:

a. By recognising the cyclists, the authority may upset the equilibrium attained amongst the current set of road users. There could be a struggle for new definitions, relationships, resources and attention by the newly recognised road user. These may lead to new competition for space, distance, time and speed on the road. Given the overcrowded nature of our roads, this may bring forth new conflicts, contests, and arbitrations, which maybe socially and politically uncomfortable. Status quo is always good.

b. In recognising their rights, new policies will have to be put in place, and their implementation may call forth new infrastructures, rules, and regulations that cause road widening, rule changes to traffic lights, re-education of current road users, imposition of safety gears on cyclists and motorists, and the need for parking spaces, licensing enhancements, monitoring of use, and inspection of vehicles. These require public expenditure and have to be funded through taxes, which seems to be a sensitive matter in a country still faced with structural unemployment. The recent hikes in the Goods and Services Tax have unsettled Singaporeans, which raised heated debates on its pros and cons. Raising taxes do not go well with attracting foreign investments and talents to the nation in a highly competitive Asia Pacific.

c. There isn't a culture of safety amongst cyclists in Singapore. As cyclists exist in the grey economy, there is no impetus to cultivate safety in cycling and little investments are made by cyclists and other motorists to harden their vehicles and themselves against accidents. By recognising their rights, it is expected a certain degree of safety, in terms of gears, professional training and certification, and regular inspections, will be installed to ensure that bicycles and their riders are road worthy. These spell new legal and administrative costs, which may drive the cyclists underground instead of making them coming forward as a legitimate entity. Many may even abandon cycling entirely.

d. There was an attempt in the late 1990s to encourage pedestrians to convert to cycling. The idea was to encourage the use of bicycles as a method to connect the pedestrians to the Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) stations, thereby reducing the dependency on feeder buses, which were operation at a lost at that time. The experiment did not take off, and since 2000, parking lots for bicycles at the MRTs stations were removed. In a performance based civil service, attending to the needs of her constituents is important, but there are potential risks of failures where social experiments fail. This could be politically fatal for the individuals promoting and lobbying the rights of cyclists in their discourses.

Ways in Which These Dilemmas Might Be ‘Settled’

31. The current settlement is not consensual. Cyclists are not acknowledged and are dominated by the interests of pedestrians and motorists. This lack of legitimation causes the policy to take on temporarily status as crisis of outcries and indignations over the lack of rights and having to exist in the gray economy flare up regularly each time there are accidents leading to injuries and deaths. There are attempts to improve the situation by removing the barriers from the bridges and imposing the S$1,000 fine on cyclist for crossing the bridge on the mount. However, these efforts are highly contextual and are fixated at concealing the true nature of the problem. The authorities will continue to appeal to our common sense by highlighting that in a land scarce Singapore, cyclists do not have a place in the country and should be relegated to the fringes of the nation. We will continue to see cyclists circumventing the rules and regulations imposed on them because of their status.

32. Given this outlook, I propose three ways that maybe settlement for the incident:

Apply the ‘generative politics’ approach, which involves the community in meeting the needs of the cyclists. This includes providing guidelines to Town Councils on demarking areas with have amble space for cycling activities. The scheme has been place for some time at East Coast Road, where pedestrian walkways are shared with cyclists. The extension of this experiment to other parts of Singapore is useful. The community could be gravitated to increase the profile of bicycles as a viable and safe mode of transport, and communicate that bicyclists are as responsible as those motorised versions on the roads. Community centres are good outfits for generating adventure rides for cyclists wanting to take on to the roads. Such outings provide all motorists the experience of interacting with each other on the road.

Adopt a ‘structural policy’ response by shifting the burden of safety for the cyclists from the government to the merchants and owners of bicycles, cars and motorcycles. This shift helps start an economy of safety consciousness, which include hardening the transportation devices, drivers, passengers and other road users against accidents the cause damages, injuries and deaths. In addition, early settlements may include giving all motorists new rules of engagement with the cyclists and establishing the right of way for the cyclists. In doing so, all road participants have a common language to communicate with each other on the road.

Take to the ‘conjunctural policy’ response, which will charge the cyclists for using the roads. These charges may include licence fees, road taxes and toll fares, which could pave the way for the cyclists to go on the roads as a fully recognised user in the near future.

Conclusion

33. I have moments of hesitation over the choice of activity to submit for Assignment Two. Finally, I settle with critical incident analysis, and I am humbled by the experience of completing it.

34. The incident is critical in every way. It was a severe accident and someone was critically injured. On the face of it, the rider, Town Council and LTA are blameworthy. However, on closer examination, things may not be as simple. The web of values, judgement, decisions and actions have come into play, and created circumstances beyond the awareness and control of the stakeholders. It is as if the rider is destined to be paralysed from neck down. If the discourses continue to be closed and restrictive, settlement could be in a structure that is the same as the last. Another accident most likely will repeat in the near future as stakeholders continue to do more or less of what they have done before in creating policies, in adhering to rules of implementation, and in establishing governance. Breakthroughs could be difficult when the underlying currents continued to be sustained and played out, and where changes are applied to control the symptoms rather than the drivers of the incident. This is problematic and is making the incident very critical.

35. I am excited with the outcomes, discoveries, and experience. I believe these need not have to exist in this document. The insights can be practically applied through active engagement with the government and her communities.

Footnote:

Paralysed cyclist gets $800k (News Coverage Extracted from 27/3/2008's Today Newpaper)

MORE than two years after he was left paralysed from the neck down after crashing into a metal barrier at an overhead bridge in Tampines, a cyclist has finally been awarded nearly $800,000 in compensation.

Mr Koh Liep Hang, 43, had earlier sued the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and barrier contractor Koh Brothers for negligence, resulting in his injury and wanted about $1 million in compensation.

Last August, Mr Koh dropped the lawsuit against the LTA, and agreed to bear 35 per cent of the responsibility for the July 2005 accident, with Koh Brothers bearing 65 per cent, reported Lianhe Zaobao yesterday.

In an earlier Today report, the LTA had been quoted as saying that the contractor did not follow proper procedures when installing those barriers.

Mr Koh, a father of two young children, told the Chinese newspaper that it had been depressing period for his family. While he is able to lift his hands, communicate and eat normally, his fingers and legs have no strength.

When contacted, Member of Parliament for Tampines GRC, Mr Ong Kian Min, told Today that he was happy that the parties "have come to an amicable settlement". The "unfortunate incident" serves as a lesson that such barriers have to be carefully designed so that they will not harm the public. — Alicia Wong

Reference

Burgum, M. and Bridge, C. (1997). Using critical incidents in professional education to develop skills of reflection and critical thinking.

Teh Jen Lee (16 July 2005). DEADLY BARRIERS - Cyclist didn't see them in dark, Singapore: The New Paper.

Tripp, D. (1993). Critical incidents in teaching. Developing professional judgement. London: Routledge.

This essay was first completed on 19 Apr 2007 and updated with the Footnote on 28 Mar 2007.

Critical Incident Analysis - Deadly Barriers - Cyclist Didn't See Them in Dark

2007-09-03T23:27:00.000+08:00

Introduction

1. This is a 300 to 800-word write-up on my initial thoughts, ideas and insights of what could eventually make up the layout and content of my final article.

Understanding ‘critical incident’

2. To understand the requirements for this activity, I believe I first must attain a degree of understanding of what 'critical incident' is about. My original thought about ‘critical incident’ is just as it was - an incident of critical proportions.

3. However, after reading Burgum and Bridge (1997)'s article on their application of 'critical incident' as a tool for professional education to develop the skills on reflection and critical thinking amongst midwives, I discover that 'any event could be analysed to create a critical incident'.

4. My thoughts on the term achieve even greater clarity when I refer to Tripp (1993:24-25). He described critical incidents as "mostly straight forward accounts of very commonplace events that occur in routine professional practice which are critical in the rather different sense that they are indicative of underlying trends, motives and structures. These incidents appear to be 'typical' rather than 'critical' at first sight, but are rendered critical through analysis." [I added the emphasis].

5. The stylised portion of the statement seems to indicate that it is not how critical the impact of the event has on the stakeholders that deem it an 'critical incident' but how critical we look at the causes to uncover the underlying currents of incident that renders it critical.

6. In doing so, I could learn from the occurrence, and with practice, it creates a space that prevents me from instinctively reacting to the event, as it occurs, for it face value, which is like giving breathing a thought before inhaling the breathe. This delayed-reaction mode could help me uncover options that are not available to me when I am in my instinct-reaction mode, thereby increases my flexibility for more comprehensive response.

7. This also indicates the application of 'critical incident' analysis could:

a. Enhance reflection. The approach provides a structure of looking at the incident reflectively. Tripp (1993:26) has advocated such an approach, which is what are asked for in this assignment. This allows me to habitually dedicate time for recalling the incident and running through the sequence in the event.
b. Improve critical thinking. The most enlightening thing about Tripp's statement is that I don't have to wait for a critical incident to apply the critical analysis. An ordinary incident is as good an item for analysis when we look at it critically through its contexts - political and social dimensions to uncover its 'trends, motives and structures'.

c. Establish positions. What is perhaps useful about the analysis is that the incident provides me an opportunity to determine a stand now, which I could apply in the future. Establishing and shifting positions could influence and shape my values and beliefs systems.

d. Develop strategies. From positions, strategies could be developed and applied onto events of a similar nature.

Conclusion

8. The direction for the completed 5,000-word document for Activity One of Assignment Two will be the application of Tripp's technology to a chosen incident ("DEADLY BARRIERS - Cyclist didn't see them in dark" By Teh Jen Lee (2005)) to demonstrate its power in revealing the drivers creating the incident, and providing responses to it.

9. One possible presentation of the article could contain five key headers. These are:

a. Outline of what I understood as ‘critical incident’,

b. Explanation of the incident under review,

c. Briefs on the contexts within which the incident occurred. Including:

· Specific context of my workplace, and

· Broader political context.

d. Dilemmas for policy making evidenced by these incidents, and

e. Ways in which these dilemmas were/might be ‘settled’, which include a discussion on the notion of ‘policy settlement’.

Reference

Tripp, D. (1993). Critical incidents in teaching. Developing professional judgement. London: Routledge.

Burgum, M. and Bridge, C. (1997). Using critical incidents in professional education to develop skills of reflection and critical thinking.

Teh Jen Lee (16 July 2005). DEADLY BARRIERS - Cyclist didn't see them in dark, Singapore: The New Paper.

Policy Analysis - Influenza Pandemic Readiness and Response Plan

2007-09-03T23:17:00.000+08:00

Introduction

1. I was to asked to conduct a policy analysis using in parts and/or in combination any of the following five approaches:

Contexts of policy making,
Discourse analysis,
Post-structural critique,
Critical policy sociology, and
Study guide questions.

2. The write-up is to be presented in the structure and style of articles found traditionally in academic journals.

3. I believe the final 5,000-word document would reveal the following:

Focused analysis in relation to a critical issue or question,

Review broad developments in the field to locate my analysis,

Clarify how I have approached my analysis, and

Present my analysis.

4. In this 300 to 800-word write-up, I will offer my initial thoughts, ideas and insights on a critical issue in question, which could be used for this activity.

Critical Issue in Question

5. Influenza, which is a seasonal epidemic, causes an average of 14.8 deaths per 100,000 Singaporeans or 600 deaths a year in Singapore. All over, the health authorities’ key concern is the H5N1 strain of the avian influenza, which maybe capable of mutating into a human influenza that could cause a pandemic that sweeps the world and reduces her population, like the 1918’s "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe", a global disaster that killed 20 to 40 million people in just 18 months.

6. The first case of human infection was reported in January 2004 in Vietnam and Thailand. Since then, Cambodia, China, Laos, Indonesia, Turkey, Azerbaijan Iraq, Egypt, and Nigeria had reported H5N1 related human infection and deaths, while Japan, Romania, Serbia, Albania, and Poland had reported avian influenza in poultry.

7. WHO is particularly worried about the situation in Asia. Given the nature of poultry farming, proximity of bird and human, and poor sanitation, countries in Asia could become hot beds for incubating the virus and promoting efficient human-to-human transmission beyond the family cluster,

8. In addition, the rise of the middle income in Asia, and the rural occupants attracted to the affluence of cities, make the scare of another flu pandemic a very clear and present danger.

9. In light of these social developments, the Ministry of Health, Singapore, produced an Influenza Pandemic Readiness and Response Plan that lays out the policies for reducing avian flu intrusion and containment in Singapore.

Richness in the Analysis

10. The 22-page document with its ten annexes introduce me to the government’s polices on surveillance, education, containment, management, and communication of the pandemic

11. The plan, together with it briefing notes and ministerial press releases, provide a rich backdrop for policy analysis. For example:

Contexts of policy making - context of influence, of policy text production, of carriage of policy from one context to another

There are strong nationalistic and economic undertones influencing the construction of the policy, and the experience gained from the SARS incident, which killed 33 in Singapore in 2003, could be seen in the plan.

Post-structural critique - 5 questions of 'What', 'How', 'Why', 'Why Now', and 'What Are the Consequences'

The relations between H5N1, avian flu and the human influenza pandemic are concerns of the health authorities worldwide, and my research in the past flu pandemics, like the 1918 Spanish Flu, indicates catastrophic political, social and economical impact worldwide once human-to-human transmissions are efficient.

This article was first written on 26 Mar 2007 but was not further developed.

Essays on Policy and Governance - The References

2007-09-03T23:07:00.001+08:00

For these essays:

1. Is there a difference between policy and governance?

2. Describe a particular approach to policy analysis, identifying its strengths and weaknesses

Here are the references:

Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, Corporate Governance in the Public Services (London, CIPFA, May, 1994), p.6.

Colebatch, H.K. (2002) Policy (second edition). Concepts in the Social Sciences Series. Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6 & 7.

Dean, M. and Hindess, B. (1998) Governing Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

D. Osborne & T. Gaebler. (1992) Reinventing Government. Addison-Wesley, p.34.

Hall, Land, Parker & Webb. (1975) Singapore, Monash University, EDF6821 Policy and Governance, Reading Guide 1-3, 2007), p.107.

Hogwood, B. & Gunn, L. (1984) Policy Analysis for the Real World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp.12-31.

Kenway, J. (1990) Gender and Education Policy: A Call for New Directions. Geelong: Deakin University Press.

Offe, C. (1985) Disorganised Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.

Olssen, M. Codd, J. O-Neill, A. (2004) Education Policy: Globalisation, Citizenship and Demoncracy. London: Sage, pp.39-72.

Pierre, J. (2000) Debating Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rein. (1983) Singapore, Monash University, EDF6821 Policy and Governance, Reading Guide 1-3, 2007), p.110.

Rhodes, R.A.W. (1996) The New Governance: Governing without Government. Political Studies, XLIV: 652-667.

Rizvi & Kemmis. (1987) Singapore, Monash University, EDF6821 Policy and Governance, Reading Guide 1-3, 2007), p.113.

Smith. (1982) Singapore, Monash University, EDF6821 Policy and Governance, Reading Guide 1-3, 2007), p.111.

Taylor, S., Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. & Henry, M. (1997) Education Policy and the Politics of Change. London: Routledge.

Thompson, J.B. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Wilenski. (1986) Singapore, Monash University, EDF6821 Policy and Governance, Reading Guide 1-3, 2007), p.116.

Young. (1982) Singapore, Monash University, EDF6821 Policy and Governance, Reading Guide 1-3, 2007), p.107.

Describe a particular approach to policy analysis, identifying its strengths and weaknesses

2007-09-03T22:56:00.000+08:00

Introduction

1. In this essay, I will list the various approaches of policy analysis, and briefly describe the 'analysis policy parts' approach. I will attempt to identify its strengths and weaknesses, and in the process, propose a more ideal approach to analysing policy.

Types of Policy Analysis

2. The literature indicates that policy analysis provides insights into the discourse, ideology, genre and settlement of a particular policy. It uncovers answers to the 'what', 'how', 'why' (Kenway, 1990, p.24), 'why now' and 'what are the consequences' (Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard & Henry, 1997, p.40) of a policy.

3. By understanding policy in this way, we are more able to appreciate the complexity of the policy, able to communicate its intent, motivate to bring the resources together to create its outcomes, and accurately refine the policy.

4. There are five different ways of analysing policy:

a. Analysing its parts
b. Focusing on particular contexts
c. Asking basic questions
d. Identifying its discourses
e. Looking through different lenses

Analysis Policy Parts

5. In this approach, policy is the target to which a set of questions are aimed at. These questions can be organised into five main areas:

a. Policy production. This is the 'springboard' to 'policy parts' analysis. Here, we uncover the actors behind the creation of the policy (Young, 1982), and unveil the processes (Hall, Land, Parker & Webb, 1975) and influences these actors and their stakeholders assert in rationalising it (Hogwood & Gunn, 1984). These actions leave a mark on the character (Hogwood & Gunn, 1984) as well as the type (Offe, 1975 & 1985) of policy created, which by themselves deserve their own set of questions and investigations.

b. Context. We can also examine a policy from it political, economical, ideological, historical, and contemporary context. Context is always paramount. Policies come into existence because their context calls for them (Rein, 1983). In execution, context continues to invoke constraints (Smith, 1982) on its approaches and methods. Without context, policy has no meaning, which renders the analysis improbable and meaningless. So, we are looking for the contextual drivers that bring the actors together who brought the policy into existence.

c. Content. In exploring the policy content, we take to deconstructing the policy document to understand its overarching principles, demonstrative power through its styles and language structures (Rizvi & Kemmis, 1987), and saliency of its goals, and reconstructing the policy discourses to discover the logic and interrelationships between context and discourses (Thompson, 1984). We may as well say that we are looking for the invisible hands exercised to enforce the policy.

d. Implementation. In analysing implementation, we look at the key success factors of proper policy implementation; we basically asking 'what caused the success or failure of the policy?' These include the exercise of political will, choice of implementation strategies (Wilenski, 1986), realistic time frame and number of stages in the adopted strategy (Rein, 1983), deployment of resources, and cultivation of supportive institutionalised structures.

e. Evaluation. Finally, in evaluation, we either try to predict the success of a policy or assess its success after implementation. The policy is assessed through pre-policy and/or post-policy research for its consistency and coherence throughout its formulation to implementation process, and by making evaluative comparisons to other contemporary policies and social realities, and ideal policy.

Strengths

6. Looking at the policy analysis framework described above, I can see two key strengths:

a. It is relatively structured with five distinct areas, which seems to trace a linear path from the birth of the policy to its implementation and eventual evaluations. Given these, we can examine the policy according to it distinct segments and understand the specifics of 'what', 'how', 'why' 'why now' and 'what are the consequences' of a policy with greater clarity. The eventual story about the policy does come across uncluttered and unambiguous.

b. As the stages and parts of this analysis framework is clear, it is also easy to determine and generate the questions to ask policy. We will be able to concentrate questions only about the originality of the policy during 'policy production' stage, and questions only about political will at the 'policy implementation' stage. This makes the investigation direct, distinct and uncompromising.

Weaknesses

7. However, it is the strengths of the mentioned approach that give rise to three obvious weaknesses:

a. It is not necessarily the case that the path of policy process follows the one shown in the 'analysis of policy parts' framework. Colebatch (2002, p.50, figure 5.1) shows a more comprehensive version of the 'stage' model of the policy process. Even if the framework truncates some of the stages, it does not seems to incorporate questions about 'problem recognition' in the analysis.

b. It cannot be assumed that the sum of the parts is a good indication of the total. In this case, we cannot make it mean that we understand the policy because we comprehend the parts. We cannot ignore the intra-actions within the parts and interactions between the parts for something as dynamic as policy creation, development and implementation.

c. Analysis by it parts is just one approach of policy analysis. There are four other approaches, which have their distinctive benefits. It is desirable to adopt a more inclusive approach by absorbing the flavours of approaches like 'identifying its discourses' and 'looking through different lenses' into the exercise. Also, according to Colebatch (2002, p.92), there are social sciences of structuration, institutional organisational theory and governmentality are useful and could add new insights into understanding of the policy, which are not addressed the described approach.

Conclusion

8. In this article, I have explained the reasons for analysing policy and the approaches to do so. I have also briefly described the 'analysis policy parts' approach and expounded on its strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Finally, towards the end of this write-up, I indicated the importance of being inclusive by allowing other approaches into the framework so that the weakness of one approach can be strengthen by another approach.

This article was first completed on 10 Mar 2007

Is there a difference between policy and governance?

2007-09-03T22:48:00.000+08:00

Introduction

1. In this essay, I will describe my initial thoughts to the question. Following this, I will list some of the definitions of ‘Policy’ and ‘Governance’ presented in the literatures, and in the process I will highlight their differences. Towards the conclusion, I will present their similarities, and propose how policy and governance could be seen as grapevines and their trellis.

Personal Views

2. My initial views of policy and governance are simplistic and mutually exclusive. These are rooted in my memories and experience in dealing with my former organisation.

3. I see policies as documented statements expressing the important ‘concerns and activities’ (Colebatch, 2002, p.8) of an organisation. They are so important that these statements ‘set limits on the behaviours of’ (Colebatch, 2002, p.9) her workforce.

4. As for governance, I see it as frameworks of ‘overseeing and controlling’ (Rhodes, 1996) how these concerns are addressed and how these activities are carried out. I do not see governance as activities carried out to bring policy outcomes into existence. Rather, I see governance as separate occurrences (Rhodes, 1996, p. 654) that ensure policy related activities are done within certain accepted and agreed norms or boundaries.

5. After reading some of the articles on both topics, I found some alignments between my personal views and those provided in the literatures.

Defining Policy

6. Most of the readings suggest that at the macro level, policy could be defined in three board ways:

Policy as disposition, intervention, and allocation,
Policy as intention, documentation and in-use, and
Policy as text, discourse, (Ball, 1994) and ideology

7. Hogwood & Gunn (1984) was specific when they unveiled the ten different uses of the word ‘policy’. Of these, I find affinity with 'Policy as an expression of general purpose or desired state of affairs' since the intent of this statement seems to correspond with my initial view of policy as important ‘concerns’ of an organisation.

8. Colebatch (2002, p.9) described policy as ‘labelling thoughts about the way the world is and the way it might be, and of justifying practices and organisational arrangements…’. This definition denotes that policy has three central attributes of order, which gains consistency in behaviours; of authority, that enforces compliance; and expertise in using the policy to solve problems. These, I see as mechanisms in addressing the concerns in the form of 'activities' in the organisation.

9. Nevertheless, lt seems that there is no one definition of what policy really is. It comes across to me as if each author attempts to describe the boundaries of the envelope that keeps policy within, similar to describing a fish by talking about the aquarium that contains it.

10. However, by referencing these with the Colebatch’s vertical dimension of policy, these perspectives become clearer. I can see that these authors are trying to talk about the description, creation, and transmission of policies, their justifications and ‘authorised decisions’ (Colebatch, 2002, p.22) downwards to the subordinates to have them bring these policies outcomes into existence.

Defining Governance

11. Most usage of governance ‘denotes a more complex organisational framework for governing, but retaining a central role for the government’ (Pierre, 2000). The demands for greater social participation and engagement (Dean & Hindess, 1998) forces the public sector to adopt open market practises, managerialism, and new institutional economics (Rhodes, 1996), to delivery public services more effectively and efficiently. Since the government is now comprised of stakeholders not within her control in the traditional sense, governance is the only means affordable to the government some control over how police outcomes are produced responsibly and responsively. Thus, government can only steer now, and not row (Osborne & Gaebler (1992) like in the past.

12. Rhodes described six distinct meanings of governance, and I understand governance as 'corporate governance', 'New Public Management', and ‘Good Governance’ better as these clearly indicated governance is a separate activity from policy.

13. I think Rhodes’ simulative definition of governance as ‘self-organising, interorganisational networks’ as governing structures for authoritatively allocating resources and exercising control and co-ordination best describe the nature of governance from policing. By referencing this to Colebatch’s horizontal dimension of policy, it seems all these governance related activities are actions related to policy of ‘structuring of action’ (Colebatch, 2002, p.23) so that the accountability of non-governmental participants are addressed when public services are delivered to the public in an environment of shrinking government and influence vis-à-vis non-governmental entities.

14. In the face of these, it is quite clear that there is a striking difference between policy and governance. The formal addresses the contents in the form of 'what's', while the latter talks about the boundary in which the 'how's' are carried out.

Grapevines and Their Trellis

15. Up to this point, the impressions I get from these readings indicate that the academia is attempting to converge on an acceptable definition of what policy and governance should and could be. It is this need to converge that perhaps indicates that there are also many similarities between policy and governance.

16. One suspicion I harbour is that if policy involves behaviour as well as intentions, the same would apply to governance. The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy recommended ‘holding individuals responsible for their actions by a clear allocation of responsibilities and clearly defined role’ (1994), which must be 'an expression of general purpose or desired state of affairs'. Maybe, there is no difference in policy and governance except for the frame of mind or the context the expected behaviour and purpose is intended for.

17. Going back to Colebatch’s ‘three central elements’ of order, authority and expertise in policy, I begin to understand that without setting the context, it is very difficult to differentiate policy from governance. Figure 3.1, the vertical and horizontal dimensions of policy (Colebatch, 2002, p.24), shows vertical policy and horizontal governance while separated by two boundaries, are overlapped in many ways, because there is order, authority and expertise related to statements found in policy as well as in governance.

18. We could see policies as grapevines. Controlled by its own set of rules called genes, it will grow and bear grapes, which are important outputs for our champagnes and wines. However, vines are basically weak bushes. They need physical support to govern the spread of the branches to keep the weight of the grapes off them. Trellis has specific rules that determine how the weight on the bush is supported and spread out without obstructing the growth of the grapes.

Conclusion

19. From the readings and writings, I proposed that policies and governance are different because of the context of their application. However, there are also significant similarities in their production and distribution.