Organizational Leadership

Competency Name: Organizational Leadership Capstone
Competency Statement: Evaluate a strategic organizational issue from multiple perspectives to recommend effective leadership approaches and an action plan
Final Assessment Title: Strategic Issue Analysis
Competency Objectives:
Assess the implications of leadership theory, ethics, diversity, team leadership, and organizational theory on a complex organizational issue.
Apply leadership strategies, including a personal definition of leadership, to resolve a significant organizational challenge.
Program Learning Outcome(s): PLO 1: Leadership: Assess an organizational issue from multiple leadership perspectives to recommend solutions.

Purpose of this Strategic Issue Analysis
The purpose of this Final Assessment is to provide you the opportunity to integrate your learning of ethics, diversity, team leadership, and organizational theory and demonstrate your mastery of Organizational Leadership.

Items Required for Submission
You will complete a comprehensive paper that is a minimum of 15 pages in length (12-point Times New Roman font, standard 1” margins, does not include title or reference pages) with a reference list of at least twenty independent entries. APA 6th edition guidelines apply.

Step ONE: Identify a Strategic Issue for Analysis
Revisit Learning Objective 2, Topic 1, “Strategic Issue Analysis: Environmental Scanning.” There, in the Learning Activity titled “Environmental Scan: Organizational Issue,” you began the process of reading about leadership challenges and exploring a significant organizational leadership challenge you have witnessed, either in your own organization or one that you are confidently familiar with.
Reflect upon your Learning Journal notes where you began analyzing the issue and proposing recommendations. If your Tutorial Faculty has approved your strategic issue in the related Milestone Activity titled “Strategic Issue Analysis: Environmental Scanning – Determining the Organizational Issue,” you may build upon this early analysis to complete the analysis below. Keep in mind that your issue must have significant leadership implications that can be analyzed from multiple perspectives to draw valid conclusions and recommend action.
The strategic issue could be a problem or opportunity, such as a merger, reorganization, or implementation of a new policy or system. In analyzing and addressing the issue you must

position yourself as the leader. For example, you might choose to examine how to lead the transition to becoming a paperless organization. You may rather choose to address this issue as the internal project manager, while others may analyze it as an external consultant guiding the management team.
Included in this section will be your Environmental Scan. You have begun building the framework for this in the “Strategic Issue Analysis: Environmental Scanning – Determining the Organizational Issue,” “Organizational Dynamics, Team Building, and Change Management,” and “Leadership Effectiveness and Action Planning” Milestone Activities.
These are where you were asked to consider the state of the organization by gathering information about the local economy and demographics that may influence the organization’s well-being, by identifying the organization’s competitors, and if there are any notable trends, opportunities, and threats that might impact the organization. This will help you to categorize the organization’s strengths and weaknesses.

Step TWO: Write a Strategic Issue Analysis Paper
Once the strategic issue (that has been approved by your Tutorial Faculty) is identified, you will apply relevant course theories and concepts from your previous MAOL courses to analyze the issue and assess the implications on the organization’s short and long-term strategy and objectives, considering the insights gained from leadership theories, diversity and inclusion, ethics, organizational dynamics, teams, and change theory in addressing the issue.
For example, in addressing the issue of becoming a paperless organization, you would assess what ethical issues could occur and how the leader could address them. And how can diversity and inclusion, the four-frame model from organizational dynamics, team collaboration, and change models facilitate implementation?
The multiple perspective analysis will enable you to determine critical factors and recommend two or more leadership theories or models that would enhance leadership effectiveness in taking action.
Strategic Issue Analysis Paper Content:
❏ Issue Description (completed in STEP 1)
❏ In 1 – 2 pages, concisely describe the strategic organizational issue and its potential impact on organizational effectiveness. The narrative should discuss the need to address the issue, its impact on the organization’s short and long- range goals, key players (names optional), and the leadership challenges faced.
❏ Leadership Analysis
❏ Examine the strategic issue from multiple leadership perspectives demonstrating

your knowledge of the importance and value of each to organizational and leadership effectiveness. For each topic listed below, apply relevant theories and concepts covered in your competency to analyze the issue and assess the implications on the organization’s short and long-term strategy and objectives:
❏ Change – Analyze the issue from a change management perspective.
❏ Collaboration – Analyze the issue from a team perspective.
❏ Diversity – Examine how diversity and inclusiveness contributed to the issue.
❏ Ethics – Analyze the issue from an ethics perspective identifying ethical issues created by the situation and proposing an ethical decision-making framework to discuss how you, as the leader, would address the ethical issues.
❏ Organizational Dynamics – Analyze the issue using the four-frame model considering potential structural, human resource, political, and cultural implications.

❏ Analysis
❏ After reviewing your Environmental Scan, integrate and synthesize your analyses of the issue from the multiple perspectives of organizational dynamics, change, collaboration, ethics, and diversity.
❏ What are the critical factors causing the issue?
❏ What are two or more leader theories and/or models discussed in Learning Objective 1 that would enhance leadership effectiveness in addressing the issue or that would best describe the challenges facing the organization?
❏ Elaborate on your answer with specific examples, citing case studies and articles from this competency.
❏ Recommendations
❏ Recommend an action plan to address the strategic organizational issue supported by evidence and data derived from your leadership analyses; the plan should be specific. Discuss why and how the recommended action plan is aligned with and enables the achievement of the organization’s short and long-range goals.

Step THREE: Complete Checklist for Submission
Before you submit your work, check to see if you have met the criteria noted below. Did you:

❏ Comprehensively describe a strategic organizational issue with significant leadership implications?
❏ Fully identify the impact on short and long-term organizational goals and key players?

❏ Comprehensively identify and analyze all relevant ethical issues created by the situation?
❏ Propose an appropriate ethical decision-making framework for the leader to address the ethical issues?
❏ Comprehensively analyze the issue using the 4-frame model, fully describing structural, human resource, political, and cultural causes and implications?
❏ Demonstrate an in-depth understanding of organizational dynamics?

❏ Analyze the issue from a team’s perspective identifying if and why team effectiveness is contributing to the issue?
❏ Fully describe how to enhance team collaboration?

❏ Demonstrate an in-depth understanding of team leadership?

❏ Thoroughly examines how diversity and inclusiveness contributed to the issue?

❏ Propose action steps towards the creation of an environment or culture that embraces diversity and promotes inclusion?
❏ Apply APA 7th edition guidelines?

Step FOUR: Submit Your Work
● Your completed files should be submitted through the Final Assessment page of your competency.
● Please note, for files smaller than 10MB (e.g., most Word documents), use the corresponding “+UPLOAD STUDENT FILE” button to upload your Final Assessment documents. For larger files of any type (e.g., voice-over PowerPoint files, video

presentations), please use the optional TEXT EDITOR to provide a URL where your tutorial faculty can download your file.
● How you create a download URL is up to you, but various free online providers, including Google Drive and Dropbox, offer this service. Please make sure that the URL you provide can be accessed by anyone with the link. For further instructions on how to create public links for uploaded files, consult the support pages for your chosen provider.