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Microsoft Word - MGT811 Assessment 1, Critical Incident Report, Example Document .docx MGT 811 – Critical Incident Report 1 1. Introduction Currently, there is a presence of an incident in the media relating to the CEO of the company. In detail, the CEO has been accused of sexual harassment as the COO of another corporate. However, the CEO obstinately denies these actions; despite the consistency in the stories of two subordinates. This report aims to produce an analysis of the professional manager's skills, capabilities, and behaviour to address the supervision problem in the organisation and recommendations for the Board to assess the current CEO. Moreover, the scope of the report will base on fundamental personal competencies leadership theories, namely servant leadership and emotional intelligence, to demonstrate the standard of a manager to the Board. 2. Situation analysis Firstly, in the position of a COO – he must understand the harassment policies and the negative impact of these actions to him individually and the corporate collectively (Hamlin & Hoffman, 2002). Nevertheless, he believes he has the permission to misconduct as he portrays himself as the leader with power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Kunstman & Maner, 2011). The likeliness of the incident to happen depends on the accuracy of the subordinates' statements. In this case, they are similar in details, without knowledge of each other. An example of this matter is Harvey Weinstein; his victims are his business partners and employees; they all had the same accusation along with unique, similar aspects (Hope, 2017; Farrow, 2017). Therefore, there is a high chance that the incident did occur, and it reflects the immoral leadership of the current CEO. Thus, an effective leader should follow a set of critical competencies. 3. Key personal competencies There are multiple leadership competencies that reflect ethical and practical leadership; however, two key capabilities (servant leadership and emotional intelligence) will be evaluated corresponding to the recent situation of the company (Jokinen, 2005; Stoller, 2008; Harwiki, 2016). 2 3.1 Servant Leadership Servant leadership is a model that sets serving others above all. A servant leader encourages cooperation and power-sharing in decision making (Greenleaf, 1973; Greenleaf, 2003). Figure 1 displays ten characteristics of a servant leader; three of them are directly associated with the incident (highlighted in red). These three traits will demonstrate a suitable CEO for the organization. Figure 1 Servant Leadership Characteristics (Spears, 1995) 3 3.1.1 Listening Research stated that listening skills and comprehending others’ communication approach enhance employee loyalty (Mayfield & Mayfield, 2002). Moreover, active listening is a significant element that includes sympathetic actions (eye contact, appropriate gestures, and expressions) (Robbins & Hunsaker, 2011). Consequently, a suitable manager should be able to embrace feelings and morale as an essential matter in communication (Wolvin, 2005). Hence, the manager should be aware of their workforce and listen to people’s opinions, thus able to treat them with respect instead of exploiting them (Reave, 2005). 3.1.2 Empathy Empathy is the skill to acknowledge and appreciate others’ emotions, which helps the managers to develop an association of mutual trust with staff (Mahsud, Yukl, & Prussia, 2010). Their values contain subordinates’ wellbeing and commitment to support, improve, and inspire them (Page & Wong, 2000). In a way, it is also to motivate the workforce towards the firm’s goals as people will be happier and perform more effectively (McKee, 2016). Thus, the lack of empathy is the leading contributor to sexual harassment occurrences (Flaherty, 2015; Albergotti, 2017; Michallon, 2020). In this case, if the CEO were able to be in the employees’ positions and recognize their emotions subjected to his behaviours, he would be considerably less likely to perform these acts (Gourguechon, 2017). 3.1.3 Healing Various academics have proposed that healing is among the most potent abilities for successful management (Spears, 1998; Dacher, 1999). Emotional healing defines a leader’s obligation to adopting nonphysical revival from distress. Mentors using emotional healing are particularly sympathetic and excellent listeners; they establish secure environments for workers to express their personal and professional opinions (Barbuto & Wheeler, 2006). Therefore, it can be stated that a manager with an emotional healing skill would be more likely to discuss and train the workforce towards clear harassment policies rather than perform these actions and let the employees undergo the trauma (Jones, 2017). Criticism 1: A CEO with the indicated three traits will be less likely to abuse their employees as they would communicate with subordinates, support them emotionally and physically in order to create a healthy workplace. However, since its first studied in the 1970s, the servant leadership style is not entirely perfect as it is slightly outdated and can be considered insufficient to some organisations as servant leaders might not be able to challenge their workforce to grow (Greenleaf, 1973; Heskett, 2013; Fox, 2019). 4 3.2 Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence (EI) incorporates awareness of an individual’s own emotions (Boyatzis, Koman, & Wolff, 2008). In a team, the leader with EI will have the ability to constructs emotional capacity and develops social capital, which leads to effectiveness (Jordan & Troth, 2004; Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts, 2002). These theories have progressed into four clusters shown in Figure 2, which contains individual and social competencies (Boyatzis, Goleman, & Rhee, 2000; Goleman, 2001). Additionally, the social awareness cluster will be examined towards the CEO’s actions since the incident affects not only him but the company as a whole. Figure 2 Four clusters of EI and their competencies (Goleman, 1998) 5 3.2.1 Social Awareness Social Awareness indicates how people manage relationships and others' feelings, requests, and interests. This cluster involves three competencies: Empathy, Organizational Awareness, and Service Orientation (Goleman, 2001). As Empathy capability has been stated in servant leadership, the other two traits will be further evaluated. 3.2.1.1 Organizational awareness Organizational Awareness is the acknowledgment of the current situations in the company (emotionally and politically) (Sala, 2001). Druskat and Wolff (2001) found that productive firms had a better understanding of the organization's culture. Likewise, culture is a complicated context that must be aligned to encourage ethical behavior (Trevino & Nelson, 2016). An effective leader should be familiar with the internal policies, codes of conduct, training programs, as well as programs for handling performance and objectives. Therefore, a leader with organizational awareness would likely follow the company's established guidelines and aware of the misconduct consequences (Kolthoff, Erakovich, & Lasthuizen, 2010). Hence, the possibility of a manger harassing their employees is very less likely. 3.2.1.2 Service orientation Service orientation is the ability to understand and offer services to others' needs (Hopkins, O'Neil, & Williams, 2007). This competency is often more critical to individual contributors than Organizational Awareness because it emphasizes supporting clients and customers (Bennis, 2003). In this case, a leader who is service-oriented supposed to understand employee behaviour as it directly influences their job performance of satisfying business partners' requests (Kandampully & Solnet, 2005; Popli & Rizvi, 2015). Hence, if the CEO of the company harasses or pressure the staff; they tend to be less productive and get distracted from the goals of meeting clients' needs (Ashraf & Khan, 2014). In other words, a leader without this trait would be more likely to mistreat the employees and cause an emotional disturbance, which can affect the outcome of the organization. Criticism 2: An ideal CEO will consist of EI with the competency of social awareness, which makes them less capable of harming the employees as they are fully conscious of the company policies and mindful of the employee's feelings and behaviours. Nonetheless, EI alone or too much EI does not assure perfect leadership as emotionally intelligent managers can be manipulative, self-centered, and untruthful, just as they can be selfless, attentive on the general welfare, and highly principled (Hicks & Dess, 2008; Mittal & Sindhu, 2012). 6 4. Board Recommendations In general, it is recommended to the Board that a suitable CEO should have EI and follow the servant leadership style. Comprehensively, the CEO will have the capabilities to listen and empathize with employees yet aware of the company's guidelines on the code of conduct. Hence, there will be a minor likelihood of abusing and harassing employees in the workplace. Consequently, the report also recommends the Board to examine the current CEO to investigate his qualifications to continue to work for the organisation by developing a specific EI and servant leadership assessments. Figure 3 displays an example of the competency assessment that the Board can send out to the current CEO. Otherwise, the report suggests the Board inform the recruitment department regarding the replacement of the current CEO. Figure 3 Examples of EI (left) and Servant Leadership (right) assessments 7 5. Conclusion In conclusion, the report has examined the current vital situation that would negatively affect the company. Thus, the study proposes the key personal competencies that a CEO should possess in order to minimise the likelihood of harassment in the office. In particular, a