Certainly needs to be addressed: \"Personally, I have experienced mergers, organ

Question

Certainly needs to be addressed: "Personally, I have experienced mergers, organizational restructuring, downsizing, rightsizing, and leveraging. In each change management had to be prepared to address potential fallout, erratic departures out of fear or uncertainty (Manning, 2015)."

Respond: Regarding you are describing phenomena which took place on a huge scale from the early 80's down to the present day. Some refer to this as an attack on the middle and working class by the economic and power elite. They assert that many competent people have been forced by these mechanisms into the part-time, contracting, gig-economy, working for what they can get, and with neither job security nor benefits. Regardless of the motives which shaped it, the gig economy is real. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about the motives, but we must all account for and deal with this phenomenon as we address organizational and team leadership. A team cannot be effective if it is bounded by a false ideology.

For further discussion. Is not the concept and implementation of a team predicated on the idea that the team members are affectively attached to the organization, loyal to it as it is to them? The temping, part-time, contracting, and off-shoring certainly provide little evidence of organizational loyalty to its people. Does that make this literature and course on teams and team leadership just an academic discourse? What are your thoughts on this?

Explanation / Answer

Certainly, needs to be addressed. But organizations can have better ways to address the needs rather than showing distrust to it people by taking steps like downsizing, rightsizing and restructuring.

The role of the leaders is to protect the people working for them. They must protect the people working under them even if it demands personal sacrifices by them! Leaders enjoy all the perks and benefits coming from the hard work of people working for them. These perks and benefits do not come for free. The cost of leadership is high. A leader must sacrifice in order to protect the people working for them. This is the only way to gain loyalty from the people working for them. If a team doesn't feel safe, it cannot be effective. If I don't feel safe, I won't take risks and would play safe. Moreover, if I don't feel safe I won't accept my faults and would try to blame others for my mistake. This cascades into distrust in the team and suddenly everybody is playing safe. A team cannot be effective in such a situation. It is the job of a leader to make the people feel safe, so people can perform with any fear. So people can trust each other and combine their efforts in a collaborative manner.   

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