Word count: 3500-4000

Question one:

There appears to be much consensus in the leadership literature that leaders and leadership are vital in today’s organisation. Drawing upon both mainstream functionalist perspectives and critical leadership studies discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement.

Here you need to engage with both bodies of literature – a good text for this is Leadership by Carroll, Ford and Taylor (2019), also consider some of the more contemporary approaches to leadership such as authentic, distributive, relational and systematic (see Uhl-Bien and Ospina work on this) what are the implications of such approaches? Do we need leaders and if what sort of leaders do we need?

Question Two

How will contemporary issues such as Brexit and Covid impact an organisations recruitment and selection practices, policies and procedures in the next decade?

Here I would draw upon future of work studies and the networked organisation (Chris Forde at Leeds University has some papers on this), also consider some of the intergenerational aspects of this for example three generations working within the same organisation – are they inherent tensions here. You may also like to draw upon approaches to work force planning, the psychological contact and training and development and importantly issues of equality and diversity.

Question Three

What do organisations need to consider when implementing best practice performance management systems?

This question should consider best practice approaches to PM and issues around line management involvement and issues of fairness and ethical behaviour. Training and development of managers is key to successful implementation and effective operation. Also consider some of the contentions of PM – for example bias, exploitation and the psychological contract – you may also wish to consider how effective such practices are when we are mainly working for home.

Question Four

Describe the key concepts in learning and development and are these fit for purpose in a post Covid world?

Covid has certainly changed organisational responses to HRD, but what does good practice look like in the context of a pandemic and what have we learnt from it- you may wish to draw upon management of change literature and organisational responses to it. Also consider some of the literature around home working and the implications of it -of which is there much. Also CIPD has conducted some very recent studies which document some of the approaches to this.

Question Five

What are the main objectives of reward management systems and how has best practice influenced the development of them?

Think about the extent to which these are fair and ethical especially from a gendered perspective and what sort of behaviour they drive? Here visit French and Raven (1985) work on reward power. You may also wish to look at Tourish (2013) dark side of transformational leadership where he reviews how reward power at Enron drove unethical behaviour and that of Rhodes and Bloom (2018) CEO society. More broadly consider the economic, psychological and motivational consequence of reward management systems- see CIPD for this.