Leadership Is "Having an Irrational Sense of Hope"

NANYANG BUSINESS SCHOOL MBA 2012-2013 TRIMESTER 1 B6018 LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR Course Coordinator/Instructor: Assoc. Prof Lim Beng Chong Office: S3-B2B-63 / E-mail : [e-mail] Class Schedule: Wed evenings 6:15pm - 9:30 pm (or Saturday mornings 9:00 am -12:00 noon for extra/postponed sessions) Class Venue: NTU @ one-north SR 502 COURSE DESCRIPTION A leader is a man (woman) who has the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do, and like it – Harry S. Truman (1954) Few organization and management issues have attracted as much interest and research work as leadership. From politics to the business world to military institutions, people are always searching for that someone, whom they called LEADER, to lead and inspire the people to achieve success or to bring about change. So what is leadership? There are many definitions of leadership in organizations. Almost every author of books has one. Bass (1990), after reviewing the literature, suggests that there are at least 12 different approaches to the definition. What is your definition of leadership? What type of leader are you? How can you be a better leader to your work team or organization? I hope you will begin to think about these questions as you embark on your leadership journey with me in this course. Essentially, effective leaders are those who can mobilize others to get extraordinary or exceptional things done in their work teams or organizations. In today’s organizations, managers are not only responsible for the planning, organizing and controlling functions in their work teams or organizations; they have to accomplish these goals by leading their people. Hence, their success as managers is dependent on their ability to motivate and inspire others. In other words, being leaders of their people. From this perspective, success and failure as managers rest squarely on the ability of the managers to understand and manage people at work. Therefore, critical to leadership success