NAME: SYED AKIF ALI SHAH

ID: 021-18-43851
SUBMITTED TO: DR. SHAHNAWAZ ADIL
COURSE: LEADERSHIP (FINAL EXAM SPRING 2020)
CLASS TIMING: SUNDAY 8:30AM – 11:30AM

Question 1 (1):
Mr. Nasir’s head of department has a conscientiousness personality trait and Mrs. Tariq’s
head of department possess neuroticism personality trait.

Question 1 (2):

a. The dyadic relationship between Mr. Nasir’s department and his head of
department is mostly formal and does not prefer informal means of
communication like calls and messages. Instead their preference is to
communicate using formal channels of communication. They demand strict
compliance of task completion schedules from his subordinates and keeps the
department’s flow of work in a planned manner. Whereas Mrs. Tariq’s head and
his subordinate’s dyadic relationship tends to be more informal, this can be useful
and positive for the working environment However, the subordinates follow
leaders in stressful situations therefore they also perform poorly in difficult
situations and fails in stressful instances.
b. Mr. Nasir’s head of department can push his subordinates to have higher level of
efficiency and plan to work in a systematic way with all the employees working
in-sync with each other, which enhances subordinates performance. Whereas Mrs.
Tariq’s head of department and his subordinates are low achievers and moody and
emotional who cannot work in a stressful environment, their in-role job
performance is unacceptable as they do not perform their duties in assigned time.
c. Mr. Nasir’s head of department will have positive impact on voluntary work and
efforts made by the employees to draw attention and show the departments head
of their performance, which will be rewarded by his superior. Similarly, Mrs.
Tariq’s head of department’s subordinates would not want to be highlighted and
do not normally shows efforts of an OCB possessing employee.

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 d. Mr. Nasir’s department will have overall higher performance as compare to the
Mrs. Tariq’s department due to their head of department having different
personality traits and subordinates following leaders in stressful situations.

Question 1 (3):
No, it is not possible for a person to exhibit both extremes personalities in different situations,
the person may have some characteristics of other personality trait but not much that he may
may called the other. Also managers can try to adjust themselves according to the situation
and reduce the level of stress by managing the situation that suits them best, but to
completely change their personality trait is not possible. For example, a moody person may
try be less moody to increase his efficiency because people with different moods will achieve
different level of efficiency.

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Question 2 (1):
Creativity will be the most important leadership factor because creativity is the result of
problem solving skills (analytical intelligence), domain-specific intelligence (practical
intelligence) and creative intelligence (ability to create novel and useful work). Creativity can
only be achieved if a leader possess the first two intelligence levels that is he can deal with
the problems arising in his department or field intelligently.
To further elaborate the above argument we will use the example of automobile sector and
the derivative market management. The automobile sector had been in losses for some years
now due to the fluctuating currency and now due to COVID-19 situation. Now the CEOs of
the car manufacturing industries have the ability of problem solving in their fields so they do
the process of creative thinking and thought out two alternatives first one is to lower the
prices which will increase substantially increase their sales. The other one is the inflation of
prices, this option seems odd given their already low sales however if we deliberate one
option 2 we can understand that the purchasing power of people is ever decreasing and the
further pandemic situation will prolong it. In addition, those cars can be stored in their
warehouses for a longer period and they can overcome this by delaying their production.
The other example is of the derivative market where almost all businesses invest in to
mitigate their losses so they invest in these markets in advance of their actual business deals.
They invest in different currency and commodity derivatives to deal with such a low revenue-
generating situation of COVID- 19. These options are result of their creative thinking.

Question 2 (2):
We start the creative thinking process by brainstorming and develop a possible number of
options. Once through divergent thinking multiple original/novel and useful options have
been identified we then stop and perform a cost benefit analysis of the discussed options. The
results of cost benefit analysis will converge our efforts using convergent thinking into favor
of a particular option as a result of our divergent thinking, here this is a situational leadership
situation where we have to adjust to the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

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Question 3 (1):
Males managers usually associate themselves with the higher authority or the one that holds
power over them. They cooperate with and build relationships with powerful organizational
members. They improve these relations by increasing networking with such individuals in
return they support his views in meetings. Whereas female managers usually seek power by
staying informed about their work and stay ahead of the rest of the team by performing and
excelling, this way they exert some amount of power over others by use and restricting
knowledge.
Male managers also try to be as flexible as possible in situations where females may not be
comfortable to accept it initially for example: working late, here males usually give leave to
the females gaining some amount of political power over them.

Question 3 (2):
Males and females influence their bosses in different way but in a high-performance work
systems environment males and females have to be ethically honest, respectful and
trustworthy to their bosses. The only difference can be seen in the way they influence is that
females tends to care for others while males tend to care for themselves. This difference can
be seen in many aspects of work be it planning or interpersonal relationships, females
generally keep others interests in mind as well while males do not. The personality of the
male and females managers matters the most, as that manager will automatically be closer to
their bosses. These differences stays the same throughout their career.

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Question 4:
Our vice president has instructed the sales manager to establish 5 sales teams covering major
hospitals of Karachi to sell their health and safety equipment (assuming our company will
offer personal protective equipment for health workers). Our sales manager has formed five
teams of 10 members. They receive instructions from the manager to be connected via
Microsoft Teams and share their progress on SharePoint using their official outlook profiles
given the pandemic situation. The forming stage and the first meeting took place on Teams
and all were assigned their tasks and shared with each member of the group. Some of the
teams were assigned private hospitals and some were assigned govt. hospitals. All team
members of each team understood their tasks. Then the team members started to face role
conflicts as some of the sales team members were senior and should have been given task of
visiting private hospitals given better treatment of sales teams there. This is the stage of
storming and the start of mid-point transition point where sales teams could not achieve their
targets and selected team members were given ultimatum to cover impossible tasks of
covering multiple hospitals in a day this explains the intra sender role conflict. Once all the
the team members started to settle in their teams they all had private group meeting to discuss
the conflicting issues that were between the teams so that performance oriented working
conditions could be achieved, this marks the start of performing stage and the phase 2 of
punctuated equilibrium model. As the time to deliver the targeted hospitals came close their
performance increase substantially and achieved the targets getting to the conclusion phase.
These teams has to resolve their intra group conflicts as well as inter group conflicts they
faced during sales of these PPEs.

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Question 5 (a):
Policastro (1995) has given the concept of creative intuition which means that a person when
has deliberated upon an a number of ideas for a given problem starts to move and think and
feel about the right solution and tends to select that one that he feels to be the right in the
intimation stage of Wallas (1926) cognitive process of creative model. Sadler-Smith (2015)
incorporates the same idea that Policastro presented in 1995 in the “creative intuition: an
integrated review”. And used it to illustrate the intimation stage using the concept of fringe
consciousness.

Question 5 (b):
A start-up wants to introduce a way to reduce the carbon footprint in the city. They
brainstorm and out of many ideas that included the CO 2 filtration plants and vertical
gardening. They used the first stage of preparation to accumulate the ideas. Then comes the
stage of incubation, the management is left with two ideas to choose from they think about its
pros and cons consciously and unconsciously by diverting their efforts to other validation
processes of these business plans. Third is the stage in between incubation and illumination
called intimation, here the management start to feel positively towards the vertical gardening
concept and starts to visualize its impacts and implementation on commercial level, after this
is the illumination stage where from the accumulation of ideas one idea just clicks. That idea
is the vertical gardening for buildings. Last stage is the verification stage here the
management collects all the evidence for their selected idea and calculations of costs to be
presented in a pitch to the venture capitalists.

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