reflection

Reflection1

Ch. 3--Ethical Ideology--What is your ethical ideology? How does this impact your job and role as a student? What ethical dilemmas have you been faced with? How have you handled them?

For part one of the Chapter Three assessment, I received an idealism score of 26 points, ranking me with high idealism. I received a relativism score of 22 points, ranking me with moderate relativism. I do not think I fit in one of the four categories completely. I think moral rules are imperative and your response to a dilemma also depends on the situation. 

This impacts my job and role as a student because morals and values are very important to me. In my current and previous jobs, I handled personal student information. As students, many of us may be asked by another student to share test answers or copy another’s work, but you need to decide what is important to you. College is not just about growing academically, but also personally. One time I had another student in my class ask me about our final exam (He was going to take it later), and I just told him to study the same thing the professor previously said. It wouldn’t be fair to give him the answers when everyone else had to study and then take an exam with unfamiliar questions. 

Ch. 3--Corporate Social Responsibility--What is your stance on corporate social responsibility? Do you think it is important? Why or why not? Have you worked in an organization that promoted these practices? How did it impact you and the community?

I received a score of 22 points. According to the feedback, I have a positive attitude toward corporate social responsibility. I agree, social responsibility is important. A lot of firms now prioritize profit, even if what they do are negatively affecting people and/or the environment. While profit is important to a firm, people and the environment are more important. After all, firms work to serve people and need the environment. So, they should treat both well. 

I have worked for educational institutions. I did learn in my previous role that the college I worked for seemed to care more about liability than helping students with mental health. However, that is due to the state chancellor’s decisions. The college must follow what is told to them. I am disappointed with that because the college has people they can help but limits themselves because of liability and rules. Giving someone a pamphlet is not enough. The chancellor may hear the concerns, but it is his decision to change things. 

Ch. 4--Global Management--What did you learn about yourself as a global manager? How could you improve your skills to work cross-culturally? Which GLOBE dimensions do you resonate with and why? How will this impact you in the workforce or in student life on GMU campus?

For part two of the chapter four assessment, I received 47 points. The feedback said that I have moderate global manager potential. The feedback suggests studying internationally and taking additional courses to improve my skills cross-culturally. Currently, I do not have the aspiration to be a global manager. However, we live in a very diverse area and I would benefit from becoming a better ‘global manager’, here in northern Virginia. As students at Mason, we represent over a hundred different cultures! Additional ways to improve cross-cultural skills include trying to better understand other cultures. You can do this by learning a new language, attending cultural events, and trying new things. 

As for GLOBE dimensions, I have a high humane orientation with 10 points out of 10. According to the assessment, humane orientation is the how much people should be encouraged and rewarded for being kind, caring, fair, and generous. Having a high humane orientation means that I think this is a value that should be encouraged. I agree, people should be taught and encouraged to help and care for others, however, whether they are rewarded or not. It disappoints me when I see people in leadership positions that do not use the opportunity they have to help others and initiate positive change, whether they are a student leader or high-ranking administrator. 

This orientation will impact me in the workforce and as a student because it is my own value, to help others when given the opportunity. I can also encourage friends and co-workers to do good things and commend them when they do.

Reflection 2

My vision for life and career is to get a job as a data analyst where I can explore my passion as a data manipulator, write codes, and help in managing and planning an organization. Goal achievement is important in every one’s life because it increases motivation and vision. I will facilitate goal achievement through create a plan of action, commitment, and leverage daily goal setting. In goal achievement creating a course of action is important. It is necessary to create detailed and intricate plan to achieve goals. Setting small goals every day and working toward those objectives without failing is my priority. Likewise, making commitment is also important to achieve goals such as, setting routines, staying motivated every day, and staying accountable for my mistakes. Setting daily goals are an effective way to stay focused and work toward long term goals. It is easy to lose sight of big goals when struggling with daily obstacles. Managed by Objectives is a management technique where managers and employees work together to formulate, implement and monitor goals within a specific time. MBO teaches not only to react to problems but also teaches us to be proactive. According to MBO I will set my objectives to start working toward my success and become an employee where I can manipulate data easily and find the required information. Second step will be more specific that I will polish my skills such as learning VBA, Coding, get proficient with Excel. Third step will be for me is to evaluate my skills what I am doing wrong, how can I make myself better. Last step is to reward that I will get the job as a data analyst. This is how managed by objective can help me achieve my goals.

In my assessment I received lowest scores in strategic thinking, I will improve my strategic thinking by improving listening skills, asking the right questions, and be aware and have a clear viewpoint. It is imperative for a critical intellectual that they listen to others intently to learn more from other’s perspectives. Developing strong listening skills encourages others to voice their opinions and foster an environment where everyone contributes strategically. I can improve my listening skills by being open to feedback, have an open mind, and listen attentively. To enhance strategic thinking, I need to think critically and ask more clear question. Communication is another skill that can develop overtime and having the knowledge before asking the question is very crucial. I need to learn to ask open ended question, it will allow listener greater comfort with communication, since they are not forced to make incomplete choices. Finally, being aware and identifying internal and external clues, help me to guide future direction. Good strategic thinker listens and understand what is being said and will read and observe whatever they can as a result they have all the information to help them make right decision.  Similarly, strategic thinking help improve and organizational performance and avoid common consequences of planning.

Core skills for planning are analysis, interaction, and problem solving. Strategic planning is the core of how to make any change in an organization. First step is to analyze the organization, who are the consumers, who are the competitors in the industry? Market analysis helps determine what is the customer’s buying pattern, consumers’ likes and dislikes, preferences, what prices other competitors are offering of the same product. Second step is communication. Discussing the business plan to employers and employees. A good strategic planner must be able to explain that what steps employees need to take to achieve organizational goals. A good communicator is also a good listener, who listens to the needs of the employers and then devise the action plan. Finally, problem solving is a crucial in any planning. For example, an organization is not meeting its financial goals, or has lack of good action plan. A good strategic planner analyze problem and then offer solution. I will make a career out of strategic planning because of it help me explore new option and draft a professional plan. Exploring new possibilities require strategic planning. For example, exploring job opportunities before enrolling myself in any educational plan, ask question, learn, offer, volunteer to gain new experience and create network.

Drafting a career plan is answering question how I can achieve my goals. For instance, I want to get a graduate degree I will stay true to plan even if takes longer than other. The process of leading myself through exploring career opportunities, deliberately set the directions and manage the career. I will monitor constantly and modify my action as if it is necessary. In the end I reward myself by accomplishing key actions. An organization can improve strategic thinking through encouraging others who come up with innovative ideas, encourage everyone to think strategically. Another way to encourage other is assign employees by making them team leader or mentor or incorporate ideas into training performance appraisal system. Similarly, an organization can improve strategic planning by making right decisions, prioritize right use of resources, money, and time. In conclusion, strategic planning and strategic thinking is all about building a framework that help organization in future, help me become a better manager and gives the best chance to achieve long-term success.

 

Reflection 3

For Chapter 7:

 

After doing the self-assessment of chapter 7, I got 24 out of 29 pts which indicates that I may have a moderate level of intuitive decision making. As a matter of fact, this result doesn’t surprise me now because most of my current decisions are related to my course development and the process of the research project and these things are familiar to me. For the pros and cons, I think the pros is to improve your work efficiency because when I decide to use intuitive decision making on something, it means that I have confidence with the results or processes and don’t need to take specific actions (Recheck, analyze, etc.) to reevaluate my decisions. This situation happens during my internship often. At first, you have to use time and energy to get familiar with the corporate rules, tasks, and workmates. After a week or so, I have to increase my working speed because of tons of data and various working tasks waiting for me to solve and submit different reports to my project managers. For the cons, I think it is also obvious to me. Sometimes, when I try to use my intuitions to make decisions, it will have some mistakes which slightly influences my process and cause unsatisfied results. For my data science project, I tried to use RapidMiner to analyze the databases of Annual home loan payments in Virginia through the R language. However, when I have finished filtering the desired data and started to analyze, I found that all my desired data are categorical, so I had to recreate the databases and use the “feature selection” method before I started to make the analysis. Although I finished my project analysis, at last, the punishment of deadlines is inevitable. Therefore, now I tried to improve it and practice my judgment vision to help me choose when I can use my intuition and when I should make a specific analysis before I make a decision.

 

For the assessment of the decision-making style, most of the choices are B, which indicates that I have an analytical style. I think it suits me well because I like to use representative data to make my results more objective and convincing. In addition, I think my style is the best because we are now living in the era of information explosion and every day we deal with data to help us work and live better. Therefore, we need to have strong analytical skills to help us mine the value of numerous datasets and apply it in the business to make a better decision which helps businesses accurately identify the customers’ needs and become profitable and competitive. Based on these results and conclusions, I will further develop my analytical skills and help my business find their blue ocean and get exact market orientation finally.

 

For Chapter 8:

 

Based on the assessment’s results, my organization has a high clan culture, high adhocracy culture, high market culture, and a moderate hierarchy culture. Because I am working at a small business, so moderate hierarchy is satisfied because we have employees and managers who take multiple tasks and responsibilities to keep the business in the right order. So at this point, I think our business still needs to improve value efficiency, timeliness, and quality. The most satisfying point for me is that my organization has a high clan culture, which helps the business itself to create a harmonious working environment. For managers, they would like to play both the “mentor” and “supervisor” roles to help improve and evaluate employees’ performances and sometimes we have a dinner party to exchange our opinions and ideas to help make the company operates better. For the second assessment, I got the highest scores on Market culture because I prefer the organization which always tries to outpace its competitors. And sustainable development is crucial for its expansions and corporate social responsibilities.

 

For Chapter 9:

 

For the first assessment of HR quality, I got 11 out of 14 pts, which indicates that my organization has high-quality HR practices. In my organization, HR has a professional job posting which helps the HR department select desired candidates for the empty position. After hiring new employees, they will have at least 1 mentor and 1 supervisor to help employees quickly adapt to the brand-new working environment and evaluate their business performance by providing weekly feedback. Based on their performance, my company will provide financial rewards during the annual party at the end of each year. I think that’s also why our HR can hire employees with strong abilities and a high level of responsibilities to support today’s success and constant development. For the emphasis on internal or external recruiting, I think both can be applied in recruiting qualitative employees especially for big businesses because without either of them, it will bring potential threats for the business itself. Just like Enron and GE’s fall. Obviously, both of them have profits and deficits. For the external recruiting, the advantage is it will increase the chances for businesses to acquire desired employees to pursue better competition with its competitors. Contrarily, the cons are also obvious: Time-consuming and high costs. That’s why small business tries to limit the number of new employees to control the business cost. For internal recruiting, it also has pros and cons. For the pros, it will have lower risks and costs for businesses to apply. Compared with external recruiting, internal one can save resources on collecting employee’s background information, evaluation, and performance test results. For the cons, differences in employment are often the focus of conflicts among senior leaders, which not only involves the distribution of power of leaders but is closely related to the authority of leaders. This is also a side of personnel reform, which will cause extremely fierce infighting in enterprise politics. Because my business mainly uses external recruiting, so controlling employment costs will be the next step for the HR department to improve.

 

For improving the quality of my HR practices, I think having a professional job posting is necessary because it is the first step of recruitment. Just like the Amazon job posting practice, I prefer to choose the positions with detailed qualifications, responsibilities and required skills rather than a common with ambiguous requirements. And I don’t think I will be an HR someday, not only because of my major, but also my interest is on data and financial analysis, rather than the recruitment. However, after I take the assessment, I think I may become a good HR manager because I have high suitability to be an organizational development and HR information system, professionals. For the improvements, I think I can improve my organization, communication, especially the skills on problem-solving and conflict management to help me become an HR specialist.