Internal and External Challenges to Organizational Behavior

¶ … successful leadership styles, strategies and traits. Two leadership styles that I believe are successful and effective styles are servant leadership and transformational leadership. Both of them emphasize strategies of helping followers to become better overall, and both build on positive traits of trust and integrity. Servant leadership focuses on putting the needs of the other ahead of one's own.

It is truly about serving one's followers and thereby building an organization that is grounded in compassion, empathy, and the desire and ability to actually help other people overcome the obstacles they face, whether they are in a particular work habit, a personal problem, or a financial difficulty. Servant leaders look out for their followers as though they were their sheep.

Transformational leaders focus on using Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Social Intelligence (SI) to build relationships and transform their followers into the kind of workers that the organization needs to succeed. This means the leader will set obtainable goals and both challenge and assist the workers to attain them. The leader provides the tools needed to grow and develop along the way, utilizing methods of communication, face-to-face time, review, training, and active participation to help develop the organization through diligence and hard work.

The transformational leader will not only transform the workers but also the workplace environment so as to better effect a place where workers want to be and happy to work. In a sense, both of these strategies/styles can go together to help create success in the workplace.

2) What are the internal and external influences that affect organizational behavior? The internal influences that affect organizational behavior are employee morale, a system of ethics (whether or not it is in place), management likeability (Sanders, 2006), communication (two-way flow) between bosses and workers, integrity in the hierarchy, transparency among the bosses, trust, honesty (or the lack thereof). All of these elements will impact the organizational behavior and the workplace culture because they deal with the human element that is most vital to an organization -- the workers themselves.

When Enron's managers and employees began adopting a spirit of mission that was unethical, for instance, the entire corporation was brought to its knees because this sort of antisocial, unethical, financially delinquent behavior was like contagion, spreading and infecting the morals and drive of those working in the organization. Poor leadership is also a factor and will ultimately be responsible for such contagion (Eichenwald, 2005).

The external influences that affect organizational behavior are community input and response to the business practices of the organization, the external environment (whether there is political, social or economical hostility towards the organization or whether the organization is embraced), cultural conflict (as Mattel experienced in China with its House of Barbie), and media reports. The media can be very influential in running an organization into the ground, especially if it is a publicly traded firm. In such.