Specifically, the assignment is to:
Select a Fortune 500 company that transitioned a large number of employees to work from home during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis.
Analyze how leadership responded to the crisis (using articles published about the company in the past 6 months, along with company-generated communications). Include a minimum of 3 sources about the business.
Provide recommendations, based on leadership theory and research, about what this organization’s leaders may want to consider as they lead their organization and its people beyond COVID-19.
This section is the “meat” of the paper and requires research using respected leadership and business journals, along with our textbook. All recommendations must include references to the source of your research, using APA guidelines (no recommendations should be based simply on opinion). Include a minimum of 6 sources in addition to references from our textbook to support your recommendations.
Important note: The quality, substance and relevance of the paper should be appropriate for submission to the chosen organization’s CEO.
Start by reading current business news to identify a business that is getting substantive press coverage (i.e. a Fortune 500 about which in-depth articles have been published in the past 6 months). Make sure you are able to find enough detail about the business and how its leadership is responding to the changes triggered by COVID 19.
Note: Companies that may not be chosen for this assignment (because there have been so many student papers written about these companies recently) are: Amazon and Walmart.
Meet with your team to share ideas, compare notes and develop your Research Paper Proposal (to be submitted in Week 2). Once the proposal is approved, your research and writing should be underway. The weeks will pass quickly.
Follow this outline when organizing your paper:
The submission should use APA format, be typed, double-spaced and contain the following sections (note the page limits).
Standard NSU Cover Page (1 page)
Table of Contents (1 page) – follow the outline provided below and identify the team members who contributed most significantly to each section of the paper.
Body of Paper (10 pages) containing appropriately labeled section headers:
Executive Summary (briefly describe the business challenge and your recommendations) – 1 page
Business Scenario (citing at least 3 current articles – published in the last 6 months – describing the specific challenges the business is facing) – 2 pages
Recommended Leadership Approaches (6 pages) – provide realistic, actionable recommendations applying the chosen leadership insights, concepts and techniques to the business scenario, and citing at least 6 relevant journal articles – in addition to our course materials.
Conclusion (describe how the recommendations will complement each other to address the business challenge) – 1 page
References – At least 3 about the business and its challenge (all published within the last 6 months) AND at least 6 sources to support your recommendations (published within the last 2 years), along with our course text.
IMPORTANT: View this as a consulting opportunity. Be sure your recommendations are substantive (i.e. would be valuable to the current executive leadership team and/or Board). Don’t leave the recommendations section to one team member. This should be a team effort. Once you have done your research on what is happening with the organization, and gathered your additional sources of information about leadership (beyond our course text), then brainstorm your recommendations and choose the best ones to include in the paper.
All Team Members must participate in the research, writing and final review/editing the paper. One student from each team should submit the final paper on behalf of the team.
Note: All members of the team normally receive the same grade on the paper. There is one exception to this guideline. Each student will independently prepare and submit a one-page confidential “Contributions Summary” describing the quality of the contributions of each student on the team. Peer feedback may result in an individual’s grade being lower than the team’s grade if a consistent theme is noted in the peer feedback which indicates a member of the team did not contribute as expected.
