Many leaders in partnership with their employees have drafted mission statements, visions, and core values that drive the priorities and beliefs of their organization. For this assignment, students are given a task to go beyond the typical mission, vision, and core values and form a team of experts in order to create a handbook that sets a new standard within the organization. This task is to create a handbook that contains many strategies to promote an organizational climate of critical and positive thinkers, decision makers, and problem solvers. Students should have an opening introduction for their own chapter/module, explaining the industry for which they are employed. In this opening paragraph explain the terms of critical thinking and decision making and its importance with supporting evidence to include how this applies in the student’s industry.
This is a group project for three or more students. I am aware that some people do not like to work in groups/teams, but since this is a critical thinking course, I want each team to collaborate and create a three plus chapter/module handbook (i.e., depends on how many students per group) to promote critical thinking and decision making for the student’s organization. Each student will take a different approach based upon the organization they are employed. For an example, if a student is in the banking industry, the student should explain how decision making is accomplished to meet their shareholders’ interests, buying and/or selling securities, the rise and fall of inflation, maximizing benefits, minimizing costs, etcetera. If a student is in the hotel industry, the student would explain about informed decisions for business goals, customer satisfaction, regulations and safety, high turnovers during holiday seasons, etcetera. If a student has a question or concern regarding this information, please contact your professor immediately.
As previously stated, each student will be tasked to create their individual chapter/module, as I will grade each module separately based on the student’s writing, research, and contribution. However, as a team, students must (a) collaborate on the overall title of the handbook, (b) develop a connection of module themes so the handbook flows well, and (c) create a well-written opening introduction and final conclusion after the last chapter/module. The introduction and conclusion are a team effort. If the team has sources in the introduction and conclusion, then there will be a separate references page after the conclusion, which will be separate from the team member’s references. In addition, upload the same finalized handbook in your own assignment submission area or it will be considered late or not submitted. This is a team project, but all students MUST submit the same document for auditing purposes and for grading.
The team will need to research for current scholarly (past 5 to 7 years) and non-scholarly resources to determine what organizational leaders/decision makers need in order to become a “leading organization” of individuals, who on their own, can think, make decisions, and develop solutions. Students should be informed, through research, regarding the differences between an organization and a learning organization. Your task is to immerse you and your team in a think tank approach and not emerge until you have developed an award-winning handbook that promotes organizational success.
Many topics to explore and select to be included are as follows: (a) deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning, (b) abducting reasoning and reasoning by analogy, (c) the importance of logic while making decisions, (d) systems thinking, (e) team building, (f) collaboration, (g) uncertainty, (h) innovation, (i) productivity, (j) process management, (k) role specification, and (l) customer satisfaction and relationships.
I would like all handbooks to be uploaded and showcased in NSUWorks; this is a publishing platform that provides unpublished and published works of students and faculty. In summary, the handbook must be properly organized and meet all requirements for content regarding the expectations. There is no set format to this document, only that each person contributes at least five FULL pages of written content that is properly double spaced per APA. All paragraphs must have at least 5 to 6 academic level sentences with 2 or more sources per topic/issue. Although students must have a total of 14 sources (i.e., 8 scholarly, 6 non-scholarly), each paragraph must have at least two of the sources to be current “scholarly” sources published from within the past 5 to 7 years. Students may also be creative and insert images, tables, figures, and other visual aids; however, this final product must be an academic-level document. The visuals will not replace any pages of the written content, only add to the number of pages. Each chapter/module will have a specific title with the individual team members name inserted below the title, just like an edited book chapter of individual contributors. I do require headings to outline your paper so any reader can follow your work, page numbers, and a references page at the end of each individual chapter/module. Team members will need their own resources, with no duplication among team members. The opening title page should have all team members’ names listed as well to include a page About the Authors and a Table of contents.
No books can be used, only current scholarly journals (past 5 to 7 years) that are labelled academic, peer-reviewed, or refereed journals [except for the required non-scholarly sources listed above]. All references must align with in-text citations and be complete with all information (i.e., authors, date, title, source) to include the DOI or the URL. The exact URL/DOI must be included to retrieve the actual source. By not including the direct URL/DOI, the source will not count towards total sources used. This will help faculty retrieve the source to determine if the source meets the requirements of the submission.