Business Leadership

Cut-off date: This tutor-marked assignment (TMA 04) must be submitted by the date shown on the study planner on
the module website.
Word count: The total word limit for TMA 04 is 2000 words.
Weighting: TMA 04 accounts for 20% of your continuous assessment for this module.
This TMA is intended to assess the following:
your knowledge and understanding of concepts in Block 5
your ability to apply these concepts to analyse leadership (where leadership stands for either a leader, group of
leaders or leadership practice)
your ability to draw conclusions and offer advice using relevant module material
your contribution to discussions in the Tutor group forum (TGF).
Assessment tasks
This TMA is based on your selection of a leadership example. In order to complete this TMA you need to have material
that identifies a leadership example and gives insight into how ethics informs the person and/or practice. You may base
your answer on one of the following:
a leader, group of leaders or leadership practice you know about through researching them (in other words, they are
not known to you)
your own experience of being a leader and practicing leadership
a leader, group of leaders, or leadership practice you have observed firsthand.
Part A
Part A will be marked out of 90.
Question 1
Provide a brief description of the leadership example you have selected and explain why you have done so (200 words).
Provide your sources of evidence in an appendix to the TMA. (10 marks)
Question 2
Analyse the leadership example in respect of ethics using two concepts drawn from Block 5 (1400 words). (60 marks)
Question 3
Using at least one concept from Block 5, offer written advice to the leader(s) or related organisation within your leadership
example in respect of practicing leadership and ethics (400 words). (20 marks)
Guidance to students
Question 1
For the first question you should give a brief description of the leadership example you are going to focus on. Do not go
into excessive detail, but provide enough to give a sense of this individual, group and/or leadership practice and the
context in which the example you use unfolded. You should also provide justification for why you chose this example, that
is, why the example is particularly relevant to leadership and ethics. In choosing a leadership example you do not have to
select one that is obviously ethically ‘good’ or ethically ‘bad’, but one you can analyse in ethical terms – as ethics is often
about people making difficult decisions. You will have identified possible examples in a number of activities in this block.
The appendix to this document should list the sources you have consulted as evidence for your discussion. These could
include:
interviews
media stories
newspaper articles
recordings or texts of speeches
visual representations of leadership (stored in OpenStudio and referenced as such, not included in the body of your
assessment).
If you focus on your experience, then the evidence will take a different form, for example:
your own written reflections
your own observations
your own account of conversations with leaders and followers
visual representations of your own experience (stored in OpenStudio and referenced as such, not included in the
body of your assessment).
You should list these in an appendix using Harvard referencing – they do not count towards the word limit.
Question 2
This is the central piece of the TMA and attracts the most marks. This part of the TMA requires you to use concepts in the
block to analyse the leadership example you have selected based upon the evidence you have gathered. There are many
concepts in Block 5 and you are required to use two. A concept can mean a particular theory of leadership ethics or more
broadly an aspect of a theory relevant to leadership and ethics from Block 5. A critique of a particular leadership theory or
the idea of leadership in general will not count as one of these two concepts but can be drawn upon in addition to your two
chosen leadership concepts.
It does not matter which two ethical leadership concepts you select, however you should choose those which you think
offer insight into your chosen leadership example from an ethical perspective. You have already completed a number of
tasks related to this TMA in your TMA builder activities.
In writing this part of the TMA you need to demonstrate an understanding of the concepts you choose and your ability to
apply these concepts to a real case. You should use the evidence to explore and analyse the leadership example using
concepts to inform your analysis. Long descriptions of what a leader has done without reference to concepts will not attract
many marks, nor will long descriptions of concepts without application to the leadership example.
Question 3
In answering this question think of yourself as offering advice to the leader or related organisation in the example you have
selected on how leadership might be improved in respect of ethics (note, if you are focusing on your own leadership
practice, you may be offering developmental advice to yourself). The particular advice should be grounded in one concept
from this block; this can be a concept already used in Question 2 but it does not need to be. Your answer to this question
will draw upon both your analysis in Question 2 and the evidence you have collected for this TMA. You should seek to use
the concept you select to offer practical and tangible advice to the individual leader, group or organisation, showing its
practical relevance for their development. Think of yourself as a coach to this person, group or organisation, who are
TMA 04 Copyright © 2018 The Open University
looking for ways of developing themselves. In your answer you need to use a concept from Block 5. Do not spend an
excessive number of words describing the concept; instead focus on the practical implications of the concept you have
chosen.
Part B
The 10 marks that can be gained for this part of the assessment is based on your tutor’s monitoring of your contributions
to the TGF discussions in Block 5. Your tutor will introduce these at the appropriate time and you can only gain the marks
by participating in these discussions before the TMA deadline.
The first five marks are for making a contribution to two TGF discussions. The second five marks are for posting a
response to at least one contribution of your fellow students in both of these discussions