Melbourne Business School

The next seismic crisis is only a matter of time, but smart business leaders can prepare for it, says Professor Glenn Hoetker. Professor Hoetker is the MBS Foundation Chair of Sustainability and Business and Director of the Centre for Sustainability and Business. In the latest Melbourne Business School Podcast, he speaks with Yasmin Rupesinghe on how businesses are coping with the current COVID-19 crisis and what they can do to better prepare for the next economic disaster down the road.

With the power of data reaching prolific heights, organisations often invest in data analytics without understanding its real value – and data analysts often lack the skills to explain it. Professor Ujwal Kayande discusses the enormous demand for quantitative marketing, why an organisation’s leadership needs to understand analytics and just how important business skill are to the career of a data analyst.

"There are some natural responses to the difficulties of 2020 that perhaps have us thinking about the future as being substantively different to the past, and while that may be true to a degree, there are some things that remain the same," says Vivek Chaudhri. "Looking through the pandemic looking glass, we've perhaps magnified certain aspects of what leadership calls on but also distorted to some degree some of the natural tendencies that we've talked about for a long time around leadership. "It's important to just situate 2021 in the context of leadership more generally, and I think one of the things that we need to be aware of is, even before this pandemic hit, that organisations and leaders have been challenged by having to deal with a volatile, uncertain and complex and ambiguous world." Vivek is an Associate Professor of Strategy and the Academic Director of Executive MBA Programs at Melbourne Business School. He spoke with Yasmin Rupesinghe in the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast on what leadership will mean moving forward in a post-COVID world.

Hostility toward employees from a manager is called "abusive supervision", and it can include actively lying to subordinates, ridiculing them, not giving them the credit they deserve and being overly controlling. In her latest research, Deshani Ganegoda, an Associate Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School, looked at the psychological effects abuse has on victimised employees and the role of the senior manager in these situations. She spoke with Yasmin Rupisinghe about her findings in the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast. "Subordinates can sometimes justify and normalise bad behaviour of their managers," she said. "For example, when your whole team gets treated badly, you might think that's just how things are done around here. You don't consider it as an anomaly. In fact, subordinates might even justify abusive supervision as tough love or think that's just 'how my manager motivates people'. "In contrast, senior managers are above the abusive supervisor. They have the vantage point to see the behaviour of many middle level managers. So, they see the difference between abusive supervisors and non-abusive supervisors." Associate Professor Ganegoda said that senior managers were not just best-placed to spot abusive supervision, but also to intervene. "If someone were to stop abusive supervision from happening, it's going to be the supervisor's manager."

For a culturally-diverse team to perform exceptionally, leadership needs to be shared among its members, says Associate Professor Carol Gill. "We're all different in terms of the way we see the world, and culture is one of the lenses in which we see the world differently," she says. Professors Carol Gill from Melbourne Business School, Nicole Gillespie from University of Queensland and Bart De Jong from the Australian Catholic University spoke with Yasmin Rupesinghe on the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast about a new way to foster trust to improve performance in culturally diverse teams. "There are two different types of leadership. One is where there's a nominated leader, who can tell people what to do, and the second type of leadership is collective leadership," she says. "This is where the individuals step up to leadership or make a leadership intervention in a team and of course it may be multiple interventions that will be made in any single interaction in a team. "One team member might show the team what direction to go in. Another team member might make an intervention about how the team should proceed. A third team member might talk about social aspects of the team, encouraging others or supporting others. "We know that there are many different interventions, and the thing is that these interventions will build trust because the conflicts that may occur when things are more chaotic will be addressed by these leadership interventions. "So, leadership can play a very big role in increasing trust, either by dyadic interactions where they talk one-on-one with others or where they speak to the team as a whole." Listen to the full episode above or visit our podcasts page for more. Carol Gill is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Melbourne Business School, who has specialised in the fields of executive development, human resource management and organisational development for more than 25 years. Nicole Gillespie is the KPMG Chair in Organisational Trust and Professor of Management at the University of Queensland Business School, and an International Research Fellow at the Centre for Corporate Reputation, Oxford University. Bart De Jong is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Australian Catholic University, whose research focuses on trust in teams and has been published in scholarly journals such as Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), and Organization Science. Yasmin is a Program Manager on our Executive MBA and Senior Executive MBA programs, and a radio presenter for PBS FM. To find out more about studying at Melbourne Business School, visit mbs.edu