Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Leadership
- Creators: O'Flaherty, Katherine
- Creators: School of Politics and Global Studies
Over the course of 2020, individuals and organizations were thrown various unprecedented obstacles that necessitated flexibility, empathy, and understanding. Many organizations were forced to reevaluate their financial status, their purpose, and how they could provide for their employees. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that most companies had to introduce a ‘work from home’ policy, drastically decreasing the face-to-face contact that employees had with each other and leadership. The virus, coupled with the social and political unrest in the U.S. in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 presidential election, inspired many companies to reframe their organization and redefine their goals.<br/> The B2B (business-to-business) Marketing Agency, The Mx Group, is preparing for a change in leadership, with the current Chief Executive Officer and Founder stepping down, being replaced by the President of the company. The company plans to execute the transition in the spring of 2022, allowing them the rest of 2021 to plan for the change, catering to employees’ individual and the company’s collective needs. It was also prompted by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic to reevaluate the values that it upholds as an organization, coinciding with the change in leadership. Leaders of the company are actively encouraging employees to engage with these values by recognizing when a colleague performs in alignment with a value.<br/> In reframing their organization, The Mx Group has a significant opportunity to uniquely position itself in the industry. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal (2017) introduced four frames: human resources, symbolic, structural, and political, as a way to guide a transformative application of leadership and management in business. Analyzed from these perspectives, The Mx Group can utilize contemporary ideas to efficiently and effectively seize its opportunity of embedding new values and a change in leadership.
number of youth becoming politically active and civically engaged. Many of whom are active
and engaged are college students, seeking change not only within politics and society, but within
their institution. At Arizona State University (ASU), the institution is spread across four unique
campuses in which each of the campuses holds its own undergraduate student government.
Within the Associated Students of Arizona State University (ASASU), each Undergraduate
Student Government (USG) experiences low voter turnout every year in their elections and high
turnover rates. Understanding why students chose to be involved in the first place is a major
question.
This project aimed to understand what best practices for leadership in the Information Technology sector and if it could be consolidated for a comprehensive learning plan. This learning plan was housed on a traditional LMS (Canvas) and utilized a combination of IT Management research, interviews conducted with five industry members (all boasting five or more years of work experience), and an analysis of six top institution IT Leadership programs, to create a template. For the provided questionnaires, participants were asked to consider their time in the industry and discuss work culture dynamics, distribution of power, and what pain points were felt in their daily operations. All participants also described their direct roles and seniority, ranging from self-described “middle” to ”high” level placements. Based on these interviews, much of what seems to halt productivity and employee satisfaction regularly comes from a lack of concise and regular communication and a need for more understanding regarding team members' drive or capabilities. Regarding the program evaluation, six IT Leadership programs were chosen, where five were constructed by higher education institutions and one from a certificate governing body. The top skills identified across all programs were communication and decision-making. Communication is an all-encompassing idea for collaboration and strong speaking skills, with programs 1,4,5, and 6 noting their importance. Decision-making in this context is about both work delegation and firm problem-solving. For work delegation, it was pointed out in the interviews that techs and engineers see strong leadership utilizing professional judgment as vital to a business’s performance, with all programs but program 4 similarly emphasizing the same. Given this evaluation, the leadership styles used can be identified as Delegative, Strengths-Based, and Transformative. The previously noted interviews and research resulted in a 4-week course demo, which utilized the interviews in conjunction with leadership concepts.