Assignment: Exemplary Followership

Assignment: Exemplary Followership

Assignment: Exemplary Followership

Diehards are totally committed to or opposed to their leaders. They are willing to die in order to support them or to perish in an attempt to remove them from their positions of power. Diehards were at the heart of recent upris- ings in the Middle East. During the “Arab Spring” thousands of citizens in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, and other nations risked death to topple dictators. At the same time, loyal supporters gave their lives defending these same leaders.

Kellerman argues that two criteria separate good followers from bad fol- lowers. First, better followers are engaged with their leaders. That’s because silence signals that followers are ignorant, apathetic, or too frightened to speak up. When followers remain quiet, bad leaders are able to stay in power. Good followers, on the other hand, speak out the first time they note leader misbehavior, before it becomes ingrained. When confronting leaders, they are well prepared, arming themselves with the facts, seeking advice, and recruit- ing allies. Motivation is the second criterion separating good from bad follow- ers. The best followers are motivated by the public interest, not self-interest. They seek to serve their organizations, communities, and countries.

Exemplary Followership To identify the components that make up follower styles, Robert Kelley

asked individuals and focus groups to describe the best, worst, and typical fol- lowers in their organizations.42 He found that followers differ on two dimen- sions—independent/critical thinking and active engagement. The best followers are people who think for themselves and take initiative. The worst followers have to be told what to do and require constant supervision. Typical followers take direction and complete jobs on their own after being told what is expected of them.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

• The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.