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My action research project will concentrate on finding a way to get young professionals to help influence upper management decisions on company policy in regards to the company’s environmental impact or any company policy in general. I am interested in this subject because my current lack of experience in the construction field, and more so in the real estate development field, are a handicaps as I try to influence my company and other companies to be more environmentally friendly and socially responsible. I aspire to eventually become a real estate developer who is socially and environmentally responsible; thus I want to have guidelines that will help me and others in these fields to influence our companies’ environmental policies. In order to be able to get entry level/young professionals excited about the possibility of being able to influence their company’s decisions, I have to create feasible guidelines that will allow them to feel empowered and confident that they can make a difference. I have had a dialogue/brainstorming session with young professionals to help me find ideas on how entry level employees can influence company policy. After my initial ideas are formed, I will use these peers to give me feedback in finalizing my ideas. My ultimate goal is to find ways to help my target audience, which consists of college students and young professionals, to believe that they can affect corporate decisions even this early in their career. I am currently working on researching the current corporate culture in America. I am trying to concentrate on finding how top down culture developed, and how it is currently is viewed by corporate America. I also want to research how some people suggest making changes to the corporate culture in order for me to find ideas; and to see if anybody has even tried the ‘angle’ of entry level employees influencing corporate policy. I have completed a dialogue/brainstorming session with young professionals to see how they felt about the possibility of down/up decision making in corporations. (Full Transcript Below). I am still working my academic research on corporate American culture and what has been done in order to affect change in it. I have collected the resources that I plan on using and will continue to look for more as my research progresses. Once my research is complete, I will evaluate it in order to help me with my plan of affecting corporate policy from the bottom up. I have begun to dwell on what I learned from the dialogue/brainstorming session with my peers that I recently conducted. It was very informative, and at the same time, helped me confirm ideas that I already had about affecting change in corporations from the bottom up. These preconceptions that I had were that one must have plenty of facts to support your ideas, and that working in groups would best help. I am still sifting through the transcript and voice recording to truly gather and evaluate all the ideas expressed. After I have finished my research and I have finished analyzing the dialogue/brainstorming session transcript and voice recording, I will begin to create a template of the guidelines that I want to create to help any entry level individual in a company influence upper management decision making. Once this template is complete, I will forward it to the people who participated in the dialogue/brainstorming session, as well as other young professionals, and ask for their feedback. Could they implement this in their particular jobs? What would not allow them to implement their ideas? After I retrieve the information I gathered from my subjects regarding my preliminary guidelines, I will read their comments and analyze them. If time permits, I would like to hold another dialogue session and ask them why they felt they could/couldn’t succeed in affecting decision making in their companies using my preliminary guidelines. I would use the information gathered to better help me form my final guidelines. If unable to have another dialogue session, I will simply try to incorporate their concerns and comments into my final guidelines. This will be the place in which my final project will end. I originally wanted to find a way in which I could influence city governments, developers, and citizens to promote and use public transportation. I was going to find a way in which I would perform action research in the future to achieve this goal once I felt I would be listened to. Now that my project seems to have geared to how entry level people to affect changed in regards to the environmental policy of their companies as well as other policies, I will end up trying to come up with an action research plan for college students and entry level employees to use in order to try to influence company policy. In a sense, my end product will be guidelines that will help these people affect policy in their respective companies; and what to do if the first try fails.
 * UPDATED OVERVIEW PARAGRAPH:**
 * ACTION RESEARCH:**
 * EVALUATION:**
 * CONSTITUENCY** **BUILDING****:**
 * REFLECTION AND DIALOGUE:**
 * PLANNING:**


 * BIBLIOGRAPHY (Current and Future Resources)**
 * 1) Lawrence, R. F. (2003). //Group Communication in Context: Studies of Bona Fide Groups – Second Edition//. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates, Inc.
 * 2) Herbold, R. J. (2005). //The Fiefdom Syndrom: The Truf Battles That Undermine Careers and Companies – And How to Overcome Them//. United States: Doubleday Publishing.
 * 3) Warwick Organizational Behavior Staff (2001). //Organizational Studies: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management//. London, UK: Routledge.
 * 4) Alvesson, Mats. (2002). //Understanding Organizational Culture//. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.
 * 5) Johnson, L. & Phillips, B. (2003). //Absolute Honesty: Building a Corporate Culture That Values Straight Talk and Rewards Integrity//. New York, NY: AMACOM.
 * 6) Dixon, N. M. (1999). //The Organizational Learning Cycle: How We Can Learn Collectively – Second Edition//. Brookfield, VT: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
 * 7) Aldisert, L. M. (2002). //Valuing People: How Human Capital Can Be Your Strongest Asset//. Chicago, IL: Dearborn Trade Publishing.
 * 8) Joyce, A. (2002). //I Went To College For This?: How to Turn Your Job Into a Career You Love//. Brookfield, VT: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
 * 9) Forgionne, G.A., Gupta, J.N.D., & Mora, M. (2002). //Decision Making Support Systems: Achievements, Trends and Challenges for the New Decade//. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.
 * 10) Quirke, B. (2000). //Making the Connections: Using Internal Communication to Turn Strategy Into Action//. Burlington, VT: Grower Publishing Limited.
 * 11) Frederick, W. C. (1995). //Values, Nature, and Culture in the American Corporation//. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
 * 12) Slater, R. (1999). //The GE Way Fieldbook: Jack Welch’s Battle Plan for Corporate Revolution//. Brookfield, VT: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
 * 13) Holtz, S. (2003. //Corporate Conversations: A Guide to Crafting Effective and Appropriate Internal Communications//. New York, NY: AMACOM.
 * 14) Poole, M. S., Van de Ven, A. H. (2004). //Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation//. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
 * 15) Murray, E. J., Richardson, P.R. (2002). //Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days//. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
 * 16) Crainer, S. (1999). //The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made…and 21 of the worst//. New York, NY: AMACOM.
 * 17) DIALOGUE AND BRAINSTORMING INTERVIEWS: SEE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT FILE.


 * TRANSCRIPT**


 * PRESENTATION**