MGT1044 POLC Reflection Sample: Principles of Management (Sunway)
For information and reference only – not to be submitted as your own work.
This extract models how a first-person reflection for the MGT1044 Principles of Management individual assignment (Sunway Business School) can be structured around planning, organising, leading and controlling. It follows the pattern of the MGT1044 Principles of Management individual assignment question, but it answers the personal-reflection version of the task. Read the companion guide to the POLC reflection first if you want the marking logic before the model.
Important: the situation below is a clearly hypothetical, illustrative example created for demonstration. It is not a real person’s experience, and every date, number and name in it is invented for illustration. Your own submission must describe a situation you were personally involved in, with your own details and your own voice.
What this extract covers
| Brief section | Suggested length | What a marker looks for |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction and context | 250–300 words | Timeframe, role, objective, people, key challenge, and the reflective purpose |
| Planning | 350–400 words | Milestones, contingency, dependencies, and a link to the planning process |
| Organising | 350–400 words | Task division, authority, resources, and coordination |
| Leading | 350–400 words | Motivation, communication, and leadership style, with evidence |
| Controlling | 350–400 words | Monitoring, comparison with standards, and corrective action |
| Personal learning and future application | 350–400 words | Specific lessons and what you will do differently |
Because this is an extract, each section is shortened. A full submission would reach about 2,000 words (plus or minus 10 per cent) and cover every section in the lengths shown above.
Model-answer extract (illustrative scenario)
1. Introduction and context
In this reflection, I examine how the four management functions of planning, organising, leading and controlling appeared in a situation I was personally involved in (Fayol, 1949; Robbins & Coulter, 2021). The illustrative scenario is a three-day food drive run by a university club over one semester. I was the project coordinator, working with eight volunteer members, a faculty adviser and two campus staff members who managed the venue.
Our objective was to collect 600 packs of dry goods for a local community kitchen within three days. The key challenge was that every volunteer had a different class timetable, so I could not rely on everyone being present at the same time. I use Gibbs’s (1988) reflective cycle to structure each section: what happened, how I felt, what worked, and what I would change. I chose it because it forces me to move beyond description into evaluation, which is what this assessment rewards.
2. Planning
I began by setting a measurable target, because Locke and Latham (2002) show that specific, challenging goals improve performance more than vague ones such as “do our best”. I then broke the target into milestones, which Table 1 summarises.
| Milestone (illustrative) | Deadline | Depends on | Contingency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venue and permission confirmed | Week 2 | Adviser’s approval | Use the foyer as a backup space |
| Donation channels announced | Week 4 | Poster design approved | Post on class group chats instead of print |
| Collection shifts finalised | Week 6 | Everyone’s timetable | Two reserve volunteers on standby |
| Delivery to the kitchen | Week 8 | Transport booking | Ask a member with a car as a fallback |
Table 1: Illustrative milestone and contingency plan
Looking back, my plan was strongest where I mapped dependencies. I realised that the poster could not go out before the adviser approved it, so I scheduled that approval first. It was weakest where I assumed that people would simply confirm their shifts. I felt confident at the time, but I now see that I planned the tasks and not the people. Had I followed the planning process more rigorously, with an explicit check of assumptions before fixing the schedule, I would have found the timetable clash earlier. Planning, in other words, was less about the document and more about testing what the document took for granted.
3. Organising
For organising, I grouped the work into three teams (publicity, logistics and collection), each with a lead. Robbins and Coulter (2021) describe organising as deciding who does what, who reports to whom and where decisions are made, and my structure tried to reflect that. I delegated authority for small decisions, such as shift swaps, to the team leads so that I did not become a bottleneck.
This worked well for publicity, where the lead was confident and fast. It worked less well for logistics, where the lead hesitated to make decisions without checking with me, which meant the structure on paper was not the structure in practice. I felt frustrated at first, but on reflection I had delegated responsibility without making the limits of the lead’s authority explicit. If I organised the same project again, I would write a one-page list of decisions each lead may make alone. I would also prepare a simple contact sheet so that coordination does not depend on one person’s availability.
4. Leading
Leading was the function I found most difficult. My volunteers were unpaid peers, so I had no formal power to reward or sanction them. Northouse (2021) notes that leaders need to adapt their behaviour to followers’ competence and commitment. In week 5, two members who had been enthusiastic became quiet and missed a meeting. My first response was to send a reminder message in the group chat, which produced no reply.
I then spoke to each of them privately and learned that one was overloaded with examinations and the other felt that her tasks were not meaningful. I changed the second member’s role to managing the donation tally, which gave her visible ownership. She became one of the most reliable people in the team. The lesson is that I had been using the same, directive style for everyone, whereas the situation called for a supportive style for one and a more delegating style for another. I would describe my early leadership as task-focused and my later leadership as more relationship-focused, and the second was clearly more effective.
5. Controlling
I monitored progress with a shared tracking sheet that compared the daily collection count against the target of 200 packs per day (illustrative). On day one we reached 120 packs, so we were 40 per cent below standard. Controlling means comparing performance with the plan and taking corrective action (Robbins & Coulter, 2021), so I called a ten-minute huddle that evening to find the cause.
We found that the table was in a low-traffic corner. On day two, we moved it to the main walkway and added a short announcement in two large lectures. The count rose to 230 packs, and we closed the three days at 610. What I learned is that my monitoring was timely but too narrow, because it measured quantity and ignored quality, such as expired items. I only discovered the expired items during sorting, which cost us time. In future, I would add a simple check at the point of collection and not just at the end.
6. Personal learning and future application
This experience taught me that the four functions are connected and not sequential. A weak plan produced stress in organising, and weak early leadership produced problems that controlling had to repair. Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle helps me see this: the concrete experience led to reflection, which led to new concepts that I can now test in later projects.
I will apply three changes. First, I will test the assumptions in any plan with the people affected before I fix deadlines. Second, I will define each delegate’s decision limits in writing. Third, I will agree on both quantity and quality indicators before the project begins. These are small, practical steps, but they address the weaknesses I identified honestly rather than only the successes.
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Marker’s view on this extract
The extract earns credit for linking each function to a concrete event, evaluating what did not work, and using theory to explain it. It would lose marks if the sections were purely descriptive, if citations were decorative, or if the final section only repeated earlier points. Compare it with a similar worked example in the Sunway University sample answer for another module.
About the expert
This extract reflects the management knowledge of Amirul Azam, whose profile lists an MBA with expertise in marketing, management, organizational behavior and international business.
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References
- Fayol, H. (1949). General and industrial management (C. Storrs, Trans.). Pitman.
- Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic.
- Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall.
- Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
- Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE Publications.
- Robbins, S. P., & Coulter, M. (2021). Management (15th global ed.). Pearson.
