The Essence of Leadership –Final assessment| 7/10/2012 1 | Page Student ID NO. 109025249 Module Name Class #656 - MOD070 - Essence of Leadership Assignment Title The Essence of Leadership –Final assessment Assignment deadline: Tuesday, 10 July 2012 Effective word count: 5.624 (deviation from 6000 = 6, 2%) This word count is done by excluding: Module names Titles Indexes and front-page information Bibliography Appendix text I confirm I have read the University regulations on plagiarism and that this assignment is my own work.
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The Essence of Leadership –Final assessment| 7/10/2012
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Student ID NO. 109025249
Module Name
Class #656 - MOD070 - Essence of Leadership
Assignment Title
The Essence of Leadership –Final assessment
Assignment deadline: Tuesday, 10 July 2012
Effective word count: 5.624 (deviation from 6000 = 6, 2%) This word count is done by excluding:
Module names
Titles
Indexes and front-page information
Bibliography
Appendix text
I confirm I have read the University regulations on plagiarism and that this assignment is my own work.
The Essence of Leadership –Final assessment| 7/10/2012
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1 A literature review of key theories of the nature and exercise of
leadership in organizations
1.1 Leadership
1.1.1 Introduction
The success of an organization is often related to effective leadership. Therefore huge investments are done in leadership development to create a competitive advantage. Several researchers show an increase attention and resources given to this leadership development. Especially this can be seen among the bigger organizations. Also different leadership development techniques have been used to make this leadership development more productive, such as leadership training, mentoring, SWOT analysis, coaching, action learning, 360-degree feedback and job assignments for example. It is save to conclude that leadership is a hot issue and therefore that having a good understanding of the essence of leadership is something worth the time and effort (Yukl, 1989;Daily et al, 2002;PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2008;Day, 2000;Bilhuber et al, 2012). It is said that there are as many definitions of leadership as the amount of people who studied it. Leadership is about the process of influencing and guiding others in different ways to let them do what needs to be done. It is also about creating change and working through the relationship with people to establish a direction (Stogdill & Bass, 1990;Yukl, 2010;Kotter, 1990;Bass, 1985). Often leadership is placed alongside management while both have very different characteristics. It is said that leadership and management are qualitatively different and cannot be combined. Someone can be a leader without being a manager or a manager without being a leader. Some definitions of leaders and managers assume they have different personalities and values. They also are seen as different processes or roles. How these processes, types of roles are defined vary somewhat depending on the writer, but some global differences seem to be obvious (Yukl, 2010; Zaleznik, 1977;Bennis & Nanus, 1997;Stogdill & Bass, 1990;Bass, 1985;Kotter, 1988;Hackman, 1980;Mintzberg, 1980;Rost, 1991).
1.1.2 Management vs. Leadership
Management is about setting objectives and organizing the work that has to be done. Managers must
motivate subordinates and communicate the tasks. The measurements of performance must be set and
the people aligned to the tasks. Meanwhile it is important that there is a workable balance between the
tasks, the group and the individual to create an optimal working environment. Management is focused
on efficiency and is very much rational in nature. It is about planning and budgeting, concerned with
organizing and resources. Management is more transactional and task oriented (Drucker, 2007 &
2.7 Applied Motivation There is a difference in how the segment manager and the manager operations motivate subordinates.
Where the segment manager increases empowerment by inspirational goal setting, the manager
operations buys this motivation by setting rewards for certain task outcomes and goals. The segment
manager mainly focus on the skills of the people, the amount of effort they are willing to put in the tasks
and the level of understanding they have about the tasks. Based on this understanding he calculates the
possible success rate of the outcome and the reward needed to push this a little further. To make sure
the goals are accepted, the manager operations defines challenging goals which are specific enough to
be well understood. He even makes it possible to participate in the goal-setting process to increase
commitment to those goals (Bass & Riggio, 2006;Yukl, 2010;Vroom, 1995;Mullins;Locke, 1958)
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The segment manager motivates people by formulating and communicating a challenging vision and
inspiring people to get aligned to this vision. He works mainly through relationships with people for
creating the needed change. By exemplary leadership this segment manager tries to model the way and
inspire his shared vision. He wants to encourage the heart and by doing so enables others to act. Instead
of telling followers what has to be done, the segment manager uses a more inspirational motivation to
bring his followers to the higher levels of the hierarchy of needs (Kotter, 1996;Kouze & Posner,
2007;Bass, 1985;Maslow, 1958).
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3 Analysis of how two leaders perceive their roles
3.1 Comparison Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are good at formulating ideas and transform them to successful products. They are not afraid to take risks and learn from mistakes. Concerning management styles it can be said that Steve Jobs had an aggressive and demanding personality and he was known to be aggressive. Although Steve Jobs was an inspirational and in fact a transformational leader; he had an autocratic way of using his transformational talents. The aspiration of Jobs was to position Apple and its products at the forefront of the IT industry. Steve wanted to be a trend setter in terms of innovation and style (Akhtar, 2012).
3.1.1 Transactional vs. Transformational
Bill Gates has performed the role of both executive as well as management. Bill is known as verbally combative and can react quite aggressive when people place the company’s long term interests at risk. He is also known to sometimes react sarcastically. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aggressively contributed in their company’s broad range of products and they both achieved a dominant position for their companies. They did this through a broad vision and managerial competences. They varied out the processes of both leadership and management and therefor they belong to the active leaders, the do people with natural authority (Yukl, 2010;Barnard, 1948;Boak, 2011;Akhtar, 2012). Bill Gates can be called a transactional leader. He tells people what to do and gives them tasks. With this behavior he is on the left hand side of the model of Tannenbaum and Schmidt (1958), where Bill tells and sells the things he wants the people to do. He makes the decisions and announces them (tell) or he makes the decision and sells them. Especially in the early days of Microsoft it was well known that people had to work very hard and that Bill was a constant threat looking over your shoulder. It was leadership by fear and a very autocratic way of directing his followers (Burns, 1978;Bennis & Nanus, 1985;Zaleznik, 1977). The style of leadership of Bill Gates slowly transformed to a more democratic, participative and transformational leadership style. Bill never was a true transformational leader because the autocratic elements stood firm till the end of his leadership period even though in the end he delegated responsibilities to different subordinates.
3.1.2 Leadership Traits
The leadership traits of Bill Gates are a mixture of authoritative, delegative and participative elements. Bill gave much freedom to his researchers and formed workgroups out of them for more product launches. At the same time he was careful in his judgment and control, although this control never was absent. Other traits and skills of Bill are persuasiveness and intellectual capacity. Bill was very persuasive in the things he wanted to achieve, like his strategic goal of “A computer on every desk in every house, running Microsoft software” and his intellectual capacity was never questioned and very much feared and respected (Akhtar, 2012;Barnard, 1948). When we look at Steve Jobs, it can be said that his leadership style was more on the right hand side of the model from Tannenbaum and Schmidt (1958), where consultation and participation is more important than telling and selling. Steve could be called a transformational leader because of his
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enthusiastic and passionate way of communicating his visions to his followers and the energy he injected into his team. He is an example of an inspirational leader. Steve helped showing people the big picture and helped them to see beyond a narrow focus and understand how their part fits into that big picture. He understood that a great leader must be a company evangelist and a great spokesman (Bennis & Nanus, 1997; Akhtar, 2012; Tannenbaum & Schmidt, 1958). Steve Jobs is sometimes called an autocratic transactional transformational leader. Transformational in the sense that he was passionate and enthusiastic about what he wanted to achieve and the vision he formulated, transactional because he often used motivation by reward and autocratic while he was sometimes unable to integrate the vision and opinion of other people into his own ideas. This can also be said concerning Bill Gates and by concluding this it must be said that although they both showed characteristics mostly on one side of the spectrum of transactional and transformational leadership, they also used elements of each of them in their leadership style. Practice show that being able to use elements of both these styles makes the chance of success more realistic (Burns, 1978;Bennis & Nanus, 1997;Kotter, 1990;Akhtar, 2012).
3.1.3 Transactional startups
When looking at both leaders and their companies, then it seems to be the case that both had a sort of transactional style of leadership during the startup phase of their companies. While Steve Jobs turned to a more transformational style soon after this startup phase of Apple, Bill Gates stuck to the task oriented style of leadership of telling his followers what to do, how to do it and when to do it. This transactional style is used among many startups and this is an interesting phenomenon (Tannenbaum & Schmidt, 1958). Bill Gates was less interested in his followers in the early days of Microsoft. It was pure transactional with big rewards. If the software shipped, people were sure of a huge bonus and an increase in the stock exchange. There was a small part transformational in his way of leadership but only when it served the organization as a whole and especially the profits it could make and the amount of shipments of Microsoft products. It must be said though, that in the later days of Microsoft some servant leadership elements bubbled to the surface in the style of leadership of Bill Gates. The service to followers became more and more important and also the sustainability of the relationship with some of them. It would be unfair to only put that change on the account of his wife Melinda, which is the driving force behind the Gates foundation (Stone et al; 2004).
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4 What can be taken from this assignment into own practice and
development as a leader
4.1 Characteristics Becoming a better leader is something I find interesting and quite a challenge. There are some strong
characteristics that I have which can help me to define some sort of transformational leadership for
myself that I can use in my daily management experiences. My strongest points of effective leadership
are being honest and consistent when resolving complex problems. Integrity is one of the characteristics
I try to apply in the way I encounter people and in my opinion building up a good relationship with your
followers is a key element in creating an effective and motivated team (Metcalfe et al, 2006;Higgs,
2003;Day et al, 2004).
4.2 Competencies To become a better leader several things are at my disposal to use. For example I can use a good coach
or mentor to get specific guidance or a model of good practice on which to base my behavior. Another
way to improve my capabilities as a leader is through action learning sets with other managers in similar
roles to learn from each other. This learning to be a better leader requires a lot of self-awareness,
emotional intelligence and the courage to make myself vulnerable. But first of all to become a better
leader I must believe that leadership applies to me and that I can make a difference by using it (Pardey,
2007;Kouze & Posner, 2007;Goleman, 2000).
To experiment with the new competencies it is important to have a good relation with colleagues and
the members of the team. It is important to be in a working environment which is safe and in which the
leader shows transformational leadership styles and characteristics of listening, showing interest in new
ideas, giving space to make mistakes and so on. To improve leadership competencies it is important to
learn from failures because it is this feedback from failure that is of high value for the improvement
process. What is learned from past experiences of failure can be helpful to develop a more effective