Term paper on real - world leadership

Management

In order to sustain and attain success for a long term period most organizations need to review and accordingly change their existing policies, structures and working climate to accommodate new technologies, processes and systems. The entire literature of organizational change has itself gone through a transformation with management leaders driving change management, purposefully and boldly, either to attain success or failure (Ahn, Anderson & Dornbusch, 115).

Leadership, organizational culture and human resource policies for driving change

There are innumerable real life examples of transformational leaders driving organizations to perform and become leading firms. Leaders like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Louis Gerstner and the like have successfully steered change management. There are several studies which have tried to determine the behavioural and personal traits of leaders in successfully driving change and most of them have been associated with organizational culture, firm performance and well being of the employee (Berson, Oreg & Dvir, 621).
The personal attributes of leaders influence the decisions and choices in the organizations and these further influence the beliefs and attitudes of followers. The next is to build an organizational climate which may reflect the choices and decisions of leaders. Senior leaders shape certain shared beliefs by means of control, rewards and attention. Accordingly leaders attract, discharge and select employees who share similar attitudes and beliefs (Oreg & Berson, 629).
There is a close association between leadership, human resource management policies and organizational climate. The main presupposition underlying the organizational learning theory is that developing a culture of knowledge transfer and sharing within an organization helps firms to gain competitive edge. Hence, change management should foster a spirit of community culture which has attributes like people oriented, friendly, teamwork, trusting and encouraging organizational environment. Also there should be ardent efforts from the management and leader to build a learning organizational culture (Jung & Takeuchi, 1936).
There are three organizational cultures namely innovative, supportive and bureaucratic. The culture which is based on hierarchies and compartments is bureaucratic culture. A culture supporting challenging, outcome oriented and creative environment is innovative culture. A supportive culture is one wherein a leader acts as a guide, coach, facilitator, teacher or educator and is extremely helpful to build a learning culture in an organization (Chen, 435).

Transformational leadership and organizational change

Transformational leaders are those why motivate followers to perform better by stimulating a debate on activity related problems, motivate followers to follow a path of innovation and stimulate a conduct of organizational citizenship (Boerner, Eisenbeiss & Griesser, 17). In fact, scholars have established that the functions of a leader in evaluating oneself is positively and significantly associated with the perception of the leader by the followers (Hu et al. 165).
Transformational leadership is mainly based on the four leadership traits of idealised influence, inspirational motivation, individualised consideration and intellectual stimulation. Idealized influence or inspirational motivation is the power of the leader to articulate and formulate a vision and accordingly make challenging objectives. The leadership attribute to instil pride of working with the leader in the mind of followers, delving beyond self interest for the welfare of the firm, executing goals and tasks, promoting confidence by achievement, articulating a strong vision and providing an interesting image of the firm after change management. Transformational leadership is positively associated with group cohesion. A transformational leader is an individual who motivates followers to work as a team in order to attain certain challenging objectives (Dionne et al. 181).
The change management consists of eight fundamental aspects. The leadership should be based on the quality of trust, followers should follow the path shown by the leader to attain shared goals, human resource should play an important function by efficiently selecting, retaining and recruiting change leaders, the mid level supervisory staff should be committed to implement and be involved in the change management process, the leader should support an organizational culture of innovation and creativity, again the leader should implement certain human resource policies which are conducive to establish and encourage a culture of responsibility and accountability, the organization must efficiently establish a lucid horizontal and vertical communication system, the leader should identify fundamental issues and particular interdependencies should be recognised. This can be attained by conducting a thorough SWOT analysis of the firm (Judge & Elenkov, 893).

Level 5 leaders

The earlier sections have observed certain traits of transformational leaders and examined the aspects of successful change management. In this context, it is necessary to include the traits of level 5 leaders. There have been a handful leaders who have steered mediocre or loss making organizations to become great and leading firms in the world. In this context, the mention of Darwin E. Smith of Kimberley Clark, George Cain from Abbott Laboratories, Coleman M. Mockler from Gillette are a few names. They are all transformational leaders having two additional qualities of fierce determination and humility. Such leaders believe in selecting the right people and then going about making modifications in the change management processes and systems. These leaders had some special traits of never boasting, displaying compelling modesty and shying away from public attention. On the other hand, they always acted with extremely calm resolve, relied mainly on inspired values and guidelines to motivate followers and did not have the attribute of charisma. Such people channelized ambition into the firm and ensured that their successors performed better than them and mainly worked for the good of the firm and not for promoting their own self. Such leaders displayed sure skills in by creating excellent outcomes in the change management process. They set certain guidelines for erecting and enduring a superb firm and are not content to settle for mediocre standards (Collins, 2005).
Conclusion

Works cited:

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