LEADERSHIP

Leadership



Leadership

Introduction

The main purpose of this study is to understand the attributes of leadership and their and their influence on organizational culture. One of the key components to any thriving organization is the persons in places of leadership (Yukl, 2009). Leadership is one of the most hotly argued topics in organisational survey, communal psychology and organisational psychology (Pfeffer, 2003). Leadership demeanour has verified to be a significant component in alignment to conceive thriving and wholesome organisations.

Discussion

Following are some basic leadership attributes:

Vision

Whether described as “long-term strategic thinking”, vision, “seeing the wood for the trees”, “the big picture outlook” or “helicopter vision”, almost all business leaders, supported by the leadership literature, give vision as the sine qua non of leadership attributes, exemplified by Jean Denton's pragmatic “if you don't know where you're going, you have no hope of getting there” (Yukl, 2009).

The leader has got to have a clear vision that is capable of being enunciated in a simple way. At Coats Viyella we have a company mission statement and objectives which provide a statement of values and a framework (Kotter, 2008). It is a bit like the rules of the game. You give your team freedom but there are some guiding principles they need to understand. It's not novel - just straight old standard business school principles applied to our business but it's had a big impact (Kotter, 2008). Then the leader makes sure that he has got the right troops in the right jobs, gives them room to do their job within the constraints that he sets down, and helps them as team coach. (Mullins 2007)

Intelligence

On the other hand, Gerry Robinson, believing that business is essentially straightforward, does not share the view that high levels of intelligence are required of business leaders:

The danger of a high intellect is that it can veer into over-intellectualizing a business problem that is essentially very simple. People with lots of nous but average intelligence can be enormously successful in running large companies (Fong, 2002). You can learn very quickly what the ten keys issues are in a company and unfortunately seven of them will be the same every time for every company.

As did Kotter, Kets de Vries (2009) notes the relationship between creating the vision and the leader's ability to recognize patterns and relationships in disjointed events (p. 201). Leaders are seen as “reducers” who are able to limit the stimuli impinging on them, handle multiple activities without discomfort and deal with complex, novel, interesting situations “without impaired task performance, cognitive disorganization or health problems” (Fong, 2002). Gerry Robinson in examining a complex environment and articulating a simple vision is clearly a “reducer”, as is Penny Hughes, as she describes the ease with which she charts the right direction:

I have an uncanny feel for business which I find hard to share with or teach other people. It probably goes back to my training as a chemist and my maths (Fong, 2002). Without a calculator, or bit of paper I can work out the value of ...