Analysis of Susan Wong’s Leadership Style
Reading 12 of Sun (2013) looks at servant leadership is a way of leading the followers or subordinates by working or representing as a servant before the team members. Susan Wong is the leader of Central Administration House (CAH) at Ridgeway Singapore SBU that heads the marketing, sales, finance, accounting, administration, and management staff with 80 reports from these areas. The leadership style, Susan adopts/follows is transactional and autocratic. The current leadership style of Susan is not more effective because of the lack of communication, interaction, and collaboration with the team members or followers, quick and independent decision-making without the participation of the team members, not taking care of the needs, interests, and expectations of the team members, ineffective supervision and disciplined actions, strict rules and regulations, and more technical and transactional approach instead of instrumental or innovative. Her leadership is based on promoting the citizenship behavior and sympathetic treatment with the team members by providing them the training based on the task-efficient and technical in order to establish and maintain healthy and harmony work relations with them (Sun, 2013).
The servant leadership style might be applied to Susan Wong’s leadership to assist in gaining the loyalty and confidence of the team members for attaining better performance outcomes from them as well as executing their tasks, projects, and activities by giving them important work related guidelines. The servant leadership is a supportive management approach with several leadership traits or characteristics, such as Active listening, empathy, healing, stewardship, foresightedness, building community, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, ethical treatment, high engagement, and sense of community that might be applied to the leadership of Susan to represent herself as a servant leader. For example, Foresightedness quality of the servant leadership will assist to enhance ingroup circle rather than outgroup circle by focusing on the growth and developing of the ingroup team members by taking care of their needs, interests, and expectations (Spears, 2010).
The emotional healing quality of the servant leadership will assist to have control on the emotions of the staffs by understanding their feelings, needs, interests, and desires. For example, by having the emotional healing quality, she could solve the discontent of Johnson case by personally involving into this matter rather than referring to the assistant manager. She could directly communicate and interact with the staff for knowing more about their desires or wants that they expect. She might allow the stakeholder participation aspect of the servant leadership to consider the participation and engagement of the followers in the team meetings, and decision-making process and considering their views, opinions, and ideas while executing the final decision-making. It could also assist Susan to be more attentive to her team members, treating them in an empathetic way and nurtures them by protecting their needs, interests, and expectations (Northhouse, 2016, chapter: 10).
Servant Leadership Approach for Susan Wong
Susan could have applied the active listening, persuasion, and stewardess to support Ben in his advanced action plan of stimulating the commercial trade shows in demonstrating advantage of the new electronic system to support the expansion of Ridgeway in other transport modes. By using the servant leadership, Susan might listen and appreciate Ben’s advanced plan and support to take it to the general manager for getting the confirmation and approval of the general manager on this. Along with this, she might apply the supportive and participative behavior of servant leadership to win the confidence and loyalty of the team members working for more than 10 years at Ridgeway. This will also assist Susan to show the high commitment and genuine interest to support the staff members by taking their needs, interests, and expectations and avoid disinterest and discontent among the employees (Mind Tools, 2015).
Susan Wong is a leader for Central Administration House (CAH) of Ridgeway industries Singapore SBU. She is a transactional/autocratic leader that prefers to do all things in her way, taking quick decisions without the participation of the senior managers or followers, and solving the problems of the staff members in her own way without involving personally. She lacks the communication with the team members as well as not responsive to take care of the staff members and not personally helping the team members or subordinates in doing their tasks or acts effectively. Susan didn’t try to know what the employee expects or desires under her leadership and did not take interest on the feedbacks of the team members’ performance. For example, rather than personally looking into Johnson case and other discontented staffs, she referred to assistant manager to look into the matter and after solving this matter to send the report to her. While on the other hand, Ben Abernathy was appointed by Ridgeway Industries Singapore SBU as a new assistant manager of sales and marketing area to boost the sales volumes and revenues of this unit (Northhouse, 2016, Chapter: 11). He was an adaptive leadership who engaged or involved the team members to learn from the past things and challenge the old system by replacing this with a new system to get things done. He focused on collaboration, team efforts, group performance, collective learning, and shared decision-making by sharing the ideas, and suggestions of the team members to achieve better performance results. Ben’s adaptive leadership style enforced the subordinate or staffs of his team to enhance their adaptability to face new challenges and innovative things for getting more expected outcomes. For ex- He allowed his team members to participate in the advance plan of trade shows or demonstration for the electronic system display for the passenger trains.
Analysis of Ben Abernathy’s Leadership Style
Susan’s leadership was transactional and technical that was known for doing the things in an older or traditional way rather than instrumental or innovative way. She was not more responsive to new ideas or innovative thinking to boost the business performance of Ridgeway as she preferred to odd ways. She also lacked the communication and social interaction with the followers. She likes to control on their performance with her strict procedures, controlled supervision, and disciplinary actions (Fjaguilarr, 2013). While, on the other hand, Ben didn’t look at the transactional and technical side rather he focused on instrumental and innovative approach to do things in the right way by taking the team members together and collaborating them for learning from the practical implications and new experiments for facing new challenges. His leadership was based on producing an advance plan or new strategies for enhancing the sales performance of Ridgeway in the automotive industry. For example, He prepared an advanced plan of trade shows or demonstrations by developing innovative ideas and take new challenges to grow the sales of the unit that was based on introduction of an electronic system for the passenger trains to expand the businesses of Ridgeway. Susan was not more responsive of such new idea of trade shows or demonstrations because of her transactional characteristic of leadership (Gagnon, et al., 2012).
Susan likes to see her team members to be engaged in executing their tasks and activities by providing them the task-based and technical training. She is only focused on attaining production outcomes without more concerning on the growth and development of the followers. She is traditional and transactional leader who is intended to create employment through the internal job opportunities from their promotions or being themselves the part of sub-groups or task group that will be highly favored and supported by the management team. While, on the other hand, Ben’s management style was based on hiring new staffs along with the internal staff to create flexibility at the workplace because new staff members will work with new roles, tasks, and responsibilities in new way with more aggression, energy, and enthusiasm. The leadership of Ben is based on the practical framework to assist the team members to adapt and thrive in the challenging business environment to learn new things. He focuses more on preparing the team members to learn from the market conditions, external environmental conditions, competitive and industrial trends, and growing practical implications and new challenges for adapting the organization as well as staff members to the modern business environment (Admin, 2011).
Adaptive Leadership Approach for Ben Abernathy
From the Reading 15 by Lewis et al (2014), the paradoxical leadership approach will enable the strategic agility to relate the five paradoxical leadership practices with the leadership issues at Ridgeway Singapore SBU. These five paradoxical practices include value paradoxes as essential element for high performance, avoiding the traps of anxiety and defensiveness, proactively identify paradox and raise tensions, regularly communicate paradox changes and visions with the followers, and specific efforts on focusing on both side of a paradox. These paradox leadership practices will enable the strategic agility to respond to the dynamic, complex, and global environments. The value paradox as a vital ingredient of high performance is the first key step to achieve the strategic agility for fostering a deep appreciation and respect for the paradoxical tensions. This is a vital ingredient to attain long-term success through dramatic and ongoing changes. This could be applied to Susan case to enhance the strategic performance by maximizing the strategic sensitivity, resource fluidity, and leadership unity. The paradox, such as proactively identifying the paradox and raise tension fosters strategic agility beyond valuing tensions for meeting the stakeholders’ needs and effective decision-making. This paradox might relate to Susan Leadership to cope with the technological discontinuities to anticipate and understand the market demands, customer needs, and disruptions. The paradox, such as communicate paradox changes and visions is to inform the strategic agility with the followers for guiding the strategic direction to the followers. This paradox might be applied to Susan leadership (who likes to do thing in older or traditional way) to facilitate changes to seek alternatives by fostering the innovation, creativity, morality, novelty, and long-term sustainabilitythroughout the organization of Ridgeway (Lewis, et al. 2014).
The paradox, such as avoid traps of anxiety and defensiveness supports the defensive actions and decision-making to foster strategic agility by going beyond tensions because the tension raises anxiety and grievance among the followers. This paradox could be applied to Ben case, he was defensive manager but avoids the anxiety, anger, and strictness to his team members. He was focused on adapting new changes by taking new challenges in supportive way. The specific efforts on both sides of paradox is the last key to strategic agility that promotes the balanced proposition among trade-offs, paradox, and compromises to respond to competitive demands and global environment will relate to managerial and leader staff of Ridgeway paradox to assist in executing better decision-making, strategic capabilities, and business performance to understand the situations and take decisions accordingly as per environmental conditions.
In the case study, Susan has played the characteristics of the transactional leadership. Susan might get benefits of applying adaptive leadership at Ridgeway for getting more value-added outcomes by more focusing on developing new ideas and strategies for focusing on seeking alternatives or adaptations to the dynamic or changing environment. This will assist Susan to engage in the activities, such as mobilization, motivation, organization, orientation, and focusing on others. The characteristics of adaptive leadership, such as innovative and risk taking, creativity, opportunities seeking, Regular distress, Get on the balcony, identify adaptive challenges, get the work back to people, and protect leadership voice from below can be applied to Susan leadership to prepare the team members for technical and adaptive challenges or complexities by executing their tasks and activities effectively toward the achievement of the future goals and business objectives. These characteristics might be applied to Susan leadership for creating the holding environment through good interaction and social relationship between Susan and her followers. These adaptive leadership behavioral characteristics will assist Susan to bring new changes, innovation, and creativity within the organization of Ridgeway to respond to new environmental challenges and competitive demands. This might assist Susan to be more rational and dynamic to take decisions as per organizational situations or conditions. She could apply different perspectives and conceptual frameworks of the adaptive leadership to incorporate implied adaptive changes as per situations in order to create innovation, creativity, and flexibility within the organization of Ridgeway (Agote, Aramburu, and Lines, 2015).
Susan could adopt the adaptive leadership to have good supervision and control on the interests, behaviors, actions, tasks, and performances of the team members rather than referring to the managers (e.g. Johnson discontent case referred to assistant manager) to look into the matter, or solve the conflicts of the team members. She might benefit from the adaptive leadership to become an inspiration leader in order to inspire the team members from the leadership role and achieving the loyalty and confidence of the team members. The adaptive leadership styles might benefit her to take advantage of the opportunities by adopting new way of doing things and replacing old or system or traditional approach of leadership. By applying the adaptive leadership, she might have focus on rational, dynamic, and interactive approach to respond to the diverse organizational situations (Qian, Lin, and Chen, 2012).
Based on the studies of chapter 12 of Northhouse (2016) and from the reading 16 by Rock (2008), it is identified that the psychodynamic approach is the core of the study that reflects the idea of the understanding the psychological aspects and emotions of the human behaviors or followers by the leader at Ridgeway. According to this approach, the leadership is to understand the values, beliefs, behaviors, intentions, thoughts, ideas, emotions, and feelings of the followers for maintain the leader-follower relationship. The psychodynamic approach assumes that the leadership behavior should me more rational, instrumental and practical rather than traditional to prepare the leaders or managers to learn about new things by facing up new challenges. The leader should provide the learning and collaborative culture, safe and healthy working conditions, appropriate guidance and work related instructions, and good supervision for managing the performances of the employees in right direction toward growth for avoiding the employee absenteeism (Qian, Lin, and Chen, 2012).
From the key readings of Rock (2008) on leadership, Susan Wong’s transactional leadership could be aligned with the possibilities that will underpin Susan leadership at Ridgeway. The observable, conscious, and rational phenomena as well as underlying irrational processes and dynamic human behaviors are such leadership aspects might be applied to support the leadership of Susan Wong. The human behaviors and social experiences could be understood with the help of Scarf Model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness). Scarf is a brain-based model that will assist Susan in collaborating and influencing others. The status domain will assist to provide the relative importance to the team members. Certainty domain will assist to take risks and challenges by predicting about the future trends. Autonomy will provide the flexibility or liberty to the team members to work in their own ways (Rock, 2008). Relatedness will provide the sense of security and social interaction by providing the safe and health conditions to the team members. The fairness will enhance the transparency, accountability, and fair exchange among the staffs. This model will develop the leadership traits, such as mindful, empathy, collaborative, stereotyping, connectedness, fairness, morality, appreciation, and social interaction in the leadership of Susan to influence the team members with her roles.
According to this, the leadership of Wong might focus on the group coaching and collective learning to create a cohesive and learning culture supporting the follower in enhancing their skills level and job competences that in turn will enhance the motivational level and performances of the followers. The group coaching is a highly intensive and effective intervention method that will prepare Susan and her team members for the significant organizational changes. This will apply the psychodynamic principles to assist Susan in performing the interpersonal relationships, collective decision-making, participative leadership, learning and cohesive culture (Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, 2009).
By promoting the collective learning, Wong could help the team members by offering the support, suggestions, reassurance, and new insights that might have a therapeutic effect contributing to Wong’s leadership level of positive emotions, sense of self-respect, and well-being of others. Susan Wong might adopt psychodynamic approach to be more dynamic, complex, unique and paradoxical with lots of motivational drivers, collective decision making, and interactive pattern. The collective learning will be effective for the leadership development of Susan by encouraging the team work, group performance, shared learning practices, and group discussions. Along with this, Wong could support 360 degree feedback in his leadership to get the responses/feedbacks of all team members on the performance outcomes (Adams, Bailey, Jr., Anderson, and Galanos, 2013).
References
Adams, JA, Bailey, DE, Anderson, RA & Galanos, AN 2013. Adaptive Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Admin, SJ 2011. Servant Leadership and Adaptive Challenges. [Online] Available at: https://joeypauley.com/servant-leadership-and-adaptive-challenges/. [Accessed: 8 May 2017].
Agote, L, Aramburu, N & Lines, R 2015. ‘Authentic Leadership Perception, Trust in the Leader, and Followers’ Emotions in Organizational Change Processes’, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 52 (1), pp. 35-63.
Fjaguilarr, 2013. On Servant and Adaptive Leadership. [Online] Available at: https://cronkitehhh.jmc.asu.edu/blog/2013/11/servant-adaptive-leadership/. [Accessed: 8 May 2017].
Gagnon, S. et al. 2012, ‘Learning to lead unscripted: Developing affiliative leadership through improvisational theatre’, Human Resource Development Review, Reading 13, Vol. 11(3), pp. 299-325.
Guarana, CL & Hernandez, M 2015, ‘Building sense out of situational complexity: The role of ambivalence in creating functional leadership processes’, The Journal of Behavioural Studies, Vol. 5, pp. 50-73.
Heifetz, RA, Grashow, A & Linsky, M 2009. ‘The practice of adaptive leadership: A novel approach for family decision making’, Journal of Palliative Medicine, Vol.16 (3), pp.326–329.
Lewis, MW et al. 2014, ‘Paradoxical leadership to enable strategic agility’, California Management Review, Reading 15, Vol. 56 (3), pp. 58-77
Mind Tools, 2015. Servant Leadership: Putting Your Team First, and Yourself Second [Online]. Available at: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/servant-leadership.htm. [Accessed: 8 May 2017].
Northhouse, GP 2016. Leadership Theory and Practice- Seventh Edition, Chapter 10, Servant Leadership, Sage Publication, London.
Northhouse, GP 2016. Leadership Theory and Practice- Seventh Edition, Chapter 11, Adaptive Leadership. Sage Publication, London.
Qian, J, Lin, X & Chen, GZ 2012. ‘Authentic leadership and feedback-seeking behaviour: An examination of the cultural context of mediating processes in China’, Journal of Management & Organization, Vol. 18 (3), pp. 286-99.
Rock, D 2008, ‘SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others’, Neuro Leadership Journal, Reading 16, Issue 1.
Spears, CL 2010. ‘Character and Servant Leadership: Ten Characteristics of Effective, Caring Leaders’, Journal of Virtues and Leadership, Vol. 1 (1), pp. 25-30.
Sun, PYT 2013, ‘The servant identity: Influences on the cognition and behaviour of servant leaders’, The Leadership Quarterly, Reading 12, Vol. 24, pp. 544-557.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
