Introduction
The present world witness a tremendous number of developments over billions of years from pre historic era. The world has now become more complex than before due to number of reasons such as continuous increase of world’s population which fundamentally increase needs and wants, hunger to acquire new technology and resources and competition for international trade, inception of world wide web, market domination and political influences and invasions to other parts of the world such as world wars. Similarly, the same process affected by current business world too.
As per the article on Industrial and Commercial Training (Pulley, M. L. and Sessa, V. L., 2001), presently we are experiencing a huge technological expansion due to digitalization. The digitalization of information is changing how we work, how we organize work and how we create value in the business. This can be proven with a real world example like World Wide Web. With the induction of the internet, the way corporations worked changed. Physical mails transformed in to electronic mail, physical meetings became video conference and finally, physical market become online. As with the evolution of human needs and wants, the competition among corporations also become high. The word “competition” often implies to speed. Companies now have to take decisions faster than ever in order to adjust themselves to complex business environment. Hence, need for speed of information to make fast and accurate decisions has become a challenge to current corporations (Industrial and Commercial Training- E-leadership: tackling complex challenges). Therefore, it could say that we are now moving from industrial era to a digital era where robots and artificial intelligence works for businesses.
The world has evolved in a way that no one ever expected, so does the future. The same is applicable to business environment as well: future of the business is rarely be a straightforward extrapolation. (Palaima, T. and Skaržauskienė, A., 2010).
Therefore it is obvious that the leaders of current business world also have to evolve with the change of environment. Traditional leadership styles such as Autocratic, Democratic, Charismatic etc. alone will not be able to tackle future problems. It requires modern methodologies such as e-leadership and systems thinking. Cloud, Transformational and Responsible leadership are few popular leadership styles which are currently running the business world compared with traditional styles.
Pulley, M. L. and Sessa, V. L. (2001) further discus that many companies are presently caught up between old organizational structure and new information systems which will eventually quite challenging for the business leaders to handle.
Type of Leadership Styles
According to Nanjundeswaraswamy T. S. and Swamy D. R. review paper of Leadership styles, an effective leader will lead his followers in a desired way to achieve required goals. In that study, they concluded that an effective organization is often lead by an effective leader who follows a 21st century leadership styles driven by innovation and competitive culture.
Below can be named as the five leadership qualities which are widely been used in current business world. Those are namely:
Cloud Leadership
Responsible Leadership
Ambidextrous Leadership
Transformation Leadership
Learning Organisational Style
Cloud Leadership style
According to Rodriguez, A. and Rodriguez, Y. (2015) Cloud leadership often refers to a style who is a technologically savvy person. The word Cloud refers to the latest technology of cloud computing where we don’t carry computers - we only have to carry a password or a smart devices which enables us to grant access to online computer. Further, a leader of this type is also concerned with principals about how individuals understand themselves and external environment, principals that conduce decision making process which are essential for complex scene-making abilities in qualitatively difference patterns and criteria.
According to the said journal, the strength of this style is that cloud leaders are usually easy to access to their team members which creates a respect towards the leader and will enable an organization to be cleared on their objectives without confusions. Cloud methodology consists of both human skills as well as technological skills which allows team members to transfer information and communicate at their ease. Cloud leaders usually provides immediate consultation with the help of latest tech (Vassilaras and Yovanof, 2011). Moreover, Johansen (2012) shows that Cloud leaders has a strong digital identity which is often preferred by young teams as they grew up in the Internet. Avolio and Gardner (2005) identified that this ability will create an impact on their followers life such as internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, relational transparency and etc. this style is optimal for where the organization is driven by young (millennial) crowd (Petrie, 2014).
Effective application of this style require to improve shared sense making capabilities, learning from shared experience, development of network among society (Drath et al., 2008). According to Wassenaar and Pearce (2012), Cloud leaders will require to learn to negotiate a social order and shared decisions, improve social influence abilities and agreements over time in order to be successful in the organization.
As this style is still new to the world, the researches on the betterment of Cloud Leadership Style is still lagging behind.
Responsible Leadership Style
Waldman and Galvin (2008) shows although various definitions for responsibility available, it all means that responsibility is a controlled behavior by an internal mechanism. To feel responsible, a person shall feel of doing the right thing. Therefore, the responsible leadership means that a style which focused on responsibility and directing attention to other members especially those whom the leader must responsible for.
Fry and Slocum (2008) state that, in recent past, there were considerable number of scandals took place in globally recognised organizations such as Enron. Such incidents gave the idea that the companies are corrupt and lacking with responsibility.
Accordingly, this style suites for large organizations. As the leaders in this style always wanted to responsible for their work and people under them, there will not be a room for a fraud. Furthermore, Hackett and Wang (2012) and Havard (2010) shows that this style showcases a lesser authority power but it’s more towards to developing others. Therefore, this will create a consistent motivating behavior and appropriate commitment towards the company which will end up by improving the organizational effectiveness and employee well-being (Meyer and Herscovitch, 2001).
Moreover, responsible leadership always resolves problems based on solid ethical judgment t ensures the sustainability of the corporation in a complex business world. However, the research on this style is still at the early stage. However, so far, this style is capable enough to address modern problems (Sarkar, 2016).
Ambidextrous Leadership Style
Ambidextrous means that this style allows its followers to focus on new business models while focusing on existing once as well. The main reason for companies to focus on new business models is the changing complex business environment. Example, IBM lost its software business to Microsoft software solutions (Probst et al., 2011).
According to Jansen et al. (2016) and (2009), most of the current research papers agree to the fact that this style consists of a complex set of behaviors and capabilities. Most critical abilities of an ambidextrous leader are conceive and perform contradictory but complementary demands (Luo et al., 2018).
As we are concerned about the current changing business world, this is an ideal style for a company to follow as this style always try to follow a new dimension from the current business to seize new opportunities. However, Probst, et al. (2011) shows that this is quite challenging task as results of new business models are usually not consistent. Examples – Executive committee grants authority while staying involved and middle management provide a vision while ensuring the execution whereas as line management and staff works together to achieve the desired task. This diversified expertise collaboration will ensure that new business model will be fit enough to current market trends.
According to Baskarada et al. (2016) and Luo et al. (2018), this style can be further extend to another two styles namely, Transformational and Transactional.
As this style is challenging since results of new ventures are not always consistent, identifying the best balance of new business and current business will be critical. This balance should be a compatible mix of both long term and short term of a corporation (Probst et al., 2011).
Transformation Leadership Style
According to Dirk Deichmann, Daan Stam (2014) there are both positive and negative sides identified by various researchers though out the past history. However, the meaning of transformation style is always employees focused one where employee’s discussions are well considered in a discussion. As per Nanjundeswaraswamy and Swamy (2014) the aim of this style is to transform people and organizations’ in to a committed to organizational goals and momentum building.
According to Bass (1985) and House (1977), this style influences their followers by communicating idealistic visions while providing intellectual development to them. This type of leaders are usually intellectually stimulating, directing teams to look in to different aspects of problems where followers will learn new things as a competence (Hetland et al. 2011). One example is the founder of Wall-Mart – Mr. Sam Walton, as per James Kendrick (2011), he regularly travels across the country to visit stores and appreciates the staff for their work done.
However, this style is more about trades according to Nanjundeswaraswamy and Swamy (2014) as employees decides their goals and plans for the company, they expects a reward. Hence, the leader will have to first validate the performance criteria with the goal and then proceed for implementation. Therefore, this will be heavily depending on reward and punishment principals.
Further, it was noted that the applicability of this style is questionable as not much research carried out regarding the applicability. Nanjundeswaraswamy and Swamy (2014) says that the applicability of this style for SMEs is not widely available and shall be considered for future research papers.
Learning Organisational Style
Kim, J. H. and Callahan, J. L. (2013) shows that learning is the power of growth and individual learning is a resource of business growth. This style showcases that a company learn by themselves with its employees. This will ideally create a big knowledge base in the company where all the employees are accessible. As with the heavy competition, the companies nowadays started inventing heavily for training and development to increase knowledge base of the company (Burke and Hutchins, 2008).
Additionally, a study by Senge (1990) states that all the members work together in a different way than other organization with a mutual trust and confidence within a learning organization. Hence the innovation of this kind of organisation comparatively higher than other organisations. Furthermore, the job satisfaction in this kind of an organization is high as the employees know more than its competitors (Popper and Lipshitz, 2000).
There are few limitations in this process. Jaber and Sikstrom (2004) show “the three forgetting models” where one cannot retain the things he learned for the rest of his life. Moreover, there is a risk of employees not applying the learnings to the process. This will affect to the employees job satisfaction as well as the company as a whole. This will also an impairment to the confidence to re-invest in learning and development (Jun Hee Kim, Jamie L. Callahan).
Conclusion
In this research paper, we have analyzed how the business world become such a complex one compared to history. And then we have analyzed the applicability of conventional leadership methods to modern business world and then five leadership styles which are widely accepted for 21 Century. As a conclusion, it could say that, along with the evaluation of current business world, the leadership styles also evolved to cater to the requirements of 21st Century.
As discussed in the introduction, the business world has become more complex mainly due to technological advancement and digitalization. It is quite challenging to understand the requirements of future and prepare for today. Due to this matter, most of the industries are stuck in the process of development. Technology, competition, cost pressure, innovation and workforce management have now become the critical issues to a company. Conventional leadership styles will no longer be able to tackle such requirement in crisis situation. The main reason is that we are currently in a digitalization era and majority of the employees are millennials. It was also noted that most of the 21st Century’s leadership styles are tech savvy and risk taking once. This is because the high competition for innovation. Although there are lots of new challenges for the application of modern leadership styles such as technical expertise, knowledge of technology, research and development.
Finally, it could conclude that the modern leadership styles are capable enough to handle modern problems arising in 21st century better than the conventional styles.
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