Essay on Leadership and Organizations Performance

According to Ogbonna and Harris (2000), Leadership is the act of leading/guiding people an organization or directing a particular group to achieve a specific specified goal or period within a given period. It is also known as the act of motivating people for them to attain some set goal within a certain stipulated time. For one to be pronounced a leader, he must be in a position to inspire others. However, to ensure we have an effective leadership style of any form, we have to base it on some ideas which must be passed to the others involve them for their personal views.

On the other hand organizational performance is referred to the actual output of an organization against the targets and the objectives of any organization (Combs Liu, Hall& Ketche, 2006). Today there is an emerging trend whereby most of the existing firms are evaluating the firm's performance using several scopes like the after services that their clients receive from the firm, ethics of the firms to the people in their locality and their loyalty to the Government. There are three main ways that are used to evaluate the performance of any firm these are the financial performance that comprises of the profits made by the firm. The returns on both assets and investments, the performance in the market of the product of the said organization and lastly the returns from shareholders who may have joined the organization at that period and the existing ones too( Andrews & Boyn, 2010).

Organizational performance is in many times linked to a leader and the leadership style and this contributes largely to is performance. For firms to perform well whether small business or a well-established firm they have to ensure that they have set the goals and the objectives and the team leader have to update his team members on the importance of achieving the written goal within the specified period (Aragon, Correa, Morales & Cordon, 2007). The leader is in charge of managing his team and must ensure the set goals and objectives do not contradict any of the team members and that he has persuaded and given them the importance of what they are working towards. In this case, they will all work achieve to achieve the targets without any hesitations. However each leadership style contributes differently to the organizational performance since they all have different approaches to how thing should be done and in the ways the leader related to his followers, to the have the knowledge of what they are working to achieve after informing them of his/her objectives which largely depend on how he can capture or transform their emotion and their mindsets changing the way they perceive issues compelling them to work towards the said goals thus improving the firms productivity ( Cummings, 2010).

In an organization, leadership assists the business focus on a particular goal. In cases where the employees are many, or it is a big firm it is essential to have proper leadership management since there many people, and if they all make their own decisions, it may be difficult to improve on productivity since the many actions taken may contradict the goals of the firm. Although leadership is important to business, it may be effective the firm's performance negatively if the leader only focuses towards achieving the set objectives without considering any other factors that may affect the company indirectly.

It is Crucial to look in details the different leadership styles, and how they contribute to the performance of business since they all have a different technique when it comes to leader-followers approach thus, they may have different performance outcomes depending on how effective each is. There various leadership styles that an organization follow for it to boost its performance both regarding profits outcomes or market share (Jing, & Avery, 2008).

According to Ogbonn Harris, 2000, Autocratic leadership where the manager has all the power to make decisions on his own without consulting the rest of his team and communication is only one way. In autocratic no one has the mandate to challenge the leader's decisions and any contribution from any of the team members is not welcome. This only works for those employees who are unskilled and requires maximum supervision and mostly rewards have to be used to motivate them. This leadership style is effective to those organizations which are constantly experiencing changes, and the leader has to make decisions immediately without taking time to consult the others, and the manager has total control of all the activities. The outcome of the firm may increase since the manager only makes the decisions that will be of benefit the firm since the members will supervise till all the work is done thus improving on the profits of the company and they may also be in a position to reach new markets thus making the company more effectively.

In Charismatic leadership style is where the manager demonstrates his/her reformative powers and transforms his / her team members to believe and trust him/her. Leaders in this category possess excellent communication skills and can gain his follower's emotional attention, their trust thus the follower is persuaded to follow, and they get to have a clear vision of the organizational goal and to make them understand its importance. It's very important for every leader to be charismatic in that he can influence his team to follow him without using his leadership powers. This mostly contributes to improved performance of firm regarding efficiency and productivity since new methods are implemented, and the team members have changed their perspectives of the job thus better performance for the company both internally and externally.

Cross culture is where an organization deals with people with different cultural beliefs or have different ideologies. It only applies to an organization that operates globally or members of the team is from diverse cultural background. In such cases, it's only it is advisable to choose a leader with knowledge in the various cultural backgrounds and with the skills to handle this kind of situation (Choudhary, Akhtar & Zaheer, 2013). However this style has some advantages that are, it may help the leader widen his knowledge at different levels since he deals with people from diverse backgrounds. Since the staffs working in that group have different beliefs/cultures they may suggest ideas from their history, and it may help solve a crisis facing the organization. However, there some limitations to this method where it cannot be used in countries/ companies that do not recognize people from other countries or people from a certain culture, may not work out if the leader does not have enough knowledge of the all the culture difference in the firm. In the recent past, this style is becoming popular as many organizations are going globally and thus the rise in the need for leaders possessing these skills. It has proved to be very efficient in improving the performance of the firm the leaders able to expand the business to new markets and reach new customers in cases where they have been unable to access the market previously (Aragon-Correa, Garcia-Morales & Cordon-Pozo, 2007).

Taylorism more leadership style is also known as Scientific Management, it was written by Fredrick Winslow Taylor (1964). He advocated in optimizing output by watching out for personal character at their work stations and setting of some procedure that should be followed and make sure that all the skills of a worker as fully utilized. He advocated division of labor to maximize profit and ensure human resources are utilized completely. Taylor believed in using the traditional motivators such as money, promotions, and bonuses to motivate people to work and also proposed that if any of the members fail to achieve their goal for the consequences they should not also be paid as have not added any productivity value to the firm. In the modern world, there are many days to day changes thus this style is rarely applied as it has been outdone by another method which seems to work better in improving the firm's performance. Therefore this style cannot be used by organizations to improve on its performance unless the company is focusing on a certain specific goal and that all the followers are fully aware and should only work to achieve it.

In conclusion leadership and performance in a firm are closely related where we find that if the manager does not carefully select the style that best fit the company, their profits, returns on output and market share will not improve at all thus no significance increase of their production output. Additionally, the manager should ensure that the goals and objectives of the company are well outlined and know to all the team members, maintain a good relationship with followers for the better performance of firms regarding the output and productivity.

References

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