Blog 2: Contemporary Leadership Styles: How relevant are they in today’s changing world?

With the development of society, leadership behavior has become a hot issue in the research field of management. Over the past years, leadership theories have experienced a long history spanning more than a century, many scholars and researchers have paid attention to this point. Many leadership paid attention to the individuals and their roles in the process of leading, which is person-oriented leadership. Weibler (2012) put forward that these approaches can be defined as  person-oriented approaches from their common perspective of individual. It can be divided into leader-oriented and follower-oriented leadership. For instance, Bass (1990) proposed that trait theory, one of the leader-oriented approaches, has been proved that it can foster leaders’ personality. Besides, Lussier & Achua (2009) hold the view that if the situation can fit a leader’s leadership style, the leader can be most effective one. The other types of leadership theories is interaction-oriented leadership, such as Leader-Member Exchange Theory, presented by George Graeo and Uhl-Bien in 1976. It pointed that due to the pressure of time, the leader only builds a special relationship with a minority of people who can become the member inside the circle and gain more trust, care and privilege from the leader. The last one is the team leadership theory. According to the studies, team approach to leadership can improve the effectiveness of team work.

The leadership theories has experienced a long way in the industrial era. But now we enter the knowledge era, so the leaders face a lot of challenges. Researchers have found that many factors make leader’s environment more complicated so that the management can be more hard. Firstly, interaction are becoming more important in an industry which is nonlinear and interdepend in system elements. Secondly, the era of Big Data not only brings the opportunities for the business but also the challenges. With the increasing data arises, information overload has become one of the challenges for business. Although there are more options for leaders to choose, it would leads leaders to be hesitate, to put off or make second-best choice. Thirdly, new technologies would change the old work pattern. The business need more talents in the field of data analysis. Fourthly, new generations start their career in the workplace with their new values and expectations to the job. Last but not least, globalization needs more cross-cultural communication among the countries and people. Therefore, the leaders of firms must to make changes. 

Let me show you a successful example of changing the leadership. The oil crisis in 2004 had a negative effect on Shell’s share price, Jeroen Van Der Veer, the CEO of the Shell claimed that structural transformations should been carried out for the sake of the company. His idea was a risk for the company because it included 80 operating units operating units and covered the company as a whole. The change required leader had solid determination and made sure every part in company would stayed on track. He built a nominated team including many professionals and experts, such as senior leaders, executive consultants and several experts, which play an important role in creating new leadership pattern.

The development of the leadership theory will be a long-term process. Transformations are probably to begin with small pockets of leaderships in organizations, who can realize the change is inevitable. These leaderships need make a good preparation to the unknown results and to find the experts who can provide new frameworks to break the boundaries of the existing practices.

Leadership can be realized by the interaction of administrative, adaptive and enabling leadership (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey, 2007). The administrative leadership needs to manage the formal activities in organization, such as coordinating and planing missions. The adaptive leadership is informal, urgent, complex and dynamic, which would appear when the interaction between agencies comes out conflicts so that agencies can realize creativity and learning action in the interaction of complex adaptive system. At last, the enabling leadership will be a coordination between the above two systems. 

In a conclusion, leadership theories mainly focused on individual and environment in the past years, the new environment is under the big pressure of competition, which is characterized by increasing complexity and interconnectedness. Therefore, the effective leading becomes more essential to organizations. The leaders should improve themselves to make effective decisions and put their sight on the globe. In stead of being forced to change the leadership approaches, they should good at observing the situation and making adjustments. Besides, in the future, the leadership theories can be developed from the perspectives of biology, anthropology and other field, which can provide new angles for scholars and become the important method of innovating the leadership theories.

Reference 

• Bass, B. M. (1990). Bass & Stogdill’s handbook of leadership-theory, research and managerial applications. New York, NY: Free Press. 
• Lussier, R. N., Achua, C. F. (2009). Leadership: Theory, application, and skill development. Mason, OH: South-Western.
• Uhl-Bien，M.，R. Marion，and B.McKelvey. Complexity Leadership Theory：Shifting Leadership from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era.[J]. The Leadership Quarterly, 2007(18).