Introduction

  • Background information

Various explanations, definitions, and theories have talked about leadership, which are still being implemented because of its effects on leaders and organizations. Many leadership literature indicate that the theory could be modified and implemented as time goes from a more practical and effective needs due to the explored correlation between leadership style and organizational behaviors.

For example, in the article “Leadership’s Influence on Job Satisfaction”, the authors mentioned stated that there is a strong correlation between leadership behaviors and job satisfaction through the influence of various motivational factors, which is valuable for supervisors to learn from (Watson, 2009, p. 300). Also, with an organization, leadership might have a positive and important effect on employee performance, which is significant for further employee training programs according to the research in one of the companies in Purwokerto with it 100 supervisors and technical staff (Bagis et al., 2019, p. 510).

Therefore, with sufficient literature, we could conclude two aspects of leadership effects, internal influences within the organization, external influences like the firm’s image, and customers relation. Also, ethical influence should also be taken into consideration in today’s society, since it is required to be a socially responsible organization by thinking about not only consumers but also the community and the whole environment. Since the leadership style is hardly based on leaders’ personal traits and the organizational culture, which are formed with various backgrounds, there might be role conflicts exited when dealing with some ethical dilemmas.

Therefore, with a better understanding of leadership styles and their correlation to organizations, leaders could avoid several negative effects and better deal with the role conflicts. So, in this article, we could use the case study research method to explore the correlation between leadership style and organizational behaviors, especially for global leaders. Then, several practical suggestions would be generated for further learning and practicing for both organizations and individuals from a well-understandable perspective.

  • Thesis statement

Since there are too many sub-sections for the topic, for better analyzing the topic, I would further marrow the correlation between leadership style and organizational behavior into two sections. First, the correlation between leadership style and workplace performance, in which we would focus on the past literature and mainly analyze the internal influences on work performance.

For example, productivity, job satisfaction, and work efficiency, etc. Second, global leaders’ leadership style implications on their global organizations, especially for several famous CEOs, like Elon Musk. Also, with plenty of established leadership styles, we could only focus on three of them, charismatic leadership, transformational leadership, and authentic leadership with their represented CEOs.

Therefore, with the analysis, we could generate how those reprehensive CEOs’ leadership styles might affect the organizational behaviors based on the workplace performance through various managerial implication, like motivation styles, organizational structure establishment, communication styles or power distances, etc.

With detailed analysis based on current global CEOs, more leaders could learn from it to implement their own leadership styles in order to achieve a wider and larger market with today’s globalization trend and find their way to improve workplace performance from a learnable approach since leadership could be learned and trained. Also, organizations could rebuild their training procedures for potential leaders to adopt their future global business strategies.

Body

  • Literature review on the correlation between leadership style and workplace performance

Since 21 century, various researchers have examined how leadership style could affect workplace performance in different managerial levels and various industries. Mark A. Huselid, (Huselid et al., 1997, p. 174) conducted research about leadership effectiveness in the HR department, which proved that technical and strategic HR management from effective leaders has an impact on the organization’s financial performance.

The study has observed 293 U.S. firms from different areas with different size, and the capacities and contributions of effective HR leaders have a significant influence on the firm’s performance regarding the annual income or other aspects related to the balance sheet, like cash flow or market value, which are effect representative of one firm’s productivity. Another research, “Leadership Change in Human and Community Service Organizations” from Elizabeth B. Bolton (Bagis et al., 2019, p. 512) shows that internal or external changes of a company could effectively affect leadership style changes through various decision-making process or motivation strategies, which could improve the firm general performance from a long-term perspective.

Also, in the research, “Impact of Communication and Leadership on Organizational Performance”, researchers examined that leadership skills could be learned, trained, and innovated by adopting the organization’s traditional culture and relevant business model, which is a significant difficulty for Human Resource department in a firm (Dr. Ramanababu Karaka et al., 2020, p. 423).

However, an organization’s effectiveness and performance could not only be estimated by financial factors, which is claimed by Falshaw, Glaister, and Tatoglu (2006), and supported by Garg and Ma (2005). Other aspects, like customer satisfaction, employee turnover, motivation strategies, and other innovation capacity are more and more important for a company’s sustainability (Ebrahimi et al., 2016, p. 354).

Different leadership styles may affect the innovation capacity with its process of influencing people within the organization (Hogg, 2001; Jung, 2001; Roussel, 2006; Winkler, 2010). There are plenty of studies that examined the impacts of established leadership styles on a firm’s innovation, and there is evidence that both transformational leadership and transactional leadership could positively affect the innovation power (Jansen, Vera, & Crossan, 2009), but transformational leadership is able to enhance the creativity of employees and provide various level of motivation from a long-term perspective (Wang & Cheng, 2010).

Therefore, with today’s globalization trend, businesses need to use various strategies to improve work efficiency and effectiveness by motivating one of the key elements within the organization, human or employees. So, strengthen the leadership style to better adapt the business model and workflow could be a crucial approach since leadership could be educated and learned. Also, for lots of global firms, a cross-culture workplace is common in teamwork, which adds extra difficulties for the leader since the various communication and work preferences could be hard to change with their established cultural backgrounds.

So, leaders should be equipped with various capacities through its management within the team and the organization. Therefore, It is crucial for management to explore and implement better leadership styles with efficient and effective training, and to improve the firm’s overall performance from a wider standard.

Case study on global CEOs’ leadership style  

  • Charismatic leadership, Elon Musk

There are three basic characteristics for charismatic leadership, leaders’ characters, followers’ characters, and the situation. On some urgent occasions, charismatic leadership could enhance team motivation with mental motivation since leaders are not only bosses but also role models.

According to the research conducted by Muhammad and Yasir, there is a positive relationship between charismatic leadership and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors through work engagement with the mediating role of leaders (Babcock-Roberson & Strickland, 2010, p. 316). With the inspirations from leaders, the follower could be more united and focus on their job and achievements. Therefore, productivity and organizational goals could be better achieved.

In Tesla. co, Elon Musk, as both the CEO and the founder, his spirit towards high tech and Mars motivates thousands of Tesla’s current employees. As described by some of the employees, “Musk is supper talent and he is born to be a hero”. Musk’s vision for Tesla is way much more than just build an electric car, he hopes to change consumers, change human’s way of living and change the world through his smart brain and efforts.

Although investors concerns about the financial performance and stock value of Tesla. co day by day, Musk’s fame and popularity around the world is enhancing year by year, which could also be valuable intangible assets for the organization. Furthermore, with the leadership under Musk, Tesla’s market value has grown to about $500 million in November 2020, while the whole world is under the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, according to data from Glassdoor, Tesla’s overall company rating fell to around 3.2 out of 5.0 based on employees’ reviews, while the overall rating for high tech companies in this website is about 3.4 (Autoblog Is Now a Part of Verizon Media, 2019). Most of the reviews complain about the high stress but low salary associated with the job position.

With the continued low rate of job satisfaction from employees, the turnover could be increased, which is a waste of organizational resources, especially for high-tech companies. However, there are still lots of millennials who would like to work in Tesla upon their graduation since they believe that work with Musk would be fun and energetic, reported by PaysScale.com (Townsend, 2020).

Since lots of interesting jobs are not always associated with high payroll or the best promotion opportunities, Tesla is still one of the hottest company to step into in the current job market, and one of the important reasons is the CEO’s personal attractive traits and inspirations, which is an important component for characteristics leadership.

Followers are admiring the leader and work to work like the leader, which could be one of the good potential sources for motivation. Also, within the organization, employees could be highly motivated by the leader for better work performance, but from the long-term considerations, the motivation strategy still needs to be improved with various levels depending on Maslow’s need theory.

  • Transformational leadership

According to our textbook, transformational leadership focuses on the inspirational effects on the follower with emotional links and considerations. Leaders are also listeners and observers to find employees’ abilities and try to motivate them, which could enhance the organization’s innovation capacity and employee engagement from various aspects.

One of the well-known transformation leaders around the world is Steven Jobs. First, as a founder of Apple, Steven Jobs is a significant element of the organizational culture, creativity, and inspiration, which helps Apple to be one of the top tech companies around the world.

Also, iPhone became one of the most popular smartphones in the market, thousands of Apple fans could wait the whole night in front of the stores for the latest released phones. Therefore, we could see that transformational leadership could bring positive implications on the organization with profitability and good customer loyalty. Furthermore, within the organization, Jobs always performs like a normal employee with short communication distance.

He would like to know employees’ creative thinking about product design and users’ experiences. We could always remember that he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans full of empathy and abasement, recalled by previous employees in Apple. With the low level of authority and a formal work environment, people could be more relax and creative with their work, which is an important element for innovation as well.

Although there are many years for Jobs’ leave, his sprint and ways of management still inspire the corporation through the organizational culture and commitment. Therefore, Apple’s job satisfaction could reach 4.0 according to 2019’s Glassdoor research, and the American customer satisfaction index could reach 80 in the list, which is listed in the top 10 (Glassdoor, 2019).

Therefore, with transformational leadership, there will be a creative environment in the workplace, which is relaxing and interesting, there are new ideas and innovations that could be better boosted, which benefit the organization, especially for high-tech or internet firms. Also, with a better communication opportunity under the transformational leadership, the ideas and thoughts could be better spread and understood, which may help the firm become more united, and could be good for the organizational commitment.

However, as transformational leaders, avoiding groups and pay attention to work efficiency could be important since not all thoughts from followers are valuable. As a result, both the external and internal aspects of the organization could be beneficial with an inspirational and creative organizational culture and a better communication approach.

  • Authentic leadership

Not like other leadership styles, authentic leadership focus more on leaders’ behaviors and action. Authentic leaders pay more attention to individual’s own strengths and encourage to develop special personal strengths.  Therefore, the authentic leader will affect others with high personal thoughts, and gain commitment, instead of manipulation and orders, so the trust could maintain longer (Khan, 2010, p. 168). Like the former female CEO for Avon Cosmetics, Andrea Jung is a representative of authentic leadership.

First, as the first female CEO in Avon, Andrea had her own controversial consensus about her strengths and power. Also, her high level of passion for the business and sense of confidence do highlight her personal values and beliefs. Therefore, other female employees could be highly motivated and further made more efforts towards the business and work. However, just like no one is perfect, personal traits are always associated with weak points.

For example, as a CEO, Andrea could be powerful and aggressive, but she is also a female with her treasurable families. Her own perspectives towards family and the preferred ways to deal with relationships might not be accepted by the majority of society. Therefore, role conflict could easily happen in the workplace. Because of the authentic leadership style, followers may admire lots of her personal values, and it could include several controversial topics.

Therefore, the decision that she made would be hard to determine and estimate, since followers trust her values and would like to learn from her in many ways, which could affect the work effectiveness and decision-making process. So, within the organization, authentic leadership could have a double-sides effect on workplace overall performance.

Conclusion

 In conclusion, this analysis mainly talked about how leadership would affect organizational behaviors from a global perspective by analyzing three CEOs’ leadership styles. From the literature review, it is clear that leadership style has a strong correlation with workplace performance, which is meant for an organization’s training programs, and influence could be affected on various departments, like HR or technical. Also, the estimated workplace performance includes both financial and non-financial factors, like job satisfaction or customer satisfaction, which are all intangible assets for one organization from a long-term perspective.

Therefore, with the internal and external effects from those three global leaders, Elon Musk, Steven Jobs, and Andrea Jung, we could know that leadership style could result in better workplace performance from various aspects. However, it could result in irrational impacts because of the natural source of leadership. Therefore, continuous scientific training would be crucial for the business, especially for global companies since the cross-culture work setting adds more complexity to the organizational internal environment, which is worth thinking about.

 

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