Assessment of different leadership styles within organisations and their effectiveness - Essay Example

Richard Branson is a founder and chairman of Virgin Group which owns and controls more than 400 companies. His leadership style is mostly based upon valuing people and taking care of their needs in order to drive their energy, innovation and creativity towards the achievement of organization goals. Richard Reed founded Innocent Drinks and his leadership style is more towards focusing on core competencies of the firm and leveraging the same through the people of the organization. This paper will discuss and explore the leadership styles of all three corporate leaders and will argue as to how much they are effective.

Jack Welch and his Leadership Style Jack Welch is a Chemical Engineer and was also the CEO and Chairman of General Electric Corporation. His tenure from 1981 to 2001 saw a tremendous improvement in the performance of GE as company’s share rose in value by 4000%. He joined GE as a junior executive and rose to different places before being CEO of the firm in 1981. One of his earlier attempts to bring in reforms and improvements in GE was his vision to make GE as no.1 or no.2 in each industry it works.

He started the aggressive consolidation at the firm and also initiated a process of simplification. His strategies led to the gradual improvement at GE as he focused more upon developing and maintaining core competencies of the firm. His style therefore was mainly focused upon having extensive focus on what GE does best and further improving the processes in order to be at the desired position within the industry in which GE operated. He started to streamline and reduce the inventories held by the firm and also made drastic changes in the fundamental structure of the firm.

Since he worked at various junior positions therefore had a good experience of how bureaucratic organizational structure was hurting GE. As a CEO, one of his earliest attempts therefore were focused upon removing the bureaucratic organizational structure within the organization and make it more open organization with simplified organizational structure at various levels of organization. (Cunningham, 2006) Jack Welch can be considered as a democratic leader as he initiated changes which allowed followers to assume the position of leaders also.

He was more oriented towards leading rather than managing and created a vision within the organization which fostered leadership at all levels. Democratic leaders always believe in social equality and tend to reward those who come up with more innovative and leadership ideas aimed at improving the overall well-being of all the stakeholders involved in the organization. His focus was on development of enough energy for followers to get them motivated and passionate about their work. This has resulted into more motivated teams and employees and enhanced group morale for the team as a whole.

( Wilson, 2002 It is also important to understand that Welch focused on bringing in more functional leadership within the organization. His focus was on removing the unnecessary parts of the organization and focus on those areas where it can perform best. This