Leadership Style of Betty Kester Who Has Been Working at Fancy Footwear - Case Study Example

Case Study Analysis Report Name: University: Date: Case Study Analysis Report Betty Kesmer working at Fancy Footwear, a shoe business owned by her uncle, was identified as the most productive worker with unmatched attendance. For this reason, the company decided to groom her by sending her to purse a Master of Business Administration so that she can occupy a top management position in the future. Afterwards, Kesmer was appointed to head the company’s largest division following the early retirement of Max Worthy. She comprehended the drawbacks of being hurled swiftly to a position of leadership, and so, Kesmer was prepared to shun them through participative management. Her predecessor was an absentee autocrat who made decisions from above and rarely made contact with the workers. A number of groups were established by Kesmer with the intention of engaging the workers, and all the groups had two meetings every week with Kesmer taking part in one of the meetings. In this case, all groups were encouraged to set up goals in their particular focus area as well as create plans to realise those goals, but in the beginning the group work was distressingly sluggish. The employees were unwilling to change their traditional way of working claiming that they are good at making shoes and not to take part in issues of management. Besides most of them were heading toward retirement and had no desire of learning a new way of carrying out their work activities. As a management style, participatory leadership is utilized these days by numerous organizations and companies. Comprehending how it functions can enable the leader to function better within the work setting. As evidenced by Kesmer, in participatory leadership style, decisions are made through participation from employees and the leader. As mentioned by Mehrabi, Safaei, and Kazemi (2013), leaders must identify their reciprocal independency as well as positively influence their workers in order for them to be motivated to participate in responsibility and reaction. Imperatively, leaders may impact worker’s overall performance through interaction between them and their followers. Self-effectiveness as defined in Mehrabi, Safaei, and Kazemi (2013) study is the employees believe concerning their capabilities to implement and organize the activities that bring about success. At a personal level, self-effectiveness strengthens the person’s performance as well as motivation through impacting their activities achieved through determination. Evidently, employees working under Kesmer lacked self-effectiveness, which could have resulted in numerous benefits such as improved performance through learning and could have enabled the workers to develop their occupational skills. Besides that, self0effectivenss is crucial for improving employee’s satisfaction, especially while working in difficult situations. Jones et al. (2008) posit that major changes in the organisation disrupts the organizational life fabric with regard to group boundaries, status of work unit and employee, reporting lines, interpersonal relationships, as well as the social identities related to group memberships. Although change as mentioned by Jones et al. (2008) is implemented for positive reasons such as remaining competitive, workers normally react negatively toward such efforts. Basically, this negative reaction as experienced by Kesmer is to a large extent because change comes with heightened stress, pressure and uncertainty for workers. According to Zaeh (2013, p. 395), change efforts mostly fail due to resistance by the employee to change; the resistance significance is compounded by the high change failure rate. Therefore, it is imperative to build positive attitudes, perceptions as well as beliefs amongst so as to succeed in the change interventions. Researchers in their effort of identifying how to effectively manage organisational change have concentrated on the factors that result in employee resistance. Critics of these studies hold the view that researchers must address the subjective change experiences of workers so as to create an understanding of what change resistance actually entails, especially when resistance theoretical paradigms underline their multi-faceted construct dimension (Oreg, 2006). In view of this, analysing the workers’ subjective change experience can help exhibit that workers are not inevitably resisting the change, but instead they are resisting the perceived unwelcome change outcomes or the process utilised to implement change. A number of workers during change can experience difficulty in disengaging from their old way of working since they feel like they are losing the highly-valued and old rules, methods and structures. At Fancy Footwear, employees were appreciating the old norms and values, and feel hard to let them go and espouse new norms and values. Explicitly, 21st century managers concur that the contemporary workplace needs employees with high productive and efficiency. To increase employees’ performance, businesses are putting much effort in training and development, but still, managers are facing unending challenges in their effort to improve productivity and attain competitive advantage. Workers always desire to work in the organizations wherein they feel valued and respected. For this reason, researchers have created a novel paradigm called ‘Hierarchy of engagement’ that looks like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Pay and benefits as basic needs are in the bottom line, and immediately these needs are satisfied, the worker focuses on the development opportunities, followed by promotion likelihood. Afterwards, the style of leadership is introduced to the model mix. Lastly, when employees’ lower level needs are satisfied, they focus on the value-meaning alignment, which according to Markos and Sridevi (2010) is exhibited through a true sense of meaning at the place of work. The majority of drivers that result in employee engagement as observed by Markos and Sridevi (2010) are naturally non-financial. For that reason, if an organisation has committed leadership, it can realise the desired engagement level without much stress. But when the financial aspect of the workers is ignored, the engaging workers in decision making and management activities becomes challenging. Even though Kesmer tried to link employees’ performance with reward, she failed to consider that human resources are not motivated by money single-handedly. According to r Markos and Sridevi (2010), benefits as well as pay are equally crucial to all employees, and therefore, the company pay should at least be equal to the market average. The employees working under the leadership of Kesmer were old and almost retiring; therefore, they were not willing to learn new things. According to Hameed and Waheed (2011), workers who are willing to learn they exhibit interest in the activities related to individual development. In consequence, they become more satisfied with their job resulting in increased employee productivity. Besides that, employee development mostly relies on the individual worker, his/her interest to learn new things. Bearing in mind that when a worker is willing to learn, he/she can learn progressively, an is ready to participate in other learning-related activities like taking part in the workshops, seminars or work productivity group. In consequence, this results in employee development and improved productivity; therefore, Kesmer should have examined the employee willingness to take part in new activities before including them in the groups. Besides that, employee learning also relies on the top management attitude, organization culture as well as limited promotion opportunities. Hameed and Waheed (2011) posit that if organization culture supports workers, then it should encourage workers to take part in decision making, and consequently can lead to improved performance. In the Fancy Footwear case, Kesmer failed to involve the employees in her decision to create groups wherein workers were expected to be main participants. This in consequence created negative energy amongst the workers who were used to doing things their own way. Employees’ own individual resources like optimism as well as self-esteem also have an effect on work engagement. Employees with profuse individual resources always approach their work with more joy and enthusiasm; they are likely to be healthier and more focused to work hard. Salminen, Mäkikangas, and Feldt (2014) posit that such employees are inclined to create these abilities through ‘job-crafting’, looking for means of making their duties ‘fit’ their interests as well as talents. Most workers admire job crafters; therefore, transferring their attitudes and abilities to them becomes easier. If the attitudes are productive, then workers’ engagement is increased easily, which consequently, result in increased productivity as well as individual reward. As indicated by Jones et al. (2008), the growing rate of dynamic organizational changes both internally and externally has compelled leaders to change their style of leadership from conventional approaches to a humanistic based leadership, which concentrate on empowerment of workers so as to accomplish organizational goals. A number of scholars have argued that participative style of leadership is the only existing humanistic leadership approach (Rad & Yarmohammadian, 2006). They further argue that the ability of the leader to accurately put participative styles into practice (particularly, power sharing, joint decision-making, empowerment as well as general consultation), in conjunction with consultative approaches (especially, appreciating follower's ideas as well as opinions in task assignments and goal settings) in planning functions of the organisation results in job satisfaction. Kesmer should have known that although, job satisfaction, participative styles of leadership, worker’s commitment and worker’s motivation are different constructs, they are to a large extent interrelated. This indicates that leaders, who can effectively put participative leadership style in practice, can as a result, motivate employees strongly to commit themselves to the organization; thus, resulting in higher job satisfaction within the organisation. References Hameed, A., & Waheed, A. (2011). Employee Development and Its Affect on Employee Performance A Conceptual Framework. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2(13), 224-229. Jones, L., Watson, B., Hobman, E., Bordia, P., Gallois, C., & Callan, V. J. (2008). Employee perceptions of organizational change: impact of hierarchical level. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 29(4), 294-316. Markos, S., & Sridevi, M. S. (2010). Employee Engagement: The Key to Improving Performance. International Journal of Business and Management, 5(12), 89-96. Mehrabi, D. J., Safaei, N., & Kazemi, D. (2013). Studying the Effect of Leader’s Participative Behaviors on Employee’s Effectiveness Perception and Performance (Kohdasht Municipality as Case Study). International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 3(1), 140-152. Oreg, S. (2006). Personality, context, and resistance to organizational change. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 15(1), 73-101. Rad, A. M., & Yarmohammadian, M. H. (2006). A study of relationship between managers' leadership style and employees' job satisfaction. Leadership in Health Services, 19(2), 11-28. Salminen, S., Mäkikangas, A., & Feldt, T. (2014). Job Resources and Work Engagement: Optimism as Moderator Among Finnish Managers. Journal of European Psychology Students,, 5(1), 69-77. Zaeh, M. F. (2013). Enabling Manufacturing Competitiveness and Economic Sustainability. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Changeable, Agile, Reconfigurable and Virtual Production (CARV 2013) (pp. 1-480). Munich, Germany: Springer Science & Business Media. Read More