Ford Leadership

Discuss the role of leadership and how it can impact organizational performance.

Leadership is essential to impacting positive organizational performance.   Leadership can also negatively impact organizations.   Leadership develops a vision and ideas to focus an organization (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2011).   An organization should develop competencies to create individual, team and organizational effectiveness.   Hellriegel & Slocum (2011) developed a model listing seven competencies that apply to an organization’s leadership as well as all employees.   The competencies are self, change, teams, communication, diversity and across cultures. The seventh competency, ethics, is in the center and “plays a foundational role in implementing the other six competencies” (pg. 9).   An organization’s leadership should embrace the competencies and understand them as relating to each other.   The leader’s values and ethics will play a large role in positively impacting organizational performance.   To counter, a leader who possesses questionable ethics can create a climate that also impacts the organization’s performance, but in a negative manner.   Another example using the competencies can examine communication.   If a leader’s job is to create a vision for the organization, the leader must also communicate the vision.   The leader must resolve conflicts between those that are charged with implementing the vision.
The leadership style of a particular leader can also impact organizational performance.   Lewin, Lippit and White (1939) conducted decision making experiments and identified three distinct leadership styles.   The styles they identified include autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire.   The different styles identified leaders in various degrees of personal interaction and involvement to arrive at a decision.   The autocratic style relied more on the decision maker to decide while the democratic leader involved other people in the process.   The laissez-faire leader requires...