Leadership Case

1.0 Introduction

Management can be defined as the practice of communicating, coordinating and completing goals in hopes of achieving the objectives and of an organisation. This essay will discuss the statement “organisations need strong leaders and a strong culture” and will also outline the effect of culture and leadership in the post-bureaucratic era. This essay is broken up into three sections: leadership and leadership competencies, culture and leadership and culture in post-bureaucratic era.

2.0 Leadership and Leadership Competencies

The traditional approach to leadership, which has been adopted in the USA, is a more hierarchical and rigid approach where there is one dominant leader. However, the more “modern” approach to leadership, which has been adopted in the UK and Australia, is a more dynamic and non-hierarchical approach where power is delegated throughout the whole organisation. This approach to leadership, as describe by Bolden and Gosling, involves soft domination and therefore changes the conception as to the traditional framework as to what it means to be a leader. From this it can be induced that the framework of management and leadership is changing and that a strong leader is not necessarily needed for success of an organisation.

In the article “Leadership Competencies: Time to Change the Tune?” suggests the shortcomings of leadership competencies. The major shortcoming of leadership competency is that it promotes conformity rather diversity of the organisation, this can be a problem as employees may believe that they do not possess a sense of self-worth and hence will not work at their optimum capacity. Another issue of leadership competency is the misuse of leadership competencies, this means that they may not be used for the purpose that they were developed for. Additionally, leadership competencies may also lead to setting up expectation or performance that is not realistic and thus not attainable. Lastly, leadership competencies works on the basis of measuring past and present performance, it does not factor in future performance. (Bolden and Gosling, 2006) Therefore, with all shortcomings of leadership competencies we can see that a strong leader is not necessarily all that is needed an organisations success.

Furthermore, Bolden and Gosling suggest that a solution to the shortcomings of leadership competencies is to encourage leaders to not only develop their competencies skills but also to improve on their human skills such as emotion, intuition and moral judgement. Thus, move towards a more democratic approach to leadership where power is distributed throughout the whole organisation.

Moreover, in the article “Leadership Training in a “Not-Leadership” Society” by Susan Herman, put forward a notion that currently in the USA there is a leadership crisis as a