Leadership in the Modern Context - Literature review Example

Leadership in the Modern Context Name of Student Course number and name Instructor’s name Date Leadership in the Modern Context Fullan (2014) posits that globalization has paved way for numerous opportunities alongside rising complexity for organizations globally. In order to navigate the complex organizational networks and to manage diverse and dispersed teams, there is need to execute global leadership consistently (Giddens, 2013). Effective leadership is critical in navigating the dynamic business environment. Multinational corporations need to go beyond their leadership development investments by deploying a patchwork of locally developed programs and case study approaches to maximize impact (Moran, Abramson & Moran, 2014). Angela Merkel is the leader I like most. This essay discusses the way that leadership has changed as well as the leadership qualities of Angel Merkel, which makes her admirable. Many leading organizations are recognizing the worth of deploying high-impact and consistent leadership development on a worldwide basis. With rising globalization, the need for global leadership rises to ensure organization success. In numerous organizations, leaders have shifted focus to employee-and-leadership development programs in order to grow their talent internally (Northouse, 2012). For instance, in America, many organizations are increasing investments by approximately $13.6 billion in leadership development programs. Given that most organizations operate in a multi-polar environment, it has become a necessity for organizations to bring together more cultures and people at nearly every point of the organization. The main programs required to aid any organization to operate commendably in a highly globalized environment also involves cultural transformation and change management (Benton & Redclift, 2013). The familiarity of these approaches may cover the intense differences of operating in the emerging global setting. Change strategies, for instance, must be established in ways that acknowledge the emerging value flows of a multi-faceted universe. Leadership transformation must pay attention on more management layers and diverse leadership actions. Cultural change programs ought to balance the desire for universal commonality with domestic authenticity and relevance. Current global leadership has embraced proper management of organizational change elements in order for them to execute a visionary universal operating and acquisition strategy especially when these organizations grow in size. By focusing on constant improvement and on processes of results measurement, leaders can invest on non-traditional approaches where they apply a patchwork of programs across different regions (Fullan, 2014). Through high-impact leadership, leaders have deployed scalable and uniform programs for leadership development. Many leaders are focusing on leadership development, which pools flow of data and information within the regulatory, economic, and political spheres. One of the greatest challenges in leadership is maintaining accountability for developments in the face of swift changes. Globalization has necessitated changing of the adopted processes in ways that address whether the leadership will consolidate or decentralize some regions. Current leadership has therefore, necessitated undertaking of critical decisions to generate the value from new achievements. This has taken strong, concerted effort in the management of change and then ensuring that governance structures are put in place. In the modern world, even the most efficient framework and methods that have been traditionally used to enable and manage change seem to be inadequate (Northouse, 2012). This especially occurs when dealing with the complexities, size, and scale of worldwide cross-generational and cross-cultural change. Companies, which succeed in the highly globalized world, are those whose leadership master emerging types of change management disciplines (Moran, Abramson & Moran, 2014). According to Benton and Redclift (2013), such leadership starts with having the ability to define the appropriate change strategies. Subsequently, the leaders will introduce the activities, which enable the necessary changes effectively. These have to be looped together with the capabilities within their businesses to manage change successfully and on a continuous basis. A workable change strategy should consider a wider range of influences in a multi-polar environment by managers. An increasingly significant element is handling talent within the global setting by leaders. In this state, control and lines of communication are normally more sparsely stretched. Proper leadership has changed to ensure adoption of effective change approaches, which focus on legal, cultural, and operational dimensions. From a cultural point of view, executive leadership in a global environment must establish communication strategies as well as reporting structures, which take into consideration the often-diverse norms and presumptions of the firm’s various seniority levels, organizational groups, and nationalities. Like the communication lines, the spans, which enable change within a multi-polar universe, must be implemented with more precision compared to the interventions in the traditional environments (Giddens, 2013). Moreover, in order for leaders to perform successfully, consistency and simplicity are required. Interventions have to occur both at a shallow awareness level, and on a structural deeper level. For workers to be familiar with new skills, awareness training is essential, as it will assist employees and leaders at all levels to appreciate diversity among cultures. At a structural level, enablement must also occur and this normally necessitates the establishment of new models of governance (Caligiuri & Tarique, 2012). Successful change leaders change business processes in ways that ensure that work mirrors the operational reality in the globalizing world. Moreover, proper leadership also puts in place attributes like revised rewards and reporting structures to ensure that employees show the new manners of behaviours desired. Metrics are significant in assessing the success of change programs. It should be remembered that metrics do not necessarily imply numbers. Current effective change leaders should observe behaviours, consequences and products, which will be reported numerically or with other types of assessments. In a multipolar and globalized world, change is more far-reaching and more constant in its effects. Therefore, it is highly likely that organizations will recognize that their internal capability to manage change as critical, an ongoing need, and something important for all change initiatives levels. This also suggests that the ability to achieve change has to be every leader’s and manager’s skill set. Organizations that are successfully taking the journey towards high performance within a multi-polar universe are doing more than executing programs of general leadership. Such leaders focus specifically on two significant elements in the specific kind of leadership required for success in a globalized environment. This leadership requirement has led to more alignment, engagement and committing to executive leadership. In this working environment, it is important that leadership in the entire organization is in lock step and aligned with the organization’s specific vision for operating in a global world (Caligiuri & Tarique, 2012). Leaders in the global world are committing to developing synergies and establishing connections across classical silos and disintegrating organizational constraints and boundaries. Today, effective leadership ought to be a collective trait that will energize an organization to inspire innovation, and guarantee that it operates excellently. The acts of aligned leaders speed up change shifting the organization to the desired direction. Leaders in high-performance are currently pursuing creative ways of ensuring that this alignment succeeds (Forte, 2013). Fombrun (1992) says that leaders in the global setting are presently diversifying their business portfolios. Senior chief executive officers are undertaking explicit measures to ensure proper configuration of their main leadership groups across diverse boundaries and functions. The leaders of every firm’s lines of business that represent dissimilar geographies should be brought together in order to redesign the main processes, which crossed the individual elements. By doing this, the groups will be compelled to work together and forge fresh and deeper associations within the groups. People will be able to communicate, make trade-offs and compromise on positions in ways that ensure the vision for operating internationally is backed up by emerging processes in order to strengthen those operations. Leaders in the global environment have considered behavioural perspectives of leadership in order to succeed in the environment. This has necessitated “culture awareness” which can only be effected in situations where leaders serve as examples who demonstrate and model new behaviours towards all individuals and their cultures within their organizations (Lane & Maznevski, 2014). In many cases, proper change management within a multi-polar world has necessitated leadership that creates a fresh mutual culture, which harmonizes and brings together attributes of diverse groups. Ideal leadership can be transformed within a unified culture. Nevertheless, this may be impractical because attempts at force fitting different workers together into a faultlessly harmonious total may involuntarily distance the workforce and emasculate the entire transformation program. However, good leaders still manage to create common grounds in such environments. Deploying international leadership progress is important in ensuring organization success. In order for leaders to attain successfully the obstacles in the modern global setting, there has to be a unified adoption of international leadership development. Organizations are normally faced with many challenges especially in the implementation of global leadership development. Every environment has its peculiar cultural nuances and norms. Therefore, leadership has to be adopt methodologies, which resonate with all audiences. Locations that are vastly dispersed usually challenge the coordination and alignment of leadership programs. In order to excel in the global environment, many leaders in organizations have had to engage their key participants across different areas in the deployment and development processes (Conine, 2014). This enables them to establish international alignment in their professions. In the modern context, there have been great changes in the operations of organizations. Good leaders are those who can link their regional objectives, individual business, as well as learning initiatives to their firm’s enterprise-wide strategies. This is important in effectively developing the capabilities, which will energize strategic execution (Giddens, 2013). Due to the highly changing business and political environments, leaders have to tailor their learning in ways that ensure consistent deployment across the entire organization while ensuring localization as necessary. Simultaneously, leaders in the global arena have to involve an extensive footprint of high-quality trainers who can communicate to all categories of their workers to ensure proper coordination of efforts (Northouse, 2012). They have to recognize that in a highly developing global environment, changes are never a one-time situation, but rather achieved with time through amalgamated activities premeditated to build, prime, and sustain competency. The leaders should influence high-impact learning modalities comprising of business model as well as other experiential learning tactics, which reliably work across different groups of workers within their workers learning environments (Schwartz, 2011). Leadership of Angela Merkel Angela Merkel is my admirable leader and the current German Chancellor. She is Europe’s most dominant woman, who has however been described as ‘boring’ by Zimmermann (2014). Personally, I love her because of her unique dressing style, which comprises an exact similar jacket in different shades, which she wears with dark trousers daily. Her story is fascinating because of her rise to supremacy as a woman, and her party Lutheran party affiliation that has many West German Catholics (Latu, Mast, Lammers & Bombari, 2013). Merkel’s style of public speaking is inspiring and this coupled with her extraordinary individual popularity rating was revealed last year as the Germans advanced towards their elections. Merkel is an intriguing leader who has done what no other politician or even any ambitious woman has done (Sheeler & Anderson, 2014). She is dutiful, unassuming, private, and a mediocre debater who usually avoids giving many speeches. This is contrary to what voter’s generally expected of their candidates; drive, energy, and action. By modern standards, Merkel is perceived as “boring” but she still connects commendably with her constituency. This is an interesting trait in leadership within a democracy where n many individuals consider all politicians as merely “all the same” and a time when outsiders, anti-politicians, and populists are feted. According to Zimmermann (2014), Merkel is an influential leader whose leadership style is founded on depicting an ability to deliver confidence amongst her electorate. Seemingly, the Germans are not safe to the fascinations of personality-driven activism of present day leaders, and therefore, Merkel’s only characteristic gesture; the manner that she puts her hands together, with her fingers pointing downwards to make a diamond shape, was used an emblem on the campaign posters of the CDU. Germans seem to have better reasons of disdaining clever talkers, showy, and flashy people who occupy power positions. Some critics argue that the Germans are only being pragmatic and obsessed with their ‘pockets’. They would rather have Merkel’s character because with her their economy is in such a safe pair of hands (Latu, Mast, Lammers & Bombari, 2013). It is not merely national stereotypes, which inform us that Germans dislike flashy leaders. From the time the Germans followed Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm II into two devastating world wars, they have developed a propensity to voting for more earnest and tempered leaders. In 1958, the Christian Democrats lead their election movement with the slogan “No Experiments!” and triumphed over 50 per cent of the vote-the highest result ever in the history of post-war German. Kohl Helmut, the initial chancellor of Germany, was the image of stability and dependability, and Merkel, the nation’s first East German elected leader, fits in his shoes perfectly. Germany has had its share of flashy politicians such as the cigar-chomping Schröder Gerhard or Joschka Fischer, the patriarch of the Green party. Nevertheless, they both streamlined their personal style when they got into government. Two years ago, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the defence minister had to step down because of plagiarism. To Merkel, this kind of flamboyance is unreasonable (Latu, Mast, Lammers & Bombari, 2013). There is no remotely extravagant or eccentric issue about Merkel. She is a great leader whose only biggest individual scandal of the past few months was that this year during the Bayreuth festival, she wore a similar dress she had worn some years before (Sheeler & Anderson, 2014). Merkel depicts an image that seems to be the opposite of what is understood as charismatic. She is described as “Europe’s most daring leader” (Baltag, 2013). Some critics posit that her management of the euro crisis can never be endorsed in the world circles. This led to criticism of the German chancellor at home by a group of economists. One member of her party had gone public complaining about her authoritarian model of managing the Christian Democrats. Another economist intimated that such kind of Merkel’s ostensible failure to save the euro is unacceptable. Nevertheless, despite of her indecisiveness in the issue, and the snowballing financial crisis, the German electorate are still steadfastly behind her (Olsen, 2011). The most significant reason for Merkel's admiration at home, nevertheless, is neither Germany history nor the euro crisis, but herself. Merkel who is a childless physicist of middle age and with a Protestant family background has swayed working class women from Berlin’s bohemians and conservative fathers from Bavaria, and convinced them that she is the greatest representative of their concerns. Merkel has remained a mystery to most Germans. She has also turned out to be the platform for the people to project their individual idea. Merkel’s taciturnity works on her favour judging by her approval ratings. Her public relations strategy of keeping things private is effective in the current world. In 2012 during parliamentary election campaign that occurred immediately after the NSA disclosures started, she refrained from drumming into anti-Americanism to gain votes, unlike her challengers. Standing next to President Obama on an official visit to Washington this year, she guaranteed to support the United States policy of imposing Russia with more sanctions if it continued undermining Ukraine notwithstanding widespread disapproval to sanctions amongst businesses and German voters (Sheeler & Anderson, 2014). For more than 20 years, the chancellor has appeared more pro-American compared to the average Germans. Merkel’s appreciation for America is traced to her growing up in communist East Germany. I admire Merkel due to her continuous public support a free-trade arrangement between Europe and the U.S referred to as the Investment Partnership and Trans-Atlantic Trade. The deal is highly approved by U.S. businesses but is widely opposed by Germany due to fears that it would destabilize standards of German consumer-protection (Olsen, 2011). Some opponents warn that in case of outrage toward America, Merkel will be cast between balancing her own beliefs with her exceptionally altered sense of political need. According to Eriksen (2012), Merkel has a great feeling of the German’s mood but if more people start to increasingly critic the United States, Merkel is going to be abandoned in the flame. A fresh opinion poll conducted in 2013 by ARD, a public broadcaster, depicted that 70 per cent of Germans showed confidence in Merkel as the best-suited individual to reclaim the euro. An alike survey by Stern, a news magazine, confirmed her approval amongst Germans. According to the survey, if they could elect their head of government straight, 49 percent of all Germans would elect Merkel (Yoder, 2011). The idea that the German economy has fared well through the international downturn does not alone completely explain Merkel’s extensive popularity. Her Christian Democratic party, for instance, has benefitted from the nation’s economic stability in a different way. The report by the ARD showed that only 36 percent of Germans would vote for Merkel's party in case they went to the polls then. In dissimilarity, Merkel is seemingly almost as a non-partisan leader of a state rather than an occupation politician (Baltag, 2013). Merkel is usually compared to relishing the Margaret Thatcher’s popularity level. This enthusiasm is incredible because of her uninspiring, reserved and rational character. In fact, Merkel's very zealous supporters would find it difficult to contend that she is a charismatic or inspirational leader and this is the reason for her extensive approval (Butler, 2013). There is a possibility that the Germans liked Merkel because, as claimed by some people, Merkel has unconsciously established a more advanced way of reasoning about leadership in a different way from the US-inspired political culture (Davidson-Schmich, 2011). The Germans have therefore busted the idea of charismatic leadership, which is healthy in any democracy. Merkel does not only make a good performer, she is also better at putting the German’s trust in tenacity, conscientiousness, and capability of taking heed to their problems. According to Davidson-Schmich (2011), Angela Merkel uses a down-to-earth methodology as her political style. Even though this attribute has made the international press to accuse her of lacking a transparent vision for the future of Europe, this repugnance to huge ideas is a historical demeanour of the nation’s post-war political philosophy. Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democratic predecessor, at one moment famously remarked that individuals with visions should find medical redress (Genovese & Steckenrider, 2013). In a nation, that has witnessed two key political philosophies of the twentieth century- communism and fascism- not merely in principle but in its most real and harsh form, patronizing naivety in politics is normally observed with suspicion. The German Chancellor is a good leader because she has for a long time paid attention to public opinion. While in Japan in 2011, she reversed her initial position and recommended that the German nuclear power stations be decommissioned. In the previous months, she showed support for Jean-Claude Juncker former Luxembourg Premier whose party triumphed the elections. Merkel eventually supported him after strong criticism in the German media. Nevertheless, Merkel has been accused in the past of letting events prescribe the course of her behaviour such as dismissing the German nuclear power program after Fukushima (Von Wahl, 2011). She is required by the German federal system to be a master strategist with regional rivals and opponents. Currently, her energy has been absorbed in leading the Europe out of the financial crisis as well as the search for tranquillity in Syria. During the G20 summit in St Petersburg this year, she epitomized the reluctant German superpower ideal; refusing to back a Syria declaration signed by other European Union leaders including François Hollande and David Cameron (Eriksen, 2012). In conclusion, in the globalized world, there is need to adopt sound leadership policies that work across different groups of people. Through leadership training, managers can improve their workers to ensure they deliver their duties. 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