Leadership and Its Role on Motivating People

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP: A CASE STUDY OF DGL INTERNATIONAL
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Executive Summary
Leadership plays a fundamental role in motivating people towards the attainment of success by establishing positive relations. Organizational leadership is a term used in management to denote the influence that leaders seek to affect on the key stakeholders of an organization, either at an individual or organizational level, with the ultimate goal of improving performance. In the course of implementing organizational leadership, crises may occur due to the complexities attributed to the divergent needs and behaviors of the key stakeholders and the volatility and uncertainty that has befallen the corporate world. The various theories on leadership have become very useful in deciphering the complexities that come along with leadership and bears the leadership styles applicable in the contemporary era.
The situation at DGL International is a typical example of how leadership crises can arise in an organization, necessitating the intervention of organizational leadership’s expertise to quell the damages that can occur. This report takes a deep dive into the organizational crises that befell DGL International, considering the different leadership styles deployed by different leaders and the followers' behavior towards the leaders’ actions. An in-depth analysis of the case scenario establishes striking democratic and autocratic leadership instances familiar with Terrill, the technical service manager, and senior management. The report signs off by making a recommendation on overcoming the leadership crisis within DGL International by first adopting the concept of a learning organization. Second, putting into practice the situational leadership style to leverage the myriad benefits of the leadership style.
Organizational Leadership: A Case Study of DGL International
Introduction
Working in an organization has become a fundamental way of living in this day and age. Even the very basic units of a society, a family, can be termed an organization. From a broader and professional perspective, an organization can be understood as a collection of people, resources, and processes that collectively work together to achieve a common goal (McNamara, n.d. par.2). The different aspects of an organization bring about complexities in an organization and the human entity, with so many varying attributes and perceptions about concepts making it challenging to achieve a common goal, the organization's ultimate objective. To consolidate the varying perceptions of concepts, the complexities, volatility, and uncertainty that have befallen the corporate world, organizational development has been adopted to serve the purposes. An organization can be composed of many different elements categorized into departments. To have a smooth flow of information and processes in the different elements that makes an overall organization, and even at the organizational level, there needs to be a person in charge of people and resources at that particular level, making the concept of organizational leadership a vital aspect of organizational development.
According to Bratton (2020), organizational leadership is a term used in management to denote the influence that leaders seek to affect the key stakeholders of an organization either at an individual or organizational level with the ultimate goal of causing a positive change in the organization's performance. Executive leadership is best described by a framework that models leadership based on three fundamental factors: context, leaders, and followers (Bratton 2020, p.6). The context part of the organizational leadership model donates the drivers of changes. In contrast, the leaders’ parts seek to understand the attribute with which the leaders seek to influence the followers or, rather, the employees in an organization. To influence change on the divergent nature of followers, it takes a lot of skillfulness on organizational leadership, particularly on matters to do with problem-solving, communication, relationship and teamwork, business ethics, among others.
DGL International case study is a typical example of a possible scenario in an organization where organizational leadership is tested. This report seeks to understand the broad concept of organizational leadership by considering the events at DGL International, the root causes of ineffectiveness within the organization, and the leadership styles deployed by the key subjects in the case study. In understanding the various aspects of leadership issues depicted in the case study, the report approaches the concerns from a consultant's perspective, exploring the various theories and philosophies on leadership and change issues. The report then provides recommendations on how DGL International can resolve the company's leadership and team management issues.
Background of the Case
Despite the technical department having the most educated and well-paid human resources, their productivity was way lower than expected. This is certainly a question of leadership and not the inadequacy of technical skills. John Terrill, the manager, put in charge of the service segment to fix the mess that had befallen DGL International, did his best to maximize the engineers’ output. However, according to the top management, the approach which Terrill employed in fixing the problem was not at all convincing. Terrill, on the other hand, was convinced that he had unmasked the root cause of low productivity in the technical department, blaming the top management for failure to pay much attention to the engineers' daily reports while putting so much pressure on the engineers to generate the reports with total disregards to their job satisfaction.
From the case study, several gaps in leadership effectiveness can be deduced. The composition of the service sector team certainly lacked personnel with the appropriate soft skills that are critical in leadership and management. A breakdown in communication between the top executives and the technical service sector team is also evident, with the top management depicting some authoritative leadership. Also, approaches to leadership that vary significantly with the difference in context are of the essence in the DGL case, where the top management and Terrill ought to have established the right context and the appropriate leadership style to handle the situation (Reunanen and Kaitonen 2017, p.10). There have been numerous theories put forward to explain the impact of leaders on the followers at different content, and the theories are evolving with the rapid change in organizational development.
Theories of Leadership
Multiple theories on leadership have been put forward in the course of organizational development and organizational leadership study. However, the trait theory, the behavioral theory, situational and contingency theory, transformational and distributed leadership theories are the most applicable leadership theories of contemporary organizational development (Jian and Fairhurst 2017, p.2). The trait theory of leadership seeks to differentiate leaders from non-leaders based on the individual's traits or the attributes that best describe an individual. Over a long period, numerous attributes have been considered in the study of the trait theory, with gender, speech fluency, self-efficacy, and self-confidence taking center stage in theory (Jian and Fairhurst 2017, p.3). The behavioral theory, on the other hand, primarily focuses o the behavioral characteristic of the leaders. Hence it is possible to deduce three distinct leadership behaviors based on this theory: autocratic, democratic, and Laissez-Faire leadership (Nawaz and Khan 2016, p.6). The situational theory complements the behavioral theory by putting the behaviors of the different leaders under different circumstances or situations. To realize t...