Have Contemporary leadership theories out of time?

 Contemporary leadership theories began from last century and have been developed for one century to formed a  full theory system. Have those theories out of time? Let’s recap the history of leadership theories briefly at first:

• 1900’s: the “great man” theories — it’s an innate ability; who is born to lead?

• 1930’s: group theory — how leadership emerges and develops in small groups.

• 1940’s-50’s: trait theory — what universal traits are common to all leaders.

• 1950’s-60’s: behavior theory — what key behavioral patterns result in leadership.

• 1960’s-70’s: contingency/situational — establish which leadership behaviors succeeded in specific situations.

• 1980’s: excellence — what interaction of traits, behaviors, key situations, and group facilitation allows people to lead organizations to excellence? 

(Infinitefutures.com 2019).

 

Arguments

However, some scholars and practitioners began to challenge those theories when entered to new Millennium. They argued those theories were no longer suitable for knowledge economy :

Drucker (1998) asserted that many basic assumptions taught and practiced in the name of management are out of date. Most of our assumptions about business, technology and organization are at least 50 years old. They have outlived their time.

Uhl-Bien et al (2007) thought those theories are products of top-down, bureaucratic paradigms and no longer suitable for contemporary knowledge oriented economy.

Image: (Getty Images: Marcus Butt)

 

Challenges 

As we know the 21st century has totally different from 20th century with the dramatically development of technologies. People’s behavior and life style changed with virtual events like virtual payment, virtual friends, even virtual companies. 

Dominic Barton, who is the global managing director of McKinsey (2012), thought the leadership requirement over the next 10 years were going to be very challenging and to extent quit different from the past. Those challenges might come from the rise of East emerging market versus the West,  the plethora of  technology that doing the disruptions in the opportunities, and so force on day-to-day basis the aging population.

Except those new challenges, leaders still struggling with problems that same as people met at the past, like how to inspire people, develop managerial effectiveness, and what scale of releasing power is suitable. Modern leaders’ challenges depend on which environment or organization they want to create.

New style organization

In this era of continuous technological development, companies with complete virtualization have gradually emerged. This kind of company structure brings many benefits, but there are many challenges to running a virtual company. Whether it is to manage the time differences of employees in different time zones or to create cohesive team spirit, it brings great challenges to leader of virtualization companies.

Scopic Software is one of the biggest virtual company with 230 employees in over 20 countries (Scopicsoftware 2018). The leadership and organization culture are totally different from the past. How does their leader overcome those new challenges? There are some principles in his leadership to maintain success.

• Hire people you trust. The key to telecommuting is to trust your employees. When the task is assigned, the employee relies on responsibility and self-discipline to complete the task, and there is no supervisor to inspect and supervise his side. No matter how the employee schedules his time, he must submit the task before deadline. So recruiting trusted employees will avoid mistakes.
• Use project management tools. Tim Burr, Scopic’s CEO (2018), said, “if our team was still using email, there would be miscommunication and endless searching through threads.” In order to minimize communication errors in remote work, it is very important to develop and utilize advanced project management tools. Ensure the first priority of productivity and reduce communication costs.
• Create a community. Even in virtual companies, a team culture is essential. There are many ways to enhance team cohesion, such as organizing offline activities or organizing virtual online team activities. In any case, creating a community to prevent the loss of core employees and enhance employees’Job Satisfaction and Life Happiness.

How to develop leadership in the future?

I think flexibility is very important in the complex future environment. It is hard to keep one style of leadership to fix various problems. Democratic decentralization works in high ability employees but might take disaster in low work willing team members. Whereas, logical and organized company structure could bring efficient in some culture. When people come from different country with conflictive culture, no principle is the principle in my opinion. My suggestion is to keep mind open, refuse the title, maintain the flexibility, learning more theories and choose one which could fix problems.

Reference list:

Center for Creative Leadership. (2019). The Top 6 Leadership Challenges Around the World. [online] Available at: https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/top-6-leadership-challenges/ [Accessed 9 Apr. 2019].

Infinitefutures.com. (2019). Late 80�s: alternative theories. [online] Available at: http://www.infinitefutures.com/essays/publichealth/leadershiphtml/tsld004.htm [Accessed 9 March. 2019].

Laurie J. Mullins (2016) Management & Organizational Behavior, Eleventh edition, Pearson Education

Software Development Company. (2019). How do the top 10 biggest virtual companies in the world make it work?. [online] Available at: https://scopicsoftware.com/blog/about-scopic/how-virtual-companies-work/ [Accessed 9 March. 2019].

Uhl-Bien, Mary; Marion, Russ; and McKelvey, Bill,(2007). “Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era” . Leadership Institute Faculty Publications. 18.[online] Available at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/leadershipfacpub/18