Leadership in the Global Corporation

Leadership

in the global corporation

Introduction

Nowadays, as the world has been becoming more and more global, there will be more and more opportunities for us to work with people from different countries with the different background or cultures on business. Along with that, the corporations have had the difficulty managing the staff in the diverse environment (Judith Dwyer, 2009). In the global corporations, if you are the leader among them, you need to lead those staff to your goal with your vision. However, according to Carlo Morrison, as of 2012, most of companies don't have the global leadership development program. Only about one in three among the 1,050 have the ones, whose result was surveyed by the two organizations (2012). In this essay, I would like to show you the real case that I experienced raising up the communication problem in the global corporate environment, and make it analyzed and reveal how it relates to the leadership lacking under the current global business situation.

Case study

In my second-previous workplace, after the replacement of the previous president, the new president got assigned to its post. The company was the one of subsidiaries of Japanese advertising agency, which has operated for more than 10 years in China managing the accounts of the Japanese famous brands such as Panasonic, Yamaha (I name it ABC advertising agency to keep anonymity in this essay from now on). The business ranges from the printings, the web, selling media to planning the consolidated marketing plan. We had 30 employees; most of them were twenties at that time. There were only 2 of Japanese (I and president). The rest of them were all Chinese employees.

Soon after his inauguration, the president started to call the meeting to gather all the managers and employees twice a week in order for him to supervise every project in details that we were working on. In the meeting, he instructed them all what to do with each project in details, which was assigned by him and tried to see in the following meeting if they were doing in the way he told them to do. It kept going on and on for some time. Later on, most of the managers and employees became unwilling to join this meeting by degrees including me because of his continuous rigid control over us.

Are you a leader or manager?

The president of ABC advertising agency should have been the leader who would lead, motivate and inspire the people in his or her organization. I would like to take a look at the differences between the leadership and management first. What are the differences between leadership and management? The key aspects of leadership are setting a direction, aligning people, motivating, and mastery of the context. The ones of management are planning and budgeting, organizing and stuffing, controlling problem solving, and control of the environment (Mike Young and Victor Dulewicz, 2008). Based on the roles shown above, the president of ABC advertising agency did the managerial tasks in order to control the team instead of what the leader had to do such as motivating people. When we work with people from the different cultural backgrounds, we tend not to trust them much and instruct them what exactly they are supposed to do because of the visible cultural barriers that limit us to the things we assume they could do, especially in the global corporate environment where the Japanese president communicate with Chinese employees in this case. However, the leader has to influence people to achieve the organizational goal through the communication with the positive trust. Dwyer said "Leaders focus on people and the long-term view; they inspire trust and innovate. Managers focus on systems and controls and the short-term view"(2009, P. 250). To leaders, being able to distinguish between what they should focus on and what the others should focus on is critical.

Situational leadership theory

There is the leadership theory called situational leadership developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, that is, the leadership taken is going to vary depending on the situation where the leader is. Based on the situational leadership, the president of ABC advertising agency is classified into S1 "telling" leadership