2 pages paper

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250607

This article shows several factors and examples which result into Bill Gates unparalleled success. Bill Gates is generally described as a transformational leader and becomes a role model for many entrepreneurs nowadays. This article provides some useful insights about transformational leader.

Idealized influence

“The focus of idealized influence is to instill pride, respect and trust within employees” (Kinicki Fugate). Bill Gates displayed high ethical standard by donation. As is known to all, Bill Gates founded The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, donating billions of dollars to poor children and adults and improve their living quality significantly. This behavior strongly demonstrates that the company’s goal goes far beyond making profits. The employees in Microsoft must be proud of their leader’s charisma and increase their identification with the leader, which engenders a more positive work attitudes. In addition, as Bill Gates has a good social reputation due to his charity, Microsoft is more attractive to those talents in the process of enrollment.

Individualized consideration

Bill Gates showed strong individualized consideration to support and empower employees. Gates always directs employees, provides enough resources to them and imparts his own experience to the employees. Employees have sufficient power to make decision in their work scale. They don’t have much limits on making decision so that they can cope with problems very quickly, but they must provide additional plan in reserve in case of the failure of the original plan. The increasing perceptions of psychological empowerment and perceived support are useful to cultivate potential leaders for the company in the future.

Inspirational motivation

Gates contended with anti-trust litigation claiming that Microsoft was a monopoly for a long time. However, he continues to look forward and focus on future. He insisted on his strategy regardless of any barriers on the way. The attractive vision of the company’s future ignite every employee’s enthusiasm and increase their job performance.

Besides, Bill Gates also has many other traits like pursuing what he loves, working tirelessly and constantly evolving. His transformational leadership style greatly led to positive outcomes such as individual performance, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. However, we need to bear in mind that transformational leadership also has several disadvantages.

1. Transformational leadership is time-consuming. As is expected, all behaviors related to transformational leadership take a long time to be effective such as instilling respect, trust and pride within followers and establishing an attractive vision of the future. In other words, if the corporation is in adversity and need changes in short term, transformational leadership may be disappointing. Task-oriented leadership is likely to be more effective.

2. Transformational leadership is lack of implementation details. This theory includes four dimensions of leadership style, but it does not provide any detailed application guidelines. That means, managers can hardly receive some training to cultivate their transformational leadership behavior. The four dimensions are too general to practice in actual situation.

3. Transformational leaders can be ethical or unethical. Their power mainly come from their charisma and personality. If they use their influence improperly, doing some immoral and unethical behaviors such as taking a high risk plan, the entire organization suffer.

In a word, the best leaders are not just transformational. It would be better to rely on other task-oriented and relationship-oriented behaviors to be a greater leader.