Post on 30-May-2018
8/9/2019 Regional facets of Leadership
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/regional-facets-of-leadership 1/2
Regional facets of Leadership
Almost the entire discussion of leadership in the business press focuses upon one
leadership style, "charismatic" leadership, a leadership style that is evidenced when an
organization is fueled by the personal energy and vision of a single individual, a larger-
than-life figure. While other common leadership styles like transactional (use of rewardsand sanctions to motivate employees), autocratic (use of authority and coercion to
motivate employees), and empowering (encouraging individuals to set their own goals,
self-monitor behaviors, and develop intrinsic rewards) are frequently overlooked.
Again while identifying individual factors that are predictors of leadership qualities there
is an over-emphasis on psychological characteristics. It is assumed that if an individual
has appropriate psychological traits he / she will demonstrate suitable leadership
behaviors, and achieve desired goals. Such simplistic hypotheses underestimate the
influence of external contextual factors, like the social, political and economic
environment, on leadership behaviors. In the Middle East unique contextual factors have
an overarching influence on prioritizing leadership behaviors based on what is importantfor success of business. The character of regional retail business is trade structured as
exclusive distributorships. The distributors develop a mind set of monopolists, and
overemphasize the need to manage brand owners, and underemphasize human resource
management to improve staff productivity or supply chain efficiency. In the Gulf it is a
lot more financially efficient to replace under-performing staff than spend time in
boosting morale and productivity. The large educated labor force in the region is an
accessible low cost resource.
Organizational factors that exert an influence on leadership behaviors are the degree of
standardization of operating procedures, the centralization of decision-making, and
differentiation of operational tasks. Regional businesses are primarily sellingorganizations, require very low levels of task elaboration, are flat organizations
dominated by the entrepreneur, and strategy is created by the entrepreneur for execution
by others making it primarily a top-down process.
It is also necessary to re-evaluate traditional leadership theories since most regional
businesses are owned and operated by entrepreneurs. In public companies the leadership
question is usually, “What leadership is good for the organization?” since public
ownership can exert pressure for change, whereas in private companies what's best for the
entrepreneur is what's best for the organization as a whole. An entrepreneur’s first
obligation is to himself or herself, and if this obligation isn't satisfied, none of the others
[to customers, employees, and so on] can be satisfied, either.
Before we identify leadership qualities, let us define outcome of good leadership as being
successful. A regional entrepreneur buys and sells products with little or no value added
within the organization, and success in business is about generating an adequate trading
profit on every sale with no dilemma in dealing with the conflict of good short-term
performance and good long-term performance. Success in the long term is equal to profit
8/9/2019 Regional facets of Leadership
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/regional-facets-of-leadership 2/2
five years in a row. A trading entrepreneur will rarely sacrifice short-term performance
for long term performance.
Entrepreneur leaders recognize the importance of selling in whatever they do. Unless the
business has positive cash flow before it runs out of capital, it won't survive. And the
only way to get positive cash flow is to get orders for whatever product or service yourcompany is offering. The regional economies being mercantile, there is an over emphasis
on selling and negligible emphasis on innovation, with a reduced sensitivity, priority, and
importance to value of the human side of enterprise. In the mind of the entrepreneur
success is attributed to a resource like a brand or a store location, and not to
organizational processes and people.
For a regional entrepreneur pricing is a fundamental strategy of the business and
understanding customers to charge them an appropriate price is a key leadership quality.
They are sensitive to the fact that customers don't make their purchase decisions based
upon price; they make them based upon value. And value has two components - benefits
and price, not price alone. The alternative to value is that the offering is identical to thecompetitor, and then the only option to generate more sales is to lower your price, a sure
road to self-destruction.
A leader knows that success requires hiring intelligent people to form a team. The
regional entrepreneur seeks team members to have a judicious balance of thinkers
(brains) and doers (experience). With only thinkers, execution of tasks become difficult
and time consuming. With thinkers it is necessary to engage in dialogue to achieve a
sense of understanding and commitment before actual action occurs to achieve goals.
With doers execution is lot easier. The entrepreneur seeks people who can do the job and
deliver results, and the right people in the region are sales driven. To achieve the right
blend of doers and thinkers, entrepreneurs will keep churning the team till the right mix isachieved by eliminating marginal performers.
Entrepreneurs also have to have the judgment to determine when the solution or a
possible option to a problem is good enough. They know when the solutions to problems
are adequate; they usually prefer to take action and tweak the execution till success is
achieved. For them a bad decision is better than procrastination, since a bad decision can
be corrected.
Leadership in the Gulf is no different from entrepreneurial leadership anywhere else in
the world. It is about team building, customer understanding, and emphasis on results.
But leadership behaviors are outcome-driven and not means driven with a very much less
emphasis on softer skills of management.