Companies are managed by leaders who are either owners of the company or these nominated by a board to run the affairs of the companies. The origins of the company and the country it started operations and the way it grew initial days may reflect in the country’s operations later too. When companies belong to the public sector there is much evidence of a culture which was always seen as laid back and not so agile in decision making and completing activities. In India specially, the situation has been home -grown private sectors, public sectors and those companies with historical presence in India and considered as a foreign company in the private sector. Such companies also known as MNCs were found a shade better in their way of doing business and achieving objectives ethically and aggressively faster. The private sector always was in the shadows of such large MNCs and the government companies. Moreover, we had a large span of years of license raj that could never help companies grow fast as seen in the post license raj. Given these phases of organizations history – leadership across different companies was more due to the prevalent business climate than the actual practices of management. While the manager of a government company always found it difficult to get to work in a private sector – the manager never could not succeed as much as required. Similarly, the slow moving public-sector companies never attracted the talent from the private sectors and the same worked for MNCs leaderships. It became imperative to study the companies in the sectors they belonged too rather than compare them across cultures. In the first place there was no similar parameters to compare and secondly the way the growth of companies and profits were projected were not same. The motivation levels also of the employees were not found in a way that could be considered homogenous. Even after the advent of IT which makes most organizations look similar in their working methods and operations -the culture part is still seen to be different across various organizations in the public and private and MNC categories.
The combining of literature on empowering leadership with theories of power distance, helps in understanding of the boundary conditions of empowering leadership. We could see through literature and research that 70% of firms across the globe have practiced or used empowerment. This fact stresses the need for a contingency theory of empowering leadership that delineates how and when it fosters team member proactive behavior – defined as actions in “taking control of, and bringing about change within the internal organizational environment”. The power distance acts as a contingency to the effects of empowering leadership on two levels – at the level of the team and at the level of the individual team member. Integrating the shared reality theory with the multilevel model of motivation, it is seen that empowering leadership exerts a stronger positive impact on individual team members’ proactive behavior when the team has a low rather than high power distance climate. Employing the role identity theory, it is observed that empowering leadership relates more strongly to team members’ proactive behavior for those endorsing power distance beliefs to a lesser extent. Based on this, many researchers have suggested a three-way interaction such that the effect of empowering leadership on team member proactive behaviors depends on both the team’s power distance climate as well as the team member’s individual power distance belief. As a conclusion we could see the team members’ motivational states – namely their role-breadth self-efficacy and organization-based self-esteem – act as underlying mechanisms that transmit the joint influence of empowering leadership, team power distance climate, and individual power distance belief on a team member’s proactive behavior
After the second world war many companies found that the key to success is collaboration with various companies/distributors /channels/agents globally to see more sales and profit. Companies started expanding globally taking their products/ services from one continent to the other. Obviously, the companies required people with a different mindset to work in their organization, especially their team leaders and senior management personnel. It was proved with the performances seen in global companies that the more versatile a leader was in terms of understanding the company’s culture and was good in his chosen expertise could deliver better by a global mindset and being a good motivator and with skills in planning, coordinating, collaborating, communicating etc. across boundaries and cultures. Leadership behavior like planning, coordinating, leading, motivating, communicating and collaborating across culture is improved by the global mind set. Even where companies established branches worldwide, while respecting local cultures ensured the corporate ethos and culture were as in the parent company. The role of the Human Resources department became more important in getting such profile personnel for the various jobs.
In various companies and organizations, the management plans for the next level of leaders who may be likely to take over the positions the existing leadership. In many companies, this is done by adopting good recruitment process to enable the right teams to be formed after recruitment. Companies that plans for leadership succession, substation, promotion etc. are always better prepared to manage leadership crisis. Companies that are efficient with lesser employees and have lesser chances for leadership vacuum to be filled must either show high level of commitment by employees who are subordinates to perform tasks and activities even when the leader is absent. This also implies companies that adopt certain processes that are responsible to help the management in the absence of leadership will not suffer. In the companies surveyed it was evident the companies will be able to manage the operations even if the leaders in various department are not present as these are manufacturing companies and work in shifts and with well-designed work flow management techniques and less supervision can produce great results.
