1. Introduction
In 21st century, we can see many new faces of leaders which we might have never expected in the past: US President Barack Obama, the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Pepsi Indra Nooyi. Some may think that these kinds of people were usually categorized as the weak because of their race, age and gender. However, their excellences in business practices and politics make us feel interesting to investigate how their leadership style differs from the traditional ones (men, aged from 50 to 60, ethnic majority). We will divide them into 3 demographic categories, women, the young and the old, and ethnic minority, in various dimensions with the support of statistics and research.
Background
Ethnic minority leadership is not as new as some people think. In the 1960s, a list of Black leaders, represented by a symbolic person Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King (MLK), have triggered studies on ethnic minority leadership as they urged for social reform of civil rights and equality as said by Davis (2009).1
In the 2008 US president election, the rise of Black American candidate Barack Obama seemed to remind the public that ethnic minority can also have great influence on society. I would like to notify here that their leadership styles are different. Martin Luther King was seen as a servant leader, while Barack Obama is called a community organizer and coalition builder.2
Causes of popularity of ethnic minority leaders
From my point of view, the trend of an increase of ethnic minority leaders can be regarded as by-products of globalization, a transition of leadership style, a general decrease of organization hierarchy, government regulation and company policy towards racial equality.
Globalization
The strengthening in globalization by the invention of Internet removed the barrier of the flow of human resources. Companies, especially for big ones, tend to adopt Western institutional practices and beliefs as a natural universe.3 So, ethnic minority leaders can more easily adopt a working environment with different kinds of demographic cultures.
A transition of leadership style
In the 1970s, most people favoured strong leaders owing to a thought that leaders should be equipped with superman like skills (Great Man Theory) to help sub-ordinates solve different kinds of problems within his/her group. This kind of leaders should be chosen from ethnic majority group so that most workers can get higher sense of recognition by subordinates. However, this kind of myth broke down by certain theories emphasize on teamwork and cooperation among members. The new favoured leadership style encourages the cooperation with team members to attend a common goal, rather than simply give rules and instructions to colleagues. So, it is no longer necessary for ethnic minority leaders to get respected by the social customs. Instead, through performance and results, they can build trust with all stakeholders around the company.
A general decrease of hierarchy and the racial equality policy in company
For more fierce competition and faster information flow, companies nowadays have to keep track on the social trend of demand for certain products and response them more quickly. In theory, companies with low hierarchy can shorten the time lag for decision making and help create innovative ideas by bottom-to-up information flow. Creative industries like Pixar are taking advantage of it to gather new and feasible ideas. Catmull (2008) stated that Pixar wanted to ensure that there are always fresh eyes, and everyone in the company regardless of discipline or position, gets to go at same point.4 This act can help the company build up the sense of racial equality among all workers. Ethnic minority workers do not need to worry about their suggestion will not be considered sorely due to their race.
Government Regulation and company policy to promote racial equality
In developed countries, the governments are under high pressure to promote racial equality. Take United Kingdom as an example. The Parliament approved Race Relations Act 1976, amended by Race Relations Act (Amendment) 2000, to clarify the burden of promoting racial equality towards organizations and companies. Also, Business Commission on Race Equality in the Workplace, set up by National Employment Panel, plays a role to monitor the ethnic minority employment gap and suggest some solutions to alleviate the problem. Through legislation and government monitoring, some organizations like the University of London walk further by setting up action plan.5
Nowadays, there are an increasing number of firms realizing that promoting racial equality can boast their company image and help explore business opportunities by ethnic minority groups. In UK, race equality index is established as a benchmark of companies and organization to encourage race equality promoting activities.
Characteristics
Ardichvili Mitchell, & Jondle (2009) suggested that ethnic minority leaders tend to go towards transformational leadership, rather than transactional leadership.6 In theory, transformational leadership is about inspiring, engaging, nurturing, inclusive and dynamic leadership style whereas transactional is a kind of rigid, bottom line needed and task oriented.7
Thomas and Ely (1996) suggested that prejudice has kept members of certain demographic groups out of organization such as ours.8 So, can ethnic minority leaders keep the cooperation among members? In US, African-American (Black) are seen as the typical ethnic minority. Through a research investigation of 4 identities: Black, White, supervisors and subordinates, Parker (1976) discovered that Black supervisors were ranked higher in managerial support, goal emphasis and work facilitation.9 We may argue that these things may be related to the history of racial discrimination they faced, though there is no concrete evidence. In the findings of the investigation, we can see that Black supervisors did not go exactly transformational, as task oriented is a characteristic of transactional leadership.
Comparison of ethnic minority leaders in crisis management
Company | Nissan | Sony | Nokia |
Industry | Automobile | Electronics | Cell phone and communication devices |
New CEO |  |  Howard Stringer |  |
Origin of company | Japan | Japan | Finland |
Ethnics of CEO | French-Arabian | American | Canadian |
Crisis that the company facing/faced | Suffered great loss (684.4 billion yen in FY2000) | Suffered great loss in 2002 and the raise of Samsung | The market share in smartphone dropped drastically due to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android |
CEO’s reaction | Dismiss 21,000 workers and cut down 1 out of 5 factories10 | Focused on profitable business (LCD TV) and cancelled some business sectors like robot dog (AIBO) | Planned to give up its original OS (Symbian) and cooperate with Microsoft to develop Windows 7 phones |
Results | Shareholders’ equity doubled within a year11 | Record high profit in FY2007 | N/A as the reform is yet completed |
It is quite interesting that some of the ethnic minority leaders were assigned when company crisis or scandal occurred. Facing great challenges, ethnic minority leaders tend to have great reform by either cutting cost or changing the core business strategy as shown on the table. Through these 3 firms, we can summarize the prerequisites of having ethnic minority leaders in certain companies. The first one is relatively high foreign ownership on that company. The greatest shareholder of Nissan is French’s automobile Renault and foreign ownership on Sony (30%) and Nokia is quite high.
Short summary
As we can see, the leadership style of ethnic minority leaders discussed above adopt is near to the Great Man Theory, which is contradictory to the statement that the leadership style of ethnic minority leaders tends to be transformational. From the case study, we can deduce that ethnic minority leaders are more willing to take risks by performing necessary organizational reform. This may be the reason for board of directors choosing an “outsider” to help the company survive.
Though we can see the contradiction of leadership style of ethnic minority leaders in normal business and crisis, it is predicted that they will keep the difference in the future. The reason is that the personality of leaders dominates in normal business practices and good decision making matters in crisis.
3. Inter-relationship of Age and Leadership
There are hot topics and issues relating to the increasing trend of importance in the impact of new developments in science, education as well as industry. Paying attention to the research in the psychological aspects of aging, the American Psychological Association and the National Institute of Mental Health worked together to investigate the relationship of age to leadership.
Take Hong Kong’s total population as example, there is aging population12 and leaders in managerial level are facing to the temporary shortage of young leader’s takeover of management.
Figure 1: Aging Population
Elder leader contributed a large proportion of the high executive and administrative positions. Young leaders have to climb up to the high position by overcoming different levels with large working experience. This is because the mature leader is a constructive person who has experienced different organization and career development stages. Young leaders have to train their own metal thinking to be mature and well-organized as they have to be able to identify the organization value and goal so as to match them with his job responsibilities and those of younger fellow workers. This requires a lot of time and young leaders have to face to the problem of diligence. The elder leader (generation X) have a very different point of views to the working attitudes and thinking of young workers (generation Y). This actually creates more obstacles to the building of young leaders into high leadership level.
Elder leader from the generation X are usually more rigid about the subject of creativity and age. While the young leaders of generation Y are the opposite. The future leadership development should be the fusion of elder and young leadership. However, we need to encourage the objective discussion of both leadership styles so as to enter a brighter future and enrich the society development as a whole.13
The merge of generation X and generation Y’s leaders are the compensation of each others. Organizational structure and culture, as well as its nature and management styles should be flexible to match with the specific leadership style to be successful. The virtual teams are widely used and becoming more popular nowadays. Leaders in generation X and Y both possess different leadership qualities. In managing the dispersion, both leaders should clearly understand the characteristics of each other so as to turn their differences and communication obstacles into critical success factors.
‘Don’t underestimate the significance of small distance’
‘Emphasize teamwork skills’
‘Promote self-leadership across the team’
‘Provide for face-to-face meetings’
‘Foster a global culture’14
Figure 2: Difference of generation X and generation Y http://www.iahcsmm.org/Recertification/LessonPlans/CHL_lessonPlans/CHL_Lessons/CHL_306.html
Andy Grove15 who is the former CEO of Intel and quintessential sense-maker, has published a book named ‘Paranoid Survive’. He possesses the sense-maker leadership qualities as the elder leader example. He used many different types and sources of information to share his management skills in workplace. There are existing business frameworks and he used creative solutions to solve problems to strive the business into a new world. Also, he checks the interpretations with others and tries small scale experiments to invent innovative IT products.
Steve Jobs15 is a prototypical visionary leader. When Jobs was trying to convince John Scully to leave his job as CEO of Pepsi to become the CEO of fledgling Apple Computer, Jobs said to Scully, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come and change the world?” Elder leaders show the visioning behaviours as he describes the desired future state and connect the organizational goals to personal or societal values to provide a full picture of the future.
This new generation of leaders/SME owners is imprinting their own values on the business and workplace. They wish to change the old rules as they desire meritocracy, social networking, grass-roots participation, on-demand approaches, mixing work and play, and being connected at all times. In the management style, they also prefer to work without fixed and assigned titles, structures, and expert-led learning.16
Successful young leader - Matt Zuckerberg who is the owner of Facebook, was only 22 years old at that time. He has reached the pinnacle of success in the unconventional path. Other young leaders like, Anthony Lacavera, Brian Scudmore, and Justin Belobabas are also young CEOs who were freshly graduated in the University. They are always ready to search for new opportunity and launch revolutions in the business world.
Ashley Bruce17 who was 25 years old to be the senior customer business manager for Campbell Soup's Team Safeway, she helps to maximize the profits and sales by making sure the Campbell’s brand is well-known with good brand image. She ensures all the Safeway managers in her region are satisfied with her customer services. As a young woman leader, she faces to different challenges which she needs to solve so as to be more successful. Please refer to the women leadership.
That’s why organization needs to match the right leaders. No matter they are old or young leaders, the business world now prefers to work with both of them so as to achieve win-win situations.
To facilitate the merging of leadership knowledge and communication between the elder and young leaders, organizations are now promoting the use of knowledge management and organizational learning in most multi-national companies. This enhances the efficiency of information storage and sharing in organizations. Elder and young leaders in different managerial level and departments can raise their own ideas in managing the business so as to achieve the company’s objectives and goals. Human resources department in the organization takes the role to set up the e-learning in the training and development aspects which assist the process of intra-organizational knowledge transfer.
Ø ‘Perception of problems and Chances’18 – This refer to the awareness of existing specific knowledge inside the company.
Ø ‘Individual learning/Collective Knowledge Exchange’18 – Training and development’s ultimate goal is to promote learning atmosphere. Individuals share their own ideas and there will be discussion and exchange of knowledge in the e-learning.
Ø ‘Selection and evaluation of knowledge’18 – Shared information will be selected and evaluated be the acquiring organization. Information is accessible and store in the knowledge management database by e-learning.
The knowledge management tools- e learning, provide a platform to exchange and gather the culture, language, workforce diversity, global mindset, organization culture as well as the fixing the network structures by the e-learning knowledge management model.
4. Inter-relationship of Gender and Leader
Historical shift of leadership in gender
In the 1960s, more severe economic conditions sent more women into the workforce. Yet, their works were often at low levels and hard to move to the top. In the 1980s, there was some change in work environment, which more professional options to women. However, most leadership positions were still given to men. Now, women occupy nearly half of the workforce in many countries, they can rise to middle level if they have adequate skills. But women still face barrier in moving to the top management, e.g. executives, directors, etc. This shows a historical shift that there is a rise of women leadership in business world, but with several barriers.
Female leadership style, characteristics, and theory
Women lead quite differently than men. Rosener 19(1990) found that socialization can explain it. Men and women received different signals about what was expected of them from society: women should be cooperative, supportive, understanding, and to provide service to others. And men have to be competitive, strong tough, decisive. This may explain why women are more likely than men to be interactive and transformational leaders. Transformational leadership is a type of leadership style that leads to positive changes in those who follow. These leaders concern and involve in the process, they are also focused on helping every member of the group succeed as well.
Grigg20 (1989) identified feminist leadership characteristics. She asserted that women use consensus decision making. They lead from the center of organization linking with interrelated teams, whereas men tend to lead from hierarchy. Therefore, women leader can get information from variety of source rather than depending on a chain of command.
Also, she stated that female leaders encourage information and skill sharing. They tend to make commitment to share information and expertise so that others become effective as organizational participants and leaders. It helps to drive organizational learning21 (OL), which is principal concept for organizational competitiveness. Various types of process- or product-related knowledge can be generated through OL activities. It can enhance communication flow.
Moreover, woman leaders tend to promote diversity in the workplace. When they move to the top, they themselves have already faced oppression related to gender and sexuality. So they are willing to bring flexibility and adaptability to working environment, which favors the minority groups (e.g. married women, disabled people). And with more female leadership, they can attract more female talents, as it shows that company does not discriminate women in job position and is willing to hear their voice.
Women leadership affected by cultures and industries
1. Culture difference
In different culture, there may be difference on women leadership. Western culture emphasize on equal status between men and women. There are widespread public recognition of women’s right and their contributions to the workplace and society in general. As a result, women and men have similar opportunity on education and work. There are more female leaders in western country. On the other hands, women have lower status than men in east culture, especially in those middle-east countries. Most of women have to stay at home to take care of children and do housework. Even they go to work, they are paid less and work in lower positions. The culture is rather male oriented. Thus, there are less female leaders in eastern countries.
2. Nature of industry
Women are not equally represented in all segments of the labour force. Employed women are most frequently found in those professions that have traditionally been considered appropriate for women, particularly in the helping professions such as nursing, teaching and clerical work (US Department of Labour, 1992).22 Some industries, such as construction, engineering, are rather male-dominated. Few women choose to enter these industries, as those job duties may require heavy physical works. Thus, those companies are hard to employ female talents, and resulted in few female leaders in those industries.
Glass ceiling and barriers
The glass ceiling is the phrase used to describe phenomena that occur when invisible, artificial barriers prevent individuals from advancing within their own organizations despite their qualifications.23 Obviously, women face glass ceiling when moving to the top, such as gender bias resulting from stereotypes, less human capital invested in education and working experience, natural biological difference of gender, etc.24 They may also face subordinates’ resistance when they become leader as well.25 Subordinates may think they don’t have enough skills and abilities to become a leader. All these threaten women to become effective leaders.
13Age and leadership , AAAs Editorial Board, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/121/3153/local/ed-board.pdf
14 Frank Siedrat, Martin Hoegl and Holger Ernst. ‘How to Manage Virtual Teams’ Mit Sloan Management Review Summer 2009 Vol. 50 No. 4 P. 63-68
15 Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Games, http://www.seriosity.com/downloads/Leadership_In_Games_Seriosity_and_IBM.pdf
16 Daneal Charney, The new face of leadership, How young leaders are redefining success http://www.leadershipreframed.com/pdfs/new_face_of_leadership.pdf
17 Leadership at every Age, Carol Hymowitz, http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/14/career-paths-success-forbes-woman-leadership-jobs.html
18 Helmut Kasper, Beate Haltmeyer, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, ‘Knowledge management and organizational learning in MNC’s’ Published online by epub.
19Rosener, J., 1990, Ways women lead, Harvard Business Review, P.119-125
20Griggs, C., 1989, Exploration of a feminist leadership model at university women’s centers and women studies programs: A descriptive study
21Kris M. Y. Law and Angappa Gunasekaran, 2009, Dynamic organisational learning: a conceptual framework, Industrial and Commercial Training, P.314
22Davidson, M. J. and Burke, R. J., 1994, An introductory overview of women in corporate management, Women in Management, P.17
23Dayle M. Smith, The glass ceiling: an introduction, Women at Work: Leadership for the Next Century, P.11
24Johnson M. K., Women leadership management, Leadership Practices: Case Studies
25Yvonne Due Billing and Mats Alvesson, Ideas about women as managers, Gendere, Manager and Organisation, P.85
5. Conclusion
When globalization is taking root in rising number of countries, we expect that the invisible glass ceiling of the background of leaders will be substantially broken down through law, company policy and custom. It inevitably promotes the diversity of employees. Good companies can take advantage of it to increase the productivity by inter-cultural exchange of ideas. As the core competency of competitive advantage weighs more heavily on the leadership quality, it forces companies to focus on the performance and related experience of the candidates.
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References:
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12Aging Population , http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/28/United_States_Population_by_gender_1950-2010.gif13Age and leadership , AAAs Editorial Board, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/121/3153/local/ed-board.pdf
14 Frank Siedrat, Martin Hoegl and Holger Ernst. ‘How to Manage Virtual Teams’ Mit Sloan Management Review Summer 2009 Vol. 50 No. 4 P. 63-68
15 Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Games, http://www.seriosity.com/downloads/Leadership_In_Games_Seriosity_and_IBM.pdf
16 Daneal Charney, The new face of leadership, How young leaders are redefining success http://www.leadershipreframed.com/pdfs/new_face_of_leadership.pdf
17 Leadership at every Age, Carol Hymowitz, http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/14/career-paths-success-forbes-woman-leadership-jobs.html
18 Helmut Kasper, Beate Haltmeyer, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, ‘Knowledge management and organizational learning in MNC’s’ Published online by epub.
19Rosener, J., 1990, Ways women lead, Harvard Business Review, P.119-125
20Griggs, C., 1989, Exploration of a feminist leadership model at university women’s centers and women studies programs: A descriptive study
21Kris M. Y. Law and Angappa Gunasekaran, 2009, Dynamic organisational learning: a conceptual framework, Industrial and Commercial Training, P.314
22Davidson, M. J. and Burke, R. J., 1994, An introductory overview of women in corporate management, Women in Management, P.17
23Dayle M. Smith, The glass ceiling: an introduction, Women at Work: Leadership for the Next Century, P.11
24Johnson M. K., Women leadership management, Leadership Practices: Case Studies
25Yvonne Due Billing and Mats Alvesson, Ideas about women as managers, Gendere, Manager and Organisation, P.85
