Analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's Leadership

Introduction

Leadership can be defined as the quality of encouraging and directing people to perform their best in terms of achieving common organisational goals. In the business setting, a good leadership style is something that directs the entire workforce towards optimising its productivity thereby enhancing its performance standard to meet all the long term and short-term goals of the organisation. This report will discuss the leadership style used by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. He is one of the most famous leaders in the modern business world who achieves lots of success and fame at a very young age. Currently, he works as the co-founder, chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder of Facebook. He is considered as a successful and highly modern business leader who is enlisted in Forbes list of 20 richest people at only the age of 40. His outstanding, smart and modern leadership philosophy is the main reason behind his achievement at a very young age. This report will discuss the reason behind selecting the leadership style and skill of Mark Zuckerberg by using relevant leadership theories. This report aims to present the rationale of effective leadership in terms of promoting positive growth and optimising productivity in an organisation. In the last section, this report will present a critical discussion in which the rationality of the leadership styles used by Mark Zuckerberg will be presented.

Effectiveness of selecting the leadership skill of Mark Zuckerberg:

Mark Zuckerberg has introduced the concept of smart and modernised leadership that throws away the traditional leadership approaches and focus on innovative leadership skill (Karagianni and Jude Montgomery, 2018). Business leaders describe Mark Zuckerberg as an aggressive and encouraging leader who always emphasize optimising growth and innovation in the organisation. By presenting this concept of leadership, modern business leaders can enhance the productivity of the workforces as well as of the entire organisation (Sousa and Rocha, 2019). Mark Zuckerberg. Rather than classifying staffs-based on their age, designation and experiences, Mark Zuckerberg always believes in respecting and valuing everyone’s idea to develop an integrated and innovative business strategy (Guzmán et al. 2020). He loves to take challenges and risk which is considered one of his best leadership qualities. As mentioned by Aslam (2018), modern business leaders must develop the risk-taking quality as it will assist them to deal with different market challenges, Mark Zuckerberg believes in continuous learning and skill development of business leaders by dealing with challenges. On the contrary Guzmán et al. (2020), business leaders need to develop effective risk assessment and crisis management skill that can assist them to pretend the possible risk for eh company. Removing barriers among the executives, managers and others staffs is a highly appreciated leadership quality of Mark Zuckerberg. His office has a glass wall through which managers and executives can easily communicate with each other and notices each other’s performances. This concept of breaking down the barriers between the employees, Mark Zuckerberg has introduced an integrated and synergetic work process in which the managers, executives and staffs can work collaboratively for meeting the common organisational goals (Sowcik et al. 2018). Mark Zuckerberg believes in employee empowerment. All the employees of Facebook are provided with opportunities to enhance their creativity, professional skill and knowledge rather than involved in tradition and bureaucracy. As a modern and good business leader he also presents the concept of throwing away all the baseless workplace tradition and formalities such as formal dresses, rather he believes in providing a free and creative environment in which employees would be better engaged in their work (Horishna et al. 2019). He is a fearless, efficient and regular communicator and resilient leader, which always judge people based on their professional qualities and performances. All these qualities of Mark Zuckerberg are highly effective and applicable in the model leadership context in terms of motivating and directing people towards achieving organisational goals. Therefore, the selection of the leadership skill of Mark Zuckerberg is useful and relevant to provides new insight into how modern business leaders will treat their employees and how they will deal with the current market challenges to gain a highly competitive advantage.

Leadership styles used by Mark Zuckerberg:

Mark Zuckerberg implements transformational leadership style into practice. As mentioned by Sousa et al. (2019), transformation leaders believe in bringing about positive changes in the organisation that can make the entire workforce passionate, energetic and engaged in their work. Mark Zuckerberg has used transformational leadership styles to form a more open and connected workplace in which employees are engaged in forming innovative and highly modernised business strategies rather than focusing on traditional business ideas. As mentioned by Rehman and Farooq (2018), transformational leadership is widely used by modern business leaders to deal with the ever-changing market environment. Mark Zuckerberg believes in bringing about new and modernised workplace philosophy that will make a positives transformation on the preferences, behaviour and attitude of employees thereby promote their optimal productivity. Mark Zuckerberg also uses democratic, autocratic and laissez-faire leadership in practices. As mentioned by Ohlsson et al. (2020), leaders must choose the leadership styles based on the organisational needs and current market context. Mark Zuckerberg believes that modern business leads must be highly resilient to any changes in the external market that will assist them to adopt the appropriate leadership styles that would be best suited to the current business context. Base on his leadership styles, autocratic leadership must be used when there is a need for a well-disciplined and dominating work framework to meet the organisational goals. On the other hand, democratic leadership and laissez-faire are the leadership styles in which groups members and staffs are involved in the organisational decision making (Schwatka et al. 2019). Mark Zuckerberg introduces the concept that a good organisational leader must understand the current status and needs of the company which are important to make effected modification in the leadership style. On the contrary Ohlsson et al. (2020), implementation of different kind of leadership styles based on the company needs brings about frequent changes in workplace structure and job roles of staffs which can contribute to mismanagement and conflict with the workplace. Critics of the eldership styles of Mark Zuckerberg argued that, although he introduces the concept o modern leadership approaches rather than using the traditional ideas, the continuous changes and modification in the leadership process of Mark Zuckerberg interfere with the organisational productivity and employee engagement. This is because here staffs have to adapt themselves with changing work process and new work goals each time which can affect their productivity and skill.

Leadership theories:

Different leadership theories are presented by theorists at different times. The Great man Theory and Trait Theory present the concept that leadership is an inherent quality and leaders born with the ability to lead people (Karagianni and Jude Montgomery, 2018). Mark Zuckerberg's leadership perspectives are opposite to the leadership philosophy presented in these two theories. Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership styles are primarily based on the Leadership approach by Shery Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. This leadership approach is mainly based on the transformational leadership approach which believes that leadership is the learned behaviour rather than inherent and leaders learn from each risk in the organisation which assist them to make an effective transformation on the business strategies (Sousa and Rocha, 2019).

Contingency theory presents the concept that good leaders must maintain perfect balance among the needs, behaviours and context within the workplace (Guzmán et al. 2020). Based on this leadership philosophy, business leader smut focus on different key variables to develop a highly organised and productive workforce. On the contrary, the leadership styles used by Mark Zuckerberg prioritise the only key element, performance as well as work process of employees. As argued by Aslam (2018), good leadership styles must consider the basic needs, behavioural development and moral quality enhancement of employees along with their performance optimisation. In this context, if modern business leaders use the leadership philosophy of Mark Zuckerberg, they must also consider these above-mentioned key aspects within the organisation that are also important for organisational improvement.

The situational theory is the widely used leadership approach that is implemented by Mark Zuckerberg into practices. As stated by Sowcik et al. (2018), situational leadership enables modern business leaders to make modifications in organisation decision-making and operation based on the current market situation. By implementing this approach to practices Mark Zuckerberg presents the concept of choosing such leadership styles that is highly resilient and adaptive to any changes in the internal and external market. This leadership approach enables marker leaders to the classy different organisational situation and sets effective strategies to make relevant changes in each situation to perfect the organisational from economic slowdown (Sousa et al. 2019).

Behavioural theory is another leadership approach that is also presented by Mark Zuckerberg in his practice. This theory enables market leaders to analyse the activities and professional behaviour of the staffs rather than focusing on the demographic characteristics and traits. On the contrary Horishna et al. (2019) argued that organisational leaders must consider additional element along with the professional behaviour of employees such as the organisational needs current market changes and changing client demand. Therefore, modern market leaders must consider all the necessary workplace element while choosing any leadership style to promote optimal organisational productivity

Conclusion:

From the overall discussion, it can be concluded that leadership is the quality to motivate people to put their best effort into achieving the common organisational goals. Many theories present different leadership philosophies. Mark Zuckerberg is the famous business leaders whose leadership skill is admired and appreciated many of the managers and managers. His leadership styles primarily based on the transformational leadership philosophy, which emphasize on constant modification of current business strategies and organisational policies to optimise organisational productivity. However, he also uses autocratic and democratic leadership based on the current business situation of the organisation. This entire study highlights the fact that modern business leaders must be resilient to make effective changes in their leadership styles to adapt to different organisational context rather than stick to a particular leadership style.

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Reference list:

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