Leadership in Organisations: Theory and Practice (MG4D5)
Case uitwerking
How can Juliette overcome challenges of her new role?
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Leadership in Organisations: Theory and Practice (MG4D5)
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London School Of Economics (LSE)
This is an action plan for Juliette to help her become a more influential member of the leadership team. With excellent use of materials from the course (lectures and readings) to support your analysis and recommendations.
Leadership in Organisations: Theory and Practice (MG4D5)
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Voorbeeld van de inhoud
Juliette is a veteran VendCo employee. She began as a sales representative in the Paris office and
worked towards building VendCo’s presence in Europe. She earned a reputation as an ambitious,
capable, and hardworking employee. This then led to her gaining the title and duties of the Regional
Head of Marketing for the EMEA offices. The next logical step for Juliette and VendCo would be for
her to be appointed as the new CMO once the position became available. However, when this
happened, the business did not recognize her qualifications and instead hired Tyler, an American
outsider, who was poached from one of VendCo’s competitors. He quickly installed a new highly
competitive and aggressive culture that reflected an ideal for many U.S organisations, but this later
failed. Given VendCo’s identity as a strongly international company, that type of cultural change
ended up alienating international employees and led to low retention and high staff turnover. This
became especially clear during COVID-19. Juliette retained most of its important staff and delivered
on flexible working options and time off. Even when confronted by Tyler for “Coddling” staff she
held her ground. Eventually VendCo board saw how Tyler was harming performance and forced the
CEO to let him go, only then hiring Juliette as CMO. Juliette has found it increasingly hard to feel
included and acknowledged within the team. Both as a leader and as a fellow colleague. It is
important to note that she is the only woman and non-North American in the senior leadership team.
Thus, she faces serious challenges in terms of power, gender, and her future.
There are a multitude of biases and barriers women face within the workplace (Carli, LaFleur,
Loeber. 1995). These sadly, only become stronger and more challenging as women make their way
up a corporate hierarchy. Research has also shown that women like Juliette are often only seen to be
successful in senior leadership roles after they have gathered a serious amount of history and loyalty
towards the business, unlike their male counterparts (Locke, 2019). Despite measures to fight
inequality and research proving that a diverse leadership team connects to improved performance.
Discriminative behaviours are still a consistent part of the corporate world (Locke, 2019). In fact, a
serious number of myths surrounding female leadership are founded in stereotypical notions that we
as a patriarchal society have incorrectly put together about women’s natural behaviours and how
they contrast with what we see as leader behaviours (Gneezy, Leonard, and List, 2009) (Kark and
Eagly, 2010). United States Fortune 500, found that women account for only 2% of executive
officers, 16% of corporate officers and 15% members of a board. Across all economic sectors there
is a continuing majority of men at decision making levels. Interestingly, both men and women have
been proven to share a considerable level of gender bias and stereotypes within the workplace.
Biases can also include the notions that leading women are seen as less likable and influential (Carli,
LaFleur, Loeber. 1995).
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, There are considerable layers to Juliette’s challenges, so let us begin with power. The position of
Formal Power Juliette is in as CMO is strong, given the legitimate nature of her promotion,
reputation, and history at VendCo. She now controls a considerable number of valued resources and
wields strong potential rewards or punishments (French and Raven, 1992). However, her newcomer
status, gender and nationality have seemingly limited her ability to build any Informal, or in other
words, Personal Power with her resistant senior leadership colleagues. There may also be a certain
level of antagonistic feelings given the ‘forceful’ nature of Tyler’s dismissal. While she can work on
attempting to build this through prioritizing any possible social events and gatherings there may be,
this is difficult as they are intentionally excluding her and using exclusionary language. She should
put together examples and notes of this and try to start an honest and open conversation regarding
her desire to cooperate and work closely with the rest of the leadership team. She could also attempt
to organize her own social events with them outside work, where some gaps may be bridged and
everyone may learn more about each other. In the event this is accepted, even reluctantly, she should
try and see if there is anything she may learn from the other leaders or express interest in, as to
continue to foster a positive relationship between the group. However, this report does strongly
recommend that Juliette proceed with caution, as gender discrimination here presents itself to seem
more systemic within VendCo rather than individual. Examples of this include the following events:
when she was ignored in her earlier attempt at the CMO position (Kark and Eagly, 2001), despite her
superior qualifications and successes, when Tyler was given an abnormally large amount of leeway
despite his constant failures and damage to the O.C (Premuzic, 2013), and finally the fact that it has
been 5 years and the rest of the leadership team is still actively excluding her from gatherings,
conversations and team dynamics.
With that in mind we can move onto the smaller scope concepts affecting Juliette’s influence and
position of power. While the concept of being a Leader is broad, there are consistencies when
experts have analysed people’s perceptions of what may be a good leader and what may be a bad
leader. Nevertheless, it can be said that there are always expectations for individuals when in such a
high position within the hierarchy for example, good leaders have been attached to certain levels of
perceived intelligence and higher levels of confidence (Driskell, Olmstead, and Salas, 1993; Murphy,
2007). It is also interesting that the myths of what the majority of people would constitute as a
‘leader’ often reflects male-agentic qualities that have very strong dark sides and are a slippery slope
towards failure. Still, it’s been proven that women do not have a significantly distinct style of
leadership in comparison to men. At times, women can tend to be slightly more participative (Eagly
and Johnson, 1990) and transformational (Eagly et al., 2003) like Juliette, but they do not differ as
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