Leadership in Dynamic Organizations: Enhancing Performance, Creating Change

Leadership is one of the key elements of organizations that contribute to organizational survival, health and competitiveness. For many decades, researchers have been working on the effectiveness of leaders and in doing so, they have studied leaders’ traits, characteristics, values, needs, attributes and behaviors. Moreover, in more recent studies, the importance of leadership situation has come to the attention and consideration of leadership writers and researchers. However, although there are many scholars and researchers who have worked on leadership styles, there is no clear typology of leadership behavior that explains the behavior of leaders in dynamic and ever-changing working environment. In other words, the role of organizational leadership styles is not well-explained in dynamic firms and industries. In this book, we look into business organizations through the new lens of Dynamic Capabilities (Dynamic Capability View). In doing so, the characteristics of key organizational resources and capabilities are explained Thereafter, major types of leadership behavioral styles are introduced. The findings in this book suggest that, the behaviors of leaders are defined based on two criteria: The degree of involvement in decision-making process and the degree of TRC-Orientation (Task-Orientation, Relationship-Orientation, and Change-Orientation) in dealing with subordinates. In addition, the book explains why managers adopt these behavioral styles in dynamic organizations and industries. The reasons behind the use of each leadership style are clearly explored and explained by the use of four main criteria: perceived benefits for subordinates, perceived benefits for the leader, perceived benefits for the organization, and facilitating factors. It is hoped that this book will help leadership and management scholars, writers, practitioners and students to better understand the nature of leadership and new era of business in order to contribute to the body of knowledge, but also to enhance the performance of firms in today’s highly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous markets.