Case Study Of Alibaba

One of the main reasons that contribute to Alibaba’s outstanding success is their implementation of a good combination of different leadership styles. This is the key to the success or failure of a company. In the case of Alibaba, Jack Ma experimented with a number of leadership styles while building his own empire in order to find the one that best fits the company. Another reason for Ma to incorporate many styles to lead his business is because every stage of its growth would require different management approach. Being born and raised in China, the founder of Alibaba is familiar with the concept of autocratic style (Schermerhorn & Wright, 2014). Although Alibaba was first founded and launched by a group of 18 people, Jack Ma was the captain …show more content…
By doing this, the company would be able to innovate and be more flexible to adapt operations and technologies to the changing requirements of work. Although Alibaba does not follow a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy, it is influenced by democratic centralism of the government. Thus, it is the senior managers who are capable of making changes within the company. According to Hofstede’s Model of national culture, China is a highly collectivist culture in which people enhance groups’ interest more than their self-interest (Hofstede Insights. (n.d.)). This explains why Chinese workers do not put too much value whether they are allowed to recommend or make any changes within the company. If the managers ask their staffs to do something that might interfere with their self-interest, they will do it without having any question. Incremental change (Schermerhorn & Wright, 2014) should also be applied as Alibaba is expanding their market to other countries such as India. This does not necessarily change the company’s way to operation that can result in a major redirection of it. It bends and adjusts existing ways to improve performance (Schermerhorn & Wright, 2014). Additionally, self-managing work teams (Schermerhorn & Wright, 2014) could be implemented because they can help the company grow faster, and eliminate the power distance between first-level supervisors and immediate subordinates. However, the obstacles that the company might encounter are different sources of organizational resistance to change. Firstly, the structural inertia in which the organizations have rigid mechanisms to produce stability (Individual and Organizational Resistance. (n.d.)) might create difficulty for Alibaba to apply changes. Many workers, especially long-time ones, are shaped and directed to