Effective Leadership In The Kodak Case

Effective leadership could contribute to the success of change. Leadership plays an important role in mobilizing organizational change, as can be seen in the Kodak case. According to the trait theory, effective leadership should have some key traits. Generic traits of the leaders might be similar, for example, Carp and Perez have some common traits such as job-relevant knowledge (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991). However, it cannot be easily concluded that traits alone are sufficient for effective leadership or the absence of some of these traits make them any less leader, because trait theory ignore the interaction between leaders and their followers as well as other situational factors (Robbins and Coulter, 2002).

The Hersey-Blanchard’s (1982) …show more content…
Clear visions enable boards to identify gaps between vision and current practices (Eadie and Edwards, 1993). The purpose of the leader’s vision giving process is to help staff in gaining a sense of identification with the firm, which in turn creates readiness for change, motivates employees in working towards the change and is comparable with Lewin’s (1951) conception of unfreezing. According to Folz (1993), organizational change failure is associated with the inadequate effort for translating shared vision into collective action. Although Carp paid specially attention on his employees’ thoughts, but he forgot that he should firstly provide a vision for the future and explain to his followers how expectations for behavior, culture, or other aspects of the work environment would be different after change, otherwise employees might feel confused and hopeless about the change and would be unable to move into the last stage ‘commitment’ of being part of the change (Kubler-Ross, 1969). It is worth noting that the vision has to be achievable and understandable (Christenson and Walker, 2004). One approach of clear visions is to provide vision stories. Vision stories provide ‘a vividly detailed description of a future that can easily picture and imagine’ (Levin, 2000: 93), which in turn give people the space to imagine themselves and their …show more content…
Good skills in communicating change contribute to the process and outcome of organizational change in terms of resistance problems (Paton and McCalman, 2008). Leaders need to communicate and create a context for the change, which is accord with the first step of establishing a sense of urgency of Kotter’s (1996) eight-step model. The critical element of this phase is for leader to gather as much information about external environment as possible (Burke, 2011) to obtain insight into the reason why such change is important and needed. Specifically, Carp and Perez should firstly make effort to master information such as changing technology in the industry and what competitors such as Canon, Epson are up to, etc., then to evaluate those information and set up short-term goal, before jumping into the change process too quickly. It is the leader’s responsibility to prepare for organization change as thoroughly as possible, to determine how to respond to the external environment change and how to build a more effective alignment for the corporation (Burke, 2011). In doing so, employees might have higher effort, commitment and willingness to support the change. Moreover, the communication must be convincing. Take the management of downsizing as an example, corporations’ redundancy selection decisions generally base on criteria related to business needs, efficiency and performance. Hence, Perez should explain to all