Transformational Leadership: The Leadership Style Of Steve Jobs

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According to the researches, the founder of the Apple company Steve Jobs had been listed as one of the successful icon as a leader. Jobs being ousted in the year of 1985 and returned as a legendary captain in the year 1996 by leading the company to a great achievement from bankruptcy in the industry (Lazonick, Mazzucato, & Tulum, 2013).
Steve Jobs had been known as an abrasive and egoistic person with the autocratic and arrogant of management style (Allio, 2012). Jobs was fostered a culture of everyone sharing the same purpose and clear vision in the Apple Company.
However, to evaluate the leadership style of Steve Jobs, the transactional and transformational leadership theory is applied. The aspects which claim that Jobs shows the sign of transactional is due to the establishment of strategy towards the main goal of the Apple Company. Even though making profit would be great, but Jobs claimed that the purpose and passion to create products is the motivation instead (Maccoby, 2012). For instance, Jobs assigned appropriate roles and tasks to all the followers by providing proper guidance and motivation such as reward in order to ensure the goal will be achieved. Aiming to the goal set, Jobs also assisted the company to join into the music industry by developing iTune (Robbins & Judge, 2007).
As a transformational leader, Jobs shows the signs of a
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Cook has been a total opposite in term of the management style compared to Steve Jobs as Cook is more towards in a more participative and collaborative ways by communicate more openly to reduce the management hierarchy and create a culture of sharing, trust and creative problem solving environment. Cook shows the difference compared to Jobs in a highly visible approach by responding to the requests of followers, initiated the stock-buyback plans and also the charitable-giving programs which Jobs would usually reject previously (Apple,

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