2.

Leadership style analysis of Steve Jobs

Leadership as a term could be defined as an influence relationship among leaders and

followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes (Rost 1993, p.102). In
the long history of leadership development practices, there are various theories proposed to
try to explain and guild the leadership behaviors such as the trait theories, Behavioral and
style theories and Situational and contingency theories, below we will try to apply some
theories with linkage with leadership practices of Steve Jobs.

2.1
2.1.1

Trait leadership theory

Literature review

Trait leadership theory, together with attitudinal and situational leadership theories are
considered as the three basic approaches in leadership theories (Hersey, Blanchard &
Johnson 2001). In the trait leadership, the earliest approach in the history of leadership
theory development, theorists have sought to understand leadership by examining the
characteristics or traits of a leader (Huber 2006, p.10). Bennis (1994, p.39) proposed that
there are five ingredients of leadership (guiding vision, passion, integrity, curiosity and
daring) and by possessing which one could be a successful leader.

2.1.2.1

Risk taking and daring

As one of the five ingredients of leadership, daring or risk taking is essential for a leader
especially in todays disruptive environments that demand the need for flexibility to respond
to such environments which means changes and the leadership trait of risk taking to
perform the changes is very important. This is also in accordance with Kouzes and Posner
(1993)s perspective that leaders are those who talk about adventures into new territory and
take the risks inherent in innovations. As in the case of Steve Jobs, he has been long been
famous for taking risks in term of pursuing innovative products that is in his vision, and
regarding his daring characteristic one of the highest compliments ever extended to him
was given in 2007 by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft that what Steve has done is quite
phenomenal, and it goes back to 1977 and the Apple II computer and the idea that it would
be a mass-market machine. The bet made by Apple uniquely was that this could be an
incredible and empowering phenomenonAnd the bet of Macintosh was riskySteve really
bet the company on it. He has pursued that with incredible taste and elegance, and it has
had a huge impact on the industry, innovation and risk taking (Gallo 2011, p.221).

2.1.2.2

Passion

As Zaleznik (2004) suggested that one of the differences between a leader and a manager is
the inspiration and human passion that a leader would incorporate into his or her
motivational work whereas a manager would focus on the actual process of dividing and
managing work. This is also in accordance with Pagonis (1992)s view that in order to
become a successful leader, he or she need to demonstrate two active, essential and
interrelated traits: expertise and empathy. As for Steve Jobs, he is not simply work as a CEO
of Apple; he always has great passion and love for the personal computer products. It is
reported that after the conference of the launch of the MacBook Air, John Markoff from the
New York Times described Steve Jobs that his passion for personal computing came across
even more so than it did when he was performing on the stage as he told Markoff in exciting
that I am going to be the first one in line to buy one of the these. Ive been lusting after
this (Gallo 2011, p.31). And the passion that Steve Jobs has for the PC industry provides
him with sufficient to him even after he had made a lot of fortune out the business.

2.1.2.3

Visionary

Steve Jobss innovative mind and idea not only come from his risk taking characteristic also
comes from his brand vision. It is believed that Great entrepreneurs are focused on today
while the most innovative have a road map of where they will be tomorrow (Gallo 2011,
p.221). As complimented by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, that Steve Jobs always
dreams about and anticipate what the customers would expect in the future. Back in 1976,
Steve Jobs and Steven Jobs as two hardware experts created Apple Computer in 1976 with
vision to make a personal computer that was affordable and with easier interface to be used.
And with this vision the Job and Wozniak created their owned version of BASIC provided by
Microsoft and their Mac operating system which was developed with a new graphical user
interface which was the first in the world to use mouse and screen icons on the screen and
this system proved to be a success. And it was believed that later Microsoft was forced to
launch a system that followed but improved based on the Mac operating system and that
system was the Microsoft Windows (Weihrich & Cannice 2010, p.371). Whats more, the
leading and previously considered as adventuresome design of a touch-screen computer
without a keyboard which was introduced in 2001 in iPod, and in the iPhone in 2007 had long
been speculated by the media and competitors as not working and not viable proved to be a
great success could be seen from the long queue waiting to purchase a Iphone 4 and Ipad 2
in white both of which are using the design of touch-screen without a keyboard. According to
many employees who had work under Steve Jobs, Jobs is a stern taskmaster who
understands the art of the possible with long-range visionary (Waters & Menn 2010).

2.2
2.2.1

Situational leadership
Literature review

Though the leadership trait theory used to be and is still popular in both research actual
management practices, there are some problems that the trait theory alone can not explain.
Stogdill (1974) who review 163 traits studies on the leadership performed during 1949 and
1970 and he found out that these studies were often inconsistent and even contradictory so
he concluded that traits alone could not explain many leadership problems such as the
leadership effectiveness. And because of the constraints of the trait theory, other theories
were developed to try to explain the leadership practices. Herbert Spencer (1884) suggested
that time produced the leader and not the other way around. His theory, known as the
situational leadership claimed that different situation call for different leadership
characteristics which means that there is no single optimal psychographic profile of a leader
(Mehta 2009, p.161). An early situational leadership theory is Kurt Lewins studies which
were done in the 1930s, from which and he claimed that there are three leadership styles
related to forces within the leader, within the group members and within the situation:
autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire (Roussel & Swansburg 2006, p.169). According to
the study, autocratic leader makes decisions alone and they focus more on finishing the
tasks; democratic leaders are more relationship oriented and concern for people in term of
care for teamwork and human relationship; the laissez-faire leaders tend to be permissive
and generally abstain from leading the staff.

2.2.2

Leadership behaviors of Steve Jobs

In the early time before Steve Jobs left Apple, he led the company using a laissez-faire
leadership style that was believed to contribute the creation of the technology-based
products and many of which proved to be quite successful because of the environment
brought by the laissez-faire leadership style and such environment did encourage the
creativity of the employees (Pride, Hughes & Kapoor 2011, p.170). But there are also
constrains of using laissez-faire leadership such as that it is confirmed as being connected
with the reason for low productivity (Bass, B. M., Bass, R. & Bass, R. R. 2008, p.451). As for
Apple, the laissez-faire leadership style of Steve Jobs become to some extent ineffective and
had made the company in disadvantage when competing with IBM after IBMs entry into the
PC market. And this was one of the key reasons why Jobs was replaced by the tough John
Scully who was known as a top-down decision maker (Clemens & Meyer 1987). And after his
return to Apple in 1996 when Apple announced that it would buy NeXT, Steve Jobs new

company for $429 million, Steve Jobs came with the leadership with some differences. He
still requested for perfection and he was manipulative and demanding which his employees
described as autocratic but such autocratic leadership was focusing on the key project as
himself was quoted saying that My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them
better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the
ways and get the resources for the key projects (Kramer 2010). Though laissez-faire
leadership style and autocratic leadership behavior seems to be contradicting, they do coexist in Steve Jobss management practices as the CEO of Apple which people explained as
Steve Job is having a personalized leadership which means that his leadership behaviors
serves primarily his own interests and obviously money is not the most important thing that
he cares about resulting in his only focusing on the key projects in his vision leaving his
other leadership roles untouched.

2.3
2.3.1

Charismatic leadership
Literature review

Charisma could be defined as a persons ability to influence others based on a sort

supernatural gift and attractive powers (Bertocci, D. I. & Bertocci, D. L. 2009, p.44).
Accordingly, charismatic leadership is a relationship between a leader and one or more
followers based on leader behaviors and attributes combined with favorable attributions on
the part of followers (Pablo & Javidan 2004, p.196). And from this definition we can see that
the most significant difference between charismatic leadership and other leadership styles is
that under a charismatic leadership the followers are actually enjoying being with such a
charismatic leadership as they probably feel inspired, correct and important which means
that the leader gains his or her major power from his or her charisma, which is usually a set
of characteristic traits, rather than a position power. And from the perspective of the
followers, the charismatic leadership could be very effective because one of the most
important effects of charismatic leadership is that the charismatic leader is seen as an
object of identification by followers who try to emulate his or her behavior and accept higher
goals or have more confidence in their ability to contribute to the realization of the company
targets (Lussier & Achua 2010, p.339). Below we will check the charismatic leadership and
the relative leadership behaviors that Steve Jobs has being the CEO of Apple Inc and leader
of other companies.

2.3.2

Case discussion

Steve Jobs is said to be the number one salesperson in Apple as he is always the one put
onstage to announce a new product or technology because no one else can communicate
better his vision with such high passion than he does and this is also because of the fact that
Apples vision for technology is largely Jobss vision for the technology in the future (Pritchett
2006, p.23). To be detailed, Steve Jobs has excellent ability to captivate the audience
attention and share with the audience or employees the vision that is in his mind. For
example, when he was doing the presentation of the new product Ipad, the tablet PC by
Apple which soon become a substitute of the traditional laptop, he would sit down in the
sofa with the Ipad on his hands and he also started to open the homepage of an US
newspaper to read the news making people vision that they are at home with the new Ipad
in a weekend morning to read the interesting news that they love in that days newspaper
with the more human touch screen function. And because of his ability to deliver his idea
with passion, he is able to become the number one salesperson in Apple using his charisma.

Figure 2 Steve Jobs in the Ipad presentation

Source: Latimes.com 2010

On the other hand, Steve Jobs also sources his charisma in leading Apple by his abundant
professional knowledge and the technology that he is immersed in for the past 30 years as
he started his career as specialist in circuit design with the necessary technical background,
and technical background and his profound experience in technology innovation provides
him with the knowledge for him show off his charisma in leading the employees including
the technicians and engineers. And charisma is also strengthened by his being the
cofounder of the Apple Computer which most employees will admire. In a word, as a born
leader with strong passion, and charisma and also his interests, vision and profound
experience in the PC technology, Steve Jobs managed to motivate the employees to follower
his vision and high expectations and also convince the customers to buy Apple products.

2.4
Leadership style of Steve Jobs and organization
effectiveness
Organization effectiveness which could be defined as the companys ability to create
acceptable outcomes and actions (Yaeger & Sorensen 2009, p.309) is considered as having
closed relationship with the leadership behaviors. There are a number of approaches to
measure the organization effectiveness and performance, and below will use the Strategic

Constituencies model to measure the effectiveness of Apple Inc under Steve Jobss
leadership as the CEO.

Strategic Constituencies, or sometimes referred as the participant satisfaction (Keeley &

Zedler 1978), measures the organizational effectiveness by examining the companys ability
to meet the needs and expectations of the strategic constituencies or stakeholders who are
all those groups and individuals who are affected by and/or affect corporate goals (Owens
2008, p.200). In other words, the Strategic Constituencies model match between an
organizations activities and stakeholders expectation. Below lets check whether the key
stakeholders such as the users, employees and shareholders have obtained what they desire
from Apple Inc.

2.4.1

Strategic Constituencies Analysis Customers

In the perspective of the users, Apple has been the top in a number of satisfaction surveys in
many of its product categories. For example as the table below shows, in 2010 Apple
enjoyed the highest customer satisfaction score than other PC brands, according to the
American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The score of 86 is the highest for Apple, and it
has a lead of 9 points even compared the second brand Acer which only score 78.

Table 1 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)

Source: Zdnet.com 2010

And for another blue chip product, the Iphone, according to the results released by J.D.
Power and Associates 2011 U.S. Wireless Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study, for the
fifth consecutive years Iphone has been placed on the top of the satisfaction study
(News.cnet.com 2011). And from the global mobile phone sale and revenue data (sees
appendix 1), Apples Iphone series have topped the global mobile phone market in term of
revenues and in term of phones shipped, it is No.4 globally. These data all suggest that the
Apple products have enjoyed very high customer satisfaction and meet and even exceed the
expectation of the users.

2.4.2

Strategic Constituencies Analysis Shareholders

In the perspective of the shareholders, the most important indicator of the organizational
effectiveness is the profit that the company creates which has close relationship with their
own interests; and according to the second quarter financial results in 2011 released in April
20 2011, Apple has a record 83 percent revenue growth, 95 percent profit growth and record
iPhone sale growth at 113 percent (Apple.com 2011). With all these sale and profit digits,
there is no way the shareholders would become dissatisfied.

2.4.3

Strategic Constituencies Analysis Employees

Table 2 Employee satisfaction report

Source: Mac.blorge.com 2009

Though explosions, suicide and other major issues still surround Foxconns Apple
manufacturing center in China, in a strict sense, these have nothing to do with the Apple Inc,
and whats more from the employee satisfaction report above, we can see that employees
are more satisfied with the company and with Steve Jobs ever than before. But for a long
time, it seems that not all the staffs will love Apple and Steve Jobs so much. According to an
senior employee in Apple, there are very few happy retirements at Apple below the
executive level and many had left the company with the thinking that Love the products,
hate the company because of the mistreatment they received in Apple (Typepad.com
2005). But now it seems that a growing business can cover a number of issues and
seemingly employees are quite content with the job they are doing.

2.4.4

Steve Jobss leadership and organization effectiveness

According to the Strategic Constituencies analysis we have above, the key stakeholders are
very satisfied with Apple Inc, and a conclusion could be made that Apple has high
organization effectiveness by meeting or even exceed the expectations from the key interest
groups. And to a high extent does the leadership of Steve Jobs shape the companys
performance and effectiveness that it achieved today, the reasons are three fold: firstly,
from a broad sense, Steve Jobs provides Apple the vision and major direction that it is using

today which is the major reasons that it is growing so fast and together the employees,
shareholder and user satisfactions come; secondly, Steve Jobs exerts higher expectations for
the employees to achieve and he also spreads his passion among the followers for them to
achieve such expectations through his charismatic leadership behaviors; thirdly, without
Steve Jobs, Apple would not be what it is today, the leadership that he has is important to
shape the organization effectiveness and performance