Assignment # 3:”Alan Mulally, CEO, Ford Motor Company”
Aboubacar Camara
Professor Doug Earhart
Leadership and Organizational Behavior- BUS 520
February 2011
Strayer University- Takoma Park Campus
1. Discuss the role of leadership and how it can impact organizational performance.
Leadership can be defined as the process where those given the role of directing are to influence and support people working in the organization to work towards pursuing the goals of the organization. According to John Maxwell, “…leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less.” Depending upon the situation leaders use the different “interpersonal sources of power” to lead organization or business that they have in charge
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A combination of Mulally’s relationship behavior and a task behavior helped him to make « some strategic mooves » for Ford industry.
As CEO, Alan Mulally created a plastic cards with four goals on the side (« Expected Behaviors ») and a revised definition of the company (« One Ford ») on the other(Hellriegel/Slocum, 2011, page 544).
Mulally as leader have focused on the customer, have a compelling vision, relentless implementation, great team. Mulally has a plan and goal for Ford and the believes that the biggest part is to change the Ford organization culture as well.
3. Discuss how goal setting helped Ford improve its performance.
According to Hellriegel/Slocum, 2011, p 202-203, “five conditions are needed in order to have an effective goal-setting process in place: ❖ The employee must have the knowledge and ability to attain the goal. ❖ The employee must be committed to the goal, especially if the goal is difficult. ❖ People need feedback on their progress towards the goal. ❖ Tasks that are complex need to be broke down so that employee can set subgoals that can be attained. ❖ One of the primary roles of a manager is to ensure that employee have the resources necessary to attain their goals and to remove obstacles in the way of accomplishing those goals
Let’s see if Ford goal setting met all the above criteria:
1) Ford’s employees are trained.
2) The challenge for the new leader of Ford was rather to motivate them in
Once Mr. Ford recognized the challenge, he had to offer a solution to the problem and introduce it into the marketplace. A solution that created value and satisfaction. This meant creating successful relationships with his
Vision Statement: People working together as a lean, global enterprise to make people’s lives better through automotive and mobility leadership.
Fordism was prevalent in car manufacturing industry; albeit, its principles were exported around the world in other industries. In accordance with Porter’s generic strategy-1985, Ford’s business strategy considers cost leadership as its competitive advantage with utmost effort on cost reduction to ensure mass consumption.
Imagine a world absent of automobiles and public transportation, no way to get from one place to another, in this day in age this would be a hard realization for most people to accept. If not for Henry Ford’s innovative approach in the advancement of the assembly line this could have been out destiny. Henry Ford revolutionize the automobile industry through his visionary and ethical leadership. I too am a visionary and ethical leader and apply many of the same principles in my leadership style. First we will discuss how as an “advancer” and visionary leader Henry Ford used “individualized consideration” and “contingent reward” to help motivate his employees by implementing positive wage and shift changes. Next we discuss how as an ethical leader, Ford utilized “open-mindedness” and the “consequence test” to help innovate the usage of the assembly line to mass produce automobiles. Finally, I will relate these same principles to my own leadership skills and how I used these same traits to help develop an electronic whiteboard idea of one of my Airman. Let’s initially delve into how Ford used his visionary leadership to make dramatic advances in the automobile industry by motivating his employees.
New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated, the 1984 joint venture between Toyota and General Motors, was by all accounts a manufacturing success. NUMMI’s effectiveness was evidenced by the drastic change in output quality, employee morale, and overall cost—but while these great outcomes were recognized by GM, they were hardly leveraged. What supported these results were exactly the factors that radically set NUMMI apart from the rest of the GM family. Ultimately, GM’s failure to adapt the plant’s success was the result of a prideful conglomerate embodying a competitive internal structure and divisive culture so strong that it was unable to fully recognize and adapt to the fundamentally different NUMMI model.
Henry Ford was born in Michigan in 1863 and as a child, he demonstrated a fascination with mechanical devices (Pittinger, 2009). He acquired employment with the Edison Illuminating Company and became chief engineer. This provided him the opportunity to lay the foundation for the Model T motorcar (introduced in 1908) because he accomplished work on the petrol drive quadricycle prior to establishing the Ford Motor Company in 1903. During production, Ford saw a massive turnover rate, which he wished to reduce, therefore, implemented an unprecedented wage increase. Additionally, he revolutionized the production line process. Consequently, Ford became a leader throughout the automobile industry. This paper the focus will be on the Ford motor company with insight into the organization overview, management, and leadership to include vision and philosophy, main business activities, demographics, the number of employees, and sustainability.
What kind of leader would you be if you forged a new path and were leading the way in an industrial revolution? Would you set yourself up for fame or would you look out for those below you and what was to come in the future? In this paper, my claim is that Henry Ford was a Visionary and Ethical Leader. When many think about Henry Ford, their first thought is that of the assembly line; however, he did not invent the assembly line. He improved it along with the lives of those who worked for him. Henry Ford is responsible for many of the industrial processes that are still apparent in the civilian and military workforces today. Watts (2006), stated “by developing Fordism in the early twentieth century, with its formula of mass production and high wages, he offered a socioeconomic blueprint for the United States’ climb to global prominence over the next half-century. Perhaps more than any other person, Henry Ford created the American Century” (p. xv). In this paper we will review the Visionary Leadership of Henry Ford. I will explain how he used the “Z” Process within Team Dynamics as a risker taker and forward thinker. I will also show how he used Transformation leadership from Full Range Leadership to successfully lead his team and employees to accomplish goals. Secondly, Henry Ford was an Ethical Leader because he used Ethical Codes as described
Ford Motor Company’s organizational capabilities include a revamped organizational hierarchy and progressive internal partnerships, initiated by Alan Mulally shortly after arriving to Ford [2]. With a new organizational structure in plan to provided direct support from the top of the organization, Mulally was able to stay involved in the progression of his ONE Ford plan. This aspect of Ford’s organizational capabilities is valuable, but not rare, hard to imitate, or hard to substitute. Many organizations both inside and outside of the
Preston Tucker was man with a dream. His entrepreneurial leadership style thrust that dream into immediate action. He built the “car of tomorrow, today.” There were shortcomings, however, with Tucker’s Entrepreneurial Visionary Strategy. If Tucker had balanced his approach with key aspects of the Shared Vision Strategy, he may have succeeded in sustaining his name as a revolutionary automaker.
With Henry Ford the layers of management just happened when needed. Examples of this were engineers who designed the machines to make the parts that other engineers designed all while they were both products of the design of an industrial engineer to make the whole system work. Henry Ford didn’t just say I need this engineer
Over the years, a great deal of time, and research has been dedicate to the study of leadership. Even with extensive data on the topic, many still disagree on what leadership really means. Hence, leadership is a word that has many different meanings and different researched theories associated with it. On a basic level, leadership involves having and establishing a clear vision, sharing that vision with followers, respecting followers, and leading an organization with excellence while ensuring that everyone is part of the team. Leadership is also a method by which a leader uses his or her influence towards getting a group of followers to take ownership or buy into a vision.
Many people think of Henry Ford simply as the man behind Ford Motor Company and the mass production of automobiles while never giving a second thought to how he got to that point. Henry Ford was a visionary leader and an ethical leader who went against what other business leaders thought and he ended up leading his company to the top. In this paper we will review how Ford was a visionary leader by describing how he fulfilled the role of creator as he instituted a way of producing automobiles quickly and cheaply enough so that they would be consumed by the masses. We will also discuss how he used individualized consideration in a way that motivated his workers to success by considering that working-class people had concerns about not having enough time off. Then, we will discuss how Ford was an ethical leader who did not worry over image and how he was a free thinker by describing when he disregarded how other business men of the time would view him when he decided to hire African American workers. Next, we will go over how I have not been a visionary leader. We will discuss how I have relied on conventional wisdom and gotten stuck using only ideas others have already generated and how I have had difficulty using individualized consideration. Lastly, we will talk about how I have not been an ethical leader by highlighting an incident when I was guilty of worrying about my image to the point that I allowed inappropriate comments to go unchecked and
Ford is one of the leading motor companies in the world in terms of market share and annual turnover. The company is driven by its strong vision which is grounded on creating value roadmap. In addition, the organization advocates for people working together as a team to gain global automotive leadership. The latter can be measured by the market share, customer satisfaction, the investors, the suppliers, and so forth. Every business has values which drive how it carries out its operations. Ford motor company is not exception. The organization has its values and strategies which are geared towards creating a competitive edge. Notably, the modern business word has grown to become very
As mentioned before, the relationships that were built continued to keep the company aligned moving in one direction, toward growth. More productivity, more sales, more money, created bigger bonuses and happier employees. Lincoln wanted to embrace the people-oriented culture and relate with employees to show them you value and respect them.
Goal setting has been one of the strategies that have seen effective leadership within the firm over the years. The leaders are equipped with effective organizational skills which enable them to set targets and goals with respective deadlines to be