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The Lion King Movie Analysis Essay examples

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Today's world requires leadership to compete and succeed. The rapidly changing conditions in the workplace demand adaptive leadership styles, and the success of an organization relies on leaders evaluating and applying effective leadership styles before workplace failures occur. The Disney's animated movie "The Lion King" portrays a combination of leadership styles and changing conditions. We chose to analyze Mufasa, King of Pride Rock, and explain his use of the Path-Goal Theory and its different leadership approaches based on who he was leading and the situation. Additionally, French and Raven’s Five Bases of Power is presented in order to highlight Mufasa's success in leading the Pride Rock Kingdom, while simultaneously using the …show more content…

The theory asserts that there are five main forms of power: Reward, Referent, Legitimate, Expert, and Coercive. These five bases fall into two categories: Personal Power, which results from a leader’s individual characteristics, and Positional Power, which stems from the leader’s hierarchical position2. Mufasa was more successful in leading his subordinates when he used personal power as opposed to when positional power. For example, Mufasa succeeded in teaching Simba to pounce, using a referent relationship with Simba as well as his own expertise in pouncing to guide his son4. He however failed as a leader when he commanded Simba not to explore the elephant graveyard5 (see Exhibit 3). He would have been more effective if he provided expert reasoning to Simba in a friendly tone, and explained that there were ruthless and murderous hyenas that lived in graveyard. French and Raven’s Five Principles of Social Power offer a useful insight into Mufasa’s successful and unsuccessful leadership of the Pride Rock Kingdom.

Zazu acted as a counselor to Mufasa in the same way Tom Hagen did to The Don. They had a relational and psychological contract between them, in addition to a trusting relationship. Zazu portrayed all three components of trustworthiness to Mufasa – competence in the way he carried out his tasks,

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