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Problematizing Leadership

Assignment 2

Raimundo Nonato Franco Sobrinho (2116951)

University Canada West

MGMT 601: Leadership in the Global Context

Marc Legacy

09/01/2022
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Introduction

For decades the corporative world based its leadership approach on “Command

and control” with a predominance of adversarial and transactional leadership systems. With the

development of the internet and electronic devices, this approach became more difficult due to

the dramatic changes in the world in the middle of the 1990s. People had more access to

information and became less isolated, at the same time, this fact made the changes happen

extremely faster than in past years bringing to the world more complexity, uncertainty, and as

consequence, unpredictability. In this way, the transactional leadership style predominant at that

time was no longer effective, and the hierarchical models fell into disuse (Lynch, 2016).

Table 1
Three Basic Styles of culture & Leadership (Lynch, 2016).
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Beyond the concepts of leadership and its styles, it’s necessary to think about how

to develop leaders so they can use those characteristics when they are demanded. In the real

world, we don’t handle isolated situations as we read in the books, leaders need to identify the

right situation where they must be more collaborative, transactional, or even adversarial.

According to Hughes et al. (2021) leadership has to create conditions for a team to be effective

and Depree (2004) brings an interesting reflection about this subject where we can think of

leaders as those “who serve” and their main responsibility is to help the followers reach their

potential, learn more effectively, serve, achieve the required results, and manage conflict. With

that in mind, we can realize that leadership is not a role, but behavior that involves reflection,

attitude, good sense, and many others.

Collaboration in the context of Megaprojects

Since ancient times humanity undertake megaprojects from the Great Pyramids to

the mission Apollo 11 and many others. Many of those megaprojects are considered failures

while others are known as well succeeded. There are several definitions of what is a successful
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project and, in this work, we will adopt the most used definition which is a project delivered with

the promised benefits, on budget, and on time (Shenhar & Holzmann, 2017).

In the website article of Boniface (2015) we can notice that at the same time the

Pyramids were built under a strong Command and Control managerial system with large use of

slave labour, some pieces of evidence suggest that the specialized manpower like estimators,

stonecutters, stonemasons, etc., were not slaves but farmers and they worked under an extremely

organized managerial system. In the same way, in modern times, we can imagine how complex

the mission of Apollo 11 was to achieve the goal to take the first humans to the surface of the

moon. To illustrate how the NASA managerial system had been worked we can analyze one

situation that almost made the astronauts abort the mission. 13 minutes from landing on the

moon’s surface the astronauts in the Eagle faced a cryptical alarm and had to make a decision of

continuing or abort the mission. They called Charles Duke, the Capsule Communicator in

Houston, to get instructions about the error, and then NASA teamwork came into play. The

decision passed through at least 5 project members in Houston ending with Steve Bales and Jack

Garman, the last one a 23 years old computer engineer, who made a simulation two weeks before

the mission and faced the same problem. They aborted the simulation and tried to fix that

computer error before the mission. As we know, the mission was not aborted and the main

responsible for that decision was the one at the lowest managerial level (Ström, 2019). That is

collaboration!

Both projects bring us the idea of complexity and how leaders have handled it

throughout the times. According to Lynch (2016), to compare the leadership styles in

megaprojects regarding delivering them on time and on budget, the best results were found in

collaborative systems. Adversarial and Transactions leadership systems produced 50% - 100%
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over-time and over-budget throughout the US with similar results in Australia and UK. If we

consider that, usually, megaprojects are huge efforts to benefit and financed by the population,

many times more than one entire nation, we can realize how important is to make them succeed.

As an example of a megaproject failure, we can cite the English tunnel which

presented an over-budget of 80% attributed to the lack of collaboration between England and

French, cultural differences, conflict of interest, poor leadership, and a poorly written contract.

The tunnel didn’t meet its original objectives, however, nowadays this megaproject is used to

transport people and goods every day which from a public good’s perspective is considered a

successful venture generating economic value for many countries in Europe (Shenhar &

Holzmann, 2017).

Adversarial leadership has characteristics like win-lose, pressure on others,

hierarchy by age and power. Those are characteristics needed in a maximum-security prison, to

lead highly dangerous criminals. But in a corporate and public administration context, history

shows that is a disaster in the long run (Lynch, 2016).

Transactional leadership brings some different ideas, better and more commonly

applied in our society like economic and cultural exchange, synergy as a result of high

efficiency, and information at the center of power. That system may work quite well for

governments and even some projects, communities, and companies. However, in the long run, it

creates some distortions and unbalances of power that generate many conflicts and present low

efficiency in uncertain and complex environments (Lynch, 2016).

Collaborative leadership deals better with those problems and has presented better

results. To transform an environment, it is needed to transform people. To obtain a more

collaborative environment, people have to be educated and made aware that it’s a more effective
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way to live. To achieve these goals in megaprojects and in life organizations, a clear strategic

vision, alignment of interests, and improve the capacity to adapt to complexity (Shenhar &

Holzmann, 2017).

Recommendations

As defined in Hughes et al. (2021) leadership has to create conditions for a team

to be effective and we saw that collaborative systems have been more effective in a corporate

context. To exemplify that, in a team build organized by Great Thinkers Group (2017) with well

succeed executives of many big companies it’s evident how important is to create a collaborative

mindset and how it benefits everyone. The experiment where groups of executives have to mount

bicycles for children as faster as possible showed that we were trained to be competitors and the

transactional leadership style is still predominant in the corporate world. But in the end, when

they decide to collaborate, even being competitors, their work was more efficient and effective,

finishing the work 30% of the time compared with the first attempt when they did not collaborate

with others. Experiments like that must be encouraged in schools, universities, governments, and

corporations since according to Robison (2014) we are naturally inclined to be collaborative, not

selfish. In this way, developing the collaborative mindset it’s not a matter of changing our nature,

it reinforces what we are already inclined to be. Even those who are inclined to be selfish can

take advantage of a collaborative system since they will be more effective in their lives.

If leadership is an art, as said by Depree (2004), we can develop it like an art.

Like musicians in an orchestra have to collaborate with each other to keep everything

synchronized, collaborative leadership is the art of serving and guiding people where excellence

only comes with practice.

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References

Robison, M. (2014, September 1). Are People Naturally Inclined to Cooperate or Be Selfish?

Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-people-naturally-

inclined-to-cooperate-or-be-selfish/?error=cookies_not_supported&code=fc2a27c1-f6e3-

43f5-84fc-cab0cb168467

Great Thinkers Group. (2017, March 18). Dinâmica de grupo team building. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NY7zDGSZUo

Hughes, R., Ginnett, R., & Curphy, G. (2021). Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience

(10th ed.). McGraw Hill.

Lynch, R. P. (2016). The Case for Collaborative Leadership - Why Collaborative Leadership is

so Important. International Collaborative Leadership Institute.

http://www.iclinstitute.com/2._The_Case_for_Collaborative_Leadership_V1.3.pdf

Shenhar, A., & Holzmann, V. (2017). The Three Secrets of Megaproject Success: Clear Strategic

Vision, Total Alignment, and Adapting to Complexity. Project Management Journal,

48(6), 29–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/875697281704800604

Ström, M. (2019, July 23). Distributed decision-making. Matthew Ström. Retrieved August 28,

2022, from https://matthewstrom.com/writing/distributed-decision-making/

Depree, M. (2004). Leadership Is an Art (Reprint ed.). Currency.