MGMT 4305 Leadership Team Project Assignment

 

Elements

1. Select a leadership domain, such as a particular industry, professional sports, politics, religion, or education. The team and I are going with “online shopping” as our industry.
2. Select two leaders from that domain. Make sure that you are selecting leaders for whom ample information is available from books, reputable periodicals, and reliable Internet sources. “Amazon and eBay” and the leaders that we chose are Jeff Bezos CEO (Amazon) in 1994 & Meg Whitman CEO (eBay) in 1998.
3. Conduct an analysis of your chosen domain during your chosen time period. If you have selected leaders from different time periods (both from the 90’s), you will need to compare and contrast the domain analyses between or among the time periods. Your analysis should consider the following:
   1. Governmental or environmental factors relevant to organizations within the domain
   2. Relevant economic factors
   3. Competition, including the threat of new entrants, and rivalry
   4. Access to supplies, capital, and labor
   5. Access to buyers/customers
   6. Substitute products/services

 

Depending on the domain you’ve selected, some of the items above will be more or less relevant. The purpose of this stage of the project is to familiarize yourself with the situation your chosen leaders faced.

4. Provide brief background information on each leader relevant to his or her chosen domain or leadership performance. This doesn’t need to be an all-encompassing biography. For instance, a leader’s birthdate is probably not relevant unless you are using it to argue that his or her approach to leadership was shaped by growing up during a particular era.
5. Describe the leaders’ organizations.
6. Describe the leaders’ styles in as much detail as possible, using content from this course and your text as well as your personal observations and insights. In some cases, you will find that someone else has already evaluated the leadership style of one of your subjects; in other cases you will have to draw your own conclusions based on the information available. In either case, provide concrete details to support these conclusions. Use associated terminology (from chapter readings) within the context of your paper showing your understanding of the terms. In addition, you are to cite at least five other resources when writing about leadership styles. Wikipedia is not to be one of the resources. You may cite other sources when discussing the backgrounds, companies and other information regarding the selected leaders. The sources for this information can vary, but at least one of the sources must be a company website (ex: Amazon.com)

Here is a list of the leadership styles covered to make it easier:

• Charismatic Leadership
• Transformational Leadership
• Charismatic-Transformational Leadership
• Stewardship and Servant Leadership
• Diversity Leadership
• Strategic Leadership
• Crisis Leadership

7. Provide your perspectives and recommendations regarding the tactics used by the leaders. What were/are their strengths and weaknesses? Would you have led differently? How would a different leadership style have affected the outcomes?