In the research that produced this article, La Bella, Colladon, Battistoni, Castellan and Francucci (2018) sought to assess organization leadership perceptions through analysis of the social media activity of several Italian companies. The leadership styles in the companies were deduced from twitter communications collected, and the perceived leadership styles were classified using a 10 factor leadership model (La Bella et al., 2018). These factors included positioning, trust, vision, communication, creativity, total resource deployment, attention and listening, mastery of internal forces, negotiation and conflict resolution and management of advisory and governing. Different combinations of the 10 factors produced four categories of leadership areas namely symbolic/visionary, behavioral, structural and political areas.
The ability of a leader to be strong or balanced in all of the 10 factors, or all four areas, was found to be rare. Most of the leaders were found to gravitate towards some of the factors and to record a lower performance in others (La Bella et al., 2018). Among the five companies which were analyzed, all of the companies performed best in the symbolic area except Unicredit Group. This group also had the highest performance in the structural and behavioral areas (La Bella et al., 2018). Pirelli & C had the poorest performance in the behavioral, political and structural areas according to the twitter communication analysis.
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Among all the five companies evaluated, it was clear that the symbolic area was prominent, even in UniCredit Group where the behavioral area had scored the highest points with the symbolic area being third. The symbolic area consisted of a combination of four of the ten factors (La Bella et al., 2018). The first factor, vision, refers to the ability of the leaders to craft a clear image if what they expected the organization to achieve in the long term. Positioning was the second factor, which refers to the ability of the company to curve its niche in the industry in such a way as to facilitate fulfillment of its objectives. The third factor, trust, referred to the ability of the leadership to retain the employees trust and to incorporate and develop trust among stakeholders as part of their organizations culture. Communication was the last factor, in reference to the flow of data and information both vertically and horizontally within an organization in order to facilitate and maximize operations effectiveness and efficiency.
According to the Twitter communications observed during the research period, leaders of the companies selected emphasized heavily on cultivating their strength in these four factors. While the other factors used in leadership assessment are important, it is clear that organizational leaders perceived these four as the most crucial. Justifiably, transformational leadership, which is often more applicable and effective than either transactional or charismatic leadership, requires that these four qualities be cultivated (Anderson & Sun, 2017). Transformative leadership requires trust, and employees need to trust in a leader’s decisions in order to follow. A leader needs to chart a way forward for the organization and it requires trust for the subordinates to understand and imbibe their leaders’ viewpoints (Anderson & Sun, 2017).
Transformative leadership demands a healthy level of charisma which is only generated by a confidence drawn from understanding the vision. The leader also needs to present practical measures that should be taken in order to achieve certain results (Anderson & Sun, 2017). Leaders should understand their companies’ position in their respective industries and markets in order to devise ways to enhance it. Transformative leaders are also effective manager of communication flow within the organization. These realities explain the trend observed in which the symbolic or visionary area seemed to have been emphasized upon by the leadership of the five companies analyzed.
References
Anderson, M. H., & Sun, P. Y. (2017). Reviewing leadership styles: Overlaps and the need for a new ‘full‐range’theory. International Journal of Management Reviews , 19 (1), 76-96.
La Bella, A., Fronzetti Colladon, A., Battistoni, E., Castellan, S., & Francucci, M. (2018). Assessing perceived organizational leadership styles through twitter text mining. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology , 69 (1), 21-31.
