BMA6115 Leadership and Management: Elon Musk's Transformational Style

This essay provides an analysis of leadership, focusing on Elon Musk's transformational leadership style and its impact on organizations like Tesla and SpaceX. It summarizes the key aspects of transformational leadership, including vision creation, motivation, and long-term sustainability. The essay also reflects on a group project experience, highlighting challenges faced during the project, such as differing opinions and the importance of teamwork, and personal learning experiences related to leadership and team management. The essay references academic sources to support its analysis of leadership theories and Elon Musk's approach.

BMA6115 Leadership and
Management

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 2............................................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
SUMMARY.................................................................................................................................3
REFLECTION.............................................................................................................................4
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

PART 2
MAIN BODY
SUMMARY
Leadership has been defined as the ability of an individual or a group to influence others
or guide others who are their followers or members of an organization (Al Khajeh, 2018).
Leadership is part of something which also involves decision- making, sometimes difficult,
decisions, for the creation and articulation of clear vision and establishment of achievable goals
for providing the followers the knowledge and tools which are essential for achieving the
collective goal (Leadership, 2018). There are many definitions of the leadership and each of
these definitions has a theory that all the great leaders have the ability to make a strategic and
predictive decision for convince of others to follow. Leadership is considered to involve a
creation and articulation of a visionary and inspirational idea or concept onto which others want
to work towards. However, the leaders are considered to be not been working and are needed for
turning the vision into a reality. The leaders have been seen to have different responsibilities
which helps them to be the efficient in their practices. Responsibilities of the leaders are
supervising the followers about their daily work. Their responsibility also involves those
encouraging activities which help the organization to reach collective goals (Rudolph, Rauvola
and Zacher, 2018). They are known to be the key towards the conflict management of an
organization. Their management is known to be disciplining to the employees, and they are
considered to be the person responsible when the employee are facing and issue inside the
organization. There are different styles of a leadership in some leaderships style the leaders
prefer to be the role model of their followers and lead by example. There as in other leadership
styles they do all their work through the communication motivating the employees to be success
in the organization. The most important aspect of leadership is about being accountable and
responsible for the actions and decisions which are taken.
Elon Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneur known to the modern generations.
He has been a great leader showing its success with different organization like Tesla, Space X
and OpenAI. Musk is both found and CEO of these organizations (Archwell and Mason, 2021).
He has been able to become the worlds the richest person. His leadership style show effect all of
its organization. The leadership style shown by him in these organizations is transformational. In

this the leadership style in which instead of thinking about the ways of how to change the world.
These leaders tend to outline the strategy which will be the essential for changing the
organization and develop their vision. Musk has shown the objective of long term sustainability
with its companies and has shown the criteria which is the distinct for those companies. It can
also be considered to be the result of the competitive advantage that has brought its organization
success which was the reason of their success. Musk has focused heavily on the hiring of the
organization as he focuses on the desire about the person capabilities. His contribution to the
technological infrastructure of the world has been immense. The transformational leadership
style includes different types of challenges which can impact the performance of the
organization. Such sort of leadership has been the reason of disruption in the daily routines
which makes it hard to cope up way the things work. The transformational leaderships style
generally is preferred by those leaders which already have some sort of power in their hands
which they are about to use for gaining success (McCauley and Palus, 2021). Thus, the power
needs to be in the right hand for effective results. The challenges faced by this leadership style
also includes lack of focus which can decrease the effectiveness of this leadership style.
REFLECTION
I have been the part of this group project on leadership in which we had to discuss
leadership. We all understood leadership differently, for members of the group leadership was a
role which a person has to play in the team by becoming the representative. However, in the
project we were able to understand how different the concept of leadership is actually. From our
learning now the leadership has been considered to be an ability which generally is god gifted to
influence others and guiding others for working for similar cause and ideas. The role of the
leaders has been understood as the influence which is essential for guiding the followers to work
towards the achievement of the collective goals. Our first during the preparation of the project
was to find a leader among ourselves which will take responsibilities of the actions.
From this project we learned a lot about the current leaders of the world during our
selection of the leader to be referred to in the project. We got to analyse the leadership qualities
and achievements of Elon Musk who has been the role model for our project. I was so intrigued
to know how he was able to grow his business. He has all the leadership qualities that a company
needs which can make an organization successful. We study about his history on how he uplifted
its organization and also analysed the ways in which he operated with his followers. From our

research we were able to find that Elon Musk uses a transformational leadership style
(Strielkowski and Chigisheva, 2018). This gave us more information on how he acts as a leader.
As a result of this research we understood the meaning of the transformational leadership style in
which the leader outlines the change or transformation which he/she is having a vision for in the
future.
During the creation of this project we came across many challenges which delayed the
project, or we can say that was the reason for limited information which was provided. The
Biggest issue in front of us was the lack of clarity which was present in the group regarding the
motive of the project. It took me several meetings which allowed me to explain to them the
objectives and clarify their doubts regarding what we are going to research on. As this was a
group project its started to turn into a certain chaos which was the result of personality conflicts
that was raised during the selection of the choice of leader. The conflict was between the
selection of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. There was a section which thought choosing Jeff would
be ideal. Then with the help of voting system we were able to rectify this error and choose Elon
Musk.
From this project I was able to learn a lot, not just about the leadership, Elon Musk or the
leadership styles. This project also taught me how to work as a team. Because I was the leader of
the team despite being inexperienced about the leadership practices I thought I performed very
well and was able to lead my team to successful presentation of the project. I also developed the
understanding of how even the great leaders have to face challenges which have the potential of
impacting their performance in the organization. It can be said that due to the experience of
leadership which I got it would be a key experience for me in the future. The influence of this
study about Elon Musk has also helped us to understand the importance of hard work and
dedication which can help a person be a successful leader. The most important part of this
project was to learn how a leader can help in gaining the team spirit, motivation and influence
them to achieve success.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Al Khajeh, E.H., 2018. Impact of leadership styles on organizational performance. Journal of
Human Resources Management Research. 2018. pp.1-10.
Archwell, D. and Mason, J., 2021. EVALUATING CORPORATE LEADERSHIP IN THE
UNITED STATES: A REVIEW OF ELON MUSK LEADERSHIP. African Journal of
Emerging Issues. 3(2). pp.1-10.
McCauley, C.D. and Palus, C.J., 2021. Developing the theory and practice of leadership
development: A relational view. The Leadership Quarterly. 32(5). p.101456.
Rudolph, C.W., Rauvola, R.S. and Zacher, H., 2018. Leadership and generations at work: A
critical review. The Leadership Quarterly. 29(1). pp.44-57.
Strielkowski, W. and Chigisheva, O., 2018. Social, economic, and academic leadership for
sustainable development of business and education in the future: an introduction. In
Leadership for the Future Sustainable Development of Business and Education (pp. 3-
8). Springer, Cham.
Online references
Leadership., 2018. [Online]. Available through
<https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/leadership>