Leadership Essay: Analyzing Jack Ma's Leadership Qualities and Impact

This essay provides an in-depth analysis of Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Alibaba Group, focusing on his leadership qualities and their impact on his business success. It examines his leadership traits, including authenticity, tenacity, self-confidence, and perseverance, highlighting how these characteristics contributed to his ability to build a global internet-based business. The essay further explores the leadership styles employed by Jack Ma, such as charismatic, transformational, democratic, and visionary leadership, and how he utilized these styles to inspire and motivate his employees, foster innovation, and make strategic decisions. By analyzing his behavior and characteristics, the essay underscores how his supportive, open, and empathetic approach to leadership has been critical to Alibaba's growth and his overall success. The paper references various sources to support the claims and provides a comprehensive view of Jack Ma's leadership philosophy and its practical application.

Leadership Experience

Running Head: Essay
Leadership plays a pivotal role in the growth and success of the business. It is the major
requirement of all the business organizations in order to sustain its image and growth.
Without a leader, no business can work effectively and efficiently. The leader in a business
organization possesses different skills, styles, traits and behavior. This paper is prepared in
order to analyze the leadership traits, styles, characteristics and the behavior of Jack Ma,
which helps him in being an effective leader. Jack Ma is the Founder and CEO of Alibaba
Group, who is considered as the most tenacious leader in the world. He is a very renowned
person and is worth of $25.8 Billion. Ali Baba is a successful internet based business due to
the goal of Jack Ma to facilitate the globalized use of the internet across the globe. Jack Ma is
one of the fascinating examples of a successful leader. This man various ambitions, which
were only possible and turned out to be as true only because of his leadership qualities, skills
and styles. He possesses illustrious leadership traits, styles and characteristics (Chiemelie,
2017). He became a good leader when he faced a situation, when he came to USA and he was
then introduced to the use of internet, where he never saw Chinese Page. This encouraged
him and he used his various traits and leadership styles to search and develop one. With
rigourous practice and efforts, he started a page which is known as Alibaba. The use of his
traits and styles are discussed based on the situation highlighted.
The Trait theory of Leadership outlines the importance of traits and characteristics in a leader
that helps in achieving success in a particular situation. The personality traits play an
effective role, thereby, various traits of Jack Ma are also discussed in order to understand his
leadership style, which were used by him to establish his business over the globe as
mentioned above in the particular situation.
Authenticity: He possesses a strong character of being an authentic leader, which helps him
in building loyalty on which his business, Alibaba grows (Whisper, 2016). The ability to
become and possess the trait of being an authentic leader helps in building trust, which is the
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Running Head: Essay
crucial aspect in growing business. Also, the sense of humor must not be sacrificed in order
to complete the task or the responsibility given to the leader (Nanjundeswaraswamy &
Swamy, 2014).
Tenacious: Jack Ma is a successful leader due to the tenacity and the his clear vision towards
work. The leaders having tenacity as their trait helps them in chasing about what they want
and aims at achieving. The aim of achieving the goal by bringing the other people together is
the remark of being a tenacious leader.
Self Confidence: This is the most important trait that helps in becoming a successful leader.
Likewise, Jack Ma has the ability to overcome the issues and the power to unite the people to
work together, his confidence within himself has helped him in building a huge empire. The
confidence with oneself has helped him in standing at such a great position.
Perservant: This trait, one of the popular leadership skills. The trait of never giving up and
trying to remain confident even after losing at some point of time helps the person to become
a successful leader. While developing the Chinese page, he faced various difficulties, but he
believed in using them as the good options. Thereby, being assertive and never giving up has
helped him in being an effective leader (Chan, 2015).
With significant traits and characteristics that Jack Ma possesses, the styles of leadership that
a leader follows are also important to understand. To start up the Alibaba business, he
required various leadership styles in order to create the Chinese page. The most important
style of leadership followed by Jack Ma is the Charismatic leadership style. Jack Ma being a
charmer and being good at persuasion follows the style of charismatic. The ability to inspire
the people around the leader and encourage them to work together is the quality of being a
charismatic leader. Jack Ma gave importance to share his passion for work with the other in
order to charm them with his own skills that has led him in building a huge successful
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business with the help of others. Also, does he follows the transformational leadership style,
which is similar to the charismatic leadership style. This leadership style aims at empowering
the employees and the co-workers to perform to their best ability in order to achieve success.
Jack Ma aimed at motivating its employees and always encouraged them to use their superior
skills in order to achieve the desired goals. Such qualities of him being a transformational
leader are his biggest strength. He also follows the democratic leadership style, as this style
aims at running a team which has the free flow of communication and ideas. Jack Ma is
known as a democratic leader as he aims at encouraging the ideas from his team members
and believes in providing an opportunity to the employees to participate in the decision
making of the business situations. This style of leadership gives him recognition as he gives
importance to the ideas of the employees working in the Alibaba Group. The characteristic of
empathy is important for being a good leader, which is possessed by Jack Ma (Berger, 2008).
The last leadership style followed by Jack Ma is the visionary leadership style. He is known
for being a visionary leader as he aims at finding the positive outcome even in the poor and
worst situations. His believe in finding the good in the bad times and situations helps him in
becoming a leader with good vision and bold approach.
It depends on the leadership behavior that a person inculcates that makes the person a good
leader. Jack Ma possessed strong leadership styles with appropriate behaviors and
characteristics. His qualities and behavior of being supportive, relatedness and openness
helped him in becoming a strong leader (Hossain, 2015). Jack Ma’s behavior of welcoming
the risks as opportunities to resolve them with good solutions was his biggest strength. His
humble behavior towards others played a vital role in showing commitment to empower its
employees. Also, his behavior to bond with the employees coming from different cultures
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and philantrophy proved out to be the best. The virtue of having empathy, helped Jack Ma in
becoming the best leader and achieving success at every stride of his business.
References
Berger, R. (2008). Leadership Compendium: Young Global Leaders on Leadership.
Retrieved from http://w02.unssc.org/leadership_compendium/pdf/lc_short.pdf
Chan, J. (2015). Jack Ma: A Leadership Insight. Retrieved from
https://johnsonchan90.wordpress.com/jack-ma-a-leadership-insight/
Chiemelie, I. (2017, May 01). Leadership: A case of Jack Ma, the Chairman and Founder of
Alibaba Group. Retrieved from http://ilokabenneth.blogspot.in/2017/05/leadership-
case-of-jack-ma-chairman-and.html
Hossain, K. (2015, May 29). Leadership qualities for 21st century leaders. Pearl Journal of
Management, Social Science and Humanities, 1(1), 18-29. Retrieved from
http://www.pearlresearchjournals.org/journals/pjmssh/archive/2015/May/PDF/
Hossain%20.pdf
Nanjundeswaraswamy, T., & Swamy, D. (2014). Leadership styles. Advances In
Management, 7(2), 1-7. Retrieved from
https://www.mnsu.edu/activities/leadership/leadership_styles.pdf
Whisper, C. (2016, December 15). The 7 Leadership Rules of Jack Ma. Retrieved from
http://www.chinawhisper.com/the-7-leadership-rules-of-jack-ma/
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