Leadership in a Changing Context: Styles and Applications

This report provides a detailed analysis of two prominent leadership styles: transactional and transformational leadership. It begins by defining and differentiating between these two approaches, highlighting their core components, strengths, and weaknesses. Transactional leadership, characterized by a focus on performance, rewards, and punishments, is contrasted with transformational leadership, which emphasizes inspiration, vision, and employee empowerment. The report then applies these leadership concepts to a case study of Mesaieed Petrochemical Holding Company, examining how each style could be implemented within different departments, specifically HR and Marketing and Sales. The report discusses the implications, challenges, and benefits of both leadership styles in the context of the company's structure, mission, and goals, offering insights into their practical application in a real-world business environment.

LEADERSHIP IN A CHANGING
CONTEXT
Differentiate Transformational and Transactional
leadership and lay out how the two concepts
translate into a practical work environment
Based on: Mesaieed Petrochemical
Holding Company

INTRODUCTION
 Leadership is a significant function for an organisation that helps to maximise the effectiveness of
the employees in order to meet the organisational goal. Leadership helps to initiate the action and
motivate the employees (John 2017).
 Leadership provides guidance to the employees how they need to behave within the workplace and
it helps to create confidence within the mid of the employees.
 Transactional leadership style focuses on performance, organisation and supervision of the
employees and leaders in this style try to promote their rules or compliance by giving both
punishment and rewards (Nguyen et al. 2017).
 Transformational leadership style is where the leaders also work with subordinates in order to create
the vision, inspire and recognise the changes for the team (Tyssen et al. 2014). Transformational
leadership brings utmost motivation for the team members.
 Tractional leadership style can improve the current situation, on the other side, transformational
leadership can change the recent situation.

TRANSACTION LEADERSHIP
 Transactional leadership focuses mainly focuses on outcomes that
must conform to the existing structure of the companies and it
focuses on measuring the success of the organisational system with
penalties and rewards.
 As stated by McCleskey (2014), transactional leaders have
positions and formal authority of responsibility with the
organisation. Transactional leaders always take the responsibility
of maintaining the daily routine by operating the individual
performance as well as the group performance of the team.
 As opined by (Delagche et al. 2017), transformational leaders set
some criteria for the employees with some defined requirements.
Transactional leadership is a ‘telling’ leadership style and the
leaders judge the performance of the employees.
 In tractional leadership, power comes from organisational position.
Some Transactional leaders in
business are:
Bill Gates
Vince Lombardi
Howard Schultz

TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP COMPONENTS
 Transactional leaders mainly use the punishment and rewards
in order to achieve the compliance from the fellow members
of the team. Transactional leadership provides the extrinsic
motivation to the employees within a workplace by bringing
the set of compliance.
 Transactional leadership is directive and it is always action-
oriented (Dvir et al. 2015). The employees have to accept the
structure, goals and culture of the organisation set by the
transactional leaders.
 Transactional leadership has two major factors, management
by-exception and contingent rewards. Management-by-
exception checks the status-quo when the employees do not
perform well. As stated by Breevaart et al. (2014), Contingent
rewards gives rewards for recognition and effort provided for
good performance.
Components of Transactional
leadership

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP
As stated by Nguyen et al. (2017), transformational leadership always
encourages people to gain the remarkable results and unexpected
outcomes within the workplace. Within an organisation,
transformational leadership provides the employees autonomy over
a work and this leadership also gives authority to the employees to
take decision.
Transformational leaders are quiet leaders and they set examples for
the fellow subordinates. Transformational leadership style is
associated with the empathy, rapport and inspiration that help the
subordinates to engage in the work process (Delagache et al. 2017).
As opined by Storm et al. (2014), Transformational leadership
provides intrinsic motivation and this leadership style possesses
with confidence, courage and willingness to work hard for greater
good..
Some Transformational
leaders in business are:
Steve Jobs
William Edwards Deming
Peter Drucker
Mark Zuckerberg

COMPONENTS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP
 As stated by Antonakis and House (2014), transformational leadership has four essential components for the
implementation of this leadership within the organisation.
 Leaders can influence the subordinates by maintain the trust and by gaining the confidence of them. The
employees gain faith within the leadership and they can show empathy towards the leaders (Birasnav 2014).
 Transformational leadership provides inspiration to the employees and this type of motivation is basically
intrinsic motivation. The leaders draw the vision amongst the employees work together within the
workplace.
 These leaders provide intellectual stimulation to the team members by supporting creativity and
innovation. This supports challenging nature of work, concepts and beliefs (Renko et al. 2015).
 Lastly, transformational leaders show a personal interest in each of the subordinates work under them and
they provide both professional and personal support by assisting the professional development.

DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TRANSACTIONAL AND
TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIPS
Transactional leadership Transformational leadership
This type of leaders relies on standard forms of rewards,
punishment and inducement and sanction in order to control
the staffs.
This type of leaders arouses emotion that provides intrinsic
motivation.
This leadership provides a link between reward and effort. This leadership is proactive and it provides new opportunities
for the employees.
This leadership is responsive and the leaders deal with recent
issues.
This leadership provides special focus on intellectual
stimulation and personal issues.
This type of leaders set the goals to have desired performance. This type of leaders creates opportunities for learning to solve
the issue.
This leadership is data oriented and it is short-term. This leadership motivates the employees beyond the self-
interest.
This leadership reacts to issues This leadership reacts before it becomes problematic

OVERVIEW OF MESAIEED PETROCHEMICAL
HOLDING COMPANY
 Mesaieed Petrochemical Holding Company is a Qatar based company and it operates
in petrochemical sector. This organisation holds 49% of the issued share capital of each
of Qatar Chemical Company Limited and Qatar Chemical II Ltd and it has 55% share in
Qatar Vinyl Company. The combination of these companies makes successful operating
with world class production facilities in Qatar (Mphc.com.qa 2018).
 Mission statement:
 Increase business portfolio through gaining efficiency and capital investment that will
result to significant increase in capacity of production and widening the product ranges
 Vision:
 MPHC is committed to be globally recognised as world-class provider in petrochemical
and other complementary industries with environment consideration to sustain profitable
growth in order to increase shareholder’s return and capital value.
 Share price of the organisation has been low in last three months 0.42%. This
organisation has been the biggest Qatari organisation in last five years. Mesaieed went
public in February 2018 and it raised $880 million (Mphc.com.qa 2018).

RIGHT APPROACH FOR LEADERSHIP IN
MESAIEED PETROCHEMICAL
 Mesaieed Petrochemical is managed by Board of Directors and
this Board of Directors has group of members.
 Senior leaders of the organisation are mixed of seniors
international managers and their powerful leadership helps the
organisation to touch the success. The middle and lower
management of the organisation consist of professionals who
have expertise in cultural and professional background.
 Chairman Mesaieed Petrochemical Holding Company is
Ahmad Saif Al-Sulaiti
 Vice Chairman of the organisation is Mohamed Salem Alyan
Al-Marri
 Managing Director is Khalid Mohammed Al-Subaey
Chairman Mesaieed Petrochemical Holding
Company is Ahmad Saif Al-Sulaiti
Vice Chairman of the organisation is Mohamed
Salem Alyan Al-Marri

RIGHT APPROACH FOR LEADERSHIP IN MESAIEED
PETROCHEMICAL
 Mesaieed Petrochemicals is led by the Transactional
leaders who are veterans and who have extreme expertise
in the field. The senior leaders play an important role in
contingent reward as the management has been providing
the rewards to the employees.
 The management of Mesaieed Petrochemicals is active
by exception (Mphc.com.qa 2018). The leaders can
anticipate the issues and they monitor the problems and
they can corrective measures as well.
 Leaders in this organisation reward the employees who
are motivated with self-interest (Breevaart et al. 2014). In
Mesaieed Petrochemical, the leaders have unambiguous
and they require repetitive tasks. The leaders help the
organisation to have short-term goals in quick basis.
 Mesaieed Petrochemicals takes transactional leadership
approach framework as there are many general styles.
Implication of Leadership
• Managers in the organisation focus on
Short-term goals
• Thrive on rules and doing the measures
correctively
• Tend to be inflexible
• Very much favour structured
procedures and policies
• Opposed to change

APPLYING THE KNOWLEDGE IMPLEMENTING
TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP ON HR
DEPARTMENT
Transactional leadership provides high performance in jobs and employees get motivated to present
ideas from level of efficiency. In HR department, HR has to follow rules to manage the employees
within the organisation (Deichmann and Stam 2015).
In Mesaieed Petrochemicals, HR leaders can follow the transactional leadership in order to make the
employees speak in same language.
The employees of the organisation need to learn to fulfil the requirements first and then they can do
the work very easily (Renko et al. 2015).
Transactional leadership style does not provide extensive training to the employees and transactional
leadership approach is easy to follow and it can apply in the HR with in short-term in Mesaieed
Petrochemicals .
.

APPLYING THE KNOWLEDGE IMPLEMENTING
TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP ON HR
DEPARTMENT (CONTD...)
Personnel administration is checked by the HR of the
organisation. Transactional leadership style is
similar to the administrative function that needs to
be handled by the personnel department in Mesaieed
Petrochemicals.
Transactional matters are associated to the benefits of
the administration. Workplace policies and investing
workplace problems can be process-oriented matters
(Renko et al. 2015).
This leadership needs to make a structure and
responsibilities for the employees. The employees
may feel the conflict of interest in Mesaieed
Petrochemicals .
According to Delegach et al. (2017), Transactional
leaders share the matter what they conceptualise the
strategic direction.
 Implication of Transaction
leadership in HR department
• Hybrid structure may create within the
workplace
• It will focus on short-term objectives
• It can decrease the innovation to follow
routine
• The organisation needs to understand
between transactional HR and strategic
HR