Leadership and Management: Theory, Practice & Case Study Analysis

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of leadership theories and styles, focusing on their practical application with a case study of Jeff Bezos' leadership at Amazon. It evaluates the effectiveness of Bezos' transactional leadership style, highlighting both positive and negative aspects, including critical thinking, organizational design, change management, and employee satisfaction. The report also examines various leadership theories such as trait, behavioral, situational, contingency, transformational, ethical, and critical leadership, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion suggests that Bezos should adopt a transformational leadership style to improve employee retention, satisfaction, and create a healthier work environment. Desklib offers a platform for students to access similar reports and study resources.

Leadership and
Management, theory
and practice
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................................3
TASK 1............................................................................................................................................3
Case Study...................................................................................................................................3
Critical evaluation upon the effectiveness of Jeff Bezos' leadership..........................................4
TASK 2............................................................................................................................................5
Different theories of leadership with critical evaluation of each................................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9
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INTRODUCTION
A leader is a person within an organization whose main role is to lead the team through
providing them continuous motivation and direction to each employee. Leadership refers to a
quality being present in a person who can act as a leader for the firm and brings huge revenues.
Whereas, the concept of management denotes to effective handling of business affairs which
involves a specific procedure comprising of planning, organizing, staffing, directing and
controlling the actions as well as the human employees of an organization (Al-Hakim, Hassan
and Al-Shammari, 2020).
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TASK 1
The money that is £10 billion which he has generated was during the situation of Covid-19
when the whole world was trying to sustain and survive their business, this made people
shocking. Other than this Jeff Bezos has already earned approximate £74 billion for the year
2021. Oxfam who is the chief of inequality campaign & policy mentioned that how could a
wealthy person can make more money especially when the millions of people across the world
was experiencing high poverty and starving for food.
The leadership quality which is being adopted by Jeff Bezos in Amazon is a Task oriented
or commonly referred as transactional form of a leader. He always tries to find the newest ways
or looks for the scope of innovation on continuous basis in order to attain various organizational
tasks (Ali and Anwar, 2021).
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The different qualities of Jeff Bezos with respect to its leadership style are mentioned below:
Critical Thinking: The vision as well as decisions of Jeff Bazos being a leader has shaped the
organization to experience grand success but on the other hand has brough up numerous
challenges.
Organizational design: The present organizational structure of Amazon is highly in support of
Jeff Bezos style of leadership. The company operates with a trio combination of divisional,
functional as well as the matrix organizational structure. This allows Bezos to facilitate the full
managerial control over the business (Groves, 2021).
Capabilities & resources: The capabilities of Amazon is developed around the efficiency as well
as the scaling structure.
Change management: Jeff Bezos as well as his company Amazon has presented that company
can bring changes post Scathing their articles.
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Positive aspect:
• Jeff Bezos always motivates and inspires his employees who all are focused for the
effective results.
• Jeff Bezos here provides both positive and negative form of motivation through
punishments or rewards to the employees of Amazon so that they can enhance their level
of productivity in order to attain their objectives more effectively.
Negative Aspect:
• The employees have experienced numerous issue of high profile with respect to
company's culture and employee’s satisfaction.
• Under this, the employees are asked to follow their leader and his policies, they are not
allowed to present their views due to which the employees feel dejected and irritated.
TASK 2
Different theories of leadership with critical evaluation of each
Trait leadership theory:
The theory is based upon the individual's quality which mentions that a leader is born
with few traits that are inbuilt in it which permits them to act like a good leader.
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Positive aspect Negative Aspect
 The individual traits could be
developed thus, more individuals could
act like a leader Jeff Bazos.
 Traits within an individual which are
inbuilt sometimes does not works when
there is dynamic situation within an
organisation (Hong, 2020).
Behavioural theory of leadership:
This theory is just opposite to the trait theory and mentions that instead of inbuilt traits a
good leader is one who behaves ethically as well as respects the feelings of others. This
comprises of identifying as well as evaluating the behaviour or the actions to the time when they
are reacting to any particular circumstance (Kupiek, 2021).
Positive aspect Negative Aspect
 This brings a feeling of higher self
confidence or motivates Jeff Bazos to
bring certain changes within a short or
long period of time.
 Adapting such kind of theory into
practice is a lengthy process as this
requires to be followed by proper
learning as well as determining various
scenarios.
Situational theory of leadership:
The theory mentions that a leader is effective when performs his actions or takes
decisions based upon the various situations occurring within the organisation so to meet such
circumstances effectively (Pallavi Awasthi and Walumbwa, 2021).
Positive aspect Negative Aspect
 This allows Jeff Bazos to take
corrective actions based upon the
situation which can be highly
beneficial to react to the situation
effectively.
 When a leader does not reacts to the
situation then he would not be able to
direct his employees properly which
eventually it will have effect over
outcomes.
Contingency theory:
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This says that a leader should be ready to react and take decisions on quick basis when
the uncertain or unidentified situation occurs. This is so because in an organisation there could be
chance that some sort of changes are required based on sudden change in market or due to any
other factor. Within a dynamic market or with regular change in customers need there is a
possibility that any contingent situation takes place (Shamdasani, 2021).
Positive aspect Negative Aspect
 This would allow Jeff Bezos to go with
trend and have strong competition with
its rival firms.
 If a leader Jeff Bazos is not ready for
unidentified situations then it could not
be able to react timely which can give
chance to rival firm to have competitive
advantage.
Transformational Leadership style:
This form of leadership style refers to an occurrence of change within individual or at
social group who are the followers of some leader and gets influenced from them. This involves
a way as how the company's leaders can bring positive or a valuable change within their team
members or the followers (Vendramin, Nardelli and Ipsen, 2020).
Positive aspect Negative Aspect
 These type of leaders pays emphasis
upon attaining various compliance
through providing different benefits or
rewards such as Jeff Bazos.
 A leader with transformational theory
cannot pursue any task when they didn't
trusts in moral accurateness of its
achievement.
Ethical leadership
The concept of ethical leadership is referred as leadership that promotes & demonstrates
the normative conduct of interpersonal as well as personal actions within an organisation. This
comprises of values, fairness, honesty, focus and other aspects which brings true actions without
focusing upon the personal benefits at first. This allows a leader to encourage and develop
healthy culture along with a mixture of respect & trust.
Positive aspect Negative Aspect
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 This allows Jeff Bezos to increase its
followers performances through
providing motivation and proper
directions ethically. This enhances the
psychological state of company's
employees.
 When a leader does not abides by the
company's ethics then he would not be
able to direct its employees properly or
can have negative working culture
within an organisation.
Critical leadership:
A critical leadership is one in which a leader critiques and examines the past as well as
present situation of social life along with some ideals pertaining to comparison. It generally
comprises of a heterogeneous, diverse as well as broad perspective which shares a focus in order
to critique the constructions or power relations that leadership changes are generally reproduced
(Yadav and Seth, 2021).
Positive aspect Negative Aspect
 A leader that is Jeff Bezos would be
able to clearly examine the
performances of its employees on true
and fair basis which would allow him
to take corrective actions when needed.
 When a leader does not evaluates the
employees performance with full
critiques then it would not be able to
examine the objective clearly and can
have false or inappropriate
observations.
CONCLUSION
From the above report, it can be concluded that Jeff Bezos must adopt a transformational
style of leadership in his operations that can bring several benefits such as high employees
retention, employees satisfaction, healthy work environments, and many others. There are
various leadership styles which a leader adopts in its organization in order to bring effective
results with complete success. Through various styles a leader is able to motivate and encourage
its employees towards the achievement of organizational objectives. When a leader adopts
different style this gives rise to a newest set of culture or values in order to foster the level of
productivity, reduces the turnover of employees, enhances staff engagement, etc. Jeff Bezos is a
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highly influencing leader and tries to bring different innovations within its organisation so to
cater more and more customers with an aim of generating huge profits.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Al-Hakim, L.M., Hassan, M.M.S.M.A. and Al-Shammari, A.A.A., 2020. The role of strategic
leadership in enhancing the capabilities of agile organizations An analytical study of the
opinions of a sample of managers of mobile telecommunications companies in the
Middle Euphrates region. JOURNAL of ADMINISTRATIVE AND ECONOMICS. 9(34).
Ali, B.J. and Anwar, G., 2021. Administrative Crisis: The Role of Effective Leadership Styles in
Crisis Management. Ali, BJ, & Anwar, G.(2021). Administrative Crisis: The Role of
Effective Leadership Styles in Crisis Management. International Journal of Advanced
Engineering, Management and Science. 7(6). pp.31-41.
Groves, K.S., 2021. Developing and Validating a Model of Leadership Potential for VUCA
Environments. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2021, No. 1, p. 16002).
Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Hillard, A.J.D.A., 2021. Management Leadership and Employee Satisfaction: A Correlation
Study. International Journal of Adult Education and Technology (IJAET). 12(3). pp.1-
14.
Hong, J.Y., 2020. The Effects of Empowering Leadership on Knowledge Sharing and Innovative
Behavior through Self-Efficacy.
Kupiek, M., 2021. Digital Leadership in the Agile World and the Present of Change
Management. In Digital Leadership, Agile Change and the Emotional Organization (pp.
1-40). Springer, Wiesbaden.
Pallavi Awasthi, F. and Walumbwa, F.O., 2021. A Paradigm Shift: Investigating the Predictors
of Servant Leadership in Public Service Organizations. In Academy of Management
Proceedings (Vol. 2021, No. 1, p. 13977). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of
Management.
Shamdasani, P., 2021. Leadership of the Brand: Time for Asian Leaders to Leverage Branding to
Build Passionate and High-Performing Organizations. In On the Emergence and
Understanding of Asian Global Leadership (pp. 75-86). De Gruyter.
Vendramin, N., Nardelli, G. and Ipsen, C., 2020. Management and leadership practices of
organizations in the digital transformation context. In AIRSI2020: Artificial Intelligence
and Robotics in Service Interactions.
Yadav, L.K. and Seth, M., 2021. Invigorating Team Processes through Transformational
Leadership: A Theoretical Proposition. Abhigyan. 38(4). pp.30-44.
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