Management Report: Leadership Styles and Theories at Apple Inc.

This report critically examines leadership styles and management practices within Apple, drawing insights from the movie based on Steve Jobs' life. It explores the application of autocratic and transformational leadership styles, along with the situational theory model, to understand Jobs' decision-making and its impact on the company's success. The report analyzes how Jobs' leadership, characterized by both visionary qualities and a controlling approach, shaped Apple's culture and its innovative drive. It also considers the interplay between his personal life and professional decisions, highlighting the complexities of his leadership approach. The evaluation includes an overview of key characters, theoretical perspectives, and the implications of Jobs' leadership style on the organization's performance and market positioning. The report concludes with a summary of the relevance of these leadership styles in the context of Apple's achievements.

MANAGEMENT REPORT

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
Critical evaluation of leadership styles and management within organisation underpinned with
appropriate theoretical perspectives theories...............................................................................1
Evaluation of leadership styles within Apple..............................................................................4
Leadership development interventions .......................................................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Developing leadership and management are essential aspects of an organization and are
interconnected to each other to bring profitability and maintain productivity. These two
conceptual frameworks go hand in hand and together lead towards understanding the skills. It
assists in planning the functionalities and building relationships while working in a team
(Rubens, Leah and Schoenfeld, 2016). This assignment will be gaining insights about the movie,
which is based on Steve Jobs and was released in 2015 under the direction of Danny Boyle. It is
going to describe about the significance of leadership styles and management at Apple.
Moreover, it is focusing on the roles and responsibilities of people who contributed immensely in
making Apple as one of the landmark products in the marketplaces. Here, several theoretical
perspectives, models and theories are going to be used.
Overview of Steve Jobs Movie: This is one of the biographical drama films which has been
adapted from the book by Walter Isaacson named “Steve Jobs”. It has been divided into three
major acts which has spanned from 1984-1998, that is for 14 years. Each act is related to a
specific product launch such as Apple Macintosh,NeXT Computer and iMac. These
incidents/events are taken to structure the movie's pace which has received critical acclaim and
gained laurels in the form of prestigious awards. It highlighted on the IQ levels, leadership skills
managerial capacities and other related characteristics of Steve Jobs who took decisions without
any prejudices and always attempted innovation with risks and purely on foundation of practical
approach. Apple has always been epitomized as the customers' dreams due its innovative features
and technological discoveries.
MAIN BODY
Critical evaluation of leadership styles and management within organisation underpinned with
appropriate theoretical perspectives theories
Overview of cast: This movie is based on three crucial acts of professional practices that affected
the profits and market positioning of Apple and has also included the personal lives of Steve Jobs
with his estranged girlfriend and proximity with daughter Lisa. Herein the roles of Apple co
founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak has been considered. This cast has also several sub
characters including Joanna Hoffman, NeXT Marketing Executive, CEO John Sculley, Chrisann
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Brennan who is former girlfriend of Steve Jobs and mother of his daughter named Lisa. In
addition to these, few smaller but pivotal characters like Joel Pforzheimer who was a journalist
of GQ magazine and played important character in the movie who helped in understanding his
behavioural changes properly, Andrea Andy Cunningham, manager of Macintosh, Avie
Tevanian as software engineer and many more.
Consequently, these real life characters have helped in gaining understanding regarding
the practices and operational activities of corporate management. Apple's leadership styles and
management had been dominated vastly on the decisions made by Steve Jobs who acted as the
fulcrum and the balancing act. However, this clearly demonstrated his autocratic management
style where Jobs was considered as the most controlling one and took revolutionary but single
handed decisions without consulting any other dignitaries working at Apple. Moreover, his
erratic decisions and instant reactions sometimes led to uncertainties and posed challenging
situations for the entire management (Amanchukwu, Stanley and Ololube, 2015). Alongside the
family issues had also influenced his behaviour and decision making that put hampering effects
on the company's environment. Steve Jobs became vulnerable in the later stages of life but never
let it affected his integrity and work ethics.
Furthermore, the autocratic management style is considered as the authoritarian style of
leadership and is definitely characterised by decisions taken by individuals. The choices made
here is based on a single frame of mindset and the decisions made are in a stress free
circumstances. The focus is on giving clear and unambiguous commands to make the work
effective with great levels of efficiency (Robinson, VanderPal and Nhat Hoang, 2017). This
style has several characteristics where the leaders are the decision makers and command on all
the ongoing operations or work related pressure handling or distribution of work. It has been
demonstrated that the members are not being considered in making any decisions or suggesting
any ideas or opinions. There is no participation of the members in a team and mostly, the work
structure is rigid and not flexible. The rules, policies and guidelines are mostly outlined to dictate
the processes, methodologies and techniques to be used by the managers and leaders.
Here the major difference is that despite Steve Jobs was independent and never consulted
his team members, yet he was always considered as a transformational leader. He was passionate
for innovative ideas and had good sense of marketing (Nguyen and et.al., 2017). However, he
never showed the real characteristics under this transformational type of leader but had
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charismatic personality which made helped him in finding out ways in both negative and positive
aspects. When his co-founder Steve Wozniak asked him to acknowledge the entire team of
Apple II team during one of the presentations, he declined that offer. Jobs did not find it suitable
and discarded this idea by citing it as an unwise and obsolete (Hunt and Fitzgerald, 2018). This
clearly again showed that he had good sense of doing business and applied it from time and
again which made Apple the most valued brand at both the international and national levels.
However, he never actually considered in following the characteristics of the transformational
style of leadership.
Therefore, it had been clearly demonstrated from this movie that Steve Jobs adopted this
type of autocratic style through several acts. For instance, when the Macintosh 128K Computers
were about to launch in the year 1984, its demo was failed. This agitated Jobs who failed to
understand this challenge and forced the engineer,Andy Hertzfeld to give solution and threatened
him to publicly implicate and seized its credits from the presentation. However, he did give a
solution by giving a suggestion of faking the demo through applying another prototype named as
Macintosh 512K. This definitely saved Apple's reputation in the marketplaces and is refereed as
an apt example where Steve Jobs showed the autocratic style. Along with this, he was a visionary
and had charisma to make people do what he wanted to do and this also indicated towards the
transformational style of leadership.
Another theoretical perspective theory that can be taken here is the situational theory
model which aids in gaining insights about the leadership styles. The focus is on identifying the
issues and challenges to assess the requirements in order to safeguard the company's reputation.
Moreover, this model is based on two factor theories of leadership and is related to two concepts
namely relationship behaviour and task behaviour. There are several components that might
trigger these two variables in building the business environment and supporting the socio-
emotional support (McCaffery, 2018). Several advantages of this model is that there is no
specific style of leadership which is considered as the best, based on task oriented approach and
willingness to become performance ready to lead a team or company. Additionally, this is
primarily dependent on fundamental ideologies which is measured by using leadership style and
the impact on the individual or organisational levels for performing tasks.
This model has been proved beneficial in understanding the instances mentioned in this
movie. Jobs has been refereed as the pioneer who brought the revolutionary modifications in the
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microcomputer world (Brown, 2018). His vision only led to astonishing discoveries on a
continuous momentum which made Apple as the brand of the world. When co-founder Wozniak
made a nasty remark about the failure of one of Steve Jobs project of opening NeXT after his
resignation from Apple in 1985. He was angry and confronted him on one to one interaction
which in turn questioned his reliability and contribution in building the historical background of
the computing world. At that instance, Jobs had keenly compared his role and contribution to the
music director who provide guidance in making music to the other musicians. He considered
himself as the conductor who took decisions according to the prevailing conditions.
Thus, all these theoretical concepts are helpful in analysing and exploring the utilities and
challenges that led Apple to rise against the odds and also helped Jobs in reaching its inner
peace. Despite the family issues and problems, his relationship with Lisa was on improving
levels and made him realise the significance of Apple as a product in an individual's life. On the
other hand, his relationships with his girlfriend were under tension and stress and paved the path
of bitterness between the two. All these aspects in personal life never affected his commitment
towards his vision and company's growth (Iqbal, Anwar and Haider, 2015). These also
highlighted that he might be more collaborative in nature but slightly dependent on the fulfilment
of his dreams and aspirations which contradicted towards the features and characteristics of other
models. Henceforth, it is clearly shown that he was a visionary and an esteemed personality who
laid radical changes in the digital world and shook it to its roots.
Evaluation of leadership styles within Apple
In the above evaluation, autocratic management and transformational leadership style has
been exhibited. Both the leadership style exhibited are completely relevant with the organization.
As it has already known by everyone that Steve Jobs was a controlling individuals who used to
take all the decisions himself. However, he used to take input from his group members but used
to take decisions himself on the basis of his understanding. In other words he used to take all the
decisions himself (Saleem, 2015). His work was highly structured and extremely rigid. He was
one one of the most creative persons and because of his creativity and autocratic leadership style
he succeeded making Apple one of the most successful Organization in the world.
However, his co-workers used to think that he was a transformational leader. As he used
to work together with his team members, identified all the changes or improvements required
within their work or within the organization and took decisions based on it. Most of his decisions
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helped Apple to reach a hight that no other mobile company achieved that time. Due to his
capability, creativity, decision taking authority he was an inspiration for his other co-workers.
Both of these leadership styles exhibited defines him perfectly and can be related to the
organization.
Steve was a mixture of autocratic and transformational leadership style. He was a person
who used to think out of the box but didn't follow rules or a path and took decisions all by
himself. He also trusted his employees and gave them an opportunity to be more creative and
find new solutions for any problem that raised within the organization. These qualities and
characteristics of his personalty made him both an autocratic leader as well as transactional
leader. These qualities made him an excellent leader, however, there is no doubt that his clear
vision to achieve success was the main reason behind his personality and the type of leader he
was (Krapfl and Kruja, 2015). All of these qualities were clearly exhibited which described his
leadership style clearly. So, these leadership styles can be clearly related to the organization as
the depiction of his leadership style is done clearly can be related to the organization in a perfect
manner.
In regard to the above, it has also been demonstrated that the situational theory model has
brought the positive aspects in bringing profitability at Apple. This adoption of leadership model
has laid the foundation of concrete decisions and implementation of rules for better management
frameworks at this company by the leaders and managers. Jobs never cared about the worldly
affairs and led to take decisions in the most profound manner. When the CEO Sculley was
blamed for the firing of Jobs, he was in dilemma on this allegation whereas Jobs was unfazed
and continued with his work to bluff Hoffman who got confused about the misdirections in
context to NeXT. She understood that it was indeed a smart move by Jobs who manipulated the
management at Apple to buy it and reinstated him as one of the board members.
Therefore, it can be stated that Steve Jobs had a leadership quality of deriving vision for
uncertain business situation which helped the entrepreneur in following excellence to every
change of business environment. He had charismatic leader which focused on influencing
employees and gaining powerful position across international boundaries (Strielkowski and
Chigisheva, 2018). He did not meet the standard for a transformational leader because he was not
a person that altered and transformed personal and emotional level of individual working with
him. He was an unconventional leader and adopted different set of tactics and strategies through
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application of situational leadership. In the early time before leaving the Apple Company, Steve
Jobs used to lead the organization through transformational style. Thus, all the models and styles
that has been considered has justified its presence and contribution in enhanced levels to develop
the management approaches for better sustainability and profitability for any organisations.
Leadership development interventions
Leadership development interventions not only enhances the performance of the
organisation but also improves the efficiency of all leaders. The most fundamental intervention
which must be incorporated into Apple is that organisation must redefines its leadership profiles.
Most of the decisions are taken by the CEO Steve Jobs without having much involvement of the
marketing executive or the other professionals. Though under the leadership of Steve Jobs
company has successfully survived in the past years but now organisation is facing tough
competition from the new arriving organisations (Harold and Holtz, 2015). Thus, it becomes
essential that for the long term sustainability organisation needs to implement the leadership
improvement interventions.
The organisation must also analyse the future needs of leadership. For instance Steve
Jobs must seek for the best leaders within company which can assist Apple in the global
expansion of the business Without such leaders the organisation will not be able to survive. For
this purpose the top management of Apple must held accountability to develop the leadership.
There must be an organisational culture which promotes the continuous development. Apple can
use several examples to bring regular improvements in its performance.
The continuous professional and personal development is one of the key approach to
groom the leadership abilities of the individual. If organisation desires to build most successful
leaders then company must encourage the training programs for professional development. When
individuals will be able to assess their strengths and to overcome their weakness only then their
leadership skills will be highlighted (Aarons and et.al., 2016). Most of the organisation does not
follow this intervention as they believe that the personal development of the employees does not
affect the leadership skills.
However contrary to this when organisation pays attention to the learning and self
development its team members then their leadership skills are improved. For this purpose the
team members can be provided with the necessary training and mentoring facility. The
accountability is the integral part of leaders and managers. Thus, organisational environment
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must be developed in a way such that it promotes active learning. Another popular strategy
which can be used by the Apple to enhance the leadership capabilities and efficiency is to follow
the 360 degree feedback mechanism.
When there is a continuous feedback system then it helps leaders or the team members to
assess the drawbacks of the team performance. The lack of team cooperation has been of the key
drawback observed in the leadership style of Steve Jobs. Thus, the organisation must promote the
culture in which all individuals are highly motivated and inspired to lead the teams and to take
the responsibilities. All employees must have capability to work in the teams along with the
cooperation and coordination.
One of the key barrier which lowers the effectiveness of the leadership is the assumption
that leaders does not need any kind of training and suggestions from their subordinates. For
minimising the failure risk in business it is a good practice that team leaders must have regular
coordination with the other team members (Senge, Hamilton and Kania, 2015.). Apple must
encourage its leaders so that they can also adopt the continuous development principles like other
team members. It will help them to understand the key implications of the leadership and areas
which needs significant improvement in the company.
With the increasing market threats from the new emerging technical companies Apple
must use interventions which can help in sustaining its global brand value. Stretch assignment is
one of such effective interventions. As per this intervention the individuals must be allowed to
expose or deal with the new risk or challenges. It will help them to grow out of their comfort
zone so that they can rapidly learn new concepts and techniques. Such innovative and quick
learning is the basic characteristic of developing mature, confident and competent leaders and
team members (Hattie, 2015). For meeting the performance and organisational goals it is
required that team members and leaders must be capable to deal with the new challenges and
risks. Currently for maintaining the performance and success of the company there is high need
that organisation must identify the individuals who have potential to possess leadership quality.
Another popular intervention for the leadership is reflection. There are several instances
when leaders are required to take risk and decisions as per the situation. Thus, the ability of the
leaders to intellectually examine their experiences and to evaluate their knowledge and
experience can be helpful in making better decisions. Team working and leadership cannot be
successful without incorporating peer learning into the process. When individuals does not have
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emotional or personal bonding then there are high possibilities that they may not gain desired
output as team (Harold and Holtz, 2015). For dealing with such situation Apple can encourage
several informal activities which enhances the social interaction between the employees.
The personal and emotional differences are also the key factors which prohibits the good
team works. The leaders can overcome this situation by encouraging the equality and more
flexible working environment. The change management assures that the Apple is moving
towards the regular development.
If company wants to sustain its success then it is essential that there must be regular
changes and innovations in the strategies and actions (Senge, Hamilton and Kania, 2015).
Though most of the company's strategies and changes are the result of market needs, consumer
demands and the profitability goals of the organisation. However, it is not easy to implement any
kind of operational or management change within company. Thus, it needs proper change
management strategy. When company implement changes without consulting the team members
then, there are risk that employees may not provide the equal cooperation.
Contrary to this when leaders implement changes with the equal participation of team
members as well as it motivates the members that their opinions are considered. Such motivation
and encouragement also improves their performance as well as overall outputs of the company.
For instance there are several functional difficulties or the loop holes which are not faced by the
leaders. Thus, the discussion with the team members helps leaders and top management to
understand the problem areas and to bring the necessary improvements (Holten and Brenner,
2015). The feedback and suggestions from the staff members of Apple is also popular
intervention which can drive changes successfully.
These interventions not only improves the leadership approaches adopted by the leaders
of the organisation but also develops an environment which promotes positive change
management. Apple must follow these interventions so that it can assure the effective and more
productive management and leadership strategies.
CONCLUSION
It has been summarised that this movie has opened many pathways in the business sector
and gained accolades from the people associated from Apple and Steve Jobs as well. This movie
mainly emphasized on the ways and techniques by which Jobs changed the market strategic
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planning and made significant changes to conduct promotion of product. Furthermore, this
assignment has shed light on the knowledge and theoretical concepts regarding the leadership
styles and managerial positions. It highlighted the need to define roles and responsibilities in
accordance to manage and monitor the operational activities of organisations like Apple.
There had been an interdependency to make the leaders and managers demonstrate a
wider understanding about the working standards to maintain the business environment under the
code of ethics. Moreover, it also included about a proposed development intervention to make
necessary changes in the business and improvise the leadership with management to engage
employees, clients and customers. These management approaches has been explained using the
main lead and other cast members of the chosen movie to outline the theoretical ideologies for
effective sustenance in the marketplaces and gaining competitive advantages.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
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Brown, S.D., 2018. Authentic Leadership, Embodied Leadership, and Followership from a
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