The Impact of Leadership Styles on Strategy Implementation in the Egyptian Pharmaceutical Field.

• Author: Khouly, Sayed El

INTRODUCTION

The characteristic of leadership cannot be defined by a universal set of standards. What managers are looking for is a gradient scale that identifies how people react to different leadership roles. People have different skills and tools and, depending on their specialties, these determine what type of leadership style they naturally fall into.

What defines a leadership style? One way to define a leadership style is the way managers handle a few categories: How managers deal with personnel --how they address human capital, from directing work to dealing with problems and conflict, will shape leadership style; How they manage the workflow; How they manage what gets done; how much oversight there will be. The perspective on leadership boils down to two broad categories: the micromanager and the macromanager. The micromanager will supervise and approve every detail, keeping a heavy hand in the overall progress of the project. The macro manager keeps track of goals and big-picture timelines, while relying on his team to make all the smaller decisions. The handling of the flow of ideas also distinguishes leaders. Some serve to enable the decision making skills of their teams. Others bring in a pre-defined philosophy and seek compliance and consent from the group.

There are two broad categories of leadership styles (more or less):

a- Task-oriented leaders are excellent at managing the nuts and bolts in their area of expertise. Their ability to get things done translates into valuable resources for the team-provided they leverage those resources with good communication and interaction.

b- People-oriented leaders are the charmers and visionaries. They get keep the human and emotional side of the team going strong. Their real value comes in making the group produce better results than would come from the sum of its parts alone.

Effective leadership will:

* Balance pushing for change with protecting the existing values and practices of the institution that work well

* Know how to align the diverse happenings within an organization

* Recognize the magnitude of change and therefore monitor carefully how it is being implemented

* Understand and value the people within the organizational community.

Successful organization leaders protect their organizations' environment, and encourage active participation. This is because a successful organization requires interaction and joint responsibility from everyone in order to use the talents of their leaders and employees in their different positions. Four kinds of leadership styles are the autocratic leadership, the democratic, the participant leadership and laissez faire.

Each one of those leadership styles affects to a different degree the strategy implementation of an organization and this is what the researchers are going to study in the current research on the pharmaceutical field in Egypt.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Leadership Style

Leadership is the life blood of any organization and its importance cannot be underestimated. Many authors have studied this phenomenon, but there is no dominant paradigm for studying it and little agreement regarding the best strategies for developing and exercising it (Bennis, 2007; Hackman & Wageman, 2007; Vroom & Jago, 2007). Omolayole (2006) views leadership as that kind of direction which a person can give to a group of people under him in such a way that these will influence the behavior of another individual or group. Ngodo (2008) perceives leadership to be a reciprocal process of social influence in which leaders and subordinates influence each other in order to achieve organizational goals. Leadership style is viewed as the combination of traits, characteristics, skills and behaviors that leaders use when interacting with their subordinates (Marturano & Gosling, 2008; Jeremy et al., 2011). Flippo and Musinger (1999) see leadership as a pattern of managerial behavior designed to integrate personal or organizational interest and effect in pursuit of some objectives.

Fiedler (1969) postulates that leadership style refers to a kind of relationship whereby people use their ways and methods to make many people work together for a common task. In modem leadership theories, five leadership styles have been presented...