Leadership Styles At Xerox

Transactional vs. Transformational Leadership

Discuss about the Leadership Styles at Xerox.

Xerox Company is the US based corporation which works for managing the documents and also sell quite a range of printers which are black and white and multifunctional, printing presses, consulting services and supplies and photo copiers. It is located in Connecticut, Norwalk. Though most of their employees are based in Rochester, New York in which the company was actually founded (Xerox, 2018).

The style of leadership in which the aims are defined earlier and the leader uses the reward and the punishment both for motivating the followers is known as transactional leadership. This type of leadership always emphasizes on the present scenario of the firm by creating and framing the stages and controlling the firm’s activities. The major aim of this type of leadership is to restore the corporate culture which presently exists and also to modify the current procedures and policies (Hussain, Abbas, Lei, Haider, & Akram, 2017).

The leadership style in which the leader uses the power and his or her influence and also the enthusiasm for motivating the followers for making them perform better for the firm is known as the transformational Leadership. In this leadership style, the leader will seek for the change in the present firm culture, provides a vision to the employees, adds mission and implement the change with the help and support of his followers (Jiang, Zhao, & Ni, 2017).

As the CEO Anne Mulcahy, she emphasized on the employees as well as her customers for saving her company from the losses. The leadership style of Anne Mulcahy actually falls in to transactional and transformational. One can relate with the leadership style that she followed. She communicated with her workers about the actions which could actually help their company to be saved from the losses. To keep in loop the employee of the company and take their support and opinions in order to save the firm from the losses is a huge step and a very different step which a company or the CEO of the company ca take. This seems more like a transformational style she followed. 

According to Kellerman (1984), the leaders who follow transactional leadership style brings their subordinates in to a relation who bonds leader and the follower and then the contributions are there from both the sides together with acknowledgement and the rewards. Now the transactional leader who is effective should fulfill the expectations of their subordinates as they are influential and have the power (Sarros & Cooper, 2006). In case of Anne, she actually met the top 100 executives for gaining the support from the team of leadership and she asked them as to if they are willing to commit themselves and the result of that was that 98 of those 100 leaders were happy to stay. In the year 1986, Graen, Liden and Hoel also can support this act. All three found that the employee who are linked in the relationships which includes support and the emotional exchange of both qualities high and low were most likely to leave the firm. While there was crisis in the firm, Anne spent approximately 90 days in the airplanes for visiting different offices just to listen to the employees and the customer’s perspectives about the firm. This shows the active management dimension by exception when Anne took corrective actions that involved the employees and the focus of the customer for getting the company to return to its normal profitability (Heuvel, 2010).

Anne Mulcahy's Leadership Style

Transformational Leadership emphasizes on the dimensions like Charisma, Inspiration, Intellectual Stimulation and individual consideration. In case of the leadership style followed at Xerox by Anne, there are some of the dimensions which explain the leadership style of Anne towards her employees which is all the dimensions like charisma, inspiration, intellectual simulation and consideration of the individual. Charisma will always give the mission and the vision in which the leader brings pride with respect and trust. This happened when Anne thought that her turnaround plan for the company was very aggressive and of this would work or not as her employees also did not question her at all with respect to the plan she had in mind. Rather than going skeptical, she outlined the new vision for the company for it to become the reality. The result of this action was that they were able to achieve approximately 80% of the target they has in mind (Bryant, 2003).

Inspiration also adds up to the leadership style of Anne and displays that this was more of the transformational leadership. She has inspired a lot of people in terms of how she managed to bring the firm up with the support of her leaders and employees. The day when she joined the company, the shares of the company went down to 15%. She came to the company on this position when the company was actually facing the crisis. Many people do not even want to deal with such a situation. But she came up and took the responsibilities in hand and brought the company up. After Xerox came out of crisis, now the company is able to generate $1 billion in a year and it has now resumed itself in the stock market as well (Fitri, 2018). 

The change concept happens in the three phases on individual level as well as organizational level.  It has been used by countless change management thinkers to understand and more effectively manage change.

 

States of Change

Source: (Prosci, 2018)

This is a very common approach in most of the firm which are already established and focus on the creation of the new products and services while having some of the goals in mind (Sen & Ghandforoush, 2011). The goals are:

• Growth of sales and the profit should exist for the current products and services.
• The protection of the present models of business.
• Creation and development of the new business models but not be cannibalizing the present ones.

This approach is well known as the approach which reduces the risk which radical innovation usually takes. This approach has the advantages for the companies which have great capital of humans and the resources and for the firm for whom it is easy to follow the path of innovation. The advantages those they bring are:

• It helps the firms to stay in the competition. At the same time, they are profiting from the product and at the same time they are also creating a new generation of the product.
• The ideas are very easy to be sold. When the customers are habitual with a particular type of the product or the service, they find it easy in understanding and buying of the new improvements(Engen & Holen, 2014).
• They are affordable. The process of the development is not impossible when the firm possess all the capital and infrastructure required for keeping the innovation continuous on the similar products and services.

Difference between Radical and Incremental Change Processes

This innovation is on the more complicated side to achieve. The whole process of this is complex instead of the discrete event and it implies a tough, long and risky process. It can be defined in a few ways but it will be apt to describe it as the blue ocean strategy (Sood & Tellis, 2006).

The blue ocean strategy means that the firm would never fight for the slice of the market cake. Instead of that, this develops new market while at the same time stepping aside of the crowd.  This approach also has some advantages. They are:

• It will always provide the opportunity to get a great win as long as the inventor is the pioneer in the domain and has no competition in the market. This is a very important advantage for any firm as they will be the only ones in the market then.
• During the first stages of any firm, if the firm does not have any competitor, it will provide the market a chance to grow a lot in a easy way. The firm then can set its own rules and pricing in order to rule the market because the customers do not have anything else to compare to(Audretsch & Aldridge, 2014).
• The markets which are new are always open for the further development and the innovation. Once the new ones are created the options for the further innovations are high mostly. This means that the capturing value will be easy as compared to in mature markets.

However, developing new Blue Ocean is not simple, rather, it is a little unsafe. Timing should be perfect, in order to deliver brand new product to the right people at the right time. Slow market adption is a clear possibility, hindering market growth, and the investment needed is usually quite big, without clear return perspectives. 

Xerox began with the implementation of competitive benchmarking as this was the apt way to utilize the best practices in the firm as in many of the copier firms the processes and the operations were not being practiced.  For tackling this Xerox followed these steps:

1. They standardized most of the parts that supported them in reducing the number of the vendors for the copier business from 5000 to 400.
2. The incepted a certification process in which the suppliers were given training or given feedback as to where and what they lacked in their processes.
3. Vendors were asked for their ideas for even better designs and also for the improvement in the services given to the customers.

The inventory costs were also minimized seeing that all Japanese companies had 1000 suppliers while Xerox had 5000.  

The culture of any company is known to be as the important factors in terms of its business. There were most companies which failed in implementing the Japanese practices because of the cultural differences. Understanding the culture in order to implement the benchmarking process or change is very important (Salem, 2013). That is one concern which Anne faced while implementation. There were several contingency factors which gave Anne a good headache while implementing the change in the company as the company was already in the downfall. The size of the firm was also a nog concern for Anne as there were many employees and cost was related with them but also there was cost cutting to be done with the suppliers and vendors (Staff, 2007).

Anne though was a strong headed CEO and she despite with so many issues, just conveyed one thing to her employees and leaders that they should either leave the firm or roll up their sleeves and work hard to save the firm (Wharton, 2005). He no nonsense and no holds barred approach gave her a dedicated team of employees and they came together for aiming the set of objectives which Anne Mulcahy set. Further she tried to be diligent about the precision of the plans which were executed and tries to work hard for them to do well. They restructured the manufacturing operations. They also resized the operations in many dynamic ways. They reduced the square footage from 80% and just tried to maintain the things which did well (Vollmer, 2004).

Incremental Innovation

Also, in advance, She and her team spent 6 months into deep and market competitive assessment to get the critical view by which they could retain expertise competency and could also find the partners who had the capability that could not be replicated. 

Anne Mulcahy definitely used the Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model for implementing the change. The eight steps which she used are as follows:

1. Create Urgency: For creating the change urgency is to be shown or displayed in front of the team and the employees for seeking motivation from them. Anne did a lot of talking before sharing anything with her employees(Kotter, 2012).
2. Power Coalition: She did convince people that change was really very important for Xerox.  The coalition of change needs to be working as a team.
3. Create Vision: Anne created a new vision for her employees to give them a new set of objective and goals to take Xerox to success again.
4. Communication of the Vision: Anne immediately shared her vision of the firm with her employees so that more ideas and the opinions from her staff(Auguste, 2013).
5. Remove the obstacles: Anne definitely got the barriers when she implemented the change in the firm. To remove the barriers, the identification of the barriers is a must. When employees are given the vision and the mission to make the firm grow, they get involved in it. But Anne as usual too these barriers seriously and removed them.
6. Short Term Wins: For the creation of the short-term wins, the goals and the aims are also to be chosen as short term. Anne knew that Xerox went through a lot of disaster and it could only be cured one by one by taking short term goals. She did as she thought of.
7. Build on the Change: Like short term goals, every small achievement is to be analyzed before starting of any other goal(Bucciarelli, 2015).
8. Anchor Change in Corporate Culture: For implementing the change, Anne started understanding the culture and travelled a lot for talking to people and customers to know their needs.

Conclusion

This report focusses on the firm named Xerox and the crisis that Xerox went through due to several reasons. When Anne Mulcahy came as the CEO of the company, there were changes done in the company. The kind of leadership she displayed was very apt for the scenario. Transformational leadership was shown by Anne which was too good and worked for the firm. This report also discusses about the barriers Anne had to face while implementing change and what were the change she implemented with the framework of implementation followed. 

References

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