Tuesday, February 8, 2011

POWER POSSESSED BY BILL GATES


Position Power

Legitimate Power: It is based on his position power given by the organization. It is also called the legitimization influencing tactic.
Employees agree to comply with management authority in return for the benefit of members. The use of legitimate power is appropriate when asking a person to do something that is within the scope of their job.

Legitimate Use of Rational Persuasion

It is used by Bill Gates while dealing with higher-level managers. Rational Persuasion includes logical arguments with factual evidence to persuade others to implement your recommended action

Reward Power:

It is based on the leader’s ability to influence others with something of value to them. Microsoft is famous for giving huge remuneration packages to its employees. An important part of reward power is having control over resources, such as allocating expense & budget funds.
Bill Gates has full control over evaluating employee’s performance determining their raises, promotions & other rewards.




Coercive Power:

The use of coercive power involves punishment & withholding of rewards to influence compliance.  It is also called the pressure influencing tactics. Bill was a autocratic leader but he never made rash threats & used coercion to manipulate others or to gain personal benefits.



PERSONAL POWERS

Personal power is derived from the follower based on the leader’s behavior. It includes expertise, friendship or loyalty and charisma.

Expert Power: It is based on the user’s skill & knowledge. Being an expert makes other people dependent on the leader. People often respect an expert & fewer the people who possess an expertise, the more power the individual has. Bill Gates is a master of his subject & his knowledge, skills, expertise is never questioned, tagging him having the expert power.

Referent Power: It is based on leader’s personal relationships with others. It is also called the personal appeals influencing tactics based on loyalty & friendship. But with Bill Gates it is more of loyalty due to his autocratic behavior towards his employees. People stay at Microsoft for longer time period than most of the companies.


INFLUENCE TACTICS

RATIONAL PERSUASION
Bill Gates extremely used this tactic by applying its functions in a very logical manner.
Bill always explained why the objectives need to be met.
He was very clear on the benefits which the followers would get & conveyed the same to others.
He was very motivational regarding the set objectives & provided subtle evidences that the objectives can be met.
He was very quick on explaining how problems & concerns will be handled.
He always innovate newer technologies & was very clear on their strength over others.


PRESSURE
Bill Gates very frequently used the pressure influencing tactics from fear of reprimands, probation, to suspension or dismissal.


"According to Fiedler, the effectiveness of a leader is determined by the degree of match between a dominant trait of the leader and the favorableness of the situation for the leader.... The dominant trait is a personality factor causing the leader to either relationship-oriented or task-orientated"



Relation-oriented leadership:
Leaders who describe their preferred coworker in favorable terms, with a high LPC, are purported to derive major satisfaction from establishing close relationships with felow workers. High LPC leaders are said to be relationship-orientated. These leaders see that good interpersonal relations as a requirement for task accomplishment.

Task-oriented leadership:
Leaders who describe their least preferred coworker unfavorable terms, with a low LPC, are derived major satisfaction by successfully completing a task. These leaders are said to be task-orientated. They are more concerned with successful task accomplishment and worry about interpersonal relations later

The second major factor in Fiedler's theory is known as situational favorableness or environmental variable. This basically is defined as the degree a situation enables a leader to exert influence over a group. Fiedler then extends his analysis by focusing on three key situational factors, which are leader-member, task structure and position power. Each factor is defined in the following.

1. Leader-member relations: the degree to which the employees accept the leader.
2. Task structure: the degree to which the subordinates’ jobs are described in detail.
3. Position power: the amount of formal authority the leader possesses by virtue of his or her position in the organization.

So in this case Bill Gates found most favorable place where positional power is high as he has most authorities in the firm, task structure is also defined as he gives the direction to subordinate/follower to fulfill his vision, and last leader-member relation is also good.

Level 4 Leaders

Bill Gates has his own visions of what the business needs to do to succeed. He decides on direction and then gets people to implement his vision. This is what level 4 leader refer to as "first what, then who." Level 4 leaders are very much in the conventional mode. They may be effective when it is not too difficult to decide what to do. And Bill Gates is too confident what he wants to do in near future and pursue his vision through his expertise.


Level 5 Leaders

We not put Bill Gates as level five leader because level five leader require both professional will + humility in which definitely he has professional will but there is some doubt about humility, although he is philanthropist who endowed $28 billion dollar in his own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and even promise to donate his 95% wealth as he will have aged but even after a lot of critics is there that he is doing all of it just because of status symbol, he is too centralize and blamed for curbing innovation.
         
Leadership style

1. Autocratic style

Control is basic to Gate's nature and his management practice. He has an obsession with detail and with checking up. Exp. Used to sign expenses for his right hand man – STEVE BALLMER.
He is trying to monopolize the World Wide Web software market and has had legal problems with the department of justice. Microsoft restricted the ability of its internet partners to deal with its rivals. Also he dislikes complaints.

2. Delegate style

Brightest talent: Gates paid special attention to recruit and retain the best talent in the software industry. He believed that the recruitment of talented software engineers was one of the most critical elements in the software industry. Gates looked for a bundle of attributes in recruits. These included the capacity to grasp new knowledge quickly, the ability to ask probing questions, and deep familiarity with programming structures. Though a great number of potential recruits applied for jobs at Microsoft, Gates assumed that the best talent would never apply directly. Consequently, Microsoft's HR managers had to hunt for the best talent and offer them a job

Gives autonomy to his manager, he delegates authority to managers to run their independent departments.




Criticism

Curbing of Innovation: The critics argued that Microsoft was not an innovative company. They said that Gates reformed existing products to satisfy customer needs instead of inventing new ones. Analysts also argued that Microsoft's overwhelming market share was a major impediment to innovation in the software industry. Microsoft was not just the market leader, but also the standards provider for the industry.
Impediment in development of smaller firms: Critics claimed that winning was so important to Gates that he would go to any extent to beat his opponent. James Wallace of Seattle Post-Intelligencer said, "Bill Gates not only wants to win, but he wants to kill the competition. He wants to bury the wounded"  
“Sometimes Gates took things so much to heart that his emotional feeling overshadowed his rational thinking. They said that Gates' intense rivalry with some of his competitors made him personalize every battle and obscured his judgment. ”
With his ambitious and aggressive business philosophy, Gates or his Microsoft lawyers have been in and out of courtrooms fighting legal battles almost since Microsoft began. 


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