Close and Distant leadership

This paper explores the leadership of Steve Jobs while aiming to understand his simultaneous enactment of close and distant leadership. It is a case study of the leadership of Steve Jobs and the reaction of Apple customers to his leadership.

Leadership elasticity enhances leadership style flexibility and mobility to enable educational leaders to maintain appropriate leadership equilibrium. The essential of leadership elasticity contributes towards organizational effectiveness by followership’s maintenance through appropriate expansion and contraction of relations and task behavioural orientation simultaneously, arrive at optimally balanced leadership equilibrium. This study aimed to explain leadership elasticity in achieving leadership equilibrium through relations and task behaviour orientating style-flex by assimilating the followership variables of task, timing, people, and trust. The study suggest both relations and task behavioural orientation is essential for a leader to bring about organizational effectiveness and social harmony. Moreover, Leadership elasticity expanding toward relations-oriented enabled less elasticity, while, expansion toward task-oriented behaviour enabled high elasticity. Leadership contextual intelligence and contextual experiences are both essential in identifying the variations in the contextual settings. This enables appropriate leadership approach of style-flex through the leadership behavioural orientations towards timing, trusting, tasking and people. The variations in the degree of elasticity can cause disturbances by frequent behavioural changes in an attempt to fit in the situation. This multi attempt behavioural changes can be the major cause of style-drift.

Keywords :Leadership Elasticity; Leadership readiness; leadership behavioural pattern; relations and Task-oriented behaviour; leadership appropriateness; leadership flexibility; leadership style-flex; leadership style-fix; Leadership style-drift; leadership multi-style flex

The aims of this study are to show that (a) transformational leadership is related to project teams’ performance via work engagement and (b) leader distance moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement. The proposed moderated mediation model was tested using 180 students in an undergraduate management course and working in project teams. The findings supported only the relationship between work engagement and performance, and thus transformational leadership does not appear to be useful in undergraduate project teams. However, the nonsignificant moderator effect revealed an unexpected finding for a direct and marginally significant relationship between leader distance and work engagement.

Driving leadership style enhances local participation and involvement in school in reducing a gap between the school and the local community. As gap filler, leadership role was therefore instigated to drive the local community to participate and involve in the School. The purpose of this exploration was to analyze the driving leadership ability to initiate participation and involvement in the school for bringing development and school. Semi structured interview was conducted as a research method. The analyses of the data were triangulated for reliability and validity. The initiation of driving leadership brought about collaborative teaming, collective values creating harmony with toning, being confident for tasking and setting the mission according to the vision with timing and participating and involving with transforming. Ability of driving leadership style displayed the magnitude of progress upon foundational improvement at the beginning of their participation and involvement. Dr...

"Driving leadership style" enhances local participation and involvement in school in reducing a gap between the school and the local community. As gap filler, leadership role was therefore instigated to drive the local community to participate and involve in the School. The purpose of this exploration was to analyze the driving leadership ability to initiate participation and involvement in the school for bringing development and school. Semi structured interview was conducted as a research method. The analyses of the data were triangulated for reliability and validity. The initiation of driving leadership brought about collaborative teaming, collective values creating harmony with toning, being confident for tasking and setting the mission according to the vision with timing and participating and involving with transforming. Ability of driving leadership style displayed the magnitude of progress upon foundational improvement at the beginning of their participation and involvement. Driving leadership style was viewed importance for changes and development bringing the driving forces with participating from the bottom as a lead follower. Driving leadership style acclaimed to be successful in eliminating the status quo and restraining forces in the teachers, parents, local groups and the external developmental agencies. Initiatives for task and considerate for the employees was an essence of producing intelligence to contextual phenomena that driving leadership style pursued demonstrate before the followers. This allowed the employees to concentrate for task and become motivated to accomplish with commitment. The effectiveness of driving leadership style resulted with maximum participation and involvement creating the chain effect in the community and influencing them to become concerned for the school. Driving leadership style by virtue appeared to be working inside out and outside in. This indicated to reach inside into the micro level to meso and to the macro and visa versa. Remaining as a lead follower in the team, driving leadership intellectual capabilities to contextual setting proved aspiring concern for task and for employees. (Contains 5 figures.)

This quotation, taken from Jobs's interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2003, describes Jobs's view of technology. In his mind, technology was about bringing people closer. This was his purpose and his guide for creating new technologies, both inside and outside ...