Influence is a great contributor to having a successful leader in an organization. When looking at recent influential leaders, many people will identify Steve Jobs as one of the most influential CEO’s of his generation. This week’s lesson describes influence tactics as the leader’s actions that help changing the audience’s attitude, values, or goals (PSU WC, L7).This leads to the question, which influencial tactics were used by Steve Jobs to motivate his followers? The lesson recognizes those influence tactics by leaders as rational persuasion, inspirational and personal appeals, consultation, ingratiation, exchange, coalition tactics, pressure tactics, and legitimizing tactics (PSU WC, L7). Although many of these tactics will fit Steve Job’s profile, his inspirational appeal stands out as his best tactic along with his socialized power.
The inspirational appeal is mainly to have the ability to propose tasks from employees using tactics that are designed to increase the workers’ enthusiasm and appeal (PSU WC, L7). Many of Job’s workers described this as one of his strongest tactics in the work place. Job’s ability to push his workers beyond their limits came from his ability to make them believe they can do extraordinary work in a short period of time which many deemed to be impossible; this was called Job’s reality distortion field (Isaacson 2012, Pg 4). An example of this situation is shown below:
“One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year–the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster.”(Isaacson 2012, pg 4)
Another reason for Steve Job’s success as a CEO is that he was a leader with socialized power. The socialized power is the service of higher goals and include empowering rather than having the need for personalized power for the person’s own needs (PSU WC, L7). This is shown through his push for perfection in Apple products and focusing more on the product’s quality than on the profit. (Isaacson 2012, Pg 5).
There is no doubt that Steve Jobs has changed the way we view the world through the innovations of Apple. The success of Apple can be greatly attributed to Job’s ability to motivate his workers through his inspirational appeal and the use of socialized power.
References:
Penn State World Campus (2013). PSYCH 485 Lesson 7: Power and Influence. Retrieved on Feb. 18, 2013, from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp13/psych485/003/content/07_lesson/10_page.html
Isaacson, W. (2012, April). The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs – Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review Case Studies, Articles, Books, Pamphlets – Harvard Business Review. Retrieved April 18, 2013, from http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs/ar/1
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GLENN J FERENCE JR says
Although I have not personally researched Steve Jobs, I find his story quite intriguing. We all know Steve Jobs to be a man of great power. Before reading your article however, his work life was not known to me. The fact that Steve Jobs used socialized power to achieve his goal makes sense. His attention to detail and perfection strategies allowed for wonderful products to enter the homes of millions of Americans. This socialized power in turn rewards Jobs by making Americans want a product far superior to anything else on the market. I personally own a Mac computer and an Apple iPhone and find it to be of much higher quality than any other product I’ve owned. The commitment to the consumer shines through and it’s my hope that this type of leadership and power continues to the next generation of Apple executives.
JACQUELINE DAWN DOYLE says
Your blog on Steve Jobs leadership style compelled me to research him further. I found that many articles have been written about Jobs and one word stands out in them all: “strategic”. He used socialized power on occassion even “falling in and out of love easily” with people who worked for him (www.strategy-business.com, P1, paragraph 6) but also pressure tactics and coercive power which resulted in him being exiled from Apple for 10 years. He was able to envision breakthrough products and his attention to detail was unparalleled. This made him an entreprenuerial leader but only became a better leader of people with age and experience. He admitted this in a 2007 conference in which he said “Because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people” (P2, par.7). While Jobs displayed expert power, even he would have benefitted from management training.
Katzenbach, J. (2012, May 29). strategy+business: international business strategy news articles and award-winning analysis. Retrieved February 19, 2013, from http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00109?pg=1