Leading 3c241u

Leading Leading is the third element in the management process, one of the management core functions. Leading accomplished by managers by inspiring, communicating, encouraging and motivating employees of a company towards a higher level of productivity so that they contribute themselves to the achievement of the mission & goals of the organization. Managers also may pursue to increase the productivity of employees and processes continuously to move the organization forward. Through continuous improvement efforts, managers can steer businesses into the future. Based on the contingency leadership theory, this assignment analyses the strategies of leadership style of Tencent founder and CEO, Pony Ma Huateng and observes the influence of his leadership style evolution on Tencent culture. Under Ma Huateng’s leadership, the leadership style changed from transaction leadership to transformational leadership. Ma Huateng has built Tencent through transformational leadership behaviours, including his vision of continuous innovation, encouragement of experimentation, and modelling that innovative spirit. This leadership style shaped Tencent's market/hierarchy orientation culture and teamwork/innovation orientation culture respectively. James MacGregor Burns (1978) first introduced the concept of transformational leadership in his descriptive research on political leaders. He defined transformational leadership as a leadership approach that causes change in individuals and social systems (Kotlyar and Karakowsky, 2007). In its ideal form, it empower positive change in the followers with the end goal of developing followers into leaders. The full range of leadership introduces four elements of transformational leadership: individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence. First of all, Ma Huateng apply the intellectual stimulation strategies which encourage creativity among followers/employees. He encourages their employees to keep on explore new ways of doing tasks and new opportunities to learn. As a result, Tencent’s employees tend to use their creativity in performing their jobs and this leads to invention on variety interest, including video games, live streaming, karaoke, sports and others. According to venture capitalist Mary Meeker, Chinese s collectively spend 1.7 billion hours a day on Tencent apps, more than they spend on all other apps combined. Besides that, more than two-thirds of Chinese people use its two messaging apps, WeChat and QQ, for everything from texting to

shopping, dating, watching videos, playing games, and ordering food and taxis. This shows the success of Ma Huateng in his transformation leadership. Next, Ma Huateng always his employees by trusting them and giving them inspirational motivation. He have a clear vision that he able to articulate to employees and help them experience the same ion and motivation to fulfil these goals. Under his leadership, numerous talks and speeches were held to motivate his employees because he knows that employee’s motivation and performance are key factors in moving a business forward. He always remind his employees that “The leader of the market today may not be necessary be the leader tomorrow”, so they must keep updated themselves with the advanced technology to become a cut above the rest. Besides that, he also used monetary rewarding as another type of motivations. Under this strategy, new ideas often come from the bottom up and they will be rewarded from 500 yuan for redeg an interface to 1 million yuan for more significant innovations. In conclusions, Ma Huateng, the transformational leader of Tencent serve as a role model for his employees because they trust and respect him. Under Ma Huateng leadership, the employees stay motivated, inspired and able to improve the performance of the organization and work together towards achieving the organizational goals.

Kotlyar, I., & Karakowsky, L. (2007). Falling Over Ourselves to Follow the Leader. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 38-49