LEADERSHIP SKILLS AND ITS IMPACT ON ORGANISATIONAL CONTROL IN SAUDI COMPANIES 2
Running head: LEADERSHIP SKILLS AND ITS IMPACT ON ORGANISATIONAL CONTROL IN SAUDI COMPANIES 1
Leadership skills and its impact on organisational control in Saudi companies
Leadership skills and its impact on organisational control in Saudi companies
1. Introduction
The role of a leader in an organisation is always of very high importance as in most cases of organisational structures, it is the leader of the company or the senior management that decides the strategic direction of the company, sets workplace policies, and makes everyday decisions that are critical to the continued success of the business. Therefore, the importance of effective leadership skills is very high for the purpose of establishing and exercising organisational control in the case of any organisation.
1.1 Research significance
From a historical perspective, the business organisations in Saudi Arabia have adhered to conventional organisational structures and autocratic-like leadership styles as the dominant industries in the region were primarily labour-intensive. However, with a change in the industrial framework in the region and new types of organisations gaining ground in Saudi Arabia in industries of hospitality, technology, entrepreneurial business concepts, and start-ups, there is an apparent change towards knowledge-intensive businesses with variance in leadership styles adopted as well. To evaluate how organisations in Saudi Arabia are operating in these changing times from an organisational control perspective, this proposed research study aims to identify the impact of leadership skills on organisational control.
1.2 Problem statement
The leadership style in Saudi Arabian companies has often been neglected by the management teams without recognition of its impact on organisational control in the knowledge-intensive industries of today resulting in many poorly performing companies.
1.3 Consequences of the problem
Leadership is one of the strongest and most important aspects of any business organisation and poor leadership skills often cause business organisations to operate inefficiently and with a bad strategic direction. The consequence of this problem of ineffective leadership includes companies failing financially and not being able to retain a competitive edge in the industry. A statistic that shows the issue with the Saudi companies and potential issue of leadership skill is that more than 200,000 companies in the private sector shut down within a year after these companies did not even meet the minimum criteria set by the Nitaqat nationalisation program (Ghafour, 2014). Another anecdotal evidence can be seen in the form of the most profitable company in the world, Saudi Aramco, failing to meet all three of its IPO (initial public offering) goals, showing poor organisational control (Pratley, 2019). Therefore, poor leadership skills indeed have major implications on the success potential of a company.
1.4 Research gap
The relationship between leadership skills and organisational control has been explored by researchers in many instances; however, most such studies were conducted in western markets. As there are many subjective and localized factors that impact both the perception of leadership and the attribute of organisational culture and control, the findings of research studies conducted in foreign markets might not be applicable in Saudi industries. A notable gap in existing research in this regard is very few peer-reviewed studies exploring the relationship between leadership skills and organisational control within the context of Saudi Arabia.
1.5 Research questions
The proposed research study will make an effort to answer the following questions:
What is the emphasis on the leadership skills of the leader in an organisational structure in Saudi Arabian companies?
How do the leadership skills of the leaders impact organisational control?
What are the implications of ineffective leadership skills on organisational control and direction of the company?
1.6 Purpose of the research study
The aim of the proposed research study is to identify the impact of leadership skills on organisational control within the context of Saudi Arabia.
2. Literature review
The importance of leadership in an organisational structure has been long established by scholars in their research studies and scholarly works. Hendry and Kiel (2004) argued that achieving organisational control in an optimum manner requires a business organisation to integrate all aspects of the business in the most effective manner. According to their research, the role of the board members and leaders is the most important in this integration process to ensure that the organisational control of the board members is high and all aspects of the business can be managed by the leadership promptly (Hendry & Kiel, 2004). Nwabueze (2011) evaluated the case of organisational control in the context of the healthcare industry by evaluating the leaderships and traits that are necessary for the healthcare industry to achieve the most effective control. According to his findings, effective leadership requires the leader to have empathy, charisma, and problem-solving abilities to ensure that they retain a certain power in organisational control (Nwabueze, 2011). Hence, leadership skills were found to have a major role in implementing total quality management (TQM).
A leader in an organisational structure has many means of ensuring that different aspects of the organisation are managed, i.e. exhibiting control in the organisation (Wang & Poutziouris, 2010). Mansouri, Singh, and Khan (2018) suggest in their research study that the leader of an organisation has a clear impact on organisational control as they are able to establish and define the organisational culture and workplace behaviour of the employees (Mansouri, Singh, & Khan, 2018). A study conducted in Saudi Arabian work environment found that autocratic and Laissez-faire styles of leadership are quite commonly followed in Saudi companies, which creates issues for organisational culture, performance, and control (Altheeb, 2020). Another research study focused on public sector organisations of Saudi Arabia found that there was a significant impact of leadership style on the organisational performance attribute (Rahman, Jarrar, & Omira, 2014). Hence, there is a pattern of leadership skills having an implication for organisational control in Saudi Companies.
3. Research methodology
The proposed research study has the objective of understanding the impact of leadership skills in the area of organisational control in the context of Saudi Arabia. For this purpose, it is apparent that the leadership skill and its perception in an organisational structure have subjective attributes that need to be accounted for in the research methodology selected.
3.1 Research design
Due to the subjective nature of leadership traits and the objective of this research focusing on identifying the impact of leadership skills on organisational control. Taking this factor into consideration, the research design selected for the purpose of this proposed research study is a descriptive research study. In this process, the phenomenon of leadership skill and its relation with organisational control can be recognized in great detail.
3.2 Research instrument
The research instrument to use for the purpose of data collection in this research project would be to conduct a primary data collection process of conducting a semi-structured interview process. This instrument has been selected because of its ability to provide highly refined and comprehensive data in a subjective manner with clarification on the concepts in real-time if needed. Furthermore, it is a suitable instrument for qualitative data collection with high control.
3.3 Data Collection
The data collection methodology adopted for the proposed research study is qualitative methodology. This is the case because it is highly difficult to quantify the effectiveness of leadership skills and the level of impact that it has on organisational control. Therefore, it is the most suitable data collection methodology to use qualitative methodology. The data collected using the interview method of data collection will be analysed using the narrative analysis approach.
3.4 Sample population
The sample population refers to the process of selecting a smaller portion of the overall eligible candidate possible for the data collection process in a way that the smaller sub-section resembles the larger population for effective representation. The sample population for this interview analysis will include five participants (n=5). The sample population would be contacted using social media tools and the interview would get conducted in a voluntary participation approach remotely. The sample population would include employees in senior positions or managerial roles in their respective organisations for more than five years in different types of industries.
References
Altheeb, S. A. (2020). Leadership Style and Employee Motivation: A Study of Saudi Arabian Work Environment. Propósitos y Representaciones, 8(SPE2). https://doi.org/10.20511/pyr2020.v8nSPE2.661
Ghafour, A. (2014, August 5). Nitaqat: 200,000 firms closed down. Retrieved March 24, 2021, from Arab News website: https://www.arabnews.com/news/611896
Hendry, K., & Kiel, G. C. (2004). The Role of the Board in Firm Strategy: Integrating agency and organisational control perspectives. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 12(4), 500–520. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8683.2004.00390.x
Mansouri, A. A. A., Singh, S. K., & Khan, M. (2018). Role of organisational culture, leadership and organisational citizenship behaviour on knowledge management. International Journal of Knowledge Management Studies, 9(2), 129–143. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJKMS.2018.091249
Nwabueze, U. (2011). Implementing TQM in healthcare: The critical leadership traits. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 22(3), 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2010.532338
Pratley, N. (2019, November 18). Saudi Aramco flotation is a failure before it has even begun | Nils Pratley. Retrieved March 24, 2021, from The Guardian website: http://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2019/nov/18/saudi-aramco-flotation-is-a-failure-before-it-has-even-begun
Rahman, H., Jarrar, M., & Omira, O. (2014). Leadership Styles and Performance of Public Sector Organizations: The Case of Saudi Arabia. Journal of Business Management and Accounting, 4, 55–62.
Wang, Y., & Poutziouris, P. (2010). LEADERSHIP STYLES, MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND GROWTH: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM UK OWNER-MANAGED SMEs. Journal of Enterprising Culture, 18(03), 331–354. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218495810000604