Essay Sample: Leaders Overcoming Challenges with Interactive Leadership

The dynamic business environments characterized by factors such as a diverse workforce have created numerous challenges for leaders. It has become necessary for leaders to adopt an interactive leadership approach to overcome the challenges brought by dynamic business environments. Kearney et al. (2019) define interactive leadership as the act of leaders engaging their followers in their day-to-day activities through delegating tasks.

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Interactive leadership fosters collaboration in organizations, facilitating the achievement of organizational goals. Today, organizations face a new set of challenges, and it is becoming difficult for leaders to take advantage of the rapidly changing business environments without the support of followers. Interactive leadership considers the nature of the relationship between workers and their impact on an organization's success. Leaders in the 21st century need to adopt interactive leadership to address issues such as workplace diversity, learning organization, and employee motivation that continue to characterize the current business environments.

The globalization of the business environments has increased workplace diversity, creating leaders' need to adopt interactive leadership to understand workers. Globalization has resulted in new challenges for leaders because they have workers from different cultural and social setups. Accordingly, leaders can only get to appreciate their workers if they initiate interaction. As opined by Daft (2014), leaders cannot use their diversity policies and practices to understand workers from a different socio-cultural environment. As such, leaders can only appreciate their followers in such working environments by adopting an inclusive style to ensure that they know each worker personally. It calls for the adoption of values such as collaboration so that a leader can get to know the workers well.

The rapidly changing technologies have compelled organizations to become learning organizations, which can only be possible when leaders adopt interactive leadership. Organizations are focused on becoming learning organizations to take advantage of technological changes. In learning organizations, workers are central in ensuring that whatever is learned is successfully implemented (Kearney et al., 2019). Thus, leaders should include workers in learning about what needs to be done to achieve their objectives. Interactive leadership will ensure that leaders get to know from their followers because it drives relationships and makes workers appreciate their role in running the organization (Daft, 2014). Interactive leadership creates an environment that promotes intellectual stimulation because employees are at liberty to question the methods at the workplace. In turn, it makes employees begin thinking in new ways, which successfully transforms a business into a learning organization.

In the 21st century, workers are more concerned about their workplace well-being, making leaders more concerned about employee motivation. Leaders need to appeal emotionally to each worker to encourage them to achieve the set goals and objectives. Therefore, leaders acknowledge the benefit of interactive leadership in understanding each employee and how best they can promote them (Daft, 2014). Interactive leadership is relationship-oriented and helps leaders develop skills such as empathy and collaboration. The latter skills increase communication between leaders and followers, which makes workers feel appreciated and valued.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the 21st-century work environments' demand makes it undeniably necessary for leaders to adopt interactive leadership to achieve the set goals and objectives. Today, organizations are more focused on overcoming the challenges brought by workforce diversity and ensuring that employees are motivated. Equally, organizations are increasingly becoming learning organizations to take advantage of technological changes. All the above changes in the working environments are making it necessary for leaders to adopt interactive leadership. Interactive leadership is more concerned with involving workers in the running of the organizations, which is crucial in addressing the issues in the current business environments.

References

Daft, R. L. (2014). The leadership experience. Cengage Learning. https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=DzYeCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR4&dq=The+leadership+experience+&ots=NohV9fJdas&sig=ZpjI4B9YszV1_TJEcnq9wUBsPT4&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=The%20leadership%20experience&f=false

Kearney, E., Shemla, M., van Knippenberg, D., & Scholz, F. A. (2019). A paradox perspective on the interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 155, 20-30. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597818301948