Running head: LEADERSHIP SURVEY AND ANALYSIS 1

LEADERSHIP SURVEY AND ANALYSIS

By: Caroline Noll

Professor

Minnesota State University Mankato

MBA 651 Managing Behavior in a Changing World

Date
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Leadership in this day and age is not about the title, presentations, or positions. It is

about the influence you have on your employees. To know how you are viewed as a leader, it is

crucial to comprehend your management style, how employees see you and listen to all

employees’ ideas. In this paper, I will be discussing the Participative leadership, its meaning, the

research behind it, the pros and cons associated to this kind of leadership style besides discussing

an analysis done by my team at 3M.

You might ask why is this a great leadership style, and why do we need this type?

According to Walden University Scholar Works, “Virtual-team professionals have reported

experiencing low job satisfaction due to lack of face-to-face interaction leading to stress,

miscommunication, and role confusion. Dissatisfaction among virtual teams has increased

turnover and management costs for organizations. Despite these known associations, there was a

gap in the literature investigating efficient leadership practices to improve job satisfaction for

highly skilled virtual teams. Participative leadership offers an effective approach to increase job

satisfaction among face-to-face teams and innovative teams, (Reidel, E., 2016, p. 4)”.

Participative leadership is a managerial style that takes the opinions of employees to help

make many decisions for the company. Even, though this can be a slower type of management

style to gather the information to make the decision, it also helps boost morale and has

employees feel like they have a say and their opinion matters. With this type of management

style, there are many pros and some cons to this type of management style. This helps

predictions of human behavior, and how they reacted with different management styles and ways

they manage employees.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “during the past decade, vast numbers of

executives have been schooled in the virtues of participative leadership. Perhaps no other
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management concept has received so much recent attention in management literature, in

company training programs, and the general press. Educators, in particular, have consistently

admonished managers to open up their decision-making activities to their subordinates. Youthful

critics of big business have also added fuel to the fire, contending that industrial organizations

are too closed and undemocratic,” (Greiener, L.E., 2014, pg.1).

Within organizations employees having a say in what their opinions/ company issues.

This then will allow the organization to come up with solutions and let the employees be

involved in the decision-making process for the organization. Participative allows employees to

have their creativity to enable them to develop a stronger work environment to be more

productive and make the company more efficient.

Employee retention is significant to organizations. It is tough to have an entire

organization to being green. Some are good to have, but having more experience or product

knowledge is essential. By having employees with high performance, you can increase

employees pay, which is a great way to increase employee retention — also allowing employees

to be active leaders in the growth and decision making of the company’s future success.

There are many positives to this type of leadership, but there are some negative views to

this as well. One of the negative aspects of management should be able to decide how they want

to run the business without the input of others. As well as the time it can take to get the input of

all employees in the office, by creating a survey or setting up one on ones with them.

Conflicts within employees can also arise from participative leadership whenever there

are multiple discussions with different opinions from employees that are highly opinionated

workers. They can also feel if the manager goes in a different direction that their opinion is not
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valued within the organization. Which then can lead the employee to want to change jobs to be

looked at being more valued within a company. But it's hard in a sense you truly can’t please

everyone.

According to Chron Small Business, they also talk about diluted expertise stating, A

democratic approach can also dilute the quality of expertise involved in a decision-making

process. If you have the best strategic planning abilities and knowledge in your small business,

taking on input from less experienced workers can dilute the quality of perspectives. In

marketing, a marketing manager that allows entry-level coordinators and specialists to have

strong voices in critical strategy decisions may take away from the strength of her own

experience and abilities” (Kokemuller, N., 2016, pg. 1). This shows that taking away from

management skill sets and allowing them to make their own decisions.

From my findings, this is the approach I would take when I become a manager in the

future. Valuing the opinions of people, one is working with because for one to be successful, he

or she has to calibrate with ideas of one another. Every manager is going to have their style, not

all you are going to like, but you must learn to adapt to the different styles. It never hurts to offer

suggestions no matter what style.

Leadership Survey and Analysis

Within 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) good leadership is significant for its

growth. Being a large organization, it needs to make sure that they retain employees and help

develop them to continue growing within the organization. Also making sure that their opinion

counts.

A little background on 3M, it started in Northern Minnesota that started with abrasives.

Has now turned into a global powerhouse, with products that are improving lives daily with

people around the world. 3M has operations within 70 countries with sales in 200. 3M has five

big business Industrial; Safety and Graphics; Health Care, and Consumer. With over 60,000

products that are used within homes and business every single day. It is hiring 72,000 employees

around the world.

For this project, I was able to survey our team of inside sales employees across

Separation Purification Sciences Division. They are focusing on growth within 3M, job

expectations and understanding what expected of them, and thoughts of our Management team.

This survey focuses on the participative leadership model, seeing their ideas on if they believe

their opinion matters.

I was able to survey 13 of our 15 employees within our inside sales team. The survey

was between 1 to 10 scale, with 10 extremely agreeing and 1 extremely disagreeing.

The results of this survey, for the most part, was favorable. The lowest rating was

metrics measured align with activities that drive growth, which can be explained by them

recently just had an increase in metrics for a number of outbound calls, and the number of

opportunities entered in a month. This was an example of change decided by Management which

they didn’t ask suggestion from employees due to this they received negative thoughts from this.

The second lowest segment was I see myself working in Insides Sales one year from now.

I think it is good to have a score like this; it shows people want to continue to move up and

change rolls. Also, they could not be at their two-year mark in a year where they even have the

option to change roles.

The highest attribute was I have a good friend at work. I think this is a strong one to

have; it’s important for employees to have someone who they can trust and be able to have lunch

with or just go take a lap around our quad with. Having friendship with employees keep the job

fun, and make you enjoy going to work each day.

Overall the Manager of the inside sales team for SPSD scored an 8.9 out of 10. To how I

look at things that is a strong score. From showing an 8.7 showing that my opinion counts are a

strong score overall. It means this manager cares about their employees, to get feedback.
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Especially in the sales world, you need strong management to encourage to keep exceeding

expectations. My suggestion for this manager is to look where he scored 3,4 and 5s. Create was

to make it fun at work, by do sales competitions, or having group lunches from time to time.

References
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Greiner, L. E. (2014, August 01). What Managers Think of Participative Leadership. Retrieved

May 1,2019, from <https://hbr.org/1973/03/what-managers-think-of-participative-

leadership>

Kokemuller, N. (2016, October 26). Weaknesses of a Participative Style of Management.

Retrieved May 4, 2019, from <https://smallbusiness.chron.com/weaknesses-participative-

style-management-77537.html>

Riedel, E. (2016, June 03). The Effects of Participative Leadership Practices on Job Satisfaction

for Highly Skilled Virtual Terms. Retrieved May 3, 2019, from

<https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3485&context=dissertati

ons>

Malik, & Hayyat, S. (1970, January 01). A study relationship between leader behaviors and

subordinate job expectancies: A path-goal approach. Retrieved May 4, 2019, from

<https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/188064>

3M History. (n.d.). Retrieved from <https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/about-

3m/history/>