leadership in the movie Wall street

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Leadership can be defined as “The ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.”(House & Javidan (2004) ). The effectiveness of leadership is more crucial to the organizational performance. For instance, the quality of executive leadership consistently accounted for between 15-45% of differences in company’s bottom line results.(Barrick, Day, Lord & Alexander, 1991; Day, 2000; Joyce,Nohria, & Robertson, 2003).
Wall Street (1987) movie was directed by Oliver stone, which mainly revolves around two main characters namely Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox. This report analyses the leadership of Gordon Gekko in the movie. Gekko (leader) is an amazing antagonist who displays power and charisma. He is a rich corporate raider who believes in making profits at the expense of others.
Budd fox (follower) is a young stock broker at Jackson Steinem & Co aspiring to become rich like Gekko. With the influence of Gekko and the attraction towards huge lumps of money, he falls into the trap of insider trading corruption. He started retrieving information from Bluestar Airlines, where Carl fox was working as president of machinist union.
In order, to evaluate the effectiveness of Gekko’s leadership his traits, skills, leadership style, Power and influence among the followers are considered.
GORDON’S POWER AND INFLUENCE TACTICS:
Power and Influence are the necessary criteria for an effective leader. The concept of power is useful for understanding how people are able to influence each other in organizations (Mintzberg,1983;Pfefer,1981,1992). The framework developed by the French and Raven (1959) identifies five general sources of power th...

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... change his leadership style depending on the level of maturity (job and psychological) of Bud’s as explained by Situational leadership theory (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977, Jackson and Parry 2011, P44). Job maturity refers to the amount of task relevant knowledge, experience and skill the Bud (follower) possesses whereas the psychological maturity refers to the Bud’s commitment or willingness towards the task.

From the above table, initially he uses the selling style with Bud as his job maturity level was low. After the sale of Anacott steel shares, Bud progressed and made some profits. Later, Gekko applied selling style as Bud’s maturity level was high. Regardless of what Gekko does, the effectiveness depends on he achieved it through unethical ways. He had less empathy towards people, which lead to exploitation and manipulation of others for his own desire.

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