Harsh J Patel

Organizational Behavior
Professor Humberd
12/11/2015

Final Paper

1. Some leaders are born while others are created. There are lot of quotes about leaders
out there. There are lot of quotes about are leaders born or made. But, todays world
doesnt see you as a born or created leader, they see you as how emotionally
intelligent are you. Most leaders have to be emotionally intelligent. Emotional
Intelligence is one of the best skill to become a successful leader. Emotional
intelligence means managing our emotions and those around us (Ovans 2015). The
term emotional intelligence was coined by two UNH professors John D. Mayer, UNH
and Peter Salovey, Yale. In one article called How Emotional Intelligence Became a
Key Leadership Skill, Mayer defined this term, From a scientific (rather than a
popular) standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your
own and others emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about
relationships; and to manage your own and others emotions. It doesnt necessarily
include the qualities (like optimism, initiative, and self-confidence) that some popular
definitions ascribe to it (Ovans, 2015). Then the article talks about the 5 aspects of
emotional intelligence: Self-awareness, Self-regulation, Motivation, Empathy for
others, Social skills are very important. Self-awareness is knowing your strengths and

weaknesses and using them wisely to make decisions. Motivation is psychological

processes that cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of voluntary actions that
are goal directed (Textbook). Being empathetic means understand from a perspective
of the other person and acting accordingly. Social skills are how well do you blend in
with others and how you connect with them. Now as I talked about Emotional
Intelligence briefly, not every leader needs to be emotionally intelligent. Leaders with
less emotional intelligence can also lead as long as they keep inspiring their
employees with passion.

We all know what leadership means. Leadership is influencing others to

voluntarily pursue organizational goals (Leadership, Slide 3). Some of the well-known
leaders/CEO of great companies are Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google),
Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) are not just leaders because they have
technical expertise and high IQ. They rose to the top because they have high level of
emotional intelligence. I am going to give a personal example. On May 2015, I got
promoted to Supervisor from Welcome Desk Attendant at the CRC. From handling
computers, I now had to manage staff 6 Welcome Desk Attendants. I had an issue with
one of the Welcome Desk Attendants where she made a mistake and I reported her to the
boss instead of showing what mistake she did and how can she improve on it.
As we can note, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership are related. To be a
successful leader, you need to be emotionally intelligent. Without emotional intelligence,
a person may not be able to perform or not be productive or creative. If employees
working with their bosses wont trust him, there will be no motivation or new ideas.

2. Today, Yahoo is facing big problem; CEO Marissa Mayers questionable

management. There are lot of problems at Yahoo, but two of significant problems that
I think Yahoo is facing is communication and leadership. Communication is very
important when it comes to anything; hiring an employee, giving a presentation to the
boss, etc. Companies give first priority to oral and written communication skills when
they hire MBAs (AACU) Survey of Employer Priorities, 2013). The Forbes article
describes how in just months, Yahoo lost its chief accounting officer, chief marketing
officer, chief development officer, a string of senior vice presidents and an alarming
number of vice presidents from across the company in product, engineering, sales and
human resources (Helft 2015). Communication is very important at every levels; from
an employee to a C-suite level executive. The article also wrote about how Marisa
hired one of the Google sales executive Henrique De Castro as the Chief Operating
Officer but when De Castro failed to meet sales goals, Marissa Mayer had to fire him
(Helft 2015). I am going to give my personal experience about how communication is
important. When I got promoted from Welcome Desk Attendant to Supervisor of the
Rec Center, my boss hired 20 new staff. Just at the beginning of the semester, he had
an issue with a patron about a membership and next month, he had another issues
regarding students IDs. My boss had to re-asses him about his job fit and he
eventually got fired. He didnt communicate effectively with patrons or students.
Communicating openly allows employees to be free and independent. Knowing
everything what is going on in the company will help them come up with ideas, make
better decisions, and grow the organization as a whole.

Another important factor is Leadership. Yahoo has gone through five CEOs in five
years (Helft 2015) which shows that there was something missing in the leaders they
hired to run the company. One of the CEOs even lied on his resume (Helft 2015). We
discussed briefly in class about leadership and what makes a good leader; the difference
between a leader and a manager. In the leadership slides, they show a clear difference
between leadership and management; leaders establish direction with a vision, while
managers bring order and consistency; leaders align resources and inspire workers to
complete the vision, while managers draw up plans, structures, and monitors results
(Leadership, Slide 4). Since Marissa Mayer got hired, she has been managing Yahoo, not
leading it. It seems like Yahoo hired her just because she was one the Googles first
employees. Mayers idea of making Yahoo a mobile platform also did not work out
because other apps and social media dominated it. I had read lot of articles about
effective leadership and one common thing that pops up is how emotionally intelligent
the leader is. This is what your leadership depends on. High IQ, Ivy League degree
doesnt matter when it comes to lead. Being an emotionally intelligent person helps you
learn about other people; it helps you being empathetic, make decisions in harder times,
etc. I think Marissa Mayer lacks some emotional intelligence.
3. Understanding organizational culture is very important. Organizational Culture is the
set of shared, takenforgranted implicit assumptions that a group holds and
determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments
(Textbook, p.32). Some of the basic functions of culture is giving members an
organizational identity, facilitate collective commitment, promote social system
stability, and shape behavior by helping members make sense of their surroundings
4

(Organizational Culture, Slide 13). Lets say I am a consultant to Dell which is

thinking of buying EMC Corporation. Dell is a multi-national tech-giant developing,
making and selling computer products. Dell also offers IT services to its customers.
EMC Corporation develops and sells IT products and services that helps other
companies analyze their big data. There is a huge difference between these two
companies organizational culture because Dell is more of a product company and
EMC corporation is service offering company. Lets say for instance as Dell is a
product based company, they might have a strong organizational culture. Strong
organizational culture has set values and beliefs companies adhere to and this helps
them to achieve their organizational goal. Lets say Dell sets an organizational goal of
is to make certain amount of laptops and computers and sell them. EMCs
organizational goal might be different like having the highest customer satisfaction
rate on their services. Dell might have a stricter culture where if you are hired to do a
certain task, you only do a certain task, while EMC might have an open culture where
employees are welcomed to throw in their own ideas. We did an in class exercise
where Eloise worked for an event planning company and she was the
planner/consultant. She had the independence to express her own ideas and if her
clients liked, they would work on it. Later, Eloise joined another event planning
company where she was hired to do the paper work. She had the knowledge and
different ideas for the clients but she wasnt allowed to interact with them directly.
Her boss told her to do what she got hired for. This shows that the culture in both
companies was different, and person like Eloise really struggled to blend in with her
new employer. Merging with another company is not joke. Some companies need to

hire new people and some need to fire their current ones. The change of leadership
drastically changes the direction where both companies are heading. After they
merge, they have to come up with common organizational goals to achieve.
Successful merge depends on the selection and socialization of new employees into
the company. But at the end, it comes down to norms, values, beliefs that define
companies culture as independent, conservative, entrepreneurial, etc.

Reference Page

1. Forbes Article, How Emotional Intelligence Became a Key Leadership Skill by Andrea
Ovans, April 28, 2015
https://hbr.org/2015/04/how-emotional-intelligence-became-a-key-leadership-skill
2. Forbes Article, The Last Days of Marissa Mayer? by Miguel Helft, Nov 19, 2015
3. Blackboard Slides
a. Leadership
b. Organizational Culture
c. Motivation
d. Communication
4. Textbook, Organizational Behavior by Angelo Kinicki and Mel Figate, 5th edition.