Steve Jobs's transformational leadership and Apple's corporate success

¶ … Steve Jobs was a legendary corporate leader is not a matter up for debate; Job\'s influence and legacy have been well documented in the literature because \"Jobs was able to move Apple from a struggling, hobbyist business selling computer kits to become the most valuable company on Earth,\" (Barnes, 2015, p. 95). However, it is not enough to rely on the folk heroism of Steve Jobs. The formative question guiding this research is as follows: Did the transformational/visionary leadership style of Steve Jobs benefit the Apple Corporation during his tenure?

The plan for conducting this research is to discuss the state of Apple\'s affairs prior to Job\'s ascendency as CEO, and to determine causality between Jobs\'s actions and Apple\'s subsequent growth. Moreover, Jobs had been fired from and later re-hired to Apple. This research will critically examine this period of time in the company\'s history to determine Jobs\'s impact on Apple. If any changes were evident in the times Jobs left Apple, those changes might have been either positive or negative. Based on the fact that Apple decided to re-hire Jobs, it is hypothesized that Jobs had a net positive impact on the changes and outlook of Apple, solidifying the company\'s position as a market leader. It is also hypothesized that the visionary and transformational leadership style of Steve Jobs turned Apple into a transformational and visionary organization.

Review of Literature: Discussion and Analysis of Data

The primary research methodology used in this report is a review of literature. A total of seven scholarly and peer-reviewed sources were selected for inclusion in the research based on their relevance to search terms including Steve Jobs, leadership, transformation, and vision. Several themes emerge in the review of literature. Those themes reflect on the primary research question of whether Jobs\'s tenure at Apple can be considered positive for the company. The first theme is related to Jobs\'s leadership style, and the different theories of leadership that can be applied to Jobs\'s case study in order to analyze the leader\'s relative success. Second, the review of literature reveals distinct trends in the performance of the company and the role Apple plays in influencing or transforming ancillary industries. Finally, the review of literature demonstrates the ways Jobs eventually transformed the organizational culture of Apple so that after his death, his legacy could continue. Some of the core problems that may arise when a firm like Apple loses its legendary leader were mitigated by Jobs himself, in spite of the dangers inherent in having a singular, famous, and remarkable leader.

Theme 1: Leadership Style and Leadership Theories.

Jobs has been differentially placed into three main leadership style categories: transformational leadership, visionary leadership, and charismatic leadership. However, Barnes (2015) offers a third category of aesthetic leadership to describe the way Jobs blended art and science, using both as \"leadership tools,\" (p. 92). Likewise, Yu (2013) states Jobs\'s leadership style is evident in his \"seizing the intersection between art, technology and business,\" (34). The intersections between aesthetic, visionary, transformational, and charismatic leadership are clear with Steve Jobs, who cannot effectively be pigeonholed into one of these leadership style categories. Barnes (2015), Dykstra-Erikson, Hoddie & Wasko (2011), Sonnenfeld (2013), Yu (2013), and \"Steve Jobs and Modern Leadership\" (2013) concur that Jobs is best described as a transformational leader in that he changed the actual industry and not just the company or firm he worked for, inspiring others to participate in a shared vision of success. For example, Jobs \"constitutes the valuable example of a transformational leader able to inspire his people to do great things they had never done before,\" (\"Steve Jobs and Modern Leadership,\" 2013, p. 267).

Barnes (2015) extends the principle of transformational leadership to what is known as shared leadership, in which the transformational leader cultivates shared purpose, social support, voice, and transparency, (p. 92). Heracleous & Klaering (2014) offer unique analysis in that they primarily focus on Jobs as a charismatic more than a transformational leader. Jobs\'s leadership style can be described as charismatic partly because of his known issues being an \"imperfect leader,\" who was frequently described as having an \"abrasive personality,\" and exhibited \"unapologetic brutality,\" (Barnes, 2015, p. 95). Sonnenfeld (2013) found Jobs to have additional problematic leadership traits such as \"grandiosity, self-righteous omniscience that combine to forge an imperial identity that defines their heroic stature,\" (p. 64). Jobs could be tyrannical and perfectionistic as well as controlling (Dykstra-Erikson, Hoddie & Wasko, 2011). Several leadership analysts describe Jobs as a \"monarch,\" (Sonnenfeld, 2013, p. 65). Yu (20130 uses the term \"captain,\" instead (p. 33). Sonnenfeld (2013) also describes Jobs as a \"folk leader,\" which is a term referring to five primary characteristics: common origins, resilience from a crushing adversity, transformative technologies, mythmaking plus self-promotion, and having wider societal visions. Likewise, Barnes (2015) calls Jobs a \"countercultural hero\" and compares him to Jerry Garcia (p. 95).

One of the features distinguishing Jobs from ordinary industry leaders is his lack of apparent concern for profit and the shift of his goal towards power and transformation. \"Although Jobs made millions of dollars at Apple and NeXT, it\'s not clear that making money was a driving force in his life or at Apple,\" (Barnes, 2015, p. 95). Jobs\'s placement of vision and aesthetics over profit may have been what led to his being fired from the company, especially within a corporate culture framework that places shareholder profit maximization as the ethical priority of the CEO (Sonnenfeld, 2013). Jobs viewed his role and the role of Apple as radically changing the human-technology interface. Profit was a short-term benefit to pursuing the ultimate goal of what could even be described as proto singularity. As Yu (2013) points out, Yu (2013) \"people still lauded Jobs as a technologist, designer, thinker, and even a visionary, rather than seeing him as a captain of industry whose entire existence revolved around the relentless pursuit of profits,\" (33).

Theme 2: Company Performance

The review of literature shows that Jobs indeed did have a direct and positive impact on the performance of Apple. From the outset until his death in 2011, Jobs had a direct and lasting impact on the firm and on the entire industry -- arguably on the culture itself. First, Jobs was instrumental in transforming the very definition of a personal computer (PC). When Jobs helped conceptualize and develop the first Apple computer, he worked within a framework that proposed a binary of computer as toy versus computer as business device (Barnes, 2015). One of Jobs\'s first successes was to rescue the computer from the binary of toy/strictly business device into the model currently in place today wherein a computer is a personal tool with multiple and indispensible functions. Second, and ironically, Jobs\'s impact can be considered tremendously positive for Apple because of the way he helped the company move beyond the personal computer model itself. Jobs helped move Apple toward product innovation that led to the evolution of new product categories like the iPhone and iPad. Jobs was \"\"responsible for making Apple what it is today -- far more than a computing company -- and creating several new product categories,\" (Barnes, 2015, p. 95). As Sonnenfeld (2013) points out, Jobs\'s legacy would be not just in personal computing but in telecommunication, which was not even Jobs\'s forte: \"A key Jobs goal was reached posthumously as Apple became the largest mobile handset vendor in the world by revenue in 2011, surpassing Nokia, then the long-time leader,\" (p. 59). Even if the goal was reached posthumously, the seed of its success was planted and nurtured by Jobs. Not only did Jobs change the Apple business model from one focused on personal computing towards one that included handsets; Jobs also changed the way telecommunications companies like AT&T operated (Sonnenfeld, 2013). Jobs had a proven role in helping diversify Apple\'s products and services because he \"transformed whole industries beyond even his own, luring consumers toward the iTunes model of purchasing digital music and video content,\" (Sonnenfeld, 2013, p. 64). Yu (2013) credits Jobs with solidifying Apple\'s role as creating an \"ecosystem,\" which was a revolutionary step for technology firms (p. 34). The term ecosystem refers to Jobs \"cultivating a technological informal community around the company\'s core platform,\" (Yu, 2013, p. 37).

Jobs\'s legacy is effectively unquestionable. \"What Jobs accomplished at Apple was, of course, monumental. Having unleashed a tidal wave of brilliant, trend-setting, consumer friendly products: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, Jobs improbably turned Apple into the world\'s most valuable technology company,\" (Sonnenfeld, 2013, p. 64). Heracleous & Klaering (2014) performed a quantitative rhetorical analysis on Jobs\'s own communications to highlight the charismatic leader\'s role in transforming the firm and the industry. Therefore, the results of Jobs\'s tenure are quantifiable and measurable.

Theme 3: Problems with the leadership style of Steve Jobs

The review of literature reveals Steve Jobs had a net positive effect on the Apple Corporation and on the technology industry in general, opening up opportunities for new entrants to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem. However, Jobs used controversial methods to obtain the lofty goals of transforming the firm\'s culture and improving technology-human interfaces. Those controversies included his abrasive and sometimes hostile interactions with others, a strict cult of secrecy, and as Sonnenfeld (2013) puts it, the impossibility to \"clone\" the folk hero that Jobs had become (p. 59). Yet when Jobs died, the company experienced temporary crisis that has since been mitigated because of Jobs\'s legacy in changing company culture.Although the Apple brand had become all but synonymous with Steve Jobs, the firm has mitigated problems with linking the brand with Jobs by internalizing its identity as a maverick firm and an industry leader. Heracleous & Klaering (2014) also point out that Jobs\'s rhetorical style created templates for organizational communication that also promoted the ongoing success of Apple.

In spite of the potential flaws in Jobs\'s leadership style, the overall impact he had on the firm and its culture and performance were measurably positive. Dykstra-Erikson, Hoddie & Wasko (2011) discuss Jobs\'s \"complete commitment to a brilliant result,\" which led to an organizational culture that stressed aspiration to succeed and creative brilliance (p. 7). Moreover, Jobs fomented a transformational organizational culture in which members of the team \"had to believe in the collective commitment to get it right,\" (Dykstra-Erikson, Hoddie & Wasko, 2011, p. 7). It was and still is insufficient at Apple to pursue individual goals because a commitment to collective goals remains tantamount. This is why Barnes (2015) describes Jobs in terms of shared leadership theory, in which both shared purpose and social support are cornerstone issues. The role Jobs had on the organization and its employees was clearly instrumental in the success of Apple even after his death. Jobs was a \"transformational leader able to inspire his people to do great things they had never done before,\" (\"Steve Jobs and Modern Leadership,\" 2013, p. 267)