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GE CEO Jack Webb

John Francis Welch Jr. is one of the leading CEOs in America today. He is a man who inspires both admiration and fear and who has been criticized for a number of problems raised under his watch over various divisions. Since 1981, he has been the CEO of General Electric Company. At that time, he was the youngest man to assume that chairmanship. He immediately set about making the huge conglomerate into a "smaller world," as he put it, so it would be easier to identify winners and losers. He undertook a revolutionary restructuring of the company. He divided the company into three "circles" of activities and said the company should concentrate its resources on these three areas. The three were its core manufacturing businesses; its newer, expanding businesses in services; and its high technology businesses. Most of the enterprises outside these three core areas were divested, for Welch determined that GE should sell off any business in which it was not the leader or the number-two company. By 1986 Welch had eliminated 232 GE product lines, closed 73 plants and facilities, and eliminated nearly 100,000 jobs (Current Biography Yearbook, 1988). An analysis of the Welch era at GE will illuminate aspects of his leadership style.

Leadership style has been shown to be a major factor in the effectiveness of the organization, and different leadership styles are sometimes more effective in different situations. DuBrin, Ireland, and Williams note that effective organizational leaders are generally consistent in the way they try to influence the behavior of group members, with this consistent pattern of behavior being the leadership style of a given manager. The behavior of most managers is too complex to be described by a single style, and a manager may modify his or her style to match a given situation (DuBrin, Ireland, and Wilson, 1988, 330). The classical method of classifying leadership styles is based on a continuum of authori...

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GE CEO Jack Webb. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:14, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691833.html