Leadership influence on organisational performance at Eskom
- Authors: Xawuka, Asanda
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Leadership -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MBA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/42433 , vital:36655
- Description: The role and the impact of leadership in business and society is a topic of interest to many in business. This is evident by the increase in the number of studies on the topic of leadership. Organisational leaders are responsible to oversee the company’s operations including the allocation of resources, people management and to facilitate process integration to enable the organisation to achieve its stated objectives. State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) such as Eskom has a mandate to provide infrastructure services to improve the country’s economic conditions. In particular, Eskom is responsible for electricity generation, transmission and distribution in South Africa and other neighbouring counties. Infrastructure development is much needed in South Africa (SA) to enable the country to attract investors and to grow local businesses, as its economy was downgraded to one notch above‘junk status’ in June 2017 (Mutize & Gossel, 2017). Apart from social responsibility, SOEs are required to operate efficiently in line with good corporate governance and become self-sufficient to fund their own future growth plans. Hence, the importance of SOEs to improve their own performance and efficiencies. In the past few years, Eskom has underperformed in meeting its key deliverables as stipulated in the shareholder compact. These include the electrification of households, maintenance of the current infrastructure and the building of excess electricity capacity. The poor performance has negatively affected the country economy due to planned outages when trying to balance electricity demand and supply. It has further contributed to ongoing community service delivery protests, which costs the country millions of rands (Kekana, 2017; Nyembezi, 2015). In the same period, the company faced many leadership changes which partly contribute to its not fully implementing its strategic plans. The objective of this study was to contribute to a possible improvement in Eskom’s performance by examining the influence of leadership on organisational performance, using the independent variables of the leadership conduct (authenticity), work support and performance determinants (culture, communication, change management, strategy implementation and talent management) and further to add to the current literature in explaining how leadership influences performance. The research design was positivistic asthe relationship amongst the above-mentioned variables was statistically tested. The sample consisted of 111 managerial and non-managerial employees in Eskom, across the nine provinces in South Africa. The empirical results were reported and interpreted. The results revealed that the talent management process, work support, effective communication and strategy implementation have a positive influence on employee performance, which in turn has a positive influence on organisational performance. These results were discussed in terms of the implications they hold for the leadership at Eskom. The limitations are reported, thereby providing areas for possible future research.
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- Date Issued: 2019
The relationship between leadership behaviours and employee inclusion
- Authors: Jagers,Leizel Hilary
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Leadership -- South Africa , Diversity in the workplace Organizational behavior Work -- Psychological aspects Psychology, Industrial
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/40084 , vital:35753
- Description: In recent times, the discussion on diversity has shifted to that of inclusion. Employee inclusion plays an integral role in the quality of the organisational environment to create an organisation that maximises and leverages diverse talents, backgrounds and perspectives of all employees to increase organisational success. Inclusion has emerged as a contemporary area of exploration while diversity embraces a rich body of research. Leadership theorists have yet to discover an approach to inclusive leadership. It is interesting to note the lack of integration concerning the relationship between leadership behaviours and employee inclusion within a South African context, thus it is worth exploring what meaning and interpretation employee inclusion holds in a diverse South African work context. The aim of this study was to determine whether a relationship exists between leadership behaviours and employee inclusion. A literature study was conducted to explore work previously done regarding leadership behaviours and employee inclusion. For the empirical study, a positivistic paradigm with a quantitative research method was utilised. The confectionary organisation under study is situated in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The leadership behaviours of production line managers (n = 11) contributing to employee inclusion of production line workers (n = 141) was studied by means of a survey in the research design. To compensate for the simplistic responses to complex issues, both closed-ended and open-ended surveys were administered. Random sampling was selected as the sampling strategy for this study. In addition, the research study made use of both inferential and descriptive statistic techniques. A statistically significant relationship exists between leadership behaviours and employee inclusion. The findings reveal that production line managers generally believe that they exhibit leadership behaviours associated with employee inclusion, whereas production line workers generally believe that their managers exhibit certain, but not all leadership behaviours associated with employee inclusion. Furthermore, production line managers leaned towards a positive point of view of their perception of the extent to which production line workers experience employee inclusion. However, most of production line workers leaned towards a negative point of view whilst the minority leaned towards a positive point of view in relation to the extent to which they experience employee inclusion. These findings suggest that components of leadership behaviour namely commitment, courage, cognizance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration correlate strongly to employee inclusion in terms of uniqueness and belongingness. The leadership behaviours discussed in the literature and empirical study can contribute to future studies in terms of creating an inclusive leadership approach or style as this has not been discovered yet. Leaders should be aware of their leadership behaviours and familiarise themselves with and implement the preferred leadership behaviours for employee inclusion through self-development initiatives, leadership training and social change initiatives. Furthermore, leaders should practice leadership behaviours and techniques based on each situation, individual or group with a specific focus on the six signature traits of an inclusive leader and finally, organisations should create opportunities for employees to give feedback to their managers to raise awareness around the importance of employee inclusion.
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- Date Issued: 2019