Professionalism is an essential trait both in business and society. It is that quality which simply drives a persons appearance, personal and professional interactions while sustainability is the capacity to endure through renewal, maintenance, and sustenance or nourishment, in contrast to durability, the capacity to endure through unchanging resistance to change in corporate sector thorough constant training & skill up-gradation programme. Many companies have initiated a variety of sustainable development initiatives to address the demands and expectations of business houses. Although most analysts argue that these initiatives contribute to making businesses more profitable, there are many managers who are not yet convinced of the validity of this argument. The reason is that most sustainable development initiatives have been developed in isolation of business activity and are not yet directly linked to business strategy. One way to strengthen the link between the two is to measure the extent to which a company’s performance increases as a result of implementing sustainable development initiatives.
Keywords : Attitude , Leadership ,Professionalism & Sustainability.
Attitude Is Everything for Success: Say It, Believe It, Receive It
Leadership: Taking the Lead and Keeping It
INTRODUCTION :
Attitude is a “Mental & neural stage of readiness organized through experience exerting a dynamics influence upon the individual’s response to all situations and object with which he is related.” Attitude is a learned predisposition towards aspects of our environment. It is a complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, Values & dispositions to act in certain ways. It refers to the way in which your mind, that part of you that thinks, perceives, believes, reasons, and imagines, is oriented relative to the circumstances both within you, as generic and habitual disposition, and outside of you, such as the organizational, cultural, social & ecological roles that you play. It is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual’s likes or dislikes for an item. It is a positive, negative or neutral views of an object. It is a mindset or a tendency to act in a particular way due to both an individual’s experience and temperament. Attitudes are a complex combination of things we tend to call personality, beliefs, values, behaviours, and motivations.
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Attitudes help us define how we see situations, as well as define how we behave toward the situation or object. Attitudes also provide us with internal cognitions or beliefs and thoughts about people and objects .Attitudes cause us to behave in a particular way toward an object or person . Although the feeling and belief components of attitudes are internal to a person, we can view a person’s attitude from his or her resulting behaviour. A person’s attitude toward the environment had a significant influence on his or her behaviour (Alfred Adler, a Viennese , in his work the theory of Individual Psychology during 1870-1937)
A person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors were transactions with one’s physical and social surroundings and that the direction of influence flowed both ways-our attitudes are influenced by the social world and our social world is influenced by our attitudes. These interactions, however, may cause a conflict between a person’s attitude and behaviour.
Leadership is a common term but it has many diverse meanings, it has been said that, like beauty, you will know leadership when you see it. This, however, means that leaders and leadership are
defined in the eye of the beholder. If this is the case, then there is a multitude of definitions and understandings of what it means to be a leader or to witness leadership. Barnard ([1938] 1991: 81) identified that ‘lead’ is both a noun and a verb and therefore has a double meaning. The noun could mean ‘to guide others, to be the head of an organization’, while the verb could mean ‘to excel and to be in advance’. Likewise, leadership is used to describe a certain type of social interaction between people and the term leader is used to denote a person (or sometimes a roup/company) who has influence over others (Yukl, 2002; Northouse, 2004). The term leadership is also used to describe personality traits, behaviours and also to denote the roles of individuals and collectives. Leadership is inherently complex and is not easily definable; in fact, it is unlikely that any consensus on the term will be found (Grint, 1997). However, leadership does have shared meanings, depending on the social group you are discussing it with. Most commonly, the term leadership refers to an individual’s role or their traits and behaviours as in ‘she or he showed leadership’ Leadership is “the reciprocal process of mobilizing by persons with certain motives and values, various economic, political and other resources in a context of competition and conflict, in order to realize goals independently or mutually held by both leaders and followers” (James MacGregor Burns, Leadership. New York: Harper & Row, 1978, p.425))”Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes” (Joseph C. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Praeger, 199)
It is a process by which members of a group are empowered to work together synergistically toward a common goal or vision that will create change, transform institutions, and thus improve the quality of life. An effective leader needs creative skills & dispositions to come up with ideas, academic skills, and dispositions to decide whether they are good ideas, practical skills, and dispositions to make the ideas work and convince others of the value of the ideas, and wisdom-based skills & dispositions to ensure that the ideas are in the service of the common good rather than just the good of the leader or perhaps some clique of family member or followers. (Robert J. Sternberg, “A systems Models of Leadership.” American Psychologist, 62.1, 2007, P.40)
A leader is not necessarily a person who holds some formal position of leadership or who is perceived as a leader by others. Rather, a leader is one who is able to effect positive change for the betterment of others, the community, and society. All people, in other words, are potential leader. Moreover, the process of leadership cannot be deserved simply in terms of the behaviour of an individual; rather leadership involves collaborative relationships that lead to collective action grounded in the shared values of people who work together to effect positive change”. (Higher education research institute; university of California, Los Angeles.)
The concept of sustainable development has received growing recognition, but it is a new idea for many business executives. For most, the concept remains abstract and theoretical. Protecting an organization’s capital base is a well-accepted business principle. Yet organizations do not generally recognize the possibility of extending this notion to the world’s natural and human resources. If sustainable development is to achieve its potential, it must be integrated into the planning and measurement systems of business enterprises. And for that to happen, the concept must be articulated in terms that are familiar to business leaders. For the business enterprise, sustainable development means adopting business strategies and activities that meet the needs of the enterprise and its stakeholders today while protecting, sustaining and enhancing the human and natural resources that will be needed in the future.
Developing an effective management framework for sustainable development requires addressing both decision-making and governance. The concept of sustainable development must be integrated both into business planning and into management information and control systems. Senior management must provide reports that measure performance against these strategies.
Leadership and attitude are phenomena that have a lot in common. Both involve influence, working with people, goal achievement, etc. however, it has been argued that there are some significant differences (see previous section). To be successful, these two activities need to be balanced and matched to the demands of the situation.
LITERATURE REVIEW:
Aruna B. Bhat, Neha Verma, S. Rangnekar, M.K. Barua in 2012 work titled “Leadership style and team processes as predictors of organisational learning” find LS has significant impact on (OL) in Indian manufacturing sector. Particularly transactional Leadership Style (LS) had greater contribution towards the organizational learning (OL) and it contradicted many previous research findings that transformational LS rather than transactional LS is most significant predictor of OL. It bears significant implications for manufacturing organisations. Mainly it suggests that in production industries, the rewards and punishment based transactional LS will have significant contribution towards OL. This finding thus provided a breakthrough to the generalized and implicit notions of researchers to advocate only transformational LS for better OL.
John Hamm in his article titled “Trust Me- Because I am your leader” during 2011 suggested that leaders should build a culture of trust to boosts performances, look for chances to reveal vulnerability, No matter how tempted you are, don’t Bullsh*t your employees, not to squelch the flow of bad news, to constantly tap into their fairness conscience & to not take any shortcuts for developing trust in a leader which is required in an organization.
King, Christina in 2010 in his their study “Attitude Reflects Leadership” researched & find Colorado Springs Utilities remains committed to developing an organizational “Incident & Injury Free Culture”. As leaders transitioned from monitoring lagging safety indicators to developing leading safety measure/indicators, many questions were raised such as; “How do they engage employees in solving their safety issues, share safety ideas, define accountability, solicit ideas, reward safe behavior?” & Springs Utilities is developing a safety leadership program which makes every employee a “safety leader”.
Judith A. Kolb Associate Professor in his study “The effect of gender role, attitude toward leadership, and self-confidence on leader emergence: Implications for leadership development ” during 2006 Results indicate that both attitude toward leadership and leadership experience were stronger predictors of leader emergence than masculine gender role.
Robert Czernkowski, Rosin a Mladenovic, Carolyn Cousins, Roger Gibson, and Gordon Howitt in 2005 work titled ” The impact of leadership style on student learning in a first-year accounting course” find that the style of leadership perceived by students was significantly positively correlated with both general and specific measures of learning outcomes. More importantly, the more the teacher-student relationship was characterized by a transformational leadership style, the more likely it was that the student performed better overall, as measured by final mark.
See-Wai Alison Yeung, Yeung Lee & K. W. Ryan Yue during his study in 2002 titled ” Multicultural Leadership , Sustainable total School environement” find & concluded that school innovation requires a moral, systemic, integrative and emergent distributed leadership to build a scalable, sustainable learning community in a multicultural school environment.
Carol J. Steiner, School of Marketing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Victoria, Australia.) during 2001, in her study titled “How important is professionalism to corporate communication?” find Professionalism is a hot topic in journals serving a wide range of disciplines, but few articles critically question the desirability or value of professionalism. This article raises doubts about the desirability and value of professionalism in corporate communication. It uses Heideggerian philosophy and Kuhnian paradigm theory to suggest that professionalism could transform a heterogeneous, flexible, dynamic, communication-centred occupation into a routine science characterised by paradigmatic protocols and techniques and prescribed values and beliefs. It argues that the uniformity of thought and conformity of behaviour that underpin professionalism can reduce the value of corporate communication to strategic management and undermine the identity of corporate communicators.
Peter Youdale in his study “Communication and the professional image” Suggests that poor communication gives rise to more management and human relations problems than all other causes put together. Offers practical steps to improve abilities. Recognises the need to ask questions, project a clear and positive image and make sure people know the why, how and by when answers. Concludes that British middle management is criticised for its lack of professionalism but this could be corrected by improving all levels of communication.
OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY: This research paper attempts to examine the best available skills used by corporate sectors to measure sustainability & to study “Attitude – Leadership” as the winning edge for corporate sustainability.’
HYPOTHESIS
HY1- Strong determination & Passion for work is highly required.
HY2-Professionalism, good communication skills & technical knowledge is highly requires to sustain in corporate world.
HY3- Confidence is the key element to success.
RESEARCH DESIGN:
The research study is conducted through exploratory research and also survey study. This genre of research simply allows the researcher to gain a greater understanding of something that s/he doesn’t know enough about.
METHODOLOGY USED
The sources of data were collected from both primary and secondary sources. The primary data was collected through a structured questionnaire (may be viewed in https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGN3Szh6LWM2Mlg0bElKLUJ1M1hkX3c6MQ#gid=0 ) , after doing a pilot survey and the secondary data was collected from books, magazines and websites. For all constructs, validated scales were used, Participants responded on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Giorgos Papagiannakis*, Spyros Lioukas 1 from Athens University of Economics and Business, Department of Management Science and Technology, Patission 76, Athens 10434, Greece in his study “Values, attitudes and perceptions of managers as predictors of corporate environmental responsiveness” who has published his work in revised form in Available online 21 February 2012 in the journal of environmental management used the methodology principal component analysis with varimax rotaion to analysis his data. Lloyd C. Harris, Emmanuel Ogbonna- Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK in their research “Leadership style and market orientation: an empirical study” used the same methodology principal component analysis with varimax rotation to analysis their data & got published European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 35 No. 5/6, 2001.
Hence the author uses the same technique Principal component analysis with varimax rotation in factor analysis to analysis her data.
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION:
SPSS 19 & other Statistical tools.
SAMPLING PLAN:
143 Mid level Executives / Educationalist who are working in small companies, multinational companies or working in leading educational institutes were selected on a Simple Random Sampling Method & e-mailed to filled up, however 31respondents have expressed their perceptive view.
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF SURVEY FINDINGS
Table – 3 : Descriptive Statistics
According to the Table 3 & Mean value strong determination for work is highly required to
We requested that all loadings less than 0.04 be suppressed in the output & hence there are blank spaces for many of the loadings. As per the Scree Plot a maximum of 2 components can be taken for granted. Hence we extracted 7 variable from Component 1 i.e Q-12, Q-14, Q-7 ,Q-4 , Q5, Q20 & Q 16 & 7 variable from Component 2 i.e Q9,Q1,Q8,Q10,Q17,Q3 & Q6.
FINDINGS
From Table 3 & 4 with component 2 , we can find & prooved the HY1- “Strong determination(Q1) & Passion(Q9) for work is highly required”.
HY2 “Professionalism, good communication skills & technical knowledge is highly requires to sustain in corporate world” is falsified.
From Table No-4 in component 2 , we proved HY3- “Confidence(Q17) is the key element to success” accepted.
MAJOR FINDINGS & SUGGESTION
From table 4, we can find component 1 with highest 38.783% of variance & hence the variable Politeness, honesty, Discipline, Trust worthy, Creativity, ability to persuade others & accountability plays a vital role in sustainability. Hence the companies need to take care of these skills & qualities in the candidate while recruiting & the existing employees should inculcate these qualities in to succeed & sustain in the corporate world.
LIMITAION OF THE STUDY:
All types’ Companies/ multinational companies could not be covered.
All the mid level executives of different Companies/ multinational companies could not be covered and contacted.
The questionnaire is collected only through online mechanism.
The study is not free from limitation of accuracy and time.
Out of 143 approached respondents only 31 have expressed their views.
A category of Respondents were the Alumnae of the Author’s Educational institute & requested to fill the questionnaire form online & also for extent the questionnaire to their colleagues, which could not be effectively co-ordinated.
Non cooperation of few Companies/ multinational companies’ authority.
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