New leadership approaches and norms of quality

Leadership is seen as a non-coercive form of influence aimed at the production of change and movement. It presents many differences compared to the concept of management, while certain leaders or leadership styles can be more successful than others.

   Many of the traditional approaches of leadership have been criticized due to their inability to keep up with new business needs. Particularly, traditional leaders focus mainly on specific factors, such as personal attributes and training of employees, or business procedures.

   The process of interaction between leaders and their followers has evolved rapidly since the globalized era began. Being an active influencer in business is a very demanding and multidimensional task. This means that there is an increased level of importance on building trust between the leader and the follower.

   In the past, traditional leadership focused more on the one-sided (or in other words top-down) approach of influential direction, while today it must be done from both directions. Employee voice is critical in terms of developing trust, integrity, and a business culture of synergy.

   The strategies and tactics of a modern leader have been changed dramatically. The leader cannot rule people and simply give them orders. Instead, there must be a form of contribution, a power balance on which both sides have the chance to develop an impact on business.

   Many factors can affect leadership style in this dynamic global environment. Unpredictable factors, complexity of situations, the diversity of people, social construction and globalization, the culture, the new norms, guiding principles, all these lead to subjective meanings that a leader must cope with.

   New human resources management (HRM) quality schemes and the internationalization of firms and organizations in the last few decades have led to a global leadership concept of understanding. Setting leadership standards on an international sphere is vital for business operations, mainly for multinational organizations.

   It is very difficult to set a balance between cultural sensitivity and cultural universality approaches. The leader is confronted with the concept of thinking, designing, and implementing new methods of how people can avoid insecure situations, facilitate the conditions, and at the end develop goods and services with the best possible quality and practices.