Leadership and change management. The General Electric case study

The main goal of my dissertation concerns the leadership and its application for the change management, explaining the entire change process and how a leader can help a company to implement innovation for getting a real advantage.
The first chapter of thesis is dedicated to leadership. Will be examined the most im-portant theories about the theoretical evolution of the concept, starting with the theory of traits, explaining the situational and behavioral theories, arriving to nowadays with the transformational leader and the empowering leadership. For each of these theories will be done a critical analysis trying to understand their strengths and weaknesses , and the limitations for which they were exceeded by most recent theories. Will be described the various styles of leadership, autocratic, democratic and Laissez-Faire, observing how these styles influence companies and how the leader really acts within the organization, taking in consideration also the process of leadership created by J. P. Kotter.
At the end of the chapter will be done a wide differentiation between leader and manager, explaining how two figure that might seem so similar are actually very different and which one is the right mix to lead a company successfully.
The second chapter is the central one. In this chapter will be analyzed business changes, and how them can be managed to bring benefits within the organization. Will be de-scribed the various types of changes, the change kaleidoscope with all the contextual features that can influence an organizational change and the process used by manag-ers/leaders to implement innovations, considering the multi-step model by Kotter. Con-tinuing in the chapter there is the examination of issues related to the process of change management, like the resistance of a single worker or of a group and the tactics to over-come these resistances. In the second part of the chapter will be evaluated how the change leader acts to favor innovations, explaining Roger’s models about the innovation decision process and the adopters’ categories. After that will be examined the transfor-mational leader, his features, his enduring skills, and how he can overcome the change manager in implementing and consolidating changes. In the final part of this chapter there is an overview of the other change agents, their role, how they can influence the change process. Finally there is the explanation of negotiation, and how it can be an im-portant tool during the implementation of changes.
The third and last chapter examines the case study of the American corporation General Electric. For the first will be analyzed the strategies and values that characterize the company since it was born in 1892 and how General Electric manages the change pro-cess. Then will be presented two of the most important leaders in the last 50 years, Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt. Two people with two leadership style completely different, and yet able to run the same company to success, creating the right assumptions to de-velop their way of leading. Welch with his autocratic style, his domineering ways, and his vision, and Immelt with his openness with the workers, his focus on the external communication with investors and customers, his democratic style, a perfect transfor-mational leader.
The chapter ends with a critical analysis of both leaders, their styles and how they have influenced in a very different way the entire General Electric.