Topic > Elon Musk and his leadership

Leadership is a characteristic of the person that drives the motivation of followers in order to improve their capabilities and influence them to work together to achieve desired win-win goals (Vroom & Jago, 2007 ). Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla Motors) has proven himself to be a successful entrepreneur and an influential leader who has converted his dreams into reality by achieving every single goal one by one, from the success of PayPal to SolarCity and from Tesla Motors to SpaceX. There are two types of leadership, where one is transactional leadership and the other is transformational leadership. Transactional leadership focuses on receiving rewards in exchange for subordinates' efforts. On the other hand, transformational leadership focuses on intrinsic needs; in other words, go beyond acquiring short-term goals. Transformational leaders have four characteristics such as inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation (Podsakoff et al, 1990). As a result, Elon Musk has all four of these characteristics that make him a transformational leader. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Despite being the most innovative company, Tesla Motors is still trying to penetrate the market to change the concept of external stakeholders by avoiding the use of conventional gasoline cars and start using new fully electric vehicles. But the market is large and the product is still in development. Considering only the overall passenger car sales in 2016, it was observed that over 74 million vehicles were sold and three major players in the automotive industrial segment (i.e. Toyota, Volkswagen, and Daimler) earned over $600 billion. The main automobile manufacturers were China, Japan, Germany and the United States. This shows that the automotive market has a lot of potential, but introducing such a new product can be difficult for companies like Tesla. The product life cycle of Tesla Motors' new cars is still in the early growth stage, but has passed the introduction stage (see Figure 2). In the introductory phase, the company has few or no competitors, so resources are allocated to developing and marketing the new product, as shown in the death valley curve (Figure 3), but the risk of product failure is high . However, in the growth stage, the product is commercialized and the company begins to profit from the launch of its product (Onkvisit & Shaw, 1986). However, it is an alarming situation for the management of Tesla Motors that the company has reached the growth stage and still not earning the desired amount of profit. Tesla Motors' goal is to produce 500,000 cars every year by 2020. If so, the company should take further steps with change management strategies and a results-oriented environment that can help achieve the desired goal. The fact is that producing such a quantity of vehicles per year by 2020 is not that far-fetched considering the size of the market if proper measures are taken. But at this stage, the overall sales of Tesla Motors may only contribute 1% of the total car sales in 2016 (Statista, 2016). Being a disruptive company does not mean that all odds will be in that company's favor, but there are always gaps and gaps between the desired outcome and the actual one. In the case of Tesla, the company is currently facing enormous pressure in terms of sales, revenue and production. The third quarter earnings report showed numbers.