Theories in Action 1
I started my internship exactly one week ago at Fresh Bowl. Fresh Bowl is a healthy food vending machine company with a special focus on acai bowls. Observing leadership in the context of the organization is very interesting as the company currently only consists of the CEO and myself, along with a few others who are assisting in the process, but are not full time employees. Due to our close quarters relationship, I have had the chance to become very close with the leader of the organization, Zach.
The most apparent leadership theory that I have observed in Zach is his transformational leadership style. As Zach and I have grown closer over the past week, I have noticed that he does not make use of reward and punishment very much. We have been super busy and most of our time is spent discussing the future of the business and the vision that he has for the company. Rather than motivating me by imposing punishment or reward, he constantly charismatically describes what he hopes the company will become, because of this I become excited about the possibilities and opportunity that lay ahead. Judging by some subtle remarks, I think that if I can help the company grow, my role as a part of the company will grow as well. Zach has never explicitly stated that he would employ me after the Summer ends, but his enthusiasm and personality indicate that I may have a future at the company. I am not sure that I would qualify this as a contingent reward. I think that his charismatic style has given me intrinsic motivation to help the company succeed. He makes me feel as though I am a large part of the company and that he would not be able to succeed without my help. As things become more formalized, I am curious to see if structured reward and punishment become more prevalent.
Sounds like the incredibly small nature of this start-up will enable you to really have close proximity to leadership, decision making, etc. Given your title, I knew this was one of your two “theories in action” reflections – but you did not categorize the post that way. It is uncategorized, which means it will not find a home within the blog. In the future, please select the category for the prompt you are addressing. Given this reflection, you may want to be thinking about ways in which Zach exhibits the various transformational leadership factors over the course of the remaining weeks (how does he provide idealized influence, intellectual motivation, individualized consideration, etc.). You’ve already addressed the inspirational motivation in this post. Just good to have those examples when you go to write the paper in the fall.