Approaches To The Study Of Leadership And Job Description For Senior Chemical Engineer

Distinguish between different approaches to the study of leadership and discuss critically the circumstances under which each approach can be implemented.

1.  Distinguish between different approaches to the study of leadership and discuss critically the circumstances under which each approach can be implemented

2.  You have been hired by a multinational company in the oil & gas industry to provide a Consultancy services for a massive restructuring exercise. One of the major assignment you have to carry out is the preparations of job descriptions. Write a job description for the position of Senior Chemical Engineer as a guide to Senior Management. The position reports directly to the Engineering Director. The Senior Chemical Engineer supervises 5 Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller.

This paper is based on the concepts of different concepts of Human Resource Management. Human resource management (HRM) is defined as the management of people, resources, policies and systems in an organisation (Johnason, 2009). Often, HRM is concerned with recruiting, selection, reimbursement and training of the candidates. This paper aims at distinguishing between different approaches to the study of leadership and discusses critically the circumstances under which each approach can be implemented. In second section, this paper aims at developing a job description for the position of Senior Chemical Engineer as a guide to Senior Management (Marchington & Wilkinson, 2012).

Generally, leadership is a theory adopted in the context of management and is defined as the social influence in which a person can influence others to follow his footsteps due to his leadership qualities. There are various kinds of approaches to study of leadership. These approaches are used differently under different situations. Various studies of leadership have developed theories that involve traits, functions, situational interaction, behaviour, power, vision etc. Leadership is the process of influence. A leader is someone who motivates, guides its followers towards achievement to their goals. Definition of leadership: Leadership is the ability to persuade an individual or group of individuals. Leadership as a process leads an individual or an organization to their goals. It also means to motivate behavior towards accomplishment (Towers, 2007).  Leadership is basically the ability of a authoritative figures to manage and motivate their followers. Thus it relies heavily on interpersonal and communication skills. It is an important factor in successful operating of firms. A leader by definition must have followers, thus to critically explore the concept of leadership it is essential to study the relationship between leaders and their followers. Leadership is a vigorous process wherein the leader-follower relationship is constantly changing. It is a two- way process and its outcome is directly proportionate to each other in nature (Baumgartel, 1957).

Leadership is a vast topic, it has a huge body of literature. Thus to perceive and understand it critically researchers have adopted various approaches to study leadership. It can be broadly classified into are four different approaches – Traits theory, Behaviouristic theory, Contingency theory and Charismatic theories of leadership (Jonathan, 2010). These approaches use different techniques and approaches to identify successful and unsuccessful leaders.

The trait theory of leader, is an approach which uses the traits of leaders to study leadership. This theory proposes that there are certain traits of an individual which make them successful leaders. By observing the traits of leaders it is basically used to predict effectiveness of the leadership. The traits fund in successful leaders are then used judge the effectiveness of other potential leaders (Budhwar & Debrah, 2013). The trait approach basically observes and studies the physiological, demographic, personal and social behavior of the potential leaders (Meredith Belbin, 2011). The traits theory basically operates on the assumption that the traits of successful and effective leaders and vastly different from the less effective or unsuccessful leaders (Guest, 2011).

Traits Theory

One of the Major limitations of the trait approach is the assumption of what or who a successful leader is. Another limitation is that the list of possible traits for successful or unsuccessful leader lends to be very exhaustive. (Jonathan,2010).

Behaviouristic theory basically studies the behavior of leaders, their main focus is on What successful leaders do? And how do they do it? Unlike the trait approach which focused on what Leaders are, the Behaviouristic theory focused on what successful leaders do (Price, 2011). They behavior of these leaders were easier to observe and study as compared to traits, which were essentially based on assumptions (Jonathan, 2010).

With the limitations of the trait theory, researchers weren’t successful in determining a fixed list of traits that differentiates successful leaders from unsuccessful ones, they started focusing their attention to observing the behavior of the leaders (Hoque, 2013). According to this theory many leaders display either task oriented behavior or people oriented behavior (Armstrong & Taylor, 2014). Task oriented behavior of leaders basically relates to the effectiveness of the leader, whereas people-oriented behaviors are those which focus on employee satisfaction. One of the major limitations of the Behaviouristic theory was that it focused on rather subjective definition of successful leaders, thus focusing only on those who are consistently successful (Jonathan, 2010).

The Managerial Grid was conceptualized by Blake and Mouton in 1985. With the managerial Grid they tried to study an individual’s approach of leadership on two different dimensions – concern for production and concern for people (Mello, 2014). It displays the results on a 9×9 grid where the grid has nine points along each dimension creating of eighty-one possible styles of leader behavior (Jiang et al. 2012).

Fig1: Concern for Production

Source: Jonathan, 2010

The managerial grid classifies the tendency of leaders to behave in a particular way. The (9,1) style focuses wholly on production is known as the task management. Managers with this style are remarkably proficient with the procedure and working of a particular task but are not so skilled in adept with people (Berman et al 2012).

Similarly The (1, 9) style is complete opposite to the (9,1) style thus  leaders with this style are better adept at dealing with people with very less focus on  task procedure. It is known as country club style of management.

Leaders scoring (9, 9) in the managerial grid are considered to be ideal leaders, they have maximum concern for people as well as production..

The Managerial Grid faces strong criticism for assuming and ignoring the considerable influence of the situational aspects.

Leadership is known to influence many organizational activities in several ways. Theses influences are basically the ability to motivate and communicate with the subordinates to get effective results. Researchers have established the fact that leadership definitely has positive or negative influences on the operating capacity of subordinates.

The Contingency Theory of leadership was conceptualized by Fred E. Fiedler. This theory basically states the team performance is the result of communication between two factors (Jonathan, 2010). Fiedler’s model of contingency theory suggests that effectiveness of leadership is the result of communication between the leader and its environment, the first factor in the theory is the leadership style. It is the system of communication which happens between the leader and its team. According to Fiedler, the leadership style of an individual is an extension of the personality of the person.

Behaviouristic theory

To classify the various leadership styles, Fiedler’s conceptualized a scale called the least-preferred coworker (LPC) scale (Jonathan, 2010).

The scale in plotted on the scale of one to eight ranging on different dimension which include –        Unfriendly – Friendly, Uncooperative- Cooperative, Hostile- Supportive , Guarded –Open, with the eight being the highest and one the lowest.

The responses to the scales are calculated by taking a total and averaged, the results of the LPC score suggests the influential ability of the leader. A low LPC score suggest that the leader is more task oriented whereas a high LPC score indicates the leader is more oriented towards people. 

This theory also purports that leaders who score less on this scale are relatively less preferred in the work space. While those who score high are generally preferred by their subordinates due to their exceptional people pleasing skills.

Write a job description for the position of Senior Chemical Engineer as a guide to Senior Management. The position reports directly to the Engineering Director. The Senior Chemical Engineer supervises 5 Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller.

I have been hired by a multinational company in Oil & Gas industry. The company is seeking consultation services in order to restructure its organisation. Hence, I am responsible to write job description of Senior Chemical Engineer who will be reporting directly to Engineering Director. The Senior Chemical Engineer will act a guide to senior management and will also supervise 5 Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller. By definition, job description refers to the details or list of roles and responsibilities that a person has to perform once he is hired. Job descriptions are used by human resource managers to find prospective candidates for the position. Further, these descriptions also provide a clear view to the candidate for the position he or she is applying. As per Torrignton, a job description is usually created by carrying an in-depth analysis of the job, its requirements and the output required from it (Collings, 2009). Managers consider the area of knowledge, relevant skills and experience of the work required to do that task. Job descriptions can also be made person-specific by turning it into ‘Terms of Reference (Paauwe, 2009).’ A job usually includes number of roles. In order to make job description role-specific, Terms of References are presented as a single document (Klerck, 2009). But in practice, Terms of Reference is included in job description only. The job description of Senior Chemical Engineer is as under:

Department: Engineering

Reports To: Engineering Director

This is a full time opportunity for a candidate who will be given the title of Senior Chemical Engineer and will report directly to Engineering Director. Senior Chemical Engineer will act as guide to Senior Management. His prime duty will be to improve the chemical processes involved in the mining of raw materials in order to produce high quality products (Merkle, 2010). The candidate will have to work individually on developing new designs, managing test work and prepare basic design packages in form of flow charts, excel sheets, Pdfs etc. The candidate will have to ensure that all project designs are passed successfully from designing to manufacturing. This person will be responsible to directly contact senior management and also carry a feasibility study at regular intervals to help in operations management (Mayo, 1945). The job role of Senior Chemical Engineer also includes supervising five Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller.

The Managerial Grid

The candidate to be chosen for the role of Senior Chemical Engineer is expected to have relevant years of experience of working with chemical processes, operations and consulting. For this, a strong academic background in engineering is mandatory to be suitable for the position. The basic roles and responsibilities for the post of Senior Chemical Engineer include investigating, designing, commissioning of chemical processes for the recovery and refining of rare metals (O’Brien, 2009). For this, both theoretical and practical knowledge is required for the candidate. The candidate is also expected to possess some experience in supervising five Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller. The roles and responsibilities of the candidate to be chosen as Senior Chemical Engineer are listed below:

Basic theoretical and practical knowledge of dealing with the rare metals

6-7 years of relevant experience in testing various chemical processes such as working with high temperature furnaces, mining, extraction, filtration methodologies such as evaporation, precipitation etc.

5-6 years of relevant experience in developing basic design packages, chemical plant engineering, estimating operational cost, industrial chemical plant experience etc.

3-4 years of experience in supervising five Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller

Experience required for the job role:

In order to be suitable for the position of Senior Chemical Engineer, the candidate is expected to possess experience in:

Handling chemical processes such as working with high temperature furnaces, mining, extraction, filtration methodologies such as evaporation, precipitation etc.

Practical experience in operations

Risk analysis and quality control experience must

Disposal of waste products and handling environmental issues effectively

Using computer simulation software for chemical processes

In contact with Senior Management and working as guide

Supervising five Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller

Managing contractors and consulting companies

Developing and Implementation of ISO systems

Besides the relevant experience, the candidate will also have to travel extensively to different travel planned plant and test sites.

The Senior Chemical Engineer is required to possess a strong academic background in chemical engineering. The educational requirements in detail are:

Degree/Diploma in Chemical Engineering/Metallurgy Engineering experience or equivalent

Minimum ten years of experience in working with chemical and hydrometallurgical processes

Minimum five to six years of experience in Process Safety Management

Experience in estimating operational cost and preparation of plan layouts

Minimum five to six years of experience in managing contractors and supervising five Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller

A Senior Chemical Engineer is required to be skilled and competent professional. Some of the skills required for the job role of Senior Chemical Engineer are:

Competency in project management and project accountability

Practice the health and safety policies effectively

Managing and supervising Chemical Engineers, Cost Engineer and Document Controller

Hands-on Senior Chemical Engineer with in-depth knowledge of chemical and hydrometallurgy processes

Possesses a methodological and logical approach with strong emphasis on quality rather than quantity

Possesses the capability of working in a team and solving problems effectively

Possess exceptional verbal and written communication skills

Must be willing to travel extensively to monitor plant sites

Must be willing to relocate anywhere across globe wherever company requires

Must have professional engineer status

The Salary of a Senior Chemical Engineer can range from75k to 95k depending upon the skills of the candidate.

This is the job description of the Senior Chemical Engineer. This job description will enable the human resource managers to select the prospective candidates (Ulrich, 1996).

References

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