Emerging Leadership Roles In Virtual Process Ownership

EMERGING LEADERSHIP ROLES IN VIRTUAL PROCESS OWNERSHIP Furqan Habib Department of Engineering Management Centre of Advanced Studies in Engineering, Ataturk Avenue, Islamabad, Pakistan. [email protected] & Abubakr Afridi Department of Engineering Management Centre of Advanced Studies in Engineering, Ataturk Avenue, Islamabad, Pakistan. [email protected]

Abstract In today’s global and electronic corporate environment virtual teams and far flung detached work units becoming more and more important for business leadership. Although significant research has been carried out in role of leadership for ever increasing virtual processes, emphasizing increased adjustment in empowerment and process management theories, little has been investigated on the emerging roles of leadership in perspective of virtual process ownership. This research article is focused on the framework of leadership traits for virtual environment and in particular its importance for process ownership in the varied process reengineering situations. A research study of aircraft spares supply chain involving detached work units and virtual processes has been made. The outcome was the identification of the mediating variables necessary to explain leadership influence on process ownership. In the end we have presented a differentiating framework for which virtual processes demands new knowledge applications for preserving and evolving leadership for process owner complex virtual tasks.

Key words: Process Owner, Leadership, Dispersed Business Units. 1. Introduction To remain competitive in today’s corporate environment, the business organizations need to be constantly adapting to the required changes. Business process reengineering and the twenty first century electronic revolution have altered the ways of trading. The new knowledge stresses additional e-systems resources for the organization processes and has made the old organizational structures redundant emphasizing more and more on need of horizontal organizations. Decentralization and reengineering are of great value for modern organization where new markets need a constant reaction and a continuous adaptation. In traditional, hierarchical organizations, the new product development process would cut across half a dozen or so functions with different executives responsible for each functional sub processes. Who than owns new product development in the traditional organization? Organizationally every one of the functions with a role in developing new products is a partial owner, but effectively no one has an overall process ownership. Tenner and DeToro (2000) states that organizations that adopt a process orientation can command a strategic advantage by clearly assigning the ownership of core processes. By redefining the organizational boundaries to correspond to core processes, the process owner will have both the responsibility and authority to improve his or her core process. Employees in this environment no longer report to the managers of functional silos but to owners of operational processes. Hammer & Champy (1993) and Hammer & Stanton (1995) use process owner as someone who is responsible for the reengineering of a specific process, including establishing the standards of performance they, however, do not investigate the challenges of

leadership for process ownership either in detached work units or virtual processes. The organization leader appoint the process owner who at his disposal have the reengineering team, a steering committee and a reengineering czar.. In order to keep the process owner personally motivated, performance of the process owner must be directly related to the performance of the process itself. Once the new process is successfully embedded, the process owner remains responsible for the integrity, communication, functionality, performance, compliance and business relevance of the process. Hence, the process owner must have the end-to-end accountability for a process.

2. Leadership Theory review Leadership has been the topic of extensive research in the general management literature. One cannot be a leader without one or more followers. In a traditional environment it means development of skills like communication, intelligent risk taking, envisioning the future, planning, team organization, process management, crisis management, conflict resolution, team motivation, situational awareness and flexibility. A leader is an individual recognized by others as the person to lead an effort. Deming (1994) has described the primary responsibility of leaders as transformation of the organization. Strategic leadership involves creating both technical and social systems that are effectively integrated and that address the needs of both customers and employees, whereas operational leadership requires ensuring that organizational processes are effectively carried out on day to day basis, monitoring performance, and addressing the constraints. Another aspect to leadership is the emotional competence of the incumbent leader. Daniel Goleman (1998) identifies three personal and two social and related competencies. These are self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. Many authors have rated the capacity of change management as a basic requirement of leadership as the organization in real world are continually thriving to improve their processes in order to remain competitive in the ever changing world. One of the core components of quality leadership is that of having every one in the organization involved in managing and improving quality of the processes for which they are responsible. This is the basic ground of empowerment. The presence of discontinuities in virtual processes and detached work units suggests that team leadership may play a particularly crucial role in enabling team effectiveness. Mojtaba & K Amin (2003) states that this leadership can be shared among team members and that more than one leader can emerge during the course of a team’s interactions. “A dynamic, interactive process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both… (that) often involves peer, or lateral, influence and at other times involved upward or downward hierarchical influence”. This perspective differs from conventional leadership theory by conceptualizing leadership as a group-level rather than an individual-level phenomenon. Thus, leaders may exercise their influence by means of their substantive expertise as well as through their coordinating and directing activities. The shared leadership perspective and the results of empirical investigations of emergent leadership in virtual processes suggest that leadership can be both shared and emergent. However, these leadership theories falls short in explaining changes in leadership behaviors for a process owner in a reengineered environment and it is this requirement which is the motivation for our further analysis of the subject.

3. Case study and research methodology In order to empirically analyze the concept of leadership in the process owners for virtual tasks a case study of a recent BPR exercise in an aircraft spares supply chain having characteristics of cross functional organization, and geographically dispersed teams was carried out. A total of three core processes i.e demand planning, order processing and procurement were subject to reengineering effort, the new reengineered design where introduced speed and elimination of non value added processes also greatly relied on information and communication technology. This has resulted into increased number of virtual processes in the organization and obliteration of a large amount of paper and personal work. A critical success factor for process implementation in a BPR exercise was found to a creation and empowerment of single, accountable Process Owner whose management activities and scope of governance span across the great divide between organizational silos. The Process

Owner plays the important role of champion, visionary, protector and advocate without whom the process has absolutely no chance of survival. The processes and the corresponding process owners are shown below:

Table 3.1 Process Description and Owners. Process Owner Mr DP Ms OP Mr PRO

Process Description Demand planning process Ordering process Procurement process

An extensive research over a ten months period for the behavioral leadership analysis of the above three process owners was made building extensive utilization of first hand observations, surveys and interviews techniques. Although the transformation of the organization into the newly reengineered processes remained a challenging task for this period, the challenging environment continued to be perfect model for our inquisitions for process owner leadership traits. The study revealed that the responsibilities of the process owner span across developing process vision and objectives, monitoring of process performance across the organization, communication to the senior managers for initiative progress and development of policies and procedures for governing the processes.

4. Findings Our analysis of the case reveals that in a traditional setup, process owners are usually misunderstood as the middle level managers performing the multi process activities, where silos working were found to be a common norm despite cross functional processes. In traditional organization process owners were found less competent and required more sense of the business being pursued. However the process owners of the reengineered processes were the senior level managers designated by the organizational leadership, who had a good sense of the business being pursued. A Process Owner’s job after a reengineering effort is to ensure that it gets done. He or she typically assembles the project team, obtains the resources that the team requires, protects the team from internal politics, and works to gain cooperation of the other executives and managers whose functional groups are involved in the process. Once the new process is successfully embedded, the Process Owner remains responsible for the integrity, communication, functionality, performance, compliance and business relevance of the process.

5. Discussion Our research and findings reveal that the process owners need to exhibit the leadership traits that are more substantive in nature in order to be more effective and efficient in running the processes. There is a requirement of high degree of information and communication skills on the part of process owners so that geographically dispersed work units and cross functional organizations can be aligned to the process requirements. Conflict resolution abilities became more important for a process owner and personal contact with the dispersed team remained a difficult task. For some process owners it was difficult to convey their specific initiatives across the virtual teams. Motivation of the respective teams became more challenging due to lack of personal touch. The most difficult tasks the process owners experienced in their working was to practically determine the judicious and viable reward and appraisal systems for the virtual and detached team members. Conflict resolution where the processes cross the functional lines became more difficult. The requirement of intelligent risk taking reduced; however envisioning the future necessitated making suitable adjustments to the processes prior in time. One of the most important traits of the process owner in context of leadership appeared to understand the inherent differences of the geographically dispersed work units and their biases. Team

motivation, situational awareness and flexibility become more demanding due to the virtual nature of work. The virtual nature of task required establishment of trust and intimacy by the process owner across the process. It can be summarized that to be successful the process owner should be a relationship builder, a facilitator of social and work processes, a care taker, a communication designer and be able to align the group structure, technology and task environment.

6. Conclusion The contribution of this paper is primarily the identification of the specific leadership tasks required by a process owner in managing virtual processes and detached work units. The findings demonstrate increased emphasis on information and communication skills, understanding of the work units biases and team motivation along with other requirements. These findings have significant implications for any future design of a process owner responsibilities and decision making techniques. We would suggest that additional research is to be carried out in this particular field as experiencing the leadership traits for process owners in different organizations over a larger period of time can be more useful for this nascent subject.

7. References D Goleman (1998), Working with Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books. M. Hammer & J. Champy (1993).Reengineering the Corporation, Collins Publishers, New York. M. Hammer & S.A. Stanton (1995). The Reengineering Revolution. Harper Business. Pink link- Pink Elephant (December 2006). R. Tenner & Irving J. DeToro (2000). Process Redesign, The implementation guide for managers T Mojtaba & K Amin (2003), Managing the Virtual Teams. Ghaemshahr University- Iran W.E. Deming (1994) The New Economics, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 116