Albert Asamoah-Mensah is an American-born Ghanaian, who was raised and lived most of 36 years in the United States. He attended one of the renowned universities in the US. He has had a successful career as a Risk Manager at the Sunbeam Financial Services, a multi-billion company in the US. The Company was renowned for achieving consistent improvement in its profit-margin and share prices. Albert was instrumental in this success story. To all intent and purposes, Albert exemplified a meticulous person, and paid attention to every detail. The Company had its subsidiary in Ghana, which was going through a state of temporal fluctuation because of the increased competition and changes in the external environment. Albert was appointed and posted to head the Companys operations in Ghana in1996. For his mandate, he had complete authority and reserved the right to make decision to reward or reprove employees, and was unquestionably responsible for his decisions. He had reputation of giving detailed orders and instructions to his staff. Albert was aware of the lack of accurate data on individual credit ratings in Ghana and the national high financial risk rating. Consequently, he reckoned that the nature of the work of the company involved a high level of risk and required that precision to exact specification of task was critical.

Albert wasted no time to make his intentions known after assuming his new position. Within the first two years of assumption of office, he became renowned across board to the admiration of all for indiscriminately rewarding those who demonstrated zeal and diligence, and punishing or firing non-performers. By the third year, he had fired about forty per cent (40%) of the workforce he came to meet in the Company, either for non-performance or persistent lateness to work or for not adhering to instructions. This notwithstanding, many people had also enjoyed several benefits including paid-for vacations. He also took special personal interest in the staffs off-the-job lives and made efforts to promote their personal welfare. With his paternal care, the staff were also expected to demonstrate loyalty, respect and compliance to the leaders. He also recruited very brilliant and talented professional who were well remunerated to support the Companys operations.

Perhaps Albert had come to Ghana in with a mistaken belief that Ghanaians were generally lazy and naturally dislike working, but later realised that what he held early on was to the contrary. He found out that the people could be ambitious and self-motivated and that given the right conditions, they enjoyed doing their jobs with little supervision. They liked to seek and accept responsibility, and applied their creativity in solving work-related problems. He had held the view that his job demanded a strong centralised control. He therefore considered that adopting a participative leadership style might result in delay and problems due to exclusion of some key staff and deliberately adopted an authoritative management style as part of his leadership strategy. He would even hesitant to let his senior managers apply their skills and utilise the workforce. Soon, Albert became overconfident with his grandiose visions about his own importance, and believed he is special and has unique gifts that the others did not. In short, he developed a sense of entitlement and everything revolved around him because he thought he was better than the others. Thomas, one of his lieutenants, recalled:

I once completed an assignment in which I did about 90% of the work. In a meeting in which my boss gave the report, he took complete credit for actually doing the work. I was stunned that this man did not at least acknowledge my input in the report. My boss really believed he had done all by himself. Well, I figured he was the boss, so everything that we achieved was something he had done,

Howbeit, his management and leadership style paid off, and helped to improve the Companys organisational efficiency and contributed to its profit by the third year. One of the senior managers remarked that,

The results would indicate the vision, confidence and pride in his own achievements within a relatively short time could presumably translate into his effective leadership in the Company.

This improvement was however a quick fix, and proved to have come at the cost of erosion of the Companys underlying assets and loss of talent and institutional memory, which laid the foundation for a staid damage in the future. The challenges begun to show after his seventh, as the Company became over-staffed with competent people who knew little about the Company and understaffed with those who were perceived as non-qualified personnel but who had learnt much on the job, yet were poorly remunerated resulting in poor motivation and morale. The obvious implication was that the Company faced erosion on value, leading to long-term decline.

Slowly and subtly, most senior managers developed high risk-aversion attitude and were unwillingness to take independent action. And somehow, most of them also had lost control over their subordinates. Most of the managers feared that they may be accused of supervising works which output would be judged as substandard. The managers were therefore reluctant to delegate and exercised close supervision. Obviously, were overworking themselves. Worse of all, Albert did not receive much cooperation from his senior management team in monitoring the activities and performance of their immediate subordinate. The effect was that those who mostly benefited from corporate recognitions and rewards were those who worked directly or were linked to his profession. For most people, Albert was only interested in those who unquestionably did what he wished in order to achieve what he [Albert] perceived as excellence defined only by the Company. Soon, the once loved benevolent authoritarian, who combined strong discipline and measured authority with fatherly benevolence, was accused of being an overbearing and a high demanding person who treated people as a commodity. The staff accused of being exploitive and lacked empathy.

Almost immediately, his leadership and management style was perceived as having a hidden and insidious form of discrimination. Ever more, the peoples morale went low with low motivation which resulted in high-turnover and absenteeism, and operations became increasingly inefficient and high-cost with low productivityand under-utilisation of capacity. His critics opined that he would have done better and achieved more successes, if he had not followed his perceived autocratic leadership style at the outset. He should have taken his time to study the people and to understand the Ghanaian humanism philosophy that highlights the need for recognising and respecting individual dignity and interest. Albert conceded that when begun he did not have any specific goals in place; he simply wanted to determine if the process would benefit Sunbeam. In his desperation, he said:

Without a clear understanding of the basic premise of the Ghanaian; the strong belief that he or she also possesses the capacity for excellence, truth and goodness, and genuine human needs, interests and dignity was of fundamental importance and concern; and is capable of attaining self-fulfilment within the framework of sound business principle, I made some initial mistakes. I wanted to see how doing business in Ghana truly was, and I really wanted to see how the employees in the trenches evaluated the manager.

He added that:

I had a philosophy that we wanted to be entrepreneurial and move quickly, but I could not affect the right changes and initiate new programmes when the time came. When we had some steady growth. I could not implement that appropriate solution to deal with the causes of the problems in the trenches because I, not my managers, didn?t think through the implications of the management style.

Having understood the true Ghanaian, he started a culture change process through the whole Company in June 2005, where all staff would be working together to increase the effectiveness of leaders at various levels of the Company. A new culture characterised by a clear, community/stakeholder-endorsed mission statements and a sense of shared direction, rather than a philosophy based on some great men and women with certain preferred traits who influence their subordinates to do what they wish in order to achieve some excellence defined by corporate goals.

(a) How will you describe Alberts leadership style? Does his style match the circumstance that confronted him? If not, what might be the problem of his style?

(b) To what extent did Alberts leadership style influence the attitude of the staff in both the short term and the long term? Would you consider that his style should be the same towards all staff?

(c) With your knowledge of the leadership theories, provide an appropriate theory that explains the behaviour of Albert. Be sure to justify your choice of theory.

(d) Leadership is contextual.Explain Alberts dilemma within the framework of this statement, highlighting the importance of contextualisation for effective leadership.

(e) How critical is Albert knowledge of the Ghanaian context to his success.