Indra Nooyi's Lessons on Leadership

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As a leader, Indra Nooyi could not be defined only based on one leadership style in every situation. She has attempted different leadership styles in adaption of meeting any strategic situations within the company. Thus, her leadership style will be explained and uncovered through three classical approaches of leadership based on Dansereau & Yammarino scheme on the categorization of all 17 leadership approaches.[4] Those approaches are namely the Fiedler contingency model, situational leadership, and path and goal theory.

The first used approach in this essay, the contingency model is defined from the definition of “contingency” itself, which refers, to the meaning of “depends”. In this model, one thing is depending on other things, and for a leader to be effective there must be an appropriate fit between the leader’s behavior/style, the followers, and the situations. The contingency model is used to evaluate whether the leader is task oriented or relationship oriented (through LPC score sum rating), and whether the situation (leader-member relationship, task structure, and position power) matches the leader’s style to maximize performance.[5] In this case, Indra Nooyi has been seen as both relationship and task oriented for most of her co-workers in the company.[6] She is seen as a perfectionist, a people person, and a very caring person (relationship oriented). On the other hand, she is also being very intense, demanding and a very good negotiator (task oriented). One of her quotes that picturized her task oriented leadership style was when she said that under her leadership PepsiCo “ought to keep pushing the boundaries to get to flawless execution. Flawless is the ultimate goal”.[7] Furthermore, her relationship oriented style is also seen from the way she maintains a blog at Pepsi where she talks to her employees via posts every other week. She writes letters to their parents to thank them for their children in consuming PepsiCo product, especially due to the new introduction of new PepsiCo’s product segments. Therefore, even though she is task oriented, the strong relationship building that Nooyi has with her colleagues is considered as one of the aspects of causal variable in Fiedler’s contingency theory to achieve the end result. Below is the illustration of the theory and her leadership style at Pepsico.

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