Examine how ethics and culture have impacted

the leadership style within an organization of

your choice.

Apple is an American multinational company that designs, develops, and

sells computer software, consumer electronics, and personal computers. It
has established itself as the biggest company in the world as of September
2020, operating in over 25 countries worldwide and enjoying annual sales
of more than $250 billion. This suggests that the company has an
organizational culture for creative innovation; its “culture of secrecy” has
become a rather controversial topic and one that has caused Apple a few
problems in the past. Hence, Apple’s leadership style has to be adapted to
respond to these problems; the term leadership style refers to behavioural
patterns employed by a leader to integrate organizational and personal
interests in the pursuit of some goal or objective.

Culture is the accepted norms and values and traditional behaviour of a

group. Organizational culture is defined as the underlying beliefs,
assumptions, values and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique
social and psychological environment of an organization. Apple’s
organizational culture focuses on maintaining a high level of innovation
that involves creativity and a mindset that challenges conventions and
standards. Under the leadership of Steve Jobs (under whom the company
had a more organizational culture), the company had issues with
combativeness (it was a known fact that Jobs randomly challenged
employees to ensure they had what it took to work at Apple); hence under
Tim Cook’s leadership, the company began changing its organizational
culture to a more sociable and less combative one. Regardless,
combativeness is a major influence on Apple. Hence, from Steve Jobs
Autocratic leadership, which focused on having full control of decision
making in the company, Tim Cook shifted to a more democratic style of
leadership, whilst still upholding Job’s vision for the company and much
more. Under Cook’s leadership, each Apple employee’s “talents” contribute
to the company’s success. The role of the hands-on participation of the
CEO in developing Apple products has been significantly reduced since
Cook took over in 2011. The iWatch is an example of this shift in structure
as Cook chose to be less involved in the details of product engineering.
Instead, he delegated those duties to members of his executive cabinet.
His notably subtle style of leadership has enhanced industry and
employee goodwill.

By definition, business ethics are the moral principles that act as guidelines
for the way a business conducts itself and its transactions. Apple,
unfortunately, has run into numerous ethical issues under both Tim Cook
and Steve Jobs’ leadership. When it comes to the environment, under Steve
Jobs’ leadership, Apple was solely focused on its technology, regardless of
its impact on the environment, meaning they made extensive use of toxic
material and were branded as a violator of safe environmental practices.
However, Tim Cook is an advocate towards decreasing pollution; hence
under his leadership, the organization has begun to take steps towards
decreasing its carbon footprint, aiming to be 100% carbon neutral by 2030.

Apple’s biggest ethical case surrounds its privacy policy issues. In the wake
of the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, attention turned to
the perpetrator’s iPhone. Apple provided the FBI with data it had in their
possession and sent Apple engineers to advise the FBI but refused to
comply with the court order to bypass the phone’s security measures:
specifically the 4-digit login code and a feature that erases all data after ten
incorrect attempts. Tim Cook issued a public letter reiterating Apple’s
refusal to cooperate. Cook advocated for the benefits of encryption in
society to keep personal information safe. He stated that creating the
backdoor entry into the iPhone would be akin to creating a master key
capable of accessing the tens of millions of iPhones in the U.S. alone.
Hence, after careful analysis of this case study, it can be determined that
the situation caused Tim Cook to change his style of leadership. From the
beginning, Cook has had a democratic style of leadership, where he
involved all of his employees in decision making and allowed them all to
contribute to Apple’s success as an organization. However, in a case like
this, Cook did not involve any employees in the decision making and wrote
a letter to the FBI on behalf of Apple.

This shows that Tim Cook employed a more Autocratic form of leadership
to deal with the crises. It proved to be a quick method to deal with crises
without wasting any time in the process; in general autocratic forms of
leadership are perfect to deal with crises that risk the global brand image.
In this case, we can see that Cook’s choice of leadership may not have
promoted its brand image in the eyes of the authorities, however, this move
by Tim Cook greatly increased customer loyalty to Apple, as customers
now saw that the company was not willing to risk the privacy of their users,
regardless of the situation. In a democratic style of leadership, there is a
high chance the vote would have been in favour of unlocking the phone,
which would decrease customer loyalty by a large number.

It can be concluded that ethical issues in Apple caused a change in the

democratic leadership style followed by Tim Cook, to ensure customers
that the company puts them above all others. The former corporate culture
at Apple mostly adopted a situational (democratic and autocratic) style of
leadership. After changing to a healthy mix of both corporate and
organizational culture, the company now has adopted a democratic style of
leadership and only employs an autocratic style in rare circumstances.