EMERGING LEADERSHIP ROLES IN VIRTUAL PROCESS

OWNERSHIP

Furqan Habib
Department of Engineering Management
Centre of Advanced Studies in Engineering, Ataturk Avenue, Islamabad, Pakistan.
habibfurqan@yahoo.com
&
Abubakr Afridi
Department of Engineering Management
Centre of Advanced Studies in Engineering, Ataturk Avenue, Islamabad, Pakistan.
aeafridi@yahoo.com

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 re-
engineering 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 Process Description

Mr DP Demand planning process
Ms OP Ordering process
Mr PRO 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