Essay on the Leadership Style Indra Nooyi Brought to the PepsiCo CEO Position

The Yale-trained management expert joined PepsiCo at a time when there was a serious concern for the firm to move from primarily concentrating on selling junk food, to more healthy food and drinks. What was essential was the need for situational leadership style, and that is precisely what Nooyi brought to her executive position? Since was named CEO and present in 2006, since then she has led specific critical changes at PepsiCo that has kept the firm top of beverage providers globally. She in-tuned and integrated customer demands to produce highly efficient health drinks and snacks. Competitors had started developing similar products, and the situation required someone who would quickly fit the position to lead such changes. That completely changed Pepsis product lines, and it has mainly been successful given the number of acquisitions she has made, the number of new products the firm has managed to introduce among other beneficial consumer products. She also brought her competence and high orientation associated with situational leadership. Her performance that stretches for over a decade had been exceptional, and everyone is working under her feels challenges to meet the same standards. She is, however, a friendly executive, and is credited maintaining good relationships with employees, something which had kept the company going strong.

Advantages of Nooyis Leadership Style and Its Implications to the Company

Situational leadership style is a practical approach that is easy for everyone to adapt and understand (Thompson & Vecchio, 2009). Nooyi has managed to exploit it and make strategic acquisitions and product developments which have ensured PepsiCo remains a global brand. She has practically moved the company form a point of being viewed as a provider of junk, to a corporate entity which is supporting a healthy lifestyle through their products.

The practices are also flexible, and such flexibility has been useful in PepsiCo. The style accommodates other styles in supporting the progress of the company (Thompson & Vecchio, 2009). For instance, maintaining good employee relations needs the style as well as other like a democratic leadership style. Nooyi had utilized the situational style to build relationship flexibly, which support the company in diverse ways. It also makes it easy to create changes where necessary. The prescriptive nature of the style is also advantageous since it shows how leaders should act to achieve effective results.

Impact of Being Female CEO in the Company

The impact of being a female CEO, and considered on that basis alone is at best speculative and debatable. She brought in the competence, courage, and consistency shown by several other business leaders like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg or IBM CEO and President Ginni Rometty. These are phenomenal women at the helm of some of the worlds largest firms, have exploited the various leadership styles to deliver the best. However, we cannot downplay the role they are playing to illustrate that leadership is not a matter of gender, but an issue of ones abilities. They are still a few of the global multinationals primarily dominated by men. Maybe the phenomenal exhibition in creating good employees relations at PepsiCo, the support of health food, and even running some corporate social responsibilities targeting women, can be credited as the impact of having a female CEO at the helm, but can also be subjected to debate since so many other firms do the same, even those with men at the helm (Gavett, 2017).

References

Gavett, G. (2017). What Its Really Like to be a Female CEO. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/07/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-female-ceo

Thompson, G., & Vecchio, R. (2009). Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.014