Case Study

Ingvar Kamprad shows he is a manager, in which he advocates stability and the status quo, by the personality of conceptions at work. He takes his ideas and those of his employees and uses them to further IKEA’s success. He proves himself as a leader, where he advocates for change and new approaches to problems, by using a leader attitude toward goals and relationships with others. He worked hard to build the company and achieve success through his ideas and thriftiness because he believed there were no guarantees to success without hard work (Nelson, D.L. & Quick, J.C. 2011). The nature of followership that Kamprad seems to have encouraged at IKEA is that of effective followers. His employees must be active, responsible and autonomous in their behavior, critical in their thinking and highly engaged in their work as shown with IKEA’s success. The fact that one main characteristic of IKEA came to be because of an employee, shows how ideas are important. The employees are kept motivated by Ingvar Kamprad because he continues to reflect what he has learned and continues to encourage intellectual development (Nelson, D.L. & Quick, J.C. 2011). The leadership orientation used by Ingvar Kamprad is that of a 9+9 team manager. He uses a paternalistic approach, which is that of “father knows best”. This is described by his drive for profits and his quest to better his employees. He shares what he has learned with them and wants them to not be wasteful and to always think beyond the current way to better things. (Nelson, D.L. & Quick, J.C. 2011). I feel Ingvar Kamprad is an authentic leader which combines transactional leadership, transformational leadership and charismatic leadership. Transactional leadership is defined as one with rewards and punishment to strike deals and shape behavior. Transformational leadership increases a firm’s