THE ANALYSIS OF DOMINANT LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR OF PRODUCTION TEAM LEADERS AS PERCEIVED BY PRODUCTION OPERATORS: A CASE STUDY OF PT. X

Abstract

International business in globalization era has to prepare for special strategies to face what it is called as cultural diversity that has more or less influence in its business practice. Unlike the common national culture of its US parent company, manufacturing subsidiary PT X as the place of the researcher’s case study adopts collective culture reflected by the teamwork as primary business function key. Due to the collective teamwork culture in PT X, leaders, especially the production team leaders in production floor, play important role to contribute as they are the “foremen” who immediately have a contact with groups of production operators, the people who directly produce the PT X products. This research aims to determine the dominant leadership behavior of PT X production team leaders according to the perceptions of production operators. It is expected that the company will be able to identify the strength of the leaders’ behavior to be maintained, and also the behavioral area that needs to be improved. The leadership behavior is based on Michigan Leadership Studies theory of Task-Oriented, Relation-Oriented and Participative leadership behavior. By holding observation and questionnaire to 100 production operators as a sample, it was found out through descriptive statistic analysis that the Task-Oriented leadership behavior is the perceived dominant behavior of the production team leaders compared to the other behaviors, with the total weighted mean value of 3.83, while 3.55 and 3.41 for Relation-Oriented and Participative leadership behavior respectively. Finally, it was concluded that the production team leaders were perceived as a predominantly task-oriented leader who coordinate the group of production operators by focusing more on their work especially the quality and quantity of the production output. Although the performance of the production operators under this leadership has been good as reflected by the improved organization quality and quantity performance, the leaders should still improve the relation-oriented and participative leadership to lead more effectively. This can be done by holding a leadership training or particular event such as team-building activity as well as communication sharing involving both leaders and operators in order to unite the bond among them more strongly.