Christiaan Cijntje Blog

Leadership plays an important role in business’s success. While there is not one universal definition of leadership I’ve chosen to share the definitions that caught my eye. Leadership is defined as the ability of mobilizing others to want to struggle for the shared aspirations, another definition of leadership is that leadership is an influencing process where the aim is to achieve a certain goal. What these 2 have in common is that Leadership involves having influence over others to work as a team to achieve a common goal. In ancient times the only leadership style that existed was the autocratic leadership style. This involved the leader making all the decisions by himself and not asking any input from his subordinates. In the 20th century various other leadership styles were invented. This was done due to the fact that people started to realize that  different organizations were in need of  different types of leadership styles to prosper in their business field.  Two o...

Motivation is  a tool that is used to keep a person actively engaged in something.  Motivation has a strong impact on what people do, how strongly people do something and how long someone will do something for. It can be derived internally, but it can also come from social influences, externally. Motivation can improve organizational performance, reduce the amount of employees that leave the company and boost the workforce morale. There are alot of theories discussing how motivation can be improved. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, employees' needs consist of social, safety, esteem, physiological and self actualization needs. To be able to motivate an employee you must first know how high the employee is on the hierarchy and from there offer him the adequate needs to become more motivated. A theory from Herzerberg named the two-factor theory  suggests that salary and recognition are vital to keep satisfied employees.  While motivation has its upsides,...

Planning consists of making goals, creating a step by step guide to achieve those goals and creating an adequate budget to allocate resources efficiently. Planning offers various advantages such as less time wasted, more productive workers and overall more clarity when it comes to the goals that need to be reached. A swot analysis plays a vital role in planning as it provides the person that is planning with the internal and external information of the company, this in turn aids the planner with aligning the organization strategies with the organization's capabilities and reduces any potential risk.  Another widely used theory is scenario planning, this theory allows firms to anticipate any potential future uncertainties.  planning offers various advantages such as less time wasted, more productive workers and overall more clarity when it comes to the goals that need to be reached. While planning has its upsides as mentioned above it also has its downsides. Plans can sometimes...