Homework SourseCase Study Novo Nordisk During the last decade it seemed no
Solution
Leadership style that dominates at Novo Nordisk:
The leadership style that dominates at Novo Nordisck is Situational Leadership. According to the Business Dictionary, “...the Situational Leadership Model is the belief that there is no single ‘best’ approach to leadership.” Novo Nordisck uses its own motivation to drive it to reach out and grasp onto success. The company uses the four styles of Situational Leadership: telling, selling, participating, and delegating. Novo Nordisck brought to attention that diabetes is now a pandemic. With that, the company wanted to improve the “quality of life” for those with type 1 diabetes in order to reduce type 2 diabetes. Novo Nordisck began to build its entire business model around the concept of defeating diabetes. Educating its employees about this issue and how they can prevent it, motivated the employees to strive to reach the company’s goal. While “selling” this information to the employees to increase motivation throughout the company, Novo Nordisck is also participating with its employees to determine the best strategies to take on in order to meet the goal of the company. Finally, Novo Nordisck have been successful by delegating task to its employees. Delegating allows the company to work more efficiently. With this concept, each employee has a smaller goal to reach in order to help the company reach its overall goal.
With Situational Leadership dominating Novo Nordisck, the company has been able to become more environmentally friendly all while earning the trust of its community. Being a pharmaceutical company, Novo Nordisck understands that trust is important, therefore finding the right way to approach certain issues is very important. It really comes down to how the company decides to execute its new plan. Having good business ethics has also helped the company thrive. With Situational Leadership, Novo Nordisck has been able to build its own leadership style according to what it trying to reach. Over the years, the company has only become more and more successful because of its careful approaches.
How Novo Nordisk’s leadership influences its organizational design and shapes its competitive strategy:
According to the textbook Organizational Behavior 12th Edition Leadership is “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives.” The role of leadership is to promote adaptive or useful changes. Novo Nordisk’s leadership has influenced its organizational design. The company has framed a strategy for inclusive access to diabetes care. Their goal is to defeat diabetes by developing better ways of detecting, treating, and preventing diabetes. The ambition to defeat diabetes is the core of Novo Nordisk’s vision. This puts the company’s objectives in perspective and inspires employees in their work. It is a beacon that keeps everyone’s focus on creating long-term shareholder value and leveraging the company’s qualities to gain competitive advantage.
When making decisions or managing their business, Novo Nordisk uses the Triple Bottom Line principle which reflects on three things:
1.) Is it economically viable? Environmental responsibility goes over the company’s impact on the environment and the impact of its activities it has over experimenting on animals and the safety issues because of genetic engineering.
2.) Is it socially responsible? Social responsibility is all about helping people. This applies to all the people that Novo Nordisk helps with in their healthcare, as well as their employees. It also recognizes the impact of their business on society and community.
3.) Is it environmentally sound? Being economically viable means to manage their business in a way that makes sure there will be growth. And to do this, they must educate their employees, make profits for the stakeholders, and invest in the business to grow.
This makes sure that the decisions they make are balanced with financial growth with corporate and both long term and short term profitability, and shareholder return with other stakeholder interests.
Novo Nordisck’s philosophy in relation to transformational change, planned and unplanned change, and the strategies it has used to create change:
Novo Nordisk is a transformational leader because they want not only financial gain, but they want to educate and help people with diabetes to ultimately defeat it. They inspire their employees to look beyond their own interests to benefit the society as well. When they found out what kind of negative impact their business did to the environment, they made some unplanned changes by reducing their CO2 emissions as well as their water usage. Being a positive role model, Novo Nordisk inspires others to help and influence change. They use intellectual stimulation to encourage employees to look at their jobs not only as jobs, but also as an opportunity to help others and make an impact on society. Novo Nordisk is able to hold up against unplanned change by holding a higher set of standards and recognizing that business practices can have a large impact in the world. They looked beyond financial incentives and decided to be responsible for its world wide effect as its planned changes. They care about their customers and everyone who lives with diabetes. They influence transformational change by working with policy makers and social influencers to improve the lives of people living with diabetes. They want to cure type 1 diabetes and want to be able to prevent onset type 2 diabetes. One of their strategies to influence this change is to create inclusive access to diabetes care. Being an inspirational leader, Novo Nordisk retains employees who also want to be a part of a transformational change and also empowers them to make an impact as well. Novo Nordisk planned to adjust to our changing society and ideology. Instead of resisting to change, Novo Nordisk uses a shared power strategy to support change by involving its employees with scorecards and empowering them to help keep in sync with the company’s vision to make a positive, lasting impact on the world.
Ways that Novo Nordisk employees could utilize self-leadership techniques to improve the effectiveness of the culture of shared leadership
According to the text, Organizational Behavior, shared leadership is “a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group [and/]or organizational goals” (Schermerhorn, 324). Here, in order to lead one another, leadership must be instilled in all members of a group rather than centralized by one single individual. And in order to achieve and improve the effectiveness of the culture of shared leadership, members should employ self-leadership techniques.
At Novo Nordisk, their vision is to hopefully one-day defeat diabetes. By focusing on this ambition, their objectives are prominent and their employees are determined in their work. Being a highly ethical and corporate sustainable company has driven them to great success and reputation.
Individual performance is extremely important to them. In making decisions and managing their business, they focus and closely monitor their individual employees. By implementing the Balanced Scorecard tool, they are able to measure the company’s progress and determine how to compensate individuals. Employees are acknowledged and rewarded for exceptional performance that meets or surpasses both financial and non financial objectives outlined in the Balanced Scorecard. But in order for individual employees to achieve such success, they should utilize self-leadership techniques in order to better themselves as well as their team as a whole.
Self-leadership techniques that they could employ consist of behavior focused, self-rewards, and constructive-thought-pattern strategies (Schermerhorn, 326). To better oneself, self-awareness is very important. By using behavior focused strategies and setting individual goals, acknowledging self-correcting feedback, and using personal observation, one can become more self-aware and change individual behavior for the better. Secondly, it is beneficial for an employee to set reachable self-goals. This helps one strive towards achievement and “keep an eye on the prize.” Novo Nordisk employees can promise to reward themselves with a spa day once they are able to optimize resource efficiency. Lastly, constructive thought pattern strategies are said to be helpful in self-leadership. If Novo Nordisk employees use “mental imagery of successful performance outcomes and positive self-talk” it can result in focus of main objectives and eventually success-- which leads to job satisfaction, mental performance, and self-efficacy. By reiterating why it is so important and good to help sick people and imagining how much helping people with diabetes in this world, employees seek the motivation to continue what they are doing.
Novo Nordisk employees must remember that self-leadership cannot rely on the sole behavior without regard to the entire team and nor should the identity of an individual be shoved to the side for the sake of the team. An effective self-leadership is when all individuals are encouraged to acknowledge one’s own identity and self-value as contribution of an entire group with synergistic functioning. And by incorporating self-leadership within individual employees, employee and organizational effectiveness will be achieved.
Strides Novo Nordisk has made for diabetes recently:
One of twelve people in the world have diabetes. This data shows that in the year 2030 our population living with diabetes can grow from 177 million people today to 552 million in less than two decades. The world’s healthcare expenditure on diabetes annually sums up to a whopping 11% which comes out to about $471 million in the year 2012. Millions of people die from diabetes-related complications such as heart attacks, blindness, kidney failure, and or loss of limbs. What did Novo Nordisk do to help the curing, treating, and life-prolonging of these patients? Novo Nordisk has been helping people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives since 1923 due to their therapeutic proteins, medicines, and methods.
Novo Nordisk works with partners with organizations and policy makers to push diabetes to the top of the healthcare agendas worldwide in order for them to treat diabetes with a more urgent mentality. They had also created a program for the aid of diabetes called “Changing Diabetes®” which they believe creates awareness of diabetes and form diabetes into a crisis that they can change. Novo Novo Nordisk has also created pens and other light, transportable tools that carry insulin within them. Whenever they need an insulin injection, all they have to do is take out their pen and inject some in through almost anywhere of the body; this makes it very convenient for patients. These insulin devices are usually shot in your system using a needle and Novo Nordisk knows that some people, if not most, do not prefer needles every time they need their medicine so they created non-insulin treatment to cater to those who prefer tablet, pill, and mostly oral medicine treatments.
These non-insulin treatments are sulphonylureas, alpha glucosidase inhibitors, biguanides, glitazones, and glinides. In a broad sense these medicines help the pancreas release more insulin, slow the rate of sugar that is created by the liver after eating, make the body more sensitive to insulin, and loss of appetite which help with food portions and weight loss. Novo Nordisk has been a substantial leader with the fight and curing of diabetes around the world, unfortunately since the diabetes pandemic effect so many people, there has to be regulations with distribution to those vast amounts.
Novo Nordisk has recently been trying to push out one of their products called Tresiba, a long-lasting version of insulin, but unfortunately the Federal Drug Association (FDA) disapproved the product on the reasons of lack of experimentation and research of the new strain. Because of this rejection by the FDA, Novo Nordisk shares have dropped down 14%, about a 14 billion dollar drop from before the disapproval. Associations in Japan and the European Union have already approved of the drug and are currently using the product when the United State’s FDA requires that Novo Nordisk have additional research and study upon the product. Further studies said that the side effects of the new version of insulin were cardiovascular related.
