The Future Investment Initiative conference recently held in Riyadh raised the importance of a new managerial style required to cope with the complex challenges of the many partnership projects and multicultural visions rolled out in Saudi Arabia.

The issue was highlighted in almost every panel discussion. Making funds available to complete the visionary projects was one thing but having the right leadership in place to execute and manage them was another.

With young, mobile, and technology savvy populations that were exposed to multicultural diversity and changes, many Gulf countries needed successful leadership to steer expectations and channel energy into productive activities.

This has raised the question of what made a leader effective? Did they need to possess certain innate inherited traits, qualities, or characteristics, or had they achieved current positions of leadership as a direct consequence of experience and patronage?

Many have argued that the effectiveness of leadership style depended upon the objectives to be achieved, whether focusing on the morale of the group or raising work productivity. Group morale may show greater improvement under a more democratic style, but productivity might be higher under an authoritarian goal-driven leader.

The question raised here was whether a management could adapt as different tasks and outcomes were required that may necessitate different leadership characteristics and behavior.

In choosing an appropriate style that would inspire employees, especially the younger, multicultural, and tech-savvy generation of the Gulf, leaders needed to recognize their organizational context and culture settings, as different cultural settings could produce different results.

In some cases, democratic style was effective, especially when the task was easy. But in the case of difficult tasks, an autocratic style ensured the desired results.

Organizational changes and reaction to it was now considered more crucial in the more dynamic corporate setting of the Gulf, especially in Saudi Arabia with wider societal empowerment under its Vision 2030 reform programs.

While many Saudi companies were still managed in a patriarchal manner, others, especially in the high-tech entrepreneurial sector, seemed more likely to accept the need to change by seeing the positives outweighing the negatives.

Many have argued that the effectiveness of leadership style depended upon the objectives to be achieved, whether focusing on the morale of the group or raising work productivity.

Dr. Mohamed Ramady

Whether liked or not, it was accepted that at some point all organizations would go through a change process — sometimes large, sometimes small, driven by significant internal or outside events.

Sometimes the organization was in control of events, sometimes it was not, but given the fast pace of socio-economic change taking place in the Kingdom, the pressure to adapt and change was now more externally driven. Otherwise, hesitant companies would be living in the past and have to make vast strides to catch up.

So, what could a successful manager do to ensure that employees embraced change?

What motivates people varies from individual to individual, so a successful leader had to ensure that people felt fully engaged in the process of change by finding ways to stimulate them both intellectually and behaviorally, so that they were motivated to commit to the process, otherwise leaders would face sullen acceptance.

While it was understood that culture was integral to lives, did it have the potential to impact on the change process? Did successful leadership need to make allowances for different needs and a greater awareness of local customs and practices, or could these be ignored as managers drove through the key requirements of a set project?

These are not academic questions, as the corporate world is littered with examples of companies losing market dominance because they did not allow for cultural changes taking place in consumer habits.

One example was the photographic industry, with household names such as Kodak continuing to produce camera film while not fully realizing the dramatic influence that mobile smartphone technology was having on the sector. The pace of change was too much for such a leadership, but lessons were learned, and managers eventually adapted, albeit with firms losing significant market share.

• Dr. Mohamed Ramady is a former senior banker and professor of finance and economics at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, in Dhahran.