{"id":44,"date":"2017-04-01T14:52:53","date_gmt":"2017-04-01T21:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/?p=44"},"modified":"2017-04-01T14:52:53","modified_gmt":"2017-04-01T21:52:53","slug":"the-importance-of-followers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/2017\/04\/01\/the-importance-of-followers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Followers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gordon Lam in his blog post<\/a> raised a very interesting issue. The media, history and textbooks have long focused on the importance of leaders. However, there is no leader without followers and thus followers are equally important<\/a>. Our professor showed us a video in class. The video portrayed people who were sitting on the grass in the middle of a sunny day when a person decided to start dancing. For some time, he was dancing on his own, so it seemed like he was embarrassing himself. This all changed when a few followers joined him. Then\u00a0within a few minutes his dance became a massive event\u00a0full of people who seemed to enjoy themselves. At that point the people outside the dance were outsiders. This outlines the importance of followers, because without them, there is no group.<\/p>\n

Gordon Lam points out that although \u201ceveryone aspires to be a leader<\/a>,\u201d \u201cthere must be followers.\u201d Followers can be leader themselves and may have followers of their own, which is often the case in organization. Followers can also depend on one another, which another form of power. Gordon explain that followers do not have to agree<\/a> with everything the leaders say. In contrast, if they absolutely disagree with the leader\u2019s decision, they can threaten the leader, if not the entire organization or government, by stop working. An example is Apple. Although Steve Jobs was the leader of the organisation,\u00a0if it wasn\u2019t for the engineers and the rest of the employees with the know-how and the expertise, the iPhone would have never been built. Thus the threat of employees going on strike, gives them a lot of power over the decision making process.<\/p>\n

The leader\u2019s job is to make the followers willing to follow him. Effective leaders enable their employees to feel useful, included and unique. As Harper Zhou mentions in her blog<\/a>, in Eastern cultures such as China and India \u201cleaders often maintain a supreme power over the decision-making power.<\/a>\u201d While in western cultures where \u201cindividualism<\/a>\u201d and individual traits are valued more, leaders tend to me more \u201cdemocratic\u201d. The leader\u2019s behavior is important because it determines willing followers are to follow and thus how functionalthe firm is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gordon Lam in his blog post raised a very interesting issue. The media, history and textbooks have long focused on the importance of leaders. However, there is no leader without followers and thus followers are equally important. Our professor showed us a video in class. The video portrayed people who were sitting on the grass […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44419"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/alexiafragaki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}