| dc.description.abstract | Given the general importance of leadership in today’s rapidly changing business
world, our thesis aims to investigate early-career success in the framework of a case
study at a company that operates in the sales and service sector. Utilizing qualitative
research, we collected data through semi-structured interviews from seven Sales
Executives at CHG-MERIDIAN who were recently promoted to a leadership
position and are considered as positive deviant within the organization. By
enriching the insights from the leaders with external and team perspectives, the
research question: ‘What do early-career and positive-deviant leaders do that makes
them successful?’ was approached from a multi-perspective view.
We identify six relevant practices presented in the proposition of a conceptual
model that shows the two main findings of our thesis. The first finding states that a
strive for continuous improvement and a constant challenge of the status-quo are
crucial for the success of early-career leaders. With initiative behavior and
continuously evoking personal and team development, the leaders gain acceptance
within the team and also contribute to overcoming their lack of experience through
the pursuit of improvement. The second finding indicates that collaborating and
building trust with and within the team is another major factor of success for leaders
at an early stage of their career. Even though CHG-MERIDIAN is an organization
that is driven by sales, which is known to be a competitive and goal-oriented
landscape, we find that the investigated sample emphasizes collaborative and
supportive practices, in order to achieve maximum potential, mutual benefit and
development for themselves as well as for their subordinates. | en_US |
