Leadership in Schindler’s List, Movie Review Example

Directed by Stephen Spielberg and Starring Liam Neason, Schindler’s List is a film set in the Nazi era. The film depicts the atrocities that most of the Jews must have gone through during the holocaust. The work of fiction is adopted from a novel written by Thomas Keneally called Schindler’s ark. There are many types of leaders depicted in the film. However, the following will be an exploration of Oskar Schindler. Mr. Schindler is self-made man with numerous ambitions in Germany. He feels that the best time to make money is when blood is running on the streets. As a result, he uses is unmistakable charm to gain favor with the German army officials in order to be granted tenders for army supplies. Mr. Schindler uses the connection to set up a factory manufacturing cooking ware and various army cutlery and crockery. In addition, Schindler is observed to be savvy business man when he decides to use Jews as cheap labor for his factory. The decision is made in order to maximize profit at first but the events that follow show the audience Schindler’s knack for leadership. He becomes a transformational leader when he realizes that his recruitment of the Jews is saving their lives. He decides to use his connections further in order to buy Jews as workers for his factory and to assist them from going to concentration camps. Schindler’s factory becomes a mini-camp sort of haven for the Jews who are lucky enough to find themselves in his employ. The following paper explores Schindler’s leadership style based on the leadership theories available today.

Transformational leadership is the type of leadership that causes change to individuals as well as social systems. In essence, transformational leadership looks to improve conditions for the people and in a very significant way, the end result of transformational leadership is turn followers into leaders. The level of inspiration availed by the leader is expected to permeate through a group to create more leaders. Transformational leadership uses various mechanisms to excite motivation, increase morale and improve performance. Some of the strategies employed include: using the followers sense of identity, employing collective identity to the mission of the organization as they see fit. Another mechanism is becoming a role model that the followers learn to depend on, challenging workers to take charge of their lives as well as their work and finally is understanding the various strengths and weaknesses of their followers in order to align them on duties appropriately. Transformational leadership is one of vision and empowerment, it is meant to increase both employee effectiveness and wellbeing.

Transformational leadership has various dimensions to it. The first is charisma. Charismatic leaders seem to excite the best out of people by almost seducing them into action. The people skills that the leaders possess seem to orient them toward bringing the best out of themselves and out of the people they interact with as well. According to Bass, transformational leadership is also inspirational (Bass 40). The leader seeks to inspire the employees into wanting to work. The sense of inspiration brings admiration and respect to the leader while allowing workers to feel a part of the team in connection to their leader. The leader uses various symbols and setting of high standards to inspire the workers into action. Apart from inspiration, Bass puts it that the leader is responsible for setting intellectual stimulations (Bass 42). The transformative leader is able to make the employees think logically for themselves. In this way, the leader leaves ample room for employees to perform their duties and mostly acts as an overseer. Consequently, the leader is able to foster rationality and careful problem solving from the employees without having to push. Another dimension of transformational leadership given by Bass is individual consideration (45). The leader takes time to coach and develop subordinates. Essentially, personal attention is paid in order to find the areas of improvement in the vast link. Hughes puts it that transformational leaders like Hitler, Martin Luther king are transformational leaders because they emerge during a time of crisis and are able to inspire significant following (Bass 47). The same is observed of Schindler who emerges to save and lead Jews during a time of crisis.

There are various traits that transformational leadership seem to embody. One of these traits is the ability to articulate strong and attractive ideological visions. In this way, the leaders are strong personalities themselves. They are able to form ideological ideals that are transmitted to the follower without much conviction. Essentially, the transformational leaders bring themselves and their ideas to their followers. Secondly, outstanding leaders, according to House and Podsakoff, outstanding leaders display passion, self-sacrifice and personal risk taking. The second is most observed in Schindler’s list when Oskar decides to take in the Jews into his factory. At this point, Mr. Schindler is only interested in saving as many lives as he can. His display of self-sacrifice and risk taking is seen when he pushes the limits to acquire more workers for his factory that is not producing as many goods as it should be. Safety for the Jews is the main concern that drives Schindler to self-sacrifice. Another trait given for outstanding leadership is self-confidence, significant determination and persistence. It is observed that without self-confidence, Schindler would have done very little to negotiate for the Jews. His tall demeanor and fixed eyes increased his ability to release many Jews into his protection. Role modelling and personal image building are important parts of transformational leadership. Like in the case of Schindler, the ability to pull himself from scraps gave him the unique ability to possess enough wealth to save the lives of as many Jews as he could. He had built his image enough to become as trusted leader in the face of the Jews. External representation is another trait of outstanding leadership. It is best explained when Schindler is seen to approach German authorities on behalf of the Jews in order to negotiate their freedom and admission into his factories.

Oskar Schindler seems to embody most of the traits of transformational leadership. In essence, he is a man who not only inspires the Jews into a second chance for freedom but also manages to convince the authorities to sell him the workers he needs for his factories. First of all, Schindler’s style of transformational leadership is persuasive and bold. From the beginning, even before he starts saving the Jews from Nazis,      Schindler is seen to be a man of persuasion and is fairly bold. We see him come from nothing until he goes into the favor of most of the Nazi generals and becomes a powerful businessman. Essentially, without his boldness and persuasive strength, his leadership would not have been as effective. Another effective leadership trait that Oskar shows is compassion and understanding. He knows that he is the only hope for captured Jews. For this reason, he uses his power to ask generals for worker into his factory. The act of compassion is seen when he collects even the most inexperienced of Jews to work in his factory. Further, as a leader, Schindler shows his ability to acquire and employ important resources. Oskar’s inclinations to business were the first reason for his acquiring Jews as cheap labor. The leader’s ability to use resources places him at an advantage where he gets more workers for very little return. Apart from the exploitative fact of the matter, Schindler is observed to be a man who is able to incorporate resources. In addition, Schindler uses a Jewish manager to recruit more workers. The manager is best at his work and is mostly responsible for collecting Jews and bringing them to work in the factories instead of concentration camps. Essentially, Schindler’s ability to empower employees is observed when he recruits the Jewish manager.

Schindler’s list shows most of the positive results of transformational leadership. However, there are some ineffective parts of transformational leadership that are important to consider as well. One of the ineffective parts of transformational leadership is its ambiguity in underlying processes and outcomes. Transformational leadership as shown in Schindler’s List is mostly based on personal traits. The leadership style cannot be properly explained academically and systematically in application and results. Secondly, another weakness given by Yukl is that transformational leadership is its insufficient explanation of situational instances. It is not clear, the specific applications suitable for transformational leadership (55). One ineffective trait pointed out by the leadership style of Schindler is that he used most of his wit to make decision, therefore, the ambiguity expressed by Yukl is observed in this case.

In summary, the movie Schindler’s list shows about four effective leadership applications. One is compassion and understanding. The level of compassion the leader had for the Jewish follower enabled him to apply himself for the wellbeing of all his workers. As a result, the workers were willing to apply themselves to improve their leader’s business. Although not conventional, the compassion the leader applied led to good work. Secondly, the leader’s ability to select the right people for the job saw more Jews saved. In the same way, saving Jews although not applicable to business was a direct result of the manager Schindler selected to oversee factory duties. The manager made sure that most of the Jews were saved and put to work. The same would not have be possible if the leader had not identified good talent. Another note of effective leadership gotten from the film is the power of boldness and persuasion in a leader, again, the case is note ideal to business application but its effectiveness is observed. It was the degree of boldness that made Schindler do several things. Firstly, boldness in negotiating with Germans and second, boldness is accepting Jewish workers in his employment. Without a doubt Oskar Schindler embodies the traits of transformational leadership.

Work Cited

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E.. Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 2006.

Yukl, G. An evaluation of conceptual weaknesses in transformational and charismatic leadership theories. The Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 285–305. 1999.