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An Early Assessment of the Lee Myung Bak Presidency: Leadership Style and Qualities

2009; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Sung Deuk Hahm, Yong-Hwan Choi,

Policy Transfer and Learning

At the beginning, President Lee Myung Bak (LMB) was praised as a tough-minded decision-maker who knows how to get things done. As South Korea’s first chief executive officer (CEO) president, LMB has what he regards as the strengths of a CEO: vision, certainty, and decisiveness. His strength as a political leader includes bold thinking and consistent adherence to his chosen policies. But the defects of this style and quality include a tendency to act without sufficient deliberation, an unwillingness to admit the complexity of many policy issues, and a tendency to consider only a narrow range of alternatives. Interestingly, LMB’s strengths as a CEO-type leader are also a mirror reflection of his weaknesses, so-called “the dual nature of leadership style.” In particular, LMB’s strengths as leader have led to policy victories when he was a mayor, but his weaknesses have led to political and administrative failures in his first one-and-a-half years as a president. In this context, this paper examines the nature of LMB’s leadership style and qualities focusing his political and executive leadership and their impacts on the trial and error of his policy initiatives that have been carried out in the first one-and-a-half years of his presidency. This paper also explores the impact of the limitation of LMB’s leadership style and qualities on the remaining three-and-a-half years of his presidency.