LEADERSHIP

The nature of leadership

Leadership can be defined as the ability to influence people towards the attainment of
organisational goals. Thus, leadership:

occurs between people

involves the use of influence
is used to achieve goals.
Leadership is a people activity, distinct from paper-shuffling or problem-solving activities.
Leadership is dynamic and involves the use of power.

Leadership versus management

Management and leadership are both important to organisations. Management power
comes from organisational structure. It promotes stability, order and problem solving
within the structure.
Leadership power comes from personal sources that are not as invested in the organisation,
such as personal interests, goals and values. Leadership power promotes vision, creativity
and change in the organisation.
Power is the potential ability to influence the behaviour of others. Power represents the
resources with which a leader effects changes in employee behaviour. There are typically
five sources of power: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert and referent. Sometimes power
comes from a persons position in the organisation, while other sources of power are based
on personal characteristics.

Position power
The traditional managers power comes from the organisation. The position gives managers
power to reward or punish subordinates to influence their behaviour. Forms of position
power are:

Legitimate power. Power coming from a formal management position in an

organisation and the authority granted to. Employees accept this source of power as
legitimate, which is why they comply.
Reward power. Stems from the managers authority to bestow rewards on
employees and thus influence behaviour. Rewards may include:
pay increases
promotion
praise
recognition
Coercive power. The opposite of reward power. Coercive power includes the
managers authority to:
fire
demote
reprimand
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 withdraw pay increases.

Different types of position power elicit different responses from followers. Legitimate power
and reward power are most likely to generate follower compliance i.e. workers carry out
instructions, even though they may disagree with them. Coercive power most often
generates resistance i.e. workers deliberately try to avoid carrying out instructions.

Personal power
Personal power most often comes from internal sources, such as a persons special
knowledge or personality characteristics. Examples of personal power are:

Expert power. Results from a leaders special knowledge or skill regarding the
tasks performed by followers. When the leader is a true expert, employees go along
with recommendations because of her/his superior knowledge.
Referent power. Comes from leader personality characteristics that command
followers identification, respect and admiration so they wish to try to be like the
leader. Employee response will be commitment i.e. workers will enthusiastically
carry out instructions.
Empowerment
A significant recent trend is for top management to empower employees at lower levels in
the organisation. Executives are more participative, more concerned with consensus
building, and more reliant on communication than command.

Leadership traits
Early efforts to understand leadership success focused on the leaders personal
characteristics or traits. Traits are the distinguishing personal characteristics of a leader
such as intelligence, values and appearance. Generally, research found only a weak
relationship between personal traits and leader success. Physical, social and work-related
characteristics of leaders have also been studied. The appropriateness of a trait or set of
traits depends on the leadership situation. The same traits do not apply to every
organisation or situation.

Autocratic versus democratic leaders

One way of looking at leader characteristics is to examine autocratic and democratic
leaders.
An autocratic leader tends to centralise authority and rely on legitimate, reward and
coercive power. Employees perform highly as long as the leader is present. Members are
frequently displeased with the close autocratic leadership and feelings of hostility frequently
arise. A democratic leader delegates authority, encourages participation, and relies on expert
and referent power to influence subordinates. Employees perform well even when the leader
is absent. The group is characterized by positive feelings rather than hostility. These
characteristics of democratic leadership explain why the empowerment of lower employees
is a popular trend. Research suggests the extent to which the leader is autocratic (bosscentred leadership) or democratic (subordinate-centred leadership) depends on
organisational circumstances. The leader tends to be autocratic if: there is a time pressure;
employees are slow to learn to make decisions; or there is a great skill difference between

leader and employee. The leader tends to be democratic if employees are able to learn
decision-making skills.

Behavioural approaches
The focus of research has shifted from leader personality traits toward the behaviours
successful leaders display. The significance of the following three streams of research is that
each stream discovered similar dimensions of leadership style.

Ohio State studies

The Ohio State studies of leader behaviour identified two major leadership behaviours
called consideration and initiating structure. Consideration is the extent to which the leader:

is considerate of subordinates
respects their ideas and feelings
establishes mutual trust.
Considerate leaders tend to:

be friendly
provide open communication
develop teamwork
be oriented toward their subordinates welfare.
Initiating structure is the extent to which a leader is task oriented and directs subordinate
activities towards goals. Leaders with this style typically:

give instructions
spend time planning
emphasise deadlines
provide schedules of work activities.
Michigan studies
The University of Michigan studies compared the behaviour of effective and ineffective
supervisors. Employee-centred leaders were the effective leaders who:

established high performance goals

displayed supportive behaviour towards employees
built effective work groups.
Job-centred leaders were the ineffective leaders and tended to be:

less concerned with goal achievement and human needs

more concerned with meeting schedules, keeping costs low and
achieving production efficiency.
The leadership grid
Blake and Mouton at the University of Texas developed the leadership grid. This is a
twodimensional leadership model that measures a leaders concern for production and
concern for people on a scale from 1 (low concern) to 9 (high concern). Team management
(9,9) is when organisation members work together to accomplish task outcomes, and is often
considered the most effective style for all managers. Country-club management (1,9) occurs

when primary emphasis is given to people rather than to work outputs. Authoritycompliance management (9,1) occurs when efficiency in operations is the dominant
orientation. Middle-of-the-road management (5,5) reflects a moderate concern for both
people and production. Impoverished management (1,1) means managers exert little effort
towards work accomplishment or interpersonal relationships.

Contingency approaches
A contingency approach to leadership is a model that describes the relationship between
leadership styles and specific organisational situations. Several contingency models have
been developed, including:

Fiedlers contingency theory

Fiedlers contingency theory attempts to match the leaders style with the organisational
situation most favourable for a correct fit or success.
Leadership style diagnoses the leaders style in terms of relation ship orientation or task
orientation. A relationship-oriented leader is concerned with people. A task-oriented leader is
primarily motivated by task accomplishment. Leadership style is measured using the least
preferred co-worker (LPC) scale. Leadership situation can be analysed in terms of:

Leader-member relations group atmosphere and members attitudes towards

and acceptance of the leader.
Task structure extent to which tasks performed by the group are defined,
involve specific procedures, and have clear, explicit goals.
Position power extent to which the leader has formal authority over employees.
Combining the three situational characteristics results in a list of eight leadership situations.
Fielder proposes that:

task-oriented leaders are more effective when the situation is either

highly favourable (everyone gets along, the task is clear and the leader
has power) or highly unfavourable
relationship-oriented leaders are more effective in situations of moderate
favourability (human relations skills are important in achieving group
performance).
To use Fiedlers contingency theory, a leader needs to:
know whether he/she has a relationship- or task-oriented style; and
diagnose the situation and determine if the leader-member relations,
task structure and position power are favourable or unfavourable.
Hersey and Blanchards situational theory
Hersey and Blanchards situational theory links the leaders behavioural style with the task
readiness of employees. This approach focuses on the characteristics of employees in
determining appropriate leadership behaviour. People low in task readiness need a different
leadership style than those high in readiness. People have low task readiness due to:

little ability
limited skills
lack of training

 insecurity.
People with high task readiness tend to have:

good ability
well-developed skills
confidence
willingness to work.
There are four leadership styles, the appropriateness of which depend on the readiness of
followers:

telling (S1) for low readiness (R1) employees; because they are unable and
unwilling to take responsibility for their own task behaviour, the leader must be
very specific and tell employees what to do, how to do it, and when to do it
selling (S2) for employees with moderate readiness (R2) who are unable but
willing or confident
participating (S3) for employees with moderate readiness (R3) who are able but
unwilling or insecure
delegating (S4) for high readiness (R4) employees; because they are both able
and willing or confident, the leader provides a general goal, delegates sufficient
authority to do the task, and expects followers to complete the task as they see fit.
Pathgoal theory
Another contingency approach to leadership is the pathgoal theory, in which the leaders
responsibility is to increase subordinates motivation to achieve personal and organisational
goals. The leader increases followers motivation by either:

path clarification the leader helps subordinates learn the behaviours that lead to
task accomplishment and rewards; or
increasing rewards the leader talks with employees to learn which
rewards are important to them. This model consists of three sets of contingencies:
Leader behaviour is classified as follows:
supportive leadership involves leader behaviour that shows concern for employees
wellbeing and personal needs
directive leadership is when the leader tells employees exactly what they are
supposed to do
participative leadership means the leader consults with his or her employees about
decisions
achievement-oriented leadership occurs when the leader sets clear and challenging
goals for employees.
Situational contingencies. The two important situational contingencies are:
1 personal characteristics of group members, which include such factors as ability,
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skill, needs and motivations.

2 work environment, which includes such contingencies as the degree of task
structure, the nature of the formal authority system, and the characteristics of the
work group itself.
Use of rewards to meet subordinate needs. The leaders responsibility is to clarify
the path to rewards for employees or to increase the amount of rewards to enhance
satisfaction and job performance.
Substitutes for leadership
The contingency leadership approaches considered so far have focused on the:

leaders style
employees nature
situations characteristics.
The substitutes contingency approach outlines the organisational settings in which a
leadership style is unimportant or unnecessary, and suggests that situational variables can
be so powerful that they substitute for or neutralise the need for leadership. A substitute is a
situational variable that makes a leadership style redundant or unnecessary e.g. highly
professional subordinates who know how to do their tasks do not need a leader to tell them
what to do. A neutraliser is a situational variable that prevents a leader from displaying
certain behaviours e.g. of a leader has absolutely no position power or is physically
removed from employees, the leaders ability to give directions to employees is reduced.
Situational variables include characteristics of the:

group, such as professionalism, training / experience and low value of

rewards
task, such as highly structured, automatic feedback and intrinsic satisfaction
organisation, such as group cohesiveness, formalisation, inflexibility, low
positional power and physical separation. Leaders should adopt a style complementary
to the organisational situation to ensure that both task needs and people needs of the work
group are met.

New leadership for learning organisations

Leadership is a quality that inspires and motivates people beyond their normal levels of
performance, and is particularly important in organisations trying to shift to a learning
organisation. Research has found that some leadership approaches are more effective than
others for bringing about organisational change.

Change leadership
Two types of leadership that can have a substantial impact when an organisation is
undergoing major changes are charismatic and transformational, best understood in
comparison to transactional leadership:

Transactional leadership is the traditional management function of

leading, and applies to a leader who clarifies employees role and task
requirements, initiates structure, provides rewards and displays
consideration for employees.
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 Charismatic leaders have the ability to inspire and motivate

employees to transcend their expected performance, to do more than
they would normally do, despite obstacles and personal sacrifice. The
impact of charismatic leaders is generally from:
1 stating a lofty vision of an imagined future that employees identify with
2 shaping a corporate value system for which everyone stands
3 trusting employees and earning their complete trust in return.
Transformational leaders are similar to charismatic leaders, but are
distinguished by their special ability to bring about innovation and change in both
followers and the organisation. They have the ability to lead changes in the
organisations mission, structure and culture, as well as to promote innovation in
products and technologies.
Transformational leaders focus on intangible qualities, such as vision, shared values
and ideas to build relationships, give larger meaning to separate activities, and
provide common ground to enlist their followers in the changes.