CHAPTER 14: LEARDERSHIP A) WHY DO PEOPLE TEND TO GIVE LEADERS TOO MUCH CREDIT OR BLAME FOR ORGANIZATIONS?

Leaders can best defined as a person that lead in organization that inducing the followers to act for certain goals that represent the values, motivations, needs and wants which established the aspirations and expectations of organizations.

While leadership is about influencing, motivating and enabling others to contribute towards the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.

Nowadays, people do tend to give leaders too much credit or blame for organization based on my opinion because of the three factors that are, stereotyping leadership, attributing leadership and need for situational control.

First of all, let us look at the first factor which is stereotyping leadership where, the theory states that mental images of an ideal leader shape our expectations and acceptance of people as leaders, which in turn affect their ability to influence us as followers. The organizations rely on leadership stereotypes partly because employees depend on immediate information to decide whether a leader is effective, where if the leader fits the mold, then employees are more confident that leader is effective. As example, if the leaders has a higher education and have many experiences, the employees will follows all the order end decision that he made.

Under the attributing leadership, research found that people tend to attribute organizational events to the leader, even the factor is beyond the leaders control. Due to this, this attribution caused attribute error in which leaders are given credit or blame for the company success or failure. This factor exits because, employees do not readily see the external forces that also influences these events, as example, if the leader is late for work, observers are more likely to conclude that the leader is lazy than to realize that external factors may have caused this behavior. This is because; observers cant easily see the external factors that constrain the persons behavior. Other than that, there is another attribution error which is self-serving bias which is tendency to attribute our favorable outcomes to internal factors and our failures to external factors. In the simple words, we take credit for our success but blame others for our mistakes. Self-serving bias protects our self-esteem, but it can have the opposite effect for people in leadership position where they expect leaders to take ownership of their failures, so they have less respect for executives who blame the situation rather than take personal responsibility.

Lastly, the need for situational control, under this, there are two elements that make the people want to believe leaders make a difference which is first, leadership is a useful way for us to simplify life events. Due to this, it is easy to explain the organization success and failure based on the leaders ability. For example, there is a lot of reason why the company had fail in the marketplace, yet this is because the company leader was ineffective. A second element is to believe that life events are generated more from people than from uncontrollable natural forces. They believe that events result from the

rational actions of leaders. As example, employees believe that leaders make a difference, so they actively look for evidence that this is so.

Nevertheless, gender differences in leadership also give one of the contributions. Basically, women leadership had interactive style which is people oriented and participative leadership. This is because, women is well accepted by people because of less status-oriented which is less ego that suit for company that emphasis teamwork, coaching and employee involvement. While men leadership is stricter and have an ego when dealing with work or to make any decision because they want to protect their reputation.

As conclusion, potential leaders must be sensitive to this fact, understand what followers expect, and act accordingly. Individuals who do not make an effort to fit leadership prototypes will have more difficulty bringing about necessary organizational change.