Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CH 7 Leadership
CH 7 Leadership
LEADERSHIP
y The Nature Of Leadership y The Difference between Traits and behavior y Difference Leadership Styles y EarlyApproches to Leadership y Contingency Approches to Leadership y Substitudes for Leadership y Self-Leadership and Superleadership y Coaching as a Leadership Role
y Leadership is the process ofOF LEADERSHIP THE NATURE influencing and supporting others work enthusiastically toward achieving objectives. y It s the critical factor that helps an individual or a group identify its goals and then motivates and assists in achieving the stated goals. y The three important elements in the definition are: - Influence/support, - Voluntary effort, - Goal achievement.
Leadership is an important part of management, but its not the whole story.
The primary role of a leader is to influence others to voluntarily seek defined objectives. y Managers also plan activities, organize appropriate structures, and control resources. Managers hold formal influence while acting as a leader.
physical, intellectual, or personality characteristics that differed between leaders and non leaders or between successful and unsuccessful leaders.
intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness, were studied. Other researchers examined physical characteristics, such as height, body size and shape,
Leadership Behavior
Much research has focused on identifying the Leadership Behaviors. - In this view, successful leadership depends more on appropriate behavior, skills, and actions, and less on personal traits. The difference is similar to that between latent energy and kinetic energy in physics: one type (the traits) provides the latent potential, and the other (the behaviors, skills, and actions) is the successful release and expression of those traits, much like kinetic energy. The three broad types of skills leaders use are Technical, Human, and Conceptual.
ability in any type of process or technique. Technical skills is the distinguishing feature of job performance at the operating and professional levels, but as employees are promoted to leadership responsibilities, their technical skills become proportionality less Important.
people and to build teamwork. No leader at any organizational level escapes the requirement for effective human skill. It is a major part of leadership behavior and is discussed throughout this book. Lack of human skills has been the downfall of many managers.
models, frameworks, and broad relation ships, such as long range plans. It becomes increasingly important in higher managerial jobs. Conceptual skill deals with ideas, whereas human skill concerns people and technical skill involves things.
Situational Aspects
y Successful leadership require behavior that unites and
Leader, Followers, and Situation are variables that affect one another in determining appropriate leadership behavior.
Followership
With few exception, leaders in organizations are also followers. They nearly always report to someone else. Even the president of a public firm or nonprofit organization report to a board of directors. Leaders must be able to wear both hats , relating effectively both upward and downward.
question y Constructively confronting the leader s ideas, values, and actions y Anticipating potential problems and preventing them
The total pattern of Explicit and Implicit leaders action as seen by employees is called Leadership style. It represent a consistent combination of philosophy. Each style also reflects, implicitly or explicitly, a manager s beliefs about a subordinate s capabilities.
to motivate them. If the approach emphasizes rewards economic or otherwise the leader uses positive leadership.
y Better employee education, greater demands for
independence , and other factors have made satisfactory employee motivation more dependent on positive leadership.
If emphasis is placed on penalties, the leader is applying negative relationship. This approach can get acceptable performance in many situations, but it has high human costs. Negative leaders act domineering and superior with people. A continuum of leadership styles exist, ranging from strongly positive to strongly negative.
Style is related to one s model of organizational behavior. The autocratic model tends to produce a negative style; the custodial model is somewhat positive; and the supportive, collegial, and system models are clearly positive. Positive leadership generally results in higher job satisfaction and performance.
Consultative leaders: approach one or more employees and ask them for inputs prior to making a decision. Participative leaders: Clearly decentralize authority. The leader and the group are acting as a social unit. Employees are informed about conditions affecting their job and encourage to express their ideas make suggestions, and take action.
Two different leadership styles used with employees are consideration and structure also known as employee orientation and task orientation.
Considerate leaders are concerned about the human needs of their employees. Structured, task-oriented leaders, on the other hand believe that they get results by keeping people constantly busy, ignoring personal issues and emotions and urging them to produce.
The most successful managers are those who combine relatively high consideration and structure, giving somewhat more emphasis to consideration.
Employees typically become better develped on a task as they reside appropriate guidance, gain job experience, and see the reward for cooperative behavior both the competence to perform a given task and the commitment to do so can vary among employees, therefore development levels demand different response from leaders.
Employees become satisfied and motivated, and they are accept the leader
Both employees and organization are better able to which their goals
How important is technical quality with regard to the decision being made? How important is subordinate commitment to the decision? Do you already have sufficient information to make high-quality decision? Is the problem well structured? If you made the decision, would the subordinate be likely to accept it? Do subordinate share the goals to be attained in solving the problem? Is there likely to be conflict among subordinate over alternative solutions? Do subordinate have sufficient information to allow them to reach a high-quality solution?
different approach to leadership that still has a modest contingency flavor has been proposed by Steven Kerr and others. Substitutes for leadership are factors that make leadership roles unnecessary through replacing them with other sources. Enhancers for leadership are elements that amplify a leader s impact on the employees.
Substitutes
peer appraisal/feedback gain-sharing reward systems staff available for problems jobs redesigned for more feedback
Enhancers
superordinate goals Increased group status Increased leader s status and reward power Leader as the central source of information supply Increased subordinates view of leaders expertise influence, and imaging use of crises to demonstrate leader s capabilities
for leadership provide partial compensation for a leader s weakness and the enhancers build on a leader s strengths. In another emerging approach to leadership, a dramatic substitute for leadership is the idea of self-leadership, which has been advocated by Charles Mans and Henry Sims. This process has to thrusts :leading oneself to perform naturally motivating tasks and managing oneself to do work that is required but not naturally rewarding. Selfleadership requires employees to apply the behavior of skills of self-observation, self-set goals, self-criticism.
It also involves the mental activities of building natural rewards into tasks, focusing thinking on natural rewards, and establishing effective thought patterns such as mental imagery and self-talk. The net result is employees who influence themselves to use their selfmotivation and self-direction to perform well.
about workers. it requires practicing self-leadership oneself and modeling it for others to see. Superleaders also communicate positive self-expectation to employees, reward their progress toward selfleadership, and make self-leadership and essential part of the unit s desired culture.
Coaching
A rapidly emerging metaphor for the leader is that of a coach. borrowed and adapted from the sports domain, coaching means that the leader prepares, guides, and directs a player but does not play the game. these leaders recognize that they are on the sidelines, not on the playing field. Their role is to select the right players, to teach and develop subordinates, to be available for problem-oriented consultation, review resource needs, to ask question, and to listen to input from employees.
Coaches see themselves as cheerleaders and facilitators while also recognizing the occasional need to be tough and demanding. Coaching can be a powerful leadership tool, if handled correctly. Good coaching focuses mostly on enhanced performance as supported by high expectation and timely feed-back while building on the tools of trust, mutual respect, integrity, openness, and common purpose.
The specific areas that most managers admit needing coaching in are: y Improving their interaction style y Dealing more effectively with change y Developing their listening and speaking skills
Other Approaches
Two other perspectives on leadership deserve mention. Visionary leaders those who can paint a portrait of what the organization needs to become and then use the communication skills to motivate others to achieve the vision play specially important rules during times of transition. A second approach looks at the reciprocal nature of influence between managers and their employees and studies the exchanges that take place between them.
SUMMARY
Leadership is the process of influencing and supporting others to work enthusiastically toward achieving objectives. It is determined partially by traits, which provide the potential for leadership, and also by rule behavior. Leaders roles combine technical, human, and conceptual skills, which leaders apply in different degrees at various organizational levels. Their behavior as followers is also important to the organization.