Leadership

• Leadership: The influence that particular individuals exert on the goal achievement of others in an organizational context.

Are Leaders Born? The Search for Leadership Traits

• Research on Leadership Traits

  • Traits: individual characteristics such as physical attributes, intellectual ability, and personality. Traits associated with leadership effectiveness include: intelligence, energy, self-confidence, dominance, motivation to lead, emotional stability, honesty and integrity, need for achievement.
  • The “Big Five” (agreeableness, extraversion, openness to experience) personality assessments resulted from these research interests with traits.

• Limitations of the Trait Approach

  • It is difficult to determine whether traits make the leader or whether the opportunity for leadership produces the traits.
  • We have few clues about what dominant or tall or intelligent people do to influence others successfully
  • The most crucial problem of the trait approach to leadership is its failure to take into account the situation in which leadership occurs.

Lessons from Emergent Leadership

• Task Leader: a leader who is concerned with accomplishing a task by organizing others, planning strategy, and dividing labour.
• Social-emotional leader: a leader who is concerned with reducing tension, patching up disagreements, settling arguments, and maintaining morale.
• In many cases, the two leadership roles are performed by the same person

Behaviour of Assigned Leaders

• Consideration

  • Consideration: the extent to which a leader is approachable and shows personal concern and respect for employees.
  • Initiating structure: the degree to which a leader concentrates on group goal attainment.

• The consequences of consideration and structure

  • In general, research shows that consideration and initiating structure both contribute positively to employees’ motivation, job satisfaction, and leader effectiveness. However, consideration tends to be more strongly related to follower satisfaction (leader satisfaction and job satisfaction), motivation, and leader effectiveness, while initiating structure is slightly more strongly related to leader job performance and group performance.

• Leader reward and punishment behaviours

  • Leader reward behaviour: the leader’s use of complements, tangible benefits, and deserved special treatment. When such rewards are made contingent on performance, employees should perform at high level and experience job satisfaction. Very positively related to behavioural changes.
  • Leader punishment behaviour: the leader’s use of reprimands or unfavourable task assignments and the active withholding of rewards.

Situational Theories of Leadership

• Fiedler’s Contingency Theory

  • Contingency Theory: Fred Fiedler’s theory that states that the association between leadership orientation and group effectiveness is contingent on how favourable the situation is for exerting influence. In other words, some situations are more favourable for leadership than others, and these situations require different orientations on the part of the leader.

• Leadership Orientation

  • Least Preferred Co-worker: a current or past co-worker with whom a leader has had a difficult time accomplishing a task.
  • LPC reveals a personality trait that reflects the leader’s motivational structure.

• Situational Favourableness (the “contingency” part of the contingency theory)

  • According to Fiedler, a favourable leadership situation exists when the leader has a high degree of control and when the results of this control are very predictable
    • Leader-member relations: when the leadership between the leader and the group members is good, the leader is in a favourable situation to exert influence.
    • Task structure: When the task at hand is highly structured, the leader should be able to exert considerable influence on the group.
    • Position power: position power is the formal authority granted to the leader by the organization to tell others what to do.

• House’s Path-Goal Theory

  • Path-Goal Theory: Robert House’s theory concerned with the situations under which various leader behaviours (directive, supportive, participative, achievement oriented) are most effective.
  • To provide job satisfaction and leader acceptance, leader behaviour must be perceived as immediately satisfying or as leading to future satisfaction
  • Situational Factors: Path-Goal Theory has concerned itself with two primary classes of situational factors – employee characteristics and environmental factors

Participative Leadership: Involving Employees in Decisions

• What is Participation?
  • Participative leadership: involving employees in making work-related decisions.
• Potential Advantages of Participative Leadership
  • Motivation: participation can increase the motivation of employees. Participation permits them to contribute to the establishment of work goals and to decide how they can accomplish these tasks.
  • Quality: participation can enhance quality in two ways: 1) people working together usually results in a higher-quality decisions than the leader could make alone.
  • Acceptance: Even when participation does not promote motivation or increase the quality of decisions, it can increase the employee’s acceptance of decisions. This is especially likely when issues of fairness are involved.
• Potential Problems of Participative Leadership
  • Time & Energy: Participation is not a state of mind. It involves specific behaviours on the part of the leader and these behaviours use time and energy.
  • Loss of power: Some leaders feel that a participative style will reduce their power and influence.
  • Lack of receptivity of knowledge è Employees might not be receptive to participation. When the leader is distrusted, or when a poor labour climate exists, they might resent “having to do management’s work.”

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

• LMX Theory: A theory of leadership that focuses on the quality of the relationship that develops between a leader and an employee.

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

• Transactional Leadership: leadership based on a fairly straight-forward exchange between the leader and the followers—employees perform well, and the leader rewards them.
• Management by exception: The leader takes corrective action on the basis of results of leader-follower transactions. They monitor follower behaviour, anticipate problems, and take corrective actions before the behaviour creates serious problems.
• Transformational Leadership: providing followers with a new vision that instills true commitment.
  • Intellectual Stimulation
    • Intellectual stimulation contributes, in part, to the “new vision” aspect of transformational leadership. People are stimulated to think about problems, issues, and strategies in new ways.
  • Individualized Consideration
    • Individualized consideration involves treating employees as distinct individuals, indicating concern for their needs and personal development, and serving as a mentor or coach when appropriate. The emphasis is a one-on-one attempt to meet the concerns and needs of the individual in question in the context of the overall goal or mission.
  • Inspirational Motivation
    • Inspirational motivation involves the communication of visions that are appealing and inspiring to followers.
  • Charisma(i.e. idealized influence)
    • Charisma: the ability to command strong loyalty and devotion from followers and thus have the potential for strong influence among them. Charisma provides the emotional aspect of transformational leadership
  • Transformational leadership strongly related to follower motivation and satisfaction (satisfaction w/ leader performance), leader effectiveness, group & organizational effectiveness. Transformational behaviours are instrumental in developing high-quality LMX relationships and for enhancing employee’s perceptions of their work atmosphere.

Strategic leadership

• In today’s rapidly changing and uncertain environment, leaders must be much more strategic than in the past when the environment was more certain and stable.
• Strategic leadership: leadership that involves the ability to anticipate, envision, maintain flexibility, think strategically, and work with others to initiate changes that will create a viable future for the organization

Culture and Global Leadership

• Implicit leadership theory: individuals hold a set of beliefs about the kinds of attributes, personality characteristics, skills, and behaviours that contribute to or impede outstanding leadership. Cultural dimensions from the GLOBE Project outlined 21 primary and 6 global leadership dimensions that are contributors or inhibitors of outstanding leadership.

Global Leadership

• Global Leadership: a set of leadership capabilities required to function effectively in different cultures and the ability to cross language, social, economic, and political borders. Global leaders have the following characteristics: unbridled inquisitiveness, personal character, duality (manage uncertainty & balance global and local tensions), savvy (must be aware of new business trends)

Ethical Leadership

• Ethical Leadership: the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making.
• Ethical leaders model what is acceptable and normal behaviour (honesty, trustworthiness, fairness, & care)
• Laissez-faire leadership: a style of leadership that involves the avoidance or absence of leadership.