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CHAPTER 14: ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP |
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CHAPTER 14 ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP OUTLINE
I. PERSPECTIVES OF LEADERSHIP
A.
Leadership is the process of influencing people and providing an
environment from them to achieve team or organizational objectives.
B.
Leadership has been contemplated since the days of Greek
philosophers and is one of the most popular research topics among
organizational behavior scholars.
II. COMPETENCY (TRAIT) PERSPECTIVE OF LEADERSHIP
A. Competencies include the knowledge, natural and learned abilities, values, personality traits, and other characteristics of people that lead to superior performance. Recent leadership literature identifies seven competencies that are characteristic of effective leaders.
1. Drive 2. Leadership motivation 3. Integrity 4. Self-confidence 5. Intelligence 6. Knowledge of the business 7. Emotional intelligence
B.
Competency (Trait) Perspective Limitations and Practical
Implications 1. Leadership is far too complex to have a universal list of traits that apply to every condition. 2. The competency perspective recognizes that some people possess personal characteristics that offer them a higher potential to be great leaders. Organizations are relying increasingly on competency-based methods to hire people for future leadership positions. 3. The competency perspective of leadership does not necessarily imply that great leaders are born, not developed. Competencies only indicate leadership potential, not leadership performance.
III. BEHAVIORIAL PERSPECTIVE OF LEADERSHIP
A. Two clusters of leadership behaviors were distilled from research:
1. People-oriented behaviors include showing mutual trust and respect for subordinates, demonstrating a genuine concern for their needs, and having a desire to look out for their welfare, listen to employee suggestions, do personal favors for employees, support their interests when required, and treat employees as equals. 2. Task-oriented leadership styles include behaviors that define and structure work roles, assign employees to specific tasks, clarify their work duties and procedures, ensure that they follow company rules, and push them to reach their performance capacity, establish stretch goals, and challenge employees to push beyond those high standards.
B. Choosing Task
versus People-Oriented Leadership 1. People-oriented leadership is associated with higher job satisfaction among subordinates, as well as lower absenteeism, grievances, and turnover. Job performance tends to be lower than for employees with task-oriented leaders. 2. Task-oriented leadership is associated with lower job satisfaction as well as higher absenteeism and turnover among subordinates, seems to increase productivity and team unity. 3. Behavioral leadership scholars report some people are high or low on both styles, others are high on one style and low on the other, and most are somewhere in between. Out of this hypothesis developed a popular leadership development program, called the Leadership Grid.
IV. CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE OF LEADERSHIP
A. Path-Goal Theory of Leadership
1. Path-goal theory states that effective leaders influence employee satisfaction and performance by making their need satisfaction contingent on effective job performance. Leaders strengthen the performance-to-outcome expectancy and valences of those outcomes by enduring that employees who perform their jobs well have a higher degree of need fulfillment than employees who perform poorly. 2. Effective leaders strengthen the effort-to-performance expectancy be providing the information, support, and other resources necessary to help employees complete their tasks. 3. Path-goal theory advocates servant leadership; leaders do not view leadership as a position of power, rather, they are coaches, stewards, and facilitators. 4. Leadership styles of the path-goal theory of leadership include four styles: a. Directive b. Supportive c. Participative d. Achievement-oriented
B. Contingencies of Path-Goal Theory
1. Skill and experience 2. Locus of control 3. Task structure 4. Team dynamics
C. Recent Extensions of Path-Goal Theory
1. Networking recognizes that leaders play an important political role and represent the work unit and engage in political networking activities to legitimize the work unit and maintain positive influences on other areas of the organization. 2. Value-based leadership includes articulating a vision of the future, displaying passion for this vision, demonstrating self-confidence in the attainment of the vision, communicating the vision, and acting in ways consistent with the vision.
D. Practical Implications and Limitations of Path-Goal Theory
1. Path-goal theory reinforces the idea that effective leaders vary their style with the situation and offers a fairly precise set of contingency factors that provide practical advice on when to use various leadership styles. 2. Path-goal theory has received considerably research support, recently expanded model adds new leadership styles and contingencies, but they have not yet been tested. 3. The model may become too complex for practical use and may become too cumbersome for training people in leadership styles.
E. Other Contingency Theories
1. Situational leadership model suggests that effective leaders vary their style with the “readiness” of followers and identifies four leadership styles: a. telling b. selling c. participating
d.
delegating 2. Fiedler’s contingency model is the leader effectiveness depends on whether the person’s natural leadership style is appropriately matched to the situation. a. Situational control is the degree of power and influence that the leader possesses in a particular situation and is affected by three factors in the following order of importance i. leader-member relations ii. task structure iii. position power
3. Changing the situation to match the leader’s natural style
a. Leaders might be able to alter their style temporarily, but the tend to use a preferred style in the long term.
4. Leadership substitutes
a. Leadership substitutes identifies contingencies that either limit the leader’s ability to influence subordinates or make that particular leadership style unnecessary. b. When substitute conditions are present, employees are effective without a formal leader who applies a particular style. c. Leadership substitutes have become more important as organizations remove supervisors and shift toward team-based structures. d. Self-leadership is the process of influencing oneself to establish the self-direction and self-motivation needed to perform a task.
V. TRANSFORMATIONAL PERSPECTIVE OF LEADERSHIP
A. Transformational versus Transactional Leadership
1.
Transactional leadership is “managing”—helping organizations
achieve their current objectives more efficiently, such as by linking job
performance to valued rewards and ensuring that employees have the
resources needed to get the job done. Transactional leadership improves
organizational efficiency. 2. Transformational leadership is “leading”—changing the organization’s strategies and culture so that they have a better fit with the surrounding environment and are change agents who energies and direct employees to a new set of corporate values and behaviors. Transformational leadership steers companies onto a better course of action.
B. Transformational versus Charismatic Leadership
1.
Charismatic leadership is a form of interpersonal attraction
whereby followers develop a respect for and trust in the charismatic
individual and the leadership extends beyond behaviors to personal traits
that provide referent power over followers. 2. Transformational leadership is mainly about behaviors that people use to lead the change process.
C. Elements of Transformational Leadership
1. Creating a strategic vision, which reflects a future for the company or work unit that is ultimately accepted and valued by organizational members. 2. Communicating the vision and evaluate the importance of the visionary goal to employees. 3. Modeling the vision through significant events by stepping outside the executive suite and doing things that symbolize the vision. 4. Building commitment toward the vision by demonstrating a ‘can do’ attitude by enacting their vision and staying on course.
D. Evaluating the Transformational Leadership Perspective
1. Subordinates are more satisfied and have higher affective organizational commitment under transformational leaders. They perform their jobs better, engage in more organizational citizenship behaviors, and make better or ore creative decisions. 2. Transformational leadership is currently the most popular leadership perspective, but it faces a number of challenges: a. Engage in circular logic by defining transformational leadership in terms of the leader’s success. b. Seems to be universal rather than contingency-oriented.
VI. ROMANCE PERSPECTIVE OF LEADERSHIP
A. Attributing Leadership is people have a strong need to attribute the causes of events around them so they can feel more confident about how to control them in the future.
B. Stereotyping Leadership where people rely on stereotypes determines
whether their boss in an effective leader. C. Need for Situational Control suggests that people want to believe leaders make a difference. Two basic reasons for this belief: 1. Leadership is a useful way for us to simplify life events. 2. There is a strong tendency in the United States and similar cultures to believe that life events are generated more from people than from uncontrollable natural forces.
VII. GENDER ISSUES IN LEADERSHIP
A.
Organizational behavior scholars warned that female leaders are
evaluated slightly less favorably than equivalent male leaders, and this
difference is almost completely due to sex stereotype bias.
B.
Women are evaluated negatively when they adopt a stereotypically
male leadership style and occupy traditionally male-dominated positions. C. Women are rated higher than men on most leadership dimensions, including the emerging leadership qualities of coaching, teamwork, and empowering employees.
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