Leadership: Influencing Behavior for Excellence
Explain leadership and behavioral relationships in
organizations.
Relationships between leaders and subordinates are
critical for explaining how leaders behave. Leadership implies a
system of inequalities in which superiors influence subordinates
and direct behavior in groups to satisfy a wide variety of
individual, organizational, and social objectives. Leadership
behavior must account for human relationships as well as for
task relationships.
Identify
and discuss traits and characteristics of effective leaders.
Individuals become successful leaders by demonstrating
their capability for eliciting results&-oriented actions from
subordinates. Effective leaders tend to be achievement&-oriented
and confident of their ability to perform well, solve problems,
and influence others to perform well. They are relatively
intelligent and capable of making effective judgments, have
strong reasoning skills, and are often creative. The most
effective leaders also skillfully apply management techniques to
plan, organize, and control work.
Describe and contrast major theories on leadership. Discuss
the Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid.
The Ohio State University and University of Michigan
model consists of a two&-dimensional grid&-"concern
for people" and "concern for tasks"&-and
four primary approaches to leadership "abdicative,"
"directive," "supportive," and
"participative." Likert's refinement of the model,
System 4 Management identifies similar behavioral sets ranging from
"autocratic" to participative."
Blake and
Mouton's Managerial Grid combines the Ohio State ad University
of Michigan model and Likert's four systems of behavior into a
nine&-by&-nine matrix encompassing a broad range of
leadership behavior.
Fiedler's contingency
theory suggests that successful leadership results from
matching managers' styles which are grounded in personality and
thus hard to change, with situations. There is no one best
approach to leadership, but rather an optimal approach in each
situation. Robert House's path&-goal theory links this
contingency approach to expectancy theory by specifying that a
leader's responsibility is to increase subordinates' motivation
to perform work by providing a path, or a direction, for
accomplishing tasks that leads to expected rewards The path&-goal
model adds to participation or team building a dimension called
"achievement&-oriented leadership."
The Vroom&-Yetton model incorporates expectancy
theory of motivation into a formal decision&-tree analysis.
Managers adapt their behavior according to a systematic analysis
of the task environment and leader&-subordinate
relationships. This model proposes that it is the type of
decision that influences leadership style rather than the other
way around.
The Hersey and Blanchard life cycle theory is
conceptually similar to Fiedler's theory. However, Fiedler based
his theory on personality characteristics and situational
variables, while the life cycle model focuses on the
"maturity" of subordinates, defined as the experience,
skill, and ability to perform a task combined with the
psychological willingness to assume responsibility. Managers
adopt one of four approaches to leadership, ranging from
delegating to telling, according to both the nature of the task
and a group profile of the maturity of subordinates.
The Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid has two dimensions,
each with nine points that create a matrix of coordinates. One
dimension is the manager's degree of "concern for
people," and the other is his or her degree of
"concern for production." In each dimension, a scale
value of 1 implies least concern and a scale value of 9 implies
maximum concern. Therefore a 1.1
orientation, suggests little concern for either people or
production (impoverished management). At the opposite extreme, a
9,9 orientation indicates a fully participative approach to
leadership that seeks to attain both maximum satisfaction for
employees and maximum work, results (team management). Other
benchmarks on the grid are a 1,9 orientation, which implies a
low concern for tasks and a high concern for employees (country
club management); and a 9,1 orientation, which suggests a high
concern for production with little regard for subordinates
(authority&-obedience management).
Discuss how motivation and leadership are interrelated and
explain the role of decision making in effective leadership.
The common assumption of leadership models is that
leadership is a process of influencing subordinates to perform
well in exchange for something they value. Likert's System 4
model assumes there is "one best way" to lead&-through
participation&-implying that, in general, subordinates want
to be involved in decisions and will be more productive when
they have a voice in directing their work, Blake and Mouton
propose that leadership behavior must be matched to
subordinates' expectations.
Both the Vroom&-Yetton model and the path&-goal
theory are explicitly based on the expectancy theory of
motivation. According to Vroom&-Yetton, leaders model their
behavior in concert with organizational expectations for
performance and employees' expectations for rewards, whereas the
path&-goal theory proposes that leaders clarify a direction
of effort for work, that leads to rewards subordinates perceive
as important.
Contingency theories encompass a wide range of
motivational elements including content needs of employees,
perceptions of job satisfaction, perceptions of task
requirements, and the interaction required between superiors and
subordinates. These theories take a situational approach,
incorporating both human,and, task elements of the
organizational environment, Leadership consists of motivating
employees to fulfill organizational goals while satisfying their
personal expectations for participation.
Describe the
multicultural environment and transformational leadership as
critical management issues.
As organizations become more culturally diversified,
managers must acclimate themselves to changes taking place in
their work groups. Cultural diversity is explained by the
profile of individuals working for the organization, including
their sex, race, ethic, age, and religious characteristics.
Within this framework, organizational leaders are concerned with
providing appropriate opportunities
for minorities, reconciling differences in behavior among
their employees, and, most important, transforming their
organization into multicultural enterprises devoid of
stereotypes and unproductive biases.
Transformational leadership addresses the human resource
issues of managing a multicultural organization, but it also
encompasses a philosophy of leadership whereby leaders are able
to make profound changes, introduce new visions for their
organizations, and inspire people to work toward achieving those
visions. In contrast to transactional leadership, which focuses
on incremental changes or adjustments in relatively stable
environments, transformational leadership is the process of
making fundamental changes in where an organization is headed.