Process of building enthusiasm and directing effort towards the organization’s goal.
Models of Leadership
Trait:
- Leaders are born
- Use tests to select good leaders
- Focus on personal traits
Behavioral:
- Leaders are made
- Train people to be good leaders
- Focus on what leaders do
Contingency:
- Links traits and behaviors to situations in which they best apply
Traits
Kirkpatrick and Locke
- Drive:
- Desire for achievement
- Ambition
- Energy
- Tenacity
- Initiative
- Leadership motivation: desire for power to make change
- Key traits:
- Drive
- Leadership motivation
- Honesty and integrity
- Self-confidence
- Cognitive ability
- Knowledge of business
- Creativity, charisma and flexibility did not show any effect
Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence Theory
Five critical components of emotional intelligence:
- Self-awareness: ability to understand your own mood, etc. and ensure or mitigate the impacts it has on others
- Self-regulation: controlling disruptive impulses, emotions etc.
- Motivation to lead for reasons other than money, status etc.
- Empathy: ability to understand emotions of others and relate to them
- Social skill: ability to build a rapport with people, network etc.
Behavioral Theories
Specific behaviors differentiate leaders from non-leaders. There are no ‘born leaders’; leaders can be trained, although to varying success - training someone that does not want to lead to lead will be difficult.
Two aspects:
- Concern for the task
- Concern for the people doing the work
Drucker
A good leader will:
- Ask what needs to be done
- Ask what is right for the enterprise
- Develop action plans
- Took responsibility for decisions, communication
- Focused on opportunities, not problems
- Ran productive meetings
- Said ‘we’, not ‘I’
Black Mouton Leadership Grid
Quadrant with two axes: concern for people and concern for people
- Low concern for production/people
- Impoverished manager: minimum effort to get the job done
- Low concern for production, high concern for people
- Country club manager: focus on people’s needs and building relationships
- High concern for production, low concern for people
- Authority-obedience manager: focus on efficiency of operation
- High concern for production/people
- Team manager: focus on building commitments to shared purpose
Middle-of-the-road: balances with output with morale.
Contingency Theories
Considers characteristics from leaders, follows and that of the situation.
Harvard Business Review survey shows a mixture of traits and behaviors are required:
- High ethical/moral standards (trait/behavior)
- Self-organizing; provides goals/objectives with loose guidelines (behavior)
- Clearly communicates expectations (behavior)
- Flexibility with changing opinions (trait)
Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Model
Quadrant with two axes: support required (relationship behavior) and guidance required (task behavior):
- Delegation: followers able, willing and confident
- Telling (give instructions): followers unable, unwilling and insecure
- Participating (share ideas): followers able but unwilling and insecure
- Selling (explaining decisions): followers unable but willing and confident
Fielder’s Contingency Model
- Leader-member relations: does the member have a good or bad relationship with the the leader?
- Task structure: how structured are the tasks?
- Power position: to what degree to which leader can reward/punish members
Depending on these three characteristics the amount of situational control they have and the preferred leadership style, task- or relationship-oriented, changes.
House’s Path-Goal Theory
Effective leaders clarify paths through which followers can achieve the goal.
Depending on the situation, leaders should be:
- Directive
- Supportive
- Achievement-oriented
- Participatory
This is dependent on the follower’s:
- Ability
- Experience
- Locus of control: how much they feel what they do makes a difference
As well as the environment’s:
- Task structure
- Authority system
- Work group
Team Management vs Leadership
These two terms may or may not be used interchangeably.
| Management | Leadership |
|---|---|
| Direct using positional power | Guide, influence and collaborate using relational power |
| Maintain | Develop |
| Focus on systems/structure | Focus on relationships |
| Rely on control | Inspire trust |
| Near-term goals | Long-range vision |
| Ask how/when | Ask what/why |
| Focus on bottom-line | Focus on horizon |
| Accept status quo | Challenge status quo |
| Do things right | Do the right things |
| Focus on operational issues | Focus on vision, motivation |