Leadership and Workplace
Introduction
Leadership is involves the diligence of duty in social influence and team work by an individual in accomplishment of a particular goal. From a psychological view, it varies much from the perennial understanding of being followed and providing guidelines and direction to others. This sets apart the terminology ‘leadership’ and ‘effective leadership’. While leadership could be mistaken for the feared boss roles with highhandedness and a stern persona, effective leadership focuses on the delivery, wellbeing and productivity of the team one leads. To understand these styles, there are numerous theories of leadership that have come up with time and all agree on the traits that are involved in delivery of quality and maximizing productivity. These include charisma, intelligence, vision power, behavior, function and situational interaction among others. The line between leadership and management from an uninformed angle is thin but in real sense, the distinction between the two is apparent.
Organizing the work environment and processing administrative tasks is managerial but not necessarily leadership. Leaders in most organizations are managers but leadership goes beyond the role to the personality. Managers plan, budget, organize, staff, control and solve problems while leaders set direction and vision, direct people to share goals, communicate and motivate. One does not have to be a manager to be a leader. Unlike the duties of a manager, a leader ought to inspire the team and nurture a culture within the organization that becomes the basis of an organization’s history and values.
Leadership –focused approaches
The choice of effective leadership characteristics lies on the organization leaders in this approach. There are a number of smaller approaches within the umbrella of the leadership based approach. From the trait approach, the more the traits a leader possess, the more the effectiveness of the leader and vice-versa. This is now used as sound basis to scout emerging leaders within organizations. This is being done by scrutiny and identification of the following traits in individuals; self motivation, intelligence, needs for dominance and social perception.
The behavioral approach is also a leader-focused approach focusing on the distinction between effective and ineffective leaders and leadership. The approach’s theorists provide two leadership behaviors; consideration and initiating structure. Consideration caters for leadership that exudes care and shows subordinates that they are well thought of, valued and cared for. This could be exemplified by a leader’s compassion when a subordinate has problems in or out of the office. Initiating structure involves a leader’s behavior that leads them to meeting with individuals on a personal level an explaining expectations and goals in task performance facilitation within groups. Within the leader focused approach is the final approach of power and influence. This is a combination of charisma and effectiveness. An effective leader influences others to be in line with organizational missions, expectations and goals. A leader’s influence depends on his/her social power and potential of influence over people. Power however if misunderstood and misused could ruin a leader and the overall goal of a group or organization. This is based on the six bases of power and the choices a leader makes with regard to them. These bases are; reward power, legitimate power, coercive power, expert power, information power and expert power. A leader chooses which base to use and leads through common tactics of leadership that is; pressure, legitimating, coalition, personal appeal, consultation, rational persuasion, inspirational appeal and ingratiation exchange.
Contingency-focused approaches
These are the most prevalent of the 3 approaches over the past decades. They base a leader’s effectiveness on their ability to assess and adapt to a situation accordingly. The assumption is that an effective leader accurately reads a situation and employs a ledership apt for it skillfully. It has the following theories; fielder’s Contingency Theory, which opines that a leader’s effectiveness depends on the relationship in interaction between his characteristics and those of the situation. The Path Goal Theory emphasizes the leader’s role in helping the subordinates achieve their goals. Te Leader-Member Exchange Model is based on the development of the leader-subordinate relationships. Vroom-Yetton-Jago Model is based on decision making skewed towards a feasibility set composed of the situational attributes.
These approaches have three main approaches employed. These are, transformational leadership; positing that there are traits that should influence subordinates to perform beyond capability, transactional leadership which is concerned with keeping subordinates in schedule and policy and authentic leadership which is centered around empathy and values and character of the leader.
Follower-focused approaches
They look at the processes used by leaders to motivate their followers. It borrows heavily from motivation. It is imperative that leaders motivate their followers because they are responsible for their ability to achieve. Leaders should know potential pitfalls in their teams, how to develop the team and how to satisfy member needs. It is now taking a new dimension with virtual teams throughout geographically distributed areas.
Literature Review and Summary of Empirical Research Articles on Leadership
Article 1: Leadership efficacy: Review and future directions
Source: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/managementfacpub/5
Authors: Sean T. Hannah, Bruce Avolio, Fred Luthans and Peter D. Harms
Research Aim
1. Investigating the hierarchical structuring of a leader’s efficacy beliefs which we propose is comprised of general efficacy, means efficacy, and various domains of specific self-efficacy, as well as the interactions between these various forms of efficacy in facilitating effective performance.
2. Advancing a deeper understanding of how efficacy develops and operates within leaders’ self-systems and influences subsequent cognition, affect and behavior.
3. Taking a multi-level approach toward understanding the emergence of efficacy in organizations, including individual (leader and follower), team/collective and organizational levels.
4. Based on our expanded conceptualization of leadership efficacy; making proposals to refine the antecedents to and processes of leadership efficacy development.
Hypothesis
Today’s leaders face unprecedented challenges as organizations struggle to adapt to ever-accelerating rates of change both internally and with the external environment in which they are embedded. Such change challenges not only the knowledge, skills and abilities of leaders, but perhaps even more important, the self-conceptualizations of their leadership capabilities and psychological resources to meet the ever increasing demands of their roles
Method
Employees in several large Korean firms completed the surveys regarding their perceptions of leadership, empowerment, group cohesiveness, collective efficacy, and team-performance.
Results
Transformational leadership was predictive of both feeling of empowerment and group cohesiveness. Feelings of empowerment mediated the effects of transformational leadership on collective efficacy. Both collective efficacy and transformational leadership were predictive of perceptions of team performance.
Article 2: Understanding Cultures and Implicit Leadership Theories across the Globe; an Introduction to Project GLOBE
Authors: Robert House, Mansour Javidan, Paul Hanges and Peter Dorfman
Research Aims
The GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) research program was a multi phase, multi method project that sought to examine the society culture, organizational culture and organizational leadership. It is a long term cross-cultural leadership study involving over 150 social scientists and management scholars from all regions of the world and different samples of culture. GLOBE’s Meta goal is to develop a theory that is empirically based to describe, explain, understand and predict the impact of certain cultural variables on organizational leadership and processes and how effective these processes are. Its specific objectives sought to answer the following questions;
- Are there behaviors, attributes, tendencies and organizational processes exuded by leaders that are universally acceptable and effective across all the cultures?
- Are there behaviors, attributes, tendencies and organizational processes exuded by leaders that are only acceptable and effective to some cultures?
- How do the attributes of organizational and societal cultures affect the acceptable and effective leader behaviors and organizational processes?
- What effect does violating cultural norms that have relevance to leadership and organizational practices has?
- What is the relative standing of each of the cultures studied as per the core dimensions of culture?
- Can the culture specific and universal aspects of leader behaviors, attributes, tendencies and organizational processes be explained in an underlying theory accounting for systematic differences across cultures?
Hypothesis
Historically, geography, political boundaries and ethnicity have been primal basis for creation of distinction and differences among people with evolution of societies through time to form communities of people with distinguishable characteristics and similarities. There is a practical need to study the effects of culture on leadership with many researchers arguing that there is a direct impact of culture on leadership styles o n the debate of universality of leadership styles. GLOBE therefore seeks to study a wide variety of cultural values and practices in many countries and cultural regions and identify he interrelationship with organizational practices and leadership attributes. There is however the same argument that there is at least one leadership aspect that transcends the cultural boundaries and is universally accepted. Shared values are enacted in behaviors, policies and practices.
Method
The Research program focused on 61 countries representing different cultural groups. Its main focus was on culture and leadership; the relationship and interrelationship. Cultures were examined using the following dimensions; performance orientation, assertiveness, future orientation, power distance, institutional collectivism, humane orientation, gender egalitarianism, uncertainty avoidance and in-group collectivism. A survey was carried out on thousands of middle managers in telecommunications, food processing and finance industries. The research was done in four phases with phase one serving as basis for the research. In this phase development of research instruments was primal. Questionnaires of high psychometric properties were formulated. Phase two assessed the 9 dimensions of societal and organizational culture and tested hypotheses. Measures for a large number of values and unobtrusive measures for the nine core societal level dimensions of culture were developed. In phase three, investigated the impact and effectiveness of specific leader behaviors and style on subordinates’ attitudes, job performance and leader effectiveness. It also scrutinizes relationships between organizational contingencies, form and processes and effectiveness. The fourth phase discussed, analyzed and tabulated the results.
Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used providing richly descriptive, scientifically valid, accounts of cultural influences on leadership and organizational processes. Quantitative methods measured societal and organizational culture, behavior and leadership attributes.
Results
The research empirically identified six culturally generalizable global leader behavior dimensions from a large pool of expected leader qualities. All cultural background respondents were able to fill the questionnaires comprising these dimensions. The psychometric scales that measured them exceeded conventional standards. All of them were viewed as universal contributors to effective leadership. One was nearly endorsed as a contributor and one is nearly perceived as an impediment to effective leadership. The endorsement of the remaining two varied by culture.
Discussion
The empirical study shows that culture by far and large affects leadership styles across the globe. Leadership is defined by what is thought to be morally palatable, socially acceptable and a societal norm. Since most of the norms, values and morals are shared across the world, the dimensions were favorably ranked as contributors of effective leadership. However, cultures differ from place to place and as such; the research shows that there are two dimensions that received mixed reactions across the globe.
Evaluation on Leadership
Conclusively, a leader should have a personal checklist against which they can gauge their effectiveness and also use it to streamline their performance to meet targets and achieve goals. The score sheet for a leader is best read on the team/ group he leads, a leader should consider the following to know how well he fairs;
The members should share a common sense of destiny and work towards the same goals driven by purpose. They should have a rationale that acts as a paradigm for what needs to be done, when and by who in priority. Individual members should know their roles and it is a leader’s duty to assign team members roles based on their skills since for personal growth they need to feel that their unique personalities are appreciated. A team should work with clear knowledge of the authority and decision making lines within the group. The leader should handle conflicts and be handy in solving them openly; there should be norms to act as standards to avoid conflict. A team should be productive and effective leading success.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the role of leadership is a gentle task; it calls for empathy and assertiveness at the same time. It is not easy handling such but with intrinsic qualities and personal training one can be a good leader. Leadership is social expectation amplified and epitomized in one person for the others to look up to.
References
Hannah, Sean T., Avolio, Bruce, Luthans, Fred and Harms, Peter D. (2008) Leadership Efficacy:
Review and Future Directions. University of Nebraska
House, Robert, Javidan, Mansour, Hanges, Paul and Dorfman, Peter (2002) Understanding
Cultures and Implicit Leadership Theories across the Globe; an Introduction to Project
GLOBE Journal of World Business 37 (2002)
