Leadership Approach Paper
Leadership in organizations is very important because it determines the organization’s performance. Leadership effectiveness in organizations is best evaluated based on the impact of influence on a team, an individual, group or the whole organization. There are many approaches to leadership that can be used in an organization. Usually, these approaches could be based on the characteristics of followers, situations or the leaders themselves. One such approach is the power-influence approach.
The power influence theory of leadership explores the processes of influence between a leader and other individuals such as his seniors, colleagues and subordinates. This theory emphasizes on behavior and traits hence; it is leader centered. It has an implicit assumption whereby it is believed that leaders act while their followers react. The main objective of this leadership perspective is to emphasize the effectiveness of a leader based on the type and amount of power they possess and how they exercise this power. Power is necessary when seeking to influence subordinates, superiors, peer colleague, as well as individuals outside the organization, for instance suppliers and clients. When using this theory to study leadership in an organization, the best methodology would be to carry out a survey by administering questionnaires to people in the organization. They would be asked to relate the power and leadership style of the leader to various leadership measures to help determine the leader’s effectiveness.
Some power influence perspective studies use descriptive incidents and questionnaires to find out how a leader can influence the behavior and attitude of his or her followers. Studying influence tactics is used as a link to this theory as well as the behavior theory. Different kinds of influence tactics can be compared based on the relative effectiveness for the leader getting other people to do what he or she wants.
The power influence theory can be said to be a participative leadership approach if it involves empowerment and power sharing of subordinates. However, this theory is also deeply embedded in behavior study traditions. In most cases, questionnaires are used to determine the relationship between follower opinions of participative leadership with the standard of leadership effectiveness, for instance, follower satisfaction, performance and effort. Both field and laboratory studies can be used to compare participative and autocratic styles of leadership. In descriptive a case study, there is an examination of how managers use delegations and consultations. This is meant to provide other people with a sense of responsibility and ownership for making some decisions in the organization.
The power influence theory of leadership study has several merits. This approach provides a clear and practical perspective of how leaders influence people in and out of an organization. It is also a reliable approach because, in most cases, studies are done directly in the organization through survey questionnaires. This gives researchers a high chance of obtaining an accurate conclusion about the effectiveness of a leader. Furthermore, this leadership study approach is easy to conduct since it involves survey questionnaires or descriptive incidents from the leader’s followers.
The theory also has some weaknesses too. There is an assumption that followers react to everything that the leader acts upon. This is not always the case, especially in organizations with decentralized systems of leadership. In participative leadership, followers make decisions and act even without the leader’s orders because responsibilities are divided. Since leadership effectiveness cannot be measured numerically, it is difficult to use this approach to measure the level of leadership effectiveness.
