BOH4M1 Leading

The Nature of leadership 

  • Leadership:

    • The process of inspiring others to work hard to accomplish important task 

  • Contemporary Leadership challenges 

    • Shorter time frames for accomplishing things 

    • Expectations for success on the first attempt

    • Complex, ambiguous, and multidimensional Problems

    • Taking a long term view while meeting short term demands 


Leadership and Power 

  • Power:

    • The ability to get someone else to do something you want done or make things happen in the way you want

    • Power should be used to influence and control others for the common good rather than seeking to exercise control for personal satisfaction

  • Two sources of managerial power:

    • Position power

    • Personal power

  • Position power:

    • Based on a manager’s official status in the organization’s hierarchy of authority

  • Sources of position power:

    • Reward power:

      • Capable of offering something of value

    • Coercive power:

      • Capable of delivering punishment or withholding positive outcomes

    • Legitimate power:

      • Organizational position or status confers the right to control those in subordinate positions

  • Personal power:

    • Based on the unique personal qualities that a person brings to a leadership situation

  • Sources of personal power:

    • Expert power:

      • Capacity to influence others because of one’s knowledge and skills

  • Referent power:

    • Capacity to influence others because they admire you and want to identify positively with you


Leadership and Vision

  • Vision:

    • A future that one hopes to create or achieve in order to improve upon the present state of affairs

  • Visionary Leadership:

    • A leader who brings a clear and compelling sense of the future to any situation, as well as an understanding of the actions needed to get there successfully

  • Meeting the challenges of visionary leadership:

    • Challenge the process

    • Show enthusiasm

    • Help others to act

    • Set the example

    • Celebrate achievements

Leadership as Service

  • Servant leadership:

    • Commitment to serving others

    • Followers more important than leader

    • “Other centered” not “self-centered”

    • Power not a “zero-sum” quantity

    • Focuses on empowerment, not on power

  • ​​Servant Leadership and Empowerment:

    • Empowerment:

      • The way in which managers enable and help others to gain power and achieve influence.

  • Effective leaders empower othersby providing them with:

    • Information

    • Responsibility

    • Authority

    • Trust


Leadership Traits 

  • Drive

  • Self-confidence

  • Creativity

  • Cognitive ability

  • Business knowledge

  • Motivation

  • Flexibility

  • Honesty and integrity


Leadership[ Behaviours 

  • Leadership behaviour theories focus on how leaders behave when working with followers

  • Leadership styles are recurring patterns of behaviours exhibited by leaders

  • Basic dimensions of leadership behaviours:

    • Concern for the task to be accomplished

    • Concern for the people doing the work


Two Dimensions of Leadership 

  • Task Concerns:

    • Plans and defines work to be done

    • Assigns task responsibilities

    • Sets clear work standards

    • Urges task completion

    • Monitors performance results

  • People Concerns:

    • Acts warm and supportive toward followers

    • Develops social rapport with followers

    • Respects the feelings of followers

    • Is sensitive to followers’ needs

    • Shows trust in followers


Blake and Mouton Leadership Grid 

  • Team management:

    • High task concern; high people concern

  • Authority-obedience management:

    • High task concern; low people concern

  • Country club management:

    • High people concern; low task concern

  • Impoverished management:

    • Low task concern; low people concern

  • Middle of the road management:

    • Non-committal for both task concern and people concern


Classical Leadership Style 

  • Classic leadership styles:

  • Autocratic style:

    • Emphasizes work over people, keeps authority and information within the leader’s tight control, and acts in a unilateral command-and-control fashion

  • Human relations style:

    • Emphasizes people over work.

  • Laissez-faire style:

    • Shows little concern for task at hand, lets the group make decisions, and acts with a “do the best you can and don’t bother me” attitude

  • Democratic style:

    • Committed to task and people, getting things done while sharing information, encouraging participation in decision making, and helping people develop skills and competencies

Contingency Approaches to Leadership

  • Fiedler’s Contingency Model:

  • Good leadership depends on a match between leadership and situational demands

  • Determining leadership style:

    • Low LPC: task-motivated leaders

    • High LPC: relationship-motivated leaders

  • Leadership is part of one’s personality, and therefore relatively enduring and difficult to change

  • Leadership style must be fit to the situation

  • Diagnosing situational control:

    • Quality of leader-member relations (good or poor)

    • Degree of task structure (high or low)

    • Amount of position power (strong or weak)

  • Task oriented leaders are most successful in:

    • Very favourable (high control) situations

    • Very unfavourable (low control) situations

  • Relationship-oriented leaders are most successful in:

    • Situations of moderate control


Contingency Approaches to Leadership

  • The Hersey-Blanchard situational leadership model:

    • Leaders adjust their styles depending on the readiness of their followers to perform in a given situation

      • Readiness: how able, willing and confident followers are in performing tasks


Hersey-Blanchard situational leadership Styles

  • Delegating:

    • Low-task, low-relationship style

    • Works best in high readiness-situations

  • Participating:

    • Low-task, high-relationship style

    • Works best in low- to moderate-readiness situations

  • Selling:

    • High-task, high-relationship style

    • Work best in moderate- to high-readiness situations

  • Telling:

    • High-task, low-relationship style

    • Work best in low-readiness situations

Path-goal Leadership Theory

  • House’s path-goal leadership theory:

    • Effective leadership deals with the paths through which followers can achieve goals.

    • Leadership styles for dealing with path-goal relationships:

      • Directive leadership

      • Supportive leadership

      • Achievement-oriented leadership

      • Participative leadership


House Leadership Styles 

  • Directive leadership:

    • Communicate expectations

    • Give directions

    • Schedule work

    • Maintain performance standards

    • Clarify leader’s role

  • Supportive leadership:

    • Make work pleasant

    • Treat group members as equals

    • Be friendly and approachable

    • Show concern for subordinates’ well-being

  • Achievement-oriented leadership:

    • Set challenging goals

    • Expect high performance levels

    • Emphasize continuous improvement

    • Display confidence in meeting high standards

  • Participative leadership:

    • Involve subordinates in decision making

    • Consult with subordinates

    • Ask for subordinates’ suggestions

    • Use subordinates’ suggestions


House Leadership Styles 

  • When to use House’s leadership styles:

    • Use directive leadership when job assignments are ambiguous

    • Use supportive leadership when worker self-confidence is low

    • Use participative leadership when performance incentives are poor

    • Use achievement-oriented leadership when task challenge is insufficient


Leader-Member Exchange Theory (LMX)

  • Not all people are treated the same by leaders in leadership situations

  • “In groups”

    • High LMX

  • “Out groups”

    • Low LMX

  • Nature of the exchange is based on presumed characteristics by the leader

  • High LMX relationship:

    • favourable personality

    • Competency

    • compatibility

  • Low LMX relationship:

    • unfavourable personality

    • low competency

    • low compatibility


Leader Participation Model 

  • Vroom-Jago leader-participation theory:

  • Helps leaders choose the method of decision making that best fits the nature of the problem situation

  • Basic decision-making choices:

    • Authority decision

    • Consultative decision

    • Group decision


Decision Making Options in the Vroom-Jago Leader Participation theory 

  • Decide alone

  • Consult individually

  • Consult with group

  • Facilitate

  • Delegate


Study Questions 3: What are the contingency Approaches to Leadership 

  • Contingency factors in the Vroom-Jago leader-participation theory:

    • Decision quality:

      • Who has the information needed for problem solving?

  • Decision acceptance:

    • What is the importance of subordinate acceptance to eventual implementation?

  • Decision time:

    • Is there enough time available to make and implement the decision?

  • According to Vroom-Jago leader-participation theory, a leader should use authority-oriented decision methods when:

    • The leader has greater expertise to solve a problem

    • The leader is confident and capable of acting alone

    • Others are likely to accept  and implement the decision

    • Little or no time is available for discussion

  • Benefits of participative decision methods:

    • Help improve decision quality

    • Help improve decision acceptance

    • Helps develop leadership potential

  • Potential disadvantages of participative decision methods:

    • Lost efficiency

    • Not particularly useful when problems must be solved immediately


Study Question 4: What are some current issues in Leadership Development 

  • Superleaders:

    • Persons whose vision and strength of personality have an extraordinary impact on others

  • Charismatic leaders:

    • Develop special leader-follower relationships and inspire others in extraordinary ways

  • Transactional leadership:

    • Someone who directs the efforts of others through tasks, rewards, and structures

  • Transformational leadership:

    • Someone who is truly inspirational as a leader and who arouses others to seek extraordinary performance accomplishments

  • Characteristics of transformational leaders:

    • Vision

    • Charisma

    • Symbolism

    • Empowerment

    • Intellectual Stimulation

    • Integrity

  • Emotional Intelligence:

    • The ability of people to manage themselves and their relationships effectively

    • Components of emotional intelligence:

      • Self-awareness

      • Self-regulation

      • Motivation

      • Empathy

      • Social skill

  • Gender and Leadership:

    • Future leadership success will depend on a person’s capacity to:

      • Be open

      • Have positive relationships

      • Be supportive

      • Be empowering

  • Gender and Leadership (cont’d):

    • Both women and men can be effective leaders

    • Women tend to use interactive leadership, which shares the qualities of transformational leadership

    • Men tend to use transactional leadership

    • Interactive leadership provides a good fit with the demands of a diverse workforce and the new workplace

  • Moral Leadership:

    • Ethical leadership adheres to moral standards meeting the test of  “good” rather than “bad” and “right” rather than “wrong”

    • All leaders are expected to maintain high ethical standards

    • Long-term, sustainable success requires ethical behaviour

    • Integrity involves the leader’s honesty, credibility, and consistency in putting values into action

    • Leaders with integrity earn the trust of their followers

    • Leaders have a moral obligation to build performance capacities by awakening people’s potential

    • Authentic leadership activates performance through the positive psychological states of confidence, hope, optimism, and resilience

    • Authentic leadership helps in clearly framing and responding to moral dilemmas, and serving as an ethical role model

  • Drucker’s “Old-fashioned” Leadership:

    • Leadership is more than charisma; it is “good old-fashioned” hard work

    • Essentials of “old-fashioned” leadership:

      • Defining and establishing a sense of mission

      • Accepting leadership as a “responsibility” rather than a rank

      • Earning and keeping the trust of others