Managing Leadership and Influence Processes
Indroduction:
Meaning:
Leadership is the use of noncoercive influence to shape the group or organization’s goals, motivate behavior toward the achievement of those goals, and help define group or organizational culture.
•Leadership is the set of characteristics attributed to individuals who are perceived to be leaders.
Leadership and Management:
•Leadership and management are related, but they are not same.
•A person can be a manager, a leader, both, neither.
•Organization need both management and leadership if they are to be effective.
•Managers administer, copy, maintain, focus on systems and structures, rely on control, take the short view, ask how and when, accept the status quo, and do things right.
•On the other hand, leaders innovate, do the originals, develop, focus on people, inspire, take the long view, ask what and why, challenge status quo, and do the right thing.
Leadership and Power:
•Power is the ability to affect the behavior of others.
•In organizational settings, there are usually five kinds of power: legitimate, reward, coercive, referent, and expert power.
•Legitimate power is power granted through the organizational hierarchy; it is the power defined by the organization to be accorded to people occupying a particular position.
•Reward power is the power to give or withhold rewards, such as salary increases, bonuses, promotions, praise, recognition, and interesting job assignments.
•Coercive power is the power to force compliance by means of psychological, emotional, or physical threat.
•Referent power is the personal power that accrues to someone based on identification, imitation, loyalty, or charisma.
•Expert power is the personal power that accrues to someone based on the information or expertise that they possess.
Leadership Behavior:
Job-centered leader Behavior
Employee-Centered Leader Behavior
Types of Leadership in Organization:
•Organizational leadership can be autocratic, bureaucratic, democratic or participative, collegial, or even laissez-faire. It can also be visionary, charismatic, transactional, or transformational.
•An autocratic leader centralizes power and decision making authority, dictates the employees with strict supervision of their activities, and generally ignores the human side of the enterprise. However, there can be benevolent autocrats who sometimes sympathizes the employees on different occasions.
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•A bureaucratic leader goes by the rules, policies and procedures. A chain of command is strictly adhered to; authority passes down vertically; and no compromise is made as to the abiding with the established rules.
•A democratic or participative leader empowers the employees, encourages them to fully participate in decision-making, and decentralizes authority. Critics say that the most popular decision may not be the right decision. Rather it may be time-consuming.
•A supportive leader treats group members as equal, shows concern for the well-being of employees, and in a friendly and approachable manner do the things to make work more pleasant.
•A collegial leader provides freedom to the members of the work-team and lends supports whenever asked for. Collegial type of leadership is especially suitable in research organizations where the members of research teams are well-qualified to guide themselves and require little directions.
•A laissez-faire leader exercises no control over the followers who make decisions on their own. They avoid taking stands on issues, do not emphasize results, refrain from intervening, and avoid making decisions. Such leadership has been connected with the reason for low productivity, lack of innovation, and more conflicts among subordinates.
—Some of the above styles involve concerns for task (such as autocratic, bureaucratic) and some others involve concerns for people (such as participative, collegial and laissez-faire).
—Leader-behavior researchers suggest that effective organizational leaders will be good at participative leadership that is high in both task and people concerns.
•Perspectives of Leadership: The contemporary leadership approaches have identified four types of competing but related perspectives of leadership: (i) visionary leadership, (ii) charismatic leadership, (iii) transactional leadership, and (iv) transformational leadership.
Visionary leadership
• An organization cannot effectively survive without a sound and pragmatic vision—a dream of the future. Vision is a term used to describe a clear sense of the future. It inspires people to achieve excellence in performance in order for the goal to be accomplished.
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•An organizational leader is viewed as visionary when he can create a “good vision” and lead the people to turn the vision into results. Visionary leaders encourage innovation, support people who have ideas, inspire others to share in a common vision, help others to gainfully utilize their talents, set example as role models, and celebrate achievements.
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Charismatic Leaders
•In the late nineteenth century the famous German sociologist Max Weber defined charisma as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or quality’.
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•Charismatic leaders are able to influence organizational culture. They can positively influence individual outcomes, group outcomes, and organizational outcomes.
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•Charismatic leadership is most likely to be effective when (i) the situation offers opportunities for moral involvement, (ii) self-goals cannot be easily established and measured, (iii) extrinsic rewards cannot be clearly linked to individual performance, (iv) there are few situational cues or constraints to guide behavior, and (v) exceptional efforts and performance are required of both leaders and followers.
Transactional Leadership
• In transactional leadership the leader adjusts tasks, rewards and structures to help followers meet their needs while working to accomplish organizational objectives. Interpersonal transactions between managers and employees are the focus of transactional leadership. It is characterized by two factors: (i) leaders use contingent rewards to motivate employees, and (ii) leaders exerts corrective action only when subordinates fail to obtain performance goals.
•Transactional leaders can manage emergencies with structures that have already been set up. But it is not effective for long-term problems.
Transformational Leadership
•Transformational Leadership motivates followers to work for transcendental goals and to perform beyond their expectations. Transformational leaders use charisma and related qualities to raise aspirations and shift people and organizational systems into new high-performance patterns. In today’s dynamic environment, transformational leadership is thought of crucially essential to achieve extraordinary performance.
Emerging Approaches to Leadership:
•Strategic Leadership
•Cross-Cultural Leadership
•Ethical Leadership
Political Behavior in Organizations:
The activities carried out for specific purpose of acquiring, developing, and using power and other resources to obtain one’s preferred outcomes