Organizational Behavior
Chapter 12
Leadership in organizational settings

What is leadership?

Leadership: influencing, motivating, and enabling others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.

• Leaders motivate others through persuasion and other influence tactics
• Leaders are enablers

Shared leadership

Shared leadership: the view that leadership is a role, not a position assigned to one person. Consequently, people within the team and organization lead each other.

Shared leadership typically supplements formal leadership. Employees lead along with the formal manager, rather than replace the manager.
Shared leadership flourishes in organizations where the formal leaders are willing to delegate power and encourage employees to take initiative and risks without fear of failure. (a learning orientation culture).
Also collaborative rather than competitive.

Transformational leadership perspective

The most popular leadership perspective is transformational leadership.
Transformational leadership: a leadership that explains how leaders change teams or organizations by creating, communicating, and modeling a vision for the organization or work unit and inspiring employees to strive for that vision.

Four elements:

• Develop and communicate a strategic vision
• Model the vision
• Encourage experimentation
• Build commitment to the vision

Develop and communicate a strategic vision

The heart of transformational leadership is a strategic vision.
Vision: a positive image or model of the future that energizes and unifies employees.
Sometimes this vision is created by the leader, at other times it is formed by employees or other stakeholders and then adopted and championed by the formal leader.

An effective strategic vision has several identifiable features:

• It refers to an idealized future with a higher purpose
  This purpose is associated with personal values that directly or indirectly fulfill the needs of multiple stakeholders.
• A vision is a challenging, distant, and abstract goal. So it needs to motivate employees to accomplish it.
• It is unifying

A strategic vision is necessarily abstract for two reasons:

• The vision hasn’t yet been experienced, so it isn’t possible to detail what the vision looks like
• An abstract description enable s the vision to remain stable over time, yet is sufficiently flexible to accommodate operational adjustments in a shifting external environment.

A strategic vision’s effectiveness depends on how leaders convey it to followers and other stakeholders.

• Effective transformational leaders generate meaning and motivation in followers by relying on symbols, metaphors, stories, and other vehicles that transcend plain language.
• Choosing phrases that ‘frame’ the vision.
• Communicate the vision with humility, sincerity and a level of passion that reflects their personal belief in the vision and optimism that employees can succeed.

Model the vision

Transformational leaders do not only talk about a vision, they enact it.
They ‘walk the talk’ by stepping outside the executive suit and doing things that symbolize the vision.

Modeling vision legitimizes and demonstrates what the vision looks like in practice.
Also builds employee trust in the leader.

Encourage experimentation

Transformational leadership is about change, and central to any change is discovering new behaviors and practices that are better aligned with the desired vision.
Effective transformational leaders encourage employees to question current practices and to experiment new ways that are potentially more consistent with the visionary future state.
They support a learning orientation.

Build commitment toward the vision

Transforming a vision into reality requires employee commitment, and transformational leaders build this commitment in several ways.

• Their words, symbols, and stories build a contagious enthusiasm that energizes people to adopt the vision as their own
• Leaders demonstrate a can-do attitude by enacting and behaving consistently with their vision
• By encouraging experimentation, leaders involve employees in change process so it is a collective activity.
• Rewards, recognition and celebrations

Transformational leadership and charisma

Charisma is distinct from transformational leadership.
Charisma is a personal trait or relational quality that provides referent power over followers, whereas transformational leadership is a set of behaviors that engage followers toward a better future.

• Transformational leadership motivates followers through behaviors that persuade and earn trust, whereas charismatic leadership motivates followers directly through the leader’s inherent referent power.

Being charismatic is not inherently good or bad.
But

• Charismatic leadership tends to produce dependent followers. Transformational leadership has the opposite effect.
• Leaders who posses charisma may become intoxicated by this power.

Evaluating the transformational leadership perspective

Transformational leaders do make difference

• Subordinates are more satisfied and have higher affective organizational commitment under transformational leaders
• Perform jobs better
• Engage in more organizational citizenship behaviors
• Make better or more creative decisions

Challenges

• Some models engage in circular logic.
• Some transformational leadership theories combine leader behaviors with the personal characteristics of leaders
• It is usually described as a universal concept. But only a few studies have investigated whether it is better.

Managerial leadership perspective

Managerial leadership: a leadership perspective stating that effective leaders help employees improve their performance and well-being toward current objectives and practices.

• Managerial leadership assumes the organization objectives are stable and aligned with the external environment.
• It focuses on continuously developing or maintaining the effectiveness of employees and work units toward those established objectives and practices.
• Managerial leadership is more micro-focuses and concrete. It relates to the specific performance and well-being objectives of individual employees and the immediate work unit.

Transformational and managerial leadership are described as interdependent perspectives.
Every manager needs to apply both transformational and managerial leadership behaviors to varying degrees.

Task-oriented and people-oriented leadership

Each style has its advantages and disadvantages.
Effective leaders rely on both styles, in different ways.

Servant leadership

Servant leadership: the view that leaders serve followers, rather than vice versa. Leaders help employee fulfill their needs and are coaches, stewards, and facilitators of employee development.

The main objective of servant leadership is to help followers and other stakeholders fulfill their needs and potentially, particularly to become more healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants.

Features:

• Servant leaders have a natural desire or ‘calling’ to serve others.
• Servant leaders maintain a relationship with others that is humble, egalitarian, and accepting.
• Servant leaders anchor their decisions and actions in ethical principles and practices.

Path-goal leadership theory

Path-goal leadership theory: a leadership theory stating that effective leaders choose the most appropriate leadership style(s), depending on the employee and situation, to influence people expectations about desired results and their positive outcomes.

Path-goal leadership styles

Four leadership styles:

• Directive
  The same as task-oriented leadership.
  Clarifying behaviors that provide a psychological structure for subordinates.
  Judicious use of rewards and disciplinary actions.
• Supportive
  The same as people-oriented leadership
• Participative
  Encourage and facilitate employee involvement in decisions beyond their normal work activities.
• Achievement-oriented
  Emphasizes behaviors that encourage employees to reach their peak performance.
  Applies goal-setting theory as well as positive expectations in self-fulfilling prophecy.

Leaders use two or more styles at the same time, if these styles are appropriate for the circumstances.

Path-goal theory contingencies

Each of the four leadership styles will be more effective in some situations than in others.
Two sets of situational variables that moderate the relationship between a leader’s style and effectiveness.

• Employee characteristics
• Characteristics of the employee’s work environment.

Four contingencies

• Skill and experience
• Locus of control
• Task structure
• Team dynamics

Evaluating path-goal theory

As path-goal theory expands, the model may become too complex for practical use.
In reality, leaders typically have a preferred style.

Other managerial leadership theories

Situational leadership theory

Situational leadership theory (SLT): a commercially popular but poorly supported leadership model stating that effective leaders vary their style with the motivation and ability of followers.
Identifies four leadership styles

• Telling
• Selling
• Participating
• Delegating

Fiedler’s contingency model

Fiedler’s contingency model: a leadership model stating that leader effectiveness depends on whether the person’s natural leadership style is appropriately matched to the situation.
Depends on:

• Situational control
  The degree of power and influence that the leader possesses in a particular situation
  Affected by three factors
  • Leader-member relations
  • Task structure
  • Position power

Leadership substitutes

Leadership substitutes: a theory identifying conditions that either limit a leader’s ability to influence subordinates or make a particular leadership style unnecessary.

• Task-oriented leadership might be less important when performance-based reward systems keep employees directed toward organizational goals.
• Increasing employee skill and experience might reduce the need for task-oriented leadership.
• Teams with norms that support organizational goals may substitute for achievement-oriented leadership, because employees encourage coworkers to stretch their performance levels.

Implicit leadership perspective

Implicit leadership theory: a theory stating that people evaluate a leader’s effectiveness in terms of how well that person fits preconceived beliefs about the features and behaviors of effective leaders (leadership prototypes) and that people tend to inflate the influence of leaders on organizational events.

Prototypes of effective leaders

Everyone has leadership prototypes, preconceived beliefs about the features and behaviors of effective leaders.
These prototypes shape the follower’s expectations and acceptance of other leaders. They also influence our perception of the leader’s effectiveness.

People want to trust their leader before they are willing to serve as followers, yet the leader’s actual effectiveness usually isn’t known for several months of possibly years.
The prototype comparison process is a quick way of estimating the leader’s effectiveness.

The romance of leadership

Followers tend to inflate the perceived influence of leaders on the organization’s success. The romance of leadership.
Exists because people in most cultures want to belief that leaders make a difference.

Two reasons people overestimate the leader’s influence on organizational outcomes

• Leadership is a useful way of us to simplify life events
• There is a strong tendency in western cultures to believe that life events are generated more by people than by uncontrollable natural forces.

One way that followers inflate their perceptions that leaders make a difference is through fundamental attribution error.

Personal attributes perspective of leadership

• Personality
• self-concept
• Drive
  Successful leaders have a moderately high need for achievement
• Integrity
  Having strong moral principles
• Leadership motivation
  They are motivated to lead others. Socialized power.
• Knowledge of the business
• Cognitive and practical intelligence
• Emotional intelligence

Authentic leadership

Authentic leadership: the view that effective leaders need to be aware of, feel comfortable with, and act consistently with their values, personality, and self-concept.
Knowing yourself and being yourself.

To be themselves, great leaders regulate their decisions and behavior is several ways:

• They develop their own style and move into positions where that style is most effective
• Effective leaders continually think about and consistently apply their stable hierarchy of personal values to hose decisions and behaviors.
• Leaders maintain consistency around their self-concept by having a strong, positive core self-evaluation.

Personal attributes perspective limitations and practical implications

The leadership attributes perspective has a few limitations:

• It assumes that all effective leaders have the same personal characteristics that are equally important in all situations
• Alternative combinations of attributes may be equally successful
• Personal attributes perspective views that leadership as something within a person, yet experts emphasize that leadership is relational.
• The link between personal characteristics and effective leadership is muddied by several perceptual distortions.
• The personal attributes perspective of leadership does not necessarily imply that leadership is a talent acquired at birth. It is potential.

Cross-cultural and gender issues in leadership

Cultural values and perspectives affect what leaders do. Implicit leadership theory.

Gender and leadership

Women do adopt a participative leadership style more readily than their male counterparts.