LEADERSHIP AND IMPROVING FOLLOWER PERFORMANCE

Leaders can improve the performance of their followers through various ways. Some of them are, by leaders creating trust and providing rewards to followers, exhibiting behavioural complexity, eliminating social loafing, acting as a servant, reducing organisational politics, creating and maintaining an effective organisational culture, involving followers in decision making, appropriate role allocation of followers, and use of workplace humour. This essay explains how leaders integrate the above mentioned factors with different leadership styles and improve followers performance with suitable examples. Moreover, it gives the underlying assumptions and shortcomings on using those factors. The essay concludes by summarizing the key findings and discusses on the implications and limitations of recommendations. The use of humour in workplace enhances followers performance and job satisfaction (Malone, 1980). The underlying assumption is that leader has high level of integrity. Humour stimulates employees to be creative and innovative and creates a favourable mood among them. Furthermore, it lightens the work atmosphere and facilitates the followers to raise their opinions and be clear on what work targets are. Also it builds group cohesion and interpersonal work relationships thereby increasing the individual and organizational performance. However, when leaders use humour and contingent reward or laissez-faire leadership style, it may worsen follower performance. Instead leaders must choose transformational style to employ humour and increase performance. For example, in financial institutions followers job performance was higher when the leader used humour at workplace. Humour can be counter-productive in cultures not open to humour and in organizations undergoing dramatic changes. Occasionally it can erode social-relations and create antagonism, so the leader must ensure humour is handled appropriately (Vecchio, Justin and Pearce, 2009).

Leaders should build trust in the mind of followers to increase their performance. By leader-member exchange theory, for social and economic exchanges promised by leader, followers in-turn trust and show their confidence on leaders actions. However, economic exchanges are short-termed so leaders must focus on creating a social bond through empowerment, social rewards and individual considerations. This would create a belief among followers that they are being treated with respect and dignity. Subsequently, it motivates the followers to work and obey the decisions of their leader (Chen, Hwang and Liu, 2009). For example, transformational leaders can build trust through empowerment and making promises on job security. Subsequently, followers get inspired and put forth extra effort. A leader can exhibit behavioural complexity by maintaining organisational stability and lead change, to improve team performance. For organisational stability, leaders can use bureaucratic leadership and make the employees to comply with policies and procedures and ensure accuracy in their work. Leaders can use relation-oriented leadership and maintain proper relationships with followers by showing concerns for their needs, encouraging participation and assisting in their career development. Moreover, leaders behaviour encourages followers to work swiftly and harder inorder to support changes in environment and customer demands. Eventually, it makes the followers to exhibit superior performance as they would show higher level of motivation and organisational commitment (Lawrence, Quinn and Lenk, 2003). However at few instances, subordinates might view leaders behavioural complexity as an inconsistency and a lack in integrity. This creates distrust and lowers the motivation to work resulting in reduction of performance (Dodd, 2009). A leader on providing contingent rewards to followers can increase their performance and job satisfaction (Densten, 2006). By applying path-goal theory, followers tend to take the path defined by their leaders and put in the required effort to reap the rewards set. Also, these rewards would be able to satisfy their physiological and esteem needs of Maslows hierarchy of needs. As a result, the followers would increase their work efforts leading to an increase in job performance (Densten,

2006). For example, leader can improve performance of sales team by providing commission based on the amount of sales each make. The limitation is that, followers will not get motivated always, towards intangible rewards like word of appreciation. Leaders must eliminate social loafing in the team to improve its performance. Social loafers exhibit lower levels of performance due to lack of effective performance evaluation, non-cohesiveness in team, unequal compensational rewards and so on. To overcome social loafing, leaders must maintain an optimum group size, define efficient evaluation and rewarding procedures, encourage group loyalty and interpersonal relationships. As a result, social loafers would get motivated and actively participate in group work, thereby increasing the performance (Lim and Zhong, 2006). For example, leaders can use people-oriented leadership to evaluate and improve individuals performance through proper assistance. The leader must provide an atmosphere wherein group members can openly exchange ideas and constructively evaluate others ideas. Moreover, the leader must involve group members in decision making process by using democratic leadership style. Consequently, the involvement of group members increases and they would feel being considered as valued individuals for functioning of group. As a result, the effectiveness of final decisions increases thereby leading to a raise in performance (McCormick, Barnett, Alavi and Newcombe, 2006). However, occasionally the constructive criticisms in the group may lead to a division in group breaking the group synergy and lowering the performance. On placing the needs of employees above their self-interests, leaders can achieve superior follower performance. Leaders become servant leaders and work for the benefit of the followers. This behavior creates an obligation and inspiration among followers and they will engage in organizational citizenship behavior to respond to leaders selfless act. Eventually, it improves the team effectiveness and followers performance (Russell and Stone, 2002). However, it can cause the leaders to lose their life balance due to their self-interests being overlooked. Also, servant leadership

is ineffective when organisational and follower goals conflict each other. This may result in followers goals being unfulfilled and reduces their job commitment. Servant leadership works only when the followers possess core skills and work-centred, making the leadership style effective only in long-run (Russell and Stone, 2002). Organisational politics can create lower levels of trust, satisfaction and commitment in an employee due to his/her negative attitudes towards organisation (Vigoda-Gadot, 2007). For example, when reward system is not based on external factors other than performance, by applying Vrooms expectancy or Equity theory, employees in out-group tend to show low levels of motivation. To overcome the issue, leaders must create an organisational atmosphere which is fair and fulfils the expectations of all the employees and eliminating matrix teams. Leaders can use transformational style to create positive perceptions of organisational climate by fairness and justice in the organisation and reducing feelings of inferiority. Ethical leadership can be also be used to ensure there is no ethical misconduct by the followers and thereby reducing political influence. However, transactional leadership can encourage politics because of underlying interest-based relationships between the leader and follower. The follower would tend to engage in political activities which would promote their self-interest (Vigoda-Gadot, 2007). Individuals prefer and are competent in performing only certain roles. So the leader must ensure that the roles are assigned matching the individuals preference and their skill set. The individuals would show higher performance due to higher job satisfaction and job fit. But, the individuals must be diverse in-order to get suited to all the necessary job roles of the team. By applying Belbins team role theory, leaders can form a balanced team by assessing the strengths and weakness of each individual. However, it can reduce the scope for creativity and flexibility (Belbin Team Roles). To overcome it, leaders must provide necessary training to followers to take-up other roles when needed. For example, an individual who is reliable and efficient must be the implementer of a team. The individuals inflexibility must be removed through learning and development to play a plant role.

An effective way to improve the performance of followers is to create and maintain an organisational culture which rewards and encourages collective effort (Kefela, 2010). The environment must promote continuous learning of followers and open exchange of opinions (Trinka, 2010). The leadership style that can be adopted is Innovative or Strategic leadership, to build the culture which embraces change and infuse followers to accept new ideologies and values (Bizmanualz, 2007). The leader must effectively communicate the changes to the followers and be a role-model for it. The followers would then respond to changes and participate in continuous learning to meet the competing demands, by enhancing their capabilities and performance. The underlying assumption is that, the followers must value continuous self-development and believe that it is the way to compete effectively. But few followers might offer resistance to change and refuse to accept the new beliefs and values (Haneburg, 2007). The essay has explained the various methods for improving the followers performance by using appropriate leadership styles. The use of workplace humour creates group cohesion and favourable mood. The trust in leader makes the followers to believe in leaders actions and behaviours. The use of contingent rewards allows the followers to satisfy their needs. Elimination of social loafing and organisational politics increases group loyalty and organisational commitment. Servant leadership inspires followers to exhibit organisational citizenship behavior. Organisational culture makes the followers to continuously develop and enhance their capabilities to meet the competing demands. As a result, followers would get motivated and deliver higher performance. The essay hasnt considered the usage of national culture, emotional intelligence and team-building to improve the performance. The leader must use a combination of various leadership styles to yield the best results from the followers. However, leader may not be an expert of following multiple leadership styles. The style must be chosen based on factors like time constraints, maturity, knowledge and experience of followers and leader, group size and its purpose, task and other external factors. Autocratic

leadership is effective for low-level workers while bureaucratic leadership can be used to define procedures and rules, when the job demands precision and repetition from workers. To create a sense of involvement and create awareness of role expectations, democratic leadership must be used. Laissez-faire leadership can be used while handling experienced and skilled followers. Autocratic leadership should be used during time critical situations. However to have a sustainable improved performance from followers, leaders must keep followers satisfied and motivated towards job. So, the leader must use relationship-oriented leadership or transformational leadership and maintain a good relationship, show positive emotions towards followers and thereby build trust. The self-interests and opinions of the followers must be considered and make them feel as valued individuals. However, the leader must be aware of the limitations of each leadership style and should eliminate it through appropriate measures.

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