The Nature of Leadership

Leadership
The process by which a person exerts influence over others and inspires, motivates and directs their activities to achieve group or organizational goals.
Effective leadership increases the firms ability to meet new challenges.

Leader
An individual who is able to exert influence over other people to help achieve group or organizational goals

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The Nature of Leadership

Personal Leadership Style
The specific ways in which a manager chooses to influence others shapes the way that manager approaches the other tasks of management.
Leaders may delegate and support subordinates, while others are very authoritarian.

The challenge is for managers at all levels to develop an effective personal management style.

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Leadership Across Cultures

Leadership styles may vary among different countries or cultures.
European managers tend to be more peoplepeopleoriented than American or Japanese managers. Japanese managers are group-oriented, while U.S groupmanagers focuses more on profitability. Time horizons also are affected by cultures.
U.S. firms often focus on short-run efforts and results. short Japanese firms have a longer-run perspective. longer European firms fall somewhere between the U.S. and Japanese orientations.
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Sources of Managerial Power

Figure 13.1
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Empowerment: An Ingredient in Modern Management

Empowerment
The process of giving workers at all levels more authority to make decisions and the responsibility for their outcomes. Empowerment helps managers:
Get workers involved in the decisions. Increase worker commitment and motivation. Have time to focus on other issues.

Effective managers usually empower substantial authority to workers.

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Leadership Models (cont d)

Behavioral Model
Identifies the two basic types of behavior that many leaders engaged in to influence their subordinates:
Consideration: employee-centered leadership employeebehavior indicating that a manager trusts, respects, and cares about subordinates Initiating structure: job-oriented leadership behavior jobthat managers engage in to ensure that work gets done, subordinates perform their jobs acceptably, and the organization is efficient and effective. Both behaviors are independent; managers can be high or low on both behaviors.
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Contingency Models of Leadership

Fiedlers Model
Effective leadership is contingent on both the characteristics of the leader and of the situation. Leader style is the enduring, characteristic approach to leadership that a manager uses and does not readily change.
Relationship-oriented style: leaders concerned with Relationshipdeveloping good relations with their subordinates and to be liked by them. Task-oriented style: leaders whose primary concern Taskis to ensure that subordinates perform at a high level so the job gets done.
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Fiedler s Model
Situation Characteristics
How favorable a situation is for leading to occur. Leader-member relations determines how much Leaderworkers like and trust their leader. Task structure the extent to which workers tasks are clear-cut; clear issues make a situation clearfavorable for leadership. Position Power the amount of legitimate, reward, and coercive power leaders have due to their position. When positional power is strong, leadership opportunity becomes more favorable.
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Fiedler s Contingency Theory of Leadership

Figure 13.2
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House s Path-Goal Theory Path A contingency model of leadership proposing the effective leaders can motivate subordinates by:
1. Clearly identifying the outcomes workers are trying to obtain from their jobs. 2. Rewarding workers for high-performance and goal highattainment with the outcomes they desire 3. Clarifying the paths to the attainment of the goals, remove obstacles to performance, and express confidence in worker s ability.

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Motivating with Path-Goal Path Path-Goal identifies four leadership behaviors: PathDirective behaviors: set goals, assign tasks, show how to do things. Supportive behavior: look out for the worker s best interest. Participative behavior: give subordinates a say in matters that affect them. Achievement-oriented behavior: Setting very Achievementchallenging goals, believing in worker s abilities.

Which behavior to be used depends on the nature of the subordinates and the tasks.
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The Leader Substitutes Model

Leadership Substitute
Acts in the place of a leader and makes leadership unnecessary. Possible substitutes can be found in:
Characteristics of the subordinates: their skills, experience, motivation. Characteristics of context: the extent to which work is interesting and fun.

Worker empowerment or self-managed work teams selfreduce leadership needs. Managers should be aware that they do not always need to directly exert influence over workers.
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Transformational Leadership
Leadership that:
Makes subordinates aware of the importance of their jobs and performance to the organization by providing feedback to the worker. Makes subordinates aware of their own needs for personal growth and development. Motivates workers to work for the good of the organization, not just themselves.

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Being a Charismatic Leader

Charismatic Leader
An enthusiastic, self-confident transformational selfleader able to clearly communicate his or her vision of how good things could be by:
Being excited and clearly communicating excitement to subordinates. Openly sharing information with employees so that everyone is aware of problems and the need for change. Empowering workers to help with solutions. Engaging in the development of employees by working hard to help them build skills.
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Transactional Leadership
Transactional Leaders
Use their reward and coercive powers to encourage high performance they exchange rewards for performance and punish failure. Push subordinates to change but do not seem to change themselves. Do not have the vision of the transformational leader.

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Gender and Leadership

The number of women managers is rising but is still relatively low in the top levels of management.
Stereotypes suggest women are supportive and concerned with interpersonal relations. Similarly, men are seen as task-focused. task Research indicates that actually there is no gendergenderbased difference in leadership effectiveness. Women are seen to be more participative than men because they adopt the participative approach to overcome subordinate resistance to them as managers and they have better interpersonal skills.
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Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

The Moods of Leaders:
Affect their behavior and effectiveness as leaders. Affect the performance of their subordinates.

Emotional Intelligence
Helps leaders develop a vision for their firm. Helps motivate subordinates to commit to the vision. Energizes subordinates to work to achieve the vision.

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