Leadership and Creating Trust
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PADM 202
Transcript of Leadership and Creating Trust
• It has been accepted as a truism that good leadership is essential to businesses, to government, and to the countless groups and organizations that shape the way we live, work, and play.
• If leadership is such an important factor, the crucial issue is: what makes a great leader?
• The tempting answer to give is: Great followers!
• Although there is some truth to this response, the issue is far more complex.
What is Leadership?
• Leadership is the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of goals.
• The source of this influence may be formal, such as that provided by the possession of managerial rank in an organization.
• Because management positions come with some degree of formally designed authority, an individual may assume a leadership role as a result of the position he or she holds in the organization.
• But not all leaders are managers, nor, for that matter, are all managers leaders?
• Just because an organization provides its managers with certain rights is no assurance they will be able to lead effectively.
• No transactional leadership, that is, the ability to influence that arises outside of the formal influence. In other words, leaders can emerge from within a group as well as being formally appointed.
• In other words, leaders can emerge from within as well as being formally appointed.
Trait Theories
• If one were to describe a leader on the basis of the general connotations presented in today’s media, one might list qualities such as intelligence, charisma, decisiveness, enthusiasm, strength, bravery, integrity, self-confidence, and so on.
• Is it possible to isolate one or more personality traits in individuals we generally acknowledge as leaders-Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell-that non leaders do not possess?
• We may agree that those individuals meet our definition of a leader, but they represent individuals with utterly different characteristics.
Behavioral Theories
• Behavioral theories of leadership sought to find something unique in the way that effective leaders behave. Do they tend to be more democratic than autocratic?
• The difference between trait and behavioral theories, in terms of application , lies in their underlying assumptions. If trait theories were valid, then leaders were basically born.
Managerial Grid
• A graphic portrayal of a two-dimensional view of leadership styles was developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton
• .They proposed a managerial grid based on the styles of “concern for people” and concern for production”, which essentially represent the Ohio State dimensions of consideration and initiating structure or the Michigan dimensions of employee-oriented and production –oriented.
• The grid has 9 possible positions along each axis, creating 81 different positions in which the leader’s style may fall.
• The grid does not show results produced but rather the dominating factors in a leader’s thinking in regard to getting results.
• On the basis of the findings from the research Blake and Mouton conducted, they concluded that managers perform best under a 9.9 style, as concerned , for example, with a 9.1 (tasked-oriented ) or the 1.9 (country-club type) leader.
• Unfortunately, the grid offers a better framework for conceptualizing leadership style than for presenting any tangible new information in clarifying the leadership quandary, since there is little substantive evidence to support the conclusion that a 9.9 style is most effective in all situations.
Summary of Behavioral Theories
• We have discussed the most popular and important of the attempts to explain leadership In terms of the behavior by the leader.
• Unfortunately, there was very little success in identifying consistent relationships between patterns of leadership behavior and group performance.
• What was missing was consideration of the situational factors that influence success or failure.
• For example, it seems unlikely that Martin Luther King Jr. , would have been a great civil rights leader In 1900, yet he was in the 1950s and 1960s.
Contingency Theory
• It became increasingly clear to those were studying the leadership phenomenon that predicting leadership success was more complex than isolating a few traits or preferable behaviors.
• The failure to obtain consistent results led to a new focus on situational influences.
• The relationship between leadership style and effectiveness suggested that style x would be appropriate under condition a, whereas style y would be more suitable for condition b, and style z, for condition c.
• but what were the conditions a, b, c, and so forth?
• It was one thing to say that leadership effectiveness was dependent on the situation and another to be able to isolate those situational conditions.
The Fiedler Model
• The first contingency model for leadership was developed by Fred Fiedler.
• The Fiedler Model proposes that effective group performance depends on the proper match between the leader’s style of interacting with his or her subordinates and the degree to which the situation gives control and influence to the leader.
• Fiedler believed that the individual’s basic leadership style is a key factor in leadership success.
• So he began by trying to find out what the basic style was. Fiedler created an instrument, which he called the least-preferred co-worker (LPC) questionnaire, for this purpose.
• It contains 16 contrasting adjectives (such as pleasant/unpleasant, efficient/inefficient, open/guarded, and supportive/hostile) and purports to measure whether a person is task-oriented or relationship-oriented.
• The questionnaire asks the respondents to think of all the coworkers he or she has ever had and to describe the one person he or she least enjoyed working with by rating that person on a scale of 1 to 8 for each of the 16 sets of contrasting adjectives.
• After an individual’s basic leadership style has been assessed through the LPC , it is necessary to match the leader with the situation. Three situational factors or contingency dimensions identified by Fiedler are defined as follows:
• 1. Leader-member relations: the degree of confidence, trust, and respect subordinates have in or for their leader.
• 2. Task structure: the degree to which the job assignments of subordinates are structured or unstructured
• 3. Position power: the degree of influence a leader has over power variables such as hiring, firing, discipline, promotions and salary increases.
• The next step in the Fiedler model is to evaluate the situation in terms of these three contingency variables.
• Leader-member relations are either good or poor, task structure either high or low, and position power either strong or weak.
• Fiedler stated that the better the leader-member relations, the more highly structured the job, and the stronger the position power, the more control or influence the leader had.
Leader Member Exchange Theory
• The Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory argues that leaders establish a special relationship with a small group of their followers.
• These individuals make up the leader’s in group-people that the leader trusts, gets a disproportionate amount of his or her time, and are more likely to receive special privileges.
• Other followers fall into the out-group. They get less of the leader’s time, fewer of the preferred rewards that the leader controls, and have leader-follower relations based on formal authority interactions.
• The theory proposes that early in the history of the interaction between a leader and a given follower, the leader implicitly categorizes the follower as an “in” or an “out” and that relationship is relatively stable over time.
• Studies confirm several LMX theory predictions: leaders do differentiate among followers ; these disparities are far from random; and followers with in-group status have higher performance ratings, lower turnover interventions, greater satisfaction with their superiors, and higher overall satisfaction than those in the out-group.
