A. Leadership is the process by which a person exerts influence over other people and inspires, motivates, and directs their activities to achieve organizational goals. Personal leadership style shapes how managers choose to influence others.
B. Power: The Key to Leadership
1. Legitimate power – authority that accompanies the position in the organization.
2. Reward power – the ability to give or withhold tangible and intangible rewards
3. Coercive power – the ability to punish others.
4. Expert power – derived from knowledge, skills, and expertise.
5. Referent power – derived from the respect, admiration and loyalty of others.
C. Empowerment: An Ingredient in Modern Management
1. Empowerment is the process of giving employees at all levels the authority to make decisions and be responsible for their outcomes.
2. Empowerment can contribute to effective leadership by increasing worker commitment and freeing up managers' time.
3. Empowerment must be introduced properly for it to be effective, with clear company values and mission, and employees with relevant skills and confidence that are supported and recognized.
II. Early Models of Leadership
Leaders provide vision and strategy whereas managers implement the strategies.
A. The Trait Model – attempts to identify personal characteristics that are related to effective leadership. But no consistent relationship has been found.
B. The Behavioural Models
1. Employee-centred behaviour (consideration)– a leader shows trust, respect, and care toward subordinates
2. Task-oriented behaviour (initiating structure)– a leader makes sure that the work gets done and that the organization is efficient and effective.
3. Blake and Mouton's Managerial Grid identifies five styles based on high/low on the above two dimensions
III. Contingency Models of Leadership
– take into account the situation or context.
A. Fiedler's Contingency Model - leaders have fixed styles.
1. A relationship oriented style is most effective in moderately favourable situations and a
task-oriented style is most effective in very favourable or very unfavourable conditions.
2. How favourable the situation is depends on leader-member relations, task structure (clarity of task and process), and position power (amount of legitimate, reward and coercive power).
3. Fiedler believes that leaders can't change their style, so the situation must fit or be changed.
B. Hersey-Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory - leaders choose from four specific leader behaviours, from highly directive to laissez-faire, that will match the follower's ability and motivation.
C. House's Path-Goal Theory – focuses on what leaders can do to motivate subordinates. Leader behaviours can be directive, supportive, participative, or achievement-oriented, depending on the nature of subordinates and their work.
1. Find out what subordinates are trying to obtain from their jobs
2. Reward subordinates for high performance with outcomes they want
3. Clarify the paths to goal attainment for subordinates, remove obstacles, and express confidence in their capability
D. The Leader Substitutes Model – sometimes leadership is unnecessary as characteristics of the subordinates (e.g. skills, abilities) or situation (e.g. interesting work) can act as substitutes.
E. Bringing It All Together – effective leaders lead in appropriate ways given the situation and the subordinates that they are leading. The theories are complementary as they all look at leadership from different angles.
IV. Transactional and Transformational Models of Leadership
A. Transactional leaders use reward power and coercive power to guide and motivate subordinates toward established goals. Transformational leaders make subordinates aware of how important their jobs are to the organization, make subordinates aware of their own needs for growth, development, and accomplishment, and motivate subordinates to work for the good of the organization.
B. Influencing Others
Transformational leaders can influence their followers in three ways:
1. Being a Charismatic Leader – having a vision and enthusiastically communicating it to others.
2. Stimulate Subordinates Intellectually and empower them to solve problems
3. Engage in Developmental Consideration to provide support, encouragement and growth opportunities
C. Research supports that transformational leadership is superior.
V. Gender, Culture, Emotional Intelligence, and Leadership
A. Gender and Leadership – there are relatively few women in top management
1. Sometimes women are more participative than men. Two possible reasons are:
a. Subordinates may try to resist the leadership of female managers.
b. Female sometimes have better interpersonal skills than male managers.
2. Male and female managers do not differ significantly in leader behaviour or effectiveness.
B. Leadership Styles Across Cultures
1. European managers tend to be more people-oriented than American managers.
2. Canadian leaders tend to emphasize short-run performance.
C. Emotional intelligence and Leadership
1. The ability to understand and manage the moods and emotions of yourself and others, helps leaders to be more effective.
2. Emotional intelligence affects how leaders relate to and deal with their followers, especially in being supportive of creativity and responding appropriately when they make mistakes.
