WEEK 3

• Leader - Someone who can influence others and who has managerial authority.

• Leadership - What leaders do; the process of influencing a group to achieve goals.

• Ideally, all managers should be leaders.

Early Leadership Theories: Trait and Skills Theories

– Research focused on identifying personal characteristics that differentiated leaders from non-leaders was unsuccessful.

– Later research on the leadership process identified seven traits associated with successful leadership:• Drive, the desire to lead, honesty and integrity, self-

confidence, intelligence, job-relevant knowledge, and extraversion

Early Leadership Theories: Style (Behavioral) Theories

University of Iowa Studies (Kurt Lewin)• Identified three leadership styles:

– Autocratic style: centralized authority, low participation

– Democratic style: involvement, high participation, feedback

– Laissez faire style: hands-off management

• Research findings: mixed results– No specific style was consistently better for

producing better performance.– Employees were more satisfied under a

democratic leader than under an autocratic leader.

Early Leadership Theories: Style (Behavioral) Theories

University of Michigan Studies

• Identified two dimensions of leader behavior:– Employee oriented: emphasizing personal

relationships

– Production oriented: emphasizing task accomplishment

• Research findings: – Leaders who are employee oriented are strongly

associated with high performance.

Early Leadership Theories: Style (Behavioral) Theories

Ohio State Studies

– Identified two dimensions of leader behavior:• Initiating structure: the role of the leader in

defining his or her role and the roles of group members.

• Consideration: the leader’s mutual trust and respect for group members’ ideas and feelings.

• Appraises leadership styles using two dimensions:• Concern for people

• Concern for production

• Places managerial styles in five categories:• Impoverished management

• Task management• Middle-of-the-road management

• Country club management• Team management

Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid

Paternalism

Paternalism / maternalism refers to a leader who uses both 1,9 and 9,1 styles but does not integrate the two. This is the “caring dictator” who acts graciously but does so for the purpose of goal accomplishment.

Opportunism• Opportunism refers to a leader who uses any

combination of the basic five styles for the purpose of personal advancement. An opportunistic leader will adapt and shift his or her leadership style to gain personal advantage, putting self-interest ahead of other priorities.

HOW DOES THE STYLE APPROACH WORK?

The style approach provides a framework for assessing leadership in a comprehensive way, as behavior with a task and relationship dimension. The style approach works not by telling leaders how to behave, but by describing the major components of their behavior.An example may help explain how the style approach works. Imagine two college classrooms on the first day of class…

Strengths and Weakneses of Style Approaches

The style approach broadened the scope of leadership research to include the behaviors of leaders and what they do in various situations.

The style approach is validated by a mass of research studies that offer a possible approach to understanding the leadership process.

Whenever leadership occurs, the leader is acting out both task and relationship behaviors; the key to being an effective leader often rests on how the leader balances these two behaviors. Together they form the core of the leadership process

Based on the style approach, leaders can assess their actions and determine how they may want to change to improve their leadership style.

o First, the research on styles has not adequately shown how leaders’ styles are associated with performance outcomes

o This approach has failed to find a universal style of leadership that could be effective in almost every situation.

o The style approach is that it implies that the most effective leadership style is the high–high style

Strengths and Weakneses of Style Approaches