LeadershipEssay Preview: LeadershipReport this essayEveryone has probably played the game “Follow the Leader” back in elementary school. It is a game where the leader stands in front of the line. He or she can say or do anything, and her followers (standing in a straight line behind her) must repeat exactly the same thing he or she does or says. Whoever was picked to be the leader must have loved the experience because one had the freedom to do whatever they please, while others followed miserably or happily depending on what the leader is saying or doing. However, if one was the follower, one would wait anxiously to be the next chosen leader. At the same time, one must somehow express his or her self in a fashion that will make them stand out from the rest of the students. Whether he or she is perfectly imitating the leader or behaving really respectfully of others. Nonetheless, who determines who should be the leader? What kind of characteristics must a leader possessed? What makes a great leader (Robbins, 2005)? Is there only one kind leadership? These questions will be answered as you continue to read on. In addition, you will come across case studies, real life experiences, and my own observation on how leaders in my work setting exhibit leadership behavior and how followers respond to it.
Leadership is the capability to influence a person or a group to achieve many goals (Robbins, 2005). To elaborate, leadership is a complex process by which a person influences others to accomplish a mission, task, or objectives and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent by applying their leadership attributes such as values, ethics, knowledge, skills, and belief (Clark, 2000). Most importantly, not all leaders happen to be managers, and not all managers are leaders (Robbins, 2005). Even though one is positioned as a manager or a supervisor (he has the power to accomplish certain tasks within the organization) it does not necessarily mean he is a leader unless he makes people want to achieve high goals and objectives. He has the authority to tell his subordinates to do the task and they will do it just to complete it but is not interested in achieving higher goals. However, “leaders can emerge from within a group as well as being formally appointed [manager]” (Robbins, 2005).
What is great leadership? According to the trait theories, some personality traits may lead people naturally into leadership role. After many studies and analyses, the best thing that could be said to differentiate leadership from nonleaders are the following seven traits: ambition and energy, the desire to lead, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, intelligence, high self-monitoring, and job-relevant knowledge. However, researchers have been organizing traits around the Big-Five personality framework. It was evident that most leadership traits could be summed up under the Big-Five. This approach shows strong support for trait as a predictor of leadership. Under comprehensive review, extroversion is the most important trait of effective leaders. Next would be conscientiousness and openness to experience. However, it is better to use traits to predict leadership (emergence and appearance of leader) than use it to distinguish between effective and ineffective leaders. (Robbins, 2005)
In contrast, the behavioral theories of leadership work on finding unique behaviors of effective leaders so that they would be able to provide answers about the nature of leadership. If there were specific behaviors that identified leaders, they would be able to teach leadership by designing programs. In trait theories, leaders are natural, they are born with it. However, lets examine the Ohio State studies and the University of Michigan studies. In the Ohio State studies, studies wanted to identify the dimensions of leader behavior. From a thousand dimensions, they narrowed the list down to two categories that accounted for most of the leadership behavior (told by subordinates). The two dimensions are initiating structure and consideration. Initiating structure is the “extent to which a leader is likely to define and structure his or her role and those of subordinate in search for goal attainment”. These behaviors include the attempt to organize work, work relationship, and goals. Alternatively, consideration is the extent “to which a person is likely to have job relationships characterized by mutual trust, respect for subordinate ideas, and regard for their feelings”. These leaders show concern for their fellow underneath him. (Robbins, 2005)
Robert House developed the path-goal theory which is a contingency model of leadership that extracts key elements from the Ohio State leadership research (initiating structure, consideration, and expectancy of motivation). The main idea is that the leaders duty is to assist his subordinate in achieving their goal and providing both support and direction to make sure that their goals are compatible with the organization/groups objectives. Hence, effective leaders help illuminate the path to help aide their subordinate get from where they are to the achievement of their work goals and make their journey easier by reducing obstacles and roadblocks for them.
In the University of Michigan studies, their objective was to locate behavioral characteristics of leaders that appear to be effective. They too, came up with two categories, which they named, employee oriented and production oriented. Employee oriented leaders highlight on interpersonal relations, which means they were interested in the need of their subordinate and will accept individual differences. In contrast, the production oriented leaders highlights the technical or task of aspect of the job satisfaction. They have low group productivity and low worker satisfaction. Therefore, researchers favored the employee-oriented leaders since they were associated with higher group productivity and higher job satisfaction. (Robbins, 2005)
Robert Blake and Jane Mouton proposed a managerial grid, which is a graphic portrayal of a two-dimensional view of leadership styles (Robbins, 2005). It uses two axes, “concern for people” is plotted along the vertical axis and “concern for production” is plotted along the horizontal axis, which represents the Michigan dimensions of employee-oriented and production-oriented. Both axes have a range of one to nine. These two dimensions can be drawn as a graph or grid. Most people would fall in the middle, but people who scores on the far end (1,1;1,9;9,1;9,9) are considered leaders. Authoritarian leaders (9 on task, 1 on people) are task oriented and are hard worker. However, there is no time for collaboration and they expect people to do what they are told without question or debate. They look for whom to blame when something goes wrong,
–Robert B. Blake, M.D.
Fascinated by our current collective effort around the issue of “power and leadership” and “superstructuralism,” we are developing an ambitious (1~1 and 2) project (in my opinion) to develop research materials that will enable us to investigate and test what these people do to meet their own requirements in their professional and personal leadership capacities. This project is a combination of five main aspects: (1) training & documentation, & (2) new tools that will enable these people to effectively operate with authority, accountability, and flexibility by setting, working, and performing high standards for human development. We are hoping that these people will find ways to achieve this task more efficiently, in the process, using the resources we already have to get them the job done successfully. When they are successful, we are confident that they would go on to accomplish their mission (e.g. by becoming good employees), achieve a greater level of knowledge, and succeed (1=1, 2=2, 3=3) and will work well for our organization as our top leaders. Our goal is for these people to be more of good citizens, but with a greater sense of responsibility (3=3, 4=6). So we hope that they would be willing to learn how to operate at their own pace. We also encourage them, as much as they can, to set forth in their own words what they have learned since they have started practicing their duties, and to engage with and understand the wider organization and community of people. The goal of the future of this organization is to build “a more powerful and responsible leadership system”; and we strongly encourage people to do the same. There is no substitute for those who do their work for the sake of this organization; and we are confident that all of our people would agree that such leaders can work even with little attention on the subject (e.g. the CEO).
We want to encourage some of these people to be leaders. We invite them to write, join our board of directors, apply to leadership positions, participate in committees (to speak briefly on how to take on leadership roles, and to ask questions), and to get experience working in front of members of the executive team. We are looking forward to working with these people and offering more training on how to develop and train leadership in an educational environment that will help them apply for and become members of the board of directors in the same way. They should be able to follow up with a manager, manager or secretary in a timely manner, so that they can start acting.
The organization is expanding on the activities of others by offering some new tools and frameworks that will help those who have been excluded (e.g. open sourcing a program to evaluate some skills, implementing new skills they believe will help them in the long run), and we want to ensure their abilities (even if they now have limited experience and may not even be able to find the kind of program that is important and will improve them). We believe our current position of working with individuals from across our organization is a much better fit now. We encourage volunteers (and others) to join this program in the same way that we have a working model called a ”