Leadership 1

Leadership 1

1. Trait Theories

   • Leaders are born - they have certain stable characteristics - who will make a good leader?
   • 1930s-40s - lots of leaders around (Hitler etc) - started to look at characteristics
   • Often referred to as the 'great man approach' - leader focussed, described typical characteristics of leaders vs non leaders - leaders possess special qualities that set them apart from others - research tended to focus on men - often incorporated idea that great leaders are born, not developed (implicated that leaders must be selected rather than developed)
     • Evidence - factors that. distinguish leaders from non-leaders - stodgily 1948 reviewed studies from 1904 - 47 - intelligence on gam most important factor - Lord et al 1986 - intelligence, dominance, masculinity and adjustment - leadership and own job performance correlation r =.69 (Bertua, Anderson, Salgado 2005 - but when leader effectiveness rated by team, intelligence is less good of a predictor r = .27 (judge 2004)
       • Can super smart leaders paper - House and Antonakis - read
         • Judge et al 2002 - meta analysis of 73 studies of Big 5 - leaders in groups usually emerge if they're either high in extraversion, or high in conscientiousness
           • practical implications - traits are considered to be relatively stable and partially innate/heritable - if leadership is determined by traits, organisations need focus on selection - negates the idea of leadership development training? (no - traits are correlated w/ performances because they shape behaviour, inter personal relations and decision making all of which can be developed
             • Evaluation of trait approaches - some consistency in traits that are important for leaders e.g intelligence - but there's much variation within studies and reviews with views being biased towards stereotypically masculine and US based
               • Lack of theoretical reasoning as to how traits lead to leadership effectiveness

2. The process whereby one individual infelucnes other group memebers toward the attainment of reined group or organisational goals

   • Key elements: influence - primarily a process of influencing actions or attitudes of group members. Influence usually non-coercive (i.e not dictators)
     • goal directed - influence is for a purpose - to attain defined group or organisational goals
       • followers - leaders only exist in relation to followers - many theories forget this
         • leadership vs management - vroom and jags - good managers possess both management nd leadership skills which they can swap between depending of the situation

3. Style

   • Late 40s to 60s - leadership about behaviour - what do good leaders do?
     • Research said - traits don't explain everything so they stopped researching it much - so they started looking at what leaders do that make them effective
       • Lewin et al 1939 - Autocratic leadership - directive, sometimes coercive, leaders make all decisions, leader defined and structures own roles and subordinates role - workers viewed as a means for getting work accomplished - at the other end is democratic leadership - leader involved subordinates in decision making, allows them greater autonomy over their work - employee orientated, leader demonstrates trust in subordinates, respect their ideas and shows consideration for their feelings
         • effects of leader style - leadership effectiveness, followers motivation, satisfaction with leader, job satisfaction, group performance all correlated with consideration/people orientation - same also correlated with initiation structed/ task orientation, but less strongly
           • evaluation - more optimistic than trait approaches because you can adapt styles - easier to link to leadership dvelopment (training of behaviour) - still fairly simplistic though - is same style right for all situations and all followers?

4. Contingency

   • Leadership is affected by context - under a given condition, what kind of leader or leadership style will be effective?
     • idea that the type of leader which is best will depend on contingency e.g organisation context, task contact etc - focus on leader effectiveness and context - multiple theories proposed
       • Hersey and Blanchard 1969 - leaders are effective when they select the right style for the readiness of their followers - should adjust style - unable/unconfident = telling style - able/unconfidenct = participative style - ale/confident = delegating style - able/confident = selling style
         • Theories criticised for being primarily intuitive - empirical support is weak (Chen and silverthone 2005, Thompsons and Vecchio 2009) - but consideration of match between context and leader style is an advance - suggests that leadership style needs to be dynamic to adapt to meet changing needs for employees and situation