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Lecture notes Leadership: mobilizing people (E_MFDM_LMP)
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Lecture notes from the course leadership: mobilizing people
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Overview Leadership: Mobilizing PeopleLecture 1: The essence of leadership: The trait approach
What is leadership:
Leadership is the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to
contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organisations of which they
are members.
Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to
achieve a common goal.
Leadership involves influence. It is concerned with how the leader affects followers.
Without influence, leadership does not exist.
Leadership includes attention to common goals. Leaders direct their energies toward
individuals who are trying to achieve something together.
Managers and leaders are not the same. This course is more about leadership, and less
about management. The differences are:
Managers: Leaders:
Plan and budget Establish direction
Organise and staff Align people
Control and solve problems Motivate and inspire
Produce consistency and order Are concerned with productive or
adaptive change
Framework for leadership:
Effective leaders in organisations motivate and enable others to achieve
organizationally relevant goals.
Organizationally relevant goals are:
1. Productive output of a unit meets the standards of quantity, quality, and
timeliness of its clients.
2. High levels of social integration within a unit
3. High levels of continuous learning and well-being of unit members
4. Goals and means to achieve goals are ethical
The trait approach:
Trait = eigenschap, kenmerk, karaktertrek
A trait is a stable characteristic of a person:
o Psychological: extraversion, intelligence
o Physical: gender, height
,
Physical features and leadership:
o Height:
Average correlation between height and leader emergence = .24
o Weight:
Relationships between weight and salary depending on gender:
Positive for men
Negative for women
o Earlobes:
Positive relationship between facial asymmetry as well as
transformational leadership, follower well-being, and team
performance.
People born with asymmetries tend to develop greater empathy, social
intelligence, and motivational skills as a ways of overcoming
unfavourable perceptions of others
Leadership emergence = the likelihood you become a leader
Leadership effectiveness = the effectiveness of you as a leader
Intelligence and leadership:
o “The aggregate of the global capacity to act purposefully, think rationally, and
deal effectively with the environment” (David Wechsler, 1944)
o “Ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment,
to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to
overcome obstacles by taking thought” (…)
o “Intellectual activity consists of grasping the essentials in a situation and
responding appropriately to them.” (Alice Heim, 1970)
o Evidence:
Intelligence and leader emergence = .25
Intelligence and leader effectiveness = .20
Observer-rated intelligence and leader emergence = .60
o Conclusions:
Intelligence for leadership (emergence and effectiveness) seems
important, but less so than commonly assumed (small to medium sized
relations to effectiveness)
Apparent intelligence may be more important than actual intelligence.
als mensen denken dat je intelligent bent zullen ze je eerder als
leider aannemen en ben je een “effectievere” leider.
The big five:
o Openness
For imagination, aesthetics, emotions, acts, ideas, norms and value
systems
People that score highly on openness are characterised by diverse
interests.
o Conscientiousness
For competence, orderliness, sense of duty, need for achievement,
self-discipline and prudence
, Conscientious people are aware of their responsibility for their job and
they work ambitiously to reach their goals.
o Extraversion
For warmth, frankness, assertiveness, activity, hunger for experience
and cheerfulness
Extroverts are usually gentle, adventurous, talkative, and tend to
socialize effortlessly with others.
o Agreeableness
Trust, conviviality, altruism, concession, modesty and goodness
Agreeable persons are very trusting and avoid confrontation with
others.
o Neuroticism
Anxiety, quick-tempered, depression, social bias, impulsivity and
vulnerability.
Highly neurotic people are anxious, nervous, worried and easily lose
their temper under pressure.
o Personality seems more important for leadership than commonly assumed
and more important than intelligence.
o
Emotional intelligence = Ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate
emotions to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge and to
reflectively regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth (Mayer &
Salovey, 1997)
o Four types of skills:
Self-awareness,
Self-management,
Social awareness,
Relationship management.
o Problems:
Measurement issues
Not more than personality and cognitive availability
Generic approach
In conclusion, intelligence, personality (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness,
agreeableness, openness to experience), physical features (height, gender) and emotional
intelligence (only for select jobs) are relevant traits for leadership emergence and leadership
effectiveness.
Evaluation:
Leaders are born and there is little organisations can do to develop effective leaders.
Organisations should therefore select people with high cognitive availabilities and a
leader like personality profile into leadership positions.
Explains which people are more likely to raise to leadership positions and which
people are the most effective leaders
Unclear why this may be the case:
o Trait behavior
o Trait leader acceptance
Both?
Problem:
, o Approach doesn’t account for situational variables, e.g. what about cultural,
organisational, and industrial context
Literature:
Northouse chapter 1:
o Leadership is a complex process having multiple dimensions
Leadership is a process, leadership involves influence, leadership
occurs in groups, leadership involves common goals.
Leadership = a process whereby an individual influences a group of
individuals to achieve a common goal.
Leadership occurs in groups who want to accomplish common goals.
Leadership = leaders + followers. Leaders are necessary for an
initiation of a relationship, creates the communication carries the
relationship. Leaders have a responsibility toward followers and are
not better or above than followers
o Trait versus process leadership:
The trait viewpoint conceptualizes leadership as a property or set of
properties possessed in varying degrees by different people. The
viewpoint suggest that certain individuals have special innate or inborn
characteristics or qualities that make them leaders.
The process viewpoint suggest that leadership is a phenomenon that
resides in the context of the interactions between leaders and followers
and makes leadership available to everyone.
o Assigned versus emergent leadership:
Assigned leaders are people that are leaders because of their formal
position in an organization (e.g., military officer). Others are leaders
because they way other group members respond to them (e.g., ‘group
leaders’ in a school project).
The individual acquires emergent leadership through other people in
the organization who support and accept that individual’s behavior.
Positive behaviors that account for emergent leadership is
being verbally informed, being informed, seeking other
opinions, initiating new ideas and being firm but not rigid. In
addition, personality traits that are helpful are dominance,
intelligence, and confidence.
A unique perspective on emergent leadership is provided by the social
identity theory: the leadership emergence is the degree to which a
person fits with the identity of the group as a whole.
o Leadership and power:
Power is the potential to influence.
Power has five common and important bases
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