Leadership & Management articles
Week 1 – Leadership
Article 1 - Leadership: Past, Present, and Future, Day & Antonakis
(2012)
What is leadership?
Leadership:
An influencing process-and its resultant outcomes-that occurs
between a leader and followers
How this influencing process is explained by the leader’s
dispositional characteristics and behaviours, follower perceptions
and attributions of the leader, and the context in which the
influencing process occurs.
Different from power and management.
Power: The means leaders have to potentially influence others (referent
power, expertise, the ability to reward or punish performance, and formal
power).
Management: Objectives driven, resulting in stability grounded in
rationality, bureaucratic means, and the fulfilment of contractual
obligations.
Necessary:
Supervisory level: Complement organizational systems, establish
and recognize group goals and values, recognize and integrate
various individual styles and personalities in a group, maximize the
use of group members’ abilities, and help resolve problems.
Functional perspective: A completer who does or gets done
whatever is not being adequately handled by a group.
Strategic level: To ensure the coordinated functioning of the
organization as it interacts with a dynamic external environment.
A brief history of leadership research
Nine major schools of leadership, classified on two dimensions: temporal
(time period) and productivity.
Trait school of leadership
Trait-based perspective:
Certain characteristics (stable attributes) differentiated leaders from
non-leaders.
Intelligence and dominance.
Behavioural school of leadership
1950s
Focus on the behaviours that leaders enacted and how they treated
followers.
Ohio State: consideration (supportive, person-oriented leadership)
University of Michigan: initiating structure (directive, task-
oriented leadership)
, Contradictory findings, and no consistent evidence of a universally
preferred leadership style across tasks or situations
Contingency school of leadership
1960s-1970s, Fiedler
Fiedler: Leader-member relations, task structure, and the position
power of the leader determine the effectiveness of the type of
leadership exercised
House: Focus on the leader’s role in clarifying paths to follower
goals
Kerr and Jermier: Substitutes-for-leadership theory, focusing on the
conditions where leadership is unnecessary as a result of factors
such as follower capabilities, clear organizational systems, and
routinized procedures.
Relational school of leadership
1970s
Focusing on relationships between leaders and followers
Vertical dyad linkage theory, which evolved into leader-member
exchange (LMX) theory.
LMX theory: Describes the nature of the relations between leaders
and their followers. High quality relations are based on trust and
mutual respect, whereas low-quality relations between a leader and
his or her followers are based on the fulfilment of contractual
obligations.
Predicts that high-quality relations generate more positive leader
outcomes than do lower quality relations.
Skeptics-of-leadership school
1970s-1980s
What leaders do is largely attributed based on performance
outcomes and may reflect the implicit leadership theories that
individuals carry in their heads.
People attribute leadership as a way of explaining observed results,
even if those results were due to factors outside the leader’s
control.
What leaders do might be largely irrelevant and that leader
outcomes affect how leaders are rated.
Focusing on followers and how they perceive reality and
differentiating top-level leadership from supervisory leadership.
Information-processing school of leadership
1980s
Lord: Focus on understanding how and why a leader is legitimized
through the process of matching his or her personal characteristics
with the prototypical expectations that followers have of a leader.
How cognition is related to the enactment of various behaviours.
,The new leadership (Neo-charismatic/Transformational/Visionary)
school
Form of leadership centred on a sense of purpose and an idealized
mission. Transformational leadership: Idealized and inspiring
leader behaviours induced followers to transcend their interests for
that of the greater good.
Biological and evolutionary perspectives
Measuring individual differences, hard science approach
Considering why certain variables might provide an evolutionary
advantage to an organism.
Neuroscientific and evolutionary points of view.
Emerging issues
Areas in need of additional research: context, ethics, and diversity issues
related to leadership.
Contextual School of leadership: Contextual factors are seen to give rise
to or inhibit certain leadership behaviours or their dispositional
antecedents.
Contextual factors: leader hierarchical level, national culture,
leader-follower gender, and organizational characteristics.
Leadership does not occur in a vacuum, and context and leadership
appear to be intertwined.
Ethics
No distinction between authentic (ethical) and inauthentic
(unethical) transformational leadership.
Should consider ethics of leader means and ends, as well as ways in
which leader moral orientation can be developed and otherwise
improved.
Diversity
Diversity of leaders and followers in terms of culture, gender, race
and ethnicity, or sexual orientation has been infrequently
addressed.
Integrate overlapping and complementary concepts of leadership:
Zaccaro: hybrid framework of executive leadership links cognitive,
behavioural, strategic, and visionary leadership theory perspectives.
Lord and Dinh propose that theoretical integration in the leadership field
requires a better system for addressing levels of analyses issues.
Necessary to distinguish among global, shared, and configural properties.
This system provides new insights regarding the shared functions and
antecedents of various leadership theories.
Van Vugt proposes Evolutionary Leadership Theory (ELT): Provides an
overarching framework that is consistent with Darwin’s evolutionary
theory (Darwin’s Toolbox), connecting the lines of social, biological,
, economic, and cognitive science. It is important to study the evolutionary
origins and functions of leadership to better comprehend its nature.
Judge and Long leadership should keep three things in perspective:
Individual differences matter, provide a usefule starting point
Leaders demonstrate different states and styles based on their
dispositions as well as through the individual differences of
followers.
Leaders do not operate in a vacuum, and context can play a
significant role in leadership outcomes.
Dark side facets of individual differences.
Ayman and Adams
Success of leadership is a function of contingencies, some
contextual and some intrapersonal, which moderate the relations of
leader characteristics to leader outcomes.
Leader’s style is not fixed. Style is either trait based, or behaviour
based.
Leaders are capable of monitoring the environment and adjusting
their responses to fit a particular context. A combination of skills
such as sensitivity, responsiveness, and flexibility may help leaders
reach ‘mettle’: the optimal match between leader characteristics
and the situational context.
Brown:
Why is it that we understand the world through leaders?
What is the nature of our mental leader category and how does it
influence followers’ perceptions of leaders?
Shared leadership: A dynamic, interactive influence process among
individuals in groups where the objective is to lead one another to achieve
group and organizational goals. Focus is on how individuals in a team or
organization can be a leader along with other members.
Carli and Eagly:
Women leaders are disadvantaged by stereotypes.
They are as effective as men leaders, and display certain
prototypically effective leader styles more often than do men.
Van Knippenberg:
Identity approach to leadership.
Identity shapes perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour. Identity can
be a powerful motivating force and a focus on leader and follower
identity is instrumental in understanding leadership effectiveness.
Identity matters when it comes to understanding leadership
processes and outcomes.
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