You are the senior organizational development strategist for ABC, Inc. ABC is known for its strong corporate culture and recently has experienced difficulty attracting diverse talent to fill major operational roles.

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Home >Business & Finance homework help >Management homework help >You are the senior organizational development strategist for ABC, Inc. ABC is known for its strong corporate culture and recently has experienced difficulty attracting diverse talent to fill major operational roles.

1. Traditional Approaches to Leaders’ Impact on Organizations

Image of a see-saw, with word “leadership” at one end and a stack of words at the other end comprising, from top down: support, integrity, influence, teamwork, motivation, management, contribution, responsibility and communication

Scores of research studies are built on the assumption that effective leadership is a key component essential for organizational success. From the battlefield to the boardroom, we are told, wins and losses are determined by decisions and behaviors of those who lead. The plethora of leadership-training programs may be an indicator that many perceive (or even assume) that there is a direct relationship between leaders and organization performance. In The Leadership Gap: Building Capacity for Competitive Advantage, Weiss and Molinaro (2005) established their premise by stating “leadership has become the primary source of competitive advantage in organizations around the world” (p. 4). These authors used case-study methods to reinforce the ideas that organizations’ lack of leadership capacity can be addressed through leadership development.

But both in research and organizations, there are those who challenge the “effective leadership = enhanced performance” supposition (Dihn, Lord, Gardner, Meuser, Liden, & Hu, 2014; Storey, 2010).

LePine, Zhang, Crawford, and Rich (2016) conducted a three-part study to test relationships among charismatic leadership, stress, and performance. Subjects were members of the United States Marine Corps. Findings suggested that charismatic leader behavior negated the negative effects of stressors on performance according to assessments by the leaders or their supervisors. And these authors found that high-level stressors were more positively viewed when charismatic leader behaviors were exhibited. However, the researchers discovered that charismatic leader behavior did not influence how Marines perceived stressors. An underlying assumption in LePine, Zhang, Crawford, and Rich’s (2016) research was that leaders do affect performance. The results, while not conclusive enough to reject the assumption, did open avenues for new dialogue and recommendations for further testing.

Dihn, Lord, Gardner, Meuser, Liden, and Hu (2014) suggested that the preponderance of research on leadership behaviors and traits may have led to assumptions about an overstated influence of the individual. In Module 1 we examined the evolution of leadership approaches from the early modern era to the postmodern era. We know that context—such as environment, capital, and goals—influences organizational design, structure, and management/leadership practices. We learned that a stable organization relies on controls to gain efficiency. Leader-centric thinking was readily accepted in the modern organization. And, research studies were designed around those assumptions, perhaps even reinforcing those assumptions.

More recently, organizations shifted structures, philosophies, and operating procedures to adapt to social, economic, political, and technological pressures. Even so, leadership researchers continued to outpace other scholars who investigated additional variables that might impact organizational processes. Researchers such as Castelli (2016) studied reflective leadership and found that “recognition of diversity” influenced organizational culture resulting in increased performance, sales, and profits. Other variables that could have a bearing on performance are the composition of followers or timed events such as product launches.

Dihn Lord, Gardner, Meuser, Liden, and Hu (2014) reflected on the difficulty of integrating leadership theories and findings. One reason, they explained, is that organizational systems are always changing and evolving, making any leadership study unique to the shifts in the environment. Additional impediments to integrating leadership studies results are the lack or inconsistency of the following:

1. Common explanation of culture

2. Organizational performance metrics

3. Standard definition of organization

More study is required to test the assumption of “effective leadership = enhanced performance.” Critical inquiry begs the question how much organizational success can be attributed to leaders. That is, an overreliance on leader traits and behaviors could be misleading. The idea that leaders are responsible for organizations’ success is a simplistic notion eschewed by some scholars and managers.

Prosperous organizations are often researched using case-study methods as a way to identify critical success factors. From such studies come theories and hypotheses that academics, managers, and consultants put to the test in real-world scenarios. The phrase Leadership, Legacy, and Luck (LLL) presents an alternate way to think about performance (Leadership Insights, 2015; Storey, 2010).

Before going further in the module, review Figure 1: Contributions to Performance Capability and Organisational Performance on the Leadership Insights website.

The model in Figure 1 shows how leadership, legacy, and luck hypothetically impact performance levels. You see that the distinction among leadership, legacy, and luck is illustrated, with each of the concepts contributing to capability. Capability impacts performance. Leadership in this context is described as decisions and purposeful actions that are specific to the market and an organization’s needs (Leadership insights, 2015; Storey, 2010).

Culture, product innovation, or technology, for example, are influenced by leaders. As symbolized in Figure 1, linked above, leadership is not individual-centric but rather is implied as being present at all levels of an organization. To illustrate the leadership symbols in the LLL model, we look to a company that seems to exemplify the concept: Southwest Airlines embraces decision making at all levels of the company, demonstrating distributed leadership. The core of Southwest Airlines is emphasis on the customer, an emphasis that has been shown to achieve competitive advantage (Investor Relations, 2017).

Let’s now examine the other elements of the LLL model.

· Legacy

· Luck

Leadership and the impact on organizations is a concept highly visible in the numbers of research studies that associate leaders with organizational success. The findings of so many researchers can’t be minimized. That said, the ability to challenge assumptions is at the core of critical inquiry.

References

Antonakis, J., & House, R. J. (2014). Instrumental leadership: Measurement and extension of transformational–transactional leadership theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(4) 746-771.

Bénit‐Gbaffou, C., & Katsaura, O. (2014). Community leadership and the construction of political legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘political capital’ in post‐apartheid Johannesburg. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(5), 1807-1832

Boycott over North Carolina's LGBT 'bathroom law' may be gaining traction as economic fallout grows (2016, April). ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Business/boycott-north-carolinas-lgbt-bathroom-law-gaining-traction/story?id=38367656

Castelli, P. A. (2016). Reflective leadership review: A framework for improving organisational performance. The Journal of Management Development, 35(2), 217-236. Retrieved from https://csuglobal.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.csuglobal.idm.oclc.org/docview/1767544220?accountid=38569

Dinh, J. E., Lord, R. G., Gardner, W. L., Meuser, J. D., Liden, R. C., & Hu, J. (2014). Leadership theory and research in the new millennium: Current theoretical trends and changing perspectives. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 36-62

Energy efficiency improvement Act of 2015. Alliance to Save Energy. Retrieved from https://www.ase.org/resources/energy-efficiency-improvement-act-2015

Investor relations (2017). Southwest Airlines. Retrieved from http://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/our-company/company-overview

Leadership insights. (2015, January). Cranfield University School of Management. Retrieved from http://blog.som.cranfield.ac.uk/cgmdblog/luck-legacy-leadership

LePine, M. A., Zhang, Y., Crawford, E. R., & Rich, B. L. (2016). Turning their pain to gain: Charismatic leader influence on follower stress appraisal and job performance. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), 1036-1059.

Storey, J. (2016). Leadership in organizations: Current issues and key trends. Ebook. London: Routledge Publishing.

Weiss, D. S., & Molinaro, V. (2005). The leadership gap: Building leadership capacity for competitive advantage. Canada: John Wiley & Sons.

2. Multilayered Leadership

Asymmetrical Leadership

a business man stands before a white wall upon which is marked numerous and interconnected phrases and diagrams related to business and leadership success.

Thus far in ORG561 we have established the evolution of leadership approaches from modern to postmodern organizations. Additionally, Western (2013) [required reading] established that contemporary organizations require what is called asymmetric leadership. Western claims that traditional thought related to individual, hierarchical, rational, or symmetrical leadership approaches are no longer relevant.

Western described asymmetrical leadership as:

the multiplicity of actors, leadership and followership relations, individual, group and mass interactions, and the emotional and symbolic that are part of leadership processes and activity. (p. 66)

Most would agree that an organization’s environment is constantly changing, and responsiveness and flexibility are necessary to meet social, political, economic, and technological challenges. Accepting the premise that organizations are asymmetrical and that leaders must adapt to the environment, Western suggests that understanding asymmetrical leadership is a “key contemporary leadership challenge” (p. 29).

Multi-level Leadership

An assumption about asymmetrical leadership is that it engages at different levels and functions within an organization. Organizational research intensified around the time of the pronouncement of multi-level management concepts, circa 2000; leadership studies quickly followed course to determine the nature of multi-level or multi-layered leadership.

Batistič, Černe, and Vogel (2017) [recommended reading] seized on those emerging ideas to conduct an analysis of leadership discourse over a 33-year period from 1980 to 2013. Relationship networking, which was introduced in Module 1 as one of four critical frames, served as a foundational element of the study. The authors established that leadership, by its nature, is present at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Additionally, the source of leadership in an organization and the leadership outcomes both composed another layer for analysis. The authors used bibliometric analysis , which draws on data from scholarly publications. Identifying relationships and interactions among topics and scholars was accomplished by studying citations from published works.

Further, Batistič, Černe, and Vogel (2017) identified through co-citation analysis the fact that specific leadership topics were clustered according to scholarly interests. Table 1 below includes a summary of the clusters by decade as follows:

Table 1

Leadership field-cluster summary by decade

Leadership Field Clusters, 1980s	Leadership Field Clusters, 1990s	Leadership Field Clusters, 2000s
Transformational and transactional leadership	Transformational and transactional leadership	Transformational leadership
Agency and governance	Firm’s capabilities and knowledge	Emotions and emotional intelligence
Competitive advantage	Creativity	Authentic leadership
Processual and interactional justice	Rater agreement	Shared leadership
Self-management	Board composition and performance	Ethical leadership
Group effectiveness	Market orientation	Organizational justice
Social identity and categorization	Emotional intelligence	Complexity, context, and leadership
Rater agreement	Trust
Leader-member exchange

CSU-Global Campus; adapted from Batistič, Černe, & Vogel, 2017

In reference to Table 1, above, and to the study by Batistič, Černe, and Vogel (2017), their results indicated that in the 1980s, transformational and transactional leadership studies were already identifying outcomes at multi-levels. However, not all clusters continued to evolve to study the magnitude of layers and levels; two examples are social identity and self-management.

By the 2000s, five of seven clusters were found to consider multi-level thinking. However, there were indications that some topics, such as transformation leadership, were stagnating. Batistič, Černe, and Vogel (2017) concluded that multi-level thinking in leadership research is quite young but progressing. The authors suggested that some topics, such as shared leadership, encourage multi-level approaches.

Mass leadership

silhouettes of businesspeople standing on a grey-scale of the planet’s continents.

Mass leadership, as described by Western (2013) [required reading], reveals how “collective actors” serve a mission or a cause in a way that is not often discussed in organizational literature. Collective action, Western suggested, is a form of leadership at a more macro-level, or in a more global sense. An example of mass leadership was witnessed in the boycott of the state of North Carolina as a protest against a law purported to violate citizens’ civil liberties (“Boycott over North Carolina,” 2016).

Bénit‐Gbaffou and Katsaura (2014) provided another look at community leadership in the form of an ethnographic study in post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa. These authors offered that community actors served to influence local social change. The purpose of the Bénit‐Gbaffou and Katsaura study was to develop tools—rather than developing typologies of traits, characteristics, or behaviors—to understand the complexity of community leadership.

In Module 1, we learned that the scope of ORG561 was limited to formal organizations. But the study of mass movements has relevance nonetheless. Lessons from studies may be tested in other environments; replicating studies within new settings has legitimacy in critical inquiry. The critical frame, Looking Awry, was introduced in Module 1 as a way to “begin from a different beginning” such as in the case of considering findings ranging from mass leadership studies to more formal organizational settings. This week’s discussion is designed to help us benefit from Looking Awry.

Multi-layered Leadership

The phrases collective actors, mandate from the bottom (or recognition from the top), individuals, groups and organizations, and sources and outcomes suggest that leadership does not reside in one place or within one individual. In this course, the term multi-layered leadership serves as a descriptor of the concepts and power and examining leadership from all angles.

References

Antonakis, J., & House, R. J. (2014). Instrumental leadership: Measurement and extension of transformational–transactional leadership theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(4) 746-771.

Energy efficiency improvement Act of 2015. Alliance to Save Energy. Retrieved from https://www.ase.org/resources/energy-efficiency-improvement-act-2015

Investor relations (2017). Southwest Airlines. Retrieved from http://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/our-company/company-overview

Leadership insights. (2015, January). Cranfield University School of Management. Retrieved from http://blog.som.cranfield.ac.uk/cgmdblog/luck-legacy-leadership

Storey, J. (2016). Leadership in organizations: Current issues and key trends. Ebook. London: Routledge Publishing.

Weiss, D. S., & Molinaro, V. (2005). The leadership gap: Building leadership capacity for competitive advantage. Canada: John Wiley & Sons.

3. Corporate Culture and Transformational Leadership

For more than two decades, leadership studies have projected the relationship between corporate culture and transformational leaders. To take a closer look at their association, review the following video. (As the video unfolds, make note of assumptions that you might have about organizational culture and leadership.)

What is Organizational Culture?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cBN8xH-5Qw

Description: The Denison Organizational Culture Model focuses on those aspects of organizational culture which have a proven link to business performance such as Sales Growth, Return on Equity (ROE), Return on Investment (ROI), Customer Satisfaction, Innovation, Employee Satisfaction, Quality and more. The model and organizational culture survey are based on over 25 years of research and practice by Daniel R. Denison, Ph.D. and William S. Neale, M.A., M.L.I.R.

In the modern organization prior to 1990, as defined in Module 1, terms such as charismatic, inspirational, and motivational were attributed to transformational leaders who were thought to have great power to “engineer” an organizational culture (Antonakis & House, 2014) [required reading]. This approach was differentiated from a transactional approach more associated with structure and functions of managers.

Hunt (2004) suggested that at the time, one-third to one-half of scholarly research publications were specific to transformational leadership (as cited in Antonakis & House, 2014, p. 6). A preponderance of literature dedicated to one leadership approach may suggest a preeminence of that approach that does or does not exist, however. Recall Batistič, Černe, and Vogel’s (2017) research that revealed stagnation in transformational-leadership thinking, as evidenced through co-citation analysis.

Western (2013) [required reading] challenged assumptions held by scholars such as Bass and Avolio who suggested that transformational leaders portray vision and purpose to build dynamic cultures. Instead, Western posited that organizational cultures are merely subcultures, influenced by both internal and external factors. Atonakis and House also suggested that external and internal environmental factors are critical to organizations and should be reflected in the leadership approach. And finally, Western expressed concern that long-held assumptions regarding the notion that leaders build cultures may be outdated in the postmodern organization.

Check Your Understanding

There are seven themes described in Chapter 3 of the textbook. Review the seven and then try to prioritize them according to what you most often observe in your real-world experiences. There are no wrong answers!

Seven leadership approaches:

___Intellectual leadership ___Unconscious leadership ___Group leadership ___Distributed leadership ___Individual leadership ___Mass leadership ___Symbolic leadership

Congratulations!

You've reached the end of this module. If you'd like to review any of the content, use the menu button on the left side of the page.

References

Antonakis, J., & House, R. J. (2014). Instrumental leadership: Measurement and extension of transformational–transactional leadership theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(4) 746-771.

Energy efficiency improvement Act of 2015. Alliance to Save Energy. Retrieved from https://www.ase.org/resources/energy-efficiency-improvement-act-2015

Investor relations (2017). Southwest Airlines. Retrieved from http://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/our-company/company-overview

Leadership insights. (2015, January). Cranfield University School of Management. Retrieved from http://blog.som.cranfield.ac.uk/cgmdblog/luck-legacy-leadership

Storey, J. (2016). Leadership in organizations: Current issues and key trends. Ebook. London: Routledge Publishing.

Weiss, D. S., & Molinaro, V. (2005). The leadership gap: Building leadership capacity for competitive advantage. Canada: John Wiley & Sons.