Org & Risk Discussions

Organizational Leadership © John Bratton

Part 1

Contextualising leadership

The nature of leadership

Chapter 1

Learning outcomes

• After completing this chapter, you should be able to: – Explain the nature of leadership and the apparent

difference between leadership and management – Explain the essence of classical and contemporary trends

in leadership theories – Discuss how the trends in leadership theories are

connected to changes in global capitalism competing theories of organizational design

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Introduction

• Many of today’s challenges are complex and the public look upon leaders for solutions or for someone to blame when crises present themselves.

• With organizational change seems near-constant and necessitates leadership, this book critically examines the role of leaders in managing organizational change and people across different contexts in both private and public organizations and, in an area which is less frequently studied, in promoting innovation and pro-environmental change in the context of managerial rationales, constraints and opportunities.

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Defining leadership

• 2000 years ago, – The first serious attempt to develop a theory of leadership

can be found in Plato’s The Republic (Grint, 1997). • 16th- century,

– Machiavelli’s The Prince attached great importance to the role of leaders in shaping societal events.

• Over the centuries, – Examples illustrating the central role of individual leaders

is repetitively found in English history such as Winston Churchill in the Second World War.

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Defining leadership

• This continuous interest in leadership is the very common assumption that ‘great’ leaders profoundly shape events in society. Plus, the growth of industrial capitalism give rise in the studies of organizational leadership.

• 20th century, – Leadership research is further driven by both the military

and manufacturing demands of two world wars, the development of the capitalist global economy and the preoccupation of organizations and government with competitiveness.

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Defining leadership

Competing Definitions of

Organizational Leadership

Traits / Attributes Interaction Interaction between specific traits of one person and other traits of the many, in such a way that the course of action of the many is changed by the one (Bogardus, 1934, p. 3).

Behaviour Leadership may be defined as the behaviour of an individual while he [sic] is involved in directing group activities (Hemphill and Coons, 1957, p. 7).

Leadership… acts by persons which influence other persons in a shared direction (Seeman, 1960, p. 53).

Power Leadership is a particular type of power relationship characterized by a group member’s perception that another group member has the right to prescribe behaviour patterns for the former regarding his [sic] activity as a member of a particular group (Janda, 1960, p. 358).

Process Leadership is the reciprocal process of mobilizing by persons with certain motives and values, various economic, political, and other resources, in a context of competition and conflict, in order to realize goals independently or mutually held by both leaders and followers (Burns, 1978, 425).

Leadership is a formal or informal contextually rooted and goal-influencing process that occurs between a leader and a follower, groups of followers, or institutions (Antonakis and Day, 2018, 5).

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Defining leadership

• For the purposes of this book, we use the following definition: – Organizational leadership is a process of influencing

within an employment relationship involving ongoing human interaction with others wherein those others consent to achieve a goal.

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Defining leadership

• The definition captures the following information: – Organizational leadership is a dialectical process (act)

embedded in a context of both cooperation and structural conflict, which may affect the style of leadership adopted. Process also implies that a leader affects and is affected by the ‘psychological contract’, a metaphor for a perceived set of expectations and understandings between employees and employers, an important concept in people management (Rousseau, 1995).

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Defining leadership

– Leadership is an influencing process occurring both directly and indirectly among others within formal employment relations.

– The influence process may involve only a single leader, such as a CEO, or it may encompass numerous leaders in the organization.

– It is ultimately concerned with achieving a particular goal, and goal achievement will be a measure of its effectiveness.

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Leadership and management

• Questions like what do managers do and what do leaders do helps us to understand their roles. A manager therefore can undertake a diverse range of roles within an organization. It is important to note here that more than one individual can perform a leadership role. That is, leadership can be shared or distributed in the organization. The opportunity to perform certain roles will depend on the manager’s position in the organization’s hierarchy, the nature of the work undertaken and the level of education of her or his co-workers.

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Leadership and management

• Role of Managers – Central to achieving control and decision by mainstream

management literature – Deal with uncertainties, resistance and conflicts by critical

studies – Analysing and designing work systems that minimized

skill requirements while maximizing management control over the workforce by Frederick W. Taylor (1911)

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Leadership and management

– Classic Fayolian Management Cycle (PDOC) by Henry Fayol

– Three set of behaviours by Mintzberg (1989) – Interconnected Three Dimensional Model by Squires

(2001) – It is also note that critical studies studies have challenged

the universality of managerial behaviour, and have emphasized the importance of factoring into the analysis of management diversity: including gender, race, sexuality and consideration of cultural mores that prevail.

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Leadership and management

• Roles of Leaders – Although both ‘managing’ and ‘leading’ can potentially

coexist in the same individual, mainstream leadership scholars since Zaleznik’s (1977) have argued that managers and leaders are in fact different and that leadership and management are different.

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Leadership and management

Role of Managers Role of Leaders • Acting as the figurehead • Establishing direction • Liaising with other managers • Communicating direction • Developing subordinates • Encouraging emotion • Planning • Empowering others • Handling conflicts • Influencing • Negotiating • Challenging status quo • Monitoring information • Motivating and inspiring others • Directing subordinates • Modelling the direction • Allocating resources • Building a team • Produces potential predictability • Produces radical change

Based on Hales (1986), Kotter (2012) and Kouzes and Posner (2017). 16

Leadership and management

• Leaders create a vision and the strategy to achieve vs Managers choose the means to implement the vision created by the leader.

• Leaders operate at an emotional level, seeking to appeal to followers’ emotions vs Managers operate logically and value rationality.

• Leaders encourage empowerment vs Managers encourage compliance.

• Leadership is a value-laden activity vs Management is not.

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Leadership and management

• Leaders are change agents associated with ‘episodic’ (Weick and Quinn, 1999) / ‘revolutionary’ (Burke, 2014) / vuja de (never seen before) (Grint, 2006) vs Managers are associated with ‘continuous’ or ‘evolutionary’ change / déjà vu (seen before). Kouzes and Posner (1997), also mentioned that exemplary leadership entails ‘challenging the process’.

Bernard Bass (1990) observed that not all managers lead and not all leaders manage, and an employee, without being a formal manager, may be a leader.

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Mapping the changing study of leadership

• Literatures about what leaders should do – contains theories for leaders – primarily normative, providing how to prescriptions for improving leadership effectiveness.

• Literatures about what leaders actually do – contains theories of leadership – primarily analytical, directed at better understanding leadership processes, explaining why they vary in different circumstances and the ‘platforms’ (ship) that leaders create to enable others to act as leaders

(Antonacopulou and Bento, 2011; Dinh et al. 2014; Ford, 2015)

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Mapping the changing study of leadership

• 5 Major Categories of Leadership Research (Bryman, 1996) – Trait – Behaviour – Contingency – Charismatic/Transformative – Shared/Distributed

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• The trajectory of leadership theory is not linear, but, rather, follows endless swings between leader-centric and follower- centric models often based on new thinking about work design and organizational change. Thus, theories of leadership and disruptive organizational change are inseparably intertwined (Parry, 2011). – Leader-centred perspectives – Contingency and situational perspectives – Follower-centric perspectives

Mapping the changing study of leadership

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Critical leadership studies (CLS)

• It has always been the case of assuming functionalist approach to leading people as functionalism assumes that organizations are unitary wholes, characterized by compliance, consensus and order.

• However, CLS critiques mainstream orthodoxies and the power relations through which leadership dynamics are frequently rationalized, often reproduced and sometimes resisted – viewing organizations as arenas of domination, inequality, tension and conflict. The focus is on power, subordination and exploitation (Tadajewski et al. 2011) and to ‘decolonise’ (Gopal, 2017) prevailing stories, to ask difficult questions of society and ourselves – addressing the intersection of class, gender and race in work, organizational design and power structures that is the reality of organizational life. – Power, leadership and ideology – Gender and leadership

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The employment relationship

• Constructed within work organizations. • A mutually advantageous transaction in a free market, a

partnership of employers and employees with shared interests, a negotiation over ‘wage-effort’ between parties with competing interests, or an unequal power relation embedded in complex socio-economic inequalities (Budd and Bhave, 2013). – Ongoing actor relationships – ‘Paradox of consequences’ – Balance of power between actors – Organized life is recognized as an arena of complex

reciprocal human relations 23