Leadership
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Leadership

Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Influence in Organizations, Second Edition

Robert P. Vecchio, Robert P. Vecchio

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eBook - ePub

Leadership

Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Influence in Organizations, Second Edition

Robert P. Vecchio, Robert P. Vecchio

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About This Book

Today, there are a growing number of business schools, law schools, and continuing education programs in executive development and management training that offer leadership classes. Despite the growing curricular recognition of this area, there is a shortage of strong college-level texts. Leadership, second edition—a completely up-to-date anthology of key writings by well-known contributors—meets this need for a textbook that encompasses the major theories in the field of leadership.

Leadership is divided into six sections. Part I provides an overview of the subject with readings that examine what leaders actually do, as well as the many myths surrounding the notion of leadership. Part II focuses on the fundamentals of leadership by taking a close look at the specific tactics people use to get their own way. These readings analyze the political games people play and the two-way nature of leader-subordinate influence. Part III considers problems that can arise from leadership gone wrong—when power and influence are abused. The major formal models of leadership that have been offered over the years are reviewed in Part IV. The next section looks at contemporary views of leadership, emphasizing reliance on maturity of subordinates for success, including leadership in the context of self-directed work teams, entrepreneurial leadership, the notion of the leader as servant, and examples of leaders who are recognized for having empowered others or for providing moral leadership. The final section examines the roles of societal and organizational cultures as they pertain to leadership.

Robert P. Vecchio has updated the second edition with six new articles. Aimed at upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses, Leadership continues to provide classic essays by the major figures in the field of leadership along with topical essays on current and emerging issues.

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Year
2007
ISBN
9780268161620
Subtopic
Leadership
PART VI
Emerging Issues
My job as leader is to keep the five guys who hate me away from the five guys who haven’t yet made up their mind.
Casey Stengal
Nice guys finish last.
Leo Durocher
Contrary to the cliche, genuinely nice guys most often finish first, or very near it.
Malcolm Forbes
Officers (and mothers) always eat last.
Colin Powell
Be awful nice to ’em goin’ up, ’cause you’re gonna meet ’em all comin’ down.
Jimmy Durante
In our final section, we explore macro-level issues that impact on the process of leadership. The first article, by Geert Hofstede, considers how other cultures have different views of leadership and management. He asks us to consider how our Westernized models may be of limited value in understanding social dynamics in other cultures and offers a model in which cultural dimensions can be categorized in order to explain differences we might observe. The following article, by Clayton Smith and Robert Vecchio, examines the topic of organizational culture and suggests that organizational culture influences the process of organizational strategic management by influencing leader perception, interpretation, and response to the external environment. Mary Zalesny and Robert Vecchio, in the next reading, consider factors that affect technological change in an organization and specifically examine the key role played by supervisors in impeding or facilitating change.
Women are entering leadership positions in increasing numbers. The article “Leadership and Gender Advantage” reviews research on the question of whether a leader’s sex is related to leader effectiveness.
The experience of extreme emotion at work is a relatively new and important topic which has been neglected in the past. In the article “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” Robert Vecchio reviews the sparse information on jealousy and envy in the workplace and offers specific techniques for managing negative emotion at work. While extreme negative emotion is readily recognized as a potential source of problems at work, it is sometimes forgotten that extreme positive emotion at work can also be a source of difficulties.
Cultural Constraints in Management Theories
Geert Hofstede
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland contains the famous story of Alice’s croquet game with the Queen of Hearts.
Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in all her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
You probably know how the story goes: Alice’s flamingo mallet turns its head whenever she wants to strike with it; her hedgehog ball runs away; and the doubled-up soldier arches walk around all the time. The only rule seems to be that the Queen of Hearts always wins.
Alice’s croquet playing problems are good analogies to attempts to build culture-free theories of management. Concepts available for this purpose are themselves alive with culture, having been developed within a particular cultural context. They have a tendency to guide our thinking toward our desired conclusion.
As the same reasoning may also be applied to the arguments in this article, I better tell you my conclusion before I continue—so that the rules of my game are understood. In this article we take a trip around the world to demonstrate that there are no such things as universal management theories.
Diversity in management practices as we go around the world has been recognized in U.S. management literature for more than thirty years. The term “comparative management” has been used since the 1960s. However, it has taken much longer for the U.S. academic community to accept that not only practices but also the validity of theories may stop at national borders, and I wonder whether even today everybody would agree with this statement.
An article I published in Organizational Dynamics in 1980 entitled “Do American Theories Apply Abroad?” created more controversy than I expected. The article argued, with empirical support, that generally accepted U.S. theories like those of Maslow, Herzberg, McClelland, Vroom, McGregor, Likert, Blake and Mouton may not or only very partly apply outside the borders of their country of origin—assuming they do apply within those borders. Among the requests for reprints, a larger number were from Canada than from the United States.
MANAGEMENT THEORISTS ARE HUMAN
Employees and managers are human. Employees as humans was “discovered” in the 1930s, with the Human Relations school. Managers as humans, was introduced in the late 40s by Herbert Simon’s “bounded rationality” and elaborated in Richard Cyert and James March’s Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963, and recently re-published in a second edition). My argument is that management scientists, theorists, and writers are human too: they grew up in a particular society in a particular period, and their ideas cannot help but reflect the constraints of their environment.
The idea that the validity of a theory is constrained by national borders is more obvious in Europe, with all its borders, than in a huge borderless country like the U.S. Already in the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne, a Frenchman, wrote a statement which was made famous by Blaise Pascal about a century later: “VĂ©rite en-deça des PyrenĂ©es, erreur au-delà”— There are truths on this side of the PyrenĂ©es which are falsehoods on the other.
FROM DON ARMADO’S LOVE TO TAYLOR’S SCIENCE
According to the comprehensive ten-volume Oxford English Dictionary (1971), the words “manage,” “management,” and “manager” appeared in the English language in the 16th century. The oldest recorded use of the word “manager” is in Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” dating from 1588, in which Don Adriano de Armado, “a fantastical Spaniard,” exclaims (Act I, scene ii, 188):
“Adieu, valour! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth”.
The linguistic origin of the word is from Latin manus, hand, via the Italian maneggiare, which is the training of horses in the manege; subsequently its meaning was extended to skillful handling in general, like of arms and musical instruments, as Don Armado illustrates. However, the word also became associated with the French menage, household, as an equivalent of “husbandry” in its sense of the art of running a household. The theatre of present-day management contains elements of both manege and menage and different managers and cultures may use different accents.
The founder of the science of economics, the Scot Adam Smith, in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, used “manage,” “management” (even “bad management”) and “manager” when dealing with the process and the persons involved in operating joint stock companies (Smith, V., i.e.). British economist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) followed Smith in this use and clearly expressed his distrust of such hired people who were not driven by ownership. Since the 1880s the word “management” appeared occasionally in writings by American engineers, until it was canonized as a modern science by Frederick W. Taylor in Shop Management in 1903 and in The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.
While Smith and Mill used “management” to describe a process and “managers” for the persons involved, “management” in the American sense—which has since been taken back by the British—refers not only to the process but also to the managers as a class of people. This class (1) does not own a business but sells its skills to act on behalf of the owners and (2) does not produce personally but is indispensable for making others produce, through motivation. Members of this class carry a high status and many American boys and girls aspire to the role. In the U.S., the manager is a cultural hero.
Let us now turn to other parts of the world. We will look at management in its context in other successful modern economies: Germany, Japan, France, Holland, and among the Overseas Chinese. Then we will examine management in the much larger part of the world that is still poor, especially South-East Asia and Africa, and in the new political configurations of Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular. We will then return to the U.S. via mainland China.
Germany
The manager is not a cultural hero in Germany. If anybody, it is the engineer who fills the hero role. Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management was conceived in a society of immigrants—where a large number of workers with diverse backgrounds and skills had to work together. In Germany this heterogeneity never existed.
Elements of the mediaeval guild system have survived in historical continuity in Germany until the present day. In particular, a very effective apprenticeship system exists both on the shop floor and in the office, which alternates practical work and classroom courses. At the end of the apprenticeship the worker receives a certificate, the Facharbeiterbrief, which is recognized throughout the country. About two-thirds of the German worker population holds such a certificate and a corresponding occupational pride. In fact, quite a few German company presidents have worked their way up from the ranks through an apprenticeship. In comparison, two thirds of the worker population in Britain have no occupational qualification at all.
The highly skilled and responsible German workers do not necessarily need a manager, American-style, to “motivate” them. They expect their boss or Meister to assign their tasks and to be the expert in resolving technical problems. Comparisons of similar German, British, and French organizations show the Germans as having the highest rate of personnel in productive roles and the lowest both in leadership and staff roles.
Business schools are virtually unknown in Germany. Native German management theories concentrate on formal systems. The inapplicability of American concepts of management was quite apparent in 1973 when the U.S. consulting firm of Booz, Allen and Hamilton, commissioned by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, wrote a study of German management from an American view point. The report is highly critical and writes among other things that “Germans simply do not have a very strong concept of management.” Since 1973, from my personal experience, the situation has not changed much. However, during this period the German economy has performed in a superior fashion to the U.S. in virtually all respects, so a strong concept of management might have been a liability rather than an asset.
Japan
The American type of manager is also missing in Japan. In the United States, the core of the enterprise is the managerial class. The core of the Japanese enterprise is the permanent worker group; workers who for all practical purposes are tenured and who aspire at life-long employment. They are distinct from the non-permanent employees—mostly women and subcontracted teams led by gang bosses, to be laid off in slack periods. University graduates in Japan first join the permanent worker group and subsequently fill various positions, moving from line to staff as the need occurs while paid according to seniority rather than position. They take part in Japanese-style group consultation sessions for important decisions, which extend the decision-making period but guarantee fast implementation afterwards. Japanese are to a large extent controlled by their peer group rather than by their manager.
Three researchers from the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii, Joseph Tobin, David Wu, and Dana Danielson, did an observational study of typical preschools in three countries: China, Japan, and the United States. Their results have been published both as a book and as a video. In the Japanese preschool, one teacher handled twenty-eight four-year-olds. The video shows one particularly obnoxious boy, Hiroki, who fights with other children and throws teaching materials down from the balcony. When a little girl tries to alarm the teacher, the latter answers “What are you calling me for? Do something about it!” In the U.S. preschool, there is one adult for every nine children. This class has its problem child too, Glen, who refuses to clear away his toys. One of the teachers has a long talk with him and isolates him in a corner, until he changes his mind. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that managing Hiroki thirty years later will be a different process from managing Glen.
American theories of leadership are ill-suited for the Japanese group-controlled situation. During the past two decades, the Japanese have developed their own “PM” theory of leadership, in which P stands for performance and M for maintenance. The latter is less a concern for individual employees than for maintaining social stability. In view of the amazing success of the Japanese economy in the past thirty years, many Americans have sought for the secrets of Japanese management hoping to copy them.
France
The manager, U.S. style, does not exist in France either. In a very enlightening book, unfortunately not yet translated into English, the French researcher Philippe d’Iribarne (1989) describes the results of in-depth observation and interview studies of management methods in three subsidiary plants of the same French multinational: in France, the United States, and Holland. He relates what he finds to information about the three societies in general. Where necessary, he goes back in history to trace the roots of the strikingly different behaviors in the completion of the same tasks. He identifies three kinds of basic principles (logiques) of management. In the USA, the principle is the fair contract between employer and employee, which gives the manager considerable prerogatives, but within its limits. This is really a labor market in which the worker sells his or her labor for a price. In France, the principle is the honor of each class in a society which has always been and remains extremely stratified, in which superiors behave as superior beings and subordinates accept and expect this, conscious of their own lower level in the national hierarchy but also of the honor of their own class. The French do not think in terms of managers versus nonmanagers but in terms of cadres versus non-cadres; one becomes cadre by attending the proper schools and one remains it forever; regardless of their actual task, cadres have the privileges of a higher social class, and it is very rare for a non-cadre to cross the ranks.
The conflict between French and American theories of management became apparent in the beginning of the twentieth century, in a criticism by the great French management pioneer Henri Fayol (1841–1925) on his U.S. colleague and contempo...

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