Practicing Leadership

Alan S. Gutterman

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781949991215
• eBook ISBN: 9781949991222
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Practicing Leadership is intended to serve as a guide to basic principles of leadership and begins with an overview of definitions and conceptions of leadership and then continues with discussions of the roles and activities expected from an effective leader; personality traits and attributes which can be learned and perfected by persons that aspire to leadership positions; styles of leadership, which encompass the strategies used by leaders to engage with their followers and leadership in developing countries.

Leadership is a universal phenomenon that has preoccupied scholars, politicians and others for centuries. In the management context leadership has been consistently identified as playing a critical role in the success or failure of organizations and some surveys have pegged almost half of an organization's performance on the quality and effectiveness of its leadership team. Apart from organizational performance, researchers have consistently found a strong correlation between leadership styles and behaviors and the job satisfaction and performance of subordinates.

When formal interest in the study of leadership first began in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the so-called "great man" theory, which assumed that certain individual characteristics or traits could be found in leaders but not in non-leaders and that those characteristics could not be developed but must be inherited, was quite popular and many assumed that leaders were simply "born and not made". As time passed, however, the consensus within the community of leadership scholars and consultants shifted significantly to the current working proposition that while some people do indeed appear to be natural leaders from birth it is nonetheless possible for many others with sufficient desire and willpower to develop into a "leader" by following a continuous process of work, self-study, education, training and experience.

CHAPTER 1

Definitions and Conceptions of Leadership

Introduction

Leadership is a universal phenomenon that has preoccupied scholars, ­politicians, and others for centuries.¹ Zagoršek observed:

the simultaneous appearance of social institutions such as government, organized religion, and a significant role for individual leaders argues that there may well be something about people in complex organizations that provides a social value in having “­leaders”—they arise to fulfill a basic social function.²

In the management context, leadership has been consistently identified as playing a critical role in the success or failure of organizations and some surveys have pegged up to 45 percent of an organization’s performance on the quality and effectiveness of its leadership team.³ Apart from organizational performance, researchers have consistently found a strong correlation between leadership styles and behaviors and the job satisfaction and performance of subordinates.⁴

During the early years of serious research in the leadership area the focus was primarily on western leadership styles and practices. This occurred for various reasons including the location of the critical mass of researchers in the United States and the fact that most companies operated primarily in the United States with some cautious expansion into foreign markets with similar linguistic and cultural traditions. However, several factors—globalization of the workforce, expansion of operations into numerous countries and regions around the world, and exposure to increase global competition—have forced leadership scholars to incorporate culture into their research and theories because leaders of businesses of all sizes in all countries must be prepared to interact with customers and other business partners from different cultures and leaders of larger companies have the additional challenge of managing multinational organizations and aligning a global corporate culture with multiple and diverging national cultures.⁵ Another driving force in the push for more work on the relationship between culture and leadership has been the emergence of an international research community that includes scholars living, working, and observing in all parts of the world and this has led to the expansion of the scope of inquiry to include such diverse topics as leadership styles of managers and entrepreneurs in Russia and other countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.⁶

Definitions of Leadership

The effective study and understanding of leadership begins with constructing a workable definition of the term “leadership.” Interestingly, although leadership has been rigorously studied and discussed for centuries, a consensus regarding how the term “leadership” can and should be defined has been elusive. In this regard, Stogdill observed that “there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept” and Fiedler wrote that “[t]here are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are leadership theories—and there are almost as many theories of leadership as there are psychologists working in the field.”⁷ Dickson et al. succinctly described leadership as involving “disproportionate influence” and noted that leadership roles around the world are universally associated with power and status and that it is therefore important to understand how power and status are distributed in a society in order to obtain a clear picture of leadership roles in that society.⁸ The researchers involved in the Global Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness (GLOBE) project defined leadership as “… the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.”⁹ The potential influence of leaders is substantial as the following observation of the GLOBE researchers illustrates:

When individuals think about effective leader behaviors, they are more influenced by the value they place on the desired future than their perception of current realities. Our results, therefore, suggest that leaders are seen as the society’s instruments for change. They are seen as the embodiment of the ideal state of affairs.¹⁰

Eckmann offered a short and not inclusive list of leadership definitions from a variety of sources and activities that included the following¹¹:

• The creative and directive force of morale
• A process of mutual stimulation which, by the successful interplay of relevant individual differences, controls human energy in the pursuit of a common cause
• The process by which an agent induces a subordinate to behave in a desired manner
• Directing and coordinating the work of group member, a definition that is more appropriate for management activities
• An interpersonal relation in which others comply between they want to, not because they have to, a formulation similar to the concept of “transformational” leadership discussed elsewhere in this guide.
• The process of influencing an organized group toward accomplishing its goals and the creation of conditions for the team to be effective, both closely linked to the study and practice of team leadership
• The thing that wins battles, a contribution by General Patton

Muczyk and Holt defined “leadership,” in a general sense, as

the process whereby one individual influences other group members toward the attainment of defined group or organizational goals. In other words, the leadership role describes the relationship between the manager and his or her subordinates that results in the satisfactory execution of subordinates’ assignments and, thereby, the attainment of the important goals for which the leader is responsible and is instrumental in setting. At the very minimum, leadership requires providing direction and impetus for subordinates to act in the desired direction.¹²

They believed that it was important to distinguish leadership per se from actions or behaviors of leaders that are actually “enablers” or “facilitators” of effective leadership, such as the traits, tendencies, and practices of leaders with respect to such things as planning, communicating, motivating, and decision-making.

Muczyk and Holt noted that the GLOBE researchers claimed to have found evidence of the following “universal attributes that facilitate leadership effectiveness”: integrity (being trustworthy, just, and honest); charismatic–visionary (having foresight and planning ahead); charismatic–inspirational (being positive, dynamic, encouraging, and motivating and building confidence); and team builder (being communicative, informed, a coordinator, and a team integrator).¹³ In turn, “universal attributes that impede effectiveness” according to the GLOBE researchers included self-protection (being a loner and asocial); malevolence (being non-cooperative and irritable), and autocratic behavior (being dictatorial). The effectiveness of other attributes, such as individualism, status consciousness, and risk taking, were found to vary based on the cultural context (i.e., culturally contingent) in the GLOBE survey. Muczyk and Holt conceded that the leadership “attributes” identified by the GLOBE researchers were important to the extent that they could be analyzed as facilitators or inhibitors of effective leadership; however, they cautioned that those attributes should not be confused with leadership itself. In their view, for example, having integrity, being visionary and/or inspirational, or being adept at team building was not “leadership,” but those traits could be presumed to be extremely useful tools in successfully filling the role of a leader, namely influencing followers toward attainment of group goals. Similarly, “communication skills, motivational techniques, and influence strategies are the means to leadership success, and not leadership itself.”¹⁴

Although there appears to be a clear consensus that leadership is an important topic within the fields of business and organizational studies, one of the most significant challenges for researchers, and the principal basis for the entire field of cross-cultural leadership studies, is the anecdotal evidence that points to the realization that leadership has a very different meaning depending upon the cultural context. For example, the researchers in the GLOBE study collected and presented the following statements taken from interviews with managers from various countries to support the proposition that leader...

Table of contents

• cover
• halftitle
• title
• copyright
• Abstract
• contents
• preface
• 01_Chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• 06_Bios
• 07_Index