Leadership Theories

10 Key excerpts on "Leadership Theories"

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  Leadership

  The Challenge for the Information Profession

  • Sue Roberts, Jennifer Rowley(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Facet Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Learning objectives After reading this chapter you should be able to: appreciate the impact of context on effective leadership behaviours understand the difference between transformational and transactional leadership reflect on leadership in practice and the leadership experience. Introduction From a theoretical perspective this chapter continues the exploration of different models of leadership. The previous chapter examined the trait and style theories of leadership and encouraged you to engage with how they can be used to reflect on your understanding of what leadership is, and how leaders behave. This chapter moves on to consider three more recent groups of theor-ies: contingency theories, transformational Leadership Theories and theories that consider leadership in practice and the leadership experience. Con-tingency theories suggest that the most effective leadership style depends on, or is contingent on the context; they identify key aspects of the context and classify leadership styles and behaviours in relation to these different types of Leadership in context 3 context. Transformational Leadership Theories seek to explore the leadership behaviours necessary to engage and motivate followers. Leadership Theories that focus on leadership in practice and the leadership experience explore the leadership process and in particular seek to contribute to leadership development. Context and contingency theories of leadership The Michigan and Ohio Leadership Theories discussed in Chapter 2 suggest that the ‘high consideration, high structure’ approach is the ‘one best way’. Although managing people and a task might intuitively seem to be essential aspects of leadership behaviour in any context, behaviour that is expected of, and respected in, staff and their leaders is different in different sectors, depending on the objectives of the organization.

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  Key Concepts in Leadership

  • Jonathan Gosling, Ian Sutherland, Stephanie Jones, SAGE Publications Ltd(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  competencies . Behaviourist Theories These theories, still regarded as currently useful, concentrate on what leaders actually do rather than on their qualities or characteristics. Different patterns of behaviour are observed and categorized as ‘styles of leadership’, which are then discussed by practicing managers in the field. Some of these ‘styles’ include charismatic leadership, servant leadership and quiet leadership. Situational Leadership This approach (also still widely popular) sees leadership behaviour as determined by the situation in which leadership is being exercised. Some situations may require an autocratic style; others may need a more participative approach. It also suggests that there may be differences in required leadership styles at different levels in the same organization, depending on follower readiness. Contingency Theory This is a refined version of the situational view, focusing on identifying the situational variables (contingencies) which best predict the most appropriate or effective leadership style to fit particular circumstances. Transactional Theory This approach emphasizes the importance of the relationship between leaders and followers, focusing on the mutual benefits derived from a form of ‘contract’ through which the leader delivers rewards or recognition in return for the commitment, loyalty and efforts of the followers. Transformational Theory The central concept here is of follower change, and the role of leadership in transforming the performance of his or her followers, through influences which impact on their growth and personal development. Transactional and transformational leaders are frequently contrasted but they are not mutually exclusive.

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  Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

  Evidence-based Lessons for Creating Sustainable Organizations

  • Steve M. Jex, Thomas W. Britt, Cynthia A. Thompson, Cynthia A Thompson(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  MODERN THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP Most Leadership Theories developed within the past 50 years fall under the broad cate- gory of contingency theories, in that they emphasize adjusting leadership behaviors based on follower attributes. In this section, we examine more modern Leadership Theories that have been most influential in the leader- ship literature. Influence is defined in terms of the research generated by the theories, as well as the impact the theory has had on the practice of leadership within organizations. Path–Goal Theory Path–goal theory represents a very ambi- tious attempt to blend leadership and employee motivation into one theory (House, 1971; House & Mitchell, 1974). The basic idea behind path–goal theory is that the role of leaders is really to help their subordinates become successful. House stated this in expectancy theory terms (Vroom, 1964); specifically, if a leader is successful, subordinates’ level of expectancy (the perception that effort will lead to per- formance) is raised. Stated differently, the function of leaders is to show subordinates the “path to the goal.” Path–Goal Theory states that leaders must adapt their leadership style to the subordi- nates being supervised and the situation in which their work takes place. House pro- posed that, to be successful, a leader must be capable of utilizing the four different leadership styles: directive leadership, sup- portive leadership, achievement-oriented leadership, and participative leadership. Directive leadership focuses on making sure that subordinates know what they are supposed to be doing, and perhaps clarify- ing task responsibilities. A leader who meets with subordinates once a week to give out work assignments is exhibiting directive leadership. Supportive leadership represents behaviors that are aimed at showing con- cern and caring for subordinates. A leader who makes it a point to ask about a subor- dinate’s sick child is exhibiting supportive leadership.

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  Leadership

  Regional and Global Perspectives

  • Nuttawuth Muenjohn, Adela McMurray, Mario Fernando, James Hunt, Martin Fitzgerald, Bernard McKenna, Ali Intezari, Sarah Bankins, Jenny Waterhouse(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  It therefore facilitates leaders’ thinking in terms of the impact that their leadership approach has on employee motivation, and on the extent to which subordinates are likely to accept them as leaders in the first place. Ultimately the applied value of any theory lies in its perceived utility as a barometer for determining leadership effectiveness. For some, contingency theories provide useful guidelines to refine their chosen leadership style. For others, contingency approaches seem too complex and one or more of the behavioural theories might provide greater insights into effective leadership practice. In the final analysis, each leader has the responsibility to decide for themselves what is useful and what is not, from the array of theoretical models and paradigms available in the literature. 52 | Leadership SUMMARY LEARNING OUTCOME 1: Identify the key contributions of the classical management writers and thinkers to contemporary understanding of leadership. Classical writers tended to view leadership as one aspect of the broader responsibility of management. Max Weber ( 1947 [1924]) emphasised the need for leaders to create well-defined structures in their organisations. Frederick Taylor ( 1911 ) advocated the establishment of clear work practices, to be overseen by leaders. Henri Fayol ( 1917 ) indicated the need to adhere to specific management principles, one of which was the promotion of team spirit by leaders. Later, the narrow classical perspective on leadership became less popular, and writers drew greater attention to the human element in organisations. Increasingly, they described leaders as individuals who have the opportunity to establish participatory management practices in organisations. LEARNING OUTCOME 2: Distinguish between trait and behavioural theories of leadership. Trait theories of leadership prevailed in the management literature from 1904 to 1947.

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  Metaphors We Lead By

  Understanding Leadership in the Real World

  • Mats Alvesson, André Spicer, Mats Alvesson, André Spicer(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP

  Mats Alvesson and André Spicer

  INTRODUCTION

  WE ARE OFTEN TOLD THAT leadership is the vital ingredient in any successful organization. It is what distinguishes thriving organizations from languishing ones. The presumed importance of leadership fuels many corporations’ obsession with encouraging their employees to become leaders. Many people think that perennial organizational problems such increasing productivity, ensuring quality, driving innovation, building morale and delivering strategies can all be dealt with through more and better leadership. When things go wrong, one of the first things that a board of directors does is look for new leadership. Even organizations that traditionally downplayed leadership now ascribe more and more significance to it. Today schools, hospitals and universities routinely try to encourage leadership in their ranks.

  Given our confidence in leadership, we might assume it would have a clear and distinct meaning. Sadly, this is not the case. A quick look at some of the academic texts on leadership reminds us there is a very broad spectrum of definitions. Yukl (1989: 253) points out that ‘the numerous definitions of leadership that have been proposed appear to have little else in common’ than involving an influence process. Yukl himself tried to bring a little order to this complicated field by defining leadership as ‘influencing task objectives and strategies, influencing commitment and compliance in task behaviour to achieve these objectives, influencing group maintenance and identification, and influencing the culture of an organization’ (p. 253). This definition makes sense but it does not to say that much. Leadership is about influencing a range of things. It seems that even the best definitions of leadership are often so broad and ambiguous that they are of limited value and sometimes become fairly meaningless. It is difficult to establish cognitive control over concepts like leadership (and many other concepts as well, but leadership may still be one of the trickiest). It works more through the associations it ignites.

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  Transformative Leadership Primer

  • Carolyn M. Shields(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  One final note of caution must be noted. Leadership Theories, for the most part, are intended to offer guidance and some underlying principles to help leaders ground their practices. Few are com- prehensive. In general they do not offer a how-to guide or recipe for dealing with the myriad of situ- ations one encounters, but comprise a lens through which to view one’s daily work. Wrigley (2013) offers an acerbic critique of the foregoing models, arguing, The officially promoted models of school evalua- tion and change … hinder a genuine rethinking of educational institutions and activity, and serve at a meta level to obstruct meaningful change in ped- agogy, curriculum, structures and relationships. They operate within a policy environment where, paradoxically, an insistence on modernisation and improvement disguises the lack of transformative rethinking, and the mantra of “mission, vision and values” serves as aesthetic and spuriously eth- ical camouflage for the reorientation of education to primarily economic functions (Ball, 2008). With honourable exceptions, the frantic productivity of effectiveness and improvement experts is marked 22 Chapter One by the absence of a critical debate about education- al purpose. (p. 31) His critique, although perhaps sharper than many, is consistent with the comments made by Blackmore (2011) above, with the call of Oakes and Rogers for equity-oriented leadership, and with my own conviction that transformative learning and leadership offer a way forward. Transformative Leadership Transformative leadership is as much a way of life and a way of (re)thinking as it is a leadership theory. It does not address the specifics of budgeting or per- sonnel management or facility construction or many other tasks a school leader may encounter; however, it does offer a set of underlying tenets that can guide these and all other decisions leaders will be called upon to make.

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  Organizational Behavior

  • Michael A. Hitt, C. Chet Miller, Adrienne Colella, Maria Triana(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Although important and useful, contingency theories of leadership have received less attention in recent years. The dynamic business environment and rapid technolog- ical advancements of the past two decades have combined to create the need for a new approach to leadership. 46 We next turn to one of the most significant contemporary para- digms for leadership. Transactional and Transformational Leadership The need for organizations to change and adapt rapidly while creating a high-performance workforce has become increasingly apparent in recent years. To stay competitive, business leaders must be able to inspire organizational members to go beyond their ordinary task requirements and exert extraordinary levels of effort and adaptability. As a result, a popular approach to understanding leadership is the transactional leader versus transformational leader framework. Transactional leadership 47 focuses primarily on leaders’ extrinsic exchange relation- ships with followers. In other words, transactional leadership is based on how leaders respond to their subordinates’ performance. There are three types of transactional leaders: contin- gent reward leaders, active management-by-exception leaders, and laissez-faire leaders. 48 transactional leadership A leadership approach that is based on the exchange relationship between fol- lowers and leaders. There are three types of transac- tional leadership behavior types: contingent reward, active-management- by exception, and laissez faire.

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  Leadership through Trust

  Leveraging Performance and Spanning Cultural Boundaries

  • Gus Gordon(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Abstract Over time one or more theories has occupied a prominent place in academic leadership research. While leadership constructs may manifest differently in specific contexts, trust usually is a part of any spe- cific theory, either explicitly or implicitly. Categorizing pure academic Leadership Theories may not be a realistic strategy to understand effective leadership since most behaviors of effective leaders are a mix of academic Leadership Theories so that lines become too blurred to use a specific aca- demic theory as a recipe for leadership. Nevertheless, due to the perva- sive use of categorized theories of leadership in the literature, they are discussed in this chapter by leadership typology. Keywords Leadership typologies · Transactional leadership Transformational leadership · Leader-member exchange Trust leadership · Cross-cultural leadership issues Authors have written about leadership for centuries. In the process, hun- dreds of thousands of pages have been written on leadership. An entire industry on leadership development has been spawned. Spending on leadership programs is said to be above $15 billion dollars per year in the USA. 1 And, yet, the secret of effective leadership remains something of a mystery. CHAPTER 1 Basic Academic Theories of Leadership © The Author(s) 2017 G. Gordon, Leadership through Trust, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56955-0_1 2 1 BASIC ACADEMIC THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP Research may be confounded by the fact that effective leaders surface in many different contexts and come from varied socioeconomic back- grounds. Psychologists who study leadership note that the cognitive component of leadership is something of a black box that can make lead- ership characteristics and traits opaque (Hambrick et al. 1993). Nevertheless, over time various academic theories of leadership have developed. What follows is a quick overview of the major theories.

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  Essential Leadership

  Develop Your Leadership Qualities Through Theory and Practice

  • Esther Cameron, Mike Green(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  4 on Contingency Theories and Situational Leadership, which set out theories and frameworks exploring how different types of leaders succeed in different contexts. The powerful idea that leaders can adapt their behaviour according to the situation is also introduced and discussed.

  Chapter 5 on Psychodynamics, Power and the Shadow looks at parallel developments in the areas of psychodynamics, personality and the source of power, and explains how this work can support leaders. Approaches to understanding personality and the dynamics between individuals are identified. We also look at how power and politics arise and the ways in which these can be used well, or lead to unhealthy interpersonal and organizational dynamics. We explain some of the phenomena of the shadow or dark side of leadership too.

  The question of motivation, inspiration and ‘moral development’ is explored in Chapter 6 , which focuses on Transformational and Transactional Leadership. This chapter describes the history and evolution of this framework, sets out some of the research that has been done to explore this approach to leadership, and looks at what the critics say about the shortcomings of some applications of this framework.

  Chapters 7 –11 look at a wider range of perspectives from the 1990s onwards. Chapter 7 on Strategic and Innovation Leadership sets out the most important development in ideas around strategic thinking, creativity and innovation from a leadership perspective by exploring the work of Schoemaker, Mintzberg and Bossink amongst others. Chapter 8 explores the wider topic of Change Leadership, setting out the evolution of theory and frameworks in this complex and important area of leadership. We refer to Kotter, Bennis, Schein and Heifetz in particular.

  The challenges of leading ethically and responsibly are explored in Chapter 9

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  Leadership for the Twenty-First Century

  • Joseph Rost(Author)
  • 1993(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  "The institutional leader," he wrote, "is primarily an expert in the promotion and protection of values" (p. 28). Although popular with practitioners, the book and its understanding of leadership never penetrated the group and behavioral views of leadership that dominated the leadership studies narratives. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were a number of leadership scholars who defined leadership in terms of influence, but that view never entered the main- stream literature because the concept was too political and slippery. It is very difficult to do an empirical study of influence. Leadership as influence is not part of the narratives. Sociologists have developed an attribution theory of leadership. As an attrib- ute, leadership is the name that people use to make sense out of complex events and the outcomes of events they otherwise would not be able to explain. In other words, people attribute leadership to certain individuals who are called leaders because people want to believe that leaders cause things to happen rather than have to explain causality by understanding complex social forces or analyzing the dynamic interaction among people, events, and environment (Calder, 1977; S. Hunt, 1984; McElroy & Hunger, 1988; Pfeffer, 1977). Such a notion calls into question the idea of leadership as something that is really real; and as such, the narratives of leadership studies could not accommodate attribution theory. Finally, the saga of leadership studies does not mention Burns (1978), whose theory of leadership is politically based and to a large extent ignores most of the mainstream theories. His transactional leadership model has its antecedents in Hollander (1964; 1978a), who was part of the mainstream group, and in Jacobs (1970), who was not; both of them espoused an exchange theory of leadership.

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