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The Role of the Situation in Leadership - Coggle Diagram
The Role of the Situation in Leadership
Leadership can have many definitions and this can make it very confusings.
Almost all definitions of leadership share the view that leadership involves the process of influence. Another common thing is that all leaders have one or more followers.
Leadership can refer to the potential or capacity to influence others
Different among the definitions can be the treatment of effects of leadership
Many believe a correlation between effectiveness of a group and leadership. So it means not only influencing others but doing so in a manner that enables organization to attain its goals.
However there are many processes leaders do that have nothing to do what is define as leadership
This study defines it "as a process of motivating people to work together collaboratively to accomplish great things."
Some implications - Leadership is a process not a property of a person
The process involves a particular form of influence called motivating
Nature of incentives not part of the definition
a consequence of influence is collaberation in pursuit of common goal
The great things are in the minds of both leader and followers and are not necessarily viewed as desirable by all others parties.
Heroic conception of model assumes leadership to be a general personal trait independent of the context in which the leadership was performed.
Testing this heroic model involved comparing traits of leaders with followers, and effective leaders with those who were ineffective.
Substantial variance has been found in experiments.
Perrow (1970) argued that effectiveness of organizational leadership was caused by structural features rather than characteristics of the people in organization. Argued that it should be viewed as a dependent variable rather than indepdent variable.
argument that the attributes of the leader are irrelevant to organization effectivessnes have 3 components
1) Leaders have very limited power
2) Candidates for a given leadership position will have gone through the same selection screen that will cut differences
3)any remaining differences among people will have been overwhelmed by situational demands in the leadership role
empirically contingency theories guide research into the kinds of persons and behaviours who are effective in different situations
Fiedler found that relationship-motivsated leader outperformed task-motivsated workers for 4/8 situations vice versa.
He argued that leadership motivation is a enduring charachteristic not subject to change or adaptation.
2 Meta-analyses of orginal work and subsequent studies support this theory
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Normative and Descriptive models of leadership and decision making
Their own work shares with path goal theory a perspective on behavioural contingencies. But focuses more specifically on the degree to which leaders involve his or her subordinates in decision making
Study involving more than 1000 managers, 38% referred to as conflict confronters became more participative in high-conflict situations. A larger percentage 58% called conflict avoiders become more autocratic in a matched set of situations that were in high conflict
Path-Goal Theory
Group of psychologists tried to resolve these inconsistencies through suggesting a theory that the leaders role is to create and manage subordinate paths towards individual and group goals, clarify expectations,and to supplement the environment when sufficient rewards from the environment are lacking. Thoguht to depend on contingency factors (1) Subordinate charachteristics 2) Environmental charachteristics. When matched job satisfaction is present and acceptance of leaders occurs
Meta anaylsis largely supported key propositions of theory. Practical applications to this theory would be the training of leaders rather than selection
A taxonomy of Situation Effects
Organizational effectiveness is affected by situational factors not under leader control.
Lots of different variable can affect this eg currency fluctuations or exchange rates or interest rates etc.
Situations shape how leaders behave. Vroom and Jago indicate the importance of incorporating the situation into the search for lawfulness rather than removing it.
Situations influence the consequence of leader behaviour.
Leadership style that is effective in one situation may prove to be ineffective in another.