14.1 The Nature of Leadership: Wielding Influence

• Leadership is the ability to influence employees to voluntarily pursue organizational goals. Being a manager and being a leader are not the same. Management is about coping with complexity, whereas leadership is about coping with change. Companies manage complexity by planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, and controlling and problem solving. Leadership copes with change by setting a direction, aligning people to accomplish an agenda, and motivating and inspiring people.
• To understand leadership, we must understand authority and power. Authority is the right to perform or command; it comes with the manager's job. Power is the extent to which a person is able to influence others so they respond to orders. People may pursue personalized power, power directed at helping oneself, or, better, they may pursue socialized power, power directed at helping others.
• Within an organization there are typically five sources of power leaders may draw on; all managers have the first three. (1) Legitimate power is power that results from managers' formal positions within the organization. (2) Reward power is power that results from managers' authority to reward their subordinates. (3) Coercive power results from managers' authority to punish their subordinates. (4) Expert power is power resulting from one's specialized information or expertise. (5) Referent power is power deriving from one's personal attraction.
• There are nine influence tactics for trying to get others to do something you want, ranging from most used to least used tactics as follows: rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, ingratiating tactics, personal appeals, exchange tactics, coalition tactics, pressure tactics, and legitimating tactics.
• Four principal approaches or perspectives on leadership, as discussed in the rest of the chapter, are (1) trait, (2) behavioral, (3) contingency, and (4) emerging.

14.2 Trait Approaches: Do Leaders Have Distinctive Personality Characteristics?

• Trait approaches to leadership attempt to identify distinctive characteristics that account for the effectiveness of leaders. Representatives of this approach are Kouzes and Posner, Brossidy, Goleman, Judge, and gender studies.
  1. Kouzes and Posner identified five traits of leaders. A leader should be honest, competent, forward-looking, inspiring, and intelligent.
  2. Brossidy, a working CEO, identifies four qualities he looks for when assessing prospective leaders: ability to execute, a career runway (ability to go beyond present job), a team orientation, and multiple experiences.
  3. Goleman argues that the most important attribute in a leader is emotional intelligence—the ability to cope, empathize with others, and be self-motivated —which includes the traits of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
  4. Meta-analyses by Judge and colleagues suggest that the Big Five personality traits of extroversion, as well as conscientiousness and openness, are important to leadership effectiveness and that personality is more important than intelligence for leadership.
  5. Women may rate higher than men do on producing high-quality work, goal setting, mentoring employees, and other measures. Women excel in such traits as teamwork and partnering, being more collaborative, seeking less personal glory, being motivated less by self-interest than company interest, being more stable, and being less turf-conscious.

14.3 Behavioral Approaches: Do Leaders Show Distinctive Patterns of Behavior?

• Behavioral leadership approaches try to determine the distinctive styles used by effective leaders. Leadership style means the combination of traits, skills, and behaviors that leaders use when interacting with others. We described some important models of leadership behavior.
• In the University of Michigan Leadership Model, researchers identified two forms of leadership styles. In job-centered behavior, managers paid more attention to the job and work procedures. In employee-centered behavior, managers paid more attention to employee satisfaction and making work groups cohesive.
• In the Ohio State Leadership Model, researchers identified two major dimensions of leader behavior: Initiating structure organizes and defines what group members should be doing. Consideration is leadership behavior that expresses concern for employees by establishing a supportive climate.
• One expert concludes from the Michigan and Ohio studies that effective leaders tend to have supportive relationships with employees, use group rather than individual methods of supervision, and set high performance goals.
• The Blake and Moulton (and McCanse) Leadership Grid model identifies the ideal leadership style as having a high concern for production (the job aspects of subordinates' behavior) and people (the human aspects). Five principal management styles were identified: impoverished management, task management, country club management, middle-of-the-road management, and team management. Team management, which gets the utmost from employees along both production and people dimensions, was deemed most effective.

14.4 Contingency Approaches: Does Leadership Vary with the Situation?

• Proponents of the contingency approach to leadership believe that effective leadership behavior depends on the situation at hand—that as situations change, different styles become effective. Three contingency approaches are described.
• The Fiedler contingency leadership model determines if a leader's style is task-oriented or relationship-oriented and if that style is effective for the situation at hand. Once it is determined whether a leader is more oriented toward tasks or toward people, then it's necessary to determine how much control and influence a leader has in the immediate work environment. The three dimensions of situational control are leader-member relations, which reflects the extent to which a leader has the support of the work group; the task structure, which reflects the extent to which tasks are routine and easily understood; and position power, which reflects how much power a leader has to reward and punish and make work assignments. For each dimension, the leader's control may be high or low. A task-oriented style has been found to work best in either high-control or low-control situations; the relationship- oriented style best in situations of moderate control.
• The House path–goal leadership model, in its revised form, holds that the effective leader clarifies paths through which subordinates can achieve goals and provides them with support. Two variables, employee characteristics and environmental factors, cause one or more leadership behaviors—which House expanded to eight from his original four—to be more effective than others.
• Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership theory suggests that leadership behavior reflects how leaders should adjust their leadership style according to the readiness of the followers. Readiness is defined as the extent to which a follower possesses the ability and willingness to complete a task. The appropriate leadership style is found by cross-referencing follower readiness (low to high) with one of four leadership styles: telling, selling, participating, delegating.

14.5 The Full Range Approach: Uses of Transactional & Transformational Leadership

• Full range leadership describes leadership along a range of styles, with the most effective being transactional/transformational leaders. Transactional leadership focuses on clarifying employees' roles and task requirements and providing rewards and punishments contingent on performance. Transformational leadership transforms employees to pursue goals over self-interests. Transformational leaders are influenced by two factors: (1) Their personalities tend to be more extroverted, agreeable, and proactive. (2) Organizational cultures are more apt to be adaptive and flexible.
• The best leaders are both transactional and transformational. Four key behaviors of transformational leaders in affecting employees are they inspire motivation, inspire trust, encourage excellence, and stimulate them intellectually.
• Transformational leadership has three implications. (1) It can improve results for both individuals and groups. (2) It can be used to train employees at any level. (3) It can be used by both ethical or unethical leaders.

14.6 Five Additional Perspectives

• Five additional kinds of leadership are (1) shared leadership, (2) servant leadership, (3) loyalty leadership, (4) Level 5 leadership, and (5) e-leadership.
• Shared leadership is a simultaneous, ongoing, mutual influence process in which people share responsibility for leading. It is based on the idea that people need to share information and collaborate to get things done.
• Servant leaders focus on providing increased service to others—meeting the goals of both followers and the organization—rather than to themselves.
• Loyalty leadership is embodied in six principles suggested by Reichheld for generating faithful employees, customers, and investors: preach what you practice, play to win-win, be picky, keep it simple, reward the right results, and listen hard and talk straight.
• Level 5 leadership means an organization is led by a person, a Level 5 executive, who possesses the paradoxical characteristics of humility and a fearless will to succeed, as well as the capabilities associated with levels 1–4: being an effective leader, a competent manager, a contributing team member, and a highly capable individual.
• E-leadership involves leader interactions with others via the Internet and other forms of advanced information technology, which have made possible new ways for interacting within and between organizations (e-business) and with customers and suppliers (e-commerce). E-leadership can involve one-to-one, one-to-many, and within- and between-group and collective interactions via information technology.