Week 10 Leadership and power

Understanding the complex nature of leadership

- Leadership: the ability to influence employees to voluntarily pursue

organisational gains

Leadership vs Management

Manager and Leader – not synonymous

- Manager
o Being a manager: coping with complexity
o Determining what needs to be done – planning and budgeting
o Creating arrangements of people to accomplish an agenda – organising
and staffing
o Ensuring people do their jobs – controlling and problem solving
- Leaders
o Being a leader: coping with change
o Determining what needs to be done – setting a direction
o Creating arrangements of people to accomplish an agenda – aligning
people
o Ensuring people do their jobs – motivating and inspiring

Manager and Leader – synonymous

Management and leadership competencies form ONE practice

Using power to differentiate between management and leadership

- Managers rely more on the power of authority needed to hire and fire, reward
and punish
- Leaders rely more on the ability to influence others through inspiring and creating
vision

PART II. Power in organisations:

- What is power?
o “A has the power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something
that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl, 1957)
o “The capacity of an individual or group to modify the conduct of other
individuals or groups in a manner which they desire and without having to
modify their own conduct in a manner which they do not desire”
- Examples of power in action
Examples of power at different organisational levels

French and Raven’s 5 sources

Other sources of power

- Connection/relational (networks, contacts; public opinion)

- Informational (possession of or access to valuable information)

The rising power of social voice

- Power of social movements

- Power of social networks
- Power of social media – light and darkness (online bullying)

What are the implications of changing power dynamics in societies for today’s
organisations?

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The dark side of power of leadership

- Toxic
- Violent
- Bullying
- Narcissistic
- Unethical

Use social media in less productive ways

Tactics for influencing others

PART III. Five approaches to leadership

Trait approaches to leadership

Trait approaches to leadership attempt to identify distinctive characteristics that

account for the effectiveness of leaders

Gender perspective on leadership around the GLOBE

- Do women have traits that makes them better leaders?

o Studies show that women executives score higher than their male
counterparts on a variety of measures from producing high quality work to
mentoring employees
- Why then are fewer women as leaders than men?
o The lack of women on top
o Unwillingness to compete or sacrifice
o Modesty
o Lack of mentors
o Starting out lower and more likely to quit
o More successful men are more liked; more successful women are more
disliked
- Globe
o Universally liked and disliked attributes of leaderships

Michigan and Ohio behavioural leadership models

- Behaviour leadership approaches attempt to determine the distinctive styles

used by effective leaders

Contingency approaches to leadership

- Belief that effective leadership behaviour depends on the situation at hand

- Also called the situational approach
- Two Approaches
o The contingency leadership style (by Fiedler)
 o The path-goal leadership style (by House)

Fiedler’s contingency leadership model

- The contingency leadership model developed by Fiedler

o Determines if a leader’s style is 1. Task-oriented or 2. Relationship oriented
and if that style is effective for the situation at hand
o Uses the least preferred co-worker (LPC) scale (the higher the score, the
more the relationship-orientated; the lower the score, the more task-
orientated)
o Based on 3 dimensions of situational control
 Leader-member relations- reflects the extent to which the leader
has the support, loyalty and trust of the work group
 Task structure – extent to which tasks are routine and easily
understood
 Position power – refers to how ,much power a leader has to make
work assignments and reward and punish

House’s revised path-goal theory

Leadership styles of the revised path-goal theory

Full-range model: Uses of transactional and transformational leadership