Leadership Defined - Leadership Principles

Leadership Defined

Leadership is the process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal (1, Pg 3). The size of the group that are being influenced can vary from perhaps a small task group to an entire organisation. By agreeing to work towards common goals, it allows the leaders and followers to work together with a common purpose. Of course, it can be argued that there are differences between the process of leadership whereby leaders influence followers, and leadership traits which is where some believe that leadership is a natural quality that an individual may possess innately. These qualities include intelligence, personality features such as extraversion or physical qualities such as height. (Bryman, 1992) (1, Pg 4).

There are a number of characteristics in a leader which I have learnt to recognise through experience as being more appropriate and successful. There are ways to adopt different strategies of leadership depending on the situation and the group of followers but I feel that there are key principles which are important in contributing to being a great influencer and the best leader I can be.

The people-based approach

From experience, I have worked with managers who are very much task focused and have organised their subordinates in line with the tasks that need to be completed. This task focused management is often referred to as task-oriented leadership as researched by Hersey and Blanchard (4, Pg 58) which is 'the extent to which a leader engages in spelling out duties and responsibilities of an individual or group'. The managers with whom I have previously worked with have been concerned with setting high but realistic performance goals, emphasising the importance of meeting deadlines and asking subordinates to follow standard procedures rather than them accepting suggestions and delegating responsibilities. These qualities of leadership are similar to those studied at Ohio State University (Stogdill, 1957) (5, Pg 50) referred to as 'initiating structure' behaviours. This leadership is not always the most effective style, it has been found that it is more effective to lead people whilst taking on a more supportive and helpful role. This is known as 'relations oriented behaviour'. The study taken place at the University of Michigan (Likert, 1961) (5, Pg 53) found that effective managers tend to use general supervision and allow the workers to have some autonomy but offer support throughout the task.

As a leader I would take on more of a relationship/people based behaviour as this has been proven to be more effective in producing higher motivation levels in subordinates as well as group performance. As shown by Judge et al (2004) there was found to be a significant improvement in overall performance when a leader is relationship oriented rather than task oriented.

Leadership Behaviour Relationship/ People Orientation Task Orientation

r/p r/p

Leader Effectiveness 0.39 0.28

Followers Motivation 0.40 0.26

Satisfaction with leader 0.68 0.27

Job Satisfaction 0.40 0.19

Group / Organisation Performance 0.23 0.23

Overall Average 0.49 0.29

Based on 400 correlations from 200 studies with 300 samples (Judge et al, 2004, JAP)

It is more important in an environment such as marketing to be more people focused, which is the area of leadership that I hope to work in. A leader in this type of role wants to inspire workers to be creative and flexible in their work. I hope to encourage workers to work towards the deadline but give them the independence to work as they like and offer continuous guidance and support throughout the task.

It can however be argued that, as Hersey and Blanchard found in the Situational Leadership Model, (2, Pg 59) that it is vital to take the situation into consideration. It may be that some situations need a more task or relationship leadership behaviour and some situations require a combination of the two. As illustrated below, leaders need to decide on their leadership style with regards to the situation looking at the competence and motivation of the people they are working with. If people have low motivation and low competence levels, the leader needs to be directing and task focused by giving instructions on what goals need to be achieved and how, supervising the followers carefully. When people are highly motivated but have low competence levels the leader should coach them using a highly directive and supportive style by 'focusing communication on achieving goals whilst meeting subordinates socioemotional needs' (1, Pg 91) but the leader will make the final decisions on goals. If the people have high competence but low motivation, the leader should be supportive and focus on goals whilst using the persons' skills, the leader should praise good results and give feedback. Lastly, if people have high competence and high motivation the leader should delegate tasks letting the subordinates have responsibility for getting the job done.

Building interpersonal relationships within the team

It is important to build on both the leader in an organisation and the leadership. A business can approach leadership as a social process and involve everyone within the organisation by creating social systems, helping to build commitments amongst members of the organisation, this takes the form of social capital (Brass and Krackhardt, 1999) (3). Social capital is where relationships are created through interpersonal exchange and in this relational model of leadership are 'commitments in the form of mutual obligations which are supported by reciprocated trust and respect' (Brower, Schoorman, & Tan, 2000) (3). The three elements of social capital became apparent whilst working at The Walt Disney Company; these included structural, relational and cognitive aspects.

Dimension Character

Structural: Sociability and commitment Disney employees have a broad range of contacts available to them with the possibility of constant interaction and the potential to build relationships. The staff are committed to the company and are willing to interact with those in the same social groups.

Relational: Trust and Reciprocity There is a mutual level of trust and reciprocity between the employees working in a friendly and safe environment. This dimension of social capital is built on over time due to the regular interaction