Chapter 13 - The Leadership Process

Question 1

Is Leadership about the behavior of leader?

Answer 1

No, Leadership is co-produced by leaders and followers working together in organizational contexts.

Question 2

What are the different elements of leadership?

Answer 2

Leaders, followers, leader-follower relationships, and context. It is only when all these elements come together effectively that leadership is produced. For this reason, leadership should be thought of as a process.

Question 3

What is the definition of Leadership?

Answer 3

Leadership is generated when acts of leading (influencing) are combined with acts of following (deferring). It represents an influence relationship between two or more people who depend on one another for attainment of mutual goals.

Question 4

Leadership Influence can be located in one person (i.e. a leader) or

Answer 4

Be distributed throughout the group (i.e., collective leadership)

Question 5

Formal Leadership

Answer 5

When leadership is exerted by individuals appointed or elected to positions of formal authority. (ex. Managers, teachers, ministers, politicians, and student organizations)

Question 6

Informal Leaders

Answer 6

Leadership that is exerted by individuals who do not hold formal roles but become influential due to special skills or their ability to meet the needs of others. (Ex. opinion leaders, change agents, and idea champions)

Question 7

Whereas formal leadership involves top-down influence flows

Answer 7

Informal leadership can flow in any direction: up, down, across, and even outside the organization. Informal leadership allows us to recognize the importance of upward leadership (or “leading-up”)

Question 8

What is upward leadership

Answer 8

Upward leadership occurs when individuals at lower levels act as leaders by influencing those at higher levels. This concept of leadership is often missed in discussions of leadership in organizations, but it is absolutely critical for organizational change and effectiveness.

Question 9

What’s the key to effective leadership?

Answer 9

Willing Followership. This means that others follow because they want to not because they have to.

Question 10

Why is followership closely related to the concept of power?

Answer 10

It’s closely related because when leaders operate from a willing followership model, others follow out of intrinsic motivation and power comes from personal sources. This differs from more compliance-based approaches that are common to managers who aren’t leaders, where others follow out of extrinsic motivation and power is more position based. Managers who are also effective leaders have both position and personal power. On the other hand, informal leaders who do not have formal positions can only operate through personal power.

Question 11

Understanding leadership as a process helps us to see that leadership is socially constructed. What is social construction of leadership?

Answer 11

It means that leadership is co-created in relational interactions among people acting in context

Question 12

An example of social construction can be seen in DeRue and Ashford’s model of the leadership Identity construction process. What does this model show?

Answer 12

This model shows how individuals negotiate identities as leaders and followers. This process involves individuals “claiming” and identity (as a leader or follower) and others “affirming” or “granting” that identity by going along with the claim.

Question 13

What is claiming?

Answer 13

Claiming refers to actions people take to assert their identity as a leader or follower.

Question 14

What is granting?

Answer 14

Granting refers to actions people take to bestow an identity of a leader or follower onto another person

Question 15

What happens when there is no designated leader in a group?

Answer 15

When there is no designated leader, group members negotiate who will be leaders and who will be followers

Question 16

Leader identity construction has important implications particularly for what type of individuals?

Answer 16

Those who are high in motivation to lead. Although these individuals may want to lead, if others do not grant them a leadership identity their efforts will not succeed.

Question 17

Natural leaders

Answer 17

When leadership is thrust upon them by others who grant them leadership identities regardless of their desire to claim leadership

Question 18

What role does the follower play in the identity construction process?

Answer 18

They (a) grant claims to leaders, (b) claim roles as followers. When these grants and claims or when followers do not accept their own role as followers - the result is conflict and lack of legitimacy.

Question 19

What are implicit leadership theories?

Answer 19

They are beliefs or understanding about the attributes associated with leaders and leadership. They can vary widely depending on our experiences and understandings of leadership. Implicit leadership theories cause us to naturally classify people as leaders or non-leaders. It is based in the cognitive categorization processes associated with perception and attribution.

Question 20

What is followership?

Answer 20

Followership represents the capacity or willingness to follow a leader. It is a process through which individuals choose how they will engage with leaders to co-produce leadership and its outcomes.

Question 21

What is the romance of leadership?

Answer 21

The tendency to attribute all organizational outcomes - good or bad - to the acts and doings of leaders. The romance of leadership reflects our needs and biases for strong leaders who we glorify or demonize in myths and stories of great heroic leaders.

Question 22

What is the problem with the romance of leadership?

Answer 22

The problem is its corollary is the “subordination of followership”

Question 23

What is the subordination of followership?

Answer 23

It means that while we heroize (or demonize) leaders, we almost completely disregard followers. To overcome the problem of the romance of leadership, we need to better to understand the role of followership in the leadership process.

Question 24

Followership in Context

Answer 24

1) Some followers hold passive beliefs, viewing their roles in the classic sense of following - that is, passive, deferential, and obedient to authority.
2) Others hold proactive beliefs, viewing their role as expressing opinions, taking initiative, and constructively questioning and challenging leaders. Proactive beliefs are particularly strong among “high potentials” - those identified by their organizations as demonstrating strong potential to be promoted to higher-level leadership positions in their organization.

Question 25

What happens to “high potentials” in authoritarian or bureaucratic work climates?

Answer 25

These environments suppress their ability to take initiative and speak up, often leaving them feeling frustrated and stifled - not able to work to their potential

Question 26

What happens to “high potentials” in an empowering work climate?

Answer 26

“High Potentials” work with leaders to co-produce positive outcomes. Individuals with passive beliefs are often uncomfortable in empowering climates because their natural inclination is to follow rather than be empowered. In these environments, they report feeling stressed by leaders’ demands, and uncomfortable with requests to be more proactive. Passive followers are more comfortable in authoritarian climates where they receive more direction from leaders.

Question 27

What is follower role orientation?

Answer 27

It represents the beliefs followers hold about the way they should engage and interact with leaders to meet the needs of the work unit. It reflects how followers define their role, how broadly they perceive the task associated with it, and how to approach a follower role to be effective.

Question 28

What is power distance orientation?

Answer 28

When followers believe leaders are in a better position than followers to make decisions to determine direction. These individuals have lower self-efficacy, meaning they have less confidence in their ability to execute on their own, and they demonstrate higher obedience to leaders. They work in contexts of greater hierarchy of authority and lower job autonomy.

Question 29

Proactive Follower Orientation

Answer 29

They approach their role fro the standpoint of partnering with leaders to achieve goals. These individuals are higher in proactive personality and self-efficacy. They believe followers are important contributors to the leadership process and that a strong follower (voice) is necessary for accomplishing the organizational mission. They tend to work in lower hierarchy of authority greater autonomy, and higher supervisor support. They need to trust leaders and to know that they will not be seen as overstepping their bounds.

Question 30

What do managers want from followers?

Answer 30

It seems managers want voice, as long as that voice is provided in constructive ways. However, findings with obedience are not significant, indicating that managers may be mixed on whether obedience is positive or negative.

Question 31

Implicit followership theories

Answer 31

It’s how leaders view followers. What characteristics do they associate with followers (effective followers, ineffective followers). There are two types of follower characteristics: Prototypical and Anit-prototypical.

Question 32

What’s the difference between prototypical and anti- prototypical?

Answer 32

The difference is that prototypical characteristics are associated with good followers including being industrious, having enthusiasm, and being a good organizational citizen.
Anti-prototypical characteristics are associated with ineffective followers include conformity, insubordination and incompetence.

Question 33

The leader-follower relationship

Answer 33

The nature of leader-followership relationships matter. When relationships are good, outcomes are positive, when the relationships are bad, outcomes are negative. There are three theories:

1) Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)
2) Social Exchange Theory
3) Hollander’s Idiosyncrasy Credits

Question 34

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

Answer 34

Leaders have differentiated relationships with followers. With some subordinates, managers have high-quality LMX relationships, characterized by trust, respect, liking, and loyalty. With other subordinates, managers have low-quality LMX relationships characterized by a lack of trust respect liking and loyalty. Whereas the high LMX relationships are more like partnerships between managers and subordinates in co-producing leadership, low LMX relationships are more like traditional supervision, with managers supervising and monitoring and subordinates complying (or maybe resisting)

Question 35

Social exchange theory

Answer 35

Helps to explain the social dynamics behind relationship building. According to social exchange theory, relationships develop through exchanges - actions contingent upon rewarding reactions. Relationships develop when exchanges are mutually rewarding and reinforcing. When exchanges are one sided or not satisfactory, relationships will not develop effectively, and will likely deteriorate or extinguish. At the core of social exchange is the norm of reciprocity.

Question 36

Norm of reciprocity

Answer 36

The idea that when one party does something for another an obligation is generated, and that party is indebted to the other until the obligation is repaid. The norm of reciprocity can be seen as involving three components:

1) Equivalence
2) Immediacy
3) Interest

Question 37

What is Equivalence?

Answer 37

Represents the extent to which the amount of what is given back is roughly the same as what was received (the exact same or something different).

Question 38

What is Immediacy?

Answer 38

Refers to the time span of reciprocity - high quickly the repayment is made (immediately or an indeterminate length of time).

Question 39

What is Interest?

Answer 39

Represents the motive the person has in making the exchange. Interest can range from pure self-interest, to mutual interest, to other interest (pure concern for the other person)

Question 40

Hollander’s Idiosyncrasy Credits

Answer 40

Developed by Edwin Hollander. Idiosyncrasy Credits represent our ability to violate norms with others based on whether we have enough “credits” to cover the violation. If we have enough credits, we can get away with idiosynchrasies (deviations from expected norms) as long as the violation does not exceed the amount of credits. If we do not have enough credits, the violation will create a deficit. When deficits become large enough or go on for too long, our accounts become “bankrupt”, and the deviations will no longer be tolerated, resulting in deterioration of relationships.

Question 41

Collective leadership

Answer 41

Considers leadership not as a property of individuals and their behaviors but as a social phenomenon constructed in interaction. It advocates a shift in focus from traits and characteristics of leaders to a focus on the shared activities and interactive processes of leadership. There are three:

1) Distributed Leadership
2) Co-Leadership
3) Shared Leadership

Question 42

Distributed Leadership

Answer 42

Research, distinguished between “focused” and “distributed” forms of leadership. This research draws heavily on systems and process theory, and locates leadership in the relationships and interactions of multiple actors and the situations in which they are operating. Distributed leadership is based on three main premises:

Question 43

Distributed leadership premises:

Answer 43

First, leadership is an emergent property of a group or network of interacting individuals, i.e. it is co-constructed in interactions among people.

Second, distributed leadership is not clearly bounded. It occurs in context, and therefore it is affected by local historical influences.

Third, distributed leadership draws from the variety of expertise across the many, rather than relying on the limited expertise of one or a few leaders.

Question 44

Co-Leadership

Answer 44

Occurs when top leadership roles are structured in ways that no single individual is vested with the power to unilaterally lead. (law firms that have partnerships, etc.) Co-leadership helps overcome problems related to the limitations of a single individual and of abuses of power and authority. Co-leadership allows organizations to capitalize on the complementary and diverse strengths of multiple individuals. These forms are sometimes referred to constellations or collective leadership.

Question 45

Constellations or collective leadership

Answer 45

Members play roles that are specialized (each operates in a particular area of expertise), differentiated (avoiding overlap that would create confusion) and complementary (jointly cover all required areas of leadership)

Question 46

Shared Leadership

Answer 46

Where leadership is a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both. This process occurs both laterally - among team members - and vertically, with the team leader. Shared leadership is distributed leadership that emerges from within team dynamics. The main objective of share leadership approaches is to understand and find alternate sources of leadership that will impact positively on organizational performance.

Question 47

Shared leadership

Answer 47

In shared leadership, leadership can come from outside the team or inside the team. Outside the team, leaders can be formally designated. Often these nontraditional leaders are called coordinators or facilitators. A key part of their job is to provide resources to their unit and serve as a liaison with other units.

Question 48

Shared leadership

Answer 48

According to the theory, the key to successful shared leadership and team performance is to create and maintain conditions for that performance. This occurs when vertical and shared leadership efforts are complementary.

Question 49

Shared leadership

Answer 49

Five important characteristics have been identified across projects:

1) efficient, goal-directed effort
2) adequate resources
3) competent, motivated performance
4) productive, supportive climate
5) a commitment to continuouse improvement.

Question 50

Shared leadership

Answer 50

The distinctive contribution of shared leadership approaches is in widening the notion of leadership to consider participation of all team members while maintaining focus on conditions for team effectiveness.