Exam 1 Flashcards
What was one of the first systematic attempts to study leadership?
Trait approach
“Great man” Theories (early 1900s)
-Focused on identifying innate qualities and characteristics possessed by great social, political, and military leaders
-Assumes certain people are “born with” leadership capabilities
What did Landmark Stogdill study in 1948?
-Analyzed and synthesized 124 trait studies to study traits interacting with situational demands
-Leadership reconceptualized as a relationship between people in a social situation
-He found that the average individual in a leadership role is different from an average group member with regard to intelligence, alertness, insight, responsibility, initiative, persistence, self confidence, and sociability
Mann in 1959 reviewed 1400 findings of personality and leadership in small groups and found…
-Less emphasis on situations as compared to Stogdill
-Suggested personality traits could be used to discriminate leaders from nonleaders
How was the critical role of traits in leader effectiveness revived?
-Stogdill (1974) analyzed 163 new studies to validate his original study and found 10 characteristics positively identified w leadership
-Lord, DeVader, and Alliger found that personality traits can be used to differentiate leaders/nonleaders
-Kirkpatrick and Lock found 6 traits make up the “right stuff” for leaders
What are the 5 major leadership traits that are known today?
Intelligence, confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability
Intelligence
-Verbal, perceptual, and reasoning capabilities
-Significantly contributes to a leader’s acquisition of complex problem solving skills and social judgment skills
-Research also indicates that a leader’s intellectual ability should not differ too much from insubordinates
Confidence (self-confidence)
-Certainty about one’s competencies and skills
-Includes self esteem, self assurance, and the belief that one can make a difference
Determination
-Desire to get the job done (i.e., initiative, persistence, drive)
-People with determination are willing to assert themselves, are proactive, and have the capacity to persevere in the face of obstacles
Integrity
-The quality of honesty and trustworthiness
-Leaders with integrity inspire confidence in others because they can be trusted to do what they say they are going to do
-They are loyal and dependable
Sociability
-Leader’s inclination to seek out pleasant social relationships
-Leaders who show sociability are friendly, outgoing, courteous, tactful, and diplomatic
-Social leaders have good interpersonal skills and create cooperative relationships with their followers
Five factor personality model and leadership
-A strong relationship between the big 5 personality traits and leadership
-Extraversion was the factor most strongly associated with leadership
-Then conscientiousness, openness, and low neuroticism
-Agreeableness was the only one found weakly associated with leadership
the tendency to be informed, creative, insightful and curious
Openness
the tendency to be thorough, organized, controlled, dependable, and decisive
Conscientiousness
the tendency to be sociable and assertive and to have positive energy
Extraversion
the tendency to be accepting, conforming, trusting, and nurturing
Agreeableness
the tendency to be depressed, anxious, insecure, vulnerable, and hostile
Neuroticism
What is emotional intelligence?
The ability to perceive and:
-apply emotions to life’s tasks
-reason/understand emotions
-express emotions
-use emotions to facilitate thinking
-manage emotions within oneself and relationships
Emotional intelligence as it relates to leadership
People who are more sensitive to their emotions and their impact on others will be more effective leaders
What are some different ways to measure EQ?
-MSCEIT: EQ as a set of mental abilities including the abilities to perceive, facilitate, understand, and manage emotion
-Goleman: EQ as a set of personal and social competencies including self awareness, confidence, self regulation, conscientiousness, and motivation
-Shankman and Allen: EQ as awareness of 3 aspects of leadership including context, self, and others
What is the focus of the trait approach?
-Focuses exclusively on the leader
-What traits leaders exhibit
-Who has these traits
-This approach emphasized that having a leader with a certain set of traits is crucial to having effective leadership
How do organizations use the trait approach?
-Organizations use personality assessments to find the “right” people assuming that it will increase organizational effectiveness
-Helps specify characteristics/traits for specific positions
What are the strengths of the trait approach?
-Intuitively appealing (people “need” to view leaders as gifted
-Credibility due to a century of research support
-Highlights the leadership component in the leadership process
-Provides benchmarks for what to look for in a leader
What are criticisms of the trait approach?
-fails to delimit a definitive list of leadership traits
-doesn’t take into account situational effects
-list of most important leadership traits is highly subjective
-research fails to look at traits in relationship to leadership outcomes
-not useful for training and development
How is the skills approach different from the trait approach?
The skills approach shifts focus from personality characteristics to an emphasis on skills and abilities that can be learned and developed
Three skill approach (Katz, 1955)
-Katz suggests that effective leadership depends on 3 basic personal skills: technical, human, and conceptual
Technical skill
-Having knowledge about and being proficient in a specific type of work or activity
-Specialized competencies, analytical ability, use of appropriate tools and techniques
-Technical skills involve hands on ability with a product or process
-Most important at lower levels of management
Human skill
-Having knowledge about and being able to work with people
-Being aware of ones own perspective and others’ perspectives at the same time
-Assisting group members in working cooperatively to achieve common goals
-creating an atmosphere of trust and empowerment of members
-important at all levels of the organization
Conceptual skill
-the ability to do the mental work of shaping meaning of organizational policy or issues (what the company stands for and where its going)
-works easily with abstraction and hypothetical notions
-central to creating and articulating a vision and strategic plan for an organization
-most important at top management levels
What are leadership skills?
the ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to accomplish a set of goals or objectives
-It examines the relationship between a leader’s knowledge and skills (aka capabilities) and the leader’s performance
-Leadership capabilities can be developed over time through education and experience
-Has 5 components: competencies, individual attributes, leadership outcomes, career experiences, and environmental influences
The skill based model of leadership also characterized as the capability model (Mumford and colleagues)
Individual attributes
-general cognitive ability (persons intelligence, information processing, creative thinking, memory)
-crystallized cognitive ability (intellectual ability learned or acquired over time)
-motivation (includes willingness, dominance, and social good)
-personality (tolerance for complex organizational situations)
Competencies/skills
-problem solving (creative ability to solve organizational problems)
-social judgment (capacity to understand people and social systems)
-knowledge (the accumulation of information and the mental structures to organize the information)
Leadership outcomes
-Problem solving (criteria= originality and quality of solutions to problem situations)
-performance (degree to which a leader has successfully performed his/her assigned duties)
Career experiences
-challenging assignments, mentoring, appropriate training, hands on experience
-Experiences gained during career influences leader’s knowledge and skills to solve complex problems
-Leaders learn and develop higher levels of conceptual capacity if they progressively confront more complex and long-term problems as they ascend the organizational hierarchy
Environmental influences
-Factors in a leaders situation that lie outside of his or her competencies, characteristics, and experiences
-Internal and external
Internal environmental influences
Can include factors like technology, facilities, expertise of subordinates, and communication
Ex. outdates technology skill level of employees
External environmental influences
-Can include economic, political, and social issues, as well as natural disasters, and can provide a unique challenge to leaders
-Not usually under the control of the leader
What is the focus of the skills approach?
-Focus is primarily descriptive; it describes leadership from skills perspective
-Provides structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership
Principle research perspectives of the skills approach
-Katz (1955) suggests importance of particular leadership skills varies depending where leaders reside in management hierarchy
-Mumford and colleagues (2000) suggest leadership outcomes are direct result of leader’s skilled competency in problem solving, social judgment, and knowledge
360 assessments
-Helps put skills approach into practice
-Leadership skills assessment from 3 angles: supervisors (top down evaluation), peers (same level evaluation), direct reports (bottom up evaluation)
-typically anonymous
- very effective for leadership skills development
What are the strengths of the skills based approach?
-describing leadership in terms of skills makes leadership available to everyone
-provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates wide variety of components
-provides a structure consistent with leadership education programs
What are criticisms of the skills based approach?
-breadth of the skills approach appears to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership, making it more general, less precise
-Weak in predictive value; does not explain how skills lead to effective leadership performance
-Skills model include some individual attributes that are trait like
What does the Behavior approach focus on?
-Emphasizes the behavior of the leader
-Focuses exclusively on what leaders do and how they act
-Primarily a framework for assessing leadership as behavior with a task and relationship dimension
What two general kinds of behaviors is the behavioral approach composed of?
-Task behaviors which facilitate goal accomplishment; they help group members achieve their objectives
-Relationship behaviors which help followers feel comfortable with themselves, with each other, and with that situation in which they find themselves
What did the university of Michigan studies explore?
Explored the specific emphasis on impact of leadership behavior on performance of small groups
What were the results of the University of Michigan Studies?
-Two types of leadership behaviors conceptualized as opposite ends of a single continuum:
-Employee orientation (strong human relations emphasis; people oriented)
-Production orientation (stresses the technical aspects of a job; task oriented)
Describe the Ohio State studies
-Analyzed how individuals acted when they were leading a group or an organization
-Done through the Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire
-Resulted in particular clusters of behavior that were “typical of leaders”
-Shortened version of LBDQ resulted in two general types of leader behaviors
What two general types of leader behaviors did the shortened version of the LBDQ find?
-Initiating structure: leaders provide structure for subordinates. Includes task behaviors: organizing work, giving structure to the work context, defining role responsibility, and scheduling work activities
-Consideration: leaders nurture subordinates. Includes relationship behaviors: building camaraderie, respect, trust, and liking between leaders and followers
Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid
-Developed in 1960s
-Used extensively in organizational training and development
-Designed to explain how leaders help organizations to reach their purpose
-Two factors: concern for production and concern for people
Two factors of Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid
-Concern for production: how a leader is concerned with achieving organizational tasks
-Concern for people: how a leader attends to the members of the organization who are trying to achieve its goals
Leadership grid components/styles of Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Leadership Grid
-Authority Compliance
-Country club management
-Impoverished management
-Middle of the road management
-Team management
-Paternalism/Maternalism
-Opportunism
Authority compliance
-Places heavy emphasis on task and hob requirements, and less emphasis on people, except the extent that people are tools for getting the job done
-Communicating with subordinates is not emphasized except for the purpose of giving instructions about the task
Country club management
-Represents a low concern for task accomplishment coupled with a high concern for interpersonal relationships
-Deemphasizes production
-Leaders stress attitudes and feelings of people, making sure the personal and social needs of followers are met
Impoverished management
-Representative of a leader who is unconcerned with both the task and interpersonal relationships
-Goes through the motions of being a leader but acts uninvolved and withdrawn
-Leader could be described as indifferent, noncommittal, resigned, and apathetic
Middle of the road management
-Describes leaders who are compromisers, who have an immediate concern for the task and intermediate concern for the people who do the task
-They find a balance between taking people into account and still emphasizing the work requirements
Team management
-This style places a strong emphasis on both tasks and interpersonal relationships
-Promotes a high degree of participation and teamwork in the organization and satisfies basic need in employees to be involved and committed to their work
Paternalism/Maternalism
-This is the benevolent dictator who acts graciously but does so for the purpose of goal accomplishment
-Treats people as if they were dissociated from the task
Opportunism
-refers to a leader who uses any combination of the basic 5 styles for the purpose of personal advancement
-May be seen as ruthless and cunning
-May also be seen as adaptable and strategic
What is the importance of the behavioral approach?
Marked a major hit in leadership research from exclusively trait focused to include behaviors and actions of leaders
Criticisms of the behavioral approach
-research has not adequately demonstrated how leaders’ styles are associated w/ performance outcomes
-no universal style of leadership that could be effective in almost every situation
-most of the research comes from the U.S
The Situational Approach perspective
-Developed by Hersey and Blanchard
Focuses on leadership in situations
-emphasizes adapting style: different situations demand different kinds of leadership
-Used extensively in organizational leadership training and development
Situational Approach definition
-Composed of both a directive dimension and supportive dimension
-Each dimension must be applied appropriately in a given situation
-Leaders evaluate employees to assess their competence and commitment to perform a given task
Directive behaviors:
help group members in goal achievement via one way communication through giving directions, establishing goals and how to achieve them, methods of evaluation and time lines, defining roles
Supportive behaviors
assist group members via two way communication in feeling comfortable with themselves, coworkers and situation. Includes asking for input, problem, solving, praising, and listening
Four leadership styles of situational approach
Telling, selling, participating, and delegating
What decides which leadership style is used with the situational approach?
Development levels: the degree to which followers have the competence and commitment necessary to accomplish a given task or activity
Telling
-low competence, low commitment
Selling
-some competence, low commitment
Participating
-high competence, varied commitment
Delegating
-high competence, high commitment
What is the focus of the situational approach?
-Assumes that subordinates vacillate along the developmental continuum of competence and commitment
-Leader effectiveness depends on: assessing subordinate’s developmental position and adapting his/her leadership style to match subordinate developmental level
Strengths of the situational approach
-marketplace approval/credible model for training employees to become effective leaders
-practicality/straightforward
-prescriptive value
-Leader flexibility
-differential treatment
Criticisms of the situational approach
-lack of empirical foundation
-further research is required to determine how commitment and competence are conceptualized for each developmental level
-conceptualization of commitment is unclear
-does no account for different demographics
