EXC 3460 Organizational Behaviour And Leadership - Leadership: No More Heroes 3rd Edition Flashcards
The Five Enablers of Leading - Inspire
Inspiration stands on two feet: intellect and passion. Intellect orientates. Passion motivates.
Intellect: A leader has to be able to show that he or she understands the business context, can read trends and knows how to direct an organisation. Intellect orientates an organisation and shows it the direction in which it needs to go. Inspiration will not happen if data are thin, arguments weak and lacking in substance. The more capable and better educated the senior team members, the stronger their demand for intellectual rigour.
Passion/emotions: Leaders will not be able to galvanise and inspire people unless they are to some extent inspired themselves. The leader has to connect with the feelings of the workforce and be able to appeal to those feelings if people are to become motivated to buy-in to change. Inspiration demands passion as well as thought in order to win hearts and minds. It demands authenticity.
None of the above is possible, however, without trust. Trust is evoked by 4 C’s: competence, care, consistency and courage.
The Five Enablers of Leading - Focus
Employees need to know where to place their effort for maximum effect. Leaders have to have the ability to focus their organisation’s work. A leader has to transform enthusiasm and passion in their workforce into results. Those who are best able to help people focus tend to be detail-orientated, methodical and disciplined. They value clarity and pursue it.
Without focus, effort is dissipated, efficiency falls and people become exhausted from unproductive activity. There are many external factors that can reduce focus: competing priorities, the tyranny of the urgent, emergencies and disasters all play their part for reasons that are understandable and may be defensible. Other factors are within us: our enthusiasm for new projects, our need for variety, our intolerance of repetition or routine, our distaste for bureaucracy.
The Five Enablers of Leading - Enable
Leaders who have inspired their organisations and provided clear focus need also to ensure that their people are able to do what is required. Focus ensures that people are clear about what they need to do and when, and enablement ensures it is possible. Enabling people allows leaders to focus on processes and attend to such matters as delegated authority, budgets, training, employee numbers, skill mixes, talent management and succession. It also prevents micro-management.
Empowerment is ultimately a matter of alignment with the purpose and strategy the organisation is pursuing and yet it will not work at all without enablement.
The Five Enablers of Leading - Reinforce
Employees who do what is required for an organisation can reasonably expect their leaders to appreciate and reward their efforts appropriately. They can also expect that colleagues who do not contribute anywhere near as much as others, or fail to contribute at all, will be dealt with appropriately. In this way, a leader creates a ‘moral’ organisation in which the consequences for different contributions are defensible. In this way, good performance is rewarded, people who are struggling are helped and persistent poor performers are removed. This convinces the workforce that a leader can be trusted.
Leaders are not just responsible for doing these things themselves, but for creating systems that embed such actions in an organisation’s culture. The appeal of working for an organisation that understands individual motivation and applies its standards and reinforcements consistently is considerable. Failure to create and deploy these reinforcements fairly depletes trust, and those who have a choice tend to leave such organisations or such managers.
The Five Enablers of Leading - Learn
Some organisations go out of their way to ensure that learning takes place at all levels as frequently as possible. A learning organisation, team or individual sets aside time for review and reflection before embarking on a new task. Michael West and colleagues at Aston University Business School demonstrated that this ‘reflexivity’ pays off in increased performance in teams.
In many safety critical organisations, the leaders seek to create a no-blame culture to encourage people to own up to their mistakes and share information about them so that people may learn from them. For many years, the British Medical Journal carried an occasional column called Mea Culpa in which doctors who had made mistakes were encouraged to write anonymously so that others may learn from their errors and prevent maxima culpa.
Even when performance is reviewed, the process tends to focus on learning from mistakes when it is usually much more helpful to focus on successes and to understand how they occurred so that those steps can be repeated.
The Five Enablers of Disastrous Leading - Overwhelm instead of Inspire
Inspiration taken to extremes leads to workers becoming overwhelmed. It disorients colleagues and causes confusion. Everything seems possible and important that no-one knows quite what to do, or certainly what to do first; and this can be as harmful to people in an organisa- tion as not having any inspiration at all. Everything can be made to seem so important that no-one knows quite how to prioritise.
The antidote here is a healthy dose of focus. A leader must sequence and pace the work.
The Five Enablers of Disastrous Leading - Obsess instead of Focus
Focusing is all about sequencing and prioritising. It is about getting things done, planning in detail, making the steps clear and doing what is required. But when pushed to extreme, focus can become rigidity, inflexibility and obsessionality. This can lead to micro-management and losing sight of objectives.
The antidote would thus appear to be to step back from the detail and allow more scope for the subordinate to make decisions about how things should be done. In otherwords, enable.
The Five Enablers of Disastrous Leading - Abdicate instead of Enable
Enabling leaders delegate, provide employees with a clear mandate and provide them with the resources they need. They then step back and give their colleagues room. But if a leader pushes that to extremes, they step back too far. They abdicate (in otherwords, ignore your high position). They become remote, appear uninterested and tend to leave their teams feeling abandoned and vulnerable.
There are several antidotes to this particular excess but one powerful example is to stay sufficiently close to colleagues to welcome updates and to help them celebrate successes. This is the role of reinforcement.
The Five Enablers of Disastrous Leading - Manipulate or Bully instead of Reinforce
Reinforcement is the creation of appropriate consequences. Successes need to be celebrated and under-performance diagnosed so that wilful failure can be disciplined and difficulties helped. If reinforcment is pushed too hard, it can turn into people cynics. They appear to operate with the assumption that colleagues will only do what is required because they receive rewards. Many colleagues will work hard out of a genuine enjoyment for the work: so-called intrinsic motivation. In this circumstance, reward from else- where is at best irrelevant and, at worst, counter-productive. In these cases, it is the person that needs to be appreciated rather than the behaviour.
Extreme positive reinforcement can also become manipulative, hood- winking people into doing what they believe to be inappropriate. The banks immediately before the 2008 financial crisis had become overly reinforcing. They had created such huge bonuses that they tempted their employees to abandon common sense and their values in order not to miss the gravy train. Being overly severe on under-performance, on the other hand, can turn the leader into a bully. They can become so dictatorial that they create a culture of fear and obedience. Thus, there are dangers in over-reinforcement of either kind: positive or negative. Here, a powerful antidote is to engage people in reviewing their own work in order to learn.
The Five Enablers of Disastrous Leading - Analysis Paralysis instead of Learn
Learning and reflection are at the core of continuous improvement. Whether by formal reviews, informal reflection or the meticulous analysis of data, learning needs to be systematic and time needs to be set aside for it. But if a leader pushes analysis and reflection too hard and too far, it can hinder action due to paralysis by analysis. Under these circumstances, there can develop an unhelpful norm of no-one being prepared to do anything unless they have clear evidence that this is the right thing to do.
Hunches need to be tested and originality encouraged. If an action is unprecedented or genuinely innovative, there will be little evidence to support it. Pilot studies may be initiated and experiments created to test an entirely new idea: an idea that may have come from innovative flair or inspiration.
The Impact of Personality on Leadership: What is Personality?
Personality can be described as a predisposition to think, feel and act in certain ways. Personality is substantially heritable: around 40% of variance in personality is attributable to genetic influences. Around 60% is therefore due to other factors, yet by adulthood, personality is relatively unchanging: the mix of genetic and other influences has stabilised and the patterns have been established. Personality is not invariant—there are systematic changes over the lifespan—but it is slow to change. Traits are distin- guishing qualities or characteristics and are defined as the more enduring aspects of personality, as distinct from states which are, by definition, more transient. There is now consensus that personality is best described as com- prising five ‘super-traits’ or ‘Big 5’ factors.
The Impact of Personality on Leadership: What is the difference between Personality and Behaviour?
An individual’s personality predisposes her or him to respond in a particular way to situations, for example, to show warmth and friendliness, or wariness and mistrustfulness. Personality interacts with the situation the individual faces and affects both how the situation is perceived (e.g. as threatening or safe) and the situation’s effects on the individual (e.g. eliciting enthusiasm or disgust). Behaviour in any situation is therefore a function of the interaction between the person (personality) and the situation itself.
Jesus Salgado 1997 (Study): The Role of FFM in Predicting job and training performance, and personnel data (accidents, absenteeism, wages)
Jesus Salgado in 1997 undertook a meta-analytic study of the validity of the FFM to predict job performance, training performance and personnel data (accidents, absenteeism, wages) using studies conducted between 1973 and 1994 in Europe. Conscientiousness showed the highest predictive power across all occupations and performance criteria; Emotional Stability (low Neuroticism) was almost as powerful a predictor. Openness to Experience was found to be a valid predictor of the ability to benefit from training. The results show that Agreeableness predicts training performance but showed only limited power to predict job performance. Finally, Extraversion does not show validity for any criterion.
Judge and Collegues (study): The Most Predictive Traits of Leadership emergence (perceived leadership) and effectiveness (leadership performance)
Judge and colleagues performed a large-scale quantitative meta-analysis, which included 222 correlations from 73 studies. Results showed that Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness and Conscientiousness were all positively correlated with both leadership emergence (perceived leadership) and effectiveness (leadership performance).
Overall, the correlations with leadership were Neuroticism = - .24, Extraversion = .31, Openness to Experience = .24, Agreeableness = .08, and Conscientiousness = .28. Results indicated that the relations of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Conscientiousness with leadership generalized in that more than 90% of the individual correlations were greater than 0. They concluded that Extraversion is the strongest predictor of leadership emergence and effectiveness, almost certainly because of the assertiveness, dominance and sociability of extraverts. The multiple correlation for all five factors was 0.48 for leadership and personality when personality is measured by the FFM. This accounts for 23% of the variance in leadership emergence and effectiveness together and 16% in effectiveness alone.
The authors acknowledge that while the research shows correlations exist between personality and leadership, it does not show causation: it does not explain why these traits relate to leadership.
The Effect of Personality on Leadership and the Extent of the Effect
We know, from a major review of the research literature published between 1944 and 1998, that personality accounts for 28% of the variance in leadership emergence (perceived leadership) and 15% of the variance in leadership effectiveness (Judge and Bono 2002). Although personality does not account for the majority of the variance, it is almost twice as powerful as intelligence in predicting leadership effectiveness.
