Leadership Flashcards
What is leadership?
An individual who influences the behavior of another individual.
The ability to get group members of achieve the group’s goals
Are there personality traits or individual differences which make leaders leaders?
- Great person theory - You attribute effective leadership to innate of acquired individual characteristics
- Big Five - Extraversion/surgency (positive attitude), agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellect/openness to experience.
What do leaders do?
- Autocratic leader - Give orders
- Democratic - Consult and obtain agreement and consent from the followers
- Laissez-faire
Can be task oriented or relationship oriented, and score high on ‘initiating structure’ and ‘consideration’ dimensions -> To be a good leader
Fiedler’s contingency theory
Situations are classified based on 3 criterion to determine their situational control:
- Quality of leader-member relations
- Clarity of the structure of the task
- Intrinsic power and authority of the leader by virtue of his position
1. If very low or very high situational control, a task oriented leader is better
2. If middle situational control, relationship oriented leader is better
Normative decision theory
(1) Need for decision-making, autocratic leadership is best
(2) Task is not very clear, consultative leadership is best
(3) lack of involvement and motivation, group decision making is best
Path-goal theory
Assumption that a leader’s main function is to motivate the group by clarifying the paths that will help it reach its goals
Idiosyncrasy credit theory
Hollander believed that to be effective, leaders need their followers to allow them to be innovative. For that, a leader needs a good credit rating, by:
- 1st conforming to the group norms
- 2nd ensure that the group feels like the leader has been democratically elected
- 3rd ensure that the group feels like the leader has the competences to fulfill the group’s objectives
- 4th the leader is seen to identify with the group, its ideals and its goals
This gives the leader legitimacy to influence and sometimes change the group norms.
Leader-member exchange theory (LMX)
Leaders develop dyadic exchange relationships with specific subordinates:
- If LMX is high, there is internal change in attitudes
- If LMX is low, it’s just an external change
Transformational leadership
Inspire to strive for something more than self-interest:
- Individualised consideration
- Intellectual stimulation
- Charismatic/inspiring leadership
Opposed to transactional leadership, which is concerned with the distribution of resources, transformational is more inspirational.
Social identity theory of leadership
Prototypical members tend to be more influential and thus more effective as leaders because:
- They best embody the group’s attributes (sources of conformity)
- They are liked (it facilitates influence)
- They find the group more central and identify more with it, it makes it easier for them
- Information related to the prototype is more salient - Because of the correspondence bias
What is the relationship between trust and leadership?
Tyler’s group value model and relational model of authority in groups - perceptions of justice and fairness are critical to the group life. In terms of both distributive and procedural justice. It creates trust, strengthens group identification, conveys respect and legitimacy, and helps with compliance and cooperation.
What about gender differences?
Women are less likely to be leaders because of:
- Glass-ceiling and glass cliff
- Role congruity theory
- Stereotype threat
How does a group take decisions? Establishing rules
2 dimensions:
- Strictness - The degree of agreement required (unanimity v. majority wins)
- Distribution of power (authoritarian v. consultative)
How does a group take decisions? Brainstorming, good or bad?
To come up with creative and novel solutions. In the end, individuals are not more creative than if they would’ve been alone, and their performance is lower because:
- Evaluation apprehension
- Social loafing and free-rider effect
- Production matching - Create a performance norm based on others’ performance
- Production blocking - Because you are interrupted and distracted by the others
Yet, there is an illusion of group effectivity because:
- It’s fun
- The group together came up with more ideas than if everyone would have worked alone
- The same idea will not be called out twice (but you personally know that you had that idea)
How does group memory work?
People recall different information. It is not that the group remembers better but that each individual remembers different facts, so overall more information is recalled.
That is called transactive memory - A shared system for encoding, storing and retrieving information (who remembers what):
- Groups can negotiate responsibility for remembering certain things (you focus on bills, I focus on groceries)
- Groups can assign memory based on relative expertise
- Groups can assign memory based on the access to information
