Leadership Navigation Flashcards
Coercive Leadership
The leader imposes a vision or solution on the team and demands that the team follow this directive.
- Effective during crises when immediate and clear action is required.
- Ineffective at other times when it can damage employees’ sense of ownership in their work and motivation.
Authoritative leadership
The leader proposes a bold vision or solution and invites the team to join this challenge.
- Effective at times when there is no clear path forward and when the proposal is compelling and captures the team’s imagination. Team members have a clear goal and understand their roles in the effort. They are encouraged to contribute their own ideas and take risks.
- Ineffective when the leader lacks real expertise.
Affiliative Leadership
The leader creates strong relationships with and inside the team, encouraging feedback. The team members are motivated by loyalty.
- Effective at all times but especially when a leader has inherited a dysfunctional and dispirited team that needs to be transformed. Leader must have strong relationship-building and management skills.
- Ineffective when used alone. For example, opportunities to correct or improve performance may not be taken because the affiliative leader fears damaging a relationship.
Democratic Leadership
The leader invites followers to collaborate and commits to acting by consensus.
- Effective when the leader does not have a clear vision or anticipates strong resistance to a change. Team members must be competent; leaders must have strong communication skills.
- Ineffective when time is short, since building consensus takes time and multiple meetings.
Pacesetting Leadership
The leader sets a model for high performance standards and challenges followers to meet these expectations.
- Effective when teams are composed of highly competent and internally motivated employees.
- Ineffective when expectations and the pace of work become excessive and employees become tired and discouraged. In the leader’s attempt to set high goals, he or she may focus exclusively on the task and not give enough time to activities that motivate team members, such as feedback, relationship building, and rewards.
Coaching Leadership
The leader focuses on developing team members’ skills, believing that success comes from aligning the organization’s goals with employees’ personal and professional goals.
- Effective when leaders are highly skilled in strategic management, communication, and motivation and when they can manage their time to include coaching as a primary activity. Team members must also be receptive to coaching.
- Ineffective when employees resist changing their performance.
Trait Theory
Leaders possess certain innate characteristics that followers do not possess (and probably cannot acquire), such as physical characteristics (for example, strength, stamina) and personality traits (for example, decisiveness, integrity). Sometimes referred to as the “Great Man” theory.
It equates these characteristics and leadership but without evidence.
It may discourage leader development by implying that the ability to lead cannot be acquired with study and practice.
Behavioural Theories
Leaders influence group members through certain behaviors.
Leadership involves managing:
Tasks (work that must be done to attain goals).
Employees (relationships based on social and emotional needs).
Five types of managers, only one of which (team leader) is considered a leader:
Country Club Managers, (low task, high relationship)
Impoverished Managers (low task, low relationship)
Authoritarian Managers (high task, low relationship)
Middle of the road Managers, (midpoint on both task & relationship)
Team Leaders (high task, high relationship)
Situational Theories
Building on behavioral theories, situational theories propose that leaders can flex their behaviors to meet the needs of unique situations, employing both task or directive behaviors and relationship or supportive behaviors with employees.
Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership- Telling, Selling, Participating, Delegating
Fiedlers Contingency Theory- Leaders change the situation to make it more “favorable,” more likely to produce good outcomes.
Path-Goal Theory- This theory emphasizes the leader’s role in coaching and developing followers’ competencies. (Directive, Supportive, Achievement, Participative)
Emergent Theory
Leaders are not appointed but emerge from the group, which chooses the leader based on interactions.
Transactional Leadership
This theory emphasizes a leader’s preference for order and structure. It focuses on control and short-term planning.
Employees and subordinates are expected to follow orders from above.
Employees and subordinates are motivated by rewards and consequences.
Employees and subordinates are closely monitored to ensure that work is done properly and on time.
Creativity and inventiveness are not typically encouraged or nurtured.
Transformational Leadership
This theory emphasizes a leader’s ability to inspire employees to embrace change. Transformational leaders are able to encourage and motivate their employees to innovate in their work, to seek out changes that can add value and growth to the organization.
Leader-Member Exchange Theory
This theory focuses on a two-way relationship between leaders and chosen employees. The leader mentors a selected team member (or members) and gives them access to more information and resources in order to strengthen levels of trust and support. This mentorship is intended to maintain the leader’s position through the development of different two-way relationships.
Servant Leadership
The leaders’ goal is to serve the needs of their employees. This theory emphasizes the sharing of power. Leaders should work to help their employees develop and perform to the highest possible level, and this will generate benefits within and without the organization. It is a way of inverting the organizational/leadership norm of bottom-up service.
Formal Organizational Structures
- Traditional reporting lines
- Decision making process
- Funding process
- Strategy, mission, values
- Events
