Lecture 9: Leadership Flashcards
Leadership
‘The process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal’ - Northhouse, 2001
problems defining leadership
- 1000s of different definitions not one unifying definition
- Having influence - power
- Good and bad leadership
- Does it matter??
- Perspective of the focal theory
2 types of leaders
○ Emergent leaders - come from the group itself (emerge and take charge) either because of skill/ability or if they are nominated by the group
○ Prescribed leaders - appointed by an outside organising body
emergent leaders
○ Emergent leaders - come from the group itself (emerge and take charge) either because of skill/ability or if they are nominated by the group
prescribed leaders
○ Prescribed leaders - appointed by an outside organising body
types of leadership
autocratic/task orientated
democratic/social or person-orientated
laissez-faire
autocratic/task-orientated leadership
○ Dictated
○ Inflexible approach to group
○ Task needs to be completed
§ As quickly and effectively as possible
○ Advice, ideas or comments not welcome
○ Cool and impersonal
○ Group members tend to stop/slow down if leader is absent
○ Aggressive towards each other when things go wrong
○ Effective when quick decisions need to be made
democratic/social or person-orientated leadership
○ Make decisions after consultation process with group
○ Actively encourage invlvement of group
○ Adopt more informal relaxed approach to leadership
○ Leader makes final decision based on info collected from group memberd and own thoughts and ideas
○ Group members continue to work on tasks when leader is absent
○ Effective in co-active sports
laissez-faire leadership
○ ‘No leadership’ - the leaders stands aside and allow group to make its own independent decisions
○ Group members get on with things in their own way
○ Leaders may help members get out of difficulties but offer no direction/involvement and group goals less likely to be achieved
○ Group members tends to be aggressive towards each other when things go wrong and give up easily
approaches to studying leadership
trait approach
behavioural approach
interactional theory
trait approach to leadership
○ The frat man theory
○ Leaders ‘born not made’
○ Successful leaders have certain personality characteristics that make it likely they will be leaders no matter what situation they are in
However no definitive set of traits that characterise a good leader
behavioural approach to leadership
○ Good leaders are ‘made not born’
○ Anyone can be taught to be a good leader
○ Links with social learning theory
§ Suggests people learn to be good leaders by observing behaviours of other good leaders in a variety of situations, reproducing those behaviours in similar situations and then continuing them should they be reinforced
interactional theory of leadership
○ Considers other factors that could affect the effectiveness of leadership, mainly the interaction between the individual and their situation
relationship-centred/person-orientated leaders
- Focused on developing relationships with the people in the group
- Work hard to maintain communication with members
- Help maintain levels of social interaction between members and themselves
- Develop respect and trust others
- Generally more effective with experienced, highly skilled athletes
○ Highly skilled athletes already highly task-orientated
task-centred/task-orientated leaders
- More concerned with meeting goals and objectives
- Tend to create plans
- Decide on priorities
- Assign members to task
- Ensure members stay on task
○ With overall focus on increasing overall group activity - Tend to be more effective with less experiences, less skilled performers who need constant instruction and feedback
multidimensional model of leadership
- Chelladurai (1978, 1990, 1993)
- Conceptual framework allowing leadership effectiveness be studies in sports domain
- Effective leadership is dynamic and based on complex series of interactions between leader group members and situation
- Behaviour does not occur in a vacuum
○ Antecedent factors such as leader and member characteristics will influence both the actual behaviour of the leader and group preferences for leadership behaviours
leader behaviour
- Actual: what they do in a situation - often determined by coaches experience
- Preferred: behaviour that followers would like to see in the leader - determined by the group
- Required: behaviour required by situation or task
antecedents in multidimensional model
situational characteristics
leader characteristics
member characteristics
What happens according to the multidimensional model if the coaches actual behaviour is what is required by the situation and what the players prefer?
This would lead to good performance on high satisfaction in players which is stated in the congruence hypothesis
According to the multi dimensional model what would happen if the coaches at your behaviour is incongruent with what is required and with what the players prefer?
Poor performance and low satisfaction should result
According to the multi dimensional model what would happen when actual coach behaviour is congruent with what is required but not but what players prefer?
Performance should be good yeah the players will be dissatisfied
According to the multidimensional model what would happen when actual coach behaviour is congruent with what players would prefer the coach to do but not with required coach behaviour
Performance will be poor but the players will be satisfied with the coach
transformational leadership
takes place when leaders go beyond their own self-interests and inspire, encourage, and stimulate others to exceed minimally expected standards’ (Beauchamp, 2014)
- A transformational leader is a person who stimulates and inspired (transform) followers to achieve extraordinary outcomes (Robbins and Coulter, 2007)
- Involves a series of exchanges/transactions between leader and follower
- Whereby leaders make use of rewards and reinforcement to foster compliance and encourage followers to meet previously agreed-upon standards
- Transactional leadership is about reward and punishment whereas transformational leadership is about inspiring people to invest effort beyond the realisation of reward and punishment.
- Enhances the motivation, morale and performance of followers through a variety of mechanisms
○ Connecting the follower’s sense of identity and self to the project and the collective identity of the organisation
○ Being a role model for followers that inspires them and males them interested
○ Challenging followers to take greater ownership for their work
○ Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of followers
- So leader can align followers with tasks that enhance their performance
meta-cognitive model of vision, support and challenge
- First developed by Hardy and Arthur in a military context
- Posits that great coaches inspire athletes by:
○ Creating an inspirational vision of the future
○ Providing the necessary support to chieve the vision
○ Provide the challenge to achieve the vision
- Posits that great coaches inspire athletes by:
issues with transformational leadership
- Reliance on correlational data
○ Relationship between variables - cannot infer causality- Overemphasis of theory on leadership process at the dyadic level
○ Explains leaders influence on individual followers, not on group - Insufficient specification of situational variables in transformational leadership
○ A fundamental assumption of transformational leadership theory is that the underlying leadership processes and outcomes are essentially the same in all situations - Theory does not explicitly identify any situation where transformational leadership is detrimental
- Overemphasis of theory on leadership process at the dyadic level
Is sport group merely the collection of a number of individuals and the leader is the most dominant individual?
- Doesn’t appear so
- Idea that there is a single leader in sport is oversimplification
- Leadership may be thought of as being distributed across many individual within a sport
challenging the ‘single leader’ assumption
Leadership as a single handed her about performance that is the property of the individual –> leadership is socially constructed with followers in context
Distributed leadership (Spillane, 2005)
- Wide range of individuals and groups are brought into leadership (not just one coach)
- Leadership practice is thought of as a product of the interactions of leaders, followers and the situations
- Therefore, interactive, rather than leader-based perspective
- Little empirical evidence (more research required)
