Pdp 18 jan2013

Editor's Notes

• #2: Title Slide
• #6: Because leadership is a term that is often used in everyday conversation, you might assume that it has a common and accepted meaning. It is also, however, a word that is often misused. We define leadership as the processes and behaviors used by someone, such as a manager, to motivate, inspire, and influence the behaviors of others. One of the biggest errors people make is assuming that leadership and management mean the same thing when they are really different concepts. A person can be a manager, a leader, both, or neither. Management focuses primarily on the activities of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Leadership, in contrast, is much more closely related to activities such as agenda setting, aligning, inspiring, and monitoring. Management and leadership may occasionally overlap but each is also a discrete and separate set of activities. Hence, a person may be a manager (but not a leader), a leader (but not a manager), or both a manager and a leader.
• #7: Early researchers believed that notable leaders had some unique set of qualities or traits that distinguished them from their peers and endured throughout history. This trait approach to leadership led researchers to focus on identifying the essential leadership traits, including intelligence, dominance, self-confidence, energy, activity (versus passivity), and knowledge about the job.
• #8: In the late 1940s, most researchers began to shift away from the trait approach and to look at leadership as a set of actual behaviors. The goal of the behavioral approach to leadership was to determine what behaviors were employed by effective leaders. These researchers assumed that the behaviors of effective leaders differed somehow from the behaviors of less effective leaders, and that the behaviors of effective leaders would be the same across all situations.This research led to the identification of two basic forms of leader behavior. While different researchers applied different names, the basic leader behaviors identified during this period were:Task-focused leader behaviorEmployee-focused leader behavior
• #10: The situational approach to leadership assumes that appropriate leader behavior varies from one situation to another. The situational approach to leadership attempts to identify various forms of leader behavior that result in contingent outcomes and consequences. By contingent, we mean that they depend on elements of the situation and characteristics of both the leader and followers.
• #11: Another recent perspective that has been adopted by some leadership experts focuses on how leaders are seen through the eyes of their followers. The two primary approaches to leadership through the eyes of followers are transformational leadership and charismatic leadership.
• #12: Transformational leadership focuses on the importance of leading for change (as opposed to leading during a period of stability).Thus, transformational leadership is the set of abilities that allows a leader to recognize the need for change, to create a vision to guide that change, and to execute the change effectively.
• #14: Charismatic leadership is a type of influence based on the leader’s charisma, a form of interpersonal attraction that inspires support and acceptance. Charismatic leaders are likely to have a lot of confidence in their beliefs and ideals and a strong need to influence people.They also tend to communicate high expectations about follower performance and to express confidence in their followers.
• #16: Finally, there are also three emerging issues in leadership that warrant discussion. These issues are strategic leadership, ethical leadership, and virtual leadership.
• #17: Strategic leadership is a new concept that explicitly relates leadership to the role of top management. Strategic leadership is a leader’s ability to understand the complexities of both the organization and its environment and to lead change in the organization so as to enhance its competitiveness.
• #18: Most people have long assumed that business leaders are ethical people. But in the wake of recent corporate scandals at firms like Enron, Boeing, and AIG, faith in business leaders has been shaken. Perhaps now more than ever, high standards of ethical conduct are being held up as a prerequisite for effective leadership. More specifically, business leaders are being called on to maintain high ethical standards for their own conduct, to unfailingly exhibit ethical behavior, and to hold others in their organizations to the same standards – in short, to practice ethical leadership.
• #19: Finally, virtual leadership is also emerging as an important issue for organizations. In earlier times, leaders and their employees worked together in the same physical location and engaged in face-to-face interactions on a regular basis. But in today’s world, both leaders and their employees may work in locations that are far from one another. Such arrangements might include people telecommuting from a home office one or two days a week to people actually living and working far from company headquarters.Increasingly, then, communication between leaders and their subordinates happens largely by telephone and e-mail. One implication may be that leaders in these situations must work harder at creating and maintaining relationships with their employees that go beyond words on a computer screen.
• #20: Many organizations today are using teams. Many other organizations are attempting to become less hierarchical – that is, to eliminate the old-fashioned command-and-control mentality often inherent in bureaucratic organizations and to motivate and empower individuals to work independently. In each case, the role of leaders is also changing. Whereas leaders were once expected to control situations, direct work, supervise people, closely monitor performance, make decisions, and structure activities, many leaders today are being asked to change how they manage people. Perhaps the best description of this new role is for the leader to become a coach instead of an overseer.
• #24: We have already noted the increased use of teams in organizations. Yet another benefit that some companies get from using teams is increased motivation and enhanced job satisfaction among those employees working in teams. Although teams are often less effective in traditional and rigidly structured bureaucratic organizations, they often help smaller, more flexible organizations make decisions more quickly and effectively, enhance companywide communication, and encourage organizational members to feel more like a part of an organization. In turn, these attitudes usually lead to higher levels of both employee motivation and job satisfaction.But managers should remember that teams are not for everyone.