Personal Leadership Style and Managerial Tasks

The Nature of Leadership

Leadership is the process by which a person exerts influence over other people and inspires, motivates, and directs their activities to help achieve group or organizational goals. The person who exerts such influence is a leader. When leaders are effective, the influence they exert over others helps a group or organization achieve its performance goals. When leaders are ineffective, their influence does not contribute to, and often detracts from, goal attainment. As the "Case in Contrast" makes clear, Jack Welch is an effective leader: He exerts strong influence over his managers, and the way he motivates and rewards them has helped GE achieve its goals. By contrast, Bill Agee was an ineffective leader: He influenced employees at Morrison Knudsen, but the kind of influence he exerted hindered organizational goal attainment as overly optimistic performance projections led to poor decision making.

Beyond performance goals, effective leadership increases an organization's ability to meet all the contemporary challenges discussed throughout this book, including the need to obtain a competitive advantage, the need to foster ethical behavior, and the need to manage a diverse workforce fairly and equitably. Leaders who exert influence over organizational members to help meet these goals increase their organization's chances of success.

In considering the nature of leadership, we first look at leadership styles, and how they affect managerial tasks and at the influence of culture on leadership styles. We then focus on the key to leadership, power, which can come from all variety of sources. Finally, we consider the contemporary dynamic of empowerment, and how it relates to effective leadership.

Personal Leadership Style and Managerial Tasks

A manager's personal leadership style - that is, the specific ways in which a manager chooses to influence other people-shapes the way that manager approaches planning, organizing, and controlling (the other principal tasks of managing). Consider how Jack Welch's and Bill Agee's personal leadership styles affect the way they perform these other important management tasks. Jack Welch's personal style is to support and encourage other managers to assume responsibility for the performance of their divisions. He delegates authority (an organizing task), allows his subordinates to develop their own strategies for their divisions (a planning task), and periodically reviews their performance to evaluate their success (a control task). By contrast, Agee's personal leadership style was to make decisions himself even when he lacked expertise and to surround himself with subordinates who would agree with him. Agee therefore centralized authority and decision making at Morrison Knudsen (an organizing task), took major responsibility for strategy development (a planning task), and threatened subordinates with job loss when they did not support him or give him overly optimistic performance projections control task.

Managers at all levels and in all kinds of organizations have their own personal leadership styles, which determine not only how they lead their subordinates but also how they perform the other management tasks. Michael Kraus owner and manager of a dry-cleaning store in the northeastern United States, for example, takes a very hands-on approach to leadership. He has the sole authority for determining work schedules and job assignments for the employees in his store (an organizing task), makes all important decisions by himself (a planning task), and closely monitors his employees' performance and rewards top performers with pay increases (a control task). Kraus's personal leadership style is effective in his organization. His employees are generally motivated, perform highly, and are satisfied, and his store is highly profitable. Though on the surface Kraus's personal leadership style might seem similar to Agee's, important differences can account for Kraus's effectiveness and Agee's ineffectiveness. In contrast to Agee, Kraus makes sure he has all the information he needs to make good decisions, respects his subordinates and looks out for their well-being, and encourages them to be open and honest with him.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1459