Leadership

Organizational Behavior
Leadership

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Outline
• • • • • What is leadership? Leadership as traits Leadership as behaviors Leadership as situations Leadership as Charisma

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Why are we so obsessed with leaders and leadership?

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Leadership
Leadershipis the process through which a member of a group or organization influences a) the interpretation of events from the part of other members b) as well as the choice of goals and strategies, c) the organization of work, d) the motivation of people to achieve the goals.

Yukl (1998)

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

What is the difference between Leadership and Managment?Leadership
Set a direction for others Aligning people’s interests with the organization’s goals and strategy (proposing a win/win situation)

Management
Plan & control Managing the resources available to the organization

Source of inspiration and motivation

Problem-solver

Produce change and caos

Produce order, predictability and results

“Do the right things”

“Do the things well”Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Leadership has been viewed as
• the product on one’s position • a set of personality traits • a set of observable behaviors • having charisma • having followers • …..
Ricardo Rodrigues Organizational Behavior

Leadership as traits or “the great person theory”
• Leadership is dependent upon certain physical and psychological characteristics •Good leaders will prove themselves regardless of the situation • Good leadership in an organization becomes a problem of selecting the right people
Ricardo Rodrigues Organizational Behavior

Let’s submit this theory to a simple test
Most leaders are male…

Most leaders are tall…

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Leaders are
• • • • • Intelligent Articulate Savvy CreativeEtc…

Let’s Watch a video

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Evaluating the trait approach
•
•

There is little evidence that leaders are born with special traits that non-leaders lack
Average correlation between effective leadership and intelligence (.30) and personality (.28)

•

Ignores the situation
Could they trade Places?

Ricardo Rodrigues

OrganizationalBehavior

Recent Research
• New traits have been studied and correlated with effective leadership • Intelligence • Creativity • Emotional stability • Resilience • Attention to follower’s needs • Etc… The understanding is that if someone possesses these traits he/she will be more likely to be an effective leader
Ricardo Rodrigues Organizational Behavior

•

Leadership as Behavior
“Youeither act like a leader or you don’t”

• If we can observe and typify how leaders behave we can help develop future leaders • Good leadership becomes an issue of training & development
Ricardo Rodrigues Organizational Behavior

Leadership as Behavior
Behavioral approaches to leadership agree that there are 2 underlying behavioral structures that characterize leadership:

• Human interaction• Consideration for subordinates’ feelings, needs, concerns, and ideas

• The task at hand

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

The Blake & Mouton framework

Critique of the behavioral approach
• Essentially useful as a teaching framework
• Good leadership needs to consider people’s feeling while being effective at the same time

• There is evidence of effective leaders whowere not particularly experts in managing people or in the tasks being performed

Ricardo Rodrigues

Organizational Behavior

Contingent approaches to leadership
• • • Leadership emerges out of the situation An effective leader in one situation may prove himself to be a poor leader under different circumstances Leadership depends on as the nature of work, the internal and external...