Leadership & Navigation Competency Flashcards
(19 cards)
Coercive leadership
The leader imposes a vision or solution on the team and demands that the team follow this directive. Suitability:
- 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. Suitability:
-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. Suitability:
-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. Suitability:
-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. Suitability:
-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. Suitability:
-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.
Behavioral Theories
Leaders influence group members through certain behaviors.
Blake-Mouton Theory
-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) create a secure atmosphere and trust individuals to accomplish goals, avoiding punitive actions so as not to jeopardize relationships.
Impoverished managers (low task, low relationship) use a “delegate-and-disappear” management style. They detach themselves, often creating power struggles.
Authoritarian managers (high task, low relationship) expect people to do what they are told without question and tend not to foster collaboration.
Middle-of-the-road managers (midpoint on both task and relationship) get the work done but are not considered leaders.
Team leaders (high task, high relationship) lead by positive example, foster a team environment, and encourage individual and team development.
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
-Leaders adapt their behaviors to meet the evolving needs of team members. Like Blake-Mouton, the behaviors involve tasks and relationships.
-As team members grow in skill and experience, leaders supply the appropriate behavior:
1. Telling when the employee is not yet motivated or competent.
2. Selling when the increasingly competent employee still needs focus and motivation (“why are we doing this”).
3. Participating when competent workers can be included in problem solving and coached on higher skills.
4. Delegating when very competent team members can benefit from greater levels of autonomy and self-direction.
The Hersey-Blanchard theory states that effective leaders change their leadership style to provide the level of direction and interaction that individual employees need at that point in their development. Since one employee’s needs will differ from another’s and since an employee’s needs six months from now will be different from the employee’s present needs, leaders must be able to identify an individual’s current needs and provide the most effective levels of direction (from managing closely to delegating) and motivation (from selling the employee on the task at hand to empowering the employee through participative decision making).
Fiedler’s Contingency Theory
-Leaders change the situation to make it more “favorable,” more likely to produce good outcomes.
-“Situation favorableness” occurs when:
Leader-member relationships are strong.
Task structure and requirements are clear.
The leader can exert the necessary power to reach the group’s goal.
-Unfavorable situations must be changed to improve group (and leader) effectiveness. This can include:
Improving relations between the leader and the team (for example, by building trust).
Changing aspects of the task (for example, breaking a project down into more manageable pieces, providing more resources for the team).
Increasing or decreasing the leader’s exercise of power (for example, to increase team involvement in and ownership of ideas, to decrease harmful conflict or resistance to change).
Path-Goal Theory
This theory emphasizes the leader’s role in coaching and developing followers’ competencies. The leader performs the behavior needed to help employees stay on track toward their goals. This involves addressing different types of employee needs:
-Directive—Help the employee understand the task and its goal.
-Supportive—Try to fulfill employee’s relationship needs.
-Achievement—Motivate by setting challenging goals.
-Participative—Provide more control over work and leverage group expertise through participative decision making.
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.
Transactional leadership is more commonly found in the military and large and multinational organizations.
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.
Transformational leaders do not micromanage. They give their employees greater autonomy to make decisions and come up with creative solutions. A leader will also lead by example, exemplifying moral and ethical standards and values, and encourage the same from others.
This leadership approach also encourages communication, cooperation, and collaboration with others and can use mentorship to help raise up future transformational leaders.
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.
This type of relationship can contribute to growth and productivity but can also create in- and out-groups within the team. The in-group may tend to strengthen and support the leader’s decisions and position due to their closer relationship. Members of the out-group may lag in development and productivity if they perceive that they are excluded or neglected.
The leader-member exchange 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 resources to strengthen levels of trust and support. This type of relationship can contribute to growth and productivity but can also create ingroups and outgroups within the team. An ingroup/outgroup bias involves assumptions based on group-level similarities or differences. With a stronger prevalence of ingroups and outgroups, this bias may be more likely.
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.
Servant leaders tend to be more empathetic and more trusted by employees. This can lead to greater innovation, collaboration, performance, and participation. This approach to leadership can be more resource-intensive and can take longer to produce results.
In servant leadership, the leader’s goal is to serve the needs of their employees. Servant leaders tend to be more empathetic and more trusted by employees. This can lead to greater innovation, collaboration, performance, and participation. This approach to leadership can be resource-intensive and can take longer to produce results.
