Discussion on Management and Leadership - Essay Example

? Management and leadership s Submitted by s: Introduction Rausch (2003, p.979) is of the opinion that the ability tomanage and to lead can be significantly improved with high quality decisions in all managerial responsibilities because decisions are the foundation for action. However, effective actions are based on sound decisions and sound decisions pay attention to all controllable matters which impact on their outcomes. The traditional view of managerial work as a cycle of activities has served as a major guide for the thinking of managers, and thereby as a foundation for decisions. He divides a manager’s duty into five primary functions that are planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling, which in the 1900s, commanding was an accurate description of the relationship between a manager and the subordinates. On a practical perspective, managerial decisions form complex decision functions and especially when leading is one of them as it is such a complex matter. Managers as well as leaders have to take into considerations some important aspects that include goals/outcomes that need to be accomplished. The goals to be met need to be included in order to meet the challenges and gain full advantage of opportunities as well as set the stage for consideration of approaches to situations. Communication with internal and external stakeholders should be effective to prepare way for other people to become involved and for effective responses to questions that may follow. Ensuring the participation of those who can and should contribute to decisions and plans is a key component as well as the highest competence in all the activities being carried out. It is also expected that the shareholders and staff members as well as others feel satisfied with decisions and hence achieve the highest levels of cooperation and coordination. Norms are important in an organisation as they affect ethics and diversity. Finally the need for performance reviews cannot be left behind as they are a significant factor in the evaluation of critical decisions. Discussion on management and leadership Godfrey (1994, p.58) asserts that it is human nature to wish to sojourn comfortably in an adequately feathered nest but the world is restless and change is imperative. The skilled manager will accept this and, against all the inertia, work to cope with and to improve all that lies before him and he must accept that “stability” may not be his – but successful survival can be. It is useful for managers occasionally to review their attitudes and experiences and this article attempts to assist that process. It is couched in general terms so as to be as widely helpful as possible, irrespective as to whether the matter in hand is as it is a truism that any action of management may be badly planned, or otherwise mishandled, almost without being noticed by anyone until it is too late. But much management activity has always been and still is inadequate in some aspect, mainly because of the decay of old-fashioned virtues – “business acumen” is one that is often in very short supply. In any management situation the agenda for operation must be set as to what is involved; what is to be done and how is it all to be improved. The good manager will realize from the outset that it may be not only staff skills, available capital, business field, market complications and so on, but also management limitations which restrict his operations – and these are in his own hands. These limitations often surface as inadequate consideration of alternatives in the market, in associations such as with third parties, in technicalities, in the financial approach and in staff deployment. A promising activity can be sunk by insufficient attention, or perhaps by traditional attitude-taking, in any of these elements – all of which betrays an unwillingness to think things through with an open mind: not trying to be continually inventive, but nevertheless being always alive to new opportunities in every aspect of the business operation. Leadership is the taking charge of situations such as partnerships, shared responsibility, consensual decision and conflict resolution. Leaders listen; weigh the evidence from every source, then decide and implement. The greatest gap waiting to be filled by management education is this: employing the tactics of leadership and humility to teach exactly the same to others, to use for themselves. Once achieved, they will in turn invent, and continually reinvent, radically effective management development methodologies that our generation cannot even imagine – yet, (Taylor, 1997, p. 312) According to Collins (1996, p.67) throughout the 1980s, UK governments have sought to change and improve the popular perception and image of managers and of entrepreneurship more generally. Pounder (2002, p. 6) writes that the original transformational leadership notion is presented by (Hartog, Muijen & Koopman, 1997, p. 22; Hinkin & Tracey, 1999, p. 116) in form of idealized influence or charisma and has been refined over time and the leader provides vision and a sense of mission, instils pride, gains respect, trust and increases optimism as such a leader excites and inspires subordinates. From this angle, the respect that the followers have on their leader due to this mode of leadership acts as an effective model for the followers to communicate a vision and use symbols to focus efforts as well as engender confidence in the leader’s vision and values. Individual consideration from the leader coaches and mentors provides continuous feedback and links organizational members’ needs to the organization’s mission and it is also a measure of the extent to which the leader cares about the individual follower’s concerns and developmental needs. Intellectual stimulation from the leader gives the followers motives to rethink old modes of transacting business and to reassess their old values and beliefs as this dimension is concerned with the degree to which followers are provided with interesting and challenging tasks and encouraged to solve problems in their own way to enhance innovation. The leader is prepared to challenge existing constraints and processes by taking risks and experimenting. The leader encourages followers to take risks and experiment and treats mistakes as opportunities for learning rather than censure as the dimension focuses on the extent to which the leader fosters a commitment to innovation in the organization. Impression management is a key aspect for the leader, as he is prepared to subordinate personal needs and desires to the general good. The leader is a “giving” person who is keen to celebrate subordinates achievements and whose personal warmth and caring to subordinates is not confined to their work lives. This dimension measures the extent to which organizational members perceive that the leader genuinely cares for them as people rather than as mere instruments of the leader’s or the organization’s mission as on the other hand intellectual stimulation serves as a stimulant for followers to rethink old ways of doing things and to reassess their old values and beliefs. This perspective shows the extent to which the supervisor gives challenging and interesting roles to the subordinates to bring out their problem solving skills. Transformational leadership is commonly contrasted with the more traditional transactional leadership that is viewed primarily as a cost benefit exchange process and an inferior form of leadership based on the principle of performance as opposed to effort. Certainly, a transactional leader’s manipulation of followers’ valued outcomes (e.g. wages, promotion) in exchange for followers’ compliance with leadership wishes, is considerably less exciting as a description of effective leadership than the dimensions associated with transformational leadership. It can commonly be assumed that although the transactional leader may motivate subordinates to perform as expected, the transformational leader has the capacity to stir subordinates to levels of performance exceeding expectation and this draws the notion that the end justifies the means (Hartog, Muijen & Koopman, 1997, p. 23). Transformational leadership is much more appreciated to the transactional leadership in any form of management system due to its implications for the quality of instructions that are transferred to the subordinates and the manner they perform towards them. According to Popper & Zakkai, (1994, p. 5) the distinction between transactional leadership based on instrumental exchange relations and emotion rousing leadership rooted in processes of transference, attribution and projection calls for critical discussion that any form of management can engage in efficiently.. There is the overly monolithic nature attributed to leaders’ influence on their people without sufficiently considering the influences of the psychological conditions resulting from the organizational context and the various levels in the hierarchy with which the leader is in contact. The key concepts in this critical discussion are “need and expectation”. These concepts permit dynamic analysis of the leader’s influences in his/her various spheres of activity and the notion of hierarchy of needs as expressed in the theories of management arguing that needs that motivate the individual’s actions operate hierarchically in terms of their intensity and effect, with physiological and security needs at the bottom of the scale and, rising up the scales, the needs for belonging, esteem and self-actualization. People have different needs in different types of organizational contexts and at various levels of the organization’s hierarchy, and thus will have different expectations of the manager as opposed to a leader. Case Scenario Sarros & Santora (2001, p. 383) argue that for instance when speaking about the changing culture at CRA Limited, an Australian holding and management company in major mining and industrial companies with around 19,000 employees, former deputy chairman John Ralph said, “Team building means getting people to operate as coaches rather than as bosses, learning and encouraging rather than commanding and controlling. It is about trusting them and gaining their trust and generating an enthusiastic team”. What Ralph was really saying was that leadership works best when leaders and workers agree where it is they want to go and what mechanism and strategies need to be used to bet there as opposed to being a manager. As a manager, the management aspect would have involved the formulation policies and strategies and take a transactionary perspective to reward the achievement of the goals attained. When Ray Smith, CEO of Bell Atlantic gave the keynote address at the Princeton University 7th Annual Conference in November 1995, he gave his vision of the new type of leadership emerging in US corporations, “a true intellectual engagement with people who deliver the goods and a new social contract – a moral commitment to the employees that we will be their partners in allocating the corporation’s resources and realising the vision of the company.” Here Smith was clearly acknowledging the contributions of employees to achieving organisational goals. The linkage between visionary leadership and its appeal to a common core of values among management and the workers is clear in the address. Agreeing the direction of the company and the means to get there rests on good leadership and core values propositions. If the value of management diverge significantly from those of the workers, leadership success by definition is possible to achieve through the use of transformational approach to the subordinates as opposed to transactional. Hence leadership is about alignment and change and is best in a world undergoing transformations in a dynamic manner, (Sarros & Santora, 2001, p. 384) Conclusion The view of leadership in organizations presented in the literature is overly monolithic and deals mainly with leader-led relations without adequate diagnosis of organizational psychological contexts and their effect. A manager on the other hand incorporated leadership, coordinating, directing, planning and controlling which is a fraction of the roles that are associated with a leader. The main claim of management as opposed to leadership in organizations should relate to organizational psychological contexts, such as the hierarchy (namely, the distance from the supervisor), the supervisor’s relationship with his/her superiors, the nature of the organization’s tasks (routine versus change) and the conditions in which they function (stability versus crisis). All these affect the probable appearance of transactional or trans-formational patterns. The view presented here expands the paradigm of the contingency models (which were formulated in the framework of the “exchange assumption” which, as described, is at the basis of transactional leadership). Most managers develop instructions that would hope to stimulate participants intellectually, to generate effort in the subject under study, to help participants to feel satisfied with the study group process, to meet participants’ instructional needs, to give participants confidence to tackle real life problems and to conduct an effective work satisfaction context. It seems that the transformational leadership notion can be tailored to the instructional context, which should enable further development of advances outcomes. Transformational leadership is an important management development focus in light of the potential benefits to the individual and the organization described in the above leadership outcomes. In order to attain desirable instructional outcomes, management development instructors should also be trained in a version of transformational leadership tailored to an instructional setting. On those occasions when management development instructors employ an instructor transformational leadership style to deliver the transformational leadership notion to managers, these instructors are truly practicing what they are preaching which is the advocated form of leadership that should be taken up at the management level. References Collins, D., (1996). Management Decision. A practical approach to management. 34(1) [1996] 66–71 Godfrey, M.R. (1994). Management Decision. Management Considerations. 32(4), p. 58-61 Hartog, D.N., Muijen, J.J. and Koopman, P.L. (1997). Transactional versus transformational leadership: an analysis of the MLQ. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. 70(1), p. 19-29 Hinkin, T.R. and Tracey, J.B. (1999). The relevance of charisma for transformational leadership in stable organizations. Journal of Organizational Change Management. 12(2), p. 105-119. Popper, M. & Zakkai, E., (1994).Leadership: Conditions Conducive to their Predominance. Leadership & Organization Development Journal. 15(6), p. 3-7. Pounder, S. J., (2002). Employing transformational leadership to enhance the quality of management development instruction. Journal of Management Development. 22(1), p. 6-13 Rausch, E., (2003). Guidelines for management and leadership decision. Management decision. 41(10), p. 979-988 Sarros, C. J. & Santora, C. J., (2001). The transformational-transactional leadership model in practice. Leadership and Organisational Journal. 22(8), p. 383 - 393 Taylor, C., (1997). Modern management education: how it needs to lead to leadership. Managing service quality. 7(6), p. 312–313 Read More