Leadership in Theory and Practice is written by Peter Northouse.
It lays out different perspective on leadership.
Leadership is a process whereby a leader influences followers to achieve a goal.
Leadership can be learned.
Assigned leadership is based on a title.
Emergent leadership is acquired from followers.
Power is the potential to influence.
Position power comes from a title:
- legitimate power (judge)
- reward power (supervisor)
- coercive power (coach)
Personal comes from followers:
- referent power (teacher)
- expert power (tour guide)
Power as a shared resource deemphasizes the idea that leaders are power wielders.
Leadership and management overlap.
Both involve influencing a group of followers in goal attainment.
Leadership emphasizes the general influence process.
Management focuses on planning, organizing, staffing, and controlling.
What counts is a leader's collection of traits.
Consistently identified traits are:
- intelligence
- self-confidence
- determination
- integrity
- sociability
Big Five personality traits in order of association with leadership are:
- extraversion
- conscientiousness
- openness
- low neuroticism
- agreeableness
Leaders who are sensitive to their and the emotions of others are more effective.
Personality assessment instruments can identify leaders.
Subjective lists of leadership traits are not reliable.
Traits also don't explain team performance.
Traits are also fixed which means leaders cannot be trained.
Three-skill approach to effective leadership:
- technical
- human
- conceptual
Different management levels require different skills:
- low requires technical and human skills
- middle requires all three skills
- upper requires conceptual and human skills
Skills approach says that the leader's skills are most important, that leadership is available to everyone and that it maps skills to performance.
Skills approach is extremely complex and cannot predict outcomes.
Skills approach has only been tested on military personnel.
What counts is how a leader behaves.
Task behaviours and relationship behaviours.
Style approach is reliable, centres on tasks and relationships and is useful as a heuristic.
Style approach has low predictive value, cannot identify universal behaviours and its claims are unsupported by research.
What counts is how a leader behaves in a situation.
| Situational leadership | directive | supportive |
|---|---|---|
| S1 | high | low |
| S2 | high | high |
| S3 | low | high |
| S4 | low | low |
| Follower development | competence | commitment |
|---|---|---|
| D1 | low | high |
| D2 | moderate | low |
| D3 | moderate | lacking |
| D4 | great | high |
Effective leadership: identify the D and match it with an S.
Questionnaires about leader's diagnostic ability, flexibility, and effectiveness help them identify how to become better.
Situation approach can be trained, is practical, prescriptive and requires flexibility.
Situation approach hasn't been researched, isn't clear on how followers move between development levels and cannot be applied to group leadership.
What counts is how a leader behaves in a situation.
Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) personality-like measure delineates:
- highly task motivated, low LPCs
- socio-independent, middle LPCs
- relationship motivated, high LPCs
Situations are measured on:
- leader–member relations
- task structure
- position power
Low LPCs are effective in extremes and high LPCs in moderately favourable situations.
Contingency theory is backed by a lot of research, emphasises situation-leader pairs and is predictive.
Contingency theory doesn't explain links between styles and situations, uses an arcane LPC scale and is not practiced.
What counts is how a leader motivates followers to be productive and satisfied.
Employees will be motivated if:
- they feel competent
- they think their efforts will be rewarded
- if they find the payoff for their work valuable
Leaders should select a style (directive, supportive, participative, or achievement oriented) that will help followers achieve their goals.
Leadership-task pairs:
- directive leadership -> ambiguous tasks
- supportive leadership -> repetitive tasks
- participative leadership -> tasks are unclear and subordinates are autonomous
- achievement-oriented leadership -> challenging tasks
Path-goal theory is a framework, integrates motivation and is practical.
Path-goal theory is complex, is not supported by research, isn't clear how leaders affect motivation and is leader oriented.
Or vertical dyad linkage (VDL) theory.
What counts is how leaders and followers interact.
Leader's in-group followers are those that expand their role responsibilities and get along with the leader. They get extra benefits.
Leader's out-group followers are those that just do their formal job description.
High-quality exchanges between leaders and followers produce positive outcomes.
Leaders should expand their in-group by leading followers though phases:
- stranger
- acquaintance
- mature partnership
LMX theory is descriptive, is about interactions (communication, even-handedness) and is linked to positive results.
LMX theory creates favourites, doesn't explain how to create high-quality exchanges and its metrics are poor.
Leaders inspire followers. Leaders are good role models, articulate a vision for an organization, empower followers to meet higher standards, earn trust and give meaning to organizational life.
Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) measures:
- idealized influence (charisma)
- inspirational motivation
- intellectual stimulation
- individualized consideration
- contingent reward
- management-by-exception
- laissez-faire
Transformational leadership is intuitive, emphasises followers and morals.
Transformational leadership is leader trait based.
Leaders empower and help develop followers.
Servant leaders "serve first": they place follower interests above their own. They build relationships, are ethical and server the greater good.
Servant leaders shift authority to those who are being led.
Characteristics of servant leadership:
- listening
- empathy
- healing
- awareness
- persuasion
- conceptualization
- foresight
- stewardship
- commitment to the growth of people
- building community
Components of servant leadership:
- antecedent conditions: context, culture, leader traits, follower receptivity
- servant leader behaviours: conceptualizing, emotional healing, putting followers first, helping followers grow and succeed, behaving ethically, empowering, creating value for the community
- leadership outcomes: follower performance and growth, organizational performance, societal impact
Servant Leadership is altruistic, gives up control, is not universally preferred and has sound servant leadership measurements.
Servant Leadership is paradoxical, not a framework, utopian and unclear.
Leaders are transparent, morally grounded, and responsive.
Authentic leadership:
- rests on the leader's knowledge, self-regulation and self-concept
- is created by both leaders and followers
- develops over a lifetime
Authentic leadership has: - self-awareness
- internalized moral perspective
- balanced processing
- relational transparency
Authentic leadership is prescriptive, has a moral dimension, is a process and can be measured.
Authentic leadership is not supported by research.
Leaders help the group accomplish its goals by increasing its effectiveness.
Questionnaires can diagnose problems and offer solutions.
Team leadership is practical, can be distributed and can select leaders.
TODO