Leadership Assignment, Research Paper Example

Introduction

Leadership refers to the process of making a group of people operate in a team, in order to reach specific goals. In business, effective leadership is one of the most important factors that guarantee successful work of the organization, its development, and stability. It is a skill that helps managers to organize all of the processes within a company and maintain constant control over the employees.  Leadership is so much more than traits, power, processes and which approach is used. Leaders also must have values and foster a culture where others want to follow. Organizational leadership not only must accomplish goals, but they must sustain what has been accomplished. Leadership is also about building relationships with the various stakeholders of an organization. An organization, whether it is a for-profit or nonprofit, needs to maintain a reputation of ethical decision making and quality customer service. Organizations are citizens and must conduct themselves accordingly; leadership sets the standard for how institutions are perceived in the global marketplace. The values of leadership and an organization are demonstrated in the manner in which business is conducted.

In organizational leadership, the most fundamental factor is organizational design, which helps managers to evaluate which of the business strategies can be applied and which are not effective. Every organization needs a leader, who is qualified enough to set directions, in order to maximize working potential of the employees. There are many theories that are often associated with the organizational culture, psychology, personalities, and management as well. Though the role of a leader is not so evident in small companies, big corporation running is impossible in most cases, if there is no person, who is able to take responsibility of making specific strategic decisions. A good leader in any organization may not only help the employees to use their potential, but also organize people to maximize their efforts. To understand the theory of organizational leadership, it is vital to learn all of its fundamental aspects. In this regard, person should deal with all of the theories and their main points, so as to determine what suits best for the company and guarantees future profit.

Any organization, whether for-profit or nonprofit, needs to maintain a reputation of ethical decision-making and high-quality customer service. All companies operating of the market were established to satisfy specific human needs. In other words, they are working for people, who are buying their products. Therefore, they must be conducted accordingly; leadership sets the standard of how institutions are perceived in the global marketplace. The values of leadership and an organization are demonstrated in the manner, in which business is conducted.

Business Roles

Leadership roles can also vary, depending of the goals people are willing to achieve. For instance, visionary leader, principle-centered leader, group man leader, situational leader, democratic leader and servant leader’s roles can be used in different situations. According to the center of visionary leadership, this role is usually practiced by managers, in order to bring employees together. (McLaughlin, 2001) Visionary leader often creates a challenging task, which can be solved only when working in a team. Principle-centered leader is a natural leader. This is a person, who takes certain responsibilities in the company and who becomes a decision-maker due to his diligence and talents. In situational leadership, there is no single person in the company, who has more authority that the others. In a team of professionals working together, each person can make decisions, depending on his/her knowledge and experience.

Business Leadership Theories

As leadership is a skill, it is logical to assume that it can be developed. There are various leadership theories in business, which involve the following factors:

• Learning how to delegate and do more of it. When running a business there are many things a leader should do. As it is almost impossible to do everything simultaneously, it important to determine personal return on investments and then allow someone else to carry on with some of the duties. Delegation is a key factor to a healthy work balance and, being a leader person should be able to know when to assign tasks.
• Promoting business regularly and consistently. The point of promoting business regularly and consistently can help to embark on urgent tasks. When promotion is well done, it results in attracting more customers. Marketing experts can be employed or hired then.
• Business planning. As a part of organizational leadership, planning is very vital, if the company is growing and becoming healthy. Planning can be done on a weekly or monthly basis, where time is set to review and adjust some of the company’s strategies and for the way forward, which will help the organization to stay on the proper track.
• Business learning also counts as a theory in business setting and there should be provision in the company to allow learning, which contributes to the development of the skills. Another point to consider is joining a new business organization, where employees can talk to business people. During this process, they gain new ideas and refine the old ones.

Leadership Models

Leadership models enable managers to understand what makes leaders act the way they do in certain situations. There are two primary models: the Four Framework Approach and the Managerial Grid. According to the Bolman and Deal, in the Four Framework Approach, it is suggested that “leaders display leadership behavior in one of four types of frameworks: Structural, Human Resource, Political, or Symbolic” (2001). However, their style can be both effective and ineffective, depending upon the chosen behavior in specific situation.

• Structural Framework. According to this framework, the leaders concentrate on structure strategy, execution, testing, environment and adjustment.
• Human Resource Framework. In order to become an effective leader, one has to turn into a mechanism with a supportive, empowered leadership style. This framework is contrary to unproductive leadership, where the leader employs rejection and deception. The leader has to believe in people, including his employees and prove it through productive communication. Moreover, following the Human Resource framework, leaders are always noticeable and available, they boost contribution to the team, they share information and experience, forcing the decision making process to flow down the organization effortlessly.
• Political Framework. Effective leadership calls for the leader to be supporter, whose management approach is based on partnership and structure, whereas ineffective leadership is best described by a leader, who presents himself as a hustler, employing manipulation as a main tool. Political leaders evaluate the distribution of power and profit, building relations with stakeholders, using persuasion as the primary tool, while using cooperation and oppression only if it appears to be crucial.
• Power can be perceived as a measure of manager’s ability to control the environment around himself, including the behavior of other managers and employees. The exercise of power is accepted as prevalent to people. The application of power should not relate to any means of force or treat (as in negative reinforcement). Though power can be considered as a way to influence people’s decisions, leadership is the application of power that is aimed to stimulate people act in sertain way, which is beneficial for the company.

Change Management in Leadership

One significantt point of leadership is initiating and managing changes within organizations, whereby change may involve threats. Change management is a type of process, by which an organization gets to its future position on the market. Change management authorities need realistic plans, which provide the company with total transformation systems approach. According to the Nancy Lorenzi, “change management encompasses the effective strategies and programs to enable those change agents to achieve the new vision” (2000).

In the modern world of competition and market economy, managers should get rid of traditional ways of handling business. Otherwise, change in the organization’s culture, corporate values, and globalization is impossible. Moreover, leaders should adjust to the modern ways of running their business, as most of the old principles are no logner applicable on today’s dynamic markets. Managers need to understand society is in the age of global organization change. Therefore, leaders should know that continuous learning is the key to an organization, which operates during recent economic crisis.

Self-Managed Teams

Self-managed teams do present management and leadership challenges. One major factor that determines team performance is the behavior of the leader. The leader must communicate a clear vision with passion, and confidence. The leader should also facilitate team learning, coaching, and training. Involving members in decision making, and allowing suggestions works great for promoting team performance as well. These traits also influence leadership roles and processes that are important for self-managed teams. To improve team cohesiveness and team decision-making leaders can share the leadership role. Meaning as the head leader I can assign leaders to different areas of the project. You can meet as a team to discuss and make decisions, and assign each a lead role. There should be some leadership coaching to help the team learn how to make group decisions, resolve conflicts, and cooperate effectively as a team.

It is difficult to measure the effects of leadership because it is difficult to measure leadership in general, but we can qualify it in some ways. I think it is certainly possible to have a very effective leader that is also a very bad leader, and I think that these qualities such as ‘effective’ are entirely relative based on what you are expecting from a leader. I tend to think of a leader as someone who attracts followers, and this can be for a number of reasons. Certainly charisma, sheer force of personality, can create a leader. Then we can have something like a results based leader. People want to follow this kind of leader because of the results they get, even those results are sharply targeted and the leader winds up being highly flawed in other areas. Sometimes these results are that people are just better because of a leader. This leader makes everyone around him better, and in my opinion is the best kind of leader, and also the hardest to either quantify or qualify. I have never viewed management and leaders as groups that must necessarily overlap, though I have had the pleasure of managers that are also good leaders. In an organization like a company, management positions are no more leadership oriented for the most part than any other position. They are simply responsible for different actions than non-managers. Their job will consist more of scheduling, coordination, and reporting, though for the most part require no particular (or quite small amounts) of leadership. What a good leader can add to a group that they are managing are some of the more intangible, or more difficult to quantify aspects. He might be able to understand his subordinates well enough to know when personal and interpersonal issues are in play, even well before they affect any sort of metrics. A good leader will also be able to motivate his group to a higher productivity, lower turnover, lower absenteeism, higher productivity and higher morale. These things are also due to a leader’s empathic abilities. He can tell how hard to push without pushing too hard; he can tell when stress is high and what to do about it. He also takes time to learn about his subordinates, and thus can tell if they are over- or under-utilized. This can have a positive effect alone for a number of reasons:

• An underutilized person can be worked more. You might have to look at in what way they are underutilized, but the potential is there to get something else out of someone that is currently being wasted
• An overutilized person is working above a sustainable level. This will result in burnout, but will likely sooner result is more and more severe mistakes. Just like in sports, it’s the tired athlete that gets injured.
•  If underutilized, it can sometimes help morale if the subordinate simply knows you recognize he is being underutilized.
• If we look at the Motivation-Hygiene theory (also known as the Two-factor theory), one of the motivators is that you are being fully utilized.

That said, I think the concept of utilizing Key Performance Indicators can be a great mistake unless great care is taken to understand just what is being measured, and the implications of measuring at all. While I’m not suggesting that business process is affected by a sort of Heisenberg principle, it is true that watching things changes their outcome. One example I’ve seen lately is in Mean Time to Recovery. An operations group that focuses on mean time to recovery at the expense of other metrics will get itself into trouble, as more and more shortcuts are taken to minimize the downtime. These can include changes that are not fully tested, straight up hacks (duct taping stuff together, for example), and making undocumented changes. All of these things will cause more problems to occur in the future, but that will not be immediately obvious by any real metric.

Leadership and Ethics

Organization leaders should be ethical when supervising processes in the company. It is important to realize that every action taken by business managers and leaders has ethical dimensions, which cannot be ignored. Only by understanding ethics in leadership the team of managers is able acquire advanced management practice, which may help them to conduct their business in a volatile market environment.

“The best leaders exhibit both their values and their ethics in their leadership style and actions” (Heartfield, 2009). Values and ethics help them not only to maintain the very process of supervising, but also to establish friendly working relations with the personnel. It is not a secret that some business campaigns failed because of mistrust and competition. Ethics at workplace allows managers to eliminate this mistrust and maintain good working relationships. Additionally, as workplace is usually a routine, friendly relationships may be helpful in creating good working environment and increase performance of both the managers and the employees.

References

Bratton J, (2004). Organizational leadership. Thomson/South-western.

Bolman, L. and Deal, T. (1991). Reframing Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Last retrieved on September 22, 2009 from http://copyscape.com/prosearch.php.

Lorenzi, N. (2000). Managing Change. The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Last retrieved on September 22, 2009 from http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=61464.

McLaughlin, C. (2001). Visionary Leadership. The Center for Visionary Leadership. Last retrieved on September 22, 2009 from  http://www.visionarylead.org/articles/vislead.htm.

Heartfield, S. (2009) Leadership values and ethics. About.com: human resources. Last retrieved on September 22, 2009 from http://humanresources.about.com/od/leadership/a/leader_values.htm