Leadership and Change Management
Chapter 1 : Understanding Leadership
The difference between Leadership
and Management
Leadership provides a direction for change
while management deals with planning and budgeting
Leadership deals with aligning people, while management deals
with organizing and staffing Leadership motivates people
while management controls and solves problems
Evolution of
leadership theories
Trait theories
Behavioral theories
Contingency approaches to leadership
Attributes of
effective leaders
Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Motivation
Empathy
Social skills.
Chapter Summary
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Leadership is often considered something mystical and
mysterious. It is often linked with charisma and other exotic personality
traits. It is considered more inspiring than management. These assumptions
have no place in a study of leadership and management of businesses.
Leadership and management are essential, distinctive, and complementary
systems of action.
If they fail to complement one another in practice, this can result in chaos
or stagnation. A majority of today’s corporations are over-managed and
under-led. They are lacking in leadership. Well-led organizations do not
wait for leaders to emerge on their own, but actively seek out people with
leadership potential and groom them into leaders, while exposing them
deliberately to varied work experiences.
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The leadership process can be institutionalized with careful selection,
nurturing, and encouragement. Leaders have to be groomed, and leadership has
to be institutionalized. But an organization should be equally careful to
build managerial strength. Strong leadership and weak management in an
organization can be far worse than weak leadership and strong management.
Hence, the challenge for organizations is to have both strong leadership and
strong management. Not many people are good leaders as well as good
managers. Some people have the potential to be good managers while others
are gifted to be leaders but not managers. A well-run organization has place
for both types of people in its teams.
Effective leaders are characterized by attributes like self-awareness,
self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. These leaders
understand their own emotional make-up as well as that of the others with
whom they work, and use this understanding to accomplish the company’s
objectives.
Three types of theories have been formulated on the basis of research into
leadership. They are the trait, behavioral and contingency theories.
According to the trait theories, some traits such as extroversion,
aggressiveness, self-confidence, honesty and integrity, and intelligence
differentiate leaders form non-leaders. According to the behavioral school,
successful leadership depends more on appropriate behavior and skills, and
less on personality traits.
Four different behavioral theories – the Ohio State Studies, the University
of Michigan Studies, the Managerial Grid and the Scandinavian Studies –
sought to identify the different behaviors adopted by leaders. The
contingency theories deal with the situational aspects of leadership styles.
Some of the well-known contingency theories are Fiedler’s contingency model,
Hersey and Blanchard’s situational theory, the Leader-Member exchange
theory, the Leader-Participation model and the Path-Goal theory.
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Short Case Studies / Caselets