Leadership enhancing the lessons of experience 8th by hughes curphy chap 12

The Formal Organization• Studying the formal organization involves the disciplines of management, organizational behavior, and organizational theory and can have a profound impact on

The Situation

“When you’ve exhausted all possibilities, remember this: You haven’t!”

• Situational engineering occurs when leaders

use their knowledge of how the situation affects leadership to proactively change the situation to improve the chances of success

• Leaders in dangerous situations may adopt

different strategies to be successful than they would in more normal situations

• The situation often explains more about what is going on and what kinds of leadership

behaviors will be best than any other single

variable

Introduction (continued)

• The appropriateness of a leader’s behavior in a group often makes sense only in the situational context in which the behavior occurs

• The situation, not someone’s traits or abilities,

plays the most important role in determining

who emerges as a leader

• Historically, great leaders emerge during social upheavals or economic crises

• Early situational theories asserted that leaders

were made, not born, and that prior leadership

experience helped forge effective leaders

Introduction (continued)

• Role theory: A leader’s behavior depends on the

leader’s perceptions of critical aspects of the

situation.

1 Rules and regulations governing the job

2 Role expectations of subordinates, peers, and

superiors

3 Nature of the task

4 Feedback about subordinates’ performance

• Multiple-influence model identifies 2 factors:

1 Microvariables (e.g., task characteristics)

2 Macrovariables (e.g., the external environment)

• The three main situational levels of abstraction

are task, organizational, and environmental.

An Expanded

Leader-Follower-Situation Model

How Tasks Vary, and What That

Means for Leadership

• Task Autonomy: Degree to which a job

provides an individual with some control over

what is done and how it is done

• Task Feedback: Degree to which a person

accomplishing a task receives information about performance from performing the task itself

• Task Structure: Degree to which there are

known procedures for accomplishing the task

and rules governing how one goes about it

• Task Interdependence: Degree to which tasks

require coordination and synchronization for

work groups or teams to accomplish a desired goals

Problems and Challenges

• Technical problems are challenges for which

the problem-solving resources already exist

– Resources have two aspects: specialized methods

and specialized expertise.

– Technical problems can be solved without changing the nature of the social system in which they occur.

• Adaptive problems cannot be solved using

currently existing resources or ways of thinking

– It can be difficult reaching a common definition of

what the problem really is

– Adaptive problems can only be solved by changing

the system itself

– Adaptive problems, which involve people’s values,

require adaptive leadership for solutions.

Adaptive and Technical Challenges

Table 12.1: Adaptive and Technical Challenges

From the Industrial Age to the

Information Age

• In the information age, many fundamental

assumptions of the industrial age are becoming obsolete

• Kaplan and Norton identified six changes in the ways companies operate to address the

changes in the environment

From the Industrial Age to the

Information Age (continued)

• Cross Functions: Organizations must operate

with integrated business processes that cut

across traditional business functions

• Links to Customers and Suppliers: IT enables

organizations to integrate supply, production, and delivery processes resulting in improvements in cost, quality, and response time

• Customer Segmentation: Companies must learn

to offer customized products and services to

diverse customer segments

From the Industrial Age to the

Information Age (continued)

• Global Scale: Companies today compete against

the best companies throughout the entire world

• Innovation: As product life cycles continue to

shrink, companies must be masters at anticipating customers’ future needs, innovating new products and services, and rapidly deploying new

technologies into efficient delivery processes

• Knowledge Workers: All employees must

contribute value by what they know and by the

information they can provide

The Formal Organization

• Studying the formal organization involves the

disciplines of management, organizational

behavior, and organizational theory and can have

a profound impact on leadership.

• Level of authority is the hierarchical level in an

organization.

• Organizational structure is the way an

organization’s activities are coordinated and

controlled It represents another level of the

situation in which leaders and followers must

operate.

The Formal Organization (continued)

• Organizational structures vary in complexity

– Horizontal complexity is the number of “boxes” at

any particular organizational level in an organizational chart.

– Vertical complexity is the number of hierarchical

levels appearing on an organizational chart.

– Spatial complexity describes the geographical

dispersion of an organization’s members.

• Organizations vary in their degree of

formalization

– Formalization is the degree of standardization,

which usually varies with size.

– Centralization is the diffusion of decision making.

The Informal Organization:

Organizational Culture

• Informal organization generally refers to

organizational culture.

– Organizational culture is a system of shared

backgrounds, norms, values, or beliefs among members of a group

• Organizational climate concerns members’

subjective reactions to the organization, which

is partly a function of organizational culture

Some Questions That Define

Organizational Culture

The Informal Organization:

Organizational Culture (continued)

• Leaders can change culture by attending to

or ignoring particular issues, problems, or projects.

• Leaders can modify culture:

1 Through their reactions to crises.

2 By rewarding new or different kinds of behavior.

3 By eliminating previous punishments or

negative consequences for certain behaviors.

A Theory of Organizational Culture

• The values depicted on opposite ends of each axis in the Competing Values Framework are inherently in tension with each other

• An organization’s culture represents a balance between these competing values

• People tend not to be consciously aware of their own organization’s culture

• The framework helps organizations be more

deliberate in identifying a culture more likely to

be successful given their respective situations, and in transitioning to it

The Competing Values Framework

Figure 12.2: The Competing Values Framework

A Theory of Organizational Culture (continued)

• The distinctive sets of values in the four

quadrants of the Competing Values Framework define four unique organizational cultures

1 Hierarchy cultures tend to have formalized rules

and procedures.

2 Market cultures emphasize stability and control but

focus their attention on the external environment.

3 Clan cultures emphasize flexibility and discretion,

focus primarily inward, and have a strong sense of cohesiveness.

4 Adhocracy cultures emphasize a high degree of

flexibility and discretion and focus primarily on the environment outside the organization

The Environment

• Ronald Heifetz argues that leaders not only are facing more crises than ever before but that a new mode of leadership is needed because

we’re in a permanent state of crisis

• Change has become so fast and so pervasive that it impacts virtually every organization

everywhere, and everyone in them

• VUCA describes this new state of affairs:

volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous

• Leadership has never been easy and appears

to be growing more difficult

Contrasting Different Environments

in the Situational Level

The Environment (continued)

• It is critical for leaders to have an understanding

of societal culture and the associated beliefs,

characteristics, and customs Failure to do so

can result in conflicts and misunderstandings

• Societal culture refers to those learned

behaviors characterizing the total way of life of

members within any given society

• Business leaders in the global context need to

become aware and respectful of cultural

differences and cultural perspectives

The GLOBE Study

• GLOBE, the Global Leadership and

Organizational Behavior Effectiveness

Research Program, is based on implicit

leadership theory.

– Individuals have implicit beliefs/assumptions about

attributes/behaviors that distinguish leaders from

followers, effective leaders from ineffective leaders,

and moral from immoral leaders.

– Relatively distinctive implicit theories of leadership

characterize different societal cultures from each

other as well as organizational cultures within those

societal cultures, i.e., culturally endorsed implicit

theories of leadership (CLT)

The GLOBE Study (continued)

• GLOBE identified 6 dimensions for assessing

CLT across all global cultures.

1 Charismatic/value-based leadership inspires,

motivates, and expects high performance from others

on the basis of firmly held core values.

2 Team-oriented leadership emphasizes effective

team building and implementation of a common goal.

3 Participative leadership is the degree that managers

involve others in making/implementing decisions.

4 Humane-oriented leadership is supportive.

5 Autonomous leadership is independent leadership.

6 Self-protective leadership focuses on ensuring the

security of the individual or group member.

CLT Leadership Dimensions

Universally Positive Leadership

Attributes

Table12.5: Leader Attributes and Behaviors Universally Viewed as Positive

Universally Negative Leadership

Attributes

Culturally Contingent Leadership

Attributes

TABLE 12.7 Examples of Leader Behaviors and Attributes That Are Culturally Contingent

Implications for Leadership

Practitioners

• Leadership practitioners should expect to face a variety of challenges to their own systems of

ethics, values, or attitudes during their careers.

• People holding seemingly antithetical values may need to work together, and dealing with diverse values will be an increasingly common challenge for leaders.

• Leaders in particular have a responsibility not to let their own personal values interfere with

professional leader–subordinate relationships

unless the conflicts pertain to issues clearly

relevant to the work and the organization.

• The situation may be the most complex factor in the leader–follower–situation framework

• Situations vary in complexity and strength

• The organizational level includes both the

formal organization and informal organization

• An increasingly important variable at the

environmental level is societal culture, which

involves learned behaviors that guide the

distinctive mannerisms, ways of thinking, and values within particular societies