Leadership enhancing the lessons of experience 8th by hughes curphy chap 13

They implicitly assume that leaders are able to accurately diagnose or assess key aspects of the followers and the leadership situation.. Levels of Participation• The normative decision

• Leadership is contingent upon the interplay of

all three aspects of the leader-follower-situation (L-F-S) model

• Four other theories share similarities:

1 They are theories rather than personal opinions.

2 They implicitly assume that leaders are able to

accurately diagnose or assess key aspects of the followers and the leadership situation.

3 With the exception of the contingency model, leaders

are assumed to be able to act in a flexible manner.

4 A correct match between situational and follower

characteristics and leaders’ behavior is assumed to have a positive effect on group or organizational outcomes.

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)

• LMX argues that leaders do not treat all

followers like a uniform group of equals

• The leader forms specific and unique

linkages with each subordinate, creating a

series of dyadic relationships.

– With the out-group, or low-quality exchange

relationships, interpersonal interaction is limited

to fulfilling contractual obligations.

– With the in-group, leaders form high-quality

exchange relationships that go beyond what the

job requires and benefit both parties.

The Cycle of Leadership Making

The Normative Decision Model

• The level of input subordinates have in

decision-making varies substantially depending

on the issue, the followers’ technical expertise,

or the presence/absence of a crisis

• Vroom and Yetton maintained that leaders

could often improve group performance by

using an optimal amount of participation in the

decision-making process

• The normative decision model is directed

solely at determining how much input

subordinates should have in the

decision-making process

Levels of Participation

• The normative decision model was designed to

improve some aspects of leadership

effectiveness

• Vroom and Yetton explored how various leader, follower, and situational factors affect the

degree of subordinates’ participation in the

decision-making process and, in turn, group

performance

• A continuum of decision-making processes

ranging from completely autocratic (AI) to

completely democratic (GII) was discovered

Decision Quality and Acceptance

• Vroom and Yetton believed decision quality and decision acceptance were the two most

important criteria for judging the adequacy of a decision

• Decision quality means that if the decision has

a rational or objectively determinable “better or worse” alternative, the leader should select the better alternative

• Decision acceptance implies that followers

accept the decision as if it were their own and

do not merely comply with the decision

• As with quality, acceptance of a decision is not always critical for implementation

The Decision Tree

• Vroom and Yetton developed a normative

decision model and a set of questions to protect quality and acceptance by eliminating decision processes that would be wrong/inappropriate

• Most questions concern the problem itself, the amount of pertinent information possessed by the leader and followers, and situational factors

• The questions were incorporated into a decision tree

Concluding Thoughts about the

Normative Decision Model

• Some questions could/should be placed

elsewhere, and no questions address a leader’s personality, values, motivations, or attitudes

• The L-F-S framework organizes concepts in a familiar conceptual structure

• No proof that leaders using the model are more effective overall than leaders not using it

• The model also:

– Views decision making as taking place at a single

Factors from the Normative Decision

Model and the Interactional Framework

FIGURE 13.2 Factors from the Normative Decision Model and the Interactional Framework

The Situational Leadership Model

• The Situational Leadership model focuses on

two leadership behavior categories

1 Task behaviors are the extent to which the

leader spells out the responsibilities of an individual or group

a) Telling people what to do, how/when to do it, and who

is to do it

2 Relationship behaviors are how much the

leader engages in two-way communication

a) Listening, encouraging, facilitating, clarifying,

explaining why the task is important, giving support

• The relative effectiveness of the two behavior

dimensions often depends on the situation

Situational Leadership

FIGURE 13.3 Situational Leadership ®

The Situational Leadership Model

(continued)

• Follower readiness refers to a follower’s ability

and willingness to accomplish a particular task

• It is not a personal characteristic, but rather how ready an individual is to perform a particular

task

• Readiness is not an assessment of an

individual’s personality, traits, values, age, etc

• Any given follower could be low on readiness to perform one task, but high on readiness to

perform a different task

• Along this continuum, however, the assessment

of follower readiness can be fairly subjective

• A leader may like to see followers increase their level of readiness for particular tasks by

implementing a series of developmental

interventions to help boost follower readiness

levels

• The intervention is designed to help followers in their development

Concluding Thoughts: About the

Situational Leadership Model

• The only situational consideration is knowledge

of the task, and the only follower factor is

readiness

• Situational Leadership usually appeals to

students and practitioners because of its

commonsense approach and ease of

understanding

• It is a useful way to get leaders to think about

how leadership effectiveness may depend

somewhat on being flexible with different

subordinates, not on acting the same way toward them all

The Contingency Model

• Although leaders may be able to change their behaviors toward individual subordinates, they also have dominant behavioral tendencies

• The contingency model suggests that leader

effectiveness is primarily determined by

selecting the right kind of leader for a certain

situation or changing the situation to fit the

particular leader’s style

• Some leaders are better than others in some

situations but less effective in other situations

The Least Preferred Co-worker Scale

• Fiedler’s least preferred co-worker (LPC)

scale has a leader consider the single individual

that has been the most difficult to work with and then describe that person in terms of bipolar

adjectives (friendly-unfriendly,

boring-interesting, sincere-insincere)

• Those ratings are then converted into a

numerical score

• The score represents something about the

leader, not the specific individual the leader

evaluated

Motivational Hierarchies for Low-

and High-LPC Leaders

FIGURE 13.5: Motivational Hierarchies for Low- and High-LPC Leaders

Situational Favorability

• Situational favorability is the amount of control

the leader has over the followers

• The more control a leader has over followers, the more favorable the situation is, at least from a

Contingency Model Octant Structure for Determining Situational Favorability

FIGURE 13.6 Contingency Model Octant Structure for Determining Situational Favorability

Prescriptions of the Model

• Leaders will try to satisfy a primary motivation when faced with unfavorable or moderately

favorable situations and will behave according

to their secondary motivational state only when faced with highly favorable situations

• Leadership training should stress situational

engineering rather than behavioral flexibility

• Organizations could be more effective by

matching a leader’s characteristics with

situational demands instead of trying to change

a leader’s behavior to fit the situation

Prescriptions of the Model

FIGURE 13.7 Leader Effectiveness Based on the Contingency between Leader LPC Score and Situation Favorability

Factors from Fiedler’s Contingency

Theory and the Interactional Framework

FIGURE 13.8 Factors from Fiedler’s Contingency Theory and the Interactional Framework

The Path-Goal Theory

• The underlying mechanism of the path-goal

theory deals with expectancy, a cognitive

approach to understanding motivation where

people calculate:

1 Effort-to-performance probabilities.

2 Performance-to-outcome probabilities.

3 Assigned valences or values to outcome.

• Path-goal theory uses the same basic

assumptions as expectancy theory.

• A leader’s actions should strengthen followers’

beliefs that if they exert a certain level of effort,

they will be more likely to accomplish a task, and

if they accomplish the task, they will be more

likely to achieve some valued outcome.

The Path-Goal Theory (continued)

• Leaders may use varying styles with different

subordinates and differing styles with the same subordinates in different situations

• Followers will actively support a leader if they

view the leader’s actions as a way to increase

their own levels of satisfaction

• Followers’ perceptions of their own skills can

affect the impact of certain leader behaviors

• Situational factors impact the effects of leader

behavior on follower attitudes and behaviors:

1 Task

2 Formal authority system

3 Primary work group

The Four Leader Behaviors of

Path-Goal Theory

TABLE 13.2 The Four Leader Behaviors of Path–Goal Theory

Examples of Applying Path-Goal Theory

FIGURE 13.10 Examples of Applying Path–Goal Theory

• The five contingency theories of leadership:

1 Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)

2 Normative decision model

3 Situational Leadership model

4 Contingency model

5 Path-goal theory

• They specify that leaders should make their

behaviors contingent on certain aspects of the followers or the situation

• All four theories implicitly assume that leaders can accurately assess key follower and

situational factors

• All theories have mixed support in field settings because they are all limited in scope