Industrial and organizational psychology/Module 12

Leadership in Organizations

Module 12.1: The Concept of Leadership

Research shows that emotional stability, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness are positively related to leader emergence skills. The leader is the individual within a group that is given tasks to direct their own group's activities, or the individual who takes the leadership role when the real leader isn't present.

Problems

Leadership has been attached to several different achievements, and it's difficult to trace these outcomes and their respective time frames due to the significant time gap in between them.

Abusive supervision, which are acts of aggression done by managers onto their employees, negatively impacts the job commitment and job satisfaction of employees.

Leadership Attempts

Remember that your manager/supervisor deals with what is being done, while the concept of leadership concerns with how it is being done. Nowadays, managerial duties are mixed with what is known as "effective leadership". Examples are delegating, maintaining positive work relationship/environments, and handling paperwork akin to an administrator.

Leader Development vs. Leadership Development

Leader development: develops, maintains, and enhances individual leader attributes.

Leadership development: concentrates on leader-follower development, sees leadership as a social exchange, and deals with interpersonal competence.

So leader development is essentially the focus on the leader, while leadership development deals with the mechanism behind leadership and how to maintain/strengthen this leadership process.

What motivates someone to lead?

People who seek leadership have high power motives, high activity inhibition (so great discipline), and low desire to want approval/connections with others.

Break motives into three categories

1. Affective-identity --> Want to have control over others/an entity.
2. Instrumental --> Benefits the person.
3. Social-normative --> Feel as if its a duty to take charge and lead.

Module 12.2 - Traditional Theories of Leadership

"Great Man" theories

What attributes do these leaders have? (w:Blueshirts)

The life of a respected leader is usually studied to figure out the clues behind such a symbolic person. They usually look at any 'remarkable experiences' or 'traits' to consider. Although interesting, I-O psych doesn't really pay much attention to this.

A prevalent approach to studying the theories of leadership is the trait approach. This was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. This approach showed that leaders possess certain characteristics that non-leaders don't, but a consistent correlation was NOT found between traits and leader effectiveness.

On the other hand, the power approach looks at the type of power exhibited by leaders, such as reward power, coercive power, legitimate power, referent power, and expert power.

Another approach is the behavioral approach, which focuses on the kind of behaviors that leaders exhibit. This is broken into two categories: consideration and initiating structure. This focus places an emphases on the relationship between leaders and their groups.

Task-oriented behavior is similar to initiating structure, while relations-oriented behavior is similar to consideration. Participative behavior is in its own distinction.

The contingency approach proposes that the role of the "situation" should be considered when looking into leadership. Hersey & Blanchard's situational theory suggests that leadership depends on the maturity of subordinate.

Consequences of Participation: Vroom-Yetton Model

Assuming that making decisions is a vital duty of a leader, this model suggests a way to choose a decision-making strategy... which implies that group decision-making is not always appropriate.

Module 12.3 - New Approaches to Leadership

The leader-member exchange (LMX) theory proposes that leaders take on different behaviors with certain subordinates, sort of like an "in-group" members vs. "out-group" members. Think of this as like the "life-cycle" of a leader-follower relationship.

We may also look at burns, or the behavior of inspirational political leaders who transformed their followers during their time-period for admirable ventures. 4 strategies used were inspirational motivation, idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration.

Bass percieves transformational leadership as building upon transactional leadership in a hierarchy reflecting effectiveness, also known as the "full-range" theory of leadership.

Charisma is defined as the personal attribute of a leader that captures the attention of followers and persuades them to identify and emulate their leader. Followers are attached to their leaders with no questions asked. This strengthens the leader while keeping the followers weak. The charismatic leadership theory looks at the various version of the idea that charisma is related to leadership:

1. Crisis situation
2. Behavior of the leader is magnetic

Module 12.4 - Emerging Topics & Challenges in Leadership Research

Since leadership has been going through a lot of rammifications (especially with remote work), the topic of leadership has always been changing.

When it comes to women vs. men, the trends have not affected the traditional roles between the two. Men lean more towards leadership as they are more assertive, while women lean more towards participation as they are more "tender-minded". More research is needed for this topic.

Persona?

• The Big 5 factor of "conscientiousness" is most closely aligned with leadership, but the factors in the Big Five are influential in theories of leadership.

Internationally?

We have the GLOBE, which is a large-scale cross-cultural study done on leadership in over 60 countries! This is needed, as the workplace is becoming much more diverse. Despite the cultural differences, charisma and flexibility are essential to good performance results and positive attitude reactions.