ADM 612 - Leadership

1. ADM 612 - Leadership Lecture 4 – Style Approach

2. Introduction • The style approach emphasizes the behavior of the leader, compared to the trait approach, which emphasizes the personality characteristics, or the skills approach, which emphasizes capabilities.

3. Introduction • Task behaviors. • Facilitate goal accomplishment. • Relationship behaviors. • Help subordinates feel comfortable with themselves, with each other, and with the situation in which they find themselves.

4. Introduction • The central purpose of the style approach is to explain how leaders combine these two kinds of behaviors to influence subordinates in their efforts to reach a goal.

5. Ohio State Studies • Hemphill & Coons, 1957; Stogdill, 1963. • Two kinds of leadership behaviors. • Initiating structure (task behaviors). • Consideration (relationship behaviors).

6. Ohio State Studies • In short, leaders provide structure to followers and they nurture them. • Behaviors are distinct and independent.

7. University of Michigan Studies • Two types of leadership behavior. • Employee orientation (relationship behaviors). • Production orientation (task behaviors). • Conceived of as opposite ends of one continuum (later reconceived as two independent orientations.)

8. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid • Also broken down by concern for production and concern for people. • Mapped onto a two-dimensional grid of leadership behavior. • Each of axes is drawn as a 9-point scale on which a score of 1 represents minimum concern and 9 represents maximum concern.

9. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid

10. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid • Authority-Compliance (9,1). • Places heavy emphasis on task and job requirements and less emphasis on people. Communication limited to instructions. Results-driven. • Country Club Management (1,9). • Low concern for task accomplishment coupled with a high concern for interpersonal relationships. Create positive climate.

11. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid • Impoverished Management (1,1). • Unconcerned with task accomplishment and interpersonal relationships. Indifferent, noncommittal, resigned, and apathetic. • Middle-of-the-Road Management (5,5). • Compromisers, intermediate concern for task and people. Avoids conflict and emphasizes moderate levels of both. Expedient, middle ground, soft-pedals disagreement, and swallows convictions in the interest of “progress.”

12. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid • Team Management (9,9). • Strong emphasis on both. High degree of participation and teamwork, satisfies need of followers to be involved and committed to work. Stimulates participation, acts determined, gets issues into the open, makes priorities clear, follows through, behaves open-mindedly, and enjoys working.

13. Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid • Paternalism/maternalism. • A leader who uses both the 1,9 and 9,1 styles, but does not integrate them. “Benevolent dictator”. • Opportunism. • Uses any combination of the basic five styles for the purpose of personal advancement.

14. How Does the Style Approach Work? • Provides a framework for assessing leadership in a broad way, as behavior with task and relationship dimensions. • Describes major components of leadership behavior, but does not prescribe behavior. • Allows leader to subdivide behavior to examine motivations.

15. Strengths • Expanded focus of leadership research from traits to behaviors. • Leadership studies validate the dimensions.

16. Strengths • The balancing of task and relationship behaviors is the core of the leadership process. • The style is heuristic. That is, it allows leaders to examine and classify their own behaviors to seek improvement.

17. Criticisms • The research on styles has not adequately shown how leaders’ styles are associated with performance outcomes. • This approach has also failed to find a universal style of leadership that could be effective in almost every situation.

18. Criticisms • It implies that the most effective leadership style is the high-high style, which may not be the case on all situations.

19. Applications • Can be easily applied in ongoing leadership settings. • Provides a mirror that allows leaders at all levels of an organization to answer the question, “How am I doing as a leader?”

20. Applications • Most training and development programs for leadership are structured on the style approach.