Understanding the Impact of Situational Factors on Leadership

1. Chapter 15 Characteristics of the Situation

2. Chapter Goals • The goal of this chapter is to simply increase awareness of an aspect of leadership that is very complex.

3. Historically • Historically, researchers maintained that the situation, not someone’s traits or abilities, plays the most important role in determining who emerges as a leader. They also believed that leaders were made, not born, and that prior leadership experience helped forge effective leaders.

4. More recently • More recently, leadership theories have explored how situational factors affect leaders’ behaviors. For example, a leader’s behavior was said to be depend on a leader’s perceptions of several critical aspects of the situation: rules and regulations governing the job; role expectations of subordinates, peers, and superiors; the nature of the task; and feedback about the subordinates’ performance.

5. The Congruence Model is a systems model with inputs, processes, and outputs. • Input, which consists of the environment, resources, and history. • Processes, which consist of the work, people, formal organization, and informal organization. • Output, which consists of the system, unit, and individual.

6. Congruence Model • The core of the Congruence Model has four components: the work, the people, the formal organizational, and the informal organization.

7. Congruence Model Cont. • The work is “what is to be done” by the organization and its component parts. • The people refers to the leader and followers and their skills, knowledge, experience, expectations, needs and preferences.

8. Congruence Model Cont. • The formal organization addresses how the level of authority, organizational structure, organizational design, lateral interdependence, and organizational culture affect leaders’ and followers’ behavior. • The informal organization refers to its culture (shared backgrounds, norms, values, or beliefs.)

9. Environmental characteristics • Environmental characteristics concern situational factors outside the task or organization that still affect the leadership process. These include technological, economic, political, social, and legal forces.

10. Summary • Although leaders’ and followers’ behaviors are affected by a variety of situational factors, all too often leaders and followers completely overlook how changing the situation can help them to change their behavior. The most important point regarding situational engineering is to get leaders and followers to understand that the situation is not set in concrete, and to think about how they can change the situation in order for everyone to be more satisfied and productive.