Leadership and the Organizational Life Cycle

The view of organizations as having life cycles, or predictable stages of development provides some guidance about when either transactional or transformational leadership is likely to be most appropriate. When an organization is at its entrepreneurial, or beginning stage, transformational leadership is particularly instrumental in creating a vision that allows the organization to be born and take a few first steps. At the collectivity stage, additional workers begin to join the initial core group, and transactional leadership becomes an important aid in handling the accelerating growth. By the formalization and control stage, organizational growth requires even greater emphasis on transactional leadership to maintain direction and control. By the elaboration of structure stage, excessive formalization and control often reduce innovation to a low level, and heavy emphasis on transformational leadership is again needed. Although both transactional and transformational styles of leadership are likely to be utilized at every stage in effective organizations, the amount of emphasis is different in each case. Thus managers need to understand both approaches to leadership in order to function effectively. Inherent in putting these leadership approaches into practice is the need to be well versed in organizational communication processes.

Read text 5 and answer the questions given after it.

Text 5. Leadership

Leadership is the process of influencing others toward the achievement of organizational goals. Leaders use six major types of power to help affect the behavior of others: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, informational, and referent. Leaders need to use their power carefully in ways that encourage commitment and build power rather than diminish it.

Researchers have had only limited success in attempting to identify common traits that distinguish leaders from non-leaders. Recent efforts suggest that there may be some general distinguishing traits, such as intelligence and dominance, and that some traits may apply only to specific types of situations.

Studying leader behaviors has provided a more promising research direction. The Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio State studies represent prominent initial efforts to identify effective leadership behaviors, or styles. The Ohio State studies identified two important leadership styles, initiating structure and consideration that they viewed as independent dimensions rather than opposite ends of a continuum. Unfortunately, leaders exhibiting both high initiating structure and high consideration did not necessarily get the best results. The Managerial Grid popularized a related approach, which emphasized concern for people and concern for productions. Studies indicate that female and male managers are similar in the amounts of interpersonal and task behaviors that they exhibit.

Situational leadership theories grew out of the recognition that leader behaviors that work well in one situation often are not as effective in another situation. Fiedler's contingency model holds that a leader's LPC orientation measures the extent to which a leader is likely to be task- or people-motivated. The effectiveness of a leader depends on whether the leader's LPC orientation matches the situation as determined by leader-member relations, task structure, and position power. Cognitive resource theory argues that a leader's cognitive resources will have a major effect on group performance only when the leader is directive, the situation is relatively stress-free for the leader, and the group supports the leader and/or the organizational goals to be achieved. When the leader is nondirective in the same situation, member cognitive abilities become important.

The situational leadership theory argues that leaders need to alter their combination of task and relationship behaviors depending on the task readiness of their followers. The revised normative leadership model helps leaders determine the extent to which they should involve subordinates in particular decisions. The path-goal theory of leadership relies heavily on the expectancy theory of motivation and attempts to explain how leader behavior impacts the motivation and job satisfaction of subordinates.

Transformational leadership can be an important factor in innovation because it motivates individuals to perform beyond normal expectations in pursuit of new visions. It is an add-on to transactional leadership, since both are needed.

There is some evidence that leadership may sometimes get more than its due credit for positive results, particularly when things are going well. Researchers call this phenomenon the romance of leadership. One reason why leadership may not be as important as it seems is that there are a number of substitutes for leadership. The organizational life cycle also may affect the emphasis that needs to be placed on transactional and transformational leadership.

1. What major types of power are mentioned in the text?

2. What are the distinguishing traits of leaders?

3. What are the two important leadership styles?

1. Read text 6.