Consequences of Influence Tactics
- Resistance occurs when people or work units oppose the behavior desired by the influencer and, consequently, refuse, argue, or delay engaging in the behavior.
- Compliance occurs when people are motivated to implement the influencer’s request at a minimal level of effort and for purely instrumental reasons. Without external sources to motivate the desired behavior, it would not occur.
- Commitment is the strongest form of influence, whereby people identify with the influencer’s request and are highly motivated to implement it even when extrinsic sources of motivation are no longer present
Organizational politics: Behaviors that others perceive as self-serving tactics for personal gain at the expense of other people and possibly the organization.
Conditions for Organizational Politics:
- Scarce Resources: When budgets are slashed, people rely on political tactics to safeguard their resources and maintain the status quo
- Complex and Ambiguous Decisions: decision makers are given more discretion over resource allocation, so potential recipients of the resources use political tactics to influence the factors that should be considered in the decision
- Organizational Change: Change creates uncertainty and ambiguity as the company moves from an old set of rules and practices to a new set.
- Tolerance of Politics: During such times, employees apply political strategies to protect their valued resources, position, and self-concept
Machiavellian values
Machiavellianism is named after Niccolo Machiavelli, the 16th-century Italian philosopher who wrote The Prince, a famous treatise about political behavior.
People with high Machiavellian values are comfortable with getting more than they deserve, and they believe that deceit is a natural and acceptable way to achieve this goal. They seldom trust co-workers, and they tend to use cruder influence tactics, such as bypassing one’s boss or being assertive, to get their own way
Minimizing Political Behaviour:
- Introduce clear rules for scarce resources
- Effective organizational change practices
- Suppress norms that support or tolerate self-serving behavior
- Leaders role model organizational citizenship
- Give employees more control over their work
- Keep employees informed
Chapter 12
Leadership in Organizational Settings
Leadership: Influencing, motivating, and enabling others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.
Shared leadership: The view that leadership is broadly distributed, rather than assigned to one person, such that people within the team and organization lead each other.
Competency Perspective of Leadership:
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Personality: The leader’s higher levels of extroversion (outgoing, talkative, sociable, and assertive) and conscientiousness (careful, dependable, and self-disciplined).
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Self-concept: The leader’s self-beliefs and positive self-evaluation about his or her own leadership skills and ability to achieve objectives.
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Drive: The leader’s inner motivation to pursue goals.
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Integrity: The leader’s truthfulness and tendency to translate words into deeds.
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Leadership motivation: The leader’s need for socialized power to accomplish team or organizational goals.
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Knowledge of the business: The leader’s tacit and explicit knowledge about the company’s environment, enabling the leader to make more intuitive decisions.
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Cognitive and practical intelligence: The leader’s above-average cognitive ability to process information (cognitive intelligence) and ability to solve real-world problems by adapting to, shaping, or selecting appropriate environments (practical intelligence).
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Emotional intelligence: The leader’s ability to monitor his or her own and others’ emotions, discriminate among them, and use the information to guide his or her thoughts and actions.
Competency Perspective Limitations
First, it assumes that all effective leaders have the same personal characteristics that are equally important in all situations. This is probably a false assumption; leadership is far too complex to have a universal list of traits that apply to every condition. Some competencies might not be important all the time.
Second, alternative combinations of competencies may be equally successful; two people with different
sets of competencies might be equally good leaders.
Third, the competency perspective views leadership as something within a person, yet experts emphasize that leadership is relational. People are effective leaders because of their favorable relationships with followers, so effective leaders cannot be identified without considering the quality of these relationships.
Leader Behavioural Perspective
- People-oriented behaviours: Showing mutual trust and respect, Concern for employee needs, Desire to look out for employee welfare.
- Task-oriented behaviours: Assign specific tasks, Ensure employees follow rules, Set “stretch goals” to achieve performance capacity.
Path-Goal Leadership Styles
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Directive: This leadership style consists of clarifying behaviors that provide a psychological structure for subordinates.
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Supportive: The leader’s behaviors provide psychological support for subordinates.
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Participative: Participative leadership behaviors encourage and facilitate subordinate involvement in decisions beyond their normal work activities.
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Achievement-oriented: This leadership style emphasizes behaviors that encourage employees to reach their peak performance. The leader sets challenging goals, expects employees to perform at their highest level, continuously seeks improvement in employee performance, and shows a high degree of confidence that employees will assume responsibility and accomplish challenging goals
Contingencies of Path-Goal Theory
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Skill and experience. A combination of directive and supportive leadership is best for employees who are (or perceive themselves to be) inexperienced and unskilled.
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Locus of Control. People with an internal locus of control believe that they have control over their work environment. Consequently, these employees prefer participative and achievement-oriented leadership styles and may become frustrated with a directive style
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Task structure. Leaders should adopt the directive style when the task is nonroutine, because this style minimizes role ambiguity that tends to occur in complex work situations (particularly for inexperienced employees).
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Team dynamics. Cohesive teams with performance-oriented norms act as a substitute for most leader interventions. High team cohesion substitutes for supportive leadership, whereas performance-oriented team norms substitute for directive and possibly achievement-oriented leadership
Situational leadership theory: A commercially popular but poorly supported leadership model stating that effective leaders vary their style (telling, selling, participating, delegating) with the “readiness” of followers.
Fiedler’s contingency model: Developed by Fred Fiedler, an early contingency leadership model that suggests that leader effectiveness depends on whether the person’s natural leadership style is appropriately
Leadership substitutes: A theory identifying contingencies that either limit a leader’s ability to influence subordinates or make a particular leadership style unnecessary
Transformational leadership: A leadership perspective that explains how leaders change teams or organizations by creating, communicating, and modeling a vision for the organization or work unit and inspiring employees to strive for that vision.
Transactional leadership: Leadership that helps organizations achieve their current objectives more efficiently, such as by linking job performance to valued rewards and ensuring that employees have the resources needed to get the job done.
Transformational Leadership Elements
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Create a Strategic Vision: Transformational leaders establish a vision of the company’s future state that engages employees to achieve objectives they didn’t think possible.
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Communicate the Vision: If vision is the substance of transformational leadership, communicating that vision is the process. CEOs say that the most important leadership quality is being able to build and share their vision for the organization.
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Model the Vision: Transformational leaders not only talk about a vision; they enact it. They “walk the talk” by stepping outside the executive suite and doing things that symbolize the vision. Modeling the vision is also important because it builds employee trust in the leader. The greater the consistency between the leader’s words and actions, the more employees will believe in and be willing to follow the leader.
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Build Commitment toward the Vision: Transformational leaders build this commitment in several ways. Their words, symbols, and stories build a contagious enthusiasm that energizes people to adopt the vision as their own.
Implicit leadership theory: A theory stating that people evaluate a leader’s effectiveness in terms of how well that person fits preconceived beliefs about the features and behaviors of effective leaders (leadership prototypes) and that people tend to inflate the influence of leaders on organizational events.