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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Current thought and contemporary guidance about leadership are often grounded in short-lived trends and value judgments about what constitutes “good” leadership. Lindstam and Olsson offer an alternative. They show how managers can improve organisational performance by aligning leadership goals with their organisation’s dynamic opportunities and challenges. Ideal for professionals in leadership development or executive recruitment, as well as managers looking for fresh perspectives, this book aims to build a bridge between business strategy and leadership behavior.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Content
Introduction
Authors
A practical note
Background
The Ohio studies: Consideration and Initiating Structure
Models using the two leadership dimensions
Models using three leadership dimensions
Other concepts behind the Strategic Leadership Style Model
Leadership style defined
Unipolarity vs. bipolarity
The Strategic Leadership Style Model and its application
Situation
Leadership objectives
How to choose the right leadership objectives
Situations demanding ‘innovative change’
Situations demanding ‘continuity and stable operations’
Situations demanding ‘good relationships and group cohesion’
Situations demanding ‘task focus and boundary setting’
Situations demanding ‘coordination and security’
Situations demanding ‘quick adaptability’
Leadership styles with their direct and indirect leadership behaviours
Changing: Examples of direct leadership behaviour
Changing: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour
Preserving: Examples of direct leadership behaviour
Preserving: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour
Relation-oriented: Examples of direct leadership behaviour
Relation-oriented: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour
Independent: Examples of direct leadership behaviour
Independent: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour
Structured: Examples of direct leadership behaviour
Structured: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour
Flexible: Examples of direct leadership behaviour
Flexible: Examples of indirect leadership behaviour
Compatible and incompatible leadership objectives
Business case
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
References
Introduction
If you want to improve organisational performance by aligning leadership with your business goals, this book is written for you.
The book is a composite of our own experiences in management diagnostics and an empirically based leadership style model, developed in a dissertation at the University of Mannheim, Germany.
Much of the current thought and guidance regarding leadership is, in our opinion, grounded too often in short-lived leadership trends. This book offers an alternative.
We believe that you think more clearly and make better decisions about the type of leadership your organisation needs if you start with a thoughtful picture of what you want managers to achieve via leadership objectives. What we call ‘leadership objectives’ are business goals that are influenced by leadership behaviour.
This book is based on three central ideas:
The Strategic Leadership Style Model can be used to promote mutual understanding among team members and increase cooperation in management teams. It can also be used to produce requirement profiles for executive recruitment. However, it is primarily a tool for improving organisational performance through goal-directed leadership development. It integrates ideas from related areas such as strategic management and organisational theory. Although integrative and broad in scope, the Strategic Leadership Style Model is about leadership. It does not address management tasks concerning capital raising, market segmentation, or financial reporting and related activities beyond a superficial level.
We will help you to reach a better understanding of the right leadership for your business. We will show what leadership styles and behaviours you need more of and what behaviours you need less of, and we will also make suggestions about organisational structure that can compensate for a lack of certain leadership behaviours.
We would like to thank Fredrik Arp, Tomas Pira, and Victor Olsson for their valuable feedback on the book’s case study. The dissertation in which the leadership style model was first presented was supervised by Prof. Dr. Werner W. Wittmann. We would like to take the opportunity to thank him again.
Authors
Dr Stefan Lindstam is the founder and CEO of Psytest AB. He works in the construction of psychological test methods, such as leadership style, personality, and ability tests, and has served as a consultant in management diagnostics for over 20 years.
Jan Olsson has worked more than 10 years as HR Director at Trelleborg AB. Jan is also the former owner and CEO of the executive search company Lisberg AB and a senior consultant at Psytest AB.
A practical note
If you want to learn about the Strategic Leadership Style Model and its application but are not interested in the theoretical background of the model, you can skip the two first parts of the book called ‘Background’ and ‘Other concepts behind the Strategic Leadership Style Model’ and begin with the chapter ‘The Strategic Leadership Style Model and its application’.
Background
In personality research, a development spanning decades has led to the well-known Big Five Model of personality. The Big Five Model is widely used, and most modern personality tests rely on this model. What is less known is that there has been a similar development in leadership research.
When you want to study and talk about leadership, the first thing to decide is how to describe leadership. That means finding the most appropriate dimensions to describe leadership behaviour. If the goal is to find such basic dimensions that are stable over time and not simply ‘fashionable leadership’, the best approach is to look at what the large-scale empirical research suggests. We will start by discussing this development in the field of leadership, beginning in the 1950s.
The Ohio studies: Consideration and Initiating Structure
In the 1950s, comprehensive studies were conducted at the Ohio State University (Fleishman, 1953, Stodgill & Coons, 1957, Halpin & Winer, 1957). The studies were empirical investigations of which dimensions are best suited to describe leadership behaviour. Some 1,800 specific examples of leadership behaviour were analysed and reduced to 150 questions in a questionnaire. This questionnaire was distributed to employees who rated the behaviour of their direct supervisor. Various Ohio studies identified two broad leadership dimensions, which accounted for about 85% of the total variation in the answers. They were named ‘consideration’ and ‘initiating structure’.
The dimension consideration (also referred to as ‘employee orientation’) is the degree to which the manager creates an environment of support, warmth, friendliness, and trust. The initiating structure, often referred to as ‘task orientation’, is the degree to which the manager leads by delegating specific tasks, specifying work methods, planning carefully, and imparting clear expectations to employees. In other words, leaders provide structure for followers, and they nurture them.
An important difference from other contemporary models was that these two leadership dimensions were found to be independent of each other. That is, an individual leader can be high or low in both or high in one and low in the other. This circumstance allows the following cross tabulation:
High Consideration Low Initiating Structure
High Consideration High Initiating Structure
Low Consideration Low Initiating Structure
Low Consideration High Initiating Structure
Table 1.Cross tabulation with the leadership dimensions consideration and initiating structure.
These two basic leadership dimensions have become very popular and are being used in well-established leadership models.
Models using the two leadership dimensions
Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid
Blake and Mouton (1964) introduced a model based on the results of the Ohio studies. Their ‘Managerial Grid’ includes an assessment of leadership in the dimensions ‘concern for results’, which is comparable to initiating structure, and ‘concern for people’, which is also comparable to consideration. The scales for each dimension range from 1 to 9, but, as a rule, only combinations of the extreme values, that is, 1 –1, 1 –9, 9 –1, 9 –9 and the middle value, 5 –5, are discussed.
Figure 1.Managerial Grid, according to Blake and Mouton, 1964.
1 –9 Country-Club Management: Suggests the manager shows maximal concern for people but minimal concern for results. Blake and Mouton state that, under 1-9 management, ‘thoughtful attention to the needs of the people for satisfying relationships leads to a comfortable, friendly organisation atmosphere and work tempo’. They add that the 1 –9 leader is often seen as ‘agreeable, eager to help, comforting, and uncontroversial’.
9 –1 Authority-Compliance Management: Suggests maximal concern for results but minimal concern for people. According to Blake and Mouton, under 9-1 management, ‘efficiency in operations results from arranging conditions of work in such a way that human elements interfere to a minimum degree’. The 9 – 1 leader is often seen as ‘controlling, demanding, hard-driving, and overpowering’.
1 –1 Impoverished Management: Exists when the manager shows minimal concern for results and for people. Blake and Mouton state that 1-1 management results in ‘exertion of minimum effort to get required work done as appropriate to sustain organisational membership’. The 1 -1 leader is often seen as ‘indifferent, noncommittal, resigned, and apathetic’.
9 –9 Team Management: Exists when a manager demonstrates maximal concern for both results and people. Blake and Mouton state that under 9-9 management, ‘work accomplishment is from committed people. Interdependence through a common stake in organisational purpose leads to relationships of trust and respect’. The 9-9 leader is often seen as a leader who ‘stimulates participation, acts determined, gets issues into the open, makes priorities clear, follows through, behaves open-mindedly, and enjoys working’.
5 – 5 Middle-of-the-Road Management: This type of leader shows a moderate concern for results and a moderate concern for people. According to Blake and Mouton, under 5-5 management, ‘adequate organisation performance is possible through balancing the necessity to get work out while maintaining morale of people at a satisfactory level’. The 5- 5 leader is often seen as one who is ‘expedient, prefers the middle ground, soft-pedals disagreement, and swallows convictions in the interest of ‘progress’.
These are the five major styles described in the Managerial Grid Model. Blake and Mouton (1985) claim that leaders normally have a dominant grid style, which they use frequently, and a backup style that they revert to when they are under pressure and their dominant style does not achieve the desired outcome.
Blake and Mouton recommend the 9 –9 style for all managers, and their training and development programs for leaders teach managers how to use the 9 – 9 style more often. Because Blake and Mouton take little notice of the manager’s situation, the 9 – 9 style is considered the superior style in general, for all situations. The next model, however, considers the manager’s situation to a great degree. It also relies on the two Ohio leadership dimensions.
Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Model
Hersey and Blanchard’s (1977) Situational Leadership Model provides recommendations about how managers should adjust their leadership style according to their situation. Hersey and Blanchard do not consider a particular leadership style superior in general. They suggest that one leadership style can only be considered better than another if the manager’s situation is taken into account.
Hersey and Blanchard regard the ‘maturity’ of the employees as the most important situational variable. Mature employees have both the capability and the motivation to perform their roles. The measures ‘capable–incapable’ and ‘motivated–unmotivated’ provide four possible combinations and, thus, four different leadership situations. Hersey and Blanchard rely on the Ohio research though they call their two dimensions ‘relationship behaviour’ (comparable to Consideration) and ‘task behaviour’ (comparable to Initiating structure).
Their recommendation is that in leadership positions with very mature employees – those who are both capable and motivated – a delegating leadership style should be preferred. A delegating leadership style is one in which managers are low in both relationship behaviour and task behaviour.
According to this model, if employees are unmotivated but capable, they demonstrate a moderate-to-high level of maturity. The manager should then use a participating leadership style, a combination of high relationship behaviour and low task behaviour.
If the employees are unmotivated and incapable – that is, they demonstrate very low maturity – the manager should use an instructive leadership style, a combination of high task behaviour and low relationship behaviour.
When the employees are motivated but incapable because of low-to-moderate maturity, the manager should use a selling leadership style, which is a combination of high relationship behaviour and high task behaviour.
Figure 2.Situational Leadership Model, according to Hersey and Blanchard
Hersey and Blanchard’s model has become very popular as a tool for leadership development even though there is a lack of empirical evidence for the model’s validity (Neuberger, 1980). One can also note that the scope of a manager’s situation is quite narrow in this model. Other situational factors than the ‘maturity’ of the employees could also be considered. Another concern is whether the conception of a leadership style with only two dimensions is too limited. Later research findings suggest that this is the case.
