Month: September 2018

Sarah wrote

https://create.twu.ca/sjasmins/2018/09/29/learning-activity-4-blog-post-2/

Hi Sarah,

I am interested in reading your story as an emergent leader. You also wrote “trust” is very important for leadership and I imagined you have practiced and now be trusted by your colleague.

For your question “Do you think it’s rare for someone in an assigned leadership role to take both a management and leadership approach? Which approach do you think more assigned leaders tend to practice?”

I think it doesn’t matter whichever the leadership is assigned or emergent, it is more depends on the level of leadership position and type of business where an assigned leadership is taken. If a group or an organization is small, I think an assigned leader more often take both approach. Think of small business owner with a few employee. As Northouse worte,  leader and manager can take both, managers think more about people rather than  leader think more about change or vision of the group.  For small group, leader who has the most information and experience  also practice the role of manager. An emergent leader is promoted to be an assigned leaders.

Hopefully I would like know what you think about it.

Best regards,

Hiromi

 

 

 

Among seven servant leader behaviors emerged from Liden et al.’s (2008), I would choose conceptualizing, helping followers grow and succeed and　Empowerment.

With conceptualizing, servant leader should understand the organization with a big picture. Leader also needs to concern with the mission of the organization and the long term-vision. Besides that, A servant leader need to grasp how the situation is going on. Servant leader.  When leader empathized and concern followers first, there may be a risk that the leader  is stucked with the followers feeling or requests and loose the long vision. Helping followers grow and succeed may be not always satisfy the followers’ request. Leader with long view can lead the followers in proper direction. Empower is another behavior which servant leader provide. Empowering is to give some power for followers to let them control the situations by themselves. These behaviors remind me Adler psychology. In Adler psychology, we trust people that they can improve naturally and use encouragement to support their grow or improvement.

 

Among these three behavior, empower is the most challenging for me. Often in the cases, doing something by myselves is much easier and faster than waiting for somebody is growing to do that. But for prosper of the organization, empower is very important. When each employee becomes aware of their situations and motivated to manage by themselves. Employee can behave more independently.

 

I feel servant leadership takes longer time to penetrate to the organization because leader urge and wait for followers’ improvement. Also leader should know both small precise information about followers but also big picture of long-term goal.

What kinds of business are good to have servant leader?

References

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Liden, R.C., Wayne, S.J., Zhao, H.,& Henderson, D. (2008) Servant leadership : Development of a multidimensional measured and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly, 19,161-177.

Northouse defined that leader has two category including assigned leaders and emergent leaders. (Northouse, 2019) An assigned leader is defined as a leader engaging with certain leading position such as CEO, principal, manage, or team head and everyone can recognize the leader by positions. Whereas Emergent leader is a real leader who really influences members of a group to move onto the goal regardless of having a certain position or not.
When I attended some class in the previous university, the professor suddenly divided the class into the small group of 4~5 people to let us try Marshmallow challenge, which compete to build the highest Marshmallow tower using some pasta and tape in 18 minutes. There were 4 members in my group and the other group members including two men and a woman were all from India. First, I thought they were better English speaker and one of the men said he was confident about the activity, so I would become followers. However, some time passed, two men started to argue to push their own way respectively. The other lady didn’t say anything and watched them. I tried to listen both opinions and it seemed that I had more geometric knowledge to design a tower. I tried to communicate nicely to point out their contradiction. I noticed both men were short temper and were not good at listening the other opinion. I emerged as a leader and leaded our discussion and activity and finally our team won the challenge with the highest record.

Northouse(2019) mentioned, “There are clear differences between management and leadership, the two constructs overlap.” Simonet and Tett (2012) who researched the overlap the difference between leadership and management found both leadership and management involve productivity, customer focus, professionalism, and goal setting, but they found leadership has some other peculiar aspects such as motivating intrinsically, creative thinking, strategic planning, tolerance of ambiguity, and being able to read people, whereas management involves rule orientation, short-term planning, motivating extrinsically, orderliness, safety concerns, and timeliness. I think leadership is more focus on followers as human beings who can improve and change by influence of leader. Manager is more focus how to use human resources to achieve the goal. For the prosper of the organization, I think strategic long-term planning is important.

I wonder what kind of situations do we need a manager? and what kind of situations do we need a leader? Leader can take over manager?

References

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Simonet, D.V., & Tett, R.P. (2012). Five perspectives on the leadership-management relationship: competency-based evaluation and integration. Journal of Leadership & Organization Studies, 20(2), 199-213

According to the Leadership written by Northouse, the definition of leadership is

“Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.”

This idea opened my eye because I never think what leadership is and vaguely I thought leadership is one side action from leaders and leaders require certain special character or behavioral manner rather than some sort of mutual influence. I am delightful to know everyone can obtain leadership. Also I was convinced to know definition of leadership has changed depends on the time and the culture.  After I read this book I like this Northouse’s leadership concept because I understand leadership should be flexible.

“Process” in leadership definition means “interaction” between leader and followers where leadership occurs. Even though a common goal is the same, leadership would be different depends on leader, followers, culture and time.  “Influence” is the main part of leadership, how the leader affects followers and the communication that occurs between leaders and follower. (Ruben & Gigliotti, 2017) Leaders use mainly power to influence followers in organization. Two major types of power is position power and personal power. In the primitive way of leadership, leaders often use position power including coercive and reward. It is clear when we see the politics in ancient era or even some countries now. When position power is immense and the distance between leaders and followers becomes farther, this process becomes more one way. However, in Northouse house’s definition, followers is given the power to leaders. When followers admit the leader is their leader and accepted to be influenced the power, the power can influence followers.Because definition of leadership is process and emphasize mutual interaction. Group context includes leaders and followers and it is important that both leaders and followers to be conscious with their common goal.

Yes, I am interested to know the definition of leadership by Northouse.  In this leadership concept, the position of leaders and followers are more equal and close to be able to interact each other. However in real world, bigger the size of organizations become , farther becomes the distance between leaders and followers and normally leaders don’t acknowledge of followers respectively like politician and followers, CEO of big companies and employee. Vice versa.  I agree that leaders are also influenced by followers. However regarding that the role of leader is to lead followers in the group to achieve common goal. Is it necessary for followers to know who lead them as a leader in any situations?

 

Reference:

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice, Seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks.

Ruben, B.D., & Gigliotti, R. A. (2017). Communication: Sine qua non of organizational leadership theory and practice. International Journal of Business Communication, 54(1), 12-30.