In this article we will discuss about the definition, impact and relevance of leadership styles in an organisation.
Definition of Leadership Styles:
Throughout human history, the meaning of leadership has remained the same, although the various ways and styles in which leadership is translated into practice have undergone a whole lot of transformation.
Leadership is defined as the process of influencing the activities of others and achieving a goal in a given situation. This perception is equally applicable in the context of politics, society, family or in an organisation.
Any organisation has two environments. One is internal, comprising the people who work their culture, attitudes, behavioural patterns, and so on. The other is external, characterised by the market factor which again consists of crucial elements like customers, competitors, and prospects.
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Another is the government and its policies that have a direct bearing on the organisation—any change can open up an opportunity or pose a threat. The concept of leadership and its approaches, thus, assumes an important role in the management of both internal and external environment.
Today, business and industrial organisations are much more complex. In a large organisation, it is only the top management and a few select managers have to be concerned about leading the ship. Nowadays, relationships with others are valued much.
The attributes like care for each other, high level of trust, open and truthful attitudes, concern-for-all, consensus, collective endeavour to face and resolve conflicts, etc. are of great importance.
The leader, in such a situation, is forced to be social instead of being autocratic or bureaucratic—he has to ensure that each member of the team excels at a personal level so that the team utilises the ‘synergy’ principle and realises that it is a combined win that matters.
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In any organisation, there are three essential sets of roles—the doer-executor—producer, the planner—manager, and the leader-motivator. It is the leader’s responsibility to generate a vision and provide direction and inspiration to people to translate the vision into reality. A true leader has to combine his visionary and direction role with the planner-manager role.
Recently, an U.S.-based consultancy firm has identified (after a survey of top executives in six continents) five distinct leadership styles or approaches, and concluded that the chief executives adopt most of these approaches in a combined form, although not singly.
These styles of leadership vis-a-vis focus are tabulated below:
Impact and Relevance of Leadership Styles:
The main features, impact and relevance of the above mentioned leadership styles to strategic management are summarised below:
1. For managers, in general, the human assets approach, which lays stress on teamwork, building people and true empowerment, is found to be a very powerful leadership style.
2. At high-tech companies, the chief executive and his top staff engage themselves in identifying the particular expertise—that is, their competitive advantage—and then focus their energies on ensuring that the expertise moves up, down, horizontally, and diagonally in all directions spreading all over the topography of the organisations.
3. Every company has its boundaries demarcated by a “box” by way of values, policies, rules, structures, systems, procedures, that control what employees do in the short, intermediate, and long term, but there are some companies where the leaders focus their energies and efforts in the creation and maintenance of that box.
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The emphasis is on control of the internal environment and processes to produce that sharp edge that helps the organisation to win in the market competition.
4. There are some leaders for whom change is a way of life. The focus is on changing the fundamentals or basics of their organisation—right from the operational procedures to compensation programmes…. to the way people communicate with each other informally in the corporate corridors. Those leaders see the need for a continuous and significant change as for them change is not needed to solve an organisational crisis.
5. Virtually, every leader has to employ the strategic approach in today’s highly competitive situation. The topmost corporate leader, the chief executive officer and his associates, have to focus their energies on determining how their organisation can remain market leaders or emerge as the market leader of tomorrow, and then can structure their organisation to support this focus.
They build into their daily time schedules activities related to interaction with external suppliers, auditors, consultants, shareholders, bankers, financial institution representative, external customers, and, if possible competitors and industry association spokespersons.
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Sometimes, they just sit, think, interpret, analyse, anticipate, visualise, and play the inner tennis game to formulate tactics for outwitting the competitors with a killer instinct.
In the case of a departmental or sectional leader, who has to run the day-to-day operations smoothly, this strategic approach takes the form of anticipating the needs of the internal customers (other departments and sections which are being fed by inputs processed in his department or section) and requirements from his internal suppliers (departments and sections which are feeding his department or section with inputs that are to be processed to generate outputs that move in to the internal customer departments or sections for value addition), visualising the impact that any non-conformance will have on the respective processing activities, and getting prepared in advance so that everything went on according to the requirements and expectations.
Commenting on strategic leadership, Hoskisson and Hitt highlight that it requires managers to handle the ambiguity of multiple and complex functions and to manage through others.
The strategic leader is expected to possess and exhibit the powers of anticipation, vision, flexibility, and the ability to empower others to create strategic change. It entails what is commonly referred to as ‘transformational leadership’—leadership that produces major changes in the organisation.