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6. Relational Theories: since the late 1970s, many ideas of leadership have
focused on the relational aspect, that is, how leaders and followers interact
and influence one another. Rather than being seen as something a leader
does to a follower, leadership is viewed as a relational process that
meaningfully engages all participants and enables each person to
contribute to achieving the vision. Interpersonal relationships are seen as
the most important facet of leadership effectiveness. Two significant
relational theories are transformational leadership and servant leadership.
A Model of Leadership Evolution
Environment
Stable Turbulent
Era 2 Era 3
Rational Management Team or Lateral
Leadership
Behavior theories
Influence theories
Contingency theories
Scope Organization Organization:
Organization:
Horizontal
Vertical hierarchy, organization
bureaucracy
Cross-functional
Functional teams
management
Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s abilities to perceive, identify,
understand, and successfully manage emotions in self and others.
Pleasure/growth Pain/fear
Motivation theories
Need-based theories of motivation
Hierarchy of needs theories: Maslow’s theory proposes that humans are
motivated by multiple needs and those needs exist in a hierarchical order.
Two-factor theory: 2 entirely separate dimensions which are hygiene factors and
motivators. Hygiene factors involve working conditions, pay, company policies,
and interpersonal relationships. Motivators involve job satisfaction and meeting
higher-level needs such as achievement, recognition, and opportunity for growth.
Hygiene factors work in the area of lower-level needs, and their absence causes
dissatisfaction. Inadequate pay, unsafe working conditions, or a noisy work
environment will cause people to be dissatisfied, but their correction will not
cause a high level of work enthusiasm and satisfaction. Higher-level motivators
such as challenge, responsibility, and recognition must be in place before
employees will be highly motivated.
Acquired needs theory: McClelland’s theory that proposes that certain types of
needs (achievement, affiliation, power) are acquired during an individual’s
lifetime.
Other motivation theories
Reinforcement theory: a motivational theory that looks at the relationship
between behavior and its consequences by changing or modifying followers’ on-
the- job behavior through the appropriate use of immediate rewards or
punishments.
Expectancy theory: a theory that suggests that motivation depends on
individuals’ mental expectations about their ability to perform tasks and receive
desired rewards.
Equity theory: a theory that proposes that people are motivated to seek social
equity in the rewards they receive for performance.
Communicating in a crisis
Being Crisis-ready
Communication is a key part of a leader’s job, to be prepared for a
communicating in crisis, leaders can develop 4 skills :
1. Stay Calm: The most important part of a leader’s job in a crisis situation is
to absorb people’s fear and uncertainties. No matter what is going on
around you, you have to be cooler than cool.
2. Be visible and supportive: being a leader means stepping out immediately,
both to reassure followers and respond to public concerns. Their presence
and support during crisis is important.
3. Tell the truth : Rumor controlling is critical, Leader do their best to
determine the fact , and then get the awful truth out to employees and the
public as soon as possible.
4. Communicate a vision for the future : People need to feel that they have
something to work for and look forward to. Moment of crisis present
excellent opportunities for leaders to communicate a vision for the future
that taps into people’s emotions and unites them towards common goals.
Teams in an organization
A team is a unit of two or more people who interact and coordinate their work to
accomplish a shared goal or purpose for which they are committed and hold
themselves mutually accountable.
A functional team is a team made up of a supervisor and subordinates in the
formal chain of command.
A cross-departmental term is made up of members from different departments
within the organization.
A special-purpose team is a team that focuses on a specific purpose of high
importance and disbands once the project is completed; sometimes called a
project team.
Self-directed teams are teams made up of members who work with minimum
supervision and rotate jobs to produce a complete product or service.
The value of teams: when tasks are highly interdependent, a team can be the
best approach for ensuring the level of coordination, information sharing, and
exchange of materials necessary for successful task accomplishment. When they
are effective, teams can provide benefits for both organizations and employees
through higher productivity, quality improvements, greater flexibility and speed, a
flatter management structure, increased employee involvement and satisfaction,
and lower turnover.
Team effectiveness
To lead any team of any area to high performance, leaders incorporate the
following elements:
A compelling purpose, clear objectives, and explicit metrics
A diversity of skills and unambiguous roles
Streamlined team size
Decision authority over how to achieve goals
Support and coaching
Leading change
Change is necessary if organizations are to survive and thrive.
Most people have a natural tendency to resist change—even when the changes
are ones that could make their lives better. Leaders should be prepared for
resistance and find ways to enable people to see the value in changes that are
needed for the organization to succeed.
The underlying reason why employees resist change is that it violates the
personal compact between workers and the organization. Personal compacts are
the reciprocal obligations and commitments that define the relationship between
employees and organizations.
Many leaders don’t understand why change is so difficult for many people. But
for something new to begin, something old has to end, and most of us have a
hard time letting go of something we value, even if we want something new.
Changing people’s thinking and behavior is possible, and the keys to doing so
incorporate five elements: a positive emotional attractor, supportive relationships,
repetition of new behaviors, participation and involvement, and after-action
reviews.
A framework for change:
1. Light a fire for change
2. Get the right people on board
3. Paint a compelling picture
4. Communicate the change widely
5. Remove obstacles and empower people to act
6. Achieve and celebrate quick wins
7. Keep it moving
8. Make changes stick
Appreciative inquiry is a technique for leading change that engages individuals,
teams, or the entire organization by reinforcing positive messages and focusing
on learning from success.
4 stages of Appreciative Inquiry:
1. Discovery stage is identifying and appreciating “the best of what exists”.
2. Dream stage is imagining “what could be” ; creating vision.
3. Design stage is formulating action plans to achieve “what should be”.
4. Destiny stage is sustaining “what will be” for the future.
Effective leaders find ways to promote creativity and innovation particularly in the
departments where it is most needed. Creativity is the generation of ideas that
are both novel and useful for improving efficiency or effectiveness of an
organization.
Instilling creative values
Foster a creative culture by encouraging corporate entrepreneurship. Corporate
entrepreneurship is internal entrepreneurial spirit that includes values of
exploration, experimentation, and risk taking.
Everyone has rough creativity potential. The problem is that many people don’t
use that potential. Leaders can help individuals be more creative by facilitating
brainstorming, promoting lateral thinking, enabling immersion, allowing pauses,
and nurturing creative intuition. Brainstorming is a technique that uses a face-to-
face group to spontaneously suggest a broad range of ideas to solve a problem.
Lateral thinking is a set of systematic techniques for breaking away from
customary mental concepts and generating new ones. Immersion means to go
deeply into a single area or topic to spark personal creativity.
Promote collaboration by speedstorming. Speedstorming means using a round-
robin format to get people from different areas talking together, generating
creative ideas, and identifying areas for potential collaboration.
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