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Weeks 12 and 13Management and leadership

Yiannis GabrielProfessor of Organizational Theory

Management and

Leadership

Management and

Leadership

Leaders and Managers

Are they the same?

Key differences:

• Attitudes to change, restlessness, turbulence. • Attitudes towards efficiency and waste• Attitudes towards details and grand picture• Emphasis on logic, plans and rationality as against

hunches, intuition and gut feeling

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Management

• Rational• Efficiency• Planning• Stability• Control

Leadership

• Emotional• Vision • General picture• Change• Conflict

Leaders inspire

• Intellectual stimulation• Unleashing emotional energies• Generate commitment• Seduce

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Crises

• Leaders, managers and the management of crises

• Crisis, problem, difficulty, challenge and other definitions of a situation

Consider the following story:"[A] twenty-two year old bride weighing ninety pounds whose husband

has been sent overseas and who, in consequence, had been given a job until his return ... The young woman, Lucille Burger, was obliged to make certain that people entering security areas worethe correct clear identification.

Surrounded by his usual entourage of white-shirted men, [Thomas] Watson [the IBM Chairman] approached the doorway to an area where she was guard, wearing an orange badge acceptable elsewhere in the plant, but not a green badge, which alone permitted entrance at her door. "I was trembling in my uniform, which was far too big", she recalled. "It hid my shakes, but not my voice. 'I'm sorry,' I said to him. I knew who he was alright. 'You cannot enter. Your admittance is not recognized.' That's what wewere supposed to say."

The men accompanying Watson were stricken; the moment held unpredictable possibilities. "Don't you know who he is?" someonehissed."

Can you think of two different ends to this story?

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The Functions of the Entourage:

Protect the leader from self or othersOffer a visible symbol of power and importance –

add to the image of the leaderCover for leader’s mistakes or for unpredictable

occurrencesProvide a ‘tool-kit’ of officials ready to undertake

actionOffer leader an opportunity to display control and,

more generally, to act in a leader-like manner

Transforming and Transactional Leaders

Leaders and managers – are they the same? The importance of orientation to change. (Zaleznik 1977)

“Leaders do the right thing; managers do things right” (Bennis and Nanus 1985)

But Drucker (Drucker 1988) has argued that it is a mistake to draw a line between the two – all leaders have to manage.

Transactional and transforming leaders (Burns 1978)

Transactional leadership is based on exchange and transforming leadership is a relationship of "mutual stimulation and elevation". Leaders are moral agents. "By ... moral leadership ... I mean, first, that leaders and led have a relationship not only of power but of mutual needs, aspirations and values; second, that in responding to leaders, followers have adequate knowledge of alternative leaders and programs and the capacity to choose among those alternatives; and, third, that leaders take responsibility for their commitments." "Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers." (4)

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"Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or in conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of others." (18)

"Leaders are a particular kind of power holder. Like power, leadership is relational, collective and purposeful. Leadership shares with power the central function of achieving purpose. But the reach and domain of leadership are, in the short range at least, more limited than those of power. Leaders do not obliterate followers' motives ... They lead other creatures, not things ... To control things... is an act of power, not leadership, for things have no motives. Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not. (18)”

Bass (Bass 1985)

1. Continuum of transactional and transformational 2. No tyrant-leader distinction3. A systematic account of transforming leadership,

as entailing 4 features:

a. Charismab. Inspirational motivationc. Intellectual stimulationd. Individualized consideration

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By contrast, transactional leadership has two components:

1. Contingent reward -- reward is contingent on performance

2. Management by exception -- management takes action when something does not go according to plan

Third type of leadership, laissez faire.

Management of meaningHow?

• The importance of symbols• Talk

– Stories– Metaphors– Words and symbols– Examples and analogies

• Visible actions– Gestures– Decisions– Being seen– Listening actively

Managing Emotion

• Leaders as readers of emotion• Leaders as intensifiers of emotion• Leaders as channellers of emotion• Leaders as mobilizers of emotion• Leaders as containers of emotion –

repression, acknowledgement, defusion• Leaders as disseminators of emotion• Leaders as providing safety valve for

emotion

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Emotional intelligence and leadership (Goleman 2001).

Dimensions of emotional intelligence:

1. Self-awareness2. Self-regulation3. Motivation4. Empathy5. Social skill

Identify different types of emotions – is anxiety a special case?

How is anxiety managed?

How is the management of emotion related to the management of meaning

Leaders and Followers –the nature of their relationship

Leaders and led.

The leader as an object of fantasy and mystique.

Leaders and the emotional needs of followers.

The followers needs (protection, security, love,ego-reinforcement)

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Core fantasies (Gabriel, 1999)

1. The leader as someone who cares 2. The leader as someone who is accessible3. The leader as someone who is omnipotent and

omniscient4. The leader as someone who has a legitimate claim

to power

Gabriel, Y. 1997. Meeting God: When organizational members come face to face with the supreme leader. Human Relations, 50(4): 315-342.

Some Leadership Dysfunctions

Some Dysfunctional Leaders:

Authoritarian Leaders (Dixon 1976)

Authoritarianism (after (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik et al. 1950))

• a mechanical surrender to conventional values; • blind submission to authority together with blind hatred of all

opponents and outsiders; • anti-introspectiveness; • rigid stereotyped thinking; • superstition; • vilification, half-moralistic and half-cynical, of human nature, • projectivity.

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Authoritarian Leaders

This was the trait which was manifested to such an extreme degree by the members of the Nazi SS that they could commit wholesale murder, not just without guilt or shame but, perhaps more surprisingly, without the slightest evidence of revulsion. This cool detachment and complete incapacity for empathy with other human beings was not only reflected in the bleakly unemotional title for their task -- 'the final solution' -- but also a sine qua non of its tidy execution. At first sight, this mixture of brutality and bureaucracy is strange to say the least. After all, it is one thing to shoot helpless prisoners in the back ... but quite another to plan such operations down to the minutest detail, to make ledgerentries of hair and calcium, wigs and artificial limbs; to stack corpses and extract the gold from their teeth. In fact, of course, this horrific concatenation of traits is an extreme example of the relationship between ... authoritarianism and the anal obsessive personality.

(Dixon 1976: 275)

Narcissistic Leaders (Maccoby 2000)

• Visions • Imagination. • Attractiveness• Communication• Emotional intelligence

But …

• Moody• Distrustful• Emotionally isolated• Grandiose • Prone to big mistakes.

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Narcissistic Leaders

• Very dependent of the followers

• Think they are invincible and want to leave a legacy

• Very sensitive to criticism• Prefer yes-men

How to deal with these pitfalls?

1. Find a trusted side-kick who gets job done and is probably an obsessive.

2. Get in analysis – find a coach or a mentor

Narcissists thrive in chaotic times, during crises etc.

And yet …

… they can be responsible for major blunders

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Leading is imagining, willing and inspiring

Inspirational leaders1. Listen

2. Respond

3. Set realistic but ambitious goals – the issue of vision

4. Give honest feedback

5. Show respect and acknowledges needs of subordinates

6. Do not allow taboo subjects

7. Acknowledge own vulnerability and ignorance

8. Never make promises they cannot deliver

9. Never treat subordinates as means to an end

10. Keep it simple

11. Care