Introduction to Management and Organization: a good manager will always be a good leader

Résumé du document

Katz and Kahn believed that leadership is commonly viewed as "the attribute of a position, as the characteristic of a person and as a character of behavior. Moreover, leadership is a relational concept implying two terms: the influencing agent and the persons influenced. Leadership conceived as ability, is a slippery concept, since it depends too much on the properties of the situation and of the people to be led." Leadership is a complex dynamic that involves three components: the leader, the follower and the situation.

Extraits

[...] According to the trait theorists a good manager will not always be a good leader, the reason being that managers and leaders aim to reach different goals, which explain that leadership requires different skills than that required by management. Drucker describes the role of the manager as maximizing the output of the organization. The manager can only justify its existence and authority by the economic results it produces Thus the manager does things by the book and follow policy, he tries to avoid risks. [...]

[...] That context includes different factors that determines whether the leader/manager will choose a directive style rather than Participative, or transformational, according to the different terminologies of the models. The first factor the good manager/leader has to take into account is the followers. The style of management will depend on employee contingencies namely, whether the employees are skilled or not, have already an experience in the task you ask them to make, if they believe that events result primarily from their own behaviour and actions( internal locus of control) or from powerful external factors like fate or chance. [...]

[...] A manager can learn how to be a leader, but not how to be a good leader. It will depend on its capacity to implement the right skills and methods in the right situation. To be a good manager seems much easier to define than to be a good leader. As Drucker argues a good manager is the one who makes positive economic results, no matter what he has done to maximize the output of the organization. On the other hand, being a good leader is not as easily measured. [...]

[...] Recent approaches to leadership talk about transformational leaders and describe them as the ideal people to have during major organizational change because they have the visionary component of the charismatic leader but also have staying power and provide energy and support throughout the change process.[10] As one's behaviour makes one a leader or not, a manager can be a leader even if deprived of the so -called inherent traits some leaders are born with. But to become a good leader implies doing the right things in the right situation. As a result, how we define good leadership is not static. In that perspective, if there was one inherent trait that could be said to be the universal skill of a good leader, it would be being pragmatic. But again, not all pragmatic people become a leader, and pragmatism can be learnt. [...]

[...] Another important aspect is the particular vision of the world and more precisely of the organization a manager/leader has. A crucial prerequisite is to adapt and update that vision of the organization to what it actually is, because all the organizations have different structures, different cultures and don't necessarily fit the personal view of the leader/manager. Nowadays the leading model of organization is a so-called postmodern organization, much more complex than its historical counterpart. While in the premodern era, small structures prevailed usually based in the family unit and structure, the modern era bore witness to the development of larger firm with uniform policies and procedure, and the postmodern era developed firms of variable size with hybrid organizational structures and processes. [...]