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BSWC-3032 Organizational Management and Leadership

2024/2025 Semester II course for 3rd year BSW Students
Instructor: Debebe Ero (PhD)
(Lecture Note)

Section One: Organizations: Structure, Effectiveness and Culture

Organization:
 An organization is defined as a cooperative social system involving the coordinated
efforts of two or more people pursuing a shared purpose. In other words, when people
gather and formally agree to combine their efforts for a common purpose, an
organization is the result.
 According to Chester and Barnard, an organization is a system of consciously
coordinated activities or efforts by two or more persons. A formal organization is the
coming together of persons who have formally agreed to combine their efforts for a
common purpose, whether it is producing and selling or organizing welfare and
charitable activities.
 Louise Allen defines organizations as “the process of identifying and grouping the work
to be performed, defining and delegating responsibility and authority and establishing
relationships for the purpose of enabling people to work most effectively together in
accomplishing objectives”

Characteristics Common to All Organizations: According to Edgar Schein, an

organizational psychologist, all organizations share four characteristics
 Coordination of effort: individuals who join together and coordinate their mental
and/or physical efforts can accomplish great and exciting things. Building the great
pyramid, conquering polio, sending astronauts to the moon-all these achievements far
exceeded the talents and abilities of any single individual. Coordination of effort
multiplies individual contribution.
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 Common goal or purpose: coordination of effort cannot take place unless those who
have joined together agree to strive for something of mutual interest. A common goal or
purpose gives the organization focus and its members a rallying point.
 Division of labor: systematically dividing complex tasks into specialized jobs, an
organization can use its human resource efficiently. Division of labor permits each
organization member to become more proficient by repeatedly doing the same
specialized tasks.
 Hierarchy of activities: According to a traditional organizational theory, if anything is
to be accomplished through formal collective efforts, someone should be given the
authority to see that the intended goals are carried out effectively and efficiently.
Organizational theorists have defined authority as the right to direct the actions of
others. Without a clear hierarchy of authority, coordination of effort is difficult, if not
impossible, to achieve. Accountability is also enhanced by having people serve in what
is often called, in the military language, the chain of command.

Classifying organizations by their intended purpose: organizations can be divided into

four categories depending upon their purpose. However, some of today’s large and
complex organizations overlap categories. For example religious organizations are both
nonprofit service organizations and mutual-benefit organizations. Nevertheless, classifying
organizations by their purpose helps clarify the variety of roles they plan in society and the
similar problems shared by organizations with similar purposes.
1. Business organizations: Business cannot survive, let alone grow, without earning a
profit, and profits are earned by efficiently satisfying demand for products and services.
The economic production function is so important to society that many think
immediately of business when the word management is mentioned.
2. Nonprofit Service Organizations: Unlike business, many organizations survive and
even grow, without making any profits at all. They need to be solvent, of course but they
measure their success not in dollars and cents but by how well they provide a specific
service for some segment of society. The problem for nonprofit service organizations
securing a reliable stream of funds through fees, donations, grants, or appropriations.
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Given today’s limited resources, both private-sector and public sector nonprofit service
organizations are under pressure to operate more efficiently.
3. Mutual-Benefit Organizations: often as in the case of labor unions or political parties,
individuals join together strictly to pursue their own self-interests. Mutual-Benefit
organizations, like all other types of organizations, need to be effectively and efficiently
managed if they are to survive. In this instance, survival depends on satisfying
members’ needs.
4. Commonweal Organizations: Like nonprofit organizations, commonweal
organizations offer public services without attempting to earn a profit. But unlike
nonprofit service organizations, which serve some segment of society, a commonweal
organization offers standardized services to all members of a given population.
Examples of commonweal organizations are the Army, police, and fire department.
Commonweal organizations are large and their great size makes them unwieldy and
difficult to manage.

Organizational Charts:
An organization chart is a diagram of an organization’s official positions and formal lines of
authority. It is a visual display of an organization’s structural skeleton. With their familiar
pattern of boxes and connecting lines, these charts are a useful management tool because
they are an organizational blueprint for deploying human resources. Organizational charts
are common in both profit and nonprofit organizations.

Organizational chart has two basic dimensions:

1. Vertical hierarchy: vertical hierarchy establishes the chain of command, or who
reports to whom.
2. Horizontal specialization: horizontal specialization established the division of labor.

The evolution of an organizational chart:

1. A one person operation with neither hierarchy nor specialization.
a. Owner/Operator (investor, producer, marketer, bookkeeper).
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2. A two-person organization with only vertical hierarchy

a. Owner/operator (investor, producer, marketer, bookkeeper)
b. General assistant
3. A mature organization with both vertical hierarchy and horizontal specialization

Organizational Effectiveness:
Effectiveness is a measure of whether organizational objectives are accomplished. In
contrast, efficiency is the relationship between outputs and inputs. In an era of diminishing
resources and increasing concern about civil rights, society is reluctant to label “effective”
any organization that wastes scarce resources or tramples on civil rights.

Today’s managers are caught up in an enormous web of laws and regulations covering
employment practices, working conditions, job safety, pension, product safety, pollution,
and competitive practices. To be truly effective, today’s productive organizations need to
strike a generally acceptable balance between organizational and societal goals. Direct
conflicts, such as higher wages for employees versus lower prices for customers, are
inevitable. Therefore, the process of determining the proper weighting of organizational
effectiveness criteria is an endless one requiring frequent review and updating.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
The notion of organizational culture is rooted in cultural anthropology. Organizational
culture is the collection of shared (stated or implied) beliefs, values, rituals, stories, myths,
and specialized languages that foster a feeling of community among organization members.
Culture, although based largely on taken-for-granted or “invisible”” factors, exerts a potent
influence on behavior.

Some call organizational (or corporate) culture the “social glue” that binds an
organization’s members together. Without the appreciation for the cultural aspect, an
organization is just a meaningless collection of charts, tasks, and people.
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Unfortunately there is a dark side to organizational cultures as well. Dysfunctional cultures

anchored to irresponsible values and supportive of (or blind to) unethical conducts. The
problem of groupthink is associated with cultural miss-direction.

Characteristics of Organizational Culture:

1. Collective: Organizational cultures are social entities. An individual may exert a
cultural influence, but it takes collective agreement and action for an organization’s
culture to assume a life of its own. Organizational cultures are truly synergistic (1+1=3).
Jeffrey R. Immelt offered this companywide perspective soon after becoming the new
head of General Electric: “We run a multibusiness company with common cultures, with
common management…where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
Culture counts.”
2. Emotionally charged: people tend to find their organization’s culture a comforting
security blanket that enables them to deal with (or sometimes mask) their insecurities
and uncertainties. Not surprisingly, people can develop a strong emotional attachment
to their cultural security blanket. They will fight to protect is, often refusing to question
its basic values. Corporate mergers often get bogged down in culture conflicts.
3. Historically based: Shared experiences over extended periods of time, bind groups of
people together. We intend to identify with those who have had similar life experiences.
Trust and loyalty, two key components of culture, are earned by consistently
demonstrating predictable patterns of words and actions.
4. Inherently symbolic: Actions often speak louder than words. Memorable symbolic
actions are the lifeblood of organizational culture. For instance, consider what has been
going on at procter and Gamble: the company made a lot of symbolic, very physical
changes so people understand we are in the business of leading change, said the CEO.
The change at P&G symbolically tell top executives to focus less on power and privilege
and more on employee development and open communication.
5. Dynamic: in the long term organizational cultures promote predictability, conformity,
and stability. Just beneath this apparently stable surface, however, change boils as people
struggle to communicate and comprehend subtle cultural clues.
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6. Inherently fuzzy: Ambiguity, contradictions, and multiple meanings are fundamental

to organizational cultures. Just as a photographer cannot capture your typical busy day
in a single snapshot, it takes intense and prolonged observation to capture the essence
of an organization’s culture.

Forms or components and consequences of organizational culture

Cultural forms Cultural consequences

Symbols ( objects, and heroes)  Sense of identity for the
Physical or non-physical. For example a flag is a physical individual
symbol, and a curtsy a non-physical symbol
Shared values: help define acceptable behavior within a  Individual commitment to
society. organization’s mission
Language: Written or spoken, used for communication
(shared jargon, slogans, and humor)  Organizational stability
Stories (shared legends and myths)
Practices (shared rituals, ceremonies, and activities)  Organization makes sense
Beliefs— fulfil the spiritual needs of a culture. A whole to the individual
culture can be based on one set of beliefs, yet a larger
cultural group may have many different sets of beliefs.

Norms— are the rules and traditions within a culture. As a

group develops laws and regulations, norms change.

Given the inherent fuzziness of organizational cultures, how can managers identify cultural
weal spots that need improvement? The following are some of the symptoms of a weak
organizational culture.
1. Inward focus: has internal politics become more important than real-world problems
and the market place?
2. Morale problem: are there chronic unhappiness and high turnover?
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3. Fragmentation/inconsistency: is there a lack of “fit” in the way people behave,

communicate, and perceive problems and opportunities?
4. Ingrown subcultures. Is there a lack of communication among subunits?
5. Warfare among subcultures. Has constructive competition given way to destructive
conflicts?
6. Subculture elitism. Have organizational units become exclusive “clubs” with restricted
entry? Have sub cultural values become more important than the organization’s values?

SECTION: TWO

Conceptual Understanding of Management

We now need to define management, in order to highlight the importance, relevance, and
necessity of studying it. Management is the process of working with and through others to
achieve organizational objectives in a changing environment. Central to this process is the
effective and efficient use of limited resources.

Five components of this definition require closer examination:

1. Working with and through others
Management is above all else, a social process. Many collective purposes bring
individuals together-building cars, providing emergency health care, publishing books,
and on and on. But in all cases, managers are responsible for getting things done by
working with and through others. Aspiring managers who do not interact well with
others hamper their careers. This was the conclusion two experts reached following
interviews with 62 executives from the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium,
Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. Each of the executives was asked to describe two
managers whose careers had been derailed. Derailed managers were those who had not
lived up to their peers’ and superiors’ high expectations. The derailed/weak/spoiled
managers reportedly had these shortcomings:
 Problems with interpersonal relationships.
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 Failure to meet business objectives.

 Failure to build and lead a team.
 Inability to change and adapt during a transition.
Significantly, the first and third shortcomings involve failure to work effectively with
and through others. Derailed managers experienced a number of interpersonal
problems: among other things, they were perceived as manipulative, abusive,
untrustworthy, demeaning, overly critical, not team players, and poor communicators.
2. Achieving organizational objectives
An objective is a target to be strived for and, one hope, attained. Like individuals,
organizations are usually more successful when their activities are guided by
challenging, yet achievable objectives. From an individual perspective, scheduling a
course load becomes more systematic and efficient when a student sets an objective,
such as graduating with a specific degree by a given date.
Although personal objectives are typically within the reach of individual effort,
organizational objectives or goals always require collective action.
Organizational objectives also serve later as measuring sticks for performance.
Without organizational objectives, the management process, like a trip without a
specific destination, would be aimless and wasteful.
3. Balancing effectiveness and efficiency
Distinguishing between effectiveness and efficiency is much more than an exercise in
semantics. The relationship between these two terms is important, and it presents
mangers with a never-ending dilemma. Effectiveness entails promptly achieving a
stated objective. Swinging a sledgehammer against the wall, for example, would be an
effective way to kill a bothersome fly. But given the reality of limited resources,
effectiveness alone is not enough. Efficiency enters the picture when the resources
required to achieve an objective are weighed against what was actually accomplished.
The more favorable the ratio of benefits to costs, the greater the efficiency. Although a
sledgehammer is an effective tool for killing flies, it is highly inefficient when the wasted
effort and smashed walls are taken into consideration. A fly swatter is both an effective
and an efficient tool for killing a single housefly.
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Therefore, effectiveness is a central element in the process of management that entails

achieving a stated organizational objective. Efficiency is a central element in the process
of management that balances the amount of resources used to achieve an objective
against what was actually accomplished.
Managers are responsible for balancing effectiveness and efficiency. Too much
emphasis in either direction leads to mismanagement. On the one hand, managers must
be effective by getting the job done. On the other hand, managers need to be efficient by
reducing costs and not wasting resources. At the heart of the quest for productivity
improvement (a favorable ratio between inputs and outputs) is the constant
struggle to balance effectiveness and efficiency.

4. Making the most of limited resources, and

We live in a world of scarcity. Those who are concerned with such matters worry not
only about running out of nonrenewable energy and material resources but also about
the lopsided use of those resources.
 A nonrenewable resource is a substance that is used up more quickly than it can
replace itself.
 The supply of a nonrenewable resource is finite, which means it cannot easily be
replenished

 Nonrenewable resources are extracted directly from the Earth.

 Most fossil fuels, minerals, and metal ores are nonrenewable resources.

The United States, for example, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, is
currently consuming about 25 percent of the world’s annual oil production and
generating 23 percent of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Although
experts and non-experts alike may quibble over exactly how long it will take to exhaust
our nonrenewable resources or come up with exotic new technological alternatives, one
bold fact remains: our planet is becoming increasingly crowded.
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In productive organizations, managers are the trustees of limited resources, and it is

their job to see that the basic factors of production-land, labor, and capital- are used
efficiently as well as effectively.
5. Coping with a changing environment.
Successful managers are the ones who anticipate and adjust to changing circumstances
rather than being passively swept along or caught unprepared. Employers today are
hiring managers who can take unfamiliar situation in stride. The next generation of
corporate leaders will need the charm of a debutante, the flexibility of a gymnast, and
the quickness of a panther. A few foreign languages and a keen understanding of
technology won’t hurt either. Also in the mix are a sense of humor, passion, and the
ability to make fast decisions.
Globalization: Figuratively speaking, the globe is shrinking in almost every conceivable
way. Networks of transportation, communication, computers, music, and economics
have tied the people of the world together as never before. Companies have to become
global players just to survive, let alone prosper. Business and job opportunities have
little regard for international borders these days. A good education and marketable
skills are the best insurance against having your job outsourced to a foreign country.

Why do Social Workers Study Management? (p. 14).

Management of people
Many practitioner skills in social work are also managerial ones, and all social workers
increasingly work to managerial agendas. The most obvious overlap concerns that
management of people. Whether these are service users, careers, the general public or
those who regulate service provision, management, just like practice, involves the
ability to write and speak clearly and to engage in purposeful interpersonal
relationships. So perhaps social workers who become mangers have a head start here/
on the other hand, believing that they should have a flair for people skills could
embarrass those who are newly promoted, impeding, spontaneity and making them
self-conscious for a time. It may help to remember that managing people is at the heart
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both of providing services to users through social work methods and of organizing and
working towards the effective delivery of those services by others.

The principles and skills involved in managing personnel are common to all
organizations- private, public and voluntary. The objectives may be different from one
agency to another, and at each level within a department, but the means used in
attempting to reach there remain constant. Engaging with and relating to people,
helping others to achieve their goals, supervising their efforts, maintaining morale,
consulting a wide range of sources prior to making decision, problem solving, and
introducing and managing the process of change are just some of the tasks common to
the practitioner and the manager.

Team Work
There are also transferable skills from particular methods and modes of social work
intervention. The systemic thinking which underlies the techniques of family therapy,
for example, is just as relevant when trying to sort out the patterns of relationships
which exist in larger systems such as organizations as it is in families. Equally when
leading a team, many of the ideas gleaned from group work also stand one in good
stead. Just as Allan Brown (1992) proposes that those who have experienced mutually
trusting, collaborative and creative teams make good group workers, so those with
experience of group work are likely to contribute to positive team spirit and
constructive co-working as facilitative team members or team leaders. Knowledge of
group cohesion, openness, risk-taking and interdependence in groups can be
transferred directly to the role of team managers, although the context and aims
naturally differ from those experienced in group work intervention.

Care management:
A further good preparation for management is the role of the care manager.
Undertaking assessments and coordinating packages of care within tight budgets has
become a core task for many frontline practitioners. Valuable skills developed include
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those of bargaining, mediating, negotiating, liaising and advocacy in order to make

the best use of resources. And one could certainly argue that social workers, who have
become more financially aware, even without holding the purse strings of a fully
devolved budget, will make better managers later on.

The management of resources

For those social workers who are budget holders, there may be some worrying issues to
be resolved. For instance, there may be inherent contradictions in orchestrating
community care packages within resources limitations while also acting as an advocate
for better client service overall, or in balancing a user’s needs and wishes while also
shopping around for the least costly forms of care.
Although these narrowly financial concerns may be recent, the management of
resources has, in fact, always dominated the social worker’s tasks if we count within
this the management of time and of self. Frontline workers devote many hours to
travelling, attending meetings, negotiating, doing administration and referring on. It is
startling how many social workers and their managers are unable to ration themselves
across a working day or week or to delegate effectively. While the theme of the 1980’s
was to assume that managers should be available at all times and respect was reserved
for the workaholics’ (the lunch is for wimps’ ethos), the managers of the future (and
ideally all workers) should be noted for their capacity to reflect on what they are doing
and to draw boundaries around the energies available for their career and those
available for personal and family commitments.

As well as managing resources, social workers and social care staff at all levels
participate in meeting required standards. In child care policy and practice, for
example, individual social workers are told very clearly what information they need to
gather about children and families in the assessment framework.

Standards and Procedures:

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Standards and procedures are equally a part of a new ethos in the voluntary and private
sectors. Most voluntary organizations have to comply with Charity commission
requirements and often the obligations of a compact and/or contracts with the local
authorities and all independent providers operate within a contract culture, which
means that staff have to be constantly aware of quality standards and required
managerial practices. Nor do freelancers escape from procedures, guidelines and form-
filling. Trainers, consultants, mentors and other self-employed people who use their
social work qualifications and experiences to work from home are increasingly
expected to operate their own quality controls to nationally recognized standards and
the contracts they obtain for their services typically require this to be the case.

Change management
A final reason why we would argue that all social workers are managers is that each
person in a department can be an instigator or a contributor to change and innovation.
These do not always have to come from outside: changing the agency from within occurs
quite frequently and one need not always be in a position of power to influence agency
practice. If we view organizations as psycho-socio-political systems and study people’s
behavior within them, we are then in a good position to change our working practices,
especially if, in their current form, they are adding to the burdens of users, careers and
others.

What is special about managers?

It may be that some readers will disagree with the assertion that social workers are
practitioner-managers. It could fairly be pointed out that being a manager consists of
more than undertaking managerially dictated duties: there are specific tasks involved,
not least enabling others to get work done and carrying forward the overall aims of the
organization. So let us consider a few of the ways in which managers’ functions are
distinct.
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First, while managers and social workers both control resources and exercise
authority, the extent to which they do so differs.
Second, the social worker is specialist in delivering the services from her/his particular
domain, whereas a manager’s tasks relate to the organizations as a whole or at least one
section of it. Thus, those who control group care services would take into account
additional factors when deciding to allocate a place in an establishment to an older
person, including the overall policy of the agency and the total number of people
competing for the resources. Managers have to make decisions and be concerned for
clients whom they have never met.
Third, although practitioners keep an eye to the future when planning their work on a
particular case, top managers have a macro-interest in the future of the whole
organization, ensuring that it will remain a going concern to meet future needs while
also dealing with ever changing current circumstances.
Forth, social work and management processes share a concern for problem solving and
enabling, but the degree of authority in organizing people to get work done is greater
for line managers, in addition, styles of leadership and the performance of managerial
tasks, such as the exercise of authority through decision-making, have an effect on other
people’s performance, not simply one’s own; thus, the size of caseloads, the allocation of
work and the supervision of it are usually part of the duties of team leaders and senior
members of staff.

Fifth, the selection and orientation of new staff, although involving the team is normally
a specific task for people in management positions.

Therefore, if we argue that all managers should be social workers, let us recap the
position so far:
a. Managerial administration is the process of organizing resources to get work
done and, at this level of generality; all social workers are involved in it.
b. Although certain roles carry the title of managers, team leaders, or senior, in
every organization each person is part of the administrative structure and is
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thus administratively, as well as professionally, accountable for the work they

do.
c. At the same time, managers who have this title have specific functions that are
essential ingredients of their role as administrators; some of these are different
in degree rather than kind from the work of social workers, but others are
related to the authority which is exercised.

Should all managers be qualified social workers?

Is it necessary for those who develop and maintain social welfare organization to be
qualified social workers? In the United States when social services departments
were first created, it was thought that those heading them should, if possible be
qualified in social work and, ideally, be experienced and/or trained in
administration. At that time many top managers were promoted through the
practitioner ranks and only a few were from other professions. Management
training and qualifications were poorly developed; experience and ‘political’ ability
were seen as the key requirements. The rise of the managerial ethos in the 1990’s
undermined this position, with generic management training and skills coming to
the fore. Now services to children, adults and the elderly take a range of other
services such as education, and health together in one, new organizational structure.

In the voluntary sector, there are equally significant changes. Charitable

organizations have had to become more businesslike, more competitive in an age of
contracting out, are held to account for their performance and are reliant on
marketing their image and their work in order to sustain an income; their managers
face new challenges accordingly (Jackson and Donovan, 1999). Of course, there is
enormous diversity among voluntary bodies in the UK and only a fraction have a
social work identity or even employ a qualified social workers, although, at the same
time, there is a continuing trend for local authorities to contract out public services
to voluntary sector provider agencies. The question of who their ‘managers’ should
be is, therefore, complex. The private sector has also increasingly entered social
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care, as a provider of a wider range of services, bringing its own ethos of customer
relations and financial management. It is not uncommon for mangers to run their
own care homes or be employed in relatively small businesses. A social work
qualification would not be a high on the list of requirements for such a position.

All of these arguments radically change the balance of the argument about what is
needed in a manager. When even well established charities have to look for
figureheads who are good at ‘fronting’ their organizations, the idea of being
professionally qualified in social work may seem almost irrelevant. And the
emphasis on commercial or business ‘success’ may dictate a different set of
priorities and skills from those traditionally valued by organizations which see
themselves as preventing human distress and working in partnership with users-for
whom there may be little public sympathy or support.
Administration in human service organization is analyzed as a generic process in
which direction, management and supervision are key elements. In this formulation
if administration refers to the overall process, then the component elements
correspond to three general levels in the hierarchy:
 At the top, the directing function involves long-term planning and objectives;
 In the middle, the management function sustains the system as a going
concern;
 While the supervisory function at the team leader level oversees the use of
the resources and policy instructions provided by management to ensure
that performance is up to standard.
In large organizations, the first two tiers primarily call for sound management and
are precisely the levels at which staff are increasingly studying for MBAs, while the
supervisory roles are best carried by those who have competence in the
professional activity they are supervising.

Whatever the position held in a social welfare organization, there are certain commitments
that all managers have to make and particular challenges to address:
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1. Despite, and in some senses because of, the breadth of issues tackled in the personal
social services, this is nevertheless a highly specialized field.
2. Social workers have their own skills, knowledge and values. As professionals, their
expertise in planning and decision making within their own field has to be
acknowledged and mirrored in the way the agency involves them in administrative
process.
3. Any plan for developing services or rethinking the agency’s mission need to reflect the
equal opportunities goals that have become part of social work’s traditions, including a
commitment to anti-oppressive practices.
4. If the manager comes from a different professional background, credibility might be
established more readily by showing a genuine willingness to learn about social work’s
current professional concerns and practices.
5. The importance of relationships needs to be highlighted: between service users and
workers; among team members; with other disciplines; and also with numerous local,
regional and national bodies.
6. What distinguishes human service management from that in non-service sectors is the
fact that many agencies are dependent upon other organizations; planning has to take
into account the restraints imposed by legislation and policy imposed from outside, as
well as those inherent in relying on others to purchase or provide services.
7. Management approaches in social work cannot always be the rational and tidy ones
suggested in some of the management literature. Service goals may contradict one
another (for example caring versus controlling antisocial behavior) and there are
additional demands in making services holistic and appropriate rather than fragmented
for impersonal, as well as in matching them wherever possible to the felt needs of a
particular community (for instance in providing home care services which are
acceptable to people of varying ethnic backgrounds).
8. Human services operate in turbulent environments, frequently subject to political
whims and media-led changes, therefore long-term plans have to be flexible.
9. While coping with all this uncertainty, the manager of a service organization also has to
recognize that staff work from imperfect theories and conflicting ideologies about the
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‘causes’ of human behavior, they are called upon to tackle unpredictable and
unknowable events and they increasingly focus largely on the ‘heavy end’ of human
distress and need, as in child protection and mental health services. This makes staff
care and staff development particularly important in social work, but also means that
any requests from management are likely to be experienced as yet one more demand
from those who are not actually involved in doing the frontline job.
10. Perhaps most importantly, the commitment of social work managers must not be to the
organization as an end in itself or to their own personal ambitions. The raison d’etre
(reason for living) of social work is its service users and the general public more widely;
consequently, the focus has to be on high quality services and on supporting,
development, monitoring and guiding the work of the professionals who implement
them.

Section THREE

Management Theories
Starting from the classical theories of management, we will look at: scientific
managerialism, which tends to treat employees like cogs in a machine; the human relations
school of management theory which added people into the equation; and the study of
organizational structures, particularly bureaucratic hierarchies and organizations as
systems, because these models will be most familiar to social workers.

1. Scientific Managerialism (Universal Process Approach)

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1. Principles of management (Henri Fayol 1841-1925). According to Fayol, organizations

do not manage themselves. If policy is to be uniformly followed and resources fairly
allocated, communication and coordination have to be deliberately facilitated.
According to the universal process approach, the administration of all
organizations requires the same rational management process. He is best
remembered for his 14 principles of management, among the most important of which
for our purpose are the following:
a. Those at the top are responsible for identifying key objectives . We shall
return to this, Fayol’s unity of direction, under the fashionable label of
‘mission statement’,
b. Specialization is achieved by dividing groups to undertake similar functions .
In social work, this can be by user group, problem type, method of working,
setting or context, population group, practice role, specific tasks, or stage in
the allocation and progress of the work.
c. Each worker should report to only one senior . This, again, is a principle still
followed today, although there can be complications with it, as we shall see
below.
d. Each person should have a job description. This is ever more important.
e. The ideal span of control. That is, it was thought that the number of people
doing similar work supervised by one person should be six to eight. Senior
social workers may end up supervising more than this especially when
covering vacant posts.
Critique and legacy of Fayol’s ideas:
1. Only considered small scale organizations: He based much of his theory, his
‘functional principle’, on a relatively small-scale company, employing one kind of
workers to do one kind of job, with a single product (coal) which needed very
little done to it before could be sold, and serving only a few markets in which it
had a virtual monopoly. His design principle is not well adapted to complexity,
size, innovation or externally imposed change, all of which feature heavily in
social work.
 20

2. He assumed top-down management- forecasting and planning being, the main

task of the organizational head- rather than the participation, partnership and
team work of which there is so much talk today, or the answerability to outside
interests, like government and the local community, that pertain in social work.
3. One size fit for all: The key limitation in Fayol’s thinking lay in trying to prescribe
one set of principles to cover all eventualities. Joan Woodward in the 1950’s
revealed that there are, in fact, no optimum structural characteristics (such as
number of levels of hierarchy or ideal span of control) or principles of
administration that apply to all organizations. What affects success is the fit
between structure, task, technology, management, employees and environment.

2. The Operational Approach; Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1917): ‘Scientific

Management’:
Production oriented filed of management dedicated to improving efficiency and
cutting waste. It is a kind of management that relies on developing performance
standards on the basis of systematic observation and experimentation. He is the
originator of the movement known as ‘scientific management’ or ‘Taylorism’. His
lifelong interest was engineering and innovation based on which he tried to make
specific tasks rational, like Taylor.
a. Focused on division of tasks and management control : He set about
systematically studying work, breaking each task down into its components
movements to discover the most efficient way of performing each job, and
then considered how management techniques could control the workers to
work consistently at maximum efficiency.
b. Introduced the concept of peace rate to measure outcome : Everyone is
familiar with his methods- the stopwatch and the ‘time and motion’ study-
and with their outcomes in the form of piece-rate working and incentive
schemes.
c. Considered people like objects of production: He looked at people as if they
were machines, except that humans make errors and, in his view, work only
 21

to earn money (albeit money that can buy a better quality of life outside
work). Taylor’s interest in management lay in not allowing people to make
machines less efficient than they ultimately could be.
d. Today whenever we hear talk of output measures, functional analysis of
occupations, performance indicators and so on, we are in the world of
Taylorism.
Critique and legacy of Taylorism
1. On the plus side, Taylor wanted to take the unnecessary toil out of work and
believed that increased productivity would lead to a living wage.
2. But he studied the bottom end of the hierarchy without being ‘bottom-up’ in his
attitudes towards management control, putting the onus on the workers to make an
organization profitable without according them any status beyond the mechanistic.
3. His methods gave no scope to imagination or innovation. Workers were treated as
less than human and not as able to innovate or change their own working patterns
for the better.
4. Nevertheless, Taylor is remembered as the first person to study work as a subject in
its own right.
Henry Ford (1863-1947). Similar to Taylor
e. Ford was a genius at marketing. He paid his workers twice the going rate in
order to turn them into a market for his own cars and introduced mass
production methods to keep up with the sales of an affordable, reliable and
practical product that everybody wanted.
f. He started the concept of special offers (a $20 refund promised, and
delivered, to every purchaser in the country if sales hit a certain target) and
international marketing efforts.
g. Ford never trusted managers, hung onto control himself and sacked anyone
else who tried to make decisions; he saw no reason why one department in
his business empire should know what another was doing and eventually lost
a great deal of money.
Critique on Fordism:
 22

1. Lack of collegial support and team work leading to feel stressed

2. Procedural efficiency, based on performance indicators and monitored outcomes,
appear to have taken the place of building relationship.
In summary, classical theories of management rooted in
 To see organizations as machines and their employees as cogs (working parts) each
working out specialized tasks.
 Associated with continuous processing and mass production
 Regards mangers as holding top-down responsibility for planning, monitoring, and
motivating the work of others within their span of control.
 But, these ideas are regarded as too rigid and predictable to reflect the
contemporary world of work.

Max Weber (1864-1920). German Sociologist

Formulated a typology of organizational forms based on the exercise of power and
authority (i.e, the behavior within organizations and not just their outward shape), from
which the bureaucracy emerged as the most technically efficient. He identified three types
of authority:
1. Charismatic authority: combination of personal qualities and vision (unfortunately
true of some abusive residential regimes, as well as religious and political
movements)
2. Traditional authority: on account of hereditary position
3. Rational-Legal authority: the chief form of delivery is through large, local authority
bureaucracies or voluntary organizations in which a high value is placed on
personal and organizational accountability.
Weber defined the bureaucratic organizational structure as a hierarchy of offices, or posts,
rather than individuals. According to Weber (1947), the five main characteristics of a ‘pure’
bureaucracy are:
1. A clear-cut division of labor, with activities rationally distributed as official duties
(you work within your job description and on work as allocated, not what you feel
like doing that day).
 23

2. The distribution of duties through formal administrative hierarchy, in which each

office is supervised by the one above supervisory chain. (A social worker does not
just ring up the director to ask for more resources or advice on a difficult case, nor
do people conduct their work through those they happen to get on with).
3. A prescribed system of rules and procedures , which, if not followed, can lead to
disciplinary action and, conversely, should safeguard the worker if the rules are
followed but a case does not turn out well.
4. Exclusion of personal and official business: The exclusion of personal considerations
from the conduct of official business, both by the employee and the organization.
(Here, thinking has moved on somewhat, as we shall see, below, but it is still
absolutely the case that social workers must be able to distinguish between their
personal and professional boundaries.)
5. Salaried employment based on technical qualifications and constituting a career
within the hierarchy-recruitment and selection against job descriptions and person
specification, staff development and promotion prospects all relate to this element
of a bureaucratic organization.

Critique of the Bureaucratic Model in Social Work:

This formalized hierarchical model is still commonly found in social welfare organizations
and it does offer some benefits. There are undoubtedly advantages to a large workforce in
having clear lines of common, coherence and predictable rules. The organization is more
readily answerable to those who use its services-in allocating resources fairly, for example-
and also to staff members who may feel aggrieved. Workers know when they apply for
promotion what abilities they will be expected have and can usually expect staff
development opportunities to assist them if they want to move on in their career because
this is also to the advantage of the organization. Some security is offered inasmuch as staff
knows who does what and that here is stability in the system.
There are also limitations for social work in this organizational form because:
1. It is best suited to routine, stable, unchanging tasks . There have always been doubts
about its appropriateness for social work practice. Not only is social work forever in
 24

a state of flux at the wider level, as thinking about social welfare changes along with
the political climate but, at the front line, it is also has to deal with the messiness and
unpredictability of people’s lives. This makes it hard to give anything but the most
general indication of how each person should be treated, or, at the other extreme,
risks turning people into categories and losing the social work skill of working with
each as a unique individual in a specific set of circumstances.
2. A rigid organizational structure is not well suited to situations where individual
members of staff are required to exercise personal judgment or professional
autonomy (Aldridge, 1996). Social workers are not expected to have to be told in
detail how to do their jobs. They bring with them the ability to make specialized,
individualized and complex judgments about people and their lives which is the
hallmark of the qualified professional. Consequently a hybrid term of ‘bureau-
professionalism’ is sometimes used to apply to the social work context.
3. A rigid approach may be less responsive to the many, potentially competing
stakeholders in social work beyond the immediate employing organizations.
a. First, social workers retain more autonomy than factory-floor workers
because they draw their professional skills, knowledge and values from
outside points of reference (Mintzberg, 1989), particularly those of a
university-based academic discipline and a professional association with its
own ethical code as well as the requirements of a regulatory bodies. These
organizations are linked to global groupings of practitioners, teachers and
researchers who are in continual debate about what social work is, what it
can achieve and the standards by which it should operate.
b. Second, those bodies that actually pay social workers’ wages are themselves
loosely grouped into an ‘employers’ lobby’ consisting of many disparate
organizations. There are also many other relevant groups that are bigger and
more influential than a single agency.
c. Third, there is increasing pressure on social work, and rightly so, to be
responsive to users and careers, as well as to the general public who feed
their views, for example, into local community care plans.
 25

4. The more diverse and organization’s activities and the more types of people it
serves, the greater the complexity required in the shape that holds everything
together (Haynes, 2003). Thus social services, for example, tends to sprout side
shoots in the form of specialist teams or, increasingly, workers are out posted into
multidisciplinary teams where staff from other agencies or professions, as hospital
consultants, managers of youth offending teams or teachers, will be as influential as
the social workers’ own departmental managers. Such structures are likely to
become more common with the increase in partnerships with and within bodies.
Also, there is an increasing need for non-social work, technical specialists to manage
or advise on whole parts of the organization or department’s activities, such as
computing, legal or equalities issues. Their policy priorities and links with staff may
cut across operational line management, that it, across the overseeing of the basic
business of that department or agency.

3. Human Relation Theorists (The Behavioral Approach):

To Weber and Fayol, people were roles in a hierarchy of responsibilities; to Taylor, they
were cogs in a machine; to Ford, the consumers of his products and the workers on his
assembly lines.
A reaction against these mechanistic approaches came in the form of the human relation
movement. The key thinkers behind this approach recognized that people not only work
for an organization, they are the organizations. Of equal importance as the manifest formal
structure is the informal structure created by the behavior of people, as individuals and in
groups, as they live out the un-predictabilities and emotional vagaries that social workers
know so well.
The human relation movement was an effort to make managers more sensitive to their
employees’ needs. This approach is supported by three historical influences: the threat of
unionization, the Hawthorne studies, and the philosophy of industrial humanism.

Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933): human problems and working them out together. She
was instrumental in shifting the emphasis in management from a concern with
 26

organizational control to one of sensitivity to human factors. Just like social workers, she
considered that management should be based on the ethical principle of respect for human
work and dignity, not the emotionally sterile pursuit of efficiency at any cost. Follett drew
her thinking about the worth of all people and the dynamic integration of organizations
into four fundamental principles which are still relevant:
1. Interaction among employees: To achieve coordination, it is important that people,
regardless of their position, should have direct contact with one another.
2. Participation: Everyone concerned with a policy or decision should be involved from
the early stages, they should not be brought in afterwards as this denies the benefits
of participation, increased motivation and raised morale.
3. Considering issues contextual & interrelated: Coordination depends on seeing all
factors in a situation as inter-related.
4. Coordination and executive decisions are continuing processes; nothing is final. And,
because so many people contribute to a decision, it is an illusion to suggest that,
ultimately, the person in the hierarchy who carries the authority is the one and only
person on whom responsibility can be placed.

Elton Mayo (1880-1949): Motivating people and understanding informal relations of

employees
Just as people can affect the working of a system, so too can they be affected by it, that is, by
the general climate in the workplace and the way they are treated there. He revealed that
every organization has an informal structure which affects how people behave, how the
system functions and which management methods need to be adopted to raise morale and
assist people to be mentally healthy at work.
Mayo saw that business methods that take no account of wider human issues, such as
emotional reactions and the social climate of the workplace, can lead first to subtle
sabotage and then to formalized industrial conflict.

Mayo explored the informal social systems which grow up among employees and which,
because they underlie both cooperation and resistance to change, must play a part in the
 27

effective organization of work. People have a natural propensity to associate with one
another and they care what ‘their’ group thinks about them. To be motivated, they need a
management style that maintains and builds on this spontaneous cooperation in groups,
takes a genuine interest in both the individual and the group, provides new interest from
time to time and also recognizes that workers, employed in an enterprise which has been
artificially created to achieve certain ends, do think about what good their work is to the
wider society. All these makes perfect sense in social work

Chris Argyris (1923-) suggested that workers do not grow or become self-actualized in
structures which offer them little control over their work. Rather people who do not
experience autonomy and involvement adapt their behavior in ways that are immature,
passive and dependent. Initiative is lacking people ‘clock watch’, take longer and longer
breaks, cling to habitual routines, resist change, impede progress and show minimal
commitment to the agency or its work. Management responds with repressive control, staff
grow yet more infantilized and resistant and a downward spiral is created that,
unfortunately, is not unknown in social work setting.

If it were possible to encourage ways of working that did not put individuals and
organizational needs in opposition, then Argyris considered that worker satisfaction and
productivity might both improve.
His model of management takes a multidimensional view of a worker as not just a strong
arm or a good mind but a whole person.

Douglas McGregor (1906-1964) another psychologist built on Abraham Maslow’s (1954)

motivation theory of basic human needs, with which many social workers will be familiar.
Once basic physiological and safety needs have been met, people at work become
interested in self-fulfillment and responsibility. So work is not just a source of money but of
self-respect, risk-taking and creativity (contrast the way that Taylor thought about his
workers). If this is so, then positions have to be designed and fitted to people in the
hierarchy, rather than the other way round.
 28

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: human needs can be identified in terms of a hierarchy, with
higher needs coming to the fore after lower needs have been met. The hierarchy of needs
includes from lowest to highest.
1. Physiological needs, at the level of basic survival
2. Needs for safety and security
3. Needs for belonging, love, and social interaction
4. Esteem and status needs, and
5. Self-actualization needs.
Maslow’s notion is that the lower needs dominate until they have been reasonably satisfied.
When the lower needs have been met, the human being becomes increasingly motivated to
satisfy higher needs. The ideal has strong implication for work-related motivation because
leadership must involve the identification of those needs that will form the basis for
employee performance. Maslow’s theory makes it clear that once the lower order needs
have been met, they no longer serve as motivators.

McGregor (1960) coined the terms ‘Theory X’ and ‘Theory Y’ to describe the authoritarian
and participative approaches to management.
‘Theory X’: assume that people are naturally lazy, irresponsible and resistant, rather than
being made that way by the organization they work in. managers would have to
assign tasks, like Taylor, be job-centered rather than person-centered;
supervisors would ensure that their subordinates were kept busy. The design of
the organization would be one of clear lines of authority, narrow spans of
control and centralized decision-making.
‘Theory Y’: people are naturally striving, taking pride in their accomplishments and seeking
new experiences, would indicate a structure which delegates responsibility and
control, encouraging workers to participate in decision-making. Some social
service organizations still manage to operate in this style and consider that it is
easier to meet quality standards when staff are committed to their work and the
organization is not dogged by uncontrolled sick leaves, high staff turnover or low
 29

morale. Theory Y-style management certainly seems more suited to social work
and social care.

Rensis Likert (1903-1981) was always interested in leadership styles. From the attitude
research of workers he gave his name to the ‘Likert Scale’, which grades
responses to survey questions and in a 1961 book based on this research,
categorized four systems of organizational management along a continuum.
Likert (1967) examines a number of specific organizational variables, including
leadership, motivation, communication, decision making, goal setting and
control. He divided organizations into four basic types, based on how they deal
with these organizational variables. He labels his four types:
1. System 1. Exploitative authoritative: leaders distrust subordinates,
decision making concentrated at the top of the hierarchy, communication
exclusively downward , control and power centralized in top
management and others feel little concern for the organization’s overall
goals.
2. System 2. Benevolent authoritative: Power is centralized in the hands
of the few at the top of hierarchy, but adds an increased degree of
communication. There is more trust in subordinates, but it is
condescending in nature.
3. System 3. Consultative: Increases communication, employees have the
opportunity to give input, although all major decisions are still made at
the top of the management hierarchy.
4. System 4. Participative group: Leaders have complete confidence in
workers, by motivation that is based on responsibility and participation
as well as on economic rewards, by communication among all
organization members, by extensive interaction, by decentralized
decision making, by wide acceptance of organizational goals, and by wide
spread responsibility for control
 30

A close-knit work group supports management’s aims can, he thought, induce its
members to be more efficient, just as a resistant one can pull performance down.
On the other hand, a team which forgets that it is still part of its employing
organization, and which uses its collaborative strength to deviate from
organizational norms or purposes, is likely to find itself pulled back into line. To
avoid this, the leaders of effective work groups not only get to know people as
individuals and allow maximum participation in decision-making, but also
ensure that the group’s contributions are linked to the overall performance of
the organizations. These managers need to function as ‘linking-pins’ between the
group they manage and the management group. They need to think themselves
as members of both groups because they constitute the primary communication.

The downside of this is, of course, that middle managers my feel like the meat in
the sandwich-hemmed in from both sides as they try to respond to ever
increasing team and management pressure (each of which may in turn be
operating under wider ranging influence such as government regulation, user
and career demands or trade union views). The team leader will know exactly
how that feels.
Critique of the human relations school:
1. Some of the researches led to unrealistic conclusions such as, the idea of
handing over all problem-solving to work groups lower down the
organization.
2. An overall criticism of this body of work is that, although these theorists have
drawn on psychology, sociology, philosophy and anthropology, they remain
located within business studies and centrally concerned with the
productivity needs of organizations. At the end of the day, this is still about
controlling work, not about personal issues or interpersonal relations for
their own sake; it is almost as if aspects of people’s humanity are being
understood only to be used against them so as to turn them into more
compliant workers.
 31

While the recognition of the need for good human relations might be a more
congenial approach than the authoritarian concepts of scientific
managerialism, the intention behind it is still to pursue the aim of any
organization to be more effective and efficient in its use of resources and, in
the private sector, to ensure a return on the investment. In other words, to
make worker satisfaction and increased productivity complement each other
through collaboration.

4. The Systems Model:

The key idea of the systems model is that each organization is both a system itself and
made up of other systems, all systems tend towards an internal equilibrium, and
organizations are ‘open’ systems in that they interact with their environment.
A system is a collection of parts operating interdependently to achieve a common purpose.

Eric Trist (1911-1993) origins of the organizational model

Eric Trist with his colleagues at Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London
developed a theory of ‘open system’ which recognizes the dynamic movement in and out of
organizations as well as inside them. Classical models had been constructed from observing
virtually closed business systems, usually pursuing specific economic goals, had left out the
‘people factors’ as well as the external context. Organizations, though, employ and serve
human beings and also operate in turbulent, ever changing fields where the outside world
can be as influential as policy made internally (in social work, think of media scandals over
child deaths, or government changes in welfare legislation).

Trist’s experience is based on his and his colleagues’ study on the effects of mechanization
on the Durham coal mines, what is interesting to social workers is that they realized they
had to put the people into the equation. They found that, if an organization was to operate
effectively, its technical systems had to mesh with its social system. Trist showed that the
organization of work has social and psychological properties of its own, that is, that social
and technical systems interact. In particular, he demonstrated the role of motivation in
 32

productivity and team-building. Unlike robots, people find satisfaction in finishing a whole
task, controlling their own behavior, setting their own targets and in working together as a
team; a comprehensive assessment, for example, is a complex piece of work in which a
sophisticated professional judgment is balanced against that of other professional, the
views of users and careers, and the policies and resources allocations of the employing
organization.

Key concepts in thinking about organizations as systems:

The systems approach does not prescribe any particular organizational design rather its
ideas focus on a way of understanding the structure an organization already had, the
process that go on within existing structure and the way that changing particular
interactions might help to work better towards its desired outcomes. Each organization
can be conceptualized as a system, by analogy with a biological system such as the human
body. This means that:
 It has boundaries around it.
 It is composed of sub-systems- in the body’s case, these include the
respiratory and circulatory systems, and in social services they include
information and financial systems.
 It interacts with other discrete systems in super-system- people interact with
each other in societies; organizations interact with each other, for example,
in a wider system of welfare, encompassing health, social care, housing,
financial support…etc.
o Discrete system: organization
o Sub-system: example, ‘financial system’ within discrete system
o Super-system: system of welfare
But the three are sometimes called just as systems.
The boundaries around a system may be more or less open or permeable or they may be
closed. Discuss the input, throughput, output, and feedback loop.

Systems thinking in social work and care management:

 33

The systems thinking has special place in social work particularly in family therapy and
ways of managing the whole organization. The managers role in the systems approach is to
focus on how the subsystem(s) he or she manages relate at all the points of ‘interface’ with
the larger, total system and the outside world-known as ‘boundary management’.
The system approach relates well to care management, for example, because the latter
emphasizes the crucial links between commissioners and a range of external and in-house
providers, as well as the important interlinking between all the different parts of the
organization that deal with quality standards, complaints, contracting, budgets and so on,
and other external bodies such as housing and health authorities.

Critique of the systems model:

 It does not give allowance to human emotions. System analysis provides an
abstract description but can never lay down a strategy or guide for action or
behavior. Other theories are needed for that.
 The theory is also artificially politically neutral, functionalist and normative,
taking little or no account of the interplay of power dynamics within the
organization.
 Like any theoretical model, systems theory is only an attempt to look at
something essentially familiar in fresh ways. It does not exist in reality, so it can
mislead us, and it can get in the way of other ideas. For example, the analogy
with biological bodies is not at all exact. Two organizations could decide to share
a subsystem without losing their distinctive identity. It will lead us to overlook
some important possibilities for working in partnership.
 Systems analysis may be a force for unhealthy conservatism. It does not cope
well with the big questions. It does not contain clear place for political questions
such as how the system came to be the way it is, who holds the most power
within or over it, why some system such in more energy (resource, personal
information) than they can put to good use,…etc. in using a systems analysis to
look at organizations, we need to take care not to ignore these bigger questions
of power and powerlessness.
 34

 To sum up, as organizations become bigger and complex the systems model has
attempted:
o To offer a manageable way of thinking about them as if they are giant
bodies with all their activities interacting.
o Show everything interacting with everything at the boundaries where
they take place.
o Social workers are attracted by the openness, team work and
interdependence in systems thinking
o Social workers also like the systems model the fact that a theory they may
have learned for social work practice or systemic family therapy can
double up for use in understanding organizations (Coulshed and Orme,
1998).
o The model also helped managers to think about what inputs produce the
desired outputs, with a dynamic sense about process and change.
 But it is being outdone now by the sheer complexity of the scope and inner
workings of many organizations.
o The loosely coupled sub-systems are now virtually independent, each
needing to be understood on its own terms in order to understand the
whole (Leigh, 1988). Example, child welfare department, social defense
department, elderly department…etc in the Ministry of Women, Children
and Youth Affairs.
o Some elements of organizational works can be outsourced to contractors
and private practitioners, thus adding a further layer of complexity.

Organizational learning and knowledge management is a new approach to systems

perspective. An organizational learning perspective portrays the organization as a living
and thinking open system. Organizations are said to learn from experience, just as humans
and higher animals do. Organizations, thus, engage in complex mental processes such as
anticipating, perceiving, envisioning, problem solving, and remembering.
 35

5. The Contingency Approach:

This is relatively a new management approach. Protagonists of this approach take
management away from universally applicable principles towards situational
appropriateness. Fred Luthans, a noted contingency management writer says, “The
traditional approach to management were not necessarily wrong, but today they are no
longer adequate. The needed breakthrough for management theory and practice can be
found in a contingency approach”. Formally defined, the contingency approach is an effort
to determine through research which managerial practices and techniques are appropriate
in specific situations. Contingency refers to the choice of an alternative course of action.
Contingent management is considered synonymous with situational management. This
implies that the application of a particular management techniques and tools and the
effectiveness of a given management pattern is depending upon multitudinous factors and
their relationship in a specific situation.

Contingency approach has three characteristics:

1. An open System Perspective: this is central to contingency approach. They do not
only limit their understanding of management to just internal working of the
organization but also how organizational systems combine to interact with outside
social, cultural, political and economic systems.
2. A practical Research Orientation: their management is based on research and
outcomes of researches are used to develop tools for more effective management.
3. A multivariate Approach: in traditional closed-systems thinking prompted a
search for simple one to one relationships. Example higher moral of employees
increases productivity. However, employees’ personalities, the nature of the task,
reward, employees’ satisfaction… are multiple variables that affect productivity.
Contingency management theorists strive to carry out practical and relevant
multivariate analyses.
 36

Section Four:
The Management Functions:
1. Planning-Setting Direction: planning is defined as a process of setting objectives and
making plans to accomplish them. Objectives are the specific results that one wishes
to achieve: plans are action statements that describe how the objectives will be
accomplished. Planning initiates the management process and sets the stage for
further managerial effort at organizing.
Types of plan:
First, plans vary by timeframe.
i. As a rule of thumb, short-range plans cover one year or less
ii. Intermediate-range plans cover one to two years, and
iii. Long-range plans cover two to five years or more. Planning objectives
will be more specific in short-range plans and more open-ended when
addressing the long term.
Second: Plans differ in the scope or breadth of activities they represent.
iv. Strategic plan address long-term needs and see comprehensive action
directions for the entire organization or major subunit. They help
managers allocate resource to achieve best possible long-term results.
v. Operational plan are more limited in scope and define what needs to
be done to implement strategic plan.
Third: Plans vary according to frequency or repetitiveness of use.
vi. Standing plans are ongoing guidelines for action. Designed to cover
recurring situations, they guide behavior in common directions over
time. Example organizational policy, procedures and rules
vii. Single-use plans are used only once to meet the needs of unique
situations.
b. Approaches to Planning:
i. Inside out planning: focuses on trying to do the best at what you are
already doing.
 37

ii. Outside-in planning; includes analysis of the external environment

and making internal adjustments necessary to exploit the
opportunities and minimize the problem it offers.
iii. Top-down planning
iv. Bottom-up planning
c. Contingency planning: involves identifying alternative courses of action that
can be implemented if and when an original plan becomes inappropriate due
to changing circumstance.
2. Organizing- Creating Structure as a management function; is the process of defining
work tasks and arranging together people and other resources to best perform
them. Once plans are created, the manager’s job is to organize things so that they
can be properly implemented. Planning sets the directions; organizing creates the
systems to turn plans into performance results.
a. Organizational structure is the system or network of communication and
authority that links people and groups together as they perform important
tasks. It is the way the various parts of an organization are arranged to both
divide up the work to be done and coordinate performance results.
From organizational structure we can learn, division of labor, supervisory
relationships, communication channels, major subunits, and levels of
management.
b. Types of organizational structure;
i. functional structures
ii. divisional structures
iii. matrix structures
iv. team structure
v. network structure
c. organizing trend in the modern workplace
i. shorter chains of command
ii. less unity of command
iii. wider span of control
 38

iv. more delegation and empowerment

v. decentralization with centralization
vi. reduced staff component.
3. Leading- Inspiring Effort- as a management function: leadership- the process of
inspiring others to work hard to accomplish important tasks- is one of the most
popular management topics. It is also one of the four functions that constitute the
management process. Planning sets the direction and objectives; organizing brings
the resources together to turn plans into actions; leading builds the commitments
and enthusiasm needed for people to apply their talents fully to help accomplish
plans; and controlling makes sure things turn out right.
4. Controlling-ensuring results; controlling is the process of monitoring performance
and taking action to ensure desired results. As the fourth management function, its
purpose is straight forward- to make sure that actual performance meets or
surpasses objectives. Planning sets the direction and allocate resources; organizing
brings people and materials resources together to do the work; leading inspires
people to best utilize these resources; controlling sees to it that the right things
happen, in the right way, at the right time.
 39

SECTION FIVE: LEADERSHIP

Leadership is the ability to inspire confidence and support among the people who are
needed to achieve organizational goals. Several other definitions of leadership are as
follows:
 Interpersonal influence, directed through communication toward goal attainment
 The influential increment over and above mechanical compliance with directions
and orders
 An act that causes others to act or respond in a shared direction
 The art of influencing people by persuasion or example to follow a line of action
 The principal dynamic force that motivates and coordinates the organization in the
accomplishment of its objectives.
 A willingness to take the blame

Leadership as a partnership:
An important current thrust in understanding leadership is to regard it as a long term
relationship, or partnership. According to Peter Block, in a partnership the leader and the
group members are connected in such a way that the power between them is
approximately balanced. He further described partnership as the opposite of parenting (in
which one person-the parent- takes the responsibility for the welfare of the other-the
child).
Partnership occurs when control shifts from the leader to the group members, in a move
away from authoritarianism and toward shared decision making. Four things are necessary
for a valid partnership to exist:
1. Exchange of purpose: every person at any level in a group is responsible for
defining vision and mission. Through dialogue with other people the leader helps
articulate a widely acceptable vision.
2. A right to say no: people who express contrary opinion will be punished runs
contrary to a partnership.
 40

3. Joint accountability: in a partnership, each person is responsible for outcomes and

the current situation. Each person takes responsibility for the success and failure of
the organizational unit he/she belongs.
4. Absolute honesty: not telling the truth to one another is an act of betrayal. When
power is distributed, people are more likely to tell the truth because they feel less
vulnerable.

Looking at leadership as a partnership is important also because it is linked to an optimistic

view of group members referred to as stewardship theory. This theory depicts group
members (or followers) as being collectivists, pro-organizational, and trustworthy. A
collectivist is a person who is more concerned about the welfare of the group than about
his or her personal welfare.

Leadership versus Management:

Leader’s roles:
1. Figure head:
a. Entertaining clients or customers as an official representative of the
organization
b. Making oneself available to outsiders as a representative of the organization
c. Representing the organization at other organizations and forums
d. Escorting official visitors
2. Spokes person: as a spokesperson, a managerial leader keeps five groups of people
informed about the unit’s activities, plans, capabilities, and possibilities (vision).
a. Upper-level management
b. Clients or customers
c. Other important outsiders such as labor union
d. Professional colleagues
e. The general public
3. Negotiator: three negotiating activities of a leader are:
 41

a. Bargaining with supervisors for funds, facilities, equipment, or other forms of

support
b. Bargaining with other units in the organization for the use of staff, facilities,
equipment, or other forms of support.
c. Bargaining with suppliers and vendors for services, schedules, and delivery
times
4. Coach: an effective leader takes the time to coach team members. Specific behavior
in this role include
a. Informally recognizing team members’ achievements
b. Providing team members with feedback concerning ineffective performance
c. Ensuring that team members are informed of steps that can improve their
performance
5. Team builder: a key aspect of leaders’ role is to build an effective team. Activities
contributing to this role include:
a. Ensuring that team members are recognized for their accomplishments, such
as through letters of appreciation
b. Initiating activities that contribute to group morale, such as giving parties
and sponsoring sports teams.
c. Holding periodic staff meetings to encourage team members to talk about
their accomplishments, problems and concerns
6. Team player: related to the team builder role is that of the team player. Three
behaviors of team players are:
a. Displaying appropriate personal conduct
b. Cooperation with other units and staff in the organization
c. Displaying loyalty to superiors by supporting their plans and decisions fully
7. Technical problem solver: two activities contribute to this role
a. Serving as a technical expert or advisor
b. Performing individual contributor tasks on a regular basis, such as making
sales calls or repairing machinery
 42

8. Entrepreneur: although not self-employed, managers who work in large

organizations have some responsibility for suggesting innovative ideas or furthering
the business aspects of the firm. Three entrepreneurial leadership role activities are:
a. Reading trade publications and professional journals to keep up with what is
happening in the industry and profession
b. Talking with customers or others in the organization to keep aware of
changing needs and requirements
c. Getting involved in situation outside the unit that could suggest ways of
improving the unit’s performance, such as visiting other firms, attending
professional meetings or trade shows, and participating in educational
programs.
9. Strategic planner: setting out the strategic planner role enables the manager to
practice strategic leadership. Specific activities involved in this role include:
a. Setting a direction for the organization
b. Helping the firm deal with the external environment
c. Helping develop organizational policies

A Framework for Understanding Leadership:

The framework presented here focuses on the major sets of variables that influence
leadership effectiveness. The basic assumption underlying the framework can be expressed
in terms of a simple formula with a profound meaning: L= f(l, gm, s). The formula means
that the leadership process is a function of the leader, group members (or followers), and
other situational variables. In other words, leadership does not exist in the abstract but
takes into account factors related to the leader, the person or persons being led, and a
variety of forces in the environment.
Leadership can be best understood (according to this model), by examining its key
variables: leader characteristics and traits, leader behavior and style, group member
characteristics, and the internal and external environment.
 43

Leader
Leader
characteristics
characteristics
and
and traits
traits

Internal
Internal and Leader
Leader behavior
behavior
external and Leadership
external and style
style
environment
environment Effectiveness

Group
Group member
member
characteristics
characteristics

Leadership effectiveness refers to attaining desirable outcomes such as productivity,

quality, and satisfaction in a given situation.

Leadership effectiveness:
Refers to attaining desirable outcomes such as productivity, quality, and satisfaction
in a given situations. Whether or not a leader is effective depends on the four sets of
variables defined below.
1. Leader characteristic and traits:
Refers to the leader’s inner qualities, such as self-confidence and problem-solving
ability that helps a leader function effectively in many situations
2. Leader behavior and style:
Refers to the activities engaged in by the leader, including his or her characteristic
approach that relate to his or her effectiveness. A leader who frequently coaches
group members and practices participative leadership, for example, might be
effective in many circumstances.
3. Group member characteristics:
 44

Refers to attributes of the group members that could have a bearing on how
effective the leadership attempt will be. Intelligent and motivated group members,
for example, facilitate the leader’s doing an outstanding job.
4. Internal and External Environment:
Environment influences leadership effectiveness. A leader in a culturally diverse
environment, for example, will need to have multicultural skills to be effective.

The Evolution of Leadership (Daft, 63-113)

The evaluation of leadership is discussed as it works at macro or micro level and in stable
and chaotic environmental conditions. The micro level leadership concerns specific
situations, tasks and individuals. The leader has detail knowledge about work process and
behaviors needed to reach certain goals. The macro level leadership transcends individuals,
groups and specific situations to focus on whole communities. Macro leadership deals with
fundamental ideals, values and strategies.
The stable and chaotic dimension deals with whether elements in the environment are
dynamic. Under this situation, environment elements constantly change. The appearance of
new product poses aggressive competition in the market, promotional activities and
countermoves. Small events can have small consequences and it is difficult to predict
tomorrow.

The framework for discussing the evolution of leadership has considered four eras.
Era 1. Macro leadership in a stable world (Pre-industrial and Pre-bureaucratic): this was
the time where most organizations were very small and were run by individuals who hire
friends or relatives and not necessarily because of their skills or qualifications. The size of
organization and the stable nature of the environment made it possible to manage by one
leader; to have a personal vision, acquire resources, coordinate all activities, and keep
things on track. This is the era of a “Great man” leadership.
Era 2. Micro leadership in a stable world: witnesses the emergence of hierarchy and
bureaucracy. Organizations required rules and standard procedures to ensure that
activities can be performed in an efficient and effective manner. Hierarchy of authority
 45

provides a sense of mechanism for supervision and control of workers. This is the time of
the ideas on “scientific management and “functions of management” take a firm root based
on the principles of engineering efficiency and control. This is the era of the “rational
manager” who directs and controls others using an impersonal approach. The rational
manager is well suited to a stable environment in which things could be taken apart and
analyzed.
Era 3. Micro leadership in a chaotic world: the prized techniques of rational
management were no longer working. This was an era of confusion for management.
Japanese were dominant in world commerce with their idea of team leadership and superb
quality products. Managers were overwhelmed as they were expected to drop the
traditional vertical hierarchy and management control and move to the notion of
horizontal organization, leadership of cross functional teams and to learn to empower their
employees. Organizations tried team-based approaches, reorganizing, downsizing, and
empowerment to improve performance. It was however challenging for most managers to
give up controlling and how to act as coaches instead of bosses.
Era 4. Macro Leadership in a Chaotic World: prepares the facilitator leader. Such leader
gave up control to the traditional leadership. Leaders learn to influence others through
relationships. Managers learn to think in terms of “control with” others rather than
“control over” others. Leaders tried to create learning organizations in which each person
is intimately involved in identifying and solving problems so that the organization
continues to grow and change to meet new challenges. The leadership goes far beyond the
rational management or even team leadership. Leaders learn to control with others by
building relationship based on a shared vision and shaping the cultures that can help
achieve it. Leaders are servants who devote themselves to others and to the organization’s
vision.
 46

Environment
Stable Chaotic

Era 2. Rational Management Era 3. Team leadership

 Confusion
 Behavioral theories
Micro  Empowerment
 Contingency theories
 Quality
Setting
Scope  Vertical hierarchy, bureaucracy Setting
 Horizontal organization
 Five management functions  Cross-functional teams
(planning, organizing, leading;
staffing &directing, controlling)  Downsizing
Era 1. Great Man Leadership Era 4. Facilitating Leadership
 Shared vision, alignment,
 Trait Theories
relationships
 Unlock personal qualities in
Macro Setting others

 Pre-bureaucratic organization
Setting

 Administrative principles  Learning organizations

 Constant change, adaptation

Source: Bob Lengel. Adapted with permission of the publisher from Richard I. Daft and Robert H.
Lengel, Fusion leadership: Unlocking the Subtle Forces that Change People and Organizations, 1998,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco, CA. All rights reserved

Research Perspectives on Individual Leadership

Traits, Behaviors, and Relationships:
1. The Trait Approach:
Early efforts to understand leadership success focused on the leader’s traits. Traits are the
distinguishing personal characteristics of a leader, such as intelligence, values, self-
confidence, and appearance. Fundamental to this theory are that people are born with
 47

traits that make them natural leaders. The Great Man Approach sought to identify the
traits leaders possessed that distinguished them from people who were not leaders.
Generally, research found only a weak relationship between personal traits and
leaders’ success.

Researchers examined personality traits such as creativity and self-confidence, physical

traits such as age and energy-level, abilities such as knowledge and fluency of speech, social
characteristics such as popularity and sociability, and work-related characteristics such as
the desire to excel and persistence against obstacles.

Personality traits Creativity and self confidence

Physical traits Age and energy level
Abilities Knowledge and fluency of speech
Social traits/characteristics Popularity and sociability
Work-related characteristics The desire to excel & persistence against obstacles

Stogdill (1948) identified traits consistently appeared with effective leadership which
includes willingness to assume a position, he also concluded that several traits could
appear related to effective leadership but it is important to see the leadership relative to
the existing situation. He said that the trait of creativity is less viable in a highly
bureaucratic organization than in a situation in which an entrepreneur is developing a new
business.
Others also added the essentiality of leadership traits but effectiveness should be seen only
in combination with additional three factors; Self-confidence, Honesty/Integrity and
Drive.

Self-confidence: refers to the degree to which one is self-assured in his or her own
judgments, decisions making, ideas and capabilities. Leaders with self-
confidence initiate change, takes risk, displays certainty about his/her ability,
gains respect and admiration from followers and builds commitment.
 48

Honesty/Integrity: Honesty refers to truthfulness and non deception. Integrity implies that
one is whole, nurtures followers trust by modeling them through daily action
and that the words of a leader will never contradict with the actions.
Successful leaders are easy to trust and are highly consistent.

Drive: is high motivation that is revealed through a high effort level of a leader. Leaders
with drive seek achievement, have energy and tenacity, and are frequently
seen to have ambition and initiative to achieve their goals. Ambition enables
them to set challenging goals and to take initiative to achieve those goals.

2. Behavior Approaches:
This approach says that anyone with appropriate behavior can be a good leader. It says
behavior can be easily learned more readily than traits that a particular leader possesses
enabling the leader accessible to all.
2.1. Autocratic versus Democratic Leadership: in early times, leaders were considered
either as autocratic or democratic. A study by Kurt Lewin and his associates at Iowa
State University study came up with the following result.
Autocratic: leader is one who tends to centralize authority and derive power from
position, control of rewards, and coercion. Employees work as long as the leader is there.
Employees reveal frequent feeling of discontent, hostility and unpleasantness to the leader.

Democratic Leader delegate’s authority to others, encourages participation, relies on

subordinates’ knowledge for completion of tasks, and depends on subordinate respect for
influence. Leaders train and involve employees so that they can participate and employees
are characterized by positive feelings rather than hostility; they perform well in the
presence or absence of the leader.
However, in later developments Tannenbaum and Schmidt indicated that leadership
behavior could exist in a continuum. Thus, one leader might be autocratic, another
democratic, and a third a mix of the two styles.
 49

The study from Iowa State University indicated that leadership behavior had a definite
effect on outcomes such as follower performance and satisfaction. Equally important was
the recognition that effective leadership was reflected in behavior, not simply by what
personality traits a leader possessed.

The Autocratic-participative-Free-Rein Continuum

Amount of Authority Held by the Leader

Autocratic Style Participative Free-Rein Style

Consultative Consensus Democratic

Amount of Authority Held by Group Members

A synonym for free rein is laissez-faire, a French term meaning “let them do”. Leadership is
given to group members indirectly. They are given free rein to figure out how to perform it
best. The leader does not get involved unless requested. Team members are allowed all the
freedom they want as long as they do not violate policy. In other words, the free-rein leader
delegates completely.
2.2. Ohio State University: two major categories of leader’s behavior types are identified
by their study
2.2.1. Consideration: the extent to which the leader is sensitive to subordinates, respects
their ideas and feelings, and established mutual trust. Showing appreciation,
listening carefully to problems, and seeking input from subordinates regarding
important decisions are all examples of consideration behaviors.
2.2.2. Initiating Structure: the extent to which a leader is task oriented and directs
subordinates work activities toward goal achievement. The behavior includes
directing tasks, working people hard, planning, providing explicit schedules for
work activities, and ruling with an iron hand.
 50

2.3. University of Michigan Studies. The Michigan researchers established two types of
leadership behavior, each type consisting of two dimensions:
2.3.1. Employee-centered: leaders focus on the human need of their subordinates.
Leader support and interaction facilitation are the two underlying dimensions of
employee-centered behavior. In addition to supporting employees, they facilitate
positive interaction among followers and minimize conflicts.
2.3.2. Job-centered: directs activities towards efficiency, cost-cutting, and scheduling.
Goal emphasis and work facilitation are dimensions of the leadership behavior. By
focusing on reaching task goals and facilitating the structure of tasks, job-centered
behavior approximates that of initiating structure. The studies however,
acknowledged that often the behaviors of goal emphasis, work facilitation, support,
and interaction facilitation can be meaningfully performed by a subordinate’s peers,
rather than only by the designed leader.
2.4. University of Texas proposed a two dimensional leadership theory called The
Leadership Grid that builds on the work of the Ohio State and Michigan studies. They
rated leaders on a scale of one to nine according to two criteria: the concern for people
and the concern for production.
THE LEADERSHIP GRID’S FIGURE

High 9 (1, 9) Country club (9, 9) Team

management: management: work
Concern 8 Thoughtful attention to accomplishment is from
the needs of people for committed people:
7 satisfying relationships interdependence through
leads to a comfortable, a common stake in
for
friendly organization organization purpose
atmosphere and work leads to relationships of
tempo. trust and respect.
people
6 (5, 5) Middle of the road
management: adequate
5 organization performance
 51

4 is possible through
balancing the necessity to
get out work with maintain
morale of people at a
satisfactory level.

3 (1, 1) Impoverished (9, 1) Authority

management: exertion of compliance management:
2 minimum effort to get efficiency is operations
required work done is result from arranging
1 appropriate to sustain conditions of work in such
organization a way that human
membership. elements interfere to a
minimum degree.

Low 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Low High
Concern for results
Opportunism

1, 9 9,9 1,
9
9+9

9, 9+9: Paternalism/Maternalism: Reward

5,5 and approval are bestowed to people in
1
return for loyalty and obedience; failure
to comply leads to punishment

1,1 9,1

In opportunistic Management: people adapt and shift to any grid style needed to gain the
maximum advantage. Performance occurs according to a system of selfish gain. Effort is given
only for an advantage for personal gain.

Theories of a “high-high” leadership: the findings about two underlying dimensions and the
possibility of leaders rated high on both dimensions raises four questions to think about.
 52

1. Whether these two dimensions are the most important behaviors of leadership.
Certainly, these two behaviors are important.

2. Whether people orientation and task orientation exist together in the same leader, and
how. The Grid theory argues that ‘yes’, both are present when people work with or
through others to accomplish an activity. Leaders may be high on either style, there is
considerable belief that the best leaders are high on both behaviors.

3. Whether a “high-high” leadership style is universal or situational. Universal implies the

behavior will tend to be effective in every situation, while situational means the
behavior succeeds only in certain settings. The answer is yes, the leader behavior of
concern for people tended to be related to higher employee satisfaction and fewer
personnel problems across a wide variety of situations. Likewise, task-oriented
behavior was associated with high productivity across a large number of situations.

4. Whether people can actually change themselves into leaders high on people and/or
task-orientation. The answer is yes based on the preference of the person he/she can
learn new leadership behavior. However, there is a general belief that high-high
leadership is a desirable quality, because the leader will meet both needs
simultaneously.

THEME OF LEADER BEHAVIOR RESEARCH

People Oriented Task Oriented

Ohio State University Consideration Initiating Structure

University of Michigan Employee-Centered Job-Centered

University of Texas Concern for People Concern for Production

 53

2.5. Dyadic Approach: they believe that trait and behavior theories oversimplify the
relationship between leaders and subordinates. They focus on the concept of exchange
between a leader and a follower, a relationship known as a dyad. Dyadic theory involves
a perspective that examines why leaders have more influence over and greater impact on
some followers than on other followers. They argue that leaders do not uniformly
broadcast a trait such as self-confidence or a behavior such as people-orientation that is
received equally by each subordinate. They argue that a single leader will form different
relationships with different followers. Four stages of specific relationship in each
leader-subordinate dyad is proposed:

Stages of Development of Dyadic Approach:

2.5.1. Vertical Dyadic Linkage Model: leaders’ behaviors and traits have different
impacts across individuals creating in-groups and out-groups. It is important to be
aware of a relationship between a leader and each subordinate, rather than between
a leader and a group of subordinates.
Some subordinates might report a leader and their relationship with the leader, as
having a high degree of mutual trust, respect, and obligation. Others might report a
low quality relationship with the leader, such as having a low degree of trust,
respect, and obligation perceiving the leader low on important leadership behavior.
Based on these two extreme exchange patters, subordinates were found to exist in
an “in-group” and “out-group” in relation to the leader.
2.5.2. Leader-Member Exchange: Leadership is individualized for each subordinate.
Each dyad involves a unique exchange independent of other dyads. This stage
examines specific attributes of the exchange between leader and subordinate. On
the Leader-Member Exchange, they studied that the impact on outcome depended
on how the leader-member exchange developed overtime. They explored such things
as communication frequency, value agreement, and characteristics of followers, job
satisfaction, performance, job climate, and commitment. Three stages were identified
in the stages of leader-member relationship:
 54

2.5.2.1. The leaders and followers at initial stage, as strangers, tested each other to
identify what kinds of behaviors were comfortable.
2.5.2.2. The leader and member acquainted, they engage in shaping and refining the
roles they would play together.
2.5.2.3. As the role reaches maturity, the relationship attained a steady pattern of
behavior. Leader member exchanges were difficult to change at this point. The
exchange tended to determine in-group and out-group status.
2.5.3. Partnership Building: Partnership building leaders can reach out to create a positive
exchange with every subordinate. Doing so increases performance. The third stage
explores whether leaders could intentionally develop partnerships with each
subordinate. The emphasis is not about knowing how or why discrimination among
subordinates occurred rather on how to develop beneficial relationship so that
more equitable environment could be created that brings greater benefit to leaders,
followers and the organization.

The leader views each person independently but may treat each individual in a
different but positive way. This is called individualized leadership and leaders
develop positive relationship with each subordinate. The leader develops positive
relationship on one-on-one with each subordinate and as these relationships
mature, the entire workgroup becomes more productive. Leaders provided support,
encouragement, and training, and followers participated, influence decision, and
responded with high performance.
2.5.4. Systems and Networks: leader dyads can be created in all directions across levels
and boundaries to build networks that enhance performance. It is about whether
the view of dyads can be expanded to include larger systems and network. This
perspective proposes that leaders’ dyads can be expanded to the larger system and
discusses about how dyadic relationships can be created across traditional
boundaries to embrace a larger system. In this view, leaders’ relationships are not
bound to subordinates, but include peers, teammates, and other stakeholders
relevant to the work unit. The theory suggests the need for leaders to build networks
 55

of one-to-one relationships and to use their traits and behaviors selectively to create
positive relationships with as many people as possible.

Questions:
Do you think a leader should develop an individualized relationship with each follower?
What are the advantage and disadvantages to these approaches?
What is the difference between the trait theories and behavioral theories of leadership?
 56

Human Service Organizations (HSO)

The environment of human service organizations: uniqueness of Human Service

Organizations.
Organization is a socially constructed concept. The meaning of organization vary
depending on the specific situation being described (Morgan, 1986). However, in general,
organizations can be defined as a regular and ongoing set of structured activities involving
a defined group of individuals. Communal organizations are those social structures that are
created around personal and affective connections in which the continued existence of the
social structure is the primary purpose of such activities. They include families, friendship
groups, communities, and societies (Hillary, 1968). Formal organizations have an explicit
productive purpose. They use resources-inputs- to create –outputs. Formal organizations
also include mutual benefit associations that are established primarily to provide outputs,
or benefits, to a defined group of members. Mutual benefit associations include, among
others, credit unions, labor unions and professional associations.
Although the boundaries of the definition of human service organization are fuzzy, a set of
core characteristics, when taken together, make human service organizations a distinctive
context for managerial performance. One of the important consequences of these
distinctive characteristics is that organizational managers in human service organizations
deal continuously with a series of unresolvable dilemma, dilemmas that are inherent in the
nature of HSO. Hasenfeld (1992a) describes these as human service organization
“enigmas”. Both organizational structures and services production processes involve
complex trade-offs among important human values and important organizational goals.
There is no ultimate correct structure or correct service production process in any HSO
that completely resolves these dilemmas.
What are Human Services?
The concept of human service can include the following (Austin, 1988):
 Education and socialization of children and youth
 Prevention of illness, accident, interpersonal violence, and psychological and social
distress
 57

 Care, treatment, and rehabilitation of individuals who are ill, including those with
mental illness
 Transfer of economic resources, or the direct provision of food, shelter and medical
care …
 Care and treatment of individuals with disability conditions
 Care and protection of dependent persons
 Mutual assistance in emergency and catastrophes
 Control of dangerous or deviant individual behavior
 Development of work skills
 Recreation and social activities
 Information and counseling for individuals with psychological difficulties
 Development of social interaction skills involved in group participation and in collective
decision making
 The organization of problems solving groups
 The organization of social support groups and support networks

Management in Human Service setting is a highly challenging task, primarily because the
factors that differentiate nonprofit from profit making firms are the very factors that tend
to make management difficult. Despite their similarities in many aspects in modern society,
several aspects of human service organizations make their management particularly
challenging and some are listed below.
1. Human Service Organizations have unclear, “fuzzy” goals. Goal statements are too
general to have a great deal of meaning either to consumers or to service deliverers.
Recently there is a changing situation with the realization that process and output
measures common in human services (# of counseling sessions, referrals made) but still
do not tell communities or policy makers much about what is actually being
accomplished. Much of the activities are difficult to measure and to set clear
performance goals for workers and managers.
2. There are conflicts in values and expectations among the groups involved in human
service delivery. Hasenfeld (1992) describes human service as “moral work” to
 58

illustrate the dilemma that the goals of human services are not accepted unanimously
by all stakeholders. In the USA the goal of welfare reform law of 1996 for many
conservatives implied or explicit, was to get people off welfare. They expect the poor to
take care of themselves. For others the goal was to enhance self-sufficiency. Conflicting
policy priorities often result in conflicting mandates and regulations for human service
agencies.
There is also a difference among many professionals employed in human service
organizations. The different groups of professionals who are equally committed to
client services, conflict may emerge based on differing treatment philosophies. A dually
diagnosed client may be seen very differently by a twelve-step-oriented substance
abuse provider and a mental health professional that sees medication as the main way
to control behavior.
The production of human service includes critical decisions that involve complex value
judgments and have moral consequences. Example:
 The decision to prolong the life of a physically handicapped premature infant
 The advice of a high school counselor to a high school student regarding
academic and career options
 The decision between institutional placement of for the parents of a multi-
handicapped child
 The choice between family preservation services or court-ordered removal of an
abused child from her or his home…etc
The outcomes of the decisions that are made are judged in human value terms, not just
in instrumental terms. The choice to use the withdrawal of social benefits, the
enforcement of constraints, or other forms of individual punishment in an effort to
achieve the objectives of a service program is first, and foremost, a moral decision
rather than an issue of relative program efficiency.
3. Human service agencies have historically demonstrated more concern for means than
for ends. Because of the difficulty in effective service methods and outcomes, human
service providers have concentrated more on the nature of the services than on
ultimate outcomes.
 59

4. Measuring the outcomes of human service organizations is difficult. It is easier to count

the number of job-training sessions an unemployed client receives than to document
having an individual employed in a living-wage job for a particular length of time.
5. Human service organizations often serve involuntary, “undesirable,” or multi-problem
clients. Hasenfeld (1992) uses the term client reactivity to describe the complexity of
the relationship between clients, often with multiple problems, and the service delivery
process. This is complicated by the many actors who may be interested in the case. In
an allegation of child abuse, for example, the interests of the child, the parents, other
family members, and the community intertwine in complex way, making service
delivery complicated.
But human service agencies are not necessarily doomed to a future of mismanagement
and inefficiency. Many of the problems that plague them can be solved or at least cut
down to manageable size through more effective planning, which includes proactive
attention to key factors in the human service environment.

What are the human service environment that needs attention and the current major
trends?
1. Stakeholder expectation: those with a stake in what the human service
organization is doing and how it does business. Its sources of finance, clients, human
service organizations, business people, government agencies and all the regulatory
bodies are among the core stakeholders. The human service organization should
strive to know their interest and address it in whatever possible way.
2. Analysis of environmental trends: seeing not only current trends but the
underlying deep, strong “currents” and then responding to them by developing
strategies and programs is important. The following are major trends of the
environment and are not “surface trends” that are likely less important in a matter
of a year or two.
a. Political Trends: considering the government federal system where power is
decentralized to the regional states is essential. Various sectoral policies plus,
in a recent development, the Civil Societies Proclamation No 1113/2019 that
 60

defined types, organization, legality, sources of resources…of human service

organizations particularly CSOs are federal government laws that set the
future trends of human service provision. Issues of accountability and
constituency building, working in partnership with the private sector and the
results of the new political trend in Ethiopia.
b. Economic Trends: the global economic and financial crisis, the increasing gap
between the haves and the have-nots, increased market competition,
unemployment, the escalation of prices of public goods and services…etc may
exacerbate the inequality. These economic trends have their own effect on
the service delivery of human service organizations.
c. Social Trends: the growing rate of unemployment, rural-urban migration of
the youth due to lack of productive assets such as land, HIV/AIDS and its
aftermaths, rise of cost of living, child abuse such as, trafficking, labor, sexual
and physical abuse, the expansion of prostitution…etc are all social issues
that affect the programs of human service organizations.
d. Technological Trends: the broader definition of technology in view of social
work includes the work rules, tools, equipments information used to
transform inputs into outputs (goods or services). The service delivery
method and processes we use to help change people for example, casework,
psychotherapy, and community organizing) are our technologies. Human
service organizations are increasingly pressured to change or adopt
technologies. Organizing the poor into new business and self-help programs,
restructuring the human service organizations, using information systems…
etc all are part of technological changes.
3. From the World to the Neighborhood: Thinking Globally and Acting Locally. The
issues so far discussed are by and large global or national that is applicable to all
human service organizations. A wise manager of HSO will, to function effectively and
purposefully, think globally and act locally. The following points will deal with
techniques for keeping up-to-date on what is happening in the agency’s immediate
environment.
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a. Needs Assessment
b. Asset Mapping
c. Community collaboration
4. Boundary Management: Collaboration, Professional Association, and Networks. In
addition to all of their other responsibilities, managerial leaders, especially those at
the upper echelons, need to assume “boundary-spanning” roles that require them to
interface with those elements of their organizations’ task environment, or supra-
system, that have a direct bearing on the organization’s growth, survival, efficiency,
and effectiveness. Knowledge of the environments in which human service
organizations are embedded and of the skills required to negotiate balanced
exchanges of tangible and intangible goods and services between the organization
and its task environment becomes an essential component of the managerial
leader’s professional armamentarium.
They have to spend much time outside of the organization in face-to-face meeting
with other service providers, funders, community members, advocacy groups,
government officials, and the news media.
5. Marketing: human service workers may view the subjects of marketing and public
relations with resentment, puzzlement, bemusement, of indifference. In fact a
market orientation is compatible with the social work values and ethics of client
self-determination and empowerment. Managers should understand the value of
these tools and use them appropriately for the good of the agency and its clients.
Public relation and marketing are ways of interacting with the environment. Lauffer
(1984) summarizes the key components of marketing using five Ps.
a. Publics: input publics consist of those who provide resources, primarily
funding sources, throughput public are staff, and output publics are clients.
All of these needs to be treated as important stakeholders, and agency
service and processes should be designed in way that respond to their key
concerns or expectations.
b. Products: are programs and services. From a marketing perspective, it is
important that services are, in fact, seen as a valuable product-something
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that clients, funders, or referring agencies will want to use. A useful

marketing concept in this regard is the notion of the market segment or
niche. The agency should design and offer programs based on its unique
skills and competencies. Determining a program’s niche can be aided by
using a competition analysis in relation to other service providers.
c. Place: the third P, is place which is important in competition analysis. An
agency may see from the analysis that services are missing in particular
geographic area, and the features may be defined from the funder’s
perspective using a specific geographic area or responding to a call for
proposal, it might be also with respect to client accessibility and convenience.
d. Price: price may range from nothing to sliding-scale fees to reimbursements
from funders or insurance companies. There are also psychic costs to clients:
will there be embarrassment or inconvenience factors to overcome? A client
decision to come to an agency may be based partly on the client’s weighing of
the benefits and the costs. Price is also relevant in the context of grant or
contract amount. It will be increasingly necessary for an agency to be
“competitive” offering funders or clients a valued service at the best cost. The
challenge for the agency when negotiating the grant or contract funding
amount and scope of services will be to ensure that quality services and
desired outcomes can be delivered for the agreed-on cost.
e. Promotion: promotion involves putting all the other Ps, together and
“selling” the program’s services to its various publics. Market “positioning”
then involves orchestrating the way the program or services are presented to
the various publics. This is partly public relations: shaping the agency’s or
program’s image through media relations, advertising, brochures,
networking, or other public relations activities.
Marketing and collaboration: Marketing does not only refer to competition but
also has a significant element of collaboration. An agency may engage in
marketing through collaboration with other agencies. They may decide
jointly to design their promotions to fill complementary niches, based, for
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example, on each agency providing the same services in a different

geographic area. The emphasis should always been responding appropriately
to clearly identified community concerns and needs, to the improvement of
the quality of life of its members.

STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGIC PLANNING

(Daft, pp124-145), (Lewis, et al, 2001, pp43-55)
Superior strategic performances are achieved through leadership choices. In a fast
changing world, leaders are faced with a bewildering array of complex, ambiguous
information, and no two leaders will see things the same way or make the same choices.
The complexity of the environment and the uncertainty of the future can overwhelm an
executive. Thus many are inclined to focus on internal organizational issues where they feel
they have more control. They tend to concentrate on short term results rather than taking
the long-term view.

The first essential step to remain competitive is to develop an understanding of the trends
and discontinuities that can be used to gain an edge. Thinking about how to meet future
customer needs is more important now than ever. Globalization, advancing technology, and
changing demographics and lifestyles are profoundly altering the way business are
perceived and operate.
Strategic Leadership is responsible for the relationship of the external environment to
choices about vision, mission, strategy, and their implementation.

Leadership vision:
A vision can be thought of as a dream for the future. For organizations, a vision is an
attractive, ideal future that is credible yet not readily attainable. A vision is not just a
dream-it is an ambitious view of the future that everyone in the organization can believe in,
one that can realistically be achieved, yet offers a future that is better in important ways
than what now exists. It is an ambitious view of the future that requires employees to give
their best. It is a guiding star, drawing everyone in the organization along the same path
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toward the future. Taking the organization on this path requires leadership. Bill Gates at
Microsoft has been talking about “ a personal computer on every desk in every home” for
20 years-long before most people knew how to turn one on. When employees have a
guiding vision, everyday decisions and actions throughout the organization responds to
current problems and challenges in ways that move the organization toward the future
rather than maintain the status quo.
The strategic planning model can be presented consisting of eleven stages:
1. Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process: this is about whether the
organization’s commitment not only to develop a plan but also to ensure that it is
implemented. An important implication is that the strategic plan may require the
organization to break out of “business as usual” and do both new things and do the
ongoing work in a new way. Decision makers should understand this point and expect
that a new organizational culture, perhaps more dynamic and participative, may evolve.
2. Identify organizational mandate: any HSO organization has formal and informal
mandate. Not for Profit organizations have formal mandates reflected in their
government or foundation grants and contracts and any statements of purpose
reflected in the organization’s bylaws or charter.
Informal mandates are sometimes harder to discover but may be found by looking at
the expectations that the members of the organization’s governance bodies bring to
their role. They may feel that they need to get the organization to either change or
maintain its focus and purpose. Examples would include the use of a feminist
philosophy in program design for women focused project, debate over medial or social
models of substance abuse, the nature of services to persons with HIV/AIDS…etc.
3. Identify the organization’s stakeholders and their needs and concerns:
Stakeholder Analysis: stakeholder is a person or a company that is involved in a
particular organization, project, system, etc., because they have invested in it or
negatively or positively affected by it. During strategic plan development, leaders
should assess the interests of stakeholders with the purpose of meeting their needs and
sharing the expectation of the organization from its stakeholders.
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Name of stakeholder Stakeholders needs Ways for addressing HSO’s expectation

and expectations their expectation from stakeholders
EX. Private Colleges
CSOs
Students
The key actors in the human service organization’s environment having the most influence
on the organization are its funding sources, its regulatory bodies, the legal system, other
human service organizations, and the organization’s clients and constituency groups.
Hence, expectations for improved customer service are challenging agencies to make
improvements in service delivery philosophies and methods. Managers need both depth
perception and peripheral vision when looking at the environment. They need to know
what is relevant from the past and need to look ahead into the future. In the present, they
need to look “sideways” beyond the daily arena of service delivery programs.

4. Clarifying Organizational Vision, mission and values: human service organizations

are inherently purpose driven and often put significant emphasis on the organization’s
vision, mission and values.
What vision does
1. Vision Links the Present to the Future: vision connects what is going on right now
with what the organization aspires to. A vision is always about the future but it
begins with the here and now. Some say that today’s leaders need “bifocal vision,”
the ability to take care of the needs of today and meet current obligations while also
aiming toward dreams for the future.
2. Vision Energizes People and Garners Commitment: a powerful vision frees
people from the mundane by providing them with a challenge worthy of their best
effort. Employees are not generally willing to make emotional commitments just for
the sake of increasing profits and enhancing shareholder wealth. Vision needs to
transcend the bottom line because people are willing and even eager, to commit to
something truly worthwhile, something that makes life better for other or improves
their communities.
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3. Vision gives meaning to work: people have always needed to find meaning and
dignity in their work. People love having a larger purpose for what they do, and they
want to feel pride in their work.
4. Vision Establishes a Standard of Excellence: vision provides a measure by which
employees can gauge their contributions to the organization. Most workers
welcome the chance to see how their work fits into the whole. It defines an image of
the future and lets people see how they can contribute. A vision presents a challenge
and asks people to go where they haven’t gone before. Thus it encourages workers
to take risks and find new ways of doing things.

Five themes are common to powerful visions:

1. Vision Has Broad Appeal: it focuses on people. The ideal vision is identified with
the organization as a whole, not with a single leader or even a top leadership team.
It allows each individual to act independently but in the same direction. This is
called the principle of self-reference. Self-reference means that each element in a
system will serve the mission of the whole.
2. Vision Deals with Change: vision is about action and challenges people to make
important changes toward a better future.
3. Vision Encourages Faith and Hope: vision exists only in imagination-it is a picture
of a world that cannot be observed or verified in advance. The future is shaped by
people who believe in it, and a powerful vision helps people believe that they can be
effective, that there is a better future they can move to through their own
commitment and actions. Vision is an emotional appeal to our fundamental human
needs and desires-to feel important and useful, to believe we can make a real
difference in the world.
4. Vision Reflects High Ideals: good visions are idealistic. Vision has power to inspire
and energize people only when it paints an uplifting future. When Kennedy
announced the “man on the moon” vision, NASA had only a small amount of the
knowledge it would need to accomplish the feat.
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5. Vision Defines the Destination and the Journey: a good vision for the future
includes specific outcomes that the organization wants to achieve. It also
incorporates the underlying value that will help the organization get there.
Mission:
The mission is the organization’s core broad purpose and reason for existence. It defines
the company’s core values, and reason for being, and it provides a basis for creating the
vision. Whereas vision is an ambitious desire for the future, mission is what the
organization “stands for” in a larger sense. The following are some of the questions that a
good mission statement should answer:
 Who are we?
 What basic social needs do we address?
 What we do?
 What makes us unique? What is our niche?
Mission is typically made up of two critical parts: the core values and the core purpose.
The core value guides the organization “no matter what.” Core values define what
the organizations stands for and core values can be held even if they become a
competitive disadvantage in certain situations.
The mission includes the company’s core purpose. An effective core purpose
statement doesn’t just describe products or services; it captures people’s idealistic
motivations for why the organization exists.

It is important to remember that the vision continually grows and changes, while
the mission endures. It serves as the glue that holds the organization together in
times of change and guides strategic choices and decisions about the future.

5. Assessing the Organization’s External and Internal environments:

Environmental Analysis: Environmental scanning refers to systematically analyzing
the current social context and the political and economic climate in which the
organization’s welfare services are currently being delivered (including demographic
trends, changes in the welfare policy and advances in communication technology, the
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going rate for costs and charges nationally, the current best practice in making services
more acceptable and accessible…etc). Evaluating any advantages or limitations that the
organization itself may have is assessing its internal climate and capacities which is part
of environmental scanning.
Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat (SWOT) Analysis can be exercised using a four grid
matrix.

Strengths (Internal) Weaknesses (Internal)

Manufacturing/service Outdated facilities?
efficiency Obsolete technologies?
Skilled workforce? Weak management?
Financing? Past planning failures?
Reputation?
Systems and policies?
Opportunities (External) Threats (External)
Possible new markets? New competitors?
Strong economy? Shortage of resources?
Weak market rivals? Changing market tests?
Emerging technologies? New regulations?
Growth of existing market? Substitute products?
Favorable policies?

A useful technique for formulating strategies consistent with organizational mission

and objectives is the SWOT analysis. It involves the analysis of organizational strengths
and weaknesses, as well as environmental opportunities and threats. A SWOT analysis
should provide a realistic understanding of the organization in relation to its
environment. It should also assist in the creation of strategies that take maximum
advantage of strengths and opportunities while minimizing weaknesses and threats.
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It starts with an internal appraisal of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses. A

major strategic management goal at this point is to identify distinctive competencies, or
special strengths, that do or can give the organization a competitive advantage in its
operating domain.

The other part of SWOT analysis involves the analysis of environmental opportunities
and threats. Given the intended direction as clarified in an organization’s mission
statement, it is necessary to assess how actual-and future-environmental conditions
may affect its accomplishment. Broadly speaking, good strategic management is based
on understanding the influences of the environment. These influences include the
general environmental factors of economic, socio-cultural, legal-political, and
technological conditions; they also include the specific environmental influences of an
organization’s customers/clients, competitors, resource suppliers, and regulators,
among others. All strategic management whether addressing the needs of the entire
organization or one of its subcomponents, must be consistent with both short-run and
long-run environmental challenges. This requires constant vigilance on the part of
managers and the ability to interpret environmental trends correctly and use this
understanding to make successful strategies and action plans.

6. Identifying the strategic issues facing the organization. Strategic issues are
identified using a SWOT analysis: assessing how internal strengths and weaknesses
interact with environmental opportunities and threats. Strategic issues can be
differentiated from tactical issues: are part of the consciousness of the board and
management, have long-term implication, affect the entire organization, involve
significant financial stakes, are likely to require new or modified programs and changes
in resource allocations, are sensitive to community or to political concerns. Three kinds
of strategic issues are identified by Brayson (1995). Those for which no action is
needed at present and merely need to be monitored; those that can be handled as part
of the regular strategic planning cycle, and those that needs to be handled immediately.
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7. Formulating strategies to manage the issues: general responses to the strategic

issues identified are to build on strengths, overcome weaknesses, exploit opportunities
and block threats. Strategy is a pattern of purposes, policies, programs, actions,
decisions, and/or resource allocations that define what an organization is, what it does,
and why it does it. Strategies can be developed at the agency level, at the program level,
or for specific functions or processes. There should be a strategy for each strategic
issue. The following questions are asked according to Bryson’s five step process as
adapted from the Institute for Cultural Affairs model (Spencer, 1989).
a. What are the practical alternatives, dreams, or visions we might pursue to
address this strategic issue?
b. What are the barriers to the realization of these alternatives, dreams, or visions?
c. What major proposals might we pursue to achieve these alternatives, dreams, or
visions directly or to overcome the barriers to their realizations?
d. What major actions (with existing staff and within existing job descriptions)
must be taken within the next year (or two) to implement the major proposals?
e. What specific steps must be taken within the next six months to implement the
major proposals, and who is responsible? (Brayson, 1995, p.139)

8. Reviewing and adopting the strategic plan: the plan should then be shared as widely
as possible throughout the organization, ideally at briefing sessions where it can be
discussed and the process celebrated.

9. Developing an effective implementation process: the keys to successful

implementation of the plan are the commitment of all key internal stakeholders and a
detailed action plan that is clear to all and for which responsible persons are assigned,
necessary resources commitments, and clear connections between strategies and daily
operations.

10. Monitoring and updating the plan on a regular basis: in monitoring the strategic
plan, first, stay focused on what is important; the mission and mandate of the
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organization. Second assign a review group to identify strategies or action plans that
may need to be modified. For organizations to succeed, they need ways to translate
vision, values, and purposes into action, which is the role of strategy. Formulating
strategy is the hard, serious work of taking a specific step toward the future. Strategic
Management is the set of decisions and actions used to formulate and implement
specific strategies that will achieve a competitively superior fit between the
organization and its environment so as to achieve organizational goals. It is the leader’s
role to find this fit and translate it into action.

Strategy formulation integrates knowledge of the environment, vision, and mission with
the company’s core competence in a way to achieve synergy and create value for
customers. When these elements are brought together, the company has an excellent
chance to succeed in a competitive environment.
Strategy can be defined as the general plan of action that describes resource allocation and
other activities for dealing with the environment and helping the organization attain its
goals. Asking questions such as “where is the organization now? Where does the
organization want to be? What changes and trends are occurring in the competitive
environment what courses of actions can help us achieve our vision?” are fundamental in
strategy formulation.
Core Competence: is something the organization does extremely well in comparison to
competitors. Leaders try to identify the organization’s unique strengths-what makes their
organization different from others in the industry.
Synergy: occurs when organizational parts interact to produce a joint effect that is greater
than the sum of the parts acting alone. As a result the organization may attain a special
advantage with respect to cost, market power, technology, or employee skills. Synergy can
be also obtained by good relations between suppliers and customers and by strong
alliances between companies. Such collaboration helps members to share resources, skills,
equipment, customer lists, and other information that enables each member to go after
more business that it ever could without the team approach.
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Value Creation: focusing on core competencies and attaining synergy helps companies
create value for their customers. Value can be defined as the combination of benefits
received and costs paid by the customer. A product that is low cost but does not provide
benefits is not a good value.
In summary,

 Strategic management is the process of creating and implementing strategies to

achieve long-term objectives.
 Corporate strategy sets the direction for an entire organization: business strategy
sets the direction for a business division or product/service; functional strategy sets
the direction for the operational support of business and corporate strategies.
 The four grand or master strategies are growth to pursue expansion, retrenchment
to scale back operations, stability to maintain the status quo, and combination to
utilize various aspects of growth, retrenchment, and stability.
 Strategies must support organizational mission and objectives.
 All managers are responsible for strategic management within their areas of
supervisory responsibilities.
 All management practices and systems-including the functions of planning,
organizing, leading, and controlling-must be mobilized to support strategy
implementation.
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THE PERSONAL SIDE OF LEADERSHIP

(Daft, 1999, pp 333-355; Dubrin, 2001, pp59-85)
Charismatic, Transactional, and Transformational Leadership
Charismatic Leadership
Charisma is a Greek word meaning divinely inspired gift. Charisma is difficult to define, but
involves mental and emotional intensity. It has been called “a fire that ignites followers’
energy and commitment, producing results above and beyond the call of duty”. In the study
of leadership, Charisma is a special quality of leaders whose purposes, powers, and
extraordinary determination differentiate them from others. It is a positive and compelling
quality of a person that makes many others what to be led by him/her. The following are
some of the definition of Charisma and Charismatic Leadership
 a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he or she is set apart
from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at
least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.
 A devotion to the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of a
n individual person, and of the normative pattern revealed or ordained by that person
 Endowment with the gift of divine grace.
 The process of influencing major changes in the attitudes and assumptions of
organization members, and building commitment for the organization’s objectives.
 Leadership that has a magnetic effect on people
 In combination with individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, and
inspirational leadership, a component of transformational leadership.

Charismatic leaders work deliberately at cultivating the relationship with group members
through impression management. In other works, they take steps to create a favorable,
successful impression. William L. Gardner and Bruce J. Avolio gave the following two
interpretations to explain how charismatic leaders use impression management to remain
charismatic to their constituents.
1. Charismatic leaders, to a greater extent than non-charismatic leaders, value and pursue
an interrelated set of images-trustworthy, credible, morally worthy, innovative,
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esteemed, and powerful. Constructing and maintaining these images in the minds of
followers is essential for the leader’s charismatic image.
2. Charismatic leaders, to a greater extent than non-charismatic leaders, use the assertive
impression management strategies of exemplification and promotion to secure and
maintain desired identity image of their selves, vision, and organization.
Charismatic leadership is possible under certain condition. The beliefs of the constituents
must be similar to those of the leaders, and unquestioning acceptance of and affection for
the leader must exist. The group members must willingly obey the leader, and they must be
emotionally involved both in the mission of the charismatic leader and in their own goals.
Finally, the constituents must have a strong desire to identify with the leader.
The Effects of Charisma as defined by theory of Charismatic leadership:

Effects of Charisma (Robert J. House’s) Dimensions of Charisma (Jane

A. Halpert)

1. Similarity of group members’ beliefs to those of the Referent power (ability to

leader influence others because of the
2. Identification with and emulation of the leader leader’s desirable traits and
3. Affection for the leader characteristics)

4. Group member trust in the correctness of the Expert power (ability to

leader’s beliefs influence others because of
5. Unquestioning acceptance of the leader one’s specialized knowledge,
6. Willing obedience to the leader skills or abilities)

7. Emotional involvement of the group members or Job involvement (perceptions

constituents in the mission related to task or mission. Job
8. Heightened goals of the group members related effects are concerned
9. Feeling on the part of group members that they will with job involvement)
be able to accomplish or contribute to, the
accomplishment of the mission.
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In summary, the nine charismatic effects in Houses’ theory can be reduced to three
dimensions: referent power, expert power and job involvement. Such information is useful
for the aspiring charismatic leader. To be a charismatic, one must exercise referent power
and expert power and must get people involved in their jobs.
Types of charismatic leaders:
Charismatic leaders can be categorized into five types.
1. A socialized charismatic is a leader who restrains the use of power in order to benefit
others. This type of leader also attempts to develop value congruence between himself
or herself and constituents. The socialized charismatic formulates and pursues goals
that fulfill the needs of group members and provide intellectual stimulation to them.
Followers of socialized charismatics are autonomous, empowered, and responsible.
2. A personalized charismatic. This type of individual exercises few restraints on their use
of power so they may best serve their own interests. Personalized charismatics impose
self-serving goals on constituents, and they offer consideration and support to group
members only when it facilitates their own goals. Followers of personalized
charismatics are typically obedient, submissive, and dependent.
3. The Office-holder charismatic. For this type of leader, charismatic leadership is more a
property of the office occupied than of his or her personal characteristics. By occupying
a valuable role, office-holder charismatic attain high status. Office-holder charisma is
thus a byproduct of being placed in a key position.
4. Personal charismatics. This type of leader gain very high esteem through the extent to
which others have faith in them as people. A personal charismatic exerts influence
whether he or she occupies a low-or high-status position because he or she has the
right traits, characteristics, and behavior.
5. The divine charismatic. Originally, charismatic leadership was a theological concept: A
divine charismatic is endowed with a gift of divine grace. In 1924 Max Weber defined a
charismatic leader as a mystical, narcissistic, and personally magnetic savior who
would arise to lead people through a crisis.
Some characteristics of charismatic leaders
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1. They are visionary because they offer an exciting image of where the organization is
headed and how to get there
2. Have masterful communication skills. They use colorful languages to inspire people and
exciting metaphors and analogies.
3. Have the ability to inspire trust. Constituencies believe so strongly in the integrity of
charismatic leaders that they will risk their career’s to pursue the chief’s vision.
4. They are able to make group members capable. One technique for helping group
members feel more capable is to enable them to achieve success on relatively easy
projects. The leader then praises the group members and gives them more demanding
assignment.
5. Have an energy and action orientation. Like entrepreneurs, most charismatic leaders
are energetic and serve as role models for getting things done on time.
6. Have emotional expression and warmth. They have the ability to express feelings
openly. Non verbal emotional expressiveness, such as warm gestures and frequent (non
sexual) touching of group members, is also their characteristics.
7. They romanticize risk. They enjoy risk so much that they feel empty in its absence. As
great opportunists, charismatic people yearn to accomplish activities others have never
done before. Risk taking adds to a person’s charisma because others admire such
courage. They use unconventional strategies to achieve success.
8. Have a self-promoting personality. They frequently tool their own horn and allow
others to know how important they are.
9. They challenge, prod, and poke. They test your courage and your self-confidence.

Concerns About Charismatic Leadership

Does charisma result effective leadership or people who are outstanding leaders are
granted charisma (perceived as charismatic) by their constituents as a result of their
success?
The concept of charismatic leadership has been challenged from two major stand points:
the validity of the concept, and the misdeeds of charismatic leaders. Charisma can be a
curse as well as a blessing. Leaders such as Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and
 77

Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King exhibited tremendous charisma. So did leaders such
as Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, and Idi Amin, Mengistu H/Mariam. Charisma is not always
used to benefit the group, organization, or society. It can also be used for self serving
purposes, which leaders to deception, manipulation, and exploitation of others.

Transactional Leadership
This is an exchange process between the leader and followers. The whole effort of the
leader is to address the needs of employees so that in exchange they will work to achieve
performance goals of the organization. Followers receive rewards for their achievement
and leaders benefit from the completion of tasks. Leadership is a series of economic and
social transactions to achieve specific goals. Transactional leaders are good at traditional
management functions of planning, budgeting, controlling and attaining organizational
mission and goal. They are good at meeting follower’s expectation, building confidence of
followers, improving productivity and morale. However, since their motto is commitment
to “follow-the rules” transactional leaders often maintain stability within the organization
rather than promoting change. Transactional skills are important for all leaders, but when
an organization needs change, a different type of leadership is needed.

Transformational Leadership
The focus on transformational leadership is on what the leader accomplishes, rather than
on the leader’s personal characteristics and relationship with group members. The
transformational leader helps bring about major, positive changes. To explain further, the
transformational leader moves group members beyond their self-interests for the good of
the group, organization, or society. In contrast, transactional leader focuses on more
routine transactions with an emphasis on rewarding group members for meeting
standards (contingent reinforcement).
Transformational leaders have the ability to lead changes in the organization’s vision,
strategy, and culture as well as promote innovation in products and technologies. They do
not use tangible incentives to control specific transactions with followers. Instead, they
focus on intangible qualities such as vision, shared values, and ideas in order to build
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relationships, give larger meaning to diverse activities, and find common ground to enlist
followers in the change process. Transformational leadership is based on the personal
values, beliefs, and qualities of the leader rather than on an exchange process between
leaders and followers. They differ from transactional leadership in four significant areas.
1. Transformational leadership develops followers into leaders. Followers have the freedom
to control their own behavior. The leader rallies people around a mission and defined
the boundaries within which followers can operate in relative freedom to accomplish
organizational goals. Followers are motive to take initiatives and solve problems and to
look at things in new ways.
2. Transformational leadership elevates followers’ concerns from lower-level physical needs
(such as for safety and security) to higher-level psychological needs (such as for self-
esteem and self-actualization). It is important that followers’ lower level needs are met
through adequate wages, safe working conditions, and other consideration. The
transformational leader pays attention to each individual’s need for growth and
development. The leader sets examples and speaks to followers’ higher needs.
Followers’ abilities are challenged and linked to the organization’s mission.
Transformational leader appeal to followers in a way that challenges and empowers
them to change the organization.
3. Transformational leadership inspires followers to go beyond their own self-interests for
the good of the group. Transformational leadership motivates the group to do more than
originally expected. Followers admire leaders, identify with them, and have a high
degree of trust in them. However, transformational leadership motivates people not to
follow the leader personally but to believe in the need for change and be willing to
make personal sacrifices for the greater purpose.
4. Transformational leadership paints a vision of a desired future state and communicates it
in a way that makes the pain of change worth the effort. The most significant role may be
to find a transformation vision that is significantly better than the old way, and to enlist
others in achieving the dream. It is vision that launches people into action and engages
the commitment of followers. Change can occur when people have a sense of purpose as
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well as a desirable picture of where the organization is going. Without vision, there will
be no transformation.

How does transformation take place?

The Eight Stage Model of Planned Organizational Change
1. Leaders establish a sense of urgency that change is really needed. Crisis or threats will
thaw resistance to change. Leaders assess external and internal environment of the
organization. After identifying potential crises or problems, they find ways to
communicate the information broadly and dramatically.
2. Establishing a coalition with enough power to guide the change process and then
developing a sense of team work among the group. For the change process to succeed
there must be a shared commitment to the need and possibilities for organizational
transformation.
3. Developing a vision and strategy. Leaders are responsible for formulating and
articulating a compelling vision that will guide the change effort, and developing the
strategies for achieving that vision. A ‘picture’ of a highly desirable future motivates
people to change.
4. Leaders take every means possible to communicate the vision and strategy. At this stage,
the coalition of change agents should set an example by modeling the new behaviors
needed from employees. Transformation is impossible unless a majority of people in
the organization are involved and willing to help, often to the point of making personal
sacrifices.
5. Empowering employees throughout the organization to act on the vision. This means
getting rid of obstacles to change, which may require revising systems, structures, or
procedures that hinder or undermine the change effort. People are empowered with the
knowledge, resources, and discretion to make things happen.
6. Leaders generate short-term wins. Leaders plan for visible performance improvements,
enable them to happen, and celebrate employees who were involved in the
improvements. Major change takes time, and a transformation effort loses momentum if
there are no short-term accomplishments that employees can recognize and celebrate.
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7. Builds on the credibility achieved by short-term wins to consolidate improvements, tackle

bigger problems, and create greater change. Leaders change systems, structures, and
policies that do not fit the vision but have not yet been confronted. They hire, promote,
and develop employees who can implement the vision for change.
8. Institutionalizing the new approaches in the organizational culture. This is the follow
through stage that makes the change stick. Old habits, values, traditions, and mind-sets
are permanently replaced. New values and beliefs are instilled in the culture so that
employees view the changes not as something new but as a normal and integral part of
how the organization operates.

What are the focuses of change?

1. Strategy and structure change; policies, reward systems, coordination, control systems
and so forth in addition to the structure or strategic focus.
2. Technology change; production processes including knowledge and skill base, that
enable distinctive competence. It includes change in work methods, equipment, and
work flow designed to make production more efficient or to produce greater volume.
3. Product and service change; new products and services are designed to increase market
share and develop new markets.
4. Culture change; values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs, and behaviors of employees.

1. Raising people’s awareness: transformational leader makes groups members aware

about the need for change and the rewards accompanying these changes.
2. Helping people look beyond self-interest. Helps group members to look the ‘bigger
picture’ for the sake of the team and the organization
3. Helping people search for self-fulfillment. Helping group members go beyond a focus on
minor satisfactions to a quest for self-fulfillment.
4. Helping people understand the need for change. Change may demand dislocation and
discomfort. But the transformational leader must understand this emotional
component to resisting change and deals with it openly. Must help people to become
unhooked from the past.
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5. Investing managers with a sense of urgency. To create the transformation, the leader
assembles a critical mass of managers and imbues in them the urgency of change. The
managers must also share the top leader’s vision of what is both necessary and
achievable.
6. Committing to greatness. By adopting the greatness attitude, leaders can ennoble
human nature and strengthen societies. Greatness encompasses striving for
effectiveness, efficiency and business success.
7. Adopting a long range perspective and at the same time observing organizational issues
from a broad rather than a narrow perspective. The leader helps people to have future
orientation so that transformation can take place.
There are four key qualities of transformational leaders. (Dubrin, 2001)
1. They are charismatic. They have a vision and a sense of mission, and they have the
respect, confidence, and loyalty of group members. As a result of experiencing a bond
of identification with such leaders, many group members have faith, pride, enthusiasm,
and a trust in what they are attempting to accomplish.
2. They practice inspirational leadership. By giving emotional support and making
emotional appeals, transformational leaders inspire group members to exceed their
initial expectations.
3. They provide intellectual stimulation. Encouraging group members to examine old
problems or methods in new ways. The transformational leader creates an atmosphere
that encourages creative thinking and intuition. At the same time, emphasizes
methodical problem solving, rethinking, reexamining assumptions, and the use of
careful reasoning rather than giving unsupported opinions. The net result of intellectual
stimulation is that group members are willing to submit even fanciful ideas.
4. Demonstrate individualized considerations by giving personal attention to group
members. Employees are treated as individuals and receive special attention regarding
their individual concerns. The transformational leader invests in one-on-one
communication with group members and listens to them carefully, thereby helping
them to feel respected. The leader emphasizes the personal development of group
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members by such thing as taking to them about career goals and developmental
opportunities.
Leadership Mind:
The leader’s mind can be developed beyond the non-leader in five critical areas:
1. Independent thinking: means questioning assumptions and interpreting data and
events according to one’s own beliefs, ideas, and thinking, not according to pre-
established rules, routines, or categories defined by others. People who think
independently are willing to stand apart, to have opinions, to say what they think, and
to determine a course of action based on what they personally believe rather than on
what other people think. To think independently means staying mentally alert, thinking
critically, being mindful rather than mindless. Mindfulness can be defined as the
process of continuously reevaluating previously learned ways of doing things in the
context of evolving information and shifting circumstances.
2. Open mindedness: open-mindedness. One approach to independent thinking is to try to
break out of the mental boxes, the categorized thinking patterns we have been
conditioned to accept as correct. Mind potential is released when we open up to new
ideas and multiple perspectives, when we can get outside our mental box. Leaders have
to forget many of their conditioned ideas to be open to new ones. This openness-putting
aside preconceptions and suspending beliefs and opinions- can be referred to as
“beginner’s mind”. Whereas the expert’s mind rejects new ideas based on past
experience and knowledge, the beginner’s mind reflects the openness and innocence of
a young child just learning about the world. Effective leaders strive to keep open minds
and cultivate an organizational environment that encourages curiosity.
3. Systems thinking: means seeing patterns in the organizational whole instead of just the
parts, and learning to reinforce or change systems patterns. Traditional managers have
been trained to solve problems by breaking things down into discreet pieces, and the
success of each piece is believed to add up to the success of the whole. Systems’
thinking enables leaders to look for patterns of movement over time and focus on the
qualities of rhythms, flow, direction, shape, and networks of relationships that
accomplish the work of an organization. Systems’ thinking is a mental discipline and
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framework for seeing patterns and interrelationships. An important element of systems

thinking is to discern circles of causality. It is argued that reality is made up of circles
rather than straight lines. The other element of systems thinking is learning to influence
the system with reinforcing feedback as an engine for growth or decline.
4. Mental models: are the deep-seated assumptions, beliefs, blind spots, biases, and
prejudices that determine how leaders make sense of the world. Mental models govern
the actions leaders take in response to situations. Someone who has the assumption
that people are untrustworthy will act very differently in a situation than someone who
assumes people are trustworthy. When leaders are not aware of their own biases and
mental models, they have the potential to make serious mistakes. In a time of rapid
change, many leaders are still trapped in mental models based on circumstances that no
longer exist. To help organizations survive in today’s rapidly changing global
environment, leaders have to break out of outdated mental models or paradigms.
5. Personal mastery: Peter Senge uses the term personal mastery to describe the
discipline of personal growth and learning, of mastering yourself in a way that
facilitates your leadership and achieves desired results. Organizations can grow and
learn only when the people who make up the organization are growing and learning.
Personal mastery embodies three qualities-- personal vision, facing reality, and holding
creative tension.
First: leaders engaged in personal mastery know and clarify what is important to them.
They have clear vision of a desired future, and their purpose is to achieve that future. One
element of personal mastery, then, is the discipline of continually focusing and defining
what one wants as their desired future and vision.
Two: facing reality means a commitment to the truth. Leaders are relentless in uncovering
the mental model that limit and deceive themselves and are willing to challenge
assumptions and way of doing things. These leaders are committed to the truth and will
break through denial of reality in themselves and others. Their quest for truth leads to a
deeper awareness of themselves and of the larger systems and events within which they
operate. This increases the opportunity to achieve the desired results.
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Third: often there is wide gap between one’s vision and the current situation. The gap
between the desired future and today’s reality can be discouraging. But the gap is the
source of creative energy. Acknowledging and living with the disparity between the truth
and the vision, and facing it squarely, is the source of resolve and creativity to move
forward. The effective leader resolves the tension by letting the vision pull reality toward it,
in other words by reorganizing current activities to work toward the vision. The less
effective way is to let reality pull the vision downward toward it. This means lowering the
vision, such as walking away from a problem or settling for less than desired. Settling for
less releases the tension, but also engenders mediocrity. Leaders with personal mastery
learn to accept both the dream and the reality simultaneously.
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Motivation and Empowerment

The complex webs of factors that motivate our work efforts are as varied as our
occupations. The term motivation refers to a psychological process that gives behavior
purpose and direction. It refers to the forces either internal or external to a person that
arouse enthusiasm and persistence to pursue a certain course of action. Employee
motivation affects productivity, and so part of a leader’s job is to channel followers’
motivation toward the accomplishment of the organization’s vision and goals. By appealing
to this process, managers attempt to get individuals to pursue organizational objectives
willingly. Motivation theories are generalizations about the “why” and “how” of purposeful
behavior.

Job performance is the product of a combination of an individual’s motivation and ability.

Both are necessary. All the motivation in the world, for example, will not enable a
computer-illiterate person to sit down and create a computer spreadsheet. Ability and
skills, acquired through training and/or on-the-job experience, are also required. The
individual’s motivational factors –needs, satisfaction, expectations, and goals- are affected
by challenging work, rewards, and participation.

People have basic needs, such as for food, recognition, or monetary gain, that translates
into an internal tension that motivates specific behaviors with which to fulfill the need. To
the extent that the behavior is successful, the person is rewarded when the need is
satisfied. The reward also informs the person that the behavior was appropriate and can be
used again in the future.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards:

Intrinsic rewards: are internal satisfactions a person receives in the process of performing
a particular action. An intrinsic reward is internal and under the control of the individual,
such as to engage in task behavior to satisfy a need for competency and self determination.
Intrinsic rewards appeal to the “higher” needs of individuals, such as accomplishment,
competence, fulfillment, and self-determination.
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Extrinsic reward: are given by another person, typically a supervisor and include
promotions and pay increases. Because they originate externally as a result of pleasing
others, extrinsic rewards compel individuals to engage in a task behavior for an outside
source that provides what they need, such as money to survive in modern society. Extrinsic
rewards appeal to the “lower” needs of individuals, such as material comfort and basic
safety and security.
Rewards can be provided system wide or on an individual basis. System wide rewards
apply the same to every individual within the organization or department. Individual
rewards may differ among people within the same organization or department. Extrinsic
system-wide reward could be insurance benefits or vacation time. An intrinsic system-wide
reward would be the sense of pride that comes from within by virtue of contributing to a
“winning” organization.

Leaders often try to motivate others by providing them with the opportunity to satisfy
higher needs, and thus become intrinsically rewarded. The source of an intrinsic reward is
internal to the follower. When leaders empower followers, that is, allow them freedom to
determine their own actions, subordinates reward themselves intrinsically for good
performances. They may become creative, innovative, and develop a greater commitment
to their objectives.

Theories of Motivation:
Need Theories:
1. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs Theory: In 1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow
proposed that people are motivated by a predictable five-step hierarchy of needs.
Humans are motivated by multiple needs and those needs exist in a hierarchical order,
where in the higher needs cannot be satisfied until the lower needs are met. Little did
he realize at the time that his tentative proposal, based on an extremely limited clinical
study of neurotic patients would become one of the most influential concepts in the
field of management. The five hierarchy of motivating needs are:
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a. Physiological needs: the most basic physiological needs include food, water, sleep
and sex. In the organizational setting, these are reflected in the needs for
adequate heat, air, and base salary to ensure survival. Fulfillment of these lowest
level needs enables the individual to survive, and nothing else is important when
these bodily needs have not been satisfied. As Maslow observed “It is quite true
that man lives by bread alone_ when there is no bread”.
b. Safety Needs: next is the need for a safety and secure physical and emotional
environment and freedom from threats- that is, for freedom from violence and
for an orderly society. In an organizational work place, safety needs reflect the
needs for safe jobs, fringe benefits, and job security.
c. Belongingness or Love Needs: People have a desire to be accepted by their peers,
have friendships, be part of a group, and belived. People strive hard to achieve a
sense of belonging with others. In the organization, these needs influence the
desire for good relationships with coworkers, participation in a work team, and
a positive relationship with supervisors.
d. Esteem Needs: The need for esteem relates to the desire for a positive self-image
and for attention, recognition, and appreciation from others. Within
organizations, esteem needs reflect a motivation for recognition, an increase in
responsibility, high status, and credit for contributions to the organization.
e. Self-Actualization Needs: The highest need category, self-actualization,
represents the need for self-fulfillment; developing one’s full potential,
increasing one’s competence, and becoming a better person. Self-Actualization
needs can be met in the organization by providing people with the opportunities
to grow, be empowered and creative, and acquire training for challenging
assignments and advancement.
The self-actualizing manager can have the following characteristics:
 Has warmth, closeness, and sympathy
 Recognizes and shares negative information and feelings.
 Exhibits trust, openness, and candor
 Does not achieve goals by power, deception, or manipulation
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 Does not project own feelings, motivations, or blame onto others

 Does not limit horizons; uses and develops body, mind, and senses
 Is not rationalistic; can think in unconventional ways
 Is not conforming; regulates behavior from within

2. Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory: during the 1950’s Frederick Herzberg

proposed a theory of employee motivation based on satisfaction. His theory implied
that a satisfied employee is motivated from within to work harder and that a
dissatisfied employee is not motivated. He believed that two entirely separate
dimensions contribute to an employee’s behavior at work:
a. Hygiene factors; the presence or absence of job dis-satisfiers, such as working
conditions, pay, company policies, and interpersonal relationships. When
hygiene factors are poor work is dissatisfying. Hygiene factors work in the area
of lower level needs, and their absence causes dissatisfaction. Unsafe working
environment or a noisy working environment will cause people to be
dissatisfied.
b. Motivators fulfill high level needs and include achievement, recognition,
responsibility and opportunity for growth. Higher level motivators such as
challenge, responsibility, and recognition must be in place before employees will
be highly motivated to excel at their work. The implication of the two factor
theory for leaders is clear. The leader’s role is to go beyond the removal of
dissatisfiers to the use of motivators to meet higher level needs.
3. Acquired Needs Theory (David McClelland): The acquired needs theory proposes that
certain types of needs are acquired during an individual’s lifetime. People are not born
with these needs but may learn them through their life experiences.
a. Need for achievement: the desire to accomplish something difficult, attain a high
standard of success, master complex tasks, and surpass others.
b. Need for affiliation: the desire to form close personal relationships, avoid
conflict, and establish warm friendship
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c. Need for power: the desire to influence or control others, be responsible for
others, and have authority over others. Need based theories all focus on
underlying needs that motivate how people behave.
4. Reinforcement Perspective on Motivation: Reinforcement theory simply looks at the
relationship between behavior and its consequences by changing or modifying
followers’ on the job behavior through appropriate use of immediate rewards or
punishment. Behavior Modification is the name given to the set of techniques by which
reinforcement theory is used to modify behavior. The basic assumption underlying
behavior modification is the law of effect, which states that positively reinforced
behavior tends to be repeated, and behavior that is not reinforcement tends not to be
repeated. Tools of reinforcement include:
a. Positive reinforcement
b. Punishment
c. Extinction
5. Expectancy Theory: is a motivation model based on the assumption that motivational
strength is determined by perceived probabilities of success. Expectancy refers to the
subjective probability (or expectation) that one thing will lead to another.
The expectancy theory of motivation is based on the premise that the amount of effort
people expend depends on how much reward they expect to get in return. In addition to
being broad, the theory deals with cognition and process. Expectancy theory is
cognitive because it emphasizes the thoughts, judgments, and desires of the person
being motivated. It is a process theory because it attempts to explain how motivation
takes place.

According to the theory, in any given situation, people want to maximize gain and
minimize loss. People choose among alternatives by selecting the one they think they
have the best chance of attaining. Furthermore, they choose the alternative that appears
to have the biggest personal payoff. Given a choice, people will select the assignment
that they think they can handle the best and that will benefit them the most.
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Expectancy theory is based on the relationship among the individual’s effort, the
possibility of high performance, and the desirability of outcomes following high
performance. A leader’s responsibility is to help followers meet their needs while
attaining organizational goals. To increase motivation, leaders can increase followers’
expectancy by clarifying individual needs, providing the desired outcomes, and
ensuring that individuals have the ability and support needed to attain their desired
outcomes.
Expectancy theory has three basic components: valence, instrumentality, and
expectancy. All the three elements must be present for motivation to take place. To be
motivated, people must value the reward, think they can perform, and have reasonable
assurance that performance will lead to a reward.
 Valence: the worth or attractiveness of an outcome is referred to as valence. An
outcome is anything that might stem from performance, such as reward. Each
outcome has a valence of its own. And each outcome can lead to other outcomes
or consequences, referred to as second-level outcomes. A person who receives
an outstanding performance appraisal (a first level outcome) becomes eligible
for a promotion (second level outcome).
 Instrumentality: The probability assigned by the individual that performance
will lead to certain outcomes is referred to as instrumentality. (An
instrumentality is also referred to as a performance-to-outcome expectancy
because it relates to the outcome people expect from performing in a certain
way). When people engage in a particular behavior, they do so with the intention
of achieving a desired outcome or reward.
 Expectancy: The probability assigned by the individual that effort will lead to
correct performance of the task is referred to as expectancy. (The same concept
is also referred to as effort-to-performance expectancy). An important question
people ask themselves before putting forth effort to accomplish a task is, “If I put
in all this work, will I really get the job done properly?” Expectancies thus
influence whether a person will even strive to earn a reward. Self-confident
people have higher expectancies than do less self-confident people. Being well
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trained increases a person’s subjective hunch that he or she can perform the
task.
The importance of having high expectancies for motivation meshes well with a
new thrust in work motivation that emphasizes the contribution of self-efficacy,
the confidence in your ability to carry out a specific task. If you have high self-
efficacy about the task, your motivation will be high.

Environment Outcome

Performance Outcome Valence of

Effort
Expectancy Instrumentality outcome

Ability Outcome

Implication of expectancy theory for leaders and managers with respect to

motivating others:
1. Determine what level and kinds of performance are needed to achieve
organizational goals
2. Make performance level attainable by the individuals being motivated
3. Train and encourage people
4. Make explicit the link between rewards and performance
5. Make sure rewards are large enough
6. Analyze what factors work in opposition to the effectiveness of the reward
7. Explain the meaning and implications of second-level outcomes
8. Understand individual differences in valences.
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6. Goal-Setting Theory: Goal setting is a basic process that is directly or indirectly part of
all major theories of work motivation. A vision, for example, is really an exalted goal.
The core finding of goal setting theory is that individuals who are provided with specific
hard goals perform better than those who are given easy, nonspecific, “do your best”
goals or no goals. The premise underlying goal-setting theory is that behavior is
regulated by values and goals. A goal is what a person is trying to accomplish.
Specific goals lead to higher performance than do generalized goals. Tolling someone to
“do your best” is a generalized goal. Another key point is that performance generally
improves in direct proportion to goal difficulty. The harder one’s goal, the more one
accomplishes. In order to improve performance, goals need to be:
 Specific
 Hard but realistic
 Accepted by the person
 Used to evaluate performance
 Linked to feedback and rewards
 Set by individuals or groups
 Learning oriented,
Goals motivate employees by:
 Directing attention: directs one’s attention to a specific purpose
 Encouraging effort: a goal encourages one to exert effort toward achieving
something specific
 Encouraging persistence: a challenging goal requires sustained or repeated
effort, it encourages persistence
 Fostering goal attainment strategies and action plans: because goal creates the
problem of bridging the gap between actual and desired, it fosters the creation of
strategies and action plans.
7. Behavior modification and Motivational Skills: Behavior modification is a well-known
system of motivation, is an attempt to change behavior by manipulating rewards and
punishment. Behavior modification stems directly from reinforcement theory. The
underlying principle of behavior modification is the law of effect: behavior that leads to
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a positive consequence for the individual tends to be repeated. In contrast, behavior

that leads to a negative consequence tends not to be repeated.
Rules for the use of behavior modification
1. Target the desired behavior. An effective program of behavior modification begins with
specifying the desired behavior-that which will be rewarded.
2. Choose an appropriate reward or punishment. An appropriate reward or punishment is
one that is
a. Effective in motivating a given group member or group
b. Feasible from the company standpoint
3. Supply ample feedback
4. Do not give everyone the same size reward
5. Find some constructive behavior to reinforce.
6. Schedule reward intermittently
7. Rewards and punishments should follow the behavior closely in time
8. Change the reward periodically
9. Make the rewards visible and the punishment known

The carrot and stick controversy

Despite the testimonies of numerous organizations that enjoy incentives programs, the
arguments against the efficacy of carrot and stick method are growing. Critics argue that
extrinsic rewards are neither adequate nor productive motivators and may even work
against the best interest of organizations. The reasons for this criticism include the
following:
1. Extrinsic rewards diminish intrinsic rewards
2. Extrinsic rewards are temporary
3. Extrinsic rewards assume people are driven by lower needs
4. Organizations are too complex for carrot and stick approaches
5. Carrot and stick approaches destroy people’s motivation to work as a group.

Empowerment
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Empowerment is power sharing, the delegation of power or authority to subordinates in

the organization. In addition to delegating power, leaders can provide subordinates with
the knowledge of how their jobs are relevant to the organization’s performance and
mission. This connection between job and mission gives subordinates a direction within
which to act.

Reasons for Empowering

1. Empowerment provides strong motivation because it meets the higher needs of
individuals. Individuals have a need for self-efficacy, which is the capacity to produce
results or outcomes, to feel they are effective. Most people come into an organization
with the desire to do a good job, and empowerment enables leaders to release the
motivation already there.
2. Empowerment actually increases the total amount of power in an organization: leaders
share power to create a bigger overall power base.
3. Leaders benefit from the additional capabilities employees participation brings to the
organization: leaders can devote more time to vision and the bigger picture.
Empowerment also takes the pressure off because subordinates are able to respond
quicker and better to the markets they serve.

Elements of Empowerment
1. Employee receive information about company performance
2. Employees receive knowledge and skills (training) to contribute to company goals:
knowledge and skills lead to competency- the belief that one is capable of
accomplishing one’s job successfully.
3. Employees have power to make substantive decisions: many of today’s most
competitive companies are giving workers the power to influence work procedures and
organizational direction through quality circles and self-directed work teams.
4. Employees understand the meaning and impact of their job: Empowered employees
consider their jobs important and personally meaningful and see themselves as
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influential in their work roles. It enables employees to fit their actions to the vision and
have an active influence upon the outcome of their work.
5. Employees are rewarded based on company performance: Employees can be financially
rewarded based on company performance through profit sharing and employee stock
ownership plans. Contrary to the controversial carrot and stick plans, these rewards
focus on the performance of the group rather than individuals. Furthermore, rewards
are just one component of empowerment, rather than the sole basis of motivation.
In empowering employees further, organization-wide motivational programs can be
adopted against the carrot and stick plan controversy:
 Employee ownership (share and stock ownership) so that they feel owners rather
than employees
 Pay for knowledge; employees are motivated to gain more skills to increase their
salaries
 Gain sharing: method of encouraging team work among employees by rewarding
groups for reaching productivity improvement
 Job enrichment: engagement of employees in diversified activities and assignments
and perform a wide range of tasks.
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Coaching and Mentoring as Leadership Philosophy

Coaching is a way of enabling other to act and to build on their strengths. To coach is to
care enough about people to invest time in building personal relationships with them. The
organization also benefits from coaching because it can lead to a competitive advantage,
based on the elevated productivity of many of the workers who are coached.

Coaching is a paradigm shift from traditional management, which focuses heavily on

control, order, and compliance. Coaching in contrast focuses on uncovering actions that
enable people to contribute more fully and productively.
 Coaching is a comprehensive and distinctive way of being linked to others in the
organization. Mentoring is one example of this unique relationship. Protégés are
inspired to greater achievement partially because of the quality of their relationship
with their mentors.
 Coaching is a dyad-like leader-group member, or director/actor, it cannot exist without
at least two participants.
 Coaching requires a high degree of interpersonal risk and trust on the part of both
people in the relationship. The coach might give the person being coached wrong
advice. Or the person being coached might reject the coach’s encouragement.
 A key advantage of coaching is that it generates new possibilities for action and
facilitates breakthroughs in performance.
 Good coaching fosters high motivation. And effective coach keeps up the spirit and
administers praise and recognition frequently.
 Good coaching also leads to personal development. Members are encouraged to cross-
train and serve as backup for each other.
 Good coaching improves group performance. Effective coach makes team members
aware of one another’s skills and hot these skills can contribute to attaining the group’s
goals.

Fallacies about Coaching

 Coaching only applies in one-to-one work
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 Coaching is about providing new knowledge and skills. The truth is that people often
need more help with underlying habits than with knowledge and skills. Good example is
coaching someone about time management.
 Another stereotype deals with an important ethical issue: If coaches go beyond giving
instruction in knowledge and skills, they are in danger of getting into psychotherapy.
The counter argument is that coaches should simply follow the model of effective
parents. This involves listening to the other person, attempting to understand his or her
real concerns, and offering support and encouragement.
 Coaches need to be expert in something in order to coach. To use a sports analogy, a
good coach doesn’t have to be or have been an outstanding athlete. An important role
for the coach is to ask pertinent questions and listen. Questioning and listening can help
the other person set realistic learning goals.

Coaching skills and Techniques:

 Communicate clear expectation to group members. For people to perform well and to
continue to learn and grow, they need a clear perception of what is expected of them.
 Focus on specific areas that require improvement. To coach a group member toward
higher levels of performance, the leader pinpoints what specific behavior, attitude, or
skill requires improvement. Another important point about giving specific feedback is
to avoid generalities and exaggerations.
 Listen actively. An active listener tries to grasp both facts and feelings. Observing group
members’ non verbal communication is another part of active listening. The leader
must also be patient and not poised for a rebuttal of any difference of opinion between
him or her and the group members. Part of being a good listener is encouraging the
person being coached to talk about his or her performance.
 Help remove obstacles. This may refer to removing obstacles such as a maze of rules and
regulations and rigid budgeting. An important role for the leader of an organizational
unit or team is to be a “barrier buster.” A leader/manager is often in a better position
than a group member to gain approval from a higher-level manager, find money from
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another budget line, expedite a purchase order, or authorize hiring a temporary worker
to provide assistance.
 Give emotional support. By being helpful and constructive, the leader provides much-
needed emotional support to the group member who is not performing at his or best.
 Reflect content or meaning. An effective way of reflecting meaning is to rephrase and
summarize concisely what the group member is saying.
 Give some gentle advice and guidance. Too much advice giving interferes with two-way
communication, yet some advice can elevate performance.
 Allow for modeling of desired performance and behavior. A good coaching is to show
group members by example what constitutes the desired behavior.
 Gain a commitment to change
 Applaud good results. Good coaches give positive reinforcement by applauding good
results

Mentoring
Another experience-based way to develop leadership capability is to be coached by an
experienced, knowledgeable leader. Quite often this person is a mentor, a more
experienced person who develops a protégé’s abilities through tutoring, coaching,
guidance, and emotional support. The mentor, a trusted counselor and guide, is typically a
person’s manager. However, a mentor can also be a staff professional or coworker. An
emotional tie exists between the protégé (or apprentice) and the mentor.

A high level of mentor involvement is to coach the apprentice on how he or she handles
certain leadership assignments. The mentor is not usually physically present when the
protégé is practicing leadership. A substitute is for the protégé to recap a leadership
situation and ask for a critique.

Mentoring can be formal or informal. Mentoring is traditionally thought of as an informal

relationship based on compatibility or spark between two personalities. In reality it is
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widespread practice for employers to formally assign a mentor to a new employee to help
him or her adjust well to the organization and to succeed.

LEADERSHIP AND CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

Organizational creativity is the “creation of a valuable, useful new product, service, idea,
procedure, or process by individuals working together in a complex social system.”
An old but a well accepted model of organizational creativity divides creative thinking
into five stages.
1. Opportunity or problem recognition: a person discovers that a new opportunity exists
or a problem needs resolution. Some forty years ago an entrepreneurial leader, Robert
Cowan, recognized a new opportunity and asked, “Why do business meetings have to be
conducted in person? Why can’t they connect through television images?”
2. Immersion: the leader concentrates on the issue and becomes immersed in it. He or she
will recall and collect information that seems relevant, dreaming up alternatives
without refining or evaluating them. Cowan grabbed every fact he could about
teleconferencing. At one point he helped NASA and the University of Alaska produce the
first videoconference by satellite. Cowan synthesized all his information into a book
about teleconferencing.
3. Incubation. The person keeps the assembled information in mind for a while. He or she
does not appear to be working on the problem actively; however, the subconscious
mind is still engaged. While the information is simmering, it is being arranged into
meaningful new patterns. Cowan did not actively pursue his business
videoconferencing idea for several years.
4. Insight. The problem conquering solution flashes into the person’s mind at an
unexpected time, such as on the verge of sleep, during a shower, or while running.
Insight is also called Aha! Experience: all of a sudden something clicks. At one point
Cowan suddenly thought of forming a teleconferencing business to exploit the potential
of his idea.
5. Verification and application. The individual sets out to prove that the creative solution
has merit. Verification procedures include gathering supporting evidence, logical
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persuasion, and experimenting with new ideas. Application requires tenacity or

persistence because most novel ideas are first rejected as being impractical.

Characteristics of Creative Leaders:

1. Knowledge. Creative problem solving requires a broad background of information,
including facts and observations. Knowledge provides building blocks for generating
and combining ideas.
2. Intellectual Abilities. Intellectual abilities comprise such abilities as general
intelligence and abstract reasoning. Creative problem solvers, particularly in business,
tend to be bright, but not at the absolute top end of the brilliance scale. Organizations
use their own screening method for hiring highly intelligence people. They may use
standard measures of intelligence such as mental ability tests, grades in school, and past
accomplishments. Creative people show an identifiable intellectual style, being able to
think divergently. They are able to expand the number of alternatives to a problem,
thus moving away from a single solution.
3. Personality. The emotional and other nonintellectual aspects of a person heavily
influence creative problem solving. Creative people tend to have a positive self-image
without being blindly self-confident. Because they are self-confident, creative people
are able to cope with criticism of their ideas. They can tolerate the isolation necessary
for developing an idea. Talking to others is a good source of ideas, yet at some point the
creative problem solver has to work alone and concentrate.
Creative people are frequently nonconformists and do not need strong approval from
the group. They are persistent, which is especially important for the verification and
application stage of creative thinking. They enjoy dealing with ambiguity and chaos.
Less creative people become quickly frustrated when task descriptions are unclear and
disorder exists.
4. Passion for the Task. A dominant characteristic of creative people that is closely
related to personality is a passion for the work. Passion for the work or a high degree of
intrinsic motivation is also part of emotional intelligence.
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5. Social Habit and Upbringing. Many people especially who become leaders, enjoy
interacting with people and exchanging ideas. So it is said that most creative people are
not introverted loners or nerds. However, the combinations of the right personal
characteristics with the right environmental condition yields the most creative output.
Because behavior is a function of a person interacting with the environment [B=f (P x
E)].

To be a creative thinker you have to move away from nontraditional thinking.

1. A creative person thinks outside the box. A box in this sense is a category that confines
and restricts thinking. Example a consultancy firm that exploits graduates by creating
favorable office environment.
2. People who are not creative suffer from “hardening of the categories”. Example,
some people believe that, the new generation is trouble maker. The only way to bring
good governance is through punishment or negative reinforcement. A non-creative
person thinks categorically.
3. To be creative, one must develop new paradigms. A paradigm is a model or a
framework of understanding reality. One example is that, if School of Social Work,
considering the current limited opportunity for social work education, believed that
students should be treated shabbily because they need the school more than the school
needs them. But in reality, students are resources to the school and will be sources of
strength for the school and there has to be mutual respect. Another example is the
practice of challenging indispensability in leadership and replacing experienced people
with young professionals.
4. Creativity requires overcoming traditional mental sets. A traditional mental set is a
conventional way of looking at things and placing them in familiar categories. Example.
Thinking that the only way for Iddir members to get the death benefit is to die.
5. Creative people engage in lateral thinking in addition to vertical thinking. Vertical
thinking is analytical, logical, process that results in few answers. The vertical, or
critical, thinker is looking for the one best solution to a problem, much like solving an
equation. In contrast, lateral thinking spreads out to find many different solutions to a
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problem. The vertical thinking leader attempts to find the best possible return on
investment in financial terms only. The lateral-, or creative-leader might say, “a
financial return on investment is desirable. But let us not restrict our thinking.
Customer loyalty, quality, being a good corporate citizen and job satisfaction are also
important returns on investment.”
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LEADERSHIP COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION SKILLS

Communication: is a process by which information and understanding are transferred

between a sender and a receiver. The sender is anyone who wishes to convey an idea or
concept to others, impart information, or express a thought or emotion. Potential
communication errors exist when sending and receiving messages, because knowledge,
attitudes, and background act as filters and create “noise” when translating from words
into meaning.

Management communication; managers are information processors. They spend most of

their time on meetings, telephone calls, talking informally with others. Managers scan their
environments for important written and personal information, gathering facts and data,
which in turn are then sent to subordinates and others who can use it. Managers have a
huge communication responsibility directing and controlling an organization.
Communication effectiveness lies in accuracy of formulation, with less “noise” as one
determinant of success. Managers communicate facts, statistics, and decisions. Effective
managers establish themselves at the center of information networks to facilitate the
completion of tasks.
Leadership communication: leaders often communicate the big picture-the vision-rather
than facts and pieces of information. A leader is a communication champion. A leader as
communication champion is grounded in the belief that communication is essential to
pursuing the organizational vision. Learning, problem solving, decision-making, and
strategizing are all oriented around and stem from the vision. Communicating vision is not
only about formal speeches and motivating people. It is about drawing the vision to the
forefront in people’s minds during day-to-day interactions and activities. Leaders can use
many communication methods including rich channels of communication, stories,
metaphors, informality, openness, and dialogue.

Open communication is sharing all types of information throughout the company,

especially across functional and hierarchical levels. Open communication runs counter to
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the traditional flow of selective information downward from supervisors to subordinates.

Eliminating the conventional boundaries and directions of communication enables leaders
to convey a higher mission and establish followers’ understanding of it. Followers need to
see the vision and values enacted by their leaders before they can accept what leaders want
to convey. Thus, open communication not only improves the operations of an organization,
but it provides a foundation for a leader to communicate vision, values, and other vital big
picture information.

Listening is an important tool of communication for leaders.

Listening: listening involves the skills of grasping and interpreting a message’s genuine
meaning. Only then can a leader’s response be on target. Listening requires attention,
energy, and skill. (Refer the keys to effective listening on the text page 160). Listening
involves dialogue, discussion and discerning.
Dialogue: a dialogue occurs when a group of good listeners convene. In dialogue, people
together crate a stream of shared meaning that enables them to understand each other and
share a view of the world. People may start out as polar opposites, but by talking
authentically to one another, they discover their common ground, common issues, and
common dreams on which they can build a better future. An absence of prejudgment,
personal agendas, and right answers are characteristics of participants who engage in a
dialogue. Participants in a dialogue do not presume to know the outcome nor do they sell
their convictions. Participants bring only uncertainty; they have no “right” answer or
solution because it has yet to be discovered. A dialogue’s focus is to reveal feelings and
build common ground, with more emphasis on inquiry than advocacy. The result of a
dialogue is marked by group unity, shared meaning, and transformed mind-sets. The kind
of result is far reaching. A new, common mind-set is not the same thing as agreement,
because it creates a reference point from which subsequent communication can start.
Discussion: Explores opposition by individuals who advocate their positions and convince
others to adopt those positions. While both types of communication can result in change, a
discussion is resolved by logic or “beating down” opponents. The result of a discussion is
limited to the topic deliberated.
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Discernment: by this kind of listening, the leader detects the unarticulated messages
hidden below the surface of spoken interaction, complaints, behavior, and actions. A
discerning leader pays attention to patterns and relationships underlying the organization
and those it serves.

Communication Channel:
For leaders to be effective communicators, the communication channel they are applying is
essential.
Communication channel is a medium by which a communication message is carried from
sender to receiver. A leader may discuss an issue face-to-face, use the telephone, write a
memo or letter, use email, or put an item in a newsletter depending on the nature of the
message.
The richness of an information channel can be influenced by three characteristics:
1. The ability to handle multiple cues simultaneously
2. The ability to facilitate rapid, two-way feedback; and
3. The ability to establish a personal focus for the communication.
 Face-to-face discussion is the richest medium, because it permits direct experience,
multiple information cues, immediate feedback, and personal focus. Face-to-face
discussion facilitates the assimilation of broad cues and deep, emotional
understanding of the situation.
 Telephone conversation and interactive electronic media, such as voice mail
and electronic mail, while increasing the speed of communication, lack the element
of “being there.” Eye contact, gaze, blush, posture, and body language cues are
eliminated. Therefore, a leader’s ability to listen actively or discern is diminished.
 Written media that are personalized, such as notes and letters, can be personally
focused but they convey only the cues written on paper and are slow to provide
feedback. Impersonal written media, including fliers, bulletins, and standard
computer reports, are the lowest in richness. The channels are not focused on a
single receiver, use limited information cues, and do not permit feedback.
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Stories and Metaphors:

Communication encounters can be further enriched by leaders who are conscious of the
language they use and the definitions and contexts they create with their language.
Choosing the best terminology is but one way leaders can enrich their communication. It is
in the leader’s preview to direct followers’ attention to the values that underlie the
organization, to define the meaning of situations and objectives, and to give visionary
messages in ways that make them palpable and meaningful to organizational members.
People seek meaning in their daily work and want to understand their role in the large
context of the organization. By using language rich in metaphor and storytelling, leaders
can make sense of situations in ways that will be understood similarly throughout the
organization.

Feedback and Learning:

Feedback is an essential tool for leadership communication. As an evaluation, feedback
enables leaders to determine if they have been successful or unsuccessful in
communicating with others. It is only by evaluating the success of a communication can
leaders reformulate and increase the effectiveness of subsequent messages, signals, and
organizational practices. The feedback process involves four elements:
1. Observation. Visible occurrences, either subordinate behavior or result of
organizational activity
2. Assessment. Interpretation of observed behaviors, an evaluation of the results in terms
of vision and goal
3. Consequence. The outcome of what is observed, and can include both actual
consequences and the consequences possible if no change takes place.
4. Improvement or development. The sustainment or improvement of behaviors.
Leaders communicate what they observe, how they assess it, what consequences it has,
and how to effectively address the observed behavior and consequences. Each element
is communicated from the leader to the individual or organization.
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Supportive communication:
 Problem-oriented not person-oriented
 Descriptive, not evaluative
 Based on congruence, not incongruence; similarity of verbal and non verbal
communication
 Focused on validating, rather than invalidating, people. Even if it is not
acceptable at the moment, appreciate the ideas or suggestions, value the person’s
presence and you can propose to see to it some other time.
 Specific, not global; example field education program is totally unacceptable
instead you can specifically raise the problems observed.
 Conjunctive, not disjunctive. Connect your statements with previous messages,
thus enhancing communication. Disjunctive communication is not linked to
pervious messages, resulting in impaired communication.
 Owned, not disowned; do not attribute the authority behind the ideas to another
person. Example the school of social work wants every student to spend at least
three hours a day in the library. Rather the leader should say “I want….”
 Requires listening as well as sending messages.

Attribution and Cross-cultural communication

A major underlying factor in overcoming cross-cultural communication barriers is to
understand attributions, the judgments we make about the behavior and attitudes of
others. Three factors affect the attribution or judgments we make. Judgment in attribution
specifically focuses on interpretations of causations.
Perception refers to the various ways in which people interpret things in the outside world
and how they react on the basis of these interpretations. Example, the interpretation of
Adegegna Bozene
Stereotyping is evaluating an individual on the basis of our perception of the group or class
to which he or she belongs. Although stereotype has a negative connotation, positive
stereotypes can be useful in dealing with people from another culture. Example, positive
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attributes /Gurage people are hard working and business oriented/, negative attributes
/some ethnic groups whose livelihood is based on manufacturing jewelry and others craft
works are evil eye/
Ethnocentrism is the assumption that the ways of one’s culture are the best ways of doing
things. Displaying ethnocentrism can lead to complete communication breakdowns.

Some suggestions to overcome cross-cultural communication barrier:

 Be sensitive to the fact that cross-cultural communication barriers exist. Example
o Asking personal questions. The British protect their privacy
o Thinking that a business man from England is unenthusiastic, when he/she says
“not bad at all”. English people underestimate positive emotions.
o Expecting to complete work during the French 2hrs lunch
o Expecting punctuality. Your appointments usually arrive 20-30minutes late
/Spain/
o Shaking hands or hugging Japanese in public. They consider the practice
offensive
o Not interpreting “we will consider it” as a no when spoken by Japanese
businessperson.
o Using black boarders on stationery and business cards because black is
associated with death in China.
 Challenge your cultural assumptions
 Show respect for all workers. Behavior that promotes good cross-cultural relations in
general helps overcome communication barriers
 Use straightforward language, and speak slowly and clearly
 When the situation is appropriate, speak in the language of the people from another
culture
 Observe cross-cultural differences in etiquette (in good manners)
 Do not be diverted by style, accent, grammar, or personal appearance.
 Avoid racial or ethnic identification except when it is essential to communication
 Be sensitive to differences in nonverbal communications
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CONFLICT MANAGEMENT, RESOLUTION AND NEGOTIATION

The term conflict has a strong negative connotation, evoking words such as opposition,
anger, aggression, and violence. But conflict does not have to be a negative experience.
Based on research evidence most organizational conflicts occur within a cooperative
context. “Conflict involves incompatible behaviors; one person interfering, disrupting, or in
some other way making another’s actions less effective” (Dean Tjosvold, 1993). The
definition sets the scene for important distinction between competitive (or destructive)
conflict and cooperative (or constructive) conflict.

Competitive Vs cooperative conflict

Competitive conflict:
Opposing goals mistrust and disbelief avoid and win-lose go
separate ways

Collaborative conflict
Collaborative goals trust and rely discuss and win-win move
forward together.

Styles to handle conflict /conflict management/:

1. Competitive style: the competitive style is a desire to win one’s own concerns at the
expense of the other party, or to dominate. A person with a competitive orientation is
likely to engage in win-lose power struggle. It reflects assertiveness to get one’s own
way, should be used when quick, decisive action is vital on important issues or
unpopular actions, such as during emergencies or urgent matters.
2. Accommodative style: favors appeasement, or satisfying the other’s concerns without
taking care of one’s own. People with this orientation may be generous or self-
sacrificing just to maintain a relationship. In groups this style is best when people
realize that they are wrong, when an issue is more important to others than to oneself,
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when building social credits for use in later discussions, or when maintaining
cohesiveness is especially important.
3. Sharing style/compromising style: moderate amount of both assertiveness and
cooperativeness. It is appropriate when the goals on both sides are equally important,
when opponents have equal power and both sides want to split the differences, or when
people need to arrive at temporary or expedite solutions under time pressure.
4. Collaborative style; reflects both a high degree of assertiveness and cooperativeness.
This style enables both parties to win although it may require substantial dialogue and
negotiation. The collaborative style is important when both sets of concerns are too
important to be compromised when insights from different people need to be merged
into an overall solution, or when the commitment of both sides is needed for a
consensus.
5. Avoiding style; reflects neither assertiveness nor cooperativeness, is appropriate when
an issue is trivial, when there is no chance of winning, when a delay to gather more
information is needed, or when a disruption would be costly.

Bargaining/Negotiating: means that the parties engage one another in an attempt to

systematically reach a solution. They attempt logical problem-solving to identify and
correct the conflict. This approach works well if the individuals can set aside personal
animosities and deal with conflict in a businesslike way.
Negotiation is “a decision-making process among interdependent parties who do not share
identical performances”. It is through negotiation that the parties decide what each will
give and take in their relationship.

Elements of effective negotiation:

 Adopting a Win-Win attitude. Win-Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly
seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-Win means that agreements or
solutions are mutually beneficial, mutually satisfying. All parties feel good about the
decision and feel committed to the action plan. Win-Win sees life as a cooperative,
not a competitive, arena.
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 Knowing your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). This old-

sounding label represents the anchor point of effective negotiations. What will you
settle for if negotiations do not produce your desired outcome(s)? BATNA is the
standard against which any proposed agreement should be measured. That is the
only standard which can protect you both from accepting terms that are too
unfavorable and from rejecting terms it would be in your interest to accept.
 Identifying the Bargaining Zone. Negotiation is useless if the parties involved have no
common ground. At the other extreme, negotiation is unnecessary if both parties are
satisfied with the same outcome. Midway, negotiation is necessary when there is a
degree of overlap in the range of acceptable outcomes. Hence, the bargaining zone
can be defined as the gap between the two BATNASs- the area of overlapping
interests where agreement is possible.

Mediation: using a third party to settle a dispute involves mediations. A mediator could be
a supervisor, another team leader, or someone from the human resources department.
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Power, Politics, and Leadership:

Power is an intangible force in organizations. It cannot be seen, but its effect can be felt.
Power is often defined as the potential ability of one person (or department) to influence
other person (or departments) to carry out orders or to do something they otherwise
would not have done. Power is the ability of one person or department in an organization
to influence other people to bring about desired outcome. It is the potential to influence
others within the organization with the goal of attaining desired outcomes for power
holders.
There are five types of powers of leaders:
1. Legitimate power: is granted from a formal position in an organization. Certain rights,
responsibilities, and prerogatives accrue to anyone holding a formal leadership position
and followers accept this legitimacy.
2. Reward power: this power vested with authorities to exercise on subordinates to
influence their behavior.
3. Coercive power: it is the negative side of legitimate and reward power where leaders
exercise reprimand, negative letter or warning, and other administrative measures.
4. Expert power: refers to the competence or knowledge and expertise that leaders have
so that subordinates will go along the decisions or recommendations of the leaders.
Subordinates also can have expert power where leaders may not have on some very
technical aspects of a task.
5. Referent power: steams from the leader’s personality characteristics that command
followers’ identification, respect, and admiration so they wish to emulate the leader.

What are the sources of power for leaders?

 Legitimate, Reward and Coercive powers can emanate from the leader’s formal position
in an organization
 Expert and Referent powers are derived from the leader’s personal qualities.
 Organizational dependency refers to the interdepartmental dependency as a key
element underlying leader power.
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 Organizational centrality: the extent to which the work of a department is more central
to bring about the final output of the organization is the source of power for the leader.
 Coping with uncertainty: when the organization is uncertain about the future direction,
the department that develops a coping up mechanism is more powerful over other
department. Example in the context of the new CSO policy environment, the resource
mobilization and communication departments of HSOs in Ethiopia have helped to
design strategies to ensure the survival of their organizations.

Organizational Politics Asserting Influence: involves activities to acquire, develop, and

use power and other resources to obtain desired future outcomes when there is
uncertainty or disagreement about choices. Engaging in politics can be either a positive or
negative force, depending on what a leader wants to accomplish. The following are some of
the political tactics leaders use to get things done in an organization.
1. Build coalition: taking the time to talk to followers and other leaders to explain
problems and describe their point of view. An important aspect of coalition building is
to build positive social relationships. Social relationships are built on liking, trust, and
respect. Reliability, trustworthiness, and the motivation to work with others to achieve
desired future outcomes are the desired use of politics.
2. Expand network: a leader’s network of contacts can be expanded by reaching out to
establish contact with additional people and by co-opting dissenters.
3. Use legitimacy and expertise: the area that a leader has recognized legitimacy and
expertise can be used to exert influence. Because in their area of expertise they can
produce logical arguments and factual evidence to persuade others that a proposal is
viable and can produce the desired outcomes.
4. Use information and analysis: information and its ability to reduce uncertainty, is a
source of influence. It is often important to gather facts and figures and do underlying
rational analysis to enable broad support of a proposed course of action. A leader can
commission research to find out facts about an alternative course of action he/she is
promoting.
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5. Use symbolic actions: use symbols, stories, heroes, slogans, and ceremonies to
persuade others of the high purpose to be achieved with the desired course of action.
6. Use assertiveness: leaders with the courage to bring their proposal forward and
explicit may be accepted simply because others may not have better alternatives.
Political activity will be effective when leaders ask, and made their vision, goals and
desired changes explicit so the organization can respond. Effective political behavior
requires sufficient forcefulness and risk-taking to at least try to achieve desired
outcomes.

Teamwork in Organizations:
Team: a team is a unit of two or more people who interact and coordinate their work to
accomplish a specific goal.
1. Teams are made up of two or more people
2. People in a team work together regularly
3. People in a team share a goal
A team is a group of people, but the two are not equal. A professor, coach, or employer can
put together a group of people and never build a team. There could be a group of people
who are better individually but who never make up a better team. The team concept
implies a sense of shared mission and collective responsibility. A team achieves high levels
of performance through shared leadership, purpose, and responsibility by all members
working toward a common goal. Teams are characterized by equality; in the best teams,
there are no individual “stars” and everyone sublimates individual ego to the good of the
whole. (Daft)
A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a
common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach, for which they hold themselves
accountable. Teamwork is an understanding and commitment to group goals on the part of
all team members. All teams are groups, but not all groups are teams. (Dubrin)

Differences Between Groups and Teams

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Groups Teams
Has a designated, strong leader Shares or rotates leadership roles
Individual accountability Mutual and individual accountability
(accountable to each other)
Identical purpose for group and Specific team vision or purpose
organization
Performance goals set by others Performance goals set by team
Works within organizational Not inhibited by organizational boundaries
boundaries
Individual work products Collective work products
Organized meetings, delegation Mutual feedback, open-ended discussion, active
problems-solving
Source: Daft, R. L. p.270

Types of Teams
Functional Teams/Vertical Team or Command Team/
A supervisor and subordinates in the formal chain of command form a functional team.
Functional teams may include three or four levels of hierarchy within a department. A
financial analysis department, human resources department, and services departments all
are functional or vertical teams. Each is created by the organization within the vertical
hierarchy to attain specific goals through members’ joint activities.

Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-Functional Teams are made up of members from different functional departments
within the organization. CFTs typically have a specific team leader and lead change
projects, such as creating a new product in a manufacturing organization or developing an
interdisciplinary curriculum in a middle school. Cross functional teams generally involve
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projects that affect several departments and therefore require that many views be
considered.

Cross-functional teams are based on assigned rather than voluntary membership. Cross
functional teams facilitate information sharing across functional boundaries, generate
suggestions for coordinating the departments represented, develop new ideas and
solutions for existing organizational problems, and assist in developing new practices or
policies. The members of one type of cross-functional team, the problem-solving or
process-improvement team, meet voluntarily to discuss ways to improve quality, efficiency,
and the work environment. These teams may gradually evolve into self-directed teams.

Virtual teams
A virtual team is a physically dispersed task group linked electronically. Face to face
contact is usually minimal or nonexistent. E-mail, voice mail, videoconferencing, web-based
projects software, and other forms of electronic interchange allow members of virtual
teams from anywhere on the planet to accomplish a common goal. Special steps need to be
taken to communicate role expectations, performance norms, goals, and deadlines. Virtual
team work may be faster than the traditional face to face kind, but it is by no means easier.
In managing virtual teams, one reality is evident. Periodic face-to-face interaction, trust
building, and team building are more important than ever when team members are widely
dispersed in time and space.

Self-directed teams:
Self-directed teams are long-term or permanent in nature and they typically include three
elements:
 The team includes workers with varied skills and functions and the combined skills are
sufficient to perform a major organizational task, thereby eliminating barriers among
departments and enabling excellent coordination.
 The team is given access to resources such as information, financial resources,
equipment, machinery, and supplies needed to perform the complete task.
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 The team is empowered with decision making authority, which means that members
have the freedom to select new members, solve problems, spend money, monitor
results, and plan for the future.

Determinants of Team Effectiveness

People related factors

 Personal work satisfaction
 Mutual trust and team spirit
 Good communications Effective Team Performance
 Low unresolved conflicts & power struggle  Innovative ideas
 Low threat, fail-safe, good job security  Goal(s) accomplished
Organization-related factors  Adaptable to change
 Organizational stability and job security  High personal/team
 Involved, interested, supportive management commitment
 Proper rewards and recognition of accomplishments  Rated highly by upper
 Stable goals and priorities management.
Task-related factors
 Clear objectives, directions, and project plans
 Proper technical direction and leadership
 Autonomy and professionally challenging work
 Experienced and qualified project/team personnel
 Team involvement and project visibility