Leadership - Module 1

According to John P. Kotter in "What Leaders Really Do," management and leadership both involve deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people to accomplish the agenda, and ensuring that the work actually gets done. (T/F)

True

Vroom and Yetton's Decision Model approach to leadership has leaders answer seven key questions, working their way though a decision tree based on their responses, to determine which of five different leadership styles would be appropriate in the specific situation. (T/F)

True

The researchers studying behavioral approaches to leadership hoped to identify behaviors that would universally predict leadership in all circumstances. However, similar to the trait-based approaches to leadership, the behavioral approaches fell out of favor because they

neglected the environment in which the behaviors are demonstrated.

Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey's Situational Leadership Theory (SLT), a contingency approach to leadership, suggests that

the appropriate leadership style depends on the combination of an individual's competence (i.e. skill) and commitment (i.e. employee readiness or will).

House's Path-Goal Theory of Leadership is based on the expectancy theory of motivation, where employees are motivated when they believe, or expect, all the following, except

they are not the Least Preferred Coworker

After the disappointing results of the trait-based and behavioral approaches to leadership, scholars began to specifically incorporate the role of the environment into leadership theories. One of the first of these contingency approaches to leadership was Fiedler's Contingency Model (also called the LPC Theory of Leadership), developed by Fred Fiedler in the 1960s. One of the most important contributions from Fiedler's Contingency Model is that

it explicitly recognized that leadership effectiveness depends (or is contingent upon) the favorability of the situation. According to Fiedler, a task-oriented leader would only be successful if the situation called for a task-oriented leader.

The Transformational Leadership Theory distinguishes between transformational leadership styles and transactional leadership styles. Which is not an element of transformational leadership?

Contingent rewards

According to The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner, leadership can not be learned. You are born with it. "Either you have it or you don't." (T/F)

False

Both task-oriented behaviors and people-oriented behaviors have important outcomes. Task-oriented behaviors seem to lead to greater employee satisfaction while people-oriented behaviors are more strongly related to leader effectiveness. (T/F)

False

Which theory suggests that because leaders are not able to change their style to adapt to the situation, either the situation should be changed to match the leader, or the leader should be changed to match the situation?

Fiedler's Contingency Theory (LPC Theory of Leadership)

A significant difference between Fiedler's Contingency Theory and many of the other contingency leadership theories, including Situational Leadership and House's Path-Goal Theory is that

Fiedler's Contingency Theory assumes that a leader's style is fixed and does not change, while Situational Leadership and House's Path-Goal Theory assumes a leader can vary their style depending on the situation.

Which of the following is NOT a contingency approach to leadership?

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

Which theory proposes that leaders form different types of relationships with their employees and, based on the quality of that relationship, employees will often fall into in-groups or out-groups?

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

According to John P. Kotter in "What Leaders Really Do," leadership involves all the following except

Organizing and staffing.

According to John P. Kotter in "What Leaders Really Do," management involves all the following except

Setting direction.

After scholars became disillusioned with the trait-based approaches to leadership in the 1940s, they began to focus on behavioral approaches to leadership by trying to determine the behaviors of effective leaders. Through the work of researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, two broad categories of leadership behaviors were identified. These two categories are:

Task-oriented behaviors and people-oriented behaviors.

Which position on the Managerial Grid is sometimes described as the ideal style of management, where both task-oriented and people-oriented behaviors are high?

Team Management

One of the main differences between the Michigan Studies and the Ohio State Studies was how they classified the two broad categories of behaviors that they identified. Choose the response that best describes this difference.

The Michigan Studies identified that Task-Oriented and People-Oriented behaviors were on different ends of a single continuum, while the Ohio State Studies classified these two behaviors as independent, each being on a separate continuum.

Leadership may be defined as:

The act of influencing others to work towards a goal.