BCOR 2202 Quiz 2

Leaders as Coaches

Likewise, then, from the standpoint of an organizational leader, a coaching perspective would call for the leader to help select team members and other new employees, to provide some general direction, to help train and develop the team and the skills of its members, and to help the team get the information and other resources it needs. The leader may also have to help resolve conflict among team members and mediate other disputes that arise. And coaches from different teams may need to play important roles in linking the activities and functions of their respective teams. But beyond these activities, the leader keeps a low profile and lets the group get its work done with little or no direct oversight from the leader.

Basic Premises

argues that subordinates are motivated by their leader to the extent that the behaviors of that leader influence their expectancies. In other words, the leader affects subordinates' performance by clarifying the behaviors (paths) that will lead to desired rewards (goals),also suggests that a leader may behave in different ways in different situations

strategic leadership

as the capability to understand the complexities of both the organization and its environment and to lead change in the organization so as to achieve and maintain a superior alignment between the organization and its environment. Strategic leadership, on the other hand, puts greater weight on the leader's ability to think and function strategically.

THE RATIONAL APPROACH TO DECISION MAKING

assumes that managers follow a systematic, step-by-step process. It further assumes that the organization is dedicated to making logical choices and doing what makes the most sense economically and that it is managed by decision makers who are entirely objective and have complete information

The leader who engages in employee-centered leader behavior

attempts to build effective work groups with high performance goals. The leader's main concern is with high performance, but that is to be achieved by paying attention to the human aspects of the group. These two styles of leader behavior were presumed to be at opposite ends of a single dimension. Thus, the Michigan researchers suggested that any given leader could exhibit either job-centered or employee-centered leader behavior, but not both at the same time. Moreover, they suggested that employee-centered leader behavior was more likely to result in effective group performance than was job-centered leader behavior.

Enhanced performance

can come in many forms, including improved productivity, quality, and customer service. Working in teams enables workers to avoid wasted effort, reduce errors, and react better to customers, resulting in more output for each unit of employee input. Such enhancements result from pooling of individual efforts in new ways and from continuously striving to improve for the benefit of the team

Task motivation

closely parallels job-centered and initiating-structure leader behavior, and relationship motivation is similar to employee-centered and consideration leader behavior. A major difference, however, is that Fiedler viewed task versus relationship motivation as being grounded in personality in a way that is basically constant for any given leader.

The five basic group performance factors are

composition, size, norms, cohesiveness, and informal leadership.

Verification

determines the validity or truthfulness of the insight

path-goal theory identifies four kinds of leader behavior

directive, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented.Unlike the LPC theory, path-goal theory assumes that leaders can change their behavior and exhibit any or all of these leadership styles. The theory also predicts that the appropriate combination of leadership styles depends on situational factors.

satisficing

examining alternatives only until a solution that meets minimal requirements is found and then ceasing to look for a better one.

Global teams

face-to-face or virtual teams whose members are from different countries

Trait Approaches to Leadership

focused on identifying leadership traits, developing methods for measuring them, and using the methods to select leaders, emotional intelligence, drive, motivation, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, cognitive ability, knowledge of the business, and charisma

prospect theory

focuses on decisions under a condition of risk, argues that such decisions are influenced more by the potential value of gains or losses than the final value itself

Transformational leadership

focuses on the basic distinction between leading for change and leading for stability. According to this viewpoint, much of what a leader does occurs in the course of normal, routine, work-related transactions—assigning work, evaluating performance, making decisions, and so forth.

Affinity groups

groups are relatively permanent collections of employees from the same level in the organization who meet on a regular basis to share information, capture emerging opportunities, and solve problems.

Decision-Making Defects and Decision Quality

groupthink increases decision-making defects

Ethical Leadership

hold them more accountable than in the past for both their actions and the consequences of those actions

Finally, achievement-oriented leadership

involves setting challenging goals, expecting subordinates to perform at their highest level, and showing strong confidence that subordinates will put forth effort and accomplish the goals.

The Hersey and Blanchard model

is based on the notion that appropriate leader behavior depends on the "readiness" of the leader's followers. In this instance, readiness refers to the subordinate's degree of motivation, competence, experience, and interest in accepting responsibility.

A leader exhibiting supportive leadership

is friendly and shows concern for subordinates' status, well-being, and needs.

nonprogrammed decision

it requires problem solving.

Suboptimizing

knowingly accepting less than the best possible outcome.

Organizations need both

management and leadership if they are to be effective. For example, leadership is necessary to create and direct change and to help the organization get through tough times. Management is necessary to achieve coordination and systematic results and to handle administrative activities during times of stability and predictability. Management in conjunction with leadership can help achieve planned orderly change, and leadership in conjunction with management can keep the organization properly aligned with its environment

Coworkers

may work side by side on related tasks—but if they do not interact, they are not a group.

Cross-functional teams

members come from different departments or functional areas

Functional teams

members come from the same department or functional area

Brainstorming

most often used in the idea-generation phase of decision making and is intended to solve problems that are new to the organization and have major consequences

Group Polarization

occurs when the average of the group members' post-discussion attitudes tends to be more extreme than average pre-discussion attitudes

The leader-member exchange model (LMX)

of leadership, conceived by George Graen and Fred Dansereau, stresses the importance of variable relationships between supervisors and each of their subordinates. Each superior-subordinate pair is referred to as a "vertical dyad." The model differs from earlier approaches in that it focuses on the differential relationship leaders often establish with different subordinates.

The in-group

often receives special duties requiring more responsibility and autonomy; they may also receive special privileges, such as more discretion about work schedules.

Ohio state, When using initiating-structure behavior

on the other hand, the leader clearly defines the leader-subordinate roles so that subordinates know what is expected of them. The leader also establishes channels of communication and determines the methods for accomplishing the group's task.

Perceived ability

pertains to how people view their own ability with respect to the task. Employees who rate their own ability relatively highly are less likely to feel a need for directive leadership (since they think they know how to do the job), whereas those who perceive their own ability to be relatively low may prefer directive leadership (since they think they need someone to show them how to do the job).

The path-goal theory

proposes that leader behavior will motivate subordinates if it helps them cope with environmental uncertainty created by those characteristics. In some cases, however, certain forms of leadership will be redundant, decreasing subordinate satisfaction. For example, when task structure is high, directive leadership is less necessary and therefore less effective; similarly, if the work group gives the individual plenty of social support, a supportive leader will not be especially attractive. Thus, the extent to which leader behavior matches the people and environment in the situation is presumed to influence subordinates' motivation to perform.

Locus of control

refers to the extent to which individuals believe that what happens to them results from their own behavior or from external causes. Research indicates that individuals who attribute outcomes to their own behavior may be more satisfied with a participative leader (since they feel their own efforts can make a difference) whereas individuals who attribute outcomes to external causes may respond more favorably to a directive leader (since they think their own actions are of little consequence).

Command group

relatively permanent and is characterized by functional reporting relationships such as having both a group manager and those who report to the manager, are usually included in the organization chart.

Insight

represents a coming together of all the scattered thoughts and ideas that were maturing during incubation

Understanding Time Frames

shortly after implementation, team performance often declines and then rebounds to rise to the original levels and above Changing Organizational Rewards:team members are generally rewarded for mastering a range of skills needed to meet team performance goals, and rewards are sometimes based on team performance

Steps in Rational Decision Making

state the situational goal, identify the problem, determine the decision type, generate alternatives, evaluate alternatives, choose the alternative: choose alternative with highest possible payoff, contingency plans are basically back up plans,implement the plan, control, strength, weaknesses

Employee Benefits

teams give employees the freedom to grow and to gain respect and dignity by managing themselves, making decisions about their work, and really making a difference in the world around them. As a result, employees have a better work life, face less stress at work, and make less use of employee assistance programs

Virtual teams

teams of geographically and/or organizationally dispersed coworkers who communicate using telecommunications and information technologies

Venture teams

teams that operate semi-autonomously to create and develop new products, processes, or businesses

Under a condition of risk

the decision maker cannot know with certainty what the outcome of a given action will be but has enough information to estimate the probabilities of various outcomes

Phase 5 of implemtation process

the end result of the months or years of planning and implementation. Mature teams are meeting or exceeding their performance goals. Team members are taking responsibility for team-related leadership functions. Managers and supervisors have withdrawn from the daily operations and are planning and providing counseling for teams. Probably most important, mature teams are flexible—taking on new ideas for improvement; making changes as needed to membership, roles, and tasks; and doing whatever it takes to meet the strategic objectives of the organization

With participative leadership

the leader consults with subordinates about issues and takes their suggestions into account before making a decision.

The Ohio State Studies, When engaging in consideration behavior

the leader is concerned with the subordinates' feelings and respects subordinates' ideas. The leader-subordinate relationship is characterized by mutual trust, respect, and two-way communication.

With directive leadership

the leader lets subordinates know what is expected of them, gives specific guidance as to how to accomplish tasks, schedules work to be done, and maintains definitive standards of performance for subordinates.

Self-directed teams

set their own goals and pursue them in ways defined by the team

The Delphi Technique

originally developed by Rand Corporation as a method for systematically gathering the judgments of experts for use in developing forecasts. It is designed for groups that do not meet face to face. After recruiting participants, the manager develops a questionnaire for them to complete. The questionnaire is relatively simple in that it contains straightforward questions that deal with the issue, trends in the area, new technological developments, and other factors the manager is interested in. The manager summarizes the responses and reports back to the experts with another questionnaire.

Subordinates who are not a part of this group are called the

out-group, and they receive less of the supervisor's time and attention.

A programmed decision

recurs often enough for decision rules to be developed.

Under a condition of certainty

the manager knows the outcomes of each alternative.

The administrative model is characterized by

(1) the use of procedures and rules of thumb, (2) suboptimizing, and (3) satisficing. Uncertainty in decision making can initially be reduced by relying on procedures and rules of thumb.

Leadership versus Management

A person can be a manager, a leader, both, or neither

informal leader

A person who engages in leadership activities but whose right to do so has not been formally recognized by the organization or group

norm

A standard against which the appropriateness of a behavior is judged

Leader Motivation and Situational Favorableness

A task-oriented leader is appropriate for very favorable as well as very unfavorable situations. For example, the LPC theory predicts that if leader-member relations are poor, the task is unstructured, and leader position power is low, a task-oriented leader will be effective. It also predicts that a task-oriented leader will be effective if leader-member relations are good, the task is structured, and leader position power is high. Finally, for situations of intermediate favorableness, the theory suggests that a person-oriented leader will be most likely to achieve high group performance.

A group in which groupthink has taken hold exhibits eight well-defined symptoms

An illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all members, that creates excessive optimism and encourages extreme risk taking Collective efforts to rationalize or discount warnings that might lead members to reconsider assumptions before recommitting themselves to past policy decisions An unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality, inclining members to ignore the ethical and moral consequences of their decisions Stereotyped views of "enemy" leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate or as too weak or stupid to counter whatever risky attempts are made to defeat their purposes Direct pressure on a member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group's stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that such dissent is contrary to what is expected of loyal members Self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member's inclination to minimize the importance of his or her doubts and counterarguments A shared illusion of unanimity, resulting partly from self-censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent The emergence of self-appointed "mindguards," members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.

Top-Management Support

Change starts at the top in every successful team implementation. Top management has three important roles to play. First, top management must decide to go to a team-based organization for sound business performance-related reasons. A major cultural change cannot be made because it is the fad, because the boss went to a seminar on teams, or because a quick fix is needed. Second, top management is instrumental in communicating the reasons for the change to the rest of the organization. Third, top management has to support the change effort during the difficult periods.

Teamwork Competencies

Conflict resolution abilities, Collaborative problem-solving abilities, Communication abilities, Goal-setting and self-management abilities, Planning and task coordination abilities

Gain-Sharing Systems

Gain-sharing systems usually reward all team members from all teams based on the performance of the organization, division, or plant. Such a system requires a baseline performance that must be exceeded for team members to receive some share of the gain over the baseline measure.

Evidence-Based Decision Making 5 principles

Face the hard facts and build a culture in which people are encouraged to tell the truth, even if it's unpleasant. Be committed to "fact-based" decision making—which means being committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions. Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype—encourage experimentation and learning by doing. Look for the risks and drawbacks in what people recommend (even the best medicine has side effects). Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs, what you have done in the past, or uncritical "benchmarking" of what winners do.

Leader-Situation Match

Fiedler contends that when a leader's style and the situation do not match, the only available course of action is to change the situation through "job engineering."

Preparation

Formal education and training are usually the most efficient ways of becoming familiar with a vast amount of research and knowledge.

3 factors that determine the favorableness of a situation

Leader-member relations refers to the personal relationship that exists between subordinates and their leader. It is based on the extent to which subordinates trust, respect, and have confidence in their leader, and vice versa. A high degree of mutual trust, respect, and confidence obviously indicates good leader-member relations, and a low degree indicates poor leader-member relations. Task structure: is the second most important determinant of situational favorableness. A structured task is routine, simple, easily understood, and unambiguous. The LPC theory presumes that structured tasks are more favorable because the leader need not be closely involved in defining activities and can devote time to other matters. On the other hand, an unstructured task is one that is nonroutine, ambiguous, and complex. Fiedler argues that this task is more unfavorable because the leader must play a major role in guiding and directing the activities of subordinates Finally, leader position power is the power inherent in the leader's role itself. If the leader has considerable power to assign work, reward and punish employees, and recommend them for promotion, position power is high and favorable. If, however, the leader must have job assignments approved by someone else, does not control rewards and punishment, and has no voice in promotions, position power is low and unfavorable; that is, many decisions are beyond the leader's control.

Vroom's decision tree

Moreover, Vroom and his associates have continued to develop training and assessment materials to better enable managers to understand their own "natural" decision-making styles.

The Administrative Model

One crucial assumption of the administrative model is that decision makers operate with bounded rationality rather than with the perfect rationality assumed by the rational approach.

Enhancing Creativity in Organizations

One important method for enhancing creativity is to make it a part of the organization's culture, often through explicit goals. Another important part of enhancing creativity is to reward creative successes, while being careful to not punish creative failures.

Other Organizational Benefits

Other improvements in organizations that result from moving from a hierarchically based, directive culture to a team-based culture include increased innovation, creativity, and flexibility

Group

as two or more persons who interact with one another such that each person influences and is influenced by each other person.

Skill-Based Pay

Skill-based pay systems require team members to acquire a set of the core skills needed for their particular team plus additional special skills, depending on career tracks or team needs.

Team Bonus Plans

Team bonus plans are similar to gain-sharing plans except that the unit of performance and pay is the team rather than a plant, a division, or the entire organization. Each team must have specific performance targets or baseline measures that the team considers realistic for the plan to be effective.

Reduced Cost

Team members feel that they have a stake in the outcomes, want to make contributions because they are valued, and are committed to their team and do not want to let it down

Costs of Teams

The costs of teams are usually expressed in terms of the difficulty of changing to a team-based organization. Another cost associated with teams is the slowness of the process of full team development.

Group composition

The degree of similarity or difference among group members on factors important to the group's work

Group cohesiveness

The extent to which a group is committed to staying together

Informal groups

Whereas formal groups and teams are established by an organization,________ are formed by their members and consist of friendship groups, which are relatively permanent, and interest groups, which may be shorter-lived.

The Michigan Studies

The goal of this work was to determine the pattern of leadership behaviors that result in effective group performance. From interviews with supervisors and subordinates of high- and low-productivity groups in several organizations, the researchers collected and analyzed descriptions of supervisory behavior to determine how effective supervisors differed from ineffective ones. Two basic forms of leader behavior were identified—job-centered and employee-centered The leader who exhibits job-centered leader behavior: pays close attention to the work of subordinates, explains work procedures, and is mainly interested in performance. The leader's primary concern is efficient completion of the task.

Gender and Leadership

The one difference that does seem to arise in some cases is that women have a tendency to be slightly more democratic in making decisions, whereas men have a similar tendency to be somewhat more autocratic. One possibility is that women may tend to have stronger interpersonal skills than men and are hence better able to effectively involve others in making decisions. Men, on the other hand, may have weaker interpersonal skills and thus have a tendency to rely on their own judgment. The other possible explanation is that women may encounter more stereotypic resistance to their occupying senior roles. If this is the case, they may actively work to involve others in making decisions so as to help minimize any hostility or conflict.

Symptoms of Groupthink

The three primary conditions that foster the development of groupthink are cohesiveness, the leader's promotion of his or her preferred solution, and insulation of the group from experts' opinions.

Evaluation and Implications

The validity of Fiedler's LPC theory has been heatedly debated because of the inconsistency of the research results. Apparent shortcomings of the theory are that the LPC measure lacks validity, the theory is not always supported by research, and Fiedler's assumptions about the inflexibility of leader behavior are unrealistic. The theory itself, however, does represent an important contribution because it returned the field to a study of the situation and explicitly considered the organizational context and its role in effective leadership.

Other Behavioral Forces in Decision Making

These include political forces, intuition, escalation of commitment, risk propensity, and ethics. Prospect theory is also relevant.

The Nominal Group Technique

To use this technique, a group of individuals convenes to address an issue. The issue is described to the group, and each individual writes a list of ideas; no discussion among the members is permitted. Following the five- to ten-minute idea-generation period, individual members take turns reporting their ideas, one at a time, to the group. The ideas are recorded on a flip chart, and members are encouraged to add to the list by building on the ideas of others. After all ideas have been presented, the members may discuss them and continue to build on them or proceed to the next phase.

Virtual Leadership

Virtual leadership, therefore, is leadership via various forms of distance technologies.

The decision maker who lacks enough information to estimate the probability of outcomes (or perhaps even to identify the outcomes at all) faces

a condition of uncertainty

Incubation

a period of less intense conscious concentration during which the knowledge and ideas acquired during preparation mature and develop

Team

an interdependent collection of at least two individuals who share a common goal and share accountability for the team's as well as their own outcomes

Work groups

are formal groups established by the organization to do its work, include command (or functional) groups and affinity groups (as well as teams).

path-goal theory

focuses on the situation and leader behaviors rather than on fixed traits of the leader

Bounded rationality

is the idea that although individuals may seek the best solution to a problem, the demands of processing all the information bearing on the problem, generating all possible solutions, and choosing the single best solution are beyond the capabilities of most decision makers. Thus, they accept less-than-ideal solutions based on a process that is neither exhaustive nor entirely rational.

Problem-solving teams

teams created to solve problems and make improvements

Group size

the number of people in the group, can have an important effect on performance. A group with many members has more resources available and may be able to complete a large number of relatively independent tasks. In groups established to generate ideas, those with more members tend to produce more ideas, although the rate of increase in the number of ideas diminishes rapidly as the group grows

The path-goal theory proposes two types of situational factors that influence how leader behavior relates to subordinate satisfaction

the personal characteristics of the subordinates and the characteristics of the environment

The LPC

theory attempts to explain and reconcile both the leader's personality and the complexities of the situation. LPC = Least Preferred Coworker

The ongoing management of teams requires additional insights. These include

understanding the benefits and costs of teams, promoting effective performance in teams, and identifying and developing teamwork competencies.