MGMT 6100 Quiz 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.

True

While House's Path-Goal Theory of Leadership is highly complicated and has not been fully and adequately tested, it has receive partial and encouraging support from researchers. However, the theory's greatest contribution may be that it highlights the importance of a leader's ability to change leadership styles depending on the personal characteristics of subordinates and the characteristics of the environment.

True

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

the appropriate leadership style depends on the competence and commitment (employee readiness) of an individual.

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

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

Contingent rewards.

Both task-oriented behaviors and people-oriented behaviors seem to be related to important outcomes. Task-oriented behaviors seem to lead to greater employee satisfaction while people-oriented behaviors are more strongly related to leader effectiveness.

False

The Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory of Leadership deals with the benefits and consequences of

In-groups and out-groups and their relationships with their manager.

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

Organizing and staffing.

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. These two categories are:

Task-oriented behaviors and people-oriented behaviors.

Leadership may be defined as:

The act of influencing others to work towards a goal.

A significant difference between Fiedler's Contingency Theory and House's Path-Goal Theory is that

Fiedler's Contingency Theory assumes that a leader's style is fixed and only the environment can change, while House's Path-Goal Theory assumes a leader can vary their style depending on the situation.

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.

True

Some of the earliest approaches to the study of leadership sought to identify a limited set of traits, or personal attributes, that distinguished leaders from nonleaders. One of the main learnings from these trait approaches to leadership was:

While there are some some traits that have often been associated with leadership, not all traits are equally effective in all circumstances. Scholars now conclude that the traits that are important for leadership depends on the circumstances and conditions of the organizational situation.

After the disappointing results of the trait and behaviors 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 on the circumstances and that different people can be effective in different situations.

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.