Direct And Indirect Leadership 304d54

Direct & Indirect Leadership Most of the theories mentioned above talk about effective leadership which focus on behaviours used to directly influence immediate subordinates, but there are ways a leader can also influence other people inside the organization. Direct forms of leadership involve the attempt to influence others when interacting with them or using communication media which include sending memos or reports to employees, sending email, presenting speeches on television, holding meetings with their employee and participating in activities involving employees to connect with their employees. Most of these forms of influence can be labelled as direct leadership. Indirect leadership on the other hand, has been used to describe how a chief executive can influence people at lower levels in the organization who do not interact directly with the leader (Bass, Waldman, Avolio, & Bebb, 1987; Waldman & Yammarino, 1999; Yammarion, 1994). One form of indirect leadership which is used by chief executive officer (CEO) is called “cascading.” Cascading is for when the direct influence of the CEO is ed down the authority hierarchy of an organization from the CEO to middle managers, to lower-level managers and so on. Apart from that, another form of indirect leadership involves influence over management systems, formal programs and structural forms (Hunt, 1991; Lord & Maaher, 1991; Yukl & Lepsinger, 2004). Most large organization conducts programs to influence the attitude, behaviour and performance of employees. Examples of these programs include recruitment, selection and promotion of employees. Another form of indirect leadership involves the leader’s influence over the organization culture, which is defined as the shared beliefs and values of (Schein, 1992; Trice & Beyer, 1991). Leaders can attempt to either change an existing cultural beliefs and values or to strengthen them. There are a lot of ways a leader can influence an organization’s culture. Indirect leadership is a good example to show scholars that leadership influence is not limited to the types of observable behaviour emphasized in most of the leadership theories. However, some forms of influence are not easily classified as either direct or indirect leadership. Moreover, direct and indirect leadership forms are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to improve its effectiveness when used together in a consistent way.

Leadership or Management There is a continuing debate about the difference between leadership and management. It can be said that a person can be a leader without being a manager, and the same can be said as a person can be a manager without leading. Nobody has said that managing and leading are equivalent, but there is a lot of overlapping between those two in which is debatable. Some may contend that leadership and manager are qualitatively different and mutually exclusive (e.g., Bennis & Nanus, 1985; Zaleznik, 1977). The most extreme distinction assumes that management and leadership cannot be in the same person. Managers value stability, order and efficiency, and they are impersonal, risk-averse, and focused on short-term results. They are concerned about how things get done, and they try to allow people to perform better. On the other hand, leaders value flexibility, innovation, and adaptation; they care about people as well as economic outcomes, and they have a longer-term perspective with regard to objectives and strategies. Leaders are concerned with what things mean to people, and they try to get people to agree about the most important things to be done. There are people that proposed that “managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who the right thing”. However, it is not safe to assume that people can be sorted neatly into these two extreme stereotypes, managers or leaders. Based on the stereotype, it implies that managers are generally ineffective compared to leaders. The term manager is an occupational title for a large number of people, and it is insensitive to denigrate them with a negative stereotype. Some scholars have different views on this matter, they view that leading and managing as distinct processes or roles, but they do not assume that leaders and managers are different types of people (Bass, 1990; Hickman, 1990; Kotter, 1988; Mintzberg, 1973; Rost, 1991).Some described that leadership as one of the 10 managerial roles. Leadership includes motivating subordinates and creating favourable conditions for doing the work. On the other hand, managing seeks to produce predictability and order, whereas leading seeks to produce organizational change. Both roles are important, but problems can happen if an appropriate balance is not maintained between the two. Too much emphasis on the managing role can discourage risk taking and creating a bureaucracy without a clear purpose,, but if there’s too much emphasis on the leader ship role can disrupt order and create change that is impractical in a organization. Another view on those two is that they defined management as an authority relationship that exists between a manager and subordinates to produce and sells goods and services. They defined leadership as a multidirectional influence relationship between a leader and followers with the mutual purpose of accomplishing a similar goal. Leaders and followers influence each other as they interact in a non-coercive ways to decide what they should do. Managers may be leaders but only if they have this type of influence relationship.

A Working Definition of Key The definition of leadership is arbitrary and subjective, some definitions are more useful than others, but there is no right or wrong definition that captures the essence of leadership. From the book I read, leadership can be define as broadly in a way that takes into several things that determine the success of a collective effort by of a group or organization to accomplish meaningful tasks. This is the definition that has been used: Leadership is the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives. The definition above not only includes efforts to facilitate and influence the current work of the group or organization, but also to ensure that it is ready to face challenges. Both direct and indirect forms of influence are included in the definition; the influence may involve more than one leader depending on the situation. Leadership is treated as both a specialized role and a social influence process. More than one individual can perform he role for example leadership can be shared or distributed, but some role differentiation is assumed to occur in any group or organization. The essential aspects of leadership include both rational and emotional processes.