LEADERSHIP AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
I.Introduction
II. Northhouse approach to leadership
III.Lerstrom approach to leadership
IV. Conclusions
Leadership and Change Management
Introduction
Leadership can be considered as an ability of a person to unite other people among common values and lead them to common goals. A leader is usually a person that takes responsibility for particular actions, organizes work and represents the whole group in relations with other people, groups and supervisors. It is very important to distinguish leadership and management, since they are quite different functions. Management is rather a formal category, while leadership is an informal phenomenon. There are the different types of leadership. Two of them are going to be considered below.
Question 1
Alan Lerstrom has analyzed the situational approach to leadership in his article. Initially, this type of leadership has been studied by Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey. Situational approach to leadership supposes that a leader may adjust his/her a style according to the different situations and requirements and expectations of followers. Sometimes a leader can be democratic, when subordinates desire to express their opinion and have some degree of freedom. On the other hand, a leader can follow a strict way of management in the other conditions.The main principle of this approach is that a style of leadership changes according to the different situations.
These situations usually have the following five elements (Leadership Models):
Features and characteristics of a group and its members;
Physical and other limitations of a group;
The structure and character or relations among the members of a group;
Characteristics of a group’s environment;
The perceptual representation among the members of a group.
The main value of a situational approach to leadership is that it allows a leader to adjust behavior in order to create conditions for the most effective execution of tasks. This is quite flexible style of leadership. That is why, a lot of researchers consider it as the most effective style of leadership, since it is able to adapt to the changing environment.
Among the limitations of this approach to leadership the following ones may be pointed out:
Absence of clear instructions to a leader;
Absence of instruments and mechanism of influence of a group;
Inability to build and implement universal mechanism of resolving of conflict situations in a group.
Question 2
Northouse approach to leadership is the so-called style approach. The different approaches to leadership emphasize on the different characteristics and roles of a leader. Style approach to leadership pays the main attention to behavior of a leader, the way of acting and particular actions.
According to researchers, leadership consists of two types of behavior: task behavior and relationship behavior. The main role of task behavior is to set appropriate tasks for subordinates and help them to achieve these tasks successfully. Respectively, the main purpose of relationship behavior is to create comfortable climate and relations between subordinates, subordinates and a leader.
Taking into account the name of this approach, it is reasonable to assume that there are several styles of leadership. According to Brown, there are three styles of leadership – an authoritative leader, a democratic leader and …
