Chapter Nine
Leadership and Decision Making
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Define leadership and distinguish it from
management.
2. Summarize early approaches to the study of
leadership.
3. Discuss the concept of situational approaches to
leadership.
4. Describe transformational and charismatic
perspectives on leadership.
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L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S (cont.)
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
5. Identify and discuss leadership substitutes
and neutralizers.
1. Discuss leaders as coaches and examine gender and
cross-cultural issues in leadership.
2. Describe strategic leadership, ethical leadership, and
virtual leadership.
3. Relate leadership to decision making and discuss
both rational and behavioral perspectives on
decision making
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What’s in It for Me?
•
Why does understanding leadership matter
to you?
•
By mastering the material in this chapter,
you’ll benefit in two ways:
1. You’ll better understand how you can more
effectively function as a leader
2. You’ll have more insight into how your manager or
boss strives to motivate you through his or her
own leadership
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The Nature of Leadership
• What Is Leadership?
• Processes and behaviors used by someone, such
as a manager, to motivate, inspire, and influence
the behaviors of others.
• Are Leadership and Management the Same?
• No. A person can be a manager, a leader, both,
or neither.
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TABLE 9.1 Kotter’s Distinctions Between Management
and Leadership
Source: The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from A Force for
Change: How Leadership Differs from Management, by John P. Kotter, 1990. Copyright 1990 by John P.
Kotter, Inc.
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Early Approaches to Leadership
• Trait Approach
• Focused on identifying essential leadership traits
• Intelligence, dominance, self-confidence, energy, activity (versus
passivity), and knowledge about the job
• Physical traits (height, body shape, handwriting)
• Yielded inconsistent results
• Recent research has focused on a limited set
of traits
• Emotional intelligence, mental intelligence, drive, motivation,
honesty and integrity, self-confidence, knowledge of the business,
and charisma
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Early Approaches to Leadership (cont.)
• Behavioral Approaches to Leadership
• Focused on the behaviors of effective versus
ineffective leaders
• Assumed behaviors of effective leaders would be
the same across all situations
• Task-focused leader behaviors related to increasing the
performance of employees
• Employee-focused leader behaviors related to job
satisfaction, motivation, and well-being of employees
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The Situational Approach to Leadership
• Situational Approach
• Assumes that appropriate leader behavior varies
from one situation to another
• Continuum of leadership behavior
• Considers characteristics of the leader, subordinates,
and the situation
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FIGURE 9.1 The Leadership Continuum
Source: Harvard Business Review. An exhibit from “How to Choose a Leadership Pattern” by Robert Tannenbaum
and Warren Schmidt (May-June 1973). Copyright 1973 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; all rights
reserved.
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Leadership Through the Eyes of Followers
• Transformational Leadership
• Set of abilities that allows a leader to recognize
the need for change, to create a vision to guide
change, and to execute the change
• Transactional Leadership
• Basic management involving routine, regimented
activities (leading during a period of stability)
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Leadership Through the Eyes of Followers (cont.)
• Charisma
• A form of interpersonal attraction that inspires support
and acceptance
• Charismatic Leadership
• Influence based on the leader’s personal charisma
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Special Issues in Leadership
• Leadership Substitutes
• Individual, task, and organizational
characteristics that tend to outweigh the need
for a leader
• Leadership Neutralizers
• Factors that cause leadership behaviors to be
ineffective
• Cohesive groups
• Elements of the job
• Organizational factors
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TABLE 9.2 Leadership Substitutes and Neutralizers
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The Changing Nature of Leadership
• Leader as Coach
• From directive overseer to mentor
• Gender
• Understanding the differences and dynamics in
the approaches of women and men to leadership
• Cross-Cultural Leadership
• Effects of an individual’s native culture on his or
her approach to leadership when functioning in
another culture
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Emerging Issues in Leadership
• Strategic Leadership
• Leader’s ability to understand the complexities of the
organization and its environment and lead change to
enhance organizational competitiveness
• Ethical Leadership
• Leader’s ability to maintain high ethical standards for
personal conduct, unfailingly exhibit ethical behavior,
and hold others to the same standards
• Virtual Leadership
• Leading through effective communication and
maintaining collaborative relationships at a distance
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Leadership, Management,
and Decision Making
• Rational decision making
•
•
•
•
•
•
Recognizing and defining the decision situation
Identifying alternatives
Evaluating alternatives
Selecting the best alternative
Implementing the chosen alternative
Following up and evaluating the results
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FIGURE 9.2 Steps in the Rational DecisionMaking Process
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Behavioral Aspects of Decision Making
• Political Forces in Decision Making
• Coalition: An informal alliance of individuals or groups
formed to achieve a common goal
• Intuition
• An innate belief about something, often without
conscious consideration
• Escalation of Commitment
• Staying with a chosen course of action, even when it
appears to have been wrong
• Risk Propensity
• The extent to which a decision maker is willing to gamble
when making a decision
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Key Terms
behavioral approach to
leadership
charismatic leadership
coalition
decision making
employee-focused leader
behavior
escalation of commitment
ethical leadership
intuition
leadership
leadership neutralizers
leadership substitutes
risk propensity
situational approach to
leadership
strategic leadership
task-focused leader behavior
trait approach to leadership
transactional leadership
transformational leadership
virtual leadership
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