Transcript Background of Organizational Theory

Leadership
A Leadership Story:
• A group of workers and their leaders are set a task
of clearing a road through a dense jungle on a remote
island to get to the coast where an estuary provides
a perfect site for a port.
• The leaders organise the labour into efficient units and
monitor the distribution and use of capital assets –
progress is excellent. The leaders continue to monitor
and evaluate progress, making adjustments along the
way to ensure the progress is maintained and efficiency
increased wherever possible.
• Then, one day amidst all the hustle and bustle and
activity, one person climbs up a nearby tree. The person
surveys the scene from the top of the tree.
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Leadership
• And shouts down to the
assembled group below…
• “Wrong Way!”
(Story adapted from Stephen Covey (2004) “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” Simon &
Schuster).
• “Management is doing things
right, leadership is doing the right
things”
(Warren Bennis and Peter Drucker)
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Leadership
• Controversy has arisen
over whether leaders are
different from managers
or whether management
is different from
leadership.
• The role of
management is to
promote stability or to
enable the
organization to run
smoothly
• The role of leadership is
to promote adaptive or
directive changes
• We can define
Leadership as the
capability of a person to
direct, guide, and
influence a group in an
organization toward the
achievement of goals of
that organization
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Leadership
Leadership is the process where a
person exerts influence over others
and inspires, motivates and directs
their activities to achieve goals.
Effective leadership increases the
firm’s ability to meet new challenges.
–
Leader: The person exerting the influence.
•
Personal Leadership Style: the ways leaders
choose to influence others.
– Some leaders delegate and support subordinates, others
are very authoritarian.
– Managers at all levels have their own leadership style.
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Leadership
Types of
Leadership
Democratic:
• Encourages decision making
from different perspectives –
leadership may be emphasised
throughout the organization
– Consultative: process of consultation
before decisions are taken
– Persuasive: Leader takes decision
and seeks to persuade others that the
decision is correct
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Leadership
Democratic:
Types of
Leadership
Style
– May help motivation and
involvement
– Workers feel ownership of the firm
and its ideas
– Improves the sharing of ideas
and experiences within the
business
– Can delay decision making
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Leadership
Autocratic:
Types of
Leadership
– Leader makes decisions without
reference to anyone else
– High degree of dependency on the
leader
– Can create de-motivation and
alienation of staff
– May be valuable in some types of
business where decisions need to
be made quickly and decisively
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Theories of
Leadership
Leadership
Trait theories:
Leadership is characterized by some specific traits
which can differentiate leaders from non-leaders.
Such as
Ambitious and energetic
Determined
Honest and integrative
Confident
Intelligent
Self-directing
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Knowledgeable
Theories of
Leadership
Leadership
Trait theories:
– Are such characteristics
inherently gender biased?
– Do such characteristics
produce good leaders?
– Is leadership more than
just bringing about change?
– Does this imply that leaders are born
not bred?
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Theories of
Leadership
Leadership
Behavioural:
Specific behaviours differentiate
leaders from non-leaders
• Imply that leaders can be trained – focus on
the way of doing things
– Structure based behavioural theories – focus on
the leader instituting structures – task orientated.
Define standards of performance
– Relationship based behavioural theories – focus
on the development and maintenance of
relationships – process orientated
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Organizational Ethics
• What is ethics?
• The term “Ethics’ was chosen from the ancient
Greek "ethikos", meaning "arising from habit";
also morality.
• Fundamentally ancient philosophers grounded
the term ethics on morality.
• Then psychologists, sociologists, and eventually
economists, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Milton
Friedman, and Maynard Keynes addressed the
term from their own point of view.
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Organizational Ethics
• Ethics, a major branch of philosophy, is
the study of value, or morals and morality.
It covers the analysis and employment of
concepts such as right, wrong, good, evil,
and responsibility.
• Ethics is the science of standardization of
eternal human behavioral pattern, culture,
criteria, norms, and values for human
action, conduct, and attitudes.
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Organizational Ethics
Ethics in Organization: Individual Culture
• A controversial topic of ethics in organization is
related to its origin issue.
• Collins et al., (2005) argued that problematic
agency derived in modern organization is due to
self definition, construction, and articulation of
morality to support self-interest.
• The subjects who are acting as problematic
agents, like discriminators in organizational
structure are conceptualizing morality in their
own constructs and consequently defending
their problematic agency as moral.
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Organizational Ethics
Ethics in Organization: Organizational
Culture
• But several authors dealing with
organizational ethics do not agree with this
individual view (Tabachnick, Keith-Spiegel, & Pope, 1991; White
& Rhodeback, 1992; Bauman, 1993; Gunz et al., 2004).
• They found the influential impact of
organizational philosophy on individual
view and consequently characterize
immoral and unethical views as the
product of modern organizational culture.
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Organizational Ethics
Ethics in Organization: Organizational Culture
• Modern organizational culture forces individuals
and groups to comply with organizational norms
and values which are significantly deviated from
traditional ethics.
• Schein (2000) argued that top executives, who are
climbing the ladder to the top, are unaware of
morality and do not response to right or wrong.
• They fully accustomed to relative truth of the
organization. More ironically, they advocate for
any matter which is better for the company as
the truth.
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