Leadership and innovation

Leadership & innovation

Leadership styles (L1)

The concept of leader is quite different from the concept of manager. In fact, a manager is someone who gets things done through other people in an organization while a leader is someone who is able to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or goals. For this reason, not all managers are leaders and not all leaders are managers. However, organizations need both because the leadership matters are traditional management (decision making, planning, and controlling), communication, HR management (motivating, managing conflict, and training), and networking (socializing and politicking). A successful manager (speed of promotion) differs from an average one because SM has less traditional management but more networking. However, an effective manager (quality of performance and satisfaction of employees) differs from a SM because has few networking but many communication and HR management.

By the historical point of view, the prescientific and classical periods were focused on the division of labour and the basic functions of managers. Later, during the neoclassical ages and then modern ones, the focus shifted on the cooperative systems, the workgroup dynamics, and the leadership style and so on.

The Organizational Behaviour is the field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, groups, and structure have on behaviour within organization for applying such knowledge toward improving an organization’s effectiveness. In other words, it is the study of what people do in an organization and how their behaviour affects the organization’s performance.

• Individuals: measuring, explaining and changing human behaviours (Psychology);
• Groups: focus on peoples’ influence on one another (Social Psychology) and studying people relation with their social environment (Sociology);
• Organizations: studying the society to learn about human being and their activities (Anthropology);

In particular, the individual behaviour is characterized by personality, that gives the individual his identity and is determined by heredity and environment in which the individual grows, and by personality traits (e.g. shy, lazy, ambitious,...).

Myers Briggs type indicators

• Extraverted (outgoing, sociable, assertive) vs. Introverted (shy, quiet);
• Sensing (practical and focus on details) vs. Intuitive (“unconscious process”);
• Thinking (reason and logic to handle problem) vs. Feeling (rely on personal values and emotions);
• Judging (word ordered and structured) vs. Perceiving (flexible and spontaneous);

The Big Five personality model

• Extraversion: comfort level with relationship person gregarious and sociable;
• Agreeableness: individual’s propensity to defer the others person cooperative and trusting;
• Conscientiousness: is a measure of reliability person responsible and organized;
• Emotional Stability: is a person ability to withstand stress person calm, self-confident and secure;
• Openness to experience: is the range of interests and fascination with novelty person creative and curious. They are more adapted to change;

There are also other three personality traits:

• Proactive: actively taking the initiative to improve their current circumstances identify opportunities, show initiative and take action;
• Self-monitoring: individual’s ability to adjust his behaviour to external factors highly sensitive to external cues;
• Self-perspective: people see themselves effective, capable and in control;

These personality traits can predict leadership and they do a better job predicting the emergence of leaders than distinguishing between effective and ineffective leaders. The fact that a person exhibits these traits does not necessarily mean the leader is successful at getting the group to achieve its goals.

The Dark Triad

• Machiavellianism: the degree to which an individual is pragmatic, maintains emotional distance, and believes that ends can justify means;
• Narcissism: the tendency to be arrogant, have a grandiose sense of self-importance, and have a sense of entitlement. Often they are selfish and exploitive;
• Psychopathy: the lack of concern for others and of guilt or remorse when their action causes harm.

Holland’s occupational personality types

• Realistic: prefers physical activities that require skills and coordination. He is a shy, genuine, and practical person (mechanic, farmer, assembly-line worker);
• Investigative: prefers activities that involve thinking, organizing, and understanding. He is an analytical and curious person (economist, mathematician);
• Social: prefers activities that involve helping and developing others. He is sociable, friendly, and cooperative (teacher, counselor);
• Conventional: prefers rule-regulated, orderly, and unambiguous activities. He is an efficient and practical person (accountant, bank teller);
• Enterprising: prefers verbal activities in which there are opportunities to influence others. He is a self-confident and ambitious person (lawyer, small business manager);
• Artistic: prefers ambiguous activities that allow creative expression. He is an imaginative, idealistic person (musician, writer);

Values are basic and stable convictions and are divided into:

• Terminal Values: the goals that a person would achieve during his lifetime;
• Instrumental Values: the means of achieving terminal values;

An individual’s set of values is the person’s value system. Values are established in our early years from our parents, teachers, and friends. There is a relation between an individual’s value system and their job. Some examples:

Schwarz’s Ten Values

• Power: social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources;
• Achievement: personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards;
• Hedonism: Pleasure and sensuous gratification for oneself;
• Stimulation: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life;
• Self-direction: Independent thought and action choosing, creating, and exploring;
• Universalism: Understanding, tolerance, and protection of the welfare of all people and of nature;
• Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact;
• Tradition: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture and religion provide the self;
• Conformity: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms;
• Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self;

Leadership in modern organizations (L2)

Leadership Theories

The leadership theories are divided into three categories:

• Leader-centric perspective;
• Interactional perspective;
• Follower-centric perspective;

Leader-centric perspective

The Leader-centric perspective emphasized the personal qualities, traits, and behaviours that are most commonly in leaders. There are two main theories:

1. The first one is the Trait Theory whose focus is on personal qualities and characteristics of the leader and it thinks that leaders naturally possess traits that set them apart from other people. Kirkpatrick and Locke have identified some major traits like honesty, integrity, self-confidence, personal ability, and others, but also the Big Five dimensions of personality can predict the leadership. However, we believe that traits are good in predicting the emergence of leaders but may fail in distinguishing between effective and ineffective leaders. The fact that an individual exhibits the traits does not necessarily mean the leader is successful at getting the group to achieve its goals. Traits are good in predicting the emergence of leaders but may fail in distinguishing between effective and ineffective leaders.
2. Through practice, learning, dedication, and motivation it is possible to overcome nature.

The second category is the Behavioural Theories and say that it is possible to train people as a leader. The Ohio State Studies collected 1800 samples of leadership behaviour which were classified in 150 functions. Then, these 150 functions were summarized into two leadership styles:

• Initiating Structure: is the extent to which a leader is likely to define and structure his role and those of his employees in the search of goals attainment (e.g. expect workers to maintain determined standards of performance, emphasis on deadline, etc.);
• Consideration: is the extent to which a person’s job relationships are characterized by mutual trust, respect for employees' ideas, etc.;

In roughly the same time, the University of Michigan identified two behavioural dimensions:

• Employee oriented leader: they emphasized interpersonal relationships by taking a personal interest in the needs of employees and accepting individual differences among them;
• Production oriented leader: emphasized the technical or task aspects of the job focusing on accomplishing the group’s task;

It is evident that these two classes of dimensions are strictly related and very similar.

The contingency model says that a key factor in leadership success is individual’s leadership style. In particular, the Fiedler’s contingency model proposes that effective group performance depends on the proper match between the leader’s style and the degree to which the situation gives the leader control. Fiedler created the least preferred co-worker questionnaire to identify the leadership style by measuring whether a person is task or relationship-oriented. He also assumes that an individual’s leadership style is fixed. This means if a situation requires a task-oriented leader and the person in the leadership position is relationship-oriented, either the situation has to be modified or the leader has to be replaced to achieve optimal effectiveness. He identifies three dimensions:

1. Leader-member relations: is the degree of confidence, trust, and respect members have in their leader;
2. Task Structure: is the degree to which the job assignments are procedurized;
3. Position Power: is the degree of influence a leader has over power variables such as hiring, firing, promotions, and salary increases;

Combining the three dimensions yields eight possible situations in which leaders can find themselves: task-oriented leaders perform better in situations very favourable for them or very unfavourable (1,2,3,7,8). Instead, relationship-oriented leaders perform better in moderately favourable situations (4,5,6). So there are only two ways to improve leadership effectiveness: change the leader to fit the situation or change the situation to fit the leader by restructuring tasks or increasing/decreasing the leader’s power to control factors.

So according to these theories of the leader-centric perspective, leaders who have certain traits and display consideration and structuring behaviours do appear to be more effective. But some leaders may have these traits and display the right behaviours and still fail because the context also matters.

The Situational Leadership Theory

The Situational Leadership Theory focuses on the follower and says that successful leadership depends on selecting the right leadership style contingent on the followers’ readiness, or the extent to which they are willing and able to accomplish a specific task. So a leader should choose one of four behaviours depending on follower readiness:

• If followers are unable and unwilling to do a task, the leader needs to give clear and specific directions (leader makes decision, high task orientation);
• If they are unable and willing, the leader needs to display high task orientation to compensate for followers’ lack of ability and high relationship orientation to get them “to buy” into leader’s desires (leader makes decision);
• If they are able and unwilling, the leader needs to use a supportive and participative style (leader and followers make decision, high relationship style);
• If they are both able and willing, the leader doesn’t need to do much (followers make decision, low task and low relationship style);

This theory acknowledges the importance of followers and builds on the logic that leader can compensate for their limited ability and motivation.

The Path Goal Theory

The Path Goal Theory says that it’s the leader’s job to provide followers with the information, support, or other resources necessary to achieve their goals. In other words, effective leaders clarify the path to help followers achieve goals. According to this theory, whether a leader should be directive or supportive or other behaviour depends on complex analysis of the situation. It includes four leadership styles:

• Directive leadership: see initiative structure in Behavioural Theories (satisfaction when tasks are ambiguous);
• Supportive leadership: see consideration in Behavioural Theories;
• Participative leadership: emphasized consultations with subordinates before decisions are made;
• Achievement-oriented leadership: leader is preoccupied with setting challenging goals for the work group;

So if subordinates know how to do the job and the path is clear, the best style may be supportive. Instead, when tasks are uncertain a more directive style may be welcomed by subordinates. This theory, like the situational leadership and unlike Fielder’s contingency theory, considers that leadership style is flexible and can be adapted to varying situations.

The Transformational Leadership Theory

The Transformational Leadership Theory views leaders as individuals who inspire followers through their words, ideas, and behaviours. The previous theories describe transactional leaders who guide their followers toward established goals by clarifying role and task requirements. Transformational leaders, instead, inspire followers to transcend their self-interests for the good of the organization and can have extraordinary effects on their followers. They pay attention to the concerns and needs of individual followers and they excite and inspire followers to put out extra effort to achieve group goals. Transactional and transformational leadership complete each other but, if a transformational leader can improve his transactional leadership, the reverse is not true. Leaders are generally more effective when they regularly use each of the four transformational behaviours.

Transformational leaders are more effective because they are more creative and encourage followers to be more creative, too. Companies with transformational leaders have more decentralization of responsibility. But we must pay attention because there is also a dark side of transformational leadership. A research showed that narcissistic individuals are also higher in behaviours associated with charismatic leadership. It is also true that some people are successful in convincing people to pursue a vision that can be disastrous.

Follower-Centric Perspective with its Attribution Theory of Individuals

According to Jeffrey Pfeffer, it says that leadership has nothing to do with exceptional qualities of some individuals, but rather with the gullibility of their followers. People, in fact, tend to simplify the reality when they make casual inferences and they do so in order to make predictions in the future, which gives them a measure of control over their environment. The problem is that reality is complex and people have limited cognitive abilities. They thus need to simplify the world and one way is to look for salient objects, circumstances, or people in their environment. A person (or object) is salient when he stands out in contrast to the background. So Pfeffer concluded that because leaders are highly visible, their followers attribute special power to them, assuming that they are the cause of organizational performances, when they have a very modest influence on it. Leadership is a mystification caused by the followers. In fact, leaders have an important role but their actions are symbolic rather than real. Effective leaders are those who associate themselves with positive organizational outcomes, pretending they caused them more than they actually did and divest themselves from negative outcomes, blaming them on the system or on someone else. This assertion was found to be exaggerated but enforced the notion that leadership does not just reside with the leader, but also involved followers and that leadership concerns both real and symbolic actions.

There are no leaders without followers (and vice versa). Followers may vary in terms of the extent in which they commit, comply and resist a leader’s influence attempts. A follower should:

• Understand the leader
• Understand him/herself
• Understand the gap and “accommodate” the leader

Leadership in Modern Organization

There are four main drivers of change from a Traditional organization to a Modern one:

• Teams are pushing aside the individual as the primary building block of organizations;
• Command-and-control is giving way to participative management and empowerment;
• Ego-centred leaders replaced by customer-centred leaders;
• Employees increasingly are being viewed as internal customers;

Leadership for change & innovation (L3)

No company today is in a particularly stable environment. Even those with dominant market share must change, sometimes radically. Today, time available before the full impact of innovation is shorter and shorter; innovation is not episodic or sporadic but an everyday business; sources of innovation are more and more outside the company boundaries with actors that in many cases are not contractible by the company. In fact, there are six forces that stimulate changing and innovation, two internal and four external:

• HR resource problems: they could be problems of productivity, absenteeism and more.