Chapter 7: Management and Leadership

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Chapter 7 Management and Leadership
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Chapter aims

• Explore the linkages between management and
  leadership
• Identify assumptions of mainstream thinking
• Identify criticisms of mainstream thinking
• Explain critical approaches to the topic

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Management v leadership

• Terms are often used interchangeably but
  suggested differences are
• Management
• Allocating work tasks
• Maintaining existing organizational arrangements
• Coordinated through organization structure
• Leadership
• Energizing staff with a sense of direction and
  commitment
• Establishing/transforming organizational
  arrangements
• Involves engaging hearts and minds
• Currently fashionable to elevate leadership over
  management

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Mainstream agenda

• How to approach
• Aim is maximizing performance
• Assumes underlying consensus of values and
  objectives between members of society and
  organizations
• Assumes the legitimacy of management
• Focused on how to help managers meet existing
  goals rather than reflect critically on those
  goals

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Classical thinking about management

• Set out to overcome custom, prejudice and
  favouritism
• Belief in one best way
• E.g. Fayols principles of management
• Classical thinking identifies 5 key activities
• Planning
• Organizing
• Coordinating
• Commanding
• Controlling

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Modern thinking about management

• More attention given to contextual factors
• Culture
• Technology
• History
• Customer preferences
• Competitors
• Attempts to identify styles that fit the
  context
• A more holistic approach than classical thinking
• Emphasis on both internal and external
  environments

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Behavioural approach to management

• Classical and modern thinking is normative i.e.
  prescribes what ought to be done.
• Focus on solutions
• Often appeals to managers and students because it
  reduces anxiety/insecurity
• Behavioural approach focuses on what managers
  actually do
• E.g. Mintzbergs (1973) study of managerial roles
• Interpersonal
• Informational
• Decisional
• Concludes that managerial work more complex,
  contingent and dynamic than classical and modern
  thinking suggests

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Mainstream approaches to leadership

• Trait theory
• Aims to identify the personality characteristics
  of leaders
• E.g. initiative, intelligence, self-assurance
• Argues leaders are born rather than made
• Includes transformational leadership, which is
  popular today
• Ignores relational aspects of leadership (e.g.
  characteristics of followers)
• Ignores contextual factors (e.g. nature of the
  task)

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Mainstream approaches to leadership

• Contingency and situational theories
• Leader success contingent on the circumstances
• Situations give rise to different leadership
  styles
• E.g. democratic v authoritarian
• Includes
• Fielder (1967)
• Hersey Blanchard (1993)
• Vroom Jago (1988)

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Limitations of mainstream approaches

• Take for granted the prevailing form, structure
  and knowledge of organizations
• Democracy in organizations is usually absent from
  the agenda
• Contingency approaches are based on questionable
  assumptions, such as
• Knowledge is complete and available
• Goals do not vary across the organisation
• Managers and leaders do not operate out of
  self-interest
• The external environment does not necessarily
  impact on economic goals

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Critical agenda

• Questions how institutions become established and
  maintained
• Focus on conflicts of interest and paradoxes that
  undermine efforts to control
• Asks whether owner/manager/subordinate divisions
  are conducive to establishing trust and
  confidence
• Challenges assumptions of consensus in
  organizations
• Consensus often forced or driven underground

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Expressing dissent through humour
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Essentialism

• Mainstream approaches are based on essentialist
  thinking
• i.e. it is assumed that the world comprises a
  series of essences or universal aspects
• E.g. a claim that economic self-interest is human
  nature
• Each mainstream approach appeals to essences
• Trait theory personality characteristics i.e.
  leadership essentially an individual matter
• Situational and contingency theories leadership
  essentially determined by context
• Critical approaches see reality as socially
  constructed
• E.g. the context is defined/described by people
  rather than being a self-evident or transparent
  entity
• Important therefore to consider the interests and
  politics involved in these constructions

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Socially constituted leadership

• Argues that traits and context are
  constituted/constructed socially
• i.e. open to interpretation and any consensus
  involves the exercise of power
• E.g. feminist approaches to leadership
• Sinclair (2005) close connection between
  constructs of leadership, traditional assumptions
  of masculinity and a particular expression of
  male heterosexual identity

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Critical approaches to management and leadership
Contributions

• Connecting management and leadership to wider
  social and political issues
• Examines management and leadership as
  problematical social phenomena rather than taking
  them as self-evident
• Strips away the gloss and hype that surrounds
  leadership
• Opens us a space for different notions of what
  they could mean