Organizational Behavior and Leadership as a Concept - Essay Example

1. What was the single most useful theory or concept you learned in this Please describe the theory and explain how you have been able to apply the theory at work, or how you plan to apply the theory in the future. (10 pts) I learned various ideas about leadership concept in this course, especially on the theory of situational leadership. The theory about situational leadership emphasizes the unacceptability of leadership ideas based on styles and traits (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2010, p.472). Based on Fiedler’s contingency model and House’s revised path goal theory that are associated with situational theory of leadership, one could understand that leadership goes beyond styles and traits. Based on these theories, situational control and applying environmental factors to motivate the human resource while taking into account leader behaviors, employee characteristics and leadership effectiveness are integral components of leadership success. I therefore found that employing both the ideas of Fiedler and House depending on the situation would work. After all, the bottom line of these two theories of leadership is about understanding the prevailing situation and the probable actions necessary for the leaders to take. Personally, I always would make it a very important point to be extra sensitive to the actual situations in the future prior to motivating the human resource. After all, leadership is about influence (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2010), so as a leader I need to understand the prevailing situations in order to create influential moves. So part of this move is to always make sure leaders should take into account their actual behaviors, understand the varying characteristics of their employees, and evaluate the effectiveness of their employed leadership. 2. Can managers be trained to be effective leaders? a.) Choose a leadership theory to support your answer. b.) Assuming you believe they can be trained, what would you include in your training program? (I have added a PowerPoint on Leadership that you might find helpful. Look in Course Documents.). Personally, I believe managers can be trained to be effective leaders as they always have a better chance to learn from the actual situations. What I am trying to point out is the idea based on situational leadership that goes beyond traits and styles (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2010). In situational leadership, leaders will always have a chance to evaluate prevailing situations making them more effective in their actual decision making, prior to building a strong influence. Even though a manager did not start having the right leadership style or even leader’s traits, when they are constantly expose to certain situations, they will always have considerable inputs for as long as they are willing to learn. That is why they need to be exposed to some training to help them understand more about leadership. Assuming that there is a remarkable truth that managers could be trained to be effective leaders, the following are what should be included in my training programs. Articulating the vision is necessary because this could help managers effectively establish the right direction that their followers should take. In this program, managers must be well-equipped to effectively convey the vision making it more effective for the followers to grasp and apply the right directives. Creativity and analytical training program is necessary. So it is important to engage the managers with an activity to enhance or develop their creativity and analytical thinking by using metaphors and analogies. Finally, there is a need for emersion of managers to actual activity where they could fully understand followers’ needs and expectations. However, it is important that part of this activity, the inclusion of theory concerning needs and motivation should be integrated. Thus, managers would be expected to fully grasp the human psychology and behavior applied in the context of the workplace. However, the great point above all is to integrate the idea about situational leadership in which the manager would be able to manage everything by the inclusion of evaluating actual situations such as incorporating actual behaviors of the managers, understanding the varying characteristics of their employees, and evaluating the effectiveness of their employed leadership. 3. Your organization’s president has read a lot about teams in the popular press and wants to implement teams throughout your division on a trial basis. She has asked you to lead the transition. Up until now, your organization has not had a history of using teams to reach its goals, and in fact, has relied on the more traditional form of a “command-and-control” hierarchy to reach its goals. Based on your readings about groups and teams and your insights about group process, how would you go about building high performance teams in your division? Are there any special considerations for virtual teams? Are there any drawbacks to teams you should warn her about? Based on the given readings about groups and teams, I learned that it is important to ensure strong cohesiveness of the team. After all, it would not be about individual effort when it comes to team, but a unified approach in order to achieve goals and objectives in a highly efficient and effective manner. For this reason, it would be important to ensure that everyone is motivated to work as a team, and remain cohesive in all aspects. In building a high performance team, unity is important no matter what would be the individual cultural background, values and beliefs. This is to ensure teamwork that everybody would be willing to participate and work for the welfare of the team and forget about their individual intentions and motives. Regarding this, it would be important to conduct workshops that would help develop the spirit of cohesiveness and teamwork within the entire team. Special considerations are of course necessary for virtual teams. This is due to the fact that there would be no personal live interaction, so there would be absence of some verbal and non-verbal communications. In virtual teams, it should be important that everyone should be guided primarily with policies and procedures so it would also be important to initiate “command-and-control” hierarchy, but with some justifications. For instance, it would be important to encourage creativity more, and even a sense of flexibility and awareness, just like in the case of Apple Incorporated with its “horizontal hierarchy” approach. However, what seems important in this approach is to ensure flexibility so as to allow followers to be more flexible with change and easy adaptation to the created corporate culture. Everyone should be empowered more in a virtual team so as to prevent strong reliance to other members that may result to a highly passive team. In creation of teams, there are some drawbacks. Some members might reduce productivity as they might rely on other members. Thus, this would further result to some followers who might diminish their actual power of digging more on their potential but to rely more on other members of the team. This may result to a highly passive individual, resulting to a passive team in the long run. Therefore, it is important to spot who might be the actual performers in the team and who are those who performed well. Managers must be able to spot them because they might be in the long run become the only source of everything as other members would tend to strongly rely on them. Managers should therefore ensure equal contribution of each member in the team. Thus, it is important to understand that another drawback in forming a team is the tendency to come up with unequal contribution of each member of the team. References Kreitner, R. & Kinicki, A. (2010). Organizational Behavior (10th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. Read More