Leadership as an Authoritative Power in an Organisation - Research Paper Example

Why most managers are less concerned with “leadership” than with simply getting through the working day Introduction “The troublesome fact is that mediocre management is the norm,” – Thomas Teal said in his article in the Harvard Business Review even in 1996 (Teal, 1996, p.36). Few things have changed for the last years – in spite of that management has become one of the world’s most common jobs, to be a good manager still demands an acquiring and a possession of a long list of knowledge, skills and qualities – from strategic thinking and negotiating to dealing with money, cost control and resource allocation; to product development and marketing; to motivating, mentoring and guarding people in an organisation. And above all, it is commonly accepted managers are responsible for the overall organisational success. As Teal (1996, p.36) notes: “Practicing this common profession adequately, in other words, requires people to display on an everyday basis the combined skills of St. Peter, Peter the Great, and the Great Houdini”. So, it is not surprisingly, that most managers seem to perform their tasks unsatisfactorily. This paper is intended to discuss some essential aspects of management, related to an understanding leadership as an authoritative power in an organisation. Being based on the review of several works of famous researchers in management and leadership, I try to answer the question: why most managers are less concerned with “leadership” than with simply getting through the working day? Leadership is one of the major qualities a good manager should demonstrate; it includes such human features as “vision, fortitude, passion, sensitivity, commitment, insight, intelligence, ethical standards, charisma, luck, courage, tenacity, even from time to time humility” (Teal, 1996, p.36). Is it possible to an average manager to be concerned with all of these factors in a day-to-day routine? Researchers suppose - yes, if the manager understands two simple, at first glance, things: “managing is not a series of mechanical tasks, but a set of human interactions” (Teal, 1996, p.36) and “the real power of organization lies in the relationships between people” (Knights & Roberts, 1982, p.61). Section 2 of the paper presents a brief overview of the meaning of leadership, focusing particularly on the concept of authority and organisational power. It introduces several conceptions of power in organisations, and discusses consequences, originated from erroneous understanding of the nature of power. Section 3 focuses on reasons of misunderstanding of the concept of leadership, making an important contribution to answering the topic question. The final Section 4 summarises the conclusions given throughout the discussion. 2. What is leadership? Researchers’ interest to the leadership concept has a long history – even in 1939, Kurt Lewin identified three styles of leadership: authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire (Gough et al, 2009). Since this moment numerous studies of leadership have entailed a plenty of definitions of leadership and classifications of its styles, often diverse in their nature. There is no room in this paper to make a detailed analysis of different approaches; I would only mention after Barker (1997, p.346) that often “the words used to define leadership are contradictory, the models are discrepant, and the content of leadership is confused with the nature of leadership”. Encyclopedia of Management (Gough et al, 2009, p.462) defines leadership as: “a process by which one individual influences others toward the attainment of group or organisational goals”. Three important points should be emphasized regarding to the leadership definition: 1. Leadership is a social influence process. 2. Leadership elicits a voluntary nature of compliance in actions from the followers. 3. Leadership results in followers’ behaviour that is purposeful and goal-directed. These points serve as a basis for understanding of why leadership should be distinguished from management. The primary functions of management are regular: planning, organising, staffing, directing, and controlling – all these functions are performed by a manager itself. Besides, a manager has formal authority according to the position in an organisational structure. The primary function of leadership, by contrast, is influence others. An ability to influence is based on factors other than formal authority or position. Barker (1997) supports this opinion, asserting that the function of management is to create stability through a rational activity, while the function of leadership is to create changes – new patterns of action and new belief systems. Rost (1993) also points out that leadership is a form of an influence relationship or interactions among leaders and their collaborators with their mutual purpose to real changes. Leaders influence collaborators with the aid of power. But as I said above, this power is not based on formal authority; it should be understood as a condition of social relations: “It is erroneous to ask who has power. Instead, it is necessary to explore how power is exercised” (Knights & McCabe, 1999 cited in Gough et al, 2009, p.459). In 1960 French and Raven laid the groundwork for following discussions concerning power and authority, identifying five types of power: coercive, legitimate, reward, referent, and expert power (Gough et al, 2009). In their work “The Power of Organization or the Organization of Power?” Knights and Roberts (1982) introduce one more type of power - authoritative. The researchers compare two types of power - coercive and authoritative, giving a comprehensive view on the problem and reasons of unrealized potential of the power of organisation. The main reason of this unrealized potential is, according to Knights and Roberts (1982, p.49): “the failure of both management and staff to recognise the unavoidable interdependence of their actions”. As a consequence, power is considered as “an individual or group possession, rather than a condition and outcome of relationships” (Ibid.). In order to understand better differences of these two types of power, I summarised arguments of Knights and Roberts (1982, pp.49-51) in the Table 1. Table 1. Coercive and authoritative powers. Coercive power Authoritative power What is it? It appears as something one person has over another, and for those coerced it is often seen or described in terms of the denial or removal of individual choice Circumstances under which individuals voluntarily accept the advice and direction of others. Distinctive feature It individualises, being based on and itself helping to generate a calculation of self-interest on the part of all parties to the relationship It involves, only maintaining through a mutual recognition of each other as subjects; each recognises his/her dependence on the others action, as well as the others freedom of action. Key words Compliance, self-interest, distrust Consensus, moral, trust Consequences - All parties seek to transform interdependence into complete dependence, and view each other only instrumentally as mere objects to be used and controlled. - Possibility of a real consensus, a generating an acceptance through dialogue, rather than a self-defeating avoidance or denial of the interdependence of action. Knights and Roberts (1982) describe several cases where misunderstanding of power gave rise serious consequences for companies, to the extent of self-destruction. On the examples of real life companies, which they studied, they have made certain that coercion can lead to a “low-trust” dynamic, to a regressive spiral of attempted control and countercontrol, causing escalating mistrust. When power is viewed as a property of position in the organisational hierarchy (bureaucratic administration), employees avoid any kind of personal relationship between different levels of hierarchy. Managers seek only to control actions of subordinates and also use a very close external supervision. But what they can not control – the real individual attitudes of their staff to work. When working under conditions of close supervision, of “a personal abuse of management powers”, employees can respond only by protecting their own individual self-interests (Ibid, p.53). The price of such management is a high staff turnover, high direct and indirect financial costs, but what is more important – a strained climate of distrust between managers and staff, as well as an increasing non-productivity of management in an organisation itself. Summarizing the discussion about nature of power, I would emphasize an important note that compliance (which accompanies coercion) can be easily mistaken for consensus associated with authoritative power interactions (Knights & Roberts, 1982, p.51): While managers may express publicly a concern to meet the needs and wants of employees, their real concern is with productivity, and human relations theory is viewed simply as a potential instrument for increasing their control. …Similarly, employees may engage in such “dramaturgical” behaviour, giving the appearance of personal commitment to the aims and rules of management, but in reality being committed only to the protection and pursuit of their own self-interest, with little actual concern for the consequences of their actions on others.” 3. What are reasons of misunderstanding of leadership? “The real power of organisation lies in the relationships between people (Habermas, 1971 cited in Knights & Roberts, 1982, p.61). Following this, I consider one of the major reasons of misunderstanding of leadership is unrecognising of management-staff interdependence and quality of the relationship between people within organisation. Employees should be recognised as people with their own purposes, attitudes and values. When one’s identity or sense of value as a person is not confirmed or even threatened, mental distance, if not complete physical separation, appears to be the only viable solution for abandoned person (Knights & Roberts, 1982). Barker (1997, p.351-352) made the point speaking about leadership as “a social process …of dynamic collaboration, where individuals and organization members authorize themselves and others to interact in ways that experiment with new forms of intellectual and social meaning …[This is] a process of change where the ethics of individuals are integrated into the mores of a community”. Thus, while managers understand an organisation as a group of people working alongside each other, rather than a team of individuals interacting with each other for the mutual purposes; they will not understand what effective leadership does mean. The second reason I think is based on the general broad understanding of leadership, caused by a big number of definitions, research articles and management consultants’ insights. Goleman (2000) argues that effective leadership eludes many people and organisations partly because in spite of a great number of researches, no of them has demonstrated which precise leadership behaviours lead to positive results. When introducing six distinct leadership styles: coercive, authoritative, affilative, democratic, pacesetting, and coaching, Goleman (2000) reveals the important outcome: “leaders with the best results do not rely on only one leadership style; they use most of them in a given week – seamlessly and in different measure – depending on the business situation” (Goleman, 2000, p.78). Another important reason is that a lot of people on the top position can be good managers, but not leaders in terms of their personal attitude to obligations, which mainly lead to so called formal and functional rationality – “activity consciously planned and calculated to attain some goal (Jackall, 1988, p.75). It can be explained partly by historical tradition of scientific theory of management, highly specified by different step-by-step approaches (Jackall, 1988); partly by the fact that educating and training programmes are focused too much on technical proficiency of managers and too little on their characters (Teal, 1996). There is one more reason – many people, even at the high levels of organisational hierarchies, don’t want changes, they don’t want more responsibilities. They want guarantees, but not risks. I completely agree with Jackall (1988) who says that when such managers make decisions they prefer “looking up and looking around”. They prefer to rely upon others because of fear of “being found out”, of not “measuring up to the expectations in their social world” (Jackall, 1988, p.79). 4. Conclusion When seeking answer on the question, I realised that researchers see effective leadership as a function, which is influenced by three essential parts - the leader, the followers, and the situations. Those leaders, who serve their counterparts as people, interact with them on a basis of mutual interests, who are able to adapt and lead successfully in various situations – provide the most valuable leadership in an organisation. At the same time, the ways in which leaders influence their staff and encourage it to work productively also depend on various factors, the most important of which is a personality of a leader. 5. References Barker, R.A. 1997. How Can We Train Leaders if We Do Not Know What Leadership Is? Human Relations, 50(4), p.343-362. Goleman, D. 2000. Leadership That Gets Results. Harvard Business Review, 74(6), pp.78-90. Gough, J., Harper, K.A., Hill, S.D. & Selden, H.M. eds., 2009. Encyclopedia of Management. 6th Ed. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning. Jackall, R. 1988. Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. New York: Oxford University Press. Knights, D. & McCabe, D. 1999. Are There No Limits to Authority? TQM and Organizational Power. Organization Studies, 20(2), pp.197-224. Knights, D. & Roberts, J. 1982. The Power of Organization or the Organization of Power? Organization Studies, 3(1), pp.47-63. Rost, J.C. 1993. Leadership for the twenty-first century. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Teal, T. 1996. The Human Side of Management. Harvard Business Review, 74(6), pp.35-44. Read More