Which Skills, Styles and Attributes of Leadership Behaviour Are Most Effective - Literature review Example

Running Head: LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR Leadership behavior Name Course Lecturer Date LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR Leadership studies polarize researches and debates in social sciences. These studies began with the determination of hereditary characteristics that distinguished leaders from non-leaders. However, subsequent studies have revealed that personal behavior, skills, demographics, traits and abilities do predict leadership effectiveness. Opponents of the trait paradigm have gone further to examine how the behavior of a leader affects his leadership effectiveness. This resulted to the behavior paradigm. The effects of behavior have been elaborated in theories such as the transactional and transformational leadership models, Blake and Mounton’s (1964) managerial grid and Fiedler’s (1967) contingency model. The behavior paradigm has not only provided a basis for new theories but has indeed proven that leader’s behavior has a significant share in the effectiveness of leadership (Judge & Piccolo, 2004). Emotional intelligence (EI) is also an interesting topic of study and research among scholar in the field of social sciences. Researchers have found out that the intellectuality of an individual plays a major role in the effectiveness of his/her leadership. While past research underscored the role of academic intellectuality, which is quantified using Intellectual Quotient (IQ), as the cornerstone of effective leadership, recent studies have identified more component of intelligence other than IQ scores. The concept of emotional intelligence was coined by Salovey and Mayer (1990) during their study of the interaction between thoughts and emotions. There are numerous discussions and studies attempting to explore the concept of EI and in particular how it can serve as good leadership tool. A relationship exists between EI and certain aspects of leadership behavior specifically transformational and transactional leadership models. This essay will begin by giving an overview of leadership behavior in terms of attributes, styles and skills, as well as the concept of emotional intelligence. It will further discuss the concepts of transactional and transformational leadership models and describe how they are related to emotional intelligence. Two other leadership models of personal interest will also be discussed. The final part of the essay justifies the argument that leadership behavior as well as demands on emotional intelligence, vary depending on prevailing circumstances such as gender, personality, crisis and conflict among others. Leadership behavior and emotional intelligence According to Johnson & Indvik (1999), emotional intelligence is a set of non-cognitive skills, competencies and capabilities that contribute to one’s ability to cope with environmental pressures and demands. Psychologists have categorized emotional intelligence into three intelligence categories namely social intelligence (ability to relate to people), concrete intelligence (ability to manipulate and understand objects) and abstract intelligence (ability to comprehend and manipulate mathematical and verbal symbols. Minor categories of noncognitive intelligences include personal, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, linguistic and logical-mathematical inteligence. Palmer (2001) contends that individuals with high EI have the most effective leadership qualities. She maintains that EI can be learnt an if the training focuses on teaching an individual the competencies involved in EI. In 1998, Boyatzis (1999) developed the Emotional Competence Inventory test 360 (ECI 360) whose function is to identify and test EI competencies most associated with star performance of an individual as well as strengths and weaknesses of a person’s EI competencies. Other measures commonly used include Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) and Trait-Meta-Mood-Scale (TMMS) (Burtler & Chinowsky, 2006). Leadership behavior is defined as a powerful display of mannerisms that reflect the values and expectations of an organization and sets the pace and tone for organizational climate (Grojean, et al 2004). Much of the research conducted in relation to leadership behavior has generally examined two aspects: identification of effective leadership behavior and how leaders spend their time throughout the year. Although there could be numerous classes of leadership behaviors, scholars and academicians have agreed to Farris (1988) two categories of leadership behavior: relations-oriented and task-oriented behaviors. Generally, task-oriented leaders are primarily concerned to fulfilling goals. They assist their followers to achieve goals by establishing them, giving directions, defining roles, setting time and being a good role model. Besides that, task-oriented leaders use one way communication to clarify how work should be done. Generally speaking, their behaviors are geared towards attainment of stipulated goals. Relation-oriented leaders on the other hand are concerned with development of close interpersonal relationships with their followers. They apply a two-way communication method and encourage engagement of junior in decision making. Generally, their leadership behaviors include recognizing behavior, developing behavior and supporting behavior. Grojean et al (2004) states that behavior support of leaders, to a large extent, influence the efficiency of employees and the overall performance of the organization. Their behavior and competence have reciprocal effects. Leaders who feel competent may in turn promote facilitative and supportive behavior of employees. Transformational and transactional leadership Transformational leadership is a component of Bass and Avolio’s “full range leadership theory”. This style is hailed for its ability to produce a number of leadership outcomes including employee satisfaction and motivation and the overall organizational effectiveness. Transformational leaders act as role models and mentors to their followers fostering a climate of trust, providing challenges and encouraging personal development, achievement and learning. The five dimensions underlying this leadership are intellectual simulation, inspirational motivation, individual consideration, idealized behavioral influence and idealized attributed influence. Generally, transformational leaders orient their employee followers to standards beyond the set out expectations; they emphasize on empowerment rather than dependence. Transactional leadership, on the other hand, is defined as one where there is a leader-member exchange relationship. The leader satisfies all the needs of his followers in exchange for their performance to meet the basic expectations. The leader in this case works on building the confidence of employees hence permitting achievement of goals (Gardner & Stough, 2002). Barlinget al (2000) and Palmer et al (2001) through their explanatory studies suggested that emotional intelligence predisposes leaders to use transformational leadership behaviors. They argue that consistent with the conceptualization of idealized influence leaders can effective manage and understand their emotions as well as portray the act of self control as role models to their followers. This enhances followers’ respects and trust for leaders. Besides that leaders who possess high levels of emotional intelligence are more likely to perceive ways of raising followers’ expectations; a component of the transformational inspirational motivation subcomponent. The ability of leaders to manage relationships allows emotionally intelligence leaders to predict the needs of followers and hence react accordingly. Sosik & Megarian (1999) suggest several elements of EI that can facilitate transformational leadership , and they include self awareness, emotion management, empathy and the ability to put the needs of others ahead of personal needs. Non-transformational leadership styles such as transactional leadership and laissez-faire do not require emotional attributes as they are based on basic reactive behavior. As such authors have maintained that these styles do not have any relationship with emotional intelligence. Alternative leadership styles Laissez-faire leadership style Others have renamed it as delegative leadership while others terms it as the “do nothing” style of leadership. The reason why this leadership has captured my interest is the fact that leaders have excessively undermined it among other leadership styles. It produces the lowest productivity and effectiveness. In this leadership, there is little to guidance from leaders, followers have complete freedom to make decision, leaders only provide resource needed to execute duties and followers are expected to solve problems on their own. Even so, laissez-faire leadership is finds application in situations where group members are highly skilled thus require minimum supervision as well demonstrate high levels of capability and motivation to work on their own. Cherry (2012) states that although the terms laissez-faire” is viewed as a complete hand-off, leaders remain available and open to followers for the provision of resources, consultation and feedback. However, laissez-faire leadership is not ideal in workplaces where employees do have sufficient experience or knowledge to complete tasks independently as well as lack decision making skills. Such people cannot manage projects, solve problems or even set time frames , and the result is the ultimate downfall of the organization. Laissez-faire leadership is highly discouraged as it often leads to inefficiency, chaos and anarchy and is generally negative leadership. Democratic leadership It is sometimes referred to as enlightened leadership. The leaders recognise the self esteem and worth of each follower. Some of the behaviors he demonstrated include mutual respect, openness, equality, honesty, integrity and trust. Democratic leaders show concern for other by understanding and listening to them in an empathetic manner. Besides that, they employ a two-way, open communication with all employees at all levels. Unlike the Laissez-faire leadership, leaders are actively involved in decision making , and they do involve subordinates. The result of democratic leadership is often a motivation-oriented and highly positive working environment which fosters high levels of self-actualization and self-esteem as required by Abraham Maslow (1998) in the hierarchy of needs. Due to their active role, democratic leaders function as facilitators hence gradually developing synergy for the entire group. Additionally, these leaders strongly emphasize on teamwork for effective attainment of goals. In this respect, the leader works on establishing commitment among followers by first encouraging them through coaching and mentoring and second establishing a feedback mechanism where the performance of individual employees is monitored and communicated back. They use rewards rather than punishment and correction of discipline are administered justly when needed. This is because they recognise that mistakes are inherent in the workplace and they consider them learning opportunities. Democratic leadership is one of the most common and effective leaderships in contemporary organizations as it gives employees significant freedom and control over their work while the authoritative position of the managers in maintained. Basically, democratic leadership establishes a mutual relationship between parties (McCauley & Van Velsor, 2003). Variations of leadership behaviors and emotional intelligence Gender According to a wide range of research, women are more participative, democratic and less hierarchical in their leadership styles. This contradicts mens’ way of leading which is rather task-oriented, autocratic and directive. Additionally, women are people-oriented, flexible, show social confidence and sensitive to the needs of others. Unlike men, who are stronger on visions, women are more grounded on details and not inclined to stray from facts; their mission is always to hit the goals using the most correct way. According to Ginka et al (2007), leaders who tend to provide emotional assistance to others indeed possess a combination of high positive affectivity disposition, high self-monitoring and managerial responsibility. By contrast, leaders with less emotional sensitivity to other tend to have low positive affectivity and self-monitoring and therefore, do not possess good managerial capabilities. Noor et al (2011) found out that women are slightly superior to men in terms of perceiving emotions. Additionally, women demonstrate slightly greater ability in emotional and social intelligence. They have greater doubt about decisions and feelings unlike men who base their arguments on intellect. This is to mean that women are more intuitive; they do leave anything to chance. Even so, studies investigating the role of gender on leadership behavior and emotional intelligence have differed considerably. In fact, no evidence proves that women are less capable of taking up leadership roles as most people would think. There is no significant difference in the leadership styles of men and women. Noor et al (2011)states that its about time to stop talking about gender differences in leadership styles and start focusing on how the differences can enhance the overall organizational performance. Culture Noor et al (2011) states that there is a significant difference in the behavior of leaders based on the prevailing culture or mixture of cultures. According to the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness (GLOBE), there are nine dimensions of culture that are used to measure different national attitudes and expectations of leadership: performance orientation, assertiveness, humane orientation, in-group collectivism, societal/institutional collectivism, future orientation, uncertainty avoidance and gender egalitarianism. The research also found out that there is universal preference for charismatic, transformational leadership. Leaders in almost all cultures are expected to be confidence builders, dynamic, motivational, positive, encouraging and have foresight. Additionally, in almost all cultures, leaders are expected to excellent decision makers and intelligent as well as good coordinators. Jassawalla et al (2004) suggests that it is imperative to consider emotional intelligence when selecting managers to serve in multi- cultural settings. This is because some espoused competencies of EI used in some countries do collide with those of other nations with different cultures. Thus, leaders should incorporate and at the same time eliminate some components of EI so as to effectively match the cultural needs of the specific cultures hence ensure optimum performance. Past researches have identified attitude variances across cultures especially with regard to time focus and power distance. Alder (2002) asserts that organizational culture is a factor of national culture and the greater the differences between organizational culture, for international companies, and the national culture of their host country, the greater the differences in organizational practices and attributes. Ethics Transformation leadership stresses that being value-based is a critical aspect of leadership. This is because leaders are highly visible and their acts greatly amplified. Therefore, their moral actions carry greater weight than those of commoners. Furthermore, ethics and trust have a strong correlation as moral behavior is important in enhancing and maintaining trust. However, ethical values in most cases vary more so with expected leadership effectiveness. Pursuit of achieving goals or results might be in friction with the desire to adhere to moral value and standards. Even so, leaders are expected to demonstrated top most morality like in being respectful and understanding employees and also being sensitive to their needs. Emotional intelligence plays a fundamental role in establishing personal and organizational values. Ethical decisions are based on consideration for others in addition to personal value judgments; this is a natural emotional process. Ethical decisions made by leaders involve a certain degree of emotional labor. Wong & Law (2002) define emotional labor as the psychological effort one needs to expend to present an emotion needed to perform a task. These authors noted that emotions account for a significant amount of the variance on interpersonal outcomes on ethical choices. In relation to emotional intelligence, Wong & Law (2002) identified four emotional actions that one pursue in order to attain ethical excellence: situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment and cognitive change. Personality Authors have cumulatively agreed that the Big Five personal traits have a strong relationship to transformational and transactional leadership behaviors. The first personality trait is extraversion. Extraverts are generally optimistic, energetic, upbeat, talkative, active and assertive. They have two central components: affiliation (value warm inter- personal relationships) and agency (they are influential, assertive and dominant). Besides that, they have positive emotionality; they express positive emotions. In other words, they have high emotional intelligence. In this regard, extraverts exhibit inspirational leadership. The second form of personal traits is neurocritism. People exhibiting this personality are generally pessimistic; that is they view the world with a negative eye. Due to this, they have frequent emotional distresses which makes them high tempered. In fact, they are less likely to demonstrate transformational leadership behaviors. It is, therefore, recommended that people with such nueroticism should never be involved in leadership. The third personal trait is openness to experience. This basically defines an individual’s ability to be insightful, resourceful, imaginative, introspective and creative based on intellect and past events. Bono & Judge (2004)posits that individuals high in this trait tend to have intellectual curiosity as well as emotional responsiveness. They engage in divergent thinking and have flexible attitudes. Due to these characteristics, such persons score highly for inspirational leadership and transformational leadership. The fourth personality trait is agreeableness which represents traits such as kindness, gentleness and cooperativeness. These individuals avoid conflicts and value affiliation. Due to their trustworthiness, they score high in idealized influence. The final personality trait is conscientiousness. Individuals showing this trait are guided by achievement of goals. They tend to be organized, neat, self-disciplined, deliberate and cautious. As a result of this features, they tend to become dependable and are less likely to delegate work. Thus, they exhibit passive leadership behavior. Conclusion By means of thorough research, this essay has extensively explored two major aspects underlying leadership: leadership styles and emotional intelligence. Clearly, emotional intelligence is a central consideration in leadership as it determines how one is able to deal with pressure and demands of the workplace through noncognitive skills and competencies. Leadership behavior generally refers to mannerism portrayed by leaders to reflect interests and expectations of the organization. Transformational and transactional leadership behaviors are the most prominent types of leadership behaviors. Transformational leadership focuses on empowering employees while transactional leadership emphasizes on the establishment of leaders-follower relationship. Emotional intelligence is particularly associated to the transactional leadership with the relationship tied by the three factors of EI namely self awareness, emotional mentoring and self motivation. Alternative leadership styles are Laissez-faire and democratic leadership styles. Laissez-faire is highly discouraged as delegates almost all his duties and does not actively participate in the running of the organization. Democratic leadership, greatly contradicts Laissez-faire. The leaders work hand in hand with followers thus builds a mutual relationship. Gender has significant influence on leadership behavior and emotional intelligence. Women generally have high EI relative to me , but their leadership behavior has been objected due to the glass ceiling concept. Although values affecting leadership behavior vary across culture certain leadership behaviors are universally accepted. Emotional intelligence, however, does vary considerably across cultures and, therefore, leaders should know which EI competencies to use in which cultural settings. While taking ethical consideration, individuals utilize substantial amount of emotions. Therefore, the level of morality of a leader is greatly influenced by their emotional intelligence. Extraversion, neurocritism, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness are all consistent with one or two styles of leadership. Evidently, leadership behaviors are closely related to emotional intelligence and hence leaders should coordinate their leadership tasks with EI competencies to ensure ultimate effectiveness. References Alder, N. (2002). International dimensions of organizational behavior. Cincinnati: Thomson Learning. Barling, J., SLater, F., & Kelloway, K. (2000). Tranformational leadership and emotional intelligence: an explanatory study . Leadership and organization development 21(1) , 157-161. Bono, J., & Judge, T. (2004). Personality and transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analysis . Journal of applied psychology 89(5) , 901-910. Burtler, C., & Chinowsky, P. (2006). Emotional intelligence and leadership behavior in contsruction executives . Journal of management in engineering22(3) , 119-124. Cherry, K. (2012). 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