Organizational Behavior: concept and practices of leadership - Essay Example

Leadership, however, is a surprisingly complex and elusive concept that requires in-depth understanding and explanation. In today's world of competence, leadership is the most important aspect. All organization weather it is large or small, public or private sector needs strong and competent leaders to succeed. Leadership is not just for the top leaders, but it is a need for each segment of an organization. Managers, supervisors, employees and volunteers, all of them need to lead and lead well.

This is because the world is changing too rapidly and the environment is too complex for strategic intelligence, decision making and initiative to come from the top alone. Leadership has become an urgent issue in most of the organizations as a consequence of rapidity and unpredictability of change. Organizations have to be more well-organized, more efficient, more innovative and, in the case of business, far more competitive. Above all the workforce is changing. Today employees demand respect, fair treatment and an opportunity to contribute.

And if they are denied of these they look out for other options and quit the organizations (The Conference Board of Canada, N.D.). Organizational behavior is a field of study that is of particular importance to enterprises and those in management positions. One of the major issues that firms have to deal with is the problem of motivation. Motivation is the power that makes us do things. This comes from the result of personal needs being fulfilled so that one has encouragement to complete the assignment or the assigned work.

The needs vary from person to person as everyone has his/her individual needs to motivate themselves. One may think that motivation for an employ is higher salary, mostly it is wrong because of the reason that it might not satisfy all employees to a lasting level (bizhelp24.com, 2005).At this point of time it is beneficial to understand the difference between the managers and leaders roles in organization. Although managers and leaders functions and roles overlap considerably, the term manager connotes that authority has been formally granted to an individual by an organization.

Management involves power legitimate formal authority that is granted to the occupant of a position by a higher organizational authority. Responsibility and accountability for the use of organizational resources accompany the power accorded to a manager or director. In contrast, the term leader implies effective use of influence that is somewhat independent of the formal authority granted to an individual because of position. Leadership cannot be granted to a person by a higher authority; rather, those who decide to follow bestow it on an individual.

While managers have formal authority, leaders have the informal ability to get things done by attracting and influencing followers. Effective managers in any organizations must be leaders also, and many leaders become managers, leaders, and directors. The two sets of roles and functions, however, differ (Steven, 2001).Traditionally managements the term "management" refers to the activities (and often the group of people) involved in the four general functions i.e. planning, organizing resources, leading a group of people, and controlling and coordinating the organizations system.

One of the common views of management is getting things done by a group of individual. To most employees, the term "management" probably means the group of peopl