Principle-Centered Leadership - Assignment Example

The nature of management is all about human beings. Its fundamental task is to make people work together to achieve a common goal, to establish a common value and to create the right structure with the right training and development they need to perform and respond to change. By definition, the area of management includes the effective and efficient process of achieving organizational goals by engaging in the four major functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the organization's resources (Daft and Marcic, 2008). Leadership is a critical part in the field of management. The consequences of poor leadership in an organization would include increase costs, damage to relationships and loss of trust. It is therefore imperative to have an effective leader in an organization to achieve goals and attain success. Effective leadership separates the successful organization from failed companies . But what is effective leadership Defining leadership is very complex. There exists a lot of meaning for leadership, along with theories and models to describe them. Leadership is the process of influencing others to accomplish an objective and the manner of guiding an organization to become consistent and unified (Briner et al 1996). Leadership capitalizes on individual strengths to fulfill the roles of the position. Effective leaders perform in a proactive manner. They also maintain a balance between the internal and external forces at play in the organization. Effective leaders today are very different from leaders from the past. The time has passed and the environment has changed. Today, leaders must have the capacity and capability to lead complex organization in a global setting and proportion. The trend for leaders now is to demonstrate visionary thinking with the ability to execute the vision. He must hold the highest standards of ethics. He should develop other people in different levels, while understanding the business as a whole and building influential relationships with customers and stakeholders. Pioneers of effective leaderships includes Peter Drucker. He searches for answers on what makes an executive most effective. To be effective means that leaders must manage their time, focus on people's contributions to create results, build on strengths, set priorities and make effective decisions (Drucker, 1967). Stephen Covey (1992), a leadership guru, provided insights into facing daily challenges by employing the concept of principle-centered leadership. Jim Collins (2001), a business consultant, defined the five level leadership hierarchy. These are: Level 1-Highly Capable Individual; Level 2-Contributing Team Member; Level 3-Competent Manager; Level 4: Effective Executive; and Level 5-The Leader. Peter Senge (1990) points out the need for an organization not only to adapt to a changing environment, but also to go beyond adapting to a generative learning approach that allows for growth. Building an organization where people are continually expanding their capabilities to shape their future is the key responsibility for leadership. He identified the need to have a learning organization. Margaret Wheatley (1992) looked at how new discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology challenged our way of thinking about organizations. She showed that the old models of leadership, such as hero-leader or leader as individual, stands in the way of the organization's innovativeness and effectiveness. She predicted that the ultimate destination of an organization is the realization that teams are capable of being self-managed where the idea of leadership may be different. High performance teams are a product of the learning organization concept and the idea of self-managed teams. This team can work on its own. Senge and Wheatley innovated the new concept of team-based leadership. High performance teams are created with a mission that have developed their own set of norms or rules, which is written as a team charter. The team members have clearly designated their roles and responsibilities. They have implemented their specific strategies. The team encouraged joint decision-making that involves all members in project activities. They also reward members for their work. Power, responsibility, decision-making and credit are all shared in the team effort. The concept of high performance teams is based on the fact that more heads are better than one. This means that the mission of the team to solve problems and achieve their goals can be much better with a collective intelligence and mental capacity with a certain focus than that of any single person. The team may not be efficient in terms of resources, but they surely are effective in terms of achieving results. High performance teams are self-directed yet individually empowered. The challenge of completing a project or arriving at the objective within a short period of time motivates the team members to work hard and succeed. High performance teams are self-managed such that the team members can work with little or no supervision. The team needs to be given a direction or an objective to jump start its activities. With the right support of resources and empowerment, high performance teams would excel in its existence and be effective in its work. Managing high performance teams requires management to satisfy its members of the job, both intrinsic and extrinsic. Job satisfaction is essential in the existence of the organization. It is also the basic task of a leader to motivate its members and provide employee's contentment. Job satisfaction has been defined as a representation of person's evaluation of one's perceived job characteristics and emotional experiences at work. Employees can be satisfied with some elements of the job while simultaneously dissatisfied with others. Satisfied workers have an over-all pleasurable and favorable appraisal of their jobs based on their observations and experiences (McShane, 2001). Job satisfaction is one area of human behavior and organizational management that is most important and widely studied. Maslow arranged five needs in a hierarchy in his theory that laid the foundation for job satisfaction. These are physiological, safety, belongingness, self-esteem and self-actualization needs. People who experiences self-actualization desires more. Alderfer's model, similar to Maslow's, has three sets of needs in his ERG theory; existence, relatedness and growth Frederick Herzberg seeks to explain satisfaction and motivation in the organization through his two-factor theory. The two factors that drives satisfaction and dissatisfaction are motivation and hygiene. Motivation factors make people want to perform. Hygiene factors include pay, policies, management practices and other extrinsic working conditions. Job satisfaction reduces turnover and absenteeism. It creates excellence in employee performance. It also increases customers satisfaction. It is the nature of management to make people add value to the organization. Effective leadership would not just make a successful organization through profit and growth but also create an environment for its people to be fulfilled and satisfied. Management must realize that motivation is a driving force for employee's performance. Well-contented employees shows their gratitude towards management through his work and attitude. Well-motivated workers become members of high performance teams that achieves results. Results that would increase the organization's bottom line, profit and growth. References Briner, Wendy, Michael Geddes, and Colin Hasting. Project Leadership. 2nd ed. United Kingdom: Gower, 1996. Covey, Stephen. Principle-Centered Leadership. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Collins, Jim.. Level 5 leadership: The triumph of humility and fierce resolve. Massachusetts:Harvard Business School Press, 2001. Daft, Richard and Dorothy Marcic, Management: The New Workplace. 6th ed. South Western, Australia: Cengage Learning, 2008. Drucker, Peter. The Effective Executive. New York, NY: Harper and Row Publishing, 1967. Hanlan, Mark. High Performance Teams: How to Make them Work,.Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2004 McShane, Steven. Organizational Behavior. Princeton, NJ: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Senge, Peter M.. The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Wheatley, Margaret. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1992. Read More