Organisational Leadership Behavior - Essay Example

Similarly, and again by analyzing well-known persons, we find that their leadership abilities and characteristics are not confined to only the rich and famous but apply equally to the hard-pressed CEO trying to turn around a failing manufacturing plant, or a dedicated school teacher attempting to breathe life into quadratic equations whilst struggling with yet another edict on curriculum change.

But by taking a hard look at the subject most would agree that leadership could be seen as a set of skills or perhaps the practice or use of a set of skills. Some leaders will fail to use this set of skills to the best effect, some will be average in terms of skills use and others will set an example to the rest in a display of dazzling intensity and supreme capability. What has this latter leader got that the others haven’t? Are there components to this form of leadership that can be dismantled and inspected? Indeed, can leadership be defined, written about, and learned? The search for a ‘definable’ leadership is now an industry. Books are written about it; some foundations specialize in it; there are seminars, lectures, and even university courses on the subject. Few if any of the well-known leaders of our time have even thought about receiving instruction on the subject, let alone attending a course. So why all the hype? Course answers that effective organizational leadership is a critical component of a well-run business and effective leadership can be looked upon as an individual’s ability to advance the common goals of a group or organization or company and so moves the group away from the status quo toward a future state of being desired by the owners or shareholders or society. The group could as easily be a family-owned corner shop, a multinational corporation, a military regiment, or a school. By understanding its organizational behavior dynamics, there is a greater potential for that group to meet and overcome competitive and economic challenges and the organizational leader must thoroughly understand those dynamics and be able to demonstrate some of these elusive qualities of leadership about which so many writers have written so many words.

Barnes and Kriger (1986, pp.15-16) suggest that many of the theories of leadership, particularly the early ones are insufficient because they “deal more with the single leader and multi follower concept than with organizational leadership in a pluralistic sense.” They contend that leadership is not found in one’s traits or skills but it is characteristic of the entire organization, in which “leader roles overlapped, complemented each other and shifted from time to time and from person to person, implying a more inclusive style of leadership. This concept of organizational leadership has not been examined as closely as the investigations of individual leadership traits and behavior, but the concept could be extended to suggest that it resembles a type of shared leadership, a notion supported by many researchers. Indeed one researcher, Murphy (1988, p.655) has stated that the hero leader framework “ignores the invisible leadership of lower level staff members throughout effective organizations.

Joseph Stalin was not the first leader to recognize that organizational leadership posed problems and was attended with difficulties. “What are these difficulties; and wherein are they lodged?” he asked. “They are difficulties attending our organizational work, difficulties attending our organizational leadership. They are lodged in ourselves, in our leading people, in our organizations, in the apparatus of our party, state, economy, trade union, Young Communist League, and all other organizations……….”.

Stalin knew that the competitive and economic pressures faced by organizations of the day needed effective stewardship of all organizational assets and most good organizational leaders know that humans are the most valuable of resources in the organization. In today’s world, nothing has changed. Although corporation leaders are no longer able to imprison or kill off underperforming employees, it is recognized that this human resource through training and experience increases in value over time. The potential to maximize this valuable asset demands that the leader thoroughly and intuitively understands organizational behavior so that organizational development can be designed and implemented. It can follow therefore that although the leader must move the group forward in the desired direction, he or she must accomplish this through the interaction of human resources.