Organizational Change and Development of Transformational Leadership - Literature review Example

Running Head: ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT Organizational Change And Development [Name Of Student] [Name Of Institution] ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT INTRODUCTION Bass and his colleagues defined transformational leadership mainly in terms of the leader's end product on followers, and the performance used to achieve this outcome. The followers experience belief, admiration, reliability, and esteem toward the leader, and they are provoked to do further than they formerly expected to do. The basic authority process is explained in terms of encouraging followers by making them further attentive of the consequence of assignment outcomes and suggesting them to excel their own self-interest for the sake of the association. Transformational leadership is distinguished from transactional leadership, which engages a switch over procedure to stimulate follower conformity with leader requests and business rules. AIM OF PAPER In this paper I am going to look into transformational leadership critically with regard to organizational structure, culture, and politics of change. DISCUSSION The seminal work on transformational leadership, sometimes known as charismatic leadership, was done by House (1977) and Burns (1978). Although transformational and charismatic leadership have differences, House and Aditya (1997) and Dvir, Eden, Avolio, and Shamir (2002), among others, have concluded that these differences are relatively minor, with a strong convergence among the empirical findings. The basic notion is that a transformational leader can create an impression that he or she has high competence and a vision to achieve success. Subordinates respond with an enthusiasm and commitment to the team's objectives. Bass (1985, 1998) extended this work to a theory of transformational leadership whereby the leader can inspire and activate subordinates to perform and achieve goals beyond normal expectations. Because R&D teams are often cross-functional, the transformational leader can convince members, via charisma and serving as a coach and mentor, to look beyond individual or functional orientations to the importance of a technological innovation or new product as a team outcome (Bass, 1985; Yukl, 2002). Burns (1978) and Bass (1985) have distinguished transformational leaders (who inspire through a vision) from transactional leaders (who use exchange relationships and monitoring). Bass (1985) postulated that leaders could be transformational, transactional, both, or neither in their leader behaviors. Literature reviews of transformational leadership generally have found positive associations with follower motivations and self-rated performance (House & Aditya, 1997; Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996; Yukl, 2002). Relationships with separate-source measures of performance have had lower correlations. Recent research has continued the generally positive results for transformational leadership. Judge and Bono (2000) found transformational leaders to have higher effectiveness and more motivated and satisfied subordinates, and Waldman et al. (2001), in a longitudinal study, found that charismatic CEO leaders had higher financial performance under conditions of uncertainty but not under conditions of certainty. COMMON FACTORS THAT INHIBIT EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP Though there are many reasons why a manager fails but I believe that any team is doomed to failure if the leader is not effective. As far as I have learnt from this course, the most common factors that inhibit the introduction and application of effective leadership into functional organizations have been identified as follows: 1. Resistance to change, because the project structures, leadership styles, and information, planning and control system are departures from traditional management. 2. Due to the diversity of project scope acceptance of a singular (i.e. universal) project management methodology, will invariably lead to frustration and resistance from the project managers on smaller projects, who see it as too much extra work, not 'justified' for a smaller project (Gido, 2001). 3. The tendency of top management is therefore to keep people in their present posts and to just load the managing of projects onto their 'normal' functional workload (Gido, 2001). 4. People being driven by loyalty to their primary function, that is to first and foremost promote their professional, functional skills in a parochial sense. This leads typically to a 'prima donna' propensity that could mean being untouchable, inflexible and not inclined to share with others. 5. Absence of a 'team culture', that is failure to work together with and/or take orders from people outside one's own functional division (Gido, 2001). 6. Low cost (money) and time sensitivity. Project management is by definition concerned with performance, time and cost efficiency and consequently orientation to it is a success factor of critical importance. 7. The organization structure: Most functional organizations do not provide for, or even facilitate non-functional management -- the management of activities outside the jurisdiction of a function's hierarchy. 8. Several factors pertaining to financial management were found to impede on effective project management implementation and functioning. Firstly a lack of or insufficient incentives to perform on any or all of the project management success factors. Secondly zero-based annual budgeting instead of continuous project budgeting; and thirdly a financial management system that does not include an autonomous activity- and output-orientated cost management system (Gido, 2001). 9. Occasionally statutory constraints may be inhibiting to project management, for example specific auditory requirements, the appointment of personnel and the actions of unions. HOW AND WITH WHOM DO LEADERS BUILD RELATIONSHIPS? According to Yukl (1999), building relationships involves managing conflict, team building, supporting, and networking. Building relationships with subordinates has been considered fundamental to effective leadership by modern leadership theorists since the 1990s, when the Personnel Research Board at Ohio State University presented the results of a decade-long program of research on leadership behavior that examined subordinate perceptions of leaders. This research showed that "consideration," or relationship building (for instance, helping employees and looking out for their welfare), was most often predictive of subordinate satisfaction and sometimes predictive of leader effectiveness (see Fleishman, 1993; Stogdill & Coons, 1997). A few decades later, Hersey and Blanchard (1992) argued that the behavior required of traditional leaders depends on the experience level and motivation of employees. They proposed that experienced and motivated employees who are delegated responsibility require independence and have little need for the caretaking inherent in relationship building. The relevance of relationship building to effective external leadership has never been studied. Steckler and Fondas (2001) argued that building relationships with team members may allow external leaders to build influence and team member commitment. Since they cannot rely on formal power over team actions and decisions, external leaders may need to rely on relating to or understanding the perspectives of team members to gain influence. Research also suggests that traditional leaders who build relationships with members of the larger organization are likely to obtain resources that improve their employees' performanc. A focus on building external relationships has also been said to be important for external leaders because self-managing work teams tend to have limited control over their environments and limited opportunity to develop relationships with organization members who hold resources. WHO MAKES DECISIONS? Leadership is synonymous with decision responsibility. In traditional environments, making decisions includes behaviors like problem solving, planning, and delegating (Yukl, 1999). A question traditional team leaders must answer is whether to empower team members to make their own decisions and, if so, how much decision authority to delegate. Some have also argued that leaders love empowerment in theory, but mostly engage in command and control behaviors because it is what they know best. WHAT IS THE PROCESS OF EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP? Leadership is a dynamic process that does not reside solely within a given person or a given situation; rather, situations create an interplay of needs, and effective leaders work to continually identify and meet them. Taxonomies of leader behavior like Yukl's provide information about what leaders do. Yet there exists little theory or research providing information about how these behaviors combine to create the dynamic process of leadership that meets situational needs. The goal should be to develop a model of effective external leadership that reveals the process through which leader behaviors combine to facilitate team self-management and team effectiveness. The benefits of such a model lie in the questions it can answer about effective external leadership and in the new questions it can surface. The primary component of transformational leadership has been charismatic leadership, in which subordinates are inspired to perform beyond normal expectations via a commitment to a vision and perception of competence provided by the leader (Bass, 1985; Pawar & Eastman, 1997; Yukl, 2002). In effect, subordinates have bought into a charismatic relationship with the leader that enables them to go beyond individual self-interests to focus on the team's outcomes. Subordinates, moreover, are motivated by a higher level of self-efficacy to persist in reaching more challenging goals (Conger & Kanungo, 1987; Waldman et al., 2001). Bass (1985) proposed intellectual stimulation as another component of transformational leadership that—although related to charisma—he saw as a distinct factor. Bass (1985) argued that a leader could be an intellectual stimulation to subordinates by acting as a teacher who prods and questions, and Conger and Kanungo (1987) saw the charismatic leader as one who engages in innovative behaviors that are counter to prevailing norms. Waldman, Javidan, and Varella (2004), moreover, found that intellectual stimulation allowed CEO leaders to provide a problem-solving component in addition to charisma. It is quite logical that R&D project teams would be helped in their performance by intellectual stimulation from a leader who might suggest an alternative way of approaching a problem or a different source of scientific and technological information. Contextual factors, such as the type of task, have received an increasing amount of attention as moderators of the relationship between transformational leadership and performance (Pawar & Eastman, 1997; Stewart & Barrick, 2000). Prior research on R&D teams has found that type of work—namely, research versus development—can be an important moderator between an independent variable, such as leader behavior, and project team performance (Elkins & Keller, 2003; Keller, 1992). Research projects usually have a longer time frame than development projects, require the use of scientific and technological information that often resides outside the project team, and generally deal with more radical technological innovations that go beyond existing knowledge than do the more focused incremental innovations of product development projects. It is therefore logical to expect transformational leadership to be more effective in research projects, in which charismatic leadership or intellectual stimulation can encourage bold and unconventional thinking that can generate new knowledge. Because initiating structure emphasizes the leader's assignment of tasks and definition of roles for subordinates, it is also logical that it will be more effective in development projects, which usually entail incremental innovation, tend to have the needed knowledge residing within the project, and require the internal diffusion and coordination of such knowledge by task assignments among team members. OVEREMPHASIS ON DYADIC PROCESSES The majority of the theories of transformational leadership are composed principally at the dyadic rank. The main attention is to give details a leader's straight influence over person followers, not manager weight on set or organizational processes. Instances of applicable group-level progressions consist of: (1) how well the job is prearranged to operate employees and resources; (2) how fit inter-related group actions are harmonized; (3) the quantity of element accord about objectives and precedences; (4) mutual faith and collaboration in the middle of members; (5) the degree of associate identification with the collection; (6) member assurance in the capability of the collection to accomplish its objectives; (7) the procurement and resourceful use of possessions; and (8) exterior organization with other parts of the association and outsiders. How leaders control these group progressions is not explicated very sound by the transformational leadership assumptions. CONCLUSION In today's dynamic workplace, organizations must increasingly contend with varying degrees of uncertainty for such reasons as mergers and acquisitions, global competition, and changes in the economy and the stock market. It is in such times that transformational leadership is critically needed to lead these organizations out of uncertainty. This paper attempts to fill several important voids in the transformational leadership literature by examining the potential dispositional antecedents of transformational leadership and the consequences of transformational leadership on collective performance under typical and maximum performance contexts. We found that transformational leadership appears to be more critical for team performance under a maximum performance context than a typical performance context. Future research should address the limitations present in this field study to help build theories linking transformational leadership to collective performance in typical and maximum contexts. A quote from Bass (1998) elegantly captures the essence of transformational leadership and our findings: “To be effective in crisis conditions, the leaders must be transformational … transforming crises into challenges” (p. 42, 45). Future leadership research likewise needs to transform our understanding of individual-level process in typical performance contexts to multilevel process in typical and maximum performance contexts. REFERENCES Ancona, D. G., & Caldwell, D. F. (1992). Demography and design: Predictors of new product team performance. Organization Science, 3, 321–341. Barling, J., Loughlin, C., & Kelloway, E. K. (2002). Development and test of a model linking safety-specific transformational leadership and occupational safety. Journal of Applied Psychology, 8, 488–496. Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York: Free Press. Bass, B. M. (1990). Bass & Stogdill's handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications (3rd ed.). 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