Introduction
Globally, the concept of leadership has been contextualized within the diverse multi-cultural identities, various social norms, and the ever-growing international business settings. As such, international corporate organizations are faced with multiple challenges that have been recognized as consequential and related to leadership approaches. For instance, problems related to the control of the firm’s goals, vision, and the establishment of cohesiveness, collectiveness, and poor or inadequate communication are just but a few organizational drawbacks emanating from leadership approaches and style. According to Henry, Buyl, and Jansen (2019), enacting strong partnerships and incorporating systems through new rules which institute frameworks ensures that organizations focus their ideal functions as a means of objectifying administrative health. However, the predominant stand of such research studies has been on realizing managerial vigour through the concept of societal assimilation or engagement of corporate elements into trade principles.
Although in some sense, the move may improve a firm’s degree of togetherness, it often inclines towards the isolation of the prevailing communal or social beliefs of a business’s objectives, norms, and work settings. In this regard, different styles and approaches to leadership may create a division between a company and its workers, international and host societies, and other important members of an organization (Swanson et al., 2020). With retrospect to companies achieving the mission, cohesion, and communications, it is the stand of this paper that both functional and relational leadership approaches provide diverse views yet acceptable frameworks for the attainment of or directorial duties. The two approaches have been identified to not only provide internal organizational health, but also maintenance of healthy correspondence between corporations and their direct contextual elements or stakeholders. For instance, relational precepts of cooperation and trust are present in relational leadership, depicting a more embracing approach concerning multiplicity and diverse social systems. Therefore, this paper discusses the imperative of both functional and relational leadership approaches for organizational performance.
Literature Review
Functional Leadership Theory
Functional leadership model addresses the particular management behaviors, which are underwritten to administrative or unit efficiency. In this approach, leaders’ main task is to establish that all the accessible resources required by a group are availed. One can ascertain the achievement of a functional leader in instances where work is effectively and cohesively done. Functional theories of leadership are industrialized by learning positive influencers and categorizing the activities and behaviors they display (Wellman et al., 2019). Therefore, with available online research data, it is possible to assimilate and associate what managers do through their engagements or actions with their successful outcomes.
Several research studies have been conducted to understand functional leadership and group performance. Leadership according to Farh and Chen (2018) is a function and the effectiveness of this function rests predominantly on the approachability, sustenance, and the togetherness of participants who share the same agenda. According to Farh and Chen (2018), is the performance of leadership is premised on its legitimacy and substantiation which are evolving from its degree of approval and entrenchment within its set-up, cluster, or organization. Therefore, leadership is defined primarily by its functions and the degree to which it is capable of “carrying others along” in its activities and roles (Coetzer, Bussin & Geldenhuys, 2017). From the foregoing, the three leading characteristics relevant in addressing the idea of organizational leadership are– first, the function of guiding and directing the administration’s resources and energies towards clearly acknowledged goals and objectives; second, the function of assistance and representativeness of the group, and third, the function of communication within the institute.
Based on other research studies, the significance of managers as multiplicity influencers on the interconnection between group diversity and functional leadership is greatly acknowledged to be missing. To understand the functional model of leadership, an integrative theory that outlines the interplay between diversity and team leadership is required. According to Homan et al. (2020), functional model of leadership requires three main comprehensive and integrated behaviors and characteristics such as; (a) acquaintance of the satisfactory and disapproving processes that can be initiated by diversity, (b) mastery of task- and action-focused leadership behaviors essential to addressing concomitant team requirements, and (c) abilities to predict and analyze team prerequisites and to apply equivalent leadership performances to address such necessities. In their research findings, Homan et al (2020) established that the Leading Diversity Model (LeaD) guarantees effective leadership in collective teamwork (Homan et al., 2020. Notably, LeaD requires both proactive and reactive attention to the group’s needs in terms of informational versus intergroup processes, and acceptable control of the procedures through task-versus individual-focused leadership.
Moreover, LeaD provides new intuitions into explicit aptitudes and skills which allow managers to silhouette the impact of team multiplicity on group outcomes and, thereby, harness the prospective value in diversity. According to Homan et al (2020), corporate firms can utilize the theory to enhance optimal developments and performance in diverse group initiatives. Moreover, leaders who indicate both sets of such behaviors as task-focused and individual-focused leaderships have the potential to produce efficient work than a leader showing only one characteristic (Homan et al, 2020). Therefore, it is imperative that a good leader must possess both behaviors to lead effectively and efficiently.
Relational Leadership Theory (RLT)
Relational leadership is a practice that encompasses social influence and is achieved through social and hierarchical order by changing an individual’s morals, customs, attitudes, and behaviors. It is interesting to investigate how leadership relationships are established within RLT and to comprehend which context plays a role by investigating how relational dynamics one has to deal with (Nicholson & Kurucz, 2019). However, both perspectives play a significant role in RLT. According to Reitz (2017), RLT can also be explored through dialogue, which enables an easy understanding of the relational dynamics of management. Dialogue results in improved leadership in organizations, where there is a probability to eliminate the differences between the managers and the workers (Reitz, 2017). In essence, dialogue creates a better comprehension of diverse cultural backgrounds where the members of an organization are coming from, thus, establishing cohesion and togetherness in a workplace.
Collectivism in relational leadership enhances togetherness and unit and group performances. According to a study by Chatman, Greer, Sherman, and Doerr (2019), collectivism in relational leadership causes people to “distort” their cultural differences, creating a lesser diversity and unifying inconsistencies, thus affecting standards and group performance. In this case, in a conjunctive-based task, the performance of an organization is determined by the group’s weakest link, thus calling for a high degree of togetherness (Chatman et al., 2019). Leadership relation through collectivism aids group conjunctive performance with high diversity by distorting disruptive relational.
A group’s performance is determined by its best affiliate in a disjunctive task. Choudhury and Haas (2018) investigated the effect of relational leadership experiences in an organization with patenting activities and how such activities affect parenting results. The main objective of the study was to examine how the composition of patenting groups associates with both the patent application and its subsequent approval. This was done through cross-monitoring the main effects of group members’ intra-organizational multiplicity and the regulating properties of the relational team leader experience. Accordingly, patenting is an essential premeditated tool for most organizations in the creation of a firm’s values. For instance, a corporate can profit from filing a patent application which gets faster approval. However, according to research by Choudhury and Haas (2018), the effect of relational leadership and its experience affects both the speed of approval and its scope. For example, the study indicated that there is a give-and-take between patent claim’s scope and patent approval’s speed, which generates pressures for an organization of patenting actions inside companies. Choudhury and Haas (2018) established that the diversity of a patenting group is significant to its patent scope. However, the study found no significance in relating patenting speed and experience of the team leader.
Discussion
For functional leadership, leaders can proactively or reactively alter their practice of person-centered leadership or task-focused leadership depending on what their teams need. According to Homan et al. (2020), functional leaders who possess both behaviors can be more efficient in an organization than mastery of one particular behavior. However, McClean et al. (2019) note that the capacity of such leadership activities can only be attained when the functional leader successfully and purposefully shifts between behaviors depending on the future or current needs of the team. In the functional leadership theory, leadership does not rest on an individual alone, but on a collective set of group behaviors that facilitate that work is done. In essence, if a particular member of a group can perform such leadership behaviors, then the result indicates that they too participated in the leadership.
Precisely, the functional model of leadership establishes greater emphasis on “how” a corporation’s work is led rather than the “who” has been previously tasked the leadership role. John Adair’s “action-centered Leadership” is one of the most studied forms of the functional model of leadership (cited in Shafiu, Manaf & Muslim, 2019). According to Adair, functional leadership has three main postulates which state: a) an assignment can only be conducted by the group and not by one individual; b) the team can only realize exceptional duty performance if all the persons are fully industrialized, and c) the characters in group functional leadership need the job to be challenged and inspired (Shafiu et al., 2019). In this regard, Adair’s model defied trait theory by concentrating on what managers do. He revealed that leadership could only be trained and does not depend on the traits an individual had.
Megan Reitz, describes the RLT as a social procedure in management within a corporate society. In the research, Reitz explores how relational leadership in multinational organizations affects its people and how such moves impact positively or negatively on the ambitions of the employees becoming what the leader desires (Reitz, 2017). The concept of the relational leadership model is well defined through Martin Buber’s I-Thou theory. For instance, Reitz is depicted in the wonder of how the various interactions with people are established within a workstation, and how an empathic association is created between a director and its worker (Reitz, 2017). This concept is in agreement with the research by Chatman et al. (2019), who posit that collectivism aids group conjunctive performance, with high diversity. As such, the people-to-people interaction and dialogue are important, without which the contact is unavoidable. Furthermore, Reitz posits that for relational leadership to be effective, the mutual association between the employees and the superiors must exist, which ultimately results in increased performance in an organization (Reitz, 2017). This is also evident in the research by Choudhury and Haas (2018) who established that group efficiency and speed in a task vary and depend on the relational diversity and the experience of the team leader. RLT focuses on leadership developments and relational leadership performance.
It is also about the value of the supervision, which affects the affiliation with staff. The connection between a worker and an administrator also impacts the quality of work. Two perspectives have been used in research to discuss relational leadership theory: The entity perspective and the relational perspective. The entity perspective emphasizes isolating the attributes that organizational executives need for entering into interpersonal affairs with their teams. On the contrary, relational perspective highlights leadership as a development of societal construction, through which definite ideas of leadership are established between leaders and the people being lead. Although the two perspectives of RLT differ in meaning and function, they both complement each other’s roles. For instance, through the two perspectives, one can establish an overarching framework for the RLT.
Conclusion
Several research studies consider Adair’s Three Circles Model to be too unsophisticated and outdated because it was industrialized in the 1970s. However, the review on whether leadership is innate or cultivated through character building forms a bigger portion of the inquiry of whether human being obtain leadership skills through the work of the environment or is cultured through behavior. The concept forms major discussion points for functional leadership theory, to the credibility that if an individual can professionally work on a task, then other people can acquire the same skills of doing it.
However, in terms of relational leadership, interpersonal communication is often complex. In this case, to motivate interpersonal happenstances, Reitz encourages people to have a real dialogue within the group, which profits the relational leadership. It is also important to consider the objective of workers meeting in the office. Essentially, this has to do with an organizational characteristic; the task of a manager is to educate, encourage, and control a worker. Additionally, an employee will have the task of following up on the instructions of superiors. That explains why colleagues want to work together, have lunch together, and so on, while other colleagues avoid each other on every level. Nevertheless, Reitz considers it important that organizations try to find out how people meet each other. People will always be looking for justification behind what they’re doing. Without room for dialogue, employees will work much more individually and will be less inclined to want to work together.
In summary, this study defines leadership as that feature of the organization tasked with the responsibility of strategic decisions, resource control, and harmonious working relationships. This definition as earlier noted is not constrained by role possession, constructions, behaviors, or panaches but provides a shift in leadership, which focuses on the non-traditional leadership perspective of societal, teleological, and prototypical leadership functions and relations. This also paves the way for a more unified method in discussing both functional and relational leadership and their pivotal roles in addressing the various diversity and unique contextual experiences of multinational organizations.
References
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