Leadership and Influence Report

Introduction

According to Northouse (2009, p. 3), “Leadership is a process whereby an individual influence a group of individuals to achieve a common goal”.

Considering leadership a process implies that it cannot be defined as a characteristic or trait that is typical of a leader, but a transactional phenomenon that arises from the communication between a leader and followers.

Defining leadership from this perspective provides greater understanding of the influences and interactions between leaders and their subordinates. Hence, leadership cannot exist without influence because it constantly occurs in groups, the context in which leaders operate and influence individuals to achieve a common purpose.

In the course of development, leadership practices have evolved into multiple models and theories. This is of particular concern to transformational leadership and situational leadership models. There are also frameworks that are premised on such aspects as personality traits, skills, and behavior.

All these approaches provide a wider picture of how leadership can be characterized, as well as what dimensions are the most efficient ones in managing an organization.

Initial Reflection on Unit

General analysis of leadership is closely associated with the contexts in which leaders operate, trends in organizational dynamics, and discussion of traits, skills, and competencies that a leader should possess.

Engaging in formative activities, specific attention has been given to the analysis of personal skills, experiences, and activities that relate to leadership analysis. Multiple tests and procedures have provided awareness of pitfalls and benefits that can further be considered in self-evaluation tests.

In particular, self-assessment is designed to assist leaders with determining what skills are needed to develop new leadership competencies.

Context

Because leadership can refer to process and influence, the contextual dimension of understanding this phenomenon is vital. Introducing new models, techniques and approaches to leadership educations has strong connection with social environment, political aspects, as well as the dynamics of human nature.

More importantly, due to the fact that leadership as a process that refers to various cultural contexts and personal dimensions, specific attention should also be given to self-reliance and personal growth initiatives, being the main drive forces of developing leadership skills.

Leadership evaluation is closely associated with evolution of social and organizational change. In this respect, Rost and Barker (2000) emphasize that, at the threshold of the twenty first century, leadership perspectives are more oriented on individualistic training of leaders as a superior class.

Focus on leaders’ and ignorance of followers, however, does not contribute to the development of efficient management environment because the influence and interaction stand at the core of the relationship.

In this respect, Rost and Barker (2000, p. 4) assume, “leadership education…is goal oriented, where the goal is defined by some level of organizational performance; …it is centered on self-interest; it is founded in materialism”.

Such a perspective has dramatically changed nowadays since more models are oriented on individuals rather than on goals. Leaders should develop a set of values and goals that can suit the employees’ culture and generate profitability, commitment, motivation, and high performance in an organization.

Ability to adopt new approaches is closely associated with change management. It is also inherent condition for promoting leadership perspectives.

In this respect, Dawson (2008, p. 1) stresses, “evaluating the extent and depth of company change allows us to classify change from small development activities and routing modifications through a large-scale transformational initiatives”.

Apart from the evident connection between external aspects of change and its influence of organizational development, change management should be consistently applied to individuals working with an organization.

In this respect, Dawson (2008, p.) insists, “…the importance of communication, employee involvement and ensuring that behavioral change is rooted within the culture of an organization has a relationship has longstanding history in the field of Organizational Development”.

Therefore, both organizational environment and human potential are important factors triggering new trends in leadership styles.

With regard to the above, leadership contributes greatly to formation of workplace setting, which influences the level of individuals’ achievement, purpose, and security.

Therefore, leaders should realize that the turnover level and recruitment culture depend largely on personal characteristics and approaches that they to improve organizational culture.

In this respect, Hull (2003, p. 3) understands workplace leadership in terms of “how the immediate supervisor, team leader, manager or coordinator presented himself or herself”. The focus is made on leadership and individual potential, but not on administration and management.

Hence, the employed environment should be effectively organized to enhance employees’ motivation and increase their competence (McDonald n. d.). In addition, leaders should be able to organize their followers in teams to operate effectively and achieve the established goals.

Within a cultural context, it should be acknowledged that most leadership styles are oriented on western models that are characterized by a narrow-focused orientation. In this respect, Mellahi (2000) advises to think beyond western stereotypes and promote new, unconventional approaches to business management.

Diverse leadership practices, therefore, are vital for creating a universal scheme. Similar to Mellahi (2000), Avramopoulos and Thomas (2007) also discuss leadership in the context of Greek traditions. In simplistic terms, understanding Greek context does not imply focusing on historic analysis of specific leaders.

Rather, the tradition is associated with “the interference of cultural factors and key principles relating to leadership development as evidenced within broader literary source of ancient Greek figures” (Avramopoulos and Thomas 2007, p. 52).

Within this perspective, the leadership style illustrates social ideology and qualities that ancient leaders tried to achieve. At an individual level, the myth aims to outlinine an important process of searching for the self through struggle and effort.

During the struggle, potential leaders should be guided by an appropriate mentor who can provide viable advice. Therefore, the Greek mythology closely relates to gods and goddess who accompany mortal heroes in their pursuit of goals.

Finally, at the threshold of the technological era, leadership should be connected with the development of online communication, which requires leaders and supervisors to inquire new skills and experiences, including instant messaging, technological competence, and constant interaction with several subordinates (Martinsons et al. 2009).

In this respect, the virtual context also influences the modes of negotiation and supervision.

Organizational Dynamics

Organizational dynamics and development is closely associated with individuals’ performance, group working, and organizational culture. All these components should be harmonized through efficient leadership and supervision.

The research on organizational dynamics, therefore, aims to define the extent to which individuals should be involved in teamwork, as well as how group cooperation, should concern how close leaders should follow the firmly established goals.

Team culture is an important element of successful interaction and cooperation, but focus on individual achievement is not less important. Finally, lack of support and inability to adjust to quickly changing environments does not contribute to innovation and improvement.

Team building is an indispensible factor affecting corporate cultures. It defines duties and responsibilities that each team member should take. In this respect, the role of a leader is confined to taking control of the processes held within the team and providing team members with enough space for creativity and critical thinking.

The individual potential should be appraised by leaders. In this respect, Thomas and Walker (2010, p. 189) insist, “the sharp end, where policy rhetoric meets organizational reality, is an ideal opportunity to examine leadership and its handmaiden failure”.

The failure to conform to a specific end should not be regarded as a disability of a team leader to achieve the desired goals. The problem is that leaders are not flexible enough to recognize alternative solutions to the problem that have been offered beyond the established framework.

As a result, the organization fails to response to the rapidly changing external environment, which can also lead to low competence.

The value of team working should not be underestimated because it provides a number of benefits for employees’ performance and productivity. In particular, team building is primarily premised on constant support, assistance, and interaction, leading to generation of new ideas and thoughts.

As an example, Smith (2012) on the Olympic games held in Australia when Australian swimmers failed to achieve the results just because no one expected they could win the game.

Reluctance to make the effort refers, first of all, to the prejudices and biases shaped within the coach’s team. According to Smith (2012, p. 2), “this relatively dismal showing has come to be seen as the inescapable product of poor administered sport in sharp decline…weak leadership and double standards”.

Strong dependence on authority, however, prevents individuals from developing their professional skills, as well as cognizing personal abilities and skills.

Such a perspective explains the dark side of supervision and leadership that is concerned with cult of a leader, rather than adherence to specific goals (Dark Side of Leadership n. d.). More importantly, self-destructive behaviors of leaders can cause the decline of corporate culture.

Leader as a Social Architect

It has been defined that leadership is connected with the social and cultural environment in which leaders can be regarded as social architects. Hence, managers and supervisors should be able to scan the external and internal setting for delivering new mechanism to face challenges of constantly changing market.

Product innovation, knowledge management, human resources are among the priorities that leaders should consider before engaging into organizational development. Cultural diversity is another phenomenon that has penetrated the management landscape and has shaped new perspectives on leadership.

Cross-cultural communication is indispensible for leaders to reach consensus with their employees and find the motivating factors increasing employees’ engagement into the organizational process.

According to Abbasi and Hollman (1989, p. 19), “managing involves dealing with people who have unique emotions, interests, attitudes, perceptions, cultural experiences, and socio-economic backgrounds”.

In other words, leading an organization successfully, managers should control organizational processes as they believe they should be controlled. Regardless of personality traits, executives should consider a number of rules and principles of managing people.

To begin with, leaders should demonstrate high integrity, which possible through trust, honesty, and respect. Second, fear should be removed from the employed setting because employees will be more productive in case they are not under the pressure.

Third, open communication and open channels of interaction and information exchange is another successful solution to the problem. Finally, providing objective recognition of employees’ achievements can also generate higher rates of job performance.

There are number of opportunities for leaders to adjust to constantly changing working setting. Leading change effectively, executives should be more concerned with developing a new outlook on performance that emphasizes team-based models to cope with the transition to a new model (Kaplan and Norton 2001).

The task of a leader lies in developing a new set of values and structures that can contribute to the development of a new management system that introduce measurement to articulate change (Lussier and Archua 2009).

In additional, the evaluation of behavioral patterns within an organization is also important because it influences strategic thinking, trustful relationships, progressive stability, and considerations for others.

While deliberating on similarities and differences of leadership across cultures, Taormina and Selvarajah (2005, p. 314) pay attention to Asian leadership by stating “the East-West cultural different on t his factor may be noticed in practice”.

For example, western leaders expect their organizations to undertake risk and, therefore, they accept risk as an important condition for conducting daily operations. In contrast, Eastern leadership focuses more on a well-planned activity that ensures the security of subordinates who are involved in specific ventures.

Individualistic biases, universality, and readiness to adjust to new challenges should create the basis of change management and organizational progress.

According to Sturdy and Grey (2003), leaders should be able to quickly react to the emerging problems, as well as pay attention to employees’ needs, values, and beliefs to define what styles should be employed to improve the situation.

More importantly, the interaction between transformational leadership style and organizational change will allow the leaders to establish successful modes of performance (Boga and Ensari, 2009). In such a manner, executives will be able to stand the competition successfully.

Conclusion

A multi-dimensional analysis of leadership education and development has provided a wider picture on cultural, political, social, and economic aspects of its influence on organizational culture and employees’ performance.

More importantly, the analysis has provided new theoretical and empirical perspectives of leading change within an organization through introducing innovation. All the above-presented themes are interdependent because one dimension influences the outcomes of another.

Communication and individual-centered approach are also important for sustaining a competitive advantage.

Reference List

Abbasi, SM, and Hollman 1989, ‘KW Incompetence Bosses: Are You One of Them?’, IM, pp. 17-19.

Avramopoulos, S, and Thomas, KV 2007,‘Leadership Odyssey’, The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Change Management, vol. 6, no. 9, pp. 51-60.

Boga, I, and Ensari, N 2009,‘The Role of Transformational Leadership and Organizational Change on Perceived Organizational Success’, The Psychologist-Manager Journal, vol. 12, pp. 235-251.

‘Dark Side of Leadership Revisted’ n. d., pp. 3-26.

Dawson, PM 2008, ‘People and Process: Making Sense of Change Management’, ICOMS Asset Management Conference, 1-11.

Hull, D 2003, Simply the Best Workplaces in Australia, University of Sydney, pp. 2-41.

Kaplan, RS, and Norton DP, 2001, ‘Leading Change with The Balanced Scorecard’. Financial Executive, pp. 64-66.

Lussier, RN, and Archua, CF 2009, Leadership: Theory, Application and Skill Development. Cengage Learnng, New York.

Martinsons, MG, Davidson, RM, and Martinsons, V 2009, ‘How Culture Influences IT-Enabled Organizational Change and Information Systems’, Communications of the ACM, vol. 52, no. 4., pp. 118-123.

McDonald, R n. d., ‘Core Skills for Work – A Framework’, Ithaca Group, pp. 1-13.

Mellahi, K 2000, ‘The Teaching of Leadership on UK MBA Programs: A Critical Analysis from an International Perspective’, Journal of Management Development, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 297-308.

Northouse, P 2009, Leadership: Theory and Practice, SAGE, New York.

Rost, JC, and Barker, RA 2000, ‘Leadership Education in Colleges: Toward a 21^st Century Paradigm’, Journal of Leadership Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 3-12.

Smith, W 2012, That Sinking Feeling, The Australian, pp. 1-7.

Sturdy, A and Grey C 2003, ‘Beneath and Beyond Organizational Change Management: Exploring Alternatives’, Organization, vol. 10 no. 4, pp. 651-662.

Taormina, RJ, and Selvarajah, C 2005, ‘Perceptions of Leadership Excellence in ASEAN Nations’, Leadership, vol.1, no. 3, pp. 299-322.

Thomas, KT, and Walker AD, 2010, ‘The Sharp End: Real Life Challenges in a Complex Activity Space’, Journal of Public Affairs, vol. 10, pp. 186-199.