Abstract
This paper provides insight into leadership, power, and management with a view of determining the best approaches to improved employee performance. Most leadership approaches used in modern organizations either promote or hamper employee performance and task proficiency.
The modern world has witnessed rigorous dynamism and complexity as employee responsibilities grow less formalized and increasingly difficult to encourage specialization. This paper compares and contrasts two leadership approaches that are prevalent in the twenty-first century with a view of determining the best approach to improved employee performance.
Introduction
In the wake of digitization owing to the constant technological advancement, the escalation of uncertainty and rapid dynamism in the execution of leadership roles has been inevitable. Organizations face the dilemma of choosing the leadership approach that suits the changing employee behavior appropriately. It is worth noting that leadership behaviors stipulated by the embraced approach have a significant effect on task performance.
Leaders play a critical role in ensuring robustness and commitment. The organizational performance mirrors the effectiveness of its management and leadership. Where the performance seems to take a declining trend, it reflects bad organizational leadership and management.
Numerous leadership theories have been put forward to analyze the best and worst leadership approaches to organizational success. This paper examines the empowering and directive approaches to determine their effects on employee performance.
Empowering
The empowering leadership approach entails the sharing of power, work, and resources amongst the organizational leaders and subordinates by ensuring the provision of additional responsibility and decision-making autonomy. In addition, the leaders also offer support to the employees to promote the attainment of additional tasks (Appelbaum, Karasek, Lapointe, & Quelch, 2015).
Although the two concepts differ in the breadth of tasks involved, empowering leadership borrows from the delegation that involves the transfer of power. Empowering goes beyond power delegation to encompass a broader scope of behaviors including the expression of confidence and building capability in the employees (Giltinane, 2013).
Three main perspectives correlate the empowering leadership approach to the employee activity in the workplace. At the outset, the self-determination theory posits that competence and autonomy are necessary ingredients for the formation of intrinsic motivation (Van Wart, 2013).
The supporters of this theory affirm that motivation encourages more complex, creative, and self-directed efforts since the autonomous behaviors are intrinsically rewarding. Besides, they offer personalized satisfaction. As leaders share power and involve employees in decision-making, self-management, and confidence, and motivation, task performance is significantly promoted.
Secondly, proactive work behavior is a recent theoretical development that proposes self-efficacy (Northhouse, 2015). The proactive behavior must be supported by power autonomy and supervision (Appelbaum et al., 2015). The third perspective is the empowerment theory that considers the individual teams in different work units. These teams can be empowered to boost motivation at the unit level of performance.
Providing a sense of impact, competence, and autonomy boosts the intrinsic motivation as it provokes the employees’ initiative to undertake more roles (Van Wart, 2013). Empowerment leadership is the most helpful and applicable approach that takes care of employee behavior shifts and interests (Appelbaum et al., 2015).
Directive Leadership Approach
This approach can be defined using the path-goal theory. It encompasses behaviors that offer employees guidance to the set goals, achievement of strategies, and performance standards (Giltinane, 2013). Directive leaders act by actively monitoring the performance to provide suitable feedback that can include both rewards and penalties.
This approach closely relates to the transactional. However, it differs in that the latter does not offer employee guidance. Transactional leadership only focuses on the provision of contingent rewards and punishments to the employees.
Directive leadership works best when improving the core organizational tasks that are relatively static and predictable (Martin, Liao, & Campbell, 2013). Leaders prescribe the guidelines for the tasks in advance. Employees are expected to assume the respective roles as the leaders watch from a distance with little or no active involvement. According to path-goal theorists, directive leaders ensure improved performance through constant monitoring and provision of timely direction to the employees who seem to lag behind (Northhouse, 2015)
Comparison and Contrast
Various studies have shown that leadership behavior and styles are strongly linked to the employee performance. The abovementioned leadership approaches have been shown to contrast in terms of the degree of autonomy and power vested in the leaders.
For instance, the directive leadership seeks to provide employees with concise guidelines to attain set goals whilst the empowering approach focuses on granting them some degree of power and autonomy to make independent decisions (Martin et al., 2013). Secondly, the empowering leadership model involves motivating the employees to assume more roles including the involvement in decision-making.
The directive leaders only monitor and guide weak employees towards improved performance. These two leadership approaches have different outcomes regarding task performance and employee activity. The empowering leadership approach achieves motivation and confidence amongst the employees that translates to increased proactive performance (Giltinane, 2013).
Conclusion
The leadership approaches focus on different methods of influencing the employee performance. In the wake of technological advancement and shifting organizational activities, leaders ought to embrace the best approaches that integrate these changes and needs. The empowering leadership approach can boost the employees’ commitment as leaders grant them autonomy and provide support to additional roles within the organization.
Directive leadership has become outmoded as the mere monitoring of employees does not yield observable results in the long-run. The organization needs to focus on embracing more inclusive leadership approaches that take into account the stakeholder inputs for overall organizational performance.
Reference List
Appelbaum, S., Karasek, R., Lapointe, F., & Quelch, K. (2015). Employee empowerment: factors affecting the consequent success or failure (Part II). Industrial & Commercial Training, 47(1), 23.
Giltinane, C. (2013). Leadership styles and theories. Nursing Standard, 27(41), 35-39.
Martin, S., Liao, H., & Campbell, E. (2013). Directive versus empowering leadership: a field experiment comparing impacts on task proficiency and proactivity. Academy Of Management Journal, 56(5), 1372-1395.
Northhouse, P. (2015). Leadership, Theory and Practice. Sage: Thousand Oaks
Van Wart, M. (2013). Lessons from Leadership Theory and the Contemporary Challenges of Leaders. Public Administration Review, 73(4), 553-565.