Flipped Learning Lecture Seventeen Leadership theories

Flipped Lesson Seventeen Leadership theories
Lesson Outcomes
Understand various leadership theories
Reflect on your understanding of leadership theories
Identify strengths and weaknesses of leadership theory
Relate the Graduate Attributes to your leadership style

Leadership Course Outcomes: Semester One
Read Academically
Read an article or text and demonstrate understanding by writing a short summary or response and engaging in class discussions.
Communicate Effectively
Use appropriate written and oral communications in classroom activities and in faculty interactions.
Act with Integrity
Practice principles of integrity especially with respect to plagiarism and collusion.
Manage Time Wisely
Select and use a time management tool to plan academic & extracurricular activities, manage a class schedule, and meet assignment deadlines.
Reflect Purposefully
Maintain a reflective journal chronicling academic and personal development.
Use Available Resources
Demonstrate knowledge of where and how to receive assistance for academic and personal support

Course Objective for Class
Reflect Purposefully
Read Academically
Communicate Effectively

Leadership Portfolio
This week we are going to start addressing our remaining Leadership Portfolio prompts.
In order to answer complete your portfolio, you need to understand the latest research on what Leadership is, how to evaluate it, and how it is best conducted.
Your Leadership Portfolio prompts will require you to do the following:
1.clearly and specifically define your vision of leadership and
2. list the traits, characteristics and approaches that empower a good leader.

According to scholars, What is Leadership?
Leadership definitions:
Since leadership is known to be a complex, highly contextual and hard to define term, Stogdill (1974, p.7) inferred that “there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept”.
There were more than 350 definitions of leadership found by Bennis and
Nanus (1985) through numerous studies over the years. That number has
grown even bigger since then.

What is Leadership?
Leadership definitions:
Arguably one of the most appealing, perhaps due to simplicity and sincerity of the words used to explain it, definitions of leadership phenomenon belongs to Cuban (1988, p. xx):
“By leadership I mean influencing other’s actions in achieving desirable ends. Leaders are people who share goals, motivations, and actions of others. Frequently they initiate change to reach existing and new goals. …Such leadership takes much ingenuity, energy and skill.”

What is Leadership?
Leadership definitions:
For many centuries leadership was considered a personal quality, where leaders were born and not created. A leader needed to have good virtues, intelligence, charisma, be able to support, motivate and inspire people (Machiavelli, 1992; Bass and Avolio, 1990). ‘Great man’ and ‘Trait’ theories (Stogdill, 1969) support this view.
Nonetheless, after a certain period of time leadership as a term in literature evolved and was no longer seen as a result of one’s special qualities only (Stogdill, 1969).

What is Leadership?
Leadership definitions:
Handy (1992) and Northhouse (2007) defined a new concept where leadership was seen as a process of influencing others to achieve a common goal.
Bennis and Townsend (1995) proclaimed leadership creating a capacity to translate vision into reality by influencing others (followers), whereas Kellerman in her interview with Volckmann (2012) added that context in which leadership takes place is equally important. The role of context and culture in understanding leadership will be debated further on this course.
Perhaps, Kruse’s (2013) definition of leadership where he states that “leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal” (Forbes magazine, 2013) is reflective of all key elements mentioned above.

What is Leadership?
Warren Bennis, a professor at University of Southern California for 35 years and the author of 30 books on leadership:
“A leader is not simply someone who experiences the personal exhilaration of being in charge. A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or for worse, sometimes for ever and ever."
Bennis W., 1993, “An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change”.
Image retrieved from https://www.leadershipnow.com/leadershop/warrenbennis.html

What is Management?
Even though management as a process does seem to influence people in similar ways to leadership, it still tends to relate to more of operational matter processes. Management, in a sense, is a way of coordination and administration of tasks required to achieve a certain common goal.
Whereas leadership, as it has been discussed above, is a notion of moving the change forces ahead by means of motivating and inspiring people for the change.
Some might argue that leadership and management are the concepts with the same meaning and that a Head or a Director in any organization will exercise both conceptions to some extent.

What is Management?
Others, however, might rightly identify that the difference between these overlapping definitions may vary from country to context, culture and time. In order to provide more distinctive difference examples between leadership and management, one might argue that managers manage work tasks and subordinates, whereas leaders lead people and develop leaders.
Leader Vs Manager
Watch this video ‘Simon Sinek: Leader Vs Manager’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSUJwmPQEyg

Leadership questions
How would you define leadership?
What does leadership mean to you?
How is it different from management?
Put together your own leadership statement.
Who is a leader for you? Provide a leadership example (this can be a public figure or someone you know). Why do you consider this person a leader?

Leadership Theories

What is Leadership?
You should now have an idea of how the definition of leadership has evolved and how it is different from management.
How do you define leadership?

What is theory?
Think back to our lesson on theory.
What do you remember about using theories to understand a complex subject?
Remember that theory is lens that allows you to focus on the aspects of a topic that you feel are the most important.

What are Leadership Theories?
Leadership is context and culture bound.
In research written over the past 100 years we can find theories of leadership to help us understand the evolution of leadership scholarship and to give us different lenses to understand how to evaluate leadership.
The great man theory
Traits theory
Behavioral theory
Contingency theory
Management theory
Transformational theory

Leadership is a Trait
You will now be briefly taken through different leadership theories. Most slides will have authors cited according to different theory they may have made a contribution to. At the end of the presentation you will find a Reference list with all sources of information (authors and books). You are welcome to explore the theories further by reading some of the sources.
The Great man and Trait theories
The great man is the oldest theory (originated in the 19th century) that is based on the idea that capacity for leadership is inherent. It supports the view that leaders are born with the necessary internal characteristics and abilities such as good virtues, confidence, charisma, intelligence, ability to support and inspire people that make them natural-born leaders (Stogdill, 1969).
According to this theory leaders were born, not made.

Leadership is a Trait
Traits theory supports a similar, in some ways, view that there is a particular set of traits that is common to all leaders. It focuses on identifying different personality traits that are linked to successful leadership.
Both theories have little impact on theorising leadership today since it has proved empirically impossible to identify a particular set of traits that would be present in all leaders across all countries and cultures.
The traits perspective of leadership was accepted until 1940s – early 1950s, when Stogdill (1948), Fiddler (1967), Yukl & Van Fleet (1992) Huges, Ginnett, & Curphy, (1996) and many other scholars began to consider that traits on their own are insufficient to predict the effectiveness of a leader.

Leadership is a Behavior
Behavioral leadership theory
Behavioral theory started emerging from the field of psychology in mid-1900 (Komives et al., 2007). This theory is based on the idea that leadership is not about traits or certain personal characteristics, but about a set of specific behaviors that successful leaders seem to share. That behaviour related to how leaders get things done and how they treat people. For example, some leaders share the decision making process or distribute power throughout the organisation (Spillane, 2006) while the others take more of an authoritarian approach to how they lead.
This theory began to give way to contingency or situational theory due to oversimplifying the leadership concept and neglecting the importance of the environment or context on leader’s success.

Leadership is a Skill
Contingency leadership theory
Contingency theory is based on the idea that a leader’s success is dependent on whether their leadership style suits a certain situation. It supposes that a leader does not operate in isolation and will be affected by his/her circumstances, people and socio-cultural environment. Fiedler (1967) considered that leaders with different skillsets would be more or less successful in different circumstances. For example, Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during the World War II, is thought to be a more successful leader in the times of war than peace.
There are several other contingency based theories, which might appear similar on the surface however offer their own view on leadership, that fall under the general contingency theory umbrella. They include Fiedler’s Contingency Theory, the Situational Leadership Theory, the Path-Goal Theory and the Decision-Making Theory.

Leadership is a Relationship
Management theory
Management or transactional leadership theory studies leadership as a system of instruction, supervision, organisation, reward/penalty and performance management (Burns, 1978). It is thought that the management theory is based on the idea of exchange where followers receive a reward for achieving a goal. This type of leadership is effective in emergency situations, as well as when achieving results matters more than the development of people.
Unlike Transformational theory where a leader is believed to identify and lead towards a change, transactional leaders look to manage tasks and focus on results.

Leadership is a Relationship
Transformational theory
Transformational leadership theory is based on the belief that a leader in the organisation works with teams to not only identify needed change and create a vision to guide the change through inspiration, but also to help every team member to develop and succeed in achieving common and personal goals (Bass and Avolio, 1990; Burns, 1978).
Burns (1978, p. 141) defined a transformational leader as “one who raises the followers level of consciousness about the importance and value of desired outcomes and the methods of reaching those outcomes”. Transformational leaders are proactive as opposed to responsive Transactional leaders.

Leadership Theories
There are 2 underlying aspects of leadership that we focus on when we think of leadership:
1. Decision making
2. The centrality of people or task
Decision making dimension focuses on the style of management and varies along a spectrum from authoritarian at one end to democratic style at the other. The 2nd major aspect (Blake & Mouton, 1978) places a leader on a grid between the 2 possible variants of concern for task or concern for people.
There are more leadership theories that are out there to explore this topic further: Distributed leadership, Power influence theory and others. All theories represent attempts of research to explain the nature and effect of leadership.

Leadership Theories Questions
Choose a leadership theory that resonates with you most and answer the following questions in your own words:
Summarize the chosen theory in a brief paragraph.
List 1-2 strengths of the theory.
List 1-2 critiques of the theory.
You can read from the Reference list (from NU library or Internet) to inform yourself more on the chosen theory.

Leadership Theories
Reflective Journaling task
How have your thoughts on leadership evolved after learning about the theories of leadership?
Which theory or combination of theories most resonates with you, and why?

Reference list
References: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SNtYctnqPGIZ3i74Bq_jZN-yN6gWhAI82quO1EHOXz8/edit?usp=sharing
Academic journals:
John R. Latham (2014) Leadership for Quality and Innovation: Challenges, Theories, and a Framework for Future Research, Quality Management Journal, 21:1, 11-15, DOI: 10.1080/10686967.2014.11918372