UNIVERSITY OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

Graduate School 1st Semester of SY 2019-2020

Name: Chona G. Escatron

BA 215 - Corporate Social Responsibility
Briefer: Chapter 10 – Corporate Social Responsibility and Leadership

All organizations of course have leaders but this is not what we are concerned with –
rather it is the leadership process which we are going to look at. Effect change management
requires leadership to instigate and drive the process and an understanding of this leadership
process will help you become a more effective change manager.

The concept of leadership

When we consider the attributes of a good leader it is very common to come up with a
list of the qualities which a good leader should have such a list might look as follows:
 Integrity
 Judgement
 Energy
 Humor
 Fairness
 Initiative
 Foresight
 Dedication
 Objectivity
 Decisiveness
 Ambition

And of course we can also come up with a set of attributes which we consider that a good
leader should not have. This might include the following:
 Stubbornness
 Vainness
 Self-centeredness
 Ruthlessness
 Unfairness
  Prejudice

Styles of Leadership
These ideas suggest that the qualities of leadership are not fixed but rather that they
depend upon the people involved, and their respective personalities. This in turn suggests that
it is fruitless to study leadership in terms of defining a set of qualities which make a good
leader. Good leadership depends upon the interaction between the leader and the led, but it
depends upon more than this. It also depends upon the situation. The leadership style for a
brand new start up business would probably need to be very different from that to lead a
company which is long established but going through a difficult period. This in turn might be
very different to a style needed to reorganize a business after a takeover. The demands of
leadership depend therefore upon the circumstances as well as the people involved.

We can classify leadership styles into three distinct types:

 Authoritarian
 Laissez – faire
 Democratic

We can relate these back to the styles identified by Hersey & Blanchard by comparing the
authoritarian style to the telling style, the laissez – faire style to the delegating style and the
democratic style to the selling and involving styles. What we cannot do however is to state that
any style is necessarily better than any other. This depends upon both the people involved
and the situation in which the organization finds itself. Thus we can state that there are three
variable involved in the determination of good leadership. These are:
 The personality of the leader
 The personality of the followers
 The situation at the time
 The Limitations of Agency Theory

While Agency theory offers a number of advantages in the way in which it explains managerial
behavior in organizations it is necessary to recognize that it also suffers from a number of
limitations:

 It is based on a single-period model. In other words, it is not a dynamic model, and may
not be applicable in more realistic multi-period settings.
  Its assumption that both principal and agent are rational utility maximizers is
questionable.
 The analysis is limited to one principal and one agent, and therefore the results may
not be applicable in multi principal and multi agent settings.

Conclusions
We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but leadership is a complex subject and crucial
to the understand of the operation of CSR in an organization. There are a lot of leadership
theories which have some application and relevance. Equally Agency Theory is an important
aspect of understanding organizational behavior.