Part II.

Approaches to Leadership

2.1. The Trait Approach

The trait approach is one of the first systematic attempts to study leadership throughout the
20th century. The theories studied in the 20th century to determine what made certain people to
be leaders were called as great man theories because they focused on identifying the innate
qualities and characteristics possessed by great social, political and military leaders. It was
believed that people were born with these traits and the only great people possessed them.
During this time, many researches were concentrated on determining the specific traits that
clearly differentiated leaders from followers.

In the mid 20th century, the trait theory was challenged by research that questioned the
universality of leadership traits. In a major view, many suggested that no consistent set of
traits differentiated leaders from non leaders across a variety of situations. An individual with
leadership traits who was a leader in one situation might not be a leader in another situation.
Rather than being a quality that individual possesses, leadership was conceptualized as a
relationship between people in a social situation. The trait approach has earned new interest
through the current emphasis given by many researchers to visionary and charismatic leaders.
Charismatic leaders have catapulted to the fore front of public attentions. In a study to
determine what distinguishes charismatic leaders from others, charismatic leaders possess
traits of self monitoring, engagement in impression management, motivation to attain social
power and motivation to attain self actualizations.

How Does the Trait approach Work?

The trait approach is very different from other approaches in that it focuses exclusively on the
leader, not on the followers and situation. This makes the trait approach theoretically more
straightforward than other approaches. In essence, the trait approach is concerned with what
traits leaders exhibit and who has these traits. The trait approach does not lay out a set of
hypotheses or principles about what kind of leader is needed in a certain situation or what a
leader should do, given a particular set of circumstances.

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The trait approach suggests that organizations will work better if the people in managerial
positions have designated leadership profiles. It gives individuals a clearer picture of who they
are as leaders and how they fit in to the organization’s hierarchy. In areas where their traits are
lacking, leaders can try to make changes in what they do or where they work to increase their
traits’ potential impact. The trait approach has several strengths. These include:

 It is institutively appealing.
 It has a century of research to back it up.
 It is more conceptual in nature, results from the way the trait approach highlights the leader
component in the leadership process.

Apart from its strengths, it has several weaknesses. These include

 It failed to delimit a definitive list of leadership traits.

 It failed to take situations in to account.
 The other weakness derived from the first two weaknesses (criticism) is that it has resulted
in highly subjective determination of the most important leadership traits.

2.2. Skills Approach

Like the trait approach, the skills approach takes a leader centered perspective on leadership.
However, in the skills approach, we shift our thinking from a focus on personality
characteristics to which usually were viewed as innate and largely fixed, to an emphasis on
skills and abilities that can be learned and developed. Beginning in the early 1990s, a
multitude of studies has been published that contend a leader’s effectiveness depends on the
leader’s ability to solve complex organizational problems.

Three skills Approach: Based on field research in administration and his own first hand
observation of executives in the work place, Katz (1995) suggested that effective
administration leadership) depends on three basic personal skills; technical, human and
conceptual. Katz argued that these skills are quite different from traits or qualities of leaders.
Skills are what leaders can accomplish, where traits are who leaders are (their innate
characteristics). These skills are

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 Technical skills: is knowledge about and proficiency in a specific type of work or activity. It
includes competencies in specialized area, analytical ability and the ability to use appropriate
tools and techniques. For instance,

In computers, technical skills include

 Knowing software language and programming

 The Company’s software products and how to make these products function

Human Skills: is knowledge about and to work with people. The major focus point is to work
with people, not with things. It also considers working with and understanding subordinates,
peers and supervisors. The other focus area of human skill is to assist group members to work
effectively in achieving organizational objective.

Conceptual Skills: is concerned with the ability to work and deal with ideas.

 Talking with ideas and intricacies about organizations.

 Good to put company goals in to words
 Understand the economic principles that affect the company
 Works with abstractions and hypothetical notions
 Central in creating vision and strategic plan.

In Accounting, technical skills include understanding and having the ability to apply GAAP.

How does the skill approach work?

The skills approach is primarily descriptive. It describes leadership from skills perspective. It
provides a structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership.

Strengths:
 It is a leader centered model that stresses the importance of developing particular
leadership skills.
 It is intuitively appealing. It makes leadership available to everyone.
 It provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates a wide variety of components,
including problem solving, social judgment, knowledge, individual attributes and career
experiences.

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 Criticisms:

 The breadth of the skills approach seems to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership.
 It includes motivation, critical thinking, personality and conflict resolution; it addresses
more than just leadership.
 The skills model is weak in predictive value. It does not explain specifically how variations
in social judgment skills and problem solving skills affect performance.
 It is also criticized for claiming not to be a trait model when a major component in the
model includes individual attributes which are traits like.
 The final criticism of skills approach is that it may not be suitably or appropriately applied
to other context of leadership.

2.3. Style Approach

This approach emphasizes the behavior of the leader. This distinguishes it from the trait
approach which emphasizes the personality characteristics of the leader and the skills
approach which focuses on the leader’s capabilities. The style approach focuses exclusively on
what leaders do and how they act. Researchers studying style approach determined that
leadership is composed of two general kinds of behaviors: task behavior and relationship
behavior. Task behavior facilitates goal accomplishment and relationship help subordinates
feel comfortable with themselves, with each other and with the situation in which they find
themselves. The central purpose of the style approach is to explain how the leader combines
these two kinds of behaviors to influence subordinates in their efforts to reach a goal. Many
studies have been performed to investigate the style approach: These include

A. The Ohio State Studies: A group of researchers at Ohio State believed that the results of
studying leadership as a personality trait seemed fruitless and decided to analyze how
individuals acted when they were leading a group or an organization. This analysis was
performed by having subordinates complete questionnaires about their leaders. The
questionnaire contained 150 questions and called as Leaders Behavior Description
Questionnaires (LBDQ) in 1957.

Researchers found that subordinates’ response of the questionnaires clustered around two
types of leader behavior: Initiating structure and consideration. Initiating structure behaviors

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 are essentially task behaviors such as organizing work, giving structure to the work context,
defining role relationship and scheduling work activities. Considerations behaviors are
essentially relationship behaviors and include building camaraderie, respect, trust, and liking
between leaders and followers. The two types of behaviors identified by the LBDQ represent
the core of the style approach and are central to what leaders do: Leaders provide structure for
subordinates and they nurture them.

B. The University of Michigan Studies: Researchers at Ohio State were developing the LBDQ,
where as researchers at the University of Michigan was exploring leadership behavior giving
special attention to the impact of leaders’ behavior on the performance of small groups. The
program of research at Michigan identified two types of leadership behaviors: employee
orientation and production orientation. Employee orientation is the behavior of leaders who
approach subordinates with a strong human relation emphasis. They take an interest in
workers as human beings, value their individuality, and give special attention to their personal
needs. Employee orientation is very similar to the cluster of behavior identified as
consideration in Ohio State studies. Production orientation consists of leadership behavior that
stresses the technical and production aspects of the job. From this orientation, workers are
viewed as a means for getting work accomplished. Production orientation parallels the
initiating structure cluster found in the Ohio State studies.

Blake and Mouton’s Managerial (Leadership) Grid

The best known model of managerial behavior is the managerial Grid which appeared in the
early 1960s and has been refined and revised several times. It is a model that has been used
extensively in organizational training and development. The managerial Grid which has been
renamed the Leadership Grid was designed to explain how leaders help organizations to reach
their purpose through two factors:

 Concern for production and

 Concern for people

Concern for production refers to how a leader is concerned with achieving organizational
tasks. It involves a wide range of activities including attention to policy decisions, new
product development, process issue, work load and sales volume.

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Concern for people refers to how a leader attends to the people in the organization who are
trying to achieve its goal. This concern includes building organizational commitment and trust
promoting the personal worth of employees, providing good working conditions, maintaining
a fair salary structure and promoting good social relationships. The Leadership (Managerial)

Grid joins concern for production and concern for people in a model that has two interesting
axes. The horizontal axis represents the leader’s concern for results and the vertical axis
represents the leader’s concern for people. Each of the axes is drawn as a 9-point scale on
which a score of 1 represents minimum concern and 9 represents maximum concern. The
Leadership Grid portrays five major leadership styles:

 Authority Compliance (9, 1)

 Country Club Management (1, 9)
 Impoverished Management (1, 1)
 Middle of the road Management (5, 5)
 Team Management (9,9)

Low Medium High

High Country Club Team Mgt

Concern for
People
Medium Middle of the
Concern for
production road Mgt
Low Impoverished Autocratic- Task mgt
(Authority Compliance)
Mgt

Autocratic-task Oriented
This leadership style concentrates on setting of organizational goals, development of effective
operations systems, utilization of organizational resources, achievement of objectives and
stress on quality of work and production. The leader functions in an autocratic way with no or
very little concern for people.
Country Club Management

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Leaders who follow this style of leadership display very high concern for people and very
little interest for production. They create a very relaxed and friendly environment. There are
no organizational goals and exist very loose style of functioning. The working environment is
workers welfare oriented.
Impoverished Management
Under this style (as shown in the figure-left bottom corner,) is referred to as impoverished
management or Laissez-faire type of management. Managers do not involve themselves with
the work or people, they only mark time and have abandoned their job. They act as messenger
to pass information from superiors to subordinates. They neither display any concern for
people nor for the production. They display minimum involvement in the job they are
assigned to. This amounts to exertion of minimum efforts on the part of leader to get required
work done is appropriate to sustain organizational membership.
Middle of the Road Management
Managers have both concern for people and production. They set moderate production goals
and achieve them. They have equal concern for people and work. They achieve reasonably
satisfactory results in maintain high morale of workers and meet production requirements The
managerial grid is widely used model for training and development of managers. The model
cannot determine a particular style of a leader because leadership is influenced by personality
traits, skills, attitude of the leader and the followers. Apart from the above situational factors
in work environment and the organizational culture affects the leadership style to a great
extent.

Team Management
At the extreme opposite is team management style of leadership where managers mesh
interest of people and production needs in the balanced manner. Their involvement is total.
They are real team leaders who have full knowledge, skill and aptitude for job and also
concern for the welfare of workers. Blake and Mouton argue strongly that style is the most
effective management style. They believe, this leadership approach will, in all situations, result
in improved performance, low absenteeism, and turnover and high job satisfaction.
How Does the style Approach Work?

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 The style approach is not a refined theory that provides a neatly organized set of prescriptions
for effective leadership behavior. Rather, the style approach provides a frame work for
assessing leadership in a broad way, as with a task and relationships dimension. The style
approach reminds leaders that their actions towards others occur on a task level and a
relationship level.

Strengths:

 The style approach marked a major shift in the general focus of leadership research.
 A wide range of studies on leadership style validates and gives credibility to the basic tenets
of the approach.
 Researchers from the style approach have ascertained that a leader style consists of
primarily of two major types of behaviors: task and relationship.
 The style approach is heuristic. It provides us with a broad conceptual map that is worth
while to use in our attempts to understand the complexities of leadership.

Criticisms:

 The research on style approach has not adequately shown how leaders’ styles are associated
with performance outcomes.
 This approach has failed to find a universal style of leadership that could be effective in
almost every situation.
 The final criticism is that it implies that the most effective leadership style is the high –high
style.

2.4. Situational approach

One of the most widely recognized approaches to leadership is the situational approach which
was developed by Hersey and Blanchard in 1969.Situational leadership focuses on leadership
in situations. The premise of the theory is that different situations demands different kind’s
leadership. From this perspective, to be an effective leader requires that a person adapt his or
her style to the demands of different situations. It stresses that leadership is composed of both
a directive and supportive dimension and that each has to be applied appropriately in a given
situation. To determine what is needed in a particular situation, a leader must evaluate her/his

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 employees and assess how competent and committed they are to perform a given task. The
essence of situational leadership demands that leaders match their style to the competence and
commitment of the subordinates. Effective leaders are those who can recognize what
employees need and then adapt their own style to meet those needs.

Assumptions

 The best action of the leader depends on a range of situational factors.

Style

 When a decision is needed, an effective leader does not just fall into a single
preferred style, such as using transactional or transformational methods. In practice, as they say,
things are not that simple.

 Factors that affect situational decisions include motivation and capability of

followers. This, in turn, is affected by factors within the particular situation.

 The relationship between followers and the leader may be another factor that affects
leader behavior as much as it does follower behavior.

 The leaders' perception of the follower and the situation will affect what they do
rather than the truth of the situation. The leader's perception of themselves and other factors
such as stress and mood will also modify the leaders' behavior.

 The dynamics of situational leadership are understood when we separate the situational
leadership model in to two parts:
 Leadership style and Development of subordinates.
1. Leadership Style: Leadership style consists of the behavior pattern of a person who
attempts to influence others. It includes both directives (task) behaviors and supportive
(relationship) behaviors. Directive behaviors help group members accomplish goal by giving
direction, establishing goals and methods of evaluation, setting time lines, defining roles, and
showing how the goals are to be achieved. Directive behaviors clarify, often with one way
communication, what is to be done, how it is to be done, and who is responsible for doing it.
Supportive behavior helps group behavior feel comfortable about themselves, their coworkers

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 and the situation. It involves two way communications and responses that show social and
emotional support to others.

Leadership behavior can be classified further in to four distinct categories of directive and
supportive behaviors:

A. High directive and low supportive style: It is also called as directive style. In this style the
leader focuses communication on goals achievement, and spends smaller amount of time
using supportive behaviors. Using this style a leader gives instruction about what and how
goals are to be achieved by the subordinates and then supervises them carefully.
B. Coaching Approach: In this approach, the leader focuses on both achieving goals and
meeting subordinates’ socioeconomic needs. The coaching style requires that the leader
involve him/her with subordinates by giving encouragement and soliciting subordinate input.
C. Supportive Style: It requires that the leader takes a high supportive and low directive style.
In this approach, the leader does not focus exclusively on goals but uses supportive behaviors
that bring out the employees’ skills around the task to be accomplished. The supportive style
includes listening, praising, asking for input and giving feedback.
D. Low-Supportive Low- Directive Style: It is also called as delegating approach. In this
approach, the leader offers less task input and social support, facilitating employees’
confidence and motivation in reference to the task. The delegative leader lessens involvement
in planning, control of details and goal clarification. After the group agrees on what it is to do,
this style lets subordinates take responsibility for getting the job done the way they see fit.
2. Development Level

The best action of the leader depends on a range of situational factors. Leaders should adapt
their style to follower development style (or 'maturity'), based on how ready and willing the
follower is to perform required tasks (that is, their competence and motivation).

 There are four leadership styles (S1 to S4) that match the development levels (D1 to
D4) of the followers.
 The four styles suggest that leaders should put greater or less focus on the task in
question and/or the relationship between the leader and the follower, depending on the
development level of the follower.

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 Leadership style in response to Follower development level
follower development level
Low High

R4 R3 R2 R1

Task / directive behavior

Low High

Relationship /  
supportive S3 S2
behavior High    
Partici- Selling
pating
   
S4 S1
Low    
Dele- Telling
gating  

S1: Telling / Directing

 Follower: R1: Low competence, low commitment / Unable and unwilling or insecure
 Leader: High task focus, low relationship focus
 When the follower cannot do the job and is unwilling or afraid to try, then the leader
takes a highly directive role, telling them what to do but without a great deal of concern for the
relationship. The leader may also provide a working structure, both for the job and in terms of
how the person is controlled.
 The leader may first find out why the person is not motivated and if there are any
limitations in ability. These two factors may be linked, for example where a person believes
they are less capable than they should be may be in some form of denial or other coping. They
follower may also lack self-confidence as a result.
 If the leader focused more on the relationship, the follower may become confused
about what must be done and what is optional. The leader thus maintains a clear 'do this'
position to ensure all required actions are clear.
S2: Selling / Coaching

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 Follower: R2: Some competence, variable commitment / Unable but willing or
motivated
 Leader: High task focus, high relationship focus
 When the follower can do the job, at least to some extent, and perhaps is over-
confident about their ability in this, then 'telling' them what to do may demotivate them or
lead to resistance.
 The leader thus needs to 'sell' another way of working, explaining and clarifying
decisions.
 The leader thus spends time listening and advising and, where appropriate, helping
the follower to gain necessary skills through coaching methods.
 Note: S1 and S2 are leader-driven.
S3: Participating / Supporting
 Follower: R3: High competence, variable commitment / Able but unwilling or
insecure
 Leader: Low task focus, high relationship focus
 When the follower can do the job, but is refusing to do it or otherwise showing
insufficient commitment, the leader need not worry about showing them what to do, and
instead is concerned with finding out why the person is refusing and thence persuading them
to cooperate.
 There is less excuse here for followers to be reticent about their ability, and the key is
very much around motivation.
 If the causes are found then they can be addressed by the leader. The leader thus
spends time listening, praising and otherwise making the follower feel good when they show
the necessary commitment.

S4: Delegating / Observing

 Follower: R4: High competence, high commitment / Able and willing or motivated
 Leader: Low task focus, low relationship focus
 When the follower can do the job and is motivated to do it, then the leader can
basically leave them to it, largely trusting them to get on with the job although they also may
need to keep a relatively distant eye on things to ensure everything is going to plan.

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 Followers at this level have less need for support or frequent praise, although as with
anyone, occasional recognition is always welcome.
 Note: S3 and S4 are follower-led.
How does The Situational Approach Work?

The situational approach is constructed around the idea that employees move forward and
backward along the developmental continuum, which represents the relative competence and
commitment of subordinates. For leaders to be effective, it is essential that they determine
where subordinates are on the developmental continuum and adapt their leadership styles so
they directly match their style to that development level. In a given situation, the first task for
a leader is to determine the nature of the situation. Questions such as the following must be
addresses:
 What task are subordinates being asked to perform?
 How complex is the task?
 Are the subordinates sufficiently skilled to accomplish the task?
 Do they have the desire job once they start it?

Strengths:

 The 1st strength is that it has stood the test of time in the market place. It is well known and
frequently used for training leaders within organization.
 The second strength of it is its practicability. It is easy to understand, intuitively sensible
and easily applied in a variety of settings.
 The 3rd strength is its prescriptive value. Whereas many theories of leadership are
descriptive in nature, the situational approach is prescriptive.
 The 4th strength is it emphasizes leader flexibility. It stresses that leaders need to find out
about heir subordinates’ needs and adapt their leadership style accordingly.

Criticisms:

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 The first criticism of situational leadership is that only a few research studies have been
conducted to justify the assumptions and propositions set forth by the approach.
 The 2nd criticism that can be directed at situational leadership concerns the ambiguous
conceptualization in the model of subordinates’ development levels.
 The authors of situational leadership do not explain the theoretical basis for the changes in
the composition of each of the developmental style.
 It has to do with how the model matches leader style with subordinate development level-
the prescription of the model.
 It failed to account for how certain demographic characteristics (age, education, experience
and gender) influence the leader subordinate prescription of the model.

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