QUALIFI LEVEL 4 BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

Module Name: Leadership and the Organization

Task 1

a. Describe the concept of organizational leadership.

Organizational leadership is a management approach in which leaders help set strategic goals for
the organization while motivating individuals within the group to successfully carry out
assignments in service to those goals.

The company CEO, army general, political party leader, school superintendent, department head,
team coach – these are but a few examples representing one of the fundamental components of
organizational leadership. Inside of every organization, there must be a person responsible for
directing or guiding the group.

According to Jessica Dihn and her co-authors in a 2013 article for "The Leadership Quarterly," the
role of the leader is "to structure the way that the inputs of others are combined to produce
organizational outputs." But what distinguishes an organizational leader (OL) from, say, a
functional manager or an executive with other leadership qualities?

The key difference is that organization leaders combine business understanding with their roles as
“future visionaries and forward-thinkers who lead broad initiatives using integrity and ethics,”
according to Dr. Linda Ellington, faculty lead for organizational leadership at Southern New
Hampshire University (SNHU). Organizational leadership, then, is a management approach in
which leaders help set strategic goals for the organization while motivating individuals within the
group to successfully carry out assignments in service to those goals.

“If your goal is to influence people and impact the organization at the highest level possible, then
you want to learn about organizational leadership,” said Deborah Gogliettino, faculty lead for
human resources at SNHU.
It’s one thing to learn about a subject. But can the essential skills and mindsets of organizational
leadership be learned? According to Ellington, these include:

• Problem-solving and decision-making

• Communicating (especially listening) effectively
• Relationship- and team-building (including developing leadership potential in others)
• Identifying future innovations and opportunities
• Understanding your business environment and operations
• Using integrity and ethics
• Thinking strategically, system-wide, and holistically
• Spreading the organization’s vision and inspiring others to share in that vision

“People are not empty vessels,” Ellington said. “They have unique experiences, talents and
knowledge.” And if they have the drive, commitment and passion to learn about organizational
leadership, “we can teach them those OL skills and mindsets while also sprinkling in the business
understanding,” she said.

Of course, some people learn organizational leadership skills through real-world experiences. Yet
the benefit of an education, either at the undergraduate or graduate level, is the chance to study
theories about motivation, strategy and leadership, and then put those theories into practice without
the same level of risk.

“After all, the practice is when you make mistakes – and we all make mistakes,” said Ellington.
“The difference is that in an education setting, no one is going to get fired or lose their company
or go into debt. We provide a safe sandbox or playground for our students to try simulations and
develop confidence in their abilities.”
 b. Evaluate the importance of leadership development for organizational success.

Leadership refers to the ability to influence, modify and exercise control over the behaviour of
others in a group. It is the ability of an individual or a group of individuals to influence and guide
members of an organization. Leadership involves establishing a clear vision, sharing the vision so
others will follow willingly and providing the knowledge, information and methods to realize the
vision. Simply, leadership is the ability of an individual or organization to lead or guide other
individuals or organizations. Today, people are increasingly recognizing the importance of
leadership in organizational development. Leadership is the willingness to take ownership of the
organization combined with an intrinsic urge to do what is best for the organization.

Leadership plays an important role in the development of any organization. No organization can
work efficiently without effective leadership. Leadership is an important function of the
management which helps to enhance productivity and to achieve organizational goals. In
fact., leadership is an essential part and a crucial component of effective management which helps
to maximize efficiency and achieve organizational goals.

The importance of leadership in organizational development cannot be denied

Influencing the behaviour of people: A leader impresses his subordinates with his leadership
ability. He brings them under his control in such a way that they put in their best efforts to achieve
the goals of the organization. Good leaders usually get good results through their followers.

Helps employees in fulfilling their needs: A leader establishes personal relationship with his
subordinates and tries to meet their requirements. People follow a leader because he provides them
security and the opportunities to earn wealth, gives them the right to work and tries to understand
their feelings. Employees willingly accept him because he takes care of their needs. Consequently,
they work with complete dedication and enthusiasm.

Introducing required changes: The business environment is changing at a quick pace, so in order
to face the changing environment, many alterations have to be introduced in the organization.
Since the people already happen to be under the influence of the leader, he can easily makes them
agree to implement these changes. In this way, the possible resistance to the change is eliminated
with the strength of leadership ability.

Solving conflicts effectively: A leader can effectively solve every type of conflict be it employee
vs. employee or employees’ vs. employer, under the weight of his influence. A leader allows his
followers the liberty to express their views. That is the reason that he easily understands the reality
of the conflict, in this way, by understanding the nature of the conflict he tries to provide timely
solution and minimizes the possibility of adverse results.

Training and Development of Subordinates: A leader helps in the training and development of the
employees. He makes them aware of the modern techniques of work. In addition, he makes it
possible for them to be good leaders in future.

Setting a clear vision: This means Influencing employees to understand and accept the future state
of the organization. A good leader will influence his followers to perform their duties by explaining
the vision and the importance of their role in the outcome.

Motivating and guiding employees: This involves finding out the needs of the employees and
fulfilling them. It is important to define the employees’ role in the work process and provide them
with the tools needed. A good leader will explain the task and be available to assist them if they
run into a problem.

Building morale: This involves pulling everyone together towards a comment goal. A good leader
will let the employees’ know how much their work is appreciated. A simple gesture like providing
praise for a task well done, or throwing a party to recognize small achievements, will regenerate
their spirits.

There is a great importance of leadership in organizational development. The role of leaders,

throughout an organization, is critical to the success of organizational development interventions.
Creating and maintaining worthwhile businesses require an understanding of the role of leadership
in addressing personal development of employees. Happiness and contentment is a common goal
of everyone and the rest of the things are possibly means to that goal.
Personal outcomes of employees like meaning in life and individual well-being have become an
important concern for organizations in the extreme competition for attracting and retaining talent.
Meaning in life makes one’s life purposeful and subjective well-being is about being happy; these
are important dimensions of anyone’s life, and people expect work organizations to contribute to
them. Focusing only on work-related outcomes may not be sufficient anymore.

There is a need to better understand the processes by which desirable personal outcomes of
employees can be enhanced. Leadership motivates the people to a higher level of performance
through their strong human relations. It is an important function of management which helps to
maximize efficiency and to achieve organizational goals, so managers must have traits of a leader.
Task 2

a. Describe the skills and characteristics of good leaders.

Whether running your own business or leading teams in an office setting, the best leaders require
a strong set of leadership qualities to help positively interact with their employees, team members,
and clients.

Behavioral theories suggest that leadership skills aren’t ingrained and can be taught – people can
obtain good leadership qualities through teaching and learning these skills over time.

The most important qualities of a good leader include integrity, accountability, empathy, humility,
resilience, vision, influence, and positivity.

“Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is
about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.”

What Are the Leadership Qualities that Make a Great Leader?

Irrespective of how you define the word leadership, you can’t deny that certain individuals can
greatly impact the lives of others based on their experience and insights.

While we’re all living different timelines on the journey of life, we look to leaders for guidance
and advice.

While some leaders seem like they were naturally born that way, leadership skills can be learned.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t led before.

There are certain leadership characteristics, traits, and skills that ultimately build the most effective
leaders. Learn these and you can change the lives of others.
Here are the most important leadership qualities and skills to look for in a great leader.

• Effective Communication.
• Integrity.
• Accountability.
• Empathy.
• Humility.
• Resilience.
• Vision.
• Influence.
• Positivity.
• Delegation.
• Confidence.
• Open-Minded
 b. Analyze 2 different leadership styles.

Leader One– Zhang Ruimin

Zhang Ruimin was born in 1949, in Shan Dong Province. He was rewarded a MBA degree after
his graduation at University of Science and Technology of China in 1995. He is now holding the
title of senior economist and the CEO of Haier Group.

In 1984, Zhang Ruimin’s position was transferred from Qing Dao Home Appliance’s manager to
the director of Qingdao Refrigerator Factory. Just after taking office, he started to propose the
Branding Strategy. Zhang Ruimin led personnel to seize opportunity for productivity acceleration
and succeeded in transforming a small and indebted factory with total debt of RMB1, 470,000 into
a China’s top home appliance brand, Haier Group.

By 2009, Haier, consisting of 29 manufacturing plants, 8 Research & Development centres and 19
overseas trading companies, became the world fourth-largest white appliances producer. Haier’s
high-tech, high quality and high efficiency products are distributed into 160 countries across the
world. This gives out that the worth of Haier’s brand has gone beyond $7.5 billion.

As Waddel mentioned in his book, the function of transformational managers is to let the
subordinates be aware of their significant work performance, help them discover their own needs
of personal growth and motivate them properly in order to achieve organisational goals.
Nevertheless, transactional managers intend to use their reward and coercive power to encourage
high performance.

Zhang Ruimin’s leadership style perfectly matches the requirement for a transactional leader. He
believes that failing to grasp product quality, the enterprise won’t last long. His toughness on
product quality is well-known by most Chinese businessman. Just after he came into Qingdao
Refrigerator Factory, he realised that “Quality didn’t even enter into anybody’s mind.”(Business
Week Online, 1999) Soon, after a customer complained about the poor quality of their products,
he picked up a sledgehammer and told the workers to smash the defective models, also including
himself to do so. He shouted angrily “The message got through that there’s no A, B, C, and D
quality. There’s only acceptable and unacceptable.” From that day, the lesson deeply imprints to
Haier people’s heart and resulted in increasing product quality. However, when the lengthy
defectiveness problem was about to solve, undisciplined and inactive personnel became another
threat to the enterprise. “The real problem was that workers had no faith in the company and didn’t
care,” recalled by Zhang Ruimin. He then realised the importance of incurring competitive spirit
and crisis awareness. By bringing the philosophy of survival of the fittest into management, he
thinks highly of creating competitive environment to staffs. He often admonishes workers that
hardship will lead to prosperity, while comfort will lead to destruction. He also developed Haier’s
reward and punishment system by knowing that efficiently use of human resources needs to
motivate and constrain employees properly.

The system consists of positive motivate and negative motivate.

Positive motivate is aiming to reward the employee whose behaviour accords to organisational
goals and expectations. For example, there’s a rewarding event named “Tool Naming”. If a front-
line worker invents a new tool, the invention will be named as the worker’s first name. Zhang’s
Tool Naming builds up workers’ confidence as it can make them proud. More importantly, it
successfully breaks down the barriers of activating personnel’s innovative enthusiasm. These lead
Haier employees to achieving high performance.

Negative motivate applies when unexpected behaviour occurs. Zhang believes punishment makes
employee compunctious and clearheaded. It also helps them adjust to a situation consisting with
organisational goals. However, he highlighted managers should leave a clear way out to fallible
workers by ideological education, showing concern and instruction, instead of losing their
confidence by “knock them down at one stroke”.

Since Zhang Ruimin is skilled not only in reward system development but also in properly
managing his coercive power. It can be concluded that Zhang is an experienced and transactional
leader.
Bill Gates is the CEO of Microsoft Corporation, It is the world’s top and leading software company
of personal computers. Bill Gates dropped out from Harvard University , and use all his energies
for develepls for every office desktop and home, they started developing software for personal
computers. Gates’ foresight regarding personal computer has been lead him to the success of
Microsoft enterprise, and the world wide software industry as well. As a leader, Bill Gates actively
plays an importaning Microsoft during his junior year. He had started Microsoft in 1975,and work
with his friend named Paul Allen. He believes that the personal computer will become a very useful
and valuable toot role in strategic decisions making and management at Microsoft.

The one important and major factor in Fiedler’s theory is situational characteristics. Fiedler
develops his analysis by focusing on three situational factors, which are leader-member, task
structure, position power.It’s is defined as the degree that a situation enables a leader to implement
influence to a group.

Bill Gates found most favourable place where positional power is high because he has most
authorities in the company, task structure is also defined as he gives the direction to subordinate
to implement his vision, and last leader-member relation is also good.That’s mean Bill Gates is
more likely Task-oriented leader who want performance from his subordinate and work has to be
done to achieve the goal of the company.
Task 3

a. Identify different methods of leadership development.

Successful leadership development is the result of three things:

• Individual learner characteristics, including willingness and ability to learn

• The quality and nature of the leadership development program, including its structure and
content
• Opportunities to practice new skills and receive performance feedback

Methods of Leadership Development

Leader development takes place through multiple mechanisms: formal instruction, developmental
job assignments, 360-degree feedback, executive coaching, and self-directed learning. These
approaches may occur independently but are more effective in combination.

• Formal Training

Organizations often offer formal training programs to their leaders. Traditional styles provide
leaders with required knowledge and skills in a particular area using coursework, practice,
“overlearning” with rehearsals, and feedback. This traditional lecture-based classroom training is
useful; however, its limitations include the question of a leader’s ability to transfer the information
from a training environment to a work setting.

• Developmental Job Assignment

Following formal training, organizations can assign leaders to developmental jobs that target the
newly acquired skills. A job that is developmental is one in which leaders learn, undergo personal
change, and gain leadership skills resulting from the roles, responsibilities, and tasks involved in
that job. Developmental job assignments are one of the most effective forms of leader
development. A “stretch” or developmental assignment challenges leaders’ new skills and pushes
them out of their comfort zone to operate in a more complex environment, one that involves new
elements, problems, and dilemmas to resolve.

• 360-Degree Feedback

The 360-degree feedback approach is a necessary component of leader development that allows
leaders to maximize learning opportunities from their current assignment. It systematically
provides leaders with perceptions of their performance from a full circle of viewpoints, including
subordinates, peers, superiors, and the leader’s own self- assessment. With information coming
from so many different sources, the messages may be contradictory and difficult to interpret.
However, when several different sources concur on a similar perspective, whether a strength or
weakness, the clarity of the message increases. For this mechanism to be effective, the leader must
accept feedback and be open and willing to make changes. Coaching is an effective way to
facilitate 360-degree feedback and help effect change using open discussion.

• Coaching

Leadership coaching focuses on enhancing the leader’s effectiveness, along with the effectiveness
of the team and organization. It involves an intense, one-on-one relationship aimed at imparting
important lessons through assessment, challenge, and support. Although the goal of coaching is
sometimes to correct a fault, it is used more and more to help already successful leaders move to
the next level of increased responsibilities and new and complex challenges. Coaching aims to
move leaders toward measurable goals that contribute to individual and organizational growth.

• Self-directed Learning

Using self-directed learning, individual leaders teach themselves new skills by selecting areas for
development, choosing learning avenues, and identifying resources. This type of development is a
self-paced process that aims not only to acquire new skills but also to gain a broader perspective
on leadership responsibilities and what it takes to succeed as a leader.
 b. Discuss the usefulness of the leadership theories.

Research shows that these traits are considered the most important to leaders around the world.
And leadership theories help explain how leaders harness and develop these traits. Recently
leadership theories have been more formalized, making them easier to understand, discuss, and
analyze in action.

Ralph Nader says “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not followers.” This is
considered transformational leadership—a leader can alter the perspective or psychology of a
follower and shift them to want to become a leader too. This suggests that at the end of the day,
leadership should be elevating and inspiring. Leaders should push the people they lead to new
heights, helping them to grow into what they know they can become. Transformational leadership
is an important psychological perspective for leaders to study and understand if they want to really
influence and impact others. Different leadership theories address to create stronger and more
effective leadership, helping followers become encouraged to be leaders themselves.

While there are dozens of leadership theories and psychology, there are a few that are more well-
known. These more common leadership theories are important to understand and recognize,
especially if you currently are, or are studying to be business leader in the future. Understanding
psychological and social impacts of effective leadership will help you determine the kind of leader
you want to be.

Behavioral theory. The behavioral leadership theory focuses on how leaders behave, and assumes
that these traits can be copied by other leaders. Sometimes called the style theory, it suggests that
leaders aren’t born successful, but can be created based on learnable behavior. Behavioral theories
of leadership focus heavily on the actions of a leader—this theory suggests that the best predictor
of leadership success is viewing how a leader acts. Action rather than qualities are the focal points
of behavioral learning theory. Patterns of behavior are observed and categorized as “styles of
leadership” in this theory. Some of the styles of leadership include task-oriented leaders, people-
oriented leaders, country club leaders, status-quo leaders, dictatorial leaders, and more. At the end
of the day, the actions and actual behaviors of a leader are what defines success in this theory.
Contingency theory. The contingency leadership theory, sometimes called situational theory,
focuses on the context of a leader. These theories look at the situational effects of the success or
failure or a leader. A leader’s effectiveness is directly determined by the situational context. While
a leader’s personality is a small factor in their success, the most important factor is the context and
situation of the leader.

Great Man theory. The great man theory of leadership, sometimes called the trait theory, suggests
that good leaders are born. They have innate traits and skills that make them great, and these are
things that can’t be taught or learned. The trait theory suggests that leaders deserve to be in their
position because of their special traits.

Management theory. The management theory is sometimes called transactional leadership, and
focuses on supervision, organization, and group performance. Transactional leadership is a system
of rewards and punishments, and transactional leadership is regularly used in business. When
employees do something successful, managers reward them. When they fail, they may get
punished. Transactional rewards and punishments are given based on the idea that people really
only do things for the reward. Their psychology doesn't allow human beings to do things out of
goodness, but rather out of the promise of a reward.

References

Boela , A. (2001). Leadership development. New York : Routledge .

Murphy, S. (2003). The Fututre of Leadership Development. New York : Routledge .
Ryan, R. (2009). Leadership Development. London : Elsevier .