The Interaction Model

Leader follower and situation

Lecture 2
The Interactional Framework for
Analyzing Leadership
The Interactional Framework for
Analyzing Leadership (continued)

 Depicts leadership as a function of three elements:

 The leader
 The followers
 The situation
 A particular leadership situation scenario can be
examined using each level of analysis separately.
 Examining interactions in the area of overlaps can lead to
better understanding.
 Leadership is the result of complex interactions
among the leader, the followers, and the situation.
The Leader
 Individual aspects of the leadership equation:
 Unique personal history
 Interests
 Character traits
 Motivation
 Effective leaders differ from their followers, and from ineffective
leaders on elements such as:
 Personality traits, cognitive abilities
 Skills, values
 Another way personality can affect leadership is through
temperament.
 The Leader (continued)

 How the leader came to be leader is important:

 Leaders appointed by superiors may have less credibility and may
get less loyalty.
 Leaders elected or emerging by consensus from ranks of followers
are seen as more effective.
A leader’s experience or history in a particular organization is
usually important to her or his effectiveness.
 The extent of follower participation in leader’s selection may
affect a leader’s legitimacy.
The Followers
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=680NlRI3v2I
 Certain aspects of followers affect the leadership process:
 Expectations
 Personality traits
 Maturity levels
 Levels of competence
 Motivation
 Workers sharing a leader’s goals and values are more motivated.
 The number of followers reporting to a leader can have significant
implications.
 Other relevant variables include:
 Follower’s trust in the leader.
 Follower’s confidence or lack thereof in leader’s interest in their well-
being.
Changing Roles for Followers
 The leader-follower relationship is in a period of dynamic
change.
 Increased pressure to function with reduced resources.
 Trend toward greater power sharing and decentralized authority
in organizations.
 Increase in complex problems and rapid changes.
 Followers can become much more proactive in their stance
toward organizational problems.
 Followers can become better skilled at “influencing upward,”
flexible and open to opportunities.
The Situation
 Leadership often makes sense only in the
context of how the leader and followers
interact in a given situation.
 Thesituation may be the most ambiguous
aspect of the leadership framework.

“You’ve got to give loyalty down, if you want

loyalty up.”
~ Donald T. Regan,
Former CEO and White House chief of staff
Illustrating the Interactional Framework:
Women in Leadership Roles

 Women are taking on leadership roles in

greater numbers than ever before.
 Problems still exist that constrain the
opportunity for capable women to rise to
the highest leadership roles in
organizations.
 Research shows that there are no
statistically significant differences between
men’s and women’s leadership styles.
The Shift Toward More Women In Leadership
Roles

Factors that explain the shift toward more women in leadership roles:
 Women themselves have changed.
 Leadership roles have changed.
 Organizational practices have changed.
 Culture has changed.
 There is no Simple Recipe for
Effective Leadership
 Leadership must always be assessed in the context of the leader,
the followers, and the situation:
 A leader may need to respond to various followers differently in the
same situation.
 A leader may need to respond to the same follower differently in
different situations.
 Followers may respond to various leaders quite differently.
 Followers may respond to each other differently with different
leaders.
 Two leaders may have different perceptions of the same followers
or situations.
 The Situation

 “When you’ve exhausted all possibilities,

remember this: You haven’t!”

 ~Robert H. Schuller
 Background
 The appropriateness of a leader’s behavior with a group of
followers often makes sense only in the situational context in
which the behavior occurs.
 The situation, not someone’s traits or abilities, plays the most
important role in determining who emerges as a leader.
 Great leaders typically emerged during economic crisis, social
upheavals, or revolutions.
 It was believed that leaders were made, not born, and that prior
leadership experience helped forge effective leaders.
*
 Situational engineering occurs when leaders use their
knowledge of how the situation affects leadership to
proactively change the situation to improve the chances of
success.

 Leaders in dangerous situations may adopt different

strategies to be successful than they would in more normal
situations.

 The situation often explains more about what is going on

and what kinds of leadership behaviors will be best than
any other single variable.
Situational Factors That Affect Leaders’
Behaviors
 Role theory: A leader’s behavior depends on a leader’s perceptions
of several critical aspects of the situation:(textbook)
 Rules and regulations governing the job.
 Role expectations of subordinates, peers, and superiors.
 Nature of the task.
 Feedback about subordinates’ performance.
 Multiple-influence model
 Microvariables
 Macrovariables
 Situational levels: Task, organizational, and environmental levels.
An Expanded Leader-Follower-
Situation Model

Figure 12.1: An Expanded Leader–Follower– Situation Model

Characteristics of the task

 Task Autonomy: Degree to which a job provides an individual with

some control over what and how he does it.

 Task Feedback: Degree to which a person accomplishing a task

receives information about performance from performing the task
itself.(Driving, KPI)

 Task Structure: Degree to which there are known procedures for

accomplishing the task and rules governing how one goes about it.

 Task Interdependence: Degree to which tasks require coordination

and synchronization for work groups or teams to accomplish a desired
goals.(Some sports)
 Task problems and challenges

Technical Problems:
 Problems or challenges for which the problem-solving resources already
exist.
 These resources have two aspects: specialized methods and specialized
expertise.

Adaptive Problems:
 Problems that cannot be solved using currently existing resources and
ways of thinking.
 Can be difficult reaching a common definition of what the problem really
is.
 Solving such problems requires that the systems facing them make
fundamental changes of some kind.
Contingency Theories of Leadership

 “It is a capital mistake to theorize before

one has data.”
 ~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
 Introduction
 Leadership is contingent upon interplay of all three aspects of
the leader-follower-situation model.
 Similarities between the four theories:
 They are theories rather than personal opinions.
 They implicitly assume that leaders are able to accurately diagnose or
assess key aspects of the followers and the leadership situation.
 With the exception of the contingency model, leaders are assumed to be
able to act in a flexible manner.
 A correct match between situational and follower characteristics and
leaders’ behavior is assumed to have a positive effect on group or
organizational outcomes.
 Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)
 Leadership relationship develops over time.
 LMX argues that leaders do not treat all followers like a uniform
group of equals.
 The leader forms specific and unique linkages with each
subordinate, creating a series of dyadic relationships.

 “In group” – high quality exchange relationship that goes beyond what
the job requires
 “Out group” – low quality exchange limited to fulfilling contractual
obligations
 The three stages of the theory are:
• Role taking – an early stage where opportunity is offered to a
follower with the leader assessing outcomes and potential.

• Role making - this stage follows role taking and allows the
leader to assess the followers trustworthiness.

•Routinisation – This stage occurs when the relationship

between the leader and follower has become well established..
The Cycle of Leadership Making

Table 13.1: The Cycle of Leadership Making: Source: Adapted from G. B.

Graen and M. Uhl-Bien, “Relationship-Based Approach to Leadership:
Development of Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Theory over 25 Years: Applying a
Multi-Level Multi-Domain Perspective,” Leadership Quarterly 6 (1995), pp. 219–47.
 The Normative Decision Model

 The level of input subordinates have in decision-making can,

and does vary substantially depending on the issue.

 Vroom and Yetton maintained that leaders could often

improve group performance by using an optimal amount of
participation in the decision-making process.

 The normative decision model is directed solely at

determining how much input subordinates should have in the
decision-making process.
Normative Decision Model – Levels of
Participation

 The normative decision model was designed to improve some

aspects of leadership effectiveness.

 Vroom and Yetton explored how various leader, follower, and

situational factors affect the degree of subordinates’
participation in the decision-making process and, in turn,
group performance.

 A continuum of decision-making processes ranging from

completely autocratic to completely democratic was
discovered.
 Decision Quality and Acceptance
 Vroom and Yetton believed decision quality and decision
acceptance were the two most important criteria for judging
the adequacy of a decision.

 Decision quality: Means that if the decision has a rational or

objectively determinable “better or worse” alternative, the
leader should select the better alternative.

 Decision acceptance: Implies that followers accept the

decision as if it were their own and do not merely comply
with the decision.
Vroom and Yetton’s Leadership Decision Tree

FIGURE 13.1 Vroom and Yetton’s Leadership Decision Tree

Source: Reprinted from V. H. Vroom and P. W. Yetton, Leadership and Decision Making, by permission of the
University of Pittsburgh Press, © 1973 University of Pittsburgh Press.
 Concluding Thoughts about the Normative
Decision Model
 There are no questions about the leader’s personality, motivations,
values, or attitudes.

 No evidence to show that leaders using the model are more effective
overall than leaders not using the model.

 The model also:

 Views decision making as taking place at a single point in
time.
 Assumes that leaders are equally skilled at using all five
decision procedures.
 Assumes that some of the prescriptions of the model may not
be the best for the given situation.
 The Situational Leadership Model – Leader
Behavior
 The Situational Leadership model focuses on two leadership
behavior categories.
 Task behaviors are the extent to which the leader spells out the
responsibilities of an individual or group.
 Telling people what to do, how/when to do it, and who is to do it
 Relationship behaviors are how much the leader engages in two-
way communication.
 Listening, encouraging, facilitating, clarifying, explaining why the task is
important, giving support

 The relative effectiveness of the two behavior dimensions often

depends on the situation
Situational Leadership
The Situational Leadership Model – Follower
Readiness

 Follower readiness: A follower’s ability and willingness to

accomplish a particular task.

 It is not a personal characteristic, but rather how ready an

individual is to perform a particular task.
 Readiness is not an assessment of an individual’s personality, traits,
values, age, etc.

 Any given follower could be low on readiness to perform

one task but high on readiness to perform a different task.
 Concluding Thoughts about the Situational
Leadership Model
 The only situational consideration is knowledge of the task,
and the only follower factor is readiness.

 Situational Leadership is usually appealing to students and

practitioners because of its commonsense approach as well
as its ease of understanding.

 It is a useful way to get leaders to think about how leadership

effectiveness may depend somewhat on being flexible with
different subordinates.
 The Contingency Model
 Although leaders may be able to change their behaviors toward
individual subordinates, leaders also have dominant behavioral
tendencies.

 The contingency model suggests that leader effectiveness is

primarily determined by selecting the right kind of leader for a
certain situation or changing the situation to fit the particular
leader’s style.

 To understand the contingency theory, one must look first at the

critical characteristics of the leader and then at the critical
aspects of the situation.
 The Path-Goal Theory

 The underlying mechanism of the path-goal theory deals with

expectancy, a cognitive approach to understanding
motivation where people calculate:

 The Theory argues that the leader should first assess the situation
and select a style of leadership appropriate to the demands of the
identified situation
 The Path-Goal Theory (continued)
 Leaders:
 Leaders may use varying styles with different subordinates
and differing styles with the same subordinates in different
situations.
 Followers:
 Satisfaction of followers
 Followers perception of their own abilities.
 Situation:
 Task

 Formal authority system

 Primary work group
The Four Leader Behaviors of
Path-Goal Theory
Examples of Applying Path-Goal Theory

FIGURE 13.10
Examples of Applying Path–Goal Theory
Summary

 The five contingency theories of leadership:

 Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)
 Normative decision model
 Situational leadership model
 Contingency model
 Path-goal theory
 They specify that leaders should make their behaviors
contingent on certain aspects of the followers or the
situation.
 Thank You !

Thushara Asuramanna
ACMA-UK, CGMA-UK, MBA (PIM-USJ), Bsc Eng (Hons), Dip in Mgmt (OUSL), BMS – OUSL,
AM (IESL), M (IET-UK), Certified Expert in SME Finance

asuramanna.t@gmail.com.