The paper is intended to present an analysis of new theories regarding the leadership and the management and to promote a new concept, that of “Leadership in the mirror”. An organization that intends to “grow up new leaders” is good to hire managers according to the type of leadership they intend to implement. The manager faces the complexity and the leader the changes, grouping the characteristic activities of management and leadership. The leadership in the mirror in a new concept based on personal observations that starts from a study done during 10 years upon 50 persons initially subordinates, in leading positions nowadays.
Keywords: Leadership in the mirror, Leading, Manager, Decision, Interpersonal relations
The leader has to be seen as an assembly of attributes of the role the person has in a group, and at group’s level, as an interaction process. Gary Johns,[1] without denying the importance of individual characteristics in getting a prestigious position, believes that other two factors are determining the leading characteristics: “in reality, the leader exists according to the need of a group of people, according to the nature of the situation where this group is trying to act”. The nature of the group and the concrete situation in which the leader is placed at a given moment, not personal qualities, determine his appearance.1
[1] Gary Johns, Organizational behavior, Ed. Economică, Bucureşti. 1998:p.37.
The leader is the person who exercises great influence or power within social groups of various sizes. The leader exercises his leadership function by making decisions regarding the group he leads. There is a difference between the formal leader (institutional leader), the person designated with the leadership function by institutional means, and the informal leader (unofficial leader), respectively the person who exercises the greatest influence within the group. In most situations, achieving high performance and a climate that generates satisfaction requires that the formal leader coincide with the informal leader.
The leadership is the ability to orientate through means of communication and convince others to get involved and participate in the realization of a concrete activity, being a complex process of elements aimed at trusting the people trained in a certain action, the mission of the analyzed system, the collective decision and motivating human resources.
Management implies leadership, being more complex than this, determined by the personal characteristics of the leader, the climate in the organization and the business environment. Within a group, the leader has a privileged status, his influence in receiving the message will be felt. At the group level, leadership and influencing depend on communication: horizontal or vertical (it can be downward - from boss to subordinate, or ascending - from subordinate to boss).
Leaders are "relays between the means of mass communication and the opinions of the collective" by exercising authority over the group's projects, establishing relationships with those led and influencing the behavior of group members. The group leader has a great influence in receiving and transmitting messages, communication being much faster and more efficient. The group can also learn information from the outside from people with high, privileged, recognized status and hardly or hardly at all from individuals with modest, low status.
The leaders represent crucial points of communication inside a group. Communication is an important characteristic of groups, together with self-organization, conformity, unity, efficiency etc. The leadership appears when a group of people gathers and unifies their efforts in order to achieve a common goal. Because in a company are a formal organization and an informal one, that are often sensitively different, the informal leaders may not identify with the managers, with the persons with leading positions in the company.
Leadership is also a component of management, being the ability to determine others to systematically pursue the achievement of defined objectives, ensuring the coherence of a group and motivating it to achieve goals. Management activities such as planning, organizing and making decisions are inactive germs until the leader triggers the training, that is, the power of motivation in people guiding them towards certain goals.
Managers are those who organize structures of the organization and implicitly, activities and the people associated with them; they are mainly present in the intermediate levels of the organization; Managers intertwine organizational and execution activities with management acts. The activities carried out are 80% organization and 20% management!
Managers are responsible for the activities that derive from the management functions: they design and apply development strategies, make forecasts and short-term plans for a maximum of one year; organizes, controls and coordinates the work; ensures a climate conducive to performance, which motivates employees; is concerned with increasing the efficiency of the management act; promotes communication with staff, customers and suppliers; develop strategic relationships.
Managers are associated with action verbs: to do, to develop, to intervene, to direct, to control, to correct, etc. Managers do not manage states of equilibrium, but dynamic phenomena; they do not seek to maintain an existing situation, if it is no longer profitable, they promote changes that mainly bring immediate results.
When we talk about managers, we are used to thinking first of all about those people who have to manage resources (human, financial, material, informational, etc.) of a business, project or program, of a department, group or organization and less about the one/those who start the business, provide the initial resources and develop forecasts over long periods of time. Sometimes, depending on the social, economic and political situation, the hierarchical position and the specific tasks that the manager has, it is possible that his abilities as an administrator are not important, but rather those of a leader.
The director of a small or medium-sized organization (the general manager) is and the main shareholder must also be a leader, a leader, that is, an entrepreneur, a pioneer. Often, however, they tend to drive insufficiently while administering excessively. Managers are people who "do what they have to do" while entrepreneurs are people who "do what they do, how they should", that is. efficiently.
A leader-manager will lead through communication, through visions, will ensure the direction of action of the group; an administrator-manager will lead through action and direct participation, according to strict rules and with reduced vision. The manager must develop and promote a policy based on a communication and motivation system that allows him to permanently adjust the organizational structure and process to the constantly changing conditions. Also, through his role as negotiator, promoter of the organizational policy and transmitter of this policy, the manager must form and maintain a network of information that is particularly useful in carrying out the internal policy of the company, having a decisive role in the multiple changes to which the organization is subjected.
Modern management is based on communication and motivation that it considers vital components of the managerial system of any organization; Without a good communication relationship between manager and subordinate, there can be no progress within the company, without the involvement of positively motivated subordinates, there is no way to achieve efficiency and performance. The manager is the person who applies the management functions, in accordance with the tasks, competencies and responsibilities assigned to the function he exercises, constantly motivating the subordinates.
Managers have activities from the management functions: they word and apply development strategies, they make the forecast and the plans; they organize and coordinate work; they insure a proper climate to performance – that motivate the employees; they take care of the growing of the management’s act efficiency; they promote communication with the employees, with the customers and with the suppliers; they develop strategic relations.
Managers are linked to some action verbs: to do, to develop, to interfere, to manage, to control, to correct etc. Managers do not administrate balance states, but dynamic phenomena; they do not search to maintain an existent situation if it is not profitable.
The manager develops the ability to achieve his own plan by organizing production and motivating personnel - creating an organizational structure and designing workstations, appointing qualified people to those positions, communicating the plan to these people, delegating responsibility to carry out the plan and planning the system to follow its implementation. The equivalent activity of the leader is, unlike the previous situation, the "alignment of persons". This means communicating the direction of action to those people who can form a team, who can understand the plan and can be decisive through involvement in its implementation.
The manager ensures the fulfillment of the plan by controlling and solving problems - comparing the results obtained with those planned even in terms of details, formal or informal, through reporting, meetings or other methods, identifying deviations; planning and organizing the resolution of problems through corrective actions.
Management solves the complexity of problems first. Without good management, complex enterprises tend to become very quickly difficult to control and chaotic. A competitive management ensures the organization and consistency necessary for some essential attributes of the organization such as the quality and profitability of the products, by planning and budgeting - choosing immediate objectives or goals for the future (for the next month or year), establishing the stages for achieving these goals and allocating resources to achieve the proposed plan.
Leaders are mainly present at the base of the organization (imagining that it has a pyramidal composition), their essential role being that of direct human influence, within the activity groups (the leader is closely associated with the activity of the group; both the formal and the informal leader are unimaginable outside the direct action within the group.[2] The activities carried out are 80% management and 20% organization!2
Leaders are associated with the verb to change. It is characteristic of them that they can identify the true hierarchy of priorities, that they can act efficiently in interdisciplinary areas with a high degree of uncertainty, taking risks and finding ways to solve them by combining the efforts of their collaborators, perseverance and ambition in achieving strategic objectives being their great qualities. When everything seems lost, unattainable, unattainable, they find the resources to move on.
In order to achieve the vision, the leader must communicate effectively, motivate, determine the involvement and commitment of subordinates, achieve their "alignment" on the established direction despite the major obstacles that have arisen in the way of changes, appealing to what is most important in achieving the vision, without neglecting the needs, values and emotions of people. A closer examination of each activity listed will lead to the clarification of the qualities that a leader must have, important being foresight, planning, training people, budgeting, clear communication and perseverance in achieving goals.
Leadership solves the problems of change, which is one of the reasons why it has become so important in recent years due to the fact that the business world has become increasingly complex and volatile. Rapid technological change, increased international competition, market irregularities, overproduction in intensive industries, zonal wars, the fragility of the oil cartel, restrictions imposed by climatic and environmental factors, stock market manipulation, and demographic changes in the labor market are some of the factors contributing to these changes. Achieving the same thing as yesterday or 5% better is no longer a formula for long-term success. Major changes, adaptation, flexibility are increasingly necessary to survive and compete effectively in any environment. More change always requires more leadership.
The leader will lead the organization through constructive changes, starting with creating a vision of the future (often the distant future), choosing a direction along with the appropriate strategies for implementing the necessary changes, a speech through which to emphasize the need for changes and determine the desires of those he leads to achieve what he has imagined.
The leader’s equivalent activity is ranging the people. This means to communicate the direction of action to those people which can form a team, which can understand the plan and which can be involved in its fulfillment.
As much as the function of leadership is to produce change, the correct setting of the direction of this change is fundamental for the leader. The right choice of direction (goal predictability) is never the same as planning, or even long-term planning, although people often confuse these terms. Planning is a function of management, deductive in nature, intended to lead to ordinary expected results, not change.
To choose a direction, leaders gather a complete set of information and look for ways, relationships and connections that can explain and forecast the evolution of some situations, creating images (vision) and strategies. They describe a business, technology, or the cultural environment of the organization in terms of what it should become over a longer period of time and formulate a possible path to achieve this goal. Most discussions about images tend to degenerate into mysticism. It is a difficult, exhausting process of collecting and analyzing information. The people who will make such images (visions) are not magicians, but are based on strategic, logical thinking and are willing to take risks.
Neither the images nor the strategies have to be particularly innovative. Effective business images usually have almost the quality of being trivial and consist of ideas that are well-known. The combination or modeling of the idea may be new, but sometimes not even that, the important thing will be the way to achieve the final goal.
[2] Dumitru Iacob, Diana-Maria Cismaru, Organizaţia Inteligentă 10 teme de managementul organizaţiilor, Bucureşti, Ed. Comunicare.ro. 2002:p.82.
The organization, depending on its characteristics, can create the leader, can ensure the ascendancy of the individual it needs or can form around the one who creates it. This process can only be understood in terms of group dynamics, where three dimensions of group and individual behaviour intervene, different from one case to another: each individual wants to satisfy some personal needs, to solve some tensions of an interhuman nature, to maintain balance; most of the needs can be satisfied only through relations with other individuals or groups of individuals; For each individual, the fact of using, for the purpose of satisfying his needs, the relationships with other individuals is an active process, there being a positive correlation between the "hunger" for the satisfaction of needs and the multiplicity and variety of interpersonal relationships that the individual establishes. If the group is heterogeneous, having distant and unfamiliar relations, then the interactions are reduced, and group’s activity is low. If the group is united, uniform, informal, then his interactional capacity grows, and the effectively also grows.
The leader must correctly intuit what is expected of him, and especially the fact that he must be in accordance with the requirements of the group. If the leader's behavior changes more or less, the behavior of the group, in turn, is constrained to certain patterns of behavior of the group's nature. If the group is heterogeneous, practicing distant and unfamiliar relationships, then interactions are reduced, and the effectiveness of the group is low. If the group is united, homogeneous, intimate, then its interactional capacity increases, and its effectiveness increases.
The traits of a leader that are necessary and effective in a group or situation may be totally different from those of another leader in a different setting. An individual who presents real leadership qualities, as an official in an authoritarian organization, will show less ability in a less structured, more democratic organization. A person who proves to be influenceable in a situation that requires deliberation and planning may be less influenceable in a situation that requires immediate action. Someone who proves efficiency in a group where the climate is friendly and cooperative becomes ineffective in a hostile atmosphere. While groups can present numerous similarities of structure and functioning, they can also present strong elements of uniqueness, of particularity.
Almost every member of a group can become a leader under circumstances that enable him or her to perform the required functions. Different situations give the possibility of ascending to different people. If the situations require very different people for the management position, it means that the same person, in special situations, will present different degrees of power and efficiency.
The study of situations allows at the same time to master them, to control them. If the leader's consistency in behavior is a characteristic of leadership, the change in behavior style according to the situation is no less important indicator of the ability to lead. If we want to realize the ability or inability to lead, we must study situations in their relation to personality reactions.
It is not for nothing that a young man, in order to become a chief, is recommended to leave his community of origin. Even if he has registered failures in certain circumstances, the individual has learned certain types of situations. Put in similar situations, he will no longer make mistakes, he will be able to control them. That is, a person capable of driving in a certain type of situation will also manage in other similar situations, and the use of the same driving techniques in special situations in which that technique is the possibility of not suitable will fail.
Controlling the situation is the ability to perceive the similarities and differences of the present situation in other situations. The more experience a leader has, the less likely he is to lose his authority and prestige, provided he retains his mobility and mental ability.
A more complete scheme for situational research proposes the term "situation" with at least four categories of determinants of the leader's behavior: the structure of interpersonal relationships within the group, the characteristics of the group, the characteristics of the total culture in which the group from which the group members originated, and the physical conditions and task with which the group is confronted.[3] The environment from which the members of the group come, as well as the one in which the group operates, leaves its mark on the behavior of the members.3 The mentalities, attitudes, ways of acting and other traces of material culture that influence the individual, determine his behavior in one circumstance or another. The dynamics of group interactions, especially when the group is confronted with new circumstances and tasks, is decisively determined by the characteristics of the environment from which the members came.
A complete lay-out for the situation’s research presumes the word “situation” with at least four categories of determinants of leader’s behavior: the structure of interpersonal relations inside the group, group’s categories, total culture’s characteristics where the group exists from where the group members are and the task the group has to fulfill.4
The environments from where the group members come from, as well as the environment where the group acts will hall-mark its member’s behavior. Habits, attitudes, acting ways and material culture that influence the person, determine its behavior in different circumstances. The dynamic of group interactions, especially when the group confronts new tasks, is determined by the environment characteristics from where his members come from.
The situation plays an important part while determining the leading type, without having the exclusiveness of type determination. It is difficult to settle a standard of situations where a person can become a leader, as it is difficult to settle a type of standard personality for the leader.
A differentiation of the behavior of a Democratic leader from an authoritarian one is described in chart 2:
Differentiation criteria, types of leaders – Chart 2.
Research conducted in recent years has clearly supported the controversial idea that there is no "best" leadership style, but each of the styles can be effective or ineffective depending on the situation. The theory of situational leadership is based on the interaction between the totality of the instructions issued (task-oriented behavior) (1), the socio-emotional support (relationship-based behavior) that a leader provides (2) and the level of "maturity" that subordinates show in carrying out a task, function or objective that the leader expects to be fulfilled either by the individual or by the whole group (3). In situational leadership theory, "maturity" is defined as the ability of the coordinated person to set difficult but achievable goals (motivation to achieve), the desire and ability to take responsibility, and individual or group education or experience.
Effective leaders need to know their staff well in order to be able to meet any changes in their abilities and to act accordingly. Over time, subordinates, whether as an individual or as a group, adopt their own patterns of behavior and ways of acting, such as norms, habits, etc. A leader may use a particular style for the group as a whole and at the same time have to behave differently from individual to individual, because they have different levels of maturity.
The leadership in the mirror in a new concept based on personal observations that starts from a study done during 10 years upon 50 persons initially subordinates, in leading positions nowadays. We have grouped the 50 persons in 2 subordinates’ categories:
- The Quicksilver subordinates, inventive, difficult to lead, with managing abilities, with initiative, with personal approach in solving the tasks, generally having problems in the relation with the hierarchic leaders most of them “democratic leaders”;
- The Yes-man subordinates, methodic, punctual, scrupulous, excellent executants – fulfilling exactly the dispositions of the hierarchic leaders generally “authoritarian leaders”.
Same subjects in different positions (leaders and performers) were applied to test batteries on leadership styles (Questionnaire "Organizational climate" Questionnaire "Analysis of leadership styles" Questionnaire "Styles influence" and "Leadership Style Survay ") and have been seen and appreciated in the performance of tasks in the same view.
Following this research we obtained the following results (Chart 3):
Leadership in the mirror – Chart 3
Once in leadership positions, their behaviors, the type of leadership role model they embraced was different. 88% of those in the first category and 8% of the second category became "democratic leaders", while 12% of those in the first category and 92% of the second category became "authoritarian leaders". Moreover, both groups preferred to work with subordinates who resembled their initial profile, encountering relationship problems when meeting personalities from the other category. We concluded that the leadership style of the new leaders was greatly influenced by those who initially led them. An organization that wants to "grow new leaders" should hire managers depending on the type of leadership it aims to implement.
When people have to be trained for leading positions, a lot of companies ignore the recent specialty literature that explains why people cannot be very good managers and authentic leaders. When an organization understands the fundamental differences between leadership and management, this can being to train people for leading positions by taking into consideration both aspects.
There is a big difference between manager and leader. The first deals with complexity and the second with changes, grouping the characteristic activities of management and leadership. Every system of action involves making the decision about what needs to be done, creating connections between people, relationships that can lead to a common plan, and then trying to make sure that those people do their duty. Everyone performs these three tasks in different ways.4,5
[3] Michel Bland, Communicating Out Of a Crisis, MacMillan. 1998:pp.127-129.
None.
This Conceptual Paper received no external funding.
Regarding the publication of this article, the author declares that he has no conflicts of interest.
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- 3. Bland M. Communicating Out of a Crisis. MacMillan. 1998.
- 4. Duluc A. Leadership et confiance. Dunod. Paris. 2000.
- 5. Mondy WR, Robert NM, Shane PR. Human Resource Management. Eighth Edition. Prentice Hall. New Jersey. 2002.