Business Management -- Leadership Issues

Business Management -- Leadership Issues Differentiate between leadership and management by defining each concept and identifying three characteristics of each concept that help to explain the differences. Generally, leadership and management in modern business organizations are closely related and often overlap substantially in their specific areas of responsibility. Likewise, good managers are often effective leaders and good leaders are capable managers. However, in principle, there are significant conceptual differences between leaders and managers.

Leadership and management are distinguishable from one another primarily in that leadership pertains to the manner in which the individual in authority relates to people whereas management pertains to the work that is performed. Leaders focus on motivating, inspiring, and teaching people, whereas managers generally focus much more on monitoring work processes and on teaching specific vocational skills. For this reason, leadership is sometimes described as doing the right thing while management is described as doing things right.

Generally, leadership is substantially a function of personality traits of the authority figure whereas management is a function of vocational expertise and skills that can be learned. Likewise, managers become managers by appointment by higher authority and typically earn their management position by their previous achievements and excellence in the same vocational capacity as those whose performance they supervise as managers.

By contrast, leaders tend to be those who exhibited leadership traits and skills independent of their vocational achievements and irrespective of their technical expertise or even their entry into the professional environment. Good leadership does not depend on the ability of the leader to perform the specific tasks for which subordinates are responsible; they may perform the leadership role effectively in relative ignorance of those actual work processes.

Conversely, technical expertise is almost always a prerequisite for good management; effective managers almost always possess higher levels of technical skills than those individuals they supervise. Finally, whereas good leaders tend to help employees realize and achieve their fullest potential, managers are comparatively unconcerned with employee development and tend to focus much more narrowly on the product, goods, and service output of their employees and organizations. 7. Explain what is meant by participative leadership and identify three situations when you think participative leadership should be used to improve employee relationships.

In the participative leadership style, leaders do not merely issue orders or instructions; they include their subordinates in decisions and encourage their active participation in the analyses involved in those decisions. The participative leadership style offers the advantage of increasing employee morale and feeling of involvement in the organization and their importance to specific decisions. Generally, when there are no specific reasons militating against its use, the participative leadership style offers substantial benefits to the leader, the employees, and the organization.

Typical examples of good opportunities to employ the participative leadership style to improve employee relationships would include those where the employees are more technically proficient or expert in the specific tasks involved in the areas of decision-making; those where the leader is not in possession of some of the information or data that is available to employees, and those where the nature of the business or the organizations is more conducive to a collaborative approach to decision-making.

The participative style would be particularly appropriate as a means of improving employee relations where employees possessing high levels of technical expertise in the subject of their work have expressed confusion or frustration with management decisions that do not adequately consider the value of their input. It would also be appropriate where management is too removed from the impact of their operational decisions to gauge the effects of those decisions on the working conditions of the employees who are responsible for implementing them.

Finally, the participative leadership style would also be appropriate for introduction where long-time experienced personnel are exhibiting a lack of morale or enthusiasm for their work or where there is a low level of "buy-in" on their part to management decisions or to the organization's operational or strategic goals. 8. Define delegation and empowerment; describe two key components of developing each (delegation and empowerment); and explain why both of these forms of participative leadership are valuable to an organization.

Delegation has always been a fundamental aspect of business management because it is absolutely necessary to the underlying concept of hierarchical management functions. In principle, delegation simply means that supervisors, managers, and others in positions of relative authority within business organizations have the ability to increase their productivity and that of their organizations by assigning specific tasks and responsibilities to other employees, usually their subordinates.

The concept of delegation is simply a means of allowing specific tasks to be completed by the most appropriate individuals while freeing up the time and attention of more highly skilled individuals and/or those with supervisory or management functions to devote their attention to matters that only they are capable of handling. Generally, delegation is a process or task-oriented concept. By contrast, empowerment does not relate to processes or to tasks but to people, much the same way that leadership relates to people while management pertains to processes.

Empowerment is a means that leaders use to help employees reach their fullest.