Weeks 12 and 13

Management and leadership

Yiannis Gabriel
Professor of Organizational Theory

Management
and
Leadership

Leaders and Managers

Are they the same?

Key differences:

Attitudes to change, restlessness, turbulence.

Attitudes towards efficiency and waste
Attitudes towards details and grand picture
Emphasis on logic, plans and rationality as against
hunches, intuition and gut feeling

Management
Rational
Efficiency
Planning
Stability
Control

Leadership

Emotional
Vision
General picture
Change
Conflict

Leaders inspire

Intellectual stimulation
Unleashing emotional energies
Generate commitment
Seduce

Crises
Leaders, managers and the management
of crises
Crisis, problem, difficulty, challenge and
other definitions of a situation

Consider the following story:

"[A] twenty-two year old bride weighing ninety pounds whose husband
has been sent overseas and who, in consequence, had been given
a job until his return ... The young woman, Lucille Burger, was
obliged to make certain that people entering security areas wore
the correct clear identification.
Surrounded by his usual entourage of white-shirted men, [Thomas]
Watson [the IBM Chairman] approached the doorway to an area
where she was guard, wearing an orange badge acceptable
elsewhere in the plant, but not a green badge, which alone
permitted entrance at her door. "I was trembling in my uniform,
which was far too big", she recalled. "It hid my shakes, but not my
voice. 'I'm sorry,' I said to him. I knew who he was alright. 'You
cannot enter. Your admittance is not recognized.' That's what we
were supposed to say."
The men accompanying Watson were stricken; the moment held
unpredictable possibilities. "Don't you know who he is?" someone
hissed."

Can you think of two

different ends to this story?

The Functions of the Entourage:

Protect the leader from self or others
Offer a visible symbol of power and importance
add to the image of the leader
Cover for leaders mistakes or for unpredictable
occurrences
Provide a tool-kit of officials ready to undertake
action
Offer leader an opportunity to display control and,
more generally, to act in a leader-like manner

Transforming and Transactional Leaders

Leaders and managers are they the same? The
importance of orientation to change. (Zaleznik
1977)
Leaders do the right thing; managers do things
right (Bennis and Nanus 1985)
But Drucker (Drucker 1988) has argued that it is a
mistake to draw a line between the two all
leaders have to manage.

Transactional and transforming leaders

(Burns 1978)
Transactional leadership is based on exchange and
transforming leadership is a relationship of "mutual
stimulation and elevation". Leaders are moral agents. "By
... moral leadership ... I mean, first, that leaders and led
have a relationship not only of power but of mutual
needs, aspirations and values; second, that in
responding to leaders, followers have adequate
knowledge of alternative leaders and programs and the
capacity to choose among those alternatives; and, third,
that leaders take responsibility for their commitments."
"Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to,
the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and
values of the followers." (4)

"Leadership over human beings is exercised

when persons with certain motives and
purposes mobilize, in competition or in conflict
with others, institutional, political, psychological,
and other resources so as to arouse, engage,
and satisfy the motives of others." (18)

"Leaders are a particular kind of power holder.

Like power, leadership is relational, collective and
purposeful. Leadership shares with power the
central function of achieving purpose. But the
reach and domain of leadership are, in the short
range at least, more limited than those of power.
Leaders do not obliterate followers' motives ...
They lead other creatures, not things ... To control
things... is an act of power, not leadership, for
things have no motives. Power wielders may treat
people as things. Leaders may not. (18)

Bass (Bass 1985)

1. Continuum of transactional and transformational
2. No tyrant-leader distinction
3. A systematic account of transforming leadership,
as entailing 4 features:
a.
b.
c.
d.

Charisma
Inspirational motivation
Intellectual stimulation
Individualized consideration

By contrast, transactional leadership has two

components:
1. Contingent reward -- reward is contingent on
performance
2. Management by exception -- management
takes action when something does not go
according to plan
Third type of leadership, laissez faire.

Management of meaning
How?
The importance of symbols
Talk

Stories
Metaphors
Words and symbols
Examples and analogies

Visible actions

Gestures
Decisions
Being seen
Listening actively

Managing Emotion

Leaders as readers of emotion

Leaders as intensifiers of emotion
Leaders as channellers of emotion
Leaders as mobilizers of emotion
Leaders as containers of emotion
repression, acknowledgement, defusion
Leaders as disseminators of emotion
Leaders as providing safety valve for
emotion

Emotional intelligence and

leadership (Goleman 2001).
Dimensions of emotional intelligence:
1. Self-awareness
2. Self-regulation
3. Motivation
4. Empathy
5. Social skill

Identify different types of emotions is

anxiety a special case?
How is anxiety managed?
How is the management of emotion related to
the management of meaning

Leaders and Followers

the nature of their relationship
Leaders and led.
The leader as an object of fantasy and
mystique.
Leaders and the emotional needs of followers.
The followers needs (protection, security, love,
ego-reinforcement)

Core fantasies (Gabriel, 1999)

1. The leader as someone who cares
2. The leader as someone who is accessible
3. The leader as someone who is omnipotent and
omniscient
4. The leader as someone who has a legitimate claim
to power
Gabriel, Y. 1997. Meeting God: When organizational members come face to face with the
supreme leader. Human Relations, 50(4): 315-342.

Some Leadership Dysfunctions

Some Dysfunctional Leaders:
Authoritarian Leaders (Dixon 1976)
Authoritarianism (after (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik et al. 1950))
a mechanical surrender to conventional values;
blind submission to authority together with blind hatred of all
opponents and outsiders;
anti-introspectiveness;
rigid stereotyped thinking;
superstition;
vilification, half-moralistic and half-cynical, of human nature,
projectivity.

Authoritarian Leaders

This was the trait which was manifested to such an extreme degree by
the members of the Nazi SS that they could commit wholesale murder,
not just without guilt or shame but, perhaps more surprisingly, without
the slightest evidence of revulsion. This cool detachment and complete
incapacity for empathy with other human beings was not only reflected
in the bleakly unemotional title for their task -- 'the final solution' -- but
also a sine qua non of its tidy execution. At first sight, this mixture of
brutality and bureaucracy is strange to say the least. After all, it is one
thing to shoot helpless prisoners in the back ... but quite another to
plan such operations down to the minutest detail, to make ledger
entries of hair and calcium, wigs and artificial limbs; to stack corpses
and extract the gold from their teeth. In fact, of course, this horrific
concatenation of traits is an extreme example of the relationship
between ... authoritarianism and the anal obsessive personality.
(Dixon 1976: 275)

Narcissistic Leaders
(Maccoby 2000)

Visions
Imagination.
Attractiveness
Communication
Emotional intelligence

But

Moody
Distrustful
Emotionally isolated
Grandiose
Prone to big mistakes.

Narcissistic Leaders

Very dependent of the followers

Think they are invincible and want to leave a
legacy
Very sensitive to criticism
Prefer yes-men

How to deal with these pitfalls?

1. Find a trusted side-kick who gets job done and is
probably an obsessive.
2. Get in analysis find a coach or a mentor

Narcissists thrive in chaotic times, during crises

etc.
And yet
they can be responsible for major blunders

10

Leading is imagining, willing and inspiring

Inspirational leaders

1. Listen

2. Respond
3. Set realistic but ambitious goals the issue of vision
4. Give honest feedback
5. Show respect and acknowledges needs of subordinates
6. Do not allow taboo subjects
7. Acknowledge own vulnerability and ignorance
8. Never make promises they cannot deliver
9. Never treat subordinates as means to an end
10. Keep it simple
11. Care

11