Contemporary leadership Roles (Robbins et.

al)

Mentoring; Self-leadership; Coaching; Online Leadership

AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP:

CHALLENGES TO LEADERSHIP CONSTRUCT: ROBBINS (L as an attribution, substitutes and

neutralizers of leadership, online leadership, ethical challenges) + my notes at the end also refer (Muchinsky
& Robbins et. al)

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP:

According to an article published in Forbes 2016, the leadership challenge for 2016
will continue to be the pace of global change and the rate at which technology is
updated. The two are a cruelly matched pair that will forever challenge any leader's
judgment and decision-making

Challenges emerge from the changing business environment in which leaders function

Keeping up with technology: Technology is evolving at lightning speed and

keeping up with it is a great challenge. The latest and greatest tools from just a few
years ago are now obsolete, and business leaders may find it difficult to follow every
change. Taking help from younger generation Y employees help.

Globalization: The Internet has opened the doors for global business opportunities in

many different industries. This means entering previously untapped markets, which
implies that leaders need to be more aware of what happens in those markets.

Changing demographics of employees (workplace diversity) and Lack of an

engaging and inclusive leadership:
The inclusive leadership is the acknowledgement of differences in term of culture,
education background, gender, ethnic groups and other differences (Visser 2011, p.91)
that reduces disputes and conflicts of multicultural teams.

Understanding complex changing customer needs and motivations:

Disposable income and spending power have increased greatly for Generation Y. It's
imperative to understand the emotional and intellectual essentials of your customers
better than anyone else, and then motivate your organization to deliver innovative,
relevant products and solutions that meet [customers'] needs. Spending quality time
(eg. through the use of social media) with your customers to let their voices drive
progress and inform changes within your organization
Information and choice available to the workforce: to attract and retain
top talent to your organization requires healthy collaborative culture and
leadership, as these aspects cannot be hidden from potential employees owing to
websites like Glassdoor and Rate My Employer. Also, today’s employees are
more autonomous and are driven by intrinsic factors more than
extrinsic ones.

According to a survey conducted at the Center for Creative Leadership by Gentry et al

(2014), involving 763 leaders, there are six leadership challenges across seven
countries that were studied - India, China/Hong Kong, Egypt, Singapore, Spain,
United Kingdom and United States. For Indian leaders, developing managerial
effectiveness (prioritization, time management, decision making) tops the challenges
list with 23 per cent, followed by developing employees (19 per cent), guiding
change (17 per cent), managing retention and leading vision (14 per cent), leading
a team and managing internal stakeholders and politics (13 per cent).
NAVIGATING AMBIGUITY: Market conditions, customer experiences,
transformational technologies define the current business norms, which too will
change To reduce ambiguity and stay productive, modern leaders need to create new
habits and distinct patterns by being agile, observant, and responsive

Leadership in a global context:

Butler and Rose, (2011) Globalization poses challenges to manage the diversity of
employees

Theories of leadership did not take “culture” into account. They were only focused on
leader behavior and styles, and matching it with the situational context.

Leadership = f(cultural context)

GLOBE research project focuses on culturally endorsed implicit leadership

theories. (House et. al., 2004).

Sample: project GLOBE conducted over 10,000 middle managers from over 60
countries,

Results: Identified around 100 attributes on the basis of which followers categorize
their leaders. These attributes fall under 21 different culturally endorsed leadership
prototypes, such as INTEGRITY (trustworthiness), CHARISMA (eg., visionary,
inspirational), TEAM INTEGRATING (eg, communicative), SELF PROTECTIVE
(loner, asocial), MALEVOLENT (non-cooperative), AUTOCRATIC (eg., dictatorial).

Behaviors /traits Behaviors /traits Culturally contingent

universally considered universally considered endorsement of
facilitators of impediments to leadership attributes
leadership effectiveness leadership effectiveness
Trustworthy Loner Individualist
Visionary Asocial Status conscious

Inspirational and Non-cooperative Risk taking

motivating
Communicative Dictatorial

Organizations operating in a global context should select leaders who embody

universal prototypes

CHALLENGES TO LEADERSHIP CONSTRUCT: Do leaders make a

difference?

a) Leadership as an Attribution:   Is leadership merely an attribution that people

make about other individuals?

Attribution Theory of Leadership

The idea that leadership is merely an attribution that people make about other
individuals
Qualities Attributed to Leaders:
- Leaders are intelligent, outgoing, have strong verbal skills, are aggressive,
understanding, and industrious.

- Effective leaders are perceived as consistent and unwavering in their decisions.

- Effective leaders project the appearance of being leaders.

b) Substitutes and Neutralizers to Leadership: LEADER SUBSTITUTE

THEORY  BY KERR AND JERMIER, 1978.
- ASPECTS OF SITUATION THAT MINIMIZE THE NEED FOR A
LEADER.
- Focus is concerned with providing an explanation for the lack of strong
empirical support for a relationship b/w leader traits/behavior & subordinates’
satisfaction/performance
- Strong Support for Substitutes and Neutralizers

LEADERSHIP SUBSTITUES: MAKING LEADERS REDUNDANT

Characteristics of ORGANIZATION - Formalization

- Group cohesiveness
- Inflexible rules
- Organizational rewards not
under leader control
Characteristics of TASKS - Routine/repititive tasks,
- Satisfying tasks
Characteristics of SUBORDINATES - Ability, job related knowledge
- Experience
- Training

Neutralizers (negate the effect of leadership): INCLUDE Reward,

Authority and external factors

Some argue that sometimes leaders are not even needed! Sometimes individual,
job, and organizational variables can act as substitutes for leadership or
neutralize the leader's effect to influence followers (ex = a highly structured
task)
THE ROMANCE OF LEADERSHIP:

The romance of leadership literature suggests that we have developed romantic

notions about leaders and their effectiveness. We tend to overestimate the
significance of their contributions. We tend to blame the leader for negative
performance outcomes and give them credit for positive outcomes, no matter whether
they are really responsible for them (Meindl et al, 1985).

When reviewing the literature on executive leadership and organizational

performance, Day and Lord (1988) were able to show that executive leadership
explains as much as 45% of the variation in an organization’s performance – which is
quite a lot!
 Contemporary leadership roles

1) Building Trust as the foundation of Leadership

 A positive expectation that another will not act opportunistically

 Competence, consistency, loyalty and openness are dimensions of trust
 You cannot lead others who do not trust you!  Reengineering, downsizing, and
the use of 'temps' have undermined employee trust in management

Three Types of Trust

 Deterrence Based Trust (based on fear)

 Knowledge Based Trust (based on predictability over time)
 Identification Based Trust (based on mutual understanding of wants and needs)

2) Leaders as Shapers of Meaning

Framing Issues:  A way to use language to manage meaning

Like in Charismatic Leadership: Followers make attributions of heroic or

extraordinary leadership abilities when they observe certain behaviors (ex - Martin
Luther King and JFK)

Transactional vs. Transformational Leadership: Transformational - leaders who

inspire followers who transcend their own self-interests and who are capable of having
a profound and extraordinary effect on followers.

Visionary Leadership

 The ability to create and articulate a realistic, credible, attractive vision of the
future for an organization or organizational unit that grows out of and improves
upon the present.
  The ability to explain the vision to others, the ability to express the vision not
just verbally but through the leader’s behavior, and the ability to extend the
vision to different leadership contexts.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) & Leadership Effectiveness

Emotional Conservation

Rapid commoditization of Artificial Intelligence is converting our workplaces into hyper-automated

zones, thus reducing human dependencies. However, this act of cognifying the human world offers its
own challenges. Simulated interactions with devices are swiftly replacing meaningful interactions with
other humans, which may eventually deplete people’s emotional intelligence — the key difference
between humans and robots.
The mark of modern leadership lies in emotional conservation at the automated workplace, which
necessitates modern leaders to redesign jobs that complement automation as well as conserve
work zones as human-centered pods. They need to foster a climate that values emotional expressions
free of insensitivities or fears of consequence, and encourage expressions of emotions both positive and
negative in appropriate forums, listen empathetically, embrace the positive ones and skillfully channel
the negative ones towards constructive ends. Emotional conservation also demands modern leaders to
be graceful while tactfully managing individual and collective emotions, and also understand both sides
of contradictory issues without succumbing to cognitive dissonance. This, in turn, will give the modern
leaders a distinct advantage in times of digital transitions. 

 EI has 5 key components - which "great" leaders demonstrate:

self-awareness, self-management, self-motivation, empathy, social skills

3) Providing Team Leadership

 Many leaders are not equipped to handle the change to teams.
 New skills such as the patience to share information, trust others, give up
authority, and knowing when to intervene are paramount.
 Team leaders are liaisons with external constituencies, troubleshooters, conflict
managers, and coaches
 the mark of modern leadership lies in tactfully holding the environment
through a sustained period of disequilibrium and in discerning the adaptive
challenges from the technical ones while conceiving solutions. the key to
managing adaptive challenges lies in steering team members to learn new
habits, modify their values or priorities and alter the work methods. But
since it requires individuals to take responsibility to learn the new ways,
modern leaders need to shift gears from being responsibility-takers to
being responsibility-developers by being constructive question-givers and act
as people’s guide-on-the-side. 

4) Mentoring: A senior employee who sponsors and supports a less-experienced

employee (protégé)

Good teachers present ideas clearly, listen, and empathize

Two functions:
Career Coaching, assisting, sponsoring
Psychosocial Counseling, sharing, acting as a role model
- Can be formal or informal
- Mentors tend to select protégés who are similar to them in background: may
restrict minorities and women
5) Self-Leadership: A set of processes through which individuals control their
own  behavior.

-Effective leaders “superleaders” help followers to lead themselves

- Important in self-managed teams
To engage in self-leadership: a) Make a mental chart of your peers and colleagues
b) Focus on influence and not on control c) Create opportunities; do not wait for them
6) Ethical Leadership

Leadership is not value free - before we judge who is an "effective" leader, we

must consider both the means used to achieve goals and the moral content of
those goals.

ENRON EXAMPLE:
 There is more to EFFECTIVE leadership than just achieving organizational
goals. What these goals are and what are the means to attaining those goals
are two different things. This is the domain of ethical leadership: concerned
with kinds of morals and values organizations and their leaders find
desirable or appropriate (Brown and Trevino, 2006)
 Two ways of looking at this issue:
- Philosophical approach: which values/morals to be considered ethical,
which is not. A focus is on ethical decision making.
- Social scientific approach: clarifies who is more likely to become an ethical
leader, and how organizations and leaders ensure that people behave
ethically. ESTABLISHING a climate of ethics (organizations’ policies,
procedures and actual practices with regard to ethically correct behaviors) is
necessary.
 7) ONLINE LEADERSHIP:

§         Most research has been conducted with “face-to-face” and “verbal”

leadership situations.

§         What about online leadership?  There is no “non-verbal” component (you

cannot “read” the other person via email).

The lack of face-to-face contact in electronic communications removes the nonverbal cues that
support verbal interactions.
There is no supporting context to assist the receiver with interpretation of an electronic
communication.

§         Instead, the structure of words and tone in digital communications/

electronic messages can influence reactions or response of receivers. : full
sentences, phrases, USING ALL CAPS, formality, importance/urgency, style
(emoticons, jargon, abbreviations, etc).   Messages can convey trust, status, task
directives, or emotional warmth. 

§         Writings skills are likely to become an extension of interpersonal skills in

the future.

An individual’s verbal and written communications may not follow the same style.

Digital Fluency

Where new digital technologies like social media, mobile, and analytics are advancing rapidly on the
economic scales, digital fluency of leaders acts as a differentiator. Digital fluency refers to the state
of being at ease with digital technologies, demonstrating the technical, social, legal, and moral
understanding that enables individuals to be successful and safe in a digital world.

Digital transformations across the world have made digital fluency

a business imperative for modern leaders.
For this, modern leaders need to sculpt their positive digital identities and effectively facilitate
digital transformations for the organization by learning and actively engaging themselves on
various online platforms to accelerate and expand their reach to others. They will need to consider
their digital profiles and digital interactions carefully and aim for consistency in their values and profiles.
Digital fluency also demands modern leaders to leverage digital disturbance to catapult their team’s
relevance by investing in building internal capabilities and grooming their teams through digital
academies. By prudently coordinating digital initiatives, modern leaders can continuously advance their
and their organization’s digital competitive advantage. 
In today’s business world of ever-accelerating change and evolving ideas, modern leadership ushers
leaders to effect change through other people rather than make things happen themselves. Modern
leaders will last as long as they are committed to continual renewal, are meaningfully engaged in the
business prospects, and are creating long-term value for their organization.