Management Theories # 28 - Action Centred Leadership

The concept of Action-Centred Leadership was created by leadership management guru John Adair whilst lecturing at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and remains his best known work.

The Action-Centred Leadership model uses three circles to link the three key elements of leadership, the task needs, the team needs, and the individual needs, in a simple but effective tool for leadership development.

Responsibilities to the task include:

• Define the task
• Identify available resources
• Formulate a plan
• Delegate responsibility
• Set quality standards
• Maintain control
• Keep to schedule
• Report to higher authority
• Assess progress and adjust plans as appropriate

Responsibilities to the team include:

• Establish and communicate acceptable performance standards
• Establish and communicate acceptable ethical standards
• Maintain discipline and focus
• Proactively resolve conflicts
• Encourage team spirit
• Motivate the team
• Establish leadership roles within the team
• Establish and maintain effective communication
  

Responsibilities to the individual include:

• Understand individuals, their strengths, skills, personality, and needs
• Support and assist individuals
• Acknowledge effort and good work
• Identify individual training needs
• Encourage and develop individual creativity, freedom and authority

Often a leader will be operating in just one or two of the areas, the three circle model helps leaders plot exactly where they are and help develop their own leadership skills to take advantage more fully of the resources available from a whole team to get the task done.

Management Theories # 26 - Lewin's Leadership Styles

Kurt Lewin and colleagues did leadership decision experiments in 1939 and identified three different styles of leadership, in particular around decision-making.

Autocratic Leadership

In the autocratic style, the leader takes decisions without consulting with others. The decision is made without any form of consultation. In Lewin's experiments, he found that this caused the most level of discontent.

An autocratic style works when there is no need for input on the decision, where the decision would not change as a result of input, and where the motivation of people to carry out subsequent actions would not be affected whether they were or were not involved in the decision-making.

Democratic Leadership

In the democratic style, the leader involves the people in the decision-making, although the process for the final decision may vary from the leader having the final say to them facilitating consensus in the group.

Democratic decision-making is usually appreciated by the people, especially if they have been used to autocratic decisions with which they disagreed. It can be problematic when there are a wide range of opinions and there is no clear way of reaching an equitable final decision.

Laissez-Faire

The laissez-faire style is to minimize the leader's involvement in decision-making, and hence allowing people to make their own decisions, although they may still be responsible for the outcome.

Laissez-faire works best when people are capable and motivated in making their own decisions, and where there is no requirement for a central coordination, for example in sharing resources across a range of different people and groups.

Discussion about Lewin's Leadership Styles

In Lewin et al's experiments, he discovered that the most effective style was Democratic. Excessive autocratic styles led to revolution, whilst under a Laissez-faire approach, people were not coherent in their work and did not put in the energy that they did when being actively led.

These experiments were actually done with groups of children, but were early in the modern era and were consequently highly influential.

Management Theories # 10 - Leadership Continuum

The Leadership Continuum model of Tannebaum and Schmidt (1973) suggests that autocratic leaders are more likely to make their own decisions and not engage their subordinates, whereas a more democratic leader (laissez-faire manager) gives subordinates a greater degree of delegation in decision-making.

In 1938, Lewin and Lippitt proposed classifications of leaders based on how much involvement leaders placed into task and relationship needs. This range of leadership behaviors was expressed along a continuum by Tannebaum & Schmidt in 1973, ranging from boss-centered (task) to subordinate-centered (relationship).To choose the most appropriate style and use of authority, the leader must consider:

1. Forces in the manager: belief in team member participation and confidence in capabilities of members.
2. Forces in the subordinate: subordinates who are independent, tolerant of ambiguity, competent, identify with organizational goals.
3. Forces in the situation: team has requisite knowledge, team hold organizational values and traditions, teams work effectively.
4. Time pressure: need for immediate decision under pressure mitigates against participation.

Advantages of the Leadership Continuum Model include:

• Gives managers a range of choices for involvement.
• Presents criteria for involvement and delegation.
• Focuses decision maker on relevant criteria (e.g., forces & time).
• Emphasizes employee development and empowerment.
• Is heuristic--encourages research to see how effective delegation may be under the model.
  

Some limitations of the Leadership Continuum theory:

• Involves only the initial step of assigning a task to someone, not the following processes that may determine the effectiveness of the outcome.
• Assumes the manager has sufficient information to determine disposition to self or team.
• Assumes "neutral" environment without social bonds or politics.
• Simplifies complex decisions to a two-polar dimension; more simple than reality is.

Management Theories # 5 - Theory Z

Theory Z is the name applied to the "Japanese Management" style popularized during the Asian economic boom of the 1980s. In contrast Theory X and Theory Y, this Theory Z focused on increasing employee loyalty to the company by providing a job for life with a strong focus on the well-being of the employee, both on and off the job.

According to Dr. William Ouchi, its leading proponent, Theory Z management tends to promote stable employment, high productivity, and high employee morale and satisfaction. Ironically, "Japanese Management" and Theory Z itself were based on Dr. W. Edwards Deming's famous "14 points". Deming, an American scholar whose management and motivation theories were rejected in the United States, went on to help lay the foundation of Japanese organizational development during their expansion in the world economy in the 1980s.

Deming's theories are summarized in his two books, Out of the Crisis and The New Economics, in which he spells out his "System of Profound Knowledge". He was a frequent advisor to Japanese business and government leaders, and eventually became a revered counselor. Deming was awarded the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure by the former Emperor Hirohito, and American businesses ultimately tried unsuccessfully to use his "Japanese" approach to improve their competitive position.

Characteristics of the Theory Z

• Long-term employment and job security
• Collective responsibility
• Implicit, informal control with explicit, formalized measures
• Collective decision-making
• Slow evaluation and promotion
• Moderately specialized careers
• Concern for a total person, including their family

In essence, Theory Z is a form of management in which workers are involved in the work process on the factory floor. Schedules, division of labor, work assignments, and other aspects of the labor process are given over to workers to do as they see best. Investment policies, wages, fringe benefits and kind of product are not given over to workers to decide; only how best to do that decided by top management.

Theory Z essentially advocates a combination of all that's best about Mcgregor's XY theory and modern Japanese management, which places a large amount of freedom and trust with workers, and assumes that workers have a strong loyalty and interest in team-working and the organisation.

Management Theories # 4 - Contingency Theories

Contingency theories are a class of behavioral theory that contend that there is no one best way of organizing / leading and that an organizational / leadership style that is effective in some situations may not be successful in others.

In other words, the optimal organization / leadership style is contingent upon various internal and external constraints.

These constraints may include: the size of the organization, how it adapts to its environment, differences among resources and operations activities, managerial assumptions about employees, strategies, technologies used, etc.

Four important ideas of Contingency Theory are:

1. There is no universal or one best way to manage
2. The design of an organizations and its subsystems must 'fit' with the environment
3. Effective organizations not only have a proper 'fit' with the environment but also between its subsystems and
4. The needs of an organization are better satisfied when it is properly designed and the management style is appropriate both to the tasks undertaken and the nature of the work group.

Contingency theory of leadership:

In contingency theory of leadership, the success of the leader is a function of various contingencies in the form of subordinate, task, and/or group variables. The effectiveness of a given pattern of leader behavior is contingent upon the demands imposed by the situation.

These theories stress using different styles of leadership appropriate to the needs created by different organizational situations. No single contingency theory has been postulated.

Some of the theories are:

Fiedler’s contingency theory: Fiedlers theory is the earliest and most extensively researched. Fiedler’s approach departs from trait and behavioral models by asserting that group performance is contingent on the leader’s psychological orientation and on three contextual variables: group atmosphere, task structure, and leader’s power position. This theory explains that group performance is a result of interaction of two factors. These factors are known as leadership style and situational favorableness. In Fiedler's model, leadership effectiveness is the result of interaction between the style of the leader and the characteristics of the environment in which the leader works.

Hersey & Blanchard’s situational theory: This theory is an extension of Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid Model and Reddin’s 3-D management style theory. With this model came the expansion of the notion of relationship and task dimensions to leadership and adds a readiness dimension.


Contingency theory of decision making

Vroom and Yetton’s decision participation contingency theory or the Normative decision theory: According to this model, the effectiveness of a decision procedure depends upon a number of aspects of the situation: the importance of the decision quality and acceptance; the amount of relevant information possessed by the leader and subordinates; the likelihood that subordinates will accept an autocratic decision or cooperate in trying to make a good decision if allowed to participate; the amount of disagreement among subordinates with respect to their preferred alternatives.


Contingency theory is similar to situational theory in that there is an assumption of no simple one right way. The main difference is that situational theory tends to focus more on the behaviors that the leader should adopt, given situational factors (often about follower behavior), whereas contingency theory takes a broader view that includes contingent factors about leader capability and other variables within the situation.