jueves, 19 de mayo de 2011

LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT STYLES

According to kotter (1990) management maintains order and leadership is responsible for other aspects inside the organization as change.
There are some personality dimensions, as the following that inquire management and leadership:
·         Attitudes toward goals: a leader has a positive attitude and a manager has a passive one
·         Conceptions of work: a leader looks for a high-risk positions and a manager looks for moderate risk
·         Relationship with others: a leader encourages people and a manager avoids solitary work activities
·         Sense of self: a leader always is questioning life and a manager accepts life as it is
EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP + GOOD MANAGEMENT= HEALTHY ORGANIZATIONS
LEADERSHIP: is a process of guiding and the behavior of people in work, there are 2 kind of leadership, the formal leadership that is based on  authority and infomal leadership that give to another person  the leadership in the organization; so the person who is guided by a leadership is called followership.
a leadership has some purposes:
Values
Mission
Vission  
According to Arthur G. Jago prominent trends in leadership research are reviewed. Theoretical perspectives are organized in a four-fold typology based on the dominating assumptions of the research effort:
1.       the focus on a universally appropriate set of leadership traits
2.       the focus on a universally appropriate behavioral style
3.       the focus on situational contingent leadership traits
4.       the focus on situational contingent behavioral styles
 Potential organizational prescriptions following from each perspective are identified (e.g., selection, placement, and training). It is argued that existing research has mapped only a portion of the domain of leadership phenomena due to a concentration on relatively few leadership constructs and because of the popularity of a limited set of empirical methodologies. Recent developments, promising new directions, and novel methods in leadership research are described (Leadership: Perspectives in Theory and Research Arthur G. Jago Management Science Vol. 28, No. 3 (Mar., 1982) (pp. 315-336).

MANAGEMENT: there is a model that includes national management style that is influenced by 2 attributes:
·         national culture: is the collective programming of the mind acquired by growing up in a particular country (Hofstede 1991, pag 262)
·         level of development: is the extent to which the companies in a country are advanced in terms of sophistication



Trait theory
The early leadership theories centered on the traits of an individual. It was thought that certain traits could differentiate those who would become leaders and those that could not.  Actually, instead of focusing on the person, it was found that the process of leadershipcould be more definitive. As Kirkpatrick and Locke explained there are seven traits linked to leadership:
1.       Drive: Leaders exhibit a high effort level. They have a relatively high desire for achievement; they are ambitious; they have a lot of energy; they are tirelessly persistent in their activities; and they show initiative.
2.      Desire to lead: Leaders have a strong desire to influence and lead others. They show the willingness to take responsibility.
3.       Honesty and integrity: Leaders build trusting relationships between themselves and followers by being truthful or non deceitful and by showing high consistency between word and deed.
4.      Self-confidence: Followers look to leaders for an absence of self-doubt. Leaders, therefore, need to show self-confidence in order to convince followers of the rightness of their goals and decisions.
5.      Intelligence: Leaders need to be intelligent enough to gather, synthesize, and interpret large amounts of information, and they need to be able to create visions, solve problems, and make correct decisions.
6.      Job-relevant knowledge: Effective leaders have a high degree of knowledge about the company, industry, and technical matters. In-depth knowledge allows leaders to make well informed decisions and to understand the implications of those decisions.
7.      Extraversion: Leaders are energetic, lively people. They are sociable, assertive, and rarely silent or withdrawn.

QUESTION

Discuss transformational, charismatic, and authentic leadership. Would you expect these styles of leadership to exist in all cultures? Differ across cultures? Explain

TRASNFORMATIONAL LEADERS:
Leaders who inspire followers to transcend their selfinterests and achieve exceptional performance.
·         Charisma
·          Individualized consideration
·          Inspirational motivation
·          Intellectual stimulation
Some recent works (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999; Kanungo & Mendonca, 1996) on transformational and charismatic leadership suggest that authentic transformational leaders'  behaviors and influence strategies have to meet high moral or ethical standards.
The transformational leadership influence process, on the other hand, is considered to be ethical because transformational leaders use empowering rather than control strategies.

Empowering strategies such as demonstrating exemplary behaviour, showing confidence in the follower's ability, verbal encouragement to accomplish task objectives, and increase the follower's capacity for self-determination while pursuing the collective purpose embodied in the leader's vision for the organization.

CHARISMATIC LEADERS:
A leader’s use of personal abilities and talents in order to have profound and extraordinary effects on followers.

Charismatic Leaders who are building a group, whether it is a political party, a cult or a business team, will often focus strongly on making the group very clear and distinct, separating it from other groups. They will then build the image of the group, in particular in the minds of their followers, as being far superior to all others.
The Charismatic Leader will typically attach themselves firmly to the identify of the group, such that to join the group is to become one with the leader. In doing so, they create an unchallengeable position for themselves.

AUTHENTIC LEADERS:
A leader who is guided by explicit values that emphasize collective interest (shared purpose?), enabling them to operate at high levels of moral integrity. Not egocentric.

Being an "authentic leader" means two things:
·          you've got to share the struggle and the risks with your people.

Along with sharing the struggle, there's another crucial requirement for authentic leaders: They must make sure their actions consistently reinforce the one or two most important values they hold up for their organizations. If you say that you're going to put customers first, for example, or that you put employees first, then you had better follow through, especially when you're forced to make tough trade-offs.

those types of leaders exist in many culture but depending of some cultural aspects that can influence people´s decisions about those leaders and their willingness to create a good environment in the group or culture; also, the type of leaders differ to each culture, because people´s beliefs, moral aspects and some created values that allow them to prove or not the leaders ideas and thoughts being guided by them in politics, economy or just cultural aspects

SOURCES
ennis, W. G. (1989). On becoming a leader. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.GEMENT
 STY

MIGRANT WORKERS AND EXPATRIATE ASSIGMENTS

Or known as economic migration, involves the movement of people from one country (or region) to another primarily for employment related reasons (IPPR 2004).

Migrant workers are used extensively for crop harvesting, mandating that they follow the harvest seasons (Business dictionary 2011).

Small firms 'struggle' on migrant worker recruitment

REASONS TO GO AWAY
physiological needs
safety needs
social needs
steem needs
self actualization
desire for money

EXPATRIATE
to exile (oneself) from one's native country or cause (another) to go into exile.

Managing expatriate assignment
according to Adler and Gadhar,1990 expatriate assignment are used as a source of managerial development, that allows individuals to develop the requisite international skills to become a more valuable resource to their MNC; and subsidiary control to ensure headquarter consistency in terms of strategy and operational policies.
• Success of personnel assigned abroad depends largely on their preparedness through training in culture, customs, and language.
• Recognize them for their work and potential for making contributions to the firm now and in the future (this can help shape proactive returnees).

Expatriates are workers who leave their home country to work in another but they are usually sent by their employer to perform an important job or as a part of the company’s policy which is all about sending employees abroad for them to have the experience of working in another country with different people and then go back to apply what he/she had learned in the benefit of the company.

This category of migrant workers is treated separately because of the nature of the movement itself. Normal migrants move because they want to find better opportunities and sometimes that’s not the case and because of their low level of training and skills they find themselves working in worst conditions as they would be in their home country. Expatriates on the other hand leave their home country with all the guarantees and the support of the company who sends them. They don’t have to worry about what job will they find or if they’ll even find one, they have their accommodation arranged for them and usually with the same or more comforts than they have at home.
SOURCES
Jeffrey P. Shay, Sally A. Baack Vol. 35, No. 3 (May, 2004), pp. 216-232  Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3875146
Adjustment and Career Development: A Multiple Mentoring Perspective,
International Business StudiesJournal of, Vol. 36, No. 5 (Sep.), pp. 519-538

COMMUNICATION AND VIRTUAL TEAM

VIRTUAL TEAM
According to Miles and Snow (1986) virtual team is an evolutionary form of a network organization, authors use advanced information and communication technologies to interact, members seek to collaborate productively while geographically dispersed.
Virtual teams are groups of people working on interdependent tasks, geographically distributed, conduct their core work mainly through an electronic medium and share responsibility for team outcomes. Although a virtual team is an evolutionary form of a network organization, new forms of organizational governance may have profound implications for both job content and security. In the other hand Henry and Hartzler (1998) define a virtual team as a group of people working closely together though geographically separated and may reside in different time zones; also as “cross-functional workgroups brought together to tackle a project for a finite period of time through a combination of technologies.” Virtual teams may therefore work across distance, time, and organizational boundaries (Langevin, 2004, p. 3)

According to Powell, 2004 virtual teams represent one such organizational form, one that could revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented level of flexibility and responsiveness.
in a virtual team, the members have to take into account some dimensions:
  • communication
  • understanding
  • role clarity
  • leadership attitude
  • well-planned monitoring mechanisms

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE
COMMUNICATION
is the evoking of a shared or common meaning in another person. exist some barriers for communication:
  1. physical separation
  2. status differences
  3. gender differences
  4. cultural diversity
  5. language
Middle management communication and interaction practices and their influence on employee satisfaction and motivation:
Strong managerial communication skills and interactions are essential leadership behaviors, yet despite an explosion in communication mechanisms available, employees have continued to experience increased separation from management because of ineffective communication practices.


QUESTION
Accroding to Kuruppuarachchi (2009), what benefits and problems arise as a consequence of
the creation of virtual team? Identify five each. Based on this, explain how to make the transition from a more traditional team structure to the more distributed team
structure?

the benefits of creating virtual team are:
  • all members are from different locations (have different beliefs,ways of working)
  • members are communicated through media as computers,virtual committees and mails
  • the team task is so structured so it is neccesary coordination
  • The availability of a flexible and configurable base infrastructure is one of the main advantages of agile virtual teams.
  • they save time and improve aspects because of the interaction with different people


the problems of creating virtual teams are:
  • those are geographically dispersed (over different time zones)
  • Driven (or guided) by common purpose
  • Involved in cross-boundary collaboration
  • Small team size
  • It is not a permanent team, so team members may belong to different companies
to make a transition from a more traditional team structure to a more distributed one the leader has to
their opinions and suggestions , cares about member’s problems, gets to know
them, expresses a personal interest in them and defines responsibilities of all members and
exercises authority, all those aspects in order to create a new organizational structure where members can create and offer new ideas and opportunities to the organization, and finally asign task and research to each member to achieve goals.
SOURCES