Week 3 Leadership Skills and Styles

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Skills Approach To Leadership
Leadership skills
• ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to accomplish goals and objectives
• leader-centered perspective
• emphasis on skills and abilities that can be developed
• approach suggests that one can learn to be an effective leader

Skills vs Traits
• skills: what leaders can accomplish
• traits: who leaders are (i.e. their innate/ intrinsic characteristics)

Katz’s (1955) Three Skills Approach

Leaders need all 3 skills but relative importance △s based on level of management
Technical skill
• e.g. IT tech → IT tech leader
○ individual contributors move into mgt
○ still required in high levels of mgt
○ middle mgt still exposed to diff tech skills

Human skill

Conceptual skill

Working with emergent leaders

Technical Skills
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Technical Skills
Working with things

Having knowledge about and being proficient in a specific type of work or activity
• specialised competencies
• analytical ability
• use of appropriate tools and techniques

Involve hands-on ability with a product or process (things)

Competent and knowledgeable on

• activities specific to an organisation
• organisation's rules and SOPs
• organisation's products and services

Important: Lower levels of management

• i.e. supervisory managers
• not so much for middle and top management

Human (Interpersonal) Skills

Working with people

Having knowledge about and being able to work with people

• how people behave; how they operate in groups; how to communicate effectively with
them; people's motives, attitudes and feelings

• effectively influence people to accomplish organisation’s goals and objectives

○ e.g. followers/ subordinates, peers, superiors

• being aware of one’s own perspective and others’ perspectives simultaneously

• assisting group members in working cooperatively to achieve common goals

○ e.g. navigating office politics, group dynamics

• empower members

Leaders with higher level of interpersonal skills are better able to

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Leaders with higher level of interpersonal skills are better able to
• adapt their own ideas to others' ideas
○ esp. when this helps with achieving organisation goals more quickly and efficiently

• more sensitive and empathetic to what motivates others

• create atmosphere of trust for their followers

• take others' needs and motivations into account

○ when deciding what to do to achieve organisational goals

Important: All levels of organisation

• supervisory, middle, senior
• a lot of training spent here

Conceptual Skills
Working with ideas

Ability to do the mental work of shaping meaning of organisational policy/ issues

• what company stands for and where it’s going
○ works easily with abstraction and hypothetical notions
○ central to creating and articulating a vision and strategic plan for an organisation

Leaders with higher levels of conceptual skills are better able to

• think through ideas that form an organisation and its vision for the future
• express these ideas in verbal and written forms
• understand and express economic principles underlying organisation's effectiveness

Comfortable with abstract

• asking "what if" or hypothetical questions
• working with abstract ideas
• give abstract ideas meaning
• make sense of abstract ideas for superiors, peers and subordinates

Important: Top management levels

• e.g. CEO
• less important for middle, least important for supervisory

Toughest to train but can be learned

Skills-Based Model (Mumford et. al., 2000)

Capability model
• examines r/s between a leader’s knowledge and skills and leader’s performance

Suggests many people have potential for leadership

• if they can learn from exp., they can become more effective leaders
• involvement with activities &/or exposure to people & events → ↑ in skills, knowledge,
abilities

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Emphasises
• capabilities that make effective leadership possible rather than what leaders do

3 Components of Skills Model

• individual attributes
• leader competencies
• leadership outcomes

Affected by:
• career experiences
• environmental influences

Competencies Skills

Compounding effect through practice

Problem-solving
• define important problems and issues
• accumulate info related to problem
• develop new ways to comprehend each problem
• develop unique alternatives for solving the problems

Operate in context of an organisation and its environment

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Operate in context of an organisation and its environment
Require leaders be aware of their own capacities and challenges
• relative to the problem and organisational context

Solutions/ alternatives developed to solve problems and issues

Require leaders be conscious of time required to develop and execute
• are the solutions achieving short-term or long-term objectives?
• are objectives organisational or personal?
• external context
○ industry, national, international environments

Social Judgment
• enable leaders to comprehend people and social systems
○ e.g. friends, family
• facilitate working with others
○ to lead change, solve problems, make sense of issues

Perspective taking
• sensitivity to others' objectives and perspective
• empathic perspective to solving problems
• leaders actively seek out knowledge regarding people & organisation's social fabric

Social perceptiveness
• leaders knowing what people will do when confronted with proposed △s

Behavioural flexibility
• being able to △ what one does when confronted with others’ attitudes and intended
actions
• leaders understand that there are many different paths to achieving △ and goals and
objectives associated with △

Social performance
Being skilled in several leadership competencies
• able to persuade and communicate
○ e.g. convey own vision to others in the organisation
• able to mediate interpersonal conflicts
○ related to △ and lessen resistance to △
• able to coach and mentor
○ giving subordinates support and direction to achieve organisational objectives and
goals

Knowledge
Gathering of info + development of mental structures to organise information meaningfully
• mental structures (schemas): diagrammatic representation or depiction
• allows prior incidents to constructively plan for and change the future

Knowledgeable leaders have

• more highly developed and complex schemas that they use to collect and organise data
• able to consider complex organisational issues and to develop alternative and apt
strategies for △

Individual Attributes

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General cognitive ability
• ↑ as we age to early adulthood, but ↓ as we get older
• +vely affects leader's ability to acquire knowledge and complex problem-solving skills

Crystallised cognitive ability

• develops ∵ of experience
• remains relatively consistent and ⓧ diminish as we age
• +vely affects leadership potential by ↑ competencies skills

Motivation
Willingness
• a person must want to lead
• to engage in solving complex organisational issues and problems

Dominance
• leader must be willing to exert influence
• willing to be dominant within a group of people

Social good
• advance the social good of the organisation

Personality
• +vely linked to leadership competencies
• tolerance for ambiguity, openness, curiosity
• leaders with confidence and adaptability
○ help with situations of conflict

Leadership Outcomes

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Career Experiences

• experience gained during career influences leader’s knowledge & skills to solve
complex problems
• leaders learn & develop higher levels of conceptual capacity
○ if they progressively confront more complex and long-term problems as they
ascend organisational hierarchy

Environmental Influences
Factors in a leader’s situation that lie outside of his/ her competencies, characteristics
and exp.

Internal environmental influences

• e.g. outdated technology, skill level of employees

External environmental influences

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External environmental influences
• e.g. economic, political or social issues, natural disasters

Three-Factor Leadership Model (Englert et al., 2006)

Future Oriented
• ability to have vision, set stretching objectives, identify trends & seek better ways of
doing things
• e.g. has a vision of where they would like the department to move, anticipates future
needs, consequences and trends
• links to Katz's Conceptual Skill
• 'big-picture' thinking

Operational Focus
• behaviours around day-to-day management of an office and employees
• e.g. providing feedback, staying in touch with others’ performance, influencing staff to
behave in line with department values
• can think on 'ground-level'

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Positive Energy
• leader’s charisma and their effect on others in terms of morale & empathy
• e.g. facilitates a strong sense of involvement with staff, creates strong morale and spirit
in team, has +ve influence on people that work for them

How does the Skill Approach Work

Focus is primarily descriptive
• describes leadership from skills perspective

Provides structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership

Principle Research Perspectives

• Katz (1955)
○ importance of particular leadership skills varies depending where leaders reside in
management hierarchy

• Mumford et al. (2007; 2000)

○ higher levels of all skills needed at higher levels of hierarchy
○ leadership outcomes are direct result of leader’s skilled competency in problem
solving, social judgment & knowledge

Strengths
• 1st approach to conceptualise & create a str. of process of leadership around skills
• describing leadership in terms of skills makes leadership available to everyone
• provides expansive view of leadership incorporating wide variety of components
○ i.e., problem solving skills, social judgment skills

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 ○ i.e., problem solving skills, social judgment skills
• provides str. consistent with leadership education programs

Criticisms
• breadth of the skills approach
○ appears to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership
○ making it more general
○ less precise
• weak in predictive value
○ ⓧ explain how skills lead to effective leadership performance
• skills model includes individual attributes that are trait-like

Application
• provides a way to delineate the skills of a leader
• applicable to leaders at all levels within the organisation
• skills inventory
○ provide insights into the individual’s leadership competencies
• test scores
○ leaders to learn about areas in which they may wish to seek further training
○ e.g. 360 feedback

Style Approach to Leadership

Leadership Style Approach

Comprised of 2 general kinds of behaviours

1. Task behaviours
○ facilitate goal accomplishment
▪ e.g. help group members achieve objectives
○ production-based

2. Relationship behaviours
○ help subordinates feel comfortable with themselves, each other, and situation
○ people-based

Emphasis
• behaviour of leader
• exclusively on what leaders do & how they act

Ohio State Studies

Leadership Behaviour Description Questionnaire (LBDQ)
To identify no. of times leaders engaged in specific behaviours
• 150 questions
• participant settings
○ military, industrial, educational
• particular clusters of behaviours were typical of leaders

LBDQ-XII (Stogdill, 1963)

Shortened version of the LBDQ
• most widely used leadership assessment instrument
• core elements: leaders provide structure for followers and nurture them

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 • core elements: leaders provide structure for followers and nurture them

Results
2 general types of leader behaviors

1. Initiating structure - Leaders provide structure for subordinates

○ Task behaviours
▪ organising work
▪ giving structure to work context
▪ defining role responsibility
▪ scheduling work activities

2. Consideration - Leaders nurture subordinates

○ Relationship behaviours
▪ building camaraderie
▪ respect
▪ trust
▪ liking between leaders & followers

University of Michigan Studies

Aim
• exploring leadership behaviour
• specific emphasis on impact of leadership behaviour on performance of small groups

Results
2 types of leadership behaviours conceptualised as opp. ends of a single continuum

1. Employee orientation
○ strong human relations emphasis
○ take an interest in workers as human beings
○ value employee's individuality
○ give special attention to employee personal needs

Similar to consideration

2. Production orientation

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 2. Production orientation
○ stresses the technical aspects of a job
○ workers are viewed as a means for getting work accomplished

Similar to initiating structures

Later Studies
Reconceptualised behaviours as 2 independent leadership orientations possible orientation to
both at the same time

Blake & Mouton’s Managerial Grid (1964)

Based on predispositions over skills

Purpose
• used extensively in organisational training and development
• designed to explain how leaders help organisations to reach their purposes

Two Factors
Concern for production/tasks
• how a leader is concerned with achieving organisational tasks
• not limited to products and services, it's whatever the organisation is seeking to
accomplish
• e.g. attention to policy decisions, new product development, process issues, workload,

Concern for people/relationships

• how a leader attends to members of organisation who are trying to achieve its goals
• e.g. building organisational commitment and trust, promoting the personal worth of
followers, providing good working conditions, maintaining a fair salary structure,
promoting good social relations

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Authority Compliance (9,1)
Efficiency in operations results from arranging conditions of work such that human
interference is minimal

Role focus
• ↑ emphasis on task and job requirements + ↓ emphasis on people
• communicating with subordinates mainly for task instructions
• results-driven: people regarded as tools to that end
• 9,1 leaders: seen as controlling, demanding, hard driving, & overpowering

Country Club (1,9)

Thoughtful attention to needs of people leads to a comfortable, friendly organisational
atmosphere and work tempo

Role focus
• ↓ concern for task accomplishment + ↑ concern for interpersonal relationships
• de-emphasises production; leaders stress the attitudes and feelings of people
• 1,9 leaders: try to create a positive climate by being agreeable, eager to help,
comforting, noncontroversial

Impoverished (1,1)
Minimal effort exerted to get work done is appropriate to sustain organisational membership

Role focus
• leader unconcerned with both task and interpersonal relationships
• going through the motions, but uninvolved and withdrawn
• 1,1 leaders: have little contact with followers and are described as indifferent,
noncommittal, resigned, and apathetic

Applicable to older employees and sports people

• don't want job and people problems but want to stay for salary
• about to retire

Middle-of-the-road (5,5)
Adequate organisational performance possible thru balancing necessity of getting work done
while maintaining satisfactory morale

Role focus
• leaders who are compromisers
○ have intermediate concern for task and people who do task
• to achieve equilibrium, leader avoids conflict while emphasising moderate levels of

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 • to achieve equilibrium, leader avoids conflict while emphasising moderate levels of
production and interpersonal relationships
• 5,5 leader: described as expedient; prefers the middle ground, soft pedals
disagreement, swallows convictions in interest of “progress”

Team (9,9)
Work accomplished through committed people; interdependence via a “common stake” in the
organisation’s purpose, which leads to relationships of trust and respect

Role focus
• ↑ emphasis on both tasks and interpersonal relationships
• promotes high degree of participation & teamwork, satisfies basic need of employee to
be involved & committed to their work
• 9,9 leader: stimulates participation, acts determined, makes priorities clear, follows
through, behaves open mindedly and enjoys working

Paternalism / Maternalism (1,9; 9,1)

Reward & approval are bestowed on people in return for loyalty and obedience; failure to
comply leads to punishment

Role focus
• leaders who use both 1,9 and 9,1 w/o integrating the two
• “benevolent dictator”; acts gracious for purpose of goal accomplishment
• treats people as though they were disassociated from the task
• regards the organisation as a family
• makes most key decisions
• rewards loyalty and punishes non-compliance

Opportunism

People adapt and shift to any grid style needed to gain max. advantage
• *Note: Leaders usually have a dominant grid style used in most situations and a backup
style that is reverted to when under pressure

Role focus
• performance occurs according to a system of selfish gain
• leader uses any combination of the basic five styles for the purpose of personal
advancement

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 advancement
• may be seen as ruthless, self-motivated cunning OR adaptable and strategic

But, good leaders usually have stable consistency in terms of style

How does the Style Approach Work

Focus
Primarily a framework for assessing leadership as behaviour with a task and relationship
dimension
• some followers need leaders who provide a lot of direction
• others need leaders who can show them a great deal of nurturance and support

Overall scope
• offers a general means of assessing the behaviours of leaders
• reminds leaders their impact on others occurs through tasks they perform and in
relationships they create

Strengths
• marked a major shift in leadership research from exclusively trait focused to include
behaviours and actions of leaders
• broad range of studies on leadership style validates and gives credibility to the basic
tenets of the approach
• at conceptual level, a leader’s style is composed of 2 major types of behaviours: task
and relationship
• the style approach is heuristic - leaders can learn a lot about themselves and how they
come across to others by trying to see their behaviours in light of the task and
relationship dimensions

Criticisms
• research has not adequately demonstrated how leaders’ styles are associated with
performance outcomes
• no universal style of leadership that could be effective in almost every situation
• implies that the most effective leadership style is High-High style (i.e., high task/high
relationship); research finding support is limited

Application
• many leadership training and development programs are designed along the lines of the
style approach
• by assessing their own style, managers can determine how they are perceived by
others and how they could change their behaviours to become more effective
• style approach applies to nearly everything a leader does

How does the skill and style approach differ from the trait approach?
• The trait approach focuses on characteristics that you have developed through
experienced or that are genetically determined, resulting in a prevailing behavioural
tendency. Think the Big Five or another extended Trait model like EI.
• The skills approach, in contrast, focuses on the ability to use various areas of
competence to achieve leadership outcomes. Depending on whose model you refer to
these skills may be the likes of technical, human and conceptual.

How is the style different from skills and traits?

• The style approach to leadership is in many ways s a mix of both traits and skills. A
leader might have a natural style, traceable back to their behavioural preference ala
traits. Alternatively, a leader may be able to adapt their style depending on the situation,
in which case a style is operating more like a skill.

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