The research of (Bennis & Nanus, 1985) and (Tichy & DeVanna, 1986, 1990) offered other perspectives. They used similar methodologies by interviewing a number of CEOs using unstructured open-ended questions.
Bennis and Nanus
o
They asked CEOs 90 questions such as What re your strengths and weaknesses?
Events? Critical career points?, etc.
o
They identified 4 common strategies used by leaders to transform organizations
·
Clear vision of the future state of their organizations.
·
Visions are attractive, realistic, believable, understandable, beneficial and
energy creating.
·
The compelling nature of the vision touched the experiences of followers.
·
The vision needs to grow out of the needs of the entire organization.
·
While leaders play a role in articulating the vision, it emerges from both
leaders and followers.
·
These leaders were social architects of their organizations
·
Communicate direction that transforms the values and norms.
·
They move people to accept new group identity and philosophy of organizations.
·
These leaders create "Trust" in the organizations.
·
They make their position known and stand
by it.
·
Being predictable and reliable.
·
When leaders create trust in the organizations, it establishes a sense of
identity .
·
They use creative-deployment of self through positive self-regard.
·
Leaders knew their strengths and weaknesses.
·
They emphasized their strengths in instead of dwelling in their weaknesses.
Trichy and DeVanna
Similar to Bennis and Nanus, they studies 12 CEOs of mostly large corporations. They mostly focused on how leaders carried out the change process. They wanted to find out how leader bring change when working under challenging conditions such as increased competition, cultural changes, rapid technological changes, etc. They found out that leaders bring change through a 3 steps process.
o
Act 1 - Recognize the need for change
·
There is a tendency to be comfortable with the status quo and resist change.
·
The need for change sometimes go unrecognized.
·
These leaders are change agents.
·
Three techniques were suggested by Trichy and DeVanna to increase openness for
change.
Encourage dissent and allow people to disagree
Encourage objective assessment of how well an organization is meeting it goals.
Encourage members of the organizations to visit other organizations to obtain
different view points.
o
Act 2 - The creation of the vision
·
A vision creates the conceptual roadmap where an organization is headed.
·
Develop a mission statement as it is the center piece of creating a vision.
o
Act 3 - Institutionalizing change
·
Leaders need to break down old structures and establish new ones.
·
Find new followers to implement new ideas.
·
May need to create a new coalition of followers to be compatible with the
vision.
How does the Transformational theory work?
·
This theory is a broad-based approach that encompasses many facets and
dimensions of leadership.
·
It describes how leaders can initiate, develop, and carry out significant
changes in organizations.
·
It sets out to empower followers and nurture them, it raises their conciseness
and transcend their own self interest for the sake of others.
·
Leaders become strong role models with a highly developed set of values,
self-determined sense of identity, confident, competent, and articulate.
·
Followers want to emulate transformational leaders.
·
Leaders create a vision which becomes the focal point of the organization.
·
Out of uncertainty, transformational leaders create change.
·
Transformational leaders become social architects, clarifying the values and
norms in an organization.
·
Transformational Leadership does not tell people what to do, but provides a
broad set of generalizations. It does not tell the leader how they should act in
a particular situation, but it provides a general way of thinking about
leadership.
·
Transformational Leadership can be taught in organizations at all levels, affect
performance, used in recruitment process, promotions, and training and
development.
·
The training and development begins by basically working with leaders on their
Vision/Mission statements.
Strengths
·
It is a current model that has received a lot of attention by researchers and
has been widely researched using qualitative studies of prominent CEOs.
·
It has a strong intuitive appeal. It is consistent with the society's popular
notion of what leadership is. People are attracted to transformational leaders.
·
It emphasizes the importance of followers in the leadership process.
·
It goes beyond traditional transactional models and broadens leadership to
include the growth of followers.
·
It places strong emphasis on morals and values.
·
There is substantial evidence that transformational leadership is an effective
form of leadership (Yukl, 1999)
Weaknesses
·
It lacks conceptual clarity because it covers many aspects (Creating visions,
motivation, change agents, trust, social architects, etc.)
·
There are some doubts about the validity of the MLQ measuring transformational
leadership.
·
It sometimes implies that transformational leadership has a trait-like quality.
These leaders are often seen as visionaries.
·
It can be seen as elitist and undemocratic because the leaders create the vision
and change directions.
·
Research data focus heavily on senior-level leaders. The data may apply to
leaders of organizations and not necessarily leaders in
organizations.
·
It has the potential to be abused because it is concerned with changing people's
values and moving them to a new vision.
Leadership instrument
The MLQ is made up of questions that measures the leader's behavior and perception of the seven factors in the transformational leadership. There is also an abbreviated version called MLQ-6S developed by Avolio in 1992.
No comments:
Post a Comment