Hi everybody, welcome to the online lecture for Chapter 3 in our textbook. This chapter is going to get us into some leadership theory, and we're going to start off with five different approaches to leadership. Now you can think of these approaches as theories or lenses we can look through as we think about leadership. You might think of them as five different pairs of glasses we can put on to look at leadership in different ways. The five approaches to leadership that we will be examining are the traits approach, the situational approach, the functional approach, the relational approach, and the transformational approach. Now in this chapter, we're going to be focusing on the first four. That last one, the transformational approach, is explained in more detail in chapter four. Again, remember, these are all just different ways of looking at leadership or understanding the process of leadership. When you finish reading the chapter, you should be able to explain each of these approaches, give examples, explain a context in which they might be used. Let's start by looking at how the study of leadership came about. In the early 20th century industrial manufacturing era, when we saw the advent of assembly lines and manufacturing plants, certain people were put in charge of other people in those kind of businesses. And this gave rise to articles and books about leadership effectiveness. People started studying What made certain individuals effective in guiding other individuals in the workplace. And they focused on what traits did an effective leader have and what techniques did an effective leader use in influencing those around him. And the focus of these early theories was on productivity. So the idea was to be prescriptive, to figure out what makes a person effective leader, and then say, okay, here's what you should do. to be an effective leader yourself. This leads us into the first of the five approaches to understanding leadership, which is the traits approach. You've probably heard the question, are leaders born or made? And people will give different answers to that. If you tended to believe leaders are born, you might buy into the traits approach. The traits approach suggests that there are some personal traits that can predict that a person will be an effective leader. So if a person has the right package of personal qualities, that they're likely to be a good leader. And again, you've probably heard some of these. If a person comes from the proper family background, if they have had a middle or upper middle class upbringing, if they've had a good education, that might lead to a person being a better leader. If they are attractive or tall, that could lead to being a better leader. If they have an outgoing personality, we've talked a little bit about introversion and extroversion over on the general chat board. This idea that our culture tends to value outgoingness, so that could be another trait that people think would predict effectiveness. So again, the idea behind the traits approach is that a person possesses a certain set of qualities that are going to make them an effective leader. While that might be somewhat true, the pure traits approach has gone out of favor with social scientists. And now there's a belief that leadership is skills that can be learned, and those are as important, if not more important, than traits. So traits can have some validity, but modern social scientists don't place as much emphasis on them as on techniques and skills. The next approach is the situational approach. And this approach tells us that leadership is contextual, meaning depending on context. So different types of situations require different leadership skills, and the same person in different situations could be a different kind of leader or decide to lead differently. It depends on the situation, it depends on the group of followers that you have. I'm going to spend a little time talking about the idea of situational leadership, and you will find this explained on pages 84 through 86 of your textbook. Please review those carefully. You'll find there's something called the Hersey and Blanchard situational leadership theory, and this is a really interesting theory. It tells us that there are different ways to lead different kinds of followers, and that we should consider the ability and willingness of our followers. in deciding what kind of leadership is required. The situational leadership model suggests that there are four possible combinations of ability and willingness that you might encounter in followers. And the way you go about leading those followers will depend on their levels of ability and willingness. So here are the four possible combinations you could encounter. You could have a follower with low ability and low willingness. You could have low ability with high willingness. You could have high ability but low willingness. And you could have high ability with high willingness. So you can see we've got lower high ability combined with lower high willingness in four different ways. And I'll explain each one of these in the slides that are coming up. So let's look at each one of these and let's begin with the idea of low ability and low willingness. So you're a leader, you have a follower sitting in front of you, and this person has low ability and low willingness. What does that mean for you? Well, it means their attitude is, I've never done this before and I'm not that motivated to do it. So you have someone who doesn't know how to do the task and also isn't very interested in doing it. So that can be a tough follower. to deal with. Here's what you want to do with a follower like this. You want to give specific task-related help to make instructions clear. Clear instructions may increase confidence and motivation. So the idea here is that their willingness might improve if they feel they have a chance of doing the task well. So good specific task-related help might improve that willingness factor. So let's look at the next combination, low ability and high willingness. Imagine you're a leader, you have a follower in front of you who has this combination, low ability, high willingness. This person is thinking or saying, I've never done this before, but I'm excited to try it. So they don't know the skill, but they're willing and even eager to do it. So for this kind of follower, you need to give guidance for the task and encourage their positive attitude. Now let's look at the high ability combinations. If you have a follower who has high ability but low willingness, you have a situation where the person is thinking, I'm good at this, but I'm not that motivated to do it. Okay, so for this person, skill is not your problem, motivation is. So for this kind of follower, task guidance is not as important. What you need to focus on is promoting participation. You remember in the last chapter, we talked about task versus interpersonal elements of a job. In this particular case, this person doesn't need the task guidance necessarily, but you do need to encourage them to participate. And then this final combination is one that many would think is ideal, high ability and high willingness. When you have a follower who has this particular combination, you have someone who would say, I'm good at this and I'm excited to do it. What a treat for a leader, huh? So you can delegate to this kind of follower. They know what they're doing. They're willing to do it. They're going to be self starters and self disciplined. The nice thing about the situational leadership model is that it's prescriptive or it tells you what to do in different situations. So as a leader, start thinking more about your followers and is this follower someone with lower high ability and lower high willingness? And then what kind of task guidance and motivation might they need? Make sure you know all four ability and willingness combinations here. When the exam comes up, you're going to see an application question where I'll give you a little story about a group of followers and say what combination of ability and willingness does this group of followers have. So you'll need to be able to not only define them but know what kind of followers would fit in to that situation. As a teacher I've encountered all these different kinds of groups. When I'm preparing a class I consider the level of the class I'm teaching. And is it likely that students have been exposed to the material before or have experience with it? In the case of COM 3350, it's a leadership class. It's a 3000 level leadership class. Most of the people who take this class are juniors and seniors. Many of you are what we call contemporary learners, which is the new phrase for non-traditional student. It tends to mean an older student or someone who has had work experience. So the students in this class usually have some experiences to draw upon and can share stories of their own leadership situations. So I know I'm not starting from square one. I believe that most of the people in this class have high ability. Now the willingness can vary a little bit, but I take the approach that most people in this course are interested in the subject matter and quite capable of doing the assignments. So again, reflect on that idea of looking at your followers, what they have, and what they need in order to decide how to lead them. The next approach is the functional approach, and this approach suggests that if someone performs the functions of leadership, we tend to see them as a leader. In other words, if someone steps forward and takes charge, we might see them as the leader, whether they deserve it or not. So this approach is useful for understanding how some people become leaders, but it's not really prescriptive like the last approach we studied, meaning that it doesn't really tell us how to be effective leaders. And one problem here is that sometimes the person who takes charge is not the best leader. When you think of situations you've been in with class projects, you might get together in a group and you have a person in the group who kind of takes over and says, okay, here's what I think we should do. A lot of times everybody will defer to that person because they stepped forward to perform the function of leader. And then later on you might reflect on it and say, how did this person become our leader? I don't remember that we ever voted for them. You didn't. You just deferred to their taking charge. Another example, if some people stopped at the scene of an accident and everybody was confused as to what to do, and then someone steps up and says, okay, you call 911 and you start giving him CPR. People will tend to obey and do what the person is suggesting because they're performing the function of leadership. They might not always be the best person to be leading, but oftentimes in these situations we do defer to that person. And the final approach that we're going to be examining in this chapter is called the relational approach. And there are a couple of different theories here. One is called the vertical dyad linkage model, and the other is called leader-member exchange theory. Now, both of these theories tell us that there are one-on-one relationships between leaders and followers. So leaders treat each follower differently, and each follower would offer different stories about the same leader. So both of these are focusing on the idea that there is an interpersonal relationship between a leader and every single follower. When you study these ideas in the chapter, you'll notice that the vertical linkage diet model focuses on the idea that each follower has a unique one-on-one relationship with the leader and that leaders don't treat everyone the same. And then leader-member exchange theory takes that a step further and suggests that liking and rapport between leaders and followers is very important and plays a big part in how effective the leader can be. So, leader-member exchange theory suggests that we feel like we have an in-group relationship or an out-group relationship with our leader. And if we feel we have an in-group relationship with that person, we'll be more productive and we'll want to please our leader. So this is an interesting idea to think about. Have you ever had a boss who played favorites? And you tend to know whether you are or are not a favorite. So think of situations in which you have been a favorite and how pleasant maybe that made your work situation and how motivated you were versus a situation where maybe you knew you weren't a favorite or you had the sense that your boss or supervisor didn't like you. And was your experience with that person different from that? of your peers. Maybe you had peers that thought, oh, that person's terrific. They're a fantastic leader or boss or supervisor. And you were like, no, they're really not because they don't treat me that well. It's something to ponder. So, these relational approaches tell us that liking and rapport between leaders and followers matters. Those one-on-one relationships can be key to effective leadership, and we need to establish good relationships with our followers. An example I wanted to share with you, about 10 years ago, I was working at a very small university and we got a new university president. And this new university president decided that she wanted to meet one-on-one with every faculty member and every staff member. So she made an appointment with each of us to come to our office, so she came to us. And just sit down for 10 or 15 minutes and, you know, introduce herself and get to know us a little bit and to ask us what we thought were some of the most important issues facing the university. And to offer us her support and welcome us to contact her at any future time that we might want to talk about those things. And you might remember in the first unit we were talking about... the symbolic nature of leadership. Many of us found that gesture of hers very symbolic of the kind of leader that she wanted to be. And it was a good effort in establishing those one-on-one relationships with followers. It was a small school, but it still took her quite a long time. I think it probably took her about a year or two. to get to everybody, but you really felt like you'd had your chance to tell her what you were thinking and you felt like you could approach her after that. So I thought she was a good example of using this relational approach to establish good one-on-one relationships with followers. And with that, it's time to work on the task list, so please read it carefully and follow the instructions. And if you run into any questions or problems, shoot me an email and I'll see you in the next module.