Reference no: EM133216188
1. Leadership and Influence Processes: Skill-Building Exercise
Exercise Overview
Diagnostic skills help managers visualize and understand the most appropriate response to a situation. These also relate to assessing how various things are related to one another. Interpersonal skills refer to the ability to communicate with, understand, and motivate individuals and groups. Implicit in this definition is the notion that a manager should try to understand important characteristics of others, including their behaviors. Diagnostic skills help managers visualize and understand the most appropriate response to a situation. This also relates to assessing how various things are related to one another. This exercise will give you insights into relating the behaviors of individuals to their motivation and leadership capabilities.
Exercise Background
Most large organizations, as well as some smaller ones, devote considerable attention to identifying current employees who might be good candidates for promotion in the future. The criteria for these assessments might include current job performance but often focuses instead on future potential. An important consideration in many cases is the potential an individual has for taking on more substantive leadership roles in the future.
Assume that you are a human-resource executive in a large company. You have just been given a new assignment: You are supposed to devote part of your attention to identifying leadership potential among middle managers within the company. This will not be the only criteria used in future promotion decisions for these individuals but will be one of several important factors that will be considered. You are excited about this new assignment but are also concerned by its lack of clarity and structure. With the approval of your boss, you have decided to spend the first few weeks of your new assignment observing various behaviors across a wide variety of managers in the company as well as conducting several interviews to help you develop a framework to be used as you start the work.
One thing you want to develop is your own ability to distinguish between management behaviors and leadership behaviors. Another is to understand more about the interrelationships between power and leadership. Finally, you want to begin to distinguish between leadership behaviors that appear to be more effective and those that appear to be less effective.
Use your interpersonal and diagnostic skills to answer the following questions.
Your firm recently hired a new research and development manager to lead a new project. This individual holds several patents and is acknowledged to know more about certain technologies than anyone else in the world. Based solely on this information, which forms of power does this person have? Check all that apply.
Reward power
Legitimate power
Coercive power
Referent power
Expert power
During an interview with one manager, he commented that only people who were physically attractive had any real potential to become leaders. Which approach to leadership would such a comment predict?
Employee-centered leader behavior
Consideration behavior
Initiating Structure behavior
Job-centered leader behavior
Leadership traits
Yesterday you interviewed one of your company's warehouse managers and asked for her views on leadership in the warehouse. This is what she had to say: "Leadership? We really don't have much need for that out here. My workers all know what to do. Trucks come in, a team of workers unloads whatever is in them, and then a different team moves the cargo to where it goes. We have standard procedures, policies, and practices to follow, and as long as everyone understands those, everything works fine." Which leadership approach do these statements reflect?
Substitutes for leadership
Path-goal theory
LPC theory
LMX approach
Vroom's decision tree approach