Leadership Respond to Changing Process (Research Paper Sample)

Leadership Respond to Changing Process
(Name)
(Institution’s Name)
Introduction
When we think about leadership, images come to mind of influential dynamic individuals who control victorious armies, shape the activities of an organization or events of the nations, develop powerful religions and beliefs, and direct corporate empires CITATION Rob121 \l 1033 (Lussier & Achua, 2012). We think of President Obama, Donald Trump, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping. How did certain leaders build great armies, countries, and companies? Why famous leaders have committed followers whereas others do not? Why were Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King such influential figures? How did Hitler rise to prominence in Germany? In this research paper, I will describe the major challenge facing leadership; what causes several organizational leaders’ to lose their job. A leader is more of a manager and his greatest strength is inability to notice change. Innovation brings change. Noticing change is part of leader’s responsibility. Bill Gates noticed what computer technology would mean to the world in 20th-century. He noticed an opportunity, dangling in the air, and he took it.
There is no clear universal definition of leadership since leadership is complex and studied in different ways that need different definitions. Since ancient time, the subject of leadership has been generating excitement and interest. Leadership scholars have spent a great deal of time and faced different challenges worrying about the definition of leadership. Rost (1993) outlined four essential elements that form the basis of defining leadership. They are; the existing relationship should be based on influence, the relationship must include leaders and followers as the main participants, the leaders and followers should object real changes, and leaders and followers should develop mutual purposes. These four components must be present fo any relationship to characterized as leadership. In his book, Leadership, Mumford summarizes the definition of leadership as the influence of others toward a collective objective. From this definition it is critical to identify some of the terms used when the topic of leadership, as a discussion, is brought up. These terms are influence and followers. Followers are those individuals whom a leader applies influence for the reason of accomplishing a collective objective whereas influence refers to changing the motives or standpoints of another to attain a set goal CITATION Mic091 \p 5 \l 1033 (Mumford, 2009, p. 5). Generally, leadership does not symbolize fundamentally different concepts for different scholars. One can easily detect a family resemblance between various definitions of leadership. All of them signify leadership as some process, act, or influence that in a way rallies people to do something CITATION Joa04 \l 1033 (Ciulla, 2004). A class of scholars, each holding own definition, would understand each other.
Role of a Leader: Management Perspective
The main responsibility of a manager is to optimize present operations of an organization, in good industrial frame of mind fashion. Management responsibilities generally comprise of planning, organizing, making decision controlling, and motivating. Managers concentrate on how to improve the extant business and spend their time indentifying and solving challenges blocking the performance of their organization. The primary view through the eyes of the manager is always inside the boundaries of the business and commonly confined to short-term period. On the other hand, leaders look far beyond the external boundaries of the organization. They focus in an up and out fashion. They are mainly accountable for developing clear strategic direction for the organization’s future CITATION Dea02 \l 1033 (Anderson & Anderson, 2002). Leaders also assume that some changes will be necessary to keep up with the present marketplace; hence, they attend to what is taking place outside the organization’s environment. Thus, they are able to forecast how the business has to operate to succeed in its environment. Leaders have the duty of communicating the new strategic requirements for performance and profit to the organization, and the manager put the new plans into practice.
Leaders also keep a strategic eye on how the business is doing, set precedence, satisfy stakeholders needs, assist solve strategic conflicts, and present parameters to the attainment of set objectives. From early 1980s leaders have been tasked with creating vision for their organizations since the scope and pace of change started to increase. The purpose of visioning is to provide clear and common direction, in addition to motivating change. Whereas leaders always give more attention than managers do to motivating and inspiring followers, visioning makes their responsibility even more complex CITATION Rig05 \l 1033 (Rigolosi, 2005). Leadership structure can be classified into five key configurations: external manager, designated team leader, temporary assigned team leader, task-based team leader, and distributed team leadership. The distributed leadership model maps four distinct leadership styles on four team stages. The four leadership responsibilities are; envisioning, organizing, spanning, and social. Envisioning is the act of developing new ideas and conveying a powerful vision of the organization CITATION Mit10 \l 1033 (Rothstein & Burke, 2010). Change leadership has secured effective change through the integration of envisioning and empowerment. According to Remenyi (2005), envisioning requires change leaders to present and communicate clear vision to create enthusiasm, energy, and dedication for others to follow.
Leadership: Change Leader Critical to the Change Process
Organizational change is frequently initiated and managed by leader; change leaders. Change leaders manage change with the help of change agents. Change agents are required at various levels of the organization and operate with different change skills and competencies depending on specific objectives and business settings CITATION Pet05 \l 1033 (Lok, Walsh, Rhodes, & Jones, 2005 ). Table 1 illustrates seven core competencies that change leaders should possess. Ague (2008) believes that effective and successful change process needs well0structures and incorporated design that must consider all three spheres of influence.
Table SEQ Table \* ARABIC 1: Responsibilities of a Change Leader CITATION Dea02 \l 1033 (Anderson & Anderson, 2002)
Change Process
Transformation, eventually, is the journey of developing an organization from where it is to where the stakeholders target. Change can be achieved through bridging the existing gap between stakeholder’s expectations and communication between leaders; thus, change is significant that it requires the employees and the organization’s culture to transform CITATION Chi14 \l 1033 (Chisholm-Burns, Vaillancourt, & Shepherd, 2014). The journey must start before the leader can fully identify what his ultimate goal or desired state resembles. Change leadership is the task of leading an organization through a transformation journey. In CITATION Ton10 \l 1033 (Wagner, et al., 2010), change leaders are accountable for devising the process of this transformational journey, controlling, and planning the processes as they unfold. Two basic types of change process that promote occurrence of leadership problems with respect to stakeholder’s expectations are planned and emergent. Here, we use the term stakeholders to represent the range of people and entities affected by the leadership services. For instance internal stakeholders and external stakeholders of an organization as listed in Table 2.
Table SEQ Table \* ARABIC 2: Examples of Stakeholders
Stakeholders Expectations and Leadership Communication: Why do problems occur?
Chisholm-Burns et al. (2014) outlined four service related conceptualizations of stakeholder’s dissatisfaction: performance evaluation, disconfirming of expectations, affect-based assessment, and equity-based assessment. Performance evaluation involves determining stakeholder’s satisfaction with salient characteristics of a certain services, like interactions with the leaders of an organization or the physical environment of the organization. Leader’s friendliness, empathy, communication skills, competence, knowledge and skills presents their unique feature of handling problems while location, organizational security and privacy presents the organizational environment. Secondly, disconfirmation of expectations refers to the process of appraising service experience where stakeholders evaluate the gap between their expectations with respect to services and their standpoints of the actual experience. In circumstance where their expectations exceed the target, the stakeholders are likely to be satisfied when they fail, dissatisfaction looms. Affect-based assessment represents the emotional reaction for instance pleasure or displeasure, a customer may experience due to poor services offered by the organization. This form of assessment facilitates the investigation, by leaders, of the emotional response to services offered by the organization. This assessment is useful when customer’s expectations are not applied when carrying out service evaluations. Lastly, equity-based assessment presents stakeholder’s view of equality in the provision of services, together with inputs and outcomes of the designed change process implemented in organizational service delivery. This idea brings about reputational standpoint of the organization. When reputational impacts of service delivery are quantified in monetary terms- for instance, expected reduction in income result...