Effect of Leadership styles and Change Management

Leadership experts agree that “The” most important factor which is being faced by leaders now and in the future are sensitivity to radical change and the experts also agree with the fact that radial change is the most important key. The result is a model of radical change describing the leadership styles best suited to the successful implementation of each stage in the change process. Using the Leadership Style Inventory (LSI), leaders can determine which stages of radical change they are equipped to handle. The key component of a successful leader is the proactive and responsiveness to radical change .Some experts in this field describes the qualities that should be there is a leader are that he should be flexible to change , now leaders should be open to novel alternatives and they should be willing to take greater risks. Now days leaders are more information seeker then information distributors as compared to before.

Leader Style

Focuses on

Persuades by

Makes changes

Learned by

Commanding

Results

Directing

Rapidly

Doing

Logical

Innovation

Explaining

Carefully

Studying

Inspirational

Opportunities

Creating Trust

Radically

Questioning

Supportive

Facilitate work

Involvement

Slowly

Listening

Now this above table is knows as “Leader style inventory (LSI) ” which basically tells us about the main styles of different types of leaders which is their main focus , how to tend to approach their work , how they are able to make changes and how do they learn to do it. There are four main types of leader styles. The commanding style focuses on performance and has a short-term goal orientation. Commanders are highly productive and results oriented. They can be very effective when goal achievement is the primary focus. They learn better by their own successes and failures than by input from others. Other one is the logical style they tend to cover all the alternatives and they have long-term goals they tend to take decisions very carefully and they learn to do things by studying all the aspects. Third one is the inspirational style, which comes in those leaders who fore see future opportunities and develop meaningful visions by experimentation. And those who are more concerned with customers and are more customer oriented is a specialty of supportive style leaders. They are involved as much as possible and in their view change is low by listening to each and everything what others have to say.

Now radical change is done through five main stages which are planning, enabling, launching, catalyzing and maintaining. The way leaders handle work are categorized by these five stages some can be good at planning or initiating while other can be useful at monitoring and marinating. Now leaders who are versatile are known as strategic leaders. They know how to plan and organize things at the work place they know how to handle customers and stretch their employees imagination for developing and implementation of strategies. so leadership qualities are very important is change management . The five stages of a process, which are mentioned above, are very important and the leader has to adopt and cope with the change.

Now in this article (Stephen Warrilow, 2010) stated that change management support those strategies which are people centric rather than totally process oriented and such strategies are successful which are based on this theory. This article is based on a research project which was held at Hawthorne Plant of western electric company in the US, now the project was not to examine the motivation styles or to see how leadership effects the whole process but they wanted to know that how environment plays an important role i.e. to check the environmental and physical influence of the workplace. The studies which came as a result they called it as the “The Hawthorne Effect” which basically means that psychological factors plays important role in the motivation and the improvement of the work quality of the employees and the Hawthorne effect also states that “people would work better when they are allowed to socially interact witch each other and a supportive attention is given to them” according to them workplace is a social network where people come and interact with each other. There were three further conclusions which experts analyze from this effect which are as follow

Social factors influence individual’s production more rather than the individual’s aptitude.

There is a group life among the workers i.e. there is a group life and how the works tend to develop their relation with their superiors tend to direct the work and will carry out orders in the same manner.

Work group norms affect the productivity

So basically the leadership styles effect the productivity for instance better supportive attentions should be given to the employees.

By applying some principles managing organizational change will be more successful. Now change management requires thoughtful planning and sensitive implementation but above all the main characteristics, which affects are consultation with and involvement of the people which are affected by the change. These factors are vital for any leader because they need to consult before they making any decision and involvement of other people are very important because if you are working in a team then it is very important that you take the whole team along with you individualism sometimes costs heavy. There is a difference is culture as there are some cultures that still promote individualism but most of the nations have understood the power of teamwork and they heavily reply on it. Now the managers should be encouraged to communicate face to face with their people too if they are helping one manage an organizational change. Email and written notes and extremely weak at conveying and developing understanding. For organizational change that entails new actions, objectives and processes for a group or team of people, use workshop to achieve understanding, involvement, plans, measurable aims, actions and commitments now another main and important way of doing things in an organization is to encourage your management team to use workshops with their people too if they are helping you to manage the change. The leader should understand that people should be involved at all times, they should understand where the organization is at the moment, understand the future goals that where wants to be and the most important is to communicate, involve, enable and facilitate involvement from people, as early and openly and as fully as in possible. There are eight steps which are stated as John P Kotter eight step change model can be summarized as increased urgency, build the right guiding team, get the vision right, communicate for buy in, enpower action, create short term win which means that the goals should be set which are easy to reach and it is don’t let up and lastly make change stick.

Organizational culture and leadership and inter related experts have two approaches to the study of the cultural aspect in organization: cultural as an organizational variable an, then culture something which can be manipulated. So the leader himself can control the nature, direction and the impact of such manipulations. Now if culture can be seen as an integral part of an organization then everything is affected by the culture. In (Schein, 1992) observed that organizational culture and leadership and inter related and this relation can be seen by considering the organizational life cycle. So during the process of organization formation the founder of the company creates an organization, which reflects their values and beliefs. (Bass, 1985) demonstrated the relationship between leadership and organizational culture by examining different styles of leadership on culture. According to him there are two kinds of leaders one are transactional leaders which perform their duties and work within the culture of the organization and second are the transformational leaders who frequently work towards changing the organizational culture in line with their vision. Findings show that the style of the leader effects performance, certain types of culture are linked to superior performance and culture and leadership are related, behavior and styles also play an important role in the leadership and the change management as the decisions are based on the leaders for that they have to diagnose the problem first then act according to it then understanding of the situational factors are very important because if the leader don’t know where he wants to be and where he wants to take the organization then he will fail as a leader and organization will collapse as a whole.

Good leadership is critical to a successful organization. Success comes from aiming high with the clear visions and communication that good leadership brings. The importance the executive attaches to leadership and development of leadership capacity is reflected in the leadership agenda set out in Ambitious, Excellent organization. The behaviors of leaders within organizations have been found to account for some of the organization’s overall performance. The characteristics of a successful leader and ways of achieving

Exemplary leadership.

Challenge the process by looking for new ways of doing things.

Inspire a shared vision by looking into the future and communicating the organization’s goals to the rest of the group.

Enable others to act by listening and encouraging others to participate.

Model the way by first knowing the philosophy, goals and plan of the organization.

Encourage others to grow by acknowledging and rewarding their accomplishments.

Although present day leaders may think in terms of empowerment and team building, the fundamentals of leadership are integrating followers and helping them achieve the organization’s common goal. In order for the organization to grow, there needs to be change. There are two things that need to happen in order for change to occur. First, many leaders need to be working together. Secondly, leaders need to break down or abandon the familiar way of doing things. Although this is often seen as the disruptive side of leadership, this process challenges others to go beyond their limits and bring to the organization new and innovative way of doing things. So we can conclude that leadership styles do tend to influence the performance of the organization and they way they tend to take those decisions effect the whole of the organization.

This article reports a longitudinal study that examined mergers between three large Multi-site public-sector organizations. Facts are provided and used to examine the effect of leadership and change management strategies on acceptance of cultural change by individuals. In this article basically “the great man” theory of leadership is discussed according to which situation also plays a vital role in determining the leaders effectiveness to that and how different types of leader act in different situations. Theories of transformational leadership and organizational change emphasize that change is accomplished through the leader’s implementation of a unique vision of the organization through powerful persuasive personal characteristics and actions designed to change internal organizational cultural forms

This study attempts to identify the impact of three different leadership styles on the learning climate generated in the organization. The leadership styles studied are: benevolent or paternalistic style, critical style and developmental style. The impact variables studies include the extent to which they produce loyalty and dependence, resentment and counter dependence and learning, job satisfaction and morale. The study indicated that while benevolent style creates dependence and resentment, critical style creates resentment and it is developmental style that tends to creates learning and job satisfaction

This article will present a conceptual framework of the various elements of organizational change in order to obtain a better understanding of the management of organizations. As such, the purpose of this article is to present an overview of strategic organizational change (SOC) and its managerial impact upon leadership, learning, motivation and productivity. Successful organizations show more positive than negative attributes. Successful organizations tend to focus on customers and their needs. They invest in ways to improve sales and provide superior service to clients, and they do not forget that their customers and their customers’ needs underlie their organization’s existence.