Behavior-oriented leadership

Goals:

• Identification of typical behavioral patterns of leaders

Leadership dimensions:

• Performance Orientation (Initiation of strucutre)

• Employee Orientation (Consideration)

Performance Orientation - Behavioral patterns:

• Goal setting

• Prioritizing of task

• Delegation

• Employee assessment

Emoloyee Orientation - Behavioral patterns:

• Respect and appreciation

• Consideration

• Interpersonal relationships

Behavioral patterns are not mutually exclusive!

• Goal setting by leader

• Perfomance rush

• Employee interests minor important

• Example: Firefighter, Army

• Personal well-being of employees

• Positive climate

• Leader as care-taker

• Example: Family Business, SME (Small- and midsize Enterprise)

• Large organization/government

• Process orientation

• Impersonal climate

• Example: President, politicans

• People - performance - balance

• Employee participation

(Example: Project Manager in an IT-Company)

An Extension to Customer orientation:

-> Customer-oriented leadership means:

• Examplification

• Permanent emphasis

• Recognition

• Alignment

Characteristics:

• high performance and customer orientation combined with low employee orientation

• limited development of a customer-oriented attitude by employees

• no alignment between goals and task for employees

Characteristics:

• high customer and employee orientation

• low level of performance orientation

• Creation of certain prerequisites for anchoring customer orientation in the attitudes and behavior of employees.

• too little support for employees (e.g. by agreeing on objectives or suggesting measures) to be able to achieve performance success through customer orientation

Characteristics:

• attaches importance almost exclusively to performance that can be measured quantitatively

• attaches low relevance to employee and customer orientation if these are soft

• almost impossible for employees to internalize or even live customer orientation

Characteristics:

• overall cooperative behavior of leader causes a relatively high motivation of the employees

• customer orientation is neither exemplified by the leader nor is it explicitly promoted in his/her own area of responsibility

• focus on the optimization of internal processes

• customer orientation is largely neglected

Two core dimensions of leadership:

• Objective and rational orientation: concentration on tasks

• Socio-emotional orientation: focus on interpersonal aspects

Basic idea:

• Best mix between objective and socio-emotional orientation is key

Idea:

• Fit between leadership and context required

Basic assumptions:

• Distinction between task and relationship motivated leaders

• Measurement via Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) scale

• Situational factors:

  • leader-member relationship

  • leader’s position power

  • task structure

Limited evidence:

• Confirmation only under laboratory conditions

• No confirmation in real environment

Limited implications for business practice:

• Average LPC value scores are correlated with more leadership success than high or low LPC value scores

• Goal acceptence is key

• Goal should bring personal benefits

• Supportive leader behavior

• Directive leadership

• Result-oriented leadership

• Participatory leadership

Basic idea:

• Extension of Ohio State Leadership approach

  → employee vs. performance orientation

• Employee maturity matters

  → “functional” employee maturity- Can?

  → “psychological” employee maturity – Want to?

High demands on leader:

• adaption to maturity of employees requires a variety of leadership styles

• High analytical capability needed

Limited evidence:

• No confirmation of validity of theory

• Operationalization unclear, lacking validity of instruments