Emerging Approaches of Leadership | Charismatic Leadership | Transformable Leadership | Leader Member Exchange (LMX) Theory

Emerging approaches of leadership are: 

1. Charismatic Leadership 

Charismatic leadership theory is also called as 'Great Man Theory'. Charismatic leaders are dynamic risk-takers who show their expertise and self-confidence; express high performance expectation and use symbols and language to inspire others. They can also be mentors who treat employees individually and guide them to take action. 

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In other words, charismatic leaders are those who inspire followers and have a major impact on their organizations through personal vision and energy. Charismatic leaders may become a liability to an organization once the crisis and need for dramatic change subsides. This is so because, in the times of peace, charismatic leader's over-whelming self-confidence becomes ability. The basic assumptions and implications of charismatic leadership theory are as follows: 

• These leadership qualities make a leader effective and situational factors do not have any influence.
• Leaders, in general, and great leaders in particular, have some exceptional inborn leadership qualities which are bestowed upon them by the divine power.
• Since these qualities are inborn, these cannot be enhanced through education and training. Further, since these qualities are of personal nature, these cannot be shared by others. 

2. Transformable Leadership 

Under transformable leadership, the leader pays attention towards the developmental needs of individual subordinates. The transformational leadership excites, arouses and inspires the subordinates to put an additional effort to achieve the goals of the organization. It is build on top of the transactional leadership. It means that this leadership develops people for achieving the organizational goals. The subordinates are made high performers and developed employees. Subordinates are motivated to transcend their self interest for the betterment of organization. It leads to higher productivity and higher employee satisfaction. Transformational leadership has four important features: 

• Individualized consideration
• Intellectual simulation
• Inspiration 
• Charisma 

3. Transactional Leadership 

This theory emphasizes on effort and performance. Under the transactional leadership, the leader directs his subordinates toward the achievement of goals. The leader clarifies the roles to be played by the subordinates while performing their respective tasks. The leader guides and motivated his followers to achieve the organizational goals. 

Leaders under this theory have following features: 

a) Passive Management by Exception: They intervene only if standards are not meet. 

b) Contingent Reward: They provide various kinds of rewards in exchange for usually agreed-upon goal accomplishment. 

c) Laissez-faire: They abdicate responsibilities and avoid decisions. 

d) Active Management by Exception: Leaders keep watching for deviations from rules and standards and taking corrective action. 

4. Leader Member Exchange (LMX) Theory 

This theory indicates that a leader establishes a special relationship with his subordinates. Under this theory, some of the subordinates get special privileges while others are paid less attention and may considered as out of group members. The leader categorizes some members of the group as inner members and other members as outer members. This 'in' and 'out' group are relative ordinates and have formal authority interaction. These 'in' and 'out' groups are relatively stable during the course of organization behavior and leaders seek to higher employee satisfaction. The leader member exchange theory motivates the employees personally. The leader takes personal care of the employees. The members who are not highly regarded by the leader feel dissatisfied. They try to know the likings and disliking of the leader and behave accordingly. This theory motivates only a few members of the group while other members are frustrated and many create some problems to the leader. 

5. Attribution Theory 

The attribution theory implicitly explains that a leader should have an effective influence on the followers. Employees perceive good leaders as those who are high structure and have high relations (people-oriented). People perceive such leaders best in all situations. In an adverse situation, they do not blame the leader because they have perceived him as the best leader because of this high orientation, i.e., high structured and high initiated. If such leaders fail, employees attribute the failure to the situation and adverse conditions. 

Related Topic:

- Application of Perception Theories (Attribution Theory)

In other words, the attribution theory of leadership is related to perception i.e. how people view the leader. People establish and develop perception with cause and effect. How a leader behaves has a long lasting impact on the followers. The vent happening is attributed to some causes. The attribution or assigning of a cause to an event gives birth to the attribution theory. The followers attribute many happenings to leadership. If a country faces an acute inflation, it is attributed to the ruling party. It is known here that this attribution may be real or unreal. Just the attribution of inflation to a government is not always correct because there may be other causes of inflation. Similarly, attribution theory makes the low oriented leaders always responsible although he is not responsible for failure, because of adverse conditions.

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Application of Perception Theories in Organizations

Organization is a place where different types of individuals work together for achieving common as well as individuals goals. In the process of working together they need to understand each other. Such understanding of others depends on one’s perception. Perception plays a vital role in organizations particularly in the field of recruitment, selection, appraisal, promotion and so on. 

People’s perceptions and attributions influence how they behave in their organization. Perception describes the way people filter, organize and interpret sensory information. Attribution explains how people act, determining how people react to the actions of others as well. Accurate perception allows employees to interpret what they see and hear in the workplace effectively to make decisions, complete tasks and act in ethical manner. Faculty perceptions lead to problems in the organization, such as stereotyping, that lead people to erroneously make assumptions. 

Perception is a concept of psychology. The subject of organizational behavior applies the concept to explain various events and behavior that occur in formal organizations. What are those applications? 

Often the main aspects of perception in an organization is how an individual views others, as this can be a major point in how that person will behave within the business. It is also an aspect of how an individual is motivated within an organization. If they preserve people in a certain way then they may believe they are disliked, not listened to or ignored by this person and therefore their motivation to do anything will be far smaller. This is why in organizations, there needs to be sure that employees will in the organization fit before being hired and then when they are hired their first perceptions of others need to be good. 

To achieve first impression good companies will often introduce new employees and current employees in ways which show off key skills and highlight the importance of these people to the team. So positive perceptions are built instead of negatives. The perceptual process is how organizations cope with the aforementioned. 

Attribution Theory

Attribution theory has been proposed to develop explanations of the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior. Basically, the theory suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends largely on three factors. 

1. Distinctiveness 

Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations. Is the employee who arrived late today also the source of complaints by co-workers? What we want to know is, if this behavior is unusual or not. If it is unusual, the observer is likely to give the behavior an external attribution. If this action is not unusual, it will probably be judged as internal. 

2. Consensus 

If everyone, who is faced with a similar situation, responds in the same way, we can say the behavior shows consensus. Our late employee’s behavior would meet this criterion if all employees who took the same route to work were also late. From an attribution perspective if consensus is high, we would be expected to give an external attribution to the employee’s late coming, where as if other employees who took the same route made it into work on time, our conclusion as to causation would be internal. 

3. Consistency

Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. Does the person respond the same way over time? Coming ten minutes late for work is not perceived in the same way for the employee for whom it is a unusual case (he hasn’t been late for several months), as for the employee for whom it is part of routine pattern (he is regularly late two or three times a week). The more consistent the behavior, the more the observer is inclined to attribute it to internal causes. 

Attribution theory tell us that if an employee performs at about the same level on other related tasks as he does on his current task (low distinctiveness), if other employees frequently perform differently better or worse-than employee does on that current task (low consensus) and if employees’ performance on this current task is consistent over time (high consistency), their manager or anyone else who is judging their work is likely to hold them primarily responsible for their task performance. 

In short, it can be stated that the studies on attribution theory have generated the following conclusions: 

1. When we are explaining our own behavior, we tend to over-estimate the importance of the situation and under estimate our own personality characteristics. 
2. When we observe someone else behavior, we tend to over-estimate the influence of personality traits and under-estimate situational influences. 
3. In evaluating the performance of employees, poor performance is generally attributed to internal personal factors, especially when the consequences are serious. 
4. Employees tend to attribute their success to internal factors and their failures to external causes. 
5. In casual situations, as we observe the successes and failure of others, we tend to attribute their successes to personality traits such as effort and ability and their failures to external factors such as the difficulty of the task. 

Attribution Errors

Attribution theory states that we have a tendency to explain someone’s behavior by attributing a cause to their behavior. In our effort to try to understand the behavior of others, we either explain their behavior is terms of their personality and disposition (internal), or we explain their behavior in terms of the situation (external). You might, for example, explain your professor’s harsh words about class performance as being the result of his angry personality type, or you might attribute it to his disappointment with the overall class performance. If you attribute his harsh words to an angry personality type, then you have made the fundamental attribution error. 

1. Fundamental Attribution Error 

The fundamental attribution error is our tendency to explain someone’s behavior based on internal factors, such as personality or disposition, and to underestimate the influence that external factors, such as situational influences, have on another person’s behavior. We might, for example, explain the fact that someone is unemployed on his or her character, and blame him or her for his or her plight, when in fact he or she was recently laid off due to a sluggish economy. Of course, there are times when we are correct about our assumptions, but the fundamental attribution error is our tendency to explain the behavior of others based on character or disposition. This is particularly true when the behavior is negative. 

2. Self-serving Bias 

A self-serving bias is nay cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback and focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more responsibility for their group’s work than they give to other members, they are protecting the ego from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self’s need for esteem. For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade in an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher’s poor teaching ability or unfair test questions is exhibiting the self-serving bias. Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace, interpersonal relationships, sports and consumer decisions. 

Both motivational processes (i.e. self-enhancement, self-presentation) and cognitive processes (i.e. locus of control, self-esteem) influence the self-serving bias. There are both cross-cultural (i.e. individualistic and collectivistic culture differences) and special clinical population (i.e. depression) considerations within the bias. Much of the research on the self-serving bias has used participant self-reports of attribution based on experimental manipulation of task outcomes or in naturalistic situations. Some more modern research, however, has shifted focus to physiological manipulations, such as emotional inducement and neural activation, in an attempt to better understand the biological mechanisms that contribute to the self-serving bias.

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Sensation differ from Perception

Concept of Attribution Theory

The perception of people differs from our perceptions because we make inferences about the actions of people that we don't make about inanimate objects.

Attributions theory has been proposed to develop explanations of the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior. Basically, the theory suggests that we observe an individual's behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused.

Sensation differ from Perception

People usually mean sensation and perception the same. But, there is a clear cut distinction between the two. In simple words, sensation may be described as the response of a physical sensory organ to some stimuli. Our physical senses i.e. vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste are continuously bombarded by numerous stimuli that are both inside and outside of our body. Our physical sensory organs often react to these stimuli. The reaction of our eye to color, ear to sound, nose to odour and so on are the examples of our every day sensations. What these examples indicate is that sensation activates the perception. In this way, sensation serves as a raw input to be processed so as to make sense out of them to perceive the environment or stimuli around us.

Perception is much more than sensation. Perception depends upon the sensory raw data, yet it involves a cognitive process that includes filtering, modifying or even changing these sensation raw data to make sense out of them. In other words, the perceptual process adds to or/ and subtracts from the sensory world. A simple instruction may be looking at an object. We see by means of our eyes. Remember, it is not our eyes but what we see and tend to see in its totality, with a figure and form against a background. Thus, we find that eyes activates to see an object i.e. sensation and what is being seen i.e. perception. In this seeing process, though both sensation and perception are involved, yet perception process overcomes sensation process to make what is being seen. Following example will help to understand the difference between sensation and perception more clearly.

1. You buy a  two wheeler that you think is the best, but not one the engineer says is the best.
2. A subordinate's answer to a question is based on what he heard his boss says, but not on what the boss actually said.
3. The same professor may be viewed by on student as a very goods professor and by another student of the same semester as a poor professor.
4. The same item may be viewed by the manufacturing engineer to be of high quality and by a customer to be of low quality.