Situational Leadership II

Situation-based leadership theory holds that the leader's behavior must adapt to the degree of preparation of the leader to achieve effective leadership effects. That is to say, the leadership style is not static, it must be changed based on changes in the environment and employees.

The three skills are diagnosis, flexibility, and contract leadership. Diagnosis is to assess the needs of subordinates in the development stage; elasticity is to make it easy to use different leadership types; Agreed leadership types are to establish partnerships with subordinates, the type of leadership required by a subordinate agreement.

The application of this model consists of three steps: the first step is to identify the tasks and requirements of employees; the second step is to judge and evaluate the preparation of employees; and the third step is to select the appropriate leadership style.

Identifying tasks and requirements for employees is a prerequisite for evaluating the leader's readiness. Because the degree of preparation is related to the specific task, because the required tasks are different, the employee's degree of preparation is often at different levels. To assess the readiness of a leader more accurately, an effective method is to segment the work. For example, a laboratory researcher may be very experienced in experiment control, but he is not able to write the experiment report. Obviously, in these two jobs, the degree of readiness of the study staff is different, and leaders should provide different work support. Preparation for diagnosing a Leader refers to the ability and willingness of the leader to complete a specific task. Competence refers to the knowledge, experience, and skills displayed, and willingness refers to the confidence, commitment, and motivation displayed. The following four levels of preparation can be formed based on the different levels of employee competence and willingness. Preparation Level 1 (R1): unable, unwilling, or uneasy. Preparation Level 2 (R2): incapable, willing, or confident. Preparation level 3 (r3): ability, unwilling or uneasy. Preparation level 4 (R4): ability, willingness, and confidence. The four preparations can be determined based on the actual situation. For example, a new employee who is not interested in his work is motivated only to exchange for living conditions. As a newbie, he lacks the necessary training and skills and has no psychological interest or motivation to do a good job. He is at the level of preparation. A new employee who is interested in work is at the level of preparation level 2, despite lack of skills and training, but has the willingness and confidence to do a good job. He is at the level of preparation because he has been refining for many years, his work knowledge and skills are impeccable, but he does not have the motivation and desire to do a good job. However, an experienced, skilled, and eager backbone engineer is capable, willing, and confident. He is at the level of preparation. For these four different employees, the leadership behavior is obviously not the same. The focus of situation-based leadership theory is that it is consistent with the employee's situation. Therefore, determining the employee readiness is the key to this model. It must be noted that the basis for determining the readiness of employees is "performance" rather than "potential ". Behaviors are not comments and thoughts. Hesse particularly emphasizes the understanding of the word "performance", that is, determining the readiness based on the behavior of the leader is the ability and willingness to "Express, rather than potential or verbal "Ambition ". In this case, Zhuge Liang suffered this loss by using a Trojan horse. Two thousand years ago, Kong's husband and wife stressed that they should "listen to what they say and observe what they do". The truth is the same. These seemingly commonplace things, once ignored, will make a big mistake in practice. After selecting a proper leadership style and evaluating the readiness, the next task of the leader is to determine the leadership style. There are various leadership styles in real life. Leaders influence employees through work behaviors and relationship behaviors, and show different leadership styles. Work behavior is a kind of one-way action, that is, to tell the leader what to do, where to do, how to do it, and when to complete it. Link behavior is a two-way or multi-direction behavior that emphasizes listening, letting leaders participate in and make decisions, and allowing trial and error. The combination of work behavior and relationship behavior forms a two-dimensional model of the leadership style. The X axis shows work behavior, from low to high, and the Y axis shows relationship behavior, it is also from low to high. Through the combination of high and low levels, we can simplify the leadership style into four modes: the first is the high-work-low relationship (S1), and the second is the high-work-high relationship (S2 ); the third is low-work-high relationship (S3), and the fourth is low-work-low relationship (S4 ). People usually have the best leadership style in mind, but in fact it is impossible to find one of the best leadership styles. At this point, the Situational Leadership theory is significantly different from the Management square theory. Dr. Hesse believes that different situations correspond to different leadership styles. The leadership style can only be the most effective in a certain situation, but not the most effective in any situation. They associate four levels of readiness with four leadership styles to help leaders select efficient behavior patterns. Informed leadership style because employees at the R1 level are not prepared for their work, leaders need to clearly tell them what to do, where to do, when to do and how to do it. This stage should not support behavior and two-way communication. Too many support behaviors may lead to misunderstanding by leaders, believing that leaders can tolerate or accept poor performance, and even encourage poor performance. The leaders are not familiar with their work, lack of skills, and lack of skills. They do not have the skills to grasp the skills, but cannot come up with creative ideas. Too much participation in decision-making will lead to fear and increase the ideological burden. A suitable practice is to conduct a small amount of communication to promote the leader's understanding of work instructions. The best leadership style at this stage is high work and low relationship behavior. Because leaders need to give detailed instructions, they are also called "notification", which is similar to what is generally called imperative. Sales-style leadership for employees at the R2 level, although they lack the necessary knowledge and skills, they have the willingness to work and the motivation to learn, due to lack of ability, leaders should provide more work guidance. In addition, the leaders at this stage are in good self-status and have the desire to actively participate in decision-making or have full confidence in their work. Employees with such beliefs are generally disgusted with direct commands, leaders must give them support or encouragement. Otherwise, they may feel frustrated and cannot be trusted. At this stage, we should adopt a leadership style with high work and high relationship behavior. Leaders should explain the reasons for decision-making to the leaders, and try to make the leaders feel valued and psychologically accept them, therefore, it can be called a "Push type ". A leader must have comprehensive instructions or guidance, also known as "coaching ". Employees with a participatory leadership style at the R3 level have sufficient capabilities, but lack confidence or a low level of commitment. They don't need a lot of guidance and specific instructions on improving capabilities, but they need support and encouragement from leaders in a psychological and atmosphere. The leadership style at this stage is low work behavior and high relationship behavior. Leaders can let go of specific tasks. However, they must strengthen communication and encouragement and encourage employees to participate in decision-making to stimulate their willingness to work, build confidence. This method emphasizes the participation of subordinates, so it is called "participatory leadership style ". Employees with an authorized leadership style reaching the R4 level have sufficient abilities, willingness, and confidence. For such a leader, the leader can basically let go and be fully authorized. In work practice, such employees have the knowledge and skills, they do not need guidance or instructions, do not need frequent supervision, they are confident and take the initiative to complete the work, there is no need for too much encouragement and communication. What leaders need to do is to make appropriate comments on their work results. This kind of leadership style is between low work behavior and low relationship behavior. Because leaders need to give full trust to such employees and both decision-making and execution right are moved down, they are called "authorized leadership style ". The effectiveness of leadership the effectiveness of leadership depends on the task requirements, the status of the leader and the interaction between the leader's behavior. There is no way of leadership to ensure that it works on any occasion. Each factor is crucial and mutually influential. Each factor is a variable rather than a constant. Leaders cannot control all factors in the Organization. Among the many factors, Hesse and branchard believe that there must be a decisive factor, which is the relationship between the leader and the leader. Heshi defines the leadership as: "leadership is any effort to influence individual or group behavior ." According to this definition, leadership is the influence. If a leader cannot have an influence and is not expected to obey the leader, other factors will become meaningless. Therefore, the effectiveness of leadership is mainly achieved through the extent to which the leader is influenced. In this way, Hesse and branchard have simplified the Analysis Framework of leadership activities and made the leadership situation uniform and stylized. In this way, the core of the effectiveness issue is grasped. The leadership style situation leadership model provides a method to help leaders determine the proper leadership mode, but it cannot achieve the effect once and for all. Even if the leadership scenario is simplified to a single employee readiness, the employees themselves are constantly changing. Leaders should make positive assumptions about the potential of their employees and help them grow. As their readiness changes, they should change their leadership style. In this regard, Hesse and branchard have made some amendments in the follow-up study. They suggested that leaders should improve employee preparation by fine-tuning work behaviors and relationship behaviors. For employees in the preparation level of R1 and R2, leaders should take two steps to promote their growth and development. The first step is to reduce the number of instructions or supervision given to them as their subordinate skills increase. Then, observe the situation of employees. If their performance meets the expectations of leaders, step 2: Increase the number of link behaviors. These two steps cannot be reversed. It is necessary to determine that after the leader's work behavior is reduced, the employee can respond well to the behavior to further increase the relationship behavior. Here, the relationship behavior of leaders can be seen as a reward for employee growth. Of course, rewards must be given only after satisfactory performance. For employees at the level of preparation for R3 and R4, the direction for fine-tuning of leadership behavior is different. As people grow, their needs change, and of course they need different incentives. For employees with a low level of preparation, adding relationship behavior is a reward. for employees with a high level of preparation, trusting them to take responsibility independently is a reward. If leaders strengthen relationships with highly prepared employees, they may be considered insecure. Therefore, there are two steps to promote highly prepared employees. The first step is to reduce the work behavior of leaders in an appropriate amount, the second step is to reduce the relationship between leaders based on employee performance (see the picture on the right ). Here, the demand for highly prepared employees is the opposite of that for low-prepared employees. The reduction of relationship behavior can be seen as a reward. In actual use, the situational leadership model should not only consider the improvement of employee level, but also the decline of employee level. If the readiness of employees declines, the leadership should be adjusted in reverse order according to the above fine-tuning process. This small style change makes it easier for leaders to accept their employees and leads them to stop downgrading and return to their original level. Without such fine-tuning of timely intervention, the problem may accumulate to a serious extent, forcing leaders to change their behavior significantly. In practice, many see the pressure of the situation, the leadership style from the authorization type S4, suddenly fell to the notification type S1. Drastic changes in leadership behavior often make employees unacceptable and affect the leadership effect.

 

Situational Leadership II