Task and Relationship Leadership: A Detailed Analysis
Chapter 4: Attending to Tasks and Relationships
1. What Are Task and Relationship Styles?
a. Task Style: Goal-oriented, focused on achievement, and finding meaning in work. Task-oriented individuals often use to-do lists, calendars, and planners.
b. Relationship Style: Finds meaning in being rather than doing, seeks connection with others, and celebrates relationships. These individuals have a strong orientation in the present.
2. The Task-Relationship Continuum
The task-relationship continuum is often viewed as a push and pull. However, it can misrepresent a leader’s style because individuals can be high or low in both. It’s not an either-or situation.
3. Research on Men’s and Women’s Leadership Styles
Both men and women use both styles, but they are not perceived the same way. Women face a double standard, needing to balance the two styles. Female leaders often switch between styles.
4. Task and Relationship Leadership Behaviors
a. Task Leadership:
- Initiating Structure: The leader organizes work, defines role responsibilities, and schedules work activities.
- Production Orientation: The leader stresses the production and technical aspects of the job.
- Concern for Production: How the leader is concerned with achieving organizational goals.
b. Relationship Leadership:
- Consideration Behavior: The leader creates camaraderie, respect, trust, and regard between leaders and followers.
- Employee Orientation: Taking an interest in workers as human beings, valuing their uniqueness, and giving special attention to their personal needs.
- Concern for People: How a leader attends to the people in the organization who are trying to achieve its goals.
c. Effective Leadership:
The most effective leaders recognize and adapt to followers’ needs. The best leader helps followers achieve the goal by attending to the task and by attending to each follower as a person.
5. What is Change Behavior?
Change behavior includes visioning, intellectual stimulation, risk-taking, and external monitoring.
Chapter 5: Developing Leadership Skills
1. What Are Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills are learned competencies that leaders can demonstrate in performance. They give people the capacity to influence others. Leadership research has shifted from focusing on traits to skills because skills can be learned and developed.
2. What Are Administrative Skills?
Administrative skills are the competencies a leader needs to run an organization in order to carry out its purposes and goals. These include:
- Managing People
- Managing Resources
- Showing Technical Competence (having specialized knowledge about the work we do or ask others to do)
Administrative skills make you an effective leader by enabling you to run the organization smoothly and efficiently.
3. What Are Interpersonal Skills?
Interpersonal skills are abilities that help a leader work effectively with followers, peers, and superiors to accomplish the organization’s goals. These include:
- Perspective-taking
- Being Socially Perceptive: Having insight into and awareness of what is important to others, how they are motivated, the problems they face, and how they react to change.
- Having Behavioral Flexibility
- Showing Emotional Intelligence: The ability to understand your own and others’ emotions, and then to apply this understanding to life’s tasks. The ability to perceive and express emotions, use emotions to facilitate thinking, understand and reason with emotions, and manage emotions effectively within oneself and in relationships with others.
- Managing Interpersonal Conflicts
4. What Are Conceptual Skills?
Conceptual skills involve working with concepts and ideas. These include:
- Problem-Solving
- Strategic Planning: The ability to think and consider ideas to develop effective strategies for a group or an organization.
- Creating Vision
At What Level of Management Are These Skills Most Needed?
The need for each category of skills varies depending on the level of management. However, all three categories—administrative, interpersonal, and conceptual—are essential for effective leadership at all levels.