Behavioral

The behavioural theory of leadership evolved in the 1950s. After understanding that
the personal traits of a leader are essential for effective leadership, the researchers
were now keen to know that what leaders do to become effective leaders

Thus, they now focussed on the leader’s behaviour rather than traits. To study the
behaviour of leaders, two major research programs were started by two different
universities namely, the Ohio State Leadership Studies and the University of
Michigan Studies.

Autocratic leaders are classic micromanagers, taking responsibility for all decision-making.
While an autocratic leader might be able to make decisions quickly and firmly, many teams grow
to resent autocratic leaders. Micromanaging a team can be ineffective because it monopolizes a
manager’s time and draws their attention away from more important things, and because it can
cause employees to feel disempowered.

Democratic leaders involve the team in decision-making, allowing everyone to have a say.
While team members may still disagree with their leader’s decision, their perspectives are taken
into account. This style of leadership can cause teams to become more invested in the process
and the goal, but they can also get bogged down with complicated decisions.

Laissez-faire leaders use a light touch managing their teams. They expect their team
members to make the right call on their own and trust their employees to do their jobs well. This
can be an effective style of leadership with a highly skilled team, but it can result in a team
suffering from a lack of direction. Less-skilled teams can run into problems as well.

The Ohio State University Studies: A group of researchers at Ohio State

University prepared a questionnaire to be surveyed in military and industrial setups,
to determine the perception of the subordinates for the actual behaviour of their
leaders. From their findings, the researchers identified two major categories of
leader behaviour:

Consideration: The leaders are attentive towards their subordinates and build up
an excellent inter-personnel relationship with them. They are very supportive and
friendly. This was termed as ‘people-oriented behaviour’.

Initiating structure: The leaders are majorly concerned about the achievement of
goals and schedule and structure work accordingly. For such leaders, subordinates
are just resources, and they have to make the optimal utilisation of them. This was
termed as ‘task-oriented behaviour’.

The University of Michigan Studies: This study is based on how the leader’s
behaviour is related to group performance. Researchers made a comparison of
effective managers with the ineffective ones and found that the two can be
discriminated on the basis of their behaviour, i.e. job-centric behaviour and
organisational-member centric behaviour.

The study further resulted in the identification of four additional behaviours

essential for effective leadership which are:

Support ,Goal emphasis, Work facilitation, Interaction facilitation

Managerial Grid

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton have developed the Managerial Grid, also called as a leadership grid.
According to them, the leadership styles can be identified on the basis of manager’s concern for people
and production.Here, concern for people means the degree to which an individual is committed towards
the goal achievement, maintaining self-esteem to workers and satisfying interpersonal relationships.
Whereas, the concern for production means an attitude of superiors towards the quality of procedures
and policies, creativeness of research, effectiveness of staff, work efficiency and volume of output.The
managerial grid identifies five leadership styles based on two behavioral dimensions
as shown in the figure below:

Impoverished Management (1,1): The managers with this leadership style exert
minimum effort to get the work done by the subordinates. They have minimal
concern for both the people and production, and they function merely to preserve
their jobs and seniority. Therefore, the disharmony, dissatisfaction, disorganization
arises within the organization.
Task Management (9,1): Here, the leader is more concerned with the production
and lay less emphasis on the personal needs of his subordinates. This leadership
style is also called as a dictatorial or perish style, where the subordinates are
required to perform the task as directed by the superiors. In this leadership style,
the output in the short run may increase drastically, but due to stringent rules and
procedures, there could be a high labor turnover.

Middle of the Road (5,5): The manager with this style tries to keep a balance
between the organizational goals and the personal needs of his subordinates. Here,
the leader focuses on an adequate performance through a balance between the
work requirements and satisfactory morale. Both the people and production needs
are not completely met, and thus the organization land up to an average
performance.

Country Club (1,9): Here, the leader lays more emphasis on the personal needs
of the subordinates and give less attention to the output. The manager adopts this
style of leadership with the intent to have a friendly and comfortable working
environment for the subordinates, who gets self-motivated and work harder on
their own. But however, less attention to the production can adversely affect the
work goals and may lead to the unsatisfactory results.

Team Management (9,9): According to Blake and Mouton, it is the most effective
leadership style wherein the leader takes both people and production hand in hand.
This style is based on McGregor’s Theory Y, where the employees are believed to be
committed towards the goal achievement and need not require manager’s
intervention at every step.The leader with this style feels that empowerment, trust,
respect, commitment helps in nurturing the team relationships, which ultimately
results in the increased employee satisfaction and overall production of the
organization.

Thus, the managerial grid is a graphical representation of different leadership styles

that manager adopts while dealing in the industrial settings.