Asian perspective, leadership roles ,challenges to

leadership construct, finding and creating effective

group leader.
Asian Perspective of
Leadership
 Leadership is an imported construct from the
west, as they are high on Individualism.
 Southeast Asian societies are more collectivist,
the cultural values that push superior-subordinate
relationships more toward a type of relationship
that is HEADSHIP.
 The typical categories of leadership style and
behavior that is found in western tradition may
not be applicable.
 Asian Perspective has Leadership and Headship.
 headship
 Headship is imposed on
followers.
 The “head” has achieved that
status through some means
outside of the leader-led
relationship(e.g., inheritance)
and has a perceived right to
“head” the group and to
determine what group does.
 The authority of the head
derives from some extra group
power that he has over the
members of the group, who
can’t meaningfully be called
followers.
leadership
 Leadership is accorded by the
followers to the Leader.
 A “leader” must exhibit
qualities that followers find
credible, useful, and
appropriate, which enable the
conferring of leadership upon
the leader.
 The leader’s authority is
spontaneously accorded by
fellow group members and
particularly by followers.
 Headship
 Headship is maintained through an organized
system and not by fellow group members
spontaneous recognition of an individual’s
contribution to group progress.
 The group is chosen by head persons in line with
their interests and is not internally determined by
the group itself.
 There is little or no sense of shared feeling or
joint action in pursuit of given goal.
 There is a wide social gap between the group
members and the head who strives to maintain
the social distance.
 Requirements in leadership/headship situation
 Requirements for order and compliance
1) Met through traditional cultural values that support and
legitimate natural hierarchies.
2) Acceptance of and defence to authority
3) Role conformity
 Requirements for harmony
1) Leaders and managers must display “proper” behaviour
2) Be considerate and human-hearted
3) Respect the”face” and dignity of the sub-ordinates
4) Lead through moral character
 The model for leadership is the father : strong
and clear power but with a genuine and expected
obligation to take care of the subordinate.
 Leadership roles

1. Providing team leadership

2. Mentoring
3. Self leadership
4. Online leadership
 Providing team leadership
 Have to learn certain skills
 Patience to share information, to trust others, to
give up authority and to understand when to
intervene
 New team leaders may try to retain to much
control when team members need more
autonomy and they have to abandon their team
when the team need their support and help
 A study of 20 organizations have found certain
responsibilities that all leaders have to assume
Coaching, Facilitating, Training, Handling
disciplinary problem, Reviewing team/individual
performance, Training and communication
 Priorities in specific roles
 Liaison with external constituencies: this include
upper management, other teams, customers and
suppliers. He represents the team to other
constituencies, secured needed resource, clarifies
others expectations from outside and share
information with team members
 Troubleshooter: whenever team require help them.
This rarely relates to technical or operation know
how but to solve penetrating problems and to
provide them with resources
 Conflict mangers: when disagreement surface,
they help process the conflict. what’s the process
of conflict? Who is involved? What are the issues?
what are the advantage and disadvantage of each?
By getting team leaders to address questions like
this, the team minimizes the disruptive effects of
intrateam conflict.
 Coaches: they clarify expectation and roles, teach,
offer support and do whatever else is necessary to
help team members improve their work
performance
 Mentoring
A mentor is a senior employee who sponsors and
support a less experienced employee. Successful
mentors are good teachers. They are broadly
divided into two categories
1. Career function
2. Psychosocial function
 Career functions
 Lobbying to get a protégé challenging and visible
assignments
 Coaching the protégé to help develop her skills and
achieve work objectives
 Assisting the protégé by providing exposure to
influential individuals within the organization
 Preventing the protégé from possible risks to her
reputation
 Sponsoring the protégé by nominating her potential
advances or promotions
 Acting as a sounding board for the ideas that protégé
might be hesitant to share with direct supervisor
 Psychosocial functions
 Counseling the protégé about anxieties and
uncertainty to help bolster her self confidence.
 Sharing personal experiences with the protégé
 Providing friendship and acceptance
 Acting as a role model

Some organizations have formal mentoring

programs in which mentoring are formally
assigned to new or high potential employees
 Most effective mentoring exist outside the
immediate boss subordinate context.
 Self leadership
 There are set of processes through which
individuals control their own behavior.
 Effective leaders help their followers to lead
themselves, they do this by developing leadership
capacity in others and nurturing followers so that
they no longer need to depend upon the formal
leaders for directions and motivation.

How do leaders create self leaders?

1. Model self leadership: practice self observation,
setting challenges personal goals, self direction
and self reinforcement. They display these
behaviors and encourage others to rehearse and
then produce them.
2. Encourage employees to self set goals: having
quantitative, specific goal is the most important
part of self leadership.
3. Encourage the use of self rewards to
strengthen and increase desirable behavior.
4. Create positive thought pattern: encourage
employees to use mental imagery and self talk to
further stimulate self motivation
5. Create a climate of self leadership: redesign the
work to increase the natural reward and focus on
naturally rewarding feature to increase motivation
6. Encourage self criticism: encourage individuals
to be critical of their own performance

SELF MANAGED TEAMS REQUIRE LEADERS

WHO ARE SELF DIRECTED. THEY SHOULD BE
ABLE , RESPONSIBLE AND EXERCISE
INITIATIVE WITHOUT EXT. CONTROL
 Online leadership
As compared to face to face leadership or non
verbal leadership, Online leadership deals with
communicating with staff through email or other
mode of telecommunication
in online communication the leaders need to take
care of tone of their message, their style i.e
emoticons, Abbreviations and jargons.
Leaders who face to face leadership skills are less
than satisfactory may shine online, their talents
may lie in their writing skills and ability to read
the message behind written communiques.
 There is lack of intimacy and face to face
interaction, online leaders unique challenges like
developing and maintaining trust.
 Challenges to leadership context.
 Two perspective that challenge the widely
accepted belief in the importance of leadership.
1. Leadership as an attribution
2. Substitutes and neutralizers to leadership.
 Leadership as an attribution
 Leadership is merely an attribution that people
make about other individuals
 People characterize leaders as having traits as
intelligence, outgoing personality
 Substitutes and neutralizers to leadership.
 This theory says that certain individual, job and
organizational variable can act as substitutes for
leadership or neutralize the leaders influence on
his/her followers
 Neutralizer make it impossible for leader
behavior to make any difference to follower
outcomes, they negate the leader’s influence.
 Substitute however make a leader’s influence not
only impossible but also unnecessary
 Finding and Creating Effective
Leaders
Selection

The entire process that organizations go through to fill

management positions is essentially an exercise in trying to
identify individuals who will be effective leaders.
Your search might begin by reviewing the specific
requirements for the positions to be filled. What
knowledge skills and abilities are needed to do the
job effectively?
Testing is useful for identifying and selecting leaders.

Personality tests can be used to look for traits associated with leadership.

Testing to find a leadership candidate ‘s score on self monitoring also makes sense

Interviews also provide an opportunity to evaluate

Training
All people are not equally trainable .Leadership training of kind
is likely to be more successful with individuals who are
high self monitors than with low self monitors .Such
individuals have the flexibility to change their behavior.
We can teach vision creation implementation skill,
understanding about theme critical to effective vision