Models of Management: Leadership, Motivation, and Communication
Unit VI: Models of Management
Direction influences individuals to contribute towards the fulfillment of organizational and group goals. Therefore, it primarily deals with the interpersonal aspect of management. All managers must agree that their major problems result from individuals (their desires, attitudes, and group dynamics). Effective managers must also be effective leaders. Since leadership implies followers, and people tend to follow those who give them the means to satisfy their needs, wishes, and desires, it is understandable that management involves motivation, leadership styles, and communication approaches.
At this stage of the administrative process, behavioral sciences made their greatest contribution to administration.
In analyzing relevant knowledge, the following topics play an important role in management:
- Leadership
- Motivation
- Communication
A. Leadership
Leadership is the art or process of influencing people to strive voluntarily and enthusiastically in meeting group goals. The ideal is to encourage individuals to develop not only a willingness to work but also to build hard work and self-confidence. Hard work is the passion, formality, and intensity in the execution of work. Security is a reflection of experience and expertise.
Leaders foresee the future, inspire the members of the organization, and chart the path it will follow. Leaders must instill values, whether their interest is focused on quality, honesty, taking calculated risks, or employees and customers.
Virtually no group of people performs at nearly full capacity when an individual lacks leadership skills. Everything indicates that this ability is composed of at least four important capabilities:
- The ability to develop an efficient and responsible use of power
- The ability to understand that human beings have different motivations at different times and situations
- The ability to inspire others
- The ability to act in the development of an atmosphere conducive to responding to motivations and the emergence of these.
Leadership Styles
For a leader to fulfill their role, they must assume a particular style – a pattern that develops based on experience, vocational education, and training. Leaders must be able to discover and understand existing leadership styles, debug them, and use their criteria in their application, since the style they carry positively or negatively affects members of their group.
In general, there are three leadership styles: authoritarian, participative, and liberal.
Authoritarian Leadership
Also known as the autocratic leadership style, leaders assume responsibility for centralizing all aspects of operations under their control, such as motivation, decision-making, communication, and staff control. There is little to no opportunity to promote worker creativity since the leader reviews all phases of personnel work.
Leadership exercised through this style cannot delegate important actions, so there is no participation or exchange of ideas. Everything runs according to the”standard” set by the leader. There is another view that holds validity: the leader commands, and the group follows. Under no circumstances should anyone challenge the order from the higher authority. It flows in one direction – descending. It is a style practiced in very hierarchical organizations such as churches or armies or institutions where group members lack technical knowledge or have failed to develop maturity and commitment to the company.
Participative Leadership
The participative leadership style is known as the democratic leadership style. It is characterized by promoting the active participation of different members of the organization. The participative leader seeks the views, comments, and suggestions of their employees and encourages and creates conditions for enhanced teamwork. Under this leadership style, the communication process occurs in every sense: descending (from top to partner), ascending (from partner to superior), and horizontally (among workers at the same hierarchical level).
You can apply this style of leadership in organizations characterized by a high level of commitment from workers and where there is much maturity and management expertise.
Liberal Leadership
Also known as laissez-faire or “free rein” leadership, under this style, the leader does not define standards, guidelines, plans, procedures, methods, programs, or policies. On the contrary, it gives complete freedom for partners to work according to their own goals, commitments, and desires. To apply this style of leadership, workers must be highly involved and have a foolproof level of maturity, expertise, and responsibility.
These three leadership styles do not exist in organizations in isolation or as pure models. They usually occur as a combination of the three, and levels or grades are given, more or less depending on the use of authority or the degree of freedom given to the followers or subordinates.
B. Motivation
Motivation is a general term that applies to all kinds of urges, desires, needs, and similar forces. To say that managers motivate their subordinates means they do things that will satisfy these desires and impulses and induce subordinates to act in the desired way.
Motivation results from the interaction between the individual and the situation. Individuals differ in their motivational drive, but motivation generally varies from one situation to another. When analyzing the concept of motivation, it should be noted that the level of motivation changes, both from one individual to another and at different times in the same individual.
In our terminology, we mean by need an internal state that makes us feel that certain results are compelling. An unmet need creates tension that stimulates impulses in an individual. These impulses generate behavior aimed at identifying specific goals, which, if achieved, may satisfy the need and reduce tension.
Motivating employees to achieve high organizational performance is important. Both academic researchers and practical managers have struggled for years to understand and explain employee motivation. Early attempts to explain the reasons were Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, McGregor’s Theories X and Y, and Herzberg’s two-factor theory, all focused on finding out what motivates individuals. However, these theories could not effectively explain varying levels of employee motivation, i.e., they did not recognize that individual motivation factors are different for each person. Because of this omission, researchers understand motivation from the perspective of how it happens. How does employee motivation originate? It is possible that if we understand the process of motivation – how it is produced – we can design effective motivation and reward systems to induce employees to display high job performance.
Motivational Techniques
The theories and approaches considered now are the latest explanations of employee motivation. Although perhaps not as well known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory or McGregor’s X and Y, they have a reasonable degree of valid documentation supporting them.
C. Communication in Organizations
A major strategic imperative that has emerged recently concerns communication. While organizations are thought to communicate extensively, what truly exists is extensive information. This is why many leaders, without thinking, make mistakes (perhaps unconsciously) that negatively affect firms’ productivity.
Given the importance of communication in current competitive scenarios, Rolando Zuniga, in 1978, thought that communication “is like the blood of the human body and that without it, the social body, which is the organization, dies or runs into conflict.” He adds that good communication should be present in any leader or chief, who must “focus their activities to ensure they are conducted in good condition.”
Concepts and Elements of Communication
Communication must be understood as a process in which an issuer encodes a message and sends it through a particular channel to a receiver, who must decode it. But for the transmitter and receiver to ensure that a message is properly understood, they should carry out a feedback stage. This way, you can ensure that “a thought or idea transmitted is perceived by the receiver in the same way as imagined by the issuer” (Robbins and De Cenzo, 1997).
The same idea can be expressed by stating that communication is the process involving “a transmitter that sends a message through the media, which corresponds to a receiver” (Kotter, 1977).
Authors James Stoner and Edward Freeman (1994) argue that communication is a “process by which people try to share meaning through the transmission of symbolic messages.”
From the definitions listed above, the elements of the communication process are clear, as shown in the figure below:
Communication Model
Noise
Feedback
The following explains the concepts covered:
- Issuer: The individual or organization that has an idea, encodes it, and communicates it to others. That is, the one who issues or delivers a message with a particular intention.
- Encode: The process by which the issuer translates their ideas into a message. The message transforms into symbols the recipient can understand.
- Message: Information encoded and transmitted verbally or nonverbally to a receiver.
- Channel: The medium used by the issuer to transfer the message to the receiver. It can be written, visual, auditory, electronic mail, telephone, or simply personal contact, among others.
- Receiver: The individual on the other end of the communication from the issuer who decodes the message from their partner for feedback to show or indicate whether or not they understood the message.
- Decoding: The action by which the receiver translates the codes with which the sender issued the message.
- Feedback: Perhaps one of the most important elements of the communication process, feedback determines whether the receiver received and accurately understood the message as the issuer intended. It is the answer and/or reaction to the message from the receiver.
- Noise: Any obstacle or problem that prevents the message issued by an issuer from being received or understood by the receiver. There are five communication barriers.
Noise, Barriers, or Obstacles to Communication
Pentagon Noise
To understand the foregoing better, it should be noted that administrative barriers relate to organizational structures, management styles, and the administrative process itself. All these elements can become real barriers to communication if the nomenclature and administrative actions are not made operational.
Psychological barriers are associated with the personal and subjective aspects of how each person perceives or understands the world around them. Values, the educational system, culture, attitudes, desires, etc., may influence how the receiver receives the sender’s message.
Regarding physical barriers, it should be borne in mind that these relate to inappropriate ways in which media transmits the message from a sender to a receiver.
There are also semantic barriers related to the meanings of language and, globally, to the symbols used and the corresponding coding process.
Finally, physiological dysfunction or other organic matter links the barriers, limiting an issuer and their respective receptors.
Wrong Style in the Communication Process
There are noticeable attitudes, difficulties, or barriers, as in the case of noise, a process that distorts or impedes the message delivered by the communicator, not allowing it to come across clearly and be understood by the receiver.
In the same vein is a series of styles that communicators and leaders take. Strictly speaking, these are pseudo-styles of communication, as in most, it is not feasible to observe the feedback stage clearly.
Discordant Communication
This communication style occurs when a mismatch exists between what the sender transmits verbally and the attitudes and gestures accompanying the message.
Take, for example, when the infuriated leader or sender yells at a subordinate or colleague, and as they raise their voice and hit the table, their face flushed, they repeat, “Although I am vehemently calling your attention to this, do not think I’m angry.”
Charged Communication
This form of communication may also be linked to an autocratic leadership style. When a leader or sender practices this, it embodies accusations and personal attacks, always emphasizing the assistant’s or subordinate’s negative aspects or attitudes. Never do any words or meritorious actions highlight the salient features of their personality.
Indirect Communication
This form of communication is when the leader or issuer cannot say things directly to their questioner. Specific messages are circling in the air, often leaving a shadow of instability, doubt, or suspicion. Such attitudes generate confusion in the receiver because they never know what the issuer is asking or who is leading a deterministic comment.
A good example of this form of communication is when a leader wants to call attention to a colleague or subordinate who responded poorly to a client but does not dare tell them alone and calls all the office staff, stating: “I have called this meeting for us to converse, but above all to draw your attention to the fact that I find something very regrettable.” After a brief pause, they add, “I realized that some officials in this office are not taking good care of customers, and this seems serious because if we fail to deliver good service to our users, not only do we lose a client, but we are also seriously endangering the viability of our company.”
This discourse confuses the receivers because nobody knows who the target is, which may cause two negative effects. First, they may personally waste time and start to realize what they are failing to do when caring for a client. The second possibility is that everyone thinks the problem must be from a colleague, so I have nothing to enhance.
Impersonal Communication
In this form of communication, the issuer does not take their message personally, so their speech or answers are always constructed in the third person.
For example, when a colleague or subordinate asks permission to miss work on Friday, the head’s response should be, “The truth is I cannot give you permission that day because I am not authorized to do so.” But they choose to respond as follows: “Everyone knows that the company does not give permission on Friday.” Leaders use this communication type when they do not want to compromise their self-image and generalize about what is functional for their purposes.