Leadership and Organizational Change

There has been some debate in the fields of management and organizational development about the differences between managers and leaders, or if there are any significant conceptual differences. Leaders are often seen as more visionary, while managers are defined as concerned with the daily tasks of the organization.

The intent in this paper is to define leadership, explore some different types of leadership, or leadership styles, and to examine how particular styles or types impact the process of organizational change.

In his article about leaders and managers, Zaleznick (1977) clearly asserted that leaders are different from managers and have distinctive skills. For him, the primary difference between the manager and the leader is the focus of these individuals. As he put it: "The distinction is simply between a manager's attention to how things get done and a leader's to what the events and decisions means to participants" (1977, p. 73).

It is at the meaning, or organizational culture level, that change occurs or gets bogged down. Brown (1990) indicated that much current technological change fails because of inadequate attention to meaning within organizations. Morrill (1991) showed that there are fullydeveloped, although almost invisible and unconscious, meaning systems involved in mediating corporate change that is chaotic, such as takeover situations.

Messick and Bazerman (1996) focus on ethical leaders

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defined servant leadership in a contemporary context as including several specific behaviors that a leader can embody in relationship to employees. These include: 1. Trusting employees with ideas; 2. Giving employees with ideas a fair hearing; 3. Being risktakers who adopt projects they believe in and speak for them; 4. Listening openly and asking key questions; 5. Fostering the creativity of people around them; 6. Developing inner security, flexibility, and generosity; 7. Encouraging people's growth and allowing them to take credit for their ideas; 8. Sounding the theme of creativity and innovation at every opportunity (Threefold approach to leadership, 1990, p. 7). Servant leadership is a form of transformational leadership style. Transformational leadership, which was first discussed by John MacGregor Burns (1978). Burns distinguished two different basic styles of leadership, which he termed transactional leadership and transformational leadership. The transactional leader is an agent of interaction between individual and groups. His focus is transactions using resources, information, and other elements of importance. The emphasis is on rationality, efficiency, and effectiveness. On the other hand, the transformational l
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Approximate Word count = 2821
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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