Hi Daryn,

I cannot imagine a leadership which is impersonal. On the other hand, how do you define a leadership without an organization? Do you mean to define the difference between leadership and management?

I know the difference between a manager and a leader.

I recollect coming across the term "organizational leadership" the other day and just thought it would be good to throw in front of an academic crowd. Organizational leadership...what is it? If it exists, why is it different than leadership generally?

Before defining organizational leadership we have to define leadership without organization. If we cannot define leadership without organization, how can we define organizational leadership? What do you mean by general leadership?

Leadership - is a construct or personal quality where an individual possess the ability to envision an objective; plan, organize and motivate people toward achieving the objective. There are many types of leaders: coaches, transactional leaders, commanders, conciliators, dictators etc...

What is your definition of leadership?

Good morning. My definition is not quite different than yours. I may add that leadership may be decorated with given official power or not. It is a social phenomenon necessitates people, organization and goals. Leader is a person who motivates and move people in an organization (this can be a squad, a nation, or a multinational corp.) from point A to point B on line of direction defined by goals. Also goals can be dynamic.

Leader is a person whereas leadership is the quality and ability to influnce others so that the vision and mission is acheived. Leadership could be demonstrated in various platform, social events, organization, discussions, travel and all walk of life. Organizational leadership is more a formal nature, notably heads of the department, and higher at the organizational level such as General Manager and the CEO. By virtue of position, they are at the top and they have to show leadership abilities, and they are measured based on the ability and results achieved.

Hello again, Mr Ateya and Mr Dyer

Let's think a leader in an organization without official authorization. What will we call him/her? And how come do we say that a society or an NGO or a group of mountaineers climbing Everest are not organizations?

In my opinion “organizational leadership” is not a theoretically solid type of leadership. Correct categorization may be "leadership with authority" and "leadership without authority".

Dear Ufuk: AS a senior person at home, we need to show our leadership to manage our daily life, look into the well being of our family and friends. We may also be travelling whereby someone has to decide where to go , at time to return and where to eat and the menu selection. These are some examples of leadership as well. Leadership is there in every walk of time, either with wrtten authority or acceptance that of a leadership ability. There are great individuals with cherismetic personality recognized as a great leader in this world.

Organizational leadership, as you said , has to be with power and authority. There are formal rules and regulations that empower the people to have leadership roles. In your logic, leadership with authority could be organizational leadership

Good, this is interesting. I wonder if there is a test to figure out the degree to which you are a "Leader" and an "Organizational leader"?

Hello Daryn,

Interesting discussion. After 24 years in military service, I'm accustomed to leadership being defined as "the art and science of influencing and directing people to accomplish a mission." I'm not sure how that differs based on setting (i.e., organization). Where I've tried to make a contribution is looking at different leadership styles (e.g., transformational, servant, etc.) and how effective those styles may be in different organizations. I'd be interested to see your research proposal.

Robert,

Thanks for the response. No proposal yet, although I am about to take an organizational change course and it will require a research component. I haven't committed to particular project on the topic; time is a resource at the moment. When I come up with something interesting I will show it to you.

Leadership styles also interest me, particularly national leadership styles: presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, blue-chip business leaders...

A question of interest: when you think of the military, do you view it as an organization?public institution?

Good luck with the course.

I view the Air Force as a nested organization. That is, we have several layers of leadership (flight, squadron, group, wing, major command, and headquarters). What you call the organization is a function of where you are currently assigned. As a leader, I consider "my organization" to be everything inside my sphere of control.

Trata-se de uma questão vital no estudo da gestão de negócios. Liderança "em geral" pode ser aplicada a qualquer campo: política, ativismo ambiental, e tantos outros. Já, a liderança em organizações é mais focada. Está absolutamente unida aos objetivos da organização. Assim, houve muitas pessoas que se julgaram "líderes", em função de resultados organizacionais bons de alguns momentos, e cometeram erros ao extrapolar essa "liderança" a outros campos. O recente exemplo brasileiro de Eike Batista é paradigmático, pois uniu-se a forças políticas, apoiou inúmeras forças comunitárias (esportivas ou até policiais), enquanto esqueceu de trazer os resultados prometidos a seus acionistas. Outro exemplo foi o de Anita Roddick - apontado em meu texto sobre a Body Shop (The Body Shop: uma empresa ou uma ONG?).

An organizational leader uses the power of existing organizational structures, e.g. a hierarchical organizational structure, as part of his leadership approach. General leadership doesn't use that component.

Mathias,

Thanks for the answer: I think you are referring to legitimate power...

Daryn

At the risk of oversimplifying ...leadership is the ability to lead and organizational leadership is the ability to lead your organization. In my opinion organizational leadership is a subset of leadership that was developed in academia to discuss leadership in the context of large organizations as opposed to small work teams or personal leadership issues.

It has developed as a separate discipline to address these needs but I believe the core elements of leadership survive in both contexts. A good leader will 1) Coach his team to become better than they could have become without him or her. 2) take command when necessary but not micromanage and 3) Create an environment where the team or organization can thrive.

Far too many organizations succumb to The BossHole Effect when their leader leads them in the wrong direction.

Book The BossHole Effect, Three Simple Steps Anyone Can Follow to...

Daryn,

There is no difference in leadership (as you said, on a personal level, say at home) and organisational leadership. What varies is the context according to which we may play down certain choices we make; modulate the manner in which we control the environment; define our objectives and the 'cost' that we are prepared to pay for obtaining the result or objective. Just a small example:

At home, the finances for managing 'domestic affairs' (like paying the servants, obtaining grocery, etc) are delegated to the spouse. The larger financial affairs like investment in stocks, real estate, or family health insurance, etc, are handled by the bread winner (BW). The spouse while shopping for groceries splurges a couple of dollars on some indulgence. What will the BW do? Let tempers fly? Not at all, while apportioning the responsibility to handle domestic finances, the authority to exercise certain discretion is also given.

If the BW, in his or her organisational position, lets tempers fly for similar and reasonably ignorable discretions of the subordinates, the style of organisational leadership would be considered poor. It would be only a matter of time, before good colleagues and subordinates would unceremoniously say 'thank you' to the BW.

I personally feel that leadership at home and in the office cannot be two different things - after all, we are one individual and affecting different behaviour, however consciously, will give it away at certain critical points of time.

Hope this helps!!

I feel there are issues of formality and personal decision in between homa leadership and official leadership. In Office, our decisions are guided by rules and regulations, formalities where as at home it is more the logic and common senses.

While the basics of leadership remains the same.

cheers

But putting the right rules and regulations in place is part of effective leadership....at the office just like at home......

True in the sense that organizational leadership need to from formal structural procedures whereas at home informally governs more than the formalism . We have more flexibility at home compared to organizational leadership.

No voy a dar una respuesta técnica a esta pregunta; solo las palabras necesarias para su entendimiento.

El liderazgo se basa en la simpatía, admiración por sus actos y actuación moral en las decisiones que trasmite a sus administrados; la dirección de organización esta fundamentada en la preparación técnica, la eficacia en la toma de decisiones y sobre todo el diálogo con el equipo de colaboradores.

Ethics

With the leadership qualities we can manage people at work place and family members also. Its depend on understanding the situation and handle the situation.

There are so many definitions of leadership that the issue of personal vs organisational leadership becomes 'stuck' in that same quagmire. Part of the problem is that there is really no consensus (or valid theory) of leadership, especially when it is related with outcomes - and what sort of outcomes one is measuring. Sure, one can say that some organisational leadership facets may be related to outcomes such as employees' citizenship behaviour, job satisfaction etc. However, other outcomes are equally important, such as organisational sustainability, decision-making etc.

In relation to leadership in the family, is one measuring influence, responsibilities, self-leadership or what? I am a believer in operationalizing leadership aspects for one to be able to respond to the question posed by you.

If you are interested in a "practices" rather than a "traits" perspective on effective leadership, I suggest you take a look at this recent paper that uses complexity science as a model: .http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1112&context=managementfacpub

Daryn, would you mind to define what do you mean by organizational leadership? As I found it is an interesting topic. We have personal leadership, however, in an organization, leadership of different leaders interacting dynamically. And somehow a pattern of leadership in an organization might be emerged which I would call the "organizational leadership". Such leadership could be kind of organic. In fact, I believe such leadership dynamic affect very much the innovation capability of an organization and hence it's survival.

Are you asking about leadership IN an organization, leadership of organization, or something else? My response is tied to leadership in organizations. Leadership is an influence process. Individuals have multiple ways/techniques/strategies to influence others, most dependent on power. Power may be based on one's self (personal), one's associations/relationships (political), and one's hierarchical standing (positional). Leadership IN organizations offers more opportunity to use positional power. Positional power-based leadership, however, is generally not as effective as personal power-based leadership.

Dear Martin,

Quite an apt classification for debate. Without positional leadership, one cannot influence the organisational activities and without personal leadership one cannot influence people. The ideal combination therefore is development of certain leadership 'habits', maximisation of inherent strengths and pursuance of objectives through collective effort (by motivation, rewards, incentivisation, etc). A successful leader obviously will appropriate 'political' authority also.

The term you used 'influence process' rests on two elements - example and conviction. Many a times we tend to cross the line between 'conviction' and 'obstinacy'. An enlightened leader must also know when to stick to his guns and when to compromise. This, many would say, is by intuition. It may be so under certain circumstances, but most of the time it is to be carefully evaluated and consciously done.

Leading people is the most challenging task anyone can aspire for. To borrow a few words from General Patton (WW II) - "it brings out all that is base" in an individual; it tests our courage moral and physical; but in the end gives the complete satisfaction of achieving what could have been otherwise impossible.

Have a great day.

I see that leadership in general has many ways to gain the influence (e.g., Expert, Referent, Coercive, and Reward Power) but leadership is different in legitimate power.

It's the same kind of question when you ask : Are you a leader or a manager?

The paper referenced above by James Hazy (above) entitled "Towards operationalizing complexity leadership: How generative, administrative and community building leadership practices enact organizational outcomes".

I lingered on a particular statement in the paper "leadership facilitates how the system as a whole selects what works, and preserves information about how it works within the very structure of the system". This brought to my mind: Organizational climate, standards and norms of behavior, responsibility and authority, motivation levels of the people in the organization, decision making (how decisions are made), policies and procedures and many other items.

Assuming a leadership role and becoming effective in an organization, is indeed, a challenge. For me the difference between individual leadership and organizational leadership is the size of the "toolbox". Organizational leadership requires the leader to be knowledgeable of more variables that affect the leader's success.

The difference between leadership and organizational leadership: Leadership is the process of influencing others to follow your way which maybe pesonal or aiming to achieve organizational objective. Organizational leadership is refering to excellent performance or bad perrformance in organizational activities compared to the players within the industry, for example, organizational leadership in promotion, product innovation, customer satisfaction/disatisfaction etc.

Further to my comments and interesting inputs from others, wish to add the following:

When we talk of organisational leadership, we imply two separate and connected dimensions. One, being personally organised-with clarity as to personal objectives and the organisational objective; second, ability to transmit organisational objectives to peers and subordinates with the aim of integrating each others efforts for achieving the organisational objectives.

Thus we can infer that leadership of individuals is what contributes to organisational leadership.

Without an organization we cannot define "leadership"

Dear Dearyn

I think, all leaders have to have a vision; which they need to share with those they want to influence. In other words, the vision must create a buy-in for the members of the organization concerned or the community or groups of people that are the target audience. All leadership involves change and its articulation or management. So, the leader has to create a dissatisfaction among her/his people, showing that the current state of affairs need to change so as to deliver what they (members) want. Then s/he must inspire, and ignite passion in them to work towards that shared goal.

This is the basic framework of leadership, which is applicable to organizational leaders and other leaders e.g country leaders, caste leaders, political leaders, moral leaders, religious leaders, etc. Up to here there is no difference between the two types of leaders.

In case the leader relates to a business organization, the question of competitors and their strategies come in the picture. Also, resource constraints, cost, talent availability, work culture and other factors impact leadership.. Leaders may have to measure the results and create an equitable reward structure so as to create a motivational climate. So they need to create metrics for giving rewards to high performers, and have to create built-in incentives in the system so that every one can feel enthused to work towards the organizational goals. The organizational leader normally have a perpetual cause unlike specific-cause leaders who are especially fighting for a cause. When that cause/goal is attained the specific purpose may come to an end. But organizations are perpetual arrangements that have to create their future as ongoing concerns. So organizational leaders need to celebrate and create fun as a technique of bringing fulfillment in the work lives of the organizational members.

Also, often organizational leaders use a mix of soft and hard people management stratgies. Sometimes, they need to use command and control, and may not use democratic approach. in fact, research also reveals that most leading firms use mix of what are called empowerment and instrumental interventions in managing their people i.e. a judicious combination of soft and hard.

These are some of the points that may distinguish the two kinds of leadership domains..

If you are trying to distinguish what the difference between dyadic leadership vs. say, team-level or organizational level leadership is, I don't think any of the previous responses are accurate.

There are four different conceptual levels of leadership:

1) Intra-Leadership

2) Dyadic

3) Group

4) Organizational

Good Thank you sir

Intra-Leadership