Peter Drucker once said, " Trees die from the top, so do the organizations." This is true for any organization, as the top man at the helm of affairs, should be a person with proven ability to lead, guide & motivate the people in the organization and move them as strong, organized, unified force to achieve the organizational goals, so as to fulfill all the stakeholders' expectations. That is why, leadership is an important criteria in organizational achievement. In today's world, the transactional type of leadership is gradually being replaced by transformational leadership which values human potential as creative element which requires to be developed for organizational growth. Organizations cannot be effectively managed merely by set of transactions through authority - responsibility relationships. Leadership style tend to create the proper organization culture for growth, innovation and sustainability.

Thanks all. I have heard the top leader saying " when they reach at the top, they learned that power is at the bottom". It means that if they will not receive the support from the employees, they alone may be able to produce results. When something substantial achievement is made, they thank the employees for their support and cooperation, and hard work. But when the success or failure of the organization is measured, it is the leader to be identified first. From the stakeholder point of views, it is the leader to be rewarded for the work done by the creative employees.

DattaGupta rightly addressed the need for transformational leadership that nurture the human abilities at work and the leadership role to make sound cultured organization. What can be the practices, in our experience, that count the role of the employees for achievements?

A lot of people think that management=leadership. Leadership does not necessarily have to be top -> down. Leadership could be one employee coaching another: I have found that quite often employees have skills or there are tasks that they are good at maybe even the best in the company. Managers don't see this because they don't work with employees on a daily basis or at the micro-level. Thus, leadership can be, one employee making, another employee aware of their contribution and asking why them why they are good at that task.

In every organization I work for I build two types of networks; each serves a purpose. 1) is an information network, where I can turn to people who have a hard skill or tacit knowledge. 2) Is a socialization network. In addition, I make it my goal to learn every process, every task, every customer, employee, manager and through my networks I exert much more influence then someone with legitimate power, a manager for instance. The only reserve powers or options a manager has in this situation is to work with me or fire me, at the expense of company morale.

The best indicator of success, with this leadership approach is when employees from other departments or managers start asking me questions about process or practices.

Leadership is something that is not always structured.

Leadership can be understood as a popular notion and discourse in organizations and in society as well as in universities. However leadership is not easy to find explicit in organizations (see Mats Alvessons and Stefan Svenningsons articles from 2003). It is much easier to find and valuate management than leadership. However, leadership exist in different ways in different organizations among both leaders and employees.

One way of understanding leadership is as relations and interactions between leaders and employees, i.e.the relations between different actors in an organization. How the leadership express itself and is formed will be the result of the logics and the discourses, which are are influential in the organization. This is well known in for example healthcare organizations, often descibed as organizations with different action logics (see Glouberman and Mintzberg 2001).

Leadership is about feelings, how employees perceive and recognize. You rightly expressed that discourse with staff is important to look at the leadership. Maintaining relations and influencing them to achieve results beyond expectation is all about leadership.

There is a Turkish proverb "Balık baştan kokar". It means "Fish always stinks from the head downwards."

True Turen. Leadership should start from the top. If the top management maintains sound behaviour and ethical values , these practices are then followed by the employees in the organization .

Dear all,

only a short remark. Scapegoating top-managers is simply an organizational way of dealing with organizational failures as Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik told us some time ago in their seminal book The External Control of Organizations (1978). Organizations are in the main institutionalized as Meyer and Rowan (1977) portrayed. And scapegoating top-managers for organizational failures is an institutionalized way of handling failures in organizations. As such it is a taken for granted, legitimized and highly excepted way of handling failure by stakeholders inside as well as outside organizations. This said, top-managers are not only paid for being scapegoats and, in addition, have, as a rule, more power than others to change organizational practices, procedures or programms which may have caused the failure. Scapegoating them, thus, seams often reasonable too to some extent. However, scapegoating top-managers has an additional advantage for organizations: they can go on without scrutinizing the causes for failures and reporting them to stakeholders to openly. This is something organizations value much.

it Is the leader who provides direction, determine stratégies and selects which employée dors what for the organisation. More So, the leader offers inspirations to the employées by given them room to manifest their spécial talents and abilities, when thèse are done right, organisation Is likely to succeed and vice versa.

Dear Binod,

I think there is a difference between actual / legal responsibility and what is perceived to be responsibility by the wider public. Imagine, that employees commit illegal acts or just fail to implement company strategy or even to adhere to budgets at the operational level. In such a case the executives are clearly not responsible under law. But they make take responsibility (if the employees' transgression amounts to a corporate disaster) for ethical reasons or because of their failure to establish proper control and culture at the company.

Paul

Dear all,

I would like to add another point to the discussion. I like to refer to the insight of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik in their 1978 seminal book The External Control of the Organization. Quite convincingly they argue in the closing chapter of their famous book that making top leaders accountable is foremost an institutionally legitimized organizational mechanism to deal with organizational problems of any kind. You can simply make the leader a scapegoat and change the leader. Thus, the organization itself can continue to exist. Organizations who successfully act like this are not put itself into question, even if the problems the organization face have nothing to do with a misbehavior of top management actors.

Arnold

The reference:

Pfeffer, Jeffrey, & Salancik, Gerald R. (1978). The external control of organizations. A resource dependence perspective. New York: Harper & Row.

Dear all,

Yes the leadership is often blamed! I agree with Arnold's answer concerning the making of the leader a scapegoat, which is shown in a study of mergers at three University hospitals in Sweden. Please see the reference below.

The mentioned study focuses on the power relations between hospital managers and the politicians work, especially the board-manager one, in conjunction with three mergers. It was shown that organizational power relations drive hospital managers to resign. Three themes emerged; collision between values, displacement of responsibility and the resign of the manager. Politicians appeared to distance themselves from personal responsibility and enactment by blowing up the mass media and professionals who together counteracted the merger. When leading politicians built alliances with powerful professionals the position of the hospital manager was threatened and did not last. As conflicts also arose top leaders became the target of criticism and was forced into the role of the scapegoat.

Reference: Nordgren, L. (2015) 'Power relations between managers and politicians:The resign of managers in conjunction with university hospital mergers'