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12/5/2016 |
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Good Bosses Switch Between Two Leadership Styles |
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Good Bosses Switch Between Two Leadership Styles by John Maner Think back to the last team project you participated in at work. How did the person running the project lead the group? Did they lead by presenting a plan and using their authority to insist that others follow along? Or did the person instead lead by explaining why a particular course of action seemed like the best one, allowing others to willfully get on board? These two leadership styles, which I and other researchers refer to as dominance and prestige, respectively, reflect two fundamental strategies people use to navigate their way through social and organizational hierarchies. Leading through dominance means influencing others by being assertive and leveraging one’s power and formal authority. Leading through prestige means displaying one’s knowledge and expertise and encouraging others to follow. In the case of dominance, employees usually have little choice but to follow the leader; when it comes to prestige, deference to the leader is more negotiable. Dominant leaders achieve their goals by asserting their role as the boss, incentivizing people with bonuses and promotions, and coercing people with the threat of punishment. In meetings, they do most of the talking and may even lower the pitch of their voice as a way of intimidating others. Dominant leaders crave power, because power allows them to make decisions knowing that their subordinates will fall in line. As one former Apple employee said about Steve Jobs, a paradigmatic example of a dominant leader: “When Steve was pissed off about something, it got fixed at a pace I’ve never seen…people reacted that fast out of fear.” Read full article o Harvard Business Review.
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