AIOU Assignment BEd 1.5 Year 8618 School Leadership Assignment 2

AIOU Assignment BEd 1.5 Year 8618 School Leadership Assignment 2

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Q. 3 Discuss the various theories of leadership in detail.
Answer: 

Leadership theories are schools of thought brought forward to explain how and why certain individuals become leaders. The theories emphasize the traits and behaviors that individuals can adopt to boost their own leadership abilities.

Early studies on the psychology of leadership pointed to the fact that leadership skills are inherent abilities that people are born with. It was not until recently that formal leadership theories emerged, despite leadership becoming a concept of interest at the beginning of time.

Leadership at a Glance

A leader is crucial to the success of every team. Take an orchestra, for instance, one that consists of all the best musicians in the world but lacks a conductor. Even though every member of the orchestra can play perfectly by themselves, they will only produce an incompatible melody in the absence of a conductor. The same concept applies to communities, companies, and countries. Without a leader, nothing will ever run smoothly.

So, what makes leaders who they are? Why are some people elected as managers and presidents while the rest remain followers? Leadership theories were developed to find answers to these questions.

Key Leadership Theories

Great Man Theory

According to the Great Man Theory (which should perhaps be called the Great Person Theory), leaders are born with just the right traits and abilities for leading – charisma, intellect, confidence, communication skills, and social skills.

The theory suggests that the ability to lead is inherent – that the best leaders are born, not made. It defines leaders as valiant, mythic, and ordained to rise to leadership when the situation arises. The term “Great Man” was adopted at the time because leadership was reserved for males, particularly in military leadership.

Trait Theory

The Trait Theory is very similar to the Great Man Theory. It is founded on the characteristics of different leaders – both the successful and unsuccessful ones. The theory is used to predict effective leadership. Usually, the identified characteristics are compared to those of potential leaders to determine their likelihood of leading effectively.

Scholars researching the trait theory try to identify leadership characteristics from different perspectives. They focus on the physiological attributes such as appearance, weight, and height; demographics such as age, education, and familial background; and intelligence, which encompasses decisiveness, judgment, and knowledge.

Contingency Theory:

The Contingency Theory emphasizes different variables in a specific setting that determine the style of leadership best suited for the said situation. It is founded on the principle that no one leadership style is applicable to all situations.

Renowned leadership researchers Hodgson and White believe that the best form of leadership is one that finds the perfect balance between behaviors, needs, and context. Good leaders not only possess the right qualities but they’re also able to evaluate the needs of their followers and the situation at hand. In summary, the contingency theory suggests that great leadership is a combination of many key variables.

Situational Theory

The Situational Theory is similar to the Contingency Theory as it also proposes that no one leadership style supersedes others. As its name suggests, the theory implies that leadership depends on the situation at hand. Put simply, leaders should always correspond their leadership to the respective situation by assessing certain variables such as the type of task, nature of followers, and more.

As proposed by US professor Paul Hersey and leadership guru Ken Blanchard, the situational theory blends two key elements: the leadership style and the followers’ maturity levels. Hersey and Blanchard classified maturity into four different degrees:

M1 – Team members do not possess the motivation or tactical skills to complete necessary jobs.

M2 – Team members are willing and ambitious to achieve something, but they lack the necessary ability.

M3 – Team members possess the skills and capacity to accomplish tasks, but they’re not willing to take accountability.

M4 – Team members possess all the right talents and are motivated to complete projects.

According to situational theory, a leader exercises a particular form of leadership based on the maturity level of his or her team.

Behavioral Theory

In Behavioral Theory, the focus is on the specific behaviors and actions of leaders rather than their traits or characteristics. The theory suggests that effective leadership is the result of many learned skills.

Individuals need three primary skills to lead their followers – technical, human, and conceptual skills. Technical skills refer to a leader’s knowledge of the process or technique; human skills means that one is able to interact with other individuals; while conceptual skills enable the leader to come up with ideas for running the organization or society smoothly.

Applying Leadership Theories at the Workplace:

To a great extent, leadership theories have helped form and shape the kind of governance that exists today. Many aspects of these theories can be applied to help one improve his or her leadership skills.

Maximize Your Strengths

As proposed by the Trait Theory, effective leadership depends on the traits that one possesses. Leaders should strive to focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. The strengths vary from one leader to another and may include:

A strong will is crucial to staying resilient and seeing leaders through difficult times. No matter how challenging the situation may be, a strong-willed leader is able to find inner strength and carry on until he overcomes all challenges.

A decisive nature is another strength that some leaders possess. Decisiveness means that when others may be perplexed, a leader can calmly assess the situation and choose one action to unite everyone by. But, since they may not always make the right decisions, they must also be willing to learn from their mistakes.

Be Inclusive Leaders

Some of the more complex situational theories emphasize focusing on people. It means that they acknowledge individual people to be their greatest assets and not just mere numbers in their workforce. Being an inclusive leader requires that one constantly involves other people in their leadership, whether it be by always welcoming the feedback of others or delegating more responsibility to others than other forms of leadership.

Key Takeaways

There are numerous ways of defining leadership. Some leadership theories attempt to explain what differentiates a leader, while some explain how great leaders come to be. The Great Man Theory believes that the inherent traits that one is born with contribute to great leadership. Situational Theory recommends leaders to adopt a leadership style depending on the situation at hand, while the Behavioral Theory is all about the learning the skills necessary to become a good leader. Leadership theories don’t only exist in history. They are concepts with actionable advice that can be adopted by many, from executive managers to community leaders and government officials.
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Q. 4 You are supposed to be a DEO. Being an educational manager what do you think which leadership style is most appropriate for the said post? Also explain why not other styles are appropriate.
Answer:

Does transformational leadership have a positive relationship to organizational culture and innovation propensity in business organizations of Pakistan? Transformational leadership has been associated with a variety of positive organizational outcomes in a number of studies. However, the outcomes of transformational leadership in Pakistan are still unexplored. The current study examines the specific relationship between transformational leadership, organizational culture, and innovation propensity among a sample of 523 organizational members in Pakistan. Our findings show that transformational leadership is positively related to organizational culture and innovation propensity. Results also indicate that organizational culture mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and innovation propensity. Further, exploratory analysis also identifies differences in ratings of transformational leadership across employees’ education level and company size. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.

The cultural context of Pakistan represents a high power distance and strong uncertainty avoidance culture. National value systems tend to influence organizational value systems which determine the integration of individuals and groups in an organization (Hofstede, 1985). This contextual consideration has triggered the need for examining leadership in different cultural settings. This realization has also prompted researchers to examine leadership behaviors in developing country contexts and underpins the reason for focusing on Pakistan in this study. We reviewed the extant literature in scholarly journals by using the descriptor “transformational leadership” and “Pakistan” in a range of online databases. Our literature review yielded only two papers, which were found to have some methodological weaknesses. Khan et al. (2009) demonstrated that organization size moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational innovation. However, explicit size of organizations and factor analyses of measurement concepts were not reported. Bodla and Nawaz (2010) conducted their study in the education sector of Pakistan and found that faculty members in private and public sector institutions were practicing transformational leadership to an equal extent. In this instance, the findings were largely descriptive and also did not report any factor structures. All in all, transformational leadership is believed to be related to a number of organizational dimensions and follower outcomes. In line with the objective of the current study, we further explore how transformational leadership is related to innovation propensity and organizational culture.

Research examining the relationship between follower’s education level and transformational leadership has generated mixed results. Shin and Zhou (2003) employed education level (doctoral and master degrees) as a control variable and found no significant correlation with transformational leadership. Based on a survey of 147 respondents, Chen, Chen and Chen (2010) examined educational level (both graduate and undergraduate) as a moderator/mediator in the relationship between transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. This study revealed that level of education mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate job satisfaction, though it was not a moderator between transformational leadership and organizational commitment. Green (2008) studied the relationships between the quality of leader-member dyadic exchange and age, gender, education, and organizational tenure. The results suggested that only education level was associated with leader member exchange at the follower level. Though employees who had a Bachelor or more rated their leaders high or very high in leader-member exchange, in the same vein, followers who had High School also rated their leaders high in leader-member exchange. However, followers with Some College had a low to moderate quality of leader-member exchange. This shows that subordinates with lower levels of educational attainment could also have high quality leader-member exchange relationship. Though not related directly to the concept of transformational leadership, this research does suggest a possible effect of education on followers’ perceptions of their leaders.
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Q. 5 Write notes on the following: (20)
i. Shaping Norms and Values
Answer:

This is a very broad question, but something I’ve been intensely interested in. The most general answer would be, I think, silently. We tend to think of ourselves as more or less autonomous individuals making decisions based on abstract or rational grounds that would seem to clear to us in posterior analysis. But I feel that if you dig deep enough, you’ll always find things that escape the basis on which you assume your decisions are made. Most of this new, obscure level of behaviour-determinants could be understood as “values, meanings and norms”.

There’s a very dynamic new field of economic thought called Institutional economics which is concerned with this very issue: how much better can we understand the economy if we take not the individual, but institutions as the central category?

What fascinates me most about this approach is its interdisciplinarity. It opens up conventional economics to a long-needed dialogue with the other human sciences. Sociology is the first one to come back to the game – institutionalism was born with Thorstein Veblen, and it has always surprised me a little that that economics keeps on using notions like rationality and equilibrium after all that sociologists have written in the last century. Understanding meaning, in turn, requires coming to terms with the truly revolutionary philosophical thought in linguistics that follows Wittgenstein and Saussure. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to bring in psychology – particularly psychoanalysis – to the field. The unconscious can be understood as the place beyond reason and abstraction in which things like institutions take hold. In the continental tradition, in particular, the Lacanian notion of The Symbolic can be seen as the first step in bringing together individual behaviour and the entire system of meaning in which the individual is formed, and through which it functions.
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ii. Conflict Management and the right school culture
Answer:

Sequel to the variability and dynamism of individual cherished values, core objectives and dire needs which most times do not always go pari – pasu, conflict occurrences in organizations like schools becomes aggregately inevitable. Thus, the teacher’s onus as an inloco-parentis in managing such inevitable conflict becomes grossly unavoidable. However, for the teacher to possess the disposition to manage such conflicts effectively in schools, a clear understanding and interpretation of conflict issues are requisite. Such an understanding is direly needed by the teacher so as to be able to address the given encumbrances which may be spotted out in the interaction among parties.

Conflict management in schools as it relates to teachers pertains to a given condition whereby teachers acquire programmed and patterned mediums through which they can twig and deal decisively with conflict as a way of embellishing conditions of conflict in schools at all times.

There are paradigms for elucidating the causes of those conflict conditions that require effective management in schools, just as there is cornucopia of avenues available at the teacher through which conflict within the precinct of schools could be managed. Those paradigms are what we shall attempt to explore in this paper.

In the classroom and by extension, school precinct, there are certain students-defiant behaviours that could be tolerated while some are and will remain insufferable, for example; fighting in the classroom, answering of phone calls in the classroom at the peak of the lesson, abusing and physically confronting the teacher, stealing, so many to mention but a few. Although, such conflict causing scenarios could be considered to be an integral part of every school system, the teacher’s role in preventing or even ameliorating their occurrences especially the ones that are seen to be internecine remains pivotal.

Conflict in school is said to occur when one party perceives the action of another party as encumbering the opportunity for the attainment of a goal. Hence, for conflict to actually occur in schools, two salient prerequisites must be satisfied, viz; perceived goal incompatibility and perceived opportunity for interference or blocking Conflict in schools can be objective or subjective, violent or nonviolent and positive or negative (Schmidt and Kochan, 1972) in (NUCUP, 2006). But whatever may be the case, the teacher’s rejoinder to them can either be assertive or cooperative in nature. Also, such school conflicts may constitute either a prominent debilitating or enchanting effect on the victims.

The concept of conflict management in schools is perhaps an admission of the reality that conflict in schools is inevitable, but that not all conflicts can always be resolved; therefore, what the teacher can do is to manage and regulate them, thus the teacher’s role as an inloco-parentis. It is also worthy of note to assert that School conflict management is inclusive of other discrepant variances of conflict management models which are in most cases at the disposal of the teacher.

In this instance, when we talk about conflict management in school and the role of the teacher, we simply mean those responses that the teacher makes in order to deal with the conditions that can encumber the realization of the aggregate objective of the school and the teacher’s instructional and/or behavioural classroom lesson objective.

The classification of conflict as it pertains to internal school systems can be between; students and fellow students, Teachers, non-academic staff and teachers, management and teachers, management, non-academic staff and management, non-academic staff, students and non-academic staff and students and management. But for the purpose of this paper, we shall limit our scope or consideration to conflicts between students, teachers, students and teachers.

In this article, we shall commence with the conceptual and theoretical explication of the key concepts of the discourse which are; conflict management, conflict, school and the teacher. We shall also establish the causes of school conflict, state the reason why we need to manage conflict in schools, express some of the contributory roles the teacher could make in the school conflict management process, advance some specific recommendations and finally present our concluding remarks.
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