There are various Leadership Assumptions in the corporate world. However, they are nothing but myths. The first assumption suggests that Leaders are born, not made. In other words, “Leadership is a rare ability only given to a few”. (Smith, 2008) The Second assumption and third assumption interlink with the first assumption. The second states, “Good leaders have more education than other people”. (Smith, 2008) The third assumption states, “Effective leadership is based on control, coercion, and manipulation”. (Smith, 2008)
In accordance with the first assumption, a leader is a ‘chosen one’ but the reality is much different. Wright indicated in his book, The Moral Animal: why we are the way we are, that a fundamental supposition of the Leadership team of professional approaches is that the whole staff of the organization including both the management and the workers, equally contribute to the common purpose, share the common objective and have full attention in the progress of the organization. The Leadership policies and ideals undergo constant changes due to the influence of some basic factors such as domestic and international competition, changes in the social structure and developments in technology, etc. (Wright, 2007)
Thus, it is seen that leadership is about simplicity and understanding common and day-to-day problems and a company hardly need an extremely special person to negate them. In the words of Smith, “The key ingredient making people good leaders are the ability to care about others. The second ingredient is a sense of purpose, vision, or mission. A good leader charts a course and provides direction to those they lead.” (Smith, 2008)
In accordance with the second assumption, education is the most important element of leadership. However, reality speaks otherwise. The efficiency of the Leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals lies in not only making the employees work but to make them work willingly, sincerely and consciously, by employing new knowledge, new methods, new designs, new machines, and novel techniques of production and by allaying mistrust and antagonism.
The leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals under the aspects of Management principles can be defined as the art of creating industrial relations of any kind, between people engaged in the industry. These can be stated as the relation between employers and employees, relation between individuals entering into commercial contracts, relation between investors, etc, in order to maintain true cooperation of all concerned along with motivating the entire deal into a positive favor. Thus, understands and sensitivity that is more important than education.
Some critics, as stated in Zimmerman’s Introduction to Management Principals, feel that scientific methods are not applicable in the art of management, which mainly concerns human beings, such as Leadership formulation and management of leadership. According to the efforts to manage, industry scientifically has worsened the relationship between the employers and the employees. Their point of view is that though in the leadership framework workers get absorbed into a comparatively more employee-friendly group-oriented associative work culture, the feeling of individuality remains in them.
This is a reason behind their halfhearted contribution to the progress of the organization. However, it is not so. In fact, using practices or policies of scientific methods of management like leadership construction or Leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals, need trained mind, which is used to unbiased observation and is not amenable to hasty conclusions and untenable theories.
The leadership of a team of professionals instructs the managers to be detached and impartial. The development of industrial relations to make a company productive is an evolutionary process, depends on the initiative, constructive thinking, and discipline on the part of all engaged in the industry. The form of relationship between the employee and the management with which the unitary ideology is concerned is about hundred years old issue and the most important aspect is understanding and not mere education. (Zimmerman, 2005)
In accordance with the third assumption, a true leader should manipulate and control the issues. However, the fundamentals of long-termed success are ethical values and understanding rather than manipulation. As for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award that started in 1981, leadership was defined and categorized under definite qualities. These qualities were of a leader examined “how senior executives guide the organization and how the organization addresses its responsibilities to the public and practices good citizenship”. (Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, 2007)
The Leadership purpose takes account of several activities, and the most important among them is making a decision on what staffing requirements one has and whether to use autonomous contractors or take into service employees to meet these needs. Leadership is also about appointing and training excellent employees, making sure that they are better performers, handling performance-related problems, and ensuring that the human resources and administrational practices do the accepted thing to a various set of laws. (Manning, 2005)
Lamb states in his extremely important book on the subject Cult to Culture: The Development of Civilization that the increasing significance of competitive advantage and of the growing presence of multinationals has resulted in noticeable changes in the sector of Leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals’ ideologies. Globalization has led employers to push for the implementation of fewer directives of industrial relations, less standardization of the employment affiliations, and a greater focus on the workplace as the center of gravity of Leadership.
Of the three popular models in Leadership construction Management, the global Leadership model has the utmost coverage from an international point of view due to worldwide growth approaches, degree of delegation, organization’s dimension and requirement for deportee reimbursement, etc. Due to steady Industrialization and accelerating competition in the market, today organizations have to face a tough time to survive. These conditions also affect leadership strategy and policies up to a great extent and the aspects of Leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals as a whole. Such an environment gives rise to organizational conflicts.
Such as conflict of power versus moral values, which include raising standards of production along with humanizing the workplace, Managerial prerogatives with ownership policies such as system, reliability, hierarchy, uniformity, etc conflict with sensitivity, responsiveness, interactiveness, novelty, and sub-optimization. (Lamb, 2004)
It is obvious to mention that there is a huge amount of pressure on the leaders and it is still obvious the true leader is the one who is able to successfully negotiate this pressure. There are several outlets of this pressure and some of them can be related to personal psychology too. With success or constant failure, a leader may tend to be more arrogant, over strict, ruthless taskmaster, and rigid. All these are personal problems but when put into the parameters of a company or corporate house these elements become very hard to digest and thus become detrimental for the company. However, it should be taken into consideration from the management point of view of the company and proper measures be taken.
One good move is to incorporate a refreshed educative move. Another individual measure may include elaborate counseling by a professional management counselor. Thus, the ethical approach is the most important feature of leadership.
In conclusion, it can be stated that healthy relations between the management and the employees only can bring prosperity to the company and so the leadership principals are to be maintained with care. Thus, the leadership system or the Leadership of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team of professionals is not simply about trade unions and industrial relations between management and employees. In fact, it is a definition, which portrays the projection and maintenance of understanding, togetherness, and essential values and ethics as accepted by both the management and the workers of the companies.
Thus, it is a managerial frame of reference, which does not easily bring itself together with companies or social positions, which are distinctively more politically influenced. Instead of all drawbacks in Leadership ideologies of management, it has numerous facilities. Thus, the companies for finding solutions to their management-employee problems could always follow the realities of leadership and not remain fixed with the assumptions related to leaderships.
References:
Lamb, Davis; 2004; Cult to Culture: The Development of Civilization; Wellington: National Book Trust.
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award; 07; What are the Baldrige criteria; Baldrige National Quality Program, NIST. Web.
Manning, Schissler Susan. (2005). Leadership in Human Services: A Multi-Dimensional Approach, New York: Allyn and Bacon.
Smith, Gregory P; 2008; Leadership Mythology; Business Know-How; Attard Communications, Inc. Web.
Wright, Robert; 2007; The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are; Dunedin: Little, Brown & Co.
Zimmerman, S; 2005; Introduction to Management Principals; Wellington: National Book Trust.