Organizational Dynamics and Behaviour: MBA Summary, Study notes of Organization Behaviour

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Organizational Dynamics and Behaviour

Summary 2017/

Master of Science in Business Administration

Tor Vergata University

Lorenzo Capone – Simone Potocco

EXPECTATIONS AND LEARNING

Learning is the cognitive and physical ability to give rise to a relatively permanent change in knowledge skills of attitude. Distinction is between learning producing declarative as opposed to procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is essentially factual information while procedural knowledge involves understanding process. Many things that we do involve a mix of both. Learning process is the way we try to renovate the skills in the organization and to keep the competitive advantage. Instead training is the organized effort to assist learning through instruction and attitudes. Learning is important because of:

• Shift from tangible to intangible assets (the value of intangible assets may be worth more than tangibles in some firms)
• The need to respond to changing context and aligning with the economic imperatives of responsiveness and adaptability. Learning theories help to:
• Develop effective training programmes
• Identify competences
• Describe work Stimulus-response theory: the classical conditioning (Pavlov-Lutham) It focuses on conditions external to individuals. A stimulus is something perceived by an organism in the environment (i.e. doorbell, supervisor’s request...). A response is a unit of behaviour (usually observable) emitted by an organism (i.e. answering the door, anxiety...). Stimulus-response theorists explain how responses are acquired by examining what precedes the response and what happens in the environment once the response has occurred. It is a process through which an individual learns to extend a certain behaviour after being exposed to a particular stimulus that elicits a natural response, but the stimulus is neutral, artificial. Phase 1 : Conditioning is a way of learning where the presence of a stimulus elicits a desired response. UCS----------------Reflex behaviour----------------------UCR The original reflex is composed of an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and an unconditioned response (UCR). In Pavlov’s experiment the meat powder was the UCS and the do salivation the UCR. Phase 2 : In a learning trial, we introduce a conditioned stimulus in the previous process and we get the same response CS-------------------------UCS------------------------UCR The neutral stimulus is known as the Conditioned stimulus (CS), the bell, a tone.

Phase 3 : Learned behaviour: when the behaviour is learned the UCS is removed and we still have the initial UCR. However, when salivation occurs after the presentation of the CS in its own the response is termed conditioned response (CR). CS-----------------------CR However, the CR is never as strong as the original UCR. The dog salivated less in Pavlov’s experiment. Disadvantages: If the CS is presented on a number of occasions without the UCS, the CR will decline in strength. This decline is known as extinction. Two important features of the conditioning process:  Generalization: refers to the organism capacity to respond similarly to stimuli that are similar in certain aspects to the original CS (i.e. young children sometimes refer to all adult males as daddy). Generalization can be maladaptive if the learned response is generalized to situations in which it is inappropriate.  Discrimination : It is the opposite tendency, allowing organism to respond differently to similar stimuli (young children eventually learn how to apply the word daddy to one adult male only). Conditioning provides us with patterns , which are conditioned thoughts, feelings, behaviours which are fairly fixed and characterize the way we respond to certain event or people. Patterns are formed during experiences that have caused an individual distress. The implications are that once patterned, we can only pay attention to the characteristics of the situation that elicits distress; so we are unlikely to acquire improved methods to deal with these situations (ex. Authority figure: if we had punitive parents we might find it difficult to shed the patterns we acquired in childhood. We could continue to experience distress in the presence of authority and perceive them as threatening even if they are not). The conditioned patterns are usually formed over years but they can also be the result of a single traumatic event. Training programmes make individuals aware of their own patterned behaviours and then can begin to practice more effective methods of dealing with the situations that elicit their maladaptive responses. Stimulus-response theories II: operant conditioning (Skinner) An operant is a unit of behaviour, such as eating a meal. Skinner believed that the environment shapes an individual’s behaviour by maintaining certain responses and suppressing others. He believed that the most powerful shaping mechanism is the reinforcement. Reinforcement operates either negatively or positively. Positive reinforcement occurs when pleasant stimulus follows a response. Money, status recognition and praise can all act as positive reinforcers since they all increase the likelihood of the preceding response being emitted again. Negative reinforcement reduces the intensity or removes an unpleasant stimulus.

Is behaviour modification effective in the workplace? A psychologist who studied hard this topic was Fred Luthens, but even in these studies the effects of behaviour modification are complex and short-lived. By the way, we can say that in behaviour modification programmes the intervention is generalized and affects non-targeted but functionality related behaviours. Why is behaviours modification not widely used in work organizations despite the goal evidence from mite-analysis? Because it is a complex technique and it is essential that the target behaviours are readily describable and measurable. Additionally, the controlling of reinforcement can be difficult and it is not clear which reinforcement schedule is most effective. Moreover, target behaviours normally return to their baseline level if the reinforcement is removed. Last but not least, BM can’t be taken over by non-professional, because it needs a specific mindset; in more practical terms, this mental set means managers need to learn how to identify critical behaviours, observe them, establish base rates for them, determine what responses are supporting unwanted behaviours and estimate what stimulus will reinforce the desired behaviours. Cognitive approaches to learning Many researchers have argued that stimulus-response theories are mechanistic and reductive. Complex human activity does not fit easily into a stimulus-response framework, because people actively develop models of the system they are interacting with. Individuals do not respond directly to the environment, as the stimulus-response theory assumes, but to the models they construct on it. People do not react instinctively but also because they learnt how to react. Skills are factors that contribute to the learning process and they allow to have a competent performance. They are made up by activities which cut across task boundaries, this means that although two jobs involve different tasks, they can require similar skills. Transferable skills are skills that can be applied to many jobs and tasks. It is believed that skilled activities differ in the extent to which they involve conscious awareness. Subroutines for example are so well learned that they can be retrieved from secondary memory and applied without passing through primary memory. Subroutines enable individuals to execute fast stages of action without having consciously to control the activity. In the cognitive approach is possible to differ between:  Operating programmes convert the content of our models into behavioural outputs by triggering subroutines.  Executive programmes, select the skill most appropriate to a situation. Improvement in performance occurs when:  The operating programme develops, triggering new subroutines thus new behaviours  Models of a situation develop What sets the upper limit to the refinement of the model and operating program is the individuals’ level of motivation.

Learning from training In reality training is almost ineffective and always fails to transfer back to the workplace. The main causes of this failure are two:

1. Characteristic of the train program; the ideal program is one to one. Moreover the organizations must have a competence model  for every position there is a list of competences needed plus a map of people who have these competences. Position  bando of tasks and responsibilities attributed to the individual who will cover that position.
2. Related to the lifecycle of individuals; the more we get older the less receptive we are in terms of developing skills. In order to learn from training, the latter should be relevant (need to customize) involving a mixture of both cognitive and stimulus-response learning strategies. Moreover, the trainees must feel the training is valuable and different learning strategies could be applied to different people. Considering the environment, it should have the following features: control and autonomy over the way the individual works and support from colleagues and management. TEAM PROBLEM, DECISION MAKING AND EFFECTIVENESS Much of our time is spent interacting with other people and some individuals are better than others in dealing with this situation. Impression management assumes that social life is much more dynamic and creative, contrary to the static trait-based explanation of human behaviour. Individuals are seen as constantly involved in attempting to define themselves and the encounters they are involved in. The social world is seen as a stage on which actors constantly create and recreate their social selves by observing others. Interaction is characterized by monitoring our own performance and monitoring others’ performance. Persona is the term to describe the social face we present to others. We adapt our roles and representations in order to succeed in a given situation: you have to interpret a role to be successful, and you have to adapt in the context in which you are acting. Most of us do it unwittingly and instinctively, while some individuals are more conscious of this aspect and use it more strategically (waiter would constantly change his face according to the type of customer he is serving). Actors have to be able to recognize, create and define the social situation they are in and possess some knowledge of the rules of behaviour within it. However, actors may be able to define a situation correctly but not have an adequate supply of personas to draw upon to act appropriately within it. Goffman tries to understand the symbolic aspects of self-presentation activity. He saw social encounters as comprising a manipulation of both sign activity (verbal and non-verbal behaviour) and sign equipment (stuff and clothes). Actors manipulate these symbolic aspects of social interaction in order to project definitions of themselves onto situations. This self-definition is termed personal front. People who are more skilled at acting as actors in the organization have higher chances to perform better, because they can adapt their behaviour and explore the best synergies with the other people. Social face is not a mask, but just the knowledge of how you should behave in different situations.

Social skills Social skills are the skills we deploy to understand 3 aspects of social interaction: a) The social situation in which we interact; b) The person we interact with; c) The components of the interactional work which enable us to attain our goals in social encounters. The social situation Argyle suggested that we should characterize situations as discrete entities, each having its own goals, rules, elements, concepts, settings and roles. In understanding social situations, we have to identify the goals behind people’s behaviour, that can be both expressive and task related (i.e. a supervisor may pursue an expressive goal, to be accepted as an approachable person, and a task goal, such as coordinating group activity). It is important to balance the two. Secondly, you have to look at the rules , understand them and adapt your behaviour to them. Rule  structure, bando of behaviour to adopt in a specific situation. Rules can be  Universal : present in all situations, such as common language  Specific : they apply to the given situation  Interpretative : providing criteria for interpreting events in the social world (I do not go to an interview with shorts)  Prescriptive : they indicate what ought to be done in response, once a situation has been interpreted  Non-generalizable rules : one-off rules created on the spot when routines produced by more stable rules are interrupted. Thirdly, each situation defines a specific repertoire of elements as meaningful and other as inappropriate, so we know the suitable actions in each situation (verbal, non-verbal, bodily actions). After that, concepts are important because they are the bases of our comprehension of social situations. They provide categories that reduce the complexity of the situation itself. Finally, we have the environmental settings that make up the physical layout, such as privacy, space and psychological variables. Roles are the expected way to behave in a situation. Expectations of others (colleagues, superiors and subordinates) are followed by the internalization of such expectations: roles are then internalized during role episodes, and behaviour is guided by the individual understandings of the role. People who don’t have a clear picture of their role may act in a bad way, because they don’t know what is expected from them. Roles are different from positions. Comprehending other people In order to understand other, we construct models during the social interaction. We build the model from language, face, gaze, body posture and movement and appearance. According to the personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955), each one of us has their own construct system that helps us understand other people.

The causes for the failure in understanding others are:

• lack of sociality; means that we subsume that others behave in a particular way, while they actually don’t and they fail to understand that we are using a wrong model.
• lack of commonality;
• the assumption that our construct is “correct”;
• false consensus effect;
• pre-emption (no time, willingness or capacity to create constructs);
• circumspection (excessive construing). Interactional work The aim in interactional work is to develop the ability to achieve goals in social situations through social encounters. We have three kinds of situations:
  1. Open situations , casualties, where there are no prior goals or specific interactional routes (e.g. friends talking). The rules are quantity, quality, relevance, manners and orderliness;
  2. Defined situations , where at least one participant has an objective to achieve;
  3. Closed situations , where the listener engages in the interaction by providing simple, definitive answers The nature of managerial rationality Is decision-making rational? Bounded rationality : writers criticized conventional management and economic theories of the firm, based on traditional ideas of market behaviour which tended to suggest that decision making was optimal and based on absolute forms of rationality. There was the assumption that information about markets and competitors was available and cost-free to gather. Instead, the Chicago School pointed out that in fact decisions are only rational up to a point. Actual decision making is bounded by human limitations and failings and even by foolishness and error. Management decision making is rarely optimal in the sense of the best solution being sought and found. In practice, a satisfactory solution that will cope with the problem in hand is the most common outcome. The reason is that problem solving is an arduous activity involving the expenditure of much effort. The take of a decision is a search process and once a satisfactory solution has been found the search tends to stop. Behavioural theory, Mintzberg and Kotter Mintzberg and Kotter tried to answer the question, “what do managers do?” They actually observed managers and found that there was little long-term activity and much more reactive decision-making and short-term behaviour. Managers spend their time making snap decisions and engaging in interactions of a few minutes duration. There was also a great deal of social behaviour (lots of phoning up). Managers job were characterized by high pressure and pace of work, and the activities they engaged in daily were defined by brevity, variety and fragmentation and conform to no obvious pattern. Managers had a preference for live action, rather than paperwork and working alone, and they were strongly oriented towards informal communication and garnering information. In this way, rationality was seen as being limited not only by real-life pressures, but by the need for a degree of “system maintenance”, that is the maintenance of the social groups that form a manager’s network of contacts.

Main traits defining extraversion:

• Venturesomeness: means that extroverts are socially confident and show high level of empathy during interactions. They are good at generating a rapport with individuals they are meeting for the 1st^ time.
• Affiliativeness: they are warmer and friendly. Introverts prefer more arm’s length dealing with others at work, extraverts prefer closer involvement.
• Energy: extraverts prefer too much rather than little to do. Extraverts enjoy working providing variety.
• Ascendance: extraverts are more assertive, not minding being at the centre of attention. They are more dominant that introverts. These people are better at jobs with high level of stimulus, novelty and variety. They have the ability to enhance a team’s cohesion and they are team leaders; furthermore, they are multitasking people. Usually, assertiveness is connected to the fact that most group leaders are extraverted people. This doesn’t mean that introvert people are not useful in the organization: the needed person depends on the role that such person has to cover. There are some psychological explanations of why people are extravert or introvert: the difference is in their brain cortex. Both the extremes of this characteristic have positive and negative aspects. 2) Neuroticism-stability Neuroticism implies an high level of negative affect. It is the only explicitly negative trait. Their general mode of experience is thus unhappy. Main traits:
• Anxiety: trait or state anxiety (being anxious often or in a specific situation)
• Tenseness
• Low self-esteem: neurotic people feel like they are not suitable for their position in the organization
• Guilt-proneness: more self-blaming
• Emotional control: they lose their temper easily
• Irrationality and/or distorted view of reality: because of their strong negative feelings
• Shyness: there is a degree of fear accounted to ordinary social encounters, also due to anxiety
• Moodiness: more subject to shifting feelings quickly Neuroticism-stability, like extraversion-introversion, have the roots in our biological and genetic make-up. It is much better to be towards stability. Most of the impact is determined by the context. 3) Conscientious-expedient The conscientious has a strong sense of obligation and duty. It is dominated by the need to live up to other people’s and self-imposed expectations. At work, this person is punctual, systematic and has a sense of order. The expedient is more individualistic, they pursue their own agendas and are more willing to ignore the rules constraining other people actions. They are less organized and plan less. Conscientiousness is the single best predictor of performance across all jobs types.

4) Open/closed to experience Open people actively seek new experiences. They have aesthetic interests, they’re analytic, intellectual, imaginative, abstract and have a diversity of interests. At work, they’re creative problem solvers and abstract thinkers. They manage processes and discover new ways of solving problems. Closed people are practical and down to earth; at work they focus on accomplishing tasks. 5) Agreeable/hostile Agreeable people maintain good relationships and serve others; at work they’re natural “team players”, they’re adaptive. Hostile people are mistrustful, irritable and headstrong. At work they’re not easily fooled, they’re lower performers. These people spend much time building interpretations of other people’s behaviours, so they perform badly. These five concepts can help to build profiles for the people who are interviewed and to compare the profiles to the position that has to be covered. We can make assumptions about people’s personality and measure their potential. Freud and the dynamics of personality Freud believed that personality is the outcome of a dynamic process: meaning that personality can change. Freud’s basic proposition was that most of the material in our minds is housed in what he termed subconscious, a vast repository which for most of the time was inaccessible to us. According to Freud what is available to individuals in the conscious mind represents just the tip of the iceberg. Between the conscious and the subconscious mind lies the pre-conscious. Here information is more readily available than if it were in the subconscious (i.e. meeting time). Freud does not accept the stability assumption because personality is the result of the combination of 3 different elements that combine themselves inside each person’s life:

• Conscious, that consists of thought and perceptions
• Pre-conscious, that consists of memories and stored information (experience)
• Subconscious, concerning phobias, traumas sexual urges Freud also proposed a tripartite structure for personality:

1. Id : it is the natural intention. It is driven by an instinctual psychic energy which fuels two innate drives, sex and aggression. The id operates on the pleasure principle, meaning that it seeks immediate gratification of impulses produced by its two drives.
2. However, the social world is not organized in a way that makes it possible (we can’t always satisfy our pleasures!), but its demands are housed in the ego , where the reality principle prevails, and the id’s impulses are relocated to times or activities in which their gratification is possible. Much of the ego is housed in the pre-conscious and sub-conscious.
3. The superego incorporates values and morals that people adopt during their lives. The superego is acquired through a long process of internalizing parental and societal values. The id (pleasure) and the superego (morality) struggle for control over the ego (reality). The superego will contain various negative prescriptions forbidding behaviours of certain sorts, often leaving little room for the gratification of basic desires sought by the id.

Conceptions of intelligence An important element of personality is intelligence : we have both implicit and explicit dimensions about intelligence. The implicit theories about intelligence are based on intuitive assumptions about the nature of intelligence (Spearman 1904) and concern:

• the power to generate accurate responses;
• the ability to use abstract thinking;
• the ability to adjust to the environment;
• the ability to adapt to new situations;
• the capacity for knowledge and knowledge possessed;
• the capacity to learn or profit from experience. The explicit theory concerns the cognitive process, that is related to the way and to the speed in which you process information. Cognitive processes assumed to be the basis of intelligent functioning are:
  • Pure speed, of an individual’s information processing
  • Choice speed, the ability to make a quick choice
  • Speed of lexical access, time taken to retrieve information from long-term memory
  • Speed of reasoning process, that regards the higher order information processing How to measure the explicit intelligent factors? A large proportion of the variance in intelligence can be accounted for a single, large general factor “G”, intelligence is one thing. The G is assumed to permeate all our intellectual activity, determining how well we do on spatial, verbal, numerical, memory and other types of test. The G, for Spearman, is the innate ability to perceive relationships and educe (draw out) co-relationships. In other words, the ability to see a connection and work out what it follows. Some researchers preferred to break up G into more specific abilities. Seven primary aptitudes are identified: spatial ability, verbal reasoning, perceptual speed, numerical ability, memory, verbal fluency, inductive reasoning. The problem of this indicator is that we can’t use the stability assumption for intelligence, because we can always develop our intelligence. Beyond G, there is a comprehensive notion of intelligence. Each individual possesses a unique blend of the eight intelligences. This is a “social revolution”: we can’t accept any indicator. Gardner’s opinion (1999) is that there are eight different intelligences: linguistic, logical, mathematical, musical, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic. We moved from an explicit theory (unique definition of intelligence and unique indicator, the IQ) to a more comprehensive definition of intelligence. This new perspective is not in contrast with the normal distribution assumption we made. The cognitive partition theory (CP) operates a cognitive partition of the labour market, where we find:
• the cognitive elite, consisting of high-IQ individuals in certain occupation, who get richer and are segregated from others in the workplace and in society;
• the growing underclass, made by low-IQ individuals, focused on specific jobs and neighbourhoods. The main assumption about intelligence is that its impact on performance in organization occurs much more indirectly (“go after the brightest and the best”, Enron recruiting procedures).

The cultural preoccupation with intelligence has meant that we became too concerned with being smart rather than with the process of learning and growing over time. The consequence is that intelligence is malleable, so there is a focus on the long term, and we can employ strategies that lead to learning, self-improvement and achievement. MOTIVATION Motivational theories can be divided into:  Content theories : for which all individuals have the same needs  Process theories : for which individuals have different needs, and focusing on the cognitive processes creating these differences. Content theories Maslow is the most influential of the content theorists. He believed, like Freud, that human needs are instinctive in nature and have their basis in our biogenetic and evolutionary heritage. Maslow suggested a hierarchy of needs, identifying deficiency needs and high-order needs:  Physiological needs: men’s natural needs such as hunger and thirst.  Security needs: need for a shelter, a job and a car (anything that reduces the anxiety of the situations we live in)  Social needs: giving and receiving affiliativeness, belonging, love, creating relationships with other people  Self-esteem needs: imply being recognized for our role inside the community (recognition is an interiorization of other people’s evaluation of our behaviour)  Self-actualization needs: need to develop one’s full potential (to become everything that one is capable of becoming) Physiological and security needs are called deficiency needs, which are our most natural needs and relate us to our origins. The needs pyramid is a process of natural growth, from low-order to high- order needs. The main rule for motivation is that having satisfied a need we move to the next (when a need is satisfied it stops motivating people). Lack of satisfaction is the engine of motivation. Needs differ in what Maslow termed their prepotency , the extent to which a need determines our behaviour. So, for Maslow people might satisfy 85% of their physiological and safety needs, 70% of social ones, 40% of self-esteem, but only 10% of their self-actualizing needs. Self-actualization, thus, will motivate us for all our lives (it is never fully satisfied). When jobs are scarce employees are motivated only by deficiency needs. When jobs are readily available, pay is adequate and there is a degree of job security, deficiency needs are easily satisfied and so social needs become motivators in the workplace. Organizations must provide opportunities for employees to satisfy their needs at all levels. Maslow never tested the validity of the model. Alderfer “ERG” theory suggests that individual needs can be divided into 3 groups:

1. Existence needs, which include nutritional and material requirements. At work, working conditions and pay fall into this group
2. Relatedness needs, which are met through relationships with family and friends and at work with colleagues and supervisors
3. Growth needs, which reflect a desire for personal psychological developments.

Vroom ’s VIE theory implies that the motivational force is the VIE, which is made of three elements:

• expectancy : individuals calculate first whether there is a connection between their effort and their performance;
• instrumentality , which is the probability that valued rewards follow from high performance;
• valences , the valued rewards. The intensity of the reward is the motivating dimension, that is mediated with the probability that the task is accomplished. It’s important to share the instrumentality: people should know that there’s a high probability to get the reward. The value of the reward itself is not very important. Here are some useful prescriptions :
• employees must perceive a link between their effort and their performance;
• managers should determine what outcomes an employee values;
• share assumption about expectancies inside a work group. Knowledge of results and goal-setting are two ways of motivating. Knowledge of results means feedback, not only when the performance has fallen below some optimal level. The suggestions are to be positive and well-timed; the feedback must be about behaviours that individual controls, and it has to be specific and about publicly observed behaviours. Feedback should also be sensitive when it’s negative. Some techniques are the feedback sandwich and the causal analysis. Goal-setting directs effort and provides guidelines; participation may help. Job satisfaction It is an affective rather than cognitive response (more feelings than perceptions) and it is relevant to well beings. Petar Warr claimed that a two-dimensional model best captures the way of affective response to work. The model indicates both the content of individual’s feelings and their intensity. The model generates three measurements axes: one is horizontal (pleasure-displeasure), axis two (anxiety-comfort), axis three (enthusiasm- depression). The model is a measure of feelings, not perception, in workplace. There are 2 main theories about job satisfaction. One theory stresses the individual subjective nature of job satisfaction, because it assumes that individuals can differ in their perceptions and experience of similar jobs. The other proposes that there are important objective features of the jobs people do which give rise to job satisfaction:

1. Variance theory It is based on a simple idea. If you want x from you work then you are satisfied to the extent that it provides you with x. the major problem is defining what is that people want from their jobs. There is a transaction between the individual and the organization: if you ask for something and you are given that thing you are satisfied. Such thing can be either related to the motivational theories or to the nature of the work. The variance theory explores whether there are significant individual differences in reported levels of job satisfaction.

2. Job satisfaction through job characteristics It suggests that the causes of job satisfaction are t be found in the objective characteristics of a job. The Hackam and Oldham model has the virtue of drawing from both content and process models of motivation, and so it incorporates the explanatory power of both needs and expectancies. Hackam and Oldham suggest that jobs differ in the extent to which they involve five core dimensions:

• skill variety , that’s the extent to which they require the use of many different skills and talents;
• task identity , that is the extent to which they require the completion of a whole, identifiable piece of work;
• task significance , that is the degree of impact they have on other people inside and outside the organization;
• autonomy , that is the extent to which they provide freedom, independence and discretion in determining such things as workplace and allocation of tasks;
• task feedback , that is the extent to which they provide clear and direct information about effectiveness of performance. These 5 dimensions create 3 psychological states in employees:

1. Experienced meaningfulness of work, determined by the level of skill variety, task significance and task identity
2. Experienced responsibility for wok outcomes, determined by the amount of autonomy present
3. Knowledge of results of work activities, determined by the amount of feedback present When these critical psychological states are experienced work motivation and job satisfaction will be high. Motivating potential score (MPS). MPS= [(skill variety+ task identity+ task significance)/3] x autonomy x feedback Since the first 3 core dimensions contribute to the same critical psychological state, they are averaged. LEADERSHIP Situational leadership The leadership effectiveness is the outcome of an interaction between style and situation. Starting from this statement, Hersey and Blanchard wanted to conceptualize the situation. They believed that the key situational issues faced by leaders were the competence and motivation of the followers. Is what they called “readiness” or “maturity” of the followers, meaning how well an individual or a group is likely to perform a specific task. By combining high and low relationships and task behaviour Hersey and Blanchard created four leadership styles:
4. Telling (high task behaviour- low relationship);
5. Selling (high task and high relationship;
6. Participating (high relationship and low task);
7. Delegating (low task and low relationship). So, leaders should diagnose the readiness level of the followers for a particular task and then provide the appropriate leadership style for that situation. Leaders are rational and they can