My_Essay

As a group grows larger, separate cliques and factions are likely to emerge. These subgroups often compete for power and resources, creating conflicts and posing a threat to group cohesiveness and teamwork. Thus, the leader of a large group needs to devote more time to building group identification, promoting cooperation, and managing conflict. However, the pressure to carry out more administrative activities in a large group may cause the leader to neglect group maintenance activities until serious problems arise Just as the leader tries to reconcile demands from above and below, so also is it necessary to make compromises in seeking to reach agreements with other units. Subordinates expect the leader to represent their interests, but it will not be possible to maintain an effective working relationship with other units unless the leader is also responsive to their needs. Salancik and colleagues (1975) conducted a study of managers in an insurance company to investigate this kind of role conflict. They found that to maintain a cooperative effort, managers with interdependent work activities tended to become more responsive to each other’s needs. The greater the number of peers a manager had to interact with on a regular basis, the less responsive the manager was to the desires of subordinates. In his book entitled Leadership without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz (1994) proposed that the primary role of leaders is to help followers confront conflict and find productive ways to deal with it. The leader must engage people in facing challenges, changing perspectives, and learning new ways to work together effectively. Like Burns, Heifetz described leadership as both a dyadic and collective process. Leaders influence individuals, and they also mobilize collective efforts to accomplish adaptive work. The type of influence used by leaders includes not only use of rationality and appeal to values, but also formal authority. Leaders can use their authority to direct attention to problems, frame issues, structure decision processes, mediate conflicts, allocate resources to support problem solving, and delegate specific responsibilities to individuals or groups. However, formal authority is not necessary to provide ethical leadership. Emergent leaders can acquire informal authority by taking responsibility for exercising leadership in situations where it is needed. Heifetz emphasizes that meaningful change requires shared leadership, and it cannot be accomplished by a single, heroic individual. Leaders can do