Lecture
Topic objective: to study the professionally significant personal qualities of a manager.
Topic outline:
7.1 Managerial leadership style («Self-assessment of leadership style», «Propensity for a particular leadership style», E.P. Ilyin; «Power motive», E.P. Ilyin, modified by O.B. Polyakova; the Blake-Mouton questionnaire).
7.2 Model of a successful manager's profile and methods for assessing managerial staff.
7.3 Features of communicative attitude and its role in managerial activity. (The «Your communicative attitude» test, V.V. Boyko, «Communicative minimum of a manager», G.S. Nikiforov et al.).
7.4 Neuropsychic stability of a manager (The «Self-assessment of emotional states» method, A. Wessman, D. Ricks; the «Prognosis» method, V.V. Boyko). A manager's occupational health, «stress-coronary» behaviour, striving for achievement and competitiveness, striving for dominance, working «to the point of exhaustion», etc., and its diagnosis (the S.D. Polozhenitsev and D.A. Rudnev method)
7.5 Expert appraisal in forming personnel structure.
Topic discussion: Psychological profile of a successful manager.
Management style is the set of the most characteristic and stable methods of problem-solving used by managers in practical managerial activity. Style reflects a manager's merits and shortcomings, his strengths and weaknesses.
Here it must be recognized that leadership style and types of leadership, although close, are not concepts of the same level. This is because East Slavic managerial culture distinguishes between the concepts of leader and manager. It is quite difficult to classify management styles clearly, although such attempts have been made repeatedly.
One of the first attempts to classify styles of managerial activity was made by the German social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who emigrated to the USA in the 1930s after Hitler came to power. Lewin studied the influence of leadership on various aspects of group activity.
The names of the first two styles have subsequently been translated and interpreted by researchers with minor variations.
«Authoritarian» - autocratic, administrative, willful, directive.
«Democratic» - collegial, comradely.
The «liberal» style is translated and interpreted by researchers differently - free, formal, permissive, neutral, permissive-type, non-interfering, nominal, etc.
Let us give a brief description of each of them.
Authoritarian (from Latin auctoritas - power, influence) - the manager favors centralization of management and holds sufficient power. He rigidly dictates his will to subordinates. He more often appeals to lower-level needs, proceeding from the concept that everyone is by nature lazy, avoids work and responsibility, and that in order to make them work, coercion, control and threat must be used. He makes decisions alone, based on personal experience and intuition. The functions of subordinates are determined by directive. Any manifestations of initiative are suppressed. The actions of subordinates are strictly controlled. Any criticism directed at him is suppressed. He gives performers a minimal amount of information. Such a manager, in his activity, is guided by the established managerial hierarchy, the current management structure, and the system of employees' rights and duties.
This style, which knows neither compassion nor compromise, is not necessarily characteristic of a strong personality. More often this leadership style is preferred by weak managers of low intelligence who strive to become «indispensable» by any means.
A constant orientation toward formal methods of influence leads to growing tension and conflict among subordinates under the authoritarian style.
But this is an extreme characterization of this style. Within this style, researchers distinguish a number of its variants.
Dictatorial (domineering) - employees follow strict one-man orders under threat of punishment.
Autocratic - the manager has an apparatus of power and relies on it alone when making decisions.
Bureaucratic - the manager's authority is due to his formal position; everything is subordinated to rules, instructions, and regulations. Everything is rigidly formalized.
Patronizing - the manager makes decisions himself but tries to instill these decisions in all subordinates.
Patriarchal (charismatic) - the manager decides with the help of the authority of the «head of the family»; employees obey on the basis of unlimited trust.
Benevolent - the manager's authority is based on his personal positive qualities, which employees believe in.
Democratic - the manager decentralizes his managerial power. Decisions are made collegially. Subordinates receive a sufficient amount of information to have an idea of the prospects of their work. This management style practices the delegation of functions and powers from the manager to subordinates. Initiative is stimulated in every possible way. The manager appeals to a higher level of a person's needs without imposing his will on them.
Subordinates are convinced that by fulfilling the boss's requirements they will receive a reward adequate to their efforts, and they respond with interest to management decisions, in the preparation of which they themselves often take part.
Under this management style, the manager's main functions are:
- coordination;
- unobtrusive control.
Employees' discipline is based on their conscientiousness rather than on fear of punishment. The level of conflict in such teams is fairly low. A commonality of views and positions and the manager's high prestige create favorable conditions for making decisions on the basis of a plurality of opinions. Within this style, its variants can also be distinguished.
Communicative - employees may express an opinion but must follow instructions.
Consultative - the manager calls employees to a discussion and listens, and at the end of the discussion makes the decision himself. (we consulted, and I decided).
Joint decision-making - problems or opportunities are discussed by the employees, who together arrive at a single decision.
Autonomous - employees decide for themselves without any assigned constraints; control and responsibility remain with the manager. This is recommended when an organization or team solves creative tasks without strict limits and deadlines, with informal communications and a flexible organizational structure. Its essence is management through influence and reliance on employees.
Liberal - characterized by minimal participation of the manager in management. The main mechanism of influence is waiting. A manager practicing this style takes on no responsibility whatsoever. He in no way influences the process of distributing functions among subordinates, granting them full independence in making decisions and determining the forms of their execution. This style relies on the high awareness, dedication to the common cause, and creative initiative of all team members.
Such a management style is justified when the team performs creative or individual work and is staffed with the highest-qualified specialists with justifiably high ambitions. A manager using this style must masterfully command the principle of delegating authority, maintain close relations with informal leaders, or himself combine formal and informal leadership in one person. He must be able to correctly set tasks and determine the main directions of work. Under this style, the predominant function is coordinating employees' interaction to achieve common goals.
Each of these styles has its own advantages and disadvantages and is most effective under certain conditions (situations). An experienced manager, as a rule, has mastered all styles of managerial activity.
Empirical research shows that styles do not occur in pure form. Depending on the situation and their own personal qualities, every manager is at times a «democrat» and at times a «dictator». It can sometimes be very difficult to discern which management style a manager (whether effective or ineffective) actually adheres to.
According to V. Vroom, there are five styles of managerial activity. As a basis for classification, V. Vroom identifies the manner in which the manager makes a managerial decision.
A.V. Morozov identifies twelve styles of managerial activity. In recent years, a graphical interpretation of leadership (management) styles known as the «managerial grid», proposed by the American scholars R. Blake and J. Mouton, has become quite popular. In its own kind of «coordinate system» - concern for people versus concern for production - it reflects leadership styles. The ideal is considered to be the style that is maximally oriented toward both people and production.
In characterizing styles of managerial activity, it must be taken into account that, in addition to the status he holds, a manager plays a certain managerial role. According to V.A. Rozanova, these are not identical to social roles. G. Mintzberg identifies ten managerial roles. The roles he identifies are interdependent and determine the content and volume of a manager's work, regardless of the nature of the organization.
One of the bases for classifying styles of managerial activity is the procedure for making a managerial decision. A managerial decision is the main product of managerial activity. A decision may be made individually or collegially. But in any case, it is a fairly complex, multifaceted, creative process with its own algorithm, techniques and methods.
The main purpose of assessing managers' potential is to expand the capabilities of this category of personnel, as well as to find ways to improve the efficiency of all structural units and the organization as a whole.
Assessing the potential of managerial staff involves not only determining the degree of a manager's success in solving specific tasks, but also identifying opportunities for improving the work of the managers being assessed.
When considering a manager's potential and his ability to solve increasingly complex tasks over time, it is necessary above all to assess the level of development of managerial competencies. The most important managerial competencies include:
the manager's level of qualification (having higher education and professional experience needed to successfully perform managerial functions, good orientation in related fields);
the ability to optimize the process of managing a unit or the organization as a whole (defining authority, planning subordinates' work, the ability to competently allocate personnel, etc.);
the skill of building an effective team (staff selection, creating conditions for the productive work of the unit or organization, fostering a sense of commitment to the organization, etc.);
a results orientation (including decisiveness, persistence, the ability to take risks, and the capacity to show initiative);
the ability to analyze problems and develop alternative solutions;
the ability to maintain discipline within the team by clearly setting goals and objectives, defining specific requirements for work results, and monitoring their fulfillment;
the ability to motivate the team to work (command of means of material and moral incentives, the ability to achieve results from subordinates);
readiness to help subordinates, taking into account the difficulties the team encounters in the course of its work;
the manager's effective use of his own potential (career planning, professional development, time management, the ability to organize his own activity competently, etc.).
Of course, the above list of competencies is not exhaustive. In some cases a manager needs additional competencies related to the specific features of the organization's activity or to the particular staff working in the unit he heads. For example, the personnel management department of the «Russkaya Trapeza» company, in order to determine the benchmark competencies a project manager for sales of complex technical equipment should possess, conducted a survey of a group of sales managers working in various divisions of the organization.
Based on the survey results, a rating of the manager's key competencies was compiled, which included the following:
1) negotiation skill (the ability and drive to achieve results based on mutual understanding in the course of direct business communication);
2) results orientation (the ability to clearly envision the final result and the drive to achieve it in the process of organizing production activity);
3) dynamism of thinking (the ability to switch quickly from one type of activity to another, the ability to establish and structure connections between pieces of information, and to build a holistic picture of the situation being analyzed);
4) leadership skills (the ability to inspire others, prompt them to act, and demonstrate a high level of activity, influence, and participation in decision-making);
5) planning skill (the ability to develop plans and schedules to coordinate one's own actions and the work of the unit's team);
6) responsibility (the ability to take on specific commitments, make decisions independently and answer for their fulfillment);
7) analytical abilities (the ability to analyze a problem, identify its components, and draw logical conclusions based on correctly selected information);
8) sociability (the ability to build a process of communication with people regardless of their position, social status and personal characteristics).
Methods for assessing the potential of managerial staff:
expert appraisals;
assessment of the manager's potential by subordinates;
situational-behavioral tests and personality questionnaires;
conducting specialized seminars.
The above methods are optimal in terms of the ratio of reliability and validity, as well as economic costs.
Situational-behavioral tests
Situational-behavioral tests are understood as certain evaluation procedures within which experts assess the presence and degree of expression of a manager's professional qualities and personal characteristics based on his behavior in an artificially created problem situation. The purpose of these tests is to recreate the real conditions of the professional activity for which suitability needs to be assessed. The results of situational-behavioral tests make it possible to determine avenues for the manager's further development.
Specialized seminars
Conducting seminars allows modern organizations to combine employee training with the assessment of managers' potential. Specialized seminars run for several days, each pursuing specific goals. As practice shows, the purpose of such events is to identify participants with the highest potential, for further consideration as candidates for the personnel reserve or for a higher-level position.
The personnel management department considers the results of specialized seminars together with the results of other evaluation activities, which makes it possible to forecast the success of each individual manager and determine avenues for his further development.
A person's communicative attitude is a readiness to react to particular types of interaction partners in a certain way, which is conditioned by the experience of communication the person has, and by assessments and impressions of their nature, views and behavior.
Attitude is a response cliché, a habit of responding in a memorized way to familiar life situations, recurring social phenomena, and frequently encountered types of people. Attitude is a carrier of psychic energy. The energy tension is due to a state of readiness to react; it is like a spring inside us, waiting for its moment to act. As soon as a particular person appears within our field of awareness, we immediately match him with a type held in memory and automatically reproduce the ready-made response cliché.
The «Your communicative attitude» method determines:
1. Veiled harshness in attitudes toward people, in judgments about them.
In a disguised, muted or indirect form, a person's judgments contain ill will, wariness in relations with many partners, negative conclusions about people, and unwillingness to respond to their problems. Such attitudes of mind carry negative energy. Naturally, not many volunteers would themselves admit to having them. Most of us believe in our own good will, responsiveness and other socially approved qualities, ignoring or smoothing over in our self-assessments whatever contradicts our desired self-image. Nevertheless, life shows otherwise as well.
2. Open harshness in attitudes toward people.
The person does not hide or soften his negative assessments and feelings regarding most of those around him: his conclusions about them are harsh, unequivocal, and made, perhaps, once and for all.
3. Well-founded negativism in judgments about people.
This is expressed in objectively grounded negative conclusions about certain types of people and particular aspects of interaction: after all, life does contain distressing phenomena that it would be naive not to notice. Hence a degree of negativism in one's attitude toward people is inevitable.
4. Grumbling, that is, the tendency to make unwarranted generalizations of negative facts in the area of relationships with partners and in observing social reality.
5. Negative personal experience of communicating with others.
This component of the attitude shows the extent to which you have been lucky in life with your immediate circle of acquaintances and partners in joint activity (the previous indicators assessed more general situations, rather).
In terms of preventing and diagnosing emotional states, special importance is attached to so-called neuropsychic instability, which reflects both the mental and somatic levels of an individual's health simultaneously. Neuropsychic stability (NPS) indicates the risk of an individual's maladjustment under conditions of stress, that is, when the system of emotional reflection functions under critical conditions caused by both external and internal factors.
The method was developed at the S.M. Kirov Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg and is aimed at determining neuropsychic stability and the risk of maladjustment under stress. It is recommended when selecting people suited for work in extreme situations. The «Prognosis» method makes it possible to identify individual signs of personality disorders, as well as to assess the probability of neuropsychic breakdowns occurring. A qualitative analysis of the answers makes it possible to clarify certain biographical information, behavioral features, and the state of a person's mental activity in various situations.
This method is most often used to assess the potential of managerial staff.
Traditionally, managers are assessed simultaneously by several experts: superior managers; managers of the same level; and subordinates.
In this process, strict confidentiality is observed not only on the part of those assessing but also on the part of the person being assessed.
The form of the questionnaire used in expert assessment of a manager's potential may vary depending on the specifics of the organization's activity. In this case, the best-known method is the «360 degrees» method. Its objectivity is due to the fact that the manager is assessed simultaneously by superior managers as well as by colleagues and subordinates. The purpose of using this method is to establish feedback with colleagues in an ethical, correct form, which gives the manager the opportunity to plan further training, development and self-improvement. However, alongside its advantages (the ability to assess business and personal qualities, and features of work behavior), this method has some drawbacks, in particular psychological errors of perception (the leniency effect, the halo effect, excessive strictness, etc.).
Assessment of a manager's potential by subordinates Traditionally, the assessment of a manager's potential by subordinates is conducted in modern organizations once a year in the form of a dialogue between the boss and the subordinates. The latter are asked to assess the management style of their immediate supervisor. The effectiveness of such an assessment can be ensured only if the information obtained is used constructively. However, both the manager and the subordinate face certain difficulties and psychological barriers in carrying out this task.
However, from the authors' point of view, some aspects of managers' activity cannot be subjected to assessment (for example, planning and organizing the work process, financial planning, goal-setting, the level of managerial knowledge, decision-making, analytical and technical abilities, and relationships with senior management). Accordingly, the aspects of managerial activity that can be assessed by subordinates include: leadership style and communication with subordinates, the ability to distribute work fairly, willingness to cooperate, clarity of requirements, self-control, etc.
Review questions
Characterize the styles of leadership.
The most important managerial competencies.
Methods for assessing the potential of managerial staff.
What is a person's communicative attitude?
What does the «Prognosis» method make it possible to identify?
Traditionally, managers are assessed simultaneously by which experts?
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