Empowering Leaders
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Empowering Leaders
Being an empowering leader has many advantages to groups, members, and the organization. However, leaders who feel they must control everything or feel insecure about giving up control will need a coach or a mentor to help them overcome these behaviors. According to Srivastava and Vyas (2015), leaders with high self-esteem are more effective in setting organizational goals and in motivating members than leaders with low self-esteem. For leaders to be empowering, they must feel comfortable giving up some control. Leaders who lack experience may have a challenging time switching to an empowering leadership approach. Leaders with a high self-esteem are more likely to be confident enough to share leadership and give up control. Li, Chiaburu, and Kirkman (2017) state that empowering leaders delegate more power, provide opportunities to members and for autonomy, and therefore boost member meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Wheelan (2016) indicates that effective empowering leaders anticipate challenges to their authority as well as member requests for more participation in running the group, without viewing those challenges as a threat to their authority, but view it as a positive sign of group progress. An effective strategy that leaders might consider for encouraging challenges to their authority and demanding greater involvement include slowly empowering group members to participate more equally in group management functions so that members have time to work out conflicts and roles, because giving up control all at once may be disruptive (Wheelan, 2016). From experience, when leaders give up all their power too quickly, group members may struggle to figure out their roles as well as who has the final say when making decisions. Giving up power too quickly may cause the team to churn and lose productivity. To ensure that group members are ready to share leadership responsibilities, leaders may start by modeling behaviors of an empowering leader. Leaders can empower teams by mentoring, coaching, and demonstrating to others how to share leadership and control. Rousseau and Aubé (2019) suggest that when leaders enact empowering behaviors, members are granted freedom and flexibility to change their ways of working according to the demands of the work situation and leaders who exhibit empowering actions serve as a model of effective leadership behaviors for their team members. Li, Chiaburu, and Kirkman (2017) indicate that team-directed empowering leadership has a positive effect on member psychological empowerment and has a significant positive influence on member and team outcomes. Leaders may increase team empowerment by taking a transformational leadership approach since seeds of empowering leadership exist there as well as emphasizing the role of empowerment as a central mechanism to building commitment to the organization’s objectives (Srivastava & Vyas, 2015). Leaders that implement a strategy to increase group empowerment, must be able to recognize empowered teams. An example of an empowered team is one that has the responsibility of controlling, organizing, and monitoring themselves; assigning members roles; scheduling and planning work; making task related decisions; and solving team, customer, and quality-related problems (Rapp, Gilson, Mathieu, & Ruddy, 2016). From experience working with software development teams, encouraging self-organization in teams is important for empowering members. When leaders control and organize a team’s work, assign people roles that may not fit, plan and schedule work without understanding the context, make decisions about work-related tasks, and don’t allow members to solve problems, group members will stop thinking for themselves and will wait for their leader to make decisions for them. The team will not feel empowered and motivation and performance will suffer. Empowered teams feel confident and safe enough in their environment to make decisions and take actions that they need to meet their goals.
References
Li, N., Chiaburu, D. S., & Kirkman, B. L. (2017). Cross-level influences of empowering leadership on citizenship behavior: Organizational support climate as a double-edged sword. Journal of Management, 43(4), 1076-1102. doi:10.1177/0149206314546193
Rapp, T. L., Gilson, L. L., Mathieu, J. E., & Ruddy, T. (2016). Leading empowered teams: An examination of the role of external team leaders and team coaches. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(1), 109-123. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.08.005
Rousseau, V., & Aubé, C. (2019). Disentangling the relationship between empowering leader behaviors and adaptive performance in work teams. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, doi:10.1177/1368430219854801
Srivastava, M., & Vyas, R. (2015). Empowering leadership: A study of team leaders & team members. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 50(4), 696-712.
Wheelan, S. A. (2016). Creating effective teams: A guide for members and leaders (5th ed.). [Kindle Version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
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