The skill of leadership is
important in businesses that seek to overcome their next market challenge and
make their way to the top. Transformational leadership is positively associated
with creative performance (Shin & Zhou, 2003). Leaders who inspire and give
a proper path are more pragmatic in their performances and therefore lead to
higher levels of employee creative contributions.
The reason why leadership can
have such an impact on organizations is because of the way they perceive their
employees. Those leaders who label additional effort by employees as
citizenship behavior versus ingratiation view and reward their employees at a
higher level (Eastman, 1994). Leaders
and managers create precisely the type of behaviors they view their employee
with. A leader or manager who perceives employees as lazy, unproductive, and
ignorant are likely to create employees who mimic this behavior.
If the very leaders on the top
view employees in such a negative way the belief system will pass down through
the layers of managers and impact how employees behave and view themselves.
Findings help highlight how there is a cascading effect of leadership whereby
middle-level managers are a pivotal psychological link between leaders and
frontline workers (Zohar & Luria, 2005). The mannerisms and perceptions of
leadership filters throughout the entire organization and management is the
connecting point of passing these perceptions onto employees to prime
behavioral expectations.
When these expectations are in a
negative light the overall performance of employees is damaged. Particularly
their willingness to engage in and solve problems is hampered and this lowers
future growth prospects of the firm. Creativity is about free thinking, problem
solving, and sharing those perspectives with others to create new economic
realities. Employees have no incentive to do this if their ideas are automatically
discounted due to poor management perception.
Research by Liu, Liao & Loi
(2012) was conducted in a large Midwestern automobile company and had 22 departments,
108 teams and 762 employees participate in the study. The study attempted to
determine the impact of abusive leadership and abusive management on worker
creativity. It also analyzed the concept of cascading layers of management and
how this impacts performance expectations and transference of beliefs.
Results:
-Abusive supervision by top management creates
likelihood that middle level managers will also be more abusive and this
damages creativity.
-How employees perceive the reasons (two
perceptions) for this abuse can either exacerbate or mitigate its effectiveness.
-Departmental leadership abusive behavior has an
impact on team leader behaviors (cascading layers of management) which impacts
team member behavior.
Analysis:
The report supports attribution theory that
indicates that employee characteristics and team leader characteristics
interact and influence the environment. Furthermore, the research also supports
social learning theory by indicating that group behaviors and organizational
culture are formed by these unique attributes. Employees learn to accept their
station in life or resist against such poor treatment. To change poor behavior
within an organization is to ensure you have a leader with transformational
skills, proper management training, and strong employee attributes.
Eastman, K. (1994). In the eyes of the beholder: an
attributional approach to ingratiation and organizational citizenship behavior.
Academy of Management, 37: 1379-1391
Liu, D., Liao, H. & Loi, R. (2012). The dark
side of leadership: a three-level of investigation of cascading effective of
abusive supervision on employee creativity. Academy
of Management Journal, 55 (5).
Shin, S. & Zhou, J. (2003).
Transformational leadership, conservation, and creativity: Evidence from Korea. Academy af
Management Journal, 46:
703-714.
Zohar, D., & Luria, G. (2005).
A multilevel model of safety climate: Gross-level relationships between
organization and group-level climates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90: 616-628.
