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Chapter
12
The Situation

“When you’ve exhausted all possibilities,

remember this: You haven’t!”

~Robert H. Schuller

12-2
Introduction

• Situational engineering occurs when leaders

use their knowledge of how the situation affects
leadership to proactively change the situation to
improve the chances of success.
• Leaders in dangerous situations may adopt
different strategies to be successful than they
would in more normal situations.
• The situation often explains more about what is
going on and what kinds of leadership
behaviors will be best than any other single
variable.

12-3
Introduction (continued)

• The appropriateness of a leader’s behavior in a

group often makes sense only in the situational
context in which the behavior occurs.
• The situation, not someone’s traits or abilities,
plays the most important role in determining
who emerges as a leader.
• Historically, great leaders emerge during social
upheavals or economic crises.
• Early situational theories asserted that leaders
were made, not born, and that prior leadership
experience helped forge effective leaders.

12-4
Introduction (continued)

• Role theory: A leader’s behavior depends on

the leader’s perceptions of critical aspects of
the situation.
– Rules and regulations governing the job
– Role expectations of subordinates, peers, and
superiors
– Nature of the task
– Feedback about subordinates’ performance
• Multiple-influence model identifies 2 factors:
– Microvariables (e.g., task characteristics)
– Macrovariables (e.g., the external environment)
• The three main situational levels of abstraction
are task, organizational, and environmental.
12-5
An Expanded Leader-Follower-
Situation Model

Figure 12.1: An Expanded Leader–Follower– Situation Model

12-6
How Tasks Vary, and What That
Means for Leadership
• Task Autonomy: Degree to which a job
provides an individual with some control over
what is done and how it is done.
• Task Feedback: Degree to which a person
accomplishing a task receives information about
performance from performing the task itself.
• Task Structure: Degree to which there are
known procedures for accomplishing the task
and rules governing how one goes about it.
• Task Interdependence: Degree to which tasks
require coordination and synchronization for
work groups or teams to accomplish a desired
goals.
12-7
Problems and Challenges

• Technical problems are challenges for which

the problem-solving resources already exist.
– Resources have two aspects: specialized methods
and specialized expertise.
– Technical problems can be solved without changing
the nature of the social system in which they occur.
• Adaptive problems cannot be solved using
currently existing resources or ways of thinking.
– It can be difficult reaching a common definition of
what the problem really is.
– Adaptive problems can only be solved by changing
the system itself.
– Adaptive problems, which involve people’s values,
require adaptive leadership for solutions.
12-8
Adaptive and Technical Challenges

Table 12.1: Adaptive and Technical Challenges

12-9
From the Industrial Age to the
Information Age
• In the information age, many fundamental
assumptions of the industrial age are becoming
obsolete.
• Kaplan and Norton identified six changes in the
ways companies operate to address the
changes in the environment.
– Cross functions
– Links to customers and suppliers
– Customer segmentation
– Global scale
– Innovation
– Knowledge workers

12-10
From the Industrial Age to the
Information Age (continued)

• Cross Functions: Organizations must operate with

integrated business processes that cut across
traditional business functions.

• Links to Customers and Suppliers: IT enables

organizations to integrate supply, production, and
delivery processes resulting in improvements in
cost, quality, and response time.

• Customer Segmentation: Companies must learn

to offer customized products and services to
diverse customer segments.

12-11
From the Industrial Age to the
Information Age (continued)

• Global Scale: Companies today compete against

the best companies throughout the entire world.

• Innovation: As product life cycles continue to

shrink, companies must be masters at anticipating
customers’ future needs, innovating new products
and services, and rapidly deploying new
technologies into efficient delivery processes.

• Knowledge Workers: All employees must

contribute value by what they know and by the
information they can provide.

12-12
The Formal Organization

• Studying the formal organization involves the

disciplines of management, organizational
behavior, and organizational theory and can
have a profound impact on leadership.

• Level of authority is the hierarchical level in an

organization.

• Organizational structure is the way an

organization’s activities are coordinated and
controlled. It represents another level of the
situation in which leaders and followers must
operate.

12-13
The Formal Organization (continued)

• Organizational structures vary in complexity.

– Horizontal complexity is the number of “boxes” at
any particular organizational level in an organizational
chart.
– Vertical complexity is the number of hierarchical
levels appearing on an organizational chart.
– Spatial complexity describes the geographical
dispersion of an organization’s members.
• Organizations vary in their degree of
formalization.
– Formalization is the degree of standardization,
which usually varies with size.
– Centralization is the diffusion of decision making.

12-14
The Informal Organization:
Organizational Culture

• Informal organization generally refers to

organizational culture.

• Organizational culture is a system of shared

backgrounds, norms, values, or beliefs among
members of a group.

• Organizational climate concerns members’

subjective reactions to the organization, which
is partly a function of organizational culture.

12-15
Some Questions That Define
Organizational Culture

Table12.2: Some Questions That Define Organizational Culture

Source: Adapted from R. H. Kilmann and M. J. Saxton, Organizational Cultures: Their Assessment
and Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983).

12-16
The Informal Organization:
Organizational Culture (continued)

• Leaders can change culture by attending to

or ignoring particular issues, problems, or
projects.
• Leaders can modify culture:
– Through their reactions to crises.

– By rewarding new or different kinds of behavior.

– By eliminating previous punishments or negative

consequences for certain behaviors.

12-17
A Theory of Organizational Culture

• The values depicted on opposite ends of each

axis in the Competing Values Framework are
inherently in tension with each other.
• An organization’s culture represents a balance
between these competing values.
• People tend not to be consciously aware of their
own organization’s culture.
• The framework helps organizations be more
deliberate in identifying a culture more likely to
be successful given their respective situations,
and in transitioning to it.

12-18
The Competing Values Framework

Figure 12.2: The Competing Values Framework

Source: K. S. Cameron and R. E. Quinn, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1999), p. 32. 12-19
A Theory of Organizational Culture
(continued)

• The distinctive sets of values in the four

quadrants of the Competing Values Framework
define four unique organizational cultures.
– Hierarchy cultures tend to have formalized rules and
procedures.
– Market cultures emphasize stability and control but
focus their attention on the external environment.
– Clan cultures emphasize flexibility and discretion,
focus primarily inward, and have a strong sense of
cohesiveness.
– Adhocracy cultures emphasize a high degree of
flexibility and discretion and focus primarily on the
environment outside the organization.

12-20
The Environment

• Ronald Heifetz argues that leaders not only are

facing more crises than ever before but that a
new mode of leadership is needed because
we’re in a permanent state of crisis.
• Change has become so fast and so pervasive
that it impacts virtually every organization
everywhere, and everyone in them.
• VUCA describes this new state of affairs:
volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
• Leadership has never been easy and appears
to be growing more difficult.

12-21
Contrasting Different Environments
in the Situational Level

Figure 12.4: Contrasting Different Environments in the Situational Level

12-22
The Environment (continued)

• It is critical for leaders to have an understanding

of societal culture and the associated beliefs,
characteristics, and customs. Failure to do so
can result in conflicts and misunderstandings.

• Societal culture refers to those learned

behaviors characterizing the total way of life of
members within any given society.

• Business leaders in the global context need to

become aware and respectful of cultural
differences and cultural perspectives.

12-23
The GLOBE Study

• GLOBE, the Global Leadership and

Organizational Behavior Effectiveness
Research Program, is based on implicit
leadership theory.
– Individuals have implicit beliefs/assumptions about
attributes/behaviors that distinguish leaders from
followers, effective leaders from ineffective leaders,
and moral from immoral leaders.
– Relatively distinctive implicit theories of leadership
characterize different societal cultures from each other
as well as organizational cultures within those societal
cultures, i.e., culturally endorsed implicit theories
of leadership (CLT).

12-24
The GLOBE Study (continued)

• GLOBE identified 6 dimensions for assessing

CLT across all global cultures.
– Charismatic/value-based leadership inspires,
motivates, and expects high performance from others
on the basis of firmly held core values.
– Team-oriented leadership emphasizes effective
team building and implementation of a common goal.
– Participative leadership is the degree that managers
involve others in making/implementing decisions.
– Humane-oriented leadership is supportive.
– Autonomous leadership is independent leadership.
– Self-protective leadership focuses on ensuring the
security of the individual or group member.

12-25
CLT Leadership Dimensions

Table12.4: Relative Rankings of Selected Societal Clusters on CLT Leadership

Dimensions

12-26
Universally Positive Leadership
Attributes

Table12.5: Leader Attributes and Behaviors Universally Viewed as Positive

Source: Adapted from House et al., Cultural Influences on Leadership and Organizations: Project
Globe. Advances in Global Leadership, vol. 1 (JAI Press, 1999), pp. 171–233.

12-27
Universally Negative Leadership
Attributes

TABLE 12.6 Leader Attributes and Behaviors Universally Viewed as Negative

Source: Adapted from House et al., Cultural Influences on Leadership and Organizations: Project
Globe. Advances in Global Leadership, vol. 1 (JAI Press, 1999), pp. 171–233.

12-28
Culturally Contingent Leadership
Attributes

TABLE 12.7 Examples of Leader Behaviors and Attributes That Are Culturally
Contingent
Source: Adapted from House et al., Cultural Influences on Leadership and Organizations: Project
Globe. Advances in Global Leadership, vol. 1 (JAI Press, 1999), pp. 171–233.

12-29
Implications for Leadership
Practitioners

• Leadership practitioners should expect to face a

variety of challenges to their own systems of
ethics, values, or attitudes during their careers.
• People holding seemingly antithetical values
may need to work together, and dealing with
diverse values will be an increasingly common
challenge for leaders.
• Leaders in particular have a responsibility not to
let their own personal values interfere with
professional leader–subordinate relationships
unless the conflicts pertain to issues clearly
relevant to the work and the organization.
12-30
Summary

• The situation may be the most complex factor in

the leader–follower–situation framework.
• Situations vary in complexity and strength.
• The organizational level includes both the
formal organization and informal organization.
• An increasingly important variable at the
environmental level is societal culture, which
involves learned behaviors that guide the
distinctive mannerisms, ways of thinking, and
values within particular societies.

12-31