Invited reaction: Influence behaviors and managerial effectiveness in lateral relations
✍ Scribed by James L. Farr
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 424 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Allan Church and Janine Waclawski have addressed in their article an increasingly important issue in contemporary organizations. As they note, organizations are turning more and more to flatter structures and group-or team-based work. Managers therefore have larger spans of control and must also rely more on team leaders, task force chairs, project managers, and others who do not have formal managerial authority for task accomplishment. Consistent with these structural trends is the increased number of employee empowerment efforts designed to distribute power or influence across a larger proportion of the organizational workforce than would be the case in traditional, hierarchical organizations (Liden and Arad, 1996). The largely unanswered (and indeed unasked) question to which Church and Waclawski provide some initial clues is, What factors contribute to the effectiveness of these informal leaders in group-based work settings?
Church and Waclawski have focused on the influence behaviors used by informal leaders as they work in cross-functional groups, and on how these behaviors relate to judgments of leader effectiveness. Further, they have examined the extent to which the level of agreement between focal leaders and their peers and superiors on the use of these influence behaviors is also related to judged effectiveness. The level of agreement between the focal leaders and their peers and superiors is termed managerial self-awareness. Church and Waclawski argue that managerial self-awareness is important because for individuals to be maximally effective in influencing others, they must be aware of their own actions (influence behaviors in particular) and of the consequences of those actions for the "target" others. This awareness presumably develops through some type of feedback process as the individual interacts with others and attempts to influence them as part of work role duties. Thus the leader who is high in managerial self-awareness will have a better sense of which influence behaviors work well and which do not in the work setting, will enact those that work well, and will be more effective in job performance. Church and Waclawski's data provide support for their hypotheses. Certain influence