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    Leadership and Coping: An Inquiry Into Coping With Business Uncertainty
    Leadership and Coping: An Inquiry Into Coping With Business Uncertainty
    Leadership and Coping: An Inquiry Into Coping With Business Uncertainty
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Leadership and Coping: An Inquiry Into Coping With Business Uncertainty

    By Ghassan O. Qutob

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    The challenges presented by business environments worldwide require managers to have a strong sense of leadership. The wealth of literature on coping and resilience lacks a fundamental theory to link coping with leadership; on the contrary, the popular cognitive resource theory of leadership states that leaders lose their cognitive skills under stress, and advocates the value of experience only in the face of challenges.

    LEADERSHIP AND COPING is a research based book , it weaves the relationship between leadership style and the ability of a leader to cope with the stress of uncertainty in business. It therefore discloses and advises new practical principles to assist in the development of leadership cultivation programs. It also synthesizes a modified version of the Sense Of Coherence psychometric test applicable to measure coping in business contexts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 28, 2013
    ISBN9781626759558
    Leadership and Coping: An Inquiry Into Coping With Business Uncertainty

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      Leadership and Coping - Ghassan O. Qutob

      Appendices

      1. INTRODUCTION

      THE LEADERSHIP DILEMMA

      stase, 2010).The most recent economic crisis is unprecedented, and the lack of guidance from the past has left many organizations in a state of confusion. Studies have revealed that at least two million jobs were lost in 2008, which is the highest in the two crises of the 20th century (Colvin, 2009).

      New business models require business to be conducted globally, which requires leaders to deal with people from a distance, and being able to compete with limited resources. Mergers and acquisitions also impose new risks for job loss and changes in roles. Under these challenges, organisational culture accounts for 20-30% of business performance. Furthermore, 50-70% of the way employees perceive their organisation’s climate is attributed to corporate leaders (Thomas, 1988). In fact, studies on senior management show that management-positive moods (such as exhibiting energetic and enthusiastic approaches) decrease the probability of organisation conflict under stress, which in turn sustains good performance (Carmeli, 2003).

      In spite of this emphasis on the value of leaders, Kotter (1990) suggests that most companies are over-managed but under-led, and he states that companies need to develop the capacity to exercise leadership by learning how to cope with rapid change. However, Fisher (1999) defines a leadership paradox: namely, that most professionals cannot lead, and they do not want to be led. The ability to cope with the stresses and challenges of change is indeed a fundamental attribute for many levels of management, and needs to be developed for by businesses that intend to cultivate leadership.

      Coutu (2002) stresses the value of resilience to the success of the organisation. In her qualitative research, she finds that resilience is a greater determinant of success than education and capabilities. She describes resilience as a result for reflection for facing and understanding the world. This was emphasised by Goleman et al.(2001) in their study of emotional intelligence in a business context, and they concludes that, when leaders drive emotions positively they bring out everyone’s best. (Goleman et al. , 2001 :1) suggest that driving a team to achieve their best is the intent of resilience. This indicates that managers are now required to develop cognitive and emotional flexibility, in order to promote effective decision-making and problem-solving. Moxley (1998) also emphasises the importance of psychological capabilities for leadership cultivation. He suggests that the goal in leadership development is to develop leaders with the skills and personal attributes needed to adapt and to act with flexibility despite contradictions.

      In order to face the challenges of the contemporary business environment, organisations are investing billions of dollars on leadership training programs. However, Goleman et al (2004) state there is only weak evidence that these programs lead to genuine changes, despite the extensive leadership literature on which they are based. Expenditure on leadership training has nevertheless been extensive: some statistics show that more than sixty billion dollars has been spent on leadership training within the span of a decade (Goleman et al, 2004).

      In the context of this high focus on leadership training programs that overpromise and under-deliver, some scholars have started to question the added value of corporate leaders, since substantial numbers of people believe that leaders lack the capability to guide business and governmental institutions to greatness (Kouzes and Posner 2011 : xiii).

      THE GOAL OF THIS RESEARCH

      Avolio and Bass’s (1997) multifactor leadership model is common leadership theoretical model and assessment tool for leadership styles in modern literature. With this model they have established evidence that a transformational leadership style is the most effective leadership style to drive organisation success at times of difficulty. Although research has been conducted to investigate how transformational leaders are able to cope with business stress, this research often lacks a fundamental theory.

      The difficulty of assessment increased with the popularisation of the cognitive resources theory (Fiedler and Garcia, 1987), which hypothesises that the stress of work-life can negatively influence the intelligence of the leader and his or her decision-making. Cognitive resource theory correlates much of a leader’s ability for decision-making under stress to the value of his or her experience, rather than to any cognitive capabilities. For such reasons researchers have called for more research on the dispositional basis of transformational leadership (Bass, 1998).

      Responding to this call, the research presented in this book further examines the psychological resources of transformational leaders that help them to cope with stress more effectively than other styles of leadership (such as transactional or passive leaders).This research therefore attempts to fill an important gap in the literature. By choosing to focus only on the coping elements of personality, this study is particularly relevant for today’s turbulent business environment. The choice of transformational leadership theory is justified by Bass’s empirical finding that this is the most useful theory assembled in the past three decades (Avolio and Bass , 2005).

      To evaluate what makes transformational leaders resilient and able to cope, this research uses a well-validated and common coping theoretical framework, termed the sense of coherence(SOC).First introduced by Antonovsky (1979),the SOC is defined as an integrated perception of one’s life as being comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. The SOC is an empirically tested personality disposition model and can be used

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