Abraham Zaleznik, a clinical psychoanalyst by training, asked that question in a 1977 article in Harvard Business Review. Zaleznik believed the difference was the view of chaos versus order held by the manager or leader. Managers believe in process, stability, and control, and seek to resolve problems quickly. Leaders tolerate chaos and delay problem solving until they understand the problem. Zaleznik’s work was based on the 1950’s behavioral research on what motivates people published by Maslow, Herzberg, Vroom, Porter, and Lawler.
During the 1960’s, Likert at the University of Michigan studied the effects of a manager’s employee orientation versus the manager’s production orientation. During the 1970’s, Stogdill at Ohio State University researched the physical traits and psychology of both managers and leaders. Both of these studies moved from the belief that managers and leaders had one orientation or trait to theories that orientations and traits operate on a continuum. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, Bennis and Nanus concentrated on differences between manages and leaders: managers do things right while leaders do the right things; managers are problem solvers while leaders are problem finders; managers are past oriented while leaders are future oriented; managers are efficient while leaders are effective (for a table summarizing these differences and more, see Kim Lee’s work in Darr and Nowicki’s Managing Health Services Organizations and Systems). In Where Have All the Leaders Gone? (1989), Bennis argued that while managers are safe, leaders were an endangered species. Bennis believed that institutional autonomy no longer exists and has been replaced by fragmented shared values and any real possibility of consensus. Kotter’s theory was that managers produce predictability and leaders produce change; however, Kotter also was among the first to believe that management and leadership characteristics can be present in the same individual. For example, an individual could be a manager on most issues but exhibit leadership characteristics on an issue that is passionate for the individual.
Management is a process of interrelated social and technical functions occurring within a formal organizational framework in order to accomplish the predetermined mission and objectives of the organization. In Dunn’s Healthcare Management, she identifies five management functions (sometime called skills): planning, organizing, staffing, influencing (sometimes called directing or motivating), and controlling; and three connective processes: decision-making, coordinating, and communicating. Mintzberg contributed the following management roles: interpersonal (figurehead, leader, and liaison), informational (monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson), and decisional (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator). The National Center for Healthcare Leadership (NCHL) developed a model of managerial competencies that include knowledge, skills, and roles that must be mastered before graduation from an accredited MHA program. MHA graduate students must master hundreds of competencies before graduation; the competencies fall into six domains: conceptual, technical managerial and clinical, interpersonal or collaborative, political, commercial, and governance. An important distinction is that management can be taught and learned—the didactic portion in the classroom and the experiential portion in the work setting.
Much of leading, on the other hand, is inherent to the individual: hence the saying “Leaders are born and not made”. The essence of leading is influencing followers to do something they might not do on their own. Leaders rely on sources of power developed by French and Raven and Yukl at different times. Leaders can be either formal or informal. Formal leaders rely on legitimate power or the power granted to them by an authority. Informal leaders rely on the following sources of power to influence others: the power to reward or punish (being part of the group or being ostracized by the group), information power, ecological power, referent power (sometimes called charismatic power), and expert power. In his classic work, James S. Burns identified two forms of leaders: transactional and transformational. Transactional leaders influence others in a series of transactions (or deals) with others often in a micro sort of way. Transformational leaders influence others by challenging the status quo and providing remedies in a more macro sort of way considering the effect on something bigger and the effect on the future. Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her seminal work The Change Masters argues that in order for transformational leaders to provide remedies the leaders must understand the reasons why people resist change: loss of control, fear of the unknown, loss of status, concerns about competence, and past history.
Can an individual be a manager and a leader at the same time? I can see an individual seeing one issue as a micro-issue and another issue as a micro-issue—so it might depend on the situation which Fiedler’s addresses in his contingency theory which was popular in the 1970’s.
Fiedler’s situation was based on leader-follower relations, tasks to be accomplished, and leader power. One of the problems with the contingency theory is followers may not see the situation the same way as the leaders. And because situations change, the leaders responses will change, making the leader somewhat unpredictable (Google the benefits of predictable leaders). Bennis says that constancy (sometimes called reliability) is one of the five C’s of leadership (the other four being competency, caring, candor, and character). Bennis reports on a study that concludes “that people would much rather follow individuals they can count on, even when they disagree with their viewpoint, than people they agree with [on a specific situation] but who shift positions frequently (Why Leaders Can’t Lead, p. 21).
Note: some of the above is based on Darr and Nowicki’s Managing Health Services Organizations and Systems, 7th edition, where you can find more material on managers and leaders.
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