BUSI 503 Week 8 Discussion Board Forum 2 Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Enable Others to Act and Encourage the Heart

BUSI 503 Leadership Theory, Discussion Board Forum 2 Thread and Reply

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The forum prompt and the classmate are composites; the textbooks, the research and the Scripture cited are real, and the structure follows Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 503.

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Kouzes and Posner (2017) make a claim that sounds backward to many managers: leaders become more powerful by giving power away. Their argument is that people who feel in control of their work, capable of doing it and trusted to make real choices commit themselves more fully, and that the leader's influence grows as theirs does. Strengthening others, in their terms, means increasing self-determination and developing competence, not just assigning tasks.

Research supports the claim. Spreitzer (1995) described psychological empowerment as four related experiences: finding the work meaningful, feeling competent, having self-determination over how the work is done and believing one's work has an impact. Seibert et al. (2011) combined well over one hundred studies; employees who reported feeling empowered were, on average, more satisfied, more committed to their employers and better performers, and they were less inclined to look for another job. The leader does not lose anything when a team member gains choice; the team gains a member who cares about the result.

I saw this at my own company last year. Our warehouse manager used to approve every schedule change personally, which meant small problems waited a day for his signature. He gave the shift leads authority to approve swaps within their own shifts, with one rule: coverage could not drop below the minimum. Within a month, the shift leads were solving problems he had never heard about, and two of them started proposing improvements to the picking routes. He told me he had more influence over the warehouse once he stopped making every decision in it.

Scripture records the same lesson. Moses was judging disputes for the people from morning until evening, and his father-in-law Jethro warned him that he would wear out both himself and the people. Jethro advised him to teach the people the law and set reliable, God-fearing men in charge of units of various sizes, from a thousand down to ten, who would handle the ordinary cases and bring only the hard ones to Moses (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Exodus 18:13-23). Moses did not become less of a leader by sharing the work; the people were served better and he could endure.

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, I agree with your point that recognition is one of the most undervalued tools a manager has, and that it costs almost nothing. Kouzes and Posner (2017) describe recognizing contributions as showing appreciation for individual excellence, and your example of the supervisor who wrote handwritten notes to every employee after the holiday rush is a good picture of it.

There is experimental evidence that your instinct is right. Grant and Gino (2010) ran a set of experiments in which some participants who had helped someone received a brief expression of thanks and others did not. Those who were thanked were substantially more likely to help again, both the same person and a different one, and the effect worked through their sense of social worth: feeling valued made them more willing to give. The thanks took a few seconds, yet it doubled the likelihood of further helping in one of the studies.

That raises a question about your example. Did the handwritten notes mention specific actions, or were they general? Kouzes and Posner (2017) stress that recognition is most powerful when it is personal and tied to the standard being celebrated. A note that says "thank you for staying late on the 23rd to finish the Henderson order" tells the employee exactly what the organization values, while a general thank-you only says that the supervisor is polite. If your supervisor's notes were specific, that may explain why they were remembered so long after the season ended.

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Grant, A. M., & Gino, F. (2010). A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(6), 946-955. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017935

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Seibert, S. E., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. H. (2011). Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(5), 981-1003. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022676

Spreitzer, G. M. (1995). Psychological empowerment in the workplace: Dimensions, measurement, and validation. Academy of Management Journal, 38(5), 1442-1465. https://doi.org/10.5465/256865