PSYC 648 Week 4 Group DB Forum 4 with Weekly Summary 4 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 4: Weekly Summary Thread and Two Replies to the Research Question

PSYC 648 Leadership and Motivation, Group DB Forum 4 with Weekly Summary 4 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The group, the presenter's research question and the classmates' replies are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the textbook and the journal articles are real and described from their published sources; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 648.

Thread: Weekly Summary and Takeaways

This module covered five approaches that place values at the center of leadership. Northouse (2015) describes transformational leadership as a process in which leaders engage followers and raise their motivation and morality, working through four factors that amount to modeling admired values, inspiring a shared vision, stretching followers' thinking and caring for each person. Authentic leadership emphasizes leaders who know themselves, act on an internalized moral perspective, process information in a balanced way and are transparent in relationships.

Servant leadership reverses the usual emphasis, asking leaders to put followers first, help them grow and serve the community beyond the organization. Adaptive leadership focuses on helping people face adaptive challenges, problems that require changes in values and behavior rather than technical fixes an expert can supply. The chapter on leadership ethics presents principles of respect, service, justice, honesty and community as standards for any approach, and it reminds readers that a leader's influence carries moral responsibility because it shapes the lives of followers.

How well do these approaches predict results? When Judge and Piccolo (2004) pooled studies of the two styles, transformational leaders had followers who were more satisfied and motivated and were themselves rated more effective, yet leaders who simply rewarded good performance fairly came close on several of those measures. Hoch et al. (2018) then tested whether the three newer labels earn their place: ethical and authentic leadership turned out to overlap heavily with transformational leadership, while servant leadership still predicted outcomes once transformational leadership was taken into account. The newer approaches, in other words, are not all equally distinct. For practitioners, that means choosing an approach for its practical guidance, such as servant leadership's attention to follower growth, rather than for its label.

Takeaways:

• Transformational leaders raise followers' motivation and sense of purpose.
• Authentic leadership begins with self-awareness.
• Servant leaders measure success by followers' growth.
• Adaptive challenges cannot be solved by experts alone.
• Ethics applies to every leadership approach, not only one chapter.
• Contingent reward still works well.
• Ethical and authentic leadership overlap heavily with transformational leadership.
• Servant leadership appears to add something distinct.

Reply 1 to the Presenter's Research Question

Brianna asked whether servant leadership can work in a competitive company. I agree with Luis that it can, if it is understood correctly and practiced consistently. Northouse (2015) does not present servant leadership as passivity; servant leaders still set direction and hold standards, but they do it by developing people. A store manager I worked for at a national retailer spent much of each shift coaching new employees and covering their breaks, and her store had the region's lowest turnover. In retail, where hiring and training are expensive, keeping people is a competitive advantage. Her district manager first saw her approach as soft, then began sending struggling managers to shadow her.

Reply 2 to the Presenter's Research Question

Adding to Luis's point and my first reply, the research gives servant leadership more credibility than its gentle name suggests. Hoch et al. (2018) found that it explained outcomes beyond transformational leadership, which suggests it captures something real about how leaders affect followers that other models miss. Judge and Piccolo (2004) also showed that leaders who attend to individuals tend to have more satisfied, motivated followers. Competition rewards organizations that retain capable people and draw out their best work. Servant leadership may be harder than command-and-control styles, but there is little evidence that it is weaker. The real risk is a counterfeit version in which a leader avoids hard decisions and calls it service.

References

Hoch, J. E., Bommer, W. H., Dulebohn, J. H., & Wu, D. (2018). Do ethical, authentic, and servant leadership explain variance above and beyond transformational leadership? A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), 501-529. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316665461

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Northouse, P. G. (2015). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). SAGE.