Research - (2021) Volume 10, Issue 4
Received: 14-Aug-2020
Published:
09-Apr-2021
, DOI: 10.37421/2169-026X.2021.10.298
Citation: Tariku Frew, Tolosa Dadi, Haile Girma and Yiberta Teklemichael. "Practice of leadership effectiveness in public sectors organization ." J Entrepren Organiz Manag 10 (2021):298.
Copyright: © 2021 Frew T, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The main purpose of this article is to identify the practice of leadership effectiveness of public service organization of North shoa. For this purpose, 190 leaders in the sectors and 50 individuals from the community have been participated in the study and predetermined survey questionnaire with leadership effectiveness were provided to respective parties to obtain information from them.To collect the data, the study have employed simple random sampling to identify respondents from selected wored as of the zone and then applied purposive selection to select respective parties to respond to survey questionnaires. The finding indicated that the practice and status of leadership effectiveness of the selected sectors needs improvements. Therefore, it is advisable the concerned body to consider the status of leadership effectiveness.
Leadership • Leadership effectiveness • Public sectors
Leadership takes on different meanings depending on the person who leads and the people being led. On any given day, leadership can mean teaching, coaching, assigning, cheerleading, counseling, guiding, correcting, protecting, explaining, and observing. Leadership asks you to fill out forms, chair meetings, hold hands, explain decisions, think about the future, and resolve conflict. None of these actions or tasks will happen discretely; usually they’ll happen all at once. If you thought becoming the boss would give you more control of your time and tasks think again. Like the new entrepreneur, you’ll discover that you have less control over your daily activities as you work to help and support the people you lead [1].
Leaders and managers are not one and the same. While leaders may be effective managers, not all managers can be rightfully called leaders. Managers who are leaders inspire, motivate, and energize people with their clear visions and strategies towards a shared goal. On the other hand, mainstream and traditional managers are short-term oriented, and more concerned with day to day activities. Nevertheless, they are efficient at organizing, allocating, controlling, and monitoring resources [2].
Developing others as leaders compares to running a marathon race. The best runners set up at the starting line. The many other runners line up in rows each further and further behind the line. In some races with thousands of runners, the last row of runners can be as far as a mile behind the starting line. When the gun sounds to begin the race, the first rows of runners race past the starting line. Those at the back of the pack may not even cross the starting line for up to ten minutes. Exceptional leaders pace the marathon race to develop others as leaders. They recognize that some may take longer than others to even begin effective mastery of their skills [3].
Leadership is desperately needed. How it is defined differs slightly from panelist to panelist. The panelists agreed on the tremendous need for leadership in dealing with both the short-term financial crisis and the many longer-term issues facing the business community, the United States, and the world. Each panelist offered a different perspective on leadership [4].
Based on an extensive review of literature Brown and colleagues formed the following definition, ethical leadership is defined as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement and decision-making” [5].
Leadership, the capacity to make decisions, has played a crucial role in the growth and development of the Malaysian economy. The pre-1970 growth and development phase was marked by the concern with diversifying the economy away from reliance on (declining) commodity prices, shifting resources from low-productivity to high-productivity agriculture, and the beginnings of the push towards industrialization. The leadership grappled with these developmental challenges. Leadership in the post-1970 period was faced with the challenge of distributive demands and wide ethnic economic imbalances arising from the May 1969 racial riots, and the need to raise the pace and intensity of industrialization. A stylized view would suggest that agricultural diversification and rural and infrastructure development were the outstanding features of the pre-1970 phase, while the post-1970 phase was marked by the need to promote rapid industrial growth, with concerns for equity and the structural transformation of the economy [6].
Most organizational theorists agree that effective leadership is one of the most important contributors to overall organizational performance success. However, the common problem in most public service organizations is to identify what leadership is and what leaders do to ensure team and organizational success is less well understood [7].
Leading an organization is clearly more difficult than surfing, but both require learning. Successfully creating sustainability through changes that progressively build on each other requires a learning engine that runs throughout the organization. Strategy-making and strategy-implementation processes provide the foundation for that learning engine, and strategic leadership is what drives it. We use a framework called “strategy as a learning process” to depict this engine. It describes a specific strategy mind-set, a way of thinking about how to craft and implement strategy. In particular, it implies that successful strategy operates in an ongoing state of formulation, implementation, reassessment, and revision. Let’s briefly introduce the concept here, and then deepen our understanding by showing how it has played out in one company, Neoforma [8].
According to Yazdanifard [9] discuss How Effective Leadership can Facilitate Changein Organizations through Improvement andInnovation with the variables of trust, organizational culture, learning, teamwork, communication and leading and conclude that whenever there is leadership effective they can get trust from their employees. Therefore in this study the employees trust has a positive relationship with leadership effectiveness.
According to Mihelic [10] explore under the issue of Ethical Leadership which consider being ethical leader help to make the leadership effective. Based on this, this study discusses the variables like Traits, Values and Integrity. By referring these literatures our study were explore with the variablesof professional skill, incentives, awareness, commitment, experience and corruption. In addition to this as the knowledge of the researchers we didn’t find any study conducted with the above mentioned title and study area. The objective of this article is to assess the current status and practice of leadership effectiveness of the Zone.
Leadership can be defined as a complex social process, rooted in aspects of values, skills, knowledge as well as ways of thinking of both leaders and followers. Thus, it is all about the continuous process of establishing and maintaining a connection between who aspire to lead and those who are willing to follow. Many of scholars and researchers agreed that leadership is a combination of skills and behavior which exhibits those skills.
Hersey & Blanchard defines leadership as the process of influencing the activities of an individual or a group in efforts toward goal achievement in a given situation. Similarly, Bass defined leadership in different terms from earlier to the recent times. The earlier definitions identified leadership as a focus of group process and movement, personality in action. The next type considered it as the art of inducing compliance. The more recent definitions conceive leadership in terms of influence relationships, power differentials, persuasion, influence on goal achievement, role differentiation, reinforcement, initiation of structure, and perceived attributions of behavior that are consistent with what the perceivers believe leadership to be. Therefore, leadership is influence based relationships between the person who lead and other members.
The last aspect for improvement of organization performance accounts to subordinates’ perceptions of managers’ effectiveness. The element of unit effectiveness means the capability of the superior in executing their tasks and leading the subordinates to meet the goal of the division. The subordinate perceived that their leaders as effective to them and to the unit as well. Arguably, transformational leadership results in followers’ performing beyond expectations. Lowe found that individuals exhibiting transformational leadership gain perceptions of being more effective leaders whose subordinates perform better than individuals who exhibit only transactional leadership in public and private settings.
Transformational leaders’ behavior encourages subordinates’ awareness of the special role they should play in the organization and provide personal guidance, which results in higher ratings of perceived effectiveness of the leader. Similarly, corrective transactional leadership with contingent rewards is effective for improving leaders’ effectiveness, which engenders positive attitudes and performance among subordinates.
Additionally, Hater and Bass found that subordinates tend to report leaders’ high levels of effectiveness when supervisor acquire a specific leadership skill (i.e., active transactional management by exception). In addition, Judge and Piccolo indicated that leadership (i.e., passive-management by exception in transactional leadership and laissez-faire) are ineffective and/or negatively correlate with perceived effectiveness of leadership. With the rapidly changing business environment in managers’ use of leadership containing transformational/transactional behavior, result in higher motivation and productivity among subordinates, and the issue has become increasingly important, rendering importance for leaders’ effectiveness.
Leadership effectiveness could be related to diverse constructs of tangible or intangible performances, which include the psychological and development of members. The outcomes of the leadership determine the leadership effectiveness, which in turn drives the performance of the members. The most common subjective measure of leadership effectiveness is the ability of the leaders to complete tasks successfully, organizational survival and growth through its ability to achieve organizational goals. In addition, leadership effectiveness may lead to increases in organizational performance with the increase of effectiveness and profitability.
The organizational performance is often derived from the foundation of leadership effectiveness. The leadership effectiveness was referred to the leaders’ successes at influencing followers towards the organizational objectives. Leader effectiveness can also be evaluated through follower attitudes, behaviors, satisfaction and followers’ acceptance of the leader.
The leadership and organizational performance are interlinked with the managers and employees of the organization. From another perspective, leadership is critically interlinked between leadership effectiveness and employees performance at the organizational level. Organizational leadership, operating as a system or tool to derive the maximum output from the employees, is crucial for organizational performance. In this respect, the organizational performance will be referred through Outcomes of Leadership. It can be surmised that leadership effectiveness is an essential element of every organization owing to the impacts of leadership towards organizational performance, and that managers at the highest level strongly influence performance.
Empirical literature reviews attempt to analyze, evaluate and synthesis the topic concerned by looking at different research findings and working paper to see what they declare on the effects of leadership styles to the performance of the organization. There are a numbers of studies stating the leadership effectiveness in relation to organizational performance.
According to the finding however, the need to recognize the influence of the personality characteristics of group members, especially in situations where group performance calls for personality variables beyond those possessed by the leader appears are key to leadership effectiveness.
Research design
The type of research that was used under this study was descriptive research. This study describes factors that affect the leadership effectiveness in public organization in North shoa zone.
Sources of data
In order to address adequately research questions primary data were collected from sampled respondents of the study. In addition the secondary data were collected from Zonal administration office reports and published and unpublished books and focus group discussion.
Sample size determination
According to the data obtained from North Shea zone Human Resource office the total population of leaders in selected workedas for the study area is 190. Therefore, the researchers decide to use census method and the distribution of the population details are presented on below
Since the number of population is small the researcher decided to use censes methods. Finally the sample size of the study is190 key respondents.
Method of data collection
Questionnaire and focus group discussion was the tools through which the data was collected from participants. Questionnaires were used mostly with close-ended and open-ended as the main instruments in assessing constraining factors. The questionnaire was distributed to the sampled respondents of the sectors.
In order to make the data collection more effectively and relevant to the objective of the study focus group discussion was conducted with the community leaders which can incorporates Religious leaders, community leaders, youths, females, disabled individuals and influential communities from each study area.
Background of respondents
The background of respondents includes gender, age, educational level, marital status, family size, work experience, and specialization of the respondents. These characteristics were analyzed using the descriptive method i.e., frequency table and percent (Table 1).
| Specialization of respondents | |||||
| Frequency | Percent | Valid Percent | Cumulative Percent | ||
| Valid | Management | 39 | 20.5 | 20.5 | 20.5 |
| Leadership | 36 | 18.9 | 18.9 | 39.5 | |
| Literature | 20 | 10.5 | 10.5 | 50.0 | |
| Economics | 36 | 18.9 | 18.9 | 68.9 | |
| Agriculture | 40 | 21.1 | 21.1 | 90.0 | |
| Teaching | 9 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 94.7 | |
| Accounting& Finance | 7 | 3.7 | 3.7 | 98.4 | |
| Health | 3 | 1.6 | 1.6 | 100.0 | |
| Total | 190 | 100.0 | 100.0 | ||
| Work experience of the respondents | |||||
| Frequency | Percent | Valid Percent | Cumulative Percent | ||
| Valid | 1 | 10 | 5.3 | 5.3 | 5.3 |
| 3 | 37 | 19.5 | 19.5 | 24.7 | |
| 5 | 34 | 17.9 | 17.9 | 42.6 | |
| 7 | 29 | 15.3 | 15.3 | 57.9 | |
| 9 | 32 | 16.8 | 16.8 | 74.7 | |
| >10 | 48 | 25.3 | 25.3 | 100.0 | |
| Total | 190 | 100.0 | 100.0 | ||
From the total of 190, (40) 21.1% of respondents have Agriculture specialization, (39) 20.5% respondents have a management specialization, (36) 18.9% respondents have a specialization of leadership, (36) 18.9% of respondents have a specialization of Economics, (20) 10.5% have literature, (9) 4.7% of respondents have a specialization of teaching, (7) 3.7% of respondents have accounting and finance specialization, the remaining (3) 1.6% of respondents have a specialization of health. This indicates that most of the respondents are Agricultural specialization holder.
As shown in the table above, regarding the work experience in year, from the total of 190 respondents (48) 25.3% respondents have greater than 10 years f experience in working, (37) 19.7% have working experience of 3 years, (34) 17.9% of respondents have 5 years of experiences, (32) 16.8% of respondents have working experiences 9 years, (29) 15.3% of them have 7 years of experience and the remaining of (10) 5.3% have experience of 1 year of working experience. In this discussion we can summarize that most of the respondents have morethan 10years of working experience (Table 2).
| The status of leadership effectiveness in your office | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frequency | Percent | Valid Percent | Cumulative Percent | ||
| Valid | Very good | 26 | 13.7 | 13.7 | 13.7 |
| Neutral | 30 | 15.8 | 15.8 | 29.5 | |
| Very poor | 38 | 20.0 | 20.0 | 49.5 | |
| Good | 60 | 31.6 | 31.6 | 81.1 | |
| Poor | 36 | 18.9 | 18.9 | 100.0 | |
| Total | 190 | 100.0 | 100.0 | ||
Based on Table 2 the status of leadership effectiveness in sampled study area is discuses as below. From the total respondents of 190, (60) 31.6% of respondents reply that the status of leadership is good which was followed with (38) 20% replied that the status is very poor, which needs improvement.
As of the discussion held with the community representatives and some group, the level of leadership effectiveness of the overall study area is average which needs improvement. In addition to this, the focus group discussion members articulates that the way of treating customers of their respective office is not advanced with the time or it is not situational. Therefore, we can conclude here the status of leadership effectiveness is still it needs modification.
What do you think the solutions to these problems to make effective leadership?
As stated on above the problems have been identified. The next step is how to improve those listed problems. In order to modify or to make effective leadership there are a lot of mechanism from that, firstly, if it is possible the concerned body is expected to train the candidates of leaders even though whatever their background.
Organizational leadership effectiveness needs every body’s effort that should be exerted for the successfulness of organization’s strategy. In the face accelerating turbulence and changes, business leaders and policy makers need new ways thinking to sustain performance and growth of their company. The leader’s most powerful tool in the motivation process iscommunication. Communication drives the action forward,keeping leader and follower and leader and organization alignedand focused on joint goals that are meaningful and worth achieving. Communication, by nature, is a two-way process; it ensuresthat leader and follower understand each other, and understanding is essential to building trust therefore leadership is the way to empower the followers rather than having every things by one hands. The study employeddescriptive statistics to assess the practice of the leadership effectiveness of the study area. Based on the descriptive statistics and focus group discussion the practice of leadership is not as expected and the following sections discussed about the final conclusion remarks of the study and applicable recommendations.
• The overall status of the leadership effectiveness is averagely good. Based on the results obtained from the community discussion the leadership practice of the study area needs improvements like respecting the community while they are coming to their office to have service, giving attention while they are with customers, respecting the time of government that means keeping working time, updating them with additional training and experience sharing.
Based on the analysis of factors affecting leadership effectiveness of selected woreda of North Shoa zone, Oromia Regional state, Ethiopia, the overall analysis shows that still there is additional efforts to fulfill the individuals, leaders, government and community for sustainable development of leadership effectiveness. Based on this the researcher has mentioned the below recommendations to be applicable by concerned body.
• The results show that, the status of leadership effectiveness is no as such expected that means it needs improvement.
• Beside this the status of leadership effectiveness there an issues which needs improvement specially the leaders awareness and experience on leading their office and the way they are delivering the service of the institutions for the customers.
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