"WHERE KNOWLEDGE IS WEALTH"

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

“Which is the Power Predominant for Leadership Effectiveness – Expert, Referent, or Personal?” - Professor M.S.Rao

"Charisma is the result of effective leadership, not the other way around." - Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus


Leadership Effectiveness

Leadership effectiveness is confluence of several competencies and capabilities. However, the current article addresses it from three types of powers such as expert power, personal power and referent power.

According to business directory, referent power means ‘Influence over others, acquired from being well liked or respected by them’ and personal power means, ‘Influence over others, the source of which resides in the person instead of being vested by the position he or she holds’. In addition, expert power means, ‘ability to influence someone regarding a course of action because of specific knowledge, experience, or expertise. A person may be given the power to make decisions for others because he is an expert on the particular subject.’

For leadership effectiveness all the three powers are required for leaders. But the moot point here is which is the predominant power for leadership effectiveness. Any effectiveness starts with domain competence. That means leaders must be good at their tasks to command respect from their followers. Succinctly, they must be good at hard skills. Secondly, personal power does help to greater extent in enhancing leadership effectiveness. That means leadership without title in the words of Robin Sharma. Several definitions of leadership clearly say that leadership is not a designation, nor a title. Leadership is by example. Thirdly, leaders must have referent power of being liked to get the tasks executed efficiently and effectively. To conclude, leaders must blend all the three powers judiciously for enhancing leadership effectiveness as per the situation.


Professor M.S.Rao
Founder and Chief Consultant,
MSR Leadership Consultant, India
Blog: http://profmsr.blogspot.com
Where Knowledge is Wealth
Email: profmsr7@gmail.com

3 comments:

Maddali Laxmi Swetha said...
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Maddali Laxmi Swetha said...
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Eileen McDargh, Pres.McDargh Communications said...

Of great value for leadership effectiveness is an understanding of the different kinds of leadership styles. May I recommend your new book,SPOT YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE. Prof.Rao has distilled over 50 years of leadership theory and models into 28 fascinating "brands". Such useful categories allow the reader make sense of a disparity of styles. The book's value is in identifying both the strengths and weakness of the 28 brands while realizing that one might have a blend of a number of brands. The critical question for the reader: what blends suit the context of the enterprise and what resonates as authentic to the leader.