OB FORMATIVE ASSIGNMENT

1.Issues facing Ralston From my point of view one of the basic issues facing the company is that Charyl lacks some fundamental leadership abilities she has to perform and is unable to lead and give sufficient support to the project team in order to accomplish the goals of the organisation. I decided to shine a light on the case study with the help of path-goal theory (House,1971) as it encompasses the relationship between executives and workers in their day-to-day relationship and functioning as well as being mainly a theory of task and person oriented supervisiory behaviour (House,1971,1996). What is the basic conception of the theory is that it mainly demonstrates that leaders should be effective, be occupied in behaviours that supplement and reinforce workers skills and abilities and in a manner that compensates for insufficiencies and is intermediary to worker satisfaction and individual and work unit performance (House J.1996). Leader behaviour is motivational and increases endeaveour. This behaviour makes satisfaction of worker’s needs dependant on effective performance and supplies the working atmosphere by providing permanent coaching,support,guidance and rewards to maintain effective performance. (House and Mitchell,1974) Yukl (1994a,p.290) also emphasized that the theory takes into consideration that if we reduce the role obscruity it will result in increased expectancies and that elucidating role may make it clear to employees that to achieve a successful performance and goal acquirement is more difficult than the employee initially expected. The level of leadership/guidance and direction is inversely proportional to the degree of the task definition. According to Wren (1994) the path-goal theory argues that a leader should either focus on task or relationship according to the requirements of the particular situation. Path-goal theory displays that it is the leaders responsibility and function to provide support and resources to accomplish a goal if workers lack such support and resources (House ,1996) which is more similar to the Katz & Kahn’s (1978) leadership definition,”the role of the leader is to provide the necessary incremental information,support and resources over and above those provided by the formal organisation or the subordiante’s environment,to ensure both worker satisfaction and effective performance” House and Mitchell(1974) defined four kinds of behaviour in more specific terms:
1)A Directive leader allows followers comprehend what is expected of them,orders to be done and provides particular guidance as to how to achieve tasks (Stephen P.Robbins;Timothy A.Judge;Timothy T.Campbell,2010)
2)The Supportive leader behaviour is aimed toward the satisfaction of workers demands and desires (House and Mıthcell,1974). Graen and Cahman(1975) noted that if leader acts like a supportive leader the quality of relationship between workers and superiors will increase but it will decrease the worker stress. With the burden of high level stress employees are unable to utilize their intelligence and heavily rely on experience. Consequently,intelligence becomes negatively related to performance(Fiedler and Garcia,1987)
3) A Participative leader behaviour as the name implies it seek advice with followers an make use of their recommendations before making a decision.(Stephen P.Robbins;Timothy A.Judge;Timothy T.Campbell,2010) It is the leader who invites workers to share and consult in the decision making. 4) Achievement oriented behaviour holds several features; such as setting challenging goal,looking for improvement,highlighting perfection in performance and displaying confidence that employees will fulfill high standards of performance as well as it is aimed at stimulating performance excellence (House and Mitchell,1974) The nature of the task and the workers’ needs will inform on the leadership style that the leader should