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participative management
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participative management 112 Silver Prayaas Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomenon on earth. Burns (1978) remarks. The problem arises not only in understanding the operation of the theory but even in its definition Leadership is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon to which organizational and psychological research has been applied. A macro-level comparison of business organizations in India vis-a vis those of successful countries like Japan, America, Germany, France and Korea provide certain interesting information. Physical and human resource-wise comparison indicates that there may not be yawning gaps between Indian organizations and the organization of the countries cited above. While these countries have developed management styles in consonance with their cultural ethos, Leadership in organizations : An Indian perspective S W DESHPANDE A number of theories and models have been proposed of leadership in organisations by western theorists. These theories have worked well in those countries since they have been developed keeping in view, the cultural context. These models may be good there but they prove to be some what inadequate in the Indian cultural context. Indian organisations cannot forget that their leadership models come from their socio culture. Indian cultural is so accommodative that it welcomes noble thought coming from all over the world. The author has developed a leadership model which would befit Indian organisations. The model ‘EAST MEETS WEST’ could satisfy the needs of the Indian corporate world. Indian management experts had no choice but to depend on western perspectives because of the absence of a local database and theoretical framework. Leadership theory began as a one dimensional, internal and individualistic process in which only a leader ’s personality traits or behaviors were considered. Situational elements, external to the leader-member dyad were subsequently added to the leadership equations as well as an acknowledgement of group processes. An important new growth stage was reached in the contingency era as leadership theory evolved from unidimensional to the multidimensional arena. Here the interaction of the leader, subordinates and the situation all became important in explaining leadership. Leadership theory was further advanced when the focus changed from leadership being primarily a top-down process to much more of a bottom-up process. Situational and non- leadership factors were considered again but this time from an integrative perspective. The culture era built on the situational factors, which extended the scope of leadership from group interactions to the interactions of the entire organization, affected by the persons involved, their situations and their influences on each other. King (1990) has summarized the major leadership eras and periods, which are presented in Table 1. PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory trial version http://www.pdffactory.com March 2003 113 Table 1: Evolutionary Stages of Leadership Theory Personality Era Transactional Era - Great Man Period - Exchange period - Trait Period - Role Development Period Influence Era Anti-Leadership Era - Power Relation Period - Ambiguity Period - Persuasion Period - Substitute Period Behavior Era Culture Era -Early Behavior Period - Transformation Era -Late Behavior Period - Charisma Period -Operant Period - Self- fulfilling Contingency Era In India the studies on leadership began in the mid 50s. There are two definite trends in the studies, the first one are the studies done by Indian researchers following the western models, ignoring the Indian cultural characteristics and the second are the studies conducted by the American organizational behavioral scientists visiting management institutes in India in the 60s and opined on the basis of a limited data. Both the types of studies have their limitations in the sense that they have presented a lopsided view of leadership of the Indian organizations. In the first type, we may include the study by Ganguly (1977) who has surveyed a large number of managers from a variety of organizations and concluded that that there was an interactive effect of the leadership styles and the organizational climate. Leaders tended to use the benevolent autocratic style but shifted to the consultative style in organizations, which have a participative work climate. Prior to this, Pendse (1965) had done his doctoral work on consultative style of leadership and suggested that this worked very effectively with the rural folk. The second type of studies projected authoritarian features on Indians. Mead has opined that Indian subordinates need authoritarian leaders. Empirical studies (Hofstede, 1976, 1988) comparing values across a number of countries have clearly indicated the existing cultural differences. Hofstede observed that Americans score high on recognition and achievement and low on conformity, whereas Asians scored high on conformity and orderliness but low on independence Sinha (1973) has questioned the validity of the assumption that Indians are authoritarian in the sense defined by Adorno et al (1950). One of the typical Indian cultural characteristics is tolerance, which does not go with the authoritarian personality.
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