The Link Between Leadership and Organizational Behavior

The importance of leaders is impossible to overestimate, as they help the organization to survive. What is more, they help turn failures to the organization's advantage at hard times. This article discusses the importance of leadership and its impact on organizational behavior. Before getting down to the topic, let's clear up what leadership, management, and organizational behavior are.

Organizational Behavior (OB) is a field of study which looks at how the individuals, groups, and structure affect the behavior in an organization. As a rule, it is applicable to the behavior of people in all types of organization including business, state service, and services organizations. Organizational Behavior is an applied field. It uses the knowledge about individuals and the influence of structure on behavior to enable organizations to work more efficiently. OB includes such aspects as motivation, leadership skills, interpersonal skills, groups’ structure and process, learning, attitude, development and perception, change process, conflict, job design, and work stress.

Whereas leadership and management go hand in hand in practice, in theory, there is a world of difference between these two concepts. The main feature of leadership is dealing with stress. It is something that enables a leader to impact a group in order to achieve set goals. Leaders define the direction by designing the vision of the future; afterward, they align people imparting this vision and giving them inspiration to surmount all the hassles. On the flipside, management is all about the functional process of attaining goals of a particular organization by means of other people's assistance. The main task of management is to deal with complexity. It helps the organization to work consistently by mapping out formal plans, creating organizational structures, and analyzing the results against the plans. A manager is a professional who is responsible for attaining the goals which were assigned to them as a part of general plans of the organization. For organizations, both leadership and sound management are of utmost importance to achieve efficiency. Whereas a powerful leader can steer the organization in the right direction, it still requires a well-organized individual who would ensure that the organization is moving in this direction.

As a rule, efficient leaders not only take care of the task but also attempt to find individual an approach to each worker. Since employees, their efficiency and organizational performance are linked, the leaders should strive to maintain a friendly work environment to magnify and improve employees’ efforts to attain organizational efficiency.

High performance leadership teams know that their behavior and the behavior of their team can have a positive or negative effect on the entire organization. And because most employees tend to decide what is important and how to behave basing on the leader's behavior and attitude, disagreeable behavior at the top may have a detrimental effect on the behavior of a team and as a result, hindering organizational performance and productivity.

Conclusion

Both behavior and leadership affect how the organization will work and what it will achieve. There are two options: either the behavior will set the direction in which leadership will function, or leadership will change the organizational behavior to make it correspond to the organizational values.