Leadership and Management

Managing means responding to the needs of the organization; leadership means responding to the needs of subordinates (Plachy 2009:53). Although leadership and management may overlap, they are still two distinct functions of organizational behavior and must be recognized as such. Leaders provide vision and intrinsic motivation while managers are responsible for the technical oversight and details needed for meaningful change. To add to the confusion, leadership is often portrayed as something more positive that management, which may be denigrated as a purely technical, negative exercise of control. Ideally, managing begins with leadership and a vision but "when leaders continue after stating a vision to manage the accomplishment of the promise, they enter a new role that may require decisions not perfectly consistent with the vision and values promised" (Plachy 2009: 54).

One problem with leadership positions, however, is that the nature of the ways in which leadership...
[ View Full Essay]