NCJ Number
143254
Journal
Houston Police Department Leadership Journal Dated: (October-December 1992) Pages: 47-63
Date Published
1992
Length
17 pages
Annotation
Business has evolved a new breed of employees called managers and established a power ethic that favors collective over individual leadership; as a result, managerial leadership, while ensuring the competence, control, and balance among groups with the potential for rivalry, does not ensure imagination, creativity or ethical behavior.
Abstract
The development of the managerial collective hedges the risks inherent in concentrating power in the hands of an individual leader. However, the managerial ethic has also fostered a bureaucratic culture in business, which often fails to serve its best interests. A managerial culture emphasizes rationality and control, and looks at leadership from a practical perspective. The efficient manager adopts impersonal attitudes toward goals, which themselves are deeply embedded in the organization's history and culture. Leaders, on the other hand, are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas and adopting a personal attitude toward goals. Managers view work as an enabling process involving a combination of people and ideas interacting to establish strategies and make decisions, while leaders work from high-risk positions and indeed are disposed to seek out risk and danger when opportunity beckons. The need to seek out others with whom to collaborate is a strong characteristic of managers; leaders perform best in environments where individuality is stressed. Peer training, common in many businesses, perpetuates the managerial orientation; businesses can best develop leaders through one- on-one relationships between senior and junior executives, where there is a formal and recognized difference in the power of the players and opportunity for emotional interchange. 8 notes