All teams at one time or another will have deficiencies. Leaders must patrol the
ID: 344447 • Letter: A
Question
All teams at one time or another will have deficiencies. Leaders must patrol these deficiencies and be the first to take the needed corrective action. How the leader responds to discrepancies is an indicator of trust and respect among the entire team. The multiple-linkage model lists behaviors a leader can take to improve a deficiency in the six mediating variables (task commitment, ability and role clarity, organization of work, cooperation and mutual trust, resources and support, and external coordination).Choose one variable, and write a brief essay explaining how the leader can improve the deficiency.
Explanation / Answer
Managerial behaviour and intervening variables are not independent of each other but interact in various permuation and combination. The multiple linkage model focuses on these interacting efforts of managerial behaviour and intervening variables. The effectiveness of a group or organisational subunit depends on the net effect from the interaction of these intervening variables.
Ability and role clarity is one of the intervening variables in the multiple linkage model. In simple words, it is the extent to which the group members know what to do, their responsibilities and how to do it (i.e the skills or ability).It goes without saying that ability of individual group members is a deciding factor that influences the performance of the group. Ability means possessing a skill to do something. It may be a skill on how to lift some heavy equipment (manual labor) or it may be a skill to write a computer program to get something done (non manual labor). Different skiils take different time to be mastered. Groups usually invest a substantial amount of time after hiring to make the members 'able' to perform the tasks that the group is mandated to. High exposure tasks like aircraft maintenance and medical treatment of a patient where costs involved for mistakes are very high require members to have a lot of ability.
Role in a group is a function assumed by a group member in a particular situation. The situation is a professional workplace situation in the case of an organisation. Clarity about the tasks that a member is responsible for along with the costs (if he does a mistake) and benefits (if he does his tasks well) plays a very important role in influencing the performance of a group. Role clarity is not just about matching the ability of an individual's ability to the tasks involved in project, it also means how the different roles are organized and how they interact with each other to achieve a higher level goal. Performance of a group will suffer if members are given tasks for which their skills are irrelevant.