Question

Explain the Hersey Blanchard Situational Leadership Model. Explain each of the different components, including each leadership styles and follower readiness. Use an example in your description.  

Answer 1

Managers and CEOs search for the best leadership style and model, while research and data show that there may be no single leadership strategy that may fit all kinds of scenarios and situations. Therefore, the successful leaders may adapt to the situations and respond to the unique scenarios through modulating their behaviors and practices and by analyzing other elements of the scenario.

The Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard “Situational Leadership” model explores the amount of social-emotional support or “relationship behavior”, and the direction or “task behavior” a leader on manager should provide in response to a given situation. The model is also based on evaluating the amount of readiness of the followers. A correlation between these two aspects that may be unique for given situations may help in finding out the right leadership style and pathways for the managers.

Task Behavior or Relationship Behavior

While some managers can be viewed to be more authoritarian, others can be seen as more participative. In the same way, managers can be seen as more production-oriented or more employee-oriented. The scale can accommodate different managers that can value different aspects to varying degrees. When a manager or leader engages in one-way communication and restricts himself to explaining the task to the followers, he/she is displaying “task behavior”. Relationship behavior involves two-way communication between the leader and the follower and may also include social-emotional support, facilitating behavior, and certain motivations and reinforcements that can be called psychological strokes. The relationship behavior can be classified as:

a. High-Relationship, Low-Task Behavior
b. High-Task, High-Relationship Behavior
c. Low-Relationship, Low-Task Behavior
d. High-Task, Low-Relationship

Level of Readiness of the Followers

The level of readiness of a follower also has special importance in the situational leadership style. The level of readiness here is the willingness and ability of an employee to take responsibility for directing his/her behavior and actions. However, the variable has to be seen in terms of the particular task that is to be performed. People may be able to guide themselves to varying degrees for various kinds of jobs due to their own experiences, skills, expertise, or other factors. The total level of readiness is therefore never absolute or taken in a total sense. For instance, a sales representative may be more ready to direct his actions for making a sales pitch, a sales presentation, and/or sales calls, but would at be a low readiness level when it comes to writing advertising messages. Therefore, the manager would provide more direction to the representative for writing the advertisement messages, and less for making the sales calls.

In due course of time when the employee gains more expertise in new areas that he has not been adequately exposed to before, the manager would reduce the intensity of his task behavior and will indulge in relationship behavior more. At even more later stages, both task behavior and relationship behavior are reduced by the manager and the employer now is confident and committed himself enough to chase the goal and to direct himself accurately. At later stages the employee does not require much reinforcement and motivation, he can generate these psychological strokes by himself. With an increase in trust, a delegation of responsibilities and power increases. Therefore, the situational leadership model correlates the effectiveness of leadership style with the level of readiness of the follower.

A manager or leader can choose the right leadership style by knowing the readiness level of the follower for the given task that is being accomplished. As we can see, when a manager or leader is displaying low relationship behavior, it does not mean that the leadership is unfriendly. It just means that at that level of guidance the particular behavior is more appropriate and productive. With regard to the Hershey-Blanchard situational leadership model, the leadership styles of situational leadership may include:

a. Telling style- the leader provides explicit and clear directions and also carries out close supervision in low-relationship high-task style leadership. The maturity level of followers may be the least here.

b. Selling style- the leader will attempt to sell and forward his ideas to the employee group and will be highly persuasive in explaining his direction. It is a high-relationship high-task style of leadership where the followers may have the ability for doing the job but may be unwilling to so.
c. Participating style- this is a high-relationship low-task style of leadership with an emphasis on sharing the decisions and ideas. Followers here are not experienced or confident to pursue the direction.

d. Delegating style- the style is used with the high maturity followers and is a low-relationship low-task leadership style. The group here is mature and will take responsibility for the decisions.