Question

What is the managerial grid? Contrast this approach to leadership with that of the Ohio State and Michigan grouips.

Answer 1

A managerial grid was proposed by Blake and Mouton which was based on the “concern for people” and “concern for production,” and at the same time it represents the Ohio State
dimensions of consideration and initiating structure or the Michigan dimensions of employee-oriented and production-oriented. In this grid, there are 9 different possible positions in every axis and thus it creates a total of 81 different compositions. This grid is quite useful in depicting the prevalent factors which can be observed in the thinking of a leader with reference to accomplishing the results.

The main focus of Ohio State researchers remains on finding out the independent factors associated with the behaviour of a leader. They developed two different categories in order to narrow down to thousands of factors initiating structure and consideration.

During the same time, the study was also conducted for University of Michigan for the leadership which was very much similar to the Ohio study and both were having similar objectives for the researchers. In this study, two main aspects of leadership behaviour were recognized which was employee orientation and production orientation. The main focus of employee-oriented leader remains on the interpersonal relationship and they take the keen interest in addressing the concerns of the manpower and identify the individual differences among the members. On the other hand, the main focus of production oriented managers remains on the technical or task factors related to a certain job and the team members are just a medium of obtaining this objective.