MT304 Unit 2 Leadership Definition Paper Example

Influence People Could Decline: An MT304 Unit 2 Leadership Definition Paper Applied to One Week at a Claims Office

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT304: Leading the 21st Century Organization

Unit 2 Leadership Definition Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The insurer, its staff and the three acts are composite; the definitions and studies cited are real.

The Stance

In this term's papers, leadership means influence that people could decline without penalty, aimed at a change both sides can name and shaped by the followers' purposes as well as the leader's. Whatever works only through position, through the power to assign, approve or evaluate, is management and will be judged as management. Neither is better than the other; they are different, and an organization needs both.

Sources

Rost (1991) defined leadership as an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes. He wrote against what he called the industrial paradigm, in which leadership was treated as good management performed at a higher level, so that anyone with a senior title was assumed to lead. Rost's alternative separates leadership from position entirely: a person with no title can lead, and a person with a large title can manage without leading at all.

Northouse (2021) treats leadership as a process of one person influencing others toward a goal they hold in common. That process view is broader. It does not require that followers could decline, and it allows influence that rests on position to count as leadership. My stance adds a condition the textbook leaves open: influence counts as leadership only if it would survive the follower's freedom to say no.

Why Draw the Line at Declining

The choice to make the follower's freedom to decline the dividing line is deliberate. In a claims office, almost every instruction comes with some authority behind it: a team lead assigns queues, a manager approves overtime, a director sets targets. If influence backed by that authority counts as leadership, then every manager leads simply by managing, and the word becomes a synonym for rank. Drawing the line at declining makes leadership something an observer can test for. It also matches the experience of the people being led. Appraisers at our office know the difference between doing something because the team lead assigned it and doing something because a colleague convinced them it was better. The second kind of change tends to last after the person who started it leaves, which is one practical reason to tell the two apart. It also keeps me honest about my own role, since as a desk appraiser I have no authority at all.

Three Tests

The stance produces three tests, numbered so later papers can cite them.

1. Could the act have been ignored at no cost? If refusing would bring a penalty, such as a poor review or a reassigned queue, the act works through position.

2. Is there a change both sides could describe? Leadership aims at a real change, not only at compliance with a rule.

3. Did the followers' purposes shape it? Leadership reflects mutual purposes; an act designed entirely by one side, however well meant, is direction.

An act must pass all three to count as leadership.

Three Acts From One Week

The acts below all happened in the claims office in the second week of September.

Act 1: Re-sorting the total-loss queue by claim age. The team lead changed the order in which total-loss claims are worked, from order received to oldest first. Test 1: no; appraisers must work the queue as sorted. Test 2: yes; fewer claims over thirty days. Test 3: no; appraisers were not consulted. Verdict: management, and good management. The change was right and needed authority.

Act 2: Persuading two senior adjusters to phone policyholders before valuation reports arrive. A desk appraiser with four years' tenure argued in the break room that a call explaining the valuation process reduced angry calls later. Two senior adjusters tried it and kept doing it. Test 1: yes; they could have refused and nothing would have happened. Test 2: yes; fewer escalated calls, which both sides could name. Test 3: yes; the adjusters' own wish for fewer hostile calls shaped how the idea was tried. Verdict: leadership.

Act 3: An all-staff email about owning the customer experience. The vice president of claims sent an email asking every employee to "own the customer experience." Test 1: technically yes, since nothing happens if staff ignore it. Test 2: no; no one could describe what change was intended. Test 3: no; it reflected a corporate theme, not staff purposes. Verdict: neither leadership nor management. It was a message.

The only act that passed all three tests came from someone with no authority to require it.

Critique

Alvesson and Sveningsson (2003) interviewed managers at a knowledge-intensive company and found that managers described their leadership in terms of vision and strategy, but when pressed for examples described mostly listening, chatting and informal contact. They suggested that leadership may partly disappear when examined closely, dissolving into ordinary management and conversation. That is the strongest critique of my stance: if leadership is so hard to locate, perhaps defining it narrowly only makes it rarer, not clearer.

My answer is that the narrow definition is useful precisely because it makes leadership rare. If every managerial act counts as leadership, the word adds nothing. The tests let me find the few acts, like the break-room argument, that changed what people chose to do. Alvesson and Sveningsson's managers may have been leading in the listening and chatting they downplayed, if that contact shaped what staff chose to do.

What the Stance Commits Me To

1. In later units, I will judge managers by the standards of management, efficiency, fairness and clarity, and will not fault them for not leading when management was what the situation needed.

2. I will look for leadership among people without titles, not only among executives.

3. When I propose leadership responses in later papers, I will describe influence people could decline, not new rules.

4. Messages like Act 3 will be treated as neither, unless they produce a change someone can name.

Conclusion

Drawing on Rost, the paper defines leadership as influence people could decline, aimed at a change both sides can name and shaped by mutual purposes. Three tests separate it from management. Applied to one week at a claims office, they found management in a queue change, leadership in a persuaded pilot and neither in an all-staff email. The narrow definition is defended against Alvesson and Sveningsson's critique because it makes leadership visible where it occurs.

References

Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2003). The great disappearing act: Difficulties in doing "leadership." The Leadership Quarterly, 14(3), 359-381. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(03)00031-6

Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE.

Rost, J. C. (1991). Leadership for the twenty-first century. Praeger.