Followership

According to Mary Parker, “of the most importance, but which has been far too little considered, and that’s the part followers…” (1949, p.41)

In 1992, Kelly’s Model was developed by Kelly on how followers must be engaged and developed. Further in 1998, Hayes stated that “followers are important to be motivated since they are the organization assets...” (Hayes 1998).

There are many more researcher undertake studies on the importance of follower and followership such as; Bain (1982), Hersey and Blanchard (1982) & (1984), Hensen (1987),Alcom (1992), Strebel (1996), Citrin (2002), Lawrence and Nohria (2002),William and Miller (2002), Cross and Parker (2003), Blackshear (2003), Hower and Shamir (2005) and Robbins (2005).

The management and organization has been dominated towards leaderships, leadership characteristics; which romanticized larger role as a result (Meindi 1987). Many attentions are on leaderships while the importance of followership was rarely discussed. Ironically, the effectiveness of a leader is to a great extent dependent on the willingness and consent of the followers. Without followers there will be no leaders indeed (Hansen 1987).

Figure 1: Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Quadrants

(Source: Robbins, 2005)

It is then an ideal leadership model was developed by Hans & Blanchard in 1982 (please refer to figure 1) and then the popular Kelly’s Model in 1992 as in figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Kelley’s different type of followers

(Source: Elizabeth C. Thach, 2006)

However with Robbins research in 2005, explaining the motivational factor and how to manage the organization while taking critical measures on stress, conflict management within followers, a new followership model developed; “The Integrated Model of Followership.” It is an integration of Kelly’s Followership Model and Blanchard leadership Model; which is to be used as the most effective followership style or model to be followed by followers.

Figure 3: Integrated Model of followership and leadership styles

(Source: Elizabeth C. Thach,. etl. 2006)

For reasons above, it is important the organizational leaders NOT to neglect the followers and the followers need to be train, explain and educate how to engage into “followership”

Behaviors within the followers need to be developed for optimum matching to the styles s as in figure 3. This only could be done by training and educating the followers. The impact or outcome is the organization able to achieve its business objectives.

Questions:

1. Followership has becoming an important issues in strategic management and strategic implementation. Describe how could you integrate leadership values and followerships values to ensure your strategic implementation being executed effectively in your own organization.

2. Select a case from your own organization that you are currently attached to, define what are the issues, problems faced. Strategically provide a proposal on how you are going to resolve the issues.

3. Select a company financial statement. Analyse and explain what are the problem faced by the organization. Describe and explain on how you will solve the problems that the organizations is facing.

Words: 2,500 - 3,000 words
Font: 12 - Calibri
Chart and graphs are required - compulsory.
Space: 1.5
Reference: compulsory