Экономические науки/5.Управление трудовыми ресурсами

Zelenova A.S., PhD Merkulova N.V.

Voronezh State Technical University, Russian Federation

Up-to-date Theories of Leading in Management

Modern world with its extremely large economic platform is continuing to progress very fast. The sphere of business becomes closer and closer to everyone from the greatest international companies to ordinary people who are searching for a job. That is why studying of management is under special attention.
Management in common meaning is the set of methods, forms and production management tools, which is used for maximizing productivity. One of the main problems of management is exploring of its fundamental function, such as the leading function of management. 
Management as an independent science has been found in XX. It was due to the development of a social market economy.
The founder of the science of social management is considered to be an American engineer and researcher F. Taylor (1856-1915) [1]. The system of organization of labor and management relations created by him has caused an «organizational revolution» in the field of production and management.
As any science, management had been to be studied, classified and detailed. 
Henri Fayol (1841-1925) allocated six functions of management: forecasting, planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling [2].
The function of leading was recognized equally important.
Leading is one of the general functions of management, which represents an opportunity to influence people, coordinate activities of a group by the leader’s own authority. 
The phenomenon of leadership is one the most studied problem of political psychology.
Throw the development of management there have been elaborated some theories of what the leading is and how it had appeared. 
The traits theory: this theory was founded by an English psychologist and anthropologist Francis Galton. 
Sir Francis Galton was an English Victorian statistician, progressive, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician [3]. 
He published over 340 papers and books. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean.
The theory of traits presumes that some people inherit special qualities which make them more suitable for being leaders. This theory usually determines characteristics commonly appropriate for a chief. Nevertheless, the theory has a certain contradiction: why does not every person have such special features to become a leader? This question presents the main difficulty in explanation.
The situation theory: this point of view is mostly connected with particular accidents when some people manage to show their abilities to lead somehow.
The founder of this theory is considered to be Fred Fiedler [4].
Fred Edward Fiedler was one of the leading researchers in industrial and organizational psychology of the 20-th century. He investigated shape psychology and was a leading psychologist.
The behavioral theory: this one is based on conviction that people are not born as leaders, but can become them. This leading theory represents the actions of leaders, not their mental qualities or internal states. According to the theory, everyone can learn how to be a leader.
A significant contribution to the development of this theory made the American psychologist Ralph Melvin Stogdill [5]. He had been one of the main world specialists in researching of leadership for 30 years. He is an author of more than 50 researching articles, which were based on original data, 16 books and monographs and a huge amount of chapters in collections.
The attributive theory: this theory focuses attention on the networks of power and influence which a leader creates. The basis of this theory is that the leader governs the followers, but the behavior of the leader is determined by the followers’ expectations.
This direction was firstly showed by American scientists C. Manz and H. Sims [6], and the others in 60-70s of XX-th century. 
In modern management the following functions are distinguished:
1. The strategic function: acting as an initiator and conductor of ideas, a leader in the majority of cases is a source of values and norms that create the group world view, which as a whole reflects the ideology of the society to which the group of people belongs. One of the most important strategic functions of leadership is to establish the objectives and main lines of group behavior.
2. The administrating function: the essence of administrating is not the independent performance of work, but prescribing it to other members of the group, the ability to shift some of the responsibility and authority to others. This is the art of coordination activities of the collective of people as a whole. A particularly important factor is the system of rewards and punishments, which the leader uses to control the activity of the group members.
3. The representative function includes many aspects. First of all, the leader of it is an official spokesman of the group in their external environment; he/she identifies all group members, their collective intelligence. Secondly, the leader is seen as a symbol of the team.
4. The role function: social role is a model of behavior given by the social position of the individual within the system of social relations. In includes role expectations (what is expected of a given role) and role behavior (what the person actually performs as a part of its role). Being a leader means that this is the most authoritative person who really plays a central role in the organization and can regulate the relations in the collective of people in a whole and between its individual members.
But in either event, leader is a person who is trusted by the others and he/she should try to save the trust of the group members. Moreover, he/she often determines the future of the company. 
It should be noted that the function of leading in management is always connected with a huge amount of responsibility. 
Nowadays studying of management and especially its leading function is continuing to be developed. Business processes are becoming much deeper than they were before, that is why individual segments of management including human resource management and leading conception should be learned carefully. 
 
References:
 
1. F. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911.
2. Henri Fayol, Industrial and General Administration, 1930.
3. Sir Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences, 1869/1892/1962; Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1883/1907/1973.
4. Fred Fiedler, A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
5. Ralph Melvin Stogdill, Handbook of Leadership, 1974.
6. C. Manz, H. Sims, Superleadership: Leading Others to Lead Themselves. Berkley Trade, 1990.