High Performance Management - Chapter Two - Literature Conclusion - Part 5

2.5 Literature Conclusion
As summarised in Table 2.3 on the previous page, the trend established brings one to the conclusion that the differences in approach are; (1) leaders create change to ensure tomorrow’s business whilst (2) managers create stability to ensure today’s business. This definition of the literature conclusion only takes into consideration the dominant underlying suggestion, but is not completely inclusive of all aspects of leadership and management traits. As noted in the literature, one is suggesting that the authors are not saying that managers only focus on today’s business whilst leaders only focus on tomorrow’s. However, the terms used to describe these differences in approach strongly suggest such a view in one’s interpretation. Terms such as create change; new ways of doing things and communicate vision are used to describe leaders while terms such as control, best practise, put vision into action and create stability are used to describe managers; prompting this thought into one’s mind. For this reason, the following sets of behaviours have been identified as they are consistently suggested throughout the literature;

(1) create a vision to aspire towards;
(2) include others in decision etcetera;
(3) inspire others to follow;
(4) provide direction and an action plan to reach the vision;
(5) provide processes and update skills to meet vision;
(6) monitor and measure performance.

Therefore, one can conclude based on the literature review that a leader-manager would be a combination of the two individual traits. Again as noted in Table 2.3, statements such as “transition from management to leadership” (Ozeroff et al 2003, p.3), “leaders will have been managers at some stage” (Knight 2005, p.36) and “leadership doesn’t mean that you can skimp from your managerial skills” (Diamond 2007, p.66) strongly suggest that it is possible for an individual to be a leader-manager; a point previously made by Turk (2007). In addition Mintzberg’s (1990) conclusion that leadership is a function of “management” would then also hold true. However as already established throughout this document, there is no conclusive evidence to support the view that leader-managers would yield better results such as more satisfied and inspired subordinates than pure managers or pure leaders. Therefore to contribute to the study of management, one aims to provide some evidence to support or refute this view by carrying out an application to determine the outcome.