Management vs. Leadership: What's the Difference? - Essay Sample

Introduction

Management and leadership are two concepts that seem similar, but the elements and factors involved ensure differences exist between them. On one hand, management is the process of controlling, directing or organizing resources to realize organizational or team or business goals (Riaz, 2016). Conversely, leadership is the concept that entails encouraging and motivating people within a group to increase or maintain their productivity to achieve common goals and objectives (Gordon, n.d.). In essence, managers are individuals who are mandated to lead. However, in many cases, most of them fail due to ineffective leadership skills. As such, analyzing the distinction between leadership and management is important to the understanding of the underlying principles of managing and leading in an organizational context that can help managers improve their performance. With that in mind, this essay explores the concepts of management and leadership to clarify the differences and connection between them and understand how they apply to the management practice.

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The Concept of Management

As stated above, management simply entails the act of administering a business. Some of the activities involved under management include setting the strategic direction, directing resource utilization, organizing the workforce, and coordinating the efforts of various departments to guarantee the actualization of organizational objectives (Morden, 2017). One of the critical aspects that managers need to put into consideration is how to manage the utilization of financial, human and technological resources to derive the expected benefit and progress. In this regard, management is a term that can be used to denote the people who manage the organization from an individual level. Typically, is encompasses the people, as well as the task of occupying the top-most decision making position.

Type of managers

In some organizations, managers are categorized into three distinct levels namely senior, middle-level and lower managers. Longenecker and Insch (2018) stipulated that senior managers are those who occupy positions in the board of directors, and whose roles are to determine strategic goals and make key decisions on how the company or business will operate. Such managers are regarded as professional level executives who provide direction. The middle-level managers, on the other hand, include branch, department and regional heads, whose main purpose is to act as sources of direction to frontline directors and supervisors by communicating strategic goals from senior managers.

The third type, lower managers, encompass team leaders and supervisors who act as overseers to the regular employees (Longenecker & Insch, 2018). Their responsibility involves providing direction to workers and other staff members in the organization. Smaller businesses and companies have individual managers with a wider scope. It is important to note that in such small businesses, a single manager can assume a wide range of responsibilities, including all the ones discussed above. Markedly, the type of manager is determined by the organizational structure or size.

Nature of Work for Managers

Typically, managers serve the primary function of guaranteeing the satisfaction of stakeholders, especially in profit-making organizations (Longenecker & Insch, 2018). This is the main reason why managers need to have effective leadership skills since striving for profitability cannot be the role of an individual or department. In most cases, managers who lack appropriate leadership skills fail in ensuring sustainable profitability for their business. Managers are expected to ensure financial benefits to shareholders while maintaining value for customers and guaranteeing employment opportunities for employees. This scenario depicts how leadership and management are both necessary for organizational success. Similarly, non-profit organizations expect their managers to sustain the faith of donors, a situation that also portrays management as an essential part of any organization regardless of the profitability aspect.

The Concept of Leadership

Leadership is a wide concept that involves both a practical skill and an area of research. Nonetheless, this paper focuses on the practical aspect. In this aspect, leadership is an ability to influence other people socially to accomplish specific tasks (Storey, 2016). Understanding this ability requires an exploration of various leadership theories that are founded on elements such as attributes of a leader, function, values, behavior, situation and power among others.

Leadership Theories

Many theories of leadership seek to explain how leaders can be categorized according to their traits, behavior or situation. For example, the trait theory suggests that the effectiveness of a leader is determined by their individual qualities and characteristics (Storey, 2016). Conversely, the behavioral theory suggests that successful leaders require a strong personality, self-esteem and confidence to enhance their effectiveness. In this regard, it can be stated that a manager is any person who occupies a top decision making position. However, without the above attributes, it becomes difficult for them to implement the decisions they make, or to motivate employees to increase their productivity towards achieving the corporate goals. Earlier, with management being described as an activity, the conceptualization of leadership as an attribute by the behavioral theory further demonstrates the difference between these two concepts.

Another theory that provides additional insight into leadership is situational/contingent model. Storey (2016) elucidated that this model highlights the quality of a leader in modifying their leadership style to suit varying contexts since different scenarios call for different decisions and approaches to executing decisions. For instance, each context may have unique group needs, which prompt the leader to ascertain and address them to enhance cohesiveness within the teams. Based on this example, it is safe to argue that a manager may fail to become an effective leader is they do not promote cohesiveness within his team. Furthermore, if the manager cannot resolve conflicts and find a lasting solution to a problem that may hinder organizational success, then he is deemed to have failed as a leader. In addition to the above theories, the transformational, leader-member exchange and transactional theories describe further how leaders are expected to execute the role and responsibilities attached to their mandates.

Why Some Managers Fail in Their Responsibility of Providing Effective Leadership

The above discussions on the concepts of leadership and management explain the distinction between them, whereby management is focused on the control of an entity to achieve common objectives, whereas leadership is more inclined towards the ability of an individual to influence and motivate others to contribute positively towards organizational, team or business success. The statement that some managers fail in terms of effective leadership is true since some managers can have people who work for them, but not necessarily follow them. For an organization or business to be successful, they must have strong managers with strong leadership qualities, which may not always be the case.

A person can occupy a top decision-making position, earning the title of manager, but they may be ineffective in getting people to believe in the organizational vision. In such a case, the managers may fulfill their managerial obligations of administering and coordinating the day-to-day activities but fail in guiding and spurring success among their subordinates.

Such insight into the two concepts leads to the inference that leadership revolves around motivating employees or team members to perform exemplary, while management is concerned with planning. A manager's primary role is to maintain processes and find faults that need to be addressed. In as much as the manager may fulfill this task, he needs leadership skills in driving the workers, praising success, appreciating the contribution of others, and leading by example. For that reason, both leadership and management abilities are vital for organizational prosperity and managers must, thus, utilize them in administering their entities. These two elements are essentially inseparable and any organization that disregards one of them is likely to encounter problems.

Conclusion

This essay has explored the concepts of management and leadership to clarify the differences and connection between and understand how they apply to the management practice. The discussion underscores management as an activity that involves planning and supervising the execution of various organizational tasks, while leadership is the ability to motivate and inspire productivity, cooperation and teamwork among employees. Management may be required in the senior, middle-level or lower organizational levels. Nonetheless, leadership is equally significant in these levels. The situational and functional theories describe the ability of a leader to adapt to different corporate situations, which all require him to be able to guide the subordinates. Therefore, a leader is tasked with ensuring all stakeholders are pulling in the same direction. This evaluation shows that a manager will fail as a leader if his employees lack cooperation, cohesiveness or do not believe in the company's vision. Therefore, further research can focus on how managers should optimize different leadership skills to suit different organizational situations without diverting from the main corporate objectives.

References

Gordon, M. (n.d.). Leadership: A guide to developing enlightened leadership. Roffey Park. Retrieved from https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/Leadership%20Guide%20(Roffey%20Park).pdf

Longenecker, C., & Insch, G. S. (2018). Senior leaders' strategic role in leadership development. Strategic HR Review, 17(3), 143-149. Retrieved from https://e-tarjome.com/storage/panel/fileuploads/2019-05-05/1557052986_E11047-e-tarjome.pdf

Morden, T. (2017). Principles of management. Routledge. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315246079

Riaz, N. M. (2016). Define management and explain the functions of management with suitable examples from your area of work? Research Gate. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307931813_Define_management_and_explain_the_functions_of_management_with_suitable_examples_from_your_area_of_work

Storey, J. (2016). Changing theories of leadership and leadership development. In Leadership in Organizations (pp. 17-41). Routledge. Retrieved from https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:vkSEJyncI4sJ:scholar.google.com/+Storey,+J.+(2016).+Changing+theories+of+leadership+and+leadership+development.+In+Leadership+in+Organizations.+Routledge.&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5