The magazine for alumni and friends of the UB School of Management
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���Building strong, positive leader/follower relationships leads to better outcomes for everyone.��� Robyn Brouer Assistant Professor Part of the reason for the shift from a hierarchical leadership model to a more informal one is because of changes in the population and structure of work over the last generation and the complex globalized environment in which leaders find themselves, Brouer says. Even formal hierarchical leaders should realize that they can no longer rely on legitimate power alone, she says. ���To truly succeed, leaders should build positive relationships with their followers, based on leader and follower needs.��� The Social Network ���When a formal leader has informal strengths, the team thrives.��� Prasad Balkundi Associate Professor 10 Buffalo Business Spring 2013 Prasad Balkundi, associate professor, has published research exploring how informal connections between and among leaders and followers can help leaders be successful. ���The traditional view of leadership was about what a leader does,��� Balkundi says. ���But that ignores the social fabric that the leader is part of, with subordinates, supervisors and people outside the leader���s own work group. ���There are people on work teams who have extraordinary influence who are not formal leaders,��� he says. ���When a formal leader has informal strengths, the team thrives.��� Through his research, Balkundi has found that even qualities considered innate in strong leaders, such as charisma, can be learned through the person���s social abilities. ���Charismatic leaders are typically depicted as extraordinary individuals capable of inspiring their subordinates,��� Balkundi says. ���However, research has shown that it is often the team members themselves who attribute charisma to their leaders through their informal interactions with them.��� Balkundi found that team leaders can develop socially relevant aspects of their personalities through frequent interaction with their subordinates, such as the giving and receiving of advice. The leader���s will- ingness to have social interaction with team members leads to positive experiences for the team, which, in turn, leads team members to see the leader as charismatic. So, in certain ways, leaders��� charisma is linked to their willingness to humble themselves and interact with their followers, a view that is supported by the research of Bradley Owens, assistant professor. The Importance of Humility In a study of leaders across a variety of industries, Owens found that humility is a key factor in being successful, and that the essence of leader humility involves serving as a model for how followers can grow their own skills. ���Followers view leaders who show humility as having a unique type of courage���being willing to risk the potential social reprisal of admitting limitations to legitimize others��� development. Leaders who can overcome their fears and broadcast their feelings as they work through the messy internal growth process will be viewed more favorably by their followers,��� Owens says. ���Admitting mistakes, spotlighting follower strengths and modeling teachability are at the core of humble leadership,��� he says. ���These three behaviors are powerful predictors of the leader���s growth and the organization���s growth.��� Owens believes this new approach to leadership was bolstered as a response to the financial scandals of the early 2000s. ���Major, well-publicized events sometimes shape the collective psyche of what it means to be a good leader,��� he says. ���The Enron and WorldCom scandals created a perception that we had a ���crisis of leadership,��� and that the leaders we were creating in business schools were not the kind of leaders the business world needed. ���In response, prominent business schools have designed courses that hold up characteristics like