Video Transcript: The Behavioral Approach to Leadership- The Importance of Task and Relationship

Let's talk about different approaches to understanding leadership in organizations. We're going to start off with what's known as the behavioral approach to leadership, which emphasizes both the task and relationship behaviors of a leader. In the behavioral approach to leadership. There are two categories of essential leadership behaviors. One is task oriented behaviors that's getting stuff done. So task oriented behaviors help group members achieve goals and objectives, help the group do what they're supposed to do, get stuff done. Sometimes this is called initiating structure. Sometimes it's called concern for results, but the idea is that the leader is focused on getting stuff done and works towards making the people that he's leading accomplish those goals. Those are task oriented behaviors, but that that's not enough. The other main category of leadership behavior are relationship oriented behaviors, and that's where the leader helps members of the group, help people that he or she is leading feel comfortable with themselves, each other and the situation, to develop healthy relationships and just have a good time and good relationships within the group that's working towards the goal. Sometimes this is called consideration in the leadership literature, or concern for people. So you've got these two big categories of leadership behaviors, task oriented behaviors and relationship oriented behaviors. And the theory in this behavior approach to leadership is that the most effective leaders are both highly task oriented and highly relationship oriented. It's not a question of one like, Oh, he's a task oriented person or she's a relationship oriented person. No, the best leaders are both highly task related, task oriented and highly relationship oriented. And the data supports this approach to understanding pretty well the real the relationship oriented behaviors research indicates that, yeah, the the more the supervisor is relationship oriented employees have higher job satisfaction. They're more motivated for work, and they perceive their leader to be more effective. So the relationship oriented behaviors pay off the leaders get or help the employees quite a bit, and they're perceived as being more effective. But the tax task oriented behaviors also pay off the leaders that are focused on accomplishing the task. Their performance is rated higher by their supervisors. Team performance goes up the more the in general the leader is task related, the better the team will perform and get its goals done. And individual employees, the people that are being led, not necessarily in a team context, their individuals contributions to the organization's goals also go up. So this behavioral approach to leadership is just a real simple way to understand leadership, but it's extremely effective, because if you're ever in a literature leadership situation, you can say, okay, am I being focused enough on the task? Am I really working to achieve the goals? If not do so? Am I working towards making everybody's relationships better and having a good relationship with people? And if not, you need to do that. And so this gives you a really good, simple approach to evaluate your own leadership and the leadership of others, because we need to be both relationship oriented and task oriented to be effective leaders.