The Leadership Skills Approach
Mumford et al, Skills model
On the late 1990s Mumford and his colleagues proposed a new model based on the skills that a leader should have. This model has 5 components, and they are: Individual Attributes, Competencies, Leadership Outcomes, Career Experiencies and Environmental Influences. A famous representation of the model is as follows:
From the first view, you can see clearly the complexity of the model when compared to the Katz’ Model. As depicted the model has 5 components, they are:
INDIVIDUAL ATTRIBUTES
The leftmost component of the model, has four individual attributes that hast to be taken into account when studying leadership. This components are:
- General Cognitive Ability: In simple terms, it refers to a person’s intelligence. It has nothing to do with experience, only inborn talent.
- Crystallized Cognitive Ability: Is the intellectual ability that is forged through learning and experiencie. It includes a wide range of abilities like learning new skills and comprehending complex information, being able to communicate in spoken and written forms to name a few.
- Motivation: In this model, motivation is seen as an essential part to develop the leadership skills. Three aspects has to be taken into account. First of all, motivation has to be internal, a person must want to lead for leadership to occur. Second, leaders has to express their leadership –dominance, they have to exert and be responsible of influence over their group. In third place, the leader has to move towards find “social good”, to improve the human good and value of the organisation.
- Personality: Just to make sure that authentic leadership, has a clear and precise personality. And personality is what influences and has an impact on the development of the leadership skills. In this model, any personality characteristic that helps to cope with complex organisational situations is highly related to leadership performance.
COMPETENCIES
The center component of the model has 3 key areas of compentencies that can be studied to define a leader, the areas are:
- Problem solving Skills: It refers to a leader’s creative ability to solve new and unusual, ill-defined organizational problems. It comprehends the whole range of abilities that are needed to solve a problem, that is: defining a problem, formulating new understandings about the problem, finding creative solutions, taking those solutions to be achieved. A good leader knows his capacities and applies them in creative ways to solve problems.
- Social Judgment Skills: Along with problem solving skills, a leader needs social judgment skills too. Social Judgment Skills refer to the ability of leaders to understand people and social systems. The ability to work with people, solving problems, fostering collaboration and marshalling support to implement change in organisations.
There are four in this model, these are: perspective taking, social perceptiveness, behavioral flexibility and social perfomance. - Knowledge: The last competence identified in the model refers to “the accumulation of information and the mental structures used to organize that information” (Northouse,2000). These mental structures are referred to as “schemas”. The more you know, the more schemas you have. Building complex knowledge is basically building up complex structures based on simpler ones. Thus, the more you know the more complex schemas you can understand and build.
Knowledge has a positive impact in the way leaders approach complex issues and identify solutions to problems.
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