Scientific Approach | Leadership Management information Ways

The scientific approach to leadership

The decisions a leader makes, more than anything else he does, determine his effectiveness. Two leaders with the same information available to them, may arrive at different conclusions and take different decisions. This is because decision-making involves making a choice. If there is no choice, if there is exercise of one's freedom, there can be no decision. For example, there is often no choice by the child about his birth. Similarly, there is often no choice in the mater of one's death. The Leaders attitudes and mental make-up are important aspects in decision-making. Quantitative and other techniques are tools for analysis. They provide information. But they have to be seen in the total context of the scientific approach to management.

Characteristics of a scientific approach

A scientific approach has the following characteristics:

emphasizes the fact that human being are individuals, that they can choose, that they can pre-determine their future. Working from different hypothesis, the end result can be quite different. For example, the judicial system in the country is based on the hypothesis that man is innocent until he is proved guilty.

Without the framework of a leadership theory, information is useless. For example, some time back a man was passing a heap of waste paper by the road side.

He must have passed it two or three times before, when something made him stop and look, and he saw currency notes to the value of about rupees two hundred lying amongst the waste paper.

The money was there all the time, but his background and experience had conditioned him not to look for currency notes amongst waste paper. The converse is also true - because an individual has a theory, he may find supportive data in otherwise common-day occurrences.

Collection of information then becomes objective-oriented. There is no generation of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Experiments are conducted to prove or disprove an hypothesis. Analysis and studies are done to prove or disprove an assumption.

The scientific approach to uncertainty

This brings out the next aspect in decision-making- that all decision-making is done in the face of uncertainty. There is an element of choice, a trade-of. One makes a choice in the hope that the path chosen would give better results then some other alternate path. Every decision, therefore, involves a gamble. This is so because of three reasons.

There may be inaccuracies in the information. This brings in the concept of credibility. A person's recommendations may be rejected in an organization not because one can find fault with the logic, but because the individual lacks credibility. The possibility or error is rated high from past experience or bias.

Every decision create a new set of circumstances which result in reactions , new pressures and new imperatives. For Example, maximizing the price may appear the best thing to do, but it could lead to customer reaction in terms of material substitution and other measures.

In essence each of the three conceptions-the trait approach, the situational approachand the group-follower-oriented approach-taken separately reveals only a part of the total phenomenon. Indeed, it is a felt by many researchers that all three approaches represent different facets of the same social phenomenon and yet they may not provide an adequate theoretical framework for the study of leadership. If the leader is not oriented to adopting the scientific approach, these techniques have no meaning.