Human resource management practice I also available by michael armstrong

The nature of leadership and 

management

There has been much debate on how leadership differs 

from management. The problem is that leadership 

involves  management  and  management  involves 

leadership  so  that  it  may  be  difficult  to  separate  

the  two. There  is  some  consensus  on  the  essential  

nature  of  both  and  the  skills  involved,  as  set  out 

below, but there is more disagreement on which is 

the most important.

Leadership

Leadership means inspiring people to do their best 

to  achieve  a  desired  result.  It  involves  developing 

and communicating a vision for the future, motivating 

people  and  securing  their  engagement. As  defined 

by Dixon (1994: 214): ‘Leadership is no more than 

exercising such an influence upon others that they 

tend  to  act  in  concert  towards  achieving  a  goal 

which they might not have achieved so readily had 

they  been  left  to  their  own  devices.’  Leadership 

skills include the ability to:

 

●

inspire others;

 

●

persuade others willingly to behave differently;

 

●

clarify what needs to be done and why;

 

●

communicate a sense of purpose to the team;

 

●

understand, as established by research 

conducted by Tamkin et al (2010), that 

leaders cannot create performance 

themselves but are conduits for performance 

through their influence on others;

 

●

get the team into action so that the task is 

achieved.

Management

The word ‘management’ is derived from the Italian 

verb maneggiare, which means ‘to handle a horse’. 

This definition at least states that to manage is to 

have charge of or responsibility for something, but 

there is clearly more to it than that. Management 

has  often  been  defined  as  ‘getting  things  done 

through  people’,  thus  emphasizing  its  leadership 

component. But managers are also responsible for 

guiding and controlling the business or their part of 

it by managing their other resources – finance, work 

systems and technology. Management could therefore 

be defined as deciding what to do and then getting 

it done through the effective use of resources.

Research by Tamkin et al (2003) established that 

the abilities managers need are:

 

●

to empower and develop people – 

understand and practise the process of 

delivering through the capability of others;

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