Leadership Theory

- Evaluative: Making a judgment about the worth, goodness, or appropriateness of the other person's statement.

- Interpretive: Paraphrasing - attempting to explain what the other person's statement means.

- Supportive: Attempting to assist or bolster the other communicator.

- Probing: Attempting to gain additional information, continue the discussion, or clarify a point.

- Understanding: Attempting to discover completely what the other communicator means by her statements.[5]

     Nonverbal Behaviors of Communication

     To deliver the full impact of a message, the leader must use nonverbal behaviors to raise the channel of interpersonal communication:

- Eye contact: This helps to regulate the flow of communication. It signals interest in others and increases the speaker's credibility. People who make eye contact open the flow of communication and convey interest, concern, warmth, and credibility.

- Facial Expressions: Smiling is a powerful cue that transmits happiness, friendliness, warmth, and liking. So, if you smile frequently you will be perceived as more likable, friendly, warm and approachable. Smiling is often contagious and people will react favorably. They will be more comfortable around you and will want to listen more.

- Gestures: If you fail to gesture while speaking you may be perceived as boring and stiff. A lively speaking style captures the listener's attention, makes the conversation more interesting, and facilitates understanding.

- Posture and body orientation: You communicate numerous messages by the way you talk and move. Standing erect and leaning forward communicates to listeners that you are approachable, receptive and friendly. Interpersonal closeness results when you and the listener face each other. Speaking with your back turned or looking at the floor or ceiling should be avoided as it communicates disinterest.

- Proximity: Cultural norms dictate a comfortable distance are: rocking, leg swinging, tapping, and gaze aversion.

- Vocal: Speaking can signal nonverbal communication when you include such vocal elements as: tone, pitch, rhythm, timbre, loudness, and inflection. For maximum teaching effectiveness, learn to vary these six elements of your voice. One of the major criticisms of many speakers is that they speak in a monotone voice. Listeners perceive this type of speaker as boring and dull.[5]

3. The influence of emotions and the charisma

     In the mid 1960s, Paul Ekman studied emotions and discovered six facial expressions that almost everyone recognizes world-wide: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Although they were controversial at first, he was booed off the stage when he first presented it to a group of anthropologists and later called a fascist and a racist, they are now widely accepted. One of the controversies still lingering is the amount of context needed to interpret them. For example, if someone reports to me that they have this great ideal that they would like to implement, and I say that would be great, but I look on them with a frown, is it possible that I could be thinking about something else? The trouble with these extra signals is that we do not always have the full context. What if the person emailed me and I replied great (while frowning). Would it evoke the same response?

     During the communicational process leaders must trust their instincts. Most emotions are difficult to imitate. For example, when you are truly happy, the muscles used for smiling are controlled by the limbic system and others, which are not under voluntary control. When you force a smile, a different part of the brain is used -- the cerebral cortex (under voluntary control), hence different muscles are used. This is why a clerk, who might not have any real interest in you, has a "fake" look when he forces a smile.

     Of course, some actors learn to control all of their face muscles, while others draw on a past emotional experience to produce the emotional state they want. But this is not an easy trick to pull off all the time. There is a good reason for this -- part of our emotions evolved to deal with other people and our empathic nature.

     If these emotions could easily be faked, they would do more harm than good. So our emotions not only guide our decisions, they can also communicated to others to help them in their decisions -- of course their emotions will be the ultimate guide, but the emotions they discover in others becomes part of their knowledge base.

     We often hear that the content of a message is composed of:

• 55% of the content from the visual component
• 38% from the auditory component
• 7% from language

     However, the above percentages only apply in a very narrow context. A researcher named Mehrabian was interested in where people get information about a speaker's general attitude it (positive, neutral, or negative), towards the person the speaker is addressing in situations where the facial expression, the tone, and the words might be sending conflicting signals.

     Thus, he designed a couple of experiments. In one, Mehrabian and Ferris (1967) researched the interaction of speech, facial expressions, and tone. Three different speakers were instructed to say "maybe" with three different attitudes towards their listener (positive, neutral, or negative). Next, photographs of the faces of three female models were taken as they attempted to convey the emotions of like, neutrality, and dislike.

     Test groups were then instructed to listen to the various renditions of the word "maybe," with the pictures of the models, and were asked to rate the attitude of the speaker. Note that the emotion and tone were often mixed, such as a facial expression showing dislike, with the word "maybe" spoken in a positive tone.

     Significant effects of facial expression and tone were found in that the study suggested that the combined effect of simultaneous verbal, vocal and facial attitude communications is a weighted sum of their independent effects with the coefficients of .07, .38, and .55, respectively.

     Mehrabian and Ferris also wrote about a deep limitation to their research: "These findings regarding the relative contribution of the tonal component of a verbal message can be safely extended only to communication situations in which no additional information about the communicator-addressee relationship is available." Thus, what can be concluded is that when people communicate, listeners derive information about the speaker's attitudes towards the listener from visual, tonal, and verbal cues; yet the percentage derived can vary greatly depending upon a number of other factors, such as actions, context of the communication, and how well they know that person. [5]

     It is important to look at the question of charisma. It is so much a part of how we look at leadership - but is such a difficult quality to tie down. Charisma is, literally, a gift of grace or of God. Max Weber, more than anyone, brought this idea into the realm of leadership. He used ‘charisma’ to talk about self-appointed leaders who are followed by those in distress. Such leaders gain influence because they are seen as having special talents or gifts that can help people escape the pain they are in.

     When thinking about charisma we often look to the qualities of particular individuals - their skills, personality and presence. But this is only one side of things. We need to explore the situations in which charisma arises. When strong feelings of distress are around there does seem to be a tendency to turn to figures who seem to have answers. To make our lives easier we may want to put the burden of finding and making solutions on someone else. In this way we help to make the role for ‘charismatic leaders’ to step into. They in turn will seek to convince us of their special gifts and of their solution to the crisis or problem. When these things come together something very powerful can happen. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the problem is dealt with - but we can come to believe it is. Regarding such leaders with awe, perhaps being inspired in different ways by them, we can begin to feel safer and directed. This can be a great resource. Someone like Martin Luther King used the belief that people had in him to take forward civil rights in the United States. He was able to contain a lot of the stress his supporters felt and give hope of renewal. He articulated a vision of what was possible and worked with people to develop strategies. But there are also considerable dangers.

     Charisma involves dependency. It can mean giving up our responsibilities. Sadly, it is all too easy to let others who seem to know what they are doing get on with difficult matters. By placing people on a pedestal the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ widens. They seem so much more able or in control. Rather than facing up to situations, and making our own solutions, we remain followers (and are often encouraged to do so). There may well come a point when the lie implicit in this confronts us. Just as we turned to charismatic leaders, we can turn against them. It could be we recognize that the ‘solution’ we signed up to has not made things better. It might be that some scandal or incident reveals the leader in what we see as a bad light. Whatever, we can end up blaming, and even destroying, the leader. Unfortunately, we may simply turn to another rather than looking to our own capacities.[2] 
 
 

      CONCLUSION

     Having researched the question of the contacts in the leader’s activity, I understood that skills of the clever contact are important not only for leaders, but also for others subjects of public activity since in any public or business process such things as correlation, cooperation and support are important. But, certainly, for the leader this question has a special meaning since in any event they set an example both in the sense of behaviour, and in the sense of the solving different contradictions and problems concerning the organization or team.

     As we have already defined, the word “leadership” can mean the process of leading, those entities that perform one or more acts of leading or the ability to affect human behavior to accomplish a mission designated by the leader.

     One of the most important leadership factors is communication, that’s why it requires more detailed study. During the contact, two processes will be received by the receiver: content and context.

     During the communicational process there is a lot of things that prevent understanding – physical and psychological barriers.

     The purpose of feedback is to change and alter messages so the intention of the original communicator is understood by the second communicator. It includes verbal and nonverbal responses to another person's message. To deliver the full impact of a message, the leader must use nonverbal behaviors to widen the channel of interpersonal communication.

The emotions and charisma have a significant importance in the process of the contact, which in different situations can define the further move of an event. So, it is necessary for the truly leader to learn to cope with them, use them to achieve their purposes. Herewith, they must not to forget about the power of the emotions and the charisma. It is necessary to remember that their misapplication, direction them at the wrong riverbed can call the undesirable consequences for subordinated and for organization as a whole.

LITERATURE

1. Lussier, Robert N. Human relations in organization: a skill-building approach/ Robert N. Lussier. – 3rd ed. – 1996. The McGraw – Hill Companies, Inc. – P. 206-231;
2. www.infed.org
3. www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/leader/leadhb.html
4. www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/leader/leadcon.html
5. www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/leader/leadcom.html