Organizational Life Cycles and Leadership Styles

Introduction

Organizations are social entities that are goal directed, are designed as deliberately structured and coordinate activity systems and are linked to the external environment. They are made up of people and their relationships to one another. This becomes really important throughout an organization’s life cycle. An organizational life cycle is the idea that orgs are born, they grow older, and then they die. Daft says things like organizational structure, leadership style, and administrative systems follow a predictable pattern throughout the stages of this life cycle. There are four phases of an organizational life cycle. They are the infancy phase, the adolescence phase, the middle aged phase, and the maturity phase. Each phase have their own unique characteristics in term off their goals, size, and structure. What is also unique to each phase is the type of leader it takes to successfully get through it. There are many different leadership styles and tactics and there is no one best way to be a leader in any of these phases. Often times, the type of leader needed is based on the situation. But there are general attributes to each phase that allows one to determine what type or types of leadership style would best suit the organization.

Question

What are the phases of the organizational life cycle and which leadership styles accurately fit each phase of the cycle?

Organizational Life Cycle Phases

Phase 1 – Infancy: The infancy phase of an organization is also known as the entrepreneurial stage. The primary goals of this stage are to get the organization started and then trying to take it to the next level. They also focus a lot on survival. At this point, the organization is small and nonbureaucratic. The structure is...

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...us learning. They need to e able to negotiate and collaborate and have great influence management skills. One would think that at this very bureaucratic stage that the leadership styles needed would be autocratic, bureaucratic, and task oriented. But that is not the case. If these leadership styles were practiced in this stage, it would cause the organization to be over-bureaucratized and slowed down, which could lead to an organizational decline and eventually the death of the org. The organization would not be able to make changes fast enough to keep up with the environment. So while the structure may still be very bureaucratic, the organization needs leaders that can balance those bureaucratic styles with the styles needed in the infancy stage. They need leaders that are still creative and are still visionaries in order for the organization to survive and thrive.