Comparing Leadership And Management: The Difference Between Management And Leadership

Zaleznik (1977) arguably began the trend of comparing leadership and management by exposing an image of the leader as an artist, who uses creativity and intuition to navigate his/her way through confusion, whilst the manager is viewed as a problem solver dependent on rationality and control (Bolden, 2004).

Management and leadership both involve deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people to accomplish the listed tasks or goals, and ensuring that those people really do the work (Kotter, 2001). Their work is complementary, but each system accomplishes those tasks in different ways.

The first distinction is between the managerial and leadership main functions. Since the aim of leadership is to produce change, setting the direction of that change is fundamental to

Management strives to make it easy for people to complete routine jobs day after day. But since high energy is essential to overcoming the barriers to change, leaders attempt to touch people at their deepest levels—by stirring in them a sense of belonging, idealism, and self-esteem. For instance, at Procter & Gamble's paper products division, Richard Nicolosi underscored the message that “each of us is a leader” by pushing responsibility down to newly formed teams. An entrepreneurial attitude took root, and profits rebounded.

In emphasizing the difference between leaders and managers, Warren Bennis (1989) notes: “To survive in the twenty-first century, we are going to need a new generation of leaders—leaders, not managers. The distinction is an important one. Leaders conquer the context—the volatile, turbulent, ambiguous surroundings that sometimes seem to conspire against us and will surely suffocate us if we let them—while managers surrender to it” (p. 7).

Bennis and Nanus (1985, p. 21) summarized his previous quotation as follows: “Managers do things right, while leaders do the right