Nelson Mandela s Influence Using Organizational Behaviour Techniques

Nelson Mandela s Influence Using Organizational Behaviour Techniques Leadership and Motivation Megan Latzkowski

A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting them go out ahead, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. Nelson Mandela By using organizational behaviour techniques, you are able to positively influence your staff and team towards a specific outcome. Nelson Mandela was a leader and using these type of techniques, he was able to change the world. In your business you do not have to change the world but you can change the ways that your company is run in a positive way. Organizational behaviour will help make your organization more enjoyable to be a part of, you will be able to achieve your goals, and have some of the most valuable assets to help improve your business. Organizational Behaviour Organizations are groups of people who work interdependently towards a purpose. To achieve that purpose you need to have a great team. A good team will have a leader who is able to help, encourage, and motivate the team. Organizational behaviour techniques will help you on your way to achieving success. Organizational behaviour is the study of what people think, feel, and do in and around organizations (McShane, 2012). Being able to use this field to help us understand and influence behaviours can help us in so many ways within our organization. The setting within our teams and organization is the most important thing that we have to influence our employees. If we have a team that is able to execute our goals then we will be able to succeed in achieving our goals. We need to utilize our mentors, fields of study, and proven techniques to build our team. There are many successful leaders who have made a difference in the world, their society or community, or in their organization. Nelson Mandela was a great leader and used his qualities and motivation to pursue his goals. His team was the people. Together, they were able to make a difference and achieve goals people never thought possible. Being able to acquire the knowledge from his country, the people, and even the enemies helped him to be able to hold on to intellectual capital within his team. They were able to use this knowledge to help them in the fight towards apartheid. He was able to influence, using leadership, motivation, goals, change, attitudes, and emotions. Those are things that any organization will benefit from if used properly. By studying organizational

behaviour, you will be able to positively guide your company in the right direction for its success. Nelson Mandela did just that to achieve his goals towards freedom. Influence Influence can be defined as the action or process of producing effects on the actions, behaviour, and opinions of another person or group. Nelson Mandela achieved exactly that during his term as president of South Africa, as well as throughout his political life, by using passion, ambiguity, personality, and perseverance to gain the trust of his supporters. The following sections will examine many of Mandela s accomplishments by using his influence and will show how types of organizational behaviour impacted his supporters and the rest of the world. He was able to use his team as a competitive advantage towards the fight to apartheid. In a way Mandela was able to reward his people by showing them that there is a positive outcome to achieving their goal. He was able to show them that by working hard towards their goal, they would get to where they want to be. Just like in a business, you want to be able to motivate and show your staff that there is a positive outcome for hard work put in. By using organizational behaviour techniques, you are able to get your organization where you want it to be. The contingency anchor is an action that may have different consequences in different situation. Mandela realized that you had to make a decision, and knew that there would be forms of consequences so he would try and select the best strategy for his team to get to their goal. It may have been stressful in physiological, behavioural, and psychological ways but Mandela was able to show a positive outcome for his people and help to take away some of those stresses. Just like in a job burnout situation, the people would have felt emotional exhaustion and reduced accomplishment. They would have felt the stress from the tough situations and ambiguity involved with the process they were going to have to go through. Having a great leader is what employees need to be able to relieve those stresses and remove the stressors, if they cannot do it alone. Mandela s people especially needed the social support to remove those stressors and he was there for them. His goals faced several challenges

throughout the way, but through positive leadership and motivation, he was able to achieve so many successes. Leadership Nelson Mandela was a leader. He used his ambition, personality, and passion to lead those who wanted to seek change like he did. People loved him because he truly cared about what he believed in, which is what a good manager or leader does. They gain people s trust and they are passionate about what they do; they lead by example. That s exactly what Nelson Mandela did. He had his own leadership styles that helped him to get such a supportive group behind him. He also knew that he couldn t do it alone. He needed a team, and for that team to be effective, he had to be an effective leader. Mandela actually had his own list of leadership styles that he went by, and that is what he felt worked for him. He was able to use organizational behaviour to lead them to a better future. In an organization, it is important to have shared values and ethics to decide whether a situation is right or wrong and be able to guide preferences for the outcomes of a situation. He had many strong morals and values which his people also shared with him. If your employees can understand those values and be included in the same organizational culture, your team will work more cohesively. Mandela was a coach leader and engaged in visionary leadership. He was there to help people and teach them along the way. Visionary leadership is the ability to create and articulate a realistic, credible, and attractive vision of the future that improves on the present situation (Robbins, Coulter, Leach, Kilfoil, 2009). That is precisely what Mandela did. He had a goal that he wanted to implement change in South America for his people. He showed them what an improvement of the future could look like and what could be better about the situation of apartheid at hand. He was able to engage in a form of globalization to connect with other parts of the world. In an organization, it is important to be aware of other cultures, and know that they can have an influence in your company as well. He had a democratic leadership style. He involved people in his decision making, and encouraged participation with his followers. He loved being able to give his input, yet still see other sides of the story and using that feedback as an opportunity. He had consensus from his team and followers. He knew how

to build commitment and how to motivate his group members toward objectives. He was able to successfully manage conflict and deal with the enemies. Mandela was able to listen to all sides of the argument and give his guidance and offering his analysis. People crave a genuine leadership, he was able to inspire, elevate, and enlist his people in a shared journey (Friedman, 2009). Mandela had strength, conviction, and dignity. Mandela felt that communicating through body language and smiling would inspire the simplest things in people. Using simple, yet expressive language, along with those other techniques will motivate people. What you see or feel is 55% of the message that you get from people (McShane, 2012) and Mandela knew that simple non-verbal communication could help with connecting with his people, and even his enemies. He had to be persistent and engage in forms of creativity to bring his team together. Goals, Change, Emotions, and Attitude Mandela was clear on his goals. He knew what he wanted and what changes he wanted to see and that his how he went forward. He set out his goals and formulated plans on how he was going to do that. Mandela set a strong, clear message for people who wanted to be on his side. He was firm and consistent in his message, highlighting his values, beliefs, and goals. He was honest and authentic and that his how people learned to understand and trust him. A good manager or leader builds their team, group, or business through trust and respect. There were points in his life where he realized that he needed to change, and to make changes. That is what a manager does. They embrace change and they understand that they need to change in order to keep moving, be effective, and productive. By using organizational behaviour techniques, an organization is able to motivate, lead, and inspire their employees in a positive way that makes them feel involved and connected to the company. People tend to resist change, but Mandela helped show that the goals and outcomes were of bigger value. The MARS Model of Individual Behaviour is a good example of how values, perceptions, emotions, and attitudes can affect and drive an employee s behaviours. Their motivation, ability, and role perceptions is what will help get the job done and the way they execute their productivity. An attitude is how you feel towards a certain person, object, or event (McShane, 2012) and because Mandela and his people had such strong emotions and attitude towards

apartheid, they were able to cluster their beliefs, feelings, and intentions to influence their behaviour. The right attitude to have is a positive one, and although the situations were difficult, and they went through difficult times, Mandela managed to try and stay positive throughout leading his people. It probably influenced some emotional labour with Mandela by trying to stay positive and help country, even though he may have been feeling defeated at times or negative about a situation. Being able to have the ability to perceive and express emotion, while being able to reason, understand, and regulate emotion is emotional intelligence (McShane 2012). The model of emotional intelligence shows self-awareness, selfmanagement, social awareness, and relationship management. Mandela had a high emotional intelligence. He was able have self-awareness and self-management to perceive, understand, and manage his own emotions. He was able to understand other s emotions because he knew what his people were going through. He felt for them and wanted to make a better like for the country and future generations to come. Lastly, he was able to have a form of relationship management by helping his people through the hard times. He was able to manage the emotions by being on their side and stay as positive and motivated as possible. Naturally, he had those skills but he also had people that he looked up to and learned from. Mentors play a big part in learning how to have emotional intelligence and to show the way not just in organizational behaviour but in all aspects of running a successful company. Mandela didn t necessarily run a company, but he was able to help motivate his staff with some form of rewards. His rewards were the outcome of the goals; freedom and equality. In a company, you can achieve the goals by using certain techniques such as financial rewards, job-status based rewards, and competency based rewards. You can reward your staff with group or team-based rewards, and also with individual rewards. The rewards need to be relevant and valued and this will help with your employee s performance. Mandela was able to show his people what a life with freedom and equality would look like and that was how he helped to reward his team. In our companies, we strive for a better future and by using some of those techniques, we are able to help motivate our employees.

Team Building and Motivation The forces that are within a person to exert an effort level that affects the direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behaviour toward a particular goal is called motivation (McShane, 2012). There are drives and needs that affect the behaviour. In Mandela s case, they had a need for equality and freedom. The four drive theory shows is that everyone has drives to want to defend, learn, bond, and acquire. His people needed to protect themselves, resolve conflict, while also forming relationships and having a social identity. This influenced their goal-directed choices and efforts. Setting goals is the process of motivating employees by establishing performance objectives. By having clear goals, your employees will know what they are striving towards and can help to figure out how to get there. Mandela had some very high goals that sometimes seemed impossible. It always seems impossible until it s done Nelson Mandela. In an organization, it is best to set goals that you think your team will be able to achieve. If you set higher goals, you need to be able to be there for them and help them along the way using organizational behaviour techniques to make sure that they don t give up or distrust you or the company. Nelson Mandela felt that he was a capable leader and could make sure that his people were taken care of. He was clear on what he wanted and in turn, his people knew what his vision was and they had the same one. An effective goal is specific, relevant, challenging, accepted, participative, and needs feedback. The employees need to be able to connect to the goals, relate to the behaviour, and trust the source. This was how Mandela was able to get his people on board with the goals he had for the country. He was able to enforce the dimensions of empowerment. Impact is when the employees feel their actions influence success towards their goal. With competence, the people had feelings of selfefficacy and that Mandela knew they were able to do it and helped them feel confident. The goal of freedom had his people believing that the work they were doing had meaning, was important and that they were making a difference. Self-determination is when people feel like they have freedom and discretion and Mandela tried to lead from behind. He made them feel like they had a voice and that they were important as well.

One of his most effective techniques was team building. There are many advantages to working as a team. Teams make better decisions and there is higher engagement within people in teams. Mandela said that we need to form opinions not on our own, but through shared experiences (Leadership Mandela-Style, 2014), which is exactly what a manager should do. They use culture to mold together a team. They use those shared experience to band people together and talk about what has affected them and how what works. He said that you need to build a team to work with you on the causes or projects that you most care about. The team will help get you through that and be an effective group to succeed and get to the goals you have set in the beginning. You can build organizational commitment with justice and support, shared values, trust, and employee involvement. Mandela was able to generate moral authority by getting his team to do something hard together. They had to fight for what they believed in, and by fighting a long and hard battle; he was able to gain their trust and they were committed to him. He trusted his people with the truth and was able to be honest with them. Leaders who trust people with the truth, are trusted back (Friedman, 2013). He created a group where enough people trusted him back so they could unite and do the hard work together. By using identification-based trust, he showed that he had common values to fight towards the same purpose. He was able to have a balance between individualism and collectivism in which his people valued their group as well as letting them each have a uniqueness to their individual personality. By encouraging those values, he was able to create a strong team. He inspired hope in others and elevated people. Mandela used his team to help him and utilized resources of everyone involved. He was a revolutionary leader who, through his passion and beliefs, set the stage for people to follow. Without even knowing all of the specific organizational behaviour techniques we talk about now, he implemented them. It shows that those are effective ways to deal with people and achieve a goal. Organizational behaviour is so important and when you can positively influence your staff, you will have a successful business. Mandela made changes in the world that people didn t think were possible and through those techniques he is known as one of the greatest leaders of all time. He is someone to look up to, a perfect example of what a leader should be. In a business, if you have a manager and a leader who you can look up to,

respect, and do the job as best you can for, well then they have done their job. It is up to the team to help get the job done, and up to the leader to motivate and show them the way. Mandela was a motivational leader.

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