Social Exchange in Leadership
Each social exchange that a leader has with his or her followers may affect different behaviors and attitudes, thus multiple exchange relationships are needed both by the team members and their leader .
Employees get different forms of resources and support from each social exchange, while organizations benefit from different and desired employee attitudes and behaviors.
Social Judgment Skills for Leaders
Besides the basic social skills that every person in the organization must understand, there are four primary social judgment skills that a good leader must learn:
Perspective Taking - Using empathy to understand other's attitudes towards goals, problem solving, solutions offered, and their points of view.
Social Perceptiveness - Having insight and awareness to how employees will react to organizational change by understanding what is important to them and what motivates them.
Behavior Flexibility - The ability to change and adapt one's behavior to situational changes by being flexible rather then locked in to one's impulses.
Social Performance - Understanding the employees' perspectives in order to communicate a vision. If there is resistance or conflict, be a mediator and/or coach, rather than a boss who gives orders.
Social Judgment skills can be increased by watching and reflecting on how others do it, increasing your listening skills, and using empathy. Watching how other people do something and then learning from it is called modeling. It is one of the primary ways that people learn social skills. Reflecting on how people react to you and to others will help expand your understanding of the skill and help you to learn it more deeply. When talking with others, be sure to listen to them rather than just hear them. In addition, listen for understanding, rather than be judgmental.
To empathize with them, heed the Sioux Indian Tribal Prayer,
“Great Spirit, help us never to judge another until we have walked for two weeks in his moccasins.”
Empathy differs from sympathy in that sympathy connotes spontaneous emotion rather than a conscious, reasoned response. For more information, see Motivation.