Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service

Theory and Practice

Montgomery Van Wart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317472759
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Eminently readible, current, and comprhensive, this acclaimed text sets the standard for instruction in

1

Introduction

Those wishing to study leadership in an effort to improve their effectiveness need to be aware of three related facts:

• leadership is a complex phenomenon;

• those embarking on a study must be willing to consider more sophisticated intellectual and applied models if more than platitudes are desired; and

• ultimately, leadership is such a vast subject that one must focus on the particular domain of leadership (e.g., leadership of organizations versus social movements) that one is interested in to provide concrete insights (Bass 1990).

The complexity of the subject becomes apparent when trying to specify a focus or perspective on leadership. For example, is it only about political, social, and business leaders who change the world, or does it include those in charge who simply run things well? Are those who change the world for the worse nonetheless leaders? Does it have to be about executives exclusively, or can it include managers, supervisors, frontline workers, soldiers, or even volunteers? And when we have settled on an operational definition of leadership, do we want our theory to explain the best styles and behaviors to use in an “average” situation? In preparing for a controversial change or responding to a crisis? Do we want to explain how some leaders accomplish things by employing charisma while others do so with a quiet, life-long passion devoid of significant charm? Do we explain the totality of leadership or do we address certain traits, such as decisiveness, only when they appear to make a difference?

Because of the complexity of leadership, simplistic models have limited utility for those wanting useful intellectual or practical insights. Streamlined, overarching theoretical models of leadership certainly have the virtue of elegance. However, they also invariably fall prey to three problems. First, they can overgeneralize, meaning that occasionally good advice may be wrong in a given situation. Second, they can be incomplete, meaning that the advice may be detailed and accurate enough in a few areas but many critical elements of leadership are ignored. Finally, they can lack applicability, meaning that even if the principle is broad enough to be right, it falls short on advice about how to use it. An overview of schools of thought about leadership is provided in this chapter, with theoretical perspectives covered extensively in Part I of this book.

At the applied level, leadership is complex. It involves, among other things, an array of assessment skills, a series of characteristics (traits and skills) that the leader brings to a particular setting, and a wide variety of behavioral competencies. Furthermore, the leadership skills needed in the same position may vary over time as the organization’s environment and life cycle change. An applied model distilled from the theoretical and applied literature is provided in Part II. A leadership assessment instrument in the appendix of this book is keyed to this applied model. Part III looks at issues related to leadership development and evaluation.

Finally, types of leadership vary substantially, even though elements of leadership have some commonality at the most global level. For example, the followers of a general differ markedly from those of a religious leader. Likewise, the head of a successful accounting firm will need skills very different from those needed by the head of a troubled manufacturing firm whose bottom line is being undermined by international competition.

This chapter sets the stage for the theoretical, practical, and developmental analyses of leadership. It first defines the scope of study with a review of leadership types. It next reviews the leadership literature by focusing on traditional and contemporary themes, and follows up by contrasting the mainstream and public sector literatures. The chapter then concentrates on the perennial debates that weave throughout the mainstream leadership literature and again contrasts them with those in the public sector literature. Finally, some of the important nomenclature (terms) used in leadership studies are defined and discussed. It is from these discussions that one working operational definition of leadership (among many possible) is offered.

TYPES OF LEADERSHIP

An important distinction to make when discussing leadership is to decide what type is involved. While types of leadership inevitably have some similarities, they have important differences, too. Consider organizational leaders, political executives, legislators, community leaders, and the range of opinion leaders. The organizational leader has a large number of defined followers (generally paid) and concrete services or products to produce. Rather than employees, the followers of a political executive tend to be an electorate, producing public policy and ensuring implementation compliance. Legislators are certainly leaders, but their followers are exclusively the electorate, and their major product is legislation. Local level community leaders (e.g., parent-teacher association presidents, volunteer fire chiefs, small nonprofit advisory board chairs), depending on their exact role, often have characteristics that coincide with those of political leaders and organizational leaders. They are often trying to influence policy, but just as often they are a part of the service delivery system, too, if only as volunteers. Opinion leaders (e.g., religious leaders, inventors, and ideological leaders without formal positions) are generally an entirely different sort; they lead others who are not accountable to them, and they affect policies or social trends that are not their direct responsibility. See Exhibit 1.1 for an analysis of the “followers” among different types of leaders.

The primary topic of this book is organizational leadership. Special attention is given to public- and nonprofit-sector settings. Generally, organizational leaders have been delivered authoritative assessments about which problems to address. This is particularly true in the public sector. Their concern is how to deliver services or products through their organization. Thus, organizational leaders will spend the bulk of their time assessing internal capacities such as task skills, role clarity, and other attributes that are of marginal interest to political leaders. Because of the mission orientation infused in public and nonprofit leadership, the book also includes community-change leadership. Although community-change leadership can have political ramifications, it is a reality for senior and midlevel public sector organizational leaders.

Exhibit 1.1

A Simplified View of Different Types of Leaders

		Types of work
		Execution	Policy	New ideas
Types of followers	Employees	Managers	Executives with policy responsibilities	Transformational leaders
	Constituents	Community leaders of volunteer groups	Legislators and advisory board members	Lobbyists and policy entrepreneurs
	Adherents	Small group leaders	Leaders of social movements	Philosophical zealots and social trendsetters

Even narrowing the focus to organizational leadership leaves a broad array of perspectives to consider. Some important distinctions include: leadership exercised at various levels of the organization (executive, management, supervisory, or even frontline employee), line leadership versus staff leadership, leaders in small or large organizations, leaders in old or new organizations, leaders in resource-rich environments versus those in poor environments, and leaders in relatively static organizational environments versus those in relatively dynamic environments.

HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE ON LEADERSHIP IN THE MAINSTREAM AND PUBLIC SECTORS

A brief historical overview of the massive leadership literature is provided as an initial introduction to the subject. It begins with the traditionally dominant themes and then follows up with contemporary themes since the 1990s. Next, the discussion contrasts the distinctly different tones and emphases assumed in the public- versus the private-sector leadership literature.

Dominant Themes in the Modern Leadership Mainstream Through the 1990s

It is certainly impossible to pigeonhole all the mainstream leadership literature¹ into distinct eras with clear demarcations; however, it is possible to capture themes and interests for a heuristic overview. An excellent, exhaustive review can be found in The Bass Handbook of Leadership (Bass 2008) for those interested in a detailed history and more complex analysis.

The nineteenth century was dominated by the notion of the “great man” thesis. Particular great men (women were invariably overlooked despite great leaders in history such as Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, and Clara Barton) somehow move history forward due to their exceptional characteristics as leaders. The stronger version of this theory holds that history is handmaiden to men; great men actually change the shape and direction of history. Philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and William James firmly asserted that history would be different if a great man were suddenly incapacitated. Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 essay on heroes and hero worship is an early popular version of this, as was Galton’s 1869 study of hereditary genius (cited in Bass 1990, 37–38). Such theories generally have an implicit class bias. A milder version of the theory is that as history proceeds in its irrevocable course, a few men will move history forward substantially and dramatically because of their greatness, especially in moments of crisis or social need. This sentiment was expressed by Hegel, who thought that the great man was an expression of his times, as did Herbert Spencer. Economic determinists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, although not theorizing about leadership per se, imply that great men overcome obstacles of history more effectively and quickly than do lesser individuals.² Although these lines of thinking have more sophisticated echoes later in the trait and situational leadership periods, “hero worship” is certainly alive and well in popular culture and in biographies and autobiographies. It has as its core a belief that there are only a few, very rare individuals in any society at any time that have the unique characteristics to shape or express history. Although this thesis may serve sufficiently for case studies (essentially biographies), it is effectively nonrefutable and therefore unusable as a scientific theory, and it is equally unsatisfying as a primary leadership teaching tool.

The scientific mood of the early twentieth century fostered the development of a more focused search for the basis of leadership. What traits and characteristics do leaders seem to share in common? Researchers developed personality tests and compared the results of average individuals with those perceived to be leaders. By the 1940s, researchers had amassed very long lists of traits from numerous psychologically oriented studies (Bird 1940; Jenkins 1947). This tactic involved two problems. First, the lists became longer and longer as research continued. Second, and more important, the traits and characteristics identified were not powerful predictors across situations. For example, leaders have to be decisive but they must also be flexible and inclusive. Without situational specificity, the endless list of traits offers little prescriptive assistance and descriptively becomes nothing more than a long laundry list. In 1948, Ralph Stogdill published a devastating critique of pure trait theory, which subsequently fell into disfavor as being too unidimensional to account for the complexity of leadership (Stogdill 1948).

The next major thrust looked at the situational contexts that affect leaders, and attempted to find meaningful patterns for theory building and useful advice. One early example was the work that came out of the Ohio State Leadership Studies (Shartle 1950; Hempill 1950; Hempill and Coons 1957). These studies began by testing 1,800 statements related to leadership behavior. By continually distilling the behaviors, researchers arrived at two underlying factors: consideration and the initiation of structure. Consideration describes a variety of behaviors related to the development, inclusion, and good feelings of subordinates. The initiation of structure describes a variety of behaviors related to defining roles, control mechanisms, task focus, and work coordination both inside and outside the unit. Coupled with the humanist/human relations revolution that was occurring in the 1950s and 1960s, these (and similar studies) spawned a series of useful, if often simplistic and largely bimodal, theories. Arygris’s maturity theory (1957), Likert’s motivational approach (1959), and McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y (1960) all implicitly encourage more consideration in all leadership behavior. Maslow’s (1967) eupsychian management recommends that leadership be assigned based on the needs of the situation so that authoritarian tendencies (excessive structure) can be curbed. This line of thinking was further advanced and empirically tested by Fiedler (1967), who developed a contingency theory and related leader-match theory (Fiedler, Chemers, and Mahar 1976). Blake and Mouton’s (1964, 1965) managerial grid recommends leaders be highly skilled in both task behaviors (initiating structure) and people-oriented behaviors (consideration). Hersey and Blanchard’s life-cycle theory (1969, 1972) relates the maturity of the followers (both in terms of expertise and attitude) to the ideal leader behavior—telling (directing), selling (consulting), participating, and delegating. (For an early example of this insight, see Exhibit 1.2.)

Exhibit 1.2

The Administrator as Leader

“If administration is to be leadership and not command, then it were well that the high echelons of hierarchy were Escoffiers or Rembrandts, sensitive to the flavor and shades of coloring in the group relationships. Such leadership requires not just an understanding of the organizational interrelationships of the hierarchy. It requires some knowledge of the psychological dynamics of group behavior, of belief systems, of status values, and of the learning process itself. The administrator who is a leader must also be a teacher. For such leadership he requires not only formal education in administration but also apprenticeship and on-the-job training.”

Source: Marshall (1953, 13).

These early situational theories were certainly useful for several reasons. First, they were useful as an antidote to the excessively hierarchical, authoritarian styles that had developed in the first half of the twentieth century with the rise and dominance of large organizations in both the private and public sectors. Second, they were useful as teaching tools for incipient and practicing managers who appreciated the elegant constructs even though they were descriptively simplistic. As a class, however, these theories generally failed to meet scientific standards because they tried to explain too much with too few variables. Of the major theories, only Vroom’s normative-decision model broke out of this pattern because it self-consciously focused on a single dimension of leadership style—the role of participation—and identified seven problem attributes and two classes of cases (group and individual) (Vroom and Yetton 1973; Vroom and Jago 1988). Although the situational perspective still forms the basis of most leadership theories today, it has largely done so either in a strictly managerial context (i.e., a narrow level of analysis) on a factor-by-factor basis or it has been subsumed in more comprehensive approaches to leadership at the macro level.

While ethical dimensions were occasionally mentioned in the mainstream literature, the coverage was invariably peripheral bec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Leadership Theories
• 2 Theoretical Building Blocks: Contingency Factors and Leader Styles
• 3 Leadership Theories: Early Managerial and Transactional Approaches
• 4 Leadership Theories: Charismatic and Transformational Approaches
• 5 Horizontal and Distributed Models of Leadership
• 6 Ethics-Based Leadership Theories
• 7 Specialized Approaches to Leadership: Power, Culture, Diversity, and Gender
• 8 Integrative Theories
• Applying Theory
• 9 Leader Assessments
• 10 Leader Formulation and Prioritization of Goals
• 11 Traits That Contribute to Leader Effectiveness
• 12 Skills That Contribute to Leader Effectiveness
• 13 Task-Oriented Behaviors
• 14 People-Oriented Behaviors
• 15 Organizational-Oriented Behaviors
• Developing and Evaluating Leadership
• 16 Leadership Development
• Evaluating Leadership
• appendix1 Assessment of Organizational Conditions and Leader Performance
• appendix2 General Instructions for the Assessment of Organizational Conditions and Leader Performance
• appendix3 Study of Federal Managers
• appendix4 Study of Local Government Managers
• reference
• Index
• List of Contributors