What's Wrong With Leadership?

Improving Leadership Research and Practice

Ronald E. Riggio, Ronald E. Riggio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351671668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Leadership practitioners and those who seek to develop leadership are concerned with whether they are using evidence-based best practices to develop leadership capacity in themselves and others. Are we indeed using best practices in the study, practice, and development of leadership? This book seeks to draw attention to the limitations of extant work on leadership, and to provide suggestions for a way forward. Presenting chapters on topics ranging from research methodology, gender and cross-cultural issues in leadership studies, and the role of the humanities in our understanding of leadership, the book represents a rigorous multidisciplinary collaboration.

This is a must-read for graduate students studying leadership, leadership consultants and trainers, leadership scholars, and anyone who practices, teaches, or seeks to develop leadership. It will help expand the horizons of how we think about and practice leadership.

PART I

Improving Leadership Methodology, Assessment, and Selection

1

LEADERSHIP RESEARCH METHODS

Progressing back to Process

Maureen E. McCusker, Roseanne J. Foti, and Elsheba K. Abraham

The term leadership is much used, but poorly understood. In 1974, Ralph Stogdill stated that there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are persons who have defined it. More than 100 years of leadership research has led to many paradigm shifts (Antonakis & Day, 2018), as well as calls for more integrative strategies (Hernandez, Eberly, Avolio, & Johnson, 2011). Today, there exists an interactive development of leadership theories and methodologies (Lord, Day, Zaccaro, Avolio, & Eagly, 2017); thus, to discuss leadership research methods, we first have to define what we mean by leadership. Given its many definitions, we selected three quotes with which to begin our chapter and to illustrate our own definition.

Leadership places its emphasis:

. . . not on a set of personal characteristics or on particular kinds of leadership behavior, but upon the circumstances under which groups of people integrate and organize their activities toward objectives, and upon the way in which that integration and organization is achieved. Thus, the leadership function is analyzed and understood in terms of a dynamic relationship.

(Knickerbocker, 1948, p. 26)

An early element of confusion in the study of leadership was the failure to distinguish it as a process from the leader as a person who occupies a central role in that process. Leadership constitutes an influence relationship between two, or usually more, persons who depend upon one another for the attainment of certain mutual goals within a group situation.

(Hollander & Julian, 1969, p. 388)

Leadership is no longer simply described as an individual characteristic or difference, but rather is depicted in various models as dyadic, shared, relational, strategic, global, and a complex social dynamic.

(Avolio, Walumbwa, & Weber, 2009, p. 423)

All of these definitions share a common theme: moving beyond characteristics of a single individual towards a dynamic influence process. The first quote is from Knickerbocker (1948); the second, from Hollander and Julian (1969), was published 21 years later; the third quote, from Avolio and colleagues (2009), some 40 years later. Thus the distinction between leaders and leadership, as well as a focus on dynamic processes, spans more than 60 years. As these quotes illustrate, leadership is not simply a person, a behavior, or an outcome, but a socio-perceptual and relational process.

Now let us turn from the conceptualization of the leadership process to the methods used to study it. The “typical” leadership research study, as described by Hunter, Bedell-Avers, and Mumford (2007), generally begins with the distribution of a self-report questionnaire. The typical questionnaire is a predeveloped, behaviorally-based leadership assessment. These questionnaires are completed by individuals reporting on their immediate supervisor’s behavior. Generally, the results of these questionnaires are then correlated with outcomes such as job satisfaction and perceived effectiveness. This “typical” leadership study is in sharp contrast to early leadership research, such as Bales’ (1953) interaction process analysis and Browne’s (1949, 1950, 1951) series of studies of the relational and communication patterns of executive leadership.

Consistent with the typical leadership study, when Lowe and Gardner (2000) summarized the research methods used in empirical articles published in the first ten years of The Leadership Quarterly, they found that 64 percent of them used a questionnaire-based approach. An analysis of the second ten years of publications in the journal revealed that the most prevalent research strategy for empirical articles was still the sample survey (Gardner, Lowe, Moss, Mahoney, & Cogliser, 2010). This state of affairs led Kaiser, Hogan, and Craig (2008) to conclude that most leadership research concerns how individual leaders are regarded and provides little information about the process of leadership.

Thus the conceptualization of leadership as a process has remained mostly unchanged, while the typical leadership study has largely ignored process variables and methods. By not aligning our research methods with our conceptualization, we are drifting further away from a better understanding of the process of leadership and how and why it happens, leaving us with only a narrow and incomplete understanding of leadership. Furthermore, when studying leadership, researchers typically study the outcome of the process, not the process itself. In the case of leadership emergence, this involves studying who emerged as a leader in a group by, for example, measuring perceptions of who emerged as a leader using questionnaire-based measures of the outcome of the leadership process (Acton, Foti, Lord, & Gladfelter, 2019). In the case of leadership effectiveness, ratings of the effectiveness of leaders or the job satisfaction of subordinates are used as measures of the outcome of leadership. To study the process itself means to focus on the mediating mechanism that explains the causal relationship between inputs (for example, leader behaviors) and outputs (for example, effective performance), following an input–process–output logic (Fischer, Dietz, & Antonakis, 2017).

The main purpose of this chapter is to help research to get back on the path to understanding the dynamic process of leadership – that is, the how and the why of leadership. Thus our chapter is both retrospective and prospective. We first discuss what it means to study leadership as a process, noting the key elements that are critical when conducting process-oriented leadership research. We then provide recommendations and examples of process-oriented research methodology that addresses each of the key elements.

Key Elements of the Leadership Process

The process orientation of leadership research methods certainly lags behind that of leadership conceptualization. However, as academics, we are not incapable of conducting leadership research using process-oriented methods. History is replete with examples of early research involving much more process-oriented methods than today’s “typical leadership study” (Hunter et al., 2007). Additionally, technological advancements have equipped us with the tools to design, collect, and analyze process-oriented data more feasibly than ever before (Tan, Shiyko, Li, Li, & Dierker, 2012). But if leadership is generally understood to be a socio-perceptual and relational process, and we have the ability to research process dynamics, then why are we rarely employing process-oriented methods? One reason may be that the core concepts underlying the study of leadership as a process are underdeveloped or lacking in terms of current leadership theory and measurement (Kozlowski, Mak, & Chao, 2016). This suspected lack of clarity of the critical components, or elements, of the leadership process in turn hinder the effective implementation of process-oriented methods. In what follows, we aim to begin to unpack what a leadership process actually means by identifying some of the critical elements involved.

Rather than developing yet another definition of leadership as a process, we use existing definitions of leadership to uncover the critical elements. We conducted a review of leadership literature conceptualizing leadership as a process, extracted definitions of leadership, and identified commonalities among the critical elements involved in the process of leadership. Our results are laid out in Table 1.1. Our review yielded four critical elements of the leadership process: interpersonal interactions, time, levels, and context. While we recognize that these are not the only elements involved in leadership processes, these four were the most critical and the most common elements represented in our analysis. Next, we discuss each of these elements in more detail.

TABLE 1.1 Examples of process-oriented definitions of leadership, published between 2010 and 2017

Interpersonal Interactions

Leadership, especially in the informal sense, is an emergent phenomenon. The concept of emergence is rooted in multilevel theory (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000) and is defined as a process by which higher-level, collective phenomena arise from the dynamic interactions of lower-level elements over time (Cronin, Weingart, & Todorova, 2011; Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). Thus leadership, the emergent product, comes into existence as a result of a series of simultaneous emergent processes occurring within and across multiple levels. For example, the constructions of cognitive self-structures of leadership occur within individuals (Lord & Chui, 2018), interpersonal interactions unfold among dyads (DeRue & Ashford, 2010), and dynamic group-level processes and states frame and constrain these lower-level processes (Day & Antonakis, 2012). While leadership researchers most commonly study the outcome of what has emerged (van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013), studying leadership as a process means studying how all of these congruent micro-dynamic processes within and between actors produce the emergent product (Rost, 1995).

Researchers have long argued that interpersonal interactions are the crux of any social process, including leadership. For instance, in one of the earliest interaction studies, Stogdill and Shartle (1948) used direct observation among other methods to categorize leadership behaviors into “planning” and “coordination.” This created a framework for systematically assessing effective behavioral interactions, which could be carried out by any member of the group, not only those assigned to formal leadership roles. What followed from Stogdill and Shartle’s research, and similar research by contemporaries, was a recognition that interactions among all group members were a defining characteristic of the process producing leadership relationships. As stated by Peter Blau (1964), social structures (that is, leadership) emerge(s) through interpersonal exchanges, and understanding how those structures emerge cannot be reduced to studying only individual characteristics, attributes, or behaviors.

Individual interactions and their complexities progress over time. Early work by Robert Bales (1950), Hollander and Willis (1967), and Karl Weick (for example, 1978, 1979) established the importance of sequences, or patterns, of behavioral interactions (that is, acts, interacts, and double interacts) as the organizing processes in social groups. Since this time, a group of leadership and communication researchers have focused on behavioral interactions among group members as the means of unpacking the process through which leadership is enacted (Lehmann-Willenbrock & Allen, 2018). For example, Fairhurst’s work on discursive leadership focuses on assessing and understanding the patterns of speech that underlie and characterize leader–follower relationships (Fairhurst, 2007; Fairhurst & Uhl-Bien, 2012). DeRue and Ashford’s (2010) leadership identity construction theory claims that dyadic leadership relationships emerge from a series of reciprocal and iterative, mutual-influence behaviors consisting of “claims” and “grants” of leadership. Individuals within a social context grow to recognize these patterns of behavior and co-construct identities as leaders, which result in the formation of dyadic leader–follower perceptions. These perceptions, cognitions, and identities influence, and are influenced by, the behavioral interactions, producing the complex, reciprocal process of leadership (DeRue, 2011).

The key to studying leadership processes as interactions is a focus on the interactional behaviors of pairs or groups of individuals (DeRue, 2011). While there is an extensive literature on leadership behavior (for example, Bass, 1985; Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010), the unit of analysis is most commonly the individual, with frequencies or types of behavior aggregated within an individual, often over time. While this technique is useful for understanding and defining leadership behaviors in general, it provides little insight into the process of how particular behaviors influence leader–follower relationships (Weingart, 1997). Alternatively, by measuring sequences or patterns of interpersonal behavior (Fairhurst & Uhl-Bien, 2012; Lehmann-Willenbrock & Allen, 2018; Marchiondo, Myers, & Kopelman, 2015; Leenders, DeChurch, & Contractor, 2015) over time, we can more precisely identify and understand the dynamic, active interactions between people impacting on leadership relationships (Shamir, 2011). We discuss specific research methods for doing so later in the chapter.

Time

The following phrases are included in Merriam-Webster’s (2018) definitions of process: “phenomenon marked by gradual changes,” “a continuous operation or treatment,” “a continuing natural or biological activity,” and “a series of actions or operations.” All of these definitions invoke a sense of temporality, suggesting that all processes are inherently tied to time. The leadership process is no different, as noted in the process-orientated definitions we compiled at the outset of this chapter. The enactment of behavioral interactions, the development of leader or follower identities, the formation of relational perceptions, and the impact of leadership inputs on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• What’s Wrong with Leadership?
• Leadership: Research and Practice Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: What’s Wrong with Leadership? Improving Leadership Theory, Research, and Practice
• PART I Improving Leadership Methodology, Assessment, and Selection
• PART II Increasing the Scope of Leadership Research
• PART III Improving Leadership Practice and Expanding Our Thinking about Leadership
• Index