Contemporary Issues in Leadership

William E. Rosenbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429973635
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book describes concepts of leadership that range from self-leadership and transactional and transformational leadership to transcendental leadership and the intersection of self, group, and organizational leadership. It discusses the paradox of the dual role of leader and follower.

– PART I –

HEART

Leaders are tested, again and again, throughout their careers, and the self-knowledge gained from these tests of character is the heart of leadership.

JOSEPH L. BADARACCO JR.

Leadership is widely discussed and studied but continues to remain an elusive and hazy concept. Although the study of leadership has emerged as a legitimate discipline, there is still little agreement about what leadership really is. Indeed, there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people attempting to define it. Yet we know good leadership when we experience it! Today, as in the past, the definitions are very often bounded by the academic discipline or the experience of those attempting definition. In 1978, Pulitzer Prize winner James McGregor Burns wrote that we know a lot about leaders but very little about leadership. However, Walter F. Ulmer Jr., former president and CEO of the Center for Creative Leadership, believes that we know more than we used to about leaders, but that much of our knowledge is superficial and fails to examine the deeper realms of character and motivation that drive leaders, particularly in difficult times.

If we are to begin to understand what leadership is, it is worthwhile to examine what leadership is not. Leadership is not hierarchical, top down, or based on positional power and authority. Although effective managers must practice good leadership and effective leaders must possess managerial skills, leadership is not management or some part or principle of it. To understand leadership, we must understand its essential nature, that is, the process of the leader and followers engaging in reciprocal influence to achieve a shared purpose. Leadership is all about getting people to work together to make things happen that might not otherwise occur or to prevent things from happening that would ordinarily take place.

Looking through the history of the study of leadership, we find that the earliest coherent thrust centered on an approach now referred to as the Great Man or Great Person theory. For a full generation, leadership scholars concentrated on identifying the traits associated with great leadership. At first it seemed obvious: are not great leaders exceptionally intelligent, unusually energetic, far above the norm in their ability to speak to followers, and so on? However, when these “obvious” propositions were subjected to test, they all proved false. Yes, leaders were found to be a bit more intelligent than the average, but not much more. And yes, they were more energetic and dynamic, but not significantly so. True, they were better-than-average public speakers with some charm, but again their overall advantage was not very great. And so it went: each of these and other leadership myths evaporated under the glare of scientific scrutiny.

What followed was a focus on the behavior of leaders. If the key was not who they were, perhaps the crux of leadership could be found in what they did. In fact, researchers were able to identify two crucial types of leader behavior: behavior centered on task accomplishments and behavior directed toward interpersonal relations. Their peers typically reported individuals who consistently exhibited high levels of both of these types of behavior as leaders. Those who engaged in a high level of task-related activity but only an average level of relationship-centered behavior were sometimes still designated leaders. But those who engaged only in a high level of relationship behavior were rarely designated leaders by their peers. And those who did little in the way of either task- or relationship-centered activity were never seen as leaders.

Perhaps, then, the essence of effective leadership was engaging in high levels of both task-oriented and relationship-centered activity. To test this possibility, researchers trained factory foremen in the two types of behavior and put them back on the job. For a while things did seem to improve, but the effects were short-lived. After only a few weeks the foremen went back to their old behaviors; performance and productivity also returned to their prior levels. Although further research showed that even sustained high levels of the new behaviors had limited long-term effects on employees’ performance, productivity, or satisfaction, the task-oriented and relationship-centered leadership-training programs developed in the early 1960s were still popular. Serious students of leadership, however, soon recognized the need to look further for answers to the riddle of effective leadership.

Some took a new path, suggesting that leadership effectiveness might require different combinations of task and relationship behavior in different situations. Theoretically, the most effective combination would depend upon certain situational factors, such as the nature of the task or the ability level of employees reporting to a certain supervisor. Another somewhat different path was to combine the situational hypothesis with some variations of the personal characteristics approach. Like earlier attempts, however, these efforts to explain effective leadership met with limited results.

Interestingly, this focus on relationship and task behaviors was common to the many theories developed over the past decades. The attempts to develop predictive and prescriptive models led to serious research and popular fads as scholars worked to solve the leadership puzzle. As popular literature focused on leadership tools and techniques, most people remained skeptical about leaders and leadership. Thus, we must ask, what have we really learned?

In this book we distinguish between two basic types of leadership. Transactional leadership clarifies the role followers must play both to attain the organization’s desired outcomes and to receive valued personal rewards for satisfactory performance, giving them the confidence necessary to achieve those outcomes and rewards. Transactional leadership is the equitable transaction or exchange between the leader and followers whereby the leader influences the followers by focusing on the self-interests of both. The self-interest of the leader is satisfactory performance, and the self-interests of the followers are the valued rewards gained in return for good performance. Used well, and in appropriate situations, transactional leadership will result in good performance. Transactional leadership is simply good management and might be considered managerial leadership.

Transformational or transforming leadership involves strong personal identification of followers with the leader. The transformational leader motivates followers to perform beyond expectations by creating an awareness of the importance of an organization’s mission and vision in such a way that followers share beliefs and values and are able to transcend self-interests and tie the vision to the higher-order needs of self-esteem and self-actualization. Transformational leaders create a mental picture of the shared vision in the minds of the followers through the use of language that has deep meaning from shared experiences. In addition, they are role models: in their daily actions they set an example and give meaning to shared assumptions, beliefs, and values. Transformational leaders empower or, better yet, enable the followers to perform beyond expectations by sharing power and authority and ensuring that followers understand how to use them. These leaders are committed to developing the followers into partners. In the end, what transformational leaders do is to enable followers to transform purpose into action.

What we have learned from recent leadership research is that there is no one best way to lead—the most effective leadership style is dependent upon the organization’s culture, the characteristics of the followers, the external environment, and the personal traits of the leader. Leadership is all about character, integrity, and competence. Effective leaders are confident, adaptable, and collaborative, and they take the initiative for their own self-development. They have a high degree of self-awareness resulting from introspection and proactive reflection, which leads to self-regulation and the ability to align their values with their intentions and behaviors.

Ultimately, leadership is always a personal choice.

LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVES

In “Leadership” (Chapter 1), Marshall Sashkin proposes that there has been a paradigm shift in leadership theory and practice. He reviews the evolution of the concepts of transactional and transformational leadership and describes transformational leadership behaviors and characteristics as well as the social context of leadership. Sashkin also explains how The Leadership Profile (TLP) measures leadership effectiveness. Leadership matters, he writes, because it makes a difference.

In “What Makes a Leader?” (Chapter 2), Daniel Goleman, the premier expert on emotional intelligence, describes why emotional intelligence is the crucial component of leadership and how it is displayed in leaders. Superb leaders have very different ways of leading, and different situations call for different styles of leadership. Goleman has found, however, that effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. He discusses each component of emotional intelligence and shows how to recognize it in potential leaders and how it can be learned.

Robert J. Allio, in “Leadership: The Five Big Ideas” (Chapter 3), argues that what we need to know about leadership springs from just five important research hypotheses. Those who aspire to become leaders or improve their performance as leaders must understand and incorporate these ideas into their personal leadership style.

In Chapter 4, “Transcendent Leadership,” Mary Crossan and Daina Mazutis describe the key leadership challenges of leading across the levels of self, others, organizations, and society. They argue that most of the leadership discourse has focused almost exclusively on leadership of others and occasionally on the leadership of the organization as a whole, yet little has focused on the integral component of leadership of self. They provide evidence of the necessity of multiple levels of leadership, as well as some practical guidance, by drawing from in-depth interviews of six leaders in various contexts.

“Summit Leadership: Learn from Sir Edmund Hillary,” by David Parmenter (Chapter 5), describes eleven lessons to be drawn from Sir Edmund Hillary’s experience of climbing Mount Everest as a team member and later of working as a CEO.

1

Leadership

Marshall Sashkin

THE PUZZLE OF LEADERSHIP

There have been almost as many leadership theories and models as authors who have written on the subject. This chapter is aimed at integrating as much as possible that is of value into an overall leadership approach.

The history of leadership thought and research is generally recognized as having followed a sequence of three primary areas of study. The first was the study of leadership traits. When this seemed to have been relatively unprofitable, as summarized in Ralph Stogdill’s (1948) classic research review, the second area, the study of leader behavior, dominated research and theory for about twenty years. However, when this area, too, proved to provide a less comprehensive explanation to the puzzle of leadership than had been hoped, the third area of study came to the fore. This was, and is, the examination of leadership in the context of its setting. Even this approach failed to offer as powerful an answer to the question “What is leadership?” as had been hoped.

One way to resolve the puzzle of leadership is to simply insist that the way one has defined and measured leadership is the correct and only way to do so. Many writers on leadership have taken this approach and many continue to use simple, unsubstantiated assertion as their answer to the question of the nature of leadership. Some take a different approach and suggest that all three of the leadership aspects we have mentioned—personality, behavior, and the situational context—must be taken into consideration if we are to fully understand leadership. Although this makes sense, it still fails to provide a coherent answer.

We propose a somewhat different approach. Although accepting the premise that personality, behavior, and situation are all important, we take a step back. We start with a reexamination of the personal nature of leadership, not in terms of simple traits but in the sense of the basic element of human nature. This provides us with a central organizing framework for our concept of leadership.

LEADERSHIP CHARACTER

What is the nature of the leader’s character? Is it simply a new set of traits? Though some had long dismissed traits as an adequate explanation for leadership, it is quite common for leadership scholars and practitioners to use traitlike models to assess individuals’ “leadership competencies.” Yet the approach we present here is as old as Stogdill and as current as the most recent “five-factor” personality theory (Costa and McCrae, 1992; Digman, 1990; McCrae and Costa, 1997; Wiggins, 1996).

Stogdill observed that although no single trait or set of independent traits seemed to be strongly associated with leadership, there were five clusters of traits that when taken together seemed to be linked to leadership. Taken together, Stogdill’s cluster list and the five factors fit rather well with what we see as three elementary aspects of leader character.

Although these three basic aspects of leadership all concern the leader perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Exhibits, Tables, and Figures
• Preface
• – I – HEART
• – II – RELATIONSHIPS
• – III – JOURNEY
• – IV – HAZARDS
• – V – SOUL
• About the Editors and Contributors