Leadership in Organizations

John Storey, John Storey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317443995
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This third edition of Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends builds on the success of the previous versions, with new and updated chapters providing fresh and lively insights into a subject that can often be tricky to pin down.

Leadership in Organizations carefully balances theory and practice, including critical perspectives, to examine fundamental questions about the meaning of leadership, its use and its development. Readers will benefit from the text's rich use of cases and examples of real-life tensions, challenges and successful outcomes of leadership practice. The book also sets itself apart through its distinctive focus on leadership within the wider contexts of politics, economics and public policy, as well as organizational behaviour and management.

New elements for this edition include:

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• The moral pitfalls of leadership

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• Leadership roles under crisis conditions

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• Fresh analysis of the impact of leadership on performance outcomes

This is the ideal text for advanced students of leadership studies, as well as practitioners looking to deepen their understanding of the leadership process and to enhance their leadership skills.

Part 1

Introduction

1 Signs of change

‘Damned rascals’ and beyond

John Storey

Chapter outline

This chapter:

• Highlights the massive extent of interest in leadership in public and private sector organizations.

• Places the ideas of leaders, leading and leadership in historic context and highlights current issues and key trends.

• Locates the leadership phenomenon in its contemporary socio-economic context.

• Sets the scene for chapter 2 on leadership theories and research.

When introducing the first edition of this book, which was published in 2004, it was noted that ‘There are few, if any, hotter topics in management, business and organization theory at the present time than “leadership”.’ The observation remains equally valid more than a decade later despite some hefty knocks to and dents in the leadership sheen as a result of numerous corporate scandals. Indeed, leadership as a theme is now more central than ever before. However, the leadership domain (it is evidently not an academic discipline in its own right) is a peculiar one. Contributions veer from the celebratory, uncritical and triumphant to the most sceptical and dismissive.

Because many studies of ‘leadership’ have, over the years tended to focus on the qualities of individual ‘leaders’, there is a huge risk that such contributions veer off into uncritical hagiography. Leader-celebrities are asked about the ‘secret of their success’ and, not surprisingly, they are often only too willing to impart plausible causal sources (for example, sheer determination, hard work, early traumas, overcoming dyslexia, helpful mentor, innate feel, lucky break, etc., etc.). Biographies and autobiographies are staples of the Christmas book market and many of these are positioned as quasi or even outright studies of success or leadership case studies. For example, in 2015, Sir Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United manager, co-authored his latest autobiography, simply titled Leading, with Sir Michael Moritz (chairman of Sequoia Capital), (Ferguson and Moritz 2015). It contains a series of reflections built on the experience of a long and successful career. Harvard University based a case study on his leadership of the club and a Harvard academic has collaborated on an analysis of his methods which resulted in a Harvard Business Review article in October of 2013 and a part-time appointment for Sir Alex at Harvard Business School.

Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer notes the gap between serious social science research on the many aspects of leadership and the everyday talk about it:

Want to be a leadership coach? You can go to an institute or enroll on one of many programs … but you don’t even have to do that. You can coach tomorrow. Want to be an expert on leadership? You can get training or exposure to the relevant literature, but it’s not necessary. If you are persuasive enough, articulate enough, or attractive enough you can be a successful blogger, speaker or consultant – whether or not you have ever read, let alone contributed to, any of the relevant social science on the topic.

(Pfeffer 2015: ix)

Paradoxically, while some academics remain deeply sceptical about the field of leadership, their universities are only too willing to offer the prospect of significant leadership development opportunities. London Business School, for example, confidently declares: ‘Overcome leadership challenges at every stage of your career. Our range of leadership programmes empower you to drive change, manage teams and deliver results.’ And INSEAD, the European business school based in Fontainebleau, says that its Global Leadership Centre provides a Leadership Development Programme which ‘combines a wide range of innovative learning methods designed to bring out the leader within you’. It says the programme is ‘founded on a belief that leadership is more important than management’. And Harvard Business School, offers a plethora of leadership programmes: Authentic Leadership Development; Leading Global Businesses; Leadership for Senior Executives; High Potential Leadership Program, The Women’s Leadership Forum, and Leadership Best Practices, to name a few. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Pfeffer, the notable Stanford academic, rails against the prevalence of ‘Leadership BS’ (Pfeffer 2015). It is a strange state of affairs indeed.

Despite the scepticism about the role of individual leaders and the idea that their contribution is exaggerated, press and public continue to look to them for blame and scapegoating when things go wrong or crises present themselves, and look for alternative leaders for resolution. For example, within hours of the emission test scandal at Volkswagen in October 2015, the chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, who had been in that position since 2007, was forced to resign. His successor Matthias Muller came-in from Porsche as a ‘new broom’. It soon emerged that Porsche was also implicated, but one sending-off was deemed sufficient for the time being. An interesting aspect of the case is that VW is governed by a supervisory board which has representatives from the workers council. This governance system has been judged as weak and too cosy (Milne 2015).

A question too rarely asked is why people seem so interested in, even fascinated by, leaders and leadership. There are several possible reasons. One set of reasons derives from an assumption that organizational success or failure stems from the behaviours of those at the top. Hence, if there is an assumed causal connection then it would seem logical to scrutinise the source. Another set of reasons is more ideological in nature – this reflects the belief in a ‘great man’ as potential saviour of firms or country. Strong leaders also loom large in national stories and their histories. Thomas Carlyle famously stated that the history of the world is the biography of great men (though Herbert Spencer countered that great men were the products of their society and time).

Francis Fukuyama, in his expansive sweep of the emergence and decay of political order across the globe, notes the struggle between strong leaders (be they warrior-chiefs, kings/emperors or authoritarian political supremos) and institutional order (Fukuyama 2012, 2014). When viewed historically, he tends to see strong leaders as often positive agents in the state-building process provided they have the interests of the state uppermost in their priorities. These might be survival, consolidation or expansion. Examples include Qin Shi Huangdi (creator of the first Chinese state) and the kings of Prussia from Frederick the Great on. Such leaders needed to raise, provision and finance loyal and efficient armies over long periods of time, for which they required reliable sources of taxation and a trained bureaucracy. However, while such institutions might curb patrimonialism, clientalism and fragmentation of the state, they could, and often did, militate against the rule of law or the democratic accountability increasingly demanded by new elites generated by global commerce and industrialisation. Thus, the struggle over leadership is often a struggle over the particular interests promoted or threatened by those leaders.

Thus, the link between democracy and leadership is complex. Democratic institutions may be established to curtail the arbitrary power of autocrats yet leaders may be required to establish and maintain democratic institutions. Thus, even those persons operating far from hero worship may regard leaders and leadership as important to scrutinise. Persons suspicious, even fearful, of individuals or cabals wielding power will want to concern themselves with leaders and leadership in order to regulate, circumscribe or curtail such power.

Another set of reasons is cultural. If a society gives so much attention to leaders and leadership – in popular media coverage, in business analysis, in film, drama, academic analysis and so on – then it becomes a phenomenon which merits study. Finally, a thread running through a number of these reasons is a certain note of fantasising, infantilising and romanticising that sometimes accrues to leadership. This is made evident in times of unusual uncertainty and crisis: on such occasions there is a natural tendency to seek an authoritative spokesperson to reassure and unify.

And then there is the leadership development side of things. In 2016, just as in the year 2000, major bodies continued to launch strategic leadership initiatives. The long-view perspective allows us to see how such initiatives are in continual flux. The importance of leadership, it seems, is periodically discovered, emphasised, institutionalised, taken for granted, neglected, discarded and then rediscovered. Throughout the ups and downs, the leadership industry remains large. Harvard professor, Barbara Kellerman, has noted the continuing fascination with leadership; she also notes that despite an estimated $50 million annual spend on corporate training and development that the results have been poor (Kellerman 2015). Yet scholarly interest in leadership has also increased exponentially (Dinh et al. 2014).

Strategic leadership initiatives are launched and re-launched with surprising regulatory – perhaps reflecting the see-saw of belief and hope vying with experience and disillusionment. Since the previous edition of this book, for example, we have seen the NHS first launch a new ‘leadership council’, then introduce an NHS Leadership Academy, which has since been absorbed by Health Education England (HEE). Despite the ups and downs, the opening and the closing of programmes, the emphasis on leadership remains strong. Indeed, according to one claim: ‘The demand for talented and capable leaders in the NHS has never been higher, and the need for specific and proven leadership development continues to grow’ (NLA 2015: 1).

Meanwhile, in the civil service, there was formerly the Civil Service College (part of the Cabinet office), which then became the National School of Government, containing the Centre for Strategic Leadership. This in turn was closed down in 2012. But in a report published in March 2015, the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) lamented failures such as the cancellation of the West Coast Mainline franchise competition and failures in IT procurement and traced such failures to weaknesses in civil service leadership capabilities. As a response, it recommended the establishment of a new Civil Service Leadership Academy to address the unique challenges faced by public sector service leaders. Notably, it stressed that this did not mean re-establishing the former National School of Government. Leadership development for the long term was seen as a solution to the problems of short-termism and apparent lack of preparedness as found with the 2008 financial crisis and the 2014 Ebola outbreak (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee 2015).

After all this time, the search for appropriate leadership development for civil servants goes on. The Public Administration Committee of the House of Commons reporting on its inquiry into leadership stated:

We […] fully support John Manzoni’s intention to establish a Civil Service Leadership Academy. This should be a place in which Civil Service leaders can reflect and build upon their experiential learning. In establishing this academy we recommend that the Cabinet Office consult academics to ensure that this institution provides Civil Service leaders with effective access to conceptual, reflective and experimental learning. It must address the unique challenges faced by public service leaders, which conventional business training cannot. This should also provide a central focus for the other leadership academies already being established for the NHS, Police and Major Projects, and any others being proposed, such as for commercial skills, which will have to educate public service leaders to deal with similar challenges.

(House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee 2015: para 45)

And so the cycle of invention, review, closure, rediscovery continues.

The College of Policing in the UK launched a major leadership review in 2015. This made ten recommendations that fitted new leadership development to new challenges in the wider economic and social context. It proposes a new model of leadership that includes some blending of management and leadership. It starts with the well-known distinction between management being about ‘doing things right’ and leadership about ‘doing the right things’. Meanwhile, the Fire Service in the UK has its own executive leadership programme and this places the emphasis on executive coaching and action learning. Like the police, it tends to blend management and leadership.

In education, the National College for School Leadership was formed in 2000 and occupied a prestigious building on the University of Nottingham campus. In 2013 it merged with the Teaching Agency to become the National College for Teaching and Learning (NCTL). This in turn closed in 2014. Thus, the remarkable churn in national leadership provision in different sectors continues. Problems are identified, leadership is seen to be lacking and new programmes and institutions are launched. After a short while these provisions are often reduced or even closed only to be re-launched at some later date.

Leadership is often seen as the answer to increasingly challenging problems – including meeting increasing demands with constraints on resources. Overall, when visiting, for a range of diverse purposes, corporate training centres and hotel ‘conference suites’, I continue to be taken aback by the sheer number of workshops being held on this subject. Despite much soul-searching in the light of the global economic crisis and the alleged demise of the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ of capitalism, the fascination with leadership has by no means evaporated and it probably never will. The sceptical note struck by this book in the first edition when the leadership cult was at a periodic peak has proved to be more than justified. Nonetheless, the fascination with leadership and leaders continues.

Virtually every sector and all levels of staff appear to be represented and engaged in the search for leadership. Everyone, it seems, is being invited to join in. ‘Are you here for the Leadership Workshop?’, receptionists would cheerily and routinely enquire. Leadership in contemporary organizational life has become a pervasive phenomenon. The climate in relation to it certainly seems to have changed significantly when compared with the traditional mode of approach used, for example, by US navy captains with respect to relations with their crews. Standard form, it is reported, was for captains to address their men as ‘you damned rascals’ (Leiner 2001: 32). Nowadays, public and private sector organizations alike are caught up in a frenzy of activity as they seek to demonstrate that they are taking responsible steps to populate the ‘leadership pool’ with a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 The (changing?) elements of leadership: issues and trends
• PART 3 The processes of leadership training and development
• PART 4 Leadership and career development
• PART 5 Leadership issues and trends in the private sector
• PART 6 Leadership issues and trends in the public sector
• Index