a. In electronic communication, writing skills are likely to become an extension of
interpersonal skills.
B. Selecting Leaders
1. The entire process that organizations go through to fill management positions is
essentially an exercise in trying to identify individuals who will be effective leaders.
2. Items of consideration during selection include:
a. Reviewing the specific requirements for the position such as knowledge, skills,
and abilities that are needed to do the job effectively.
b. Personality tests can identify traits associated with leadership—extraversion,
conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
c. High self-monitors are better at reading situations and adjusting their behavior
accordingly.
d. Candidates with high emotional intelligence should have an advantage, especially
in situations requiring transformational leadership.
e. Experience is a poor predictor of leader effectiveness, but situation-specific
experience is relevant.
f. Since nothing lasts forever, the most important event an organization needs to
plan for is a change in leadership.
3. Some organizations seem to spend no time on leadership succession and are surprised
when their picks turn out poorly.
C. Training Leaders
1. Billions are spent on leadership training and development every year.
2. Here are some things management can do to get the maximum effect from their
leadership-training budgets:
a. Leadership training is likely to be more successful with individuals who are high
self-monitors than with low self-monitors.
b. Second, organizations can teach implementation skills.
c. We also can teach skills such as trust building, mentoring, and situational-analysis
skills.
d. There is evidence suggesting that behavioral training through modeling exercises
can increase an individual’s ability to exhibit charismatic leadership qualities.
e. Recent research also indicates that leaders should engage in regularly reviewing
their leadership after key organizational events as part of their development.
f. Finally, leaders can be trained in transformational leadership skills that have
bottom-line results.
II. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Leadership plays a central part in understanding group behavior, because it’s the leader
who usually directs us toward our goals.
B. Knowing what makes a good leader should thus be valuable in improving group
performance.
C. The Big Five personality framework show strong and consistent relationships between
personality and leadership.
D. The behavioral approach’s major contribution was narrowing leadership into
task-oriented (initiating structure) and people-oriented (consideration) styles.
E. By considering the situation in which the leader operates, contingency theories promised
to improve on the behavioral approach.
F. Contemporary theories have made major contributions to our understanding of leadership
effectiveness, and studies of ethics and positive leadership offer exciting promise.
Specific implications for managers are below:
1. For maximum leadership effectiveness, ensure that your preferences on the initiating
structure and consideration dimensions are a match for your work dynamics and
culture.
2. Hire candidates who exhibit transformational leadership qualities and who have
demonstrated success in working through others to meet a long-term vision.
Personality tests can reveal candidates higher in extraversion, conscientiousness, and
openness, which may indicate leadership readiness.
3. Hire candidates whom you believe are ethical and trustworthy for management roles
and train current managers in your organization’s ethical standards in order to
increase leadership effectiveness.
4. Seek to develop trusting relationships with followers, because, as organizations have
become less stable and predictable, strong bonds of trust are replacing bureaucratic
rules in defining expectations and relationships.
5. Consider investing in leadership training such as formal courses, workshops, rotating
job responsibilities, coaching, and mentoring.
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Trait Theories
A. Strong Leaders
1. Trait theories of leadership focus on personal qualities and characteristics.
2. A comprehensive review of the leadership literature, when organized around the Big
Five, has found extraversion to be the most important trait of effective leaders, but it
is more strongly related to the way leaders emerge than to their effectiveness.
a. Sociable and dominant people are more likely to assert themselves in group
situations, but leaders need to make sure they’re not too assertive—one study
found leaders who scored very high on assertiveness were less effective than
those who were moderately high.
b. Unlike agreeableness and emotional stability, conscientiousness and openness to
experience also showed strong relationships to leadership, though not quite as
strong as extraversion.
3. Leaders who like being around people and are able to assert themselves (extraverted),
who are disciplined and able to keep commitments they make (conscientious), and
who are creative and flexible (open) do have an apparent advantage when it comes to
leadership, suggesting good leaders do have key traits in common.
a. One reason is that conscientiousness and extraversion are positively related to
leaders’ self-efficacy, which explained most of the variance in subordinates’
ratings of leader performance.
b. People are more likely to follow someone who is confident she’s going in the
right direction.
4. Another trait that may indicate effective leadership is emotional intelligence (EI),
discussed in Chapter 4.
a. A core component of EI is empathy.
b. A leader who effectively displays and manages emotions will find it easier to
influence the feelings of followers, by both expressing genuine sympathy and
enthusiasm for good performance and by using irritation for those who fail to
perform.
5. The link between EI and leadership effectiveness may be worth investigating in
greater detail.
a. Recent research has demonstrated that people high in EI are more likely to emerge
as leaders, even after taking cognitive ability and personality into account.
6. Based on the latest findings, we offer two conclusions.
a. First, contrary to what we believed 20 years ago and thanks to the Big Five, we
can say that traits can predict leadership.
b. Second, traits do a better job predicting the emergence of leaders and the
appearance of leadership than actually distinguishing between effective and
ineffective leaders.
i. The fact that an individual exhibits the traits and that others consider him or
her a leader does not necessarily mean the leader is successful at getting the
group to achieve its goals.
II. Behavioral Theories
A. Introduction
1. Behavioral theories of leadership implied we could train people to be leaders.
B. Ohio State Studies
1. The most comprehensive theories resulted from the Ohio State Studies in the late
1940s, which sought to identify independent dimensions of leader behavior.
2. Beginning with more than a thousand dimensions, the studies narrowed the list to two
that substantially accounted for most of the leadership behavior described by
employees: initiating structure and consideration.
3. Initiating structure is the extent to which a leader is likely to define and structure his
or her role and those of employees in the search for goal attainment.
a. It includes behavior that attempts to organize work, work relationships, and goals.
b. A leader high in initiating structure is someone who “assigns group members to
particular tasks,” “expects workers to maintain definite standards of
performance,” and “emphasizes the meeting of deadlines.”
4. Consideration is the extent to which a person’s job relationships are characterized by
mutual trust, respect for employees’ ideas, and regard for their feelings.
a. A leader high in consideration helps employees with personal problems, is
friendly and approachable, treats all employees as equals, and expresses
appreciation and support.
b. In a recent survey, when asked to indicate what most motivated them at work, 66
percent of employees mentioned appreciation.
C. GLOBE Study
1. Some research from the GLOBE study suggests there are international differences in
preference for initiating structure and consideration.
a. Based on the values of Brazilian employees, a U.S. manager leading a team in
Brazil would need to be team-oriented, participative, and humane.
2. Leaders high in consideration would succeed best in this culture.
a. As one Brazilian manager said in the GLOBE study, “We do not prefer leaders
who take self-governing decisions and act alone without engaging the group.
That’s part of who we are.”
i. Compared to U.S. employees, the French have a more bureaucratic view of
leaders and are less likely to expect them to be humane and considerate.
ii. A leader high in initiating structure (relatively task-oriented) will do best and
can make decisions in a relatively autocratic manner.
iii. A manager who scores high on consideration (people-oriented) may find that
style backfiring in France.
b. According to the GLOBE study, Chinese culture emphasizes being polite,
considerate, and unselfish, but it also has a high performance orientation.
i. Thus, consideration and initiating structure may both be important.
D. Summary of Trait Theories and Behavioral Theories
1. Leaders who have certain traits and who display culturally appropriate consideration
and structuring behaviors do appear to be more effective.
a. Future research is needed to integrate these approaches.
2. As important as traits and behaviors are in identifying effective or ineffective leaders,
they do not guarantee success. The context matters too.
III. Contingency Theories
A. Introduction
1. Tough-minded leaders seem successful in difficult times, but tend to be dismissed
when the environment improves.
2. Situational factors that influence success or failure need to be explored further.
B. Fiedler Model
1. Introduction
a. The first comprehensive contingency model for leadership was developed by
Fred Fiedler, who proposed that effective group performance depends upon the
proper match between the leader’s style and the degree to which the situation
gives control to the leader.
2. Identifying leadership style
a. Fiedler believed that a key factor in leadership success is the individual’s basic
leadership style. He created the least preferred coworker (LPC) questionnaire
for this purpose.
b. After assessing leadership style, it is necessary to match the leader with the
situation. Fiedler has identified three contingency dimensions:
i. Leader-member relations—the degree of confidence, trust, and respect
members have in their leader.
ii. Task structure—the degree to which the job assignments are procedural.
iii. Position power—the degree of influence a leader has over power variables
such as hiring, firing, discipline, promotions, and salary increases.
c. The Fiedler model proposes matching them up to achieve maximum leadership
effectiveness.
d. Fiedler concluded that task-oriented leaders tend to perform better in situations
that were very favorable to them and in situations that were very unfavorable.
e. Fiedler would predict that when faced with a category I, II, III, VII, or VIII
situation, task-oriented leaders perform better.
f. Relationship-oriented leaders, however, perform better in moderately favorable
situations—categories IV, V, and VI.
g. Evaluation of Fiedler
i. There are problems and the practical use of the model that need to be
addressed.
3. Situational leadership theory
i. Situational leadership is a contingency theory that focuses on the followers.
ii. Successful leadership is achieved by selecting the right leadership style, which
is contingent on the level of the followers’ readiness.
(a) The term readiness refers to “the extent to which people have the ability
and willingness to accomplish a specific task.”
(b) A leader should choose one of four behaviors depending on follower
readiness.
(i) If followers are unable and unwilling to do a task, the leader needs to
give clear and specific directions.
(ii) If they are unable and willing, the leader needs to display high task
orientation to compensate for followers’ lack of ability and high
relationship orientation to get them to “buy into” the leader’s desires.
(iii) If followers are able and unwilling, the leader needs to use a
supportive and participative style.
(iv) If they are both able and willing, the leader doesn’t need to do much.
iii. SLT has an intuitive appeal. Yet, research efforts to test and support the theory
have generally been disappointing.
4. Path-goal theory
a. The theory
i. One of the most respected approaches to leadership is the path-goal theory
developed by Robert House.
ii. It is a contingency model of leadership that extracts key elements from the
Ohio State leadership research on initiating structure and consideration and
the expectancy theory of motivation.
iii. It is the leader’s job to assist followers in attaining their goals and to provide
the necessary direction and/or support to ensure that their goals are compatible
with the overall objectives of the firm.
iv. The term path-goal is derived from the belief that effective leaders clarify the
path to help their followers achieve their work goals.
b. According to the path–goal theory, whether a leader should be directive or
supportive or should demonstrate some other behavior depends on complex
analysis of the situation. It predicts the following:
(a) Directive leadership yields greater satisfaction when tasks are ambiguous
or stressful than when they are highly structured and well laid out.
(b) Supportive leadership results in high performance and satisfaction when
employees are performing structured tasks.
(c) Directive leadership is likely to be perceived as redundant among
employees with high ability or considerable experience.
ii. Other research has found that goal-focused leadership can lead to higher
levels of emotional exhaustion for subordinates who are low in
conscientiousness and emotional stability.
iii. These studies demonstrate that leaders who set goals enable conscientious
followers to achieve higher performance and may cause stress for workers
who are low in conscientiousness.
5. Leader-participation model
a. The final contingency theory we cover argues that the way the leader makes
decisions is as important as what she or he decides.
b. Leader-participation model relates leadership behavior and participation in
decision making.
c. Like path–goal theory, it says leader behavior must adjust to reflect the task
structure.
d. As one leadership scholar noted, “Leaders do not exist in a vacuum”; leadership is
a symbiotic relationship between leaders and followers.
IV. Contemporary Theories of Leadership
A. The leader-member exchange (LMX) theory argues that because of time pressures,
leaders establish a special relationship with a small group of their followers.
B. These individuals make up the in-group—they are trusted, get a disproportionate amount
of the leader’s attention, and are more likely to receive special privileges.
C. The theory proposes that early in the history of the interaction between a leader and a
given follower, the leader implicitly categorizes the follower as an “in” or an “out” and
that relationship is relatively stable over time.
1. How the leader chooses who falls into each category is unclear.
2. The leader does the choosing on the basis of the follower’s characteristics.
3. In groups have similar characteristics. (Exhibit 12-2)
D. The theory and research surrounding it provide substantive evidence that leaders do
differentiate among followers.
E. Research to test LMX theory has been generally supportive, with substantive evidence
that leaders do differentiate among followers.
1. These disparities are far from random; and followers with in-group status will have
higher performance ratings, engage in more helping or “citizenship” behaviors at
work, and report greater satisfaction with their superior.
2. One study conducted in both Portugal and the United States found that
leader–member exchange was associated especially strongly with followers’
commitment to the organization when the leaders were seen as embodying the values
and identity of the organization.
a. These positive findings for in-group members shouldn’t be surprising, given our
knowledge of self-fulfilling prophecy (see Chapter 6).
b. Leaders invest their resources with those they expect to perform best. And
believing in-group members are the most competent, leaders treat them as such
and unwittingly fulfill their prophecy.
V. Charismatic Leadership and Transformational Leadership
A. Introduction
1. View leaders as individuals who inspire followers through their words, ideas, and
behaviors.
B. Charismatic Leadership
1. What is charismatic leadership?
a. Charismatic leadership theory proposed by Robert House.
b. Followers make attributes of heroic or extraordinary leadership abilities when
they observe certain behaviors. (Exhibit 12-3)
c. General characteristics are they have vision, are willing to take personal risk, are
sensitive to followers’ needs, and exhibit extraordinary behaviors.
2. Are charismatic leaders born or made?
a. Individuals are born with traits that make them charismatic.
b. Most experts believe individuals can learn to be charismatic leaders.
c. A three-step process is suggested:
i. First, an individual needs to develop the aura of charisma by maintaining an
optimistic view; using passion as a catalyst for generating enthusiasm; and
communicating with the whole body, not just with words.
ii. Second, an individual draws others in by creating a bond that inspires others
to follow.
iii. Third, the individual brings out the potential in followers by tapping into their
emotions.
3. How charismatic leaders influence followers
a. Articulating an appealing vision.
i. Vision statement
ii. High performance expectations
iii. A new set of values
4. Does effective charismatic leadership depend on the situation?
a. A strong correlation between charismatic leadership and high performance and
satisfaction among followers.
b. Charisma appears to be most appropriate when the follower’s task has an
ideological component or when the environment involves a high degree of stress
and uncertainty.
c. This may explain why, when charismatic leaders surface, it’s more likely to be in
politics, religion, wartime; or when a business firm is in its infancy or facing a
life-threatening crisis.
d. Another situational factor apparently limiting charisma is level in the
organization.
e. Finally, people are especially receptive to charismatic leadership when they sense
a crisis, when they are under stress, or when they fear for their lives.
5. The dark side of charismatic leadership
a. Don’t necessarily act in the best interest of their companies.
b. Many have allowed their personal goals to override the goals of the organization.
i. The results at companies such as Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and HealthSouth
were leaders who recklessly used organizational resources for their personal
benefit and executives who violated laws and ethical boundaries to inflate
stock prices and allow leaders to cash in millions of dollars in stock options.
c. It’s not that charismatic leadership isn’t effective; overall, it is.
i. But a charismatic leader isn’t always the answer.
ii. Success depends, to some extent, on the situation and on the leader’s vision.
C. Transformational Leadership
1. Introduction
a. A stream of research has focuses on differentiating transformational and
transactional leaders.
b. Transformational leaders inspire followers to transcend their own self-interests
for the good of the organization.
i. They change followers’ awareness of issues by helping them to look at old
problems in new ways; and they are able to excite, arouse, and inspire
followers to put out extra effort to achieve group goals.
ii. Transformational leadership is built on top of transactional leadership—it
produces levels of follower effort and performance that go beyond what would
occur with a transactional approach alone. (Exhibit 12-4)
c. Transactional and transformational leadership complement each other.
i. They aren’t opposing approaches to getting things done.
ii. Transformational leadership builds on transactional leadership and produces
levels of follower effort and performance beyond what transactional
leadership alone can do.
d. The best leaders are transactional and transformational.
2. Full range of leadership model (Exhibit 12-5)
a. Laissez-faire is the most passive and least effective type.
b. Management by exception is slightly better.
c. Contingent reward leadership can be effective.
d. The remaining four correspond to transformational leadership:
i. Individualized consideration
ii. Intellectual stimulation
iii. Inspirational motivation
iv. Idealized influence
3. How transformational leadership works
a. Companies with transformational leaders have greater decentralization of
responsibility, managers have more propensities to take risks, and compensation
plans are geared toward long-term results—all of which facilitate corporate
entrepreneurship.
i. One study of information technology workers in China found empowering
leadership behavior led to feelings of positive personal control among
workers, which increased their creativity at work.
b. Companies with transformational leaders also show greater agreement among top
managers about the organization’s goals, which yields superior organizational
performance.
i. The Israeli military has seen similar results, showing that transformational
leaders improve performance by building consensus among group members.
4. Evaluation of transformational leadership
a. Transformational leadership has been impressively supported at diverse job levels
and occupations (school principals, teachers, marine commanders, ministers,
presidents of MBA associations, military cadets, union shop stewards, sales reps).
i. One study of R&D firms found teams whose project leaders scored high on
transformational leadership produced better-quality products as judged 1 year
later and higher profits 5 years later.
ii. A review of 117 studies testing transformational leadership found it was
related to higher levels of individual follower performance, team performance,
and organizational performance.
b. Transformational leadership isn’t equally effective in all situations.
i. It has a greater impact on the bottom line in smaller, privately held firms than
in more complex organizations.
ii. Transformational leadership may be most effective when leaders can directly
interact with the workforce and make decisions than when they report to an
external board of directors or deal with a complex bureaucratic structure.
c. Transformational leaders also obtain higher levels of trust, which reduces stress
for followers.
d. In short, transformational leadership works through a number of different
processes.
i. One study examined how different types of transformational leadership can be
effective depending on whether work is evaluated at the team or the individual
level.
ii. Individual-focused transformational leadership is behavior that empowers
individual followers to develop, enhance their abilities, and increase
self-efficacy.
iii. Team-focused transformational leadership emphasizes group goals, shared
values and beliefs, and unified efforts.
e. In summary, transformational leadership is more strongly correlated than
transactional leadership with lower turnover rates, higher productivity, lower
employee stress and burnout, and higher employee satisfaction. Like charisma, it
can be learned.
f. The GLOBE team concluded that “effective business leaders in any country are
expected by their subordinates to provide a powerful and proactive vision to guide
the company into the future, strong motivational skills to stimulate all employees
to fulfill the vision, and excellent planning skills to assist in implementing the
vision.”
D. Transformational versus Transactional Leadership
1. When comparing transformational leadership with transactional leadership, research
indicates transformational leadership is more strongly correlated than transactional
leadership with lower turnover rates, higher productivity, lower employee stress and
burnout, and higher employee satisfaction.
2. However, transformational leadership theory is not perfect. The full range of
leadership model shows a clear division between transactional and transformational
leadership that may not fully exist in effective leadership.
3. And contrary to the full range of leadership model, the four I’s of transformational
leadership are not always superior in effectiveness to transactional leadership;
contingent reward leadership, in which leaders dole out rewards as certain goals are
reached by employees, sometimes works as well as transformational leadership.
4. More research is needed, but the general supportable conclusion is that
transformational leadership is desirable and effective, given the right application.
E. Transformational versus Charismatic Leadership
1. Charismatic leadership places somewhat more emphasis on the way leaders
communicate (are they passionate and dynamic?), while transformational leadership
focuses more on what they are communicating (is it a compelling vision?).
2. Still, the theories are more alike than different. At their heart, both focus on the
leader’s ability to inspire followers, and sometimes they do so in the same way.
Because of this, some researchers believe the concepts are somewhat interchangeable.
VI. Responsible Leadership
A. What Is Authentic Leadership?
1. Authentic leaders know who they are, what they believe in and value, and act on
those values and beliefs openly and candidly.
2. The result: People come to have faith in them.
3. Recent research indicates that authentic leadership, especially when shared among top
management team members, created a positive energizing effect (see affective events
theory, Chapter 4) that heightened firm performance.
B. Ethical Leadership
1. Ethics touches on leadership at a number of junctures.
2. Leaders who treat their followers with fairness, especially by providing honest,
frequent, and accurate information, are seen as more effective.
3. A recent research review found that role modeling by top leaders positively
influenced managers throughout their organizations to behave ethically and fostered a
climate that reinforced group-level ethical conduct.
a. The findings suggest that organizations should invest in ethical leadership training
programs, especially in industries with few ethical regulations.
b. The researchers furthermore advised that ethical leadership training programs to
teach cultural values should be mandated for leaders who take foreign
assignments or manage multicultural work teams.
4. To convey their beliefs, leaders should learn to express their moral convictions in
statements that reflect values shared with their organization’s members.
a. Leaders can build on this foundation of trust to show their character, enhance a
sense of unity, and create buy-in from followers.
5. Leadership effectiveness needs to address the means that a leader uses in trying to
achieve goals as well as the content of those goals. Leadership is not value free.
6. Efforts have been made to combine ethical and charismatic leadership into an idea of
socialized charismatic leadership.
C. Servant Leadership
1. Scholars have recently considered ethical leadership from a new angle by examining
servant leadership.
a. Servant leaders go beyond their own self-interest and focus on opportunities to
help followers grow and develop.
b. They don’t use power to achieve ends; they emphasize persuasion.
c. Characteristic behaviors include listening, empathizing, persuading, accepting
stewardship, and actively developing followers’ potential.
2. Because servant leadership focuses on serving the needs of others, research has
focused on its outcomes for the well-being of followers.
3. What are the effects of servant leadership?
a. A study of 123 supervisors found servant leadership resulted in higher levels of
commitment to the supervisor, self-efficacy, and perceptions of justice, which all
were related to organizational citizenship behavior.
i. This relationship between servant leadership and follower OCB appears to be
stronger when followers are focused on being dutiful and responsible.
b. Second, servant leadership increases team potency (a belief that one’s team has
above-average skills and abilities), which in turn leads to higher levels of group
performance.
c. Third, a study with a nationally representative sample found higher levels of
citizenship associated with a focus on growth and advancement, which in turn
was associated with higher levels of creative performance.
4. Servant leadership may be more prevalent and more effective in certain cultures.
a. When asked to draw images of leaders, U.S. subjects tend to draw them in front of
the group, giving orders to followers.
b. Singaporeans tend to draw leaders at the back of the group, acting more to gather
a group’s opinions together and then unify them from the rear.
c. This suggests the East Asian prototype is more like a servant leader, which might
mean servant leadership is more effective in these cultures.
VII. Positive Leadership
A. Trust and Leadership
1. Trust is a psychological state that exists when you agree to make yourself vulnerable
to another because you have positive expectations about how things are going to turn
out.
2. Trust is a primary attribute associated with leadership.
3. When trust is broken, it can have serious adverse effects on a group’s performance.
4. Followers who trust a leader are confident their rights and interests will not be
abused.
a. Transformational leaders create support for their ideas in part by arguing that their
direction will be in everyone’s best interests.
b. People are unlikely to look up to or follow someone they perceive as dishonest or
likely to take advantage of them.
c. Thus, as you might expect, transformational leaders do generate higher levels of
trust from their followers, which in turn is related to higher levels of team
confidence and, ultimately, higher levels of team performance.
5. In a simple contractual exchange of goods and services, your employer is legally
bound to pay you for fulfilling your job description.
a. But today’s rapid reorganizations, diffusion of responsibility, and collaborative
team-based work style mean employment relationships are not stable long-term
contracts with explicit terms.
b. Rather, they are more fundamentally based on trusting relationships than ever
before.
c. You have to trust that if you show your supervisor a creative project you’ve been
working on, she won’t steal the credit behind your back.