Problem 5 – Spector, Landy, Buchanan, Randall
Leader: the individual in a group directing task-relevant activities or carrying the primary
responsibility for performing these functions in the group. Leadership involves influencing the
attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings of other people.
- Attempted leadership: person A accepts the goal of changing person B and can be
observed attempting to do so.
- Successful leadership: person B changes his behavior as a function of person A’s effort.
- Effective leadership: as a function of person B’s behavioral change resulting from person
A’s efforts, person B will be more satisfied, will be better rewarded and will have attained a
goal of mutual importance to person A and person B.
Leadership vs Management: managers do thing right and leaders do the right thing. A leader
influences, inspires and generates change. A manager plans, designs, monitors and delivers.
THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP
The Great Man theories:
- Developed by historians who looked over the life of respected leaders for clues of what led
to their greatness.
- 2 kinds of sources are popular:
o 1) an inspiring hardship / a dramatic life story
o 2) an admirable trait such as persistence, optimism, intelligence etc. g
- Some traits are:
- Strong drive for responsibility, focus on completing task, persistence in goals, originality in
problem solving, drive to exercise initiative, self-confidence, sense of personal identity,
accepting consequences of actions, absorbing interpersonal stress, tolerating frustration
and delay, influencing other’s behaviors, capacity to structure social systems
- There is some support but there are no additional considerations like leader behaviors or
situational factors.
Trait approach:
- An attempt to show that leaders possess certain characteristics than non-leaders do not.
- Some would argue that good leadership is a function of the person and that person would
be a good leader in any situation. However, this is not likely as each leader has different
attributes and adopts a different approach.
- Various studies have used many measures of personal characteristics as well as measure of
performance. Some traits that leaders are higher than non-leaders are: intelligence,
dominance/need for power, self-confidence, energy/persistence, knowledge of task
- Many studies have tried to show a correlation between a leader trait and subordinate
productivity but leadership has so much more to do with than productivity.
- Leader Emergence: who in a group will become the leader. Several Big Five factors are
associated with leader emergence.
- Emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience and conscientiousness are all
positively correlated with people who emerge as leaders. Agreeableness was found to be
unrelated surprisingly.
- Advantages: influential, appealing, can be easily measured
, - Disadvantages: no definite list of traits, no consistent relationship was found between
traits and leadership effectiveness because there is little agreement and inconsistency
across results.
Behavioral approach:
- Concerned with what leaders do rather than what their characteristics might be.
- A leadership style is a cluster of related behaviors that represent an approach to dealing
with subordinates.
- E.g. some supervisors prefer to allow subordinates to have input into decisions, this is
participative. Others, don’t involve subordinates but rather make the decision and
announce it, this is autocratic.
- Ohio State University studies: collected incidents and created a questionnaire. They did a
factor analysis and first classified leader behaviors into 10 broad categories. These were
ultimately grouped into 2 dimensions:
o 1) Consideration (interpersonal orientation): behaviors indicating mutual trust,
respect and a certain warmth between supervisor and group. Emphasizes a concern
for group member’s need, includes more participation in decision making and
encourages 2-way communication.
o 2) Initiating structure (task orientation): includes behaviors in which supervisor
organizes and defines group activities and his relationship to the group. Emphasized
on overt attempts to achieve organization goals.
- One major contribution from this study was the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire
(LBDQ) even though there were some problems with biases and causal conclusions.
- Criticism:
o Results are inconsistent from study to study.
o They always used ‘he’, failing to acknowledge female leaders.
o Studies depend on questionnaires, there might be bias and errors.
o Responses might have been influences by leader stereotypes of respondents
- University of Michigan studies: concentrated more on the dynamics of how leaders and
groups interacted. They also identified task-oriented behavior and relations-oriented
behavior (similar to Ohio). What was different was participative behavior as key to
effectiveness. They suggested that leadership is not about leader-follower interaction but
how the leader interacts with the work group as a whole.
Leader: the individual in a group directing task-relevant activities or carrying the primary
responsibility for performing these functions in the group. Leadership involves influencing the
attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings of other people.
- Attempted leadership: person A accepts the goal of changing person B and can be
observed attempting to do so.
- Successful leadership: person B changes his behavior as a function of person A’s effort.
- Effective leadership: as a function of person B’s behavioral change resulting from person
A’s efforts, person B will be more satisfied, will be better rewarded and will have attained a
goal of mutual importance to person A and person B.
Leadership vs Management: managers do thing right and leaders do the right thing. A leader
influences, inspires and generates change. A manager plans, designs, monitors and delivers.
THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP
The Great Man theories:
- Developed by historians who looked over the life of respected leaders for clues of what led
to their greatness.
- 2 kinds of sources are popular:
o 1) an inspiring hardship / a dramatic life story
o 2) an admirable trait such as persistence, optimism, intelligence etc. g
- Some traits are:
- Strong drive for responsibility, focus on completing task, persistence in goals, originality in
problem solving, drive to exercise initiative, self-confidence, sense of personal identity,
accepting consequences of actions, absorbing interpersonal stress, tolerating frustration
and delay, influencing other’s behaviors, capacity to structure social systems
- There is some support but there are no additional considerations like leader behaviors or
situational factors.
Trait approach:
- An attempt to show that leaders possess certain characteristics than non-leaders do not.
- Some would argue that good leadership is a function of the person and that person would
be a good leader in any situation. However, this is not likely as each leader has different
attributes and adopts a different approach.
- Various studies have used many measures of personal characteristics as well as measure of
performance. Some traits that leaders are higher than non-leaders are: intelligence,
dominance/need for power, self-confidence, energy/persistence, knowledge of task
- Many studies have tried to show a correlation between a leader trait and subordinate
productivity but leadership has so much more to do with than productivity.
- Leader Emergence: who in a group will become the leader. Several Big Five factors are
associated with leader emergence.
- Emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience and conscientiousness are all
positively correlated with people who emerge as leaders. Agreeableness was found to be
unrelated surprisingly.
- Advantages: influential, appealing, can be easily measured
, - Disadvantages: no definite list of traits, no consistent relationship was found between
traits and leadership effectiveness because there is little agreement and inconsistency
across results.
Behavioral approach:
- Concerned with what leaders do rather than what their characteristics might be.
- A leadership style is a cluster of related behaviors that represent an approach to dealing
with subordinates.
- E.g. some supervisors prefer to allow subordinates to have input into decisions, this is
participative. Others, don’t involve subordinates but rather make the decision and
announce it, this is autocratic.
- Ohio State University studies: collected incidents and created a questionnaire. They did a
factor analysis and first classified leader behaviors into 10 broad categories. These were
ultimately grouped into 2 dimensions:
o 1) Consideration (interpersonal orientation): behaviors indicating mutual trust,
respect and a certain warmth between supervisor and group. Emphasizes a concern
for group member’s need, includes more participation in decision making and
encourages 2-way communication.
o 2) Initiating structure (task orientation): includes behaviors in which supervisor
organizes and defines group activities and his relationship to the group. Emphasized
on overt attempts to achieve organization goals.
- One major contribution from this study was the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire
(LBDQ) even though there were some problems with biases and causal conclusions.
- Criticism:
o Results are inconsistent from study to study.
o They always used ‘he’, failing to acknowledge female leaders.
o Studies depend on questionnaires, there might be bias and errors.
o Responses might have been influences by leader stereotypes of respondents
- University of Michigan studies: concentrated more on the dynamics of how leaders and
groups interacted. They also identified task-oriented behavior and relations-oriented
behavior (similar to Ohio). What was different was participative behavior as key to
effectiveness. They suggested that leadership is not about leader-follower interaction but
how the leader interacts with the work group as a whole.
