He is also an advisor to the Center for Values-Driven Leadership. This article is republished from the archives. For example, the emergence of values-driven leadership seems to be a growing theoretical stream of thought and research well suited for the complexity of business in the 21 st century.
The topic of leadership is familiar to all peoples and it knows no cultural boundaries. Writings on leadership date back over years to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and have continued to be a recurrent theme amongst: philosophers, poets, playwrights, prophets, priests, royalty, scholars, and entire societies.
Over the last 75 years leadership has literally been defined hundreds of different ways by both academics and practitioners. Clearly, it is not an easy concept to define and there are probably as many definitions of leadership as there are authors. As a result, someone inevitably ends up in charge. Leaders in the past have generally belonged to one of three categories: Political, Military or Religious. Modern Leaders With the rise of the industrial revolution, a new kind of leader emerged: Economic.
The so-called Captains of Industry found they could build an empire based on modern technology instead of swords. Oil Barons, railroad magnates, and factory owners built large fortunes without the benefit of armies; it was often at the expense of the people they employed.
This gave rise to Union leaders and various movements designed to promote justice where abuses were perceived to exist. The Industrial Revolution also increased the number of Scientific Leaders, as scientists now had easy access to a wide range of new materials for their work.
Psychiatry and Psychology came into prominence with studies on the workplace, in regards to improving productivity and the effect on the workforce. If employees feel they are listened to, respected, and treated fairly, they are happier in their work and perform better than those who feel they are disrespected and unappreciated. Which kind of work environment would you prefer? Alexander the Great conquered the known world.
Genghis Khan then ravaged most of it. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Harriet Tubman saved hundreds from slavery in the Underground Railroad. Mother Theresa aided and comforted thousands in Calcutta who were abandoned by society. Theory goes that these people did great things because they were simply great people determined by fate and fulfilling their destiny.
If you have the ability to lead, you were born with it, with no way to learning those skills. Today, we recognize that true leadership seems to come from a combination of both theories — and more. As we have seen, there are wide varieties of leadership qualities. Everyone has some ability in at least one or more of these areas. This means that under the right circumstances, anyone can rise to a leadership role and be successful based on the leadership style that best matches their personality if they know how to use that ability to properly address the situation at hand.
Other leadership skills can indeed be learned, developed, and mastered. Transformational Leadership In , James MacGregor Burns introduced the idea of transformational leadership as he researched political leaders. Bernard M. It is not the individual traits and vision of the leader that matter as much as it is their ability to influence the feelings, attitudes, and commitment of their followers.
As we mentioned before in productivity studies, if followers feel they can trust a leader or better yet, if they admire a leader who can stimulate a sense of loyalty and respect the followers go beyond what was originally expected of them and will do so happily.
As a result, productivity and unity increases. The followers are transformed by a charismatic, motivational leader.
The result was five different types of behavioral styles. By exhibiting development-oriented behavior, these leaders would value experimentation, seek out new ideas and generate and implement change. Their studies indicate that just concentrating on two different dimensions of behavior may not be adequate to capture leadership in the twenty-first century.
Behavioral theories had modest success in identifying consistent relationships between leadership behavior and group performance.
But none of these consider situation as a factor. Would Franklin Delano Roosevelt have been as successful leading the nation through the Revolutionary or the Civil Wars? None of these behavioral theories could clarify these situational differences.
So, as we continued to grow in our theories of leadership, we started to look at contingency theories—theories that considered the leader and the situation.
This is the contingency approach. Circumstances might lead to peers and followers shunning a particular leader, and then seeing him or her in a different way later on.
Since the s, the guiding light for research has been the assumption that what makes a leader great depends on the situation. The failure of researchers to arrive at any consistent results around leadership in the mid-twentieth center led to the study of situational influence. As they started to realize that a certain style and set of skills was appropriate for one situation and failed in another, they sought to determine which conditions matched which styles and skills.
Fiedler started his study by determining whether a leader was more task oriented or relationship oriented in his or her behavioral traits.
The least preferred coworker asked leaders to react to sixteen sets of contrasting adjectives that would describe their least preferred coworker. LPCs respondents that described their least preferred coworker in relatively positive terms, it stood to reason that the leader employed a relationship based approach. Those that described their least favorite coworker unfavorably were deemed to be more task oriented. At this point, Fiedler sought to define situations by which to compare these results.
He did, in fact, identify three contingency dimensions that he was convinced defined the key situation factors that determine leadership effectiveness.
Those situations were. Fiedler then started comparing task-oriented and relationship-oriented leaders and their performances, based on the twenty-four possible combinations of the situations above, and this was the result:.
Fiedler concluded that task oriented leaders tended to perform better when situations were very favorable or very unfavorable to them. Relationship oriented leaders perform better when situations are moderately favorable. Fiedler then modified his conclusions to state that task oriented leaders performed better in situations of high or low control, while relationship oriented leaders performed better in situations of moderate control.
In other words, bright individuals perform worse in stressful situations, and experienced people perform worse in low-stress situations. This theory is garnering solid research support. In addition to these four approaches to leadership, there are also four levels of follower maturity:. As a general rule, each of the four leadership styles is appropriate for the corresponding employee maturity level:.
Identifying the employee maturity level becomes a very important part of the process, and the leader must have the willingness and ability to use any of the four leadership styles as needed. The leader-member exchange theory considers leaders relationships with people, and proposed that, because of time constraints, leaders establish relationships with a small group of their followers.
The factors are environmental task structure, formal authority system, work group and subordinate locus of control, experience, perceived ability. Environmental factors dictate which of the leadership behaviors above will be most effective, and the subordinate factors dictate how those leadership behaviors are interpreted.
Research supports this theory. Victor Vroom, the researcher who developed the expectancy framework by which we compared motivational approaches, also has things to say about leadership. The revised model , the more widely accepted of the two, provides a set of rules to determine the form and amount of participative decision making in different situations.
All of these contingency models, which have been discussed and contemplated for more than forty years, seem to suggest, above all things, that there is no one right way to lead. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Module Leadership. Search for:. Learning Outcomes Discuss our understanding of leadership from the historical perspective Describe the early trait approach Describe the behavioral approach Describe the contingency approach and its variations.
Practice Question. PRactice Question. Figure 1.
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