Some people say it dilutes a leader’s authority if subordinates are allowed to give feedback to the leader concerning their perceptions of the leader’s performance. Do you agree? Solution WHAT IS LEADERSHIP The first thing that we must do is to differentiate between the role of leadership and the functions of leadership. The role of leadership refers to a position of authority in some organizational hierarchy, while the function of leadership refers to the activities and processes that move a group or organization towards the accomplishment of its goals. Many people think of leadership has something that the formal leader does. However, leadership can be viewed is any act by any group member that advances the effectiveness of the group. For groups to be effective, it is generally believed that four functions must be performed, that is, four things must happen: In some cases, the former leader performs all these functions. However, in most organizations these functions are performed by a variety of people, structural mechanisms, and cultural mechanisms. The role of leadership becomes more important in determining the effectiveness of the group when other mechanisms fail to fulfill these functional imperatives. LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS AND HOW IS IT ASSESSED Returning to the above discussion of leadership as the acts of the formal authority figure or leadership as the mechanism to perform certain functions, we must distinguish between the effectiveness of \"leadership\" and the effectiveness of an individual would referred to as the leader. There is the conceptual question of what is leadership effectiveness and the practical question of how do we evaluate individuals in leadership roles. The application question is: Is Joe Torres an effective coach? Is Jack Welch an effective CEO? From the practical perspective, the issues get very blurred depending upon who is doing the evaluation and the purpose of the evaluation. Ways In Which Leader Effectiveness Is Evaluated Leaders are constantly been evaluated by organizational members, superiors, and the public. There are four basic ways in which these groups evaluate the effectiveness of a leader. Sometimes a particular group will use different approaches at different times. There is no one best way or most appropriate way to evaluate a leader. The appropriate approach depends upon the purpose to which the evaluation is to be used. Among the many reasons to evaluate a leader are to determine whether leader should remain in the position, to help the leader develop his or her leadership skills, and to improve the performance of a group. Listed below are the four fundamental approaches used to evaluate leaders Three variants of the normative process or mental model approach uses characteristics of the leader as a metric of leader effectiveness. These characteristics can be viewed as predictors of leadership success. The stronger the mental model supporting the relationship between these characteristics a.

1. Some people say it dilutes a leader’s authority if subordinates are allowed to give feedback to the
leader concerning their perceptions of the leader’s performance. Do you agree?
Solution
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP
The first thing that we must do is to differentiate between the role of leadership and the functions
of leadership. The role of leadership refers to a position of authority in some organizational
hierarchy, while the function of leadership refers to the activities and processes that move a
group or organization towards the accomplishment of its goals. Many people think of leadership
has something that the formal leader does. However, leadership can be viewed is any act by any
group member that advances the effectiveness of the group. For groups to be effective, it is
generally believed that four functions must be performed, that is, four things must happen:
In some cases, the former leader performs all these functions. However, in most organizations
these functions are performed by a variety of people, structural mechanisms, and cultural
mechanisms. The role of leadership becomes more important in determining the effectiveness of
the group when other mechanisms fail to fulfill these functional imperatives.
LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS AND HOW IS IT ASSESSED
Returning to the above discussion of leadership as the acts of the formal authority figure or
leadership as the mechanism to perform certain functions, we must distinguish between the
effectiveness of "leadership" and the effectiveness of an individual would referred to as the
leader. There is the conceptual question of what is leadership effectiveness and the practical
question of how do we evaluate individuals in leadership roles. The application question is: Is
Joe Torres an effective coach? Is Jack Welch an effective CEO? From the practical perspective,
the issues get very blurred depending upon who is doing the evaluation and the purpose of the
evaluation.
Ways In Which Leader Effectiveness Is Evaluated
Leaders are constantly been evaluated by organizational members, superiors, and the public.
There are four basic ways in which these groups evaluate the effectiveness of a leader.
Sometimes a particular group will use different approaches at different times. There is no one
best way or most appropriate way to evaluate a leader. The appropriate approach depends upon
the purpose to which the evaluation is to be used. Among the many reasons to evaluate a leader
are to determine whether leader should remain in the position, to help the leader develop his or
her leadership skills, and to improve the performance of a group. Listed below are the four
fundamental approaches used to evaluate leaders

2. Three variants of the normative process or mental model approach uses characteristics of the
leader as a metric of leader effectiveness. These characteristics can be viewed as predictors of
leadership success. The stronger the mental model supporting the relationship between these
characteristics and success, the more likely they will be used as metrics of effectiveness.
LEADERSHIP STYLE
Leadership style is a form of cross situational behavioral consistency. It refers to the manner in
which a leader interacts with his or her subordinates. More specifically, dimensions of leadership
style depict the way in which a leader (a) attempts to influence the behavior of subordinates
(Goal Attainment Function); (b) makes decisions regarding the direction of the group
(Adaptation Function); and (c) his or her balance between the goal attainment function and the
maintenance function of the group. Listed below are three different ways in leadership style has
been defined.
Set Short-Term Goals and Benchmarks of Progress
Another key strategy that successful school leaders use to strengthen confidence and competence
is to set and achieve specific, attainable and assessable goals. Actively envisioning some
concrete short-term and desired outcome—as opposed to only articulating an abstract,
indeterminate, remote goal—can motivate you, shape your actions, define your competence, and
ultimately provide real evidence of efficacy. Indefinite goals do not help you decide which
activities to choose or how much effort to invest. Indefinite goals also give you no useful
information for evaluating your performance. You cannot unambiguously know that you have
successfully gotten somewhere unless you know in advance where you are trying to go. You
cannot be fully satisfied and feel competent about what you have done unless your
accomplishment clearly fulfills personal goals that you have set (Maddux, 2002, p. 283).
An example of the motivational power of specific, short-term goals comes from marathon
running. As an endurance runner you learn early not to define the goal as completing 26 miles in
a certain time. You must break the whole into parts in order not to become overwhelmed,
intimidated, and defeated by the pain that running 26 miles entails. A first goal may be to run the
first five miles in a certain time and then see how you feel. At that point, you can experience
early success in meeting your first target and set a second goal—the next five miles—and adjust
the hoped-for time according to your performance so far.
The scholars and practitioners whom we interviewed for this volume certainly confirmed the
value of setting focused, short-terms goals. Tom Sergiovanni, for example, stated, “I think there
are two virtues that have to do with whatever success I've had, and neither of them has to do
with what you know or how smart you are. One is ... to be able to have a razor-sharp focus on a
handful of things that are really important to you. [The other is to] try not to dilute what you're
doing at first across the whole spectrum of the rainbow, so to speak.” As Sergiovanni suggested,

3. short-term, attainable, specific goals not only provide a “razor-sharp focus” for energies and
actions but also help you avoid distractions that can dilute efforts, attenuate success, and lead to
lower self-efficacy.
Carol Choye confirmed in practice short-term goals' value to success. She became involved in a
strategic planning process that laid out a global vision of school district aspirations but failed to
provide the impetus and motivation necessary to galvanize people's attention and energies. “You
had hundreds of people involved with strategic planning,” she said. “But one of the things you
didn't have was community and staff action planning. ... A very supportive board ... said it's not
enough just to have a strategic plan; you need to come to us and tell us on a year-to-year basis
what the priorities are. We ... developed a model so that every year we could fine-tune.”
“Chunking out” the strategic plan into smaller annual goals helped Choye mobilize resources and
achieve greater competence.
Interestingly, though, research suggests that accomplishment of a challenging goal does not
automatically lead to strengthened competence, confidence, and the desire to achieve even more
challenging goals. Unlike Choye and Fowler, some people feel enough self-doubt, even after a
success that came with difficulty, that they do not want to invest themselves so totally again.
Some judge that the cost of success was too high and choose not to set such challenging goals
again. Some of the school leaders whom we interviewed evinced this attitude. They felt good
about what they had accomplished—for example, in convincing a reluctant community to
support a reorganization of grade-level structure that meant some families would attend different
schools—and experienced no loss of self-efficacy. However, they felt, overall, that the cost to
them personally was too great in terms of time invested, hostility faced, and pain felt.
Personality and leadership
In the context of interaction theories there is room for a thorough exploration of the extent to
which attributes of the leader are related to the process of leadership and to group performance.
Probably the earliest “explanation” of leadership phenomena was given in terms of personal
qualities that, while partially modifiable and learnable, characterized the individual and
established his dominance of and influence in any situation. For a time during the late 1940s,
reaction against this view was so marked that psychology seemed to some to be in danger of
offering a thoroughly “situational” view of leadership phenomena. The major influences in this
reaction were Gibb’s report of the situational shifting of leadership in small groups (1947) and
Stogdill’s study of the literature of personality traits (1948), which revealed that those
personality traits which were leadership traits depended upon the situation and the requirements
of the group. Each of these papers, however, was interactional rather than situational in
theoretical orientation. And the interactional approach has opened the way for understanding the
relation between personality and leadership, while at the same time ending the quest for

4. generalized “leadership traits.”
The early tendency to lean heavily to the side of situational determinacy in this process was most
effectively checked by Carter and Nixon (1949), who showed that when the emergence of
leadership was studied in a carefully controlled way, through tasks which fell into three distinct
“families,” the leadership varied considerably from task family to task family but that within
families it was relatively stable and appeared to be determined by other, probably personality,
factors. In the years since 1950 many studies have provided evidence that personality factors
contribute to the emergence and maintenance of leadership status. This has been especially true
of those studies in which the situational variance has not been relatively great.
Representative studies
As examples, four of these studies may be mentioned.
(1) Bass (1960, p. 172) reports that in initially leaderless discussion groups extremely
authoritarian personalities, as measured by the California F scale, are least likely to exhibit
successful leader-ship behavior. On the other hand, in these groups he observed a positive
correlation between successful leadership and perceptual flexibility. But prob-ably the most
telling is the finding of Klubeck and Bass (1954) that persons who do not naturally exhibit
successful leadership in such groups are unable to profit from brief coaching as to how to behave
as leaders, and the conclusion that these persons seem to be limited by personality and would
need to undergo change, probably through major psychotherapy, before they could be freed to
behave as leaders.
(2) Borgatta, Couch, and Bales have presented findings that they describe as relevant to a “great
man” theory of leadership (1954). They varied the composition of three-man groups working on
the same tasks and showed that individuals who scored high on a composite of intelligence,
leadership ratings by fellow participants, participation rate, and sociometric popularity in one
group were also high in three subsequent group sessions, where they interacted with different
persons. Those who scored highest on this composite criterion in one group did so consistently,
and it was evident that “great men” selected on the basis of their first session continue to have an
influence on the relatively superior performance of the groups in which they subsequently
participate. However, as Hollander comments, “the task setting was essentially constant with
only the participants varying across sessions” (Hollander and Julian 1964).
(3) In somewhat similar vein Cattell and Stice (1954) offered four formulas for selecting leaders
on the basis of personality. They differentiated four kinds of leaders: “persistent momentary
problem solvers” or technical leaders, identified in terms of the frequency with which
nonparticipant observers had judged the individual to have influenced the group; salient leaders,
picked by the observers as most powerfully influencing the group in at least one of the 22
situations presented; sociometric leaders, identified by choice by fellow members; and elected

5. leaders, who were named after formal election on one or more occasions in the course of the
experimental interaction.
The personality profiles of leaders were compared with those of nonleaders, and eight
personality factors showed differences in the same direction for all four categories. These wereC,
emotional maturity, or ego strength; E, dominance; G, character integration, or superego
strength; H, social adventurousness; N, shrewdness; O (negative), freedom from anxiety; Q3,
deliberate will control; and Q4 (negative), absence of nervous tension. Differences between
leader types were that technical leaders had higher general intelligence, B, and elected leaders
were higher in F, surgency. Discussing these results, the authors indicate that the relationships
revealed are consistent with both technical and nontechnical thinking about leader-ship and the
influence process. For example, the timid, withdrawn, hesitant behavior associated with a low H
score would not be conducive to leadership in any of the categories. The anxious, worrying
cautiousness in dealing with people represented by high O would not inspire confidence. And
where conscience is considered to be the “will of the group”—a regard for superindividual
values—the selection of leaders with high G represents a gain for the group. [SeeTRAITS.]
(4) Some confirmation of this finding is to be found in a study by Borg (1960). He derived four
factor scores from a variety of tests that were primarily measures of personality variables and
related these to sociometric measures of six small-group roles. Twelve of his 24 correlation
coefficients were significant at the .01 level. The predictor factor “assertiveness” was the most
successful. A correlation of .46 was found between assertiveness scores and a composite
leadership role derived from individual role measures of assertiveness, creativity, and leadership.
It is interesting to observe that the predictor factor “power orientation” is consistently
unassociated with this leadership composite and that a third predictor, “rigidity,” dependent
primarily on the California F scale, is consistently and significantly negatively associated with
leadership, thus confirming Bass’s results. As Borg himself points out (p. 115), his success in
predicting especially the leadership-role scores may mean that even more can be achieved in this
area if predictor instruments are further developed.
Summary of the literature
Despite the common promise of these studies and others like them, it cannot at this time be said
that there is evidence for a predominant personality component in leadership. The best review of
the literature in this area to date is that of Mann (1959). In the course of examining a number of
relationships between the personality characteristics of the individual and the way he behaves or
is perceived to behave in small groups, Mann presents a summary of the relation-ships between
some aspects of personality and leadership, as follows.
Intelligence. After examination of 28 independent studies, the positive association of intelligence
and leadership in small groups seems to be beyond doubt, although the median correlation is

6. only .25; no reported coefficient exceeded .50; and just half of the results examined failed to
establish the significance of this trend.
Adjustment. The association of personal adjustment and leadership was found in 22 studies.
Again the over-all trend is clearly positive, with a median correlation of approximately .15 and
no single correlation coefficient greater than .53.
Extraversion-introversion. Twenty-two different studies have suggested a median correlation
between extraversion and leadership of .15, and the highest correlation reported is .42. Despite
some difficulty in ensuring the real similarity of scales of similar title, there is evidence for the
conclusion that “those individuals who tend to be selected as leaders are more sociable and
outgoing.”
Dominance. On the evidence of 12 studies, dominance, as measured by personality scales, is
positively associated with leadership, having a median correlation around .20 and a highest re-
ported correlation of .42. “Although the trend is not very strong, these data suggest that dominant
or ascendant individuals have a greater chance of being designated leader.”
Conservatism. Seventeen studies reveal that in general there is a negative association between
conservatism and leadership. Mann found that the California F scale had been used ten times in
the prediction of leadership and that on each occasion authoritarian persons had been rated lower
on leadership.
Interpersonal sensitivity. The measurement of interpersonal sensitivity, or empathic ability, has
been subject to much attention. Some caution is needed in attempting to summarize the 15
studies relating it to leadership, and Mann duly qualifies his summary judgment that “there
appears to be a low but clearly positive relationship between inter-personal sensitivity and
leadership.”Goal AttainmentAdaptationIntegrationMaintenanceLeaderTask Leadership
BehaviorsEstablishing Vision, Mission, or Strategy
Change Leadership
CoachingTeam building
Problem solving facilitation
Conflict Management BehaviorsRelationship building BehaviorsOtherReward System
Control System: Rules, Goals
Strong Culture
Member goal internalization
Task Feedback System (KOR)
ProfessionalismProcess (e.g., TQM)
High member creativitySelf Directed Work Team
High member co-dependencyJobs with FLOW
Cohesive Work Group