A sample leadership primer from an Organizational Behaviour course.

1. A primer.
(from an Organisational Behaviour course)

2.  It is not who you are but how you behave that
creates a leader.
Lippitt and White (1943)*
 Lippitt and White believed that an important function
of a leader was to
◦ create a social climate in the group, and that
◦ the group's morale and effectiveness would be dependent
on the nature of the climate engendered.
*One of the earliest and most influential studies of leadership.

3. Two themes:
 initiating structure;
 a consideration for others.

4. Davies (1972) found that the four general traits
related to leadership success were:
 intelligence
 social maturity
 achievement drive
 human relations attitudes
Traits model of leadership concentrates on the person
leading rather than on the job to be done.
(borne out of trait theory e.g. leaders are born and
not made).

5. Nowadays we hear phrases about leadership
competencies such as:
• maintain the trust and support of colleagues and
team members
• provide the environment for people to excel
• nurture individual development
• recognise success
• encourage enthusiasm.

6.  Stewart (1967)
 Mintzberg (1973)
Useful summary of possible roles for leaders provided by Krech, Crutchfield and Ballachey
(1962):
 co-ordinator - of functions and people
 planner
 expert
 external group representative- to customers/suppliers
 controller of internal relations
 controller of rewards and punishments
 arbitrator and mediator
 role model
 ideologists
 parent figure
 scapegoat

7. People in groups have three sets of needs, or
leadership functions:
• the task to be accomplished together
• maintaining social cohesion of the group
• individual needs of team members
Adair (1982)*
* An early influential model of leadership in Britain.

8. Generally these functions are carried out by three
types of leader:
 autocratric;
 democratic;
 laissez faire/free wheeler

9. • Trait theory (assumes that leadership qualities
are innate)
• Style theory (links organisational effectiveness to
the balance between the leaders' concern for
profit and concern for people)
• Contingency theory (links traits and style to the
situation)
• Transformational theory (emphasises the
leaders role in empowering employees

10.
The contingency approach emphasises the importance of the
situation in which leader and group find themselves
Fiedler (1967) was the first to use the phrase 'contingency' in the
context of leadership.
Three factors will determine the leader's effectiveness
• leader-member relations - how well is the leader accepted?
• task structure - are the jobs of the members routine and precise or
vague and undefined
• position power - what formal authority does the leader's potion
confer?

11.  Fiedler then devised a novel device for
measuring leadership style - called the Least
Preferred Co-worker scale or LPC scale
 i.e., a scale that indicated the degree to which
people described favourably or unfavourably
their least preferred co-worker.

12.  Those who used relatively favourable terms
tended towards permissiveness and a human
relations orientation and considerate style - he
called them high LPC.
 Those who used an unfavourable style tended
to be managing and task controlling and to be
less concerned with the human relations
aspects of the job - he called them low LPC.

13. In the 1980s there was increasing emphasis on
leaders rather than managers .

14.  Strategy
 Structure
 Systems
 Style
 Staff
 Skills
 Shared goals
Watson (1983)

15. Watson suggested that managers tend to rely on:
 strategy
 structure
 systems

16. Leaders, use the softer S's of:
 style
 staff
 skills
 shared goals

17.  Kotter (1982) made perhaps a more detailed
distinction.
 Kotter saw management as predominantly
activity-based,
 whereas leadership means dealing with people
rather than things.

18. Management involved:
 planning and budgeting
 organising and staffing
 controlling and problem solving

19. Leadership:
 creating a sense of direction
 communicating the vision
 energising, inspiring and motivating

20. • First conform to the groups norms and then
introduce new ideas
• build up credit with the rest of the group:
• this credit is what provides the subsequent legitimacy to
exert influence over those same group members and to
deviate from the existing norms.
• Hollander calls this 'idiosyncrasy credit'. Essentially the
more credit one builds up the more idiosyncratic
behaviour will be subsequently tolerated by the group.
* Based on the work of Hollander 1958; Hollander and Julian 1970;
Merei 1949; Hollander 1982

21. Four main methods:
 Adhere initially to the group's norms.
 Stems from the methods whereby the leader
achieves their position: elected by group or imposed
by external authority (more credit if selected by
group, democratically)
 Leader's competence to fulfil the group's objectives
 Leader's identification with the group - share same
goals
Merei (1949)

22.  A popular distinction between leaders is that
made by Burns (1978) and Kuhnert and Lewis
(1987)
 They distinguish between
◦ Transactional and
◦ Transformational leaders.

23.  ... use styles of communication and techniques
to clarify task requirements and:
 ensure that there are appropriate rewards when
the task is completed.
 Sometimes called command and control type
leadership.

24.  ... are those who articulate a mission and create
and sustain a positive image in others.
 They are sometimes called ‘visionary leaders’.
The latter has become the more accepted
definition of what leadership is about.

25. Or - Is creating a vision and energising a workplace
enough?
 fashionable but ineffective; leaders must also be
architects of success, establishing systems and
structures
 charismatic leaders (charisma is an important
dimension of transformational leadership) tend to
emerge in times of crisis, with residues of inattention
to infrastructure and detail
Bryman 1992

26.  charisma potentially destabilising and difficult to
control
(Trice and Beyer 1992)
 according to critical theorists, transformational
leadership theory is not a scientific breakthrough
so much as a celebration and reaffirmation of
masculine values
(Alvesson and Willmott 1996)

27.  the leader's role is largely symbolic, literature is
guilty of vastly overstating the role
Pfeffer (1977)
 Pfeffer believes that leaders have only very
limited scope and influence, and indeed have no
influence at all over e.g. currency fluctuations,
commodity prices, labour market conditions and
other external factors.

28.  management literature obscures the unheroic
aspects of leadership:
◦ reproduces current values, benefits only a few power
holders
◦ legitimises existing forms of control
◦ reproduces existing power relations
◦ literature understates environmental constraints
◦ the leader's own subjugation
Knights and Willmott (1992)

29. End.