Discussion – Organisation Leader & Decision Making

Organizational Leadership

John Bratton

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Part 2
Leadership theories

Relational and distributed theories of leadership
Chapter 8

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Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain the nature of, and the benefits of follower-centric approaches to understanding leader-follower relations and the leadership process.
Understand positivist/entity and social constructionist perspectives on relational leadership.
Explain how the dyadic and group relationships dynamics influence the leadership process.
Critically discuss the competing views of what distributed leadership represents in organizations.
Engage critically with important themes in team leadership.
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Introduction
Follower-centric approaches cultivate the opinion that followers’ self-concept – how we perceive ourselves through attitudes, values, perceptions, emotion – directly influences the leader-follower relationship and effectiveness, which has given rise to relational and distributed leadership theories.
Follower-centric theories explore leadership as an interdependent relationship that involves the leader and follower (s), entwined in a socially constructed purposeful relational process of influence (Adair 2008; Shamir et al. 2007; Riggio et al., 2008).
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Introduction
Distributed theories of leadership shift the focus away from leaders in hierarchical positions within the organization to viewing followers as reflective and proactive: as leaders across the organization.
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Classical relational studies
Individuals not only shape the relations they engage in, but also are simultaneously shaped by reciprocal human interactions.
For Simmel (1858-1918), society is constituted of a web of interactional forces between individuals and groups, and his focus on the concept of reciprocity emphasized that every single social phenomenon has meaning only through its relationships with others.
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Classical relational studies
Simmel investigated the influence of numbers upon human relationships, whereby the size of a group influences how individuals interact with one another (refer Figure 8.1).
In general, the larger the size of the group, the more its members can become dissimilar to each other, and more independence and intellectual development can take place. However, Simmel observed that the individual’s inner personal unity is based upon the interaction and connection of many elements and determinants.
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Classical relational studies
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Classical relational studies
Mead analyzed in detail how the human self is created by social processes, emphasizing that the human mind developed thanks to co-operation and complex social relationships.
He also wrote that, “We attempt…to explain the conduct of the individual in terms of the organized conduct of the social group, rather than…in terms of the conduct of the separate individuals belonging to it” (1934, p. 7).
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Classical relational studies
Mead’s theory of self incorporates the crucial condition of “reflexiveness” – the ability to unconsciously turn-back the experience of the individual upon himself – for the development of the human mind.
Mead views the mind in terms of what it does, the role it plays in human interaction. He emphasized the significance of human intersubjectivity: a myriad of human interactions, individual self-reflection and meaning that is modified through social interaction.
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Contemporary theories of relational leadership
The focus is on dynamic leadership relationship between leaders and followers in which influence is interactionally and dialectically achieved leading to reconfiguration of management practices and relationship development.
Subsequently, the focus is extended onto the nature of the vertical interactions leaders engage in with each of their followers because leadership effectiveness depends on the ability of a leader to create high-quality relationships with others in the organization.
Where leadership is always dependent on the context, the context is established by positive symbiotic relationships.
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Relational leadership has been defined as:
A social influence process through which emergent coordination (i.e. evolving social order) and change (e.g. new values, attitudes, approaches, behaviours, and ideologies) are constructed and produced (Uhl-Bien, 2006, p. 655).
This definition proposed that a ‘relational’ orientation to understanding leadership starts not with an individual leader or follower but with social interaction, and views leadership as relationally co-constructed (Fairhurst, 2007).
Contemporary theories of relational leadership
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Ontology and relational leadership
‘Does social reality exist independent of our perceptions?’
‘Is what passes for reality merely a set of mental constructions?’
If we lean more to the first question, the more we move towards the positivist position. This view maintains that there is such a thing as social reality and it is the researcher’s job to discover what that reality is.
If we lean more to the second question, the more we move towards the social constructionist position, whereby the view is that there are no facts, only interpretations.
Contemporary theories of relational leadership
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‘Is social reality largely fixed, something that individuals and groups have to confront but over which they little or no control, akin to the weather?’
‘Is social reality not necessarily pre-existing but fluid, and open to be shaped by individuals and groups through their social interactions and agency?’
The same conclusion is reached here as the first set of questions asked.
Contemporary theories of relational leadership
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Contemporary theories of relational leadership
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Positivist dyadic relational perspectives
Leaders and followers are treated as stable entities that have different roles in the organizational context.
Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory focuses on the quality of the dyadic relationship between a leader and an individual (see Figure 8.3). It argues that because followers are uniquely different, leaders should establish a special relationship with each of her or his followers, rather than treating followers as a homogeneous group.
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Antecedents of dyadic relationship quality:
Role of contextual forces and organizational imperatives
Leader attributes
Follower characteristics
Interactional factors between leader and follower – Perceived Congruence and Psychological Contract
Concept of equity
Differentiated LMX Relationships
In-group – relationships based on expanded role responsibilities
Out-group – relationships based on restricted role responsibilities
Positivist dyadic relational perspectives
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Positivist dyadic relational perspectives
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Social constructionist group-level relational perspectives
Through positivist perspective, 3 distinct streams of differentiated LMX theorizing are produced:
perceived LMX differentiation (Hooper and Martin, 2008) – seeks to capture perceived variability within a group
relative LMX (Hu and Liden, 2013) and group-level LMX differentiation (Erdogan and Bauer, 2010) – analyzes dyadic relationships in work groups, characterized by complexity and interdependency
These studies underscore the importance of context and role conditions.
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Through a social-cultural prism, a constructionist position is adopted to view relationships:
Self-concept is vital
Leadership does not exist as an entity but rather it emerges through processes of interaction and co-construction
Sensemaking shapes human relationships
Leadership is not possessed by an individual but “leadership resides… in the between space of the relationship” (Epitropaki et al. 2018, p. 125, emphasis added)
Social constructionist group-level relational perspectives
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Social constructionist group-level relational perspectives
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The growth of distributed leadership
Shifts the focus from hierarchy to heterarchy; from heroic to ‘post heroic’ leadership – leadership resides in every individual of the organization, who takes on the role of leading a group, not just those positioned at the top of the organization.
Propose ‘lead from behind’ through employee empowerment (Spillane, 2006).
Facilitate than being an ‘all-knowing’ expert (Hill, 2008).
Most effective when tasks are interdependent, complex and leader capabilities within the organization and teams have developed.
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The growth of distributed leadership
Distributed Leadership – an interactive process disassociated from the hierarchy.
Self-management work teams (SMWT) movement proclaimed the need for redesigning organizations to allow members to undertake a wider range of tasks, including self-inspection, decision-making and leadership responsibilities.
Team Leadership – any behavior that helps the team identify task-related or person-related problems and generate and implement in solutions.
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The growth of distributed leadership
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Practising distributed and shared leadership
Structural and Work Design
Structural Design: the planning and implementation of a structural configuration of roles and modes of operation, often displayed in an organizational chart.
Job/Work Design: the process of assigning tasks to a job, including the interdependency of those tasks to other jobs.
HRM Policies and Practices
The core of this subject can assist the development of distributed/team leadership (Danford et al., 2008).
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The Role of Appointed Leaders
Empowering employees is the key.
Organizational Culture and Climate
Vital influences.
Practising distributed and shared leadership
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Organizational Leadership

John Bratton

1

Part 2
Leadership theories

Trait, behaviour and contingency theories of leadership
Chapter 5

3

Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the early research on leadership traits, describe the research methods used, and explain why many of the early studies were contradictory or inconclusive.
Explain the University of Michigan, the Ohio State and the Blake and Mouton models of leadership.
Describe and critique early and contemporary contingency theories of leadership including; least preferred coworker theory, path-goal theory and situational theory.
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Introduction
Early leadership research focused on the role of individual traits to explain differences between leaders and non-leaders and leadership effectiveness – however, generally weak for predictive purposes.
This leads to shift the focus from studying traits that a leader ‘has’ to the study of how leaders ‘behave’, providing the framework for contingency theory which assumed rational analysis of situation or context should determine how a leader behaves.
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Leader traits and attributes
Trait – a variety of enduring characteristics, typically belonging to an individual, including personality tendencies that determine an individual’s behaviour.
4 core properties:
Measurable
Vary across individuals
Exhibit time and situational stability
Help predict attitudes and behaviours
Trait Activation Theory
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Leader traits and attributes
Trait Activation Theory
Focus on personal characteristics, or intellectual attributes that differentiate leaders from non-leaders.
Theories and researches in this matter flourished between the 19th century to mid-20th century, discovering:
specific psychological traits and attributes which would help explain whether an individual will emerge as an informal leader in a group.
how traits and personal attributes are related to leadership effectiveness.
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Leader traits and attributes
Researchers utilized various methods to identify a universal cluster of leadership traits, including intelligence and personality testing, observation, and analysis of biographical data. Though, any interpretation of comparative data might differ because the researchers use different descriptors to describe similar personal characteristics.
Considered singularly, Stogdill (1974) observed that traits have little diagnostic or predictive significance. Rather, specific “patterns of traits” appear to interact in a complex way to give leadership advantage and are a “sensible modification” of the extreme variant of situationalist model (1974, p. 87).
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Leader traits and attributes
Critiques:
Largely neglected the context within which leaders find themselves.
Underplays followership in the leadership process – focused on trait variables and optimum performance and downplaying what it is like to be a human being.
Because of the above, this model also disregarded class, gender and race – leading to studies using intersectionality.
Culturally determined.
Underestimated the challenges of proving causality.
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Leader behaviour and styles
Behavioural Theories
Focus on behaviour and infer people can be trained to be leaders – what they do and how they behave towards followers.
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Leader behaviour and styles
Evolving from a system of “scientific management” to observing a disconnection between employee’s psychological aspirations, management practices and leadership styles, this has lead to majority of the studies comparing different types of leadership styles based on 2 main types of behavior:
Task behaviours – to what extent the leader emphasize productivity targets; also known as ‘producton-centred’ and ‘task-orientated’ leadership styles.
Relationship behaviours – to what extent the leader is concerned about her or his followers as people: their needs, development, and problems; also known as ‘employee-centred’ and ‘person-orientated’ leadership styles.
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Leader behaviour and styles
University of Michigan Studies
Focus: the effect of the leader’s behaviour or style on work performance – identified 2 discrete types of leadership behaviours: production orientation and employee orientation.
From reframing these 2 types to be of opposite ends of a single leadership dimension, these 2 leadership constructs were conceptualized as independent orientations as more research is done.
Employee-oriented leader behaviours were associated with higher group performance and higher job satisfaction among group members.
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Leader behaviour and styles
Ohio State University
Focus: how leaders behaved when they were leading a team or an organization by initial study of aircrews and pilots – results suggested 2 underlying dimensions of leader behaviours: initiating structure and consideration.
Both structures are considered 2 independent dimensions, thus a leader’s behaviour can be flexible and capable of changing as the situations warranted.
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Leader behaviour and styles
Effective leader attempts to increase both initiating and consideration structure and to maintain a balance between the two.
Ohio State’s approach measured both formal and informal variables although its studies shares similarity with Michigan’s – looking into the differences between the leader’s formal responsibility and formal interaction with followers, vice versa.
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Leader behaviour and styles
Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid or Leadership Grid
Based on leader styles similar to those found in the Ohio State studies, they have characterized 2 main activities of leaders: concern for results and concern for people.
These two attitudinal dimensions are independent of each other. In different combinations, they yield a broad range of different leadership styles (see Figure 6.1).
This model differs from Ohio States (descriptive and non-evaluative) that it is normative and prescriptive.
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Leader behaviour and styles
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Leader behaviour and styles
Critiques:
Unable to identify a universal style of leadership that could be effective in the vast majority of situations.
This approach suggests that the most effective leadership style is the so-called “high-high” style, that is, high results- and high people-oriented behaviour.
It has not adequately demonstrated how leaders’ behaviours are associated with performance outcomes (causal connection; Bryman, 1992).
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Contingency theories of leadership
Proposes that the appropriate leader behaviour depends on certain factors or contingency variables including the task and the followers. Thus, there is no one best behaviour or style of leadership, but, rather, situation X requires leadership behaviour or style B.
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Contingency theories of leadership
Fiedler’s Contingency Theory
Assumes that leaders are either task-oriented or relationship-oriented, an orientation that the leader cannot change.
The effectiveness of both types of leaders depends on the favourableness of the situation – classified by the Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) Scale.
Contingency Variables: task structure, position power, and leader-member relations
Criticism: it is a projective technique, with associated measurement biases and low measurement reliability (McMahon, l972; Peters et al. 1985).
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Contingency theories of leadership
House’s Path-Goal Theory
This theory has its roots in the expectancy theory of motivation (Vroom, 1964). Expectancy theory is based on the notion that work motivation is contingent upon the perception of a link between levels of physical or mental effort and reward (Bratton, 2015).
Here, the main task of the leader is to facilitate the follower’s path to the goal.
Contingency Variables: characteristics of the work environment (situation) and of the followers.
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Contingency theories of leadership
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Contingency theories of leadership
Limitations:
The research support for the theory is weak (e.g. Schriesheim et al. 2006).
This theory incorporates so many different aspects of leadership that interpreting the theory can be unclear.
The model neglects to explain adequately the leader-behaviour-follower motivation relationship.
The leader has to provide coaching to help followers achieve their goals, which assumes that the leadership is a one-way process and fails to recognize followers’ initiative and action.
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Contingency theories of leadership
Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Theory (SLT)
suggests that the leader’s behaviour must be flexible to reflect the situation, by choosing the right leadership style contingent on the subordinates’ ability and motivation to perform a given task.
SLT requires a leader to appraise her or his subordinates’ and judge how competent and committed or motivated they are to perform and accept responsibility for completing a given task or goal.
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Contingency theories of leadership
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Contingency theories of leadership
Critiques:
It facilitates managers and leaders to become more context sensitive, flexible and responsive to peers (Graeff, 1983).
All the theories incorporate multiple factors simultaneously into recommending a preferred leadership style, which is open to wide interpretation.
They do not explain adequately the causal effects underpinning the relationships they draw. The absence of central hypotheses does not allow for a reliable testing of the variability of dependent and independent variables.
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Organizational Leadership

John Bratton

Part 2
Leadership theories

Charismatic and transformational leadership
Chapter 5

3

Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
Explain the meaning of charismatic and transformational leadership
Critically analyze the charismatic and transformational approach to leadership
Critique charismatic and transformational perspectives of leadership and explain some ethical issues
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Introduction
The ability to use language to stir emotion, to persuade and to mobilize people can be called, for simplicity, the charismatic effect.
Charismatic and transformative leadership share a common view, that leaders as individuals who inspire others through language to change.
While both take a leader-centred perspective on leadership, the focus is on a set of behaviours and skills that can be learned and developed.
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The nature of charismatic leadership
The English word ‘charisma’ derives from the Greek kharisma, itself drawn from the word kharis meaning favour or grace.
It generally describes a speaker’s personal talent to “command and compel an audience” (Perloff, 2006, p. 158).
When charismatic organizational leaders put into words, and communicate through conversations they can reassure, inspire and alter peoples’ perceptions of change.
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The nature of charismatic leadership
It is important to note here, therefore, that the power of persuasion may be less to do with the leader’s personal qualities but, instead, comes through the audience, when the speech stirs their emotions and meets the need of the hearers for a visible personification of their deeper emotions.
Communication scholars suggest that charisma is a personal attribute – command of language, use of non-verbal communications (e.g. hand motions, eye contact) – that can be cultivated, that many individuals may have and that some have more than others.
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The nature of charismatic leadership
Charismatics are effective leaders depends, to some extent, on the context.
Charismatic leaders do not always act in the best interests of their followers, shareholders or communities in which they are based.
Weber also explained that charismatic power emerges as a quality conferred on a “supernatural” leader only during periods of “extraordinary” social crisis.
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Neo-charisma and competencies
House’s reinterpretation of charisma identified the necessary persuasive competencies to influence people and, importantly, proposed that individual-deference predictors of charismatic leaders might be empirically quantifiable – establishing the “foundations for how charisma is studied today” (Antonakis, 2018, p. 63). This reconstruction also known as ‘organizational charisma’ or ‘nurtured charisma’.
House also argued that the charismatic effect is the emotional interaction between a leader and his/her followers.
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Neo-charisma and competencies
To explain how leaders engage followers, House and Shamir (1993) proposed that leaders have extraordinary effects on followers, who are motivated by enhanced levels of self-identity that lead to personal commitment to the leader’s mission, self-sacrificial behaviour and fulfilment.
Contrary to Weber,
House suggests that there are many charismatic leaders whose charisma did not diminish with time.
Bass noticed that charisma can still be present in leaders beyond the moment of crisis and that they still retain their charisma despite “failing to perform”.
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Neo-charisma and competencies
Conger and Kanungo (1998) further developed charismatic leadership by proposing that charisma is an attributional phenomenon, this happens through a three-stage behaviour process that engender high trust in the leader and enhanced follower performance:
Leader articulates an attainable vision that will inspire follower collective action to achieve objectives that are necessary in fulfilling the vision.
Leader creates an aura of confidence about the vision.
Leader who uses unconventional and novel strategies or practices to achieve the vision.
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Transformational leadership
Transactional leadership (rooted in the employment relationship) is primarily defined as an exchange relationship in which the leader and follower are engaged in some kind of agreement (e.g. these transactional exchanges constitute the ‘psychological contract’ – the implicit contract between employer and employee – which remains rooted in such an exchange process), whether economic (e.g. reward), social (e.g. group membership) or psychological (e.g. self-esteem).
On the other hand, Transformational leadership’s objective is that leaders appealed to their followers’ sense of values beyond their own self-interests. It has to be the benefit of the organization, not the leader.
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Transformational leadership
Bass and Riggio’s Transformational Leadership Model
Transformational leaders are able to inspire followers to transcend their self-interests for the good of the organization, with 4 essential behaviours:
Idealized influence
Inspirational motivation
Intellectual stimulation
Individualized consideration
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Transformational leadership
Transformational leaders link their visions to their employees’ growth needs and values through responding to individual followers’ learning and growth needs by empowering them.
In addition, there are two other elements of the leader (transactional factors):
Contingent reward
Management-by-exception
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Transformational leadership
Therefore, transactional leadership, particularly contingent reward, provides a broad basis for effective leadership, but extraordinary performance and employee satisfaction, commitment, and loyalty is possible from transactional leadership if augmented by transformative leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006).
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Transformational leadership

Figure 7.1 The Augmented Effect of Transformational Leadership
Source: Adapted from Bass and Riggio (2006)

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Transformational leadership
Charismatic, Ideological, and Pragmatic (CIP) model of leadership (Lovelace et al., 2019) emphasized a leader’s “sensemaking” process before outlining the resulting leader behaviours. Through sensemaking, leaders help followers see the past and to envision what is ahead more clearly.
Cross-cultural studies seem to confirm the universality of some aspects of charismatic leadership, though the influence of leadership is particularly popular in the United States and significantly less so in Nordic countries (see House, 1999).
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Transformational leadership
Numerous leadership writers suggest that leadership can help facilitate innovation and organizational change:
Leaders can facilitate change by communication that inspires and challenging employees to look at old problems in new ways (Kotter, 2012).
Essentially an emotional bonding between leader and followers results in followers doing things they would probably never would have done under a non-charismatic leader (Bass and Riggio).
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Transformational leadership
Value of employee ‘voice’ in the innovation and change process (Emmott, 2015).
In summary, transformational leadership must be inclusive, open, and engaging or trust, knowledge creation and sharing will falter (see, for example, Adler, 2005; Marchington, 2012).
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Authentic, ethical and servant theories of leadership
Authentic Leadership
A recent theory is still in the process of defining itself (Caza and Jackson, 2011).
Nascent endeavours have framed authentic leadership around the developmental processes (Gardner et al., 2005), and in terms of a leader’s self-awareness of work-related attitudes and behaviours, beyond what transformational leadership offered (Walumbwa et al. 2008).
Authentic leaders know what values they believe in, and they act on those values.
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Authentic, ethical and servant theories of leadership
Ethical Leadership
Ethical theories of leadership emphasize integrity and consistency between a leader’s espoused values and behaviour.
An ethical leader is someone “who does the right thing, the right way, and for the right reasons” (Ciulla and Forsyth, 2011, p. 239).
An ethical leader has the crucial responsibility to create the ethical expectations for all organizational members (Stouten et al., 2012).
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Authentic, ethical and servant theories of leadership
Servant Leadership
Leaders should go beyond their self-interest and focus on opportunities to empower and help develop followers and be attentive to their needs (Greenleaf 1970; Spears 2002).
Empathizing, listening, persuading and developing followers’ full potential are some of the characteristic behaviours of servant leadership (Van Dierendonck, 2011).
All three theories conceptualize leadership using value-loaded language and explicitly address the role of leaders in creating ethical organizational practices.
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Critiquing charismatic and transformational leadership
Transformational leadership treats leadership as a personality trait rather than a behaviour or competency that people can learn (Bryman, 1992).
Transformational leadership also reinforces the “heroic leader” perspective (Yukl, 1999) because of its basic premise that it is the leader who inspires and mobilizes followers to do exceptional things.
The charismatic nature of transformative leadership presents significant risks for organizations (Conger, 1999). Reverence and blind obedience to a leader can risk the Icarus paradox.
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Critiquing charismatic and transformational leadership
Charismatic-transformational leadership theories downplay the importance of power.
Charismatic and transformational leaders achieve, and expect, obedience by a combination of charismatic and rational-legal types of authority.
Persuasion by transformational leaders for followers to accept the need for “commitment” by displaying certain behavioural competencies, simultaneously, as the spectre of precarious work is omnipresent (Hewison, 2016), alongside an acceptance of increased insecurity in the employment relationship, is arguably ethically deficient.
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