The Heroic Leadership Imperative

How Leaders Inspire and Mobilize Change

Scott T. Allison, George R. Goethals

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781839091780
• eBook ISBN: 9781839091773
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Leaders are expected to be heroic. That is, they are expected to serve three needs of their followers: (1) basic individual needs; (2) group and collective identity needs; and (3) transcendent needs. 

The Heroic Leadership Imperative illustrates how leaders who fulfill these expectations succeed attracting followers and initiating social change. Here Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals identify leaders who have succeeded in meeting all three categories of needs—individuals such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump, as well as cult leaders such as Jim Jones—and they discuss such leaders' appeal by way of a unique integration of classic and contemporary psychology relevant to understanding all facets of heroism and heroic leadership. In so doing, the authors explore how heroes and villains have used this leadership imperative to fulfill their ambitions, and provide valuable insights into how societies can avoid falling under the spell of charismatic leaders who misuse the leadership imperative.

For its broad historical coverage, interdisciplinary approach, and relevance to current events, this book is a must-read for scholars and students of leadership studies, and it is of interest to anyone concerned with the political and social upheavals of the past five years.

1

FIRST IMPERATIVE: MEETING INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL NEEDS

Not long ago the city of Memphis installed the I Am A Man mural by Marcellous Lovelace in a public park. The mural commemorates the Sanitation Workers Protest March of 1968. At the time, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Memphis to support the workers’ strike. A few days later, in that same city, King was murdered. The phrase “I am a man” was a dramatic assertion of pride and self-respect. Not only did the marchers want economic justice, they wanted recognition as deserving human beings who had earned fair pay and decent working conditions, but just as importantly, who merited being treated with dignity, being listened to, and, in a word, respect. More recently, the idea of wanting and demanding respect is captured in the Black Lives Matter movement, and all that it entails, materially and psychologically. Similarly, Gay Pride events are about respect, self-respect, and respect from others, as the term “Gay Pride” itself implies. One particularly moving dramatization of the craving for respect and self-respect appears in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954). An iconic film that won Academy Award Oscars for Best Picture and for Best Actor, it contains a famous scene where Marlon Brando’s character, Terry Milloy, wrenchingly pleads with his brother Charlie to acknowledge having let him down. Charlie had pressured Terry to take a dive on behalf of fellow mobsters who were fixing a boxing match. It ended his career as a fighter. Nearly wailing Terry cries, “I coulda had class, I could’ve been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

Terry Milloy is not alone in craving to be “somebody.” The need is universal. It is satisfied in complex ways, integrating an individual’s own assessment and the implications of his or her relationships with others. Among the most influential of those relationships are ones with leaders and heroes. It is common to hear people who have met charismatic leaders, such as John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton, describe the feeling of being held in the president’s gaze, his only having eyes for you, and making you feel elevated, that you are “somebody.”

This chapter explores the myriad ways that the leader–follower dynamic and our relationships with heroes engage people’s needs for positive self-regard. Among other things, we note how these dynamics give leaders great power. As we shall see, leaders’ capacity to gratify or frustrate esteem needs can be used for good or ill. We begin by considering how esteem needs relate to other important human needs. Then we explore the various treatments of those needs by important psychologists and leadership scholars, highlighting how leaders and heroes relate to those needs. We will see how leaders can arouse and gratify esteem needs on an individual level. For example, we will explore the impact of a hero recognizing the contribution one makes to a moral quest. Chapter 2 considers some of the same processes at the group level, for example, the impact of a leader of a social movement convincing his followers that they are a special group, deserving power and recognition. In Chapter 3, we look beyond the need to have positive self-regard on an individual level or group level and explore how the need to feel part of something larger than ourselves or our group, part of some larger scheme of things, can generate powerful feelings of awe and wonder, ultimately making us feel that life itself is meaningful.

Our concluding chapter attempts to bring all three levels of the heroic leadership imperative together into a coherent conceptual package. Historically, the world’s most powerful heroic leaders – and villainous leaders, too – have skillfully appealed to our individual needs (Chapter 1), to our social relational and collective needs (Chapter 2), and to our more mysterious yet extremely powerful need to become part of something big, something heroic, something that will live on long after we have died. We call this transcendence. Let’s begin with an examination of that first level of needs, those that are the most basic individual level. Here we see that people, as animals, strive to have their most fundamental physiological needs met and look to leaders to make this happen. But as we shall see, unlike all other creatures on the planet, once humans have basic physical needs met, they strive for much, much more out of life and from their leaders. We begin with the fundamental human drive to attain positive self-worth.

THE QUEST FOR SELF-WORTH

The need for self-esteem exists in complex relationship to other human needs. William James (1892) listed 37 human instincts including imitation, jealousy, love, modesty, pugnacity, resentment, shame, and sociability. These instincts nod to the complexity of our relationships with others. We want to be with others, we love and emulate them, and feel shame when we don’t measure up. But we also experience jealousy, resentment, and hostility. Many of these needs connect to feelings of value or worth in one way or another. We’ll see later that resentment in particular relates to our feelings of value, and that leaders sometimes use our need to feel better about ourselves by stoking James’ resentment instinct.

Following James, Henry Murray (1938) identified several broad need domains including ambition, affection, status, and power along with a very specific need to conform to avoid blame or ostracism. We see these needs play out in two fundamental dimensions of interpersonal behavior identified by Timothy Leary (1957). First, our behavior shows varying amounts of love, affection, friendliness, and agreeableness on the one hand, versus hostility on the other hand. Second, we also behave in ways which claim high status, or dominance, on the one hand, versus on the other hand actions that submit or yield to others. When Franklin Roosevelt established the polio rehabilitation center at Warm Springs, Georgia in the 1920s as part of his own effort to recover from polio it was said that he wanted to be one of them, that is, one of the patients, but he also wanted to be “the number one” of them, that is, to claim the highest status position in the group. He combined the warmth and inclusiveness of being “one of them” with being “the number one” by declaring himself the Vice President in Charge of Picnics (Burns, 2014). This blending of warmth and friendliness with dominance and assertion was noted earlier when he was in college. As editor of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, he exerted what one fellow student called a “seamless command” (Barber, 1992). This is just one illustration of the way each individual combines friendliness, hostility, dominance, and submission in complex ways. However, they do so, we see the playing out of many of the needs identified by James and Murray, particularly love and status.

An elegant and more straightforward theory of human motivation is set forth in Abraham Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs. Although the model has been expanded and revised by Maslow and others over the years, the basics remain the same. The hierarchy consists of five levels. At the base are physiological needs for air, water, and food. These are needs we share with other animal species. Physiological needs are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy because these needs must be satisfied before other needs can be engaged. Unless one’s basic life-sustaining needs are satisfied, other needs are simply irrelevant. The next level up is safety needs. Once one’s essential life needs are met, people, and other animals, want to be safe. Safe from the elements, safe from predators, and safe from enemies. Franklin Roosevelt again provides a helpful example. In his famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech, Roosevelt identified freedom from want (physiological needs) and freedom from fear (safety needs), along with the freedom to worship as one chose and the freedom of speech and expression.

Maslow went on to argue that once physiological and safety needs are met human beings focus on belongingness and inclusion needs. They want to be part of a group and to have significant relationships. Social psychologists’ recent research on belongingness needs underlines people’s urge to “form social attachments … and [to] resist the dissolution of existing bonds.” Furthermore, such studies make clear that “the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation” (Baumeister & Leary, 1995, p. 497).

The next step up in Maslow’s hierarchy is esteem needs. We want to feel good about ourselves. As we shall develop later in this book, a great deal of the leader–follower dynamic revolves around leaders and also heroes arousing and gratifying esteem needs. Feeling good about ourselves, and satisfying our esteem needs is an exceedingly complex process. Before exploring the role that leaders play in this process, or these processes, we note the capstone motive in Maslow’s original hierarchy of motives: self-actualization. Maslow claimed that after our Physiological, Safety, Inclusion, and Esteem needs are satisfied, people are motivated toward self-actualization, broadly speaking, to realize all their potentials, to be all that they can be, and to be significant. Again, we shall see that leaders play an especially important role in engaging this need. In fact, the best and most effective leaders, whether heroic or villainous, are adept at surveying the degree to which their followers’ needs are being met at all the different levels, from the most basic physiological needs to the highest and most transcendent needs. A large component of the heroic leadership imperative involves attracting followers by identifying any gaps in those needs and by letting followers know that those gaps will be filled.

FROM MOTHER GOOSE TO DONALD TRUMP: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM

Both our need for self-esteem and our capacity to build it, in part all by ourselves, have been on full display throughout much of human history, from Mother Goose to Donald Trump. In Mother Goose, Little Jack Horner puts his thumb in his Christmas pie, pulls out a plum, and crows “what a good boy am I.” The comment is a non-sequitur, and like many such self-appraisals, not really reality based. In the same vein, many years later, US president Donald Trump declared himself a “very stable genius.” Later he added that he was also good-looking. Whether anyone else believes Horner or Trump, or whether they believe it themselves, the remarks are not atypical. We are challenged, then, to try to understand the psychological and behavioral consequences of our incessant esteem needs.

In addition to mere self-delusion, there are two fundamental interpersonal processes that shape our self-concept and thus our self-esteem. The first involves the way individuals assess themselves by measuring their perceptions of themselves against their evaluations of others. We evaluate ourselves through social comparison processes initially described by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 (Festinger, 1954). His theory of social comparison focused specifically on the ways we evaluate our opinions and our abilities but later research expanded that perspective by developing the core idea that social comparison processes are about our overall feelings of self-worth or self-esteem. Furthermore, later work also developed the idea, again implicit in the original statement, that comparison processes are more aimed at self-validation than objective self-evaluation (Suls & Wheeler, 2000). Our esteem needs are so great that they often overrule disinterested appraisals of our opinions, our abilities, and other self-defining qualities that may be relevant for an individual such as their looks, their morals, or their health.

The second process involved in self-evaluation is reflected appraisal, that is, feedback from other people, whether that is explicit or implicit. Reflected appraisals from many people affect our self-esteem, but what leaders think of us is particularly meaningful, either in making us feel good about ourselves, or in shaking our confidence. Leaders have status and they often represent the opinions of other followers. Therefore, what they think of us, and what that means about what our group as a whole thinks of us, matter greatly. However, not only leaders’ opinions matter. William James classic chapter on “The Self” notes that we even care about the opinion of “some insignificant cad” (James, 1892, p. 185).

The self-concept itself is complex and multi-dimensional so that our overall self-feeling is affected by social comparison and reflected appraisals along a number of dimensions. As noted, Festinger discussed the evaluation of opinions and abilities. We also mentioned that there are many other dimensions of self-appraisal. In his classic book on self-presentation, Erving Goffman describes the fictional character Preedy putting on a performance at the beach, acting self-consciously so as to make himself noticed and admired in a number of specific ways: Kindly Preedy; Methodical and Sensible Preedy; Big-Cat Preedy; Carefree Preedy, after all; and finally, Local Fisherman Preedy. Broadly speaking, all those qualities have to do with competence and morality (House & Shamir, 1993). We want to feel effective and we want to feel worthy. We want to be consistent. Elliot Aronson’s discussion of cognitive dissonance theory made the fundamental point that we want to avoid feeling stupid and avoid feeling guilty.

Psychologists began exploring self-esteem when the study of psychology was born. The founder of psychology in the United States was William James, noted earlier. His two volume Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, is still a highly readable classic. Along with such chapters as Habit, Memory and the Will, James wrote about “The Consciousness of Self.” For our purposes, there are three relevant elements. First, as noted James emphasized the strength of the need to think well of oneself. Even before psychology as a formal field of study got off the ground, James explored what Maslow called Esteem Needs. On the social comparison side of self-evaluation, he noted that “we cannot escape” the emotion of “dread” if we compare poorly to others. Nodding to the reflected appraisal process he noted the “innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably.” If this need is frustrated “a kind of rage and impotent desire would ere long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief” (James, 1892, p. 179).

James also noted the complexity of self-esteem by famously claiming that we have “many different social selves” and that each one is dependent on groups or individuals “whose opinion” we care about (p. 179). Given these multiple social selves, our overall self-concept can be organized around the aspects of ourselves that we choose to highlight. Other aspects can be “more or less suppressed.” Again, James is eloquent in describing how we do this. “So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his reputation.” In writing of an individual picking out the one true self and psychologically disposing of other selves, or aspects of selves, James raises the fascinating possibility that people actually have some control – we can call it self-control – over their self-concept. He notes that in doing so, and making other selves “unreal,” we see “as strong an example as there is of … selective industry of the mind” (p. 186).

James then takes this line of argument one step further. In choosing one self or set of selves, we set our aspirations. And then he offers his famous self-esteem formula, that our evaluation of ourselves is the ratio of our successes to our pretensions. Our self-esteem can be raised by increasing our successes or accomplishments, which may be quite difficult, or lowering our pretensions, or aspirations, which might be relatively easy. “Once more then,” James proclaims, “our self-feeling is in our power” (p. 188).

Interestingly, other theories of self also describe ingenious ways we control our self-esteem, and thereby show the complexity of self-related processes. Psychologist Erik Erikson writes about the self-concept or identity as a process that reflects a tension between what others think of us and what we think of ourselves:

identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation … by which the individual judges himself in light of what he perceives to be the way others judge him in comparison to themselves and a typology significant to them; while he judges their way of judging him in the light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them and to types that have become relevant to him. (Erikson, 1968, pp. 22–23)

We see here the interplay of social comparison processes – the individual considers “how he perceives himself in comparison to them” – and also reflected appraisal “the individual judges himself in light of what he perceives the way others judge him.” Most importantly, the person is active in weighing both the comparison information and the appraisals of others. Erikson wouldn’t go as far as James in saying our self-feeling is in our power, but he agrees we are not simply at the mercy of what other people think of us.

While we are not completely at the mercy of what others think of us, we might question, for example, whether we have as much control over our aspirations as James implies. Surely parents, peers, and other significant figures hold up standards for adequate behavior. Furthermore, lowering aspirations rings of giving up, lowering our aspirations, and thereby achieving much less than we would have been capable of had we persisted. One example of aspiration lowering that has troublesome implications for our society was discovered in research on stereotype threat (Steele, 1997). Among the stereotypes that have long been prevalent in American society are the ideas that African Americans are not as intellectually capable as whites, and that women perform worse than men in mathematics. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs for women have succeeded in erasing the latter bias to some extent, but its effects may be harder to overcome. Here’s how they can work. If supposed gender differences in mathematical ability are made salient to women taking numerical tests, they often perform more poorly than if those differences had not been suggested in some way. For example, simply telling women that there are gender differences on a math test brings the negative stereotype to mind. The result can be that that the test takers worry about fulfilling and reinforcing the stereotype. That worry is “a threat in the air,” in Steele’s phrase. This worry can easily distract and lower the performance. This is especially true for people who are identified with the domain, in this case, to excel in math. However, the worry that they might not be good enough, and the diminished performance that results from that fear, can lead some women to give up, and “disidentify” with math, that is, lower their mathematical aspirations. In this way, their self-esteem avoids a blow, but their leaving the field is harmful to both their prospects and the fields. In general, psychological processes that protect self-esteem may be harmful to those whose self-image is shielded by them.

Another instance of self-esteem buffering that can have quite deleterious effects on performance comes from the phenomenon of self-handicapping (Jones & Berglas, 1978). Sometimes people deliberately create obstacles for themselves that harm their performance. Pulling an all-nighter before an exam, though possibly meant to help getting a good grade, can actually create fatigue and makes things worse. Whether the all-nighter helps or hurts, the individual can believe himself, and claim to others, that it hurt, and explains the bad grade. This excuse shields the individual from facing the fact that he or she simply didn’t understand the assignment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. First Imperative: Meeting Individual-Level Needs
• 2. Second Imperative: Meeting Group-level Needs
• 3. Third Imperative: Meeting Transcendent-level Needs
• 4. Concluding Thoughts About the Leadership Imperative
• References
• Index