Leadership and Organizations (RLE: Organizations)

Alan Bryman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135936655
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In this textbook Alan Bryman provides a detailed and critical examination of the literature on leadership in organizations, giving special recognition to the needs of students of organizational behaviour and the social psychology of organizations. After an examination of the complexity of the concept of leadership, the author describes the major approaches to the analysis of leadership in organizations, including: the idea that effective leaders have special traits; the various attempts to examine leader behaviour; normative approaches to the study of leadership; and the various theories which emphasize the importance of recognizing situational differences in understanding leadership effectiveness.

1

THE IDEA OF LEADERSHIP AND THE METHODOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP RESEARCH

It is tempting to reject the usual starting point for discussions of leadership – namely with its definition – if only because it tends to be a daunting induction for the uninitiated. Writers typically point (quite properly) to the wide range of pertinent definitions (e.g. Gibb, 1969; Stogdill, 1974; Yukl, 1981) and proceed to examine a sample of them. The basic problem is that not only is there a range of definitions, but there is also no consensually agreed one. The absence of a common definition of leadership means that the initial treatment of the topic can very easily become bogged down in a definitional quagmire, providing the reader with an unattractive introduction to a promising area. It is a promising area because in everyday life people seem to believe that leadership matters, that it is important to the realization of a desirable state of affairs. This is what people mean when they bemoan the absence of ‘good’ or ‘strong’ leadership or when industrialists seek to recruit to their firm people with the ‘right’ leadership qualities.

However, this book examines the literature relating to the study of leadership in organizations (firms, schools, the military, etc.) and is not concerned with the totality of leadership research per se. Within this domain of study, there is a tendency for there to be a fair degree of concordance among writers. Consider the following definitions:

Leadership may be considered as the process (act) of influencing the activities of an organized group in its efforts toward goal setting and goal achievement. (Stogdill, 1950, p. 3)

leadership is a process of influence between a leader and those who are followers. (Hollander, 1978, p. 1)

Leadership ... is the behaviour of an individual when he is directing the activities of a group toward a shared goal. (Hemphill and Coons, 1957, p. 7)

The statement, ‘a leader tries to influence other people in a given direction’ is relatively simple, but it seems to capture the essence of what we mean by leadership . . . (Korman, 1971, p. 115)

‘Leadership’ is defined as the process of influencing the activities of an organized group toward goal achievement. (Rauch and Behling, 1984, p. 46)

The common elements in these definitions imply that leadership involves a social influence process in which a person steers members of the group towards a goal. Many of the studies which will be examined in this book seem to employ this conception as a working definition of leadership. The emphasis on ‘the group’ is a common one in leadership theory and research, which conjures the image of a leader with a small coterie of followers. In this connection, many researchers have examined the activities of supervisors or managers in industry and the implications of their behaviour for the sentiments and performance of the subordinates for whom they are responsible. This level of analysis creates a relatively small-scale emphasis in leadership research, for the organization comes to be seen as comprising a plethora of groups and attendant leaders. The organization as a whole, or as an entity sui generis, recedes from view in this context. Another aspect of the working definition is that the leader/non-leader distinction is a clear-cut one which is taken to be indicative of role differentiation within the group. This role differentiation may occur in a number of ways, but two chief notions tend to prevail in the literature. Much of the early research on leadership was concerned with the ‘emergent’ leader, that is the person who becomes a leader in leaderless contexts. Many studies exist which sought to create the conditions for emergent leadership in psychology laboratories, wherein unstructured groups worked on tasks assigned by the experimenter, and the characteristics which distinguished emergent leaders from followers were then assessed. In addition, there have been studies of emergent leadership in natural settings, such as Whyte's (1943) pioneering study of an American street corner gang. In this prima facie leaderless context, the process of emergent leadership and its subsequent retention were directly observed. Thus, one form of leadership which has been examined is that which emerges from situations in which there is no formal leadership. The second way in which the leader/non-leader distinction is likely to occur is in the context of formally designated roles. People are appointed to positions in which the exercise of leadership is a prime requirement and it is this context with which the bulk of research into leadership in formal organizations is concerned. As Stogdill and Shartle put it:

It is assumed that it is proper and feasible to make a study of leadership in places where leadership would appear to exist and that if a person occupies a leadership position he is a fit subject for study. (Stogdill and Shartle, 1948, p. 287)

In this conception, the leader is a person who is formally designated as such. The formal organization throws up a range of such positions for whom ‘goal oriented group activities’ (Stogdill and Shartle, 1948, p. 287) are an important responsibility. Researchers concerned with leadership in organizations have tended to adopt this strategy, particularly when examining the behaviour of leaders. As a result, as the succeeding chapters will reveal, there tends to be relatively little discussion of informal leadership in organizations, i.e. leadership processes which occur outside the formal blueprints of organizations. The neglect of informal leadership by most investigators can be attributed, not only to a research strategy which focuses on leadership positions, but also to a pervasive preoccupation with leadership effectiveness. Researchers have been particularly concerned with the factors (personal or behavioural) which distinguish the effective from the ineffective leader, ‘effectiveness’ being construed in a variety of ways but generally taken to involve indications of group productivity, subordinate satisfaction and involvement, and the like. Such research has typically been guided by a belief that it would be possible to refine the selection or training of leaders, if it were known which factors contribute to leadership effectiveness. Because informal leadership is relatively idiosyncratic and not always directed to official organizational goals (Blau, 1956), its relevance for the study of leadership effectiveness was not obvious.

Leadership and influence

The working definition of leadership which, it has been suggested, has provided a general orientation for leadership researchers concerned with organizations, is not without its problems. Quite aside from the fact that the definition includes notions like ‘group’ and ‘goal’ which are not as uncontentious as they first appear, it is difficult to distinguish it from other forms of social influence. In particular, it is difficult to distinguish leadership from kindred concepts like power and authority, not least because people in leadership positions typically exert (or have the capacity to exert) power and authority over their immediate subordinates. Indeed, in some approaches to the study of leadership, a deliberate attempt is made to fuse it with the concepts like power (e.g. French and Snyder, 1959; Janda, 1960). The problem of distinguishing leadership from other influence processes has been addressed by Kochan, Schmidt, and De Cotiis (1975) who follow Gibb's (1969, p. 270) assertion that leadership involves ‘influencing the actions of others in a shared approach to common or compatible goals’. Similarly, Etzioni (1965) has sought to distinguish leadership from power by suggesting that the former is an influence process which changes the preferences of those being influenced. In terms of such views, leadership is not simply a matter of effecting changes in other people's behaviour, but more to do with enhancing their voluntary compliance. This notion relates to the leader's ability to motivate, an ingredient which is often taken as the sine qua non of leadership. While Etzioni's definition subsumes this conception very readily, many of the definitions which were quoted earlier do not obviously absorb it. This suggests that the working definition which underpins much of the research to be explicated may be at variance with the popular conception of leadership as involving the motivation of others.

This notion is reinforced by a classic study of the work activities of managers by Mintzberg (1973) in which ten managerial roles were delineated as a result of his observations. One of these roles is described as the ‘leader role’, the key purpose of which

is to effect an integration between individual needs and organizational goals. The manager must concentrate his efforts so as to bring subordinate and organizational needs into a common accord in order to promote efficient operations. (Mintzberg, 1973, p. 62)¹

The problem with assessing the manager's leader role is that it infiltrates a great many of his activities which renders leadership a difficult area to study per se. When we seek to distinguish leadership from other influence activities, we are effectively attempting to distinguish it from the mere incumbency of a position or status in a formal organizational structure (‘headship’ as it is often called) to which power and authority accrue. When people talk about the ‘leadership of the Conservative Party’ they are invariably making a reference to positions of authority within the party; if they say that the Conservative Party lacks leadership, they are unlikely to be referring to the absence of persons in formal authority positions, but to a deficiency in the capacity of Party leaders to motivate and guide backbenchers and, possibly, supporters. It would seem important to maintain a distinction between the leader who is in a leadership position and who has power and authority vested in his or her office, and leadership as an influence process which is more than the exercise of power and authority as Etzioni, for example, suggests. However, as the reader will come to recognize, a great deal of leadership research rides roughshod over these distinctions. Studies abound on the subject of the behaviour of leaders in which the strategy involves discerning the activities of people in positions of leadership, with little reference to how these activities might be indicative of leadership per se as distinct from the exercise of power and authority.

The organizational context

Of course, issues associated with power are very relevant to what leaders do, since the power at their disposal affects what they can do. For example, an important component of leadership behaviour, according to some writers (see Chapter 4), is the use by designated leaders of rewards or penalties, for as Mintzberg, observes: ‘Each time a manager encourages or criticizes a subordinate he is acting in his capacity as leader’ (Mintzberg, 1973, p. 61). But the leader's opportunity to encourage or criticize may be affected by how much power he has and organizational policies in connection with the assessment of subordinates. Nor is the power structure the only constraint on how leaders can behave, for organizations frequently encumber the occupants of offices with rules, job definitions, and a catalogue of procedures which restrict and restrain them (Weber, 1947). Further, research shows that the behaviour of designated leaders is substantially affected by the expectations held of them by their own bosses, subordinates, and peers (e.g. Pfeffer and Salancik, 1975). The climate of an organization may constrain the leader's range of options too.

It was in the light of these issues that Katz and Kahn offered the following useful definition of leadership:

we consider the essence of organizational leadership to be the influential increment over and above mechanical compliance with the routine directives of the organization. (Katz and Kahn, 1978, p. 528)

This definition directs the researcher to an examination of leadership processes which are over and above conformity to organizational routine and prescription. However, leadership research is disappointing in this respect too, for it often fails to distinguish the routine compliance component of what designated leaders do, from the influential increment ingredient.

Management and leadership

Much of the early research on leadership was concerned with the investigation of the personal traits of leaders (see Chapter 2). The inability of investigators to discern unambiguous traits which permitted discrimination between leaders and non-leaders, or between good and bad leaders, ushered in a lengthy period from the later 1940s onwards in which the behaviour of leaders was the prime focus (see Chapter 3). The main emphasis of the programmes of research during this period was the type or types of leader behaviour associated with group or organizational effectiveness. The most prominent research strategy of this period was that exemplified by Stogdill and Shartle's (1948) proposal, quoted earlier in this chapter, which orientates the investigator to people in prima facie positions of leadership. Stogdill and Shartle were themselves prominent figures in the development of the strategy in that they participated in giving birth to the Ohio State Leadership Studies, one of the best-known and most influential programmes (see Chapter 3). Unfortunately, the strategy made it extremely difficult to distinguish between leadership and management. It involved treating managers or supervisors in industry and elsewhere as though they were leaders with little questioning of how one might discriminate between management and leadership. Indeed, there is even a sense in which the authors took the view that this distinction does not matter: ‘The question of whether leaders or executives are being studied appears to be a problem at the verbal level only’ (Stogdill and Shartle, 1948, p. 287).

During the period in which leadership behaviour has been a major focus of investigation it has been very difficult for an outside observer to ascertain whether it is leadership or management that the innumerable studies of ‘leader behavior’ have been examining. Terms like ‘leadership style’, ‘supervisory style’, and ‘managerial style’ tend to be used interchangeably, and seem to all intents and purposes to be addressing the same phenomena. The failure to distinguish between leadership and ‘headship’ (see the preceding section) and leadership and management in the majority of investigations has prompted the following apt comment:

Despite these distinctions, leadership research continues to be dominated by studies which in fact deal only with a restricted range of managerial behaviours. This may well be a reflection of the difficulties involved in pursuing definitions which do not tie leaders to particular role titles, such as supervisor. (Hosking and Morley, 1982, p. 10)

In recent years, a number of authors have sought to forge a distinction between leadership and management. Zaleznik (1977) draws a distinction between managers and leaders. The former are reactive organization men concerned with routine and short-term projects, whereas

Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a business takes. The net result of this influence is to change the way people think about what is desirable, possible and necessary. (Zaleznik, 1977, p. 71)

According to this view, leadership entails the creation of a vision about a desired future state which seeks to enmesh all members of an organization in its net. This view is consonant with the view that leadership is distinguishable from the exercise of authority and routine compliance with organizational protocol, by virtue of being an influence process which seeks to secure voluntary compliance to agreed goals and which transcends a slavish acquiescence to routine. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Idea of Leadership and the Methodology of Leadership Research
• 2. Traits and Abilities
• 3. Leadership Style I: Early Approaches and Normative Programmes
• 4. Leadership Style II: Participation, Rewards, Motivation and Control
• 5. Contingency Approaches to the Study of Leadership
• 6. Leadership and the Study of Organizations
• 7. Recent Developments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index