Conceptions of Leadership

Enduring Ideas and Emerging Insights

Scott T. Allison, David M. Messick, G. Goethals, R. Kramer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137472021
  9781137472014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137472038
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

An exploration of both classic and contemporary conceptions of leadership, focusing on social psychological approaches to central questions such as the way people think about leaders and leadership, the personality attributes of leaders, power and influence, trust, and the qualities that sustain positive relationships between leaders and followers.

P A R T I

Conceptions of Leadership

C H A P T E R O N E

Introduction and Commentary

DAVID M. MESSICK

In the spring of 1999, two of this book’s editors, Kramer and I, met for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago. Kramer was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and I was on the faculty of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. One of the topics that we talked about during lunch was the shift in emphasis in both business schools away from cooperation, trust, communication, coordination, and the like, to the related but distinct topic of leadership. Kramer and I were social psychologists and knew that the topic of leadership had been an important theme in some of the earliest research on group processes. However, as social psychology experienced an infatuation with the “cognitive” revolution in psychology, the topic of leadership shrank into obscurity. By the turn of the millennium, though, there were some new ways of thinking about leadership that had not been introduced to the business school environment. Why not, we thought, have a conference and invite some of social psychology’s most creative innovators to a conference to discuss these new approaches to leadership and then publish a book based on the talks? The conference was held in August of 2000 at the Kellogg School of Management, and the book based on this conference, The Psychology of Leadership, was published in 2005. Two of the creative innovators who were invited to the conference and who wrote chapters for the book are the other two editors of the current book, Allison and Goethals.

Now, a decade, more or less, later, and there has been a virtual tsunami of books and articles about leadership. When the issue of updating the earlier book was first raised, Kramer and I wondered what the point of a revision would be. We then became aware of the creative work by Allison and Goethals and realized that there was indeed a body of research that had not been described in their earlier book. So Kramer and I discussed the idea of a revision with Allison and Goethals, and we all agreed that such a project was worth exploring. After much discussion and the exchange of scads of ideas, the current book was agreed upon by all of us, who, we should note, are all associated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was a faculty member, Allison and Kramer were graduate students, and Goethals was a visiting scholar.

The familiarity of us four editors with each other is a blessing but also a shortcoming. We are all male, white, North American university professors. These facts surely limit our views of what constitutes good leadership and who qualifies to be thought of as a leader. Famous people from around the world, people like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, are all well known and admired. But there are many others who would be unrecognized by most Americans. Take, for instance, Lee Kuan Yew (familiarly known in Asia as LKY). LKY was the first prime minister of Singapore and one of the most famous and admired political leaders in Asia. When one of us (DM) taught in Hong Kong to a broad mix of Asian executives, LKY was one of the most popular figures executives wrote about to illustrate excellence in leadership. Consider also Molly Melching, about whom a book has appeared (Molloy, 2013). She is a volunteer in a not-for-profit organization in Senegal who spends time in rural villages where the practice of female genital cutting is a well-established cultural tradition. She has begun the process of gradually eliminating this barbaric practice from hundreds of villages in Senegal but remains relatively obscure in the United States. Finally, think of Simon Bolivar. His name is recognized by a fraction of US scholars, but he is famous throughout Latin America for having led the South American people in a rebellion against Spanish domination. Indeed he has one nation named after him (Bolivia) and is widely known as el Libertador throughout Central and South America. He is to Latin America what George Washington is to the United States.

Inescapably then, we editors are constrained by our backgrounds in our selection of “core” issues about leadership, and we are constrained in ways that will often be invisible to us. For instance, we are all social psychologists and have read much of the same literature on leadership. But that literature is different from that which a political scientist or a journalist or a military historian will have read. Their books on core concepts would be different from ours—not better, necessarily, nor worse, just different. The way we define leadership is likely to differ from the way people whose backgrounds and experiences are different from ours define leadership. This fact is true about professional experiences and it is equally true about political and social differences. Most citizens of the United States, for instance, would not consider Fidel Castro to be a hero and a leader, but most Cubans would. Most North Koreans think their leaders have almost godlike qualities and most Americans think these leaders are monomaniacal lunatics. What is implied by these differences is that leadership, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder. If history is written by winners, one will either be viewed as a hero or a terrorist depending on who wins.

But winning or losing may depend partly on unpredictable geological events like storms, earthquakes, or droughts, or equally unpredictable social events, and who is a hero and who is a villain acquires a random element. Flip a coin. Heads you have a leader and hero; tails you have a scoundrel. This fact, along with the subjective nature of leadership judgments mentioned above, may be inevitable and immutable. But they can also be problematic for one trying to create a logic of leadership that is “objective,” in the sense that judgments of leadership do not depend on one’s own position, and systematic, in that these judgments do not depend on random events. Eliminating the impact of chance is probably a more difficult challenge than eliminating the impact of one’s position. A major reason why this is so lies in what has been called the “outcome bias” (Baron & Hershey, 1988). The outcome bias refers to the fact that in judging the quality of an act, the result of the act—the outcome—is used as a cue. If the outcome is a good one, the act or the decision is seen as good; if the outcome is poor, the act or decision is judged to have been poor. This relationship characterizes judgments even when it is clear that the outcome depends not only on the decision but also on a random event over which the decision maker has no control. So imagine two people at a roulette table deciding to place a large bet on a single number. The first is lucky and wins her bet but the second is unlucky and loses hers. People will judge the first person to be a better decision maker than the second, despite the fact that they made identical decisions. The outcome bias violates the principle that the quality of a decision must be assessed on the basis of the information that was available to the decision maker at the time the decision was made, not on the basis of a subsequent outcome. The outcome will influence a judgment of how lucky the decision makers were, but not the quality of the decision per se.

The rule is this as it applies to leadership. Only those individuals who have made a significant difference in the world, in one way or another, are considered leaders. But to make a significant difference one must be lucky as well as skilled. We cannot count the number of business executives who tried but failed to build lasting organizations, failed often because of poor economic conditions, competition from unexpected places, the sudden introduction of new and better products, political advantages given to competitors, and so on. Leadership books are written about those who survived and thrived, even if they did essentially everything the failures did except experience bad luck. Just as we as a species are the result of a long process of evolution for which we can take no credit, successful people are the result of an evolutionary process which has eliminated many others with similar qualities. The survivors were lucky. The failures were not. A difference between biological evolution and the selective pressures for success in one’s lifetime is that the survivors of the latter often attribute their success to their qualities rather than to luck. One result of this process is the flood of “leadership by autobiography” books on the market.

A principle that accompanies the outcome bias is what Fischoff and Beyth (1975) call “creeping determinism.” When an event that is a priori uncertain happens, we tend to think that it was inevitable. Thus explaining the past, where everything is mostly known, is very different from predicting the future. People tend to be very good at the former, and very poor at the latter. When we think about tomorrow, the world is “iffy.” When we think about yesterday, what happened must have been destined to happen. The paradox is that the future is highly uncertain whereas the past is deterministic. What this means for studies of leadership is that winners appear to have been destined to win, not just lucky. Their successes must reflect qualities that are stable, permanent, and exceptional. We can illustrate this principle with a recent sports example. In the 2013 NBA championship, in game 6 between the San Antonio Spurs and the Miami Heat, with essentially no time left and San Antonio ahead by three points, Heat guard Ray Allen shot a three-point shot from the corner. This shot had at best a 40 percent chance of going in. If it did not, the Spurs win the title. If it did go in, the game is tied and goes into overtime. At this point, the outcome is totally dependent on chance. The shot does go in and the Heat goes on in overtime to defeat the Spurs, and the Heat also wins game 7 to win the series and become the NBA Champions for the second straight year. The press writes about the Heat as a team of destiny. But what seems clear is that the Spurs and the Heat are two excellent teams either of which could have won the series and the championship. It was pure luck that the Heat won on Allen’s three-point shot but it was not pure luck that the Heat was within striking distance so that the three pointer could do the trick. In other words, both skill and luck were necessary for victory.

Here is another example that is more pertinent to the content of this book. In the early years of the last century, two parties set out to be the first to reach the South Pole. A British party was led by Robert Falcon Scott, a Captain in the Royal Navy and an experienced explorer. A Norwegian party was led by Roald Amundsen, an explorer with extensive experience in polar conditions. Each of these teams set out in the summer of 1910 (Amundsen left Oslo on June 7 in the Fram and Scott sailed out of London on the Terra Nova on June 10). While they had different routes to sail to Antarctica, both teams arrived on the Antarctic continent in the antipodean spring (Northern autumn). After enduring the winter of 1911, both expeditions left for the pole in the spring, Amundsen on October 20 and Scott and his team on November 1. The round-trip journey was to be approximately 1,500 miles—on foot! In a competition of this sort, there are at least two goals. The first is to be the first team to the goal and thereby win eternal fame in the annals of exploration. This goal can only be achieved by one of the groups. This race will have one winner and one loser. The second goal is to return safely with all the team members. This goal is not zero-sum and both teams can win in this game against a viciously cold nature.

Amundsen won both contests. He reached the Pole on December 14, 1911, and he and all of his men returned safely to the coast and then to Norway. Scott not only arrived at the Pole after Amundsen, on January 16, 1912, but he and all of his men died of starvation and hypothermia on the long, arduous trek back. So Scott lost both times. He was beaten to the pole by Amundsen and his team, and he was beaten by the brutal weather in Antarctica. The most comprehensive account of this rivalry is probably that of Huntford (1999) who attributes Scott’s failures to a series of blunders and irresponsible decisions. Scott was, according to Huntford, a vaingloriously inept figure who was more concerned about his image, reputation, and place in the panoply of British exploration than about overcoming the obstacles that he and his men faced. His tragic death and that of the four men with him was, according to Huntford, directly attributable to Scott’s mistakes, oversights, judgmental flaws, and planning errors. But Susan Solomon (2001), in her wonderfully titled book, The Coldest March, takes a different spin on this historical disaster. Her book title refers to one of the coldest months of March in Antarctic history, and to the march of Scott and his men in their effort to reach a depot where food and fuel were available. (They died about ten miles from this depot.) Solomon’s thesis is that Scott and his men were brave, well-organized, and prepared, and, but for the unusually bitter weather they encountered that required them to sit immobile in a tent for nearly a week, they would have prevailed. Had they not been so unlucky, she argues, Scott and his men would have returned home and been considered heroes. While they were not the first to pole, they had man-hauled their own provisions, whereas Amundsen’s team had depended on dog teams to haul theirs, thus exhibiting the superiority of British grit and endurance.

Leadership generally implies getting results. Great leaders produce great things. But great results do not imply great leadership. Great leadership requires achievement of a social nature. Great leadership results in the outstanding performance of a social unit, be it an athletic team, an army, a political unit, or a business enterprise. We can illustrate this point with a sports example.

A leader of a sports team should take his or her team to the highest level—a championship or something close to it. If we examine the last 40 years of college basketball teams that won the NCAA tournament to claim to be the best team in the United States, we find that in only 5 years of these 40 did that championship team include the player selected by the Associated Press as the National Player of the Year. So the best player was usually not on the best team. Outstanding individual performance is not tantamount to outstanding leadership. The fastest person, the best shot, the strongest, the brightest, the most generous or the least gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Conceptions of Leadership
• Part II   Leadership Processes
• Notes on Contributors
• Index