Inclusive Leadership

Gloria Moss

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351610452
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Business General

This book breaks important new ground in describing the enhancements in performance, motivation and mental well-being that Inclusive Leadership brings to organisations. Illustrating these benefits through theory and practical examples, the book also contrasts this style with Command and Control or 'Transactional' leadership, a style that still holds sway in many organisations, with leaders focused on mistakes rather than progress.

Inclusive Leadership will transport you through time and geography – from the UK, US, and Australia to France and Norway – showing how much more nurturing an environment Inclusive Leadership provides than Transactional leadership. Read how Inclusive Leadership complements a competitive strategy emphasising innovation and how it dominates in four organisations – Royal Mail Sales, the PageGroup, Sevenoaks School and APAM - spanning sales, recruitment, education and real estate. The chapters also cover education and the associations between Inclusive Leadership and enhanced undergraduate student performance, motivation and engagement both in Norway and in the UK.

With a unique combination of both theoretical and practical perspectives, this book is a useful tool for practitioners in the corporate world; business, management and leadership students; and both emerging and established leaders.

Watch the accompanying video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DEChx953_U&t=8s

1
The evolving study of leadership

The critical role of leadership

This is a book about leadership, something that, in the words of a report by the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2012) can transform the fortunes of an organisation. They are not alone in this view since according to Ken Blanchard, Visiting Professor at Cornell University, excellent leaders can turn a good organisation into a great one and poor leaders can “send a great organization downhill” (Blanchard, 2011).

Blanchard’s words make chilling reading, and the UK government report (above) states that nearly three-quarters of organisations in England report a deficit of management and leadership, with 43% of UK managers rating their own line manager as ineffective. The effects? According to the UK government report, this deficit contributes to the UK’s productivity gap with countries such as the US, Germany, Canada, Sweden and Japan. Moreover, it is said to cost UK businesses over £19 billion per year in lost working hours and to be the cause of 56% of corporate failures.

The critical role played by leadership is the reason for yet another book about the all-important topic of leadership. This one puts the spotlight on a new style of leadership that could improve management significantly and cast poor management into the annals of history. What is more, it is tried and tested, and case studies in this book, taken from the recruitment, sales, property and education sectors, show how easily it can be adapted to different sectors and different-sized organisations, from large corporates to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Before we look at those organisations, we will consider what we mean by leadership and how it has been defined over time. We investigate two well-known and contrasting systems, transactional and transformational leadership, and in Chapters 3 and 4 compare the largely negative experiences produced by transactional leadership, contrasting these with the more energising effects of inclusive leadership, an element of which is transformational leadership. We then compare these styles through historical examples as well as through the voices of those who have experienced these approaches.

In Chapter 5, we move on to a large-scale study examining the impacts of inclusive leadership on employees, with a large volume of quantitative and quantitative data from which to judge its effects. In Chapters 6 and 7, we look at studies examining the effects of inclusive leadership on university student attainment, motivation and well-being, and in the next four chapters, we see its effects in four different sectors – Sales, Education, Recruitment and Property Asset Management. In the penultimate Chapter 12, we examine the effects of inclusive leadership on customer centricity, exploring the extent to which it allows organisations to be more focused on customer needs. In the final chapter, we look at the tools needed to implement an inclusive style of leadership.

Ahead of this exhilarating trip into new territories, an understanding of what we mean by leadership is useful, so we explore this briefly now.

What is leadership?

Although we may all have a sense of what a good leader looks like, it is one of those concepts that is very hard to define. We are not alone in having these thoughts. As Silva tells us (2016, p. 1), more than four decades ago, Stogdill (1974) affirmed that “there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept” (p. 7). At the end of the last century, Bennis estimated that there were at least 650 published definitions of leadership (Bennis and Townsend, 1995), and in this century the number has exploded with Barbara Kellerman, Professor of Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, referring to about 1,400 different definitions of the words leader and/or leadership (Volckmann, 2012). As Silva has pointed out, these numbers, real or exaggerated, simply mean that there is no consensus about what leadership is, and so the search for a better definition continues.

Amidst this plethora of definitions and approaches, specialists in leadership Alimo-Metcalfe et al (2007) chart key stages in the history of leadership studies. Readers interested in understanding the academic stepping stones that brought us to inclusive leadership should read on; meanwhile, if you are less interested in the topic, then it is better to fast-forward to Chapter 2 at this point.

Meanwhile, for those still with us, we will now sketch the main steps that brought us to inclusive leadership.

Academic stepping stones

Alimo-Metcalfe et al (2007) define the stages that leadership studies have progressed through since the beginning of the twentieth century, and we have reduced these down to the following four:

• 1 The ‘trait’ or ‘great man’ approach
• 2 The ‘behavioural’ approach, out of which the concept of managerial and later leadership competencies emerged
• 3 The ‘situational’ or ‘contingency’ approach
• 4 The ‘new paradigm’ approach, with its focus on ‘distant’ transactional, often ‘heroic’ leadership; the emergence of ‘nearby’ transformational or ‘engaging’ leadership, and the associated concepts of ‘distributed’ and ‘inclusive’ leadership.

We will look at each of these stages in turn, drawing extensively on Alimo-Metcalf’s excellent overview. For some, this may appear somewhat academic in flavour but this overview provides a useful backdrop to the discussion that runs through the book on inclusive leadership.

1. The trait approach

Initially, the first efforts at leadership research were focused on identifying the features that differentiated leaders from non-leaders. As you can imagine, factors such as intelligence, energy and dominance emerged as differentiating features alongside hundreds of other traits, so meta-analyses – studies bringing together the findings across several studies – were conducted by Stogdill (1948) and Mann (1959) to determine recurring traits. In fact, the main finding from these studies related to a lack of consistency in the conclusions of these studies. For example, Mann’s study (1959), reporting on ninety-one studies, highlighted a significant positive relationship between leadership status and intelligence in some studies but no such relationship in others, and even a negative relationship in one further study. In fact, Stogdill (1948) reached the conclusion that the qualities, characteristics and skills needed by a leader are, to a large extent, determined by the demands of the situation in which he (or she) functions and that it is therefore fruitless to look for a set of common traits.

Before writing off the trait approach, it is worth noting (Alimo-Metcalfe et al, 2007) that Stogdill later wrote that, while personality and situational factors are involved, a number of relatively consistent personal characteristics are associated with leader-like behaviour. These include a strong drive for responsibility and task completion, originality and initiative, self-confidence and sense of personal identity, and ability to influence others’ behaviour and to structure social interaction systems. Also, some years later, a study by Church and Waclawski (1995) found that managers classified as ‘motivators’ were more likely to encourage risk-taking, to maintain a challenging and motivating work environment, and to take time to celebrate accomplishments; ‘inventors’, on the other hand, were significantly better at innovating, setting direction, and establishing a sense of mission about their work, but were no more than average at galvanising followers’ hopes, enthusiasm and energy.

The contradictions in trait studies had sullied the waters, however, and so a new line of research was launched into the behaviours that distinguished leaders. This is the subject of the next section.

2. Behavioural approaches

Instead of a focus on personality features, the emphasis now was on looking at the behavioural characteristics of leaders. Essentially, the behaviours investigated included participative approaches, task fulfilment, consideration of others and a directive approach. A variety of combinations of these were used in studies, most famously perhaps the two-dimensional grid based on concern for people and concern for results (Blake and Mouton, 1964), with many studies conducted at the Ohio State University where Stogdill worked.

Unfortunately, while the ‘consideration’ behaviours of a leader (supervisor/manager) were correlated positively with employee satisfaction, they were negatively correlated with the productivity of the manager’s group (Stogdill, 1974). At one point, the notion of ‘managerial competencies’ (McClelland, 1973) emerged, but the realisation that situational factors could play an important part shifted attention to the importance of the situation.

3. Situational and contingency approach

Theories emerged in the 1960s and 1970s examining the impact of situational factors in optimizing leadersh...