Lesson 7 Notes

LESSON 7 NOTES - LEADERSHIP

I. Trait Theories
A. Strong Leaders
1. Trait theories of leadership focus on personal qualities and characteristics.
2. Comprehensive reviews of the leadership literature organized around the Big Five has
found extraversion to be the most important trait of effective leaders, but it is more
strongly related to the way leaders emerge than to their effectiveness.
a. Sociable and dominant people are more likely to assert themselves in group
situations, but leaders need to make sure they’re not too assertive—one study
found leaders that scored very high on assertiveness were less effective than those
who were moderately high.
b. Unlike agreeableness and emotional stability, conscientiousness and openness to
experience also showed strong relationships to leadership, though not quite as
strong as extraversion.
3. Leaders who like being around people and can assert themselves (extraverted) as well
as are disciplined and able to keep commitments they make (conscientious), have an
apparent advantage when it comes to leadership, suggesting good leaders do have key
traits in common.
a. One reason is that conscientiousness and extraversion are positively related to
leaders’ self-efficacy, which explained most of the variance in subordinates’
ratings of leader performance.
b. People are more likely to follow someone who is confident she’s going in the
right direction.
4. Another trait that may indicate effective leadership is emotional intelligence (EI).
a. A core component of EI is empathy.
b. A leader who effectively displays and manages emotions will find it easier to
influence the feelings of followers, by both expressing genuine sympathy and
enthusiasm for good performance and by using irritation for those who fail to
perform.
5. Although the association between leaders’ self-reported EI and transformational
leadership (to be discussed later in this chapter) was moderate in size, it is much
smaller when followers rate their leaders’ leadership behaviors.
a. However, research has demonstrated that people high in EI are more likely to
emerge as leaders, even after taking cognitive ability and personality into account.
b. Recent research has demonstrated that people high in EI are more likely to
emerge as leaders, even after taking cognitive ability and personality into account.
6. Based on the latest findings, we offer two conclusions.
a. First, we can say that traits can predict leadership.
b. Second, traits do a better job predicting the emergence of leaders than they do at
distinguishing between effective and ineffective leaders.
i. The fact that an individual exhibits the traits and that others consider him or
her a leader does not necessarily mean he or she will be an effective one.
II. Behavioral Theories
A. Introduction
1. Behavioral theories of leadership implied we could train people to be leaders.
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B. Ohio State Studies

1. The most comprehensive theories resulted from the Ohio State Studies in the late
1940s, which sought to identify independent dimensions of leader behavior.
2. Beginning with more than a thousand dimensions, the studies narrowed the list to two
that substantially accounted for most of the leadership behavior described by
employees: initiating structure and consideration.
3. Initiating structure is the extent to which a leader defines and structures his or her
role and those of the subordinates to facilitate goal attainment.
a. It includes behavior that attempts to organize work, work relationships, and goals.
b. A leader high in initiating structure is someone who “assigns group members to
particular tasks,” “expects workers to maintain definite standards of
performance,” and “emphasizes the meeting of deadlines.”
4. Consideration is the extent to which a leader has job relationships that are
characterized by mutual trust, respect for employees’ ideas, and regard for their
feelings.
a. A leader high in consideration helps employees with personal problems, is
friendly and approachable, treats all employees as equals, and expresses
appreciation and support.
b. In a recent survey, when asked to indicate what most motivated them at work, 66
percent of employees mentioned appreciation.
5. The results of behavioral theory studies have been fairly positive.
a. For example, one review found the followers of leaders high in consideration
(and, to a lesser degree, initiating structure) were more satisfied with their jobs,
were more motivated, and had more respect for their leaders.
b. Furthermore, both consideration and initiating structure were found to be
moderately related to leader and group performance along with ratings of leader
effectiveness.
C. GLOBE Study
1. Some research from the GLOBE study suggests there are international differences in
preference for initiating structure and consideration.
a. The study found that leaders high in consideration succeeded best in countries
where cultural values did not favor unilateral decision making, such as Brazil.
b. In contrast, the French have a more bureaucratic view of leaders and are less
likely to expect them to be humane and considerate. A leader high in initiating
structure (relatively task-oriented) will do best there and can make decisions in a
relatively autocratic manner.
D. Summary of Trait Theories and Behavioral Theories
1. In general, research indicates there is validity for both the trait and behavioral
theories. Parts of each theory can help explain facets of leadership emergence and
effectiveness.
2. However, identifying the exact relationships is not a simple task.
a. The first difficulty is in correctly identifying whether a trait or a behavior predicts
a certain outcome.
b. The second is in exploring which combinations of traits and behaviors yield
certain outcomes.
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c. The third challenge is to determine the causality of traits to behaviors so that

predictions toward desirable leadership outcomes can be made.
3. As important as traits and behaviors are in identifying effective or ineffective leaders,
they do not guarantee success. The context matters too.
III. Contingency Theories
A. Introduction
1. Some leaders seem successful in difficult times, but tend to be dismissed when the
environment improves.
2. Situational factors that influence success or failure need to be explored further.
B. Fiedler Model
1. Introduction
a. The first comprehensive contingency model for leadership was developed by
Fred Fiedler, who proposed that effective group performance depends upon the
proper match between the leader’s style and the degree to which the situation
gives control to the leader.
2. Identifying leadership style
a. Fiedler believed that a key factor in leadership success is the individual’s basic
leadership style. He created the least preferred coworker (LPC) questionnaire
for this purpose.
b. After assessing leadership style, it is necessary to match the leader with the
situation. Fiedler has identified three contingency dimensions:
i. Leader-member relations—the degree of confidence, trust, and respect
members have in their leader.
ii. Task structure—the degree to which the job assignments are regimented.
iii. Position power—the degree of influence a leader has over power variables
such as hiring, firing, discipline, promotions, and salary increases.
c. The Fiedler model proposes matching them up to achieve maximum leadership
effectiveness.
d. Fiedler concluded that task-oriented leaders tend to perform better in situations
that were very favorable to them and in situations that were very unfavorable.
e. Fiedler would predict that when faced with a category I, II, III, VII, or VIII
situation, task-oriented leaders perform better.
f. Relationship-oriented leaders, however, perform better in moderately favorable
situations—categories IV, V, and VI.
g. Evaluation of Fiedler
i. There are problems and the practical use of the model that need to be
addressed.
3. Situational leadership theory
i. Situational leadership is a contingency theory that focuses on the followers.
ii. Successful leadership is achieved by selecting the right leadership style, which
is contingent on the level of the followers’ readiness.
(a) The term readiness refers to “the extent to which people have the ability
and willingness to accomplish a specific task.”
(b) A leader should choose one of four behaviors depending on follower
readiness.
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(i) If followers are unable and unwilling to do a task, the leader needs to
give clear and specific directions.
(ii) If they are unable and willing, the leader needs to display high task
orientation to compensate for followers’ lack of ability and high
relationship orientation to get them to “buy into” the leader’s desires.
(iii) If followers are able and unwilling, the leader needs to use a
supportive and participative style.
(iv) If they are both able and willing, the leader doesn’t need to do much.
iii. SLT has an intuitive appeal. Yet, research efforts to test and support the
theory have generally been disappointing.
4. Path-goal theory
a. The theory
i. One of the most respected approaches to leadership is the path-goal theory
developed by Robert House.
ii. It is a contingency model of leadership that extracts key elements from the
Ohio State leadership research on initiating structure and consideration and
the expectancy theory of motivation.
iii. It is the leader’s job to assist followers in attaining their goals and to provide
the necessary direction and/or support to ensure that their goals are compatible
with the overall objectives of the firm.
iv. The term path-goal is derived from the belief that effective leaders clarify the
path to help their followers achieve their work goals.
b. According to the path-goal theory, whether a leader should be directive or
supportive or should demonstrate some other behavior depends on complex
analysis of the situation. It predicts the following:
(a) Directive leadership yields greater satisfaction when tasks are ambiguous
or stressful than when they are highly structured and well laid out.
(b) Supportive leadership results in high performance and satisfaction when
employees are performing structured tasks.
(c) Directive leadership is likely to be perceived as redundant among
employees with high ability or considerable experience.
c. Like SLT, path-goal theory has intuitive appeal, especially from a goal attainment
perspective.
d. Also like SLT, the theory can be only cautiously adopted for application, but it is
a useful framework in examining the vital role of leadership
5. Leader-participation model
a. The final contingency theory we cover argues that the way the leader makes
decisions is as important as what she or he decides.
b. Leader-participation model relates leadership behavior and participation in
decision making.
c. Like path-goal theory, it says leader behavior must adjust to reflect the task
structure.
d. As one leadership scholar noted, “Leaders do not exist in a vacuum”; leadership is
a symbiotic relationship between leaders and followers.
IV. Contemporary Theories of Leadership
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A. The leader-member exchange (LMX) theory argues that because of time pressures,
leaders establish a special relationship with a small group of their followers.
B. These individuals make up the in-group—they are trusted, get a disproportionate amount
of the leader’s attention, and are more likely to receive special privileges.
C. The theory proposes that early in the history of the interaction between a leader and a
given follower, the leader implicitly categorizes the follower as an “in” or an “out” and
that relationship is relatively stable over time.
1. How the leader chooses who falls into each category is unclear?
2. The leader does the choosing on the basis of the follower’s characteristics.
3. In groups have similar characteristics.
D. The theory and research surrounding it provide substantive evidence that leaders do
differentiate among followers.
E. Research to test LMX theory has been generally supportive, with substantive evidence
that leaders do differentiate among followers.
1. These disparities are far from random; and followers with in-group status will have
higher performance ratings, engage in more helping or “citizenship” behaviors at
work, engage in less deviant or “counterproductive” behaviors at work, and report
greater satisfaction with their superior.
2. One study conducted in an entrepreneurial firm in southeast China found LMX is
related to creative and innovative behavior..
3. Recent research has also clarified how LMX changes over time, what happens when
there is more than one leader supervising an employee, and whether the effects of
LMX spreads outside of the workplace.
V. Charismatic Leadership and Transformational Leadership
A. Introduction
1. View leaders as individuals who inspire followers through their words, ideas, and
behaviors.
B. Charismatic Leadership
1. What is charismatic leadership?
a. Charismatic leadership theory proposed by Robert House.
b. Followers make attributes of heroic or extraordinary leadership abilities when
they observe certain behaviors.
c. General characteristics are they have vision, a sense of mission, are willing to take
personal risk, are sensitive to followers’ needs, have confidence their visions can
be achieved, and engage in unconventional behaviors.
2. Are charismatic leaders born and not made, made and not born?
a. Individuals are born with traits that make them charismatic.
b. Most experts believe individuals can learn to be charismatic leaders.
i. To further develop an aura of charisma, use your passion as a catalyst for
generating enthusiasm.
ii. Speak in an animated voice, reinforce your message with eye contact and
facial expressions, and gesture for emphasis.
iii. Bring out the potential in followers by tapping into their emotions, and create
a bond that inspires them.
iv. Remember, enthusiasm is contagious!
v.
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3. How charismatic leaders influence followers

a. Articulating an appealing vision.
i. Vision statement
ii. High performance expectations
iii. A new set of values
b. Research indicates that charismatic leadership works as followers “catch” the
emotions their leader is conveying, and lead them to affectively identify with the
organization.
c. Some personalities are especially susceptible to charismatic leadership. For
instance, an individual who lacks self-esteem and questions his or her self-worth
is more likely to absorb a leader’s direction rather than establish an individual
way of leading or thinking.
i. For these people, the situation may matter much less than the charismatic
qualities of the leader.
4. Does effective charismatic leadership depend on the situation?
a. A strong correlation between charismatic leadership and high performance and
satisfaction among followers.
b. Charisma appears to be most appropriate when the follower’s task has an
ideological component or when the environment involves a high degree of stress
and uncertainty.
c. This may explain why, when charismatic leaders surface, it’s more likely to be in
politics, religion, wartime; or when a business firm is in its infancy or facing a
life-threatening crisis.
d. Another situational factor apparently limiting charisma is level in the
organization.
5. The dark side of charismatic leadership
a. Don’t necessarily act in the best interest of their companies.
b. Many have allowed their personal goals to override the goals of the organization.
i. The results at companies such as Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and HealthSouth
were leaders who recklessly used organizational resources for their personal
benefit and executives who violated laws and ethical boundaries to inflate
stock prices and allow leaders to cash in millions of dollars in stock options.
c. It’s not that charismatic leadership isn’t effective; overall, it is.
i. But a charismatic leader isn’t always the answer.
ii. Success depends, to some extent, on the situation and on the leader’s vision.
C. Transformational Leadership
1. Introduction
a. A stream of research has focuses on differentiating transformational and
transactional leaders.
b. Transactional leaders guide their followers toward established goals by
clarifying role and task requirements.
c. Transformational leaders inspire followers to transcend their own self-interests
for the good of the organization.
i. They change followers’ awareness of issues by helping them to look at old
problems in new ways; and they are able to excite, arouse, and inspire
followers to put out extra effort to achieve group goals.
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ii. Transformational leadership is built on top of transactional leadership—it

produces levels of follower effort and performance that go beyond what
would occur with a transactional approach alone.
d. Transactional and transformational leadership complement each other.
i. They aren’t opposing approaches to getting things done.
ii. Transformational leadership builds on transactional leadership and produces
levels of follower effort and performance beyond what transactional
leadership alone can do.
e. The best leaders are transactional and transformational.
f. One review suggests that transformational and transactional leadership may be
more-or-less important, depending upon the outcomes: although both tend to be
important, it appears as if transformational leadership is more important for group
performance and satisfaction with the leader, whereas transactional leadership
(primarily contingent reward) is more important for leader effectiveness and
follower job satisfaction.
2. Full range of leadership model
a. Laissez-faire is the most passive and least effective type.
b. Management by exception (active or passive) is slightly better.
c. Contingent reward leadership can be effective.
d. The remaining four correspond to transformational leadership:
i. Individualized consideration
ii. Intellectual stimulation
iii. Inspirational motivation
iv. Idealized influence
3. How transformational leadership works?
a. Overall, most research suggests that the reason transformational leadership works
is that it inspires and motivates followers.
i. For example, research in Germany and Switzerland found that
transformational leadership improves employee job satisfaction, self-efficacy,
and commitment to the leader by fulfilling follower autonomy, competence,
and relatedness needs
b. Companies with transformational leaders also show greater agreement among top
managers about the organization’s goals, which yields superior organizational
performance.
i. The Israeli military has seen comparable results, showing that
transformational leaders improve performance by building consensus among
group members.
4. Evaluation of transformational leadership
a. Transformational leadership has been impressively supported at diverse job levels
and occupations (school principals, teachers, marine commanders, ministers,
presidents of MBA associations, military cadets, union shop stewards, sales reps).
b. Transformational leadership isn’t equally effective in all situations.
i. It has a greater impact on the bottom line in smaller, privately held firms than
in more complex organizations.
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ii. Furthermore, a great deal of research suggests that the stress and demands
surrounding the context affects whether or not transformational leadership
improves health outcomes and work engagement
iii. Transformational leaders can also help reduce emotional exhaustion and
improve perceptions of work-life balance in German IT professionals when
the time pressures are high.
iv. Transformational leadership may be most effective when leaders can directly
interact with the workforce and make decisions than when they report to an
external board of directors or deal with a complex bureaucratic structure.
c. The characteristics of the leader and the followers may also matter for how
effective transformational leadership is as well.
i. For example, transformational leadership can inspire employees to learn and
thrive on the job, especially if they are high on openness to experience
performance.
ii. Another study suggests that IQ is important for transformational leadership
perceptions—leaders who are “too intelligent” may be less transformational
because their solutions may be too “sophisticated” to understand, use complex
forms of communication that undermine their influence, and may be seen as
too “cerebral.”
D. Transformational versus Transactional Leadership
1. When comparing transformational leadership with transactional leadership, research
indicates transformational leadership is more strongly correlated than transactional
leadership with a variety of workplace outcomes.
2. However, transformational leadership theory is not perfect. The full range of
leadership model shows a clear division between transactional and transformational
leadership that may not fully exist in effective leadership, especially given that
research suggests that transformational leadership is highly related to contingent
reward leadership, to the point of being redundant.
3. Contrary to the full range of leadership model, the four I’s of transformational
leadership are not always superior in effectiveness to transactional leadership;
contingent reward leadership, in which leaders dole out rewards as certain goals are
reached by employees, sometimes works as well as transformational leadership.
4. More research is needed, but the general supportable conclusion is that
transformational leadership is desirable and effective, given the right application.
E. Transformational versus Charismatic Leadership
1. Charismatic leadership places somewhat more emphasis on the way leaders
communicate (are they passionate and dynamic?), while transformational leadership
focuses more on what they are communicating (is it a compelling vision?).
2. Still, the theories are more alike than different. At their heart, both focus on the
leader’s ability to inspire followers, and sometimes they do so in the same way.
Because of this, some researchers believe the concepts are somewhat interchangeable.
VI. Responsible Leadership
A. What Is Authentic Leadership?
1.
2. Authentic leaders know who they are, and what they believe in and value, and act on
those values and beliefs openly and candidly.
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3. Their followers consider then ethical people and trust them as a result.
4. Recent research indicates that authentic leadership, especially when shared among top
management team members, creates a positive energizing effect (see affective events
theory, Chapter 6) that heightens teamwork, team productivity, and firm performance.
B. Ethical Leadership
1. Ethical top leadership influences not only direct followers, but spreads all the way
down the command structure as well, because top leaders set expectations and expect
lower-level leaders to behave along ethical guidelines.
2. Leaders rated as highly ethical tend to be very positively evaluated by their
subordinates, who are also more satisfied and committed to their jobs as well as
experience less strain and turnover intentions.
3. Ethical leaders can change norms: one reason why employees engage in more OCBs
and less CWBs is because their perceptions on whether each is equitable become
altered, so that OCBs are perceived as more equitable.
4. Ethical leaders also increase group awareness of moral issues, increase the extent to
which the group is willing to speak up about ethical issues, and raise their empathic
concern for others.
5. Research also found that ethical leadership reduced interpersonal conflicts.
6. Efforts have been made to combine ethical and charismatic leadership into an idea of
socialized charismatic leadership—leaders convey values that are other-centered
versus self-centered and who role-model ethical conduct.
C. Servant Leadership
1. Scholars have recently considered ethical leadership from a new angle by examining
servant leadership.
a. Servant leaders go beyond their own self-interest and focus on opportunities to
help followers grow and develop.
b. They don’t use power to achieve ends; they emphasize persuasion.
c. Characteristic behaviors include listening, empathizing, persuading, accepting
stewardship, and actively developing followers’ potential.
2. Because servant leadership focuses on serving the needs of others, research has
focused on its outcomes for the well-being of followers.
3. What are the effects of servant leadership?
a. A study of supervisors71 general managers of restaurants in the United States and
over 1,000 of their employees found that servant leaders tend to create a culture of
service which in turn, improves the restaurant performance and enhances
employee attitudes and performance by increasing their identification with the
restaurant..
b. Second, there is a relationship between servant leadership and follower OCB that
appears to be stronger when followers are encouraged to focus on being dutiful
and responsible.
c. Third, servant leadership increases team potency (a belief that your team has
above-average skills and abilities), which in turn leads to higher levels of team
performance.
d. Fourth, a study with a nationally representative sample found higher levels of
citizenship associated with a focus on growth and advancement, which in turn
was associated with higher levels of creative performance.
Lesson 7 Notes

4. Servant leadership may be more prevalent and more effective in certain cultures.
a. When asked to draw images of leaders, U.S. subjects tend to draw them in front of
the group, giving orders to followers.
b. Singaporeans tend to draw leaders at the back of the group, acting more to gather
a group’s opinions together and then unify them from the rear.
c. This suggests the East Asian prototype is more like a servant leader, which might
mean servant leadership is more effective in these cultures.
VII. Positive Leadership
A. Trust and Leadership
1. Trust is a psychological state that exists when you agree to make yourself vulnerable
to another because you have positive expectations about how things are going to turn
out.
2. Trust is a primary attribute associated with leadership.
3. When trust is broken, it can have serious adverse effects on a group’s performance.
4. Followers who trust a leader are confident their rights and interests will not be
abused.
a. Transformational leaders create support for their ideas in part by arguing that their
direction will be in everyone’s best interests.
b. People are unlikely to look up to or follow someone they perceive as dishonest or
likely to take advantage of them.
c. Thus, as you might expect, transformational leaders do generate higher levels of
trust from their followers, which in turn is related to higher levels of team
confidence and, ultimately, higher levels of team performance.
5. In a simple contractual exchange of goods and services, your employer is legally
bound to pay you for fulfilling your job description.
a. But today’s rapid reorganizations, diffusion of responsibility, and collaborative
team-based work style mean employment relationships are not stable long-term
contracts with explicit terms.
b. Rather, they are more fundamentally based on trusting relationships than ever
before.
c. You have to trust that if you show your supervisor a creative project you’ve been
working on, she won’t steal the credit behind your back.
d. You have to trust that the extra work you’ve been doing will be recognized in
your performance appraisal.
e. In contemporary organizations, where less work is closely documented and
specified, voluntary employee contribution based on trust is absolutely necessary.
f. And only a trusted leader will be able to encourage employees to reach beyond
themselves to a transformational goal.
B. The Outcomes of Trust
1. Trust encourages taking risks.
a. Whenever leaders and employees decide to deviate from the usual way of doing
things, or to take their supervisors’ word on a new direction, they are taking a
risk.
2. Trust facilitates information sharing.
a. One big reason employees fail to express concerns at work is that they don’t feel
psychologically safe revealing their views.
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3. Trusting groups are more effective.

a. When a leader sets a trusting tone in a group, members are more willing to help
each other and exert extra effort, which further increases trust.
4. Trust enhances productivity.
a. The bottom-line interest of companies also appears positively influenced by trust.
Employees who trust their supervisors tend to receive higher performance ratings.
C. Trust Development
1. Trust isn’t just about the leader; the characteristics of the followers will also influence
the development of trust.
2. What key characteristics lead us to believe a leader is trustworthy? Evidence has
identified three: integrity, benevolence, and ability.
a. Integrity refers to honesty and truthfulness. It seems the most critical of the three
in assessing another’s trustworthiness.
b. Benevolence means the trusted person has your interests at heart, even if yours
aren’t necessarily in line with theirs.
c. Ability encompasses an individual’s technical and interpersonal knowledge and
skills.
D. Trust Propensity
1. Trust propensity refers to how likely a particular employee is to trust a leader. Some
people are simply more likely to believe others can be trusted.
2. Time is the final ingredient in the recipe for trust. Trust doesn’t happen immediately:
we come to trust people based on observing their behavior over a period of time.
3. Trust can also be won in the ability domain simply by demonstrating competence.
4. Leaders who break the psychological contract with workers, demonstrating they
aren’t trustworthy, will find employees are less satisfied and less committed, have
higher intentions to turnover, engage in less citizenship behavior, and have lower task
performance.
E. Trust and Culture
1. Does trust look the same in every culture? Using the basic definition of trust,
certainly it does. However, in the work context, trust in an employment relationship
may be built on very different perceptions from culture to culture.
2. In individualistic societies, we might expect that paternalistic leadership will rankle
many employees who prefer not to see themselves as part of a hierarchical family
workgroup.
F. The Role of Time
1. Time is the final ingredient in the recipe for trust. Trust doesn’t happen immediately:
we come to trust people based on observing their behavior over a period of time.
2. Trust can also be won in the ability domain simply by demonstrating competence.
G. Regaining Trust
1. Managers who break the psychological contract with workers, demonstrating they
aren’t trustworthy leaders, will find employees are less satisfied and less committed,
have a higher intent toward turnover, engage in less OCB, and have lower levels of
task performance.
2. Leaders who betray trust are especially likely to be evaluated negatively by followers
if there is already a low level of leader–member exchange.
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3. Once it has been violated, trust can be regained, but only in certain situations and
depending on the type of violation.
a. If the cause is lack of ability, it’s usually best to apologize and recognize you
should have done better.
b. When lack of integrity is the problem, apologies don’t do much good.
4. Regardless of the violation, saying nothing or refusing to confirm or deny guilt is
never an effective strategy for regaining trust.
5. Trust can be restored when we observe a consistent pattern of trustworthy behavior
by the transgressor. However, if the transgressor used deception, trust never fully
returns, not even after apologies, promises, or a consistent pattern of trustworthy
actions.
H. Mentoring
1. A mentor is a senior employee who sponsors and supports a less-experienced
employee (a protégé).
2. Successful mentors are good teachers.
a. They present ideas clearly, listen well, and empathize with protégés’ problems.
Mentoring relationships serve both career functions and psychosocial functions.
b. Traditional informal mentoring relationships develop when leaders identify a less
experienced, lower-level employee who appears to have potential for future
development.
3. The protégé will often be tested with a particularly challenging assignment.
a. If he or she performs acceptably, the mentor will develop the relationship,
informally showing the protégé how the organization really works outside its
formal structures and procedures.
4. If a mentor is not well connected or not a very strong performer, the best mentoring
advice in the world will not be beneficial.
a. Research indicates that while mentoring can have an impact on career success, it
is not as much of a contributing factor as ability and personality.
b. It may feel nice to have a mentor, but it doesn’t appear that having a good mentor,
or any mentor, is critical to your career.
VIII. Challenges to Our Understanding of Leadership
A. Introduction
1. Much of an organization’s success or failure is due to factors outside the influence of
leadership. In many cases, success or failure is just a matter of being in the right or
wrong place at a given time.
B. Leadership as an Attribution
1. Attribution theory examines how people try to make sense of cause-and-effect
relationships.
a. The attribution theory of leadership says leadership is merely an attribution
people make about other individuals.
b. We attribute to leaders intelligence, outgoing personality, strong verbal skills,
aggressiveness, understanding, and industriousness.
c. At the organizational level, we tend to see leaders, rightly or wrongly, as
responsible for extremely negative or extremely positive performance.
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2. One longitudinal study of 128 major U.S. corporations found that whereas
perceptions of CEO charisma did not lead to objective company performance,
company performance did lead to perceptions of charisma.
a. Employee perceptions of their leaders’ behaviors are significant predictors of
whether they blame the leader for failure, regardless of how the leader assesses
himself or herself.
b. A study of more than 3,000 employees from Western Europe, the United States,
and the Middle East found people who tended to “romanticize” leadership in
general were more likely to believe their own leaders were transformational.
3. We also make demographic assumptions about leaders.
a. Respondents in a study assumed a leader described with no identifying racial
information was white at a rate beyond the base rate of white employees in a
company.
i. In scenarios where identical leadership situations are described but the
leaders’ race is manipulated, white leaders are rated as more effective than
leaders of other racial groups.
b. One large-scale summary study (a meta-analysis) found that many individuals
hold stereotypes of men as having more leader characteristics than women,
although as you might expect, this tendency to equate leadership with masculinity
has decreased over time.
c. Other data suggest women’s perceived success as transformational leaders may be
based on demographic characteristics.
d. Teams prefer male leaders when aggressively competing against other teams, but
they prefer female leaders when the competition is within teams and calls for
improving positive relationships within the group.
4. Attribution theory suggests what’s important is projecting the appearance of being a
leader rather than focusing on actual accomplishments.
a. Leader-wannabes who can shape the perception that they’re smart, personable,
verbally adept, aggressive, hardworking, and consistent in their style can increase
the probability their bosses, colleagues, and employees will view them as
effective leaders.
C. Substitutes and Neutralizers to Leadership
1. Data from numerous studies collectively demonstrate that, in many situations,
whatever actions leaders exhibit are irrelevant.
a. Experience and training are among the substitutes that can replace the need for a
leader’s support or ability to create structure.
b. Organizational characteristics such as explicit formalized goals, rigid rules and
procedures, and cohesive work groups can also replace formal leadership, while
indifference to organizational rewards can neutralize its effects.
c. Neutralizers make it impossible for leader behavior to make any difference to
follower outcomes.
2. Sometimes the difference between substitutes and neutralizers is fuzzy.
a. If I’m working on a task that’s intrinsically enjoyable, theory predicts leadership
will be less important because the task itself provides enough motivation.
b. But does that mean intrinsically enjoyable tasks neutralize leadership effects, or
substitute for them, or both?
Lesson 7 Notes

c. Another problem is that while substitutes for leadership (such as employee

characteristics, the nature of the task, and so forth) matter to performance, that
doesn’t necessarily mean leadership doesn’t.
D. Selecting Leaders
1. The entire process that organizations go through to fill management positions is
essentially an exercise in trying to identify individuals who will be effective leaders.
a. You can begin by reviewing the specific requirements for the position such as
knowledge, skills, and abilities that are needed to do the job effectively.
b. Personality tests can identify traits associated with leadership—extraversion,
conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
i. High self-monitors are better at reading situations and adjusting their behavior
accordingly.
ii. Candidates with high emotional intelligence should have an advantage,
especially in situations requiring transformational leadership.
iii. Broad experience is a poor predictor of leader effectiveness, but situation-
specific experience is relevant.
c. Since nothing lasts forever, the most important event an organization needs to
plan for is a change in leadership.
2. Some organizations seem to spend no time on leadership succession and are surprised
when their picks turn out poorly.
E. Training Leaders
1. Billions are spent on leadership training and development every year.
2. Here are some things management can do to get the maximum effect from their
leadership-training budgets:
a. Leadership training is likely to be more successful with individuals who are high
self-monitors than with low self-monitors.
b. Second, organizations can teach implementation skills.
c. We also can teach skills such as trust building, mentoring, and situational-analysis
skills.
d. There is evidence suggesting that behavioral training through modeling exercises
can increase an individual’s ability to exhibit charismatic leadership qualities.
e. Recent research also indicates that leaders should engage in regularly reviewing
their leadership after key organizational events as part of their development.
f. Finally, leaders can be trained in transformational leadership skills that have
bottom-line results.
IX. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Leadership plays a central part in understanding group behavior, because it’s the leader
who usually directs us toward our goals.
B. Knowing what makes a good leader should thus be valuable in improving group
performance.
C. The Big Five personality framework show strong and consistent relationships between
personality and leadership.
D. The behavioral approach’s major contribution was narrowing leadership into task-
oriented (initiating structure) and people-oriented (consideration) styles.
E. By considering the situation in which the leader operates, contingency theories promised
to improve on the behavioral approach.
Lesson 7 Notes

F. Contemporary theories have made major contributions to our understanding of leadership

effectiveness, and studies of ethics and positive leadership offer exciting promise.
Specific implications for managers are:
1. For maximum leadership effectiveness, ensure that your preferences on the initiating
structure and consideration dimensions are a match for your work dynamics and
culture.
2. Hire candidates who exhibit transformational leadership qualities and who have
demonstrated success in working through others to meet a long-term vision.
Personality tests can reveal candidates higher in extraversion, conscientiousness, and
openness, which may indicate leadership readiness.
3. Hire candidates whom you believe are ethical and trustworthy for management roles
and train current managers in your organization’s ethical standards to increase
leadership effectiveness and reduce abusive supervision.
4. Seek to develop trusting relationships with followers, because, as organizations have
become less stable and predictable, strong bonds of trust are replacing bureaucratic
rules in defining expectations and relationships.
5. Consider investing in leadership training such as formal courses, workshops, rotating
job responsibilities, coaching, and mentoring.