Leaders are members of groups who are particularly influential and who act to guide, direct and motivate the groups to achieve goals. Leadership is in part determined by the leader’s characteristics (intelligence, experience, skill), the group’s thoughts and feelings (members’ attraction to and respect for the leader), the nature of the group (ballet corps, jury, corporate board, platoon) and the group setting (a highly-stressed group versus an unstressed one).
Research on leadership began in earnest during the period immediately following World War II. This early work suggested that leaders engage in two main kinds of behaviour: task-oriented behaviours that direct the group’s work toward achieving the goals, and socio-emotional behaviours that foster positive relations and feelings in the group, and that promote group cohesiveness.
A leader who excels at task-oriented but not socio-emotional skills is often referred to as a task specialist, whereas a leader who excels at socio-emotional skills only is referred to as a maintenance specialist. Great leaders may be those who excel in both areas.
Social psychologists have taken three different approaches to the study of leadership: (a) the trait approach that attempts to identify the personal characteristics that distinguish leaders from non-leaders; (b) the situational approach that examines how social settings foster or inhibit the development of leadership; and (c) the interactional (contingency) approach that analyzes leadership as a function of both personal and situational factors. Let’s look into these approaches in detail.
Trait approach: The ‘great man/woman’ theory of leadership holds that leaders are born, not made. The obvious question implied by this approach is: what are the traits that make a person a ‘natural leader’? Research attempting to answer this question has had a mixed record of success.
One of the most consistent research findings is a small but significant relationship between intelligence and leadership. Although research consistently indicates that intelligence, in fact, contributes to leadership skills, the crowd prefers to be ill-governed by people it can understand. A good example is provided by the President of the United States. Do you think that a president is the most intelligent of all people in the country?
A number of personality and intellectual traits correlate to some degree with leadership. Leaders tend, on an average, to be more energetic, self-confident and sociable than non-leaders. Leaders also seem to have higher needs for achievement and affiliation than non-leaders. Physical and demographic characteristics may also correlate with leadership: on an average, leaders tend to be taller than non-leaders, but, of course, there are notable exceptions (Napoleon, for example). Leaders in bureaucratic groups (business and government organizations) tend to be older than non-leaders, in part because greater knowledge and experience accrue with age, but also because leaders must often “work their way up” in most organizations, and this takes time.
The personal characteristics that contribute to leadership may be inherited and ascribed as well as innate. For example, the kings and queens of olden times were leaders, not necessarily because of unusual intelligence or special skills, but by virtue of their hereditary status. Inherited wealth may also confer leadership on some individuals (specially in Pakistan).
Leaders typically possess power, that can derive from a number of different sources. In an influential analysis, French and Raven (1959) described five different kinds of power. Leaders possess reward power when they control desired goods and resources. For example, a boss can use potential pay-raises as a means of influencing employees’ behaviour. Coercive power makes use of threats and punishment — a boss threatens to fire an employee who isn’t shaping up. Leaders exert legitimate power when they are perceived to posses legitimate authority in some domain. For example, at work, bosses are often perceived as legitimate authorities. Leaders possess referent power when followers are attracted to them. John F. Kennedy was a charismatic US President who possessed referent power for many Americans. Finally, leaders have expert power by virtue of special knowledge or skills. Albert Einstein possessed clear expert power when he advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proceed with the development of the atom bomb.
Situational approach: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill showed little promise in his early career. But during World War II he emerged as one of the world’s greatest leaders. Was Churchill great because of his personal traits, or did the dire circumstances confronting England during WWII force him to rise to the task?
A number of researchers have noted that strong leaders are more likely to emerge when groups face crisis and stress. Churchill took command during England’s ‘darkest hour’, and his archenemy, Adolf Hitler, rose to power in a period when Germany suffered from economic disaster and recent military humiliation. For another situational variable, several studies suggest that the more frequently people talk and participate in a group, the more likely they are to be perceived as leaders. Of course, participation may partly be a function of stable traits such as sociability, but it may also be influenced by situational factors. Another situational factor that can have a big impact on leadership in groups is communication patterns within the groups. Some groups, such as government bureaucracies, have formal, established patterns of communication (described by organizational charts that show who reports to whom and who supervizes whom).
Fiedler’s contingency approach: What makes a leader effective? It probably comes as no surprise that leadership effectiveness is, in part, a function of the leader’s characteristics and partly a function of the setting. In his contingency model of leadership, Fred Fiedler attempted to specify which characteristics of the situation are critically important in determining leadership effectiveness.
In keeping with earlier research, Fiedler argued that there are two main kinds of leaders: those who are more task-oriented and those who focus more on the emotional relationships in the group. Who is more effective, the task-oriented or the socio-emotional leader? According to Fiedler’s contingency model, it depends on the nature of the situation. In particular, Fiedler poses three main questions to assess how favourable a given leadership setting is: (a) How good are the leader’s relations with group members? (b) How clearly defined are the goals and tasks of the group? (c) How much legitimate authority does the leader possess over the group?
Some situations can be favourable on all three dimensions: the leader has good relations with the group, a clear goal to pursue and considerable legitimate authority. Some situations are unfavourable on all three dimensions. And, of course, there are intermediate situations that are moderately favourably or unfavourable. The contingency model proposes that task-oriented leaders are most effective in very favourable or unfavourable settings, whereas socio-emotional leaders are more effective in intermediate conditions.
According to Fiedler, in very positive situations, the leader doesn’t have to worry about morale or whether group members will follow instructions, and thus the task-oriented leader need only focus on the task at hand. In very negative situations, morale and group relations are so bad that they may not be easily improved. Again, the leader is best served by being task-oriented and by trying to pick up the pieces as best he/she can. In moderately good or bad situations, however, the leader has most to gain by improving morale and personal relations, and thus the socio-emotional leader is uniquely effective. Just as a leader’s style (task-oriented or socio-emotional) has different consequences in different leadership situations, so does his or her intelligence.
Specifically, leaders’ intelligence is often positively correlated with their effectiveness in low-stress leadership settings, but negatively correlated in high-stress settings. Apparently, leaders in low-stress settings have the luxury of thinking through their plans and procedures and, of course, intelligence helps out in such activities. Leaders in high-stress settings, however, are often so pressured that they can’t think clearly or adequately, and decisions must be made quickly without the benefit of careful deliberation. In such pressured situations, leaders must often go on “automatic pilot” and make decisions based on previous experience rather than careful thought.
Implications: We live in the age of the anti-leader, and our educational structure devotes very little care to nurturing leaders or understanding followership. If there is any influence, formal education seems to discourage such pursuits. Educators argue that such preparation is implicit in general education. If that is true, how can it be that we are in a crisis of leadership in which a numbers of “educated” people make gross errors in choosing whose leadership to follow, and in which there is so little incentive for able and dedicated servants to take the risks of asserting leadership? An occasional gifted teacher will take some initiative, but institutions rarely sanction the effort. The outlook for better leadership in our leadership-poor society is not encouraging.
Criticism has its place, but as a total preoccupation, it is sterile. In a time of crisis, such as the leadership crisis we are now in, if too many potential builders are taken in by a complete absorption with dissecting the wrong and by a zeal for instant perfection, then the movement so many of us want to see will be set back. The danger, perhaps, is to hear the analyst too much and the artist too little.
The forces for good and evil in the world are propelled by the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of individual beings. What happens to our values, and therefore to the quality of our civilization in the future, will be shaped by the conceptions of individuals who are born of inspiration. Perhaps, only a few will receive this inspiration (insight) and the rest will learn from them. The very essence of leadership, going out ahead to show the way, derives from more-than-usual openness to inspiration. Why would anybody accept the leadership of another except that the other sees more clearly where it is best to go? Maybe this is the current problem: too many who presume to lead do not see more clearly and, in defence of their inadequacy, they all the more strongly argue that the “system” must be preserved — a fatal error in this day of candour. But the leader needs more than inspiration. A leader ventures to say: “I will go; come with me!” a leader initiates, provides the ideas and the structure, and takes the risk of failure along with the chance of success. A leader says “I will go, follow me” knowing that the path is uncertain, even dangerous. One then trusts those who go with one’s leadership.
Future society may be just as mediocre as the present one. In fact, it may be worse. No amount of restructuring or changing the system or tearing it down in the hope that something better will grow will change this. There may be a better system than the one we now have. It is hard to know. But, whatever it is, if the people needed to lead it well are not there, a better system will not produce a better society.
Paul Goodman, speaking through a character in Making Do, says: “If there is no community for you, young man, make it yourself.”
Older people who grew up in a period when values were more settled and the future seemed more secure will be disturbed by much that they find today. But one firm note of hope comes through loud and clear — we are at a turn of history in which people are growing up faster and some extraordinarily able, mature men and women are emerging in their early and middle 20s. The percentage may be small and again, it may be larger than we think.
Moreover, it is not an elite; it is all sorts of exceptional people. Most of them could be ready for some large society — shaping responsibility by the time they are in their 30s, if they are encouraged to prepare for leadership as soon as their potential as builders is identified, which is possible for many of them by age 18 to 20. The preparation to lead need not be at the complete expense of vocational or scholarly preparation, but it must be the first priority. It may take some difficult bending of resources and some unusual initiatives to accomplish all that should be accomplished in these critical years, and give leadership preparation first priority. But whatever it takes, it must be done. For a while at least, until a better-led society is assured, some other important goals should take a subordinate place.
All of this rests on the assumption that the only way to change a society (or just make it go) is to produce people, enough people who will change it (or make it go). The urgent problems of our day — the disposition to venture into immoral and senseless wars, destruction of the environment, poverty, alienation, discrimination, overpopulation — are here because of human, individual failures; and one-person-at-a-time, one-action-at-a-time failures.
But who is the enemy? Who is holding back the rapid movement to better society that is possible with the available resources? Who is responsible for the mediocre performance of so many of our institutions? Who is standing in the way of a larger consensus on the definition of a better society and the paths to reach it?
Not evil, stupid people or even apathetic people. Not the “system” or the protesters, disrupters, revolutionaries and reactionaries.
Granting that fewer evil, stupid, or apathetic people or a better “system” might make the job easier, their removal would not change matters, not for long. Better society will come, if it comes, with plenty of evil, stupid, apathetic people around and with an imperfect, ponderous, inertia-charged “system” as the vehicle for charge.
Liquidate the offending people, radically alter or destroy the system, and in less than a generation they will all be back. It is not in the nature of things that a society can be cleaned up once and for all according to an ideal plan. And even if it were possible, who would want to live in an aseptic world? Evil, stupidity, apathy and the “system” are not the enemy, even though society-building forces will be contending with them all the time. A healthy society, like a healthy body, is not the one that has taken the most medicine. It is the one in which the internal health-building forces are in best shape.
The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people and their failure to lead. Too many settle for being critics and experts. There is too much intellectual wheel spinning, too much retreating into “research”, too little preparation to undertake the hard and high-risk tasks of building better institutions in an imperfect world. In short, the enemy are strong, natural servants who have the potential to lead but do not lead, or who choose to follow a non-servant. They suffer, society suffers. And so it may be in the future.
Leaders are members of groups who are particularly influential and who act to guide, direct and motivate the groups to achieve goals. Leadership is in part determined by the leader’s characteristics (intelligence, experience, skill), the group’s thoughts and feelings (members’ attraction to and respect for the leader), the nature of the group (ballet corps, jury, corporate board, platoon) and the group setting (a highly-stressed group versus an unstressed one).
