Samenvatting - Leadership (YF3005)

Leadership
Leadership = the process of influencing other(s) towards the realization of a shared goal
- Leaders are made (not born!): behaviors and abilities that you need to learn and change
- Leadership:
 Dynamic influential process
 Can be developed
- Effective leader behaviors/styles are context-specific --> you need followers to be a
leader!!
- Woman and man are equally effective as leaders
- Many practices are universal and some are (depending) culturally-specific
- Being a leader contains pitfalls
- No right or wrong leadership theory




- Leader development
 Develop as a leader across the entire lifespan
 Not all individuals experience or benefit in the same way from the same
experience
 Informal rule 70-20-10
 70%: challenging assignments: new job/task that stretched the executive
because it was new, complex and demanding
 20%: developmental relationships: build a mentor/coaching work -->
feedback
 10%: coursework and training: giving new ideas, new behaviors to practice,
time to reflect and opportunities to connect with each other

Mindful engagement model
1. Approach: Identify needs and embrace learning with a growth mindset and goals.
 3 components
 Identify what you need to develop
 You can grow as person/leader: growth mindset
 Have a learning orientation & set learning goals
 Changing future of work
 Tech savviness is a sine-qua-non condition to be effective as a leader
 Culture of “continuous learning”
 Critical to “learn to learn”
2. Action: Seek learning opportunities in tailored challenging experiences
 Get out of your comfort zone by gaining experience in leading challenging assignments
 Get unfamiliar responsibilities
 Create change
 Work across cultures/boundaries
 Manage diversity
 Find challenging experiences --> inline with what we need to grow
3. Reflection: capture the lessons of experience, consider counterfactuals, and distill the lessons
learned


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,  Capture and make sense of what happened and why
 For specific events, conduct an ‘after-events review’ or debriefing

Traits = differences among individuals in a typical tendency to behave, think, or feel in some
conceptually related ways, across a variety of relevant situations and across some fairly long period
of time
- Unlike behaviors: malleable and can be changed --> personality is relatively stable and
partly determined by our genes
- Environmental/contextual factors: limited influence, exception for important life events
that can affect our personality
- Evolve? Teenage-years: level 0 – some stable around 30 years – big five some decrease and some
increase
- Research:
 Kenny & Zaccaro: between 49% & 82% of the outcome can be explained by leadership
traits
 Lord, DeVader & Alliger: much stronger relationship
- Associated with leadership
 Cognitive capacities
 Personality
 Core beliefs & self evaluation
 Knowledge and skills
 Social capacities
 Motives

HEXACO Model: provides one predominant personality typology and has an impressive body of
research that supports it --> 6 dimensions
- Honesty-Humility
 Sincerity: the tendency to be genuine in interpersonal relations
 Fairness: the tendency to avoid fraud and corruption
 Greed avoidance: the tendency to be uninterested in possessing lavish wealth,
luxury goods, and signs of high social status
 Modesty: the tendency to be modest and unassuming
 Predicts variables in organizational work (corruption, work performance)
- Emotionality
 Fearfulness: the tendency to experience fear
 Anxiety: the tendency to worry in a variety of contexts
 Dependence: one’s need for emotional support from others
 Sentimentality: the tendency to feel strong emotional bonds with others
 Ideal employees: low level of emotionality
- Extraversion
 Self-esteem: the tendency to have a positive self-regard (in social contexts)
 Social boldness: one’s comfort or confidence within a variety of social situations
 Sociability: the tendency to enjoy conversation, social interactions and parties
 Liveliness: one’s typical enthusiasm and energy
 Predict who emerge a leader in work groups
- Agreeableness
 Forgiveness: one’s willingness to feel trust and like those who may have caused
them harm
 Gentleness: the tendency to be mild and lenient in dealings with other people


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, Flexibility: one’s willingness to compromise and cooperate with others
Patience: the tendency to remain calm rather than to become angry
Agreeable individuals: better liked, engage in more organizational citizenship
behaviors and more likely to emerge as a leader
- Conscientiousness
 Organization: the tendency to seek order, particularly in one’s physical
surroundings
 Diligence: the tendency to work hard
 Perfectionism: the tendency to be thorough and concerned with details
 Prudence: the tendency to deliberate carefully and inhibit impulses
 Strongest and most consistent predictor of overall job performance
- Openness to Experience
 Aesthetic appreciation: one’s enjoyment of beauty and art in nature
 Inquisitiveness: the tendency to seek information about and experience with the
natural/human world
 Creativity: one’s preference for innovation and experiment
 Unconventionality: the tendency to accept the unusual
 Best predictor of creative behaviors
 You can be too high on those factors --> it can have a negative outcome

General intelligence (g) = the “ability to learn, to abstract, and to process information” (or the “ability
to deal with complexity…[and] to process information”
- = maximum performance that we can produce
- Intelligence is positively correlated with:
 Job performance (especially more complex jobs)
 Leader emergence and leader effectiveness

- Lewin’s equation: Behaviors = f(Traits, Situation)
 Situation strength refers to the degree to which norms, scripts or standards
dictate appropriate behaviors
 Strong situation: norm suggest what the desirable behaviors is --> traits
don’t predict our behaviors (B=S) (e.g. in job interview or religious buildings)
 Weak situation: no norm dictating our behaviors --> will predict how we
behave (B=T)
- Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority figures: learner had to say the right
word that belongs to the term, if it was wrong he gets an electric shock. The more false
answers, the higher the shock. They want to see if they can force someone (against to
who you are)

From traits to behaviors: Integrated or Process model
 Model helps to link traits with
leadership outcomes
 Multilevel: individual – group – firm
 How we behave depends on who you
are and the situation


Process theories propose that deep determinants, such as personality traits or general mental ability,
cause observable behaviors that form a particular leadership style that in turn shapes leader

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