Summary 1JK10 Leadership Articles
Week 1: Leading Clever People by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
Clever people: people whose knowledge/skills enable them to produce
disproportionate value for your firm
Clever people don’t want to be led. They are more mobile than ever more
(have more opportunities).
o Cannot function effectively without resources it provides
o Can be sources of great ideas, but unless they have systems/disciplines
they may deliver little
You must not only attract talent, but also foster an environment in which your
clever people are inspired to achieve their fullest potential in a way that
produces wealth and value for all stakeholders.
Clever people want a high degree of organizational protection and recognition
that their ideas are important. They also demand the freedom to explore and fail.
They expect their leaders to be intellectually on their plane. Leading clever
people is different from others.
Seven characteristics most clever people share:
- Know their worth
- Are organizationally savvy (smart)
- Ignore corporate hierarchy
- Expect instant access
- Are well connected
- Have a low boredom threshold
- Won’t thank you
Given their mindset, clever people see an organization’s administrative
machinery as a distraction from their key value-adding activities. They need to
be protected from ‘organizational rain’.
Organizational rain: the rules and politics associated with any big-
budget activity
It’s also important to minimize the rain by creating an atmosphere in which rules
and norms are simple and universally accepted: representative rules (include
risk, sabbatical and integrity rules).
Smart leaders also recognize that best ideas don’t always come from company
projects. They enable their clever people to pursue private efforts, because they
know there will be payoffs for company.
Important for new leaders is to identify/relate to informed insider among clever
people – someone willing to serve as anthropologist, interpreting culture,
sympathizing with who seek to understand it.
If you try to push clever people, you will drive them away. You need to be a
benevolent guardian, create a safe environment for your clever employees,
encourage them to experiment and play and even fail, and quietly demonstrate
your expertise and authority all the while.
,To increase clever people’s value – and prevent attrition:
Reduce administrative distractions
Maintain diversity of ideas
Make it safe to fail
Let clever people pursue private efforts
Demonstrate you’re an expert in your own right
Week 1: Leadership in Applied Psychology by Robert G. Lord
Early years: traits for leadership
Articles reflected interest in intelligence and individual differences
Superiority in intelligence, above a certain minimum, contributes relatively
less to business success than does superiority in several non-intellectual
traits of personality.
A personality embracing qualities from all types of leaders was often
associated with leadership.
Methods in form of factor analysis to uncover multiple groupings of leader
traits
Great Man approach: 100 greatest world leaders along with their respective
accomplishments
Every person not only has leadership traits, but also has what be called
followership traits.
The shift from trait to behavioral approaches was evident in the 1940s.
By the end of the decade, researchers at Ohio State University had begun
to transform the terrain of leadership studies by emphasizing the study of
leaders’ behavior.
o Useful in selecting/training persons who may occupy leadership
positions
o Discover what leaders do, rather than who they are
First wave of leadership research 1948-1961: leadership behavior and followers
attitude
- Behavioral style approaches: explaining leadership in terms of social
behaviors,
- Attention from identifying leadership traits to understanding/measuring
leader behaviors
- Development/application of interpersonal measures of emergent
leadership as leaderless group discussion, and sophisticated multimethod
approaches adopted in assessment centers that are still used today to
assess leadership potential and ability.
Contingency and situation-based models that emerged in 1960s-70s,
focused on how the situation moderates relationship between leader behaviors
and follower attitudes/motivation/outcomes.
Second wave of leadership research 1969-1989: extensions/limitations of
leadership style approaches
, - Social cognitive theories: helped understand the limitations of
questionnaire measures of leader behavior, and emphasized the role of
categorization processes in social sense-making
o Emotions affect ratings of behavior as well as affectively based
outcomes.
o Traits are important to perceivers, especially perceptions of leader’s
trait intelligence.
o The better the match of employee’s perceptions of their actual
leader’s profile to their implicit leadership theories, the better
quality their exchange was with their respective leader.
- Contingency/situational approaches
o Instead of “one best way” approach to leadership, various
contingency perspectives incorporated situational factors into
theory and research.
o Leadership could be fulfilled by aspects of followers such as ability
and motivation or contexts such as organizational rewards.
o Leadership could be neutralized by factors like spatial distance
between leaders and followers. Non-leadership factors were called
leadership substitutes/neutralizers.
o The lack of consistent support for contingency theories and the
broader understanding that sampling error was a sufficient
explanation for many variable results undercut the interest in
building contingency theories pertaining to leadership styles.
- Early transformational leadership
Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs): describe the effects of raters implicit
knowledge structures on ratings of leadership behavior, and initiated a line of
research that is still active today
Contemporary social-cognitive research helps to create a retrospective
understanding of this rating process
Second wave brought the study of rater cognitive processes and leadership
perceptions to center-stage for both methodological and substantive reasons.
Studies of behavioral approaches are faded in part, because of the recognition
that behavioral ratings reflect rater processes as well as a leader’s behavioral
style.
Third wave of leadership research: 1999-2007
- Meta- analyses – traits and leader styles revisited: understanding
aggregated and statistically corrected relationships between personality
and leadership
o Allow for effect sizes to be aggregated across studies and corrected
for sampling error and other statistical artifacts
- Multilevel focus
- LMX: Leader-Member Exchange
o Focus on relationship that develops between leaders and followers
o Leaders are thought to treat each of their followers in a work group
differently
, o One of first theories to embrace the multilevel nature of leadership
in organizations
o Life cycle perspective: Stranger phase – Acquaintance phase –
Maturity phase
o Increased popularity since 1990s
- Team leadership: influence of leadership behavior on team-level
processes/performance
o Roots lie in functional leadership, positing that leaders should act in
ways that provide teams with what they need when it is needed for
successful collective action
o Functional leadership: leadership responsibilities providing an
enabling structure and context, coaching, and assuring adequate
resources
o Multiteam: leaders’ setting of directions and enabling collective
performance conditions predicted improved coordination processes
and overall performance
o Important to match leader behavior to team performance
requirements
o Shared leadership: leadership role can shift among team
members, representing the distribution of functional leadership
roles in groups
- Trust: positive relationship to a wide range of outcomes
o Only antecedent that was unrelated to trust in leadership was
length of relationship.
- Transformational and Charismatic leadership (“New School”
leadership approaches)
o Transformational leaders:
Exceptional performance is created by a sense of mission and
new ways of thinking and learning.
Activate followers’ general values and social identities.
Provide greater social support and identification for followers
Transformational style could be developed
Influences team performance by facilitating emergence of
more positive team motivational states
o Charismatic leaders:
An emotional form of communal relationship
More charisma to leaders who exhibited more sacrifice and
less self-benefit, producing followers with greater
commitment to and support of their leader
Leadership perceptions often are the basis for effectiveness ratings as well as for
emergence. The Big 5 (Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness,
Openness and Neuroticism) were significantly with both leader emergence and
leader effectiveness.
Gender and Leadership: 1990s increased attention
Tendency for women to adopt more democratic and participative styles than
male counterparts.
Week 1: Leading Clever People by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
Clever people: people whose knowledge/skills enable them to produce
disproportionate value for your firm
Clever people don’t want to be led. They are more mobile than ever more
(have more opportunities).
o Cannot function effectively without resources it provides
o Can be sources of great ideas, but unless they have systems/disciplines
they may deliver little
You must not only attract talent, but also foster an environment in which your
clever people are inspired to achieve their fullest potential in a way that
produces wealth and value for all stakeholders.
Clever people want a high degree of organizational protection and recognition
that their ideas are important. They also demand the freedom to explore and fail.
They expect their leaders to be intellectually on their plane. Leading clever
people is different from others.
Seven characteristics most clever people share:
- Know their worth
- Are organizationally savvy (smart)
- Ignore corporate hierarchy
- Expect instant access
- Are well connected
- Have a low boredom threshold
- Won’t thank you
Given their mindset, clever people see an organization’s administrative
machinery as a distraction from their key value-adding activities. They need to
be protected from ‘organizational rain’.
Organizational rain: the rules and politics associated with any big-
budget activity
It’s also important to minimize the rain by creating an atmosphere in which rules
and norms are simple and universally accepted: representative rules (include
risk, sabbatical and integrity rules).
Smart leaders also recognize that best ideas don’t always come from company
projects. They enable their clever people to pursue private efforts, because they
know there will be payoffs for company.
Important for new leaders is to identify/relate to informed insider among clever
people – someone willing to serve as anthropologist, interpreting culture,
sympathizing with who seek to understand it.
If you try to push clever people, you will drive them away. You need to be a
benevolent guardian, create a safe environment for your clever employees,
encourage them to experiment and play and even fail, and quietly demonstrate
your expertise and authority all the while.
,To increase clever people’s value – and prevent attrition:
Reduce administrative distractions
Maintain diversity of ideas
Make it safe to fail
Let clever people pursue private efforts
Demonstrate you’re an expert in your own right
Week 1: Leadership in Applied Psychology by Robert G. Lord
Early years: traits for leadership
Articles reflected interest in intelligence and individual differences
Superiority in intelligence, above a certain minimum, contributes relatively
less to business success than does superiority in several non-intellectual
traits of personality.
A personality embracing qualities from all types of leaders was often
associated with leadership.
Methods in form of factor analysis to uncover multiple groupings of leader
traits
Great Man approach: 100 greatest world leaders along with their respective
accomplishments
Every person not only has leadership traits, but also has what be called
followership traits.
The shift from trait to behavioral approaches was evident in the 1940s.
By the end of the decade, researchers at Ohio State University had begun
to transform the terrain of leadership studies by emphasizing the study of
leaders’ behavior.
o Useful in selecting/training persons who may occupy leadership
positions
o Discover what leaders do, rather than who they are
First wave of leadership research 1948-1961: leadership behavior and followers
attitude
- Behavioral style approaches: explaining leadership in terms of social
behaviors,
- Attention from identifying leadership traits to understanding/measuring
leader behaviors
- Development/application of interpersonal measures of emergent
leadership as leaderless group discussion, and sophisticated multimethod
approaches adopted in assessment centers that are still used today to
assess leadership potential and ability.
Contingency and situation-based models that emerged in 1960s-70s,
focused on how the situation moderates relationship between leader behaviors
and follower attitudes/motivation/outcomes.
Second wave of leadership research 1969-1989: extensions/limitations of
leadership style approaches
, - Social cognitive theories: helped understand the limitations of
questionnaire measures of leader behavior, and emphasized the role of
categorization processes in social sense-making
o Emotions affect ratings of behavior as well as affectively based
outcomes.
o Traits are important to perceivers, especially perceptions of leader’s
trait intelligence.
o The better the match of employee’s perceptions of their actual
leader’s profile to their implicit leadership theories, the better
quality their exchange was with their respective leader.
- Contingency/situational approaches
o Instead of “one best way” approach to leadership, various
contingency perspectives incorporated situational factors into
theory and research.
o Leadership could be fulfilled by aspects of followers such as ability
and motivation or contexts such as organizational rewards.
o Leadership could be neutralized by factors like spatial distance
between leaders and followers. Non-leadership factors were called
leadership substitutes/neutralizers.
o The lack of consistent support for contingency theories and the
broader understanding that sampling error was a sufficient
explanation for many variable results undercut the interest in
building contingency theories pertaining to leadership styles.
- Early transformational leadership
Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs): describe the effects of raters implicit
knowledge structures on ratings of leadership behavior, and initiated a line of
research that is still active today
Contemporary social-cognitive research helps to create a retrospective
understanding of this rating process
Second wave brought the study of rater cognitive processes and leadership
perceptions to center-stage for both methodological and substantive reasons.
Studies of behavioral approaches are faded in part, because of the recognition
that behavioral ratings reflect rater processes as well as a leader’s behavioral
style.
Third wave of leadership research: 1999-2007
- Meta- analyses – traits and leader styles revisited: understanding
aggregated and statistically corrected relationships between personality
and leadership
o Allow for effect sizes to be aggregated across studies and corrected
for sampling error and other statistical artifacts
- Multilevel focus
- LMX: Leader-Member Exchange
o Focus on relationship that develops between leaders and followers
o Leaders are thought to treat each of their followers in a work group
differently
, o One of first theories to embrace the multilevel nature of leadership
in organizations
o Life cycle perspective: Stranger phase – Acquaintance phase –
Maturity phase
o Increased popularity since 1990s
- Team leadership: influence of leadership behavior on team-level
processes/performance
o Roots lie in functional leadership, positing that leaders should act in
ways that provide teams with what they need when it is needed for
successful collective action
o Functional leadership: leadership responsibilities providing an
enabling structure and context, coaching, and assuring adequate
resources
o Multiteam: leaders’ setting of directions and enabling collective
performance conditions predicted improved coordination processes
and overall performance
o Important to match leader behavior to team performance
requirements
o Shared leadership: leadership role can shift among team
members, representing the distribution of functional leadership
roles in groups
- Trust: positive relationship to a wide range of outcomes
o Only antecedent that was unrelated to trust in leadership was
length of relationship.
- Transformational and Charismatic leadership (“New School”
leadership approaches)
o Transformational leaders:
Exceptional performance is created by a sense of mission and
new ways of thinking and learning.
Activate followers’ general values and social identities.
Provide greater social support and identification for followers
Transformational style could be developed
Influences team performance by facilitating emergence of
more positive team motivational states
o Charismatic leaders:
An emotional form of communal relationship
More charisma to leaders who exhibited more sacrifice and
less self-benefit, producing followers with greater
commitment to and support of their leader
Leadership perceptions often are the basis for effectiveness ratings as well as for
emergence. The Big 5 (Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness,
Openness and Neuroticism) were significantly with both leader emergence and
leader effectiveness.
Gender and Leadership: 1990s increased attention
Tendency for women to adopt more democratic and participative styles than
male counterparts.
