When Margaret Thatcher stated there was no such thing as society, it seemed to mark the commencement of 20 years of economic growth fuelled by the concept of high personal reward for success, and the drive for greater and greater returns for shareholders. As Atrill & McLaney (2009, p12) point out, businesses are created by their owners (Shareholders) with the intention of enhancing those owners wealth.
During this time of relative economic prosperity, we witnessed several “ethical” scandals where business leaders appeared to put personal gain above the security of the shareholder investment, leading to false accounting and company collapses, typified by WorldCom, Enron, and Parlamat. However these fraudulent business activities did not seem to deter the dash for growth and commercial prosperity, and it was until the global banking crisis and the collapse of banks such as Lehman Brothers, that the question of the ethical approach of business leadership seemed to return to the agenda, particularly for politicians.
But do ethical CEO’s really have a social responsibility outside their consumer base, and should they actively support a decision that reduces shareholder wealth in the name of Ethics?
Leadership Ethics – The Theory
It would seem to me that a theory that is based on the work of Aristotle or Plato may just be a little confused! What seems clear is that there is this thing called ethical leadership, the concept of which most of us would support, but there is no theory of ethical leadership that appears to be a “comfortable fit” in articulating a best practice model.
Indeed, Knights & O’Leary (2006) point out the failings of various ethical leadership theories yet perhaps fail themselves to bring anything substantially new to the table.
Northouse (2010, pp 386-393) proposes 5 principles of ethical leadership:
• Ethical leaders respect others
• Ethical leaders serve others
• Ethical leaders are just
• Ethical leaders are honest
• Ethical leaders build community
Within this definition I can think of some very ethical leaders I have worked for. The overriding feeling I had with each of them was that they would always do the right thing, even if it financially disadvantaged them or the company. The most common examples I can remember are simple decisions where the company could have “got away with” accounting for some operational expenditure as capital expenditure, thus artificially enhancing the profits. Whilst there were perfectly legal ways of doing this, the ethical leaders somehow new where the line they must not cross was. They knew the difference between legally right and morally right!
Ethics – Beyond the P & L
Business ethics is not just about the legalities or moral responsibilities of business accounting. More companies are recognising the need to represent their shareholders in an ethical way in the way they trade with communities, countries, and the environment.
I was reminded this week of the dreadful events of a gas leak in a chemical factory in Bhopal, India, 25 years ago. (BBC Online News, 2010). No longer is it acceptable for western companies to run substandard divisions in developing countries, neglecting the welfare of their employees or contractors. But then again, even if Nike claims to have stopped kids sewing footballs together in “sweat shops”, they will be doing it for someone else.
At Banco Santander they invest heavily in University sponsorship and grants as a way of giving something back to the community. So is this the cleansing of the corporate sole or good PR!
Can there be such a thing as an ethical tobacco company, whose products are smoked by millions of children, throughout the world, causing addiction and ill health, as well as exacerbating poverty, or is this simply about supporting the ethics of freedom of choice?
Was the deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, about the ethical exploitation of natural resources to free the American people from external energy supply dependency, or the unethical exploitation of natural resources without consideration for the environmental risks? If you subcontract the drilling have you subcontracted the ethical responsibility?
Can an Arms manufacturing business produce and sell weapons systems that will knowingly be used to wage war between nations, ethically?
Can the pursuit of profit by an investment bank, betting on, and often causing the failure of others to makes its money be ethical?
The CEO’s of BP, BAE and BAT could fit Hothouse’s 5 principles of ethical leadership yet still, perhaps unfairly, be seen as unethical in their approaches to business.
The behaviour of an organisation and its leaders can have a significant impact on all those stakeholders involved. In BP, a failure to use caution in the assessment of the risk of equipment failure in deep water drilling, meant a failure to respond appropriately when disaster struck.
The consequence to shareholders has been enormous, both in terms of share value, and future business potential, franchisees who merely use BP as a supplier of fuel have had their gas stations vandalised across America, and as for the employees, when the ethics of an organisation are questioned, so are those of every employee.
After all, if you work for a tobacco company, you are supporting the consumption of cigarettes by everyone who smokes them, no matter what their age and background!
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the ethics of leadership are key for an organisations future growth, and whilst Knights & O’Leary (2006) dismiss the impact of the trait approach to leadership, I would argue that a common feature of the leaders of those business involved in huge financial frauds, is the presence of narcissism and psychopathy. Whilst there is an argument for traits not predicting leadership capability, identifying traits, or even personality disorders that would make someone unsuitable for leadership, may be a more effective deployment of personality measurement tools that measure the “big five” personality factors. (Myers 2007, pp 618-619)
The need for further research on ethical leadership is clear but this aspect of the leadership debate surely demands more empirical evidence and measurement of ethical leadership and its effect on performance. For whilst many companies portray themselves as ethical businesses with an eye on the social needs of those around them, I do not see too much evidence of mainstream businesses sacrificing today’s profits for tomorrows social and environmental needs.
References
Atrill, P. & McLaney, E (2009) Management Accounting for Decision Makers. 6th Edition. Harlow, England: Financial Times prentice Hall.
BBC News (2010) ‘Bhopal recalls gas leak disaster’. BBC News [online] available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/business/2009/bhopal/default.stm Accessed 12th June 2010.
Knights, D., & O’Leary, M. (2006) ‘Leadership, ethics and responsibility to the other’, Journal of Business Ethics, 67 (2), pp. 125–137, SpringerLink [Online]. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-006-9008-6 (Accessed: 11th June 2010).
Myers, D (2007) Psychology, Eighth Edition. New York, NY. Worth Publishing.
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Monday, 14 June 2010
Sunday, 6 June 2010
The Authenticity of a Leader
As an executive coach I am sometimes asked to work with executives to help them improve their authenticity. This often involves helping them develop certain behaviours that may reflect either on their own values and beliefs, or perhaps the organisation they are working for. One of the topics I discuss with them is the idea of “fake it until you make it”, which I guess is a form of inauthentic authenticity!
The concept of authentic management is still developing, but seems to be based around the concept of owning your own personal experiences, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, wants values, which form oneself, and then behaving in accordance to that model of who you are. (Gardner et al 2005).
Northouse (2010, chapter 10) reflects the concept that authenticity is developable and therefore is not fixed or rigid. This is further reflected by Erickson (1995) as quoted by Gardner et al (2005) who states that this is not an either or state and therefore leaders can grow by becoming more authentic.
Authenticity and Leadership
Gardner et al (2005) propose a conceptual framework for authentic leader and follower development, with the concept that the antecedents, or catalyst of authentic leadership starts from the personal history and key trigger life events. A large dose of self awareness, enlightening the self view of Values, Identity, Emotions, and Motives/Goals, balanced with Self Regulation, which includes the internalised processes, balancing processes, the transparency of relationships, and behaviour that matches the values, goals and identity, sets the authentic model of behaviour that is then reflected or modelled by authentic followership.
Having worked with a number of CEO’s and Chairman in my career I can understand the validity of the concept of authenticity, as having a leader who is “real” and follows what they truly believe and value, is attractive to potential followers. Simply put, if you know your Leader is real and authentic and walks the talk, you will model this behaviour creating an authentic contagion across the organisation.
It is normally at this stage of any discussion on Leadership for someone to use Nelson Mandela as their example, and Northouse (2010, p213) doesn’t let us down! He discusses the strong moral values and conscience, which he believes are essential in an authentic leader, and indeed it was Mandela’s authenticity that allowed him to cross from terrorist to prisoner to transformational leader of his country. But was Mandela a strong morally authentic man in his early days fighting with the ANC? In truth I have no idea but I raise the point to emphasise that authentic behaviour can be learnt.
I worked for a CEO, intellectually and academically brilliant, who had strong and perhaps moral values, and authentically followed these values in his honest leadership of the business. He was also transparent, partly driven by his challenging and vocal style, yet he lacked the connectedness and positive disposition argued for in many authenticity models. He was ferocious in the way he challenged performance, yet you always knew there was no easy ride or emotionally engaging relationship on offer. So was he authentic?
Gardner et al (2005) posits the idea of identity, through the self –identification of fixing and expressing one’s own identity both internally through reflection and externally through the way you present yourself. Whilst I agree that this is a way to help become aware of your identity, I don’t accept the concept that it is either a fixed state or even well formed state, and that identity is an evolving thing that changes due to life events and experience. My point of this argument is that your identity, particularly your working identity, is something that becomes clearer with age and experience and as discussed by Ibarra (2004, chapter 1) tends to become apparent as we enter the second stage of our working life.
Therefore, the model of authentic leadership demands such a level of self awareness and indeed self acceptance or contentment, I would argue most of us never reach this point and those that do, take many years to do so.
The Role of Ethics and Morality in Authentic Leadership
The academic literature on this subject emphasises the importance of such things as values, compassion of the heart, trust, and integrity as vital ingredients of authentic leadership. The idea of self awareness, self-discipline, passion of purpose, combined with integrity, trust etc, implies an importance of morality as well as ethics within this model of leadership.
Can you be an authentic immoral leader? I guess not when you consider the importance of trust. However, who defines what is moral or ethical? Is it ethical or morale to hunt whales of scientific research, whilst putting whale meat in the shops of Japan, many Japanese would say yes! Is it ethical or morale to sell arms to a country who you know will use them to oppress its own people or against a neighbouring state?
My point here is that I accept the view proposed by Gardner et al (2005) that a clear ethical and morale boundary should be transparent within an organisation, I am just not sure that those boundaries have to be particularly ethical or morale to allow authentic leadership. In other words, having boundaries and living by them is more important than what they are. After all, it is matching the behaviour consistently with the vision, values, and identity of the leader that is the real issue of authenticity.
Conclusions
I struggle with the idea of a leadership model that seems unattainable for most people. My argument is that Garner et al (2005) have proposed such an idealised model of leadership that it simply doesn’t happen very often in reality.
They argue that trigger events in life stimulate the drive for personal development, but I would argue that to achieve the required level of self insight, belief, strength of morality and ethics to transport these into your new leadership self, trigger events need to be significant, and potentially traumatic. I am not convinced by the authors view that positive trigger events are equally as effective, for in my experience, feeling good about a positive event is not as effective as the huge drive bought on by life changing tragedies or difficult events that happen to us through our lives.
We then come to the influences in a business environment that move you away from always being able to behave in a way that always reflects your values. In other words, in business we all have to do things that are unpleasant, difficult, or that we disagree with, particularly when serving a shareholder base who are investment return focused rather than organisational behaviourally focused.
I see authentic leadership sitting well with the idea of finding your passion in life and seeking out the work you love (Williams1999). But the realities of corporate business life are that the contradictory demands placed upon leaders makes a true model of authentic leadership difficult to achieve. The lack of empirical evidence to prove the benefits of such approach hinder this cause further.
References
Gardner, W.L., Avolio, B.J., Luthans, F., May, D.R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005) ‘“Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development’, The Leadership Quarterly 16 (3), pp. 343–372, ScienceDirect [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.003 (Accessed: 4th June 2010).
Ibarra, H. (2004) Working Identity; Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Boston, MA. Harvard Business School Press.
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Williams, N (1999) The work we were born to do; find the work you love, love the work you do. London, England. Harper Collins Publishers
The concept of authentic management is still developing, but seems to be based around the concept of owning your own personal experiences, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, wants values, which form oneself, and then behaving in accordance to that model of who you are. (Gardner et al 2005).
Northouse (2010, chapter 10) reflects the concept that authenticity is developable and therefore is not fixed or rigid. This is further reflected by Erickson (1995) as quoted by Gardner et al (2005) who states that this is not an either or state and therefore leaders can grow by becoming more authentic.
Authenticity and Leadership
Gardner et al (2005) propose a conceptual framework for authentic leader and follower development, with the concept that the antecedents, or catalyst of authentic leadership starts from the personal history and key trigger life events. A large dose of self awareness, enlightening the self view of Values, Identity, Emotions, and Motives/Goals, balanced with Self Regulation, which includes the internalised processes, balancing processes, the transparency of relationships, and behaviour that matches the values, goals and identity, sets the authentic model of behaviour that is then reflected or modelled by authentic followership.
Having worked with a number of CEO’s and Chairman in my career I can understand the validity of the concept of authenticity, as having a leader who is “real” and follows what they truly believe and value, is attractive to potential followers. Simply put, if you know your Leader is real and authentic and walks the talk, you will model this behaviour creating an authentic contagion across the organisation.
It is normally at this stage of any discussion on Leadership for someone to use Nelson Mandela as their example, and Northouse (2010, p213) doesn’t let us down! He discusses the strong moral values and conscience, which he believes are essential in an authentic leader, and indeed it was Mandela’s authenticity that allowed him to cross from terrorist to prisoner to transformational leader of his country. But was Mandela a strong morally authentic man in his early days fighting with the ANC? In truth I have no idea but I raise the point to emphasise that authentic behaviour can be learnt.
I worked for a CEO, intellectually and academically brilliant, who had strong and perhaps moral values, and authentically followed these values in his honest leadership of the business. He was also transparent, partly driven by his challenging and vocal style, yet he lacked the connectedness and positive disposition argued for in many authenticity models. He was ferocious in the way he challenged performance, yet you always knew there was no easy ride or emotionally engaging relationship on offer. So was he authentic?
Gardner et al (2005) posits the idea of identity, through the self –identification of fixing and expressing one’s own identity both internally through reflection and externally through the way you present yourself. Whilst I agree that this is a way to help become aware of your identity, I don’t accept the concept that it is either a fixed state or even well formed state, and that identity is an evolving thing that changes due to life events and experience. My point of this argument is that your identity, particularly your working identity, is something that becomes clearer with age and experience and as discussed by Ibarra (2004, chapter 1) tends to become apparent as we enter the second stage of our working life.
Therefore, the model of authentic leadership demands such a level of self awareness and indeed self acceptance or contentment, I would argue most of us never reach this point and those that do, take many years to do so.
The Role of Ethics and Morality in Authentic Leadership
The academic literature on this subject emphasises the importance of such things as values, compassion of the heart, trust, and integrity as vital ingredients of authentic leadership. The idea of self awareness, self-discipline, passion of purpose, combined with integrity, trust etc, implies an importance of morality as well as ethics within this model of leadership.
Can you be an authentic immoral leader? I guess not when you consider the importance of trust. However, who defines what is moral or ethical? Is it ethical or morale to hunt whales of scientific research, whilst putting whale meat in the shops of Japan, many Japanese would say yes! Is it ethical or morale to sell arms to a country who you know will use them to oppress its own people or against a neighbouring state?
My point here is that I accept the view proposed by Gardner et al (2005) that a clear ethical and morale boundary should be transparent within an organisation, I am just not sure that those boundaries have to be particularly ethical or morale to allow authentic leadership. In other words, having boundaries and living by them is more important than what they are. After all, it is matching the behaviour consistently with the vision, values, and identity of the leader that is the real issue of authenticity.
Conclusions
I struggle with the idea of a leadership model that seems unattainable for most people. My argument is that Garner et al (2005) have proposed such an idealised model of leadership that it simply doesn’t happen very often in reality.
They argue that trigger events in life stimulate the drive for personal development, but I would argue that to achieve the required level of self insight, belief, strength of morality and ethics to transport these into your new leadership self, trigger events need to be significant, and potentially traumatic. I am not convinced by the authors view that positive trigger events are equally as effective, for in my experience, feeling good about a positive event is not as effective as the huge drive bought on by life changing tragedies or difficult events that happen to us through our lives.
We then come to the influences in a business environment that move you away from always being able to behave in a way that always reflects your values. In other words, in business we all have to do things that are unpleasant, difficult, or that we disagree with, particularly when serving a shareholder base who are investment return focused rather than organisational behaviourally focused.
I see authentic leadership sitting well with the idea of finding your passion in life and seeking out the work you love (Williams1999). But the realities of corporate business life are that the contradictory demands placed upon leaders makes a true model of authentic leadership difficult to achieve. The lack of empirical evidence to prove the benefits of such approach hinder this cause further.
References
Gardner, W.L., Avolio, B.J., Luthans, F., May, D.R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005) ‘“Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development’, The Leadership Quarterly 16 (3), pp. 343–372, ScienceDirect [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.003 (Accessed: 4th June 2010).
Ibarra, H. (2004) Working Identity; Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Boston, MA. Harvard Business School Press.
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Williams, N (1999) The work we were born to do; find the work you love, love the work you do. London, England. Harper Collins Publishers
Monday, 17 May 2010
The Relationship between Personality and Leadership
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing most businesses today is how do you identify and select great leaders? I have always found it curious how businesses invest millions in the assessment and development of talent, only to appoint a new CEO or executive team member after nothing more than a couple of interviews and a bland reference.
So what do you look for when selecting a new leader? Northouse, (2010, pp 15-109) discusses four specific approaches/models of what makes a successful leader. They are the trait approach, the skills approach, the style approach, and the situational approach.
A key question in the identification of great leaders is the relationship between personality and leadership.
The Value of Personality
Hogan & Kaiser (2005) define leadership as being about the performance of groups / teams. They argue that measuring personality is a valid predictor of leadership capability, when looked at from two perspectives, firstly how you think about yourself, and secondly, how others think about you, (Reputation).
The two aspects of reputation they identify are the bright side, or when our social performance is at its best (In interview for example), and the dark side, which reflects the impression you make when you are off guard, or at your worst.
The behaviours or tendencies you display in the dark side tend to be concealed by well practiced social skills, but over a longer time period, for instance in a work/career scenario, the dark side will negatively impact relationships with others.
Many well practiced and refined candidates perform well in interview, using their social skills to mask their true behaviour as a leader.
The use of a trait model, where certain personality characteristics are seen as predictors or indicators of good leadership, are able to give a below the surface profile of a potential leader, and provider sign posts to potential problems.
Hogan & Kaiser (2005) make the important connection between personality and organisational performance through the importance of leadership style (Shaped by personality) shaping employee attitudes and the effective functioning of the team, which subsequently drives, or hinders, organisational effectiveness.
Where personality is shaped in are younger years, and therefore less developable during are adult years, the skills approach focuses on the skills and knowledge required by a leader to be successful. (Northouse 2010 chapter 3)
The skills approach uses 3 skill areas, technical, human and conceptual and postulates that leadership ability is trainable. That is not to say that the skills model completely excludes the importance of personality as one of the three components of the skills model involves personal attributes which includes personality, cognitive ability and motivation.
The style approach to leadership emphasises the importance of behaviour, which is different from the personal characteristics approach of personality based models such as the trait approach. A big question of course is can leaders behave in a way that contradicts their natural characteristics or personality? Perhaps in the short term, but on an ongoing basis?
Using a tool such as the leadership grid appears to me to oversimplify the behaviours of leadership and shows little connection between the model of style and business performance. What good is a model, if it lacks predictive capabilities? Likewise who is to say that there is a certain style of leadership most suited to a specific situation!
Situational leadership recognises that certain leaders are more successful in certain situations and espouses the need for leaders to flex and adapt their style to match the situation. Leadership style within a situational model of leadership focuses on the two spectrums of support and direction, and requires behaviour to be adapted across both.
Conclusion
When you look at some of the underpinning drivers of leadership approaches such as style, situation, and skill, I would argue that personality plays an important part.
My issue with all these models, including the trait model, is that for all the research and academic debate that has gone on over the last half century, why are we still so poor at predicting leadership success?
Perhaps leadership of more of an art than a science and therefore the factors of success are less definable than we may wish for.
I have spent many years using personality measurement within the context of picking current and future leaders and would argue that the trait approach can be a useful tool in identifying who will not be successful in a leadership role. However, using an endless list of traits, based on some theoretical model of leadership, is in my experience pointless.
Using the big five however, (Myers 2007, pp618 -620) and being clear regarding the consequences of an individual’s profile on the role you are looking to fill can be a valuable process to undertake.
For me, businesses spend too much time looking to select people into a role and not enough focus on selecting people out of a role. In other words, identify those key characteristics, such as emotional instability, low drive, and a lack of conscientiousness, that should exclude a candidate from a process, and then consider their skills, style, and ability to adapt to different situations to inform your choice.
I used to work for a privately owned business that used an external assessment company to conduct a personality, cognitive and situational leadership assessment on every managerial candidate for a leadership role. Occasionally the business would make an appointment against the advice of the assessment, and in every case 18 months down the line issues would have arisen directly in line with the concerns the assessment report suggested. The lesson for me from this was that personality, when measure along with intellect, skills, and situational capability, makes an invaluable contribution to selection decisions.
A final though on this subject is the difference between Abell’s (2006) approach to linking leadership with strategy, a forward looking approach, and the immobility of approaches such as the skills approach, which appear more focused on management tasks rather than the leadership of future success. I would argue that this gives more support to the idea of using a personality based approach, such as that proposed by Hogan & Kaiser (2005), looking for that magic ingredient of leader who can transform the organisation, and more importantly transform the hearts and minds of the workforce.
References
Abell, D.F. (2006) ‘The future of strategy is leadership’, Journal of Business Research 59 (3), pp. 310–314, Science Direct [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.09.003 (Accessed: 14th May 2010).
Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R.B. (2005) ‘What we know about leadership’, Review of General Psychology 9 (2), pp. 169–180, PsycArticles [Online]. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 (Accessed: 15th May 2010).
Myers, D (2007) Psychology, 8th Edition. New York, NY. Worth Publishing
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
Charismatic Leadership and its impact on Performance
Would you class Nelson Mandela as a charismatic leader? He transformed his country and bought racially divided groups closer together, yet his political speeches lasted for hours and were often incoherent.
How about Winston Churchill? This was a man who was able to bring the British people together to fight Nazism, yet was hardly ever seen in public, every speech he gave was extensively rehearsed, and he spent most of the day intoxicated through the excessive consumption of champagne, claret and brandy!
How about Robert Mugabe, he bought two tribal factions together to oust white rule and has followed a policy of redistributing land and wealth to veterans of the war of independence, yet has seen his country become one of the most poverty stricken on earth?
So who is the charismatic leader and how has this impacted the performance of his team?
The attraction of a Charismatic Leader
The research into transformational and charismatic leadership suggests a high level of attraction to charismatic leaders through an appeal of common values and ideals. Transformational leadership consists of four distinct dimensions:
• Idealised Influence (Charisma)
• Inspirational Motivation
• Intellectual Stimulation
• Individualised consideration
In this model charisma is only a component of transformational leadership whilst we can argue that they are either one in the same, or that charismatic leadership is the primary driver of successful leadership.
House (1976) model of charismatic leadership was based around four personality characteristics
• Dominant
• Desire to Influence
• Self-Confident
• Strong Moral Values
Within charismatic leaders these personality characteristics lead on to certain behaviours which then have an effect on followers.
Key amongst these displayed behaviours are acting as a strong role model of the values and beliefs they want to see their follower adopt, an air of competence, they articulate morale goals, they communicate high expectations of followers and display confidence that they will be achieved, and finally they arouse a task level motivation amongst their followers.
I would argue that it is this arousal within followers of a desire to deliver that makes charismatic leaders sought after by their followers.
The affective influence processes followed by charismatic leaders are based on creating positive emotions within both themselves and their followers, and therefore it is this emotional engagement that connects followers with their leaders. Charismatic leaders use powerful emotions to arouse similar feelings in their followers.
Does Charismatic Leadership equal improved performance?
The argument for improving performance through charismatic leadership is based on the idea of building an emotional contract of engagement that uses positive emotions to motivate followers into conducting work based tasks more effectively. Having a clearly communicated vision is a key aspect of charismatic leadership and the importance of this is echoed by Abel (2006) who links effective leadership with Strategy, an important component of which is a clear vision.
However, an argument around charismatic leadership is the collective will being placed above individual gain to achieve a common vision built by a charismatic leader, leading to higher performance.
This argument appears to be a contradiction to the work of Houghton & Yoho (2005) whose contingent model of leadership is based around self-leadership through psychological empowerment. Can you have self leadership and charismatic leadership side by side?
With charismatic leadership drawing its roots from personality, where is the consideration of what Hogan & Kaiser (2005) would refer to as the dark side or the consequence of this personality based approach to leadership. Whilst Ilies et al (2006) may be happy to dismiss some of the most hated dictators in history as pseudo-charismatic leaders, in it for themselves rather than real charismatic leaders who have a powerful morale core, I don’t buy the concept of selfless leaders in the commercial business world.
Whether it be ego, greed, pride, vanity, or the call of a greater good, leadership that strives to focus followers on a perhaps unquestioned delivery of a goal or purpose are replacing individual ownership of self performance with a personality based follower process that often, in the commercial world leads eventually to the moral corruption of a business, such as WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Maxwell group, Northern Rock etc.
Conclusion
I have always enjoyed working for a charismatic leader who provides a compelling sense of purpose and rallies the troops to a common cause. But modern leadership is surely about the inclusion of a flexible contribution from a diverse and talented group of individuals.
The nature of the relationship between organisation and employee has also moved from a relationship based psychological contract to a transactional based psychological contract, which again in my view undermines the effectiveness of charismatic leadership.
A final thought that comes to mind is if charismatic leadership was the secret to organisational performance, why do shareholders not demand this in their leaders of businesses? Are there not more grey suited accountants running businesses in the FTSE 100 than there are charismatic leaders?
Mandela, Churchill & Mugabe were all, I would suggest, Charismatic leaders, at least in the eyes of their followers, for as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps charisma is in the eye of the follower!
References
Abell, D.F. (2006) ‘The future of strategy is leadership’, Journal of Business Research 59 (3), pp. 310–314, Science Direct [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.09.003 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R.B. (2005) ‘What we know about leadership’, Review of General Psychology 9 (2), pp. 169–180, PsycArticles [Online]. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Houghton, J.D., & Yoho, S.K. (2005) ‘Toward a Contingency Model of Leadership and Psychological Empowerment: When Should Self-Leadership Be Encouraged?’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 11 (4), pp. 65–83, Sage Journals [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/107179190501100406 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Ilies, R., Judge, T., & Wagner, D. (2006) ‘Making sense of motivational leadership: The trail from transformational leaders to motivated followers’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 13 (1), pp. 1–22, Sage Journals [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/10717919070130010301 (Accessed: 28th Mat 2010).
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Pilbeam, S. & Corbridge, M. (2006) People Resourcing: Contemporary HRM In Practice. 3rd Edition. London. Prentice Hall International
How about Winston Churchill? This was a man who was able to bring the British people together to fight Nazism, yet was hardly ever seen in public, every speech he gave was extensively rehearsed, and he spent most of the day intoxicated through the excessive consumption of champagne, claret and brandy!
How about Robert Mugabe, he bought two tribal factions together to oust white rule and has followed a policy of redistributing land and wealth to veterans of the war of independence, yet has seen his country become one of the most poverty stricken on earth?
So who is the charismatic leader and how has this impacted the performance of his team?
The attraction of a Charismatic Leader
The research into transformational and charismatic leadership suggests a high level of attraction to charismatic leaders through an appeal of common values and ideals. Transformational leadership consists of four distinct dimensions:
• Idealised Influence (Charisma)
• Inspirational Motivation
• Intellectual Stimulation
• Individualised consideration
In this model charisma is only a component of transformational leadership whilst we can argue that they are either one in the same, or that charismatic leadership is the primary driver of successful leadership.
House (1976) model of charismatic leadership was based around four personality characteristics
• Dominant
• Desire to Influence
• Self-Confident
• Strong Moral Values
Within charismatic leaders these personality characteristics lead on to certain behaviours which then have an effect on followers.
Key amongst these displayed behaviours are acting as a strong role model of the values and beliefs they want to see their follower adopt, an air of competence, they articulate morale goals, they communicate high expectations of followers and display confidence that they will be achieved, and finally they arouse a task level motivation amongst their followers.
I would argue that it is this arousal within followers of a desire to deliver that makes charismatic leaders sought after by their followers.
The affective influence processes followed by charismatic leaders are based on creating positive emotions within both themselves and their followers, and therefore it is this emotional engagement that connects followers with their leaders. Charismatic leaders use powerful emotions to arouse similar feelings in their followers.
Does Charismatic Leadership equal improved performance?
The argument for improving performance through charismatic leadership is based on the idea of building an emotional contract of engagement that uses positive emotions to motivate followers into conducting work based tasks more effectively. Having a clearly communicated vision is a key aspect of charismatic leadership and the importance of this is echoed by Abel (2006) who links effective leadership with Strategy, an important component of which is a clear vision.
However, an argument around charismatic leadership is the collective will being placed above individual gain to achieve a common vision built by a charismatic leader, leading to higher performance.
This argument appears to be a contradiction to the work of Houghton & Yoho (2005) whose contingent model of leadership is based around self-leadership through psychological empowerment. Can you have self leadership and charismatic leadership side by side?
With charismatic leadership drawing its roots from personality, where is the consideration of what Hogan & Kaiser (2005) would refer to as the dark side or the consequence of this personality based approach to leadership. Whilst Ilies et al (2006) may be happy to dismiss some of the most hated dictators in history as pseudo-charismatic leaders, in it for themselves rather than real charismatic leaders who have a powerful morale core, I don’t buy the concept of selfless leaders in the commercial business world.
Whether it be ego, greed, pride, vanity, or the call of a greater good, leadership that strives to focus followers on a perhaps unquestioned delivery of a goal or purpose are replacing individual ownership of self performance with a personality based follower process that often, in the commercial world leads eventually to the moral corruption of a business, such as WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Maxwell group, Northern Rock etc.
Conclusion
I have always enjoyed working for a charismatic leader who provides a compelling sense of purpose and rallies the troops to a common cause. But modern leadership is surely about the inclusion of a flexible contribution from a diverse and talented group of individuals.
The nature of the relationship between organisation and employee has also moved from a relationship based psychological contract to a transactional based psychological contract, which again in my view undermines the effectiveness of charismatic leadership.
A final thought that comes to mind is if charismatic leadership was the secret to organisational performance, why do shareholders not demand this in their leaders of businesses? Are there not more grey suited accountants running businesses in the FTSE 100 than there are charismatic leaders?
Mandela, Churchill & Mugabe were all, I would suggest, Charismatic leaders, at least in the eyes of their followers, for as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps charisma is in the eye of the follower!
References
Abell, D.F. (2006) ‘The future of strategy is leadership’, Journal of Business Research 59 (3), pp. 310–314, Science Direct [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2005.09.003 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R.B. (2005) ‘What we know about leadership’, Review of General Psychology 9 (2), pp. 169–180, PsycArticles [Online]. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Houghton, J.D., & Yoho, S.K. (2005) ‘Toward a Contingency Model of Leadership and Psychological Empowerment: When Should Self-Leadership Be Encouraged?’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 11 (4), pp. 65–83, Sage Journals [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/107179190501100406 (Accessed: 28th May 2010).
Ilies, R., Judge, T., & Wagner, D. (2006) ‘Making sense of motivational leadership: The trail from transformational leaders to motivated followers’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 13 (1), pp. 1–22, Sage Journals [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/10717919070130010301 (Accessed: 28th Mat 2010).
Northouse, P.G. (2010) Leadership: Theory and practice 4th ed. London: Sage.
Pilbeam, S. & Corbridge, M. (2006) People Resourcing: Contemporary HRM In Practice. 3rd Edition. London. Prentice Hall International
Thursday, 11 March 2010
The Future of Strategy is leadership
The environment in which businesses must survive has been under rapid transformation since the start of the post-bureaucratic age commenced in the 1980's.
The transformation of the globalising economy has created a knowledge rich society, new technologies and Hypercompetition between firms across international boundaries.
This new era of globalisation has demanded a new cadre of leadership to deliver sustainable success in businesses operating in increasingly competitive markets. In most cases this means enhancing the wealth of the shareholders.
The volatile and ever changing business environment demands leaders who are able to pre-empt the future. In other words shift their focus from today’s performance to tomorrows potential. However achieving this without losing a grip on today’s performance is an ever present challenge.
Abel, D (2006) argues that strategy and leadership have converged into the same, and proposes 6 strategic leadership tasks as the priorities for new Leaders.
• The Duality of strategy focusing on today’s performance and tomorrows potential
• Vision, Mission, and Distinctive Profile become more important than Strategy
• Strategy balanced between resources, future opportunity, leadership purpose and leadership responsibility
• Strategy balancing the external changing world with the internal functional activities and business systems
• Leveraging systems as competitive advantage, such as supply chain
• Decentralising strategy-making from corporate centres to divisions and individuals.
The challenge of this approach to leadership is how it fits in a business environment that is facing a fight for survival. However, it is through this focus on future challenges and opportunities that will define the great business leaders of our era.
Defining Strategy and Leadership as one and the same perhaps does not recognise the multi faceted aspect of leadership in diverse settings in organisations. Whilst the important role of strategic planning, beyond extending the annual budget in to 3 or 5 year budgets, is difficult to deny, and that it must demand the close attention of business leaders, are strategy and leadership one in the same?
The transformation of the globalising economy has created a knowledge rich society, new technologies and Hypercompetition between firms across international boundaries.
This new era of globalisation has demanded a new cadre of leadership to deliver sustainable success in businesses operating in increasingly competitive markets. In most cases this means enhancing the wealth of the shareholders.
The volatile and ever changing business environment demands leaders who are able to pre-empt the future. In other words shift their focus from today’s performance to tomorrows potential. However achieving this without losing a grip on today’s performance is an ever present challenge.
Abel, D (2006) argues that strategy and leadership have converged into the same, and proposes 6 strategic leadership tasks as the priorities for new Leaders.
• The Duality of strategy focusing on today’s performance and tomorrows potential
• Vision, Mission, and Distinctive Profile become more important than Strategy
• Strategy balanced between resources, future opportunity, leadership purpose and leadership responsibility
• Strategy balancing the external changing world with the internal functional activities and business systems
• Leveraging systems as competitive advantage, such as supply chain
• Decentralising strategy-making from corporate centres to divisions and individuals.
The challenge of this approach to leadership is how it fits in a business environment that is facing a fight for survival. However, it is through this focus on future challenges and opportunities that will define the great business leaders of our era.
Defining Strategy and Leadership as one and the same perhaps does not recognise the multi faceted aspect of leadership in diverse settings in organisations. Whilst the important role of strategic planning, beyond extending the annual budget in to 3 or 5 year budgets, is difficult to deny, and that it must demand the close attention of business leaders, are strategy and leadership one in the same?
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