The Nature of Leadership
Volume 17, Number 3 Article by Ravindra S Bangari September, 2005
The Nature of Leadership : Edited by John Antonakis, Anna T Cianciolo, and Robert J Sternberg, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004, pp. 438, Price: $: 49.95 (Cloth). :
The topic of leadership has engaged mankind from the dawn of civilisation, as evidenced by countless epics and mythologies. It is not surprisingly one of social science's most examined phenomena. An obvious challenge, while dealing with a subject which has triggered at least a hundred years of research, would be to put together a `sufficiently broad, yet concise and integrated, cutting-edge review of leadership' that will appeal not only to academicians and practitioners but also to the interested layman. Editors Antonakis, Cianciolo and Sternberg have done just that in portrayed through the empirical analysis carried out on survey data from the US and Europe. The flavour of the process of establishing complementarities is provided in the subsequent chapter through case studies of British Petroleum and Unilever. The last chapter in the section, in order to provide a sector-specific view, looks at the evolution of four professional service organisations.
The section on managing dualities raises several interesting questions and provides food for thought. The conceptualisation of sixteen `people management dualities' under four heads is elegantly done. The chapter on the moderating effect of the nation state suggests a strong rationale for the difference in the content and pace of innovation in organisational forms across different nations. Dualities such as centralisation-decentralisation, hierarchy-network etc. are classified as a meta-duality under the head homogeneity-heterogeneity. Strategies for coping with the phenomenon are outlined with examples from three cases.
A special mention must be made of the concluding chapter that looks in depth at the production of social knowledge by researchers with diverse backgrounds from disparate regions of the world. It is indeed a unique case, and researchers aiming to carry inter-regional or inter-disciplinary research would benefit from the insights in the chapter.
The work concludes that organisations across the world have increasingly adopted innovation with differences in pace and extent owing to the difference in the institutional factors across regions. These innovations however have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary with the innovative forms supplementing, rather than supplanting the traditional forms of organising. The central message of the book is the need to strive for complementarities and manage dualities, implementing the full complement of changes especially since partial changes would actually reduce the performance of the organisation.
Given the multitude of researchers involved, a clear stand with regard to the nature of innovative forms does not seem to emerge. For example, should the forms encountered in the book be treated as forms in transition? Is there an ideal form to aim for, or are there several equifinal paths? While the cases seem to suggest the possibility of equifinal forms, this view has not been probed or developed further.
The writing style and format varies between chapters. For example, some cases such as the ING case in Chapter 5 are rich in description while some others such as the OEB or Hilti case in Chapter 3 do not have the same depth. The numbering of chapters and sections could have been carried out in a more modular way. Repetition between the two books seems to have been inevitable due to the nature of the subject. Chapter 11 alone makes good use of the first book as cognitive capabilities; personality; motives and needs; social capacities; problem solving skills; and tacit knowledge. Based on these findings, a model of leader attributes is proposed, which can be used to predict leader performance. Brown, Scott and Lewis review an emerging area of leadership research that conceptualises leadership as a social process. This comprises information processing theories that define leadership as the process of influencing others by examining the cognitive mechanisms that mediate the influencing process. R Ayman similarly reviews the classic contingency theories of leadership, concluding that effective leaders respond to the situation by changing their behaviours, by being perceived as behaving differently, or by choosing and managing their situation. This brings them closer to being in touch with the situation and experiencing `flow', which is why contingencies cannot be ignored. M Sashkin reviews the emerging literature on leadership under the rubric of transformational, charismatic, and visionary leadership approaches. Tracing the origin of these theories to the critical distinction first raised by Weber between economic and non-economic sources of authority, Sashkin sketches out eight of these approaches from literature and looks for commonalities across these approaches, namely behavioural competencies, personal competencies and the context of leadership in terms of organisational environment or culture.
The next section centres on perspectives used for judging leadership success, and issues in planning development of leadership. C D McCauley identifies the different ways in which leadership success is defined and the key themes therein, each with its related descriptors of successful and unsuccessful leadership. Among emerging perspectives are those targetting other sources that contribute to successful leadership (including the development of social capital and shared implicit theories of leadership, and the integration of macro and micro perspectives. London and Maurer present a dynamic, diagnostic leadership development model integrating individual and organisational perspectives to assess learning needs, processes and outcomes in continuously evolving organisations, based on compatibility and congruence between the organisation and the individual.
Emerging issues in leadership research, i.e., culture, gender and ethics, are taken up in the next part of the book. The contextual school is closely related to the contingency movement and looks at contextual factors giving rise to or inhibiting certain leadership behaviours or their dispositional antecedents. These can include leader hierarchical level, national culture, leader-follower gender, organisational characteristics, among others1. putting together this book to make sense of the vast amount of research and published material on leadership, which could otherwise lead one to perceive it as a somewhat elusive phenomenon.
The book is organised around four themes: the complexity, science and assessment of leadership; the major schools of leadership; leadership success and its development; and emerging issues in leadership _ culture, gender and ethics.
In Chapter 1, the editors provide an introduction to leadership, looking at its past, present and future, and the body of knowledge that has grown over the years. They also touch upon certain emerging issues in leadership research and go on to suggest how future leadership research can be consolidated by constituting `hybrid theories of leadership (integrating diverse perspectives, such as, cognitive and situational) or even hybrid-integrative perspectives' to take it to the next level of a possible general theory of leadership.
In the section devoted to the complexity, science and assessment of leadership, J G Hunt explores the concept of leadership, using a `historical-contextual superstructure' framework focusing on a number of contextual antecedents (paradigmatic; purpose; definitional; stakeholder; and levels of analysis and temporality) that have a bearing on one's conception of leadership (e.g. leadership as cognition; leadership as shared influence, self managing teams; leadership as culture, and even `e-leadership'). This provides an organisational framework for structuring the discussion in the remaining chapters. Antonakis et al. discuss the nature of leadership theory and how it is tested and developed, presenting a summary of key research-methodology sub-domains, illustrated liberally with examples of application of methods. They cover important methodological issues, whose neglect they feel could seriously impinge upon the validity of research findings. Kroeck, Lowe and Brown tackle the questions of what and how we measure when we assess leadership, and how valid these measures are in predicting organisational outcomes like performance, change and profit. The authors have compiled a useful summary list of some of the oft-used leadership measures to give an idea of the range of instruments available for the above task.
The next part of the book deals with the four major schools of leadership _ trait theories, information processing theories, contingency theories, and the transformational leadership paradigm. Zaccaro, Kemp and Bader trace the history of trait theory and review studies of leader attributes published between 1990 and 2003. They find that leader characteristics with substantial empirical support can be grouped into: leadership. What is commendable is the range of issues and perspectives that have been brought together and the interesting research leads pointed out all through. Closer home, as we get on with our day-to-day lives and humdrum decision making, we may benefit too by remembering that exceptional leadership, often, is about `exemplary, creative problem solving _ the discovery of new solutions to unprecedented problems' and being mentally prepared for our own hour of reckoning.
References and Notes <0l style="margin-left: 10px;" mce_style="margin-left: 10px;">
- The author cites Antonakis, J, B J Avolio, and N Sivasubramaniam, 2003, `Context and Leadership: An Examination of the Nine-factor Full-Range Leadership Theory using Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ Form 5X)', Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 14, pp. 261-295.
- A long term study on how societal and organisational cultures affect leadership and organisational practices: House et al, 1999, `Cultural Influences on Leadership and Organizations: Project GLOBE', in W H Mobley, M J Gessner and V Arnold (Eds.), Advances in Global Leadership, pp. 171-233, Stamford, CT: JAI.
- Hofstede presents four culture dimensions: individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, uncertainty avoidance and power distance (Hofstede, G, 1980, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work Related Values, Sage). In a later work (Hofstede, G, 1994, `Managerial Values', Harvard Business Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 1-14), he adds `future orientation'.
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