Identifying Leader Behaviors
A number of researchers have focused on the question of whether specific behaviors, rather than traits, make some leaders more effective than others.
1. If behavior studies turned up critical behavioral determinants of leadership, people could be trained to be leaders.
2. Four main leader behavior studies are carried out.
a. University of Iowa Studies—Kurt Lewin and associates—studied three leadership styles: autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire.
b. The Ohio State Studies identified two important dimensions of leader behavior—initiating structure and consideration.
c. University of Michigan Studies identified two dimensions of leader behavior—employee oriented and production oriented.
d. The Managerial Grid is a two-dimensional grid for appraising leadership styles using “concern for people” and “concern for production” as dimensions.
3. Predicting leadership success involved more than isolating a few leader traits or behavior. This “failure” to attain consistent results led to a focus on situational influences.
University of Iowa researcher, Kurt Lewin, conducted some of the earliest attempts to identify effective leadership behaviors.
1. Three types of leadership behavior styles were identified.
a. Autocratic leaders tend to make unilateral decisions, dictate work methods, limit worker
knowledge about goals to just the next step to be performed, and sometimes give feedback that is punitive.
b. Democratic leaders tend to involve the group in decision making, let the group determine
work methods, make overall goals known, and use feedback as an opportunity for helpful coaching.
c. Laissez-faire leaders generally give the group complete freedom, provide necessary materials, participate only to answer questions, and avoid giving feedback.
2. Research on the comparative effectiveness of the three leadership styles was inconclusive.
a. The laissez-fair style was ineffective.
b. The effectiveness of the autocratic and democratic leaders varied, although satisfaction levels tended to be higher in the democratically led groups.
Michigan Studies
The Michigan studies compared leadership within groups already identified as effective or as ineffective.
1. A continuum was developed from employee-centered to job-centered approaches.
2. With the employee-centered approach, managers channel their main attention to the human aspects of subordinates’ problems and to the development of an effective work group dedicated to high performance goals.
3. With the job-centered approach (or production-centered approach), leaders divide the work into routine tasks, determine work methods, and closely supervise workers to ensure that the methods are followed and productivity standards are met.
4. The outcomes of the study were mixed, but they sometimes showed that the high-producing work units tended to have job-centered supervisors.
Ohio State Studies
Researchers at the Ohio State University developed a questionnaire to measure leaders’ behaviors and to correlate them with group performance and satisfaction.
1. Two behaviors were identified as particularly important.
a. Initiating structure is the degree to which a leader defines his or her own role and the roles of subordinates in terms of achieving unit goals.
b. Consideration is the degree to which a leader builds mutual trust with subordinates, respects their ideas, and shows concern for their feelings.
2. In contrast to the Iowa and Michigan studies, the two behaviors were considered to be independent variables and are best illustrated with separate continuum rather than the single continuum developed in the Iowa and Michigan studies.
3. The leader who is high in both initiating structure and consideration was thought to be the most effective, but further research indicated that such a generalization was too simplistic.
The Mouton-Blake Managerial Grid uses concern for people and concern for production as its two axes.
1. Used a training device, the grid enables managers to understand their own styles.
2. The manager high in concern for people and concern for production is the theoretical ideal.
Research into male-female stereotypes of management styles do not hold. Most studies indicate
that male and female leaders are similar in the amounts of interpersonal and task behaviors exhibited.
Situational Theories
A. Lack of success in identifying an effective leadership style generalize-able to all situations led to consideration of situational factors—i.e., any particular style of leadership could be effective depending on the situation.
1. Situational theories are theories that emphasize situations.
2. Contingency theories are theories of leadership because they hold that appropriate leader traits or behaviors are contingent, or dependent, on relevant situational characteristics.
B. Fielder’s contingency model is a situational approach originally developed by Fred Fielder and
his associates.
1. A leader’s LPC orientation is a personality trait measured by the least preferred coworker (LPC) scale.
2. The LPC scale is a 1 to 8 rating by the leader of “the person with whom the leader can work least well.”
3. The interpretation of the scale has been controversial, but there is an orthodox interpretation at present.
a. Low-LPC leaders describe a least-preferred coworker in relatively negative terms and are likely to be task-motivated.
b. High-LPC leaders describe a least-preferred coworker in relatively positive terms and are likely to be people-motivated.
4. Fielder maintains that management style or LPC orientation is difficult to change, so it is important to carefully match the leader’s personality to situational factors that favor the leader’s prospects for success.
a. The situation should be assessed to determine the degree of situational control for the leader.
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