Challenges in Leadership: Part 3 of 3

Victor1558 (cc)

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” —Thomas Jefferson

We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on the challenges of leadership. Today’s post is all about leadership and ethics — and with Corporate Compliance and Ethics Week coming up next Monday, be sure to tune in for more related research and insights.

In their article “The Role of Moral Values in Instigating Morally Responsible Decisions” (Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, March 2013), Richard P. Bagozzi, Leslie E. Sekerka, Vanessa Hill, and Francesco Sguera warn of “the distance between espoused values and values in action” in leaders that can block “the virtuous self”:

If we want leaders to model this competency and build ethical organizations, we must provide them with the tools to understand their values at a root level and how to act accordingly. Putting expectations into action for virtuous human systems means helping people understand how their values may serve as guides to behavioral choices. Without focused awareness and commitment to right action, these values can dissipate. [Read more]

In “Someone to Look Up To: Executive-Follower Ethical Reasoning and Perceptions of Ethical Leadership” (Journal of Management, March 2013), Jennifer Jordan, Michael E. Brown, Linda K. Treviño, and Sydney Finkelstein look into what makes ethical leaders tick:

Despite a business environment that highlights the importance of executives’ ethical leadership, the individual antecedents of ethical leadership remain largely unknown. In this study, the authors propose that follower perceptions of ethical leadership depend on the executive leader’s cognitive moral development (CMD) and, more importantly, on the relationship between executive leader and follower CMD. [Read more]

And in his article “Leading questions: Leadership, ethics, and administrative evil” (Leadership, May 2012), George E. Reed warns of modern organizations’ “diffusion of information” and “fragmentation of responsibility,” noting:

The result is the very real possibility that well-intentioned people who conscientiously perform their jobs will unintentionally participate in systems and processes that produce great harm. Some may not even be aware that they are doing anything wrong; they certainly intend no great harm, and furthermore, those around them would likely agree at the time that they are simply acting in consonance with accepted professional roles and practices. They may also play a crucial part in a larger process that perpetrates harm. [Read more]

Challenges in Leadership: Part 2 of 3

Victor1558 (cc)

“Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” —John C. Maxwell (author, speaker, and pastor)

In 1978, James MacGregor Burns defined transformational leaders as those “who engaged with their followers in such a way that each was raised to a higher level of morality and motivation.” How are employee engagement and leadership related? Does innovation and creativity increase when employees feel they can personally identify with their leader? How can leaders meet the challenge of enhancing their employees’ well-being as well as their performance on the job?

In their article “Examining the Role of Personal Identification With the Leader in Leadership Effectiveness: A Partial Nomological Network” (Group & Organization Management, February 2013, Weichun Zhu, Gang Wang, Xiaoming Zheng, Taoxiong Liu, and Qing Miao found that:

…transformational leadership was positively related to personal identification with the leader, which was significantly associated with followers’ innovativeness, affective organizational commitment, and turnover intention. [Read more]

In “Employee Engagement and Leadership: Exploring the Convergence of Two Frameworks and Implications for Leadership Development in HRD” (Human Resource Development Review, June 2012), Brad Shuck and Ann Mogan Herd write:

…leadership starts with the self. Leaders who are looking to build engaging climates should be encouraged to develop in the four domains of emotional intelligence, especially the domain of self-awareness. As the foundational domain for which the other three are developed, self-awareness is the conceptual cornerstone of emotional intelligence and in many ways of leadership that promotes the development of engagement. [Read more]

And Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, David S. Sweetman, and Peter D. Harms, in their paper “Meeting the Leadership Challenge of Employee Well-Being Through Relationship PsyCap and Health PsyCap” (Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies February 2013), write:

Increasing recognition is being given to the role that employee overall well-being plays in desired outcomes of today’s organizations. To help organizational leaders searching for understanding and answers, we propose that the positive core construct of psychological capital (or simply PsyCap), consisting of the positive psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resiliency, and optimism can be extended into the well-being domain. [Read more]

Challenges in Leadership: Part 1 of 3

Is a narcissistic boss good or bad for the company? (Narcissus, via Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: This week, we are pleased to present a three-part series highlighting current research on key challenges facing leaders in the workplace.

“The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” —Jim Rohn (American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker)

Leaders are only human–and some of the most successful bosses out there can be arrogant, egotistical, and manipulative. Just how does this self-serving behavior positively or negatively affect employees, managers, and organizations?

In their award-winning article “Executive Personality, Capability Cues, and Risk Taking: How Narcissistic CEOs React to Their Successes and Stumbles”  (Administrative Science Quarterly, June 2011), Arijit Chatterjee and Donald C. Hambrick find that narcissistic bosses may be more effective risk-takers:

At the core of an executive’s subjective assessment of risk is his or her sense of confidence. Compared with gamblers, who cannot influence whether their bets will work out, business executives may believe that their personal talents, as well as the capabilities of their organizations, can greatly affect whether their risky initiatives will bear fruit. [Read more]

Update: Wolf-Christian Gerstner, Andreas König, Albrecht Enders, and Donald C. Hambrick have a brand-new article in ASQ, “CEO Narcissism, Audience Engagement, and Organizational Adoption of Technological Discontinuities,” which highlights “the role of narcissism in the context of radical organizational change, the influence of audience engagement on executive behavior, and the effect of executive personality on managerial attention.” Click here to read the article in ASQ’s OnlineFirst section.

On the other hand, Wayne A. Hochwarter and Katina W. Thompson in their article  “Mirror, mirror on my boss’s wall: Engaged enactment’s moderating role on the relationship between perceived narcissistic supervision and work outcomes” (Human Relations, March 2012) document the threats that selfish bosses pose to employee well-being:

Defined as an ego-defensive response to interruptions in goal attainment (Rosenzweig, 1944), frustration has been identified as an outcome of threatening social cues including perceived politics (Rosen et al., 2009), injustice (Lillis et al., 2007), and coworker counterproductive work behaviors (Fox and Spector, 1999). Supervisor ego-nurturing behavior, when persistent and focused, provokes frustration because it introduces bias that affects subsequent interactions and reward decisions (Emmons, 1984). [Read more]

And an article published this month in the Journal of Management’s OnlineFirst section by Frank D. Belschak, Deanne N. Den Hartog, and Karianne Kalshoven, “Leading Machiavellians: How to Translate Machiavellians’ Selfishness Into Pro-Organizational Behavior,” finds manipulative leaders may offer desirable results for organizations:

Machiavellians are said to be manipulative people who reduce the social capital of the organization. Yet some authors note that Machiavellians are also highly adaptive individuals who are able to contribute, cooperate, and use pro-social strategies when it is advantageous to them. Here we study whether transformational leader behavior can stimulate Machiavellian followers to engage in organizationally desirable behaviors such as challenging organizational citizenship behavior. [Read more]

Do you know a leader who is particularly self-interested or overly demanding? Does this serve to increase their leadership effectiveness, or does it do more harm than good?

Top Five: Leadership, Ethics, Resistance to Change, and More

How can management scholars and practitioners better understand the factors that enable (or disable) ethics in organizational life? How can organizations heal after a crisis, and end up stronger than before? How are middle managers creating positive social change? These and other questions of organizational effectiveness and humane organizing are addressed in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science’s current top five most-read articles. Some classic, some new, these papers are freely available to access using the links below through April 26. Please share and enjoy!

Linda Smircich and Gareth Morgan
Leadership: The Management of Meaning
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, September 1982

Eric B. Dent and Susan Galloway Goldberg
Challenging “Resistance to Change”
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, March 1999

David S. Bright and Ronald E. Fry
Introduction: Building Ethical, Virtuous Organizations
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, March 2013

Garima Sharma and Darren Good
The Work of Middle Managers: Sensemaking and Sensegiving for Creating Positive Social Change
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, March 2013

Edward H. Powley
The Process and Mechanisms of Organizational Healing
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, March 2013

Stay abreast of the latest most-read and most-cited articles from The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science: subscribe to the RSS feed, and click here to receive e-alerts about new articles and issues published online before they’re in print.

Who Is a Leader?

As SIOP 2013 draws near, we’re highlighting industrial-organizational psychology perspectives on management topics. Today, we look at “Five Perspectives on the Leadership– Management Relationship: A Competency- Based Evaluation and Integration,” published by Daniel V. Simonet and Robert P. Tett, both of the University of Tulsa, in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies on December 12, 2012:

How management and leadership are best conceptualized with respect to each other has been a frequent topic of debate. Five distinct perspectives are identified in the literature, including bipolar, unidimensional, bidimensional, hierarchical— management within leadership, and hierarchical—leadership within management. We assessed the viability of these perspectives by having Academy of Management and Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology experts (N = 43) map a comprehensive set of 63 managerial and leadership competencies, as a “common language,” onto defined and undefined management and leadership dimensions. Results reveal interpretable patterns of uniqueness and overlap, suggesting a hybrid co-dimensional/bidimensional configuration. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the precedence of “what” over “how” in developing leadership and management theory.

Click here to continue reading “Five Perspectives on the Leadership– Management Relationship: A Competency- Based Evaluation and Integration,” published by Daniel V. Simonet and Robert P. Tett in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, and stay tuned for more related research ahead of #SIOP13.

How Leadership Styles Influence Firm Performance

John-Morgan (cc)

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Suzanne M. Carter of Texas Christian University, whose paper “Strategic Leadership: Values, Styles, and Organizational Performance,” co-authored by Charles R. Greer of Texas Christian University, is forthcoming in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.

My colleague, Bob Greer and I, were surprised to find so many leadership styles being posited in our review of the literature. Moreover, when viewed from the standpoint of the leader’s ability to be successful, it seems that the number of things that leaders are becoming responsible for is growing rapidly. Unfortunately, we still know little, from an empirical standpoint, about whether certain leadership styles tend to lend themselves to better organizational outcomes.

The biggest surprise for us, I suppose, was discovering how little we know to date about the influence of leadership styles on firm performance from a top management perspective. In particular, evidence of leadership styles at the top management level on outcomes beyond the financial realm is extremely limited. Although some work is being done on the impact of leadership style on group processes, little empirical work has examined the impact of these styles on triple bottom line organizational outcomes such as environmental responsibility and social issues such as diversity practices.  Most of the work remains theoretical at this stage.

I hope that our article spurs an increase in empirical research on this topic. It is essential that we understand the link between leadership style and organizational performance outcomes if we are to understand the benefits of encouraging certain leader behavior.

Read the paper, “Strategic Leadership: Values, Styles, and Organizational Performance,” online in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies.

Positive Leadership and Employee Well-Being

E. Kevin Kelloway, Heidi Weigand, Margaret C. McKee, and Hari Das, all of Saint Mary’s University, published “Positive Leadership and Employee Well-Being” in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies February 2013 issue. The abstract:

We report two studies examining the relationship between positive leadership behaviors and employee well-being. In the first, data from 454 nursing home employees showed that (a) a newly developed measure of positive leadership was distinct from transformational leadership and (b) positive leadership behaviors predicted context-specific and context-free well-being after controlling for transformational and abusive leadership. In the second study, data from a daily diary study (N = 26) showed that (a) positive leadership predicted positive, but not negative, employee affect and (b) positive leadership interacted with transformational leadership to predict employees positive affect.

Click here to continue reading the article, and sign up for e-alerts from the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies so you don’t miss the latest research articles on the intersection of leadership and organizational studies.

The New Psychology of Leadership

Ready for a ground-breaking leadership read to start off your new year? Don’t miss Administrative Science Quarterly’s review of “The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power” by Alexander S. Haslam, Stephen D. Reicher, and Michael J. Platow. The book review, written by Caroline A. Bartel of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, was published in the September 2011 issue:

Would the field of organization studies benefit from another theory of leadership? This question will likely provoke some skepticism. Such a response is understandable. Leadership has been one of the most widely researched topics across many disciplines. Sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, historians, and organizational scholars, to name just a few, have offered important insights about who is fit to lead, under what circumstances, and what makes leaders more or less effective. In organization studies, myriad perspectives exist that differ in what constitutes the driving force for effective leadership, for example, whether it’s personality traits, situational opportunities and constraints, or person-situation fit. With many decades of research under our scholarly belts, we know a lot about leaders and leading, yet, with The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power, Haslam, Reicher, and Platow convincingly argue that there is fertile new ground to plow in the area of leadership.

Click here for free access to two years’ worth of book reviews from Administrative Science Quarterly. Happy New Year, everyone!

What Does Ethical Followership Look Like?

JD Hancock (cc)

If your boss asked you to do something unethical, would you obey, or would you resist? According to a new article in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies,

Followers face ethical dilemmas when leaders approach them with inappropriate requests, such as asking them to engage in behaviors that are clearly unethical. In such situations, followers must make a decision: They can choose to stand up to the unethical request (e.g., by challenging the leader’s directive, refusing to engage in unethical behavior, or proposing alternative courses of action) or they can go along with the leader’s request, in essence becoming complicit with the unethical behavior. This choice will likely be associated with their beliefs about the follower role and how followers should interact with leaders.

Melissa K. Carsten of Winthrop University and Mary Uhl-Bien of the University of Nebraska published “Ethical Followership: An Examination of Followership Beliefs and Crimes of Obedience” on November 9, 2012 in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies.

JLOS seeks to advance the theory, research and practice of all aspects of leadership and organizations, covering topics such as organizational behavior, human resource management, strategy, international management, and entrepreneurship. You can get e-alerts about new research from the journal by clicking here.

The Rhythm of Leading Change

Anna Tesar (cc by 2.0)

Leaders always face tough decisions, but some dilemmas can force them to choose between opposing alternatives, blurring the path forward and delaying or stalling their movement toward change. Larry Peters of Texas Christian University discovered that a rhythm can be traced in this kind of paradoxical force, a concept explored in his article “The Rhythm of Leading Change: Living With Paradox,” published in the latest issue of the Journal of Management Inquiry. To see other articles in the October issue, click here.

From the article:

In any complex change effort, interesting challenges can arise that create pressures that fight against leading. One such challenge is a paradox—alternatives that don’t follow from each other; where choosing one alternative acts to negate the other.

In a recent change consulting engagement, I started to notice these paradoxical circumstances. Each was different in terms of content, but all were alike in that they brought pressures on leaders that tended to stall or stop them from leading. What makes them interesting is that although the path forward isn’t always clear, these challenges always capture leaders’ attention, given that both alternatives may seem important to embrace, and they often affect their leadership.

I will describe two examples of these paradoxes based on an engagement at a company that was attempting to change its corporate culture. The business case for change had been made, and senior leaders across the organization accepted that the proposed changes were necessary, given the new business challenges the company faced. Leaders said they were “on board,” and several began leading in earnest to bring about this change. As the months went by, the change effort started to slow down, much like other change efforts that this leadership team had attempted to tackle. That’s when a team of internal and external consultants stepped up their support for these leaders.

Read the full article here, and click here to learn more about the Journal of Management Inquiry.

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