The SAGE Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies 1071840843, 9781071840849

Table of contents :
9781071840832_WEB_Vol 1
Cover
Half Title Page
Editorial Board
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Entries
Reader’s Guide
Contributors
Introduction
A
Ableism
Definition
What Is Disability?
Types of Ableism
Consequences of Ableism
Recommendations
Further Readings
Accountability
Why Leaders Are Held Accountable
How Leaders Are Held Accountable
Further Readings
Actor–Network Theory
Actor–Network Theory: The Basics
Actor–Network Theory as a Way of Understanding Leaders
Actor–Network Theory as a Way of Understanding Leadership
Actor–Network Theory and Leadership: Reservations and Hope
Further Readings
Adam Smith and Leadership
The Enlightenment Worldview
Sympathy
Socialization
Judgment
Self-Control
Public Policy
Trade and Globalization
Limited Government
Invisible Hand
Moral and Institutional Transformation
Politicians Versus Statesmen
Further Readings
Adaptive Leadership
How Adaptive Leadership Entered the Lexicon of Leadership Studies
Key Ideas
Authority Versus Leadership
Adaptive Leadership
Technical Versus Adaptive Work
Managing Disequilibrium
Diagnosing Stakeholder Values
Critiques of Adaptive Leadership
Further Readings
Aesthetic Leadership
What Does the Term Aesthetic Mean in Relation to Leadership?
Connecting Aesthetics and Leadership
Artful Leading
What Does Aesthetic Leadership Offer Leadership Theorizing More Generally?
Further Readings
Age and Leadership
Leader Age and Effectiveness
Leader Age and Innovation
Leader Age and Emotional Maturity
Age and Transformational Leadership
Leader Age and Status
Leader Age and Diversity Policies
Further Readings
Alienation
Interpretations of Alienation in Different Fields
Literature
Theology
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
Critiques of Alienation
Researching Alienation
Leadership and Alienation
Further Readings
Altruism
Altruism in the Laboratory
The Elusive Question of Motives
Altruism in Organizations
Altruism and Ethics
The Mindful Altruist
Beyond Altruism Versus Egoism
Further Readings
Appearance
Facial Appearance of Leadership Emergence and Effectiveness
Facial Appearance and Political Leadership
Evolutionary Contingency Hypothesis
Female, Minority, and Non-Western Leadership
Further Readings
Atatürk and the Turkish Transformation
Kemal's Early Life
World War I and the Struggle for Turkish Independence
The New Republic and the 1926 Civil Code
Reform, Resistance, and the Legacy of Leadership
Further Readings
Authentic Leadership
Authenticity
Defining Authentic Leadership
Antecedents and Outcomes of Authentic Leadership
Measurement of Authentic Leadership
The Case for and Against Authentic Leadership
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Autocratic Leadership
The Nature of Autocratic Leadership
Outcomes of Autocratic Leadership
Further Readings
B
Bad Leadership
Definition and Measurement
Reasons for the Growing Interest
Reasons and Remedies
Tasks for Further Research
Further Readings
Bathsheba Syndrome
Ludwig and Longenecker's Account
Alternative Approaches to the Moral Psychology of Leadership
Further Readings
Behavioral Economics
Behavioral Economics Compared With Neoclassical Economics
Data and Methodology in Behavioral Economics
Laboratory Experiments
Public Goods Game (PGG)
Field Data and Experiments
Nudges
Behavioral Economics and Leadership
Further Readings
Behavioral Theories of Leadership
The Ohio State Studies
The University of Michigan Studies
Limitations of the Behavioral Theories
Contributions of the Behavioral Theories of Leadership
Further Readings
Big Five Personality Traits
The Big Five Traits
Measures of the Big Five Subtraits
Research on the Big Five Traits
Neuroticism
Extraversion
Openness to Experience
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Workplace Research on the Big Five Traits
The Big Five Traits and Leadership
General Factor of Personality
Theoretical Limitations of the Big Five Model
Conclusion
Further Readings
Big Six of the Civil Rights Movement
A. Philip Randolph and the Labor Movement
Congress of Racial Equality: CORE
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Urban League: NUL
Southern Christian Leadership Conference: SCLC
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: SNCC
Further Readings
Biology of Leadership
Mapping Leadership Attributes Onto Brain Areas and Circuits
The Neurochemistry of Leadership
Leader–Follower Neural Coupling
Modulation of Leadership-Induced Stress Responses
Further Readings
Black Lives Matter and Leadership
Origins of Black Lives Matter
Galvanization of Black Lives Matter in 2020
Further Readings
Board Leadership
Leadership in the Boardroom
The Lead Director and Nonexecutive Chair Models of Leadership
How the Board Chairman Behavior Influences Leadership and Teamwork
Boardrooms: A Challenging Environment to Share Leadership
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Bureaucracy
Defining Bureaucracy
How Bureaucracy Comes About
Bounded Rationality
Models of Bureaucracies
Static, Persistent Model
Dynamic Model
Implications for Leadership
Further Readings
C
Caring Leadership
Care Ethics
Leading With Care
Leading Without Care
Final Thoughts
Further Readings
CEO Hubris
Hubris and Narcissism
Positive and Negative Manifestations of Hubris
Concluding Remarks
Further Readings
Change and Leadership
Leadership and Leaders of Change
Change Requires Leadership and Management
The Path Forward
Further Readings
Charismatic Leadership
The Alchemy of Charisma
The Scientific Study of Charisma
Future Directions
Further Readings
Charismatic Theory
Origins of Charismatic Leadership as a Construct
Early Theoretical Frameworks of Charismatic Leadership
Charismatic Leadership as a Dynamic Stage Model
Stage One: The Charismatic Leader's Search for Opportunities
Stage Two: Formulating and Articulating the Future Vision
Stage Three: Achieving the Future Vision
Liabilities of Charismatic Leadership
Further Readings
CIP Model of Leadership
Sensemaking and Leadership
Mental Models
Origins of CIP Styles: Formation of Mental Models
The CIP Theory of Leadership
Charismatic Pathway
Ideological Pathway
Pragmatic Pathway
Mixed Pathway
Research on CIP Theory
Limitations and Future of the CIP Theory
Further Readings
Civil Rights Movement
The Jim Crow South
Brown v. the Board of Education and a Burgeoning Movement
Rosa Parks Starts a Revolution
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
King and His Influence on the Movement
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Malcom X and His Influence on the Movement
The Movement After the March
Further Readings
Climate Change and Leadership
Climate Change
Consensus as Leadership
Youth as Leadership
Silos as Leadership
Further Readings
Coalitions
Making Coalitions Work
Collective Action Problems
Constructing Coalitions
Coalition Maintenance
Coalitions, Compromise, Commitment, and Collective Capacity
Further Readings
Coercive Management
The Complexity of Terminology
Evolutionary and Developmental Theories
Traits and Emotional Behaviors
Impact on Organizations and Employees
Further Readings
Cognitive Biases in Leadership
The Nature of Cognitive Bias
Critical Cognitive Biases in Leadership
Conservative Biases
Information Processing Biases
Egocentric Biases
Further Readings
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Foundations of Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cognitive Discrepancy and Dissonance
Dissonance and Discrepancy Reduction
Implications of Cognitive Dissonance Theory for Leaders and Followers
Further Readings
Collapsing Toxic Triangles
Cocreation of Destructive Leadership
Context
Susceptible Followers
Destructive Leaders
Courageous Followership
Follower Behaviors to Collapse Toxic Triangles
Further Readings
Collective Action
The Problem of Collective Action
Leadership as a Solution to Collective Action Problems
Characteristics of Effective Collective Action Leaders
Further Readings
Collective Intelligence
General Intelligence and Collective Intelligence
Evidence of Collective Intelligence
Smart Groups or Groups of Smart People?
When Expertise Fails
Factors Associated With Collective Intelligence
Further Readings
Collective Leadership
Conceptual Frameworks
Social Identity
Outcomes of Collective Leadership
Developing Collective Leadership
The Role of Formal Leaders
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Collective Responsibility
Responsible Leadership
Collective Leadership
Bridging Collective and Responsible
Further Readings
Communication
Models of Communication
Management vs. Leadership
Communication Strategies for Leaders
Further Readings
Community Leadership
Key Concepts in a Community Perspective on Leadership
Individualism
Sense of Belonging
Friendships and Social Networks
Concluding Remarks
Further Readings
Community Wealth Building
Origins of Community Wealth Building as a Concept
Practical Applications
Future Trends and Possibilities: Community Wealth Building as Policy Paradigm
Further Readings
Complexity Leadership Theory
Leading in Complexity
Adaptive and Order Responses
Enabling Adaptive Responses
The CLT Adaptive Process
The Complexity Leadership Model
Complexity Leadership and Followership Mindsets and Skills
Collaboration Mindset
Adaptive Mindset
Emergence Mindset
Outcomes Mindset
Further Readings
Conformity
Classic Conformity Studies
Sherif's Studies
Asch's Studies
Follow-up Findings
Normative and Informational Influences on Conformity
Cultural Context to Conformity
Groupthink
Further Readings
Confucian Ethics
Agent-Centered Self-Refinement
Role-Fulfillment as Key Way to Refine the Self
Aesthetic Dimension of Virtuous Action
Emphasis on Exemplary Individuals
Further Readings
Congressional Leadership
An Institutional View of Congressional Leadership
Leaders in the House of Representatives
Leaders in the Senate
Theories of Congressional Leadership
Further Readings
Connective Leadership
The Achieving Styles Model
The Direct Set: Acts Directly on the Situation
Intrinsic Direct
Competitive Direct
Power Direct
The Instrumental Set: Self and Others as Instruments for Achievement
Personal Instrumental
Social Instrumental
Entrusting Instrumental
The Relational Set: Achievement Through Relationships
Collaborative Relational
Contributory Relational
Vicarious Relational
Assessment Tools, Research, and Applications for Individuals and Organizations
Connective Leadership Assessments
Applications: Practice Beyond Theory
Research Highlights on Connective Leadership
Conclusion
Further Readings
Conspiracy Theories
Methodological Note: Measurement
Methodological Note: Causation
Consequences of Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Antecedents of Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Need to Restore Control/Certainty
Need to Bolster/Protect Identity
Demographics/Personality Characteristics
Mitigating the Spread of and Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Further Readings
Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences
Human Followership: Default Preferences for Warm and Nondominant Leaders
The Intergroup Conflict–Leader Dominance Link
Individual Differences and Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences
Context-Sensitivity: Sensitive to What Sort of Contexts?
Conclusion
Further Readings
Contingency Theories
Contingency Model of Leadership Effectiveness
Cognitive Resource Theory
Further Readings
Cooperation
How Researchers Study Cooperation and Human Behavior
Why Individuals Cooperate in a Competitive World
Cooperation and Leadership
Further Readings
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Responsibilities to Society
Fulfilling Corporate Responsibilities to Society
Discretion
Social Orientation
The Effects of CSR on the Firm
The Effects of CSR on Society
Further Readings
COVID-19 Pandemic
Leadership Based on Shared Responsibility, Science, Equity, and Solidarity in the COVID-19 Era
Shared Responsibility
Science-Based Communication
Equity
Solidarity
Conclusion
Further Readings
Creativity and Leadership
Leadership
Leading the Work
Leading the Team
Leading the Firm
Further Readings
Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership
The Paradox of Innovation Leadership
The Creative Engine
Creative People and Process
Innovation Networks
Climate of Innovation
Creative Spaces
Further Readings
Criminal Law
Criminal Behavior
Punishment
Enforcing Criminal Law
Determining Guilt
Challenging the Criminal Law
Further Readings
Crisis Leadership
The First Leadership Challenge of Crises: Decision-Making
Addressing the Decision-Making Challenge
The Second Leadership Challenge of Crises: Communication
Addressing the Communication Challenge
The Third Leadership Challenge of Crises: Collaborating With and Empowering Others
Addressing the Collaboration and Empowerment Challenge
Crisis Aftermath
Further Readings
Critical Leadership Studies
Critical Perspectives on Leadership
Power
Inequalities
Followership
Conclusion
Further Readings
Critical Race Theory
The Struggle Around Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory Beginnings
Foundational Ideas of Critical Race Theory
Five Tenets of Critical Race Theory
Toward a Critical Race Theory Leadership Practice
Further Readings
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cold War Context for the Missile Crisis
Finding a Peaceful Solution to the Crisis
The Aftermath of the Crisis
Lessons for Leadership
Further Readings
Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles
Leadership Across Cultures: Theory and Some Results
Cultural Differences in Leadership: Historical Origins, Change, and Transmission
Studying Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles: Methodological Considerations
Further Readings
Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education
Demographic Changes in American Society and K-12 Schools
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Liberatory Consciousness
Pluralistic Insight
Reflexive Practice
Further Readings
D
Daoist Moral Obligations
On the Concepts of De and Dao
On the Principle of Moral Action: Act by Nonaction
On Daoist Leadership: Lead by Following
Further Readings
Dark Triad
Origins of the Dark Triad
Components of the Dark Triad
Narcissism
Machiavellianism
Psychopathy
Measures of the Dark Triad
Leadership and the Dark Triad
Further Readings
Death Positivity Bias and Leadership
Explanations for the Death Positivity Bias
Real-World Examples of the Death Positivity Bias
Phenomena Related to the Death Positivity Bias
Further Readings
Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of
Assessing the Means of Leadership
The Moral Case Against Deception
Manipulation
Remaining Issues
Further Readings
Decision-Making Theory
General Approaches to Decision-Making
Decision-Making and Organizational Structures
Critical Self-Learning and Organizational Learning: A Popperian Perspective
The Objective Knowledge Growth Framework
Further Readings
Democratic Leadership
Democratic Leadership in Ancient Athens
Aristotle and the Moderating Task of Democratic Leadership
Machiavelli and the Origins of Modern Democratic Leadership
Representation and Modern Democratic Leadership
Executive Power and Public Opinion
The Progressive View of Democratic Leadership
Further Readings
Deontology and Rights
Deontological Theories
Rights
Rationalizing Deontological Rights
Leadership and Deontological Rights
Further Readings
Destructive Leadership
The Leader-Centric Perspective on Destructive Leadership
The Toxic Triangle Perspective on Destructive Leadership
Conclusion
Further Readings
Dirty Hands
Key Features of the Problem
Is the Problem Real?
Potential Causes of the Problem
Democratic Dirty Hands
Further Readings
Disagreement, Ethics of
Social Contract Theory: Decision by Majority Vote
Political Perfectionism: Decision by Experts
Communitarianism and Deliberative Democracy
Further Readings
Discourse Ethics
Introduction to Discourse Ethics
Deliberative Democracy: The Extension of Discourse Ethics as a Response to Its Criticism
Discourse Ethics in Organization and Leadership Theory
Further Readings
Distributed Leadership
Emergence of Distributed Leadership Studies
Categories of Distributed Leadership
Benefits of Distributed Leadership
Issues of Distributed Leadership
Further Readings
Distributive Egalitarianism
The Moral Basis for Distributive Egalitarianism
Strict Distributive Egalitarianism
Alternatives to Strict Distributive Egalitarianism
Challenges and Alternative Principles of Distributive Justice
Further Readings
Diversity
Gender-Based Stereotypes in Leadership
Race-Based Stereotypes in Leadership
Consequences of Race and Gender Expectations for Leader Effectiveness
Further Readings
Diversity Ideologies
Further Readings
Dominance and Prestige
Dominance and Prestige
Dominance and Prestige: Two Avenues to Influence and Informal Leadership
When Dominance Is a Source of Prestige
Dominance and Prestige in Formal Leadership
The Limits of Dominance
Further Readings
E
Economic Justice
The Rawlsian Paradigm of Distributive Justice
The Moral Grounding of Rawls's View
Critical Responses
Further Readings
Economic Recovery and Leadership
Leadership Within Economic Policymaking
Fiscal Policy
Tax Policy
Government Spending Policy
Fiscal Policy and Leadership
Monetary Policy
Monetary Policy Tools
Central Bank Independence
Central Bank Credibility
Identifying Shocks
International Organizations
Further Readings
Educational Attainment
Educational Attainment Levels of People in Leadership Positions
Positive Effects of College Attendance on Leader Emergence and Leadership Skills
Potential Problems With Equating a More Educated Leader to a More Effective Leader
Further Readings
Educational Leadership
Mission of American Educational System
The Power of Teacher Impact
The Impact of School Leaders
Instructional Leadership
Teachers as Learning Leaders
Further Readings
Effective Leadership and Selflessness
Exploring the Application of Science to Leadership
Refocusing on the Core Activities and Skills of Effective Leaders
Further Readings
Effects of Power
Power To
Power Over
Individual Differences and Situational Factors
Conclusion
Further Readings
E-Leadership
The Effect of ICTs on Leadership
Leadership in Same-Place IT-Supported Meetings
Leadership in Virtual Teams
Leadership in the Age of Social Media
Leadership in the Cloud Computing Era
The Effect of Leadership on ICTs
Further Readings
Embodied Leadership
Relational Aspects of Embodied Leadership
The Leader's Body as Somatic Site
Further Readings
Emotion and Leadership
Affective Events, Leader Emotions, and Emotional Climate
Emotion Processes
Emotional Contagion
Cognitive Inferences
Attributions About Leaders
Outcomes of Leader Emotions
Leader Emotional Labor and Emotion Regulation
Final Thoughts
Further Readings
Emotional Intelligence
About Emotional Intelligence
Foundations of Emotional Intelligence
Conceptions of EI and EQ
EI Is a Broad Intelligence
EI and Leadership
What EI Predicts
EI In Practice
Can EI Be Increased?
Future Directions for Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
Further Readings
Empathic Leadership
Types of Empathy
Leader Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Employee Well-Being
Empathy and Leadership Styles
Task and Relations Leadership
Transformational Leadership
Leader Empathy Around the World
Concluding Remarks
Further Readings
Employee Rights
Types of Employee Rights
Normative Frameworks for Understanding Employee Rights
The Grounding of Moral Employee Rights
Further Readings
Empowerment
What Is Empowerment?
Why Should Leaders Be Empowering?
How Is Empowerment Measured?
The Dark Side of Empowerment
Future Research
Further Readings
Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing
Endogeneity
Endogenous Theorizing
From Problems to Solutions: The Interplay Between Methods and Theory
Further Readings
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Organizations, Traits, and Leader Behavior
Illustrative Examples: The Martin Agency and 7-Eleven
Further Readings
Ethical Consumerism
Politics Through the Market
History of Ethical Consumerism
Contested Campaigns
Ethical Consumerism and Leadership
Dilemmas of Leadership
Lifestyle and Hypocrisy
Organizations as Ethical Consumers and Leaders
A Stringent Bar for Leadership?
Further Readings
Ethical Leadership
Ethics and Perceptions
Ethical Decision-Making
Treatment and Selection
Ethical Challenges for Leaders
Concluding Remarks
Further Readings
Ethics and Effectiveness
The Hitler Problem
Ethics and Effectiveness in Leadership Studies
Machiavelli and the Dirty Hands Problem
How Moral Theories Unite Ethics With Effectiveness
Conclusion
Further Readings
Evolution of Inequality
Agriculture and Inequality
Patrons, Clients, Leaders, and Followers
Effect of Competition Among Groups on Inequality
Implications for Modern Society and Other Considerations
Further Readings
Evolutionary Leadership Theory
Evolutionary Models of Leadership and Followership
Who Leads and Who Follows?
The Context and Ecology of Leadership
Conclusions and Implications
Further Readings
Executive Compensation
Executive Compensation in Context
Executive Compensation as a Governance Issue
Executive Compensation as an Ethical Issue
Further Readings
Exemplary Leadership
The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership
Model the Way
Inspire a Shared Vision
Challenge the Process
Enable Others to Act
Encourage the Heart
The Five Practices Make a Difference
Further Readings
F
Feminine Mystique, The
The Influence of The Feminine Mystique and Its Juncture With Leadership
Diversity in Leadership
The Limitations of The Feminine Mystique and Its Implications
A First Nation's Perspective From Australia
Models of Women and Leadership in the Postmodern Era
Further Readings
Feminism
Schools of Feminist Thought
Liberal Feminism
Radical Feminism
Socialist Feminism
Intersectional Feminism
Cultural Feminism
Waves of Feminist Social Movement in the United States
Further Readings
Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society
Politics and History
Sports
Social Justice
Conclusion
Further Readings
Film, Television, and Social Change
Leadership and Film
Television
Conclusion
Further Readings
Followership
Defining Followership
Leadership–Followership Co-Constructions
Follower Identity
Implicit Leadership Theory
Leader and Follower Identity Construction
Leader–Follower Coproductions
Implicit Followership Theory
Follower Role Orientations
Toxic Illusio
Practitioner-Based Perspectives on Followership
Future Research Directions
Further Readings
Foucault and Postmodernism
A Brief Introduction to Michel Foucault
Foucault's Archaeological Phase
Foucault's Genealogical Phase
Foucault's Ethical Phase
Applying Foucault's Ideas to Leadership
Further Readings
Foundational Lawgiving
The Analysis of Foundational Lawgiving in Political Philosophy
Relevance and Application: The Problem of Legislation
Further Readings
Full-Range Leadership Theory
Breaking Down Full-Range Leadership Theory
Application and Development
New Approach to Leadership
Further Readings
G
Gender Stereotypes
Origins of Gender Stereotypes in Western Societies
Gender Stereotypes and Professional Outcomes
Gender Stereotypes and Barriers to Leadership
Further Readings
Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth
The Glass Ceiling
The Labyrinth
The Status of Women Leaders
Challenges That Form the Labyrinth
Domestic Responsibilities
Stereotypes and Discrimination
Organizational Culture
Women Navigate the Labyrinth
Further Readings
Global Business Leadership
Demise of Globalization?
What Is Global Business Leadership?
A Theoretical Framework for Global Leader Effectiveness
Global Mindset: A Prerequisite for Effectiveness in Global Leadership Roles
Exposure to Cultural Diversity as an Antecedent of Global Mindset
The Role of the Leader's Own Home Culture
Future Directions
Further Readings
Global Leadership
Global Leadership Managing Complexity
The Process of Global Leadership
Responding to Global Challenge
Leadership With Global Acuity
Interconnections and Complex Systems
Global Leaders as Curious Negotiators
Further Readings
Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership
The Tension Between the Universal and the Particular
City and Empire
The Nation
The European Union
Leadership in a More Unified and More Fragmented World
Globalization and Democracy
Further Readings
GLOBE 2020
The GLOBE Project
The Relationship Between Ideal Leadership and Country Culture
Religiosity as a New Cultural Dimension
Role of Gender
Leadership and Interpersonal Trust
Interpersonal Trust: A Cross-Cultural Perspective to Maximize Leadership Effectiveness
GLOBE 2020 Survey Design
Country Co-Investigators
GLOBE 2020 Instrument
GLOBE 2020 Sample
Goals and Future Prospects
Further Readings
GLOBE Research Program
About the GLOBE Project
The Phases of GLOBE
GLOBE 2020
Future GLOBE Research
GLOBE and Leadership
Cultural Leadership Ideals and Effectiveness
Why Do CLTs Matter?
GLOBE and Societal Culture
Distinguishing Cultural Values From Practices
Further Readings
Group Effectiveness
Groups Versus Individuals
Improving Effectiveness
Implications
Further Readings
Group Norms
Communicating Norms
Norm Enforcement and Violation
Review and Revision of Norms
Implications
Further Readings
Group Process
Establishing the Group Process
The Special Role of Communication
Group Leader Involvement in Process
Implications
Further Readings
Group Satisfaction
Influences on Satisfaction
Satisfaction and Group Composition
Group Process and Satisfaction
Group Modality
Consequences of (Dis)satisfaction
Implications
Further Readings
Groupthink
Diagnosing Groupthink
Characteristics of Groupthink
Research on Groupthink
Implications for Group Leaders
Further Readings
H
Health Psychology and Leadership
Positive Leadership in Health Psychology
Problematic Leadership in Health Psychology
Further Readings
Health, Well-Being, and Leadership
Leadership Styles and Health and Well-Being
Transformational Leadership
Transactional Leadership
Laissez-Faire Leadership
A Comparison of Leadership Styles
Work Stress and Job Burnout
The Consequences of Work Stress
Physical Health Consequences
Mental Health Consequences
Environments Where Hierarchies and Leadership Cultures Affect Well-Being
Health Care Settings
The Airline Industry
The U.S. Military
Promoting Workplace Health
Workplace Wellness Programs
Workplace Wellness for Leadership
Further Readings
Heroic Leadership
Characteristics of Heroic Leadership
Theories of Heroic Leadership
Mental Constructions of Heroic Leadership
Further Readings
Higher Education
Organizational Diversity
Recent Trends
Multiple Constituencies
Increasing Specialization
A Complex Legal and Policy Environment
A Rapidly Changing “Business Model”
Mission Complexity
Diversity Among Students and Leaders
Leadership Approaches
Further Readings
History
Change Over Time
Context
Causality
Contingency
Complexity
Further Readings
Human Trafficking
Further Readings
Humane Education
Defining the Field and Practice
A Better World Is Possible
Poverty
Social Justice
Environmental Protection
Animal Welfare and Rights
Humane Education Seeks a Just, Sustainable, and Humane Future
What Comprises Humane Education?
Fostering Compassion and a Sense of Responsibility
Teaching Critical, Systems, Strategic, and Creative Thinking
Creating Opportunities to Make a Difference and Solve Real-World Problems
Barriers to the Spread of Humane Education
Real-World Crises Are Having an Impact on Educational Leaders
Problem- and Project-Based Learning (PBL) Have Already Been Adopted
Further Readings
Humility
Types of Humility
The Study of Humility
Leader Humility
Team Humility and Organizational Humility
Further Readings
Humor
Functionalist Perspectives
Critical Perspectives
Suppressing Humor
Manufacturing Humor
Final Thoughts
Further Readings
I
Idiosyncrasy Credit
Idiosyncrasy Credit: The Basics
Idiosyncrasy Credit and Social Exchange
Idiosyncrasy Credit, Power, and Ethical Leadership
Further Readings
Idiosyncratic Deals
Forms of I-Deals
Benefits and Costs of I-Deals
Who Gets and Grants I-Deals
I-Deals Beyond the United States and Beyond Businesses
Further Readings
Implicit Leadership Theories
Origins
Content, Structure, and Functions
Measurement
Outcomes
Future Research and Practical Implications
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Inclusive Leadership
Leadership at the Top
Inclusive Leadership of the Team
Inclusive Leadership at a Dyadic Level
Outcomes of Inclusive Leadership
Further Readings
Income Inequality
Theory and Measurement of Income Inequality
Segmented and Inefficient Labor Markets
Public Policy Approaches to Income Inequality
Further Readings
Indigenous International Diplomacy
Traditional Diplomatic Relations Prior to European Contact
Indigenous Diplomacy With Colonial and U.S. Governments
Indigenous Diplomacy in the Modern Era
Intertribal Reciprocal Agreement Regarding Hunting, Fishing, and Gathering (1997)
Anishinaabe Akii Protocol (1998)
Water Protection Treaties (2004–2006)
United League of Indigenous Nations Treaty (2007)
Northern Tribes Buffalo Treaty (2014)
Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion (2016)
The Grizzly: A Treaty of Cooperation, Cultural Revitalization, and Restoration (2016)
The Wolf: A Treaty of Cultural and Environmental Survival (2021)
Indigenous Diplomacy as a Model for the Future
Further Readings
Influence Tactics for Leaders
Influence Outcomes
Proactive Influence Tactics
Rational Persuasion
Apprising
Inspirational Appeals
Consultation
Exchange
Collaboration
Ingratiation
Legitimating Tactics
Pressure Tactics
Coalition Tactics
Personal Appeals
Effectiveness of the Proactive Influence Tactics
Findings for Individual Tactics
Combining Tactics
Sequencing Different Tactics
Using Tactics to Resist Influence Attempts by Others
Other Implications of Leader Influence Behavior
Further Readings
Innovation
The Innovation Process
The Vision Thing: How Transformational Leadership Creates Transformational Change
Climate for Innovation
Team Leadership: Ambidextrous Leadership
Diversity and Team Leadership
Individual Self-Leadership
Further Readings
Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army
Differing Paces of Change
Resistance to Change
Crisis and Cultural Change
Further Readings
Instrumental Leadership
Rationale for Instrumental Leadership
What Is Instrumental Leadership?
Why and How Does Instrumental Leadership Work?
Evidence for the Effectiveness of Instrumental Leadership
Further Readings
Intelligences
General Intelligence
Fluid Intelligence
Crystallized Intelligence
Too Much of a Good Thing
Encompassing Theories of Intelligence(s)
Successful Intelligence
Multiple Intelligences
Theories of Specific Kinds of Intelligences
Emotional Intelligence
Practical Intelligence
Social Intelligence
Collective Intelligence
Further Readings
Intelligent Disobedience
Authority and Compliance
Origin of the Term
Criteria for Obedience and Disobedience
Conditions for Appropriate Obedience
Distinctions from Civil Disobedience
Social Factors Affecting Obedience and Appropriate Disobedience
Psychological Strategies Resulting in Obedience or Disobedience
Obedience Acculturation
High Power-Distance Cultures
Applications of Intelligent Disobedience
Crew Resource Management
Adapting the CRM Model
Changes in Military Culture
Childhood Development
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Intergroup Processes
Some Influences of Conflict Among Subgroups
Theories to Reduce Intergroup Conflict
Interpersonal Theories
Intergroup Theories
Future Directions
Further Readings
International Leadership Association
Mission
A Trusted Space for Leadership Learning
A Trusted Source for Leadership Resources
A Global Leadership Community
The Core Values of the ILA
A Professional Membership Association
ILA Member Communities
What Makes the ILA Distinctive as a Professional Association?
Programs, Publications, and Special Projects
Programs
Publications
Special Projects
ILA History
Further Readings
Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership
Intersectionality of Race and Gender
Systemic Racism
Leadership and Employment: Gender and Racial Disparities
Further Readings
9781071840832_WEB_Vol 2
Cover
Half Title Page
Editorial Board
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Entries
Reader’s Guide
Contributors
Introduction
L
Labeling Theory
Weber and Types of Leadership
Deviance Typology
Further Readings
Language and Leadership
The Importance of Language for Leadership Theorizing and Research
Key Streams of Work on Language in Leadership Studies
Communication
Discourse
Multilingualism
Future Research
Further Readings
Leader Emergence and Performance
Personality, Intelligence, and Individual Attributes
Implicit Leadership Theories
Gender and Leader Emergence
Contemporary Views: Shared Leadership and Context
Emergence in Virtual Teams
Conclusion
Further Readings
Leader Exceptionalism
Origins
Explanations of Ethical Failure
Moral Theory and the Moral Psychology of Leadership
Further Readings
Leader Manipulation in Warfare
Further Readings
Leader Self-Efficacy
Origins of Self-Efficacy
Developing the Concept of Leadership Self-Efficacy
Relationship to Other Constructs and Outcomes
Leader Development and Self-Efficacy
Further Readings
Leader–Follower Relationships
The Case for Mutual Influence
Mutual Expectations
Active Followership
Leader–Member Exchange (LMX)
Emotional Connections
Future Research
Further Readings
Leader–Member Exchange (LMX)
LMX Theory Development
LMX Relationship Development
Antecedents and Outcomes of LMX Quality
Theoretical Frameworks for LMX
Beyond the Leader–Follower Dyad
Criticisms of LMX Research
The Significance of LMX
Further Readings
Leaders' Personal Crisis
Absence of Research on Leaders During Personal Crisis
Risks of Leader Personal Crisis to the Organization
Theory Relevant to Leaders in Crisis
Leaders Coping With Stressful Life Events
Leadership Risks and Benefits When Navigating Personal Crisis
Organizations of Reciprocal Care
Further Readings
Leaders' Stories
Defining a Leader
Ordinary, Innovative, and Visionary Leaders
Inclusionary and Exclusionary Identity Stories
The Unschooled Mind
Case Studies
Further Readings
Leaders' Power Resources and Followers' Reactions
The Definition, Limits, and Outcomes of Power
The Tools of Power: The Seven Power Bases
Follower Psychological Reactions and Outcomes
Instrumental Exchange (Psychological Reaction) and Compliance (Outcome)
Internalization, Personal Identification (Psychological Reactions), and Commitment (Outcome)
Dissatisfaction (Psychological Reaction) and Resistance (Outcome)
The Position Power Tool Kit
Legitimate Power (Authority)
Reward Power
Coercive Power
Ecological Power
Information Power
The Personal Power Tool Kit: Expert and Referent Power Bases
Expert Power
Referent Power
How a Leader Can Effectively Use the Power Bases
Further Readings
Leadership and Empathy on the Screen
Fictional Leadership on the Television Screen
Factual Leadership in the 21st Century
The Effect of On-Screen Examples on Leadership
Further Readings
Leadership and Management
The Emergence of Management
Management Versus Leadership
Further Readings
Leadership and U.S. International Relations
U.S. Leadership in Foreign Affairs
George Washington's Farewell Address
Expansionism in the 20th Century
World War I
World War II
The Cold War
The Challenge of the Military–Industrial Complex
The Legacy of 9/11
U.S. Core Values
The Decline of U.S. Standing in the World
The American Dream Versus The American Nightmare
Further Readings
Leadership Development
History
Models and Frameworks
Experience-Based Development
Leader Identity
Practices
Feedback
Structured Reflection
Active Listening
Coaching
Further Readings
Leadership for the Common Good
The Common Good
Conceptualizing Leadership for the Common Good
Practicing Leadership for the Common Good
Further Readings
Leadership in Children and Adolescents
Identifying and Describing Leaders Within Children's and Adolescents' Peer Systems
Leaders as Norm Setters
Socially Competent Leaders
Bullies: The Dark Side of Leadership
Leaders and Their Context
Further Readings
Leadership in Dogs
The Origins of Dogs
Instrumental and Symbolic Value
Dogs as Followers
Dogs as Leaders
The Interdependence of Dogs and People
Organizational Processes and Dogs
Further Readings
Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals
The Nature of Leadership in Nonhuman Animals
Leadership During Group Movements
Leadership During Group Foraging
Leadership During Intragroup and Intergroup Conflicts
Conclusion
Further Readings
Leadership in Science
The Limits of Earlier Paradigms
Trait Theory
Transactional Leadership
Transformational Leadership
An Action-Centered Approach
Achieving a Goal
Incentive Structures
Implications for Research and Thought Leadership
Building Teams
The Centrality of Trust
The Contribution of Diversity to Integrity
An Observed Shift From Agentic to Communal Leadership
Developing Individuals
Mentoring Is a Function of Resources
Leadership as Facilitation
Emotional Intelligence in Scientific Leadership
Further Readings
Leadership in Violence Prevention
Leaders in Violence Prevention
Leadership in Family Violence Prevention Programs
Leadership in Community Violence Prevention Programs
Leadership in Societal Violence Prevention Programs
Further Readings
Leading Diversity
Team Diversity
Inclusive Leadership
Cross-Cultural Issues
Further Readings
Leading From Below
Importance
Characteristics
Related Concepts
Managing Up
Leading From the Middle
Further Readings
LGBTQ+ Social Movements
Queer Leaders for Queer Activism
Contextualizing LGBTQ+ Leadership: The Homophile Movement
Intersectional Approaches and LGBTQ+ Leadership in the 21st Century
Further Readings
The Liberal Tradition
Defenses of Liberalism
John Stuart Mill and the Liberal Tradition
Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition
Further Readings
Liberalism and Toleration
Liberalism
Toleration
Applications of Main Ideas
Further Readings
Literature
Storytelling and Language
Understanding Literature
Basic Understanding
Linguistic Understanding
Contextual Understanding
Reframing (for Leadership)
Implications for Leadership
A Caution for Leadership Scholars and Practitioners
Further Readings
M
Majority and Minority Influence
Majority Influence
Minority Influence
Evidence for Dual Processing
Demographic Effects
Virtual Teams
The Role of Team Leaders
Further Readings
Manhattan Project
Deciding to Make the Atomic Bomb
The Building of the Atomic Bomb
The Use of the Bombs
Further Readings
Marketing Leadership
Consumer Movements
Resistant vs. Activist Movements
Tactical Repertoire of Movements
Online Brand Scrutiny
Value Cocreation
How Value Is Cocreated
Appropriation of Consumer Movements
Exploitation of Consumer Labor
Virtue Signaling
Moral Grandstanding
Further Readings
Me Too Movement
Power Dynamics That Lead to Sexual Misconduct
Leader Responsibility in Handling Workplace Sexual Misconduct
Legislative Solutions and Equitable Advancement
Further Readings
Men and Masculinities
Constructing Men's Leadership Masculinities
The Authoritative Style: Leader as Hero
The Paternalistic Style: Leader as Father
The Egalitarian Style: Leader as Good Bloke or Mate
Deconstructing Men's Leadership Masculinities
Exploring Masculinity in Leadership Decision-Making
Future Directions
Further Readings
Military Leadership
Historical Context
Modern Military Leadership
Further Readings
Mindful Leadership
Background on Mindfulness
Establishing a Core of Mindfulness
Frameworks for Studying Mindfulness at Work
Benefits of Mindfulness at Work
Cultivating Higher Levels of Mindfulness
The Transformational Power of Mindfulness
Further Readings
Monetary Policy
Guiding Multiple Voters
Communication
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Further Readings
Moral Character
Leadership and Virtue
The Good Leader: Normative Studies
The Good Leader: Empirical Studies
Character and Leadership Education
Character, Reasons, and Actions
Good Character Means Good Leadership
Further Readings
Moral Imagination
Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator
Immanuel Kant and the Three Elements of Imagination
Contemporary Moral Imagination and Decision-Making
Immoral Imagination and Blind Spots
Further Readings
Moral Language
Deontology and Consequentialism
Virtue Signaling
Further Readings
Moral Pluralism
Moral Foundations Theory
Model of Moral Motives
Relationship Regulation Theory
Loyalty Tensions in Moral Leadership
Further Readings
Moral Risk
Further Readings
Motional Intelligence and Leadership
Origins of Motional Intelligence
Actor–Audience Asymmetry in Motional Intelligence
Motional Intelligence in Romance
Motional Intelligence in Leadership
Further Readings
Multiculturalism, Ethics of
Separating State and Culture: Benign Neglect
Neutral Nationalism and the Common Denominator Approach
The Millet Approach
The Melting Pot and the Potluck Models
Further Readings
Multiple Roles of Leaders
Leaders, Followers, and the Uses of Power
Engagement Between Partners and Collaborators
Creativity and Effectiveness in Leaders and Managers
Further Readings
Mutiny
Origins of the Word Mutiny
Mutiny and Leadership
Leadership Within Mutinies
Mutinies in the Present Day
Further Readings
N
Narcissistic Leadership
Behind the Narcissistic Façade
Leadership and Personality
Personality Traits of Positive Leaders
Personality Traits of Narcissistic Leaders
Work Environment
Working With a Narcissist
Manipulation and Control
Further Readings
Networks and Networked Organizations
Understanding Organizations
Science of Networks
Contagion Typology
Geometry of Networks
The Dynamics of Networks in Organizations
Networks Are Wholistic
Networks Blur Boundaries
Networks Are Nonlinear
Networks Are in Constant Flux
Networks Are Relational
Networks Are Linked
Implications for Leadership
Shifting the Leadership Mindset
Embracing the Whole
Valuing Connectivity
Linking Complex Networks
Influencing Relevant Change
Further Readings
Neuroscience
Antagonistic Neural Networks: Task Versus Social Leadership
Leadership Is a Relationship
Stress, Power Stress, and Sustainability of Leadership Through Renewal
Strategy
Future Prospects
Further Readings
Nonprofit Leadership
Nonprofit Organizations and Leadership
Historical Origins of U.S. Nonprofit Leadership
Nonprofit Leadership in Theory and Practice
Governing Boards
Executive Leadership
Volunteer Leadership
Nonprofit Leader Roles
Nonprofit Leader Skills
Nonprofit Leader Ethics
The Unique Role of the Nonprofit Leader
Further Readings
Nostalgia and Leadership
Nostalgia as a Resource for Leadership
Personal Versus Collective Nostalgia
Leadership-Related Nostalgic Benefits
Important Mediators or Drivers of Nostalgia Benefits
Nostalgia's Utility in Leadership
Further Readings
O
Obedience
Distinguishing Obedience From Other Social Influence Processes
Bases of Power and Authority
Empirical Studies of Obedience to Authority
Concerns With Milgram's OTA Studies
Does the OTA Effect Replicate?
Victim Factors
Authority Factors
Target Factors
Factors Related to the Obedience Prompt
Future Directions
Further Readings
Organizational Leadership
The Industrial Era
The Information Technology Era
The Global Era
Further Readings
P
Panama Canal Treaties
Establishing U.S. Control Over Panama's Transit Corridor
Preserving U.S. Control Over the Canal
Overhauling the Relationship to Protect U.S. Interests
Further Readings
Paradoxes of Leadership
Understanding the Link Between Paradox and Leadership
Common Paradoxes of Leadership
Implications of Paradox for Leadership Theory, Practice, and Development
Further Readings
Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context
Dimensions of Paternalistic Leadership
Origins of Paternalistic Leadership
Paradoxical Leadership in PL
Theoretical Support
Antecedents and Consequences of PL
Further Readings
Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks
Overview
Frameworks of Paternalistic Leadership
Antecedents and Outcomes of Paternalistic Leadership
Future Research Directions
Further Readings
Path-Goal Theory
History and Background
The Theory
Concerns Raised
Outgrowths From the Theory
Application of the Theory to Practice
Further Readings
Patriarchy and Its Origins
Comparing Humans With Other Species
Sexual Selection
Gender Differences
Gendered Division of Labor
Variation in Patriarchy Cross-Culturally
Dismantling Patriarchy
Further Readings
Pearl Harbor Speech
The Dual Purposes of Rhetoric
Scholarly Analyses of the Pearl Harbor Speech
Nondeclarations of War in U.S. History
Further Readings
Persuasion
Early Research on Persuasion
The ELM and the HSM
The ELM and Route Selection
Biased Processing and Partisanship
Further Readings
Philosophy and Leadership
What Is Philosophy?
Relevance to Leadership
Other Areas of Philosophy
Further Readings
Plutarch
Moralia
Parallel Lives
Conclusion
Further Readings
Political Identities
The Nature of Political Identification
Trump's Devoted Base
Social Identity
Strategic Manipulation
Political Leadership
Further Readings
Political Leadership
The Role of Leadership in Politics
The Evolution of Political Leadership
The Great Thinkers on Political Leadership
Political Leadership Today
Further Readings
Political Leadership and Historical Memory
Great Leaders and the American Narrative
Challenges to the Heroic Style of Commemoration
The Postheroic Style
Further Readings
Political Obligation
Consent
Natural Duties
Associational Obligations
Fair Play
Further Readings
Power and Culture
Power
Culture
Power and Culture, Together
Power, Culture, and Agency
Further Readings
Power and Powerlessness
What Is Power?
Power as Agency
Power as Structured
Multidimensional Power
Power and Leadership
Navigating and Transforming Power
Power-Sensitive Leadership
Further Readings
Presidential Leadership
Barber's Analysis of Presidential Character
Fred Greenstein's Six Presidential Qualities
Skowronek: The Politics Presidents Make
Simonton: Leader Schemas and Ratings of Presidential Greatness
Conclusion
Further Readings
Pride and the Psychology of Prestige
Evolutionary Psychology and Psychological Adaptations
Evolutionary Significance of Status
The Logic of Status Allocation in Human Groups
Features of Pride and the Adaptive Problems of Status Pursuit
Further Readings
Procedural Justice
Fair Process Effects
Theories of Procedural Justice
Factors Promoting Procedural Justice
Recent Applications of Procedural Justice
Further Readings
Property-Owning Democracy
Rawls and Economic Systems
Policy and Institutional Features of Property-Owning Democracy
Further Readings
Prosocial Behavior
The Micro-level of Prosocial Behavior
The Meso Level of Prosocial Behavior
The Macrolevel of Prosocial Behavior
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership
Evolutionary Leadership Theory
Leadership and Tinbergen's Four Questions
Proximate-Single Form: How Does It Work?
Proximate Development: How Did It Develop?
Ultimate-Developmental: Why Did It Historically Evolve?
Ultimate-Single Form: Why Is It Currently Functional?
Applications to Modern Issues
Further Readings
Prozac Leadership
Excessively Positive Leaders
Resisting Prozac Leadership
Concluding Remarks
Further Readings
Purpose and Invisible Leadership
The Common Purpose as Leader: Invisible Leadership
Essentials of Developing an Inspiring Common Purpose
Embedding Common Purpose in the Culture
Ethical Dimensions of the Common Purpose
The Complexity of Purpose
Further Readings
R
Race and Ethnicity
Connecting Race and Ethnicity to Leadership
Challenging Traditional Notions of Leadership
Expanding Diversity and Leadership Studies
Issues Regarding Race, Ethnicity, and Leadership
The Intersectionality of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
Further Readings
Racial Disparities
Racial/Ethnic Representations of Leadership in the Workplace
Working Toward Equity in Leadership
Further Readings
Reconstructive Presidents
The President and the Constitution
Sequences of Affiliated and Opposition Leadership
The Political Architecture of Reconstructive Leadership
Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as Reconstructive Leaders
Further Readings
Regulating Private Sector Leadership
Regulations as a Framework
Types of Private Sector Regulation
Leadership and Self-Regulation
Healthy Leadership
Further Readings
Religion and Leadership
What Is Servant Leadership?
Religion and Servant Leadership
Theology and Servant Leadership
Biblical Examples of Servant Leadership
Biblical Characteristics of Servant Leadership
Concluding Thoughts
Further Readings
Religious Disagreement
Social Contract Theory and Religious Neutrality
The Doctrine of Religious Restraint
The Limits of Restraint and the Convergence Conception of Justification
Further Readings
Resilient Leadership
Theory and Research
Resilience Versus Pollyanna Prescriptions of “Put a Smile on Your Face”
Is Resilience Innate or Learned?
Resilience (or Lack Thereof) in Younger Generations
How the Self-Esteem Movement Produced the Resilience Movement
Can Resilience Be Taught?
Further Readings
Resonant Leadership
Origin
Theoretical Foundations
A Relationship-Based Style
Social Cognition
Neuroscience
Outcomes
Further Readings
Responsible Leadership
Stakeholders and the Relational Perspective
Stakeholder Complexity
Roles Model Approach
Organizational Outcomes
Application of Responsible Leadership
Further Readings
Rhetoric
Rhetorical Opportunities
Audiences and Rhetorical Leadership
Legitimating Institutions
Influencing Political Agendas
Framing Political Issues
Uniting the Polity
Further Readings
Rhetoric and Persuasion
History of Rhetoric and Leadership
Current Perspectives on Rhetoric and Leadership
Further Readings
Romance of Heroism
Romance Resulting From Motivational Drives
Romance Resulting From Perception and Cognition
Further Readings
Romance of Leadership
Leadership and Followership—An Unbalanced Equation
Follower Dynamics: Social Contagion
Concluding Remarks
Further Readings
Rosy Halo and Power
Power: Corrupting or Ennobling?
Flawed Perception That Power Corrupts
Reversed Causality Between Power and Corruption
Impressions of the Powerful As More Ethical
Implications
Further Readings
S
Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models
Schemas
Person Schemas
Self-Schemas
Scripts
Mental Models
Future Directions
Further Readings
Self-Leadership
Conceptual Development
Measurement
The RSLQ
The ASLQ
An Overview of Self-Leadership Impacts
Current Challenges
Self-Leadership Paradoxes
Conceptual Overlap
Overreliance on Strategies
Future Opportunities
Broader Conceptualization
Cross-Disciplinary Input
Focus on Constructs
Further Readings
September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership
Intelligence Regarding Al Qaeda
President Bush as Mobilizing Leader
Leadership and Followership on the Road to War in Iraq
Further Readings
Servant Leadership
What Is Servant Leadership?
How Does Servant Leadership Differ From Other Leadership Theories?
Research on Servant Leadership
Servant-Leader Characteristics
The Impact of Servant-Leaders
How Servant-Leaders Influence Followers
Criticisms of Servant Leadership
Further Readings
Service Innovation
What Is Service Innovation?
Disrupting Digitally
Simplifying via Automation
Personalizing the Service Experience
Further Readings
Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership
Human Leader-Follower Relations: How Universal and How Unique Are They?
Leadership and Followership Among Hunter-Gatherers
The Universality of “Good” Leadership: Dominance Versus Prestige
Service-for-Prestige as a Form of Reciprocal Altruism
Service-for-Prestige as a Form of Collective Action
Conclusion
Further Readings
Sexual Harassment
Sexual Harassment in Historical Context
Explanations for Sexual Harassment
Optimizing Choice
The Superstar Sexual Harasser
Solutions to Sexual Harassment
Critiquing the Solutions
Further Readings
Sexual Identity
History of Sexual Identity
From Activism to Mainstream
Organizations
Education
Politics
Theorizing Sexuality and Leadership
Further Readings
Sexuality
Defining Sexuality
Sexual Identity
Gender Identity
Sexual Orientation
Sexual Behavior
Leaders and Sexuality
Further Readings
Shared Leadership
A Growing Interest in Shared Leadership
Scientific Evidence of Shared Leadership
Quantitative Studies of Shared Leadership
Qualitative Studies of Shared Leadership
The Future of Leadership in Organizations
Further Readings
Situational Leadership
Origin of Situational Leadership Theory
Situational Leadership Cycle
Military Example of Situational Leadership Theory
Challenges
Further Readings
Skills
Skills and Leader Performance
Cause/Goal Analysis
Forecasting
Constraint Analysis
Creative Thinking
Planning
Wisdom
Sensemaking
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Social Change
How Societies Change
Dimensions of Social Change
Revolutionary Versus Evolutionary Social Change
Levels of Social Change: Local, National, and Global
Structures Versus Strategies in Changing Societies
Further Readings
Social Identities
How Social Identities Shape Social Expectations
Leadership in the Eye of the Beholder
Achieving Access and Legitimacy
Followers and Legitimacy
How Social Identities Shape Our Behaviors and Beliefs
Further Readings
Social Identity Theory
The Social Identity Approach
Types of Self and Identity
Salience
Prototypes
Self-Categorization
Motivation
Social Identity Theory of Leadership
Prototypicality and Influence
Social Attraction and Popularity
Social Construction of Charisma
Leader Behavior
Entrepreneurs of Identity
Social Identity Research and New Developments
Uncertainty and Leadership
Intergroup Leadership
The Future
Further Readings
Social Media
Who Is a Leader?
Differences in Social Media Use
Social Media Use and Brand Identity
Social Media Use to Engage Employees
Social Media Use and Crisis Management
Social Media Use for Collective Action
Leaders' Misuse of Social Media
Managing Generational Differences
Future Implications
Further Readings
Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics
A Taxonomy of Special Obligations
Relevance and Limits of Special Obligations for Leadership Ethics
Conclusion
Further Readings
Sports
Competitive Excellence
Student-Athlete Experience
Integrity, Equity, and Inclusivity
Resource/Revenue Development
Looking Ahead
Further Readings
State Aggression
Factors That Lead to State Aggression
World War II and State Aggression
A Turn Toward Social History
Leader Attributes and State Aggression
Investigating What Affects Adult Human Behavior
Further Readings
Stereotype Threat
Antecedents of Stereotype Threat for Underrepresented Leaders
Mitigating Factors and the Experienced Consequences of Stereotype Threat
Further Readings
Strategic Leadership
Definition of Strategic Leadership
Who
What
Making Strategic Decisions
Engaging With External (and Internal) Stakeholders
Performing Human Resource Management Activities
Motivating and Influencing
Managing Information
Overseeing Operations and Administration
Managing Social and Ethical Issues
Managing Conflicting Demands
When
How
Why
The Role of Context
Performance
Further Readings
Student Development
Nevitt Sanford's Life Influences
The Authoritarian Personality
Major Books on College Student Development
Sanford's Student Development Theory
Readiness
Challenge
Retreat
Support
Balancing Challenge and Support
Optimal Mismatch
Further Readings
Sustainability
The UN Brundtland Commission Report
The Three Dimensions of Sustainability
Environmental Sustainability
Economic Sustainability
Social Sustainability
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Three Questions About Environmental Sustainability
Challenges in Managing Common-Pool Resources
Sustainability in Business
Climate Change
Further Readings
Systems Thinking
Origins of Systems Theory
How Systems Operate
Systems and Leadership
Leadership and Systems Research
Further Readings
T
Task and Socio-Emotional Leadership
Bales's Groundbreaking Studies on Small Groups
Explanations From the Findings
Complementary Task and Socio-Emotional Leadership in U.S. Presidencies
Combining Both Types of Leadership
Further Readings
Teacher Leadership
The Development of the Teacher-Leader Role
Data Analysis
Instructional Initiatives, Professional Training, and Community Engagement
Mentorship
Compensation
Geographical Differences
Further Readings
Team Leadership
The Processes and Functions of Team Leadership
Team Leaders and Team Emergent States
Team Properties That Alter Required Leadership Processes
Collective Leadership
Further Readings
Terror Management Theory
Terror Management Theory: The Basics
Leadership and Charisma
Studies of Mortality Salience and Charismatic Leadership
TMT and the Future of Democracy
Further Readings
Theater and Leadership
The Birth of the Director
Leadership Style
Areas of Leadership Responsibility
Impacts on Gender
Calls for Racial Justice
Further Readings
Toxic Leadership
Historical Arc of Toxic Leadership
Behaviors and Psychological Qualities of Toxic Leaders
Contexts of Toxic Leadership Research
The Role of Followers
Conformers and Colluders
Environments Conducive to Leader Toxicity
Future Directions
Further Readings
Trait Theories of Leadership
Early Research on the Trait Approach
Leadership Traits
Problems and Limitations of the Trait Approach
Recent Research on the Trait Approach
The Trait Approach and the Five-Factor Model of Personality
Final Remarks
Further Readings
Transactional and Transformational Synergies
Patterns of Leader Behavior
Senatorial Leadership
Transactions and Power
Creating Power Resources
Building Bridges
Transformation Through Shared Leadership
Coda: Leadership Versatility and Beauty
Further Readings
Transformational and Transactional Leadership
A Theory Emerges
Early Stage Theory Development
A Critical Appraisal
Future Directions
Further Readings
Transformational Leadership
Transformational Versus Transactional Leadership
Attributes of Transformational Leaders
How Transformational Leaders Perceive Threats and Opportunities
Liabilities of Transformational Leadership
Can Anyone Become a Transformational Leader?
Further Readings
Transforming Leadership
Transforming Leadership in 1978s Leadership
Transforming and Transformational Leadership in Dead Center
Burns's Transforming and Bass's Transformational Leadership
Further Readings
Trauma
Types of Trauma
Effects of Trauma
The Organizational Leadership of Trauma
Further Readings
Trolley Problem
Proposed Solutions to the Trolley Problem
Killing and Letting Die
Risk Redirection
Mere Means
Applications of the Trolley Problem
Criticisms of the Trolley Problem
Further Readings
Trust
Declining Trust
Trust in Political Life
Why Leaders Are Trusted?
Social Capital
The Benefits of Mistrust
Further Readings
U
Unintended Consequences of Leadership Theories
How Leadership Theories Are Typically Developed
Critiques of Positivist Theory-Building
Unintended Consequences of Transformational, Charismatic, and Authentic Leadership Theories
Further Readings
V
Virtual Leadership
Virtual Dyadic Leadership
Virtual Team Leadership
Further Readings
Virtues
What Are Virtues?
How Virtues and Leadership Intersect
Virtues Inform Character, and Character Informs Good Leadership
Virtues and Leadership Are Linchpins Connecting Us to Each Other
Virtues and Leadership Can Be Learned and Developed
How Virtues and Leadership Are Studied
Tensions and Debates in the Study of Virtues and Leadership
Further Readings
Visual Arts
Social Engagement and the Creative Process
Education/Training
Applied Arts/Architecture
Politics, History, Exhibition, and Collection
Further Readings
Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Early Years: The Rise of the Voting Rights Act
Nuts and Bolts: The Voting Rights Act and Its Immediate Aftermath
Further Readings
W
Warmth and Competence
Leader–Follower Relationship Theories: Followers Make Task and Social Leaders
Leader Competence and Group Structure: Leaders Make the Group
Gender and Task Versus Social Dimensions
Leader Warmth and Group Structure: Relationships Make the Group
Member Perception and Group Structure: Followers Make Leaders Revisited
Future Directions
Further Readings
Weber on Charisma
The Background
Two Concepts of Charisma
Further Readings
Wellness
Defining Wellness
History of Wellness
Dimensions of Wellness
Further Readings
White Privilege
Origination of White Privilege in the Western World
Racial Hierarchy
Race as a Social Category
Further Readings
Wicked Problems
Origin and Definition
Critiques
Wicked Problems and Adaptive Leadership
Further Readings
Women and Men as Leaders
The Rise of Women Leaders
Gender Effects on Human Capital
Family Responsibilities
Leadership Styles of Women and Men
The Effectiveness of Female and Male Leaders
Gender Stereotypes and Discrimination
Organizational Culture
Women Navigate the Labyrinth
Further Readings
Women's Movement
Waves of Women's Movements
The First Wave: Suffragettes
The Second Wave: Women's Liberationists
The Third Wave: Feminist Organizations
The Fourth Wave: Hashtag Feminisms
Further Readings
Women's Values
Values in Leadership
Defining and Living One's Values
Women Leaders Who Live Their Values
Further Readings
Workplace Democracy
The Organization and Economics of Workplace Democracy
Normative Perspectives on Workplace Democracy
Leadership and Democratic Workplaces
Further Readings
Wrongful Convictions
Pervasiveness of Wrongful Convictions
Causes of Wrongful Convictions
Further Readings
Index

Citation preview

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Leadership Studies

Editorial Board Editors George R. Goethals University of Richmond Scott T. Allison University of Richmond Georgia J. Sorenson University of Cambridge

Associate Editors James K. Beggan University of Louisville Kristin M. S. Bezio University of Richmond Ronald E. Riggio Claremont McKenna College

Editorial Board Joanne Ciulla Rutgers University

Julian Maxwell Hayter University of Richmond

David L. Collinson Lancaster University

Gill Robinson Hickman University of Richmond

Nurcan Ensari Alliant International University

Crystal L. Hoyt University of Richmond

Jessica Flanigan University of Richmond

Christopher von Rueden University of Richmond

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Leadership Studies 1 Edited by George R. Goethals University of Richmond

Scott T. Allison University of Richmond

Georgia J. Sorenson University of Cambridge

Copyright © 2023 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

FOR INFORMATION: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044

All trade names and trademarks recited, referenced, or reflected herein are the property of their respective owners who retain all rights thereto. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goethals, George R., editor. | Allison, Scott T., editor. | Sorenson, Georgia Jones, editor. Title: The Sage encyclopedia of leadership studies / edited by George R. Goethals, University of Richmond, Scott T. Allison, University of Richmond, Georgia J. Sorenson, University of Cambridge.

India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 18 Cross Street #10-10/11/12 China Square Central Singapore 048423

Description: Thousand Oaks, Calif. : SAGE, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Leadership Studies is a multi-disciplinary academic exploration of the various aspects of how people get along, and how together they get things done. The fields that contribute to leadership studies include history, political science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and behavioral economics. Leadership Studies is also about the ethical dimensions of human behavior. The discipline considers what leadership has been in the past (the historical view), what leadership actually looks like in the present (principally from the perspectives of the behavioral sciences and political science), and what leadership should be (the ethical perspective). The SAGE Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies will present both key concepts and research illuminating leadership and many of the most important events in human history that reveal the nuances of leadership, good and bad. Entries will include topics such as power, charisma, identity, persuasion, personality, social intelligence, gender, justice, unconscious conceptions of leadership, leader-follower relationships, and moral transformation”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023000513 | ISBN 9781071840849 (hardcover ; 2 volume set) | ISBN 9781071840832 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781071840825 (epub) | ISBN 9781071840818 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Leadership–Encyclopedias.

Acquisitions Editor: Andrew Boney Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Hernandez ´ Developmental Editor: Sanford J. Robinson Production Editor: Vijayakumar Copy Editor: Christobel Colleen Hopman Typesetter: TNQ Technologies

Classification: LCC HM1261 .S3448 2023 | DDC 303.3/7203–dc23/ eng/20230110 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000513 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Proofreader: Benny Willy Stephen Indexer: TNQ Technologies Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Victoria Velasquez

23 24 25 26 27 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Volume 1 List of Entries

vii

Reader’s Guide

xi

Contributors

xx

Introduction

xxvii

Entries A B C D E

1 45 79 221 273

F G H I

349 377 421 451

Volume 2 List of Entries

vii

Reader’s Guide

xi

Entries L M N O P R

507 603 663 681 689 781

Index

S T U V W 1017

827 915 963 967 981

List of Entries Ableism Accountability Actor–Network Theory Adam Smith and Leadership Adaptive Leadership Aesthetic Leadership Age and Leadership Alienation Altruism Appearance ¨ and Turkish Transformation Ataturk Authentic Leadership Autocratic Leadership

Collective Action Collective Intelligence Collective Leadership Collective Responsibility Communication Community Leadership Community Wealth Building Complexity Leadership Theory Conformity Confucian Ethics Congressional Leadership Connective Leadership Conspiracy Theories Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Contingency Theories Cooperation Corporate Social Responsibility COVID-19 Pandemic Creativity Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Criminal Law Crisis Leadership Critical Leadership Studies Critical Race Theory Cuban Missile Crisis Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education

Bad Leadership Bathsheba Syndrome Behavioral Economics Behavioral Theories of Leadership Big Five Personality Traits Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Biology of Leadership Black Lives Matter and Leadership Board Leadership Bureaucracy Caring Leadership CEO Hubris Change and Leadership Charismatic Leadership Charismatic Theory CIP Model of Leadership Civil Rights Movement Climate Change and Leadership Coalitions Coercive Management Cognitive Biases in Leadership Cognitive Dissonance Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles

Daoist Moral Obligations Dark Triad Death Positivity Bias and Leadership Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Decision-Making Theory Democratic Leadership Deontology and Rights Destructive Leadership Dirty Hands Disagreement, Ethics of

vii

viii

List of Entries

Discourse Ethics Distributed Leadership Distributive Egalitarianism Diversity Diversity Ideologies Dominance and Prestige Economic Justice Economic Recovery and Leadership Educational Attainment Educational Leadership Effective Leadership and Selflessness Effects of Power E-Leadership Embodied Leadership Emotion and Leadership Emotional Intelligence Empathic Leadership Employee Rights Empowerment Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing Entrepreneurship Ethical Consumerism Ethical Leadership Ethics and Effectiveness Evolution of Inequality Evolutionary Leadership Theory Executive Compensation Exemplary Leadership Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society Film, Television, and Social Change Followership Foucault and Postmodernism Foundational Lawgiving Full Range Leadership Theory Gender Stereotypes Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Global Business Leadership Global Leadership Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership GLOBE 2020 GLOBE Research Program Group Effectiveness Group Norms Group Process

Group Satisfaction Groupthink Health Psychology and Leadership Health, Well-Being, and Leadership Heroic Leadership Higher Education History Human Trafficking Humane Education Humility Humor Idiosyncrasy Credit Idiosyncratic Deals Implicit Leadership Theories Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Indigenous International Diplomacy Influence Tactics for Leaders Innovation Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army Instrumental Leadership Intelligences Intelligent Disobedience Intergroup Processes International Leadership Association Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership Labeling Theory Language and Leadership Leader Emergence and Performance Leader Exceptionalism Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leader Self-Efficacy Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Personal Crisis Leaders’ Stories Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions Leadership and Empathy on the Screen Leadership and Management Leadership and US International Relations Leadership Development Leadership for the Common Good Leadership in Children and Adolescents Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals

List of Entries

Leadership in Science Leadership in Violence Prevention Leading Diversity Leading From Below LGBTQ1 Social Movements Liberal Tradition, The Liberalism and Toleration Literature Majority and Minority Influence Manhattan Project Marketing Leadership Me Too Movement Men and Masculinities Military Leadership Mindful Leadership Monetary Policy Moral Character Moral Imagination Moral Language Moral Pluralism Moral Risk Motional Intelligence Multiculturalism, Ethics of Multiple Roles of Leaders Mutiny Narcissistic Leadership Networks and Networked Organizations Neuroscience Nonprofit Leadership Nostalgia and Leadership Obedience Organizational Leadership Panama Canal Treaties Paradoxes of Leadership Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks Path–Goal Theory Patriarchy and Its Origins Pearl Harbor Speech Persuasion Philosophy and Leadership Plutarch Political Identities Political Leadership Political Leadership and Historical Memory

ix

Political Obligation Power and Culture Power and Powerlessness Presidential Leadership Pride and the Psychology of Prestige Procedural Justice Property-Owning Democracy Prosocial Behavior Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership Prozac Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Reconstructive Presidents Regulating Private Sector Leadership Religion and Leadership Religious Disagreement Resilient Leadership Resonant Leadership Responsible Leadership Rhetoric Rhetoric and Persuasion Romance of Heroism Romance of Leadership Rosy Halo and Power Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Self-Leadership September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership Servant Leadership Service Innovation Service-For-Prestige Theory of Leadership Sexual Harassment Sexual Identity Sexuality Shared Leadership Situational Leadership Skills Social Change Social Identities Social Identity Theory Social Media Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics Sports State Aggression Stereotype Threat Strategic Leadership

x

List of Entries

Student Development Sustainability Systems Thinking Task and Socioemotional Leadership Teacher Leadership Team Leadership Terror Management Theory Theater and Leadership Toxic Leadership Trait Theories of Leadership Transactional and Transformational Synergies Transformational and Transactional Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Trauma Trolley Problem Trust

Unintended Consequences of Leadership Theories Virtual Leadership Virtues Visual Arts Voting Rights Act Warmth and Competence Weber on Charisma Wellness White Privilege Wicked Problems Women and Men as Leaders Women’s Movement Women’s Values Workplace Democracy Wrongful Conviction

Reader’s Guide Case Studies

Service Innovation Sexual Harassment Sexuality Social Media Sports Student Development Sustainability Teaching Leadership Team Leadership Theater and Leadership Trauma Trolley Problem Virtual Leadership Voting Rights Act Wellness Wicked Problems Women’s Movement Women’s Values Workplace Democracy Wrongful Convictions

¨ and Turkish Transformation Ataturk Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Black Lives Matter Civil Rights Movement Climate Change COVID-19 Pandemic Cuban Missile Crisis GLOBE Research Program Human Trafficking Indigenous International Diplomacy Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leadership and Empathy on the Screen Leadership and US International Relations Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Science Leadership in Violence Prevention LGBTQ1 Social Movements Literature Manhattan Project Me Too Movement Military Leadership Monetary Policy Mutiny Neuroscience Nonprofit Leadership Panama Canal Treaties Pearl Harbor Speech Philosophy and Leadership Plutarch Political Leadership Presidential Leadership Property-Owning Democracy Race and Ethnicity Reconstructive Presidents Religion Rhetoric September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership

Concepts

Accountability Adaptive Leadership Aesthetic Leadership Alienation Altruism Authentic Leadership Bathsheba Syndrome Big Five Personality Traits Caring Leadership Change and Leadership Charismatic Leadership Cognitive Biases in Leadership Cognitive Dissonance Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles Collective Intelligence Collective Responsibility

xi

xii

Reader’s Guide

Complexity Leadership Theory Conformity Connective Leadership Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Contingency Theories Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Critical Leadership Studies Critical Race Theory Death Positivity Bias and Leadership Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Democratic Leadership Deontology and Rights Dirty Hands Discourse Ethics? Distributed Egalitarianism Diversity Ideologies Effective Leadership and Selflessness Effects of Power Embodied Leadership Emotion and Leadership Emotional Intelligence Empathic Leadership Empowerment Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing Evolution of Leadership Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Followership Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership Group Effectiveness Group Norms Group Process Group Satisfaction Groupthink Health Psychology and Leadership Heroic Leadership Humility Humor Idiosyncrasy Credit Implicit Leadership Theories Inclusive Leadership Influence Tactics for Leaders Innovation Instrumental Leadership Intelligences Intelligent Disobedience Language and Leadership Leader Emergence and Performance

Leader Self-Efficacy Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Personal Crisis Leaders’ Stories Leadership Development Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Leading From Below Majority and Minority Influence Mindful Leadership Moral Pluralism Motional Intelligence Multiple Roles of Leaders Narcissistic Leadership Networks and Networked Organizations Obedience Paradoxes of Leadership Path–Goal Theory Political Leadership and Historical Memory Power and Powerlessness Presidential Leadership Procedural Justice Prozac Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Reconstructive Presidents Resonant Leadership Rhetoric and Persuasion Romance of Leadership Rosy Halo and Power Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Self-Leadership Servant Leadership Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership Shared Leadership Situational Leadership Social Identities Stereotype Threat Strategic Leadership Systems Theory Task and Socioemotional Leadership Terror Management Theory Toxic Leadership Transactional and Transformational Synergies Transformational and Transactional Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Trust Unintended Consequences Virtual Leadership

Reader’s Guide

Warmth and Competence Weber on Charisma Wicked Problems Women and Men as Leaders Cross-Cultural Influences

Confucian Ethics COVID-19 Pandemic Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education Daoist Moral Obligations Diversity Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society Film, Television, and Social Change Gender Stereotypes Global Business Leadership Global Leadership Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership GLOBE Research Program GLOBE 2020 History Indigenous International Diplomacy Institutional Structure Versus Culture in the Army Intergroup Processes Panama Canal Treaties Patriarchy and Its Origins Power and Culture State Aggression White Privilege Women’s Values Ethics

Adam Smith and Leadership Bathsheba Syndrome CEO Hubris Coercive Management Collective Responsibility Confucian Ethics Cooperation Corporate Social Responsibility Daoist Moral Obligations Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Deontology and Rights Dirty Hands Disagreement, Ethics of Discourse Ethics Distributive Egalitarianism

Economic Justice Employee Rights Ethical Consumerism Ethical Leadership Ethics and Effectiveness Evolution of Inequality Executive Compensation Feminism Foucault and Postmodernism Humane Education Idiosyncratic Deals Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Leader Exceptionalism Leadership in Children and Adolescents Moral Character Moral Imagination Moral Language Moral Pluralism Moral Risk Multiculturalism, Ethics of Political Obligation Procedural Justice Prosocial Behavior Racial Disparities Regulating Private Sector Leaders Religious Disagreement Responsible Leadership Sexual Harassment Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics Sustainability Trolley Problem Trust Virtues Wellness Workplace Democracy Wrongful Convictions Evolutionary Approaches

Altruism Biology of Leadership Charismatic Leadership Collective Action Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Dominance and Prestige Effects of Power Embodied Leadership Emotion and Leadership

xiii

xiv

Reader’s Guide

Evolution of Inequality Evolutionary Leadership Theory Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Liberal Tradition, The Liberalism and Toleration Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context Patriarchy and Its Origins Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership Women and Men as Leaders Followers

Accountability Actor–Network Theory Alienation Change and Leadership Charismatic Leadership Theory Cognitive Biases in Leadership Cognitive Dissonance Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles Collective Intelligence Communication Community Leadership Community Wealth Building Conformity Conspiracy Theories Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Cooperation Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Death Positivity Bias Democratic Leadership Distributed Leadership Dominance and Prestige Educational Attainment Emotion and Leadership Employee Rights Empowerment Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society Film, Television, and Social Change Followership Foucault and Postmodernism Group Satisfaction Health and Well-Being Health Psychology and Leadership Humor Idiosyncrasy Credit

Implicit Leadership Theories Intelligent Disobedience Intergroup Processes Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions Leaders’ Stories Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Leading From Below Majority and Minority Influence Multiple Roles of Leaders Networks and Networked Organizations Obedience Persuasion Political Identities Political Leadership and Historical Memory Power and Powerlessness Procedural Justice Prozac Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Rhetoric Rhetoric and Persuasion Romance of Leadership Rosy Halo and Power Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Sexual Identities Social Identity Theory Transactional and Transformational Synergies Organizations

Accountability Board Leadership Bureaucracy CEO Hubris Coalitions Collective Action Collective Leadership Community Leadership Community Wealth Building Congressional Leadership Corporate Social Responsibility Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Critical Leadership Studies Decision-Making Theory Diversity

Reader’s Guide

Economic Recovery and Leadership Educational Leadership Employee Rights Entrepreneurship Ethics and Effectiveness Executive Compensation Foundational Lawgiving Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Global Business Leadership Global Leadership Group Effectiveness Group Norms Group Process Group Satisfaction Groupthink Higher Education Humor Idiosyncratic Deals Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Influence Tactics for Leaders Innovation Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army Instrumental Leadership Intelligent Disobedience International Leadership Association Leader Emergence and Performance Leadership and Management Leadership Development Manhattan Project Marketing Leadership Military Leadership Multiple Roles of Leaders Networks and Networked Organizations Nonprofit Leadership Organizational Leadership Property-Owning Democracy Regulating Private-Sector Leadership Resonant Leadership Service Innovation Shared Leadership Situational Leadership Social Media Sports Strategic Leadership Student Development Systems Theory Team Leadership Theater and Leadership

Unintended Consequences Wicked Problems Wrongful Convictions Personal Qualities

Age and Leadership Appearance Bad Leadership Big Five Personality Traits CEO Hubris Charismatic Leadership Charismatic Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles Communication Creativity Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Crisis Leadership Dark Triad Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Democratic Leadership Destructive Leadership Dominance and Prestige Effective Leadership Emotion and Leadership Emotional Intelligence Empathic Leadership Ethical Leadership Evolution of Leadership Exemplary Leadership Gender and Leadership Groupthink Health and Well-Being Health Psychology and Leadership Heroic Leadership Humility Intelligences Leader Self-Efficacy Leaders’ Personal Crisis Men and Masculinities Mindful Leadership Moral Character Moral Imagination Motional Intelligence Narcissistic Leadership Pride and the Psychology of Prestige Resilient Leadership Responsible Leadership Self-Leadership

xv

xvi

Reader’s Guide

Servant Leadership Sexual Identity Skills Task and Socioemotional Leadership Team Leadership Trait Theories of Leadership Transformational and Transactional Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Trust Warmth and Competence Weber on Charisma Political Leadership

Adam Smith and Leadership Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Change and Leadership Civil Rights Movement Climate Change and Leadership Collective Leadership Collective Responsibility Congressional Leadership Conspiracy Theories Criminal Law Crisis Leadership Cuban Missile Crisis Democratic Leadership Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership Indigenous International Diplomacy Leadership and US International Relations Leadership for the Common Good Leading Diversity LGBTQ1 Social Movements Liberalism and Toleration Monetary Policy Moral Pluralism Multiculturalism, Ethics of Panama Canal Treaties Pearl Harbor Speech Plutarch Political Identities Political Leadership Political Leadership and Historical Memory Political Obligation Presidential Leadership Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Reconstructive Presidents

Religious Disagreement Rhetoric Rhetoric and Persuasion September 11 Terrorist Attacks Social Media State Aggression Terror Management Theory Voting Rights Act Weber on Charisma Women’s Movement Power

Autocratic Leadership Bureaucracy CEO Hubris Change and Leadership Civil Rights Movement Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Feminine Mystique, The Foucault and Postmodernism Foundational Lawgiving Influence Tactics for Leaders Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leader–Follower Relationships Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions Leading from Below Majority and Minority Influence Moral Character Mutiny Persuasion Political Obligation Power and Culture Power and Powerlessness Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Rhetoric and Persuasion Rosy Halo and Power Toxic Leadership White Privilege Situations and Contexts

Age and Leadership Board Leadership Bureaucracy Collective Action Community Leadership

Reader’s Guide

Congressional Leadership Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Contingency Theories COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis Leadership Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education Economic Justice Economic Recovery and Leadership Educational Attainment Educational Leadership E-Leadership Higher Education History Humane Education Humility Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army Instrumental Leadership Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leadership and Management Leadership and US International Relations Leadership in Children and Adolescents Leadership in Violence Prevention Manhattan Project Military Leadership Mutiny Networks and Networked Organizations Organizational Leadership Personal Crisis and Leadership Regulating Private-Sector Leadership Service Innovation Situational Leadership Social Change Sports Teaching Leadership Team Leadership Theater and Leadership Trauma Virtual Leadership Visual Arts Wicked Problems Workplace Democracy Wrongful Convictions Social Justice

Ableism Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Black Lives Matter and Leadership Change and Leadership

Civil Rights Movement Climate Change Coercive Management Collective Responsibility Communication Community Wealth Building COVID-19 Pandemic Critical Race Theory Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Disagreement, Ethics of Distributive Egalitarianism Diversity Diversity Ideologies Economic Justice Educational Attainment Employee Rights Ethical Consumerism Executive Compensation Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Foucault and Postmodernism Gender Stereotypes Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Health and Well-Being Health Psychology and Leadership Human Trafficking Humane Education Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Intersectionality: Race and Gender Labeling Theory Leadership for the Common Good Leadership in Children and Adolescents Leadership in Violence Prevention Leading Diversity LGBTQ1 Social Movements Liberalism and Toleration Me Too Movement Men and Masculinities Multiculturalism, Ethics of Nonprofit Leadership Power and Culture Property-Owning Democracy Prosocial Behavior Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Regulating Private-Sector Leaders Relativism Rights

xvii

xviii

Reader’s Guide

Sexual Harassment Sexual Identity Special Obligations Stereotype Threat Stonewall Rebellion Virtues Wellness White Privilege Women and Men as Leaders Wrongful Convictions Styles

Aesthetic Leadership Authentic Leadership Autocratic leadership Caring Leadership Charismatic Leadership Charismatic Theory Caring Leadership Coercion and Power Democratic Leadership Destructive Leadership Effective Leadership and Selflessness E-Leadership Empathic Leadership Empowerment Ethical Leadership Exemplary Leadership Foundational Lawgiving Heroic Leadership Humor Innovation Language and Leadership Leadership and Empathy on the Screen Narcissistic Leadership Organizational Leadership Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks Procedural Justice Prozac Leadership Resilient Leadership Resonant Leadership Responsible Leadership Servant Leadership Skills Social Change Sustainability Task and Socioemotional Leadership Toxic Leadership

Trait Theories of Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Theories

Actor–Network Theory Adaptive Leadership Authentic Leadership Behavioral Theories of Leadership Big Five Personality Traits Caring Leadership CIP Model of Leadership Charismatic Theory Cognitive Dissonance Theory Complexity Leadership Theory Connective Leadership Conspiracy Theories Contingency Theories Critical Leadership Studies Decision-Making Theory Emotional Intelligence Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing Evolution of Leadership Followership Full Range Leadership Theory Groupthink Implicit Leadership Theories Influence Tactics for Leaders Intelligences Labeling Theory Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Personal Crisis Liberal Tradition, The Path–Goal Theory Persuasion Political Leadership Proximate and Ultimate Approaches to Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Romance of Leadership Reconstructive Leadership Romances of Leadership and heroism Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Servant Leadership Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership Social Identity Theory Strategic Leadership Systems Theory

Reader’s Guide

Terror Management Theory Trait Theories of Leadership Transformational and Transactional Synergies Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Women and Gender

Cognitive Biases in Leadership Diversity Diversity Ideologies

Executive Compensation Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Gender Stereotypes Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Inclusive Leadership Intersectionality: Race and Gender Leading Diversity LGBTQ1 Social Movements Me Too Movement

Men and Masculinities Patriarchy and Its Origins Sexual Harassment Sexual Identity Sexuality Social Identities Women and Men as Leaders Women’s Movement Women’s Values

xix

Contributors Ogechi Adele Princeton University

Bradford S. Bell Cornell University

Melissa Carsten Winthrop University

Scott T. Allison University of Richmond

Kristin M. S. Bezio University of Richmond

David R. Caruso Yale University

Miguel Alzola Fordham University

Michelle C. Bligh Claremont Graduate University

Sarah Chace Christopher Newport University

Julie R. Ancis New Jersey Institute of Technology

Kimberly B. Boal Texas Tech University

Ira Chaleff International Leadership Association

John Antonakis University of Lausanne, Switzerland Peter Atkinson University of Roehampton, United Kingdom Roya Ayman Illinois Institute of Technology

Kathleen R. Bogart Oregon State University Richard Bolden University of Exeter Business School, United Kingdom Richard E. Boyatzis Case Western Reserve University

Henry L. Chambers, Jr. University of Richmond G. Donald Chandler, III Williams College Joey T. Cheng York University, Canada

Stewart Braun Australian Catholic University

Cynthia Cherrey International Leadership Association

Brookes Brown Clemson University

Kevin M. Cherry University of Richmond

Alexandra Sidney Bullock Illinois Institute of Technology

Stephanie Chitpin University of Ottawa, Canada

Amanda Bullough University of Delaware

Volha Chykina University of Richmond

S. Gayle Baugh University of West Florida

Athena Cairo Virginia Commonwealth University

Joanne B. Ciulla Rutgers University

Floyd D. Beachum Lehigh University

Jessie A. Cannon Independent Scholar

James K. Beggan University of Louisville

Linda L. Carli Wellesley College

John P. Baker Western Kentucky University Michael L. Barnett Rutgers Business School Timothy Barney University of Richmond Nicolas Bastardoz KU Leuven, Belgium

xx

Marilie Coetsee University of Richmond David L. Collinson Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Contributors

xxi

Crystal Wright Colter Maryville College

Angelo DiBello Rutgers University

Susan T. Fiske Princeton University

Chris Comerford University of Wollongong, Australia

Nancy DiTomaso Rutgers Business School-

Jessica Flanigan University of Richmond

Daniela G. Dominguez University of San Francisco

John W. Fleenor Center for Creative Leadership

William Donaldson Christopher Newport University

Kerrie Fleming Hult International Business School

Jay A. Conger Claremont McKenna College Shane Connelly University of Oklahoma Noshir Contractor Northwestern University

Peter W. Dorfman New Mexico State University

Roseanne J. Foti Virginia Tech

Yalitza Corcino-Davis Independent Scholar

Wim Dubbink Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Rick Cotton University of Victoria, Canada

Patrick K. Durkee University of Texas at Austin

Richard Coughlan University of Richmond

Alice H. Eagly Northwestern University

Thomas E. Cronin President Emeritus, Whitman College

Gareth Edwards University of the West of England, United Kingdom

Dean Croushore University of Richmond

Yasmine Elfeki Virginia Tech

Cynthia M. Ganote University of Louisville

Brent Edwin Cusher Christopher Newport University

Ashley Emami Veterans Administration San Diego Healthcare System

William L. Gardner Texas Tech University

Monti Narayan Datta University of Richmond Ryan W. Davis Brigham Young University David V. Day Claremont McKenna College Angelo DeBello Rutgers University Leslie DeChurch Northwestern University Vlad Demsar Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Alain de Sales University of Queensland, Australia

Samantha E. England Independent Scholar Nurcan Ensari Alliant International University Nathan Eva Monash Business School, Australia Elizabeth Faier Independent Scholar Steven Fein Williams College Alexandra Figueroa Anderson Independent Scholar Thomas Fischer University of Geneva, Switzerland

John D. Foubert Union University Angelique Fu Alliance Manchester Business School, United Kingdom Mel Fugate Mississippi State University Adam D. Galinsky Columbia Business School

Mia Reinoso Genoni University of Richmond Michael A. Genovese, Jr. Loyola Marymount University Camille Gibson Prairie View A&M University George R. Goethals University of Richmond Jamie L. Goodwin Wheaton College Jesse Graham University of Utah Nicola Graham-Kevan University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom

xxii

Contributors

Tricia Gray University of Louisville

Julian Maxwell Hayter University of Richmond

Philippe Jacquart EM Lyon, France

Jeffrey D. Green Virginia Commonwealth University

Lisa Collier Hazelgrove University of Richmond

Sana Jarva Williams College

Druann M. Heckert Fayetteville State University

Mansour Javidan Thunderbird School of Global Management

Keith Grint Warwick University, United Kingdom Peter Gronn Monash University, Australia Carlos Guevara Mann Florida State University Julianne Guillard Virginia Commonwealth University ¨ Seval Gundemir University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Ann C. Hale University of Louisville Sara Hanson University of Richmond John P. Hardt University of Richmond Michael Hardy Coventry University, United Kingdom

Mattie V. Hedgebeth Independent Scholar William B. Heller Binghamton University Lauren Nicole Henley University of Richmond Gill Robinson Hickman University of Richmond Javier S. Hidalgo University of Richmond Amanda S. Hinojosa Howard University Violet T. Ho University of Richmond Kristy Lee Hochenberger Syracuse University Dorothy J. Holland University of Richmond Jeffrey D. Houghton West Virginia University

P. D. Harms University of Alabama

Crystal L. Hoyt University of Richmond

Ashley Harrell Duke University

Ronald H. Humphrey Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Maura Jaye Harrington Center for Nonprofit Management

Samuel T. Hunter Pennsylvania State University

Nathan W. Harter Christopher Newport University

Muzammil Hussain Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Haley A. Harwell University of Richmond

Kadia Nichelle Hylton-Fraser Lehigh University

Jeffrey K. Hass University of Richmond

Dana R. Jackson University of Richmond

Stefanie K. Johnson Leeds School of Business Jen Jones Seton Hill University Owain Smolovi´c Jones The Open University, United Kingdom Hrishikesh Joshi Bowling Green State University Kathryn E. Joyce Princeton University Surinder S. Kahai Binghamton University Devorah Kalekin-Fishman University of Haifa, Israel Jeannine Keefer University of Richmond Louise Kelly University of La Verne Ilan Kelman Independent Scholar Christine Kershaw University of Alberta, Canada Tashina Lenai Khabbaz Independent Scholar Grace J. Kim Independent Scholar Kathryn Kincaid University of Alberta, Canada Ewan Kingston College of Charleston

Contributors

Margaret A. Kneuer Virginia Commonwealth University

Kendra Lowery Ball State University

Joseph McManus Monmouth University

David Ludden Georgia Gwinnett College

Eric J. McNulty Harvard University

Karen P. Kochel University of Richmond

Aaron L. Lukaszewski California State University Fullerton

M. Saif Mekhari University of Richmond

Daryl Koehn DePaul University

Alina Lungeanu Northwestern University

James M. Kouzes Santa Clara University

Tuan Luu Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Laura E. Knouse University of Richmond

Medha Satish Kumar Simon Fraser University, Canada Donna Ladkin Antioch University Roshni T. Ladny Florida Gulf Coast University Gary Lambert Independent Scholar Kelly Lambert University of Richmond Lasse Laustsen Aarhus University, Denmark Zhen Liang DePaul University Jimmy Alfonso Licon George Mason University

Karryna Madison Monash Business School, Australia Joe C. Magee New York University Jon Mahoney Kansas State University Timothy Marjoribanks Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Mollie C. Marr Oregon Health & Science University Ashley Martin Stanford University

xxiii

Chao Miao Salisbury University Carrie Mier Indiana University East Joanne M. Miller University of Delaware Jeffrey Moriarty Bentley University Robert F. Mulligan Western Carolina University Michael D. Mumford The University of Oklahoma Susan E. Murphy University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Alireza Nazarian University of Westminster, United Kingdom Linda L. Neider Herbert School of Business, University of Miami

Hugh Liebert United States Military Academy

Robin Martin University of Manchester, United Kingdom

E. Allan Lind Duke University

´ M. Mattison Siobhan University of New Mexico

Jean Lipman-Blumen Connective Leadership Institute

Kelly Davis McCauley West Texas A&M University

Sirio Lonati NEOMA Business School, France

Carlos R. McCray Montclair State University

Toby Newstead University of Tasmania, Australia

Anthony C. Lopez Washington State University

Rose McDermott Brown University

Thao P. H. Nguyen Independent Scholar

Patricia Denise Lopez Alliant International University

Sarah G. McGinn Williams College

Camilla W. Nonterah University of Richmond

Robert G. Lord Durham University Business School

Rory McGovern United States Military Academy

Lesley D. O’Brien Virginia Commonwealth University

Maike Neuhaus The University of Queensland, Australia Tanner R. Newbold The University of Oklahoma

xxiv

Contributors

Lynn R. Offermann George Washington University ¨ Anders Ortenblad University of Agder, Norway Patrick Gavan O’Shea Human Resources Research Organization Jennifer R. Overbeck Melbourne Business School, Australia

Michael E. Price Brunel University London, United Kingdom Terry L. Price University of Richmond Jonathan T. Pryor California State University, Fresno Shanshan Qian Towson University

Daniel J. Palazzolo University of Richmond

David E. Rast, III University of Alberta, Canada

Andrew Parker University of the West of England, United Kingdom

Heidi Reeder Boise State University

Craig D. Parks Washington State University

Christopher S. Reina Virginia Commonwealth University

John M. Parrish Loyola Marymount University

Ronald E. Riggio Claremont McKenna College

Craig L. Pearce Pennsylvania State University

Jill Robinson University of Redlands

Robert M. Pearl Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Graduate School of Business

Madison R. Romero George Washington University

Kathie L. Pelletier California State University, San Bernardino Jethro Pettit Institute of Development Studies Meghan L. Pickett Illinois Institute of Technology Emily F. Plackowski Independent Scholar Alicia Plemmons Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Barry Z. Posner Santa Clara University Teresa Preddy Independent Scholar

Kenneth P. Ruscio University of Richmond Thomas R. Rutledge University of California San Diego Tess Ryan Australian Catholic University Abbey L. Salvas George Washington University Charles D. Samuelson University of Oslo, Norway Katina B. Sawyer The George Washington University

Jan Schilling University of Applied Administrative Sciences, Germany Chester A. Schriesheim Miami Herbert School of Business David A. Schroeder University of Arkansas Birgit Schyns NEOMA Business School, France Trevor Shelley Arizona State University Shavonne R. Shorter Bloomsburg University Erling Sjovold University of Richmond Stephen Skowronek Yale University Eric Alden Smith University of Washington Jennifer E. Smith Mills College Robert Smither Rollins College Sheldon Solomon Skidmore College Bert A. Spector Northeastern University Bob Spires University of Richmond Brian R. Spisak Harvard University Anthony Stahelski Central Washington University

Tobey Scharding Rutgers University

Allan C. Stam University of Virginia

Doris Schedlitzki London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

Ute Stephan King’s College London, United Kingdom

Contributors

Robert J. Sternberg Cornell University

Maria Tomprou Carnegie Mellon University

Holly White University of Michigan

Patrick A. Stewart University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Stephen P. Turner University of South Florida

Jonathan B. Wight University of Richmond

Mary Uhl-Bien Texas Christian University

David Wilkins University of Richmond

Don Vinson University of Worcester, United Kingdom

Mason B. Williams Williams College

Steven N. Stroessner University of California, Los Angeles Mary E. Stuckey Pennsylvania State University Mary Sully de Luque Arizona State University

Mark Van Vugt Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

xxv

Thad Williamson University of Richmond

Christian Voegtlin Audencia Business School, France

Samuel G. Wilson Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Christopher von Rueden University of Richmond

Suze Wilson Massey University, New Zealand

Chao (Mavis) Tang University of North Texas

Christina L. Wassenaar University of South Alabama

Mary Kelly Tate University of Richmond School of Law

Zoe Weil Institute for Humane Education

Everett L. Worthington, Jr. Virginia Commonwealth University

Liz Stillwaggon Swan University of Colorado Boulder

Chan Thai Santa Clara University Christian N. Thoroughgood Villanova University Leah Tomkins Independent Scholar

Alex Wellerstein American Institute of Physics Patricia H. Werhane University of Virginia Melissa A. Wheeler Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Kimberly Yost Independent Scholar Gary Yukl School of Business, University at Albany Stephen J. Zaccaro George Mason University

Introduction Leadership is central to the human condition. It is almost impossible to imagine human life without it. The same goes for understanding the behavior of individual members of other species. Leadership is everywhere. As for humans, leadership at its most basic is about how people get along and how they get things done. It involves individuals devising organizational structures to achieve their goals. It entails finding the right mix of leaders and followers in such structures, and finding the right people to fill those roles flexibly and effectively. Leading is not only done well or poorly, or effectively or ineptly. It is also done morally, with care for the greater good—or selfishly and destructively. Both leadership and followership are multifaceted. In a complex world, understanding fully what leadership is, as well as what makes it ethical and effective, is becoming only more difficult. Equally important and challenging is understanding the mind, and behavior, of followers. The complexities of leadership itself and the breadth of the field of leadership studies combine to challenge any endeavor to create a comprehensive and coherent encyclopedia of leadership studies. Despite the urgency of understanding leadership in a world where democratic government is now in a protracted struggle with the appeal of autocracy, scholars have been hardpressed to render a clear and relevant account of its fundamentals. This urgent challenge has spurred us to work with our colleagues and with Sage Publishing to produce this encyclopedia. Our goal is to provide readers with an understanding of the complex fundamentals of leading and following so that we can all do better in living and learning in difficult times.

As suggested above, the study of leadership demands understanding not only how leadership is done well but also how it is done ethically. It is about understanding how in the best of circumstances people can find ways of getting along and getting things done, together, in highly moral ways. Reflecting this very general view, we have endeavored to bring together work at the cutting edge of the study of leadership from the many disciplines and perspectives that inform this highly interdisciplinary field of study.

Intended Audience The field of leadership studies is vast. It involves scholars and educators, executives and leaders in business and management, nonprofits, and institutions such as hospitals, the military, and religious organizations. This encyclopedia can be of both interest and utility for all of these groups of people. It can enlighten them about what we think we know, help them think critically about our theories and our evidence, and equip them with the knowledge to act more effectively as both leaders and followers. Most important, perhaps, our work is intended for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. They are the citizens of the future. All of them will both lead and follow at different times and in different circumstances in their lives. The entries in this work can help them think about and perform both effective and ethical leadership. It can help them get along and get things done, sometimes as leaders and other times as followers. We wish them well in whatever paths they choose for the future.

xxvii

xxviii

Introduction

The Editorial Team The associate editors and editorial board members of this project have helpfully shaped both its content and its voice, or what we might call its words and music. The work’s topics and level of presentation represent their fields of scholarly expertise and their experience as teachers and mentors. The three associate editors include a scholar of the humanities, Kristin Bezio of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, a scholar of the social sciences; psychologist James Beggan from the Department of Sociology at the University of Louisville; and Ronald Riggio of the Kravis Institute of Leadership and Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College, a long-time leading scholar of leadership, nationally and internationally. The eight-member editorial board includes a wide variety of diverse perspectives on the study of leadership. That diversity of perspectives is crucial to the potential value of this project. Two of the eight are scholars of leadership ethics, Joanne Ciulla and Jessica Flanigan, who have special expertise in business ethics and medical ethics, respectively. David Collinson ensured that the important perspective of critical leadership studies was included in a significant number of entries. Historian Julian Hayter added a crucial long-term perspective to planning the content of this encyclopedia, especially as it concerns ways that race has shaped the present and our understanding of leadership. Gill Hickman brought deep knowledge of and experience with leadership in organizations. Crystal Hoyt added depth to our understanding of the importance of gender and gender differences in leadership and perceptions of leadership. Nurcan Ensari brought an important international perspective to the project. Finally, we were fortunate to have on board anthropologist Christopher von Rueden, a prominent young scholar concerned with an evolutionary perspective on leadership.

Entries and Authors This two-volume work includes nearly 300 entries authored by over 200 lead authors and many coauthors. Topics were selected based on theory

and research that is taught in leadership studies curricula, on papers presented at international leadership association meetings and conferences, and on articles published in leading journals which either focus on leadership or consider its significance. We are confident that the encyclopedia satisfactorily covers essential topics in the field of leadership studies.

Structure and Organization The entries in this encyclopedia are listed alphabetically. All of them fall into one or more categories that highlight the scope of this project, and its overall content. The categories themselves are listed in alphabetical order here: Case Studies Concepts Cross-Cultural Perspectives Ethics Evolutionary Perspectives Followers Organizations Personal Qualities Political Leadership Power Situations and Contexts Social Justice Styles Theories Women and Gender

A perhaps more useful presentation of the various categories is to explain their interrelationships. Our largest category is Concepts. Well over half of the entries in this encyclopedia introduce and describe a conceptual approach to some aspect of leadership, for example, the entry on the Dark Triad of traits can produce bad leadership. Some of the entries listed under Concepts are general enough to be listed under the heading Theories. For example, Adaptive Leadership and Behavioral Theories of Leadership are classified as both Concepts but more importantly perhaps, Theories. Closely related to Concepts is the category Case Studies. Typically the case studies included here illustrate one or more important concepts, such as the GLOBE Research Program.

Introduction

Other categories were identified according to key elements of leadership. One enduring question in the study of leadership is the relationship of power and leadership. Thus, we include a category of Power in our overall organization of entries, as represented in the entry Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions. One of the most prominent scholars of leadership, James MacGregor Burns, argued that all leaders are actual or potential power holders, but that not all power holders are leaders. Burns went on to distinguish power wielding from leadership, depending on whether the person with power uses it for selfish interests only or to meet the needs of followers as well. Other scholars argue that leaders do not necessarily have power. Reflecting these different perspectives, the relationship of power and leadership is either an implicit or explicit concern in many of our entries. Another group of entries considers leaders, followers, and how their relationships play out in specific situations or contexts. First in this set are entries that focus on the Personal Qualities and Styles of leaders. These include entries on the Big Five Personality Traits that generally contribute to good leadership and an entry on the Dark Triad, traits of some leaders that often produce the worst and most destructive instances of leadership. The entries under Styles include entries on Authentic, Caring, Mindful, and Narcissistic Leadership, that is, some of the good and the bad. Of course, many entries that consider the personal qualities or styles of leaders talk about how they interact with followers. Importantly then, there is a list of entries that focus on Followers, including for example a contribution on Intelligent Disobedience by followers. Then a set considers how leaders and followers interact or relate in our group of entries called Situations and Contexts. Two such entries are Collective Action and Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences. Another important category includes entries that reflect advances in explorations of evolutionary roots of a wide variety of human behavior, including mate preferences and emerging leadership structures in groups. For example, we include an entry on Charismatic Leadership that takes an evolutionary approach. This encyclopedia, as is evident from our team of editorial board members, emphasizes the

xxix

centrality of ethics. Various entries explore just what constitutes ethical leadership, and how does it relate to other aspects of leadership. Thus, one entry considers Ethics and Effectiveness, considering whether unethical leadership must also be ineffective. Closely related to our focus on ethics is a concern with social justice, particularly issues involving race, gender, and class. Accordingly, we have entries listed under the headings Social Justice and Women and Gender. For example, the entry on Women and Men as Leaders is listed under the categories of Social Issues and Women and Gender. Incidentally, it also is listed under Evolutionary Approaches since it addresses whether differences in the numbers of men and women leaders have anything to do with evolution. In this way, Women and Men as Leaders is typical of many entries in this encyclopedia. They touch on many aspects of leadership. Finally, we note that a considerable number of entries explore leadership in two important contexts, politics (Political Leadership category) or organizations (Organizations category). These groups include Congressional Leadership and Board Leadership. Taken together we have endeavored to create a coherent structure of entries which represent the extensive field of leadership studies.

The Reader’s Guide The structure described above was used to create our Reader’s Guide. This lists the various categories and the entries that address some aspect of the category. The fifteen categories are intended as helpful signposts in the landscape of leadership studies. We hope that they will help readers appreciate the dimensions of the field, and the ways we have endeavored to present it.

“See Also” Cross-References Most all of the entries in this work are related, closely or at a distance, to several other entries. With authors’ guidance, we have taken care to provide after each entry several “See also” suggestions of other entries that address the same concerns as the article in question. For those who

xxx

Introduction

wish to get a sense of how a given topic fits within the larger field of leadership studies, these suggestions can be very helpful. We encourage readers to explore as widely as they can in these volumes. One article can lead you to others, and there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained by taking the time to consider the broad and diverse field of leadership studies.

Further Reading In addition to cross-references, each entry lists a number of suggested sources of additional information about the subject of the entry. While we have represented the field of leadership as thoroughly as possible within the limits of two volumes, there is obviously much more to learn. These additional readings open new dimensions of learning that give not only a much fuller sense of leadership and followership but also of the more general concern with how people get along and, together, get good things done. Consulting those readings along with the cross-references can be very helpful in understanding the large, multidisciplinary filed of leadership studies.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the many, many people who have made this project a reality. First, we’d like to thank the nearly three hundred authors who have contributed entries to this encyclopedia. The quality of your contributions is exceptional, and we are deeply indebted to you. Also, most of you were timely in your submissions. This calls for an extra measure of gratitude. Your cooperation allowed us to work gently, personally, and we think effectively with authors who encountered deadline, or as we called them “due date,” challenges. In every way, our contributors have been fabulous. Next we thank our dedicated Editorial Board members: Joanne Ciulla, David Collinson, Nurcan Ensari, Jessica Flanigan, Julian Hayter, Gill

Hickman, Crystal Hoyt, and Chris von Rueden. You did more work than you initially signed on for, agreeably and effectively. This was extremely important in moving the project along at a very steady pace, indeed ahead of schedule. We thank all of you. Our three Associate Editors—James Beggan, Kristin Bezio, and Ron Riggio—were fabulous. Thank you. The work of coordinating with authors, editing, and more general troubleshooting and support were invaluable and essential to completing this work. We are grateful. It was our pleasure to work with several great colleagues at Sage Publishing. First, we are indebted to Andrew Boney for encouraging us to take on this project, and for helping us navigate the complexities of publishers’ contracts. He was also instrumental in introducing us to and handing us off to the excellent team we worked with during the writing and production phases. We are especially grateful to Leticia Guti´errez. Her patient and steady guidance in teaching us the Sage processes for tracking the progress of the project was instrumental in getting our work done. Our developmental editor, Sanford Robinson, has been patient and gentle and at the same time clear and firm. He has been a great colleague in this endeavor. Thank you.

Special Note of Remembrance and Gratitude When we started this project our dear valued colleague Georgia Sorenson, listed as the Senior Editor, was a guiding force. Her knowledge of the field, both its substance and its personnel, was essential in launching the project. Georgia passed away just as the project gained traction. We would not have been able to get under way without her. As a person and professional colleague Georgia was the best. We miss her. George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison University of Richmond

A as a disability or impairment—are fundamentally different from, and inferior to, those without. When one holds these sorts of preconceived notions and attitudes (negative beliefs, judgments, and feelings) about a group, or toward a person due to their group membership, one is said to be prejudiced against that group or person. When these (prejudiced) negative attitudes and beliefs about a group inspire one to speak or otherwise behave negatively, unfairly, or even hatefully toward a member of that group, one is discriminating against the person or group. Thus, ableism occurs when people have negative beliefs and feelings (prejudices) regarding PWDs and/or when they act against PWDs based on those beliefs and feelings (discrimination). Understanding ableism requires an understanding of disability.

ABLEISM Ableism (noun) happens when particular—and often harmful—thoughts, feelings, and actions are directed toward people with disabilities (PWDs) due to their impairment or disability status. Too often, PWDs and disability have been left out of discussions of leadership, power, and representation. The significance of this lack of inclusion is affirmed by the prevalence of ableism across the globe. The way ableism is defined has consequences for its relationship to the construct of disability, the way different types of ableism are expressed and enacted in real life, and the consequences of this enactment.

Definition Ableism can be defined in a broad and inclusive way, as prejudice, discrimination, and other expressions of social/systemic or personal antagonism and/or superiority directed toward PWDs. It should be noted, however, that many scholars are proponents of more focused conceptualizations of ableism; for example, that ableism definitions should center on biological, psychological, and/or social consequences for PWDs or on the dehumanization of or public policies regarding PWDs. Ableism (and other -isms, such as racism and sexism) is often rooted in the belief that a group of people with a certain shared characteristic—such

What Is Disability? The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health states that disability is an umbrella term referring to the interaction of an impairment with personal and environmental factors. According to this view, an impairment may not be disabling in the presence of certain personal factors (e.g., coping skills) and environmental factors (e.g., wheelchair accessibility, lack of ableism, etc.). Conversely, if such factors are missing, even a mild impairment can be quite disabling.

1

2

Ableism

Similarly, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990—the major disability civil rights legislation in the United States—defines disability as (1) a physical or mental impairment that affects at least one major life activity, (2) having a history of an impairment, and/or (3) being perceived by others as having an impairment. Thus, the label of disability is largely socially constructed. For example, a person may experience pain that makes it difficult to walk, but not consider himself or herself—nor be considered by others—to be disabled. Additionally, members of society may believe that a particular person is disabled, even if that person disagrees. People identified as having disabilities are subject to the ableist tendencies of others.

objectifying, as they often operate on the assumption that those with disabilities lack competence and the ability to achieve goals. Additionally, the excessive celebration of the accomplishments of one PWD can severely undermine overall disability rights by setting up the expectation that, if all PWDs would just try harder, they would no longer require accommodations. Pity and paternalism are also common—and ableist—reactions to disability. Although wanting to help PWDs may seem to suggest the existence of a positive and caring attitude, such intentions are not always motivated by genuine compassion or empathy. Instead, a paternalistic desire to help and protect the poor disabled person is often motivated by pity for that person, who is regarded as inferior to, and less capable than, nondisabled people.

Types of Ableism Ableism can be expressed in a variety of ways. It can be explicit and obvious (e.g., when an employer refuses to hire PWDs) or implicit and subtle (e.g., when a company neglects to include disability in its diversity statement). It can also be overtly negative, blossoming into hostile (e.g., physically attacking a PWD) or dehumanizing (e.g., treating PWDs like objects or animals) interactions. Ableism can be more difficult to identify when it is ambivalent (i.e., involving conflicting feelings). This type of ableism occurs when, for example, nondisabled folks have more negative attitudes toward PWDs who defy stereotypical expectations regarding disability (e.g., PWDs who are ambitious or sexual), while having more positive attitudes toward PWDs who conform to stereotypical expectations (e.g., PWDs who are submissive). Jealousy, too, can be ableist, as when nondisabled people are envious of the accommodations PWDs are granted (e.g., disabled parking permits) to be able to participate equitably in society. At times, ableism may seem nonhostile or even positive. Benevolent types of ableism might involve nondisabled people expressing the inspiration they feel when observing a PWD accomplishing relatively common tasks (e.g., commenting that being employed or loading the dishwasher while having disabilities is heroic or amazing). These feelings of amazement and wonder are condescending and

Consequences of Ableism As noted earlier, different types of ableism can result in many negative behaviors and attitudes being targeted toward PWDs. Ableist people may not trust, befriend, or hire a PWD. In extreme cases, ableist people may commit crimes against PWDs, who, owing to their social status, impairments, and need for accommodative help, are particularly vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and other forms of mistreatment. The underrepresentation of PWDs in legislative bodies and related organizations means that the voices of PWDs are not being heard. This not only threatens existing disability rights legislation but also can result in misplaced priorities (i.e., those developed without consulting PWDs) and a lack of effective support for PWDs within societal systems (e.g., schools, health care facilities). When health care providers, teachers, and others who are in positions of power hold ableist views, PWDs who are patients, students, or in other subordinate positions may be the victims of a lack of understanding, ignorance of accommodations, and/or abuses of power. Those with disabilities may also grow to internalize and expect ableism in their encounters with people and institutions, which can diminish their sense of well-being. In addition, PWDs—especially those with less obvious or visible disabilities—are often accused of faking their impairments to

Accountability

receive special privileges. Having to continually legitimize one’s disabilities to others, while also having to constantly manage social, interpersonal, and institutional interactions and expectations, can lead to frustration and exhaustion.

Recommendations PWDs represent one of the largest minority groups in the United States. Additionally, disability is one of the few minority groups that is open to everyone; that is, anyone can become disabled, at any time. Yet, PWDs are underrepresented in leadership roles and positions of power, if they are represented at all. To safeguard the rights of PWDs, disability must be included alongside other minority groups in statements, policies, and laws involving inclusion and diversity. In addition, efforts should be made to construct and/or renovate workplaces, schools, and public and private spaces around the principles of universal design. To spark change, it is of the utmost importance that all people speak up against ableism when they encounter it; help amplify the voices of those with disabilities; advocate for policies that increase the rights of PWDs and enhance the social, financial, and other systemic supports available to PWDs; and foster the inclusion of PWDs in positions of power and leadership. Kathleen R. Bogart and Emily F. Plackowski See also Discrimination; Ideologies and Diversity; Intergroup Processes; Labeling Theory; Leading Diversity; Paternalism; Power and Powerless; Rights; Social Stigma and Leadership

Further Readings Bogart, K. R., & Dunn, D. S. (Eds.). (2019). Ableism. Journal of Social Issues, 75(3). doi:10.1111/josi.12278 DisBeat. (2017). The ADA legacy project. Retrieved from https://www.adalegacy.com/. Accessed on July 7, 2021. Nario-Redmond, M. R. (2020). Ableism: The causes and consequences of disability prejudice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. National Council on Independent Living. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://ncil.org/

3

World Health Organization. (2001). ICF: International classification of functioning, disability and health. Geneva: World Health Organization.

ACCOUNTABILITY Why and how do we hold leaders accountable? The focus of this entry is on political leadership, particularly in democracies. But the fundamental arguments apply to leaders in any sector of modern society. Accountability is fundamentally a determination whether those granted authority and power are meeting the expected standards of competence, integrity, and legitimacy, and it provides processes to correct or even remove leaders if those standards are not met.

Why Leaders Are Held Accountable There are two basic reasons why we hold leaders accountable. One is that they are fallible. They inevitably make mistakes that have to be corrected. The other is that they always have the opportunity and sometimes the propensity to abuse their power for self-interested or corrupt ends. These seemingly straightforward premises are so ingrained in our modern understanding of leadership that we often take them for granted. But they emerged from a long history of philosophical arguments that tried to solve a basic leadership dilemma: how to empower leaders so they can do good things while constraining them so they cannot do bad things. Accountability enables us to draw boundaries around a leader’s authority. It is how we find the appropriate balance between power and constraint. At the heart of contemporary democracy are several beliefs. Individuals consent to being governed. They do so in order to be protected from harm and to be secure in the exercise of their rights. They possess those rights by virtue of their humanity, not because a political authority has seen fit to bestow them. If government fails to secure the people’s rights or violates them in the

4

Accountability

exercise of its own powers, citizens may justifiably withdraw their consent. The British philosopher John Locke (1632– 1704) was the first to articulate the problem of government in this way. He imagined a kind of contract between citizens and leaders, with citizens granting authority and power to rulers provided the rulers fulfilled their obligations to the citizens. As he wrote in The Second Treatise on Government (1689): And so whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any common-wealth, is bound to govern by established standing laws, promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees; by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws; and to employ the force of the community at home, only in the execution of such laws, or abroad to prevent or redress foreign injuries, and secure the community from inroads and invasion. And all this to be directed to no other end, but the peace, safety, and public good of the people. [§ 131]

A leader’s authority is granted conditionally and can be revoked. This principle finds one of its purest expressions in U.S. American democracy. The Declaration of Independence (1776) drew heavily from Locke, making the case that the King’s arbitrary and even tyrannical use of power over the colonists rendered it illegitimate. Later, the Constitution of the United States (1787) enshrined the principle in a set of institutional mechanisms designed primarily to ensure that leaders would hold power only so long as they adhered to the rule of law and competently fulfilled their responsibilities.

How Leaders Are Held Accountable Public officials, like the rest of us, are imperfect humans and therefore prone to mistakes. They will err, sometimes in minor and easily corrected ways and sometimes in severe ways that call into question their competence and our continued consent to their governing. When additional information or new conditions call for nothing more than a simple recalibration, leaders can and should adjust

and join in the collective effort to achieve accountability. Such leaders possess a kind of public humility, neither arrogance nor timidity, but enough of a sense of self to modify policy or strategy and learn from their mistakes. When leaders’ mistakes are more severe, significant, or harmful, there could well be a need for a more forceful reaction: a change in the laws, a change in administrators who implement the laws, or a change in leadership through an election, which is of course the ultimate means for redress in a democracy. But never in these cases are the remedies punitive, which is how we often think of holding leaders accountable. Accountability in response to a presumption of fallibility is an ordinary correction achieved through ordinary politics. If responding to incompetence is one reason for accountability, responding to corruption is quite another. In American democracy, the possibility, even the likelihood, of leaders abusing power was clearly on the minds of the drafters of the Constitution. Many of its provisions were designed as safeguards against violations of the public trust. The separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, with each checking, balancing, and limiting the others, was one solution. Impeachment and removal from office was another. The result was a complex constitutional architecture, which sometimes makes government susceptible to paralysis. That was a risk the nation’s founders seemed willing to accept. It was more prudent, they calculated, to ensure the country against corrupt rulers than to search in vain for the perfect, all-wise, and ethically pure ruler. Efficiency was not the goal; accountability was, and the price to be paid was complexity and some measure of inefficiency. In contemporary government, ways of achieving accountability have become ever more formal and complex. In the United States, there is the Government Accountability Office (GAO), established by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. It is technically an arm of Congress charged with assessing the performance of federal agencies and monitoring their expenditures. It issues reports (nearly 1,000 in any given year), submits testimony at Congressional hearings, provides legal guidance, and generally seeks to improve the

Actor–Network Theory

performance of government. GAO is led by the Comptroller General of the United States, who is appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress to serve a 15-year term. The reason for such a long term in office is to ensure impartiality, independence, and nonpartisanship. A further example of the institutionalization of accountability is the Inspector General Act of 1978. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and in fulfillment of President Jimmy Carter’s pledge to make government and its leaders more accountable, each federal agency would have its own Inspector General appointed by the president and, in most cases, confirmed by the Senate. These individuals would, on the one hand, be independent of the agency and impartial but they would also, on the other hand, be highly knowledgeable about the work of the agency and capable of using their expertise to investigate malfeasance, incompetence, or abuse of authority within the agency. There are now 73 Inspectors General within the federal government. Each oversees an extensive staff. A final example of holding leaders accountable is actually outside the government. A free press has long been seen as a way for the public to be informed and knowledgeable about its leaders and its government. Recently, that has received even more attention and has come to be known as accountability journalism. The former executive editor of The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., described it this way: “When journalists use resourceful reporting and vivid presentation to hold the powerful accountable for their acts, they fulfill their highest purpose. They help encourage the honest and open use of power” (quoted in Hacker & Pierson, 2005, p. 183). They are aided in their efforts by the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (passed in 1967 and subsequently amended), which requires public authorities to respond to requests for information and records held by governmental entities. Accountability requires transparency. Accountability also requires a degree of impartiality. When Locke referred to “indifferent and upright judges,” he had officers of the courts in mind but also was underscoring the need, in general, for individuals who could pursue accountability not simply as politics by other means, not using the mechanisms of accountability

5

to achieve partisan ends or retribution against political opponents, but instead would show allegiance first and foremost to the rule of law and the Constitution. If pursuit of accountability were perceived as the pursuit of power to achieve partisan advantage, its effectiveness and legitimacy would vanish. Kenneth P. Ruscio See also Bad Leadership; Democratic Leadership; Ethics and Effectiveness; Moral Character; Political Leadership; Responsible Leadership

Further Readings Black, C. L., Jr., & Bobbitt, P. (2018). Impeachment: A handbook (New ed.). Yale University Press. Goldsmith, J. (2012). Power and constraint: The accountable president after 9/11. W. W. Norton. Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2005). Off center: The Republican revolution and the erosion of American democracy. Yale University Press. Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. [Originally published 1689].

ACTOR–NETWORK THEORY Do humans matter when so much of work and society is automated? Is leadership possible when work is determined in advance by machines? Actor–network theory interpretations of leadership help answer these and similar questions by expanding who and what can be viewed as leading. Actor–network theory (ANT) is the most influential theory within a larger school of thought called posthumanism. This is a term for perspectives that question the centrality of the human in any analysis of organizational and social life to consider the ways in which everyday phenomena are animated instead by an assemblage of humans and nonhumans. Adopting this perspective means decentering human beings and considering the material objects that come together with people to

6

Actor–Network Theory

animate certain forms of action, while subduing others. Such a view is important for leadership studies because when you take a close look at any act labeled as leadership it does not take long to notice a host of interdependencies between people and material objects. After offering an overview of ANT, this entry considers how it can be adopted to interpret both leaders and leadership. What we come to know as leaders are increasingly in reality a series of images and sounds interacted with through technologies. Leadership, if viewed as a collective practice, is equally something that happens in and through technology, with digital technology increasingly becoming something that actively shapes the type of leadership being performed.

the waning of attention received by former U.S. President Donald Trump when he was removed from Twitter and Facebook—without these social media actants, his leadership dissipated. When the mediator is removed, its significance becomes clear. As a counter to this proposition of nonhuman objects acting, you could state that behind the object is nearly always a human designer—in the case of social media, the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who conceptualized the tech and programmers who maintain and refine it. This overlooks the tendency of technologies to take on a life of their own, beyond the intentions of their creators, to the extent that engaging in work or life without them can seem unthinkable.

Actor–Network Theory: The Basics

Actor–Network Theory as a Way of Understanding Leaders

The basis of the theory can be discerned from its title, which is that it is interested in how meaning is created and how action happens through networks of people and things, both of which can act. ANT invites us to identify and analyze the networks of human and nonhuman objects involved in any process. Methodologically, the technique used is usually one where the researcher spends significant time immersed in a particular field, observing events and coming to know its dynamics in depth—an ethnographic approach. The mental hurdle to overcome with ANT is the idea that a nonhuman object can act. Assisting us in making this leap, ANT authors tend to adopt the somewhat mysterious word actant when referring to actors in their studies, a choice that is designed to remove the association of actor with human. The idea that nonhuman things act is not as far-fetched as it may first sound. Much of our lives proceeds in fairly automated ways without us overthinking everyday actions or decisions, and this process is usually facilitated by technological mediation—by now it is normal, for example, that we engage with certain political leaders through social media. In ANT terminology, social media is a mediator. We can identify a mediator because without it, the network that delivers us the leader, and the sense of this person’s leadership, collapses. One example of this is

Leaders are usually spoken about as if they were autonomous essences rather than being dependent on a host of social, technological, and economic forces for their appeal. ANT helps situate leaders within a broad network of actants, without whom they could not be regarded as leaders at all. From this perspective we can think of leaders as human-technological hybrids. In many workplaces, it is rare that most employees ever interact with a senior executive leader. Rather, leaders communicate with workers through video messages, emails, and social media. Celebrity CEO billionaires are almost entirely known to employees and the public as social media presences—for example, warehouse workers for Amazon would not directly interact with Jeff Bezos but would come to know him as a leader mostly through carefully curated digital communication. To better understand leadership, we therefore need to study leaders as human–technological hybrids. Doing so, following an ANT approach, means going to the places where a leader is present. This can mean logistical challenges in the sense that so much work from organizational leaders now happens through computers, tablets, and cellular phones. But how these are used is of importance to understanding the way in which someone’s status as a leader is achieved and maintained. Again applying the test of the mediator, if someone ceases

Actor–Network Theory

to make sense as a leader without access to a phone, a social media account, or other actant, then we should note the operation of human–technological hybridity at work—and start investigating how the network that sustains (and challenges) the status of this leader is accomplished. These are important topics for research because they tell us something about the structure and operation of power in organizations, economies, and societies. In the case of Bezos, his Twitter profile is a highly visual and positive offering, depicting an environmental champion who is concerned with the plight of developing countries and with equalities; yet this is also a dreamer, someone who, quite literally in the instance of his space program, reaches for the stars. This self-positioning of Bezos-as-leader is emboldened through a network of resources—indeed almost unlimited resources of tax specialists, corporate lobbyists, lawyers, union busters, and social media accounts. The network effect of producing leaders introduces another key ANT term, the affordance. The particular coming together of certain human and nonhuman actants in a network affords some possibilities while closing down others. In the case of Bezos—the world’s richest person—notions of being able to afford seem apt. The networks ensuring his powerful position as a leader work at multiple scales—in the global economy, in national and regional economies, in workplaces, and in homes through Alexa, Amazon’s artificial intelligence system. Yet the presentation of Bezos-as-leader is contested through other networks and affordances, chiefly that of trade unions, their technologies, and organizing techniques, not to mention occasional investigative journalism networks exposing Amazon working conditions and tax practices. An ANT perspective allows us to see notions of being a leader contested through multiple networks, each with differential power and uneven affordances. Therefore, although ANT offers a way of understanding the decentered nature of leaders, it also, more radically, questions whether a leader as traditionally conceived really exists at all. If leaders are conceived as the products of a network, it is more apt to rethink leadership as a practice between many humans and nonhumans.

7

Actor–Network Theory as a Way of Understanding Leadership

ANT above all offers a means of better understanding the nuances of practice. It foregrounds the interdependency of humans, technology, and history in affording any practice with power and authority. In her study of the British Navy, Shipshape, Beverley Hawkins illustrates how much notionally human leadership practice is shaped in advance by a network of objects and technologies (ships, uniforms, etc.) and a tradition of leading that preexists and outlives the participants of her study. Breaking convention and enacting change means finding a way of undoing aspects of networked practice that are ingrained, even habitual. This was one of the points made by the philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour in Science in Action, which introduced the notion of a black box. When a practice, actant, or concept is blackboxed, it means that it holds great force and influence, yet is also unquestioned to the point of near invisibility—it remains boxed away. Latour illustrated this phenomenon by reference to certain concepts in science, which are so taken for granted as true that they do not need to be discussed. Returning to leadership practice in the workplace, it is possible to note that certain relations of power and conventions of who and what has authority are themselves blackboxed, unquestioned, and regarded as natural. Blackboxing is a powerful concept for analyzing contemporary work, which is becoming increasingly shaped by technology. Blackboxing closely resembles automation, in the broader sense of the word. As certain practices are automated through technology, they are also increasingly accepted as the normal and natural way of performing work. How people envisage the retail sales industry is shaped by the automated and controlling processes of Amazon—fast delivery of commodities enabled by a sophisticated network of highly managed and technologically controlled movements by human and robot workers in warehouses and transportation chains. Racing around cities to meet algorithmic targets is the reality for gig economy workers, who are not fired if they miss these but instead have apps deactivated. Home working is increasingly shaped by surveillance and

8

Actor–Network Theory

control—algorithms detecting the presence, absence, speed, or contraventions of workers. Issues of gender and race become apparent in these examples. Immigrant workers make up a disproportionately high number of gig economy workers, and so are more vulnerable to the potential control and abuse of algorithms. Women are more likely than men to be in part-time work, which in turn is more likely to be subjected to automation and the dictates of algorithms, meaning that women are more likely to be subjected to the worsening of terms and conditions that usually flow in algorithmically intensified workplaces. As women are unfortunately more likely to bear the brunt of domestic responsibilities, so any technology that applies surveillance in people’s homes is going to be more intrusive for women. ANT can help us make visible the networks of power at play within these processes and how they become normalized—blackboxed—over time. An important task of any ANT project, therefore, is unboxing practices to offer a richer interpretation of the dynamic power within a network. One way in which this can be accomplished is by approaching any practice as one of translation. This means that a practice, if it is to gain authority and reproduce itself, needs to continually undergo certain modifications through a network. Leadership communication, for example, needs to be translated through digital technology, as well as through people situated in particular socioeconomic relations, to be accepted as authoritative. Uncovering a process of translation in leadership means exploring who and what speaks on behalf of others and the extent to which their position in a network is authoritative or vulnerable. In studying leadership practice from an ANT perspective, we might, therefore, start to explore the extent to which certain people or things really speak with the authority and support of others—for example, whether managers, workplace technologies, or trade union reps really represent the interests and views of workers. Finally, one vital question ANT can help answer concerns what counts as leadership. It allows the analysis of a process and its comparison to any professed rhetoric of leadership. An individual or whole organization may claim to be offering leadership, but upon closer inspection that practice may

look an awful lot like micromanagement or command and control. Such is the reality of many automated and precarious workplaces. In this sense, ANT—and other perspectives that offer insight into materiality and technology—not only helps sharpen definitions of leadership, management, and command but also helps us see a more profound possibility within contemporary work. Namely, if work is increasingly driven by nonhumans within technologically controlled networks, perhaps the space for leadership is dwindling away, replaced in waves of translation by a technologically intensive Total Management.

Actor–Network Theory and Leadership: Reservations and Hope Before concluding more positively, let us address two main reservations concerning ANT. The first is the question of what one does with the insight that we pay too much attention to human beings over material objects. If it is humans who have given the planet rising inequality and climate change, perhaps focusing more on humans and their actions is helpful. The second critique is that ANT can underplay economic relations, chiefly some of the structural ways in which capital accumulation works in practice. Of course, ANT could in theory offer intricate ways of understanding both economic relations and the hybrid ways in which climate change and inequality are enacted—but rarely does so in practice. However, ANT could offer potential pathways to understanding more empowering and inclusive leadership. In terms of resistance leadership, it is inescapable that most effective resistance acts pass through technological mediators. When street protestors in Glasgow, UK, in May 2021 prevented the detention of two immigrant men, this at first glance appeared to be a result of hundreds of protestors using their bodies to block passage of Home Office vans. Digging deeper, however, it became clear that the resistance leadership entailed an intricate web of digital communication that had tracked the vans through the city in advance of the detention attempt. At the moment of truth, a solitary and fragile human body inserted itself beneath the wheels of the detention van, while digital networks lit up, rallying resistors to the

Adam Smith and Leadership

scene. Within hours, the network had translated itself into a crowd demanding justice. There are also plenty of available examples of technology working in networked ways with humans to generate emancipatory leadership beyond resistance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, there were numerous cases of workers, scientists, health professionals, and community groups coming together with nonhuman actants in creative ways to—and let’s not be too modest here—save the world. Community groups switched their focus, adopting digital communication and mapping to offer mutual aid to the vulnerable. Health professionals battled a novel disease while experimenting with, and discovering new pathways of, care and treatment using new technologies. Workers learned how to make a difference to people’s lives by demonstrating adaptiveness and technological creativity. ANT offers one rich way of understanding the dynamics of such human/nonhuman networks and can therefore also, in practical ways, offer hope for the future. Owain Smolovi´c Jones See also Critical Leadership Studies; Diversity and Leadership; Employee Rights; Leadership and Management; Networks and Networked Organizations; Power and Participation; Social Media and Leadership; Virtual Leadership

Further Readings Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 196–223). Routledge. Fairhurst, G., & Cooren, F. (2009). Leadership as hybrid production of presence(s). Leadership, 5(4), 469–490. doi:10.1177/1742715009343033 Hawkins, B. (2015). Ship-shape: Materializing leadership in the British Royal Navy. Human Relations, 68(6), 951–971. doi:10.1177/0018726714563810 Latour, B. (1988). Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://www.sageapps. com/srt

9

Law, J. (2002). Aircraft stories: Decentering the object in technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, S., Kempster, S., & Barnes, S. (2017). Up the ANTe: Understanding entrepreneurial leadership learning through actor-network theory. Industry and Higher Education, 31(2), 132–139.

ADAM SMITH

AND

LEADERSHIP

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment whose works on morality and on markets explained and nurtured the takeoff in human well-being over the subsequent 200 years. Smith’s primary contribution to leadership studies is to articulate a theory of human cooperation based on moral sentiments—genuine feelings about right and wrong—and not simply calculations of interests. Smith’s contribution to public policy is to promote a division of labor based on trade as a key mechanism for lifting millions of people out of poverty, focusing on long-run institutional reforms. Smith’s work continues to inspire researchers across a spectrum of disciplines including moral psychology, behavioral economics, political science, philosophy, leadership, and other areas. This entry summarizes Smith’s positions on Enlightenment-influenced topics such as sympathy, judgment, and self-control and then highlights his views and influence in public policy.

The Enlightenment Worldview Natural philosophers of the 17th century began to use the scientific method to understand the mechanisms of the physical world. By contrast, Smith and his colleagues of the 18th century Enlightenment sought to understand, and potentially improve, humans and their constructed world. Doing so requires a baseline understanding of the building blocks of society, starting with the constraints of nature. Smith argued that nature, to ensure survival and procreation, supplies humans with strong instincts. Instinctual responses are faster and more reliable than rational calculations. If nutrition is needed for survival, nature implants the instinct of hunger; if procreation is needed, the

10

Adam Smith and Leadership

sex drive. A strong instinct for self-preservation is ingrained and can be seen in the expectation of self-interest as a motivator in business dealings. Smith’s analysis was deeper than this because self-interest operates alongside other-regarding instincts such as altruism and justice. Since humans are social creatures and rely upon others for survival and procreation, the social instincts are deep-seated, although practice and reflection are required. Sympathy

Smith argued that humans have strong instincts for genuine sociability that powerfully direct our engagement with others. Affection and instinctual respect for justice, rather than fear, undergird Smith’s approach. His book on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), published while he was a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, was acclaimed and went through six editions during his lifetime. It made Smith’s reputation as a leading philosopher in the United Kingdom and Europe. In Smith’s view, human rationality is weak compared to instincts in terms of achieving the ends of nature. There are many instincts, but the key ones for leadership are •

the instinctual ability to use our imaginations to feel what others feel; and • the instinctual desire to be in alignment with what others in one’s group feel.

While the second instinct may appear to be opportunistic (we desire to fit in to ensure our own safety and reward), Smith was clear that these inbred responses happen so rapidly and, upon such trivial cases, that the natural instinct to align with others goes beyond simple calculations of self-interest. Socialization

A mother and a child, for example, bond during breastfeeding: they are in sympathetic alignment. When a child reaches an age in which perspective is possible, proper socialization involves teaching the child right from wrong behavior. If a child (who should know better) throws something

dangerous at her brother, a parent’s sympathy is withheld: One cannot imagine fellow feeling with someone who has deliberately caused pain to another. By withholding sympathy, the parent breaks the emotional bond. Feeling this, the child becomes upset and gradually learns self-control, so as to avoid such breaks. This process continues in schools, religious settings, peer groups, and other social situations. A child wants to feel approved of, and eventually to be worthy of that approval, so the child internalizes the social norms of the family and peers and acts accordingly. Sympathy—the act of putting oneself into another’s shoes and sharing their feelings—is the building block of ethical behavior and voluntary cooperation. This process is not perfect and involves making mistakes and correcting errors. One’s internal moral compass needs to be calibrated to one’s time and place. Judgment

In the modern era, one might say that leadership involves practicing empathy. President Bill Clinton famously said, “I feel your pain” as an expression of sympathy with an AIDS activist. To Smith, however, sympathy should be considered slightly different. First, Smith believed that humans share not just negative emotions such as sorrow and pain but also positive emotions such as joy. Second, and more importantly, a mature and complex aspect of sharing sympathy involves judgment—namely the acceptance that the other person’s response to their circumstances is appropriate. Suppose one encounters a coworker who is weeping inconsolably. If you learn that he or she suffered a minor paper cut, your judgment would likely be to withhold your sympathy because you cannot share the extreme emotion displayed given the circumstances. By contrast, if your coworker’s beloved mother had just died, you would be able to share in his or her grief as being fitting and appropriate. Given the limitations of the imagination to put oneself completely into another’s situation, however, fellow feeling is always imperfect; as a result, we learn to temper our own reactions to our calamities and joys so that it is easier for others to get into sympathetic alignment with us. Because of this, Smith said we often tone down our grief and joy when expressed to others.

Adam Smith and Leadership

11

Self-Control

Limited Government

Smith worried that factions can corrupt our moral sentiments because of their partiality; they represent a serious threat to leadership from internal strife. Even though emotions are the building block of Smith’s morality, one’s actions must not answer to one’s own or one’s group’s emotional reactions, but rather they must adhere to norms of behavior developed over the ages. The rules of justice, for example, are not particular to the individual. Sympathy for the victims of violent crime, when shared by many over many generations, gives rise to moral norms (and later to laws) about not harming others without cause. Even though one may be incensed by the actions of another, one cannot allow their passions to lead them to take the law into their own hands. Self-control is the premier virtue in Smith’s system, and he decried mob violence.

Smith was generally an advocate for limited government because, in the context of his times, he observed that collusion between government and business owners often leads to official monopolies that hurt the working poor by limiting competition. Breaking down barriers to competition unleashes opportunities for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Smith did not accept laissezfaire, however, an extreme view that no government was needed. Smith himself proposed government regulations in financial markets because he argued that speculators often take on too much risk. Smith was a paternalist, willing to impose limitations on the freedom of some risk-takers in order to prevent calamities to those unable to absorb the losses. He made the analogy of financial regulations being like the brick walls between adjoining structures, mandated in building codes to prevent the contagion of fire. The potential gain to many of having these regulations outweighs the loss of freedom to a few. Smith also worried about what we today call worker alienation. For trade to become an engine of growth, the market area has to be expanded to allow for the division of labor. It is likely that such a division could lead some workers into mind-deadening jobs of endless repetition. Smith noted that government should be called upon to subsidize education for the poor to offset this condition because alienation would leave someone unfit to fulfill the functions of citizenship. Smith also endorsed the need for progressive taxation (such as upon luxury items) and support of public goods (including the arts).

Public Policy Trade and Globalization

The previous points provide a model for understanding how humans come to cooperate with others on the basis of mutual and genuine sympathy. This discussion does not rule out a separate path of calculated self-interest. Smith’s second book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), explored how trade relies on such self-interested considerations. While the origin of trade likely had to do with the motive of wanting to persuade (a form of sharing sympathy), in a global trading situation, people seek to maximize their own gains in the context of socially aware market participants. That is, economic actors are often alert to social norms that constrain behaviors and prefer to deal with others whom they trust. Business people make decisions not just to gain monetary rewards, but to earn higher status in the community. The rising respectability of people of commerce, according to economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity (2010), is one reason the Industrial Revolution first appeared in England and not elsewhere. Thus, while profit remains a powerful motivator to guide behavior, it operates alongside other instincts for social acceptance, justice, honesty, and prudence.

Invisible Hand

The metaphor of an invisible hand existed long before Smith used it three times in his writing. The term took on new life in the 20th century, when it was equated with greed and laissez-faire. These narrow interpretations omit Smith’s preoccupation with cooperation based on shared moral norms, and appropriate government intervention in pragmatic cases. A broader view is that the invisible hand reflects the instincts that propel behavior, moderated by the formal and informal

12

Adam Smith and Leadership

institutions of society. The claims that the invisible hand relies only on unconstrained greed or produces an efficient allocation of resources without government intervention are modern constructs at odds with Smith’s moral and economic views. Moral and Institutional Transformation

Unlike the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argues that ethical conduct can be logically deduced using rational mind, Smith’s conception of right and wrong is tied to sympathy and the natural inclination to desire, and be worthy of, approbation. Whereas logic provides an unchanging view of morality, Smith’s conception relies on an evolving basis for what conditions or acts can be sympathized with. Legally owning another person was permissible for thousands of years across most societies, even those considered civilized. Due to the published autobiographies of the enslaved and the imagined lives depicted by fiction writers, people in the 19th century came to share the feelings of injustice done to slaves and to lobby for change. In Smith’s view, moral transformation relies on a widening moral imagination that allows one to go beyond the prejudices and limited perspective that each has. Smith asked us to imagine a great earthquake that swallows up 100 million citizens of China. The response of an enlightened European would be to express sympathy with the losses, bemoan the vagaries of life, and then go off to sleep soundly. Smith then posed this question: If by cutting off your little finger you could prevent the slaughter of those innocents, would you do it? Most certainly, he believed. Our imaginations are now fully engaged and our sympathy—while constrained by distance, unfamiliar customs, and language—is more fully alive. Superior prudence of a truly wise person evolves and supersedes the narrow prudence of our limited perspective. It is from such leaps of imagination and sympathy that human institutions—the rules that govern justice, marriage, rights, and so on—come to arise initially and to evolve over time. Leaders of democracies who wish to change public policies must first change the moral imaginations of

their constituents, a point noted by Abraham Lincoln. Politicians Versus Statesmen

Eric Schliesser in “Adam Smith on Political Leadership” notes that Smith characterized some leaders as crafty politicians whose ad hoc policies often benefit elites and insiders at the expense of the masses. These shallow leaders view the world as a zero-sum endeavor and their decisions mimic the ups and downs of current events, sometimes leading to fanaticism. A statesman, by contrast, reforms institutions and makes policies following general principles that produce anticipated good outcomes for the larger society over the long run. Enacting reforms and implementing them requires the virtues of moderation, patience, and pragmatism (rather than an insistence on perfection). Gradual reform, rather than idealized shock therapy, is preferred. A true leader rules by reason and persuasion, not by force, and elevates norms of virtuous conduct that promote trust and a general encouragement of mutual flourishing. Jonathan B. Wight See also Emotion and Leadership; Empathetic Leadership; Social Change

Further Readings McCloskey, D. (2010). Bourgeois dignity: Why economics can’t explain the modern world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/ 9780226556666.001.0001 Phillipson, N. (2010). Adam Smith: An enlightened life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ross, I. S. (1995). The life of Adam Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198288212.001.0001 Schliesser, E. S. (2021). Adam Smith on political leadership. In R. J. W. Mills & C. Smith (Eds.), The Scottish enlightenment: Human nature, social theory, and moral philosophy: Essays in honor of Christopher J. Berry (pp. 132–163). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, A. (1981 [1776]). In R. H. Campbell & A. S. Skinner (Eds.), An inquiry into the nature and causes of

Adaptive Leadership the wealth of nations. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. (Orig. pub. 1976.). Smith, A. (1982 [1759]). In D. D. Raphael & A. L. MacFie (Eds.), The theory of moral sentiments. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Wight, J. (2007). The treatment of Smith’s invisible hand. The Journal of Economic Education, 38(3), 341–358. doi:10.3200/JECE.38.3.341-358

ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP Adaptive leadership is a key construct in the constellation of leadership studies. It largely deals with the notions put forth by Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School during the 1980s and up to the present day. This entry is divided into three main sections: The history of its formulation; key ideas; and critiques.

How Adaptive Leadership Entered the Lexicon of Leadership Studies The term adaptive leadership first entered the lexicon of leadership studies in the 1980s by way of Ronald Heifetz’s work at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he and his colleagues—notably Riley Sinder and Theresa Monroe—pioneered a course for graduate students in public policy that defined leadership as the process of mobilizing groups. Heifetz made the important claim that leadership is a process as opposed to a position or an individual set of traits. In 1989, Heifetz and his colleagues published an article on their work at Harvard, which, among other observations, reinforced the crucial distinction between the role of authority and the notion of leadership. This and other distinctions, such as technical versus adaptive work and informal versus formal authority, along with a particular vocabulary that was developed for the course, comprise the framework known as adaptive leadership. The original teaching of adaptive leadership departed from the management theory of business schools and staked out an interdisciplinary territory

13

that wove together strands of anthropology, history, and psychology, as well as employing metaphors that derived from biology and music. In the classroom itself, the case-in-point teaching that set it apart from other lecture-driven courses relied on the group relations methods created by the progenitors of group dynamics methods of teaching and learning, often referred to as teaching in the here and now. This composite perspective on what it means to exercise leadership has opened up avenues of inquiry in the literature and pedagogical methods that have heretofore been mainly concerned with the exploration of traits on the one hand and management theory on the other. Whereas numerous authors have bemoaned the dearth of definitions for leadership, Heifetz makes the claim that leadership can be both defined and taught. Importantly, adaptive leadership it is not a theory with predictive capacity; it is a collection of conceptual lenses that form a framework through which to analyze the actions of persons or the evolution of events within a social system. The notion of adaptive leadership (sometimes called adaptive work—the term adaptive leadership refers to the engagement of adaptive work) has permeated the leadership literature and is taught widely at both the undergraduate and graduate levels throughout the United States and abroad. It is equally applicable to politics, finance, health, and education. In other words, it has cross-sector applicability. In terms of practical applicability, its key contribution is that of creating a construct that separates technical from adaptive work. In terms of building on the literature of leadership and management, Heifetz’s greatest contribution is that of making a distinction between exercising leadership and holding authority. In addition, Heifetz draws on several ancillary notions of leadership in groups whose origins may be found in organizational leadership and depth psychology. He does so by employing such constructs as holding environments, group dynamics, and interventions. Since about 1990, adaptive leadership has become increasingly mainstream in the literature of leadership studies. Peter Northouse’s widely taught textbook on leadership, Leadership: Theory and Practice, has included a chapter on

14

Adaptive Leadership

adaptive leadership beginning with its seventh edition. The term adaptive leadership has also made its way into the literature of complexity theory and has been somewhat redefined in its 21st-century iterations. For example, in 2007 Mary Uhl-Bien, Russ Marion, and Bill McKelvey defined adaptive leadership as “an emergent interactive dynamic that produces adaptive outcomes in social systems” (p. 306). Heifetz’s particular ideas have been built upon by Dean Williams as well as Sharon Daloz Parks. The latter author wrote a book of observations about Heifetz and his colleagues’ teaching of adaptive leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Leadership Can Be Taught (2005). Academic developmental psychologists such as Robert Kegan have incorporated Heifetz’s notions of leadership into the discourse of adult development. In 21st-century academic research, the term adaptive leadership has been used variously. In its original, essential formulation, however, adaptive leadership may be quite simply defined as the act of making an intervention into a social system where values, habits, beliefs, and priorities must be shifted in order to attain progress in the normative sense of the word.

Key Ideas There are four key ideas that comprise the theoretical model of adaptive leadership: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Authority versus leadership Technical work versus adaptive work Managing disequilibrium Diagnosing stakeholder values

Authority Versus Leadership

While numerous organizational psychologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others have defined authority in various ways, Heifetz has distilled the notion of authority into the notion of a contract for service. This underscores the aspect of authority that may be given or taken away. Once authority figures cease to provide the service of direction, protection, and order, they

will be ousted, and their contract (formally or informally given) will be withdrawn. For example, a mayor who promises not to raise taxes and then does so may not be reelected. A pop culture figure who was admired for their charitable work may lose followers on social media when a scandal surfaces. This construct has some correlation with Burns’s notion of transactional leadership. As a subset of this construct, Heifetz has introduced the notion of informal authority versus formal authority. The latter refers to holding a position of formalized power whose main charge is to provide direction, protection, and order—what Heifetz calls the three jobs of authority. Informal authority is more nuanced and refers to those who influence or guide a given group without a formal role. As an example of informal authority, Heifetz has alluded to Joseph Nye’s notion of the soft power emanated by the United States in terms of its cultural influence. Less globally, someone with referent power—another kind of informal authority—such as a favorite teacher, coach, or clergy member, might guide a community in a moment of confusion or crisis. Additionally, it is important to note that a single individual may hold both formal and informal authority. Heifetz also distinguishes between authority and dominance, drawing upon the work of Jane Goodall and others to demonstrate the latter. The emergence of dominance in groups of primates as well as young children is an example of some of the cruder forms of dominance, often disguised as authority; in such cases, the role of authority is not conferred; rather, it is forced. In the realm of political science, much has been written about the rise of dominant figures in times of chaos or distress, and there is much to explore in terms of the willingness of certain populations to support such dominant figures. In case studies of democratically elected or free-market authority figures, the failings of such figures may sometimes be attributed to the constraints that hem them in and often prevent them from exercising leadership more boldly. Heifetz has frequently contrasted the ways in which the mid-20th-century American President Lyndon B. Johnson not only leveraged his authority but also bowed to its constraints. The uses and constraints of authority during this

Adaptive Leadership

historical epoch throw into relief the exercise of leadership undertaken by, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with whom President Johnson was able to partner in order to move the cause of civil rights forward and make progress toward ending racial discrimination. Those who exercise leadership, however, often risk losing their informal authority, including their positions. They may even lose their lives. At the same time, their informal authority may increase, along with their popularity, as people recognize the courage and other noble qualities that inform their interventions. Whistleblowers provide a prime example of persons exercising leadership within a social system who take such risks. Similarly, protesters such as the 21st-century Russian dissident Alexei Navalny exemplify those who intervene in a system outside of its boundaries and who seek to change the system itself. We may also see instances of groups without leaders, as such, stage interventions into social systems, such as leaderless groups of protesters. Adaptive Leadership Leadership, by definition, disturbs the system in which it operates. Its purpose, according to Heifetz, is to draw attention to problematic realties (e.g., climate change, corruption). It is a term that has often been conflated with the notion of authority. Authority, however, is based on management principles of containing and eliminating disorder; its purpose is to stabilize a system. The purpose of leadership is to create a measure of disorder or to disturb the system in need of change. Greta Thunberg, the 21st-century teenage climate activist whose movement began with going on strike by publicly refusing to attend school, embodies this principle of drawing attention to a problematic reality. Joan of Arc, Susan B. Anthony, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, and Malcolm X are other well-known historical figures who similarly embodied the exercise of leadership without holding much, if any, formal authority—at least, not within the systems they sought to disturb. The descriptor adaptive refers to the idea that leadership is an act of adaptation within a system. Loosely drawing upon the broad ideas of

15

evolutionary biology, Heifetz and his collaborators have created a central analogy that drives this model: The act of exercising leadership is a continuous process of separating that which is precious from that which is expendable. This activity can take place in a boardroom as one protects a voice that deviates from the consensus; it is evident in the act of conserving a text to be taught as opposed to one which should be dispensed with when modernizing a curriculum; it may be found in a committee room of legislators endeavoring to reach compromise on a bill. Its essence is movement as opposed to stability. Technical Versus Adaptive Work

Numerous thought leaders and scholars of leadership have begun to address the sorting out of society’s challenges into different categories. Keith Grint, for example, has generated the categories tame as opposed to what he terms wicked problems. Adaptive work refers to those problems that might otherwise be called wicked problems. A technical problem has a known problem and a known solution. An adaptive problem has a known or unknown (in the sense of unclear or murky) problem and no known solution. For example, a pandemic is a problem that is somewhat known, but its eradication (the solution) may be unclear. Heifetz has created a grid that demonstrates the intersection of technical work, adaptive work, and the locus of authority. Into this mix, he adds the ingredient of who needs to learn what. A key assertion made by Heifetz is that decision-makers often mistake adaptive challenges for technical ones. Much of the literature based on adaptive leadership discusses cases of such substitutions. In U.S. American history, for example, the Emancipation Proclamation was a technical fix for the problematic reality of racism in the form of slavery. In its troubling aftermath, although slavery as an institution was eradicated, vicious forms of racism persisted. When Jim Crow laws were established and, later, confronted by society in the American South, the unfinished adaptive work of shifting values, beliefs, and priorities was revealed. This problem continues to haunt American society to this day.

16

Adaptive Leadership

Managing Disequilibrium

The execution of adaptive work is illustrated by the concept of managing disequilibrium. This key idea articulates the difference between the management of technical work and the risks inherent in undertaking adaptive work. Implicitly, this notion of managing disequilibrium touches on the psychological formulation of work avoidance, a concept whose origins lie with depth psychology and whose manifestations were famously explored by the influential British psychologist Wilfred R. Bion. Teachers and scholars of adaptive leadership have borrowed heavily from Bion’s notion of the work group by urging social groups to confront problematic realities—the real work of the group. One instrument by which to measure the intensity of the work to be confronted is that of the level of disequilibrium the approach to the work generates. Authority figures are often called upon to reduce the disequilibrium to a manageable level. An effective authority figure will keep the temperature (another metaphor frequently employed by Heifetz et al.) at a level where the intensity of the work is tolerable. A mayor who imposes a curfew because of rioting is responding to a level of disequilibrium that has become unmanageable. If the mayor allows protests and demonstrations to continue peacefully, they are conceivably allowing the temperature to be set to a manageable level. Diagnosing Stakeholder Values

The fourth leg of the stool in terms of describing adaptive leadership is that of diagnosing stakeholder values. Heifetz constructs within this framework a notion that most conflict is rooted in a conflict in values. Further, he proposes that factions coalesce around core values. Thus, the key to unbundling a conflict is to consider what matters to whom and the degree to which it matters. This is a distillation of negotiation strategy whereby focusing on individual interests, rather than on individuals, may assist the group in moving forward. In the adaptive leadership framework, however, the unbundling of values

may occur in tandem with the diagnosis of technical versus adaptive work, the level of disequilibrium, and so on.

Critiques of Adaptive Leadership The main critique of adaptive leadership is that its conceptual frameworks remain empirically untested. While there are, increasingly, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations that have used adaptive leadership as a conceptual lens, there is relatively thin evidence as to the framework’s efficacy. Conversely, its entry into the mainstream lexicon of leadership studies is a testament to its durability. It will conceivably remain a theoretical construct devoid of much social scientific experimentation, while its informal, theoretical influence continues to flourish. Sarah Chace See also Charismatic Theory; Coercion and Power; Complexity Leadership Theory; Organizational Leadership; Transactional leadership; Wicked Problems

Further Readings Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups. Abington-onThames: Routledge. Daloz Parks, S. (2005). Leadership can be taught. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Grint, K. (2010). Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: The role of leadership. In S. Brookes & K. Grint (Eds.), The new public leadership challenge (pp. 169–186). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heifetz, R., Sinder, R., Jones, A., Hodge, L. M., & Rowley, K. A. (1989). Teaching and assessing leadership courses at the John F. Kennedy school of government. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 8(3), 536–562. Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rost, J. C. (1991). Leadership for the twenty-first century. Westport, CT: Praeger. Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318.

Aesthetic Leadership Williams, D. (2005). Real leadership. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Williams, D. (2015). Leadership for a fractured world. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

AESTHETIC LEADERSHIP Aesthetic leadership refers to the way in which leaders are perceived by their followers from a sensory point of view. Linking aesthetics and leadership might initially seem odd, given that aesthetics is usually connected to art or the appreciation of beauty. This entry explores the link between them by explaining how aesthetics is defined by those writing about it in relation to leadership, introducing key writings associated with aesthetic leadership, and considering ways in which the notion of aesthetics can provide a counterpoint to traditional leadership theorizing.

17

popular usage of the word, aesthetic experiences are not only beautiful, sublime, comforting, or pleasing; they can also be ugly, frightening, irritating, or even boring. Aesthetic judgment alerts us to the sense that something is out of balance, chaotic, or dull just as on other occasions it can tell us that something is harmonious, soothing, or exciting. Understanding the term aesthetic as relating to a sensory experience that is subsequently labeled in some way—ugly, beautiful, exciting, or dull— provides the link to how it can be applied to leadership. After all, leaders are commonly described as charismatic, mesmerizing, or alternatively as robotic. It is normal to discuss whether or not it feels like a leader is being authentic. These are aesthetic judgments, even before they are rational ones. Such aesthetic judgments are important because they can influence whether or not a leader is followed, or the level of influence a leader is afforded. The next section explores these ideas further.

Connecting Aesthetics and Leadership What Does the Term Aesthetic Mean in Relation to Leadership? In common language, the word aesthetic is often associated with the appreciation of fine art. For instance, it’s customary to visit art galleries to indulge in an aesthetic experience of viewing famous paintings or sculptures. Although the term does have these connotations, the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss reminds us that the origin of the term is the Greek word aisthitikos, which means perception by feeling. In other words, in its original sense, aesthetics was fundamentally about our sensory perceptions; it was originally not about art but about reality—corporeal, material nature. Aesthetic awareness involves being attentive to the embodied feelings that arise as the world is encountered. Aesthetic judgment is being used, for instance, when one mobile phone is chosen over another because of its feel or the way its screen display is organized. It important to stress that aesthetic awareness does not only apply to pleasant sensory experiences. After drinking milk that has soured, for instance, one’s aesthetic experience might be expressed through a grimace or yell of “Who left the bad milk in the refrigerator?” Contrary to

One of the earliest proponents of the idea that leadership has an aesthetic dimension was the educationist Donald Duke. His article “The Aesthetics of Leadership” was published just as leadership scholarship was burgeoning in the late 1980s. Within management schools in particular, leadership was gaining the status of a distinct concept of its own beyond being a subset of management. Its scholarly profile mushroomed with theories such as Bernard Bass’s Full Range Leadership Model offering ideas that could be tested empirically. Just as the field grew in respectability, however, detractors of leadership theorizing expressed concern about the emptiness of the concept and the inability of those writing about it to agree on a once-and-for-all definition. Duke waded into the debate by suggesting that rather than understanding leadership as a group of qualities or behaviors attached to a specific individual, leadership might best be understood as an aesthetic phenomenon. He elaborated on this, suggesting that at its essence leadership is a cumulative event that depends fundamentally on followers’ perceptions that it had occurred. For Duke, perception is at the very heart of leadership, and perceiving, he argues, is fundamentally

18

Aesthetic Leadership

an aesthetically based activity. Furthermore, he argues, perceptions are imbued with social and symbolic significance. Certain perceptions become more important than others because they connect to social meanings and values. For instance, the wearing of the American flag lapel pin on the part of U.S. presidents only has meaning if the flag is understood to be a symbol of patriotism. Without that socially meaningful connection, it’s merely a rather odd piece of adornment. Furthermore, Duke emphasizes the importance of timing in determining whether or not an act taken by an individual is to be interpreted as leaderly. In some circumstances, an act might be considered worthy of the label leading (for instance, in an emergency situation in which someone says, “Let’s go this way”), whereas in other situations, the same act might be perceived to be merely the way people interact (for instance, when going on a gentle walk and your companion suggests, “Let’s go this way”). Because of the many factors that interweave, Duke concluded that leadership is a “subtle phenomenon involving more than meets the eye” (Duke, 1986, p. 12). That “more than meets the eye” element Duke described as aesthetic. Furthermore, the aesthetic judgment about whether or not something is leaderly rests in the eyes of followers. What is particularly interesting about Duke’s pursuit of leadership as an aesthetic phenomenon is that by foregrounding followers’ perceptions as critical, he opens the door to the notion that leadership is indeterminate in nature. In contrast to more formulaic accounts such as Bernard M. Bass’s 4I’s of Transformational Leadership, the appreciation of leadership as determined by the aesthetic judgment of followers accepts that the leader is not in control of those judgments. A leader may do their best to attract followers, but the choice of whether or not to align with a leader rests with those followers. Witness Hillary Clinton’s attempts to woo voters in the 2016 U.S. election by trying to appeal to different aesthetic sensibilities: styling her hair in certain ways, wearing pantsuits rather than dresses, and trying to navigate that thin line between hard-nosed and empathetic. For some voters, she was always too rigid, whereas for others, her gender precluded her from ever being tough enough. No matter what she did, it was followers who held the power in relation to whether they would stand with her.

Following Duke’s article, it was not until 2007 that Hans Hansen, Arja Ropo, and Erica Sauer published a fuller account of aesthetic leadership in The Leadership Quarterly. Their attention to this topic could be seen to arise from broader questions being raised by Antonio Strati about the aesthetic dimension of organizations. Noticing two tendencies in leadership studies more generally—a growing preoccupation with leadership being associated with the management of meaning, and, secondly, the increasing appreciation of the role followers play in making leadership happen—their work echoes many of Duke’s previous arguments. However, what they add to Duke’s argument is greater emphasis on the experiential, embodied nature of leadership. Rather than being a rationally based phenomenon that abides by certain rules, their formulation of aesthetic leadership emphasizes the emotional, irrational aspects of leadership, always mediated by human bodies. Whereas Duke, Hansen, Ropo, and Sauer introduced more general ways in which leadership theorizing can be enriched through attending to aesthetic dynamics, scholars such as Donna Ladkin and Steven S. Taylor have elaborated on how particular types of leadership can be characterized by particular aesthetic categories. For instance, in 2008, Ladkin offered the notion of beautiful leadership arising from followers’ perceptions that an individual’s performance expresses mastery, congruence, and moral purpose. In earlier work published in 2006, she considered charismatic leadership as an expression of the aesthetic category of the sublime, something that simultaneously attracts but frightens perceivers with its potential to overwhelm them. Once again, what is particularly important about the specific ways in which these aesthetic categories are applied to the concept of leading is that the aesthetic judgment of whether a leader’s performance is beautiful, or sublime, or for that matter, comic or ugly, rests with followers.

Artful Leading Before moving on to consider the distinctive contribution of aesthetic leadership to the leadership canon, it is important to distinguish aesthetic leadership, as it has been defined here, to concepts of leadership as an art, which may seem very similar to

Aesthetic Leadership

aesthetic leadership. Scholars such as Steve Taylor, who write about leadership as an art, start from the premise that there is something leaders can do to make their practice more accomplished or artful. The assumption that individuals can improve how they come across as leaders is of course important. However, as artful as any leader’s performance might be, the aesthetic leadership scholarship tells us that it is followers’ perceptions of a leader’s performance that matter. Whether a leader is successful or not in producing a certain desired aesthetic lies in the perceptions of followers to judge. Writing from a similar perspective to those advancing ideas about artful leadership, Jen KatzBuonincontro offers a four-factor model of aesthetic leadership based on an extensive literature review. She highlights the importance of emotional awareness, sensing and somatic attentiveness, interest in organizational beauty, and promotion of moral purpose on the part of the leader. These capacities could enhance a leader’s chances of being seen to be leading with artistry. However, because her review focuses primarily on the leader and what he or she can do to generate a certain effect, her work aligns more clearly with those writing about leading as an art, rather than the more relationally based aesthetic leadership in which followers’ perceptions play such a critical role.

What Does Aesthetic Leadership Offer Leadership Theorizing More Generally? The quest to understand leadership as an aesthetic phenomenon arises from a number of limitations and trends within current leadership theorizing: The lack of a final definition for leadership; • The failure of leadership recipes to produce consistent outcomes; • The realization that as a relational phenomenon, followers (and specifically, followers’ perceptions) play a key role in the achievement of leadership; • The increasing appreciation for the way in which context influences the achievement of leadership •

There are three aspects of aesthetic leadership theorizing that speak to these issues. First, by

19

foregrounding the interaction between leaders and followers in achieving a certain effect, aesthetic leadership is clearly positioned within a relational view of leadership. It further offers a way of thinking about what actually goes on in the between space amid leaders and followers: attraction, repulsion, symbolic attachment, and energetic identification. It provides a language for identifying the qualities of that relational space. Second, aesthetic leadership points to the irrational aspects of leadership. Sensory perception is precognitive; what we feel affects us before we rationally engage with whatever has prompted the sensory response. Think of what happens in political rallies, in which loud music, chanting, and the overwhelming sense of the group’s energy create an experience of being swept away, into a place where rationality is often left behind. Throughout history, leaders or aspiring leaders have dipped into the power of the aesthetic to sway followers to both good and bad purposes. Such leaders recognize the power of aesthetic engagement. Finally, because aesthetic leadership theorizing foregrounds followers’ judgments in relation to the effect a leader has, it highlights the indeterminacy at the heart of leadership relations. By embracing this indeterminacy, aesthetic leadership offers a stark counterpoint to leadership theorizing committed to developing a definitive account or never-fail recipe for this elusive, socially and contextually determined phenomenon. Donna Ladkin See also Embodied Leadership

Further Readings Buck-Morss, S. (2008). Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered. October, 62, 3–41. Duke, D. L. (1986). The aesthetics of leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 22(1), 7–27. Hansen, H., Ropo, A., & Sauer, E. (2007). Aesthetic leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 18, 544–560. doi:10. 1016/j.leaqua.2007.09.003 Katz-Buonicontro, J. (2011). How might aesthetic knowing relate to leadership? A review of literature. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 12(SI 1. 3), 2–18.

20

Age and Leadership

Ladkin, D. (2006). The enchantment of the charismatic leader: Charisma reconsidered as aesthetic encounter. Leadership, 2(2), 165–179. doi:10.1177/ 174271006062933 Ladkin, D. (2008). Leading beautifully: How mastery, congruence, and purpose create the aesthetic of embodied leadership practice. Leadership Quarterly, 19(1), 31–41. Strati, A. (1999). Organization and aesthetics. New York, NY: SAGE. Taylor, S. S. (2011). Leadership craft, leadership art. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

AGE

AND

LEADERSHIP

Historically, leadership researchers and theorists have shown little interest in the relationship between age and leadership. Most theoretical approaches to understanding leadership—such as path goal, transformational, servant, leader– member exchange, authentic, and so forth—do not specifically address the question of how age may affect an individual’s choice of a leadership style, his or her effectiveness in reaching organizational goals, choice of priorities, time horizons, or attitudes toward change. This lack of attention to age and its relationship to leadership probably has a simple explanation. In the long history of humans working together in groups, only recently did leaders start to reach older ages. When, for example, Thomas Carlyle introduced the Great Man theory of leadership in 1841, average life expectancy for males—who at that time occupied most leadership positions—was just under 40 years. In contrast, by 2020, most males could expect to live over 80 years and most females over 84 years. This lengthening of the lifespan has had a profound effect on the age of the person occupying the leadership position. In terms of political leadership, for example, in 2020, both the U.S. President-elect and the Senate Majority Leader were 78 years old, and the Speaker of the House was 80—twice the life expectancy in Carlyle’s time. Along the same lines, today the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs is just under 60. Age

differences in leaders has become more relevant simply because the ranges are so much greater than in the past. In the 1990s, more researchers began to study the differences in behavior and outcomes for organizations and groups headed by younger versus older leaders. Although gerontologists typically define older adults as being over 65, most studies of age and leadership do not specify specific definitions for younger or older, but rather consider age as a continuum. One study that did use categories, however, defined younger leaders as being under 30 and older as over 50. Although findings are scattered and still developing, some areas where researchers have considered the impact of a leader’s age on organizational functioning include overall effectiveness, attitudes toward innovation, time horizons and goals, the use of a transactional versus transformational style, and attitudes toward diversity. The remainder of this entry will explore each of the aforementioned areas.

Leader Age and Effectiveness All theories of leadership are created to address the issue of effectiveness. Specifically, leadership scholars seek to illuminate the qualities or behaviors from the leader that will facilitate subordinates’ ability to meet or exceed organizational goals. Interestingly, research on the relationship of age and effectiveness is inconclusive. Some studies have found little or no relationship between age and effectiveness, whereas others suggest that age may impact effectiveness, more often concluding that older leaders are more effective than younger. One study found that subordinates rated older and younger managers more effective than middle-aged managers. Another study of leadership in Olympic teams found that teams with older captains had fewer infringements per game and greater team discipline. But based on current research, it’s difficult to generalize about age and leadership effectiveness.

Leader Age and Innovation Perhaps not surprisingly, several researchers have identified a negative relationship between leader age and an attraction to innovation. Some studies

Age and Leadership

have suggested that younger leaders, on the one hand, pay more attention to exploring new opportunities, expansion, and new ideas in general. Older leaders, on the other hand, more often focus their attention and efforts on exploiting existing resources by increasing efficiencies and refining existing processes to maximize benefits to the organization. For example, one study found leader age to be negatively related to risk-taking and research and development spending. In contrast, however, other research suggests that CEO age relates positively to the quality of a company’s financial reporting. One interesting study found that followers rated leaders as more attractive, charismatic, and trustworthy when their message was congruent with the leader’s age. That is, younger leaders received more positive ratings from subordinates when talking about growth, expansion, and change, whereas older leaders got more positive ratings when they talked about conserving resources and increasing efficiencies. In other words, followers seem to prefer younger leaders when focusing on change and older leaders when focusing on stability. Explanations for this difference in attitude toward innovation are often based in lifespan psychology. Because older leaders already have a record of achievement and may have reached personal financial and professional goals, they probably have less interest in taking on new risks. In contrast, younger leaders are likely to be attracted to what they see as opportunities that will advance their own record of achievement and goal accomplishment. Another explanation for age differences regarding innovation and stability relates to intelligence. As psychologist Raymond Cattell pointed out in the 1960s, intelligence can be thought of as being either crystallized or fluid. In broad terms, crystallized intelligence, on the one hand, refers to the ability to come to conclusions and make decisions based on accumulated knowledge. Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, refers to the ability to solve problems in creative ways. With regard to the relevance of age, crystallized intelligence continues to accumulate up to around age 70, whereas fluid intelligence reaches its peak before age 30. In

21

this framework, younger leaders would naturally be attracted to new ideas, but this interest would decline as they age. Regardless of explanation, researchers tend to agree that age is a relevant factor in whether a leader focuses on innovation or increasing the organization’s existing resources.

Leader Age and Emotional Maturity Lifespan research also suggests that older adults have a greater orientation toward positivity maintenance (i.e., they take a more optimistic view of situations than younger adults) and they are also more emotionally stable and better able to regulate their emotions. Based on their longer life experience, older adults have greater knowledge about emotions than younger adults, but younger adults seem better than older adults at emotion recognition. That is, younger people can more quickly and accurately recognize the emotions others are feeling or expressing. These three qualities—emotion regulation, emotion understanding, and emotion recognition—can, of course, affect interactions between a leader and his or her subordinates. Perhaps not surprisingly, research suggests that as leaders age, skill at emotion recognition declines, but emotion understanding and regulation improve. Another factor related to emotion that may affect a leader’s behavior is the individual’s time horizon. Socioemotional selectivity theory, for example, argues that as time horizons shrink, people become more inclined toward emotionally meaningful goals, and they often develop a stronger sense of social awareness. Older leaders may think and plan in shorter time frames than their younger counterparts. Also, they may have already achieved personal and financial goals and have a lower need for personal achievement than younger leaders. These considerations may lead to behaviors typical of what personality and lifespan theorist Erik Erikson called generativity or behaviors aimed at developing and guiding members of the next generation. Older leaders who are largely satisfied with their accomplishments may shift their focus to helping younger subordinates

22

Age and Leadership

develop their own leadership skills. Some research supports a linkage between generativity behavior on the part of the leader and subordinate attitudes. In one study, for example, leaders who focused on generativity created more perceptions of leader effectiveness, satisfaction with the leader, and more effort on the part of followers. Legacy is another lifespan concept related to leadership. Legacy beliefs relate to ideas about whether an individual’s accomplishments and ideas will be influential after his or her death. One study found that older individuals with high legacy beliefs were more effective using both transformational and transactional approaches to create overall leadership effectiveness.

Age and Transformational Leadership Although researchers have developed a number of theoretical approaches to understanding leadership, as previously mentioned, none of the theories directly address the issue of how leader age may impact attitudes and behavior in the workplace. In recent years, however, some researchers have looked at how age affects the behaviors of leaders who use transactional and transformational styles. Transformational leadership differs from transactional leadership in its emphasis on creating an emotional bond between followers and the leader. Whereas transactional leaders motivate through exchanges (e.g., if the worker does X, the leader promises to deliver outcome Y), transformational leaders motivate by the use of four specific factors: by showing charisma or idealized influence, inspiring workers to a higher level of performance, stimulating followers to use creative approaches to solving problems, and providing a supportive environment for each individual worker. A number of studies have supported a positive linkage between transformational leadership and variables such as follower satisfaction, motivation, and performance. Although leaders of any age practice transactional leadership, transformational leadership appears to be more common in middle-aged and older leaders. However, some evidence supports the idea that transformational leadership is less effective when the leader is about the same age as his or her followers.

With regard to other theoretical approaches, one possible area for future research is the relationship between age and servant leadership. Individuals who practice servant leadership put the needs of their employees first, with the goal of developing followers’ abilities to the fullest extent. Rather than directing individuals toward performance goals, the servant leader provides support and resources and acts in ways that promote the personal and professional growth of the followers. Given the emotional maturity and record of accomplishment that is often associated with older leaders, servant leadership may provide a framework for practicing generativity by helping the next generation achieve the skills necessary for leadership positions. Although a possible linkage between servant leadership and leader age is occasionally mentioned in the literature, this linkage is yet to be studied empirically.

Leader Age and Status In most societies, age is an indication of higher status in terms of life experience, competence, and professional accomplishment. Because of this attribution, younger individuals often have a harder time establishing credibility in a leadership role. This need to establish credibility may be why younger leaders more frequently use a directive, rather than participative, approach to communicating with subordinates. Interestingly, some research suggests that when an older leader uses a participative approach, workers interpret the leader’s behavior as an attempt to help develop the leadership potential of younger employees. In contrast, when younger leaders use participative leadership, employees may see participation as the leader asking for advice and evidence of his or her lack of knowledge and experience.

Leader Age and Diversity Policies Finally, some evidence suggests that CEO age is related to the likelihood of a company introducing diversity interventions and policies. According to this research, older leaders, more often than younger, recognize the benefits of a diverse

Alienation

workforce and are more likely to support and implement diversity policies. Possible explanations for the linkage of leader age with diversity include older employees’ greater emotional maturity, social expertise, and interest in ethical conduct in organizations.

23

Zacher, H., Rosing, K., Henning, T., & Frese, M. (2011). Establishing the next generation at work: Leader generativity as a moderator of the relationships between leader age, leader-member exchange, and leadership success. Psychology and Aging, 26, 241–252. doi:10.1037/a0021429

Robert Smither See also Appearance; Biology of Leadership; Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Implicit Leadership Theories; Leadership Across the Career Lifespan

Further Readings Buengeler, C., Homan, A. C., & Voepel, S. C. (2016). The challenge of contingent reward and participative leadership on team-level turnover depend on leader age. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37, 1224–1245. doi:10.1002/job.2101 Elgar, M. A. (2016). Leader selection and leadership outcomes: Height and age in a sporting model. The Leadership Quarterly, 27, 588–601. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2015.12.005 Gielnik, M. M., Zacher, H., & Frese, M. (2012). Focus on opportunities as a mediator of the relationship between owners’ age and venture growth. Journal of Business Venturing, 27, 127–142. doi:10.1016/j.jbusvent.2010. 05.002 Kearney, E. (2008). Age differences between leader and followers as a moderator of the relationship between transformational leadership and team performance. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 81, 803–811. doi:10.1348/ 096317907X256717 Ng, E. S., & Sears, G. J. (2012). CEO leadership styles and the implementation of organizational diversity practices: Moderating effects of social values and age. Journal of Business Ethics, 105, 41–52. doi:10.1007/ s10551-011-0933-7 Spisak, B. R., Grabo, A. E., Arvey, R. D., & van Vugt, M. (2014). The age of exploration and exploitation: Younger-looking leaders endorsed for change and older-looking leaders endorsed for stability. The Leadership Quarterly, 25, 805–816. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2014.06.001 Walter, F., & Scheibe, S. (2013). A literature review and emotion-based model of age and leadership: New directions for the trait approach. The Leadership Quarterly, 24, 882–901. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2013. 10.003

ALIENATION Originally a Latin term describing the transference of property to another, alienation has developed as a concept that signifies unwanted and unforeseen separation. It also refers to the condition of people who are cut off from realizing their full potential. These interpretations imply that the causes of undesirable separation and the condition of being alienated can and should be overcome. In sundry domains of living, among them workplaces, families, schools, social relationships, and cultural unions, alienation appears and is manifested in different forms, however. Thus, for each arena, students propose different approaches to its cure. Concomitantly, in academia, alienation has proven to be of concern in literature, theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Students in each discipline, and, within each field, partisans of different streams, describe alienation in different way, laying foundations for various kinds of research and diverse modes of coping with the condition. In organizational research, styles of leadership are queried for the possibility that they may mediate, moderate, or heighten the effects of alienation.

Interpretations of Alienation in Different Fields Literature

In poetry and prose of the modern era, narratives of alienation take several forms. There are detailed accounts of the human condition as unavoidable segregation from one’s peers, inevitably leading to isolation. Individuals who suffer are often portrayed as figures condemned to

24

Alienation

struggle for a meaningful place in society. In some contexts, representations of the modern individual show her reduced to numerical categories, fated to seek an elusive identity. Mirrored in language, these trends engender experimental media of expression through the fragmentation of syntax and morphology. Theology

Students of theology are concerned with alienation on two levels. For one, the central messages of several world religions embody warnings that the transcendental good is perpetually threatened by rebellious configurations of evil—for example, the Fall in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For another, each member of a given religious group is personally in danger of alienation, in the sense of losing their connection with what they revere as the quintessential good. This fear of alienation from protection by the sacred underscores the importance of religious practices, as the means for reinforcing one’s connections with transcendental powers. Philosophy

Among philosophers, alienation has been discussed variously in terms of relations to some other. Contemporary thinkers tend to examine alienation in conjunction with social exclusion, conditions of institutionalized racism and oppression that threaten well-being. An examination of the traditional literature, however, discloses surprisingly diverse analyses. Alienation has, for example, been seen by some philosophers as part of the benign process of self-formation. The self is discovered gradually with the evolution of a person’s ability to stand aside, so to speak, and, from an alienated position, to view oneself as seen by others. In political philosophy, alienation has been described as a benevolent humanitarian act, the renunciation of individual autonomy for the collective good. In some representations, this kind of commitment is rightly imposed by a presumably well-informed and well-intentioned monarch. But voluntary alienation, the surrender of autonomy, has also been discussed as the capacity of individuals to set

aside personal interests when they comprehend the need to give them up for the good of society. Psychology

Closely allied with its now defunct usage as a general term for mental illness (with attending physicians known as alienists), alienation is conceptualized in psychology as a cluster of pathologies or potential pathologies, within individuals or between individuals and groups. It is manifested in feelings of being shut out of peer activities, of discomfort in interaction, as well as in feelings of loneliness to the point of clinical depression. Evidence of the symptoms can be found in people’s behaviors, among them the approach to work, relationships between men and women, between parents and children, and in attitudes to events of concern to the collective. Apart from causing suffering, these conditions have been identified as giving rise to social ills such as alcoholism, delinquency, and sundry harmful addictions. It is, therefore, psychologists’ responsibility to define aspects of alienation that can be subjected to professional treatment. According to one approach, that of psychoanalysis, alienation can only be treated by preventing failures of early socialization or by overcoming them through engagement in dynamic therapeutic communication. An alternative approach is detailed by Daniel Stokols. In his 1975 article, “Toward a Psychological Theory of Alienation,” he proposes a comprehensive view. He defines alienation as a sequential developmental process in the context of ongoing relationships (between individuals and between individuals and groups), which deteriorate unexpectedly while the people involved remain relatively close to one another physically. Thus, expressions of alienation vary according to whether people or circumstances are perceived to thwart individuals’ desires and according to whether alternative contexts of relations are available. Alienation is disclosed in behavioral syndromes of isolation, submission, or rebellion. Reintegrating treatment is possible, however, when the psychologist diagnoses antecedents of alienation and understands how the condition is experienced. Treatment can be designed to deal

Alienation

with emotional disturbances, loss of cognitive control, and their physiological correlates—as well as with behavioral syndromes such as agitation, irritability, and social withdrawal. Sociology

From a detailed survey of the literature of alienation in the social sciences, Melvin Seeman, in his 1959 article “On the Meaning of Alienation,” derived five features of alienation, which continue to serve as key understandings of how social alienation is experienced. These are powerlessness, the feeling that one cannot deal with problems that arise; meaninglessness, the feeling that one cannot foretell outcomes of one’s deeds; normlessness, feeling unable to decide on what norms apply in novel situations; social isolation, feeling that one does not truly belong to any group; and selfestrangement, the experience of being unable to make decisions that reflect one’s true interests. Some attempts to deal with these types of alienation derive from individual psychology. Recent theorizations speak of overcoming alienation by deliberately taking charge, by appropriating oneself and one’s world, and appropriating the right to deal with them as one wishes. Taking a different tack, many sociological studies approach alienation as an outcome of how society is organized and how social structures shape individual experiences, choices, and behaviors. The contention is that in the constantly shifting modern social order, alienation is spurred because individuals are constantly thrust into novel situations that challenge one’s cumulating knowledge of the world. Theoreticians inspired by the philosopher and economist Karl Marx’s historical analysis of systems of production identify alienation as an inevitable outcome of the capitalist system. By contrast with earlier systems of production wherein each worker could decide on the object of their labor, on procedures, and on the value of what he or she produced, workers under capitalism are systematically deskilled. They carry out work designed by others to create products for purposes over which they have no control. The division of labor turns workers into elements of production without consideration of the value of what they produce. In

25

practice, workers sell their lifetime for minimum upkeep, ensuring maximum profit for others, the owners of the means of production. The alienating effects of these relations of production are enhanced by competition, secrecy, and iron-clad hierarchies, which are basic to peer relations in the workplace. As rules of the market, the same principles characterize dealings of the corporate world within and across states. Competitive hierarchies such as those that evolve in the economy can be discerned as well in government, in cultural industries, in the structure of churches, and in the organization of households. Combined, they are identifiable as a kind of cultural programming, and thus structural arrangements are legitimated as faithful reflections of human nature. For sociologists of the Marxist school, however, the imposed order is an ineluctable source of alienation. By contrast, other sociologists contend that alienation is the price paid for denying the accepted social order. In their view, alienation can be overcome by adhering to cultural goals embedded in familiar social structures and by aspiring toward those goals by normatively approved behavioral means.

Critiques of Alienation As noted, alienation has been and continues to be a construct of interest to students and practitioners in the humanities and in the behavioral and the social sciences. In every field, it has taken on various and occasionally contradictory shades of meaning. Critics insist that the conceptual diversity signals woolly thinking and flexibility, which negate its usefulness as a scientific concept. There is, however, a rich literature of research that challenges this contention.

Researching Alienation While there is great interest in the semblances of alienation shaped in literature and the arts, and in the reasoning of philosophers and theologians, alienation research is generally the province of psychology and the social sciences. In these disciplines, empirical studies attempt to lay the groundwork for dealienation. Broadly, there are two types of research: (1) studies that assume alienation to be an outcome of

26

Alienation

sociohistorical processes, and (2) studies that assume alienation to be a condition that arises from individuals’ disappointments in dealing with life experience. Research rooted in a view of alienation as the outcome of a structural order assumes that people may not be aware of the alienating circumstances that limit their creativity. Research focusing on alienation as a condition that emerges from life experience assumes, on the contrary, that people’s views of their situations and their feelings are compelling evidence of alienation. Psychological instruments have been designed to uncover clusters of alienated feelings such as frustration, disillusionment, or depression through strictly validated questionnaires. Causes are sought in childhood experiences and/or in physiological disorders. Questionnaires have been developed as well to uncover depths of felt social alienation according to the categories defined by Seeman. These have been examined for their connections with political opinions or approaches to work. Some research has found that two or more of the categories are in fact a single construct. As noted, structural research assumes that conjunctures of historical events and economic arrangements of production, marketing, and consumption engender alienation that is not likely to be discerned by its victims. Thus, studies focus on processes and situations that do not fulfill actors’ needs and cannot be controlled. Still, research findings suggest that despite the apparent inevitability of the status quo, alienating outcomes of the institutionalized socioeconomic and political orders can be mitigated.

Leadership and Alienation Indeed, in the field of organizational studies, a frequent theme of the early 2000s has been the question of whether leaders influence levels of alienation and if so, how. Most of these studies are concerned with signs of alienated or dealienated mindsets and their correlates. Conscious feelings of disengagement, frustration, conflict, and objection to control have been examined as causes of alienation from work. In this connection, the effects of different styles of leadership have been studied in organizations. Researchers have looked at effects of laissez-faire leadership as well as those

of transformational, transactional, supportive, charismatic, and authentic styles. Direct and indirect effects of empowering leadership have been seen in the mitigation of job burnout, the advancement of ethics at work, the improvement of self-discipline and organizational commitment, as well as in task performance, job satisfaction, and work–family balance enrichment. Interestingly, a study that compared effects of leadership on organizational outcomes across six countries concludes that the most effective styles of leadership for overcoming feelings of alienation are not necessarily universal; they are closely related to cultural values. Assuming that the organizational context as a whole plays a part in causing phenomena of alienation, some researchers are studying how structural elements such as centralization and formalization combine with styles of leadership to affect alienation toward work. Thus, with discoveries of causes, manifestations, and outcomes of alienation in different types of organizations under different styles of leadership, researchers are contributing to novel understandings of the complex construct, alienation, and its relevance to organizational life in the 21st century. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman See also Bad Leadership; Creativity and Leadership; Empowerment; Organizational Leadership; Power and Participation; Systems Theory; Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Further Readings Banai, M., & Reisel, D. (2007). The influence of supportive leadership and job characteristics on work alienation: A six-country investigation. Journal of World Business, 42(4), 463–476. doi:10/1016/j.jwb. 2007.06.007 Groselj, M., Cerne, M., Penger, S., & Grah, B. (2019). Authentic and transformational leadership and innovative work behavior: The moderating role of psychological empowerment. European Journal of Innovative Management, 24(3), 677–706. doi:10.1108/ ejim-10-2019-0294 Kalekin-Fishman, D., & Langman, L. (2015). Alienation: The critique that refuses to disappear. Current Sociology, 63(6), 916–933. doi:10.1177/001139 2115591612

Altruism Marx, K. (1992/1834). Early writings. London: Penguin Classics. Sarros, J. C., Tanewski, G. R., Winter, R. P., Santora, J. C., & Densten, K. (2002). Work alienation and organizational leadership. British Journal of Management, 13, 285–304. Seeman, M. (1975). Alienation studies. Annual Review of Sociology, 1, 91–123. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.01. 080175.000515 Shantz, A., Alfes, K., & Truss, C. (2014). Alienation from work: Marxist ideologies and twenty-first century practices. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(18), 2529–2550. doi:10.1080/ 09585192.2012.667431 Corpus ID:154591643. Stokols, D. (1975). Toward a psychological theory of alienation. Psychological Review, 82(1), 26–44. doi:10. 1037/h0076230

ALTRUISM Defining altruism often involves evoking a familiar binary: altruism versus egoism. Egoists are guided by self-interest; altruists serve others. The definition is frequently honed further by referring to motives and the costs associated with helping others, with the motive question a particularly bright definitional line. Some scholars argue that behavior is altruistic only when it is an end in itself—in other words, an ultimate rather than an instrumental goal. The question of whether altruism can ever be driven solely by selfless motives has generated a great deal of creative research and intense debate. This entry explores that debate and then travels outside the laboratory to highlight investigations of altruism in organizational settings, explore links between altruism and ethics, and offer a perspective on altruism that moves beyond the either-or confines imposed by the altruism–egoism binary.

Altruism in the Laboratory Thinking even briefly about the many selfish reasons that can drive helping behavior triggers deep appreciation of the difficulty associated with calling helpful acts altruistic. Helping can be a way to

27

curry favor and develop positive relations with powerful others or to garner praise, rewards, and a good reputation. Helping also allows people to avoid social sanctions and negative judgments. In a less calculating sense, people often find encountering another person in need to be a distressing experience and helping becomes a way to reduce those negative feelings. They may also help others to experience the vicarious joy and positive affect that flow from receiving the other person’s gratitude. In sum, few would argue with the assertion that the motives behind helping behaviors observed in daily life are nearly always opaque. For that reason, insights about altruistic motivation have been generated almost exclusively in the laboratory. The control, precision, and rigor characteristic of experimental research have made laboratories the site of many contests between altruistic and egoistic motives. On one side of this debate, Daniel Batson and colleagues claim that when people feel empathic compassion for another person, helping becomes an end in itself. The dozens of experiments in this line of research follow a common methodology: participants are exposed to a person in need, with one group induced to feel empathy (i.e., by having them imagine how the person feels about what has happened to them and the impact it has had on their life or by highlighting similarities between the victim and the participant) and a second group encouraged to view the situation more neutrally (i.e., by remaining as objective as possible about the person and their circumstances). Selfish reasons to help are carefully eliminated through such means as having the help occur anonymously and even framing the victim as deserving of the fate that has befallen them. In most cases, the option to help involves donating money or time to the person in need. Quite consistently, these studies support the empathy–altruism hypothesis, whereby helping behavior is observed among participants who feel empathy toward a suffering person, even in the absence of any selfish reasons to help. The Elusive Question of Motives

Critics of the empathy–altruism hypothesis quibble with the claim that selfish motives have been removed as potential causal forces in Batson’s and others’ work. Their arguments are often rooted in a

28

Altruism

relatively broad definition of the term selfish. For example, they note that religious individuals may devoutly believe that the good works they do on behalf of others in this life will come back to them in the form of eternal rewards in the next one. People who are mourning or in psychological distress may help others as a distraction from their own pain and grief. In sum, the work of Batson and colleagues reflects something of a paradox: while the empathy–altruism hypothesis has earned impressively consistent results in study after study, skeptical voices argue either that all egoistic motives have not been ruled out in the laboratory experiments conducted to date or that they never could be. This dilemma has led some to turn away from a rather narrow focus on motives, or psychological altruism, in favor of a path that involves exploring behavioral altruism, typically seen as actions that benefit others while involving some cost to the actor. Because behavioral altruism sidesteps the motive question (and even conscious intent), it has been studied among actors as diverse as insects, honeybees, and humans who occupy leadership roles in organizations.

Altruism in Organizations Studies exploring the prevalence and impact of altruism in the workplace demonstrate that it is both ubiquitous and highly generative. To be clear, such work focuses on perceived altruism because the motives driving helping behavior in day-to-day life are rarely apparent. Still, research investigating perceptions of ethical leadership across the globe frames altruism as one of a small set of leadership hypernorms, that is, principles viewed similarly around the world even when cultural differences impact the way they are enacted within a specific society. This may explain why nearly all major leadership theories, from transactional and transformational to servant and authentic, emphasize leader behaviors that serve others rather than the self—even when the nature of those behaviors is quite different across the theories. Altruism’s generative force is likely ignited by the power of reciprocity. In myriad ways, effective leaders provide both tangible and intangible support to others. They share their time, wisdom, inspiration, encouragement, and resources to help those

they work with develop and prosper. Research indicates that these leader behaviors are some of the most potent predictors of followers’ decisions to expend extra effort and time giving back to their organizations. Of course, even when they involve costs, these responsive behaviors by followers could clearly be motivated by self-interest—followers help because they want to ensure they remain in leaders’ good graces and receive the support they find so valuable. However, particularly in cases where followers strongly identify with and form an emotional bond with the leader, they may be motivated by some of the same other-focused forces observed in Batson’s laboratory. At this point, the picture painted of altruism seems unambiguously bright—yet the remaining brush strokes require some shading and nuance. Adding that perspective involves exploring altruism through an ethical lens, then widening that lens to consider motives beyond both altruism and egoism that can give rise to helping behavior.

Altruism and Ethics Despite the positivity associated with altruism, acting altruistically is not synonymous with acting ethically. Philosopher Joanne Ciulla conveys this well by noting that judging whether altruistic acts are also ethical must involve consideration of who one is helping and how one is providing that help. For example, one may feel a powerful sense of empathy for a neighbor who has recently lost their income and has small children to provide for. Robbing a business at great risk to one’s safety and providing the neighbor with the money could be seen as altruistic, but it would be difficult to argue that such actions are also ethical. This vivid example reveals altruism’s shadow: It can induce partiality and narrowed focus. Batson and colleagues observed this in the laboratory, where participants who did not feel empathy distributed resources to needy victims equally. In contrast, those encouraged to feel empathy for one specific victim treated that person preferentially, helping other equally needy but more psychologically distant victims less. This narrowed focus appears in the situation above, where the actor is blind to the pain their actions caused employees and business owners through the robbery because

Altruism

they were gripped by their neighbor’s pain. In short, people want to help those whose pain they come closest to feeling themselves. The Mindful Altruist

Empathy is a very powerful force. How do we ensure that the altruism it generates travels along an ethical path? According to many philosophers, the answer lies in tethering altruistic acts to moral principles through mindfulness. Focusing on empathy emphasizes the emotional side of altruism but helping others can be driven by cognitive forces as well, such as trying to live up to a valued ideal or practice a virtue. When one feels empathy, this may be as simple as pausing to consider questions that connect these empathic feelings to a broader world: Who else is experiencing these same challenges, and why? How can I respond in a way that reflects both the complexity of the situation and the ethical values I am trying to live by? Mindfulness can also generate altruistic acts in a top-down way through intentional practice, such as setting aside two minutes each morning to reflect on others’ needs and how to offer support. Being mindful about ethics provides a north star to guide altruistic behavior.

Beyond Altruism Versus Egoism Batson and colleagues have generated substantial evidence in the laboratory for the existence of altruistic motives. One by one, their experiments pit altruistic against various egoistic motives as explanations for helping behavior, and the results consistently indicate that when people feel empathy, they help others in the absence of selfish reasons for doing so. Yet the picture becomes more complex once one moves from the confines of the laboratory into the complexity of organizational life. First, experiments capture behavior at one moment in time, while motives play out in day-to-day life over a much longer time span. Selfish motives for behavior that initially seems altruistic may only emerge over time, such as when an employee helps a peer who they believe will someday become their manager. Second, some motives blur the line between egoism and altruism. If a leader sacrifices personal time to provide free coaching to a less

29

experienced colleague because it makes them feel fulfilled to see that person develop, is such behavior selfish or altruistic? Third, in their pure forms, both altruism and egoism are extremes. Most helping behavior is likely driven by a mix of both, along with other motives. Imagine a financial analyst who resigns to take a much lower paying job as a firefighter. Is this psychologically altruistic? Provided they have a genuine drive to protect and serve others, at least in part. Imagine further, though, that they found the finance job boring and recently inherited a large sum of money. This allows them to satisfy a strong desire for adventure, camaraderie, and physical challenge through their work. Their religious upbringing also emphasizes putting others before self. Finally, a beloved grandparent had been a firefighter, and they see themselves as the type of person who helps others in need. Through this example, we see altruism and egoism working in tandem to channel behavior rather than in opposition. At the same time, other motives—ethical considerations, religious values, honoring family traditions—seem to fall outside of the altruism–egoism binary altogether. Many leadership theories, particularly those emphasizing transformational, charismatic, and visionary behaviors, involve leaders elevating follower motives from selfish to other- or issue-focused. In practice, helping behaviors are driven by a diverse array of motives rooted in selfish, altruistic, ideological, and ethical motives, and these likely change over time. Wise leaders do their best to appeal to them all. Patrick Gavan O’Shea See also Ethics and Effectiveness; Ethical Leadership; Mindfulness; Moral Imagination; Prosocial Behavior; Selflessness; Virtues

Further Readings Batson, C. D. (2015). Testing the empathy-altruism hypothesis against egoistic alternatives. In L. BesserJones & M. Slote (Eds.), The Routledge companion to virtue ethics (pp. 385–399). Routledge. Ciulla, J. B. (2012). Ethics and effectiveness: The nature of good leadership. In D. V. Day & J. Antonakis (Eds.), The nature of leadership (pp. 508–540). SAGE Publications.

30

Appearance

Clavien, C., & Chapuisat, M. (2013). Altruism across disciplines: One word, many meanings. Biology & Philosophy, 28, 125–140. Resick, C. J., Hanges, P. J., Dickson, M. W., & Mitchelson, J. K. (2006). A cross-cultural examination of the endorsement of ethical leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 63, 345–359. Schramme, T. (2017). Empathy and altruism. In H. Maibom (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy and empathy (pp. 203–214). Routledge. Stocks, E., Lishner, D. A., & Decker, S. K. (2009). Altruism or psychological escape: Why does empathy promote prosocial behavior? European Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 649–665.

APPEARANCE Appearance provides important cues about an individual’s leadership potential, and followers use these cues in selecting leaders. Na¨ıve perceivers consistently judge particular faces as conveying leadership qualities such as attractiveness, dominance, trustworthiness, and maturity. These judgments are made rapidly and fairly accurately by both adults and children alike and across cultures, suggesting an evolved cognitive heuristic for leadership selection. In addition to predicting who will emerge as a leader in a particular context, facial appearance is also a reasonably good predictor of leadership success. This entry begins by examining how certain facial features affect perceptions of people’s leadership qualities, with a closer look at how facial appearance influences leadership in politics and business. The entry then considers how appearance relates to evolutionary contingency hypothesis. The concluding section reviews research on the effects of facial appearance on leadership among women and minorities and in non-Western countries.

Facial Appearance of Leadership Emergence and Effectiveness People with attractive faces benefit from a halo effect in which they are attributed with various positive characteristics, such as intelligence and

extraverted personality. Facial attractiveness can be analyzed into two components—symmetry and averageness. Symmetrical faces are good indicators of health and strong genes, in that the person has successfully avoided developmental disorders that can distort physical features of the face. In contrast, an average face shares features with many other faces, and as such represents a prototype of the perceiver’s in-group. Thus, average faces are judged as more familiar and also more trustworthy. Leadership emergence is affected by a wide range of factors, from verbal cues such as what the person says and the context in which it is said to nonverbal cues such as posture, facial expression, and gesture. Additionally, both physical strength and height are factors that can impact leadership selection. Nevertheless, research indicates that facial appearance is one of the most important factors in influencing how people select a leader. In particular, facial attractiveness plays a major role in the perception of leadership ability, no doubt due to the halo effect. However, perceivers also rely on other facial features to assess leadership suitability, depending on the context in which the leadership role takes place. Facial appearance not only predicts who will emerge as leader but in some cases also how effective that leader will be. To some extent, facial features provide information about the physical and personality traits of the person that are important for effective leadership, such as health, strength, intelligence, and social skills. However, researchers also propose that a feedback loop occurs between leader and followers, such that an individual who looks like a leader is selected to lead. The expectations that the followers place on this individual then shapes his or her behaviors, thus inducing a self-fulfilling prophecy of successful leadership.

Facial Appearance and Political Leadership The bulk of research on the facial appearance of leadership has focused on the winners of elections in Western democracies, with the candidates being almost exclusively White males. In most of these studies, facial attractiveness has been demonstrated to be a major factor in election success. However, personality factors that perceivers infer from targets’ faces also play an influential role, key

Appearance

among these being competence, a trait combining both dominance and maturity. Although real voters use information beyond candidates’ appearance in making their selection, they often place inordinate emphasis on facial features. Researchers have proposed several reasons for this. First, facial features may serve as anchors around which voters consider other more relevant information about candidates’ leadership ability. Second, voters generally lack any intimate knowledge of candidates’ personalities, so inferences from facial features may be the most reliable information they have to guide their choices. At any rate, voters do seem to reach a consensus on which candidates look like leaders. Although competence is a key factor in leadership emergence, there are also important distinctions depending on party affiliation or the political system in which leaders govern. For instance, conservative voters expect their leaders to look dominant, and in fact, na¨ıve judges rate the faces of conservative politicians as more dominant than those of liberal politicians. Likewise, democratically elected politicians and dictators reliably differ in facial appearance. Whereas both types of leaders were judged to be equally dominant and competent, democratic leaders were judged as looking more attractive and warmer (a combination of trustworthiness and likability) than dictatorial leaders.

Evolutionary Contingency Hypothesis The fact that na¨ıve judges can rapidly and fairly accurately identify leaders by facial appearance alone has led researchers to posit the evolutionary contingency hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, humans and other social animals have evolved a set of followership heuristics for selecting leaders. Furthermore, these heuristics are context-sensitive, in that they set up leadership prototypes, known as implicit leadership beliefs, with the requisite set of physical and personality traits for a leader to be effective in a given situation. Two observations support the contention that these heuristics are innate rather than learned. First, even preschool children can identify winners and losers of elections just as quickly and as accurately as adults, suggesting that social learning is not a factor. Second, these patterns of leadership

31

selection generalize across cultures, with only a few exceptions. An important contextual distinction in leadership selection is whether the group is looking for a leader to guide it through a period of conflict or cooperation. In times of conflict, dominant-looking leaders tend to emerge, whereas groups are more likely to select leaders who appear trustworthy when the goal is to encourage peaceful cooperation. Facial features conveying dominance are those of the typical masculine face, specifically a square face with a strong jawline, pronounced eyebrows, small eyes, and thin lips. In contrast, facial features conveying trustworthiness are those typical of a feminine face, namely a round face with a weak jawline, small eyebrows, big eyes, and full lips. It is important to note that this is not a distinction between male and female leaders but rather between masculine- and feminine-looking faces, regardless of the leader’s sex. Apparent age also plays an important role in context-dependent leadership selection. As a general rule, older looking candidates are judged to be more competent and experienced, thus more likely to be effective leaders. During periods of stability, experience and accumulated knowledge are important qualities of an effective leader, and in such situations older looking candidates are preferred. However, when a group is facing instability or uncertainty, it is more likely to select a younger looking candidate who can come up with novel solutions to novel problems. This context-dependent preference for an older, experienced leader or a younger, innovative one reflects the distinction between crystallized and fluid intelligence. Facial appearance is an important factor in predicting leadership selection and success in other domains besides politics. In for-profit organizations, chief executive officers (CEOs) with facial features conveying dominance tend to be more successful in directing their companies, regardless of whether the leader is male or female. In contrast, successful CEOs of nonprofit organizations tend to have facial features conveying trustworthiness rather than dominance. Likewise, a for-profit organization is more likely to hire a new CEO who looks trustworthy after it has fired its previous CEO due to financial misconduct, a move that investment analysts and media alike

32

Appearance

applaud. Facial features conveying uniquely beneficial traits within a group also tend to be correlated with leadership selection. Thus, lawyers generally appear to be socially skilled, but managing partners of law firms display facial features that uniquely convey dominance. In contrast, mafia members generally look dominant, but mafia bosses additionally display facial features conveying social skill.

Female, Minority, and Non-Western Leadership The vast majority of research on the facial appearance of leadership has focused on White male leaders, mainly because they dominate leadership positions in Western societies. Moreover, researchers have tried to avoid introducing extraneous variables into their stimuli by excluding images of female, minority, and non-Western leaders. Since potential leadership ability is generally perceived in terms of masculine qualities such as dominance, females with typical feminine faces are at a disadvantage when seeking leadership roles. However, research suggests that female leadership selection and success are predicted by the same facial cues that do so in males, in that women who display masculine and mature facial features are perceived as more likely to be competent and powerful leaders. Nevertheless, women with a masculine facial appearance can suffer a disadvantage in their bid for leadership positions because they do not fit socially accepted stereotypes. Furthermore, the attractiveness advantage enjoyed by male leaders, particularly politicians, is lost on women, in that attractive, feminine-looking women are often judged to be poor candidates for leadership roles. Facial cues to leadership selection and success also vary by race. In a study of White and Black CEOs, Black leaders were perceived as more baby-faced (feminine and youthful) compared to White leaders, who were judged to be more dominant (masculine and mature). Furthermore, Black CEOs with baby-faced features earned higher salaries and led more profitable companies than those who looked more mature or dominant. Researchers conjecture that successful Black CEOs need to have a look that is disarming in a White-dominated society. This was not the case,

however, for Black women leaders, who apparently benefit from the cultural stereotype of the strong Black woman. Whereas facial attractiveness predicts political election success almost universally, the advantage provided by a dominant appearance depends on the culture. In East Asian societies, particularly Japan and Taiwan, the appearance of trustworthiness is far more predictive of election success than is dominance. This finding is in line with the evolutionary contingency hypothesis, in that these societies tend to be governed by consensus rather than majority rule. Thus, trustworthy leaders who can encourage cooperation should be preferred over those who dominate through conflict. Facial appearance predicts both leadership selection and success in a wide range of domains. However, there is no single look of a leader, in that followers select leaders whose physical and personality traits, as inferred by facial features, match the leadership qualities required for the specific situation. Judgments of leadership ability on the basis of facial appearance are both fast and reasonably accurate. Moreover, even young children perform similarly to adults, and judgments of leadership ability are similar across cultures. These observations suggest that we have evolved heuristics for context-sensitive leadership selection based on appearance. David Ludden See also Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences; Emotional Intelligence; Evolution of Leadership; Faces in Leadership; Implicit Leadership Theories

Further Readings Antonakis, J., & Eubanks, D. L. (2017). Looking leadership in the face. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26, 270–275. doi:10.1177/ 0963721417705888 Grabo, A., & van Vugt, M. (2018). Voting for a male warrior or female peacekeeper? Testing the evolutionary contingency hypothesis in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Evolutionary Psychology, 16(2). Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/ 1474704918773267 Knowles, K. (2018). The evolutionary psychology of leadership trait perception. In C. Senior (Ed.), The

¨ and the Turkish Transformation Ataturk facial displays of leaders. Cham: Palgrave McMillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-94535-4_5 Re, D. E., & Rule, N. (2017). Distinctive facial cues predict leadership rank and selection. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43, 1311–1322. doi:10. 1177/0146167217712989 ¨ Spisak, B. R., Dekker, P. H., Kruger, M., & van Vugt, M. (2012). Warriors and peacekeepers. Testing a biosocial implicit leadership hypothesis of intergroup relations using masculine and feminine faces. PLoS ONE, 7, e30399. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030399 Spisak, B. R., Grabo, A. E., Arvey, R. D., & van Vugt, M. (2014). The age of exploration and exploitation: Younger-looking leaders endorsed for change and older-looking leaders endorsed for stability. The Leadership Quarterly, 25, 805–816. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2014.06.001 Todorov, A., Olivola, C. Y., Dotsch, R., & MendeSiedlecki, P. (2015). Social attributions from faces: Determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 519–545. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143831 Van Vugt, M., & Grabo, A. E. (2015). The many faces of leadership: An evolutionary-psychology approach. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 484–489. doi:10.1177/0963721415601971

¨ ATATURK AND THE TURKISH TRANSFORMATION This entry aims to review the leadership role of ¨ Ataturk, born Mustafa Kemal, in transforming the monarchical Ottoman Empire to the democratic Turkish Republic. Turkey’s war of independence can be analyzed and understood through an account of the life and career of this transformational leader, who implemented strategic changes and radical reforms, albeit controversial, in political, social, and economic areas of the state.

Kemal’s Early Life Mustafa Kemal developed a sense of purpose and set goals in the early years of his life. Born in 1881, he grew up in turbulent times when the Ottoman Empire was struggling with internal and external

33

threats. Since the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire had been on a gradual decline, losing its military and economic dominance to the rising powers in Europe. The Renaissance and Industrial Revolution spurred European development, while the Ottomans suffered under poor leadership and fierce global trade competition. They had begun to lose key regions of their territory and lost a majority of their holds to Europe in the Balkan Wars during 1912–1913. Kemal grew up in the midst of the turmoil during the decline of the empire. Kemal was born and raised in Salonika, a cosmopolitan port city under European influence. He lost his father when he was only seven. According to his father’s wishes, he attended a military school and was exposed to science, math, and foreign languages. He was an avid reader of the French Enlightenment luminaries such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of the patriotic and revolutionary poems by Namık Kemal. His exemplary performance at school enabled his admission to the elite Military Staff College in Constantinople, the city known informally as Istanbul. As a student there, his exposure to Western ideology and secular education inspired his interest in political reform; subsequently, he joined the underground Young Turk movement. The Young Turks were liberal intellectuals and revolutionaries who opposed the absolutist regime of the Ottoman sultan and sought to reinstate the constitution. Mustafa Kemal was outspoken about his opposition to the regime and called for radical change, which resulted in his short-term imprisonment. Following his release, he received the opportunity to join the military service and served in World War I.

World War I and the Struggle for Turkish Independence Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the Allied powers partitioned the former Ottoman territories. In 1918, Allied troops occupied sections of Constantinople and set up their own military administration. Meanwhile, Mustafa Kemal’s troops had been disbanded. He returned to Constantinople, which was occupied by British, French, and Italian troops. He immediately began

34

¨ and the Turkish Transformation Ataturk

to meet with selected members of the Young Turks to formulate a strategic plan. Despite the opposition of the Ottoman sultan, Kemal launched the War of Independence in Samsun on May 19, 1919, against the Allied forces. From 1911 to 1923, on and off the battlefield, Mustafa Kemal developed the leadership qualities including “bravery in the face of physical danger, swift analysis of the tactical situation on the ground, a strategic sense of the significance of defeat or victory in the moment, and the leadership to inspire the often confused and frightened men about him” (Williams III, 2019, p. 250). Although the Ottoman Empire considered him an outlaw, and the odds of success against the Western Allies were slim, Kemal’s leadership and charisma solidified his appeal for the national war of independence, and he was promoted to the rank of general. Transformational leadership and strategic planning were Kemal’s key characteristics that led his military successes. He was an inspirational communicator, whose vision for an independent, secular, and modern Turkish Republic inspired his fellow commanders and officers to deliver the Turkish people from centuries of oppressive monarchy. He was an achievement-oriented, courageous commander with great ambitions. His tactical determination of the battle locations was based on lessons learned from previous wars. He was also strategic in timing counterattacks, reflecting his thoughtful calculations of the opponent armies’ weaknesses. As both Assembly President and Commander of the Armed Forces, he realized that consensus building could have been too risky considering the conflicting interests, potential dangers, and the amount of time required to establish consensus. His military leadership was characterized by authoritarian, unilateral, and fast decision-making, which at times was implemented as extreme measures. The Turkish Army under his leadership won many battles and, eventually, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1923. This peace treaty officially settled the conflict between Ottoman Empire and the Allies and granted independence for the Republic of Turkey. Kemal wanted to emulate the pragmatic successes of Western civilization based on his observations for necessary radical change in the political, social, and economic sectors of Turkish

society. He sought to craft a modern secular government. Strategic decisions for such a progressive movement meant controversial reforms in many areas of the state including education, citizenry culture, calendar, and the alphabet. In an attempt to reinforce secular ideals, Kemal took critical steps: religious leadership was renounced by the new state; all members of the Ottoman Empire were exiled from Turkey; Islamic law was replaced by civil law; and religious schools were closed. Upon a nationwide adoption of surnames, the new Parliament granted Mustafa Kemal the surname ¨ Ataturk, which means the Father of the Turks.

The New Republic and the 1926 Civil Code ¨ The key characteristics of Ataturk’s ideology were, and continue to be, fairness and inclusion. For example, he ensured the institutionalization of women’s rights to recognize women’s important role in the war for independence and the future of the nation. He encouraged gender equality in political and educational leadership roles. As a result, Turkey adopted the 1926 Civil Code, which recognized the equality of rights between Turkish women and men. Following this, in 1934, Turkish women received suffrage and the ability to serve in public office. Family matters such as divorce were placed in civil rather than religious courts, and polygamy was abolished. Inclusion of all citizens under the new Republic of Turkey, regardless of their residential area, their racial origin (Turk, Arab), and their religion (Christian, Jewish, Alevi Muslim, or Sunni Muslim), was the key principle of the business of governance. However, intolerant policies and tight restrictions on the minorities such as Orthodox and Armenian Christians during World War I had led to distrust between the Ottoman government and the minorities. These minority groups, especially the Greeks, Kurds, and Armenians, continued to be seen as threats to the new nation following Turkey’s independence. Some ethnic minorities, especially Kurds and Armenians, were opposed to the engineering of the nation-state for Turks and felt oppressed and marginalized. Tragic events happened, such as when Armenians were deported from Eastern Anatolia and when Kurds raised

¨ and the Turkish Transformation Ataturk

the banner of revolt in the name of Islam. Acknowledging these tensions and considering ¨ the resultant tragic events, Ataturk and his followers faced the ultimate challenge of creating a unified nation and government. The concept of ¨ ¨ uk) ¨ Turkishness (Turkç ul was originally devel¨ oped by Ziya Gokalp, a sociologist, writer, and ¨ politician, and was endorsed by Ataturk as a way to develop an overarching, superordinate identity that includes all citizens, Muslim and non-Muslim, under one nation. In 1927, he said, “We must delve into our roots and reconstruct what history had divided.”

Reform, Resistance, and the Legacy of Leadership ¨ Ataturk’s vision was to modernize Turkey and raise its economic status by utilizing education to prepare citizens as contributors toward public life and civil ¨ understood the necessity of educasociety. Ataturk tional reforms in addressing the alleviation of poverty and enabling economic freedoms. The measures he took to reform education were considered unorthodox for his time, but they were necessary steps toward radical change. The educational and linguistic reforms that began in 1926 were based on two important pillars. First, the Ottoman alphabet, which had previously used Arabic script, was replaced with the Latin alphabet. This allowed the Qur’an to be formally translated into Turkish, allowing Turks to read a non-Arabic book of religion. Second, the Turkish language was refined by the removal of words of foreign origin (mostly from Arabic and Persian) by the Turkish linguists in the 1930s. This pillar was particularly inclusive in that Turkish citizens were encouraged to participate by sending in new words to be added to the new language. The final product was a widely distributed dictionary that translated Ottoman words into new Turkish words. This language reform, coupled with other educational initiatives, increased the number of teacher-training schools and required all students to attend elementary and middle school. ¨ As with many famous reformers, Ataturk’s initiatives were met with resistance and objection, particularly by religious elites, who saw it as an ¨ intrusion on their power. Perhaps, Ataturk’s

35

biggest challenge was protecting the reforms against the condemnations of religious elites while also avoiding foreign interference. His devotion to secularism was construed by many as antireligion, and devout religious citizens did not respond well to the banning of hijabs and fez (headscarves and hats), restrictions of building new mosques, and the regulation of imams (religious leaders) by the government. In order to ensure the legitimacy, peace, and durability of his ¨ legacy, Ataturk understood the importance of creating a sense of unity within the nation, avoiding political and military alliances, and maintaining a neutral foreign policy. After the abolishing the Islamic Caliphate, he established the Diyanet (the Directorate of Religious Affairs), which was given the responsibility to promote Sunni Islam as a source of morality, as well as to solidify the unity and integrity of the nation. He prioritized self-reliance and economic stability rather than ambitious goals of expansion and development. Once this was achieved by the end of the 1930s, Turkey began to engage slowly with diplomacy to ensure peace. ¨ declared “Peace at home, peace In 1931, Ataturk in the world” to the public during his tours in Anatolia, which later became the slogan for the Turkish administration. To ensure protection of the reforms and peace in the nation, he divided his ideology into six tenets, which were written into the Turkish constitution in 1937: Republicanism (i.e., the creation of the republic), Nationalism (i.e., the establishment of the new superordinate national identity), Populism (i.e., the mobilization of popular support from the nation leaders and the public), Statism (i.e., the movement toward stable, state-controlled economic development), Secularism (i.e., the adoption of secular governmental system), and Revolution (i.e., radical reorganization of the political, social, and economic systems). These six tenets became known as the six arrows of Kemalism. ¨ Another important aspect of Ataturk’s leadership style was the strong interpersonal relationships he developed with his followers—experts, politicians, and the public. He instilled confidence in his followers, which motivated them to fight alongside with him despite all risks. During the ¨ National Independence War, Ataturk’s most

36

Authentic Leadership

reliable commanders were strong military leaders; however, they were more reserved in making ¨ difficult decisions. Ataturk shared his ambitions with them and gave them the courage and strength they needed to take on their leadership roles. Both his peers and followers appreciated his determi¨ nation and passions. Furthermore, Ataturk showed genuine interest in learning from others, which greatly impacted his interpersonal relationships. Throughout his administration’s reforms, he invited guests for dinner events. He would discuss controversial political issues and receive feedback on the reforms during these events; he was genuinely interested in hearing others’ perspectives, exchanging views, and testing new ideas. He was also humble and respectful in his relationships. Once he received a letter from a curious 10year-old American boy who had written about his admiration for, and interest in, Turkey and asked ¨ for his photograph. Ataturk replied to him in a handwritten letter and sent it the United States along with his photograph. ¨ believed in As a transformational leader, Ataturk the process of learning as a lifelong part of personal growth. He spent most of his final years reading books from his rich library and writing. His daily journals and military notes from the Ottoman period were published as a single collection. He was proficient in French and German and familiar with Greek and Bulgarian. At the height of his admin¨ istration, Ataturk became afflicted with a liver ailment and passed away on November 10, 1938. ¨ MausoHis remains were interred at the Ataturk leum (Anıtkabir) in Ankara. He left behind a formidable legacy, which remains alive throughout Turkish society today. His reforms, albeit controversial and revolutionary, built the modern Turkish nation. Nurcan Ensari Further Readings ¨ Ataturk, M. K. (1938). The great speech. Ankara: Devlet Publishers. ¨ Mango, A. (2002). Ataturk: The biography of the founder of modern Turkey. New York, NY: Overlook Press. Williams III, H. P. (2019). Turkey and America: East and West where the twain meet. New Degree Press.

AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP Authentic leadership is a genuine approach to leadership that focuses on being true to oneself and enacting that self while in the leadership role. This positive approach to leadership is manifest through awareness of one’s self, an internalized moral and ethical code, relational transparency with others, and balanced information processing. Proposed by Bruce Avolio and William Gardner as the “root construct” underlying positive leadership theories, authentic leadership was introduced into the management literature as an approach that keeps the leaders’ ethical actions at the forefront with the goal of avoiding unethical crises in organizational settings. Authentic leadership emphasizes that while authenticity is important for leaders, it can also foster and be fostered by followers’ authenticity to ultimately contribute to the development of an authentic leader–follower relationship. Authentic leadership has been shown to be related to numerous positive outcomes at the individual leader/follower, team, and organizational levels. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of authentic leadership, including the theoretical origins of the construct, the commonly accepted definition, the components, the empirically supported antecedents and outcomes, measurement instruments, and the arguments for and against the theory.

Authenticity Authentic leadership draws upon the foundational construct of authenticity. The definition of authentic leadership is dependent on whether scholars build upon the philosophical or psychological conceptualizations of authenticity. The historical origins of authenticity can be traced to ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Aristotle. Reflected by injunctions such as “Know thyself” and “To thine own self be true,” authenticity, in the eyes of the Greeks, requires and results from a focus on self-inquiry, self-reflection, the seeking of one’s life purpose, and the ethical pursuit of the highest good. Philosophical conceptions of authenticity served as an inspiration for the psychological approaches that followed. However, the psychological meanings

Authentic Leadership

of authenticity differ from their philosophical underpinnings in that most psychological approaches consider authenticity as a trait, state, or part of an identity. Works by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and Michael Kernis have shaped the primary psychological approaches to authenticity. Deci and Ryan argued that individuals’ intrinsically motivated behaviors reflect their true self, contributing to their authenticity. Additionally, they maintained that when people are self-determined and their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met, they achieve greater authenticity, providing them with optimal development and well-being. In contrast, authenticity, in Kernis’s view, is a display of optimal self-esteem. Kernis and his colleague, Brian Goldman, advanced a multicomponent model of authenticity including awareness, behavior, relational orientation, and unbiased processing, which provided the basis from which the widely accepted definition of authentic leadership was derived. While multiple perspectives of authentic leadership exist within the literature, we focus on the dominant approach to defining and researching authentic leadership that is grounded in psychological understandings of authenticity. In the following section, we present the definition(s) of authentic leadership that aligns with this perspective.

Defining Authentic Leadership Initial descriptions of leader authenticity emerged in the 1960s. These early definitions focused on organizational authenticity as manifested through leadership, with later definitions linking leadership and authenticity more closely. The previous definitions of authentic leadership were advanced within the organizational sciences and particularly within the field of education. Fred Luthans and Avolio’s conceptualization of authentic leadership ignited scholarly interest in the construct within the field of management and provided the groundwork for current understandings of authentic leadership. They defined authentic leadership as “a process that draws from both positive psychological capacities and a highly developed organizational context, which results in both greater selfawareness and self-regulated positive behaviors on the part of leaders and associates, fostering positive self-development. The authentic leader is confident,

37

hopeful, optimistic, resilient, transparent, moral/ ethical, future-oriented, and gives priority to developing associates to be leaders” (Luthans & Avolio, 2003, p. 243). These authors proposed that positive organizational behavior, transformational/full-range leadership, and ethical/moral perspective-taking serve to undergird authentic leadership theory; as such, their definition represents these theoretical underpinnings. Luthans and Avolio’s work served as a catalyst for several defining events and publications related to the development of authentic leadership theory including a 2004 Gallup Leadership Summit focused on authentic leadership, a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly dedicated to authentic leadership, and an edited volume of the Monographs in Management and Leadership by Gardner, Avolio, and Fred Walumbwa that was specific to authentic leadership. These research activities led to the model of authentic leadership that is currently supported in the literature. Specifically, Walumbwa and colleagues developed a fourcomponent model of authentic leadership that was based on Kernis and Goldman’s components of authenticity and Gardner, Avolio, Luthans, Douglas May, and Walumbwa’s self-based model of authentic leader/follower development. Their definition of authentic leadership incorporated the basic elements of authentic leadership previously discussed throughout the literature, such as a continual self-awareness and reflection process and a relational orientation. Thus, authentic leadership is commonly defined as [a] pattern of leader behavior that draws upon and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate, to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of information, and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers, fostering positive self-development. (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008, p. 94)

Based on the preceding definition, the commonly accepted components of authentic leadership include self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency. Gardner, Avolio, Luthans,

38

Authentic Leadership

May, and Walumbwa consider self-awareness to be a process “whereby one comes to reflect on one’s unique values, identity, emotions, goals, knowledge, talents and/or capacities” (Gardner, Avolio, Luthans, May, & Walumbwa, 2005, p. 349), including one’s strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, it refers to understanding the multifaceted nature of the self and one’s meaningmaking process in relation to the social world. An internalized moral perspective is based on self-regulation, which is anchored by one’s mission, deep-seeded values, and a desire to make a difference. Balanced processing involves considering others’ opinions and relevant information in decision-making while using a relatively objective lens. Finally, relational transparency refers to showing one’s true self to others and openly, but appropriately, sharing information regarding one’s true thoughts and emotions. Thus, authentic leaders welcome openness and self-disclosure in close relationships with others.

financial performance and openness of organizational climate. Authentic leadership is also negatively associated with undesirable outcomes such as contingent leader self-esteem, burnout, and concerns about status. In a brief review focused on the moral elements of authentic leadership (along with other positive theories of leadership), G. James Lemoine, Chad Hartnell, and Hannes Leroy provided a more recent overview of the outcomes of authentic leadership. These authors found that the usual (empirical) suspects that have a positive relationship with authentic leadership include perceived leader effectiveness, justice, job satisfaction, work engagement, organizational commitment, well-being, individual performance, team performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, proactivity, creativity, and innovation, while authentic leadership has a negative relationship with the outcomes of turnover intentions, deviance, stress, and burnout.

Measurement of Authentic Leadership Antecedents and Outcomes of Authentic Leadership The key antecedents of authentic leadership that have been identified by Gardner, Claudia Cogliser, Kelly Davis, and Matthew Dickens from a review of the empirical literature include psychological capital and self-monitoring. Research into antecedents of authentic leadership has been scarce, which suggests that this is a potentially fruitful area for future research. The investigation of outcomes of authentic leadership has been much more robust. Gardner and his colleagues identified numerous empirically supported outcomes in the authentic leadership nomological network. Thus, authentic leadership has been shown to result in many positive outcomes at differing levels of measurement. At the individual level, authentic leadership has positive relationships with both leader-specific outcomes (e.g., positive modeling, psychological well-being, ethical leadership, and transformational leadership) and follower-specific outcomes (e.g., empowerment, identification with supervisor, job performance, job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behaviors, and organizational commitment). At the organizational level, authentic leadership is positively related to firm

Authentic leadership is most commonly operationalized using two survey measures of the four core components as they relate to the overarching construct of authentic leadership: the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) by Walumbwa and colleagues and the Authentic Leadership Inventory (ALI) by Linda Neider and Chester Schriesheim. Walumbwa and his colleagues developed the ALQ in 2008 and provided evidence of validity using five samples obtained from China, Kenya, and the United States. In 2011, Neider and Schriesheim provided an assessment of the ALQ that revealed some areas of concern that were addressed by the ALI (which includes some items from the ALQ but also adds original items). Results of their validity assessment provided support for the reliability, content validity, fourcomponent factor structure, concurrent validity, convergent and discriminant validity, and freedom from impression management response biases of the ALI. Despite the extensive use of the ALQ and the ALI as tools for operationalizing authentic leadership, several limitations of these measures are apparent. These include those common to survey measures in general, as well as several that are

Authentic Leadership

unique to authentic leadership. Specifically, if a self-report measure is employed, potential bias is introduced because a leader who lacks selfawareness may be susceptible to self-deception or impression management biases. Alternatively, other-report measures can only tap perceptions of authentic leadership. While follower perceptions have value in and of themselves and have been shown to be supportive of the predictions made by authentic leadership theory, they nonetheless are unable to ascertain the extent to which a leader is true to self. In recognition of these limitations, in 2021, Gardner, Elizabeth Karam, Mats Alvesson, and Katja Einola suggested that the utility of alternative approaches (e.g., experimental manipulations, qualitative methods, and implicit measures) to operationalizing authentic leadership be explored.

The Case for and Against Authentic Leadership As the theory and research on authentic leadership has expanded, critiques of both have emerged. For example, Alvesson and Einola published an especially influential critique in 2019. Note that this critique was followed by an exchange of letters in which Gardner and Karam responded to specific points made in the critique, and Alvesson and Einola replied to these responses. To highlight the arguments made for and against authentic leadership, we describe the main problems raised by Alvesson and Einola, as well as Gardner and Karam’s responses. In their critique, Alvesson and Einola identified what they consider to be three main problem areas of authentic leadership theory and research. The first involves the foundations of authentic leadership, as they contend “the concept, while semantically appealing, does not offer a solid foundation for serious knowledge work” (Alvesson & Einola, 2019, p. 385). They go on to advance several arguments as to why they see the foundations of authentic leadership as problematic, which include (a) a tension between job-based roles and the authentic self that cannot be resolved; (b) the construct of authenticity is too often conflated with the related constructs of honesty, sincerity, and other related terms; (c) problems related to a

39

prior positive framing; (d) the popularization of the ancient term authenticity that reflects a general disillusionment with business; (e) a tendency for people to embrace an ideology that sees leadership as the savior; and (f) the grounding of the theory in shaky and uninformed philosophical foundations. In Letter 1 of the exchange of letters, Gardner and Karam countered by arguing that (a) people have multiple selves that can be enacted to meet leadership demands, and hence the particular self that becomes operative in a job-based role is often authentic; (b) clear distinctions between the constructs of authenticity, honesty, and sincerity have been made within the authentic leadership literature; (c) while authentic leadership theory does reflect a prior positive framing of the construct, such framing has subsequently been supported by empirical research; (d) the fact that authentic leadership resonates with practitioners is a good thing, since it partially addresses the commonly bemoaned academic–practitioner divide; (e) authentic leadership theory explicitly recognizes that no leader is 100% authentic, noting that leader authenticity varies along a continuum from low to high, but there is merit in encouraging leaders to aspire to be authentic when doing so is realistic and attainable; and (f) authentic leadership theory does not view the leader as a savior, as it recognizes leaders may be more or less authentic in different situations, and that followers play a key role in determining the level of leader, and their own, authenticity. The second main problem identified by Alvesson and Einola involved theory development, as they assert “[a]uthentic leadership theory stands on a shaky theoretical foundation”; specifically, they argue that (a) authentic leadership can be viewed as a “mere moral washing of transformational leadership” (Alvesson & Einola, 2019, p. 385) and a grouping of unrealistic ideals; (b) the four elements of authentic leadership do not constitute a solid and logical theoretical construct; (c) the definitions of authentic leadership also include outcomes, lumping cause and effect together; and (d) measuring authentic leadership is mission impossible. In the exchange of letters, Gardner and Karam reply to these concerns by pointing out that (a) authentic leadership and transformational leadership are separate theories that share little in common and,

40

Authentic Leadership

hence, the former does not provide a moral washing of the latter; (b) logical arguments as to why the four components of authentic leadership are interrelated constitute the overarching construct of authentic leadership and are supported by confirmatory factor analyses that provide evidence for a four-component higher order model of authentic leadership; (c) empirical support for the predications of authentic leadership theory has been published in top-tier management journals, including the Journal of Management, The Leadership Quarterly, and Personnel Psychology, suggesting that the conceptual foundations for the theory are not so shaky after all; (d) the inclusion of antecedents and consequences of authentic leadership in some definitions of the construct is an issue, but one that can be addressed by removal of these elements and other definitional refinements; and (e) while there are challenges involved in measuring authentic leadership, particularly via survey methods, there is evidence of construct validity for the ALQ and the ALI, and other promising approaches to operationalizing authentic leadership such as implicit measures and experimental manipulations are being developed. The final problem area that Alvesson and Einola identified reflects their opinion that modern workplaces are inhospitable environments for achieving personal authenticity. Specifically, they note that (a) authenticity is often unwanted in the workplace and may distract from efforts to align organizational members toward goal accomplishment, while potentially fostering narcissism and other pathologies; (b) being authentic may expose organizational members to personal vulnerability; and (c) sticking with one’s authentic self may result in inflexibility and conservatism. Gardner and Karam counter by pointing out that (a) assuming people can’t be authentic at work reflects a cynical view of organizational life that is at odds with examples of positive workplaces that promote and celebrate personal authenticity; (b) there is empirical evidence that authenticity, authentic leadership, and authentic followership can be achieved in workplaces that promote authenticity, and that authenticity is negatively related to narcissism and other pathologies; (c) being authentic can make organizational members vulnerable, but a willingness to make oneself vulnerable is the basis of trust in

relationships (so that is not necessarily a bad thing); and (d) because authentic leadership theory focuses on leadership development, leaders who strive for authenticity can become more versus less flexible. Despite their differences in opinions, the authors of this debate concluded that such a dialogue constitutes a healthy and productive exchange of ideas, and similar conversations among scholars with opposing viewpoints should be pursued more often in the study of leadership.

Final Remarks According to authentic leadership theory, people don’t have to meet a checklist of desired characteristics to be a leader; instead, they can be effective leaders by being true to who they are and displaying their true selves while in a leadership role, maintaining high ethical and moral standards, and being open to the opinions of others. Thus, authentic leadership theory makes leadership open to all, instead of a select few. These core tenets of authentic leadership, along with the potential to foster numerous positive outcomes at various organizational levels, have resulted in significant scholarly attention dedicated to authentic leadership within the leadership literature. While more conceptual and empirical work on authentic leadership is necessary to more fully develop and test authentic leadership theory, authentic leadership remains a cornerstone within positive leadership theories. Kelly Davis McCauley, William L. Gardner, and Chao (Mavis) Tang See also Effective Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leadership Development; Transformational and Transactional Leadership, Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Alvesson, M., & Einola, K. (2019). Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(4), 383–395. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.04.001 Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive

Autocratic Leadership forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315–338. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001 Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). “What” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. doi:10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01 Gardner, W. L., Avolio, B. J., Luthans, F., May, D. R., & Walumbwa, F. O. (2005). “Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 343–372. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua. 2005.03.003 Gardner, W. L., Avolio, B. J., & Walumbwa, F. O. (Eds.). (2005). Authentic leadership theory and practice: Origins, effects and development (Vol. 3). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gardner, W. L., Cogliser, C. C., Davis, K. M., & Dickens, M. P. (2011). Authentic leadership: A review of the literature and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(6), 1120–1145. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua. 2011.09.007 Gardner, W. L., Karam, E. P., Alvesson, M., & Einola, K. (2021). Authentic leadership: The case for and against. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(4). Advanced online publication. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2021.101495 Kernis, M. H., & Goldman, B. M. (2006). A multicomponent conceptualization of authenticity: Theory and research. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 38, pp. 283–357). Cambridge, MA: Elsevier Academic Press. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38006-9 Lemoine, G. J., Hartnell, C. A., & Leroy, H. (2019). Taking stock of moral approaches to leadership: An integrative review of ethical, authentic, and servant leadership. Academy of Management Annals, 13(1), 148–187. doi:10.5465/annals.2016. 0121 Luthans, F., & Avolio, B. J. (2003). Authentic leadership: A positive developmental approach. In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, & R. E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship (pp. 241–261). Oakland, CA: Barrett-Koehler. Neider, L. L., & Schriesheim, C. A. (2011). The authentic leadership inventory (ALI): Development and empirical tests. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(6), 1146–1164. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.09.008 Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126. doi:10.1177/0149206307308913

41

AUTOCRATIC LEADERSHIP Embedded throughout societal history is a dichotomy held to represent distinct and opposite styles of leadership, styles differentiated primarily with respect to the distribution of power and decision-making responsibility. One of these styles—autocratic leadership—is generally characterized by the centralization and concentration of such power and responsibility within an individual. Under such leadership, influence becomes largely hierarchical. Leaders take sole responsibility for decisions, push their own opinions and ideas, and may discourage subordinates from engagement in decision processes, ultimately restricting the responsibilities of followers to obedience and rule-following. Scholarly interest in autocratic leadership appeared to diminish in the latter part of the 20th century. However, it stands to reason, as some researchers have suggested, that the study of autocratic leadership is no less important today than in the past. Indeed, the outcomes associated with differences in the distribution of power and decision processes continue to yield important consequences for individuals, teams, institutions, and governments across the globe. As such, the purpose of this entry is to provide an overview of the research surrounding autocratic leadership, including a delineation of its nature as it relates to other related leadership styles and a discussion of its effects on a variety of critical outcomes.

The Nature of Autocratic Leadership Before discussing the research bearing on its effects, let’s conceptually clarify the nature of autocratic leadership, especially as it relates to different, yet associated, styles of leadership. More specifically, autocratic leadership is most commonly understood as it stands in contrast to democratic leadership, the presumptively preferred style of leadership emphasizing the decentralization and distribution of power to units or individuals throughout multiple levels of an organization. Democratic leadership is based on principles of consultation and participation, in which follower involvement in decision processes

42

Autocratic Leadership

is not only permitted but also encouraged. Democratic leaders foster interaction and the sharing of information, perspectives, and opinions and ensure the conditions whereby followers feel open to discussing criticisms and questioning assumptions. Moreover, democratic leaders also have a greater tendency to rely on and make use of the knowledge and skills of followers. Given these observations, decision-making and leadership under a democratic structure tend to become more collectively enacted as followers are empowered to have voice and involvement in important processes and decisions. In contrast, autocratic leadership, as mentioned previously, emphasizes the centralization and concentration of power within a single, dominant leader. Autocratic leadership rests on principles of control, in which the leader makes unilateral decisions and ensures such decisions are executed regardless of the opinions and perspectives of followers. Autocratic leaders not only define and impose goals on followers but also prescribe the methods, procedures, and rules guiding how these goals are to be reached. As such, follower performance may be closely monitored, with standards for adequate performance based on adherence and obedience to such rules and procedures. This control is often highly dependent on the leader’s status or position within an organizational hierarchy— with certain positions allowing such leaders to wield greater power and enhanced influence capabilities by giving them access to and control over various aspects of the work environment (e.g., information, rewards, punishments). Reliant on such power, and often harboring conceptions about the need to control and direct people’s performance, autocratic leaders may often rely on the administration of rewards and punishments distributed in accordance with followers’ levels of compliance, loyalty, and obedience. Given the nature of autocratic leadership, it is often viewed as residing at one extreme end of a power distribution spectrum and portrayed by many who study it as a destructive and unfavorable form of leadership. It is not surprising, for example, given its emphasis on centralized control, that autocratic leadership is often equated with authoritarianism, a similar control-oriented

but more domineering style of leadership generally considered to be destructive. Indeed, the foundations of authoritarianism are imbued with autocratic leadership behaviors and tendencies. This association speaks more to the dark side of autocratic leadership, where autocratic leadership may be seen as an abuse of power by way of coercive or punitive influence tactics. In such instances, autocratic leaders are hostile or ruthless and lack any real concern for the welfare of followers, reflected to some extent by their dismissal or outright suppression of followers’ opinions and ideas. Although the distinction between autocratic and authoritarian leadership remains somewhat ambiguous, the apparent overlap in the tendencies of each style points to why some researchers consider autocratic leadership either a destructive leadership style or, at a minimum, a style predisposed to negative outcomes. Even a cursory review of modern history points to many cases of institutional failure, governmental breakdown, and human atrocity at the hands of autocratic leaders seeking to exploit and maintain centralized control and power. Nevertheless, other researchers are careful in specifying the nature of autocratic leadership as neither malevolent nor benevolent, but simply a pattern of behaviors in which the associated positive or negative outcomes are dictated by the intentions of the leader and the circumstances surrounding the environment of influence. This point is further supported by the idea that autocratic leaders are often perceived to engage in many directive behaviors, often providing task structure, and being more task- and production-oriented—aspects of leadership that are, according to behavioral models of leadership, important for leadership effectiveness. Ultimately, these observations point to the ambiguity in the literature and the need for more research with regard to the specifics of how autocratic leadership should be conceptualized. However, despite these nuanced differences, some of which are reflected in the findings discussed in the following section, the generally accepted definition of autocratic leadership—centralized control and power—has been the guiding framework for studies of autocratic leadership.

Autocratic Leadership

Outcomes of Autocratic Leadership Since the inception of empirical research on autocratic leadership in the late 1930s, numerous studies have been conducted to examine its effects on a variety of individual- and group-level outcomes. Although many of these findings point to the complexity and ambiguity inherent to the effects of autocratic leadership, a clear pattern emerging from multiple studies and meta-analytic investigations has demonstrated that, compared with democratic leadership, autocratic leadership tends to result in diminished follower satisfaction. Followers tend to be aversive to leaders who make unilateral decisions and engage in highly directive, controlling, and possibly coercive or manipulative influence tactics. Indeed, the negative effect of autocratic leadership on follower satisfaction is likely exacerbated when such leadership extends into authoritarian, abusive, and punitive tendencies. Not surprisingly, people generally find greater satisfaction in leaders who empower them and provide opportunities for voice and participation in decision-making processes. Such findings further explain why researchers, the media, and the general public continually advocate for organizations to adopt democratic principles. However, as meta-analytic findings have suggested, the differential effect of these leadership styles on satisfaction is weaker than one might initially suspect and varies in magnitude as function of other moderating variables (e.g., group size, group gender composition). For example, the observed effects on satisfaction for an organization or team attempting to adopt more democratic leadership principles will depend on the extent to which newly employed democratic behaviors differ from the behaviors previously employed (i.e., potency). Thus, unless the team or organization is already operating under highly autocratic leadership strategies, the effect of implementing various democratic strategies may be minimal, at least with respect to gains in follower satisfaction. Despite these findings and the need for more research to elucidate the effect of autocratic leadership on satisfaction, the consistency of the relationship between democratic leadership and follower satisfaction highlights important implications for

43

organizations seeking to evaluate their leadership practices to foster not only satisfaction but also related variables of trust, motivation, and commitment. It is important to note, however, that, although related, satisfaction does not necessarily equate to performance. Although the findings regarding satisfaction have demonstrated some consistency, the findings linking autocratic leadership to performance outcomes appear more complex. For example, multiple studies have demonstrated autocratic leadership has the capacity to enhance the productivity of followers. Given autocratic leaders’ task orientation and engagement in highly directive behaviors, positive effects on task performance and productivity may be expected. However, many of these findings have been based on short-term, isolated laboratory experiments. Other, more long-term studies comparing the effects of democratic and autocratic leadership on group and organizational performance have found that while autocratic leadership may result in short-term benefits, democratic leadership is more likely to lead to desirable long-term outcomes. Put differently, autocratic leadership may enhance a team or organization’s capacity to meet short-term goals or demands, but the often punitive and controlling nature of such leadership results in the accomplishment of such goals at the expense of followers’ satisfaction and motivation, which, in turn, decreases the team or organization’s capacity to meet its long-term objectives. These findings, however, do not obviate the potential for autocratic leadership to demonstrate benefits under certain conditions. In fact, multiple scholars have observed that followers rely on social hierarchies and that the highly directive behaviors of leaders can provide clarity and structure within team settings. This serves to guide their understanding of team roles and responsibilities and the norms surrounding acceptable social behaviors. As such, autocratic leadership has been found to contribute to a positive team climate and team performance. This effect was dependent, however, on the extent to which team members willingly accept the social hierarchies embedded within the team. These findings emphasize that autocratic leadership may not be constrained to negative outcomes and can serve to

44

Autocratic Leadership

facilitate performance under certain moderating circumstances. In addition to willing acceptance of social hierarchies, for example, multiple other variables may serve to moderate the effects of autocratic leadership, including environmental or task demands, the characteristics of followers, and culture. For example, the effectiveness of autocratic leadership may be dependent on task complexity and, relatedly, the extent to which information and skill needed to successfully meet task demands is dispersed throughout the team or organization. Under such circumstances, autocratic leaders are likely to fail, and more democratic procedures may need to be employed to access information relevant to task execution. Moreover, these observations may become increasingly relevant as modern organizational environments continue to evolve toward greater complexity (with, e.g., rapid technological change and globalization). As another example, there has been some support for the differential effects of autocratic leadership across different cultures. More specifically, cultures high in power distance, or the extent to which the unequal distribution of power in organizations is accepted, have been shown to be more conducive to the effectiveness of autocratic leaders. Taken together, these findings and observations regarding the outcomes of autocratic leadership support a few key points. The nature of autocratic leadership, with its tendencies toward authoritarianism, may often result in undesirable outcomes. Although autocratic leaders, with their directive behaviors and task orientation, may serve to facilitate effective follower performance, these benefits may be due to the tendency for autocratic leaders to engender dissatisfaction and decreased motivation in followers, largely unsustainable or heavily reliant on a number of moderating conditions. Nevertheless, it is

important to note that autocratic leadership can be complex and ambiguous, and much more research is needed to shed light on its nature and its potential to both positively and negatively influence such outcomes. Tanner R. Newbold See also Democratic Leadership in Democracy; Destructive Leadership; Distributed Leadership; Empowerment; Obedience; Power and Participation; Workplace Democracy

Further Readings Bass, B. M. (2008). The Bass handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications (4th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. De Cremer, D. (2006). Affective and motivational consequences of leader self-sacrifice: The moderating effect of autocratic leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 17, 79–93. De Hoogh, A. H. B., Greer, L. L., & Den Hartog, D. N. (2015). Diabolical dictators or capable commanders? An investigation of the differential effects of autocratic leadership on team performance. Leadership Quarterly, 26, 687–701. Foels, R., Driskell, J. E., Mullen, B., & Salas, E. (2000). The effects of democratic leadership on group member satisfaction: An integration. Small Group Research, 31(6), 676–701. Harms, P. D., Wood, D., Landay, K., Lester, P. B., & Lester, G. V. (2018). Autocratic leaders and authoritarian followers revisited: A review and agenda for the future. Leadership Quarterly, 29, 105–122. Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates.” Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 271–299. Rast III, D. E., Hogg, M. A., & Giessner, S. R. (2013). Self-uncertainty and support for autocratic leadership. Self and Identity, 12(6), 635–649.

B leadership (corrupt, callous, insular, and evil). There are also those who suggest that incompetent leadership is a separate, third category of bad leadership, in addition to ineffective leadership and unethical leadership. Bad leadership (in contrast to bad management) would include leadership in any kind of (formal) settings, such as in private companies, nations, public organizations, and associations. Some authors focus on the leaders as persons, while others focus on leadership as a process. An advantage of referring to bad leaders is that specific people could be held responsible. However, to point out certain people as bad leaders involves some degree of stigmatization. Whereas an individual leader’s leadership may be problematic—or bad—on certain occasions, or regarded as bad by some individuals, it may be more useful to state that the leadership in a particular situation is bad, rather than the leader per se. While there is leadership that everyone could agree is bad, there is also leadership that is neither purely good nor purely bad, such as leadership that does not break any law or is not obviously unethical but that is ethically doubtful. Such leadership, which could be called gray leadership, is of course more difficult to objectively measure. There is also a certain degree of subjectivity to many claims of something being characterized as bad leadership—not always would, for instance, the owners of a company agree with the employees in their claim that a particular leadership is bad.

BAD LEADERSHIP Bad leadership could be said to be an umbrella term for various types of leadership, management, and supervision that in one or another sense is less desirable or not good enough and thus includes terms such as abusive supervision, ineffective leadership, destructive leadership, and toxic leadership. Research-wise, the main reason for pointing out bad leadership is to give attention and provide room for solutions to an important problem, which causes lots of harm.

Definition and Measurement The most well-recognized way of telling bad leadership apart from other leadership is to state that it is either not very effective or that it is not very ethical (or both). Thus, bad leadership refers to the leadership that has no (or too little) positive impact on the effective completion of the task that people are being led to perform or to the leadership in which the leader cheats in one way or another. Bad leadership refers to a bad process, while bad leader refers to individual leaders. To further give an idea of what ineffective leadership and unethical leadership mean, Barbara Kellerman, in her book Bad Leadership, one of the most well-recognized publications in the area, divides bad leadership into three subtypes of ineffective leadership (incompetent, rigid, and intemperate) and four subtypes of unethical

45

46

Bad Leadership

Reasons for the Growing Interest Although older works on bad leadership exist, such as Kets de Vries and Miller’s well-recognized book The Neurotic Organization, first published in 1984, the majority of works on this topic have been published since 2000. Plausible reasons for the explosion in interest are: •

a general increase in the freedom to criticize authorities; • an increased awareness of the huge costs stemming from bad leadership, in terms of absenteeism, sick leave, employee turnover, decreased work efficiency, negative impact on employee well-being, devastating consequences for the natural environment, and so on; and • an increased resignation and frustration that previous efforts have not had the expected or adequate outcomes. The mainstream discourse on leadership (inclusive of the enormous efforts and resources that have been put on allocating and spreading knowledge on good leadership and how to be a good leader, in terms of research, training, development, coaching, and consultancies)—which generally has been focusing on good or perfect leadership—has not turned out to be a very successful way to achieve the goal by which the vast majority of leadership is good or, at the least, not that bad.

Opponents, however, may argue that leadership in general would have been even worse had it not been for all the efforts put into research, literature, consultancy, training, and education. Despite all such efforts, there are daily examples in the media of leaders who are corrupt, who prioritize business over environment, who prioritize their own power over humanistic values, and so on. Reasons and Remedies

Unsurprisingly, the issue of bad leadership is a very complex one, and there are a number of different takes on what causes it and how the causes could best be lessened or eliminated. There is, naturally, a close interrelation between cause of bad leadership (reasons) and suggestions for how to improve leadership (remedies). Some of the

most frequently discussed approaches are as follows: Unsuited for Leadership. This take on bad leadership puts the focus on the acting or future leaders. The most classical way of approaching bad leadership is to recognize that those individuals whose personality is (too) strongly characterized by Machiavellianism, narcissism, or psychopathy (the dark triad) run a greater risk than others of exercising leadership that could come to be characterized as bad. Improved recruitment processes would therefore be a relevant remedy, as well as to rethink leadership succession plans, to prevent such individuals from being recruited or promoted. Relevant remedies for preventing leaders who have difficulties in resisting temptations to misuse the power and authority that many leadership positions come with include strengthened control systems and improved systems for dismissal of leaders. Unaware Followers. More recently, some have suggested that leaders per se are not the actual problem, but instead the followers. They reason that leadership is a mutual exchange and that, by definition, there cannot be any leader without the existence of followers who let the leader lead. Consequently, it is the followers who allow bad leadership to occur. A relevant remedy would be increased self-awareness among followers, especially when it comes to their own responsibility for letting bad leaders be bad. Inhumane Expectations. Another take on the problem of bad leadership is that the very cause is the inhumane demands that the leadership role often entails, which few if any individuals can live up to. Tightly connected to this is the heroification of leadership in society in general, and particularly in leadership research, literature, education, and training, that has been going on for quite some time. One obvious remedy to handle this would be to reformulate the leadership role or to share such roles among two or more individuals (see the entry on Shared Leadership, this encyclopedia). Other remedies that potentially would lead to more humane expectations include a general reframing of what leadership is and should be (de-heroification), to be taught in leadership education and communicated in leadership literature.

Bathsheba Syndrome

Among other takes on the problem of bad leadership are a lack of organizational support for those exercising leadership within the organization and a lack of career opportunities for good specialists other than leadership positions. These and many other perspectives are discussed in depth in the recently published anthology Debating Bad Leadership: Reasons and Remedies. One idea that has been suggested as a cure for bad leadership (among other benefits) is to professionalize leadership and thereby ensure that there is adequate education, control, and certification to reduce or minimize the number of bad leaders, hence a remedy that confronts several plausible reasons for the frequent occurrence of bad leadership.

Tasks for Further Research Scholarly research on bad leadership is in its infancy. There is a need for more research that defines what it is (especially, but not only, the gray area), suggests a gray scale of leadership (in contrast to the good–bad distinction), and suggests how bad leadership could best be measured. There is also a need for more research into why bad leadership occurs and for more studies of the impact that various remedies may have on preventing bad leadership from happening. The many reasons and remedies that have been suggested need to be weighed and the ones that are found most urgent need to be combined in order that collective efforts can be taken. ¨ Anders Ortenblad See also Dark Triad; Destructive Leadership; Effective Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Shared Leadership; Toxic Leadership

Further Readings Kellerman, B. (2004). Bad leadership: What it is, how it happens, why it matters. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Publishing. Kets de Vries, M. F. R., & Miller, D. (1984). The neurotic organization: Diagnosing and changing counterproductive styles of management. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Miller, D. (1984).

47

Korman, B. A. (2021). Leader-subordinate relations: The good, the bad and the paradoxical. Doctoral thesis. Rotterdam: Erasmus University. Retrieved from file:/// C:/Users/Bruker/Downloads/kormandissertation chapters234missing.pdf. Accessed on May 15, 2021. Lipman-Blumen, J. (2005). The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians—and how we can survive them. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ¨ Ortenblad, A. (Ed.). (2021). Debating bad leadership: Reasons and remedies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pfeffer, J. (2018). Dying for a paycheck: How modern management harms employee health and company performance. Manhattan, NY: Harper Business.

BATHSHEBA SYNDROME In their seminal 1993 article in the Journal of Business Ethics, Dean Ludwig and Clinton Longenecker take on a central puzzle in leadership ethics. They coined the expression Bathsheba Syndrome in their attempt to solve it. The puzzle is this: Successful leaders often fail ethically, sometimes spectacularly. Yet, it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of their failures. Neither explanations that point to bad character nor those that appeal to ignorance of the difference between right and wrong seem to do the trick. More often than not, the authors point out, failed leaders have admirable track records and more than enough training. Somehow, though, many leaders manage to make a moral mess of things when they rise to the top. This entry lays out the fundamental elements of Ludwig and Longenecker’s account of ethical failures in leadership, as well as alternative approaches to the moral psychology of leadership.

Ludwig and Longenecker’s Account Ludwig and Longenecker conclude that there must be something about our moral psychology that makes us susceptible to ethical failure in the leadership context. Success, the authors think, can cause an otherwise good person to do what he or she knows full well to be wrong. The source of their name for this leadership syndrome is derived

48

Bathsheba Syndrome

from the Judeo–Christian story of David and Bathsheba. As a man of God, David was a good person, and he clearly knew right from wrong. However, upon becoming the King, not even David was immune to the effects of success on his moral psychology. King David used his power to sleep with Bathsheba, orchestrate an attempt to cover up her pregnancy, and—worst of all— authorize the killing of her husband, Uriah. In the end, David was exposed by the prophet Nathan and punished by God, who took the child born to him and Bathsheba. According to Ludwig and Longenecker, David’s mistake was to think that he could get away with his immorality. The authors apply this same explanation to leaders who fail ethically today. We can attribute leaders’ mistaken beliefs to the effects of their success. They are differentiated from others, in part, by their “privileged access to information, people, or objects” and “unrestrained control of organizational resources” (Ludwig & Longenecker, 1993, p. 268). For example, David’s pattern of unethical behavior would not have been possible without his special access to Bathsheba and the resources he later used to have Uriah killed. But success also generates particular motivational and cognitive challenges: “loss of strategic focus and inflated belief in personal ability to control outcomes” (1993, p. 269). In other words, successful leaders get complacent and overconfident. It is the combination of these effects, though, that Ludwig and Longenecker believe should give us most cause for concern. But for his complacency, David would not have been tempted by his access to Bathsheba; but for his overconfidence, David would not have believed he could use his many resources to get away with it. The authors point to the dangers of these combinations, especially the overconfidence/resources combination. Ludwig and Longenecker’s basic approach thus draws our attention to the rewards and risks of successful leadership. To get its rewards, leaders need access and resources—both positive tools on their account. The risk, however, is that complacency and overconfidence—negative effects of success—can intrude themselves to cause an ethical failure of leadership. A critical question for understanding ethical failures in leadership is whether the by-products of success can be so easily categorized as positive or

negative. Admittedly, leaders cannot do their jobs without the additional access and resources associated with leadership. It is also true that complacency and overconfidence are generally impediments to good leadership. However, at the heart of Ludwig and Longenecker’s categorization is the assumption that what is good for leadership is good for ethics and, equally important, that ethical failures in leadership are the result of a deviation from the ends of leadership, not traceable to central features of the activity of leadership itself. On their account, for example, David failed ethically because he put his self-interest ahead of the interests of those he was supposed to protect. Instead of doing the job he was handpicked by God to do, David was cavorting with Bathsheba. And, instead of using the great gifts at his disposal to protect his subjects, David turned these gifts against others—not least of all, Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah. According to the authors, the perks and privileges of leadership simply activated more general aspects of David’s moral psychology that were there all along—specifically, his inclination to pursue his own self-interest. In essence, Ludwig and Longenecker’s understanding of David’s behavior traces ethical failure to the fact that he failed as a leader. This account assumes, then, that the main source of moral risk is really something about us, not something about leadership. We are all inclined to pursue our own self-interest when we can. The difference between successful leaders and others is that leaders can, or at least think they can, act self-interestedly with impunity. In contrast, others live under well-established incentives to constrain self-interest or, more accurately put, to make it self-interested to do the right thing. Ludwig and Longenecker’s solution, therefore, is to preempt ethical failures in leadership by treating leaders as the self-interested actors they really are. Self-interested actors behave ethically only if they know that they will be caught and punished for their transgressions. Preventing ethical failures in leadership thus requires fixing the incentive structure and how leaders think about incentives. Perhaps the greatest strength of Ludwig and Longenecker’s account is that it positions scholars to ask deeper questions about the connection

Bathsheba Syndrome

between leadership and ethics. For example, they contrast complacency with having a strategic focus. But the strategic focus associated with effective leadership can itself be morally blinding and, as a consequence, a significant cause of ethical failure. In this vein, the authors raise, but do not pursue, the idea that pressures to achieve organizational ends play a large role in putative justifications of ethically questionable behavior. The Bathsheba Syndrome also puts moral psychology at the forefront of leadership ethics. This move is a significant contribution to the field in its own right. Ludwig and Longenecker draw attention to an important set of issues about the relationship between moral belief, motivation, and action. On their account of ethical failures in leadership, moral belief plays an inconsequential role. Leaders who fail ethically are mistaken not about morality but, rather, about whether they will get away with their ethical violations. Alternative approaches—considered in the following section—suggest that leadership itself has the potential to alter our moral psychology. For example, the perks and privileges of leadership—including the so-called positive effects of success such as unequal access and additional resources—can encourage leaders to think of themselves as exceptions to the moral rules.

Alternative Approaches to the Moral Psychology of Leadership What other reasons might leaders have for breaking the moral rules? Ludwig and Longenecker dismiss the idea that pressures to achieve organizational ends lead to mistaken beliefs about justification. It is worth noting, though, that goal achievement is not the only consideration to which a leader might appeal to justify behavior that would otherwise be considered unethical. Leaders are sometimes moved by contractarian commitments to keep promises to the group, even if that means violating other moral norms. Other moral approaches similarly permit behaviors that privilege group members, often with much weaker consideration of outsiders, by virtue of a person’s role within the group. Even Machiavelli can be understood as offering an account of moral justification in the leadership context.

49

Taken as a whole, the various approaches to morality make room for the possibility that leaders who fail ethically believe they are ultimately justified in behaving as they do. In Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership, Terry Price argues that this possibility rests on a plausible assumption about moral belief: a person can understand that an action violates a general moral prohibition and, yet, fail to see that—or how exactly—the prohibition applies to him in his particular circumstances. For example, reasonable people uniformly accept that there is something problematic about lying, but most will deny that lying is always unjustified. Although there is a general moral prohibition against such behavior, the prohibition does not apply in all circumstances. Reasonable people will also disagree about the conditions under which it would be permissible—maybe even required—to tell a lie. Ludwig and Longenecker are right, then, that there is rarely significant controversy about the moral rules themselves. Nevertheless, there is real room for disagreement when it comes to the application of the rules. Nowhere is this truer than in leadership contexts. Leaders are responsible not only for advancing group ends but also for respecting individual group members, as well as the autonomy and interests of outsiders. The moral scope of the job itself puts them at great risk of ethical failure. Leaders must make sense of competing interests and seemingly conflicting obligations, and they must do so in the context of the larger moral community, which has its own set of requirements. We should not be surprised, then, if leaders sometimes get things wrong while believing all along that they got things right. Let us return to David’s behavior in the story of David and Bathsheba. Does this story serve as a counterexample to the claim that leadership ethics is actually quite difficult? Initially, we might be inclined to think that the wrongness of David’s behavior must have been transparent to him. However, as Price points out in Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership, the biblical account of how David was found out challenges this interpretation of the story. It is true that the prophet Nathan exposes David, but Nathan does so in a peculiar way: by telling David a parable—an educative story—about a rich man who took

50

Behavioral Economics

advantage of a poor man. Upon hearing the story, David is outraged by the rich man’s behavior. Nathan proceeds to inform David that his behavior was no different. So, even David’s brazen ethical failings can be understood in terms of a mistaken belief about morality, not simply the belief that he could get away with acting is his own self-interest. David, like a lot of leaders, lost sight of how morality applied to him. Although he understood the more general moral requirement that people in power should not take advantage of the powerless, David did not see himself as being subject to this prohibition. Ironically, he failed to apply a moral rule aimed at curtailing the exercise of power precisely because of the way power, as well as the perks and privileges associated with leadership, affects the moral psychology of leaders. Part of the beauty of the story, especially Nathan’s parable, is that it shows how leaders can be blind to their own power and its effects, even when the more general risks of power are made salient to them. Ludwig and Longenecker are certainly not without good grounds for a retort. They might reasonably suggest that, at its core, David’s moral failing was nonetheless the result of unbridled self-interest. David wanted to find a way to engage in unethical behavior, so he found a way to justify it. On this retort, David’s behavior rested on mistaken moral reasoning, but only in the sense that he engaged in what psychologists Peter Ditto, David Pizarro, and David Tannenbaum call motivated moral reasoning. King David was wrong to believe that he was morally special and that the rules did not apply to him. However, if his mistake was ultimately motivated by self-interest, then self-interest is the primary explanation for why he came to hold this belief. The explanatory force of the Bathsheba Syndrome thus depends on coming to terms with the larger questions about motivation, especially the nature of moral motivation. Terry L. Price See also Bad Leadership; Ethics of Deception and Manipulation; Leader Exceptionalism; Toxic Leadership

Further Readings Ditto, P. H., Pizarro, D. A., & Tannenbaum, D. (2009). Motivated moral reasoning. In D. M. Bartels, C. W. Bauman, L. J. Skitka, & D. L Medin (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 50). Moral judgment and decision making (pp. 307–338). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. doi:10.1016/S0079-7421(08) 00410-6 Ludwig, D. C., & Longenecker, C. O. (1993). The Bathsheba syndrome: The ethical failure of successful leaders. Journal of Business Ethics, 12(4), 265–273. doi:10.1007/BF01666530 Machiavelli, N. (1988). In Q. Skinner & R. Price (Eds.), The prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. May, H. G., & Metzger, B. M. (Eds.). (1977). The new Oxford annotated bible with the apocrypha (Rev. standard version). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, T. L. (2006). Understanding ethical failures in leadership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615979 Price, T. L. (2008). Leadership ethics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511809972

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS Behavioral economics (BE) is a subfield of economics that began to emerge in the latter decades of the 20th century, integrating psychological, neuroscience, and other social science input and insights with traditional economic theory. In its studies of economic decision-making, BE accepts that assumptions made in neoclassical economic (contemporary economics) models are not accurate predictors of human behavior. BE takes into account individual preferences and the psychology surrounding these preferences. Thus, behavioral economists attempt to increase traditional economic theory’s predictive and explanatory power by pairing it with current and proven psychological foundations. In the study of leaders and leadership, behavioral economic concepts are used to examine topics including choice and decision-making under uncertainty; influencing behavior using

Behavioral Economics

nudges, coordination, and cooperation; collective action problems; altruistic behavior; prejudice and biases; gender differences in leadership; punishments and rewards; individual risk preferences; trusting behavior; and strategic interactions. Using various methods, BE explores the intersection of leadership and many important topics related to economics.

Behavioral Economics Compared With Neoclassical Economics Neoclassical economics is the most common approach to economic thinking, using a general approach with a more rigid set of known assumptions, principles, concepts, and mathematical theories designed to make predictions on a variety of economic outcomes. Neoclassical economics is committed to rational choice theory, a set of theories that are thought to be normatively correct, although often they do not succeed in describing human behavior adequately. According to neoclassical economics, human individuals are specimens of homo economicus (economic man), meaning that people behave rationally, individuals maximize utility (wellbeing, happiness, and payoffs) and are selfish, and individuals have and use complete and accurate information when making decisions. BE understands that human decision-making is more complex than what traditional economics assumes. However, BE does share the neoclassical conception and assumptions that the study of economics looks at an individual’s decisionmaking under conditions of scarcity (limited materials, components, goods, and time), and people are responsive to financial incentives. In neoclassical economic theories, assumptions are used to simplify the mathematical modeling of individual decision-making. BE exists, however, on the basis of observations that humans are seldom rational, possess altruistic as well as selfish behaviors, and often do not acquire all pertinent information before making decisions. Hence, BE rejects the idea that people behave in the way economists assume; accordingly, BE uses tools to aid in developing models and theories that more accurately predict actual human behavior.

51

Data and Methodology in Behavioral Economics It is crucial to understand how behavioral economists acquire and collect data as well as develop a methodology to understand individual decisionmaking. At the inception of the field, economists studied hypothetical choices participants made in their studies. They would give participants a binary choice between two hypothetical options to better understand how people behave under specific conditions. Hypothetical choice studies, however, are no longer the standard; such survey questions have been replaced by methods that do not use hypothetical situations, owing to the tendency of some subjects not to reveal their true preferences. Accordingly, economists began using experimentation, which has given rise to a subfield of BE called experiential economics. Behavioral economists use the tools provided through experimental economics to understand the individual behaviors of participants by observing their behavior in making actual decisions. Since the 1980s, BE has adopted various methods to understand the motivations individuals and firms use to make decisions. These methods include incentivized surveys, controlled experiments (laboratory and field), natural data collection, and implementation of nudges. Laboratory Experiments

Laboratory experiments in BE, designed to observe people’s decision-making using appropriate incentives, originated in the 1970s and became more prevalent in the following decade. In such experiments, economists have complete control over the independent and dependent variables and can use different experimental manipulations to observe individual decision-making behaviors. Traditional laboratory experiments in BE use experimental games in which participants make decisions that impact their earnings with monetary incentives. Laboratory experiments typically use neutral language, impose a set of rules, and have abstract framing. Most frequently, behavioral economists use undergraduate and graduate students for their subject pool. When economists run experiments, the rules indicate that subjects must make actual decisions that impact their earnings of

52

Behavioral Economics

real monetary incentives. Using games developed by behavioral and experimental economists, researchers can look at cooperation, coordination, markets, altruism, selfishness, and impacts of leadership; elicit individual risk and time preferences; and much more. Economists use several classic games, including the pit markets, lottery choice games, auctions, public goods games (PGGs), prisoner’s dilemma, ultimatum games, dictator games, trust games, and many others.

can be randomly assigned to different experimental manipulations and participate, typically without knowing they are part of an experiment. By partnering with various for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including businesses, charities, and educational institutions, researchers are able to design experimental treatments to test questions of interest on a variety of topics. Researchers use field experiments to collect large amounts of data on individual preferences and responses to specific treatments.

Public Goods Game (PGG)

The PGG is one of the most commonly used games to explore the topic of leadership and leader effectiveness. In the PGG, subjects are placed in a group and have an individual choice to decide where they would like to allocate their resources. They can allocate their resources to a private account or to a public account. Any resources the subjects deposit to the public account is multiplied by a factor greater than one (and less than the group size) and divided equally among all group members. This game addresses the concept of free riding, where an individual has an incentive not to contribute and reap the benefits of the public account. This game is designed to maximize the group payoff if everyone cooperates and makes full contributions to the group account while having the individual incentive not to contribute any resources. Using variations of the PGG, researchers are able to identify cooperative and selfish behavior. Field Data and Experiments

BE also uses data collected in the field (or natural environment). Researchers may partner with various individuals or businesses to examine the data they already collect to observe human behavior without the researcher’s manipulations. This naturally occurring data collected by these businesses could offer insight into the behavior of the employees, customers, or others and be extrapolated to considerations about the larger population in general. BE also employs field experiments that are controlled and designed to test a particular question. Field experiments consist of an experimental design whereby subjects

Nudges

Another type of methodology that BE uses to change or move people’s behavior is nudging. This concept is rooted in the premise that individuals tend not to make decisions that are in their best interest. These decisions indicate a substantial problem with the neoclassical economic assumption that people are going to maximize their utility. In Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book Nudge, the authors consider a nudge as designing choice architecture, in turn altering individuals’ behavior in a certain way without taking away options or changing the incentives. Nudges tend to be relatively easy and cost-efficient to implement. Nudges include changing choice architecture such as default options, placement of products, and using other people as an example to influence behavior. This tool allows researchers to change behavior while still giving individuals a choice over their own decisions.

Behavioral Economics and Leadership Broadly speaking, leadership in the economic sense is a tool used to foster cooperation, alleviate uncertainty, and enhance coordination, resulting in the most efficient outcome for the group or organization. Leadership in economics often serves a specific purpose—to solve a particular problem related to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, or another undesirable situation. This could involve, for example, the cooperation of a group or partnership, reduction of uncertain circumstances, coordination in decision-making for the most effective and efficient outcome, and dissemination of information to group members, specifically followers.

Behavioral Economics

BE considers several different ways in which leadership and leaders can emerge. The types of leadership most often considered are random leader assignment, volunteer leaders, earned leadership, and elected leaders. In random leader assignment, subjects are randomly selected to serve as the leader, not using anything other than a randomization device (die, random number generator, etc.). In a volunteer leader paradigm, a member of the group volunteers to serve as the leader. Typically, if a leader does not volunteer, the default would be to randomly assign leadership, as just mentioned. In the earned leadership paradigm, leaders are chosen based on a previous decision. The leader that performed the best, gave the most resources, did the assignment quickest, or met some other clear standard set forth by the experimenter is chosen to lead the group. Finally, in an elected leader situation, group members will vote and elect a leader based on specific criteria and information (historical performance, campaigns, and previous task results). Using experimental games, researchers examine different types of leadership emergence on the impacts of coordination or cooperation in various game settings. Most used are PGGs, prisoners’ dilemmas, and minimum-effort turnaround games. Through many of the studies, the result that leadership increases cooperation, coordination, and earnings for followers is, for the most part, consistent. This result holds true if the leader is randomly selected, volunteers to lead, or is elected to the position. However, research also shows that elected leaders are more successful than randomly selected leaders in increasing contributions to a PGG. In the PGG setting, multiple economists have discovered that voluntary leadership increases contributions significantly and increases the efficiency of group processes. Studies also indicate that volunteer leaders can be more effective than random leadership in provision to the group accounts in a PGG. Followers’ decisions are impacted considerably when a leader offers suggestions and ideas on how to behave. There is also literature in BE using leadership in the form of an asymmetric advantage given to a particular player. This type of leadership results in situations where the leader has an asymmetric

53

advantage over other members and uses it to help lead their group or partner. This asymmetric advantage could be in the form of superior or more information, making a decision first (publicly or privately), use of punishment or reward, or ability to communicate with other players. This type of leadership mimics leadership in the real world by giving the leader an advantage to help followers make decisions that will have the greatest and best impact on the group. By providing leaders the advantage, researchers can identify how followers will respond to the information received from the leader. This advantage could be showing the leader’s decision, the threat of punishment, the offering of a reward, or the chance for the leader to communicate to the group. There is strong evidence to indicate that communication increases cooperation and coordination. Economists have also found that having a leader lead by example by making the first move will change the behavior of the followers who are dependent on the leader’s behavior. The research also indicates that punishment will increase cooperative behavior and coordination within a group, even if the punishment is not implemented. Another common theme in BE literature on leadership has to do with gender differences between male and female leaders. By controlling for gender in their experimentation on leadership, researchers can observe differences in leadership style, effectiveness, and outcomes. In the BE literature, there are significant differences in leadership owing to gender. Literature listed below indicates that women are favored less than male leaders and are given less credit for successful outcomes than their male counterparts. Some of these studies suggest that women are considered less effective leaders, although their leadership does not result in less cooperation by followers. The impacts of gender on leadership are essential considerations when designing an experiment and modeling the impact of leadership within economic theory. Haley A. Harwell See also Altruism; Cooperation; Competition; Decision-Making; Group Norms; Group Process; Psychology; Risk-Taking; Trust

54

Behavioral Theories of Leadership

Further Readings Boulu-Reshef, B., Holt, C. A., Rodgers, M. S., & ThomasHunt, M. C. (2020). The impact of leader communication on free-riding: An incentivized experiment with empowering and directive styles. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(3), 101351. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2019.101351 Camerer, C. F., & Loewenstein, G., Rabin, M. (2011). Advances in behavioral economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grossman, P. J., Eckel, C., Komai, M., & Zhan, W. (2019). It pays to be a man: Rewards for leaders in a coordination game. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 161, 197–215. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2019. 04.002 Hermalin, B. E. (1998). Toward an economic theory of leadership: Leading by example. The American Economic Review, 88(5), 1188–1206. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/116866 Hiller, N. J., Piccolo, R. F., & Zaccaro, S. J. (2020). Economic assumptions and economic context: Implications for the study of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(3), 101352. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2019.101352 Thaler, R. H. (2015). Misbehaving: The making of behavioral economics (1st ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

BEHAVIORAL THEORIES

OF

LEADERSHIP

Behavioral theories of leadership have focused on attempts to measure the categories of behaviors that are typically exhibited by effective leaders. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such behavioral theories dominated leadership research emanating from the disciplines of psychology and management. The approach these theories took was influenced by the behaviorist movement in psychology, which sought to understand complex human phenomena through the study of behavioral responses. Prior to World War II, most psychological studies of leadership focused on the traits or styles

of effective leaders. This shifted quickly for two reasons: (1) noted leadership scholar Ralph Stogdill declared that the trait approach to understanding leadership had failed; and (2) a group of researchers at the Ohio State University began a series of well-publicized studies from a behaviorist orientation. The Ohio State researchers used detailed observations of leader behaviors, as well as self-reports from leaders and reports from their subordinates, in order to create a list of hundreds of leader behaviors.

The Ohio State Studies The list of leader behaviors led to the development of a measurement instrument called the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ). The original LBDQ consisted of 150 items, such as “assigns group members to particular tasks,” “finds time to listen to group members,” and “responds favorably to suggestions made by others.” The LBDQ was designed to be administered to workers who rated how often their leaders engaged in each of the behaviors, using a five-point scale from never to always. Responses to the scale were gathered and the items were factor analyzed. The results suggested that these leader behaviors clustered into one of two categories or factors. These two factors were labeled initiation of structure and (showing) consideration. Initiation of structure behaviors were those that defined, organized, or structured work tasks or the work context. Examples of initiation of structure behaviors include assigning workers to specific tasks, emphasizing goals or standards, communicating work-related expectations, and making decisions about tasks and work structure. Initiation of structure behaviors are focused on getting tasks done. Consideration behaviors consisted of leaders showing some concern for the feelings, attitudes, needs, and opinions of followers. Consideration behaviors include such things as demonstrating trust in followers, treating them as equals, showing appreciation for their contributions, and soliciting their input in decision-making. Leaders using consideration behaviors are concerned with developing good interpersonal relationships with followers and within the group or team.

Behavioral Theories of Leadership

Consideration behaviors are focused on increasing followers’ job satisfaction and commitment to the enterprise. Interestingly, the Ohio State researchers claimed that these two clusters of leadership behaviors— initiation of structure and consideration—were not opposite ends of a continuum. Instead, they asserted that they were relatively independent of each other. What this means is that sometimes effective leaders exhibit primarily high levels of initiation of structure, while others demonstrated mainly consideration behaviors, and both were associated with leader effectiveness. Leaders who displayed high levels of both categories of behaviors were, not surprisingly, also effective. Only leaders who showed relatively low levels of initiation of structure and consideration behaviors were ineffective. The Ohio State studies stimulated a great deal of subsequent research, and the LBDQ instrument helped this line of research along. In fact, the LBDQ was further refined by reducing the number of items. The final version of the instrument, the LBDQ-Form XII, is still available and used in research today. A meta-analysis of research found that initiation of structure had a relatively strong and consistent relationship with leader and group/ team performance, while consideration behaviors tended to have a stronger positive effect on follower satisfaction and motivation.

The University of Michigan Studies During the same period that the Ohio State studies were taking place, researchers at the University of Michigan, also influenced by the behaviorist movement, began focusing on leader behaviors using a sample of leaders from large industries in the Michigan area. Just like the Ohio State researchers, the Michigan studies found that effective leader behaviors tended to cluster into two factors, which they labeled task- and relationship-oriented leader behaviors. These are also sometimes called production- and employeeoriented leader behaviors. Similar to initiation of structure behaviors, task-oriented leader behaviors focused more on the actual work team members were engaged in. They include such behaviors as setting production

55

goals, developing procedures and work standards, directing followers’ activities, and the like. Relationship-oriented behaviors, similar to consideration behaviors, were such things as allowing followers to participate in decisionmaking, demonstrating concern for workers’ well-being, and fostering good interpersonal relationships among team members. It is of note that two research programs, both focused on studying effective leader behaviors, would arrive at two similar categories, suggesting that these are robust categories of leader behaviors. The University of Michigan researchers concluded that although the most highly effective leaders displayed both task- and relationshiporiented behaviors, they suggested that overall relationship-oriented behaviors were more important. This idea that both task- and relationshiporiented behaviors are important for effective leadership served as the foundation for later theories, in particular the leadership grid (formerly called the managerial grid) and situational leadership theory. The leadership grid asserts that effective leaders need to develop both task- and relationship-focused behaviors—being concerned with both production and people. By putting concern for people on one axis and concern for production on the other axis, it forms a grid, with the best leaders high on both production and people orientation (called team leaders) in the upper right quadrant, and the least effective leaders (labeled impoverished) in the lower left quadrant of the grid. Situational leadership theory uses both task- and relationship-oriented behaviors, labeling the former directive leader behaviors and the latter as supportive behaviors. According to situational leadership theory, effective leaders need to consider the experience and sophistication of each follower/team member and adjust their behavior on these two categories so as to best fit what the follower needs in terms of leader guidance.

Limitations of the Behavioral Theories The primary limitation of the behavioral theories— both the Ohio State and the University of Michigan versions—is that they are overly simplistic. They reduce effective leader behaviors into two very

56

Behavioral Theories of Leadership

broad categories, thereby providing little guidance for practicing leaders. The theories that were inspired by the behavioral approach, such as the leadership grid and situational leadership theory, did try to go beyond the original research findings and offer prescriptions for practicing managers/ leaders. The research findings of both the Ohio State and Michigan studies also present a conundrum: how can such different forms of leader behaviors—focusing primarily on getting the task completed or focusing on the needs, concerns, and trust levels of the followers—both be related to effective leadership? The obvious answer is that these leader behaviors, in order to produce effective leadership, must interact with something else: the characteristics of the followers, the situation in which the activities are taking place, and the type of activities the team is engaged in.

Contributions of the Behavioral Theories of Leadership The first contribution of the behavioral theories was that they shifted the focus of leadership research away from abstract constructs such as leader traits and styles and toward more concrete leader behaviors. This way, through careful observation and measurement of leader behaviors, researchers had a straightforward way of assessing leadership, without having to administer personality tests or other indirect means of assessment. The fact that two independent lines of research, taking place at different universities, arrived at the same conclusion while trying to categorize effective leader behaviors is surprising, and it constitutes a second important contribution. These two categories are clear, distinct, and robust. As the meta-analysis of studies using the LBDQ and related measures concluded, these are meaningful distinctions and help us to better understand what effective leadership looks like: sometimes leaders need to focus on the task, and sometimes they need to pay attention to the people and their needs. The third contribution of the behavioral theories was that they served as a foundation for later, more sophisticated theories of leadership. These later theories, which can best be labeled as

interactional theories of leadership, look at the interaction between the leader’s behavior (or behavioral style) and elements of the situation in which the leader leads. These theories include both the aforementioned leadership grid and situational leadership theory, as well as Fiedler’s contingency model, which starts with the assumption that leaders’ motivation causes them to engage in more task- or relationship-oriented behaviors. Path– goal theory expanded and split the two categories of leader behaviors into four: directive and achievement-oriented behaviors, both focused on task and accomplishments; and supportive and participative behaviors, which reflect employeeoriented behaviors that provide emotional concern and support, in addition to consultations with them regarding any team-related decisions that are being made. In these interactional theories, and others, the leader’s behavior needs to fit the situation and the people being led in order for the leader to be effective. Ronald E. Riggio See also Contingency Theories; Leadership Style; Multiple Roles of Leaders; Power and Participation; Situational Leadership Theory; Task and Socioemotional Leadership; Trait Theories of Leadership

Further Readings Blake, R. R., & McCanse, A. A. (1991). Leadership dilemmas, grid solutions. Houston, TX: Gulf. Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1985). The managerial grid. Houston, TX: Gulf. Fiedler, F. E. (1967). A theory of leader effectiveness. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. House, R. J. (1971). A path-goal theory of leader effectiveness. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1, 321–338. Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., & Ilies, R. (2004). The forgotten ones: The validity of consideration and initiating structure in leadership research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(1), 36–51. Kahn, R., & Katz, D. (1960). Leadership practices in relation to productivity and morale. In D. Cartwright & A. Zander (Eds.), Group dynamics: Research and theory (2nd ed.). Elmsford, NY: Row, Peterson, & Co. Likert, R. (1961). New patterns of management. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Big Five Personality Traits Stogdill, R. M. (1963). Manual for the leader behavior description questionnaire–form XII. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, Bureau of Business Research. Stogdill, R. M., & Coons, A. E. (Eds.). (1957). Leader behavior: Its description and measurement. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, Bureau of Business Research.

BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS Over the past 50 years, a consensus has emerged on the structure of personality around the five-factor model (FFM) of personality commonly known as the Big Five. There is general agreement among personality researchers that these five factors appear to capture important individual differences in the human personality. Based on the results of numerous factor analyses of traits from personality and adjective inventories, researchers have been able to categorize a substantial number of these traits into five primary personality factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. With the emergence of the Big Five model, there has been a resurgence of interest in the research of personality traits especially in the workplace context. The FFM appears to represent a robust taxonomy of personality, and its structure has been replicated in numerous studies using a variety of measures of personality. The Big Five traits have been found to predict various criteria that are of interest to industrial and organizational psychologists, including job performance and leadership. The development of the Big Five model began in the 1940s with the creation of a novel personality measure by Raymond Cattell. Cattell’s model was based on an approach that used natural language to describe personality traits rather than psychological labels, which would eventually lead to his development of the 16 Personality Questionnaire. In 1961, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal factor analyzed the personality data collected by Cattell, which resulted in five significant and stable personality factors. Since then, numerous personality researchers have validated, refined, and

57

extended the findings of Tupes and Christal. The validity of the FFM has been replicated across many different cultures and languages. A substantial amount of research has found significant relationships between the Big Five traits and important outcomes. For example, relationships have been found with disparate criteria such as well-being, life expectancy, and academic achievement.

The Big Five Traits Because the Big Five traits emerged from factor analytic research, they are often referred to as factors. The five factors are characterized by the following personality attributes: Neuroticism: Emotionally unstable, sad, moody, anxious, irritable Extraversion: Social, outgoing, active, high energy, excitement-seeking, enthusiastic, assertive, interactive, friendly Openness to Experience: Playful, curious, imaginative, creative, open-minded, novelty-seeking, visionary, unconventional Agreeableness: Cooperative, helpful, accommodating, trusting, compassionate, altruistic, steady, cooperative, tolerant, easy to get along with Conscientiousness: Purposeful, determined, organized, controlled, committed, achievement-oriented, reliable, self-disciplined.

Because the term Neuroticism may be considered by some to be pejorative in nature, it is frequently labeled as its opposite pole, Emotional Stability. Emotional Stability is characterized by the following attributes: calm, even-tempered, positive, resilient, deliberate, easy-going, regulated. Measures of the Big Five Subtraits

One of the best known personality measures of the Big Five traits is the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI), which was developed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in 1983 with a revision in 1992 (the NEO-PI-R). The NEO-PI is based on the FFM of personality with the addition of six subtraits for each primary trait. The subtraits are groups of specific personality facets obtained

58

Big Five Personality Traits

through factor analysis (i.e., second-order factors) that underlie each of the primary five factors. For example, Extraversion has subtraits labeled as Warmth, Assertiveness, and Excitement-Seeking. An individual with high scores on Extraversion is likely to have high scores on most of its subtraits, but not necessarily on all of them. For example, the individual may have high scores on the social subtraits of Extraversion (e.g., Warmth, Gregariousness), but not on the Excitement-Seeking subtrait. For applied purposes, the information provided by the more specific subtraits (i.e., facets) of the NEO-PI is important. For example, both intellectual curiosity and aesthetic sensitivity are facets of Openness to Experience; however, intellectual curiosity is a better predictor of vocational interests, whereas aesthetic sensitivity is a better predictor of artistic interests. In personality measurement, the trade-off between broad personality factors and narrower, more specific subtraits is known as the bandwidth issue. The debate continues today—are broadly defined personality traits better predictors of criteria such as job performance than the more narrowly defined personality facets?

Extraversion

Extraversion has been found to be positively related to general well-being, positive attitudes, ability to meet challenges, satisfying social relationships, income, and self-confidence. Extraversion has demonstrated low negative correlations with Neuroticism and low positive correlations with Openness to Experience. Openness to Experience

Research has found that Openness to Experience is related to creativity, originality, curiosity, imagination, and unconventionality. Openness to Experience has demonstrated low correlations with Extraversion and is unrelated to Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Agreeableness

Agreeableness has been found to be related to cooperation, helpfulness, and adjustment. Agreeableness demonstrates positive correlations with Extraversion and Conscientiousness and is negatively related to Neuroticism. Conscientiousness

Research on the Big Five Traits A large number of research studies have been conducted on the correlates of the specific Big Five traits and their relationship to the other factors in the model. For each Big Five trait, a summary of this research follows. Neuroticism

Neuroticism (i.e., low Emotional Stability) has been found to be negatively related to self-esteem, self-efficacy, internal locus of control, benevolence, and conformity. Positive correlations have been reported with the lack of motivation, poor goal setting, and hedonism. Studies have shown that Neuroticism is related to drug and alcohol abuse, failure to adjust to problems, and other mental health concerns. Neuroticism is unrelated to Agreeableness or Conscientiousness and has shown low negative correlations with Extraversion and Openness.

Conscientious demonstrates positive correlations with job performance, career success, and learning outcomes. Conscientiousness has been found to be negatively related to Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and it appears to be unrelated to the other factors.

Workplace Research on the Big Five Traits The introduction of Big Five measures such as the NEO-PI into the workplace has spawned a great deal of research on the relationship between personality and job-related criteria. The Big Five traits have been found to predict both general job competencies and specific work behaviors. Research has found evidence of relationships between the Big Five traits and various criteria including job performance, work attitudes, motivation, job satisfaction, integrity, counterproductive work behaviors, teamwork, attendance, turnover, leadership potential, career choice, and

Big Five Personality Traits

training outcomes. For example, Extraversion has been found to be a valid predictor of performance in jobs that require social interactions such as sales positions. Additionally, Conscientiousness has shown the most promise as a predictor of job performance in most occupations. To demonstrate their predictive power as composite personality scores, the Big Five traits have been mapped onto numerous job-related criteria. Various combinations of the Big Five traits have been shown to predict distinct criteria such as teamwork, organizational citizenship, goal setting, training performance, and turnover intention. For example, an aggregated measure comprised of Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness has been found to be positively related to leadership potential.

The Big Five Traits and Leadership The emergence of the Big Five model was an important advance in the development of an organizing framework for the personality traits hypothesized to be important for successful leadership. Individually, four of the Big Five traits (i.e., Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness) have been found to be positively related to leadership. The Big Five traits in combination have been found to be predictors of leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. However, because the correlations between the Big Five traits and criterion measures of leadership are typically found to be modest in size, questions remain about the true relationship between personality and leadership. Several hypotheses have attempted to explain why the relationship between the personality factors and leadership is a moderate one. One explanation involves measurement issues with the personality assessments. Because most Big Five personality inventories are self-report measures, their results may be adversely affected by motivational distortion (i.e., faking) on the part of the test-takers. Research evidence suggests that observer ratings of personality are better predictors of leadership effectiveness than are self-ratings. Therefore, the use of multirater personality measures may find more robust relationships between the Big Five traits and leadership.

59

General Factor of Personality For measures of intelligence, the existence of a g factor has long been proposed to represent general mental ability. For the Big Five traits, a p factor has been proposed as a general factor of personality (GFP), which is analogous to the g factor in intelligence. Meta-analytic studies have confirmed that correlations between specific personality traits led to the emergence of a GFP that appears to be universal across cultures. Research has demonstrated that GFP is predictive of general social proficiency and has been found to be related to leadership effectiveness. These findings suggest that individuals with high GFPs are more effective leaders. More research is required to determine the extent that a GFP based on the Big Five traits is related to intelligence. Such research could conceivably lead to the unification of the intelligence and personality factors into a single, related measure that would emphasize the relative strengths of each factor.

Theoretical Limitations of the Big Five Model Although extensive empirical evidence has been provided for the Big Five model, there has been some criticism regarding the atheoretical approach taken in its development. The Big Five traits were derived using purely empirical methods (i.e., factor analysis) with little consideration of any underlying theory of personality. Historically, this method has generally been known as dustbowl empiricism. In addition to being atheoretical, the Big Five model has been criticized for ignoring lifespan personality development, which posits that one’s personality develops over time. In response to these criticisms, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae have proposed a Five-Factor Theory, which describes the five factors as basic tendencies and hypothesizes that they are innate, heritable, and universal personality traits. However, research in African and Asian cultures suggests that the Big Five factors do not fully represent the important traits in the structure of personality. In particular, the collectivist factor, which posits that some cultures are collectivist in nature as opposed to individualistic, is not included in the Five-Factor

60

Big Six of the Civil Rights Movement

Theory. A possible explanation for this oversight is that the United States has an individualist culture and American researchers may have been unaware of this factor when developing the Big Five model. Recent research suggests that the development of a more fully realized hierarchy of personality factors would require a more detailed understanding of the cultural qualities of personality at the theoretical level.

Conclusion Despite its limitations, the Big Five model represents perhaps the best attempt to date at proposing a universal structure of the human personality. With the introduction of the Big Five traits into the workplace, personality assessment has become one of the more common methods for employee selection and promotion. In the measurement of job performance, the Big Five model has made important contributions with its ability to provide incremental validity beyond the contributions of cognitive ability (i.e., intelligence) measures. Although personality and intelligence are usually considered to be separate constructs, they independently can be predictive of job-related criteria. For example, when measures of the Big Five traits are included in selection and promotion procedures, they can improve the predictive ability of the processes. Big Five inventories can provide measures of attributes that are important for successful job performance but not captured by cognitive ability tests (e.g., energy, cooperation, and organization), which adds incremental predictive validity to the process. Additionally, Big Five measures do not typically demonstrate adverse impact on protected classes as compared to cognitive ability measures. John W. Fleenor See also Behavioral Theories of Leadership; Effective Leadership; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Trait Theories of Leadership

Further Readings Cattell, R. B. (1946). The description and measurement of personality. New York, NY: World Book Company. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1995). Domains and facets: Hierarchical personality assessment using the

revised NEO personality inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 64, 21–50. Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417–440. Goldberg, L. R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26–34. Muchinsky, P. M. (2012). Psychology applied to work: An introduction to industrial and organizational psychology (10th ed.). Summerfield, NC: Hypergraphic Press. Tupes, E. C., & Christal, R. E. (1961). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings. USAF ASD Tech. Rep. No. 61–97. Lackland Airforce Base, TX: US Air Force.

BIG SIX OF MOVEMENT

THE

CIVIL RIGHTS

Despite being largely remembered for civil disobedience strategies and direct-action protest, diverse and enduring leadership styles characterized the U.S. civil rights movement. The six most influential African American civil rights organizations during the mid-20th century were A. Philip Randolph and the labor movement; the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the National Urban League (NUL); the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Each organization represented the myriad ways African Americans (and their allies) fought against racial segregation and second-class citizenship and came to epitomize the diversity of the freedom struggle. Movements for African American civil rights date back to the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. The civil rights movement emerged more immediately in the wake of the World War II, as African Americans (who were instrumental in helping the United States defeat Nazi Germany) called for an all-out end to Southern racial segregation. The movement gained momentum as White Southerners refused to integrate public schools after the

Big Six of the Civil Rights Movement

United States Supreme Court forbade public segregation in a case known as Brown v. Board of Education (1954). By the late 1950s and early 1960s, African Americans took the fight against segregation public. They not only directly provoked segregationists in strategically organized demonstrations; these demonstrations gained significant national and international media attention. Each of these organizations dedicated themselves to specific types of activism. They also often collaborated and, at times, were at odds. These organizations and their leaders were instrumental in negotiating the terms of segregation’s demise with the federal government under John F. Kennedy’s and, eventually, Lyndon B. Johnson’s administrations. They were also essential to organizing the largest massive protest in the movement’s history—the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963.

A. Philip Randolph and the Labor Movement Asa Philip Randolph was not just central to organizing the Black labor movement; he was also instrumental to the civil rights movement’s emphasis on peaceful direct-action protest and civil disobedience. His dedication to African American economic equality long predated the traditional phase of the civil rights movement and also informed the movement’s continued emphasis on matters of Black economics. Randolph, born in 1889 in Crescent City, Florida, founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 1925—a largely African American organization designed to protect the working conditions of Black railway workers. In the late 1930s, Randolph was instrumental to the BSCP being officially chartered by the American Federation of Labor. Randolph also called for an end to racial discrimination in employment during World War II and threatened to have 50,000 African Americans march on Washington in 1941. The march was only canceled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (commonly known as the Fair Employment Act) on June 25, 1941, which outlawed ethnic or racial discrimination in the United States national defense industry. Roughly

61

20 years later, Randolph was instrumental in organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and insisted on it being a peaceful demonstration. In fact, Randolph was also influential in adding the language jobs and freedom to the title of the march. His longstanding dedication to Black economic equality continued to shape the movement well into the 1960s. Principally, Randolph came to epitomize the decades-old economic struggles African American workers faced after emancipation and their desire to collectively organize labor to improve working conditions for African Americans.

Congress of Racial Equality: CORE A group of both Black and White students in Chicago, Illinois—including James Farmer Jr. (born in Marshall, Texas, 1920)—founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1941, which, arguably more than any other civil rights–based organization, initiated the movement’s dedication to nonviolent principles. Influenced by Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy against British imperialism in India, CORE dedicated itself to nonviolent civil disobedience from the outset. George Houser, Bayard Rustin, and Homer Jack (who were cofounding members) began sit-in movements to integrate Chicago restaurants as early as the 1940s. The organization came to national prominence at the height of the civil rights movement, however, for organizing the Freedom Rides of 1961. Riders purposefully disobeyed segregated ordinances by riding in racially mixed groups not only to bring attention to segregation on interstate buses but also to pressure President Kennedy’s administration to pass anti–Jim Crow legislation. CORE spent the years following the freedom rides focusing on voting registration efforts. This direction had deadly consequences. CORE members James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964 by White supremacists. Their murders, along with the eventual assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, inspired CORE to abandon its nonviolent approach to civil rights activism.

62

Big Six of the Civil Rights Movement

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Established in 1909 by an interracial group of progressive reformers (including W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moskowitz, Mary White Ovington, and William English Walling), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the largest and, arguably, the most influential civil rights organization in American history. Although the organization emerged to combat the practice of lynching and other forms of white violence against African Americans, it eventually became known for its longstanding litigation strategy against Jim Crow segregation. The NAACP, more than any other civil rights organization, became synonymous with Black technocrats and Black lawyering. Their challenges to the constitutionality of de jure segregation included housing discrimination, disenfranchisement, and education segregation and eventually culminated in the omnibus case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which led the United States Supreme Court to outlaw Jim Crow segregation. By the early 1960s, the NAACP and its executive secretary, Roy Wilkins, had become influential in voter registration efforts and the push for far-reaching civil rights bills. Wilkins, who was born in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri, became the organization’s leader in 1955. Wilkins and the NAACP remained committed to achieving African American equality through legislative means. He, along with other members of the Big Six, were instrumental in urging both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to pass civil rights legislation. Wilkins eventually joined with the student movements of the mid-1960s, yet came under intense scrutiny for his moderate views on racial reform as the Black Power movement emerged. The NAACP was essential to the ratification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crowning achievement of the movement.

National Urban League: NUL The National Urban League (NUL), established in 1910 as the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, emerged from the Great Migration (the mass movements of African Americans

out of the rural South in the early 20th century) and remained dedicated to issues of economic empowerment throughout the civil rights movement. The organization, headquartered in New York City, set out to advise African Americans migrants who had recently arrived at America’s urban centers. It, like the NAACP, was comprised of interracial leadership and moneyed white interests (namely, the Rockefeller Foundation). Under executive director, Lester Granger (1941–1961), the NUL was essential to A. Philip Randolph’s push for equality in labor unions and wartime industry during World War II. In 1961, Whitney Young, born in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, in 1921 and trained as a social worker, became the executive leader and remained the leader until his death in 1971. Young, arguably the unsung hero of civil rights leadership, had a profound influence not only on the NUL but also on federal civil rights policy, including Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The plan urged Washington to fund programs set out to combat Black poverty and lessen the achievement gap. Portions of Young’s plan influenced programs such as Head Start and Medicaid. Although Young openly disagreed with King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, he continued to support the SCLC and other organizations until his death.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference: SCLC Established in 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized demonstrations strategically calculated to expose the violence inherent to the segregated Southern system. The SCLC activated Black churches throughout the South. While Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the organization’s leader, Black women, who were instrumental to church organizations, were instrumental to the SCLC’s success. Although the group emerged immediately in the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott of the late 1950s, the SCLC used local organizations to mobilize some of the civil rights movement’s most effective demonstrations, including the March on Washington (where King delivered his now celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech).

Biology of Leadership

The SCLC’s brand of activism, which became known as the community-mobilizing tradition, also became synonymous with the moral suasion of the social gospel (the belief that religion cannot ignore social problems). Racism, the SCLC believed, violated the essence of Christian fellowship. The SCLC took on segregationists by focusing on large-scale, relatively short-term public demonstrations. These were the demonstrations that thrust King into the national and international spotlight, solidifying him as one of the world’s greatest proponents of social justice and transformational leadership.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: SNCC The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) represented not only the youth of the movement but also a dedication to a distinct form of civil rights activism that focused on long-term development of community leadership in ordinary men and women. Instead of protests, community organizing traditions sought to empower locals by emphasizing voter registration, local employment, and the importance of local government. These groups believed in teaching and empowering by example using a nonhierarchal leadership model. Local people were instrumental in bringing about change. Celebrated civil rights organizer Ella Baker recognized that college students, many of whom had organized the sit-in movements of the early 1960s, were being underutilized. SNCC grew to national prominence during the Freedom Rides of 1961 but became legendary for embedding themselves into communities (often in the Deep South) at great peril. SNCC organizers such as Bob Moses dedicated themselves to registering voters in some of the South’s most racially violent regions, such as the Mississippi Delta region and Lowndes County, Alabama. John Lewis, born in February 1941 near Troy, Alabama, became one of SNCC’s most notable members. He, along with King, Young, and Randolph, became instrumental in organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Lewis, along with Hosea Williams, urged demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma,

63

Alabama, in what became known as Bloody Sunday, where police tear-gassed and beat demonstrators. The violence generated the momentum necessary to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Julian Maxwell Hayter See also Black Lives Matter; Civil Right Movement; Leading the Resistance; Poverty and Inequality; Racism in the United States

Further Readings Dickerson, D. C. (2004). Militant mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Jackson, T. F. (2009). From civil rights to human rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the struggle for economic justice. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kersten, A. E., & Lang, C. (Ed.). (2015). Reframing Randolph: Labor, black freedom, and the legacies of A. Phillip Randolph. New York, NY: New York University Press. Payne, C. M. (2007). I’ve got the light of freedom: The organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Tushnet, M. V. (2005). The NAACP’s litigation strategy against segregated education: 1925 to 1950. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Voth, B. (2017). James farmer, Jr.: The great debater. New York, NY: Lexington Books.

BIOLOGY

OF

LEADERSHIP

Leadership studies have generally emphasized the importance of two dimensions, including relevant knowledge of the organization and effective relationship-building, for the successful performance of leaders. Throughout the past halfcentury, neuroscience research has identified relevant brain areas associated with these targeted dimensions including problem-solving, flexibility, and relationship-building. Recent research indicates that these key dimensions are enhanced through effective communication that synchronizes the brains of leaders and followers. In

64

Biology of Leadership

addition to traditional leadership profiles associated with specific neurochemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, estrogen, and oxytocin, the role of the pervasive neurotransmitter acetylcholine as a likely contributor to the important shift from exploitation to exploration in dynamic climates requiring changing leadership strategies deserves consideration. Modulation of leadership behaviors through emotional regulation may diminish compromised leadership performance during duress and create optimal neural landscapes for neuroplasticity, allowing leaders to benefit from ongoing training, education, and experiences throughout their careers. This entry begins with a review of two seminal studies that identified specific behavioral characteristics that researchers found were predictors of leadership success. The entry then explores how neurochemicals are related to leadership. Another study that investigated neural coupling during communication in a leader–follower relationship is examined. Finally, the entry highlights research focusing on the influence of stress responses on leadership.

Mapping Leadership Attributes Onto Brain Areas and Circuits An important paradigm shift in leadership theories occurred in the 1940s and 1950s when researchers at the Ohio State University (OSU) and Michigan State University (MSU) identified key behavioral characteristics, rather than predisposed traits, that predicted leadership success. According to OSU’s survey research, successful leaders engaged in constructive behavior that evolved around establishing expectations, outlining procedures, and presenting goals necessary for the success of the group. Additionally, the OSU theory acknowledged a constellation of social behaviors referred to as consideration behaviors that included listening, providing social support, and building trust that were critical for leadership success. The MSU team also identified two dimensions including responses related to production within the organization and employee-centered behavior, responses similar to OSU’s emphasis on construction and consideration, respectively. These landmark theories weakened previous theories positing that the most successful leaders

were born with traits such as high levels of charisma or intelligence that increased their probability of success as a leader. On the contrary, theories emphasizing multiple behavioral dimensions based on the OSU and MSU studies highlighted knowledge and relationship-based behaviors that could be developed through education, coaching, and training, providing support for the notion that leaders were made as opposed to being born. As signature characteristics of successful leadership have been investigated since those seminal studies, opportunities have emerged for the exploration of neurobiological mechanisms of these desired responses. Related to the construction and processing of relevant knowledge for leaders to effectively guide employees toward desired goals and outcomes, it is important to focus on brain areas associated with informed decision-making. Cognitive neuroscience research suggests that three of the brain areas that stand out as being relevant for optimal decision-making include the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex (PFC), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (Figure 1). The hippocampus is known for its role in memory, especially related to spatial and temporal aspects; consequently, this brain area influences memory-based decisions. Executive functions, including problem-solving and decision-making, are influenced by the PFC, a brain area positioned behind the eyes. Additionally, the OFC, a component of the PFC located toward the floor of the structure, is associated with situation-specific information that is likely critical for value-based and flexible decision-making responses. The OFC is especially relevant for the flexibility attributed to situational leadership theories. Corroborating evidence for the influence of these brain areas in leadership performance has been observed in the poor decisions of individuals with PFC injuries. Focusing on the second dimension that emerged from the classic OSU and MSU studies—a leader’s ability to generate and maintain interpersonal relationships that have a positive impact on the work climate and desired outcomes—researchers have utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to learn more about the neural mechanisms sustaining relationships in successful leaders. A study conducted

Biology of Leadership

Relationship-Building Attentiveness

Organizational Knowledge Attentiveness Prefrontal Cortex

65

Cingulate Cortex Hippocampus

Mirror Neurons

Insula Vs.

Orbitofrontal Cortex Inferior Parietal Lobe

Modulatory Processes Emotional Regulation (Effective coping, stress awareness, etc.)

Figure 1

Effective Communication (Engaging, authentic storytelling, empathic, etc.)

Neurobiological Influences on Dimensions of Successful Leadership. Two putative dimensions of successful leadership related to knowledge of the organization and competency in building supportive relationships are depicted, including relevant brain areas

Source: Kelly Lambert.

by researchers at Case Western Reserve University utilized a follower’s perspective by asking participants to recall two types of leaders (i.e., resonant and dissonant) they had worked with in the past. In this context, resonant leaders are characterized by cognitive and emotional attunement between the leader and other individuals and dissonant leaders are characterized by a lack of synchrony with individuals they are tasked to lead. Using this categorization, resonant leaders share positive emotional and physiological responses with others, whereas dissonant leaders evoke negative emotions and corresponding physiological responses (e.g., stress responses). When asked to recall experiences with resonant and dissonant leaders from their past while being scanned for functional magnetic resonance images (i.e., fMRI scans), interesting and diverse neural activation patterns emerged. The cingulate cortex, a brain area involved in the integration of emotions and cognition, was activated when participants recalled resonant leaders.

Although emotions that are integrated by this brain area can also be negative in valence, it’s important to note that the insula, a cortical brain area involved in complex computations involving one’s external and internal awareness, was also activated in the resonance leader recall task. When an individual is asked how they are feeling, for example, the insula is activated in generating the response. In addition to the insula, the inferior parietal lobe, a brain area associated with the activation of mirror neurons, was activated. Mirror neurons in nonhuman primate studies indicate that this neural system is activated when the observer is following the behavior of another monkey, as if the observer is mimicking or mirroring the responses of that individual. Thus, activation of the mirror neuron system, coupled with the emotional integration system of the insula and cingulate cortex, presents a powerful neural response to a resonant leader. In contrast, the right inferior frontal gyrus, a cortical brain area associated with action inhibition, was activated in

66

Biology of Leadership

addition to areas of the insula in the dissonant leader recall experiences. No mirror neurons were implicated, however, in the dissonant leader response. Thus, preliminary research suggests that different neural circuits are activated in response to certain types of leaders and these divergent neural responses likely forecast the subsequent success of leaders by influencing the degree to which individuals resonate with them.

The Neurochemistry of Leadership Existing theories of personality and leadership have focused on relative involvement of various neurochemicals. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute and Chief Science Advisor for the popular Internet dating organization Match.com, has introduced a general theory of personality characteristics based on four specific neurotransmitter substances and their commonly accepted, if not oversimplified, functions. The neurotransmitters and functions include dopamine (high risk, high energy, creativity), serotonin (structure-seeking, planning), estrogen/oxytocin (relationship facilitators, sensitivity to context and consensus), and testosterone (logic oriented, skeptical, decisive). When these neurochemical-derived personality styles are applied to leadership, the following styles were derived from the four neurochemical systems: directors (testosterone-dependent), explorers (dopamine-dependent), builders (serotonindependent), and negotiators (estrogen/oxytocindependent). Although neurochemical levels haven’t actually been assessed in the brains of individuals with these personality profiles, correlational, indirect evidence has been offered in support of their existence. Although many neurochemicals have been mapped onto aspects of temperament, personality, and leadership styles, neuroscience research suggests that the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, typically associated with the processing of basic homeostatic functions such as respiration, digestion, and movement, may play a critical role in effective decisions for leaders. Relevant to acetylcholine’s influence on decision-making is the large subcortical brain area known as the basal ganglia, generally known for the synchronization of neural

events that ultimately lead to smooth and effortless situation-specific movements such as reaching to grab a glass from a kitchen cabinet. Typically associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine, this brain area plays a role in calculating potential outcomes in specific scenarios to help determine the best response for the situation. Involved with reward systems, the basal ganglia and its large subcomponent known as the striatum facilitate repetitive, inflexible movements such as habits that are informed by previously rewarding responses. Although this strategy may be adaptive in predictable landscapes, more varied responses are typically beneficial in dynamic, unpredictable environments when a shift from familiar responses (exploitation) to more varied responses (exploration) is necessary to determine the best response for a specific situation. Interestingly, populations of acetylcholine interneurons that are known for their modulatory influences in the basal ganglia have been implicated in situations when previous responses and decisions are no longer working. In this case, basal ganglia acetylcholine-based entropy has been suggested as a mechanism facilitating a shift from exploitation of a strategy that has worked in the past to exploration for new solutions necessary for changing work landscapes. Thus, these modulatory cholinergic neurons are thought to inhibit habitual, reflexive responses to promote the consideration of varied neural patterns necessary for the identification of new response options. Similar to Spencer Johnson’s wildly popular proverbial story Who Moved My Cheese, leaders who are more sensitive to dynamic environments and tuned into necessary organizational changes are more likely to survive changing business landscapes than leaders following more rigid, inflexible strategies.

Leader–Follower Neural Coupling Research conducted by Uri Hasson and his colleagues at Princeton University provides support for the value of the age-old communication strategy of storytelling to enhance simultaneous neural processing among leaders and their followers. When brains of storytellers and listeners are simultaneously imaged via fMRI scans prior to the commencement of the story, brain activity patterns

Biology of Leadership

are divergent between the speaker and listeners (other than shared activity in auditory brain areas related to the sounds of the machine). However, once the story begins, the spatiotemporal brain activity exhibits spatial and temporal coupling, similar to two metronomes that are positioned next to one another eventually becoming synchronized. Shared neural activity has been observed in the expected auditory cortex and language brain areas (Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas), as well as the parietal lobe of the cortex, an area involved in sensorimotor processing, and the integrative insula (mentioned previously). Interestingly, comprehension and understanding of the story content were positively correlated with the strength of neural coupling observed in the fMRI scans. Thus, communication between the narrator and listeners becomes a shared experience with similar brain activity observed among participating brains. The Hasson research program delved further into the nature of the communication necessary for optimal neural coupling. It turns out, in this case, that the story matters. The stories that were unrehearsed and reflective of real-life experiences were most successful in activating cortical activity in the listeners. When the storyteller communicated in Russian, the neural coupling in non-Russian listeners disappeared, confirming that the brains weren’t synchronizing due to the mere act of listening to the same auditory stimulus. Although story-dependent brain activity patterns in the listeners are delayed momentarily in comparison to the speaker since the speaker is generating the information, a fascinating effect was observed in the realm of anticipatory events. When communication was strong, activity in the PFC (involved in executive functioning) and striatum preceded the activity observed in the speaker’s brain, suggesting that effective communication produces shared anticipatory activity in the brains of listeners. In an informal setting, when a camp counselor is telling a scary story to children gathered late at night around a campfire and a mischievous camper sneaks up and yells “BOO!” it doesn’t take fMRI scans to reveal that the listeners’ brains were coupled to the storyteller (evidenced by their synchronized screams), anticipating the next terrifying plot twist. This

67

level of synchrony is indicative of a high level of communication between leaders and others. Thus, personal interactions between leaders and followers that include engaging, relevant stories delivered in a conversational and authentic tone have an impactful influence on a leader’s ability to enhance positive relationships and create a shared vision for future endeavors. This research suggests that well-crafted stories shared by skilled speakers result in leaders and followers being on the same brain page, as effective strategies are envisioned and implemented.

Modulation of Leadership-Induced Stress Responses Considering that leaders are influenced in positive ways through life experiences, it’s important to also acknowledge the negative imprint that significant and chronic stressors leave on leaders’ brains and responses. Neuroscience research has revealed that maladaptive stress responses can derail the neural system’s underlying functions associated with effective leadership. A key player in the stress response is the hormone cortisol, a chemical released by the adrenal gland that sits atop the kidney and mobilizes the body’s energy to mount a formidable response to the threat, whether it be physical (an approaching bear) or psychological (giving an impromptu talk). The physiological stress response, designed to protect an individual from various threats, can become a threat itself in chronic conditions. Although beneficial in the short term, prolonged activation diverts energy from valuable systems sustaining growth, reproduction, and immune functions, leaving an individual vulnerable to negative health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease and compromised immune functions. When experiencing chronic stress, brain areas involved with attentive social relationships and effective problem-solving are negatively impacted. Physiological dysregulation associated with the body’s response to the stressor also translates into dysregulation of cognitive and motivational systems. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to plan for organizational needs anticipated for the next fiscal year when the company is experiencing a devastating short-term stressor such as an

68

Biology of Leadership

employee strike or a natural disaster. As described by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky in his popular book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, it’s difficult to think about the exterior paint color for a house being renovated when the approaching hurricane threatens to destroy the entire structure. Accordingly, chronic stress is often associated with a switch from flexible problem-solving/decisionmaking strategies to more of a reflexive, rigid response guided by subcortical brain areas. Although stressors will always exist, any effort directed toward building emotional regulation and preparing leaders to recognize and respond to oncoming stressors in a resilient manner will provide protection for individuals leading through stressful circumstances. Not surprisingly, strategic risk-taking necessary for high-impact leadership is often compromised by leaders crippled by the effects of chronic stress. A meta-analysis suggested that high levels of stress were inversely correlated with levels of transformational leadership and positively correlated with evidence of abusive supervision styles. With the destructive effects of prolonged stressful responses in leaders, interventions targeted toward reinforcing healthy coping styles (e.g., flexible coping strategies) or other resources to diminish stress in effective ways are warranted. In animal studies, for example, flexible coping strategies have been associated with increased levels of an additional adrenal hormone known as dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). For humans, higher proportions of DHEA secreted in proportion to cortisol have been observed in individuals with high emotional regulation such as military personnel exhibiting superior performance during stressful physical testing and elite airmen training in a challenging preparatory course. Further, a specific type of stress hormone receptor (i.e., mineralocorticoid receptors [MR]) that is located across the brain’s emotional circuits has been associated with optimal stress outcomes. Specifically, MR activity is involved in the initial stages of the stress response as the stressor is being appraised for an appropriate defense plan and has even been implicated in optimism during ambiguous situations. Thus, the stress literature reinforces the importance of emotional regulation, providing further support for the advocacy of emotional intelligence introduced by science journalist Daniel Goleman.

Heightened regulation of the stress response will quell unnecessary collateral personal and organizational damage presented by various stressful situations inevitably faced by all leaders. Because stress responses have been shown to suppress the plasticity and growth of brain circuits, a process known as neuroplasticity, a leader’s ability to establish control over runaway stress responses will be beneficial for brain health in ways that should enhance leadership performance. Now that the physiological stress response can be assessed via noninvasive techniques such as saliva collection, additional research will elucidate the role of stress management in effective leadership responses. For the time being, however, it is well-advised for leaders to be mindful of stress-mitigating practices to successfully navigate unpredictable, anxietyprovoking situations. Kelly Lambert and Gary Lambert See also Crisis Leadership; Embodied Leadership; Emotion and Leadership; Evolution of Leadership; Leaders’ Stories; Neuroscience; Trauma

Further Readings Funahashi, S. (2017). Prefrontal contribution to decision-making under free-choice conditions. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 11, 431. doi:10.3389/fnins.2017. 00431 Harms, P. D., Cred´e, M., Tynan, M., Leon, M., & Jeung, W. (2017). Leadership and stress: A meta-analytic review. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), 178–194. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.10.006 Henkel, T., & Bourdeau, D. (2018). A field study: An examination of managers’ situational leadership styles. Journal of diversity management (JDM), 13(2), 7–14. doi:10.19030/jdm.v13i2.10218 Kent, M., Bardi, M., Hazelgrove, A., Sewell, K., Kirk, E., Thompson, B., . . ., Lambert, K. (2017). Profiling coping strategies in male and female rats: Potential neurobehavioral markers of increased resilience to depressive symptoms. Hormones and Behavior, 95, 33–43. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2017.07.011 Klok, M. D., Giltay, E. J., Van der Does, A. J. W., Geleijnse, J. M., Antypa, N., Penninx, B. W. J. H., . . ., DeRijk, R. H. (2011). A common and functional mineralocorticoid receptor haplotype enhances optimism and protects against depression in females.

Black Lives Matter and Leadership Translational Psychiatry, 1, e62. doi:10.1038/tp. 2011.59 Stephens, G. J., Silbert, L. J., & Hasson, U. (2010). Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 107(32), 14425–14430. doi:10.1073/pnas. 1008662107 Stocco, A. (2012). Acetylcholine-based entropy in response selection: A model of how striatal interneurons modulate exploration, exploitation, and response variability in decision-making. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6, 18. doi:10.3389/fnins.2012.00018

BLACK LIVES MATTER LEADERSHIP

AND

Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman. The movement is based on a belief in an inclusive and liberating environment for all Blacks and people of African descent worldwide. In 2013, three Black organizers—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—joined forces to create Black Lives Matter. According to these heroic activists, Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention addressing systematic racism and protecting the lives of Blacks targeted for death. The movement is described as an affirmation of Blacks’ humanity and contributions to society in the face of deadly oppression. Since 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement and its protests have gained popularity and support worldwide. This entry describes the origins and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement since its inception.

Origins of Black Lives Matter On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, age 17, bought a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced tea from a 7-Eleven store in Sanford, Florida. He then headed back to his father’s fianc´ee’s house, where he and his father were visiting. George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer, spotted Martin and claimed, as a later

69

court record shows, that he looked “suspicious” and that “he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.” One witness told police that “she heard a commotion, which sounded like arguing,” and another witness claimed “loud talking.” Most of the witnesses agreed on hearing a gunshot. Zimmerman had killed Martin, shooting him in the chest. Zimmerman was injured during the exchange and reported to the police that Martin had attacked him, causing Zimmerman to act in self-defense. Local law enforcement said there was no evidence to refute Zimmerman’s claim, and there was no arrest due to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. The resultant outcry and national media pressure eventually led to Zimmerman’s being charged with second-degree murder. A jury acquitted him in July of 2013, triggering a storm of protests and calls for legislative change. Activists established an online petition calling for a full investigation and prosecution of Zimmerman, with the petition collecting millions of signatures. Outraged by Martin’s murder and Zimmerman’s acquittal, Alicia Garza, an activist and writer living in Oakland, California, took action. Garza describes herself as a queer social justice activist. She graduated with a degree in anthropology and sociology at the University of California in San Diego in 2002. In 2009, Garza served as the executive director for People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) for the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2011, Garza was also board chair for Right to the City Alliance (RTTC) in Oakland, which fought gentrification and police brutality. Following the Zimmerman verdict, Garza took her frustration and anger to Facebook and crafted a post. Here she first used the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Later in 2013, Garza, along with Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, officially created the Black Lives Matter movement. Soon the Black Lives Matter Global Network infrastructure was created, with the goal of supporting the development of new Black leaders and creating a network where Black people feel empowered to determine their own destinies in their communities. Black Lives Matter organizers are also sensitive to the leadership needs of women, queer, and

70

Black Lives Matter and Leadership

transgender people. They are committed placing those at the margins closer to the center. Other leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have emerged since 2013. For example, Aurielle Lucier, a 25-year-old queer African American woman, has used social media effectively in promoting the cause. After the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American boy who was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer in 2014, Lucier sent out a tweet expressing her dismay. “Staying still is becoming too painful,” Lucier posted. She tweeted her phone number, pleading with her followers to do anything using the hashtag #ItsBiggerThanYou. She received hundreds of responses on Twitter and voice mails from individuals who shared her feelings. Now #ItsBiggerThanYou is a national organization established to help young activists fight for social justice. Lucier is also active in the Black Lives Matter movement, where she helps organize protests and other civil action. Lucier’s leadership is devoted to promoting social justice to ensure the well-being of future generations of African Americans.

Galvanization of Black Lives Matter in 2020 Many consider 2020 a year of reckoning with regard to U.S. race relations. Two murders in 2020 especially galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement. On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American woman, was fatally shot by police officers in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment. Police stormed her apartment unannounced as part of their investigation into drug dealing operations. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was inside the apartment during the invasion and exchanged gunfire with the officers, believing them to be intruders. Taylor was hit by six bullets and died. Her death led to hundreds of protests around the United States against police brutality and racism. When a grand jury failed to indict the officers, further protests ensued. On May 25, 2020, shortly after Taylor’s death, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During his arrest of Floyd, Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for roughly nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face-down in the street. Also present

were three other police officers, who prevented bystanders from intervening. Floyd’s death spawned thousands of protests worldwide. Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old who video recorded Floyd’s murder, was applauded for her heroic leadership and received the 2020 PEN/Benenson Courage Award. The year 2020 also marked an acceleration of the removal of statues of Confederate figures and White supremacists. Some statues were torn down by protestors, while others were dismantled by government authorities. The momentum to remove these statues increased dramatically following the high-profile murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black Americans. The years 2020 and 2021 also featured the politicization of Critical Race Theory, which argues that racism is pervasive and systemic in American society, embedded in institutions and structures such as the law, education, policing, and health care. Critical Race Theory examines the many ways that the past and current laws, and the systems that created them, enable racial hierarchies and give rise to today’s social injustices. The theory also examines how laws are complicit in perpetuating racial disparities. Political conservatives have been vocal in their opposition to Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, and often this opposition is based on ignorance of the theory or ignorance of the pervasiveness of institutional racism. Public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has undergone a significant shift over time. From the advent of the movement in 2013 until about 2018, public opinion was mostly unfavorable. Since 2019, approval of Black Lives Matter has grown. By June of 2020, 67% of adult Americans expressed some support for the movement, according to the Pew Research Center. This increased support for Black Lives Matter is consistent with the notion of heroic lag, which describes the tendency for heroic people and heroic movements to first be seen in a negative light. As time passes, society’s values catch up to the ideals associate with these heroic individuals and heroic movements. Scott T. Allison See also Critical Race Theory; Inclusivity; Intersectionality; Race and Ethnicity; Racial Disparities

Board Leadership

Further Readings Cohen, B., Killer, M., & Render, M. (2021). Above the law: How “qualified immunity” protects violent police. New York, NY: OR Books. Eberhardt, J. L. (2020). Biased: Uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do. London: Penguin Books. Garza, A. (2021). The purpose of power: How we come together when we fall apart. New York, NY: Oneworld Books. Hennig, K. (2021). The rage of innocence: How America criminalizes Black youth. New York, NY: Pantheon. Hinton, E. (2021). America on fire: The untold history of police violence and Black rebellion since the 1960s. New York, NY: Liveright Books. Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an anti-racist. New York, NY: Oneworld Books. Taylor, K. Y. (2021). From #blacklivesmatter to Black liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

BOARD LEADERSHIP The topic of board leadership concerns itself with the dynamics of leadership operating within a group of individuals who jointly supervise the activities of for-profit or nonprofit organizations. While the powers, responsibilities, and duties of a board of directors are determined by government regulations and the organization’s constitution and by-laws, leadership is one of the most critical determinants of boardroom performance. This entry will examine how and where boardroom leadership occurs, the evolution of formal leadership roles on boards, and the barriers to boardroom leadership beyond the contributions of the organization’s CEO.

Leadership in the Boardroom A critical attribute of a high performing board is its ability to share leadership across the directorship. The complex issues facing boards—corporate oversight, strategic direction, acquisitions and mergers, and chief executive succession—demand a variety of expertise and leadership beyond the CEO’s. Until recently, however, the CEO served as

71

the official leader of the board. In response to corporate scandals and company underperformance that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, boards came under pressure to act independently of the CEO through the creation of alternative leadership roles. Today, the vast majority of publicly traded and even privately held corporate boards have one of two alternative forms of leadership—a lead independent director or a nonexecutive board chair. In the majority of nonprofit boards, independent chairs are the far more commonplace approach, whereas lead directors are rare if ever used. The terms independent and nonexecutive imply that a director has no formal ties to the organization such as holding an executive position or serving in the capacity as a paid advisor. Beyond these formal board leadership roles, there are other opportunities for leadership to be demonstrated by a board of directors—principally through leadership demonstrated by committee chairs. Increasingly, more and more of the work of boards occur in their committees. Committees face fewer hurdles when it comes to sharing leadership and working as a team. For example, they tend to be small in number—often four or five members. They have a more singular focus (e.g., CEO succession, director nominations, accounting oversight). Thanks to regulatory requirements, the members often share similar expertise. Selection is therefore a critical step in promoting leadership within committees. Therefore, it is important to staff them—especially the committee chair roles—with individuals who possess leadership skills and with individuals who can work effectively in small groups.

The Lead Director and Nonexecutive Chair Models of Leadership Under the lead director model, formal leadership of the board is shared between an independent director and the CEO. Importantly, the CEO retains the title of board chair. The lead director’s role is to partner with the CEO to set the board’s agenda and determine what information board members require. In addition, they convene what are called executive sessions, where the independent directors meet without the CEO or other organizational executives being present to discuss

72

Board Leadership

sensitive issues. Lead directors are both an ombudsman and a facilitator of the governance process. They essentially represent their fellow nonexecutive directors to the CEO. In the case of a management crisis involving the CEO, the lead director is likely to take over as the board’s chair. Under the independent board chair model, the CEO is not recognized as the board’s formal leader. The independent board chair has the power to call board meetings, control the board agenda, and determine the information that the board receives. They have the authority to represent the board in shareholder and stakeholder communications. They chair the executive sessions and communicate with directors on issues that arise outside of board meetings. They review the performance of individual directors and keep them informed of their performance. They also ensure that the board reviews its own performance annually. The main arguments in favor of a nonexecutive chair have to do with enhancing the ability of the board to monitor the CEO’s performance and, if needed, operate independently of the CEO. With a separate chair, the board has a clear leader whose major mandate is the effective functioning of the board itself. The role also acknowledges the status of directors as formal leaders of the board rather than simply the CEO. It also increases the chance that directors will feel more at ease about raising challenges to the CEO. It puts someone in charge of board meetings whose primary role is getting the board to make good decisions. This can result in better information availability, better decision processes, and more committed boards. As a result, the nonexecutive chair approach to board leadership is more likely to encourage shared leadership and greater teamwork within a board. For the nonexecutive chair and the lead director to be effective, it is very important that this individual be a genuine outsider who is independent of the CEO. They must also be an individual who is highly respected by the directors and who has the self-confidence, skills, and industry knowledge to take a leadership role during times of crisis. They must be able to share leadership with fellow directors and effectively build a team identity. This individual must have the time to follow both the company and the industry closely. For these

reasons, it is important that especially nonexecutive chairs do not hold full-time jobs or board directorships at any other organization. The time requirements often lead to the selection of retired CEOs as board chairs. Under either model of a lead director or a nonexecutive chair, a critical factor determining success is a set of clear and negotiated expectations about their roles and the CEO’s boardroom roles from the very start. An understanding of each other’s viewpoints on board governance and leadership is critical and should lead to roles and responsibilities that are outlined in writing and approved by the board.

How the Board Chairman Behavior Influences Leadership and Teamwork Research by Katharina Pick examining the leadership styles of board chairs found that certain approaches were more effective than others at promoting shared leadership and teamwork among the directorate. As one might imagine, the impact of the chair’s style has its greatest influence in boardroom meetings. The board meeting is the primary setting in which the entire board interacts as a group, and therefore the arena in which directors develop norms about their team identity and leadership. One of the great hurdles to teamwork and to leadership on a corporate board is the high status and expertise identity of directors. Directors bring very visible external identities (e.g., professions, positions) for which they were presumably selected to join the board. As a result, they arrive with a clear notion of where they will make their contributions. These narrow role definitions promote an individual identity rather than a team identity. The board chair must harness each director’s expertise while simultaneously encouraging them to contribute to a broader set of issues facing the board. The chair’s leadership task is to make certain that directors’ contributions do not become too narrow, reducing the board to a set of experts who speak only on their individual topics and who do not operate as a team. A second hurdle to sharing leadership is that some directors are more reserved while others are more dominant in meetings. Some will feel unsure about speaking on topics outside of their own

Board Leadership

professional background. Others will contribute more aggressively, searching for affirmation, trying to establish an identity in the group, and proving that they belong alongside the high-status people on the board. On boards where the chair does not actively manage director contributions, the perception of posturing and the accompanying frustration of board members appeared to be a common occurrence in Pick’s research. The more effective chairs used several techniques to address the twin challenges of status/ expertise identities and variations in participation. Their techniques included calling on directors, polling the board, having premeeting conversations with directors, and fostering conversations between directors.

Boardrooms: A Challenging Environment to Share Leadership One might expect boards to be an ideal place to share leadership. They have a relatively small number of members (typically nine to 12 directors in large publicly traded companies) and a clear focus on corporate governance. Board directors also tend to be highly experienced individuals and often are fellow CEOs or retired CEOs. Yet they face dilemmas when it comes to sharing leadership beyond the CEO and operating as true teams. The most common hurdle is a lack of time. Compared to most work groups, board members spend relatively little time together as a working board. They typically meet in person for a day or two, six to 10 times a year with gaps of weeks between meetings. There are Zoom meetings, phone calls, and email communications among board members, but as a whole the board simply doesn’t spend much time operating as a collective. This lack of time together makes it difficult for directors to distribute leadership effectively, particularly given that the CEO is often the only full-time member of the organization of which the board is providing oversight. In addition, there are competing identities that play out in the case of the majority of board members. While board membership is an important activity in directors’ careers, in most cases it is a secondary activity. Most directors have demanding full-time roles. They are often CEOs or high-ranking

73

professionals in law, finance, or the not-for-profit sector. In other words, board commitments play a small role in the overall career of most directors. Again, this is in sharp contrast to the CEO of the board, whose primary identity is their organization. Another factor that hinders shared leadership and teamwork in boardrooms is the nature of goals. On the one hand, the board’s mandate seems straightforward—representing the interests of investors and shareholders. Yet the diversity of shareholder groups and shareholder objectives makes this overarching mandate complex. Even the overarching goal of “shareholder value” is being challenged by some regulators, lawyers, unions, and even investors. Many corporations are moving beyond the singular ideal of optimizing shareholder value and now publish governance principles that indicate a broader group of stakeholders—employees, customers, and even society at large. One powerful contributor to effective leadership and teamwork—having a definitive singular goal or even definitive goals—is therefore challenging to achieve in boardrooms due to the multiplicity of goals and desired outcomes that members support. The type and quality of information that a board receives add more obstacles to shared leadership and teamwork while at the same time making it a requirement for a board to operate as an effective team. Information is complex, often conflicting, and specialized. For example, there are multiple ways to assess the simple concepts of revenue and return. While one business solution may seem to be the best, new information comes to light that may raise doubts. Often the information that boards receive and need is so specialized that only a board member with an in-depth technical understanding can interpret and act on it. In these cases, boards need to operate as a sounding board for those with the right expertise and integrate data from other areas. A final set of factors favor the centralization of leadership with the CEO over more distributed forms. On most boards, the CEO has far greater access to current as well as comprehensive information about the state of the company since the majority of directors are outsiders (in the sense that they are not employees of the board’s organization). This information advantage can greatly hinder sharing leadership across the board. Given a director’s part-time role and outsider status, the

74

Bureaucracy

typical board member’s knowledge about company affairs is extremely limited. This constraint puts boundaries on the extent to which they can contribute to decision-making in boardroom discussions. Most directors are all too aware of the gap in their understanding and therefore concede authority to the CEO. As a result, leadership ends up centralized rather than being shared among the board members even with a nonexecutive board chair. Lastly, directors see their primary role as serving the CEO and their secondary role as providing oversight. Many directors are CEOs themselves, and they share in an etiquette that suggests restraint from aggressively challenging a fellow CEO or from probing too deeply into the details of someone else’s business.

Conger, J. A. (Ed.). (2009). Boardroom realities: Building leaders across your board. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Conger, J. A., & Lawler, E. E. (2009). Sharing leadership on corporate boards: A critical requirement for teamwork at the top. Organizational Dynamics, 38(3). doi:10.1016/j.orgdyn.2009.04.007 Conger, J. A., Lawler, E. E., & Finegold, D. L. (2001). Corporate boards: New strategies for adding value at the top. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. LeBlanc, R. (Ed.). (2020). The handbook of board governance: A comprehensive guide for public, private and not-for-profit board members. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

BUREAUCRACY

Final Remarks Despite the challenges facing distributed leadership on a board, the argument for strong and shared leadership from boards is compelling. Recent regulatory requirements have promoted an intense focus on compliance to address corporate failures and misdeeds. While boardrooms need to demonstrate leadership on the compliance side, they have a bigger obligation. They must ensure that their organizations prosper over the long term. There are times when the CEO and their executive may be pulled in the direction of short-term demands and rewards. While historically boards have played primarily an advisory role to the CEO, they now must provide a counterweight to the CEO’s leadership. They can only achieve this outcome by providing leadership themselves in the boardroom. Jay A. Conger See also Coordination; Entrepreneurship; Executive Compensation; Group Effectiveness; Leadership and Management; Organizational Leadership; Team Leadership

Further Readings Charan, R., Carey, D., & Useem, M. (2013). Boards that lead: When to take charge, when to partner, and when to stay out of the way. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

The word bureaucracy evokes a range of emotions, most of them negative, because users often perceive little but a stultifying morass of petty rules, paperwork, and impersonal drones. Externally, customers, users, members, and citizens form lasting impressions of the bureaucracy as they navigate around and extract services, seek satisfaction, or generally engage with it. Internally, employees, managers, and civil servants must learn to manage and navigate the bureaucracy to deliver on their purpose within it and similarly come to conclusions about the state and efficacy of the construct. These perceptions can be either positive or negative and are largely uncorrelated with the actual effectiveness of the construct. This entry will define bureaucracy, explain how it comes about and persists, explore its most basic features and resulting challenges, and offer leadership guidance on when and where to intervene. Regardless of one’s perception of bureaucracy, as German sociologist Max Weber pointed out, bureaucracy is here to stay. It is a feature of any complex sociotechnical system that requires the predictability and stability of a coherent structure with specialized processes. Therefore, leaders must learn how to operate within bureaucracy in order to achieve its purpose. Ultimately, it is leaders who construct, manage, and occasionally revise these structures to serve that purpose. At the same time,

Bureaucracy

they must account for these negative emotions when users become frustrated with the resulting complexity. Therefore, leaders can be the difference between stultifying morass and effective liberating construct.

Defining Bureaucracy A bureaucracy is any organizational structure in which responsibility is distributed by function into a hierarchy of offices, regardless of the individual persons working there. The term is often used to refer to an administrative policy-making group or a group of government officials who are not elected and do not answer to the electorate. A bureaucracy encompasses all of the subsystems, processes, and methods in any large enterprise. This structure must be in place for the enterprise to deliver on its mission in an orderly, controlled way. Opportunities for leadership exist within each of these offices or bureaus, but then leadership also exists at higher levels to coordinate the system as a whole. Authority, therefore, is distributed, which creates the potential for confusion and evading responsibility because “that’s not my job.” Weber proposed that there are the six characteristics of bureaucracy: 1. Division of labor (task specialization) that seeks to accomplish necessary tasks most efficiently. 2. A hierarchical management structure, cascading authority, and decision-making down through the organization. 3. Formal rules for decision-making and selection of actions. 4. Uniform requirements that attempt to make decisions clear and actions effective. 5. Advancement in the organization should be based on achievement. 6. An impersonal environment.

The reader will note that all but the last are essential characteristics of any well-managed enterprise, and they are worthy of praise if done well. The last one, an impersonal environment, is not required or mandated. Instead, it is an emergent property of the resulting structure and interactions. The environment only has to be impersonal if

75

leadership allows it to be so or cannot change the culture to a more personalized setting.

How Bureaucracy Comes About Donella Meadows offers a simple, elegant description of a complex adaptive sociotechnical system (CAS)—elements coming together, interacting, and having a purpose. This simple construct can then be cascaded down through the enterprise with every parsed component (department, team, process, etc.) having the same construct—elements interacting on purpose. The perennial search for order in any enterprise pertains to each facet, including personnel, policies, and planning. This parsing and specialization lead to a vexing paradox for leaders and managers. A large CAS must be parsed in such a fashion. Yet, this very action runs the risk of losing coherence and fidelity at every juncture by setting nonexistent boundaries. Purpose and interactions can stray and vary, leading to wildly incoherent bureaucratic organizations whose parts seem unrelated. As the structure becomes more elaborate, each of these various facets tends to take on a life of its own and grows independent from the whole, shifting toward becoming an end in itself. This tendency turns out to be an unintended consequence. The worst examples gradually defeat the very purposes they were designed to serve. Nobody sets out to create such a dysfunctional structure. Even though the drift toward bureaucracy has its own momentum, leaders should be in a position to correct or even avert these tendencies. Again, we see the intersectionality with leadership. Leadership alone has the standing and viewpoint to assure adherence to purpose and fidelity to the greater whole, for it is only the throughput of the entire enterprise that genuinely matters. If leadership is not careful in this area, problems related to bounded rationality are likely to arise.

Bounded Rationality Herbert Simon coined the phrase bounded rationality, the concept that any person’s individual capacity for reasoning and decision-making is necessarily limited for many reasons. Some problems are difficult to notice even without bounded rationality complicating the decision. Some issues

76

Bureaucracy

are too complicated to be understood by one individual operating in a bounded space. Of those that can be understood, many admit of no solution. Often, there are too many variables, options, interests, and implications to process completely. The reasons Simon cited for occupants of a bureaucracy acting with bounded rationality are as follows: 1. The tractability of the decision problem as perceived by the individual. 2. The cognitive limitations of the mind of the decision-maker. 3. The time available to make the decision. Time pressures often impart an air of urgency that does not allow for proper consideration. 4. The perceived or actual limits of the decisionmaker’s view or knowledge (boundaries). 5. Some combination of all of the above.

Within systems, participants usually accept a single point of view from which to analyze the problem. Even if a person could solve these problems, there is rarely adequate time to make optimal decisions from a variety of perspectives. Under these circumstances, bounded rationality can take hold, causing local optimization that may be at odds with systemic direction and need, and out of sync with other functions. Leadership holds the key to righting these misalignments. Bureaucracy simplifies such a world for participants, specifying the problems and the relevant information, with a limited suite of responses, all of which accommodate the reality of bounded rationality. If appropriately managed, the bureaucracy need not be ineffective. However, leaders too can become so focused on solving the local problems that they neglect any broader consequences. Consequences that are far enough away or far enough into the future are relatively easy to ignore in the short term. If leadership is not vigilant, decision-makers, employing bounded rationality, act as satisfiers, seeking satisfactory (local) solutions rather than optimal (systemic) ones. Here we see the possibility of bureaucratic thought and action begin to emerge. Taken to the extreme, organizations practicing bounded rationality can become impenetrable, daunting fortresses for customers or stakeholders to

approach and psychic prisons for the permanent occupants.

Models of Bureaucracies Bureaucracies generally fall into two types. One is based on a structural model that can, and often does, become static and persistent. The other is a procedural model that can be said to be dynamic. Once again, we see the intersectionality with leadership. Leadership may be able to choose the model. Static, Persistent Model

In the literature, bureaucracy is sometimes depicted using a static model, identifying the various units and their interrelations, like a giant network or web, albeit at its most abstract, resembling the classic organizational chart. Gareth Morgan, author of Images of Organizations, proposed that this model represented the enterprise as a machine with known and established connections, routine, and standardized functions. Under this model, decision-making authority and control are distributed but highly scripted and predictable. The strength of this model is the repeatability, predictability, and ease of centralized control. However, these same features can become rigid, sclerotic, and impervious to change and amendment as need by the context. Dynamic Model

Dynamics models attempt to track the flow of work as throughput in a sequence of phases from one unit to the next. The dynamic model of bureaucracy has the enterprise constantly changing and adapting as needed by the context in which it operates. Elements, interactions, and even purpose become fluid and can adapt to new circumstances and inputs. This adaption can be very beneficial, allowing the enterprise to stay more closely aligned with its purpose and stakeholders’ needs. However, this same dynamism can be very challenging for both customers and employees inside. A master metaphor for workflow is the labyrinth, from decision point to decision point,

Bureaucracy

including roadblocks, switchbacks, and the occasional monster. For customers and occupants alike, the complex, bureaucratic maze is constantly changing, making it hard to negotiate and, therefore, frustrating.

Implications for Leadership Leadership has three key responsibilities when managing an enterprise of this complexity. The first is to ensure that the organization is structured to meet its mission and deliver on its purpose. This highlights the criticality of leadership in assuring that all of the elements and interactions of the system remain in alignment, with minimal loss of fidelity to the overall mission. This might be called bureaucracy’s maintenance, which is never easy. The second responsibility of leadership is to modify the current organization as needed, which is more difficult given the intractable character of bureaucracy generally. Finally, leadership may want or need to redefine or reorient the fundamental purpose of the enterprise. This task should be rare, of course, and for a good reason, in part, because it is most challenging to set an entirely new direction for a system. Given a finite amount of time, any bureaucracy can usually outlast attempts by a single leader to change it. Many people and a lot of resources have been dedicated to perpetuating the system as it is.

77

Again, that resilience to withstand is bureaucracy’s virtue and its vice. William Donaldson See also Coordination; Corporate Social Responsibility; Institutional Structure versus Culture in the Army; Organizational Leadership

Further Readings Deming, W. E. (1994/2000). The new economics (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Donaldson, W. (2017). Simple_complexity: A management book for the rest of us. New York, NY: Morgan James Publishing. Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Morgan, G. (1986). Images of organizations. Newbury Park CA: SAGE. Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York, NY: Currency Doubleday. Simon, H. (1957). Models of man. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons. Weber, M. (1978). In G. Roth & C. Wittich (Eds.), Economy and society. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (Original work published in 1956). Wheatley, M. (1992). Leadership and the new science. Oakland, CA: Barrett-Koehler.

C care ethicists, portrays the ethics of care as a female moral voice. She contrasts this with the ethics of justice, which involves a distinctively male moral voice. Through Gilligan’s care lens, decisions and actions are guided by a concern for how they will affect particular people in particular circumstances, rather than whether they are universally right or wrong. Care ethics is therefore as much about logics of reasoning and decisionmaking as about sentiment. It challenges modernity’s association of moral and intellectual maturity with the capacity for abstract, autonomous thinking, and valorizes the wisdom and morality of human relationship. Although care ethics originates in the domestic sphere, many theorists seek to broaden its application and appeal. Joan Tronto argues that because we all need, and hopefully receive, care at certain points in our lives (e.g., infancy, senility, illness, and misfortune), it is through care that we should approach the issue of democracy. Although human lives differ in many respects, the one thing we have in common is our need for care and, by extension, our responsibility to give care to others. She acknowledges a paradox in the way that democracy emphasizes equality, whereas care usually involves a kind of inequality or asymmetry between those who provide it and those who need or desire it. She suggests that the democratic promise of care ethics lies not in the perfection of an individual caring act (which is by definition asymmetrical), but in our commitment to a society

CARING LEADERSHIP This entry introduces the topic of caring leadership. It outlines why it is helpful to look beyond everyday associations between care and simply being nice to one another, and to consider care ethics as a form of moral reasoning and a theory of social obligation. It explores caring leadership as a series of trade-offs in the relationship dynamics between leaders and followers, which manifest differently depending on whether care is present or absent.

Care Ethics Care has been a significant ethical concern for thousands of years. In classical Greek and Roman philosophy, care played a key role in debates about how to lead the good life and how to balance responsibility toward others with responsibility toward oneself. In relation to leadership, a duty of care was considered vital to offset the harmful excesses of power. A major Socratic motif, for instance, was the trade-off between power, agency, and well-being, and the question of the extent to which followers might exchange their independence for the experience of being led competently and ethically. The modern care ethics movement arose in the 1970s and 1980s to highlight women’s domestic care as an unpaid and undervalued “labor of love.” Carol Gilligan, one of the most influential

79

80

Caring Leadership

in which caregiving and care receiving even out over the whole life-course. Such arguments see care not as a separate moral register from justice, but as its prerequisite. Leading care scholars, including Daniel Engster and Virginia Held, use such reflections on democracy to move care ethics beyond domesticity and gender and toward the question of how care shapes, motivates, and moderates our behavior as a general theory of moral and social obligation. This is particularly relevant in an era of environmental crisis, and there is a burgeoning business ethics literature that expands care’s emphasis on intimate personal relationships to encompass our duty toward the planet and to future generations; to people we will never know personally.

Leading With Care Drawing on care ethics, the notion of the caring leader has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. On the whole, the literature has emphasized care as a positive force for leadership. It often links caring leadership with similar-sounding models, such as compassionate, authentic, and relational leadership. In such models, followers are said to be inspired by their leaders’ interpersonal skills and apparently real concern for others’ well-being. Caring leadership has therefore been associated with many organizational benefits, including enhanced employee commitment and performance. Indeed, who would not want to work for a leader who prioritizes people issues over (or at least, alongside) organizational ones? However, caring leadership entails some risks, too. These mostly relate to care as a particularist (as opposed to universalist) ethics, with roots in the familial and the familiar. One risk is that leaders might manipulate their followers’ desire to feel that they belong, whether to an organization, a community, or a nation. Andreas Chatzidakis and his colleagues, in The Care Collective, call this the reactionary type of caring leadership, whereby leaders seek to win their supporters’ loyalty by creating sharp divisions between “people like us” and others. Because of this, caring leadership has been associated with a risk of favoritism, nepotism, and cronyism in leadership relations—the

very opposite of care ethics as the enabler of democracy. With both its upsides and its downsides, care throws a spotlight on relations between leaders and followers, especially the power dynamics of follower dependence/independence. This is because leaders are usually cast as caregivers in the relationship, while followers are positioned as care recipients. Put simply, caregiving triggers associations with competence and an ability to predict and address other people’s needs. By contrast, care receiving involves having needs that one is dependent on others to meet. Consequently, some scholars criticize the concept of caring leadership for reinforcing a power asymmetry which privileges leaders while disadvantaging and accentuating the dependence of followers. Yiannis Gabriel’s psychoanalytic approach to caring leadership offers an interesting perspective on these dependence/independence dynamics. He argues that followers project or displace their anxieties and needs onto their leaders, drawing (usually unconsciously) on the archetypal templates of father and mother. This means that we experience leaders in our adult life as the omnipotent, heroic, paternal archetype or the caring, nurturing, maternal archetype. The caring leader fantasy is thus associated with our primal desire to be cherished and protected, and our primal terror of being abandoned and left to fend for ourselves. This helps to explain how and why caring leadership can stifle followers’ independence for, as every caring parent knows, excessive caring can seriously inhibit the autonomy of followers and become an unhealthy overprotection. Like “helicopter parents,” leaders who are too involved and too interventionist risk infantilizing their followers, leaving them unable or unwilling to make decisions for themselves. To be effective, therefore, caring leadership involves a delicate balancing act between dependence and independence—between directing and steering followers on one hand, and empowering and enabling them on the other. Leah Tomkins, in her work with Peter Simpson, has used Gilligan’s care ethics to explore how caring leadership requires thinking through the effects of one’s actions (and nonactions) on other people, rather than (or at least as well as) thinking through

Caring Leadership

whether they are right or wrong in some abstract sense, or whether they are addressing organizational needs. In short, care ethics challenges us to honor leaders and followers as fellow human beings, despite, or perhaps because of, the power asymmetry of their roles. To help navigate these complexities, we might reflect on the dual meaning of the word care, one positive, the other negative. The positive meaning has care as a kind of responsible attentiveness (as in “I will take care of you”); the negative meaning uses care in the sense of worry or anxiety (as in “I have many cares”). In relation to the dependence/ independence trade-off, we might summarize this duality as “I am here for you and I will take care of you [positive meaning], not to remove all your worries and cares [negative meaning] and hence breed excessive dependence, but to help you to address and/or tolerate them yourselves.” This is care-ful leadership in both senses of the word—both care-as-attentiveness and care-as-worry. It does not deny the challenges of the world, but it does seek to reassure that we will tackle them together.

Leading Without Care There are many ways in which leaders can give the impression that they do not care, often through overtly prioritizing an institutional or business need over a human one. Most symbolically powerful, perhaps, is the issue of leaders failing to show up in a crisis. Just like the archetypal caring mother, the caring leader must be present and available in a crisis to reassure followers that they have not been abandoned and that the crisis can be endured. If they fail to discharge this emotional duty, leaders risk triggering followers’ deep anxieties and memory-traces of helplessness in infancy. Those who do not seem to care enough to show up in times of trouble thereby compromise both their followers’ sense of security and their own moral authority. Care is thus arguably even more potent in its absence than its presence. The complexities of care in its absence have been exercising philosophers for millennia. Classics scholar Mich`ele Lowrie highlights that the Latin origin of the word security (securitas) means being without care (se-cura). When the philosophers of the Roman Empire debated the challenges of

81

national security, they reflected a deep ambiguity about whether leading without care means being care-less or care-free. Being care-less uses care in the sense of responsible attentiveness; in its absence, therefore, it signals a negligent “I am not going to take care of you” or simply “I just do not care.” A leader’s care-free absence, on the other hand, signals something quite different. It uses care in the sense of worry or anxiety, suggesting that “I do not have many cares (and by implication, there is no need for you to have many cares either).” Here, the subliminal leadership message is a relaxed comfort and security about the world; that is, that there is no need for anyone to feel anxious. Thus, careless leaders disregard and hence deepen their followers’ anxieties and dependence, turning care-asattentiveness from positive to negative. Care-free leaders recognize and encourage their followers’ self-confidence and independence, turning care-asworry from negative to positive. In the dynamics of dependence/independence, the two manifestations of leading without care are polar opposites. Paradoxically, the leaders who most risk being experienced as care-less may be those whose overall ethos is to be care-free. In political leadership, this is primarily a risk for those with a libertarian instinct, who emphasize that we all have the right and responsibility to look out for ourselves, relatively free from governmental interference. In organizational leadership, the risk is most salient for those who prioritize facilitation over direction. In both domains, when leadership emphasizes followers’ independence and self-sufficiency, a leader’s absence is usually tolerable, even desirable. In a crisis, however, our primal fears are reawakened and our need for care intensified. If leaders then remain aloof, their absence signals laissez-faire, care-less negligence, not care-free confidence. In rejecting the negative connotations of care-as-worry, they also sacrifice the positive connotations of care-as-attentiveness.

Final Thoughts Through the prism of care, some of the most emotionally charged tensions of leadership relations are exposed. When care is present, the trade-off is between dependence and independence—between followers forsaking versus embracing autonomy and responsibility. In a

82

CEO Hubris

crisis, these dynamics are thrown into sharp relief, as the care-ful leader encounters both a heightened need for care-as-attentiveness and a heightened presence of care-as-worry. The care-ful leader does not try to downplay the severity of the situation, but rather, reassures followers through both emotional and practical competence that at least we are all in it together. When care is absent, by contrast, the trade-off is between a care-free approach and a care-less one. When crisis hits, the former can morph easily and dangerously into the latter. Caring leadership is thus not a panacea for political or organizational leadership, and it takes considerable skill, acuity, judgment, and compromise. Care is complex and sometimes contradictory in its presence; but it can be utterly devastating in its absence. Leah Tomkins See also Ableism

Further Readings Chatzidakis A., Hakim, J., Littler, J., Rottenberg, C., & Segal, L. (2020). From carewashing to radical care: The discursive explosions of care during Covid-19. Feminist Media Studies, 20(6), 889–895. doi:10.1080/ 14680777.2020.1781435 Engster, D. (2007). The heart of justice: Care ethics and political theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199214358.001.0001 Gabriel, Y. (2015). The caring leader: What followers expect of their leaders and why? Leadership, 11(3), 316–334. doi:10.1177/1742715014532482 Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lowrie, M. (2020). Care and security in Vergil’s Aeneid: An analysis of the politics of empire. In L. Tomkins (Ed.), Paradox and power in caring leadership: Critical and philosophical reflections (pp. 121–130). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Tomkins, L., & Simpson, P. (2015). Caring leadership: A Heideggerian perspective. Organization Studies, 36(8), 1013–1031. doi:10.1177/0170840615580008 Tronto, J. C. (2015). Who cares? How to reshape a democratic politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

CEO HUBRIS The upper-echelons perspective of management theory maintains that senior leadership’s demographic characteristics, values, and cognitive processing dramatically impact organizational decision-making and subsequent outcomes. One specific focus within this research stream involves the cognitive bias of hubris and how it can influence a CEO’s attention, thought processes, and decision-making. In 1997, Mathew Hayward and Donald Hambrick defined hubris as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence often resulting in retribution” that stems from an individual’s recent prior successes and achievements. Hubris represents a psychological state whereby individuals exhibit overconfidence, arrogance, and excessive pride. CEOs who suffer from the influence of hubris place inordinate faith in their own talents and overestimate their capacity to influence events as they unfold. They view themselves as exceptional and come to believe that normal societal constraints do not apply to them. Hubristic leaders also ignore the advice of others within their organizations and are unwilling to accept valid criticisms of their logic and decision-making. The result is that hubris causes leaders to enact a faster, less comprehensive decision-making process. Such leaders rely excessively on subjective assessments and often fail to consider objectively relevant contextual factors. This leads to risky or overly ambitious decisions that often generate negative organizational outcomes over time. Hubris produces these negative effects through its influence on both individual perception/ attention and the subsequent cognitive processing about a decision that follows. Because hubris leads individuals to view the self as exceptional and exceptionally important, leaders that suffer from hubris will focus attention away from important contextual considerations. Such leaders attend to their individual strengths and believe these are most significant to an effective resolution of a problem or decision. In regard to cognitive processing, hubris breeds overconfidence and excessive levels of certainty. As a result, hubristic leaders overweigh positive facts and subjectively assess the probability of a favorable outcome

CEO Hubris

much more optimistically than objectively warranted. Hubris also impacts how individuals interpret the results they achieve. When successful, hubristic leaders attribute success to their individual talent and skill. However, when hubristic leaders experience failure or results below expectations, they attribute this poor performance to external factors they could neither reasonably foresee nor control. As a result of this positive feedback loop, hubris can impact an individual’s decision-making for extended periods. Although all individuals are susceptible to the influence of hubris, management and leadership research has emphasized how hubris can influence senior leaders such as the firm’s CEO. This logic is based on the fact that CEOs rise to their position as a result of a history of organizational success, and the CEO position carries considerable hierarchical power. Therefore, CEOs appear particularly at risk of falling victim to the influence of hubris. Furthermore, the outsized impact CEOs have on decision-making and performance at their firms implies that hubris at the apex of the organizational chart is especially dangerous. A growing body of empirical studies examines how hubris influences CEO decision-making and organizational outcomes (see the following sections for some specific applications). Early work in this area identified specific antecedents that were likely to drive up hubris and examined how they related to certain observable outcomes. Proxies associated with heightened levels of hubris included significant media attention, disproportionately high levels of CEO relative compensation, and recent firm success. More recent research has sought, through the use of linguistic markers, to develop approaches to identify hubris prior to any problematic events unfolding. The premise of this research is that the language CEOs apply in communications with key stakeholder groups can accurately reflect the growing influence of hubris. As a result, these linguistic markers offer a potential signal that hubris is building to dangerous levels which may ultimately drive these leaders to make poor or excessively risky decisions.

Hubris and Narcissism Hubris shares a number of attributes with narcissism, and both are often associated with a host of

83

similar problematic leadership behaviors and negative organizational outcomes. Hubris and narcissism are, however, distinct constructs; a primary difference between the two is that hubris represents a psychological state triggered by previous successes. In contrast, excessive narcissism is a trait-based personality disorder characterized by an inflated self-concept, lack of empathy, and an oversized need for both power and the admiration of others. That said, individuals who exhibit higher levels of narcissism also appear more susceptible to the influence of hubris. Recent leadership research also theorizes that while hubristic and narcissistic leaders both seek power, they do so for fundamentally different reasons. For those with hubris, power results from their success and can prove intoxicating, whereas narcissists pursue power aggressively as a means to satisfy their pervasive need for attention, admiration, and to perpetuate their grandiose self-image.

Positive and Negative Manifestations of Hubris A growing body of research has examined the impact of hubris on a variety of leadership and organizational phenomena. The earliest examination of hubris’s potential impact within management and leadership is Richard Roll’s 1986 hubris hypothesis with regard to corporate mergers and acquisitions. Roll argued that many CEOs who engage in corporate takeovers suffer from the influence of hubris. Their hubris explains why these leaders pay such high premiums to acquire other firms, and why the subsequent performance of the combined firm is often well below expectations. Subsequent research has developed empirical support for these negative implications of hubris within the takeover context, linking hubristic CEOs to both higher deal premiums and less-favorable performance postacquisition. Additional research extends Roll’s logic to empirically demonstrate that CEOs generally make riskier decisions when they suffer from hubris, and this can prove very detrimental to the firms they lead. Beyond the context of corporate acquisitions, researchers within the field of strategic management have also documented hubris’s effects within organizational strategic planning processes and the

84

CEO Hubris

strategies leaders implement. Notably, CEOs influenced by hubris exhibit persistence and the ability to remain focused on their strategic goals despite negative developments. However, this potentially positive feature of hubris becomes highly detrimental when external factors develop that make implementation of the initial strategy challenging. In this sense, hubris drives myopia and makes leaders unable to recognize when adjustments to their approach are needed. Also, while hubris causes a strong focus on strategic goals, the overconfident state it reflects can cause leaders to pursue unrealistic objectives. The inflated sense of self-importance tied to hubris also implies that strategic decision-making will be more centralized, with leaders less tolerant of dissenting viewpoints. Finally, the fast, less comprehensive decision processing associated with hubristic decision-making translates to a less detailed strategic planning process that often fails to consider a wider variety of scenarios and alternatives. Perhaps the most troubling effect of hubris within organizational settings involves the observed positive associations between high levels of CEO hubris and unethical behavior. Simply put, hubris involves an excessive sense of self-importance and a belief that normal societal constraints do not apply. This can enable a number of destructive behaviors that fail to appropriately consider the interests of others, including serious violations of ethical and legal norms. Documented normative violations include hubris-fueled instances of destructive corporate leadership, outright fraud, and earnings manipulation. Although the existing literature places a great deal of emphasis on the negative effects of hubris, some researchers have explored the idea that hubris may generate positive effects within certain discrete contexts. These positive effects are generally posited to occur where the capacity of hubris to encourage risk-taking has broad societal benefits. As one example, entrepreneurial activity generates a number of positive social benefits and operates as a driver of economic growth. However, the failure rates for new ventures remain extremely high, making the decision to start a new business a very risky proposition from the individual’s perspective. In this context, the overconfidence and excessive belief in their individual capacity to influence environmental factors can lead hubristic leaders to

believe that the high odds of failure for a new venture simply do not apply to them. As a result, they are more willing to start new businesses, including ventures that seek to introduce radically new products or business methods. Along these lines, there is also evidence that hubris can increase a firm’s level of innovation. Similar to the entrepreneurial context, innovation is an inherently challenging process that entails tremendous risk and uncertainty. Successful innovation typically requires that leaders demonstrate exceptional vision, along with ability to manage high levels of both complexity and uncertainty. A CEO’s subjective overconfidence in their own problem-solving capabilities, coupled with a strong sense that they have greater control over outcomes than is actually the case, can cause them to support innovation projects that others might deem unattractive or unattainable. Given this logic, it is not surprising that research exists that shows a positive relationship between CEO hubris and the degree of innovation at the firms they run.

Concluding Remarks There are a number of avenues leaders may pursue to address concerns that hubris will impair their decision-making and subsequent organizational performance. First, certain types of leadership approaches that emphasize humility, such as authentic leadership, appear well suited to combat the development of excessive hubris. In addition, with many cognitive biases the mere awareness of how the bias operates assists many decisionmakers to combat the negative influences the bias carries. Also, formal constraints on CEOs’ discretion and power, such as an active board of directors, can limit the negative effects of hubris. Finally, a balanced view indicates that moderate levels of hubris may prove beneficial in certain contexts where charismatic and visionary leadership is vital to any organizational success. Joseph McManus See also Bad Leadership; Bathsheba Syndrome; Big Five Personality Traits; Cognitive Biases; Destructive Leadership; Emotional Intelligence; Exceptionalism; Groupthink; Narcissistic Leadership

Change and Leadership

Further Readings Akstinaite, V., Robinson, G., & Sadler-Smith, E. (2020). Linguistic markers of CEO hubris. Journal of Business Ethics, 167, 687–705. doi:10.1007/s10551-01904183-y Hayward, M. L., & Hambrick, D. C. (1997). Explaining the premiums paid for large acquisitions: Evidence of CEO hubris. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, 103–127. doi:10.2307/2393810 Hayward, M. L., Shepherd, D. A., & Griffin, D. (2006). A hubris theory of entrepreneurship. Management Science, 52(2), 160–172. doi:10.1287/mnsc.1050.0483 Li, J., & Tang, Y. (2010). CEO hubris and firm risk taking in China: The moderating role of managerial discretion. Academy of Management Journal, 53(1), 45–68. doi:10.5465/amj.2010.48036912 McManus, J. (2018). Hubris and unethical decision making: The tragedy of the uncommon. Journal of Business Ethics, 149, 169–185. ˆ A. (2014). The Picone, P. M., Dagnino, G. B., & Mina, origin of failure: A multidisciplinary appraisal of the hubris hypothesis and proposed research agenda. Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(4), 447–468. doi:10.5465/amp.2012.0177 Roll, R. (1986). The hubris hypothesis of corporate takeovers. The Journal of Business, 59(2), 197–216. doi:10.1086/296325 Sadler-Smith, E., Akstinaite, V., Robinson, G., & Wray, T. (2017). Hubristic leadership: A review. Leadership, 13(5), 525–548. doi:10.1177/1742715016680666 Tang, Y., Li, J., & Yang, H. (2012). What I see, what I do: How executive hubris affects firm innovation. Journal of Management, 41(6), 1698–1723. doi:10.1177/ 0149206312441211

CHANGE

AND

LEADERSHIP

The maxim that change is the only constant in life is not attributed to a 21st-century business manager, consultant, or scholar, but instead to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who was active around 500 B.C.E. It is safe to say that no matter how prescient, he could not have foreseen how accurately his words would describe the lives of countless employees around the world more than 2,500 years later. Technology, demographics, a global economy, and more recently a pandemic

85

and the associated uncertainty and forces for change, now permeate the working lives of employees and employers. The implications can be profound, such as diminished competitiveness or even failure for organizations and entire industries, and obsolescing skills, periodic job loss, and alternative work arrangements for employees. The ubiquity and significance of change place a premium on understanding the role of leaders in change, as all stakeholders look to leaders to navigate the change-associated challenges to ensure both personal and organizational competitiveness, opportunities, and well-being.

Leadership and Leaders of Change Like scholars of leadership more generally, researchers focusing on change leadership have pursued many lines of inquiry, most of which fall into two broad perspectives—who leaders are (traits) and what leaders do (behaviors). Both categories describe leadership as purposefully influencing others toward a particular outcome, and in the context of organizational change, leaders influence others to change their attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors to align with and pursue change-related expectations and goals. From a leader trait perspective, effective leaders possess personality, demographics (e.g., age, seniority, and education), and other characteristics, some of them innate, such as values, emotions, intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability, that enable them to effectively persuade others to change. People who possess such traits are likely to be perceived as leaders and thus garner the trust and support of followers, which in turn makes them more effective when leading organizational change efforts. Traits, however, are just the beginning of our understanding of change leadership. Charismatic leadership is a particular leader characteristic that has received considerable attention in numerous domains (e.g., academia, politics, business). Charismatic leaders persuade others with a combination of individual traits as well as behaviors. Charisma is often associated with dominance, a desire to influence others, notable self-confidence, and a strong sense of personal values. These in turn often manifest in

86

Change and Leadership

various behaviors, such as role modeling, competence, clearly articulated if not also compelling goals, and high expectations for others. The combination of these characteristics and behaviors fosters followers’ trust in the leader, a sense of common mission or identity with the leader, affection, obedience, and their own increased confidence. All of these are done in ways that motivate others to follow the charismatic leader. Further, charismatic leaders persuade not only with their magnetic personalities but also often via compelling visions for change and notable determination with which they pursue it. Part of the effectiveness of these leaders is their attraction or interpersonal appeal, as people are drawn to who they are, what they do, and what they stand for, and they are thus inclined to follow. The most widely studied approach to leading change in the past several decades builds on charisma and is referred to as transformational leadership. Transformational leaders often use charisma in the form of idealized influence, which is conceived as an emotional component facilitating follower identification with the leader, the leader’s values, and the leader’s cause or vision in the context of organizational change. Transformational leaders also foster inspirational motivation and are characterized by communicating high expectations for followers and encouraging them to direct their motivation and commit themselves to the vision of organizational change espoused by the leader. Intellectual stimulation, another transformational behavior, occurs when a leader challenges existing assumptions and practices, along with inspiring followers to innovate and take risks. The final element associated with transformational leadership is referred to as individualized consideration. This aspect is the “personal touch” whereby leaders create supportive organizational climates and make individual followers feel valued. Such leaders may frame changes as opportunities for followers to grow and realize new opportunities and meet new challenges. It is worth noting that none of the perspectives described here were conceptualized with the intention of identifying what is means to be a leader of change. Instead, these existing approaches are drawn from the sphere of research on leadership more generally, and have simply been tested in the context of organizational change. This may be, in

part, why some experts argue that transformational leadership has been extended beyond its intended and defensible limits. However, the lack of explicit intention to change may not be problematic because, as with leaders in other contexts, leaders of change are more effective (i.e., able to influence others toward desired outcomes) when they foster trust and motivate individuals and groups. It thus is quite possible that existing trait and behavioral perspectives of leadership appropriately capture and predict common desirable outcomes of change at multiple levels. At the firm level, for instance, research has linked many leader traits and behaviors to numerous financial outcomes, such as profits, market share, sales growth, and competitiveness. Similarly, desirable relationships have been found between leadership and employee change-related reactions, notably employee attitudes, emotions, and withdrawal. Across these perspectives, leaders are the principal means by which followers makes sense of and understand the content, processes, and intended outcomes of changes.

Change Requires Leadership and Management Some argue that leaders are responsible for conceiving of changes, creating the grand plan and compelling vision, and then leave it to managers to successfully realize or implement those changes. This view is reflected in both research and practice. However, many practitioners of change realize that regardless of title or rank, responsibilities for effective change are not clearly demarcated and instead are blended; leaders manage, and managers lead change. While some scholars imply such views, others make them explicit. Leaders of change need to effectively communicate throughout the process, not simply articulating the vision for change, but also the goals, action plans, and progress. This includes an often-understudied element of leading change, which is evaluating change-related progress, outcomes, refinements, and reimplementation. It also is important to acknowledge that our understanding and application of change leadership does not transpire in a vacuum; instead, they evolve as an iterative exchange between scholars and practitioners. In fact, some of the most

Change and Leadership

influential practical approaches to change leadership have been generated by academics. Common to these approaches are models or protocols for describing, planning, and/or implementing change as stages, phases, or steps. One approach suggests there are eight critical and sequential stages or actions necessary for successful large-scale organizational change: • •

• • • • • •

establish a sense of urgency or need for change (reasons or motives to change); form a powerful guiding coalition (a group with an appropriate blend of knowledge and influence to marshal change efforts); create an effective vision for change (a destination followers find compelling); communicate the vision (far, wide, and often); empower others to act (assign responsibilities and remove obstacles); create short-term wins (reinforce progress and not just ultimate outcomes); consolidate successes (recognize and build on progress); and institutionalize new approaches (embed changes in the organization’s culture).

This approach views change as a process, one that takes considerable time—and that success is dependent on following the eight-stage sequence, not shortcuts. Other notable contributions to the understanding and practice of change leadership outline similar both similar and different behaviors. For instance, advocating change occurs when leaders describe, argue, or otherwise convince followers that change is necessary. Arguments for the utility of compelling visions for change are found throughout academic and practitioner literature. Such visions tend to be most effective at building commitment to change when they resonate with followers’ own values and needs. Encouraging and facilitating learning, problem-solving, and innovation are other leader behaviors that various experts argue are fundamental to effective change leadership.

The Path Forward Change leadership lacks a unifying theory and cannot be described by an agreed-upon set of traits

87

or behaviors. This reality persists, despite many decades of research, writing, consulting, and practice. Regardless, the importance of effectively leading organizational change not only remains but also has intensified as the dynamism and complexity of employees’ lives continues to increase. Although many experts have abandoned the quest for a single best leader trait or behavior, instead adopting a contingency approach to leadership which explains that the “best” or most appropriate form of leadership depends (i.e., is contingent) on an interplay of factors related to the leader, followers, and other contextual elements. One potential implication of this conclusion is that a gestalt or profile of leadership characteristics exists, and once identified it can be successfully applied to a wide array of organizational changes. Another potential implication, however, is that any given change requires a new or unique profile. The significance of the consequences of organizational change alone warrant the attention, skill, knowledge, and experience of motivated individuals and organizations. Mel Fugate See also Charismatic Theory; Contingency Theories; Trait Theories of Leadership, Transformational, and Transactional Leadership; Transformational and Visionary Leadership

Further Readings Battilana, J., Gilmartin, M., Sengul, M., Pache, A. C., & Alexander, J. A. (2010). Leadership competencies for implementing planned organizational change. Leadership Quarterly, 21(3), 422–438. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2010.03.007 Fugate, M. (2012). The impact of leadership, management, and HRM on employee reactions to organizational change. In J. Martocchio, A. Joshi, & H. Liao (Eds.), Research in personnel and human resources management (Vol. 31, pp. 177–208). Bingley: Emerald Group. Kotter, J. P. (1995). Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59–67. Oreg, S., & Berson, Y. (2019). Leaders’ impact on organizational change: Bridging theoretical and methodological chasms. Academy of Management Annals, 13(1), 272–307. doi:10.5465/annals.2016.0138

88

Charismatic Leadership

Yukl, G. (2012). Effective leadership behavior: What we know and what questions need more attention. Academy of Management Perspectives, 26(4), 66–85. doi:10.5465/amp.2012.0088

CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP Traditionally, the sociological literature has suggested that charisma is an elusive and undefinable phenomenon—an inexplicable celestial ability, a persuasive force—engendering excitement, hope, and commitment from followers to the leader’s call. The modern psychology literature, however, has unraveled this force: Charisma is the transmission of information in a stylized manner using verbal and nonverbal behavioral signals. Our current understanding is centered on charismatic leaders as individuals who are convinced about the collective importance of their values, are passionate and confident about the realization of an ambitious vision, and have well-honed rhetorical skills—both in terms of how they frame their vision or message but also of how they deliver this message to their audience. This entry offers an examination of the concept of charisma, particularly in relation to theories of leadership.

The Alchemy of Charisma At the beginning of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber argued that charisma was one of three possible sources of authority, along with traditional and rational-legal forms. In line with the sociohistorical context of his times, Weber argued that charismatic leaders emerge out of crisis situations to deliver followers from their plight. Weber argued that charisma is an innate gift—that is, something that cannot be learned—and suggested it would apply to extraordinary individuals that have god-like qualities. Weber also distinguished pure charisma, originating from a leader’s behaviors, from routinized charisma, originating from holding a formal or hereditary position. Thus, charisma for Weber is inherently unstable, inevitably fading as the crisis recedes; as a result, either the original success disappears or the charismatic

leader’s ideals become routinized in the bureaucracy. Weber’s ideas on charismatic leadership have had much influence on sociologists such as Amitai Etzioni, Robert C. Tucker, and Edward Shils. In the late 1970s, the study of charisma and charismatic leaders moved to the management and applied psychology literature following Robert House’s theory of charismatic leadership. His theory examined charisma from a psychological perspective and was central in rejuvenating leadership research which, at the time, was stuck with conflicting results emerging from behavioral and contingency theories of leadership (and with trait theories of leadership then being dormant). Drawing from rich and various examples of charismatic leaders, House’s model of charismatic leadership includes a mix of both leader traits (e.g., dominance, self-confidence, need for influence) and behaviors (e.g., articulating ideological goals and high expectations, showing selfconfidence). Although House never precisely defined charisma, he pioneered theorizing about the psychological effect of charismatic leaders. Some of his propositions regarding behaviors of charismatic leaders are still the basis of contemporary approaches on charismatic leadership. Following House’s insights, charismatic leadership unfortunately became conflated with the broader concept of transformational leadership introduced by Bernard M. Bass. Also, standard practice has been until recently that charisma be operationalized mainly via questionnaires (e.g., the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire). Relying on an endogenous and outcome-based measure (i.e., measuring outcomes, effects, or attributions associated with leaders) limits our ability to understand charismatic leadership as a leadership behavior and its causal impacts. Newer approaches are based on leaders’ behaviors, termed charismatic leadership tactics. Using a signaling approach, this stream has reinvigorated the study of charisma in its own right by focusing expressly on both manipulations and behavioral measures of what leaders do.

The Scientific Study of Charisma Following House’s work, another major development in the study of charismatic leaders came from

Charismatic Leadership

Boas Shamir, House, and Michael B. Arthur, who put forth a motivational theory articulating how charismatic leaders affect followers’ self-concept and identity. They argued that charismatic leaders trigger followers’ intrinsic motivation by tying the vision to the self-concept of followers. By intricately linking followers’ self-concept to the collective identity and to accomplishing the leader’s vision, charismatic leaders increase both followers’ collective identification and self-efficacy, ultimately leading to better group performance. Followers of charismatic leaders reify the collective mission via self-sacrificial behaviors when the collective identity is salient. Shamir and his colleagues later expanded on this idea, identifying rhetorical themes commonly associated with charismatic leaders (e.g., providing moral justification for actions, signaling emotions). Interestingly, charisma is conveyed not only through the leader’s substantive message but also through how this message is framed (including nonverbal behaviors) that communicate values, emotions, and symbols. For instance, charismatic leaders can use stories and anecdotes to arouse people interests and elicit an image-based picture of a situation. They also communicate their message by using metaphors and comparisons that provide a striking picture of the situation and appeal to the emotions of the audience. Charismatic leaders can use contrasts to highlight dichotomies (e.g., between the leader’s vision and the undesirable status quo), three-part lists that are easy to remember and create the feeling of a comprehensive argument, and rhetorical questions that make arguments more persuasive by creating intrigues and actively involving followers in the vision. These tactics help charismatic leaders frame realities in meaningful ways to followers. Nonverbal behaviors are also used by charismatic leaders. These behaviors include a dynamic body language (e.g., using of hands or gestures), communicating emotions through facial expressions (e.g., smile, fear, anger), making eye contact with the audience, and using an animated way of speaking (e.g., changes in volume, tone, or speed). John Antonakis, Marika Fenley, and Sue Liechti suggested twelve verbal and nonverbal behaviors (i.e., the so-called charismatic leadership tactics)

89

and presented evidence that these can be learned and lead to being perceived as more charismatic. Building on charismatic leadership tactics and early writings on charisma, Antonakis, Bastardoz, Jacquart, and Shamir (2016a, 2016b) defined charisma as “values-based, emotionally-laden, and symbolic leader signaling” (p. 304). This definition relies on signaling theory and allows studying charisma as a leader behavior, independent of its outcomes such as achieved influence or followers’ attributions. A signaling approach rests on the idea that in an information asymmetry environment, certain individuals use signals to convey information on an unobservable characteristic. For example, the leader’s intelligence can be one unobserved characteristic communicated in the charisma signal. The charisma signal may also impart information to followers regarding the leader’s commitment and dedication to lead the group based on certain shared goals, values, or emotions. To be reliable and useful, a signal must also be costly to produce for the signaler so that someone who does not possess the underlying characteristics could not produce the signal. Further research is needed to empirically test these propositions. Signaling charisma is not enough to ensure the charismatic effect occurs; all depends on whether the values, emotions, and symbolism used match with followers’ self-concept, social identity, or felt emotions. A leader may thus be perceived as charismatic by some followers, for instance those who share a similar set of emotions regarding the status quo and who consider the salient values to be important; but other individuals with different felt emotions or values may be unaffected and may consider the individual as noncharismatic (and even nonleaderlike). This idea follows common notations that charisma is in the eye of the beholder, who ultimately attribute charisma to leaders. Charisma as a signal is loaded with values and inherently ideological. The signal need not be morally good; individuals with crooked visions can be classified as charismatic. Historical examples of charismatic political leaders (e.g., Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin) suggest that charisma is not tied to a righteous vision. A charismatic leader’s

90

Charismatic Theory

vision, building on a certain group values and emotions, can cause great harm to out-group members and be morally or ethically wrong. What is a necessary precondition for charismatic leadership is a value-laden vision; that it may be morally reprehensible is not relevant from a scientific point of view. Normative viewpoints are the province of philosophers; scientists, however, study how the world works. Charisma, like chemistry, should be studied independent of its moral overtones; how charisma or chemistry are used by humans is another matter.

Future Directions The socioscientific study of charismatic leadership is almost a century old, but much remains unknown. Recent research led by John Antonakis, George Banks, Nicolas Bastardoz, or Nicoleta Meslec shows the utility of the signaling approach across many contexts. However, we need to better understand the psychological processes explaining charisma and we need better designs to understand these causal effects and underlying mechanisms. Furthermore, the study of charismatic rhetoric and behaviors has by and large been limited to highly ranked leaders such as CEOs or heads of states. However, because of the distance to their followers, these leaders can more easily present embellished image of themselves. Close leaders (e.g., managers or individuals in functional groups without formal leaders) are arguably less able to do so. A better understanding of how charisma plays out with these close leaders is needed. Scholars need also to better understand the role of context in the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leaders, as well as individual differences predicting the use of the charisma signal. In addition, although many empirical studies have investigated crisis situations, only recently have the proper causal models been used to identify the effect of crisis on how charisma emerges in situ. Nicolas Bastardoz, Philippe Jacquart, and John Antonakis See also Charismatic Theory; Followership; Heroic Leadership; Implicit Leadership Theories; Rhetoric and Persuasion; Toxic Leadership

Further Readings Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma; an ill-defined and ill-managed gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3(1), 293–319. Antonakis, J., D’Adda, G., Weber, R. A., & Zehender, C. (2021). Just words? Just speeches? On the economic value of charismatic leadership. Management Science. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2021.4219 Banks, G. C., Engemann, K. N., Williams, C. E., Gooty, J., McCauley, K. D., & Medaugh, M. R. (2017). A meta-analytic review and future research agenda of charismatic leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(4), 508–529. Bastardoz, N. (2020). Signaling charisma. In J. P. Zuquete (Ed.), Routledge international handbook of charisma (pp. 313–323). London: Routledge. Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Antonakis, J. (2022). Effect of crises on charisma signaling: A regression discontinuity design approach. The Leadership Quarterly. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2021.101590 House, R. J. (1977). A 1976 theory of charismatic leadership. In J. G. Hunt & L. L. Larson (Eds)., Leadership: The cutting edge (pp. 189–207). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Jacquart, P., & Antonakis, J. (2015). When does charisma matter for top-level leaders? Effect of institutional ambiguity. Academy of Management Journal, 58, 1051–1074. Meslec, N., Curseu, P. L., Fodor, O. C., & Kenda, R. (2020). Effects of charismatic leadership and rewards on individual performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 101423. doi:10.1016/leaqua.2020.101423 Shamir, B., House, R. J., & Arthur, M. B. (1993a). The motivational effects of charismatic leadership: A self-concept base theory. Organizational Science, 4(4), 577–594.

CHARISMATIC THEORY Some of the most exemplary and influential leaders throughout history have been described as charismatic leaders. While popular accounts often ascribe a mythical quality to their charisma, research has identified numerous attributes and dynamics that lead to the perceptions of a leader as

Charismatic Theory

charismatic. At its core, this form of leadership is an emotionally laden attribution based on followers’ perceptions and interpretations of their leader’s behavior and mission. The intensity of the leader– follower relationship is remarkable. It can result in deep adulation and unquestioned acceptance of the leader, their mission, and the demands placed upon followers. These leaders are commonly champions of significant social, political, religious, and cult movements. They are also associated with entrepreneurship and the reinvention of bureaucratic organizations. The essential elements of charismatic leadership include inspirational communications and missions, appeals to values, symbolic signaling, and unconventional behaviors and tactics. Charismatic leadership, however, is not to be confused with popular culture’s use of the term charisma as a word to describe an individual’s charm or appealing personality. This entry begins with a review of the early studies of charismatic leadership and the subsequent theoretical frameworks that were developed. The entry then examines the three steps of the stage model approach to understanding charismatic leadership. The entry concludes with a look at some of the detriments of charismatic leadership.

Origins of Charismatic Leadership as a Construct In the context of secular leadership, the study of charismatic leadership began when German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) borrowed the term “charisma” from its original theological meaning. In the Christian New Testament, it meant a “gift of grace” from God. Weber secularized and operationalized the term as a sociological concept in his typology of the three forms of societal authority: (1) the traditional, (2) the rational-legal, and (3) the charismatic. For Weber, the power of traditional authority was rooted in the traditions or long-standing practices and customs of a society. Individuals are able to yield power because of their claim to a bloodline as in the case of a king or queen, or by their divine designation as with a pope. In contrast, rational-legal authority derives its power from laws and regulations. It is based on beliefs in the legitimacy of a society’s legal and regulatory

91

systems and the rights of appointed leaders to act on their behalf. Charismatic authority, however, is derived from the character of an individual rather than in traditions or laws. The charismatic leader is seen as a “super human.” The extraordinary powers of the leader make them worthy of being followed. Weber was not the first scholar to deploy the term “charisma” in the context of leadership. Rudolph Sohm used it to explain why Jesus’s disciples sacrificed their personal ambitions and families to follow him. It was Jesus’s God-given gift of grace—his charisma—that led the disciples to see him as the Messiah. Theologians at the end of the 19th century used the term more broadly to describe the powers bestowed by God upon the early leaders of the Christian Church such as the gifts of prophecy and healing. The actual word charisma is derived from the root charis—a classical Greek term with multiple meanings—gratitude, charm, excitement, beauty, pleasure, and allurement. Although charisma was not originally used by the ancient Greeks to describe a type of leadership, Aristotle did describe how leaders could persuade their followers by demonstrating character, defending values, stoking follower emotions, and using strongly reasoned argumentation (the ethos, logos, and pathos). His insights have influenced modern conceptions of charismatic leadership.

Early Theoretical Frameworks of Charismatic Leadership Following Weber’s groundwork, early constructs of charismatic leadership described the phenomenon as a complex interaction between the behaviors of the charismatic leader, the psychological characteristics of the followers, and certain situational dynamics. In terms of leader behaviors, it was theorized that charismatic leaders displayed a high degree of self-confidence, dominance, and moral conviction—qualities that made them highly attractive to followers. They engaged in hard work and self-sacrifice to model the very qualities they would demand from their followers. By investing in image building and self-promotion, charismatic leaders appeared even more powerful and competent to followers. By proactively challenging the

92

Charismatic Theory

status quo of their societies or fields, charismatic leaders were perceived by followers to be courageous and heroic. These qualities reinforced their attractiveness as role models and encouraged followers to willingly emulate them and to commit to achieving the consistently demanding goals set by the leader. This emphasis on the leader’s behaviors and a complex set of interactions with followers serve as the foundational framing for the research and theory we know today. There was a theoretical framework from the political science field that influenced these scholarly formulations of charismatic leadership. In his book Leadership published in 1978, James McGregor Burns concluded that leaders could be separated in two types: the transformational and the transactional. Burns argued that it was in the nature of what was exchanged between the leader and their followers that determined whether a leader was transformational or transactional. For example, the former offered a transcendent purpose and vision as their mission—one that addressed the higher order needs of followers. In the process of achieving this mission, both the leader and the led were actualized as individuals. Charismatic leaders were clearly of the transformational type. In contrast, transactional leadership was based on a more instrumental relationship with followers. Typical exchanges would be jobs for votes or compensation for work. A higher or moral purpose was missing in the nature of these transactions. In summary, research and theory building in the late 20th century moved our understanding of charismatic leadership from a focus on the extraordinary attributes of the leader to the relationship dynamics between the leader and their followers. This would lead the next generation of researchers to examine more precisely the mechanics of the influence process under charismatic leadership and how these leaders aligned the actions of their followers to achieve their visions. Scholarship moved from nascent theory building to theory testing with the introduction of large-scale surveys and quantitative methodologies. Research also delved into the liabilities associated with charismatic leaders. That being said, scholars in psychology and political science some five to six decades prior had explored the

psychopathology of the fascist charismatic leaders Hitler and Mussolini. Finally, our understanding of the contexts that favored charismatic leadership expanded. Weber had proposed that this form of leadership arose primarily in contexts of crisis. Organizational theorists, however, theorized that charismatic leaders were just as likely to be found in environments where creativity and imagination flourished. Many were entrepreneurs such as Steven Jobs, the founder of Apple. Their comfort with a lack of structure and high degrees of ambiguity made them masterful agents of innovation and entrepreneurship. They could also be found in environments where the malaise of slow-moving bureaucracies demanded reinvention and new strategic directions to address critical shifts in the external environment. While not yet in a stage of crisis, charismatic organizations could preempt such outcomes with charismatic leadership who internally championed preemptory transformations.

Charismatic Leadership as a Dynamic Stage Model To understand the complexity of charismatic leadership, most theorists adopt a stage model approach to the phenomenon. Think of leadership in general as a process that involves moving followers from a present state toward a future state. In the initial stage, there is an assessment process. The leader critically evaluates the existing situation to identify future goals to address challenges and opportunities. He or she also assesses what necessary resources are available and what constraints stand in the way of realizing future goals. They simultaneously identify the inclinations, abilities, needs, and level of satisfaction of their followers. This evaluation phase is followed by a second stage: the actual formulation, articulation, and communication of strategic and tactical goals. This phase often involves feedback and consensus building with followers to gain agreement on the appropriate goals and tactics. Finally, in stage three, the leader demonstrates how future goals can be achieved by followers. They outline the priorities, milestones, resources, organizational structures and processes, and norms of behavior

Charismatic Theory

that are required. Again, these are often established with the participation and contributions of the followers. It is along these three stages that we can identify the behavioral dimensions unique to charismatic leaders. It is important to note that the stages rarely if ever flow in such linear fashion. Leaders and followers are constantly revising existing goals and tactics in response to unexpected opportunities or challenges. As such, it is a more dynamic process with leaders and their followers moving back and forth across the stages. Stage One: The Charismatic Leader’s Search for Opportunities

In contrast to other forms of leadership, charismatic leaders are distinguished by their critical stance toward the status quo whether within their own organizations or their societies. For this reason, they are always seen as agents of transformational change or as entrepreneurs. They can be distinguished from noncharismatic leaders by a heightened sensitivity or ability to recognize important shortcomings in the present context. They advocate addressing these through radical change rather than more incremental or traditional solutions. For example, the failure of a firm to exploit new technologies or new markets would be highlighted as a strategic opportunity. Likewise, a charismatic entrepreneur might readily perceive marketplace needs that are unfulfilled and transform these into opportunities for new products or services. Internal organizational shortcomings or bureaucratic malaise are common platforms for these leaders to advocate transformational change. A charismatic political leader will champion a new socioeconomic order to address pressing moral or social or economic ills. A charismatic religious leader will advocate new pathways or practices or interpretations of God to appeal to their followers’ aspirations to attain spiritual goals. Any context that triggers a need for a major change or one that presents unexploited opportunities is therefore relevant for the emergence of a charismatic leader. In some situations, contextual factors so overwhelmingly favor transformation that a leader can take immediate advantage of them. During periods of relative tranquility, charismatic leaders, however, can play a major

93

role in fostering the need for change by actually creating the shortcomings or by exaggerating existing ones to the point that the organization or society feels the need to address them. Because of this emphasis on deficiencies in the system and high levels of sensitivity and intolerance for them, charismatic leaders are always seen as reformers or entrepreneurs. Stage Two: Formulating and Articulating the Future Vision

Charismatic leaders can be distinguished from other types of leaders by the nature of their goals and the manner in which they articulate them. Their goals are always described as visionary. Here the term visionary refers to some idealized goal that the leader wants their organization or society to achieve. The more idealized or utopian the future goal advocated by the leader, the more discrepant it becomes in relation to the status quo. The greater the discrepancy of the goal from the status quo, the more likely will be the followers’ belief that the charismatic leader has extraordinary vision and not just ordinary goals. By presenting a very discrepant and idealized goal to followers, the leader also provides a sense of challenge and a motivating force to embrace change. The goals are formulated so as to be highly meaningful and inspirational to followers. At the same time, the leader is articulating the vision and tactical goals in ways that are persuasive, encouraging followers to move beyond the status quo with a sense of urgency. The manner in which the vision is articulated is another differentiating dimension. Under charismatic leadership, theory suggests that the leader articulates four scenarios for their followers: (1) the nature of the status quo and why it has critical shortcomings, (2) a portrait of the future vision or idealized future state, (3) how the future vision, when realized, will address the deficiencies of the status quo while simultaneously fulfilling the hopes of followers, and (4) the leader’s plan of action for realizing the vision. The charismatic leader’s verbal messages construct reality so that only the negative features of the status quo are emphasized. The vision is presented in clear, specific terms as the most attractive and attainable

94

Charismatic Theory

alternative to the status quo. In the scenarios that are described, the leader attempts to create disenchantment or discontent with the status quo, a strong identification with future goals, and a compelling desire among followers to be led in the direction of the vision despite obstacles. The charismatic leader may also offer ideological explanations for action that emphasize the necessity of the collective force of followers as well as draw upon ideals and values of importance to followers. Simultaneously, charismatic leaders are articulating their own motivation to lead their followers. Using expressive modes of action, both verbal and nonverbal, they manifest their convictions, selfconfidence, and dedication to materialize the vision and goals for which they are advocating. Their rhetoric, energy, persistence, unconventional and risky behavior, heroic deeds, and personal sacrifices all serve to attest to their high motivation and enthusiasm, which, in turn, become contagious among their followers. The final articulation dimension is the expression of the leader’s confidence that followers are capable of achieving the strategic vision. While acknowledging the challenges that followers will face in their quest to attain the visionary goals, the charismatic leader emphasizes a direct relationship between their sustained efforts and the realization of the meaningful values and outcomes associated with the vision. Followers’ efforts are further imbued with a sense of moral correctness. This increases their conviction, sense of resolve, confidence, and self-efficacy. The leader also emphasizes the importance of collective efforts. It is through their collective efforts and focus that the followers possess the skills and resources needed to successfully tackle the obstacles that will be encountered on the road to achieving the vision. Stage Three: Achieving the Future Vision

In the final stage of the charismatic leadership process, the leader builds trust in their own abilities and demonstrates the tactics and behaviors required to achieve organizational goals. Trust is built through the charismatic leader’s actions of personal example, risk-taking, and unconventional expertise. Generally, leaders are perceived as

trustworthy when they advocate their position in a disinterested manner and demonstrate a concern for followers’ needs rather than their own self-interest. To be perceived as charismatic, leaders make these qualities appear to be extraordinary. They engage in exemplary acts that are perceived by followers as involving heroism, great personal risk, cost, and energy. The higher the personal cost or sacrifice they make for the vision, the greater the perceived trustworthiness of the charismatic leader. The more these leaders are able to demonstrate that they are indefatigable workers prepared to take on high personal risks or incur high costs to achieve their shared vision, the more worthy they become of complete trust. To be credible champions, charismatic leaders must be seen as knowledgeable and as experts in their areas of influence. They use their expertise to demonstrate the inadequacy of existing rules, standards, and regulations associated with the status quo. A degree of demonstrated expertise, such as reflected in successes in the past, may be a necessary condition even for the attribution of charisma. In addition, they need to demonstrate an expertise in devising effective but unconventional strategies and plans of action. Their uncommon behavior, when successful, evokes in followers emotional responses of surprise and admiration and further reinforces perceptions of their charisma.

Liabilities of Charismatic Leadership Research has documented a range of liabilities associated with charismatic leadership. For example, charismatic leaders are prone to extreme narcissism that leads them to promote highly self-serving and grandiose aims. As a result, the leader’s behavior can become exaggerated, lose touch with reality, and their followership can become vehicles for pure personal gain. They are also associated with certain skill deficiencies. They are far more adept at championing change and transformation than at effective management. They may invest little of their attention to establishing effective structures, control systems, and performance standards. As such, they need to be complemented by individuals who possess strong administrative skills. By nature, charismatic

CIP Model of Leadership

leaders are also pacesetters, so they can overwhelm their organization with too many initiatives or unrealistic and rapidly escalating aspirations. It has been postulated that the positive and negative forms of charismatic leadership can be distinguished by socialized versus personalized forms. The theory holds that while socialized charismatic leaders have a high need for power, it is counterbalanced with high activity inhibition, low authoritarianism, an internal locus of control, high self-esteem, and low Machiavellianism. These characteristics balance the socialized charismatic leader such that they emphasize the collective interests of followers, approach motivation through empowerment, govern in more equalitarian ways, and strive to continually address followers’ needs. In contrast, the personalized charismatic leader has a high need for power that is coupled with low activity inhibition, high authoritarianism, an external locus of control, low self-esteem, very high narcissism, and high Machiavellianism. These characteristics promote a leadership style that fosters dependence and unquestioning obedience over independent thinking. Personalized leaders govern in a totalitarian manner, disregard legitimate institutional channels, and advocate goals that ultimately are highly self-serving.

95

organizational settings. Academy of Management Review, 12, 637–647. doi:10.5465/amr.1987.4306715 Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1998). Charismatic leadership in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Retrieved from https://www.sageapps.com/srt House, R. (1977). A 1976 theory of charismatic leadership. In J. G. Hunt & L. L. Larson (Eds.), Leadership: The cutting edge (pp. 189–207). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Howell, J. M. (1988). Two faces of charisma: Socialized and personalized leadership in organizations. In J. A. Conger & R. N. Kanungo (Eds.), Charismatic leadership: The elusive factor in organizational effectiveness, (pp. 213–236). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Shamir, B., House, R., & House, R. J. (1993b). The motivational effects of charismatic leadership: A self-concept based theory. Organizational Science, 4(4), 577–594. doi:10.1287/orsc.4.4.577 Shamir, B., & Howell, J. M. (1999). Organizational and contextual influences on the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Leadership Quarterly. 10, 257–283. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(99) 00014-4 Zuquete, J. P. (Ed.). (2021). Routledge international handbook of charisma. London: Routledge. Retrieved from https://routledge.com. doi:10.4324/97804292 63224

Jay A. Conger See also Empowerment; Followership; Heroic Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships

Further Readings Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016b). Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology, 3, 293–319. doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-041015062305 Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Conger, J. A., Kanungo, R. N., & Menon, S. T. (2000). Charismatic leadership and follower effects. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21, 747–767. doi:10.1002/ 1099-1379(200011)21:7,747::AID-JOB46.3.0.CO; 2-J Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1987) Towards a behavioral theory of charismatic leadership in

CIP MODEL

OF

LEADERSHIP

Many modern theories of leadership focus on identifying the best and most effective way to lead. The charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic (CIP) theory of leadership differs from many popular theories in that it proposes that there are multiple ways to lead effectively. Sometimes called the multiple pathway model of leading, the CIP theory is a style-based approach aimed at developing a perspective on leadership that emphasizes diversity in how leaders approach the task of influencing others to achieve aligned goals.

Sensemaking and Leadership For most of us, the world is best characterized as complex, dynamic, and continuously evolving. At

96

CIP Model of Leadership

times, this complexity can be overwhelming and produce a sense of unease and, in an extreme form, anxiety. To provide a break from this unease, we look for ways to make sense of our environment. Leaders are often the source of sensemaking in organizational contexts as they provide guidance on why the world is the way it is, and how it might be in the future. This process of sensemaking is a useful tool for leaders and is often a way that leaders gain influence over others. That is, leaders who can successfully provide structure and guidance to followers will find themselves with followers who are willing to listen and operate in a way guided by that leader. Mental Models

How a leader makes sense of the world is driven by what they see as the causes of events in the world. This view of the causes and origins of how the environment operates can be thought of as a leader’s mental model. More specifically, leaders have a view of how the world currently operates as well as how the world might be if their goals as leaders were enacted. In the early 2000s, Michael D. Mumford developed the framing of the CIP theory and proposed that leaders develop mental models derived from how a leader views the key causes shaping outcomes in the world. A leader’s descriptive mental models represent their view of why the world is the way that it is. To provide sensemaking to followers, however, leaders must provide an alternative to the current state of the world. Leaders must offer followers a way in which the world may be better, a crisis may be solved, or an advancement made. As such, prescriptive mental models are derived directly from reflections on descriptive mental models. More specifically, Mumford argued that prescriptive mental models, sometimes called a leader’s “vision,” is derived from the goals that are to be pursued by the organization, the causes that lead to the attainment of those goals, and finally alternative models that demonstrate deficiencies in the current approach or approaches. These factors, in combination, give rise to how a leader provides a way forward.

Origins of CIP Styles: Formation of Mental Models

How leaders see the world and offer that the world can be different can be tracked back to a range of factors such as their personalities, training, education, and other individual differences. In addition, a leader’s life experiences have a large influence on how the perceive complex circumstances. Known as the life narrative framework, these experiences form the tapestry of a leader’s worldview. Life experiences can vary in ways such as the number of changes we experience, the severity of experiences, or the outcomes of those experiences. Because each leader has a different set of life experiences, they will also form unique mental models and, when attempting to offer guidance and sensemaking to followers, will also vary in their approach to leading. Most importantly, however, is that none of these types of life experiences necessarily make a leader effective or ineffective. Rather, they simply shape the style or approach an individual takes to leading. This is the essence of the CIP theory of leadership: Leaders can differ in their approach to leading yet still arrive at the same, or similar, outcome.

The CIP Theory of Leadership The CIP theory can trace its roots back to early work by Max Weber, a German sociologist, historian, and theorist who proposed that there were three differing types of influence. These three types serve as the initial starting point for CIP theory, which proposes three pathways to leading others. The three pathways are the charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic. Leaders who utilize each of these styles, respectively, take a different approach to providing sensemaking to followers and attempting to gain influence through this process of sensemaking. Charismatic Pathway

Leaders who adopt a charismatic pathway develop a compelling, future-oriented vision. They offer a version of the future that is brighter and positive, focusing on a several key outcomes and place people as the center of that vision. They use

CIP Model of Leadership

positive emotions and offer a vision that is appealing to a large group of followers. Charismatic leaders emerge more often than ideological leaders, but less often than pragmatic leaders. Followers respond to charismatic leaders with substantial energy and enthusiasm given the positive and evocative appeal of this leadership style.

97

counterparts. Yet when they do gain influence, followers respond with greater efficiency and clarity, doing their jobs well and with purpose. Pragmatic leaders emerge most frequently and, among the three styles, the pragmatic is the most common pathway to leading. Mixed Pathway

Ideological Pathway

Leaders who utilize an ideological pathway focus on developing a vision that is grounded in a return to the past or a set of ideals that were elevated in an earlier era. These leaders often focus on negative events to gain influence and discuss the application of goals that are part of a larger movement. Ideological leaders focus on contextual factors as the key drivers of outcomes and use negative emotions, such as fear, to further gain sway over followers. Ideological leaders focus on a core group of followers when developing their vision and tend to emerge less frequently than charismatic and pragmatic leaders. When they do emerge, however, their influence is built around connection through core values results in a strong bond with followers. Followers will respond with a deference to authority and willingness to sacrifice for that leader and the broader beliefs the leader embodies. Pragmatic Pathway

Leaders who adopt a pragmatic pathway are focused on solving key problems in the present. They do offer a compelling version of the future, but that future is linked to solving problems in the here and now. They are malleable and will employ whatever approach is needed to solve the problem at hand. Pragmatic leaders utilize rationality to gain influence, convincing followers through reason and logic. Leaders who operate on the pragmatic path tend to focus their efforts on key individuals who are central to enacting their mission. They recognize that a select group of followers are needed to solve core problems, and they center their efforts on influencing these individuals. Pragmatic leaders often take a bit more time to gain influence, as they are not as immediately engaging as their charismatic and ideological

In more recent iterations of the CIP theory, researchers have begun to stress the utility of viewing leaders as a mix or blend of pathways. For some leaders, particularly at the upper levels of organizations, leaders may have crystallized leadership styles and utilize one primary approach. As the CIP theory expands to other levels of leadership, however, it is likely that leaders will have a primary style or approach but may also use a secondary pathway in some contexts or with differing followers. Research will continue to explore whether the CIP pathways are best depicted as categorical, with leaders utilizing one style, or as a blend, with leaders varying in how they utilize each of the three approaches to leading.

Research on CIP Theory To understand the research on CIP theory, it is important to also understand how CIP has been studied. This understanding is essential because CIP has been studied using methods that are not commonplace in the study of leadership. Early work on the CIP theory was grounded in a method called historiometric analysis. This research method is an approach whereby researchers examine curated, qualitative data such as academic biographies and content-analyze these sources. This typically results in quantitative data derived from extensive coding that is then assessed using more traditional statistical techniques. As a research method the approach is labor intensive but also allows for investigation of leader samples that are typically inaccessible by most leadership scholars. Several studies, for example, have used data derived from 120 historically notable leaders that included presidents, CEOs, and civil rights pioneers. Moreover, this approach permits the use of leaders from a diverse background, drawing from a range of cultures and regions of the globe. The reason for

98

CIP Model of Leadership

noting the origins of the CIP theory is to showcase that the novelty of the approach can be traced back, in part, to the novel methods applied. In addition to the historiometric approach, the CIP theory has also been studied using experimental methodology, allowing researchers to draw some degree of causal conclusion on key outcomes. Newer research is also beginning to investigate leaders in applied settings using more traditional survey-based methods as well, although this research has been limited. Across more than 15 years and 30 studies using a range of methods and techniques, several general themes have emerged. The first general theme is that the three leaders do, indeed, vary in their approach to sensemaking and mental model formation. Such findings are consistent across tests of cases, historiometric, and experimental studies. The second theme is that leaders have unique developmental and life experiences. Ideological leaders, for example, are more likely to have experienced severe life-anchoring events such as the loss of a parent or loved one. The third theme is that leaders across the three styles differ in their approach to solving problems. The fourth is that there are several cultural and demographic differences across the leader types. Although research is preliminary, there is evidence, for example, that women are more likely to fall into the pragmatic style than men, although the pragmatic approach is the most common for both men and women. Fifth, leaders across the three styles will vary in their influence mechanisms and attempts at influence. Sixth, CIP leaders also differ in their leader–follower interactions. There is some evidence, for example, that ideological leaders are perceived as more volatile than their pragmatic and charismatic counterparts. Finally, the three leader styles are uniquely impacted by context. Pragmatic leaders, for example, take time to develop a strong case for their leadership approach and may not excel on shorter term tasks as well as charismatic and ideological leaders who can form bonds more quickly with followers.

Limitations and Future of the CIP Theory Although the CIP theory has demonstrated usefulness as a model of leadership, there are several

limitations to the approach. The first is that although the theory has used novel approaches such as historiometric analysis, much of the work has focused on the extremes of upper-level leaders (e.g., CEOs) and student samples with relatively little work on more typical or mid-level leaders. As such, it is open to question how and to what extent existing research applies to those leaders operating at the mid-level. Along similar lines, there is only limited work understanding the CIP theory and diversity. There have been some initial efforts aimed at studying gender differences, yet no work to date on race, ethnicity, and other demographic differences. Finally, the CIP theory is novel in that it helps expand the view that leaders can vary in how they lead, and that each pathway is viable as a route to leader success. Despite this contribution, however, the theory is not prescriptive in providing leaders with guidance on how to be a more effective leader. Rather, it opens the possibility that more individuals can be effective. As such, more work remains on applying the theory in ways that helps support leaders in being more effective at managing others. Samuel T. Hunter Further Readings Crayne, M. P., & Medeiros, K. E. (2020). Making sense of crisis: Charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leadership in response to COVID-19. American Psychologist, 76 (3), 462–474. doi:10.1037/ amp0000715 Hunter, S. T., & Lovelace, J. B. (2020). Multiple pathways to outstanding leadership: Revisiting CIP theory. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/ 9781351017152 Hunter, S. T., Cushenbery, L., Thoroughgood, C. N., & Ligon, G. S. (2011). First and ten leadership: A historiometric investigation of the CIP leadership model. Leadership Quarterly, 22, 70–91. doi:10.1016/ j.leaqua.2010.12.008 Ligon, G. S., Harris, D. J., & Hunter, S. T. (2012). Quantifying leader lives: What historiometric approaches can tell us. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(6), 1104–1133. Ligon, G. S., Hunter, S. T., & Mumford, M. D. (2008). Development of outstanding leadership: A life narrative approach. Leadership Quarterly, 19(3), 312–334. doi: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2008.03.005

Civil Rights Movement Lovelace, J. B., Neely, B. H., Allen, J. B., & Hunter, S. T. (2019). Charismatic, ideological, & pragmatic (CIP) model of leadership: A critical review and agenda for future research. Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 96–110. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.08.001 Mumford, M. D. (2006). Pathways to outstanding leadership: A comparative analysis of charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Watts, L. L., Steele, L. M., & Mumford, M. D. (2019). Making sense of pragmatic and charismatic leadership stories: Effects on vision formation. Leadership Quarterly, 30(2), 243–259. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018. 09.003

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The Civil Rights Movement was comprised of a collective of individuals and organizations who exhibited leadership while fighting for equality for African Americans in the United States. The movement began in the 1940s and rose to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s. The goals of the movement stemmed from the refusal of African Americans to accept inferior treatment to White citizens, a practice that had been in place since the era of slavery. In the wake of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that abolished slavery, African Americans were recognized as citizens, but they did not have the same amounts of wealth, land, education, social capital, and political standing as Whites, making it difficult to thrive as a member of society. Moreover, strategic actions were taken by Whites who held political office to ensure that African Americans did not have the same level of access, treatment, and social and political rights as their White counterparts through the creation of racially biased policies. The movement was a means by which to gain equal rights and to move away from segregationist practices and toward social justice. This entry reviews the Jim Crow South, which set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement. The entry examines major events and people who affected the movement including Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

99

The Jim Crow South Just after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1862, states in the southern portion of the United States began enacting what were known as Jim Crow laws. These laws were meant to establish the false notion that White individuals were superior to Black individuals. This led to a segregated system where in everyday life Whites and Blacks were kept separate from one another. Additionally, Whites always received better, and preferential treatment. Blacks and Whites were not permitted to engage in public society in common ways. Throughout the South, it was commonplace to see signs indicating that items or services were for “Whites Only” or for “Coloreds Only” (the dated term used to refer to African American people). This cultural divide was solidified as standard practice by way of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. In this case, a Black man, Plessy, was arrested for riding in a Whites Only railway car. After his arrest, he filed a lawsuit claiming that this practice ran counter to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which provided equal protection under the law for everyone, regardless of race. The court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not pertain to racial restrictions mandated in everyday social life. The ruling also shared that although items and services for Whites and African Americans should be separate, they should also be equal. Despite this ruling, this was hardly ever the case, namely due to the white supremacist philosophy that undergirded the separate-but-equal mindset. During this time, many White individuals prejudged African Americans to be second-class citizens who did not deserve to enjoy the same privilege as Whites. The reason for this was because of the color of their skin. Due to this thinking, Blacks and Whites could not do things such as drink from the same water fountains, eat at the same tables in restaurants, and use the same public restrooms. If Whites and Blacks were using separate items to achieve the same goals, such as drinking from a water fountain, the fountains for Whites were usually pristine in appearance and in excellent working order. On the other hand, the ones for “coloreds” were usually old, decrepit, and may not work at all. If Whites and Blacks had to

100

Civil Rights Movement

use shared public spaces, for example in a restaurant, Blacks were always seated in the back and may or may not receive service. This ill treatment pervaded all aspects of life for Black individuals, including opportunities to vote. Many African Americans were eager to exercise their right to vote as a tool to support legislation and candidates that represented their best interests. African Americans received the right to vote over an extended period post the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote and 50 years later—in 1920—the 19th Amendment gave African American women the same right. Upon realizing the power that African Americans had in casting votes, many state and local governments controlled by Whites enacted methods to make it difficult or impossible for African Americans to vote. Tactics used included levying a poll tax, which is a sum of money that was to be collected before a person could vote. Often the tax was so exorbitant that African Americans could not afford it and therefore could not vote. Tactics also included literacy tests, which were oral or written tests on a subject of an official’s choice purposefully crafted to be very difficult. As a result, many African Americans failed this test and could not vote. There was also the establishment of primary elections in which only Whites could vote. This essentially left Blacks to vote for candidates in the general election who had weak or nonexistent platforms as it pertained to the advancement of the Black individual. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held voting rights drives, encouraged people to know their rights, and took legal action against offenders in court. But this was just the beginning, as African Americans had long been fed up with this and other systemic forms of oppression. Large-scale mobilization for social change was about to begin and it was catalyzed by a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

Brown v. the Board of Education and a Burgeoning Movement For many, the advent of the movement begins with the Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. In 1954, the court heard this case

that challenged the concept of separate but equal as it related to public schools. The suit was brought by Oliver Brown and tried by lawyers from the NAACP. Brown was the parent of an African American child who was denied admission to a White school in Topeka, Kansas. Brown argued that Black and White schools were separate but unequal. It was easy to see why this was the case. White students had access to modern school buildings and furniture, updated books, and low teacher-to-student ratios. On the other hand, the experiences of Black students were vastly different in that they had to make due in deteriorating conditions and with dated materials. The court sided with Brown and agreed that the process of having separate schools for Black and White students was unconstitutional and in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. One year later, the courts issued further instruction through Brown v. Board of Education II, directing all schools to bring together White students and Blacks students in the same schools through a process known as integration. In many places across the United States, the response to integration from Whites was not a positive one. In fact, in many places federal law enforcement had to escort African American students into schools to ensure that they could safely enter. While the process of equality had begun in public schools, settling for equality in this one area of life would not be good enough. What transpired next was a series of events that invoked civil disobedience as a means to produce change.

Rosa Parks Starts a Revolution In 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, was making her way home from work on a city bus. She selected a seat in the back of the bus in the colored section. It was customary at that time for African Americans to be asked to move for a White bus rider if the Whites Only section had become full. The sign indicating Whites Only was simply moved back to enlarge the section, and any seated Blacks were asked to move back or if the bus was full, to stand. Seeing that the Whites Only section had become full and that there were White passengers standing, the bus driver came to move the section sign and asked Parks and other Blacks

Civil Rights Movement

seated in the section to move. While the others did, Parks did not move, as she did not think that this was a fair practice. The police were called and she was arrested but promptly let out on bail. Parks and her husband were active members of the local NAACP chapter. She served as the chapter secretary. This simple act would pave the way for a campaign spearheaded by the NAACP and other civil rights nonprofit organizations that would begin the fight for equality within bussing, and lead to the rise of another civil rights icon. The Montgomery Bus Boycott

Local NAACP President E.D. Nixon and the President of the Women’s Political Council, Jo Anne Robinson, organized what was to be a one-day protest in support of Parks and against the system of segregated bussing. African Americans comprised the overwhelming majority of bus riders and on that day, they walked or took alternative forms of transportation in mass. The success of the boycott led to the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) that was led by a young, impassioned preacher of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church named Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The MIA decided that the boycott should continue indefinitely while lawsuits were filed in court challenging this discriminatory practice. The blowback from boycott by unhappy White individuals was violent. King had his home bombed and boycotters were often attacked or arrested while walking. The legal fight made it to the Supreme Court and on December 20, 1956, segregated bussing in Montgomery was declared to be in violation of the law. The next day the boycott ended, 381 days after it began. The boycott garnered national attention and empowered other African Americans across the nation to continue to fight for equal rights. It also emboldened White sympathizers to become more vocal and active. Because of his leadership during the boycott, King soon became one of the most well-known faces of the movement.

King and His Influence on the Movement Prior to the boycott, King was beginning to become a household name within the South due

101

to his family ties and personal accomplishments. He was the son of Martin Luther King, Sr., pastor of the well-known Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was well educated, having received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the prestigious Morehouse College, a Bachelor’s of Divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Boston University. He was a powerful orator and used his sermons to call for an end to segregation in a unique way. During the time of the boycott, there was a host of opinions about how African Americans should seek equality. Some thought that they should fight fire with fire and attack those who were trying to oppress them. But King professed a nonviolent approach, developed through his Christian beliefs and admiration for the work of Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi. After the success of the boycott, King worked with other civil rights activists including Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Joseph E. Lowery, and Fred Shuttleworth to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The purpose of the conference was to help coordinate the work of other organizations that were using nonviolent methods including marches, protests, sit-ins, strikes, and voter registrations across the South. One such organization that the SCLC often worked with was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SNCC was comprised of a group of student activists brought together by SCLC staff member Ella Baker. The members of the SNCC committed themselves to fighting for equality through nonviolent means alongside others. Prior to engaging in nonviolent actions, all who participated were trained on how to endure possible attacks, how to defend themselves to avoid injury as best they could, and how not to fight back. They were often physically attacked with weapons, fire hoses, and miscellaneous objects. Many were killed. They were also often jailed. King was not only a participant in these actions but he also traveled around the country speaking out about racial injustice and imploring others to join the fight. At the height of the movement, he worked with other civil rights organizations to cohost a national march for civil rights for the underrepresented.

102

Civil Rights Movement

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom The idea for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was initially thought up by A. Phillip Randolph, a leader in both the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Negro American Labor Council. He worked with King and the SCLC, SNCC, which was chaired by John Lewis, and a host of other civil rights groups including the NAACP, National Urban League, Congress of Racial Equality, and National Council of Negro Women; Catholic and Jewish groups; and labor organizations to sponsor the march. The purpose of the march was to garner support for jobs for the underrepresented, and support for Congress to pass a Civil Rights Act that was supported by then President John F. Kennedy. The program for the march was filled with speeches from members of the sponsoring groups and other civil rights activists such as Myrlie Evers as well as songs by Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson. What is perhaps most widely associated with this event is that it is the place where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in which he shared that although African Americans had been living as free citizens for about a century, they were negatively impacted by segregation and poverty. In his speech, he expressed confidence that America could change and take tangible action steps to end police brutality and ensure voting rights for all. He also shared his vision of what true racial unity in America could look like. His speech was heard live by the more than 250,000 attendees present, about a third of whom were White, and the countless viewers around the world. King would use this platform to continue meeting with President Kennedy to bring about equality. But not all leaders within the movement agreed that nonviolent tactics were the best means to achieve their goals.

Malcom X and His Influence on the Movement Malcolm X was a civil rights leader who was the antithesis of King in almost every way. King was a Christian and X was member of the Nation of Islam. King had no criminal record, whereas X

had served six years in jail for larceny. King believed in nonviolence and X believed in achieving racial equality through violence if necessary. King sought to involve people of all races in the fight for equality, whereas X was a Black nationalist, with a disdain for White people. X believed that if Black people wanted change they would have to force it to happen by themselves. Some of the few commonalities they had is that they were both ministers of their faiths who used their messages to their attendees to share their vision for racial equality. X vehemently and publicly disagreed with King’s methods, thus the two were never in the same social circles or speaking at the same events. They never viewed themselves as competing against one another, they just offered two different perspectives to their followers. Like King, X was known to draw large crowds, which led to the expansion of his movement. His doctrine also captured the attention of one individual who was affiliated with King. Under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, the SNCC decided to shed its commitment to nonviolence and move more in line with the views espoused by X. Black power became the organization’s rallying cry. Not everyone was happy about this new direction, including King. Philosophical tensions between members of the SNCC ultimately led to the disbanding of the organization. As for X, although he softened his position over the years, he stayed true to his ideals. X was ultimately assassinated while giving a lecture in New York on February 21, 1965.

The Movement After the March After the march, instances of racial hatred continued. One of the most egregious acts was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by the Ku Klux Klan, which resulted in the deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, referred to collectively as the Four Little Girls. Shortly thereafter, President Kennedy, a proponent of civil rights, was assassinated. As a means to bring the country together, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act banned discrimination on account of one’s

Climate Change and Leadership

race, sex, religion, or national origin. Still, not everyone was eager to embrace moving beyond segregation. In March of 1965 during the Selma to Montgomery March against police brutality, peaceful protesters were viciously beaten on television by the police while trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge. In response to this event, President Johnson implored Congress to pass voting reform legislation that came by way of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act outlawed literacy tests and provided additional means to ensure there was no racial discrimination through the voting process. Three years later, the Fair Housing Act was passed outlawing discrimination in housing. It was also in this year that King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, hours after giving a speech in anticipation of participating in a strike. Many would argue that these two events brought the movement to an end. Indeed, the Civil Rights Movement was responsible for ushering in a new chapter in racial equality. Shavonne R. Shorter See also Big Six of Civil Rights Movement; Community Leadership; Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Race and Ethnicity; Racism in the United States; Social Justice

Further Readings Brown v. Board of Education (1954). (n.d.). Thirteen: Media with impact. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/ landmark_brown.html Carson, C. (2001). The autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, NY: IPM Intellectual Properties Management: in association with Grand Central Publishing. Civil Rights Movement. (2021, January 29). History channel. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www. history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement “I Have a Dream” speech in its entirety. (2010, January 18). NPR. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www. npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dreamspeech-in-its-entirety Jim Crow laws. (n.d.). PBS. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/ features/freedom-riders-jim-crow-laws/

103

Lewis, J., & D’Orso, M. (2015). Walking with the wind: A memoir of the movement. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. March on Washington for jobs and freedom. (n.d.). National Park Service. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www.nps.gov/articles/march-on-washington.htm Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). (n.d.). Thirteen: Media with impact. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www. thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/antebellum/landmark_ plessy.html Risen, C. (2014). The bill of the century: The epic battle for the Civil Rights Act. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Rosa Parks. (2021, January 5). Biography. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www.biography.com/activist/ rosa-parks Malcolm, X., & Haley, A. (1965). The autobiography of Malcolm X. New York, NY: Grove Press. Zinn, H. (2013). SNCC: The new abolitionists. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

CLIMATE CHANGE

AND

LEADERSHIP

Climate change is the process of weather changing over decades, from both natural and human causes. Human-caused climate change has been recognized for decades, yet concerted world leadership has been lacking for stopping it and tackling its impacts. The choices for the most well-known leadership approaches taken in response to climate change might explain the lack of success. This entry first presents the factors underlying climate change and its effects, then describes the chief international organizations seeking to address the problem of climate change, and discusses the key reports, protocols, and treaties they have issued and their reception. An examination of youth leadership on climate changes follows, and the entry concludes with a discussion of various efforts directed toward climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation, and the role of leadership in these movements.

Climate Change Climate is defined as average weather, so climate change is average weather changing. Typical weather

104

Climate Change and Leadership

characteristics such as air temperature, rainfall amount, and wind speed are measured and averaged over decades to describe climate and to indicate how the world’s climate is changing. The climate changes naturally in many ways, from volcanic eruptions leading to short-term cooling, to orbital cycles moving the planet into and out of ice ages over millennia, to the continents gradually drifting over the course of eons, which affects ocean and air patterns. The industrial revolution, starting in the 18th century, led to large-scale human influence on the global climate, especially as coal and then oil and gas were consumed. Burning fossil fuels release gases into the atmosphere, which trap the sun’s heat, thereby warming the planet. They are referred to as greenhouse gases, with water vapor being mainly naturally present while human activity has substantially increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and many gases. At the same time, the ecosystems absorbing these gases from the atmosphere, such as forests and wetlands, have been destroyed by human activity, reducing greenhouse gas uptake. As the planet warms, the weather patterns change, which leads to climate change. Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones are expected to become stronger, but fewer in number. Rainfall patterns are shifting, so floods and droughts now have different frequencies and intensities than people have been used to historically, over centuries. The most dangerous weather from humancaused climate change is heat/humidity combinations. These are now becoming regimes that are lethal for humans without artificial cooling, meaning that agricultural work will be impeded, thus interrupting food supplies. Heat will make large swaths of land uninhabitable, leading to rising numbers of deaths and to mass migrations. Meanwhile, the oceans absorb some of this heat along with freshwater from snow and ice melt, both of which lead to the seas rising globally. Sea-level rise could become especially catastrophic if the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica continue to melt at an accelerating rate, leading to coastal inundation and saltwater intrusion on a massive scale over the next few centuries. From the atmosphere the oceans also absorb some carbon dioxide, which combines with water to form

carbonic acid. This ocean acidification, if it continues unchecked, could disrupt ecosystems and shorelines, exacerbating difficulties with food supplies, freshwater access, and coastal flooding. According to environmental scientists, the main way to redress all these difficulties is by climate change mitigation, arresting human-caused climate change through reducing fossil fuel use and restoring ecosystems that take up greenhouse gases. Schemes are also being considered for the use of technologies to selectively suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them, or to artificially cool the planet, but none of these so far have proved to be viable. Consequently, we must deal with climate change’s impacts by adjusting ourselves, our infrastructure, and our livelihoods to the rapidly changing climate. This process is called climate change adaptation, referring to reducing the harm while taking advantage of the benefits from human-caused climate change’s impacts. Examples are taking infrastructure out of expanding floodplains or building it to withstand floods; managing water supplies to deal with floods and droughts; and ensuring that people, infrastructure, and livelihoods are not harmed by the changing weather and environment. Changing environments—such as altered patterns of storms, floods, and droughts—are not specific to climate change. People need to deal with them anyway, so reducing risks from changing weather should be built into our society. Too often, however, it is not, which is why many disasters happen. Human-caused climate change brings little new in this regard. The primary new, near-term challenge with adjusting to human-caused climate change is the heat/humidity combinations, from which the main escape is to relocate. This is also the case with sea-level rise over the long term, if the big ice sheets do disappear. Coastlines, including several coastal megacities from London to Jakarta, will need to be realigned. These endeavors are significant, affecting hundreds of millions of people. Therefore, they require that long-term planning begin without delay. To succeed, leadership is essential, but not of the various forms of leadership which have directed climate change policies and actions thus far.

Climate Change and Leadership

Consensus as Leadership The dominant international organizations for addressing climate change have led mainly through consensus processes. There are two, both of them United Nations (UN) bodies. The synthesis and assessment of climate change science is being completed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It published its first assessment report in 1990, with the sixth one published in 2021–2022. Special reports on specific topics, such as land use, are released between the assessment reports. The IPCC considers all forms of climate change, both natural and human caused. IPCC reports seek consensus from the hundreds of scientists involved in order to summarize what it known about the science and to discuss the scientists’ confidence in the conclusions. Governments who are IPCC members review, and their representatives sign, the reports, again seeking consensus. The IPCC reports, as scientist- and country-approved consensus documents, provide a statement on what current science agrees about climate change. They have not yet convinced many large emitters—such as China, India, Russia, and the United States—to change policy enough to curtail human-caused climate change, even when those countries accept the reports. The other UN body dealing with climate change was founded in 1992 as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), now referred to as UN Climate Change. It supports the global governmental response to human-caused climate change, focusing on international legally binding mechanisms to tackle human-caused climate change and address its impacts. Two notable agreements from the UNFCCC process were the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015. As of 2022, neither is seen as successful. Most emissions reductions during the Kyoto Protocol’s period happened for reasons other than nations adhering to the agreement, such as the worldwide economic woes, or by shifting emissions-producing activities to countries without Kyoto commitments. Emissions from shipping and aviation were not included in the Kyoto Protocol.

105

The Paris Agreement’s targets for country-level emissions reductions are voluntary, with progress effectively being self-reported. These voluntary commitments in total are insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement’s own target for limiting the rise in the global average temperature from humancaused climate change. Changes in emissions so far are attributed mainly to factors such as economics and the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than to countries making a serious effort to meet the Paris Agreement’s targets. With consensus leadership on climate change being enacted for both science and policy, yet each taking a long time for limited results, this approach has not been as effective as was hoped in setting up the two bodies.

Youth as Leadership One group has gone beyond consensus leadership, instead pushing for action on climate change less formally: namely, people born after the UNFCCC and IPCC were founded. Youth from every inhabited continent have emerged, calling on governmental, corporate, and nonprofit leaders to tackle human-caused climate change and its impacts. An example comes from the loose network Fridays for Future, which started in Sweden in August 2018 through a school strike in order to protest at the Swedish Parliament instead of attending classes. Many other groups—such as the Green Generation Initiative, founded in Kenya in 2016, and Earth Uprising, which states it “isn’t an organization. It’s a battle cry”—are part of the youth movement. They do not pretend to have all the answers, but demand that the “experts” in the formal processes enact the available solutions. One mantra from the youth repeated in different forms is, “You have been negotiating all my life. Get it done!” This style of informal, collective leadership, as with all leadership forms, has advantages and disadvantages. It has proven effective through internet campaigns in getting publicity for and awareness of a specific topic or task. Effectiveness remains an open question. In fact, climate change youth movements for galvanizing action have attracted their share of

106

Climate Change and Leadership

criticism. From petty, political abuse to legitimate concerns about their misrepresentation of some of the science, the movement’s leaders sometimes attract more attention than dealing with climate change—thus inadvertently enabling their opponents to distract from human-caused climate change itself. One advantage of the youth leadership seen for climate change is that, even if one person involved might be discredited (or, more likely, appear to be discredited), the movement remains afloat. Dispersed, collective leadership means that problems with a prominent leader do not necessarily undermine the core message. In contrast, when the chair of the IPCC was forced to resign in 2015 over sexual harassment allegations, it tarnished the entire organization and its processes, especially given that his leadership style was strongly based on representing the organization through his personality. Similarly, the youth movements have drawn on, yet have had far wider and deeper reach than, earlier individualfocused organizations, such as 350.org, based around a single individual. The youth leadership approach has inspired a generation. From tattoos of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the year someone was born, to Friday events on climate change education as part of school strikes, climate change leadership (even as memes) is being demonstrated. An absence remains, however, of substantive, concerted, international action on climate change.

Silos as Leadership Another notable aspect of climate change leadership has been the manufacturing of a silo for the topic, mainly by scientists focusing on climate change only, without wider perspectives. This siloing has strongly influenced policy and practice on climate change, making it a leading topic and appearing to have leadership, irrespective of the detriments. Considering actions for tackling human-caused climate change (climate change mitigation), pollution prevention was prominent in environmental movements and legislation for decades before climate change became a prominent topic in

the public conversation. World-leading examples included banning the pesticide DDT (such as in 1972 in the United States); a worldwide treaty to stop the use of substances depleting the stratospheric ozone layer (in 1987); and efforts to reduce emissions leading to acid rain (especially starting in the 1980s). When scientists demonstrated the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing uptake, many previous understandings of pollution prevention were bypassed. Climate change mitigation started almost anew. Similar attitudes were seen with actions to reduce climate change’s detrimental impacts and take advantage of benefits (climate change adaptation). Proposals tend to focus on only the influences from climate change with, less frequent connection to other environmental changes, such as earthquakes, land subsidence and heave, ocean wave and current induced coastal dynamics, and El Niño/La Niña. The field of living with the environment, to avoid disasters irrespective of environmental changes, is called disaster risk reduction. Like pollution prevention, disaster risk reduction long predates human-caused climate change as a major topic and covers all actions suggested for adaptation. Like pollution prevention, climate change leadership has focused on reinventing what is known already by rarely accounting for the extensive knowledge and experience within disaster risk reduction. Connections among environmental changes are important. For instance, the building code for the area around Kobe, Japan, used to focus on typhoons rather than earthquakes. Heavy roofs designed to stay on during high winds were one factor in exacerbated damage during the 1995 earthquake in this area. Similarly, when the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015, they certainly had to incorporate climate change. Rather than integrating climate change across the goals—as was done with pollution prevention and disaster risk reduction—a separate goal was created for climate change, explicitly assigning leadership to UNFCCC. This decision separated and isolated climate change, rather than connecting across the goals to help them support each other. Improvements in climate change leadership would be ending the separation among topics,

Coalitions

instead enfolding climate change within broader endeavors which have so much to offer. It is hard to succeed by creating difficulties, which might explain why climate change leadership has not led to successful action at the needed pace. Leadership does not need to be about staying on top, being first, or dominating. Leadership can be bringing together people and ideas, generating strength in diversity and joint work, and ceding preeminence when everyone gains. Climate change leadership could then contribute much not only to arresting climate change but also to other worthy goals. Ilan Kelman See also Change and Leadership; Collective Action; Crisis Leadership; Leadership in Science; Sustainability

Further Readings ¨ Davies, A. R., Broto, V. C., & Hugel, S. (2021). Editorial: Is there a new climate politics? Politics and Governance, 9(2), 1–7. doi:10.17645/pag.v9i2.4341 IPCC. (2021–2022). Sixth assessment report. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Kelman, I. (2017). Linking disaster risk reduction, climate change, and the sustainable development goals. Disaster Prevention and Management, 26(3), 254–258. doi:10.1108/DPM-02-2017-0043 Kelman, I., Mercer, J., & Gaillard, JC. (Eds.). (2017). Routledge handbook of disaster risk reduction including climate change adaptation. London: Routledge. UNFCCC. (2015). Conference of the parties, twenty-first session, Paris, 30 November to 11 December 2015. FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1. UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). UNGA. (2015). Resolution adopted by the general assembly on 25 September 2015, A/RES/70/1. UNGA (United Nations General Assembly).

107

objectives. Cooperative behavior, known generally as collective action, is always necessary under conditions where individuals acting alone cannot realize their ambitions. All coalitions are collective action, but not all collective action makes a coalition: coalition members contribute to and benefit from the coalition’s achievements directly; in noncoalition collective action, by contrast, the rewards from participating are different from what they achieve. For example, a person who wants to move a sofa that is too big or heavy to handle alone initiates noncoalition collective action by recruiting help in return for money, food and drink, or the pleasure of aiding a friend, none of which are related to the goal of moving the sofa. Only the person who wants the sofa moved benefits from that. This entry explores how coalitions are put together and maintained, and how coalitions contribute to compromise and collective action. All collective action begins with and depends on autonomous actors with diverse goals. All successful collective action requires defining a collective purpose and resolving the tension between individual and collective interests. Individuals, whether self-centered or altruistic, will engage in collective action only if they believe that through it they can further their aims. In collective action short of coalition, goals are set independent from participants’ preferences; in coalitions, participants jointly define their goals and can achieve them only in concert with their coalition partners. A working coalition requires both that every coalition member contributes as agreed to the collective project and that all receive their expected benefits from participating. But because participants are self-interested and objectives are jointly defined, coalitions embody an uneasy combination of cooperation and conflict.

Making Coalitions Work

COALITIONS A coalition is a particular form of decision-making and action characterized by individuals or groups united in pursuit of shared, collectively defined

The word coalition implies a certain kind of cooperation through which actors collaborate with others to achieve collective goals. It carries connotations of selfless contributions to the general welfare, but like all collective action, coalitions work because coalition members benefit from them. Coalitions can succeed only where

108

Coalitions

members can expect to further their own interests within the scope of coalition action, but that implies that their partners can credibly promise to adhere to the initial coalition agreement. Bargaining is hard and collective action is fraught with problems. Primary among these is the temptation to “free ride” (i.e., to contribute less than one’s fair share and let the efforts of others see the task though), a problem most students who participate in group projects have experienced first-hand. The temptation to free ride complicates all collective action, but there are other obstacles well. These include coordinating actions and dealing with direct conflict between what is good for individuals versus what is good for the group. Such conflict implies that individuals do best by acting against the collective interest even if everybody, themselves included, ends up objectively worse off. A candidate might be able to win election through bribery, for example, but if all candidates bribe then none gains advantage, elections are more expensive for everyone, and voters lose confidence in the system. The basic dilemma is that no one can commit to act against their own interests and no one can be certain of others’ preferences or when circumstances might motivate others to renege on prior commitments. Addressing these problems demands organization and hierarchy. Collective Action Problems

Self-interest lies at the root of all collective action and its problems. There are strategies to ameliorate these problems, but there are no perfect solutions to them. If members of a group can undercontribute to collective endeavors without being excluded from collective benefits then the temptation to free ride is strong. For example, a fire department funded through donations might thrive as long as enough community members contribute to it. If it fights all fires irrespective of donations, then everyone has an incentive to free ride by donating less than is fair because they benefit from the service anyway. But that leaves the fire department underfunded and everybody worse off. Contributing to collective action can be difficult even when participants are willing. Coalition members deciding where to site a road, airport, or

military base might agree about the need for the project but have very different ideas about where it should be built. They agree on the need for a decision but struggle to reach a consensus because each prefers the project that best benefits them or their constituents. And if an outcome that benefits some partners hurts others, as for example defining eligibility for government benefits to advantage rural dwellers over their urban counterparts, then the basic coordination problem is amplified possibly to the point of rendering any kind of collective action impossible. The problems that make forming and sustaining coalitions difficult boil down to two things: information and commitment. First, no one can really have the information to know for certain what anyone else wants or to what extent others are willing to sacrifice their own desires in the interests of achieving some collective goal. Second, no matter how much someone promises to fulfill their commitment to an agreement, they still might be better off reneging when the time comes to make good. Together with the expectation that actors seek to further their own aims, these problems mean that the compromises that all coalition agreements rely upon are precarious. But coalitions are both necessary and common. They work thanks to organization and hierarchy because they put individuals in positions of leadership, enabling them to influence coalition decisions and action, but within a structure that rewards them most (or only) when they fulfill their coalitional obligations. Constructing Coalitions

Organization and hierarchy go hand in hand. Organization defines positions, jurisdictions, and responsibilities; when it allocates authority unequally or makes some actors answerable to others, it creates hierarchy. Hierarchy reduces the difficulty of making collective decisions by limiting the number of leaders. Coalitions are one kind of organization in which there are hierarchies. A government coalition of the type often seen in multiparty democracies, for instance, is made up of political parties whose participation in government is defined by their providing cabinet ministers with varying levels of authority to lead executive ministries.

Coalitions

A coalition must overcome three distinct problems in four phases of coalition formation and action. First, actors need to find partners. Consider the task of forming a governing coalition in a multiparty context characterized by no majority party and myriad possible combinations of parties that could control a majority of legislative seats but no clear criteria for choosing one combination over others. In the Netherlands, for example, the largest of the 13 parties after the March 2017 elections held only 22% of parliamentary seats and the top three parties combined controlled only 48%. In such conditions, parties have to bargain over whether to enter into coalition, what should be the coalition’s objectives if they do join, and how to allocate responsibilities and rewards among coalition partners. In this case, it took nearly nine months to form a new government following that 2017 election. The range of alternatives can be narrowed by restricting candidate partners to parties that are relatively close together on policy grounds, and the weight of decision can be lightened by delegating the vetting and choosing of coalition partners to a formateur—typically the prime ministerial candidate who would lead the government upon successfully forming a cabinet. This makes the task more manageable, though it still can be imposing. The second problem is closely related to the first and shares its resolution with it. In principle, once coalition members are chosen they have to agree on goals and expectations for their contributions in order to accomplishing them. At the same time, however, what a coalition’s goals are will affect both the possible partners a formateur will look at and those parties’ willingness to join the coalition. In essence, a coalition’s purpose is the product of bargaining between the formateur and candidate partners, including consideration of what the feasible alternatives are should any parties prove unable or unwilling to join. But because participating in a coalition implies investing resources to achieve compromised goals, potential partners who could see the same outcome without contributing would be better off not joining. Enticing members into a coalition thus requires adjusting coalition objectives in accord with their interests. Recruiting coalition partners and defining coalition goals go hand in hand, and assigning the decision-making on both counts to coalition

109

leadership makes a process that could be extraordinarily difficult somewhat less so. Third, coalition members need to be able to tell if partners shirk their duties. This looks straightforward in governing coalitions where political parties control government ministries; ministers either produce policy in line with what they have agreed to, or they do not. But ministers know more about their own policy areas than others, so they could claim that bills actually skewed in their favor are as close to the coalition agreement as practically feasible. The closer the coalition position is to a minister’s party for a given jurisdiction, however, the easier it is for the minister to self-interestedly toe the coalition line. And if coalition members get to define policy as they wish in their jurisdictions, then defining coalition policy goals, choosing coalition partners, and allocating ministries to those partners are inextricably linked. Finally, coalition members need to have some recourse in the event that their partners take actions antithetical to their interests. Coalitions allocate responsibilities to their members to act individually in pursuit of the coalition’s collectively defined goals. As long as the expectations about policy needs in place at coalition formation hold, coalition members can be confident that their partners have no more incentive to deviate from the coalition agreement than they did when they joined. But circumstances change. If they change in ways that allow some coalition members to take actions detrimental to others, those partners who would suffer need to be able to ensure that other ministers’ actions don’t damage their own interests. Fortunately, because coalitions are structured to work best or only with the support and participation of all members, every member has a veto and all any partner has to do to block coalition action is to say no. Coalition members thus have to consider their partners’ concerns or else risk achieving nothing. Coalition Maintenance

Coalitions are born of the construction of a collective interest that fuses disparate actors into a single entity. They die when members’ particular interests are better served outside the coalition than within it. The death can be natural, as when

110

Coalitions

some unanticipated event renders the initial coalition agreement moot or unsuitable. Or it can be purposeful, as when members choose to back out of the agreement or, more notably, when a leader—in multiparty governments the prime minister or a minister from a partner party—dissolves the coalition because partners choose not to support ministerial initiatives. Such a threat, known in parliamentary systems as a motion of confidence, faces potential defectors with the choice between getting their way on the immediate issue but then being excluded from collective decisions or ceding in the short term in order to continue profiting from the coalition over time. Paradoxically, leaders’ ability to break a coalition also serves as a glue that can hold it together. In general, coalitions do not yield a mostpreferred outcome for any of their members. It might look as if coalitions’ leading players dictate their coalition lines to other members, but that would be impractical. As long as coalition members have diverse interests, as should be expected, any coalition agreement necessarily is a compromise for most or all who enter into it. Some members might prefer coalition inaction for any particular decision, even as they would continue to benefit from coalition survival in the longer term. In such circumstances, coalition leadership is essential, even as it can appear heavy-handed. A threat to dissolve the coalition in the face of any members’ failure to support a coalition initiative might appear self-interested but, to reiterate, in fact it induces members to consider not just their own interests but those of the coalition as a whole.

Coalitions, Compromise, Commitment, and Collective Capacity Coalitions embody organized, complex group decision-making. What makes coalitions distinct from other forms of collective action is both that their objectives are collectively defined and that they can achieve their goals only with every member’s participation. The elements that define coalitions, including the practical reality of jointly defined goals, hierarchical organization, and the ever-present temptation to free ride, are to some extent present in all collective action, but in coalitions the balance

tilts away from leaders more than in other collective contexts. Leaders remain an essential element of coalition, however, without which individual members would be unable to commit to any foundational multilateral compromise such that the coalition’s utility for collectively furthering members’ individual aims would be at best suspect. Coalitions cannot form unless individual and collective interests can be aligned. For less-complex, less-political collective action, this alignment can be achieved through the careful assignment of responsibilities, specification of yardsticks for success, and definition of payments. In coalitions, however, there is on the one hand no distinction between success and payment. On the other hand, the coalition’s success for any action depends on every member’s ability to commit to support the coalition line on every action. Free riding is impossible for coalition members, but because all members must compromise some of their aims in the pursuit of coalition goals, all are likely to face the temptation at some point to defect from the coalition line. Coalitions are strong, in a nutshell, precisely because any individual member’s failure to uphold their part of the coalition agreement can break them apart. William B. Heller See also Autocratic Leadership; Collective Action; Collective Leadership; Collective Responsibility; Coordination; Entrepreneurship; Strategic Leadership; Trust

Further Readings Alexiadou, D. (2016). Ideologues, partisans, and loyalists: Ministers and policymaking in parliamentary cabinets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198755715.001.0001 ´ M. (2006). Chapter 2: Carroll, R., Cox, G. W., & Pachon, How parties create electoral democracy. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 31(2), 153–174. doi:10.3162/ 036298006X201760 Cox, G. W., & McCubbins, M. D. (2007). Legislative leviathan: Party government in the House. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511810060 Kiewiet, D. R., & McCubbins, M. D. (1991). The logic of delegation: Congressional parties and the appropriations process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Coercive Management ¨ Kluver, H., & J.-J. Spoon. (2020). Helping or hurting: How governing as a junior coalition partner influences electoral outcomes. Journal of Politics, 82(4), 1231–1242. Laver, M., & Shepsle, K. A. (1996). Making and breaking governments: Cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625671 Mershon, C. (2002). The costs of coalition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riker, W. H. (1962). The theory of political coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto players: How political institutions work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400831456

COERCIVE MANAGEMENT Coercive management is a term used to describe work-based hierarchies that allow or even promote a culture of domineering and potentially abusive leadership styles. Coercive management is an important topic given its potentially farreaching effects. This entry explores the evolutionary and developmental theories relevant to emergence of coercive managers. It then discusses the organizational pros and cons of coercive managers in terms of both traits and associated behaviors. Finally, it explores the interaction of psychological processes such as empathy and how these may interact with the traits of coercive managers, detailed in terms of costs to both organizations and their employees.

The Complexity of Terminology There are a range of terms for coercive management including leader bullying, abusive supervision, petty tyranny, toxic leadership, and narcissistic leadership. Coercive management is regarded as the dark side of leadership, where leaders make decisions based on their own personal needs (e.g., for power, to enact revenge) that can harm not only subordinates but

111

also the organization itself. The developmental literature is clear that solely coercive strategies do not endear an individual to their peer group, although a mixture of coercive and seeming prosocial behavior represents the winning combination in terms of popularity. This pattern is seen even in young children, as those children that can master and effectively use both coercive and prosocial tactics, thereby presenting themselves to others as socially competent, materially successful, and socially attractive, all attributes of those who will later climb to power within the workplace. Conceptualizations of leaders as either prosocial and likable or self-interested and unlikable are simplistic. Researchers have proposed the profile of the charismatic but dominant leader who uses an authoritarian interpersonal style coupled with self-aggrandizement to exploit others for their own self-interested motivations. This description acknowledged the coexistence of both personable and aversive traits within an individual. Therefore, although some researchers have termed this style as dysfunctional, this is simplistic, as this combination maps onto the evolutionary psychology literature of resource-control theory that not only allows for the coexistence of pro- and antisocial behavior, but actually positions them both as strategies of resource control. Adopting prosocial approaches to leading via helping others, cooperating and reciprocating give the appearance of advancing both self and other interests. It also has the added advantage of indebting others, which creates the need in the other to reciprocate in future interactions. In contrast, coercive strategies appear to others to advance only the user, which risks disincentivizing cooperation and instead instilling resentment and even motivating revenge. These strategies are not mutually exclusive, however, and those who use both strategies are termed bistrategic controllers. Bistrategic controllers are flexible in their approach and adopt their resource-holding strategy based on their understanding of the moral expectations and the norms within a specific social group, fitting their observed behavior accordingly, essentially using a “Machiavellian” strategy.

Evolutionary and Developmental Theories Consistent with this is the evolutionary dualstrategies theory of social rank, which argues that

112

Coercive Management

managers and would-be managers have two broad approaches to gain and hold their high social status within an organization. These two approaches are by prestige or by dominance. A dominant style is, by its nature, one that uses coercion through the threat of punishment/harm, which is in contrast to a prestige-based manager, whom others willingly follow owing to the leader’s clear competence and generosity. Coercive managers are likely to be found amongst the dominant style leaders, adopting an authoritarian style whereby goals are reached through managerial force rather than distributive decision-making. Essentially coercive mangers use dominance and, where necessary, force to take what they need in terms of power. Prestige-orientated managers, in contrast, derive their power from the esteem they are held in by others, so that they are given their power by others. Both ways are effective paths to the top and may not be entirely mutually exclusive. The key difference is that coercive/dominant management is perceived by subordinates as aversive, and aversive leadership is conceptualized as a form of destructive leadership based on coercive power.

Traits and Emotional Behaviors Coercive management can be understood in terms of two of ethologist Niko Tinbergen’s assertions: (1) the mechanism by which coercive leaders emerge is a process based on traits and (2) the impact of a coercive leader on coworkers and subordinates and the organization. From the dual systems approach, this translates to exploring psychological traits and the corresponding behavior of the coercive manager in terms of how they impact decision-making and well-being within the group. Traits are enduring dispositions that are consistent across situations and time. The trait of empathy is regarded by the majority of CEOs as extremely important in a manager. Psychologists have categorized empathy into three broad types: Cognitive, Affective and Compassionate. Cognitive empathy describes recognizing how another person is feeling and what thoughts they may be having. Affective empathy describes experiencing emotion contagion, where someone actually feels some of the emotion they see in another person.

The final type of empathy is compassionate, in which both cognitive and affective empathy create a need to help alleviate the other person’s unhappiness. In terms of management, it is the balance of these three types that enables a manager to understand another’s current emotional state and to (when appropriate) reflect that awareness back to the person while resisting becoming emotionally impacted or even overwhelmed. This balance is critical because emotions are signals to action (i.e., e-MOTION), and, therefore, understanding another’s emotional state facilitates an understanding of their potential behavioral responses. However, research is clear that experiencing high emotional arousal negatively impacts a person’s ability to exercise self-control and effectively problem-solve. Therefore, managers are likely to be most effective when they can understand another’s emotional experience and reflect that understanding back to them while nevertheless resisting full emotional contagion. Coercive managers are likely to fall into two broad personality types: (1) callous and unemotional and (2) unstable, narcissistic, and overemotional. Callous and unemotional managers may be proficient in cognitive empathy but lack affective empathy. This may be useful in roles where individuals need to be sacrificed for the good of the organization (e.g., military campaigns), but is likely to be counterproductive in roles where person skills are important. This is because their failure to experience affective empathy inhibits deeper processing of others’ potential reactions, leaving them open to misjudging likely outcomes. Lacking affective empathy also impedes the callous unemotional manager’s ability to develop relationships with others, as human beings implicitly seek evidence of emotional mirroring. Managers are likely to be aware of the power of matching another’s body language to ingratiate oneself with the other, termed “social glue”; however, emotional mimicry also fosters affiliation and liking. Research suggests that emotional mimicry functions to regulate social interactions and therefore mimicking others can create both social warmth or, in its absence, coolness. People tend to inhibit mimicry when the other is a competitor or otherwise a member of a disliked outgroup. Therefore, a callous unemotional manager may fail to effectively mimic subordinates and

Coercive Management

other managers alike, leading others to regard them as oppositional. This has obvious implications for managing, since this relationship normally relies on frequent interactions and a sense of shared purpose. Interestingly, the narcissistic, overemotional manager is likely to experience too much affective empathy and hence become overwhelmed by other people’s emotional displays. Whilst this in itself would be unhelpful in terms of subsequent problem-solving capacity, this is doubly damaging due to the narcissistic nature of their worldview. To an unstable narcissist, the negative emotional display of another is likely to be translated into a criticism of them and hence experienced as a direct attack. For an employee with such a manager, any negative emotion shown has the potential to result in an attack, and so employees quickly learn to not voice any dissent or show any negative emotion. Coercive management can also negatively impact a leader’s acceptance of responsibility for organizational decisions. For example, psychopathic managers are less likely to take responsibility than managers lower in traits of psychopathy, which should be a concern due to the high prevalence of these traits in business leaders. Narcissistic managers have a need to protect and preserve their fragile belief in their own superiority and so will externalize blame for their mistakes onto vulnerable employees, other managers, or even their superiors. These leadership styles not surprisingly lead employees to feel helpless, which may explain why staff managed by a coercive manager are more likely to act in an immoral way because they believe that they are not acting under their own free will but instead due to pressure from their manager.

Impact on Organizations and Employees Although research into healthy management is not without its problems, it is consistent in suggesting that support from managers is important for employee well-being. Indeed, employers have a duty of care to ensure that employees’ well-being is protected. Leadership styles that are consistent with theories around well-being include salutogenic leadership—a style that aims to build trust, manage problems, and is focused on reducing work-related stress experienced by their subordinates—and relational management styles that

113

place healthy work relationships at the center of their role. Coercive managers who take power are the antithesis of healthy management as they typically seek to take successes as their own, restrict information to others and penalize rather than support underlings who struggle. Coercive managers also disincentivize others within an organization from challenging them, even when the other holds a higher status within the organization. This is because a highly coercive manager is frequently known to be exceptionally sensitive to any perceived slights and is prepared to spend copious amounts of time righting wrongs, thus making them a tenacious foe. From the position of the employees, therefore, coercive management is largely negative, as the manager’s behavior is perceived to be driven by a desire to further their own ends at the expense of others. The combination of force and manipulation found in coercive managers is instrumental to their success in climbing the organizational hierarchy. However, working under a coercive manager is a significant cause of stress and worker burnout. This is understandable when the traits and resulting behavior of coercive managers are understood. Coercive managers place their own needs before others and therefore tend to co-opt resources within the group, prioritizing their own interests over those of their employees or organization. The driving motivation of coercive managers is to attain and retain a position of power leading them to be hypervigilant to those seen as a threat to their position. Subordinates who appear to represent a challenge to the manager’s status are subjugated and, if necessary, sabotaged. This can result in staff becoming despondent and stressed and can ultimately lead to them leaving the organization, and since it is those employees with the most potential that are likely to be seen as a threat to the coercive manager’s position, it is these personnel who may be most likely to be lost to the organization. This is not to say that coercive management has no benefits; if that were the case, coercive managers would be less common than they are. Coercive managers frequently create clear hierarchies within groups, affording each member a clear position. Their punishment capability also creates a need in those around them to meet goals that are set for them in order to avoid negative

114

Cognitive Biases in Leadership

consequences, which reduces “social loafing.” Coercive managers can also benefit employees where the manager’s skillset allows them to forward the shared goals of the manager and employees; this can be particularly in the case of intergroup conflict. These benefits, however, are unlikely to outweigh the cost to the employees’ organization overall. Coercive managers do not exist in a vacuum, and the success of coercive managers/would-be managers depends on the “toxic triangle” of coercive managers, susceptible subordinates, and a conducive environment. Organizations should therefore strive to ensure that subordinates are protected and that the organizational culture and systems within it are able to directly and consistently challenge coercive management. Nicola Graham-Kevan See also Destructive Leadership; Emotion and Leadership; Empathic Leadership; Health Psychology and Leadership; Narcissistic Leadership; Trait Theories of Leadership

Further Readings Babiak, P., & Hare, R. D. (2019). Snakes in suits: When psychopaths go to work. (Rev. Ed.). New York, NY: Harper Business. Goleman, D. (2008, March 1). Hot to help. Greater good magazine. Berkeley, CA: Greater Good Science Center at the University of California. Retrieved from https:// greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hot_to_help Hawley, P. H. (2014). The duality of human nature: Coercion and prosociality in youths’ hierarchy ascension and social success. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(6), 433–438. Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. ¨ Tierpsychologie 20, 410–433. Retrieved Zeitschrift fur from https://www.esf.edu/EFB/faculty/documents/ Tinbergen1963onethology.pdf

COGNITIVE BIASES

IN

LEADERSHIP

Leadership roles do not protect an individual from bias. People tend to process information in a

biased manner, reflecting limitations in attentional, interpretational, inference, attribution, and judgment processes. Several biases are particularly likely to affect individuals functioning in leadership roles. Moreover, the consequences of these biases can be magnified in that leaders’ judgments typically affect other individuals and groups. Research on bias accelerated in the 1970s when Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman provided compelling evidence of human irrationality and reliance on mental shortcuts (called heuristics) in information processing. These demonstrations showed violations of logical axioms embraced by classic accounts of human judgment involving transitivity (i.e., that choices are consistent across options), dominance (i.e., that an objectively superior option should be chosen over an inferior option), and invariance (i.e., that equivalent options should yield consistent choices even when described differently). Research shows that people regularly violate all three axioms, routinely underutilizing available information, favoring certain types of information over others, and making decisions that fall short of rational standards. In short, research since the 1970s characterizes the flawed manner by which people make decisions. Research has identified numerous cognitive biases important in different domains. For example, biases in negotiation, in forming first impressions of people, and in intergroup perception have all been studied extensively. However, cross-domain research has developed independently, with little theoretical integration or identification of common principles. This entry summarizes a limited set of cognitive biases that appear highly relevant to leadership. Discussion of these biases will be organized in thematic terms, reflecting a set of common integrative principles.

The Nature of Cognitive Bias Cognitive biases have different causes. Some biases reflect limits in mental capabilities. For example, human attentional systems cannot capture the full complexity of information available in the environment. Instead, people focus on a subset of information, typically focusing on the most conspicuous or seemingly essential details. Other biases reflect low motivation to thoroughly process

Cognitive Biases in Leadership

available information. For example, people often rely on simplifying rules when they are tired, overwhelmed, or disinterested in a task. The ability to avoid specific biases depends on their placement on a continuum of inevitability. Some biases are ubiquitous and difficult to eliminate. For example, negativity bias involves the overweighting of negative over positive information, explaining why teachers often perseverate on one bad student review amidst a larger body of raves. Other biases manifest inconsistently across individuals in different contexts. For example, some people persistently use stereotypes to make judgments. In contrast, other individuals exhibit racial bias only when cognitively overwhelmed or in an emotional state (e.g., fear) that promotes stereotyping. Such biases can be reduced only with sufficient motivation and cognitive capacity to prevent an unwanted response. Finally, some biases are highly volitional. An exhausted individual might willingly embrace a simple heuristic to complete a daunting chore (“the thickest r´esum´e in this pile gets the job!”). Cost and reward considerations also affect the likelihood of bias in a given context, so long as the bias operates under some degree of control. Bias can yield costly errors by producing suboptimal judgments and opportunity costs. However, bias can also produce benefits by increasing efficiency. This benefit might be particularly valued when a decision-maker views the judgment as inconsequential or when timeliness is prioritized over accuracy. For leaders, who are often overwhelmed with competing demands, the appeal of using shortcuts to increase efficiency might have high appeal. Therefore, leaders may think that value in efficiency provided by heuristics exceeds the possible costs of diminished accuracy or fairness. However, benefits and costs must be considered both for the decision-maker (often a leader) and the entities affected by their judgments (typically subordinates). A reliance on heuristics might personally benefit the leader but be detrimental to the people being led. A final point regarding cognitive bias is that people are more prone to identify it in others than themselves. This phenomenon, termed the bias blind spot, means that leaders are likely to see themselves as less biased than others.

115

Unfortunately, such a blind spot reduces the likelihood that leaders will be motivated to identify and reduce bias in their thoughts and actions.

Critical Cognitive Biases in Leadership Dozens of cognitive biases have been identified, and this entry focuses on biases that are particularly relevant to leadership. Individuals in leadership roles are particularly susceptible to the biases discussed here, and the potential negative consequences when leaders demonstrate them can be considerable. Biases are discussed under three distinct yet related categories, recognizing common causes and features. These categories reflect biases exhibiting conservatism, limitations in information processing capacities, and egocentrism. Conservative Biases

People tend to be excessively conservative regarding information processing, regularly forming premature conclusions, clinging to them too firmly given new information, and defending them even when they are no longer tenable given changing conditions. Therefore, leaders regularly demonstrate a status quo bias, a preference to maintain current states. A specific example of status quo bias is when leaders honor sunk costs (also known as the Concorde Fallacy). This phenomenon involves perpetuating an action based on one’s previous commitment to it rather than future considerations. One tragic example is when political leaders justify the continuation of a war based on the number of lives already lost rather than on the prospects for a successful outcome. Similarly, other biases attest to the unique power of information encountered early in processing information. Judgments typically reflect an overweighting of the earliest information received. Research on anchoring bias shows that information introduced early in decision-making has a disproportionate impact on the final judgment, even when that information is arbitrarily determined or of little relevance to the decision. For example, opening offers in negotiations can reduce the zone of possible agreement, making it likely that the negotiation will be settled in terms favorable to the person making the initial proposal.

116

Cognitive Biases in Leadership

Other examples come from research on first impressions. When meeting a new person, impressions are shaped by what is already believed to be true (expectancy effects) or what is first learned about the person (primacy effects). Such information exerts significant influence through attentional and interpretive factors. Expectations direct the allocation of attention and, in the absence of an expectation, focus attention on the earliest information received. Both factors can also change the interpretation of later information to fit with preliminary impressions. A related bias is known as the fundamental attribution error. This phenomenon reflects the tendency to instantaneously interpret others’ actions in terms of their internal characteristics, such as personality characteristics, rather than situational factors. These biases demonstrate that initial impressions of others (e.g., employees, colleagues, competitors) are often resistant to change, even when new information suggests that a revision is justified. Once judgments are formed, other processes perpetuate them. Leaders frequently exhibit confirmatory bias, looking for and giving credence to information that confirms the validity of what they already believe to be true while simultaneously ignoring or dismissing contradictory information. Confirmatory bias at a group level can manifest in groupthink, whereby group members fail to consider or even suppress arguments that might challenge a leader’s expressed preference. Leaders’ judgments can also create self-fulfilling prophecies, prompting others to interact with them in a manner consistent with the leader’s beliefs. Through these processes, leaders can experience validation of even erroneous beliefs. Information Processing Biases

Leaders must gather and integrate information to make judgments and determine actions. Traditional views of leadership asserted that such roles flowed to individuals who possess traits promoting effective leadership (wise, intelligent, confident). These same traits were assumed to help protect leaders from bias. However, research demonstrates that even accomplished leaders are susceptible to biases inherent to human cognition.

Limitations in mental operations lead all people to fall short of rational standards, at least sometimes. Among these limitations is a reliance on heuristics that simultaneously simplify judgments and decrease accuracy. The availability heuristic involves using the accessibility of information in memory for estimating the commonality of an event. When considering a question (e.g., “How effective is this employee?”), the answer often depends on how easy it is to generate a memory of a relevant event (“Can I remember a time when the employee appeared competent?”). Memories that can easily be recalled suggest that an event is common. However, ease of recall does not simply reflect commonality. For example, people tend to erroneously judge that traveling by plane is more dangerous than driving simply because jet mishaps tend to receive extensive media attention and can therefore be easily recalled. The representativeness heuristic refers to using the similarity of an entity to its category prototype to judge whether the object belongs to that category. For example, a random sequence of alternating heads and tails coin tosses (HTTHTH) is regarded as more likely to reflect a fair coin than a set of equally numerous but clustered, sequential outcomes (HHHTTT). The first coin appears to be fairer because its behavior more closely resembles expectations of unbiased coins. This heuristic often causes leaders and experts to ignore probability rules and rely on the goodness-of-fit between an event and expectations. For example, even experienced leaders regularly estimate that an entire set of rare events tied to a realistic narrative are more probable than any of the single events contained in the narrative, a logical impossibility. A leader’s judgments can also be affected by how a problem is described or framed, even when the underlying problem is equivalent. For example, describing an event in terms of guaranteed losses versus gains tends to produce inconsistent judgments. People usually show aversion to risk when outcomes are described in terms of possible gains (keeping a guaranteed $50 rather than entering a lottery with a 50% chance of returning $100 and a 50% chance of returning $0) versus possible losses (wagering $50 in a lottery with a 50% chance of losing $100 and a 50% of losing $0). These results and others show that loss aversion can be triggered

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

by how an issue is framed, thereby producing inconsistent actions. Egocentric Biases

Other biases reflect the valuing of the self (and entities linked with the self) over others. People generally value things that are associated with “me and mine.” However, manifestations of such egocentric biases can produce a variety of harmful consequences. Egocentrism leads people to judge that their own beliefs and preferences are more common than they are. The illusion of false consensus leads people to think that their own preferences and views are widely shared. When this illusion is challenged by people expressing opposing views, they tend to be disparaged or dismissed. False consensus can lead even experienced marketers to project their personal preferences onto consumers and politicians to disengage from voters with differing views. Numerous self-serving biases reflect a persistent motivation for people to see themselves in a favorable light, exaggerating positive qualities and minimizing negative characteristics. For example, people typically believe they act more altruistically and reasonably than others and tend to rate themselves more favorably than others on various traits. These tendencies can pose a danger to leaders when they claim responsibility for successes but avoid blame for failures. Such self-serving attributions reduce the likelihood that leaders learn from errors. Ingroup biases involve valuing groups to which one belongs (and fellow group members) over groups to which one does not belong (i.e., outgroups). When demonstrated by leaders, ingroup bias can facilitate ingroup cohesion and self-esteem within the group. However, ingroup bias is also typically accompanied by prejudice and discrimination directed toward outgroup members. Bias favoring ingroup members within organizations can also affect hiring, evaluative, and promotional practices, producing perceptions of unfairness, injustice, and a low sense of belonging. Discussions of leadership often focus on styles and practices that produce effective leadership. Other approaches focus on leadership styles effective in organizations with disparate characteristics, structures, and challenges. Yet other

117

approaches consider different kinds of leadership, distinguishing transactional from transformational leadership. This entry highlights that any consideration of leadership can benefit from understanding common human frailties and shortcomings. Leaders are humans, too, sometimes failing to meet ideals of rationality and fairness. Understanding how biases cause leaders to fall short of these standards provides opportunities for improving leadership. Steven J. Stroessner and Brett N. Hu See also CEO Hubris; Cognitive Dissonance; Political Identities; Racial Disparities; Social Identities

Further Readings Gigerenzer, G. (2015). Simply rational: Decision making in the real world. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199390076.001. 0001 Hamilton, D. L., & Stroessner, S. J. (2021). Social cognition: Understanding people and events. London: SAGE. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Lewis, M. (2017). The undoing project: A friendship that changed our minds. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2, 175–220. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2. 175 Pronin, E. (2007). Perception and misperception of bias in human judgment. Trends in Cognitive Science, 11, 37–43. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.001 Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1130. doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124 Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458. doi:10.1126/science.7455683

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY Cognitive dissonance theory is a general theory of psychological processing, and thus is broadly applied across a variety of subjects and contexts,

118

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

including leadership. This entry focuses on the ways cognitive dissonance theory has evolved through the years, and how it has in turn influenced the study and practice of leadership.

Foundations of Cognitive Dissonance Theory Leon Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957. Since that time, cognitive dissonance theory has been a topic of academic and popular discussions. Cognitive dissonance theory is a theory of cognitive consistency—it asserts that people seek to maintain consistency between the cognitions they hold. Cognitions are any mental representation; they can be emotions, attitudes, knowledge, beliefs, and even memory of or intentions for behaviors. When two or more cognitions conflict, individuals will experience the negative affective state of cognitive dissonance and will seek to reduce that dissonance by adjusting their cognitions. Further elaboration on the theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that dissonance arises and is reduced in a four-step process. First, a cognitive discrepancy occurs when two or more cognitions conflict. Second, this discrepancy leads the person to experience discomfort, or the negative affective state of dissonance. Third, the person will be motivated to seek a way to reduce the dissonance experienced. Fourth and finally, the individual will engage in discrepancy reduction, altering their cognitions to reduce the discrepancy between the initially conflicting cognitions. Festinger suggested that if one cognition logically coincides with another, then experiencing the opposite of that would lead to cognitive dissonance. For example, if a leader favors a democratic leadership style but made a decision without asking for follower feedback, this could create a cognitive discrepancy between the leader’s values (democratic leadership is good) and the leader’s actions (enacting a more autocratic leadership style). The broad scope of Festinger’s work has led to many areas of research that are rooted in original formulation of cognitive dissonance theory but have largely developed separately across their respective disciplines. Scholars in religion, sociology, and anthropology have focused on refining and/or refuting the work on group processes that

occur after failed prophecies, while scholars in psychology have focused on refining the theoretical arguments about when, how, and why dissonance is likely to arise and be reduced. Other bodies of research have explored the role of influence processes, persuasion, and communication focused on dissonance reduction. In decision sciences, scholars have expanded further on the nature of choice in the dissonance process, and the effects on rationalization and sensemaking after a choice has been made. Yet, across these disciplines some of the fundamental concepts remain.

Cognitive Discrepancy and Dissonance There are several types of cognitive discrepancies and associated dissonance that have been explored in the cognitive dissonance literature. In the aforementioned example, the leader who favors democratic leadership but behaved in way that did not apply the favored behavior is engaging in a type of counterattitudinal behavior. This subset of cognitive dissonance theory and research explores dissonance that is caused by cognitive discrepancies between attitudes and actions. Typically, when dissonance is experienced because of a counterattitudinal behavior, research predicts that it will be resolved by adjusting one’s attitudes to support the discrepant behavior. For example, the leader who initially favored democratic leadership but acted in an autocratic way might modify their attitude toward democratic leadership, adjusting their attitude to be less supportive of this style of leadership. Another common type of cognitive discrepancy that has been explored is free choice. This approach explores how choice activates the process of dissonance. When people make a choice between two similar alternatives, dissonance can arise because the person is unsure that they made the best choice. Scholars suggest that when dissonance occurs as a result of free choice, people will reduce this dissonance by engaging in the spreading of alternatives. The spreading of alternatives refers to the adjustment of attitudes about the choices to provide support for the chosen alternative and reduce support of the rejected alternative. For example, if a leader must select

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

one person for a coveted training program but has two possible candidates who are relatively similar in potential and expertise, the leader may experience dissonance when selecting between the two candidates. To reduce this dissonance after choosing one candidate, the leader will likely adjust their attitudes about the chosen candidate, providing more rationale for why they were the better choice, and may try to rationalize the rejected candidate by focusing more on deficiencies in the rejected candidate. Cognitive dissonance can also occur when a person has invested a great amount of effort or behavioral commitment to something. When a person has invested a lot of effort into a choice and is then presented with information that leads them to question whether the effort was worth it, they may experience dissonance. In these scenarios, dissonance is resolved by effort justification, finding ways to rationalize why they invested so much effort into that course of action. For example, if a person went through an intense and time-consuming leadership development, they may be more likely to feel positively about the program and how it influenced their development as a leader, even if there were moments of serious doubt throughout the program. The effort devoted to the program would lead to dissonance if they could not justify their commitment to the leadership development program.

Dissonance and Discrepancy Reduction To reduce cognitive dissonance, a person could alter one or more cognitions to reduce the magnitude of dissonance experienced. This is also called discrepancy reduction because the person is reducing the discrepancy between the conflicting cognitions. Thus, the ways in which one reduces the dissonance are determined in part by the nature of the originally discrepant cognitions. For example, if a counterattitudinal behavior causes one to experience dissonance, they are most likely to reduce their dissonance via attitude change. Though they could change future behavior to also reduce dissonance, this is less common because attitudes are easier to change than behaviors. If dissonance arises because of the effort or energy one has directed toward a choice, they may

119

reduce this dissonance in other ways. For example, they may escalate their commitment, using their continued support for the choice as a way to justify their previous support for the choice. They might also seek out information that supports their commitment, engaging in selective information processing to focus on information that provides additional support for the dissonance-inducing commitment. Such behaviors can help them to rationalize their actions. Another way people reduce dissonance is to trivialize the importance of discrepant cognitions. In other words, instead of changing the discrepant attitude, they change the importance they place on the attitude. For example, the leader who favored democratic leadership but acted in an autocratic way may trivialize their attitude toward democratic leadership by focusing on how the decision had to be made quickly, and thus sticking to one’s preferred leadership style was not as important as it would be in other scenarios.

Implications of Cognitive Dissonance Theory for Leaders and Followers Cognitive dissonance theory, as put forth by Festinger, was not presented as a theory of leadership, though it certainly has implications for the study of leaders and followers. Shortly before his theory of cognitive dissonance was published, Festinger and colleagues published the results of a study in which the researchers joined a group whose leader had prophesied specific catastrophic events that were to occur on a particular date. The study follows the group as the date they foretold passes without any of the prophecies coming true. It explores how the group members reduced the resulting dissonance from being wrong. In the following year, when he published his book on the theory of cognitive dissonance, Festinger referenced these studies to further explore the role of influence processes and social support in the arousal and reduction of dissonance. Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter’s study on failed prophecy laid the groundwork for scholars to test, extend, refine, and refute the researchers’ early theses and the role of social support from groups and prophetic leaders in the dissonance process. In 2009, Jon R.

120

Collapsing Toxic Triangles

Stone published an article that provided an overview of studies published since the original failed prophecy study. In it, he notes that while Festinger and colleagues highlighted the ways the followers sought greater social support for their group after their prophetic belief was publicly disconfirmed, there were several other implications that were underexplored in the scholars’ original work. Most notable to the study of leadership, Stone explores how followers may seek out prophetic leaders when they are experiencing dissonance and the prophetic leader and group acts as a source of consonance, to bring cognitions back into balance. In the area of elected leadership, cognitive dissonance theory has been used to explore choice processes before a vote, and attitudes, continued support, and future voting behaviors. Several common outcomes of dissonance have been explored in this literature; attitude change to support the vote one has made, trivializing critiques of the candidate or elected official that the voter does not favor as much, or selective information processing to find evidence which supports ones’ vote or preferred candidate. Cognitive dissonance theory also has implications for charismatic leadership. Framing this research around cognitive dissonance suggests that followers experiencing cognitive dissonance may be more likely to be drawn in by the charismatic leader’s behaviors. However, research in this area also suggests that some charismatic leaders also create dissonance that they can then resolve, as a means of manipulation. The theory can also be used as a framework to understand how followers might view a leader whose behavior has caused the follower to experience cognitive dissonance. Although there is a large amount of research on cognitive dissonance theory, relatively little work has explored the implications of the theory for leadership. Thus, cognitive dissonance theory can be used as a framework to explore the cognitive sensemaking of leaders and/or followers in context. Followers may be drawn to leaders who help them manage their dissonance, and leaders may pursue the support of followers who do the same. Amanda S. Hinojosa

See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Charismatic Leadership; Decision-Making Theory; Emotion and Leadership; Followership; Groupthink; Religion; Rhetoric and Persuasion, Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models

Further Readings Beasley, R. K., & Joslyn, M. R. (2001). Cognitive dissonance and post-decision attitude change in six presidential elections. Political Psychology, 22(3), 521–540. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Festinger, L., Riecken, H., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hinojosa, A. S., Gardner, W. L., Walker, H. J., Cogliser, C., & Gullifor, D. (2017). A review of cognitive dissonance theory in management research: Opportunities for further development. Journal of Management, 43(1), 170–199. Immergut, M. (2014). When charisma doesn’t fail: Charismatic authority and dissonance management in the case of Diamond Mountain. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 10, Article 7. Lee, J., Wang, G., & Piccolo, R. F. (2018). Jekyll and Hyde leadership: A multilevel, multisample examination of charisma and abuse on follower and team outcomes. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 25(4), 399–415. Noghani, F. (2021). “Your cognition, my territory”: Charismatic leaders’ management of follower cognitive dissonance. Journal of Management Sciences, 8(1), 1–21. Stone, J. R. (2009). Prophecy and dissonance: A reassessment of research testing the Festinger theory. Nova Religio, 12(4), 72–90.

COLLAPSING TOXIC TRIANGLES The Toxic Triangle framework, conceptualized by Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, and Robert Kaiser, is a framework for understanding the creation of destructive leadership (DL). Destructive leadership is the confluence of contextual factors and blighted

Collapsing Toxic Triangles

leaders, who, with their colluders, manipulate other followers, which results in ruinous outcomes. DL is costly, so learning how to challenge it as constituent followers when not in positions of power is critical. Depending on the context, individuals either lead or follow, so effectively using agency is important. However, the importance of follower agency is largely understated in both leadership practice and theory. It is well established that most research focuses on how followers are galvanized into action by leaders, or how individuals behave as leaders. This view of leadership is unidirectional and disempowering. However, it is increasingly being demonstrated that leaders are prototypical of the group that they lead, such that, followers can constrain what leaders can do. Consequently, most leaders tend not to step beyond norms of what their group as a whole deems permissible. Therefore, in groups, followers as well as leaders have responsibility for the cocreation of outcomes. Before being able to challenge DL, one must be able to recognize it. So first, this entry explains the cocreation of DL, as understood by the Toxic Triangle framework. In this framework, depending on the context, follower agency can be used to collude actively with the destructive leaders or tacitly conform to them. Therefore, the group suffers destructive outcomes. Within a particular context, these outcomes are related to varying levels of harm that are detrimental to the quality of life of both internal and external stakeholders. Second, to shift the power balance against DL, this entry discusses follower behaviors that can challenge DL and collapse Toxic Triangles successfully. Therefore, even with DL, followers do have and should use their agency.

Cocreation of Destructive Leadership The Toxic Triangle framework of DL comprises (a) context, or conducive environmental factors, (b) susceptible followers, and (c) a destructive leader. Collectively, these three elements cocreate destructive outcomes. In this way, the framework encompasses several leadership theories, including trait, behavioral, contingency, and social exchange

121

theories. Each item of the Toxic Triangle is discussed in the following subsections. Context

In the DL process, Padilla and colleagues outline the following contextual elements that provide a conducive environment: (1) instability, (2) perceived threats, (3) absence of checks and balances, (4) ineffective institutions, and (5) cultural values. First, these authors point out that instability and perceived threats can appear in a multitude of ways, including, for instance, economic downturns, political uncertainty, or other forms of change. Next, the absence of checks and balances or ineffective institutions stem from structural factors. These include controls within organizations that are ineffectively governed, as well as weak external checks such as an inefficacious media or corrupt regulatory agencies. Finally, culture programming implies that individuals are more likely to tolerate destructive leaders when there is high power distance or a desire to avoid uncertainty. Cultures with centralized power or a lack of transparency can also increase instances of DL. Susceptible Followers

If context is the “oxygen” in the leadership process, then susceptible followers are the “flammable material” as described by Katherine Klein and Robert House. In the Toxic Triangle, Padilla and colleagues stated that there are two meta-groups of susceptible followers: colluder followers and conformer followers. First, colluder followers actively take part and contribute to the destructive leader’s plans. Colluders are driven by personal gain and ambition. This gain could be material or in the form of power, as asserted by Christian Thoroughgood, Katina Sawyer, Art Padilla, and Laura Lunsford. Second, conformer followers are driven by self-interest, and comply with destructive leaders and their colluder followers out of fear. Thoroughgood and colleagues explained that conformer followers are vulnerable because of

122

Collapsing Toxic Triangles

unmet needs, negative self-evaluations, or immaturity. These elements make them particularly susceptible to destructive leaders. Individuals can change their reasons for conforming or colluding over time and are influenced by contextual factors. For instance, individuals can be influenced by an ingrained culture of greed to desire power or material gain, as theorized by Thoroughgood and colleagues. Impressionable individuals who have a strong need for group membership can transform conformers into colluder followers who actively take part in a destructive leader’s plans. Destructive Leaders

To complete the Toxic Triangle, there is a destructive leader who is the “spark” that ignites “flammable” followers and contributes to the DL process. Destructive leaders tend to present a charismatic illusion. Several scholars have argued that charisma is the common attribute of most destructive leaders. These are pseudo-transformational leaders who are narcissistic and self-serving. Destructive leaders have a negative life history, an ideology of hate, and continually use control and coercion to achieve their objectives while violating the interests of others, as defined by Padilla and colleagues. DL is defined by outcomes and not the intent of a destructive leader or their susceptible followers. These outcomes can lead to varying levels of harm to their constituents or organizations. For instance, harm could include environmental disasters, poverty, bankruptcy, psychological harm, workforce demoralization, or violations of human rights as outlined by Padilla and colleagues.

Courageous Followership Robert Kelley postulated that followers are the primary defenders against DL. Yet in each context, most followers will probably reside in the conformer follower archetype. Ergo, if a follower is not actively colluding or being courageous, then they will have to be conforming because even inaction tacitly contributes to destructive outcomes. To improve outcomes, individuals need to develop courageous competencies.

Competencies associated with courageously resisting DL require conscious, sustained and selfless behavior to make ethical judgments and combat groupthink as described by Kelley. If followers actively behaved courageously, Kelley stated that the world would have few destructive leaders that damaged our organizations or society. Ira Chaleff admonished societies’ view and treatment of followers as it does not empower or prepare followers to perform their vital role in standing up to DL. Chaleff theorized that followers underestimate the benefits of effectively challenging leaders. Furthermore, followers are usually untrained to perform this vital role. Nor do these competencies occur naturally. So, the next section describes what constituent followers can do when they find themselves in a Toxic Triangle, even when they are not in positions of power.

Follower Behaviors to Collapse Toxic Triangles When trying to collapse Toxic Triangles, there are several common behaviors that followers enact with varying levels of success as identified by Alain de Sales. These behaviors in the order in which they are more likely to collapse Toxic Triangles are (1) marshaling credible evidence, (2) perspectivizing, (3) building and maintaining coalitions, (4) boundary spanning, (5) intensifying, (6) “rubiconizing,” and (7) confronting internally. First, marshaling credible evidence is a common factor and in general, followers often use evidence to support their arguments. Credible evidence often increases a follower’s courage and assists them with perspectivizing and building coalitions—described next—to convince people to act against the DL. Credible evidence has more impact when it was done in conjunction with boundary spanning, which is described later. Second, perspectivizing implies persuading others of one’s position. It can be used against all destructive leaders but is ineffective if directed purely at a destructive leader or their colluders. It could encompass symbolism to rally people to a cause and is a tool to build coalitions. As the gravitas of courageous followers increases, they find it easier to perspectivize without the need of substantial credible evidence. At this pivot point,

Collapsing Toxic Triangles

the courageous followers can be seen as alternative leaders, who continue to balance a dichotomous role of being followers in wider context while simultaneously being leaders of an alternative discourse against the DL. Third, building and maintaining coalitions is a necessary condition to challenge DLs. Research shows that followers influence leaders by forming coalitions. These are often formed using different structures and by harnessing sources of power, from expert power in business, to network power in political or mass movements. Against destructive leaders, individual followers are rarely successful in reversing decisions which lead to destructive outcomes, even when they have gravitas within the leadership team. This is because other colluder followers in the leadership are likely to have equivalent gravitas to counter courageous follower appeals. Consequently, forming coalitions outside of the leadership group is critical. Further, it is also necessary to maintain coalitions, as setbacks against the DL can demoralize coalition members and fracture courageous follower cohort. Fourth, boundary spanning is another necessary condition that followers need to enact to shift the power balances against DL. Here, followers need to take actions to move across different structures or levels. Moving across different structures involves drawing on different structural systems in society like the communal, economic, political, intellectual, and familial systems against the DL. According to Anthony Giddens, each system has its own resources, rules, norms, and organizations. Using one or more systems, a follower can gain agency to shift the power balance against the DL. Alternatively, when moving across levels, followers need to go to an authority level equivalent to, or greater than, the dominion of the DL. For instance, if a follower is challenging the president of a country with a structure such as that of the United States, they need to reach out to the Supreme Court or Congress, which are equivalent in authority, or they need to get international intervention. Within organizations, it would be akin to getting help from entities external to the organization, like a regulatory body, a union, or the media. Fifth, intensifying is akin to grit. It is making multiple attempts using different avenues to

123

influence the status quo, especially when faced with repeated setbacks as described by de Sales. Intensifying is a necessary condition shown by most courageous followers when they successfully collapsed Toxic Triangles. It is sustained over long periods of time and is related to the development of moral competence, which requires repeated courageous acts that are developed over time as outlined by Mary Gentile. Intensifying can be regarded as a multiplier for all other actions and is qualitatively very different from the other actions. Sixth, rubiconizing, which alludes to Julius Caesar’s historic act of defiance in crossing the river Rubicon, is where one crosses a point of no return with courage. Rubiconizing involves both risk and self-sacrifice. One should only rubiconize after the power bases have been built through the aforementioned five acts of resistance. For instance, whistleblowers can often show courage, sacrifice their livelihoods, or face imprisonment when they rubiconize. This is usually true if they rubiconize before securing these power bases and sometimes even after. Finally, confronting internally is a common act that followers use when challenging destructive leaders. Like rubiconizing—but unlike the other acts—confronting internally should not be used until the follower has sufficient power bases in place. If a follower confronts the DL prior to increasing their power bases, it is likely to result in punitive action against them. In conclusion, it is not only the aforementioned behaviors that are important; it is also the order in which they are enacted that is critical to collapse Toxic Triangles. Alain de Sales See also Bad Leadership; Coalitions, Collective Responsibility; Destructive Leadership; Followership; Intelligent Disobedience; Power and Powerlessness; Toxic Leadership

Further Readings Chaleff, I. (2009). The courageous follower: Standing up to & for our leaders (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. de Sales, A. (2020). Breaking toxic triangles: How courageous followers stand up to destructive

124

Collective Action

leadership. Swinburne Theses Collection. Swinburne University of Technology. Retrieved from https:// researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/items/32cf6407-c0b04d24-a953-0db1a73db3d7/1/ Gentile, M. C. (2010). Giving voice to values: How to speak your mind when you know what’s right. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kelley, R. E. (2008). Rethinking followership. In R. E. Riggio, I. Chaleff, & J. Lipman-Blumen (Eds.), The art of followership: How great followers create great leaders and organizations (pp. 5–16). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Klein, K. J., & House, R. J. (1995). On fire: Charismatic leadership and levels of analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 183–198. Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18, 176–194. Thoroughgood, C. N., Sawyer, K. B., Padilla, A., & Lunsford, L. (2016). Destructive leadership: A critique of leader-centric perspectives and toward a more holistic definition. Journal of Business Ethics, 1–23. doi:10.1007/s10551-016-3257-9

COLLECTIVE ACTION Collective action encompasses the wide range of social activities in which multiple people must combine their efforts to produce a common objective. Cross-team collaborations in the workplace, grassroots social movements bringing attention to a cause, and global actions to combat climate change are all examples of situations where the end goal cannot be produced by one individual’s behaviors alone. Instead, the goal must be reached through the coordinated efforts of multiple, interdependent actors engaged in collective action. This entry begins by examining some problems of collective action. It then explores ways in which leaders and leadership style can help solve many of those problems. The entry concludes by highlighting some of the characteristics of effective collective action leaders.

The Problem of Collective Action Early thinking on collective action assumed that individual and group interests were unproblematically aligned: the presence of a shared objective was considered sufficient to encourage people to act together to pursue that objective. But since Mancur Olson’s 1965 book, The Logic of Collective Action, scholars across the social sciences have since understood that collective action commonly entails a social dilemma. Specifically, in many collective action settings, it is any given individual’s self-interest to free-ride off the efforts of others—enjoying the benefit produced by the collective (e.g., a completed team work project, attention to an important cause, a reduction in global emissions) while allowing others to take on the costs (e.g., time, effort, money) of providing it. At the same time, if each actor opts for individual rationality by free-riding, the collective benefit will not be produced at all—and everyone will be worse off than they would have been if everyone had contributed. Tension between individuals’ and the larger group’s best interest is pervasive in collective action. This is because collective action is often enacted to produce public goods: beneficial resources that can be enjoyed both by those who have contributed their efforts to providing for the good, and those who have not. Consider efforts to protect the environment. Everyone is free to enjoy the benefits of a stable climate and clean air and water, even if the burdens of providing for these benefits are taken on by others. Other collective action settings involve a problem of public good depletion rather than production. In 1968, Garrett Hardin referred to this situation as “the tragedy of the commons.” In these settings, actors must coordinate around how much of a shared resource to harvest for themselves in the short term without exhausting the good available to the group in the long term. Other examples include preventing overfishing and encouraging water conservation during droughts. Because collective action problems are so common, much past work has sought to understand how groups mobilize their members to put aside their self-interest for the good of the collective. Olson theorized that groups would fail to achieve

Collective Action

their collective interests in the absence of private incentives—specifically, rewards to those who cooperate and/or punishments to free-riders. But more recent arguments have noted that facilitating cooperation via private incentives itself can pose a collective action problem. After all, someone has to pay for the rewards and punishments. And rational individuals would prefer that others take on those costs, while enjoying the benefits (i.e., group-level cooperation) that the administration of rewards and punishments provides. Thus, the deployment of private incentives to facilitate collective action is subject to a “second-order collective action problem” that may require a solution of its own. Research on collective action has since sought to understand what mechanisms might encourage members to take on the costs of rewards and punishments, or how cooperation can be promoted in their absence.

Leadership as a Solution to Collective Action Problems Note that despite their difficulties, the problems posed by collective action can be overcome. Indeed, people combine their efforts to successfully produce collective outcomes on a daily basis. One key solution is leadership and followership, in which a group leader or authority figure helps solve the coordination and free-riding problems that impede collective action. From small-scale hunter-gatherer societies to large-scale contemporary social movements, much past work has demonstrated that group leaders are important forces in mobilizing collective action. Leaders are typically defined as those individuals who have enhanced influence over others in a group. Leaders of collective action groups may engage in activities including setting and communicating goals, fostering cooperative norms, coordinating group efforts, monitoring members’ behaviors, and rewarding and punishing those behaviors. The position may be highly formal and institutionalized, as when members of a voluntary association follow the association’s by-laws by electing a leader via an anonymous vote. Or leaders may emerge through a relatively informal process, as in a loosely organized grassroots social movement that is initiated by a central figure—the leader.

125

As already noted, the functions and roles of leaders in collective action settings vary widely. In early stages, leaders may play a central role in initiating collective action by acting as a “first mover”—an early decision-maker whose behaviors signal to others that joining a collective effort will provide valuable benefits. Indeed, collective action groups themselves often do not even exist until people (i.e., leaders) take initial steps to create them and communicate their importance to others. Through their early public behaviors, leaders coordinate others’ actions around their own, encouraging followers to contribute to collective efforts. Once the group has been initiated (whether by a leader or not), leaders may also serve as sustainers of collective action. This includes, among other activities, monitoring nonleader group members’ behaviors and administering rewards or punishments to those who cooperate or free-ride, respectively. There is ample evidence from both the lab and the field demonstrating that people engage in more cooperative behavior in collective action groups with leaders than in leaderless groups. Additionally, collective action groups with leaders are much more efficient at promoting cooperation than the standard mechanism of enforcing cooperative norms in collective action groups—peer sanctions (i.e., where all can administer rewards and punishments to all, rather than these abilities being centralized in a designated authority figure or leader). This is because leadership solves some of the key problems of peer sanctions. Consider, for example, the aforementioned second-order collective action problem, that contributing to the provision of rewards and punishments to promote cooperation is itself a collective action problem, such that people would rather allow others to bear their costs. Centralized leadership avoids the diffusion of responsibility for sanctioning that often occurs when all group members, rather than a single role-occupant, may administer sanctions. Thus, leadership can prevent the underpunishment that is a symptom of the second-order collective action problem. Coordination about who can and should punish whom is much clearer. Leadership solves other problems that are pervasive when the administration of sanctions is

126

Collective Action

more decentralized. Granting one group member the enhanced authority to administer punishments, for example, can prevent retaliatory counterpunishment (punishment intended not to promote contributions to group goals, but to “get back” at someone for punishing). Unnecessarily harsh overpunishment is also reduced when only one person has the authority to distribute punishment, compared to when peers in decentralized structures can “pile on” each other for relatively minor infractions. More generally, placing sanctioning capacity in the hands of a single group leader has been shown to facilitate the success of collective action while avoiding many of the key problems of decentralized means of distributing private incentives. Though leadership provides clear benefits to groups facing collective action problems, it is important to note that leaders themselves take on significant costs in occupying the position. Consider a “first mover” who initiates collective action by making early contributions to signal to others that they too should cooperate. This leader risks being “suckered” by followers who choose to free-ride off the leader’s efforts rather than meeting the leader’s cooperation with their own cooperation. Additionally, leaders given enhanced abilities to monitor and sanction others’ behaviors must bear the costs of sanctions, and may face disapproval, reputational damage, or revolt from followers if their efforts fail. From this perspective, it is perhaps puzzling that people would be willing to take on the leader role at all. This issue has led scholars to theorize about the relationship between the costs and benefits of occupying the leadership role. For example, in exchange for their sacrifices, leaders may receive an outsize share of the collective benefits produced by the group. Regardless of whether or not they receive material benefits, leaders typically receive nonmaterial benefits, including enhanced esteem, prestige, and status within their groups. These, in turn, motivate people to sacrifice on behalf of the group, including taking on costly leadership positions. Indeed, the presence of a hierarchy in the group in general encourages individual members to work toward the group’s goals in an attempt to achieve valuable higher rank within the group.

This provides another avenue whereby groups with a hierarchical structure (e.g., those with leaders), compared to those where power and status are distributed equally, may mobilize their members to contribute to collective action.

Characteristics of Effective Collective Action Leaders Leaders do not become leaders at random; they are not representative of the populations that they lead. Instead, leaders emerge as a result of physical characteristics like body size or attractiveness, personality traits like charisma or extroversion, knowledge, social capital and connections, and punishment ability. When group members make the decision to formally install a leader to facilitate collective action, they also may make choices about who they wish to be the leader, including prosocial tendencies or a desired leadership style; how well the leader matches these preferences, in turn, can determine their success. Further, when leaders are chosen, exactly how they are chosen is a critical determinant of their ability to promote cooperation in the group. Democratically elected leaders have been shown in past work to be more effective than their appointed counterparts at promoting cooperation, as followers respond more strongly to sanctions meted out by elected, rather than appointed, group leaders. This finding suggests that perceptions of the leader’s legitimacy play a key role in how followers respond to leaders’ influence. These issues imply that adopting a leader, under some circumstances, may not solve collective action problems. Consider another example: the enhanced power that comes with leadership can sometimes corrupt, yielding a leader who free-rides off followers’ efforts, wields their punishment ability hypocritically, or engages in other self-oriented, rather than group-oriented, behaviors. Importantly, recent work has demonstrated that power does not corrupt all; rather, leader characteristics can predict whether leaders will be corrupted or instead ennobled by their power, engaging in high levels of group-beneficial behaviors upon occupying the leader role. Thus, the leadership solution is well positioned to succeed if

Collective Intelligence

the attributes of the leader correspond well with those of the group or situation at hand, though it could fail if they do not. On the whole, successful collective action often depends on the presence of leaders, who bear greater responsibility than other group members for the logistics of coordination, monitoring of effort, and distribution of reward and punishment. Leaders can help groups solve some of the most pressing problems with the social dilemma inherent in collective action. These include motivating members to cooperate by contributing to group efforts even when doing so entails personal costs, coordinating behaviors so that group members work together efficiently and effectively, and, more generally, fostering social order in our interdependent world. Ashley Harrell See also Collective Intelligence; Collective Leadership; Collective Responsibility; Group Process; Shared Leadership

Further Readings Baldassarri, D., & Grossman, G. (2011). Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 11023–11027. doi:10.1073/ pnas.1105456108 Glowacki, L., & von Rueden, C. (2015). Leadership solves collective action problems in small-scale societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: 370(1683) 20150010. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0010 Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science. 162(3859), 1243–1248. doi:10.1126/science.162. 3859.1243 Hardin, R. (1982). Collective action. Baltimore, MD: RFF Press. Harrell, A., & Simpson, B. (2016). The dynamics of prosocial leadership: Power and influence in collective action groups. Social Forces 94, 1283–1308. doi:10. 1093/sf/sov110 Oliver, P. E. (1993). Formal models of collective action. Annual Review of Sociology 19, 271–300. doi:10. 1146/annurev.so.19.080193.001415 Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.

127

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. doi:10. 1017/CBO9780511807763 Price, M. E., & Van Vugt, M. (2014). The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: The theory of service-forprestige. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8, 363. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00363 von Rueden, C., Gurven, M., Kaplan, H., & Steiglitz, J. (2014). Leadership in an egalitarian society. Human Nature 25, 538–566. doi:10.1007/s12110014-9213-4

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE Groups play an increasingly vital role in the work done by businesses, organizations, and researchers throughout the world. Only by working collaboratively, often across time and space connected through technology, can people accomplish tasks and realize goals that would be impractical or impossible to achieve by individuals working alone. Although groups may be assembled to work only on one specific task, many groups work over time on a variety of different tasks. An important question that has received relatively little research attention until recently is whether some groups do group work especially well, across a variety of tasks—and, if so, why? Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues have been at the forefront of research on this question, particularly since their 2010 paper published in Science. They call the ability of a group to perform well across a variety of group tasks collective intelligence. This entry begins by first more clearly defining collective intelligence, as compared to general intelligence. The entry then reviews recent research on the evidence of collective intelligence and in what ways intelligent individuals affect the collective intelligence of groups. Next, the entry considers situations and research exploring why experts may fail to positively influence collective intelligence. The entry concludes by exploring the factors researchers believe are associated with collective intelligence.

128

Collective Intelligence

General Intelligence and Collective Intelligence Just as the literature on intelligence is replete with different definitions, conceptualizations, and ways to measure intelligence, there is an abundance of meanings of collective intelligence in research on groups. Much of the work on collective intelligence addresses what may be called specialized collective intelligence, which concerns how groups perform specific tasks. The focus of this entry is on what may be called general collective intelligence—which concerns a group’s ability to perform across a wide range of tasks. This construct is analogous to the concept of general intelligence, or g, in the study of (individual) intelligence. Although there remains heated debate on what and how many types of intelligence there are, a large body of research provides evidence for the existence of a single factor of intelligence, g, that applies across the spectrum of cognitive tasks or abilities. These studies report significant and positive correlations for individuals’ scores across a wide variety of cognitive tasks, as well as factor analyses that reveal a consistent single factor that accounts for a substantial portion of the variance across intelligence measures. In other words, although there is some variation across different measures of intelligence, in general it is a safe bet that if one scores high on some valid measures of intelligence, the person will do so across most other such measures. By the same token, will a group that performs well on one group task be likely to perform well on other—and perhaps very different—types of group tasks? It certainly is plausible to expect no such consistency. Groups may be constructed for one or a narrow set of tasks, and there may be little reason to assume that these groups would succeed at far different types of tasks. Moreover, although the validity of any measure of individual intelligence is never without some debate and even controversy, there is far less empirical evidence supporting any assessment of group intelligence. The burgeoning literature on this question, however, is supportive of the concept of collective intelligence, c, that is analogous to general intelligence, g.

Evidence of Collective Intelligence Initial research investigating the concept of a general collective-intelligence factor randomly placed individuals into small groups of various sizes and had the groups work on a variety of tasks that differed in their collaborative processes. These included creative brainstorming exercises, problems involving mathematical, verbal, or visual skills, negotiation activities, and moral-reasoning judgments. Factor analyses of the scores for groups on these disparate tasks found support for the presence of a single factor that accounted for 43% of the variance in group performance—a percentage that falls within the typical range for the general-intelligence factor reported in corresponding research on g. Subsequent replications of this work have expanded the variety of types of groups and types of group tasks. This research has been conducted on both face-to-face and online groups, and these groups have included groups of students, online gamers, crowd workers, military personnel, and groups in different cultures. The tasks include groups playing checkers against a computer, working on an architectural design problem, typing onto a shared document, and playing Sudoku (a popular logical reasoning game involving numbers). It is noteworthy that these tasks vary along dimensions found to be important in research on group performance. Some tasks require group members to generate a range of different ideas, for example, whereas others involve the pursuit of one demonstrably correct solution, and still others concern the fast and accurate execution of specific movements or decisions. Replicating the finding of a single collective-intelligence factor across this variety of kinds of groups and kinds of group tasks adds converging evidence for the robustness of the construct of collective intelligence.

Smart Groups or Groups of Smart People? It is not particularly surprising that research has shown that groups consisting of relatively intelligent individuals tend to outperform groups of less intelligent group members. Can the success of

Collective Intelligence

groups considered high in collective intelligence simply be a by-product of these groups being comprised of intelligent team members? In other words, is there truly a general factor of collective intelligence that is sufficiently distinct from individual intelligence? The research pioneered by Woolley and her colleagues suggests that most of the variance in collective intelligence is not related to individual intelligence. They have found that neither the average nor the maximum intelligence of the members of a group is more than moderately correlated with the group’s collective intelligence. Some other research, however, has found a much stronger association between individual intelligence and group performance, suggesting that intelligent groups merely reflect the intelligence and skills of the people who comprise these groups. Although future research will no doubt continue to pursue this issue, a review published in 2021 suggests one possible explanation for the contradictory results. Its analysis of data from 22 studies involving more than 5,000 individuals in more than 1,000 groups found general support for a collective intelligence factor distinct from individual intelligence, but also found that whether compositional factors like the intelligence of group members serve as strong predictors of group performance varies as a function of the type of group task being measured. The intelligence of group members was more greatly predictive of group success on tasks that could be solved by one demonstrably correct answer, such as Sudoku, but it had a much more modest association with group success on additive tasks requiring group coordination, such as brainstorming or typing on a shared online document. One can imagine that on a task in which the single correct answer should be demonstrable to the rest of the group once it is offered, the presence of one or several particularly intelligent or skilled team members should greatly enhance the chances of success. As long as someone is skilled enough to arrive at the answer, the group can succeed. Even on such tasks, of course, other members of the group must be willing and able to recognize the correctness of the solution, and petty jealousies or stubbornness can subvert the group. When even more coordination and cooperation are required, effective leadership and other group dynamics

129

become even more likely to moderate group performance.

When Expertise Fails The phrase “the best and the brightest” entered the popular lexicon with the 1972 publication of the classic book with that title by journalist David Halberstam. Halberstam used the term dripping with irony, as his book detailed how the extraordinarily intelligent and highly educated individuals who led President John F. Kennedy’s administration collectively produced an extraordinarily flawed foreign policy, particularly concerning the Vietnam War. Similarly, in advancing his concept of groupthink, Irving Janis highlighted the problematic group dynamics exhibited by these intelligent men of the Kennedy administration that led to the Bay of Pigs disaster. These accounts highlighted the failure of individual intelligence to produce intelligent group behavior in some historically significant moments. The failure of individual expertise can also be seen in far more mundane contexts and without the kinds of strong pressures highlighted in the Kennedy administration examples, such as overbearing leadership and self-censorship. A 2008 study serves as one compelling illustration of how individual expertise can be undermined by group dynamics. In this experiment, four-person teams were assigned the task of solving a terrorist plot. They were given a set of information about suspects, potential locations, and planned activities. To solve the case successfully, the teams would have to share and correctly use different sets of evidence. For some of the evidence, participants with strong verbal memory would be most likely to offer correct analyses. For some other evidence, participants with strong face-recognition ability would be most helpful. Based on pretesting of the participants’ abilities, the teams were constructed so that some had experts and some did not. Specifically, half the teams had one verbal memory expert, one face-recognition expert, and two nonexperts. The other half of the teams consisted of four nonexperts. The researchers also manipulated whether or not the teams would receive a collaborative planning intervention. The teams that received this

130

Collective Intelligence

intervention were required to discuss explicitly who would be responsible for which type of evidence and plan how they would integrate the various types of evidence they were given. The other teams did not receive this requirement and instead were able to launch immediately into their work. The results revealed that groups with experts but no planning did no better (indeed, they even did somewhat worse) than groups without experts. Similarly, groups that engaged in planning but had no experts did no better than groups with no planning. Only the groups that had experts as well as the planning intervention did relatively well on the task. Requiring the groups to think about how they would use the available information and each other’s skills enabled them to reap the benefits of the expertise of group members. These results suggest that having experts in a group can be not only ineffective but even counterproductive if the experts’ skills are not properly utilized, as resentment, awkward power dynamics, and role confusion may overwhelm the group work. For many types of tasks, the intelligence, skills, and expertise of group members may be a necessary but not sufficient factor in successful group performance. Individual intelligence often may establish the potential for group performance, but for the group to realize that potential there must be wise leadership and group collaboration, such as an organized strategy of how to approach the problem before team members begin, as in the study just described. How leaders help group members in working together is critical for determining group performance.

Factors Associated With Collective Intelligence If individual intelligence is not a very reliable predictor of collective intelligence, what is? The research thus far points to a few key factors. One is the average social perceptiveness of group members. Groups whose members can judge and are sensitive to each other’s emotions are more likely to succeed across tasks. Another factor is the proportion of women in the group. This result may be driven primarily by the women tending to score higher on measures of social perceptiveness than

men. Another critical ingredient for collective intelligence is greater and more equal communication among group members. Taking turns during group discussions and ensuring that all members have an equal voice is associated with greater collective intelligence. Interestingly, these factors emerge in research not only with face-to-face groups but also with online groups, where emotional cues are much more difficult to read and there are more bottlenecks likely to interrupt communication. Groups with high collective intelligence can be sensitive to others’ emotions and can share group discussions even in online settings. One question that remains for research to explore is whether collective intelligence is a stable characteristic of groups or if it can be improved. General intelligence of individuals is notoriously difficult to be improved, particularly after childhood, but perhaps general collective intelligence could be enhanced with the introduction of appropriate structures and interventions. Whereas addressing limitations in people’s general intelligence may be daunting, it may be more plausible to train groups in important behaviors associated with collective intelligence, such as becoming more sensitive to each other’s emotions and sharing communication more evenly. Steven Fein, Sana Jawa, and Sarah G. McGinn See also Emotional Intelligence; Group Process; Groupthink; Intelligences

Further Readings Amelkin, V., Askarisichani, O., Kim, Y. J., Malone, T. W., & Singh, A. K. (2018). Dynamics of collective performance in collaboration networks. PLoS One, 13(10). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204547 Malone, T. W., & Woolley, A. W. (2020). Collective intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 780–801). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riedl, C., Kim, Y. J., Gupta, P., Malone, T. W., & Woolley, A. W. (2021). Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups. PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(21). doi:10.1073/pnas.2005737118 Rowe, L. I., Hattie, J., & Hester, R. (2021). g verses c: Comparing individual and collective intelligence across

Collective Leadership two meta-analyses. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6, 26. doi:10.1186/s41235-021-00285-2 Woolley, A. W., Aggarwal, I., & Malone, T. W. (2015). Collective intelligence and group performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(6), 420–424. doi:10.1177/0963721415599543 Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688. doi:10.1126/science. 1193147 Woolley, A. W., Gerbasi, M. E., Chabris, C. F., Kosslyn, S. M., & Hackman, J. R. (2008). Bringing in the experts: How team composition and collaborative planning jointly shape analytic effectiveness. Small Group Research, 39(3), 352–371. doi:10.1177/ 1046496408317792

COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP Collective leadership views leadership as a set of activities undertaken by multiple people. Plato’s Republic, Plutarch’s Lives, Machiavelli’s The Prince, embody three historic theories about leadership that feature prominently in modern-day discussions of collective leadership. These three texts imagined leadership as a set of characteristics and actions among particular people of interest. Over the past 100 years, a time in which society witnessed the transformations and transitions brought on by the industrial and the digital revolutions, leadership theories have shifted paradigmatically. One major paradigm shift of the most recent two decades is a pivot from examining the leader to examining groups of leaders. The core assumption of collective leadership is that the leadership process is a property of a group rather than an individual. Leadership is captured by the collective, interdependent, mutually synergistic activities of multiple people. The seed idea, that leadership is a property of a group, has now caught the imagination of a whole generation of leadership scholars working in the area of collective leadership. Notably, these scholars come from a wide variety of core disciplines that include organizational behavior, psychology, communication, and

131

sociology, and that leverage methods ranging from historiometric and qualitative approaches, to quantitative and social network approaches. The sheer number of conceptual and empirical papers, and more recently, of conceptual and quantitative reviews, speaks to the value of this line of theorizing to understanding leadership in a globalized, digitized world. This entry presents an overview of the theoretical waypoints marked over the past two decades. The sections that follow trace the development of key ideas from the initial introduction of the idea that leadership was a group property to questions of identity as a core mechanism, the development of collective leadership and, the role of formal and informal leadership.

Conceptual Frameworks The concept of collective leadership has been elaborated in several conceptual frameworks. All of them explain that collective leadership involves multiple people leading a group or network. All of them emphasize relationships among leaders and/ or among group members. Tamara Friedrich and her colleagues advanced an early framework in their 2009 paper, “A Framework for Understanding Collective Leadership.” Friedrich and her colleagues explain collective leadership as a process that involves selectively utilizing different individuals’ information and/or expertise. Collective leadership requires an exchange relationship between the leader and the team and is essentially a team- or network-level phenomenon. A second framework was advanced by Noshir Contractor and his colleagues in their 2012 paper, “The Topology of Collective Leadership.” From this perspective, there are three core dimensions of collective leadership: people, roles, and time. First, collective leadership implies that multiple individuals are enacting leadership. Second, leaders are collectively facilitating multiple functional needs of the group. For example, some individuals may be central in the cohesion network where others are central to directing and coordinating team activities. Third, collective leadership is dynamic. Multiple individuals can enact multiple, and changing, roles over time. The third framework is from Dorothy Carter and her colleagues’ paper, “Social Network

132

Collective Leadership

Approaches to Leadership.” Carter and her colleagues brought the relational and network aspect of collective leadership into sharp focus by classifying three ways networks play a role in collective leadership. One way that collective leadership takes a network approach is to consider the ways leaders come about because of their position in a social network. This is called leadership in networks. At other times, collective leadership takes a network approach by considering leadership influence ties among groups of people, dubbed leadership as networks. A third network lens considers both social networks and leadership influence networks to understand the confluence of networks in leadership. This is called leadership in and as networks. Networks feature prominently in all three conceptualizations of collective leadership. Not surprisingly, a series of theoretical advances have explicitly considered how network ties come to be in collective leadership arrangements.

Social Identity Given the centrality of network perspectives, identity-based theorizing has played a key role in explaining collective leadership. Social identity approaches consider how individuals perceive themselves in relation to groups. Identity approaches consider two related concepts, both of which are important to collective leadership: identity and identification. Identity describes the nature of the categories a person connects to their notion of self. Identification is the degree to which one or more aspects of identity is important and salient to the individual. Because collective leadership comes about informally and is a socially negotiated set of roles, social identity and identification are central to understanding it. One way that social identity has been found to shape collective leadership is in determining which individuals are endorsed and accepted as leaders. Groups develop shared values, and others who exemplify those values are more likely to be accepted. Likewise, the strength of identification with one’s organization and work team are important to collective leadership. A second way that social identity approaches have been central to collective leadership is in understanding how individuals come to see

themselves as leaders and/or followers. In this way, some social identity approaches explicitly define leader identity as a subcomponent of one’s working self-concept that includes leadership schemas, experiences, and future representations of oneself as a leader. Follower identity is a subcomponent of one’s working self-concept that includes followership schemas, experiences, and future representations of oneself as a follower. A third way that social identity approaches factor into collective leadership research is at the interpersonal level. Accordingly, leadership and followership identities emerge and develop through ongoing social interactions in which identities can be claimed, granted, or rejected. When individuals claim and are granted that identity, they can develop a leadership identity. Research in this vein finds that leadership claiming heightens perceptions of the actor’s leadership when a responding team member reinforces (i.e., accepts rather than rejects) the claim, but that when the claim is rejected, observers’ leadership ratings of the rejector increase. Leader and follower identities are thus dynamic constructs. Fourth, recent theorizing considers social identity at the group level to consider how groups develop shared cognition about leadership. According to this view, contextual features present early in a group’s life will result in members converging toward one of two models of leadership, one based on authority ranking where leadership is in the hands of a few high-status members or one based on communal sharing where leadership is a collective responsibility. Essentially, this view holds that collective leadership is one type of shared cognition that groups hold.

Outcomes of Collective Leadership As the preceding discussion highlights, collective leadership is a richly theorized topic. At the same time, there have been hundreds of empirical studies to test various aspects of these theories. It is important to consider the outcomes that are associated with collective leadership. There is strong support associating collective leadership and team performance. Moreover, collective leadership has been found to shape performance indirectly, by enhancing cognitive and motivational properties needed for

Collective Leadership

teams to perform. One central mechanism is team confidence. Collective leadership enhances members’ confidence in the team’s ability to perform. Investigations of collective leadership also provide insight into when it is most important to team performance. Collective leadership is particularly effective when task interdependence is high; that is, when team members are mutually reliant on one another. In addition, collective leadership is more important to performance for experienced, as compared to novice, teams. Finally, collective leadership is more related to team effectiveness when the work of team members is more rather than less complex. An important finding when examining outcomes is the consistent observation that the more patterning is taken into account, the stronger the linkage between collective leadership and team performance. Hence examining how much collective leadership is present is not nearly as telling as the nature of how leadership is collectively enacted.

Developing Collective Leadership Leadership development is thought to improve the capacity of a team or organization to engage in leadership. Given the value of collective leadership to performance, researchers have been thinking about ways to incorporate this work into the process of developing leadership. One line of thinking is to teach leaders to diagnose and rewire the leadership networks around them. There are three types of activities proposed in this domain: First, training leaders in areas of social competence, thereby enabling them to create relationships. Second, developing leaders’ abilities to diagnose and modify networks. Third, developing the social acuity of intact teams to rewire networks inside and outside the team.

The Role of Formal Leaders Although collective leadership assumes no formal leader providing vertical leadership, some research investigates the connection between formal leaders and collective leadership. The formal leader’s skills, a developed network, and effective communication have been found to be critical antecedents to

133

collectivistic actions. Furthermore, collectivistic actions, such as distribution of power through giving team members a voice, and building a trusting exchange relationship between the leader and followers, are positively related to team performance and outcomes. Other work acknowledges the connection between formal leaders and collective leadership, illustrating that collective strategic vision can flow downward in organizations. Formal leaders play a key role in shaping members’ endorsement of collective leadership in organizations.

Final Remarks Collective leadership represents a major conceptual pivot from focusing on the qualities and context of a leader, to examining the mutual enactment of leadership by a group. Two integral aspects of collective leadership are social identity theory and network approaches. Social identity is a crucial area of theorizing that explains how relationships come about in collective leadership. Social network approaches proffer both theories and associated methodologies to understand how patterns of relationships, both leadership and otherwise, shape collective leadership. Hundreds of studies have examined collective leadership in a wide range of organizations. There is a strong positive association between collective leadership and team performance. Team motivation is a central intervening mechanism that explains how collective leadership supports team performance. Research also finds boundary conditions, notably team interdependence, task complexity, and team tenure. Given the important role of collective leadership, attention is being paid to understanding how leader development activities can directly foster collective leadership, and how formal leaders can support its emergence throughout their organizations. Alina Lungeanu, Leslie DeChurch, and Noshir Contractor See also Shared Leadership; Team Leadership; Social Identity Theory; Leadership Development; Networks and Networked Organizations

134

Collective Responsibility

Further Readings Carter, D. R., DeChurch, L. A., Braun, M. T., & Contractor, N. S. (2015). Social network approaches to leadership: An integrative conceptual review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(3), 597–622. Contractor, N. S., DeChurch, L. A., Carson, J., Carter, D. R., & Keegan, B. (2012). The topology of collective leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(6), 994–1011. Eva, N., Cox, J. W., Herman, H., & Lowe, K. B. (2021). From competency to conversation: A multi-perspective approach to collective leadership development. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(5), 101346. Friedrich, T. L., Vessey, W. B., Schuelke, M. J., Ruark, G. A., & Mumford, M. D. (2009). A framework for understanding collective leadership: The selective utilization of leader and team expertise within networks. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(6), 933–958. Larson, L., & DeChurch, L. A. (2020). Leading teams in the digital age: Four perspectives on technology and what they mean for leading teams. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(1). Article 101377. Margolis, J. A., & Ziegert, J. C. (2016). Vertical flow of collectivistic leadership: An examination of the cascade of visionary leadership across levels. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(2), 334–348. Pearce, C. L., & Conger, J. A. (Eds.). (2003). Shared leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Wellman, N. (2017). Authority or community? A relational models theory of group-level leadership emergence. Academy of Management Review, 42(4), 596–617.

COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY The idea of collective responsibility has been part of discussion, and debated at length, in the field of philosophy for quite some time. For the purpose of this entry, collective responsibility is presented as the combination of two theories, responsible and collective, which, when brought together, form a theoretical construct of decentered leaders working together to make a positive impact in the world. The term “collective responsibility” emerged in the business ethics literature in the 1980s, which

connects the term to moral agency, involving collective moral decision-making (forward-looking) and accountability (backward-looking) for these decisions. As scholars of leadership studies take up collective responsibility, they do so independently in collective leadership and responsible leadership, with communication being a significant factor for both. This entry will illuminate the rise of each of these forms of leadership and then present some theoretical roots of the terms responsibility and collective most applicable to leadership studies. The entry concludes by bridging these terms and identifies some directions in leadership studies that stem from this discussion.

Responsible Leadership Responsible leadership entered the business ethics literature in 2005 alongside the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate citizenship, and the idea of doing well by doing good. Responsible leadership was positioned for leaders to implement sustainable development initiatives, build social capital, and contribute to the common good. Moreover, it corresponds to a turn toward stakeholder theory by calling attention to leaders’ responsibility to multiple constituencies including employees, customers, shareholders, communities, and the environment. As such, responsible leadership goes beyond the traditional leader–follower binary to position leaders as agents of positive social change by engaging with multiple stakeholders. Responsible leadership is also a response to a historical moment of unethical business practice, including those of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and others, as well as the Bernie Madoff scandal and 2008 financial crisis, all of which call for greater public accountability of leaders. Correspondingly, more scholarship continued in the following decade, with, most notably, a 2011 special issue on responsible leadership in the Journal of Business Ethics. In this issue, scholars connect ideas to responsible leadership such as leader qualities in values, authenticity, and virtue, as well as other leadership theories such as transformational leadership and discursive leadership. Most scholarship on this subject remains in the business and management fields, where responsible

Collective Responsibility

leadership is commonly tied to CSR and stakeholder theory, as well as bottom-of-the-pyramid social entrepreneurship. Scholars explore these avenues and open up new considerations on the subject, which includes discussion about the relationship of fairness with responsible leadership and its connection to multiple dimensions of meaningful work. Other research looks at the ways responsible leadership is facilitated by empathy, positive affect, and universal value orientation. Additionally, conferences devoted to the topic have been held in recent years, including a specialized conference on responsible leadership associated with The Academy of Management as well as an annual conference organized by the F.A.Z.-Institut that has taken place since 2001. In this entry, “responsibility” refers to moral responsibility, which involves accountability for the consequences of actions (past, present, and future) within human existence with others. Human consciousness and the freedom to choose present an ethical ought of responsibility in moral decision-making. As such, responsibility exists within an individual’s decision-making, which supports a great man (or woman) as a prototype of a responsible leader who makes responsible decisions to improve the lives of others. Although responsible leadership moves beyond the traditional binary, it still positions the leader at the center where responsible decisions are made. In Western thought, breaking from this individual, or self-centered, orientation is challenging. Yet, in accepting this ethical ought of responsibility, scholars will pose other considerations of responsibility within community. For example, 20th-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas posits responsibility as emergent in phenomenological intersubjective human encounters where the face of the Other commands responsibility. Similarly, a Habermasian view (derived by ¨ German philosopher Jurgen Habermas) reconciles business and societal goals through discourse that is integrative, which means responsible leadership is not merely a one-sided responsible act of the leader. These philosophical perspectives decenter responsible leaders from the agentic and heroic person who is a savior and conversely position a leader as humbled to the Other and in the midst of human experience. These perspectives also provide

135

caution for leaders with an agentic impulse who, with all good intentions, may create more harm than good. Thus, responsibility needs a counterpart of the collective to shed an individualist construct.

Collective Leadership Collective leadership responds to the paradox of American culture where democracy is the highest ideal, yet leadership and organizations are particularly undemocratic. Collectivist ideas work against traditional hierarchy, which decenters leaders as those in charge to a status of those who work alongside others with varying strengths and skillsets. In the literature, collective leadership first appears in 2001 with scholars bringing pluralism into the discussion of leadership. Pluralism in this context means diffusing power by valuing and appreciating diverse worldviews, standpoints, expertise, and human experiences that, when brought together through dialogue, offer greater possibilities for innovation and insight. Collective leadership is strong in its ability to achieve change, yet it is also fragile due to this plurality. Collective leadership challenges the traditional binary of leader-follower that is rife in leadership theory. Indeed, collective leadership is positioned as a shared phenomenon where pluralism in expertise guides shifting leadership responsibilities. This discussion recognizes the necessity to consider leadership as shared and distributed, as well as emergent, informal, and dynamic. Breaking these binaries is a process of tearing down hierarchy, which not only pervades leadership theory but also goes against an engrained cultural mindset, particularly in the West, and even more predominately in the United States. When leadership exists primarily within the individual in this agentic construction, communication is less of a concern than in collective environments. While traditional binary and hierarchy may have worked in previous epochs, scholars observe the corresponding need for collective leadership with a more connected world and networked economy. As such, communication is crucial to the collective leadership framework. Collective leadership creates responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making in which creativity

136

Collective Responsibility

is best utilized through collaboration among multiple agents. Leadership has often been posited as leader-centric, where the leader is the moral agent with a moral compass who, as a great person, inspires followers toward greatness. Thinkers like Robert Bellah, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Putnam, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who were critical of individualism, did not propose a collective takeover. Rather, they strove for a balance of the individual and the collective. In a collective frame, individualism may be replaced with pluralism, and hubris with humility. Rather than each person existing independently, as is the case with individualism, pluralism offers a recognition and appreciation for diverse subjects, who come together to offer their unique perspectives around what Martin Buber termed a common center. As such, the leader is no longer the center, but the collective mission or goal becomes the center upon which people collectively focus. Decisions are made not in the leader’s mind, but through discourse among the collective. Ideas that emerge from discourse do not reside in any individual person; they emerge in the between, to use Buber’s term, thus, the collective synergistic where something extraordinary arises as a collective thought. This discourse is not debate. Debate returns to individualism in which individuals argue to win their perspective over others. Discourse in collective action is discussion rooted in dialogue. Related to collective thought and discourse is the existentialist term group-in-fusion, which is a phenomenological sense of We, or a coming together that generates more than the sum of the parts. For the We to succeed, people must focus on a common mission. Important to note is that the individuals who make up this We do not lose their individual autonomy, as they might in a cult, for example. Pluralism remains intact while the collective is accomplished by means of common action. Mission in action is key in holding the group together, which can support the fragility of collective leadership. No one in the group is ascribed leader; they are all united by what they do, but at the same time, this communal initiative does not alienate each member’s plurality. Even more, through this collective action, individual members’ freedom is augmented. The group not

only achieves the common goal, which its members could not have attained alone, but the group also enables each person to fulfill distinctive individual capabilities in a way that could not be done in solitude.

Bridging Collective and Responsible Postmodernity moves away from individualism and toward plurality of radical alterity and subjectivity, yet also invites discourse, dwelling, and visitation with the Other. Both Max Scheler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer find ways to engender responsibility that situates a person within community, which may be described as coresponsibility. Offering an existentialist ethics, Hazel Barnes also posits consciousness is a singular universal where a person is situated with others in a historical moment and where choices are always situated in cultural, historical, economic, and community contexts. Ruth Anna Putnam proposes a pragmatist ethics of community engaged philosophy to overcome dualism akin to leaderfollower in order to contribute to the common good and human flourishing. Collective responsibility may be considered a dialectic of personal and societal, which are not at odds with each other, but are rather a balanced and necessary tension to enact positive social change. Collective and responsible are two sides of the same coin. Responsibility focuses the attention of the collective on an ethical impetus, without which collective action could be engaged for disastrous effect. Without the collective, leaders fall victim to hubris and are limited to their own perspective rather than drawing from a wealth of expertise and experience, and authentically engaging in empathy and care. Although the literature in leadership studies is rich in examining collective and responsible leadership, each independently, there is space for considerations of the intersectionality of the two, which Maurice Friedman describes as a partnership of existence. In order to bridge collective and responsible leadership, one such article posed this question: Is shared leadership key to responsible leadership? The multiple turns in postmodernity point to new directions for leadership studies, which open up possibilities for theory

Communication

development of collective responsible leadership. Other theories along this frontier are ethical leadership, which already has a strong footing in the field, as well as other more nascent theories such as collaborative and inclusive leadership. These theories work to decenter leadership from the great man, place mission as the common center, and employ plurality to enact positive change through communicative solidarity. Jen Jones See also Accountability; Caring Leadership; Collective Leadership; Corporate Social Responsibility; Democratic Leadership; Distributed Leadership; Empathic Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Inclusive Leadership

Further Readings Denis, J.-L., Lamothe, L., & Langley, A. (2001). The dynamics of collective leadership and strategic change in pluralistic organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 44(4), 809–837. doi:10.2307/3069417 Jones, J. (2014). Leadership lessons from Levinas: Revisiting responsible leadership. Leadership and the Humanities 2(1), 44–63. doi:10.4337/lath.2014.01.04 Ospina, S. M., Foldy, E. G., Fairhurst, G. T., Jackson, B., Fairhurst, G. T., & Ospina, S. M. (2020). Studying collective leadership: The road ahead. Human Relations, 73(4), 598–614. doi:10.1177/ 0018726719898736 Patzer, M., Voegtlin, C., & Scherer, A. G. (2018). The normative justification of integrative stakeholder engagement: A Habermasian view on responsible leadership. Business Ethics Quarterly, 28(3), 325–354. doi:10.1017/beq.2017.33 Pearce, C. L., Wassenaar, C. L., & Manz, C. C. (2014). Is shared leadership the key to responsible leadership? Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(3), 275–288. doi: 10.5465/amp.2014.0017 Pless, N., Maak, T., & Jongh, D. (2011). Foreword to special issue on “responsible leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 98(1). doi:10.1007/978-94-007-39956_1 Robinson, T. A., & Le Ber, M. J. (2019). Collective leadership practices: Creating responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making. Journal of Leadership Studies, 13(3), 50–55. doi:10. 1002/jls.21660

137

Wellman, N. (2017). Authority or community? A relational models theory of group-level leadership emergence. Academy of Management Review, 42(4), 596–617. doi:10.5465/amr.2015.0375

COMMUNICATION Communication is a foundational building block for effective leadership. Communication is defined as the transmission, interpretation, and exchange of information. It involves interaction between two or more people with the purpose of conveying information, ideas, feelings, or opinions. The basic process of communication includes a sender, a receiver, and a message. The sender creates and chooses a channel and medium to encode the message, which may include speaking, writing, eye contact, body language, facial expression, or gestures expressed in writing, speech, TV, film, art, or the internet. The receiver is the person or people to whom the message is directed. The receiver decodes or interprets the message and may provide feedback to the sender. Effective leaders utilize various communication models and channels based on the nature and intent of their messages. This entry begins by exploring the three primary models of communication. The entry then examines how effective communication is essential for leaders and those in management, then concludes by considering some communication strategies for leaders.

Models of Communication The three major models of communication are linear, interactive, and transactional. Within the linear model of communication, the sender encodes and sends a message through a channel to a receiver. This type of communication flows in one direction only—from sender to receiver. Linear communication was especially popular for leaders in America in the early 20th century during the Industrial Age when the activities of many were organized by one to move in a specific direction. Assembly line workers often received

138

Communication

messages from their leaders without any opportunity to ask questions or provide feedback. The ability to impress the will of the leader upon his followers and induce feelings and behaviors of obedience, respect, loyalty, and cooperation was the focus of the workforce leadership. Formal reports, memos, and letters are also types of linear communication issued by leaders. The interactive model of communication occurs when the sender encodes and sends a message through a channel. The receiver decodes and responds to the message through a channel. Two-way interaction allows the sender and the receiver to share messages and feedback one at a time. This circular model of communication incorporates a mutual exchange in which both the sender and the receiver encode and decode messages. Leaders utilize the interactive model of communication through email, social media, chat boards, surveys and polls, or any other human-tocomputer interaction. The transactional model of communication involves the continuous exchange of information between the sender and the receiver, who send messages back and forth through different channels. Because this form of communication is instant and constant, the risk of noise and distortion complicating the message is great. The most widely and frequently used model of communication for many companies and organizations that incorporate 21st-century skills, leaders utilize the transactional model quite frequently during face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, or videoconferencing. In all three models of communication, the leader begins with encoding the message and maintains a responsibility to ensure that the receiver receives and is able to decode the message. In addition to encoding the message, the sender also selects the most appropriate channel to convey his, her, or their message, which may include verbal, nonverbal, or visual cues. Verbal communication involves the use of words or language to transmit a message that can be written or spoken. Nonverbal channels do not rely on language, but instead utilize eye contact, body language, gestures, hand signals, and sounds to convey important messages. Visual communication can include signs, drawings, and colors. The linear, interactive, and transactional models of communication vary in channel richness from least

to greatest, respectively, each with advantages and disadvantages. For easily disseminated, premeditated messages or to provide formal records, leaders may send messages with a low channel richness. These types of messages travel only one way without feedback from the receiver and may be perceived as impersonal or dictatorial. Contrarily, for personal, two-way communication that allows for fast feedback, leaders may send messages with a high channel richness. With the exchange of messages in real time and often through multiple mediums, spontaneous dissemination of information combined with the potential for inaccurate and unrecorded facts could pose challenges and, however unintentionally, alter the original message. Still, the sender and receiver must also consider noise, or anything that distorts the message by interfering with the communication cycle. Effective communication includes both consideration of the intent and content of the message to determine the ideal communication model along with selection of the correct medium and channel to preserve clarity of the message.

Management vs. Leadership Strong communication skills are an essential ingredient for any successful leader or leadership team. In addition to crafting and sending messages, leaders must listen first and often. Empathetic listening enables the leader to carefully and very intentionally hear another’s perspective, identify their emotion without judgment, and communicate understanding with others. Leaders who lack the ability to effectively and authentically communicate their vision for success, who are not able to define strategies to accomplish their mission, and who do not empathetically listen will jeopardize their ability to maintain a dedicated, committed followership. Effective communication of leaders, whether through management or leadership, will promote a strong followership of engaged, positive, and independent critical thinkers. Management is based on power structures. Power is the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. Managers are responsible for planning and budgeting within an organization—keeping an eye on the bottom line. Organizational management tasks including staffing, directing, and controlling to

Communication

create and maintain boundaries is a focus. Management positions are typically based on a hierarchy of power and focused on products with some emotional distance of the leader and conformity of the followers. A manager effectively maintains stability of an organization but does not consistently inspire others or motivate organizational change. The choice to manage or lead is situational and at the discretion of the leader. Leadership is the ability and willingness to influence others to embrace change. Influential leaders design a clear vision with a defined strategy for their organizations, keeping an eye on the horizon and making preparation for future growth. Effective leaders welcome and empower followers to collaborate on creating both a shared culture and set of values that help others to grow. Leadership focuses on people, not products, and inspires and motivates followers to join the collective mission. With the establishment of emotional connections grounded in trust, integrity, and respect, leaders guide others to create and propel organizational change. Communication levels and subsequent buy-in of followers varies between managers and leaders. Specifically, the leader’s level of communication is directly correlated with the follower’s level of buy-in. The first level of communication focuses on behaviors and incorporates pay, rewards, threats, correction, and intimidation. This first level of communication prompts followers to feel apathy toward the leader and the organization and may even drive followers to either passively or actively resist the will of the leader. Based on thoughts, the second level of communication utilizes logic, data, evidence, reason, statistics, charts, and analysis to share information. Followers often agree with the data that are presented and comply with directives or requests issued by the leader. The most ideal for effective leadership, the third level of communication is based on values and beliefs. A clear vision and purpose told through stories, music, or symbols resonates with followers and inspires high levels of engagement and passion.

Communication Strategies for Leaders Effective leadership communication begins with authentically cultivating a culture of trust

139

throughout the organization. Leaders must be competent and keenly self-aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, care deeply about those whom they lead and their organizations, and exhibit character in decision-making. In opportunities to communicate with colleagues and constituents, leaders must monitor their own reactions, choosing words and actions very carefully; address concerns by listening, asking questions, and taking action; and remain open and honest with, and grateful to and for, their followers. Leaders who first project warmth, followed by strength, are better situated to facilitate a trusting environment that contributes to highly effective communication and the absorption of information. With the daily responsibility of sharing information, leaders must review certain criteria for the most impactful communication. A leader should consider and tailor their message for the intended audience. The message should be simple, straightforward, and free of errors. The message should also provide all the information needed by the follower or listener with deliberate efforts to engage the receiver through high-interest content to grab and maintain attention. The leader should make a concerted effort to disseminate information that is timely and relevant with sufficient evidence, details, and supporting data. A well-crafted message designed to appeal to self-interests or connect with the emotions will inspire people and lead to action. The leader must also analyze the intended and unintended consequences of each decision and message to determine his, her, or their best next steps. Rhetoric, the art of speaking and writing effectively, is a required skill for successful communication in leadership. Leaders must be able to effectively manipulate the three strategies of persuasion to inspire action within their organization. Ethos is the first tool of persuasion that focuses on the integrity or personal character of the speaker. Similarly, the ethos of an organization is the perceived degree of credibility believed to exist with an organization—the spirit or moral character of the community. Ethos is an effective tool because it enables the leader to build a relationship with the audience who perceive the leader as a credible source. When the leader is likable, believable, and relatable, he, she, or they are better

140

Community Leadership

able to connect with followers as a trusted source of information and they are more likely to comply and collaborate. Logos is another tool of persuasion that is based on logic and spoken word. Presentations of information based on facts and data are presented in the best interest of the followers or the organization. Leaders who thoroughly and methodically convey information based on extensive facts and research influence followers by helping them understand and feel compelled to take action. People perceive the leader as trustworthy, well researched, and with good intentions so they are more likely to follow. Pathos is the last tool of persuasion that puts the audience into a certain frame of mind by integrating empathy or emotion. Frequently used in advertisements, pathos is an incredibly effective tool for leaders who are able to master it. With pathos, leaders are able to appeal to the attitudes and values of their followers with a sense of common purpose. The leader can capitalize on shared ideals and beliefs through inspiration and enthusiasm. This tool is especially impactful because followers begin to develop an understanding of why leaders do what they do and feel personally connected to and invested in both the leader and the organization. Perhaps the most influential persuasion tool, pathos also requires the leader to develop a certain degree of emotional intelligence. That is, the leader must establish and remain firmly focused on well-balanced social emotional skills beginning with self-awareness to identify emotions, recognize strengths, and build confidence, and evolving to self-management by combining self-discipline and self-motivation to accomplish personal goals. After mastery of inward skills, the leader must look outward to strengthen skills that demonstrate their ability to appreciate diversity, respect others, and develop empathy through social awareness, and the relationship management skills of team building, social engagement, and communication. The most successful leaders are both emotionally intelligent and competent in using all three types of persuasion. Strong leaders are capable of determining which method will be most effective depending on the content and intended audience of the message. Leaders will invariably encounter and be required to engage in difficult conversations that

occasionally require negotiation. They must also be able to understand and navigate organizational structures and politics. Negotiation is the dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding, resolve a point of difference, or gain advantage as an outcome of discussion. It incorporates both the leader’s ability to provide information and the leader’s skills of persuasion. To achieve success, the leader can begin to develop a shared pool of meaning so that the leader and follower can build consensus and work toward a mutually beneficial resolution. Persuasion in negotiation is an essential proficiency for exemplary management and leadership. Dana R. Jackson See also Empowerment; Influence Tactics for Leaders; Rhetoric; Trust

Further Readings Aristotle (350 BC). (n.d.). Rhetoric, book I. Classics-MIT. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/ rhetoric.html Botsman, R. (2018). Who can you trust?: How technology brought us together and why it might drive us apart. New York, NY: Public Affairs, Hatchet Book Group. Clawson, J. (2012). Level three leadership: Getting below the surface. (5th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. New York, NY: Random House. Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Swtizler, A. (2012) Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Sinek, S. (2009). Start with why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP This entry explores how leadership research and practice can benefit from taking a community perspective on leadership. As Gareth Edwards wrote in 2011, this means widening and deepening

Community Leadership

the appreciation that research and practice has on notions of distributed-ness (considering leadership as a wider social activity than position or as an individual) and relationality (appreciating leadership as being derived from the relationship between those seen as leaders and those seen as followers). A community perspective does this by exploring interconnections in how leadership is socially constructed, as discussed by Keith Grint, and how these constructions are sociomaterial (socially and materially intertwined) in nature, as discussed by Beverley Hawkins. In essence, therefore, the entry explores conceptual links between leadership and community to develop a wider perspective that can be taken by scholars, practitioners, and developers, rather than exploring community leaders per se. These community-based interconnections are outlined here to provide a short introduction and overview. For readers who wish to explore the topic in greater detail, Further Readings are suggested at the end.

Key Concepts in a Community Perspective on Leadership The suggested orientation toward a community perspective on leadership therefore is guided by core concepts—such as individualism (while this might be seen as a polar opposite to community, the community literature, and hence this entry, sees individualism as in relation with community), a sense of belonging, friendships, social networks, symbolism, aesthetics, liminality, language, and ethics). In doing so, this type of perspective inherently takes a social construction standpoint, as suggested, for example, by Grint. These core concepts are in no way an exhaustive list, and there will be aspects of community that connect to leadership in specific contexts more readily, or in addition to, those highlighted above, and in more detail below. The point is that when researching, practicing, or developing leadership, a community perspective encourages one to appreciate these and other concepts in understanding how leadership manifests. This entry, therefore, will describe these aspects of community and highlight their importance to our understanding of leadership. It will also highlight

141

the inherent connection to place and a placebased view of leadership. Lastly, it will make a link to more postmodern views on community and highlight how we might research and practice leadership through these interpretations. Let us look more closely at some key features that typically comprise community leadership and a community-based perspective on leadership. Individualism

Leadership research and practice has over recent years been critiqued for its over reliant focus on individual leaders. Taking a community view also encourages this move away from a concentration on single individual leaders and suggests a wider, more dispersed notion. A community perspective, however, does not discount the individual and their identity in the construction of leadership. Instead, it pushes us to appreciate the plural relationship between ourselves and wider society and suggests that leadership research and practice should harness the relational interconnection between society, place, and individual identity in the social construction of leadership. This includes ourselves as researchers, practitioners, and/or developers. We also need to take our own identity into account and be reflexive in how we handle our own role in the construction of leadership in any one context. Aspects of our self-expression, for example, such as art, are part of our communities. Hence, the research, practice and development of leadership should reflect on the relatedness of aspects of who we are as individuals and distributed notions of leadership and push toward more plural perspectives. Sense of Belonging

Within the community literature, a sense of belonging is a key concept. Communities are constructed through people feeling that they belong to a place or together across places. Leadership research, practice, and development therefore should take account of this and appreciate that whatever is narratively created as leadership will undoubtedly be produced from some form of

142

Community Leadership

a sense or feeling of belonging to someone and/or something and/or some place. Leadership and followership, therefore, are entangled and intertwined with feelings of belonging and should be investigated, developed, and practiced from this basis, including those of us who are researchers, practitioners and developers. Further, however, we will feel a sense of belonging to a number of different people, things, and places at any given time and hence we will have a multiple sense of belonging (sometimes contradictory) which also needs to be appreciated in the development of understandings around leadership. The multiplicity of concepts, such as senses of belonging and, in turn, identity, will be discussed in a little more detail later. Friendships and Social Networks

Friendship in organizations tends to be a hidden concept, yet for communities it is another key factor that creates a sense of being together and belonging. A community perspective therefore suggests that organization studies can learn from community studies by examining how friendships work in our organizations and how they are inherently political and therefore have power. From a leadership perspective this means appreciating the role of friendship (and betrayal) in the construction or deconstruction of leadership and leader/follower relationships. Social network research has harnessed some sense of how we might work together socially, especially in the current modern era of social media. It still remains unclear, however, how friendships can interconnect and interrelate within these social networks and how this then impacts on how leadership is narrated in organizations and across societies. This suggests a need for a “behind-thescenes” look at our social relationships in organizations and the part they play in describing leadership. Symbolism and Aesthetics. Leadership has taken an aesthetic turn recently in research and practice terms, whereby connections to more embodied experiences of sociomateriality are promoted as part of the leadership process. A community perspective on leadership harnesses this direction but relates it back to place. Hence

a community perspective would encourage researchers, practitioners, and developers to look for connections to symbolism and wider aesthetic triggers in how leadership is being constructed in context. Hence, investigating some of the material aspects of leadership is important. One such example is art (as is alluded to above under the individualism section). Symbolism, aesthetics, and art are also key parts of a sociomaterial view of leadership, as noted by Hawkins, and can also be constructed in leadership terms in their own right. Hence, researchers and practitioners, if taking a community perspective, should look up, around, and behind at the symbolic triggers for the social construction of leadership. Liminality. Liminality is a core concept within anthropological studies of community and represents fluidity and shifting relationships in and between communities. Liminality is now also a mainstay in organization studies and taking more emphasis in leadership studies too, as discussed recently by Edwards, Hawkins, and Neil Sutherland. In particular, the role of liminality (a felt sense of being between and betwixt places and spaces) in learning appears to be an important way of understanding impact in leadership learning and development. A community perspective on leadership encourages us not only to look in and around place but is also suggestive of a need to look between places too and an appreciation of how leadership might be (de)constructed in these between places. Liminality, therefore, reminds researchers, practitioners, and developers that one should also consider between places when searching for narratives or antinarratives of leadership not just in the sites of activity that we are drawn to in research or development terms. Transitional spaces therefore become important in understanding leadership, for example, corridor conversations, social events, and virtual communications. These types of activity might not get categorized as “leadership activity” and, hence, may not be researched or considered from a practical and developmental perspective. A community perspective, therefore, can act as a reminder to take these spaces seriously when considering leadership. Language. Languages of communities are of course, a key element of feeling a part of each

Community Leadership

other, the sense of belonging highlighted earlier. Common languages, whether it be a national language or aspects of language (accents or specific organizational and cultural words and phrases for example) that are key parts of a community, are important to how we feel part of a community. Language is also becoming an important aspect of leadership research, whereby the social construction of leadership is born out of the language of place. A community perspective welcomes this shift toward a localized understanding of leadership and promotes further appreciation of meaning-making from differing languages across organizations, communities, and society. This should also be in conjunction with a reflexive account of our own language use and meaning-making as researchers, practitioners, and developers. Ethics. Similar to relational notions of leadership, ethics is the hoped-for, ideological end point of a process of appreciating leadership from a community perspective. What is meant by this is that along with understanding how leadership is constructed through this complex interplay between community concepts, one would like to see a more ethical approach to the practice of leading. The very complexity of these interactions, though, make this almost a utopian hope, given that community itself has an excluding force and is in some cases a romanticized notion (in that it is generally seen as a positive aspect of social life). For example, while some feel part of a community and feel included, others might not and may be excluded. Ethical leadership research will need to take note of these sorts of contradictory forces within social interaction to gain a deeper understanding of how leadership might be constructed as “ethical.” Added to this is the inherent multiplicity of these concepts, as discussed in what follows. Postmodern Interpretations of Community. Before concluding this examination of community leadership, it is worth noting the inherent fluidity of concepts connected to community highlighted by those with a postmodern perspective. Postmodern commentators on community suggest an inherent multiplicity and relationality. The place of investigating, practicing, and/or developing

143

leadership, therefore, is a place of entangled notions consistently in flux. While a community perspective might give some boundary to this in the sense of a geographical community, it will still be represented by a mixture in motion of these concepts (and others) within such a place. Community might also be a notion that transcends geographies and hence becomes that much more complex in interpretation. Added to this is the invitation for researchers and practitioners to look up, around, behind, and between—which is also part of a community perspective. The place in which one is situated when asking the question of leadership is therefore complex and nuanced, yet it is this complexity and nuance that one must try and harness and not avoid through generalization and objectification. A community perspective on leadership suggests that we as researchers, practitioners, and developers hold that space within place and harness the narratives, stories, and constructions that appear in front and around us in a meaningful way.

Concluding Remarks As this entry has attempted to show, all aspects of community point toward the need to appreciate place or places in our understandings of how narratives of leadership are developed and hence notions of leadership are constructed. Furthermore, researchers, practitioners and developers of leadership should look toward the complexity of place and try to understand the fluid interrelationships that present themselves always with an eye to what is not, as well as what is present. Finally, researchers, practitioners and developers would be well advised to broaden their gaze (i.e., to look at what has gone before and what is also being communicated through places in between and in antenarratives) when interpreting leadership in place. There is probably a wider, multivoiced story to what is being constructed. Gareth Edwards See also Critical Leadership Studies; GLOBE Research Program; Culture, Ethics and Effectiveness; Foucault and Postmodernism

144

Community Wealth Building

Further Readings Cunliffe, A. L., & Eriksen, M. (2011). Relational leadership. Human Relations, 64(11), 1425–1449. Edwards, G. P. (2011). Concepts of community: A framework for contextualising distributed leadership. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13(3), 301–312. Edwards, G. P. (2015). Leadership as community. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Edwards, G. P. (2017). From the Black Square to the Red Square: Rebel leadership constructed as process through a narrative on art. Leadership, 13(1), 100–119. Edwards, G. P., Hawkins, B., & Sutherland, N. (2021). Problematizing leadership learning facilitation through a trickster archetype: An investigation into power and identity in liminal spaces. Leadership. doi:10.1177/ 1742715021998229 Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of “leadership”. Human Relations, 58(11), 1467–1494. Hawkins, B. (2015). Ship-shape: Materializing leadership in the British Royal Navy. Human Relations, 68(6), 951–971. Schedlitzki, D., Ahonen, P., Wankhade, P., Edwards, G., & Gaggiotti, H. (2017). Working with language: A refocused research agenda for cultural leadership studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(2), 237–257.

COMMUNITY WEALTH BUILDING Community wealth building (CWB) refers to a family of local economic and community development strategies that aim at both the full development of local community resources and the more equitable distribution over time of wealth and political influence. It has been described as both a strategy for directly confronting entrenched inequalities of wealth, power, and opportunity and a method of community-driven problem solving that aims at inclusivity and empowerment. CWB has been adopted as a policy framework in a variety of cities in both the United States (Cleveland, Richmond, Rochester, Chicago) and the United Kingdom (Preston; Hackney Borough of

London). This approach is seen by practitioners and advocates as a practical way to begin movement toward the practical redistribution of resources while simultaneously addressing immediate community problems. This entry provides a brief introduction to the concept by reviewing its origins as a response to the perceived inadequacy of conventional economic development strategies; describing several of the most significant applications of the concept to date; and outlining future trends and possibilities for community wealth building as a policy paradigm.

Origins of Community Wealth Building as a Concept In the second half of the 20th century, the population of many central cities in the United States declined, even in the context of national population growth, as a result of suburbanization, regional shifts in capital and people, and in many cases “white flight” in response to the racial integration of urban public facilities (especially schools) beginning in the 1950s. These trends were exacerbated in many cases by capital disinvestment (deindustrialization) as manufacturing jobs shifted to lower-wage production sites overseas or declined as a result of international trade. At the local and state level, those trends produced economic development strategies heavily oriented toward attracting (or retaining) mobile capital investment: that is, persuading large corporations to make investments in one’s city, so as to increase (or maintain) employment levels. In some cases, the marketing of locations to investors focused on school quality and infrastructure; in other cases, they focused on low taxes, light regulatory requirements, or low labor costs (and anti-union policies). But beyond these general features, state and local economic development authorities customarily offered subsidy packages to potential new employers in the form of grants, tax forgiveness, new infrastructure commitments, and more. Large-scale employers in this environment customarily have been able to play states and localities off against one another to get the best possible deal for themselves—the Amazon “HQ2”

Community Wealth Building

project (that ultimately landed in northern Virginia) is an example. This approach to economic development by definition can only produce a limited number of “winners,” and sometimes the “winning” locality, having overbid for a project in order to win, may have limited or even negative net benefits from deals of this kind. Moreover, subsidy-based approaches that involve enticing employers to move jobs from one locality to another benefit one community only by making another less secure. In response to these deficiencies in standard economic development practice, CWB has emerged as an alternative economic development paradigm in order to achieve three principal goals: moving toward a full employment economy in which all communities have sufficient capital and employment base and are not in direct competition with one another; using public resources to support current residents and neighborhoods in developing their own assets; and finally, promoting more democratic and place-based forms of wealth ownership. In a 2005 article, researchers with the nonprofit Democracy Collaborative coined the term community wealth building to refer to a bundle of place-based strategies and initiatives, including employee ownership of firms, community development corporations, community land trusts, buy-local purchasing policies, community development financial institutions, locally focused workforce development initiatives, and more. A central strategy has been to leverage the economic resources of existing “anchor” institutions such as hospitals, educational institutions, and government entities that have a permanent stake in local economies in ways which more intentionally build wealth in that same locality. For instance, a hospital might proactively seek to create training and workforce development opportunities for residents of high-poverty neighborhoods in proximity to the hospital or give preferences on contracts to locally owned firms, as a way to strengthen the surrounding neighborhood. In a 2020 essay, policy analysts Melody C. Barnes and Thad Williamson redescribed the concept of CWB as a holistic policy paradigm that could be applied to virtually the whole of domestic policy by local and state governments, often with

145

the support of the federal government. Barnes and Williamson described CWB as involving four central elements: inclusive participation of citizens on the front end of policymaking; setting bold equity goals and establishing tools to measure progress; using a holistic concept of wealth encompassing the full range of resources available in communities; and utilizing innovative economic strategies to redirect the flow of resources within communities in a more equitable manner. This approach, Barnes and Williamson contended, could help communities identify opportunities for positive-sum (“win-win”) policy improvements, with the aim of both growing the stock of community wealth and distributing it in a more equitable manner. Barnes and Williamson go on to argue for empowering local governance units with the resources and power to initiate bold steps toward equity, within a supportive federal context. In a related analysis, scholars Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill have proposed CWB as a policy paradigm for the UK Labour Party, and also called attention to the potential of empowered municipalities to bring about bold change at the local level.

Practical Applications In the United States, the best-developed model of CWB is widely considered to be Cleveland, Ohio. In the face of decades of population decline and massive neighborhood poverty, a consortium of educational and health institutions, organized by the Cleveland Foundation with support from the Democracy Collaborative, moved to establish the Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund (ECDF) in 2008. The aim of ECDF is to establish and incubate start-up cooperatives committed to hiring individuals from high-poverty Cleveland neighborhoods, paying a living wage and benefits, and giving employees an ownership stake. These cooperatives in turn would obtain contracts with local anchor institutions, allowing them to be viable as enterprises while also filling a need for those institutions. The first cooperative business established was an industrial-scaled laundry, to be followed by a solar panel installation firm and an urban greenhouse growing large quantities of food. The Evergreen Cooperatives currently

146

Community Wealth Building

employ approximately 250 C level and residents; the long-term goal is to establish a system of self-funding cooperatives modeled after the Mondragon network of the Basque region of Spain. In 2014, Richmond, Virginia established the nation’s first municipal Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) to coordinate implementation of recommendations from Mayor Dwight C. Jones’s Anti-Poverty Commission. The initial aims of OCWB were to oversee programmatic initiatives impacting education, housing, workforce development, economic development in transportation, as well as to define a citywide strategy for tackling the city’s 25% poverty rate. It also established specific initiatives recommended by residents, such as hiring public housing residents to connect neighbors to existing resources and establishing new college and career advising centers within city high schools. In 2015, OCWB was ratified as a permanent agency of Richmond city government, and announced a fifteen-year goal of cutting child poverty by one-half (from 40% to 20%) and overall poverty by 40% (from 25% to 15%) by the year 2030. By ordinance, Richmond OCWB reports to a Citizens Advisory Board, at least one-half of whom must represent high-poverty neighborhoods, and is required to file a written annual report on the City’s progress toward these goals. In 2017, OCWB was awarded a five-year matching grant by the Virginia Department of Social Services to expand its holistic workforce development model. This additional funding allowed the agency to nearly triple the number of residents it helped find employment (from just over 200 to 600 annually) over a three-year time period (2016–2019). By 2019, the city’s reported poverty rate had fallen to 19%, a fall of 30% over a three-year time period, compared with an 18% drop in poverty nationwide over the same time period (City of Richmond, 2020). In 2018, Rochester, New York, moved to replicate Richmond’s model by creating its own Office of Community Wealth Building, with a focus on supporting social enterprise development, access to credit, workforce development, and other asset-building strategies. In 2021, Chicago Mayor Sara Lightfoot initiated an effort to support a citywide community wealth building strategy

through its Office of Equity and Racial Justice, with an aim of expanding “community ownership and control” of economic development in the city. Perhaps the best developed model of CWB currently is Preston, in Lancashire, UK, which has adopted the model under the leadership of Mayor Matthew Brown beginning in the early 2010s (when Brown served as a city councilor). The Preston Model leans heavily on expanding the share of local government procurement that is spent locally; this total more than doubled (from 14% to 30%) between 2012–13 and 2016–17, pumping an additional 74 million pounds (UK) into the Preston economy and contributing to stronger local employment. The Model also involves paying a living wage to public employees and establishing a public credit union; support for emerging cooperative businesses; and requiring all land and economic development deals (above stipulated thresholds) in the city to include plans to hire local residents. Preston’s efforts have drawn considerable recognition, including being recognized as the UK’s “Most Improved City” in a 2018 by the Demos Organization (UK). This evolving model has attracted the support of political leaders within the Labour Party and is being replicated by other towns and cities across the United Kingdom, with the involvement and support of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, the Democracy Collaborative, and the Labour Party itself.

Future Trends and Possibilities: Community Wealth Building as Policy Paradigm Perhaps the most crucial commonality to the different examples of CWB noted above is the idea that a more democratic, people-centered approach to economic development can also yield better results on conventional measures of quality of life such as employment, poverty levels, and community economic stability. Democratic inclusion may take place through deliberate inclusion of impacted communities on the front-end of policymaking, or it may take place through creation of cooperatives which distribute wealth and benefits more equitably. Champions of the idea in the United Kingdom envision more and more cities adopting the Preston approach to economic development, with

Complexity Leadership Theory

support from the national government. In the US context, while much attention is also focused on municipal-level application of these ideas, Barnes and Williamson (and others) have also envisioned both applying a community wealth building lens to the full range of domestic policy systems (including education, housing, transportation, public health, infrastructure), and marrying local initiatives to a national policy environment that would both provide resources and mandate minimum standards for localities. Community wealth building ultimately is a strategy for seeking better community outcomes and for providing residents more tangible ways to directly impact those outcomes. In this manner, it is potentially not just a community development strategy but a strategy for the revitalization of democracy and the core idea that popular participation can impact the quality of life and future direction of the neighborhoods, towns, and cities in which residents live their daily lives. Thad Williamson See also Economic Justice; Property-Owning Democracy

Further Readings Barnes, M., Walker, C., & Williamson, T. (Eds.). (2020). Community wealth building and the reconstruction of American democracy: Can we make American democracy work? Cheltenham: Elgar. Barnes, M., & Williamson, T. (2020). Becoming the American community we should be—But never have been. In Barnes, M., & Williamson, T. (Eds.), Community wealth building and the reconstruction of American democracy: Can we make American democracy work? Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Centre for Local Economic Strategies. (2019). How we built community wealth in Preston: Achievements and results. Retrieved August 17, 2021, from https://cles. org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/CLES_PrestonDocument_WEB-AW.pd City of Richmond. (2020). Office of community wealth building annual performance report. Retrieved August 17, 2021, from https://www.rva.gov/sites/default/files/ 2021-03/2019-Annual-Performance-Report.pdf Democracy Collaborative. (2005). Building wealth: The new asset-based approach to solving social and economic problems. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute.

147

Guinan, J., & O’Neill, M. (2019). The case for community wealth building. Cambridge: Polity Press. Williamson, T., Imbroscio, D., & Alperovitz, G. (2002). Making a place for community local democracy in a global era. New York, NY: Routledge.

COMPLEXITY LEADERSHIP THEORY Complexity leadership is a theory of leadership for adaptability. Drawing from the physical and biological sciences, it shows how concepts of adaptability from nature can be applied to human and social systems to help people understand how to effectively lead and follow in a complex world. When complexity occurs, systems experience high levels of unpredictability and uncertainty that put them into a dynamic state. In these situations, leaders and followers must pivot and adapt in accordance with the fluctuating conditions. This requires a different way of thinking, which is explained by complexity leadership theory (CLT). CLT shows how leaders and followers must work together in the face of complexity pressures and opportunities to foster adaptive responses needed to survive in complex environments. The entry begins by explaining what complexity is, why it is increasing in the world, and what it means for how people need to lead and follow differently. It then defines and explains what the complexity leadership adaptive process looks like and how it is used to enable adaptive responses. It concludes by overviewing the complexity leadership framework and describing the implications for new leadership and followership mindsets that are needed for leadership in a complex world.

Leading in Complexity A complex world is characterized by high levels of dynamism, uncertainty, unpredictability, and ambiguity. In these worlds, leaders cannot operate by traditional hierarchical command-and-control models. Instead, they must be able to adapt and change in accordance with emerging and unfolding situations. In the natural sciences, these

148

Complexity Leadership Theory

situations are known as complexity, a term used to describe systems that are richly interconnected and prone to unpredictable dynamics due to nonlinearity. Nonlinearity means that complexity events can spark phase transitions that push the system into a fundamentally different state. Once a phase transition occurs there is no going back. The system is in a “new normal,” and leaders and followers are forced to adapt and change. The COVID-19 global pandemic is an example of complexity and nonlinearity. The belief is that it started with a human developing a novel coronavirus after eating an infected pangolin. This initial nonlinear emergence event then rapidly morphed into a global pandemic that caused people, organizations, and societies to have to adapt to changing conditions around them. In this situation, people, including leaders, could not operate in the same way. They had to learn to be adaptive and willing to accept the ongoing phase transitions (i.e., emergence) happening around them. Emergence is a key concept in understanding responses to complexity. To deal effectively with complex systems, leaders and followers must think creatively and systematically to meet the unique and often escalating demands of the situation. Complexity is occurring more often today because of the highly interconnected nature of the world. Events in one place can now rapidly travel around the globe to dramatically transform the realities and lives of people in unpredicted and uncontrollable ways. This is often popularly referred to as “the butterfly effect,” the notion that a small change in initial conditions can have a profound and widely divergent effect on system outcomes, as illustrated by Edward Lorenz’s question during the 139th meeting of the American Associate for the Advancement of Science: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Recognizing this increasing complexity, Russ Marion published a book in 1999, The Edge of Organization, and a paper in 2001 called “Leadership in Complex Organizations” that applied concepts from chaos and complexity theories in science to leadership and organizations. These became the seminal pieces for what later developed into complexity leadership theory. The basic premise of CLT is that in a complex world people and organizations need to promote

adaptability in the face of increasingly dynamic and demanding environments. They do this by enabling adaptive, rather than an order, responses. Adaptive and Order Responses

Adaptive responses meet complexity with complexity by fostering emergence needed to adapt and grow along with changing environments. Adaptive responses happen when agents in a system work to identify novel solutions to complexity challenges and then get these solutions embedded into formal operating systems to generate new adaptive order (e.g., restaurant owners’ ability to creatively adapt to survive in response to lockdowns from COVID-19). An order response is one that denies complexity is happening and tries to keep a system in stability and old order. Order responses can lead to stagnation and death, as seen in the countless unnecessary deaths from COVID-19 when political leaders and followers turned to old order (e.g., refusing to quarantine or wear masks) instead of acknowledging that the world had changed and they had to adapt along with it. Order responses occur because many leaders and followers do not like the tension of complexity or pressures to change. Followers (and leaders) want to stay in the previous state because it served them better or they were more secure in it, so leaders feel pressure to reduce the tension and put the system back in order. This comes not only from leaders and followers but also from a leadership development paradigm that trains and rewards managerial forms of leadership grounded in hierarchy and control. In complexity this is the exact wrong response. To survive in complexity, people and organizations must resist the temptation to turn to order and instead enable adaptive responses.

Enabling Adaptive Responses Leaders and followers enable adaptive responses by fostering what Benyamin Lichtenstein calls generative emergence—intentional actions of agents pushing a system toward the emergence of new, adaptive order. Generative emergence is based on dissipative structures theory, the study of

Complexity Leadership Theory

thermodynamics in the physical sciences based on the work of Ilya Prigogine. Generative emergence describes the process through which new order is created in dynamic systems. It occurs in four sequential stages: (1) disequilibrium (a far-fromequilibrium state), (2) amplification (stress, experiments, critical threshold), (3) emergence (recombination through realignment of system components), and (4) stabilizing feedback. In complexity leadership, enabling adaptive responses occurs through the adaptive process. The CLT adaptive process involves individuals and systems engaging tension between a push for change and a push for stability through a process of conflicting and connecting (i.e., adaptive space) to generate adaptive outcomes. This push for change happens as a result of complexity coming in from the environment that pressures agents in a system to change. In response to complexity pressures (i.e., disequilibrium), the system initiates an adaptive process of ideation and experimentation to find a creative solution to the adaptive challenge (i.e., amplification). Potential solutions have to then be pushed up against the operating system, where they are further refined until they can be incorporated into new operating systems and structures (i.e., emergence and stabilizing feedback). The CLT adaptive process is essentially a process of generative emergence. This adaptive process is fractal, meaning it can be in a person’s head (e.g., “I am becoming obsolete at work and need to learn new things to keep myself marketable”), between people (e.g., “My colleague and I are trying to generate a new product market”), across organizations (e.g., hospital administrators and physicians trying to partner together to address healthcare challenges), or between organizations (e.g., pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers working together to rapidly scale up vaccine development and delivery to combat COVID-19). The process is the same across levels. It always involves pressures for change (e.g., innovation, learning, novelty, growth) pushing up against pressures for stability (e.g., productive, performance, results, status quo) to generate tension in the system. Tension is at the core of generative emergence and the adaptive process. It is what motivates the change needed to help a system adapt. Operating

149

systems are designed for stability and order. Without tension and pressure, they will stay in a stable state. This is fine if the environment suits stability, but if the environment is complex, inertia and status quo lead to stagnation and death. Hence, for systems and organizations to change, leading in complexity must involve engaging the tension dynamic at the core of the adaptive process. The CLT Adaptive Process

The adaptive process begins when complexity pressures put a system (e.g., a person, a group, a team, an organization, a society) into disequilibrium. Complexity pressures can be an opportunity tension, an opportunity somebody wants to capitalize on, or an adaptive tension, a change in environment that requires a person or system to have to change. These pressures are experienced as an adaptive challenge—a challenge that requires a new way of thinking, operating, or behaving. Adaptive challenges and complexity pressures activate an entrepreneurial response. In generative emergence, this is the amplification stage. Agents begin an entrepreneurial process of searching for a solution to the adaptive challenge. Agents engage in the tension to play around with ideas and experiment, iterating until a potentially viable solution is identified. If a critical threshold is reached, energy coalesces around the solution and it begins to amplify more broadly into the system. At this point the adaptive solution moves out of the local entrepreneurial pocket and into the broader system to try to generate emergence. In the emergence stage, the system begins to recombine and realign into new order. In CLT, this is referred to as adaptive space. Adaptive space is conditions that enable the tension dynamic of conflicting and connecting that initiates and amplifies adaptability in a system. Conflicting is engaging heterogeneous perspectives, needs, ideas, and worldviews in creative abrasion to spark novelty. Connecting is linking up across differences to generate and amplify ideas and solutions into emergence. Adaptive space works on a micro level to trigger creativity and novelty, and on a macro level to enable network connections that allow the solution to scale into the system.

150

Complexity Leadership Theory

The adaptive process is complete when the novelty is institutionalized into the operating system and feeds back in the form of new, adaptive order. In people, this occurs when a person who was resistant to change finds a way to be more flexible and learn new ways of doing things and operating. In organizations, it involves leading change to get new ideas accepted and implemented. In large organization, it occurs in a collective leadership process, where entrepreneurial leaders hand off the novelty to enabling leaders who are able to bridge and broker connections to amplify change across a system, who then hand off to enabling leaders in the operational system who act as sponsors to get the change formalized. The Complexity Leadership Model

The CLT model maps this adaptive process onto leadership in organizations. It shows how leaders and followers enable people and organizations for adaptability. The framework involves three types of leadership. Entrepreneurial leadership refers to leaders and followers working together regardless of title to advance novelty leading to change. They do this by thinking outside the box and identifying creative solutions to needs, problems, and entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneurial leadership can occur anywhere in the organization and involves leaders and followers cocreating adaptive solutions to complexity challenges or opportunities. Enabling leadership refers to leaders, often in positions of formal authority, who foster conditions that support the adaptive process of generative emergence. They enable adaptive space by helping nurture and protect the ideation process of entrepreneurial leadership, and by fostering amplification and emergence of ideas to scale them into the formal operating system for new, adaptive order. Without adaptive space, ideas are easily shut down and systems stay in equilibrium. In the CLT model this is known as hitting the brick wall. A major role for enabling leaders is removing brick walls and creating conditions for conflicting and connecting (i.e., adaptive space) to help novelty advance and flow across the organizational system. Operational leadership refers to reordering and realigning operating systems in organizations to accommodate emergent new order. The operating

system is responsible for efficiency, productivity, and results. Because in organizations operating systems are designed for stability and typically resistant to change, operational leadership in CLT is designed to be flexible and welcoming to change. CLT operational leaders and followers view their role as promoting operational efficiencies while partnering with entrepreneurial and enabling leaders to find ways to adapt systems and infrastructures for current and long-term organizational survival.

Complexity Leadership and Followership Mindsets and Skills The complexity leadership framework brings new mindsets and skills to leadership. The most significant is CLT’s premise that leadership can occur anywhere in the organization when people work collaboratively in a leader–follower influence relation to enable adaptive and productive outcomes. While CLT recognizes that leadership occurs in managerial roles, it does not reserve leadership to the formal structure. Instead, leadership can, and often does, occur in informal structures of the organization, and in today’s complex world this informal leadership is often the most powerful. Collaboration Mindset

To understand how to lead in complexity, people in organizations must shift their mindsets away from defining leadership as hierarchical, command-and-control models to viewing leadership as a relational cocreation of leaders and followers working collaboratively to promote adaptability. Complexity leadership is dynamic, meaning that people adapt and adjust in accordance with changing conditions; contextual, meaning that context plays a significant role in influencing how events will surface and unfold; and collective, meaning that no one person is capable of doing everything. Leading in complexity involves making handoffs to capitalize on skills and positional resources all parties can bring to the leadership dynamic. In viewing leadership as a collaboration, CLT adopts a followership lens in leadership theory. It

Complexity Leadership Theory

sees followers as an integral, and at times more important, element in leadership than leaders. For example, followers can have significant say in supporting or resisting a leader’s influence. Followers can also be powerful players in determining who gets to lead and how they lead. In this way, CLT supports followership theory’s tenet that leadership is a leader–follower cocreation, and that failed leadership is also failed followership. Adaptive Mindset

Leading in complexity requires all who are affected to have an adaptive mindset. This means that leaders and followers need to be flexible and fluid in changing conditions, and structures and systems must be agile and adaptive to change. This often goes against order and control mindsets of traditional leadership and organizations. Many people like to have things laid out for them, to know exactly what they are supposed to do and to then to have autonomy and support to do it. CLT argues instead that leaders and followers need to be comfortable in ambiguity and have learning and growth mindsets that help them to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and be willing to take risks that lead to learning and growth. Emergence Mindset

An emergence mindset is at the core of complexity. It involves knowing how emergence works and being able to recognize and engage in it when it is happening. It also means knowing how to enable emergence to get a desired outcome. It goes against traditional top-down mindsets, which say that leadership change starts at the top and then trickles down through alignment and control. Instead, emergence is an unfolding dynamic that occurs in unpredictable ways. It can be engaged with and influenced, but not managed and controlled. Developing an emergence mindset involves being good at trend analysis (i.e., watching for trends, opportunities, or threats that, if they link up, could energize and amplify in powerful ways). This allows leaders and followers to have an idea of when complexity is coming and what do to

151

when they are in it. Once in emergence, they need to engage the tension dynamic of conflicting and connecting rather than trying to turn to control and the order response. They need to be agile and adaptive in both reacting to and in knowing how to link things up in a system to feed and fuel emergence. This calls for facilitation skills and networking skills. Facilitation skills create adaptive space to help people engage across differences and agree upon viable adaptive solutions. Networking skills include bridging and brokering to help ideas connect and flow across the organizational system. Outcomes Mindset

Complexity requires a different way of thinking about, rewarding, and incentivizing leadership. Traditional models reward “strong” individual and hero leadership. Leaders are seen as powerful decision-makers who drive results. Complexity leadership looks very different. Because it consists of leaders and followers working collaboratively, one person cannot take credit for an outcome, and results are not traceable back to one individual’s behavior. Instead, leadership outcomes are the result of a collective process, and they should be recognized and rewarded as such. Having an outcomes mindset in CLT also means understanding that outcomes are emergent—they cannot be easily predicted or controlled. Therefore, leaders and followers need to be comfortable with the intent of the change they seek but not necessarily the form. As entrepreneurial and enabling leaders who are proficient at complexity leadership say, “never fall in love with your idea.” They know that ideas will morph and evolve as they flow across changing conditions and organizational structures to reach their end stage. Organizations need to design systems that reward this type of behavior, and to be careful of unintended consequences of goals and targets that overemphasize results without considering the impact on adaptability. Mary Uhl-Bien See also Collective Leadership; Distributed Leadership; Followership; Leader–Follower Relationships

152

Conformity

Further Readings Boisot, M., & McKelvey, B. (2010). Integrating modernist and postmodernist perspectives on organizations: A complexity science bridge. Academy of Management Review, 35, 415–434. doi:10.5465/AMR.2010. 51142028 Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London: Routledge. Lichtenstein, B. (2014). Generative emergence: A new discipline of organizational, entrepreneurial, and social innovation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199933594.001. 0001 Marion, R. (1999). The edge of organization: Chaos and complexity theories of formal social organizations. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Marion, R., & Uhl-Bien, M. (2001). Leadership in complex organizations. The Leadership Quarterly, 12(4), 389–418. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(01) 00092-3 Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Schneider, M., & Somers, M. (2006). Organizations as complex adaptive systems: Implications of complexity theory for leadership research. The Leadership Quarterly 17(4), 351–365. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2006. 04.006 Stacey, R. D. (1995). The science of complexity: An alternative perspective for strategic change processes. Strategic Management Journal, 16(6), 477–495. doi: 10.1002/smj.4250160606 Uhl-Bien, M. (2021). Complexity leadership and followership: Changed leadership in a changed world. Journal of Change Management. doi:10.1080/ 14697017.2021.1917490 Uhl-Bien, M., & Arena, M. (2017). Complexity leadership: Enabling people and organizations for adaptability. Organization Dynamics, 46(1), 9–20. doi: 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2016.12.001 Uhl-Bien, M., & Arena, M. (2018). Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical synthesis and integrative framework. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 89–104. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2017. 12.009 Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2007.04.002

CONFORMITY Conformity is a type of social influence whereby an individual engages in a behavior or adopts an attitude in response to the behaviors, attitudes, or expectations of other people, including following what may be perceived by the individual to be a group norm. Classic conformity studies by Muzafer Sherif and Solomon Asch affirm the powerful effects of social pressure. Subsequent research further delineated the drivers of conformity as well as factors that reduce rates of conformity, including cultural differences. In contextualizing his studies on conformity, Asch refers to the range of powerful examples of social influence, from a child’s process of learning their first language to a tribe of cannibals accepting and adopting cannibalism as a way of life. Conformity and other social influence phenomena such as compliance, obedience, group norms, and groupthink have the potential to impact leadership contexts in both positive and negative ways. Specifically, in the context of leadership, while conformity can be an expedient tool for decision-making and facilitate strong group cohesion, group pressure to conform can also distort people’s reasoning. Conformity to group or institutional values and norms can aid leaders by supporting healthy team functioning and strong focus on achieving group tasks and goals. On the other hand, negative impacts can result from leaders and followers alike who conform too easily and fail to think independently about their own and a group’s actions, goals, and decisions. This entry reviews some classic experiments on conformity conducted by Sherif and Asch to provide a foundation conformity scholarship. It then considers normative and informational influences to conformity, as well as how cultural context affects conformity. The entry concludes by examining how conformity in the leadership context is affected by groupthink.

Classic Conformity Studies Sherif’s Studies

In the mid-1930s, Sherif published a set of classic studies on conformity that utilized a

Conformity

perceptual illusion called the autokinetic effect in order to induce ambiguity and confusion due to lack of clear visual information. Participants were asked to indicate how far a pinpoint of light moved in a completely dark space when, in fact, the light was not moving at all but only appeared to be due to normal eye movements in the context of a complete lack of visual reference. The situation Sherif created in the lab in this case provided researchers with a unique opportunity to observe the development of group norms in an ambiguous situation. In the absence of clear information, participants made guesses and came to their own “norm.” However, when participants engaged in the task with others, their estimates converged toward a group norm. Findings demonstrated that group norms developed initially persisted over time, even when participants engaged in subsequent trials individually. Furthermore, if participants first engaged in the task individually then moved into a group, the conformity/convergence effect was reduced but still present. The particular type of conformity demonstrated in Sherif’s studies—using others’ behaviors and attitudes as information to inform one’s own behavior and attitudes in order to be correct and to espouse the “right” behavior or belief/attitude—came to be known as informational influence. Everyday examples of this type of conformity include observing and mimicking the behaviors of others when learning to use a new tool or technical device (e.g., chopsticks) and following other people on a particular path into an event venue.

153

line. In contrast to Sherif’s studies, Asch’s paradigm involved an unambiguous task where the correct answer was quite clear. Participants were asked to respond one by one down the row in which they were seated. The physical setup was such that the true participant was always positioned at the end of the row, responding after others. On critical trials in which confederates gave the incorrect response, participants conformed on 37% of these trials. The vast majority of the participants conformed on at least one trial, with only about 25% never conforming on any of the critical trials (the latter being an interesting and often overlooked finding regarding the independence of a quarter of the participants, as the focus tends to center on the 75% of participants who did conform). The situation created in the lab in Asch’s experiment was thus one in which the answer was clear and the situation was unambiguous; that is, the participant clearly knew the correct answer and understood that, for whatever reason, other participants in the study (in actuality confederates working for the experimenter) were giving incorrect answers. This particular type of conformity seen in Asch’s studies—conforming to the perceived expectations of others (including perceived group norms) in order to be accepted/ liked or avoid being ostracized or viewed as outside the norm—came to be known as normative influence. Common examples of this type of conformity include smoking as a result of peer pressure or publicly espousing a particular viewpoint in a group setting in an effort to avoid conflict, awkwardness, or ostracism.

Asch’s Studies

A separate set of classic experiments conducted by Asch in the 1950s centered around what came to be held as a second, distinct type of conformity. In Asch’s studies, one participant was brought into a laboratory setting with seven confederates (“participants” who were, in fact, working for the experimenter, unbeknownst to the one actual participant in the study). Participants were told a cover story that the research was focused on visual perception. The group participated in a line judgment task in which the experimenter presented a target line and asked each individual to choose which of three comparison lines labeled “A,” “B,” and “C” matched the original

Follow-up Findings

Follow-up studies revealed some key factors that affect the magnitude of conformity effects such as those demonstrated in Asch’s studies. Group size was found to increase conformity effects up to about three to five confederates, beyond which point the effects level out. The presence of an ally, or dissenting confederate, reduced conformity drastically. In addition, task difficulty affected levels of conformity, with rates of conformity increasing on more difficult tasks. Likewise, varying the importance of the task also influenced the magnitude of conformity effects

154

Conformity

such that participants conformed less when a task was presented as important compared to when it was presented as less important, but this effect appeared to be limited to easy tasks. On difficult tasks, in fact, participants were more likely to conform when the task was presented as very important compared to when the decision was presented as less important. There were limitations to Asch’s research, namely that all participants in the original studies were men. Some follow-up studies showed higher levels of conformity among women, perhaps due to societal gender role expectations. A further limitation of Asch’s particular approach to studying conformity was that the task itself lacks ecological validity. One of the most frequently cited limitations of Asch’s studies is the time period in the United States during which they were conducted, the era of McCarthyism. At the time, there was a strong prevalent expectation of adherence to American values, which led some to speculate that this powerful cultural factor may have driven some of the effect. In fact, multiple follow-up studies have demonstrated that levels of conformity have fluctuated over the decades in line with the changing sociopolitical context in the United States. On the other hand, other research has suggested a consistent steady decline in rates of conformity over time seemingly not connected with sociopolitical context. The classic studies conducted by Sherif in the mid-1930s and by Asch in the 1950s are commonly regarded as the early foundation of what is understood about the concept of conformity. However, it should be noted that Arthur Jenness had conducted research on conformity in the early 1930s in which he demonstrated the type of conformity now referred to as informational influence. Participants estimated the number of beans in a clear container, first individually then after discussion with other participants. Compared to when participants gave individual estimates, the range/variability of group consensus estimates was lower following discussion in groups.

Normative and Informational Influences on Conformity Although conformity is often discussed in a negative light, some level of conformity is necessary for

the optimal functioning of society. From not interrupting others when they are speaking to standing at the end of a line at a grocery store, we conform to countless social norms in our daily social interactions. Likewise, normative and informational influence effects are at times more complicated than might be obvious at first. For instance, some examples of conformity may involve motivations related to both normative and informational influence. Consider, for example, an individual who adjusts how they dress in acclimating to a new school or work environment. In this case, the individual may well have reasons relating to a desire to fit in and be liked (normative influence) as well as a desire to make the “right” choices about attire in this new setting where others may have more information about attire that is expected, required, or discouraged (informational influence). Follow-up studies have tested the effectiveness of behavioral interventions utilizing what is known about conformity via normative and informational influence. These studies have examined the impact of social pressure on behaviors such as littering and drug use, using a variety of approaches such as normative influence and compliance messages to determine which may be most effective at inducing behavioral change.

Cultural Context to Conformity For any given individual, cultural context is critical to discerning relevant societal expectations and social norms. In addition, cultural norms determine whether an individual’s decision to conform or not to conform is itself perceived as positive or negative. Collectivist cultures, for example, where the emphasis is on concern for social harmony and traditional values as well as respect for the needs of family, group members, and the broader culture, may view conformity more positively, even as a strength. Thus, an individual’s decision not to conform may be seen to reflect disrespect or even opposition to the group or broader cultural norms. On the other hand, more individualist cultures that emphasize independence and freedom of choice may be more likely to view conformity as undesirable, with uniqueness and individuality serving as social capital to earn respect from others. Research supports this positive relationship

Conformity

between measures of individualism-collectivism and levels of conformity, with higher levels of conformity observed in samples from collectivist cultures than from individualist cultures. It should also be noted that the distinction between individualist and collectivist cultural values can be a useful one in examining cultural differences in social phenomena like conformity, but there is also a danger of oversimplification, and there is variability in the ways that conformity effects manifest in individualist and collectivist cultures.

Groupthink Conformity is related to the broader category of social influence effects such as compliance, obedience, group norms, and groupthink. Conformity pertains to broader, often unspoken or implied (rather than explicit) social pressure from group members (whether equals or leaders or more highly valued peers or group members). Compliance and obedience, on the other hand, involve more explicit exertion of social influence and power over others, compliance relating to an individual’s choice to perform a direct request or instruction from another person and obedience involving following a direct order from an authority figure. All of these social influences can have positive or negative implications for leaders and groups. Perhaps the most vivid examples of the impact of conformity processes on leadership contexts lies in the inherent role of conformity in the phenomenon known as groupthink. Irving Janis lays out the distortions in reasoning that occur with groupthink, the phenomenon in which groups value consensus at the expense of critical thinking. This emphasis on consensus distorts the group’s ability to evaluate information realistically, and can lead to disastrous decisions/outcomes. Among Janis’s eight symptoms that may point to a group’s high susceptibility to groupthink are these circumstances that inherently involve conformity: self-censorship of dissenting views, overt pressure applied to dissenters to conform, misconceptions of the group’s unanimity, and dismissals of any challenges to the group’s ideas. Groupthink is implicated in such infamous examples as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion wherein

155

United States President John F. Kennedy and his Cabinet devised an ill-fated plan to overthrow Fidel Castro and his government by invading Cuba with 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA. The attempted invasion moved forward despite knowing that they would be outnumbered by the Cuban army by more than 140 to 1. The outcome was tragic, as many were captured or killed within a short period of time. As Janis and his colleagues examined events that likely involved groupthink processes, including immense pressures to conform, they developed a set of proposed seven antecedents to groupthink situations. Again, it is clear that several of these factors are driven in large part by conformity processes—high group cohesion, group insulation from alternative perspectives, absence of disagreement, and lack of standards for considering other opinions. Fortunately, Janis also proposed steps that group leaders can take to reduce the likelihood of groupthink, including strategies that directly address conformity pressures such as dividing the group into subgroups to discuss matters separately before reuniting to share their perspectives. Another such strategy to reduce pressures toward conformity that contribute to groupthink is for group leaders to assign a member to serve as a “devil’s advocate” to identify flaws or make counterpoints against the prevailing idea. The study of conformity and its positive and negative implications for individuals and groups continues. Its proposed consequences are far-reaching, including recent treatments suggesting that resistance and the courage to reject conformity are critical features of a democratic society. Thus, conformity remains both a classic phenomenon and contemporary puzzle within the field of psychology. Crystal Wright Colter, Rammy M. Salem, and Elizabeth C. Coyle See also Group Norms; Groupthink; Majority and Minority Influence; Obedience

Further Readings Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments. In

156

Confucian Ethics

H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men (pp. 177–190). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193(5), 31–35. doi:10.1038/ scientificamerican1155-31 Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70(9), 1–70. doi: 10.1037/h0093718 Asch, S. E. (1940). Studies in the principles of judgments and attitudes: II. Determination of judgments by group and by ego-standards. Journal of Social Psychology, 12(2), 433–465. doi:10.1080/00224545.1940.9921487 Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Jenness, A. (1932). The role of discussion in changing opinion regarding a matter of fact. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 27(3), 279–296. doi: 10.1037/h0074620 Sherif, M. A. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology, 187, 1–60. Sunstein, C. R. (2019). Conformity: The power of social influences. New York, NY: New York University Press.

CONFUCIAN ETHICS The term Confucian ethics refers to the practical, normative thinking of the philosopher Confucius (in Mandarin, Kǒng Fūzǐ; 551–479 BCE) and his famous successors (notably Mencius, or M`eng Kē, and Xunzi). Confucian thinking offers many unique perspectives on leadership not considered by those who favor models of servant or command and control leadership. Dimensions especially relevant to leadership theory that are discussed in this entry include Confucian ethics’ agent-centered emphasis on self-refinement and virtue; linking of virtue with particular roles; incorporation of an aesthetic dimension into virtuous action; and emphasis on exemplary individuals.

Agent-Centered Self-Refinement Confucius and his successors do not offer a single normative principle—e.g., a Kantian categorical

imperative or a utilitarian rule such as “act to promote the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number of people”—to which persons must adhere so as to act in a morally correct fashion. In general, Confucianism focuses less on particular actions and more on the process of self-refinement. Selves are not given but are achieved. A human being becomes a genuinely human self or a person by mindfully adopting certain stances toward others and by choosing well. In that respect, Confucian ethics is a form of virtue ethics that takes the standard of right behavior to be the exemplary person of good character. A morally good action is one that is performed in a manner akin to that of an exemplary or self-refined individual. The process of self-refinement begins in the home. Confucius posits a deep congruence between the idea of respect and care for parents and one’s sense of one’s self as a being striving for personhood. The self is a dynamic realization of distinctively human possibilities. The most worthy of these realizations consists in acquiring the virtue of ren, or authoritative humaneness, and learning the virtue of ren through being affectionate toward relatives and exhibiting brotherly love. Humans learn to respect and care for others by practicing these behaviors at home. The Dao, or way of humanity, runs through being filial at home by showing respect and kindness toward one’s elders and kin and then—as one leaves the home and moves into public life—by becoming close to and supportive of all people of ren. The duty of being filial is thus coextensive with the felt pull toward realizing themselves. Children love their parents as much for themselves as for the parents. Well-run institutions function as nurseries of virtue. Given that, for Confucius, the state is the family writ large; intermediary institutions such as corporations are best understood as quasi-families. Chinese CEOs are typically viewed as parental figures who have obligations to promote employee welfare and who, in turn, are owed loyalty and a degree of deference. Deference does not preclude disagreement, but any remonstration of one’s superiors should be gentle and civil. Leaders, for their part, should not become defensive when criticized, and neither should they go on the attack. Instead of accusing critics of being

Confucian Ethics

untrustworthy or wicked, the person committed to self-refinement asks, “Have I myself been trustworthy?” If individuals cannot correct their own behavior, then they have no business, Confucius insists, in seeking to correct others. In that respect, Confucian virtue ethics, perhaps more than other forms of virtue ethics, places a higher value on humble introspection and self-reformation than on attempts to censure other people or to mold their characters directly. The good leader is someone who encourages frank discussion and creates opportunities for those in junior roles to question and even to challenge their superiors. Confucius thinks that treating one’s parents or children well is relatively easy. Even birds and dogs are devoted to their offspring. The real ethical challenge resides in how people treat peers who are not blood relations. Ethically good leaders understand that a healthy corporate community is one that encourages individuals to look beyond blood or familial loyalties and to learn to appreciate the talents and virtues of their peers. Thus, for all of his emphasis on filial piety, Confucius would not favor nepotism, even within family-owned firms.

Role-Fulfillment as Key Way to Refine the Self Human beings are not atomistic individuals who bind themselves to each other through a social contract. In this modern contractual view, ethical goodness consists of agents pursuing their self-interest largely as they see fit, as long as they do not unduly impinge on the state-enforced rights of others to do the same thing. Such a view would strike Confucius as perverse. For Confucians, this interest lies precisely in self-realization. Because human beings are embedded in a set of social relations that are communally defined (e.g., the role of parent or teacher or wife), becoming a full-fledged human entails discharging one’s roles appropriately. In that respect, self-interest and self-refinement are identical with performing various role-based duties. One such duty is caring for one’s parents in a respectful way. As people learn what it means to fulfill this duty, they simultaneously participate in building a better society because society itself is a kind of an extended family. In a well-functioning family,

157

parents and children spontaneously help and support each other. This support is not based on a contract. A similar logic applies to interpersonal relations within intermediary institutions and the larger community. One way that human beings know they are becoming more humane is that they do not find these relationships of mutual concern and assistance onerous. Instead, such duties become delightful, and joy may be found in forging bonds of friendship and care with others. That is why even today in modern China one rarely finds individuals, even those in need, asking for favors. They expect that refined individuals, especially those with ample resources, will voluntarily come forward and help them. Since those being helped should be considering other people’s motivations, the potential recipients should initially decline any offer for help until they know that their benefactor is sincere and acting out of ren. The ethical practice of filiality discussed in the prior section is closely aligned with a practice of fulfilling roles. To lead a refined existence, rulers must rule; fathers must behave as fathers, and sons must act as sons. One is not a son or daughter simply by virtue of being born. At birth, individuals enter into a web of social roles, but these roles must be fulfilled through appropriate actions. The son must “son,” and the daughter must “daughter.” Confucian selves are dynamic. If and when the son devotes himself to “son-ing,” he will learn through that process ever more about what it means to be a son. As his understanding increases, he will be better able to “son.” So, too, there is no set of rules for becoming a good leader. Leaders learn how to lead by attending to their actions, observing how others respond to these actions, and adjusting their behavior accordingly. The universe of these roles is not static. As Confucius puts it, man shapes the Dao; the Dao does not shape man. Or, as the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi put it, individuals make the way by walking the path in a mindful manner. Given that human beings forge the way of virtue, rather than the reverse, new roles can and do come into existence. Confucius himself appears to have carved out the role of a beloved teacher living in a small community with students who in some cases followed him as he journeyed to various rulers to

158

Confucian Ethics

advise them. Leaders can create new leadership roles in and through the act of leading (e.g., Confucius’s self-invented role of journeying consultant to kings).

Aesthetic Dimension of Virtuous Action Although the concept of “action through inaction” (in Mandarin, wu´ w´ei) is often associated with Daoism, wu´ w´ei figures in Confucian normative thinking, as well. Wu´ w´ei means, in part, leading not through scolding, exhortation, praise, or blame, but through example. Confucius compares the good leader to the pole star in the heavens, a star that commands merely by holding its place and steadily shining its light; and to the wind, before which the people bend like grass in whichever direction the wind blows. Confucius repeatedly stresses that the citizens watch what their rulers or leaders do and take their bearings from leaders’ virtues or vices. When the ruler Chi K’ang Tzu complained that his subjects were stealing things, Confucius retorted that if the ruler were not himself a man of corrupt desires, then his people would not be thieves either. Confucius assumes that people can form accurate assessments of others’ motivations and intentions because these are perceptible. Unlike Immanuel Kant, who argues that one can never know another rational being’s intention or, indeed, even their own motivations because human beings are capable of infinite self-delusion and pernicious rationalization, Confucius thinks that virtues such as kindness, steadfastness, and justice shine through behavior. Vice, too, is perceptible. Confucius sometimes alludes in passing to what he takes to be the arrogance or laziness of some of his students and peers. Wu´ w´ei leadership also means seeking an approach to problems and challenges that harmonizes with the larger forces of the universe. Confucian ethics presupposes a metaphysics of endless change and flow. Good leaders seek to discern the ways in which political, psychological, and natural forces are unfolding. Attempts to force nature or to dominate or rigidly control situations never work. Refined individuals understand that they need to work with existing energies and flows. Confucius practices a form of wu´ w´ei in his

own teaching. He works with what the individual student brings to the discussion. Consequently, he says different things to different students, adjusting his comments to the energies and flows in each particular conversation. His ethical instruction is always very much in the moment. His ethical analysis is far less systematic than that of other virtue ethicists, in large part because he responds spontaneously to whatever seems to demand attention, be that some specific behavior, way of speaking, ritual, or question. Confucian ethics emphasizes the key role that the arts play in enabling us to discern and then to do what the situation calls for. Confucius particularly valued the performance of music as a modality for self-refinement. Skilled musicians have learned to listen to each other and to adjust their own playing in response to others’ tonality, volume, rhythm, pitch, and so forth. So, too, must agents and leaders perceive the dynamics of the larger whole and subtly alter their responses to promote social harmony and the development of all members of the community.

Emphasis on Exemplary Individuals Given Confucian ethics’ emphasis on leading by example, it is not surprising that this approach revolves around the righteously humane person (junzi) and the sage. Communities and cultures advance in virtue when individuals emerge who behave in ways that stir the imagination of the common people. When one observes a grown child treating his or her parents with great kindness and respect, they feel inspired to treat their own parents similarly. When stories are told of friends who sacrifice for each other, they demonstrate what real friendship means so that the audience can then draw upon this insight in their own friendships. Inspiration can come from any source. Confucius famously stopped his carriage to converse with a madman who said something that Confucius found insightful. Many of his closest relationships were with students from peasant families. Good leaders find wise men and women among those who have been dispossessed and overlooked. Once persons are inspired, however, it still falls to them to do the hard work of figuring out how to translate and embody others’

Congressional Leadership

commendable behavior into their own experience. Confucius warns against mechanically imitating what other people do. Instead, if individuals are committed to self-refinement, they should focus on finding a measured, needful, proper, and opportune response to any unique, historical situation. The Dao is endlessly fluid, and thus human beings, too, must adapt themselves and their responses to forever changing conditions if they wish to realize Confucius’s vision of the well-lived life. Daryl Koehn See also Daoist Moral Obligations; Deontology and Rights; Virtues

Further Readings de Bary, W. T. (1960). Sources of Chinese civilization. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hall, D. L., & Ames, R. T. (1987). Thinking through Confucius. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ¨ Lau, D. C. (1983). Confucius: The analects (Lun yu). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Yao, X. (2017). Reconceptualizing Confucian philosophy in the 21st century. Singapore: Springer.

CONGRESSIONAL LEADERSHIP The United States Congress and the political parties that organize the House of Representatives and the Senate depend on leaders to carry out the critical functions and day-to-day operations of the institution. It is fitting, therefore, to describe congressional leadership from the vantage point of Congress’s role in the constitutional and political system and to identify the roles of party leaders in the House and Senate. In addition, this entry briefly reviews contrasting scholarly views of the causes and consequences of congressional leadership. Consistent with other theories of democratic or elected leadership, congressional leaders are accountable to and in some ways constrained by the expectations of their followers. Moreover, congressional leadership styles, strategies, and influence are affected by conditions that are

159

beyond the control of the leaders themselves, for instance the chamber rules for debate and amendment or the degree of party unity or division on issues of the day. Yet, institutional and political conditions can also provide leaders with leeway to pursue their goals, and several congressional leaders have made consequential changes in the organization, policy agenda, and politics of the United States Congress.

An Institutional View of Congressional Leadership The purpose and functions of the United States Congress and its members provide institutional basis for congressional leadership. The Constitution assigns to Congress two primary functions: representation and lawmaking, including the appropriation of federal funds and the creation of executive agencies. A third function—oversight and investigation of executive agencies—naturally follows from lawmaking. In addition, as part of a separation of powers system, Congress inevitably must interact with the president, and the Senate is assigned the function of providing advice and consent for presidential appointments. From a constitutional vantage point, congressional leadership can be defined as the roles performed and activities taken by congressional leaders to affect representation, lawmaking, oversight, presidential-congressional relations, and advice and consent. When leaders develop strategies to foster representation, exercise influence in the legislative process, or negotiate terms with the president, they are engaged in congressional leadership. Given the prominence of political parties in Congress, the roles and activities of leaders also involve political ends. Party leaders are elected by their fellow partisans to pursue strategies and activities designed to serve electoral and policy goals. Most notably, party leaders are responsible for holding on to or gaining a majority of seats in upcoming elections and for advancing their party’s policy priorities. Those roles and activities include such things as appointing members to committees, agenda setting, fundraising, crafting and delivering public messages, strategically using formal rules and procedures, and supporting or opposing the

160

Congressional Leadership

president, depending on whether the leader shares the president’s party affiliation.

Leaders in the House of Representatives The United States Constitution conceives of congressional leadership in parliamentary terms, assigning presiding officers to the House and Senate. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker. . .,” a position that originated in the British House of Commons, where the Speaker serves an impartial role of managing the legislative agenda and mediating parliamentary debate. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is also a presiding officer, but within a few years after the first Congress convened, the House gave the Speaker the power to appoint committees. Shortly thereafter, the Speaker adopted a more political role—leader of the majority party in the House. With the election of Henry Clay as Speaker (1811–21 and 1823–25), the House had its first prominent and influential political leader. Clay used committee assignments and agenda setting to advance both domestic and foreign policy goals. By the late-19th and early-20th century, with development of the two-party system, the Speaker became a more formidable party leader, imbued with formal powers to reward and punish members of both parties. In addition to making committee assignments that affected the capacity of members to represent their constituents and influence legislation, the Speaker could appoint and remove committee chairs. The Speaker had the power to refer bills to committees and served as chair of the five-person Rules Committee, dominated by the majority party, that determined which bills made it to the House floor and which did not. The most influential speaker of this period was Republican Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine (1889–91 and 1897–1901). Reed famously adopted and executed the so-called “Reed rules,” which were designed to streamline legislative business by limiting the ability of the minority party to obstruct or delay the legislative process. Reed so staunchly defended and effectively advanced the interest of the majority party that he was deemed by some a “Czar Speaker.”

After leaving the House, Reed was eventually succeeded by Republican Joe Cannon of Illinois (1903–11). Cannon is notorious for pushing the powers of the Speaker too far and he was ultimately toppled by a coalition of progressive Republicans and Democrats, who removed the Speaker from the Rules Committee and took away the power to assign committees. While Reed had exercised strong, centralized leadership to facilitate majoritarian politics, Cannon, in the view of his opponents, had abused the powers of the office. Other notable speakers include Sam Rayburn (1940–47, 1949–53, and 1955–63), a Democrat from Texas, Democrat Jim Wright of Texas (1987–92), Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia (1995–99), and Democrat Nancy Pelosi of California (2007–11 and 2019–23). Rayburn, who served during an era of strong committee government and a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans from outside of the South, was known for his accommodating, bipartisan, and consensus-building style. Wright made use of rising Democratic Party unity to advance the party’s budget priorities in a period of divided party control, when Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush occupied the White House. Gingrich led a Republican takeover of the House after Democrats had held the majority for 40 years, and he advanced the GOP “Contract with America,” a list of campaign promises during the 1994 midterm elections. Gingrich was particularly powerful in the first term of his speakership (1995–96), drawing parallels to Reed. Pelosi is the first female to be elected Speaker and helped to advance the legislative priorities of Democratic presidents Barak Obama (2009–10) and Joe Biden (2021–). Although the Speaker of the House garners most of the attention, both the majority and minority parties in the House have substantial leadership teams consisting of members elected by their parties. In addition to the Speaker, the majority party elects a majority leader, who handles the flow of legislation on the House floor; a majority whip, who is principally in charge of tracking and garnering votes of majority party members; a party caucus chair (for Democrats) or conference chair (for Republicans), who organizes meetings of party members; and the campaign committee chair, who

Congressional Leadership

focuses on campaign fundraising. The Democrats have recently added an Assistant Speaker to their leadership team. The minority party is headed by the minority leader, a political counterpart to the Speaker, who is responsible for representing the policy and political priorities of the minority party. The minority party also has a party whip, either a party caucus chair (for Democrats) or conference chair (for Republicans), and a campaign committee chair. Regardless of whether Republicans hold a majority, the party also has a policy committee, and the chair of that committee is part of the party leadership team (For current House leaders, see https://www.house.gov/leadership.). While Pelosi is the only woman to serve as Speaker of the House, lower level leadership positions in both parties have been held by women and people of color. These positions can serve as a stepping stone to the Speakership for underrepresented members, as in the case of Pelosi, who was minority whip and minority leader before ascending to the speakership. Most leaders, beside the Speaker and minority leader, generally operate outside of the public purview. However, in a clear example of a leader bucking the majority of her party, Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming voted in favor of impeaching former president Donald Trump for his alleged role in the January 6, 2021, assault on the United States Capitol. After continuing to speak out against Trump, Cheney was removed from the position and replaced by a Trump loyalist, Elise Stefanik of New York. The rare example of Cheney’s opposition to a president of a leader’s party and subsequent ouster from leadership illustrates the price leaders can pay if they persistently oppose the majority of members in the party, especially on a high-profile issue.

Leaders in the Senate The Constitution identifies the vice president as the president of the Senate, and a president pro tempore, who is assigned to act as president of the body when the vice president is absent. Unlike the Speaker of the House, the Vice President and president pro tempore of the Senate never evolved beyond a parliamentary role; in fact, the presiding officer position is typically delegated to one of the

161

100 senators. The Vice President does have the power to break a tie vote, and those are typically the only occasions when the Vice President presides over the Senate. From the founding and for most of the 19th century, most leadership in the Senate was informal, exercised by individual senators, who normally had effective oratory skills. However, just as strong and unified political parties in the 1890s facilitated more powerful speakers in the House, they also gave rise to party leadership in the Senate. The most notable example was Nelson Aldrich, a Republican from Rhode Island, who used his position as Chair of Committee on Finance to advance his party’s legislation through the Senate. Aldrich ultimately became the leader of the Republic caucus, a job that involved agenda setting, legislative strategy, and building coalitions for party priorities. Nevertheless, while Aldrich was a formidable caucus chair, his power never rivaled anything like the Czar Speakers of this era. The Senate was then, and still is, an institution where individual members and the minority party can have influence. Aldrich’s role in the Republican Party was a precursor to the more formal role of floor leader in the Senate. The first party leader to serve as majority leader of the Senate was Democrat John Kern of Indiana in 1913. Perhaps the most famous Senate leader was Lyndon Johnson, Democrat from Texas, who would later become John F. Kennedy’s vice president and ultimately the nation’s 36th president after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Johnson served as minority leader (1953–55) and majority leader (1955–61). Although the office of majority leader granted Johnson few formal powers, he was a master of parliamentary tactics, effectively used committee assignments to do favors for individual senators, and aggressively sought information on each senator, which he would collect, store away, and use as necessary to serve his ends. He was also famous for the “Johnson treatment,” whereby he would focus squarely on an individual senator, using whatever means necessary—persuasion, intimidation, mockery, flattery, facts, emotional appeals, a slap on the back, or a pointed finger—to gain attention and support. Still, compared with the House, which allows the majority to work its will, Senate rules limit the

162

Congressional Leadership

ability of the majority leader to advance the legislative agenda of the majority party. Whereas the Speaker of the House can rely on a Rules Committee to limit the number of floor amendments and length of debate, the Senate has no Rules Committee. The Senate relies on unanimous consent agreements (UCA), worked out between the majority and minority party leaders and agreed to by all members, that define the length of debate and order of amendments to bills scheduled for the Senate floor. Thus, Senate leadership is more subtle, informal, and more dependent on bipartisanship than House leadership. If the leaders cannot agree to a UCA, the majority leader can bring a bill to the floor. But, with the exception of debates on budget bills, the Senate allows for extended debate unless a supermajority of senators—60 of 100—votes for cloture, a motion to end debate and allow the majority leader to schedule votes on legislation. Cloture is difficult in the contemporary Senate, which is challenged by both individualism—actions taken by individual Senators to obstruct the legislative process or promote their ideas and priorities almost without restraint—and excessive partisanship, which allows a unified minority party to defeat attempts at cloture. Over the past two decades, the number of filibusters has increased and the Senate routinely never takes up bills passed by the House. As previously noted, the budget is one policy issue that does not require a UCA to limit debate; Senate rules allow for no more than 20 hours of debate and amendment on budget bills. Thus, since the 1980s, budget reconciliation bills have become the primary means of advancing spending and tax legislation. The Senate majority leader’s ability to use budget reconciliation is particularly important when the President is of the same party as the Senate majority. Major tax and spending bills initiated by President Bush in 2001, President Obama in 2009, President Trump in 2017, and President Biden in 2021 were all was made possible through budget reconciliation.

Theories of Congressional Leadership Theories of congressional leadership have sought to explain the general limitations on strong centralized leadership, the variations in leadership

influence over time, and the styles of individual leaders. Political scientists generally agree that institutional context, which is comprised of chamber rules, formal leadership powers, and party unity, may either limit or encourage strong, centralized leadership. The institutional differences between House and Senate rules help to explain the degree to which leaders in each body can perform their roles. The House is much more geared toward majoritarian leadership, regardless of who the Speaker is, and the Senate is more inclined to favor leaders with negotiation skills. Yet, we have also observed that some leaders stand out more so than others, or have more influence than others, which suggests that individual qualities can independently affect the strategies, styles, and influence of congressional leaders. The debate among political scientists focuses on how conditions affect leadership and the extent to which individual leader qualities affect leadership. One critical consideration to begin with is that, since all party leaders are elected by individual members, they must be attentive to the wishes and preferences of the majority of members. If leaders routinely or repeatedly ignore, dismiss, or traverse upon the preferences of the majority, they run the risk of losing their position. This was the case for Speaker Cannon and more recently, Conference Chair Cheney. Thus, election, and the prospects for reelection, to a leadership position poses a constraint on leaders. Nonetheless, formal leadership power and party unity vary over time. Thus, scholars have sought to identify the particular conditions that support and sustain strong leadership. Perhaps the most important condition is party unity. According to conditional party government theory, formulated by David Rohde in Parties and Leaders in the Post-reform House, leader influence varies with the degree to which the members of the party agree on an issue—the more unified the party, the more influence its members are willing to yield to party leaders. Alternatively, the less unified or more divided the party, the less influence the leader has over the process. Party unity is a matter of degree and can vary across issues. Under this theory, individual leaders may be more or less inclined to use the authority or influence granted to them when the party is highly unified, but a leader has a

Connective Leadership

disincentive to exert influence if the members are divided on an issue. An important source of party unity or division can be found across the districts of individual members. Since elected members of Congress want to get reelected, they pay attention to the opinions of their constituents. For example, if a member represents a rural area where most constituents own a gun, the member is less likely to vote for bills that seek to regulate gun ownership. If members of each party represent constituents that have similar preferences on public policy issues, they are more likely to vote together on bills related to those issues. Thus, party unity (agreement within the party) and party polarization (differences between the parties) often reflect district representation: the more the members’ constituents agree, the more the members themselves agree. An alternative theory developed by Randall Strahan in Leading Representatives: The Agency of Leaders in the Politics of the U.S. House argues that while political and institutional conditions affect leadership incentives, individual leaders have goals other than holding on to their positions. Some leaders may wish to advance policy issues that divide the members of their party. In addition, some party leaders are more likely to take risks than others. Thus, faced with the same conditions, two leaders may take different actions or pursue different strategies, depending on their particular goals and tolerance for risk. Daniel J. Palazzolo See also Coalitions; Democratic Leadership; Political Leadership, Presidential Leadership

Further Readings Caro, R. A. (2003). The years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the senate. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Cooper, J., & D. W. Brady. (1981). Institutional context and leadership style: The House from Cannon to Rayburn. American Political Science Review 75 (June): 411–426. Cox Gary W., & M. D. McCubbins. (1993). Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Follett, M. P. (1896). The Speaker of the House. New York, NY: Longmans, Green and Company.

163

Green, M. (2015). Undergo politics: The minority party in the U.S. House of Representatives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. doi:10.12987/yale/ 9780300181036.001.0001 Huitt, R. K. (1961). Democratic party leadership in the senate. American Political Science Review 55 (June), 333–344. doi:10.1017/S0003055400123366 Jones, C. O. (1968). Joseph G. Cannon and Howard W. Smith: An essay on the limits of leadership in the House of Representatives. Journal of Politics 30 (August): 617–646. Peters, R. M. Jr. (1990). The American speakership. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rohde, D. W. (1991). Parties and leaders in the post-reform house. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226724058.001.0001 Sinclair, B. (1989). The transformation of the U.S. Senate. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sinclair, B. (1995). Legislators, leaders, and lawmaking: The House of Representatives in the post-reform era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Strahan, R. (2007). Leading representatives: The agency of leaders in the politics of the U.S. House. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CONNECTIVE LEADERSHIP A connective leader is any individual who uses the appropriate knowledge, skills, and temperament to lead other individuals who differ on various dimensions (e.g., gender, age, race, nationality, religion, political persuasion, as well as educational and/or occupational background) to work together effectively. Connective leaders understand the complex, broad-based diversity and technology-enhanced interconnections of their constituents. In a world where interconnectivity has rapidly become global, connective leaders are adept at guiding groups of individuals who differ significantly in myriad ways. The Connective Leadership/Achieving Styles Model, as described in this entry, is based on the premise that these leadership styles are learned behaviors, which can be used in various combinations. Moreover, training helps individuals understand which behaviors are most appropriate

ON

LA

CT

TI

RE

The nine styles are grouped into three sets or domains: Direct, Instrumental, and Relational. Each of these three domains subsumes three styles, resulting in the ninefold achieving styles repertoire Figure 1).

INTRINSIC

DI

The Achieving Styles Model

VICARIOUS

TO S SKS A

CONTRIBU OTHERS’ TE T

CONTRIBUTORY

COMPETITIVE

OW M

RS TE KS AS TAS N

for any given situation. Both training and practice also enable individuals to improve their skills in using these best-suited styles. To enable groups of diverse individuals to work together effectively, connective leaders call upon a ninefold repertoire of behavioral strategies (“achieving styles”) to achieve their tasks and accomplish their goals, as Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt described in the 1970s. These achieving styles cross international boundaries, with cultural influences affecting the frequency, strength, and circumstances under which these nine behaviors are implemented. Connective leaders draw upon the entire ninefold repertoire of achieving styles, in each case depending upon their interpretation of situational cues and their expectation that certain styles will increase their odds of success. By contrast, most other leaders, as well as individuals generally, rely primarily upon their past successes, calling mostly upon a relatively limited subset of previously effective achieving styles.

AL

Connective Leadership

RE

164

CONNECTIVE LEADERSHIP

POWER

COLLABORATIVE M IN A XI M IZ E S S TE R A C TIO N

PERSONAL

ENTRUSTING SOCIAL

INST

Figure 1

RUMENTAL

Connective Leadership Model

Source: Jean Lipman-Blumen.

against others compels them to do their best, which may mean creating a contest where it otherwise may not have existed. Power Direct

The Direct Set: Acts Directly on the Situation

Intrinsic Direct Within the Direct domain, the first style is Intrinsic. Individuals who use the Intrinsic Direct style are self-motivated, do not wait for others to help them, and incorporate a high standard of excellence. They have within themselves the resources to perform the task, and a perfectly executed task is the reward they seek. Their challenge is to outdo their own previous performance, without comparing themselves to others. Competitive Direct People who use Competitive, the second style in the Direct set, derive great satisfaction from performing a task better than anybody else. Competing

People who use Power, the third style within the Direct set, prefer to organize, be in control of, and manage people, resources, and processes. They often seek leadership roles, which ordinarily provide the necessary authority to coordinate and organize people and events, as well as commandeer resources, and keep control of the end result. The Instrumental Set: Self and Others as Instruments for Achievement

Personal Instrumental Personal is the first style in the Instrumental set. Individuals who prefer this style use everything about themselves, including their personality, wit, charisma, personal appearance, intelligence, background, and/or previous achievements to attract

Connective Leadership

others and further their goals. They often excel at public speaking, dramatic gestures, symbolism, humor, timing, and costume. They frequently engage in unexpected actions, which take both their supporters and opponents by surprise, often making their targets more receptive, excited, and even vulnerable to their directions. Social Instrumental The second style in the Instrumental domain is Social. People who call upon this style engage and involve other people with relevant training, skills, and/or experience in achieving their goals. By recognizing the connections between training, experience, and goal achievement, individuals who call upon this style use their contacts, as well as their strong political and networking skills, to achieve their goals. Additionally, this style requires maintaining a network of people, who feel remembered, liked, and poised to help. Entrusting Instrumental The third style in the Instrumental set is Entrusting. People use this style to empower others, even though those individuals have no specifically relevant training or experience. This requires, therefore, a situation where the individual can or must entrust their goals to others and believe that those others can accomplish the task with minimal supervision. This “leadership by expectation” motivates others to rise to the occasion and live up to the high and often flattering expectations placed upon them by the leader. This style is commonly called upon in crises, when other individuals with proven credentials for the task are unavailable. The Relational Set: Achievement Through Relationships

Collaborative Relational In the Relational set, the first style is Collaborative. When the situation calls for others to join (this may mean a single collaborator or a multiperson team), this style may increase the odds of success. Often, when using this style, individuals experience a sense of camaraderie from working with others, as

165

well as a devotion to the group and its goals. Tasks, as well as the rewards and disappointments of the challenge, are expected to be shared equally. Contributory Relational The second style in the Relational set is the Contributory style. People who favor this style prefer to work behind the scenes to help others achieve their goals. A sense of accomplishment and success exists when the “front” person or group accomplishes his/her/their task. The Contributory Relational achieving style involves “partnering” in the other person’s or group’s goal, with the understanding that the major and/or public accomplishment belongs to the “front” person or group. Mentoring in the family, school, and workplace is an example of this style. Vicarious Relational Third in the Relational domain is the Vicarious style. People who prefer this style derive a genuine sense of accomplishment from the success of others with whom they identify. Individuals who call upon the Vicarious style do not “get into the act” themselves. As spectators or supporters, rather than direct participants, their sense of pride in the success of others with whom they identify is sufficient reward. In sum, these nine achieving styles that constitute the Connective Leadership Model represent the available repertoire used effectively by connective leaders, as well as by ordinary individuals. They may be utilized in various combinations. While no individual style is intrinsically better than any other, the purpose of the Achieving Styles Model is to identify leadership strategies appropriate for each specific situation. Moreover, the Connective Leadership Model, based upon the nine achieving styles, describes the wide range of behaviors for promoting effectiveness in a world pulled in multiple directions by broad-based diversity and increasing interdependence. The Connective Leadership Model has wide applicability and flexibility in helping assess and direct individuals, teams, and organizations to achieve greater and more fulfilling success through its emphasis upon diversity and interdependence. This model of leadership is useful in understanding all individuals’ profiles, whether or not they are in

166

Connective Leadership

management/leadership positions, since it assumes that all individuals accomplish their tasks and achieve their goals through their Achieving Styles Profile. Most individuals tend to utilize repeatedly the same limited set of the styles; however, some individuals have the ability to call upon a greater number or all styles. Training can enlarge and enhance an individual’s profile. Importantly, no style is deemed necessarily good or bad—simply more or less effective for the situation at hand.

A-360° Profile: Desired Future Profile for an Individual as seen by another/others familiar with that individual’s current behavior Achieving Styles Situational Evaluation Assessment (ASSET) Used for selecting individuals for leadership and other organizational or team roles under various conditions, including organizational challenges.

Applications: Practice Beyond Theory Assessment Tools, Research, and Applications for Individuals and Organizations The Achieving Styles Model is distinctive in that a set of Assessments (or Inventories) have been developed, tested, and utilized since the 1970s to measure the frequency with which an individual uses and/or an organization rewards the use of various achieving styles. The suite of assessments also allows various comparisons of individuals’ and organizations’ current and desired behavioral profiles. At its core, the model assumes a growth mindset that promotes an individual’s ability to learn and use, as well as an organization’s propensity to reward, new, more effective behaviors that can be adapted and utilized as circumstances change.

Connective Leadership Assessments Achieving Styles Inventory (ASI): Individual’s Current Achieving Styles Profile Aspired to Achieving Styles Inventory (A-ASI): Individual’s Desired Future Achieving Styles Profile Organizational Achieving Styles Inventory (OASI): Achieving Styles the Organization Currently Rewards (as seen by those familiar with the organization) Organizational Aspirational Achieving Styles Inventory (A-OASI): Organization’s Desired Future Achieving Styles Profile (as seen by those familiar with the organization) 360° Profile: Current Assessment of an Individual’s Achieving Styles (as seen by another/others familiar with that individual’s current behavior)

The Connective Leadership Model is an effective conceptualization for use in leadership development, executive coaching, and team development, as well as organizational culture assessment and intervention. Since the 1980s, the Connective Leadership Institute, in Pasadena, California, has trained a community of more than 100 Certified Practitioners. These Certified Practitioners, living and working around the globe, undergo extensive training to administer and utilize the suite of seven assessments that measure individuals’ and organizations’ current and aspired-to achieving styles. These assessments can support the design of development plans for an individual, team, and/or organization. The suite of Achieving Styles™ Assessments is designed to measure both individuals’ behavioral predilections, as well as the behaviors that organizations reward. The suite of assessments allows measurement of both current and future preferred behaviors of individuals and organizational preferences. In addition, the suite includes an Achieving Styles Situational Evaluation Technique (ASSET), an instrument for measuring the fit between any candidate’s current behavioral profile and the demands of any specific organizational role under various organizational conditions. Trained consultants (i.e., Connective Leadership Associates, or CLAs) support the development of Achieving Styles of individuals and teams through training and consultation. Through assessment of current and aspirational ASI profiles, CLAs help individuals learn about the model and their own profiles. Utilizing the assessment results, a professional development plan is created to chart a path for developing the use of a more effective profile, aligned with the situation at hand.

Connective Leadership

This is often used in executive coaching to enhance executives’ own leadership skills and those of their teams. In addition, consultants (CLAs) work with teams to review individual and team leadership profiles to help members identify opportunities for improving team effectiveness. The Achieving Styles Model and Assessments also have been used in the recruitment and hiring process to assess the fit between a candidate and a specific position and/or the organization’s culture. For example, the Achieving Styles Situational Evaluation Technique (ASSET) is a powerful tool for an organization or team when identifying the skills needed for a project or position. It allows direct comparisons of various candidates. The organizational inventories are used to understand the behaviors an organization currently rewards, as well as what respondents would like the organization to reward in the future. Individual and organizational profiles also can be utilized in tandem to help identify and address such issues as job satisfaction and morale.

167

effective. Individuals with an entrepreneurial bent seem to prefer the Power Direct style, suggesting they seek out the independence of being on their own, rather than taking direction from others. Culture also appears to play a role in which styles participants use most frequently. The findings reflect, among other cultural aspects, differences based on whether the individual comes from a collectivist vs individualist culture. Research into ranking the styles from “most frequently used” to those styles “used less often,” a robust finding indicates that most individuals prefer the Intrinsic Direct style, which promotes self-reliance in accomplishing tasks. There is also evidence suggesting that, while most individuals rank the Intrinsic Direct style at the top, the Competitive Direct style ranks at or near the bottom for both males and females (despite the above-noted difference in Competitive Direct for men and women), suggesting a trend toward less frequent use of competitive behaviors across settings.

Conclusion Research Highlights on Connective Leadership With the connective leadership theory as foundation, researchers and consultants have utilized the various assessments in numerous studies. Much of the research has examined groups of college students, executive MBA students, student services professionals, educational administrators, mental health clinicians, aerospace engineers, healthcare workers, executive managers, and military professionals. The Connective Leadership database includes participants’ results from 120 countries. In addition, studies have taken advantage of the extensive ASI database, with data from more than 45,000 individuals. Studies have examined differences across genders, individuals, groups, and cultures across a wide variety of settings. To highlight some of the major findings, many studies have examined differences between males and females, with consistent results indicating that men rely more heavily on Competitive Direct behavior than do women. Additionally, when examining the styles within the leadership or management context, studies suggest that the Collaborative and Contributory Relational styles may be particularly

In sum, Connective leaders can assess their sphere of influence and select from the nine achieving styles, which style(s) will increase their odds of success. Such skills allow these individuals to connect through common ground, while honoring a diversity of voices. In our increasingly complex world, those in tune with the connective leadership theory are needed to address the ever-changing crises that threaten to conquer and divide us. Maura Jave Harrington, Jean Lipman-Blumen, and Jill Robinson See also Collective Leadership; Exemplary Leadership; Inclusive Leadership; Networks and Networked Organizations; Strategic Leadership

Further Readings Gotcheva, N., & Miettinen, A. (2008). Achieving styles of Bulgarian managers and politicians: A longitudinal perspective. Human Resource Development International, 11, 135–149. Lipman-Blumen, J. (1996). The connective edge: Leading in an interdependent world. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass.

168

Conspiracy Theories

Lipman-Blumen, J. (2006a). The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians—And how we can survive them. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lipman-Blumen, J. (2006b). Individual and organizational achieving styles: A conceptual handbook for researchers and human resource professionals (7th ed.). The Achieving Styles Institute. Lipman-Blumen, J., & Leavitt, H. (1999). Hot groups: Seeding them, feeding them, and using them to ignite your organization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Robinson, J., Cartwright, C., Harrington, M., & Walsh, K. (2017). Connective leadership: From zero-sum to inclusion. In A. Boitonao & H. E. Schockman (Eds.), Breaking the zero-sum game: Transforming societies through inclusive leadership. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Ltd. Robinson, J. L., & Lipman-Blumen, J. (2003). Leadership behavior of male and female managers, 1984–2002. Journal of Education for Business, 79, 28–33.

hat-wearing men who spend most of their time in bunkers, CTs are not solely the domain of extremists and paranoids. People of all walks of life believe CTs, in countries across the globe. For example, one recent nationally representative survey found that over half the American public endorses at least one CT. Given that these beliefs can have significant societal consequences, a growing body of interdisciplinary research examines the antecedents of CT beliefs, as well as ways to mitigate them. This entry will first review the effects of CT beliefs, paying particular attention to the negative effects. Next, this entry will discuss the antecedents of CT beliefs. The final section will explore mitigation strategies, highlighting the important role of leaders. Before proceeding to a review of the findings, a few methodological notes are in order.

Methodological Note: Measurement

CONSPIRACY THEORIES A conspiracy is commonly defined as a secret plot between two or more people to do something harmful. A conspiracy theory (hereafter, CT), then, is an explanation of an event (past, present, or future) that posits, at its core, the causal role of a conspiracy. Defining characteristics of a CT are that they involve the secret, malevolent actions of powerful people that arise as explanations of extremely negative and unexpected events (e.g., the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the sudden appearance of the deadly COVID-19 virus). Sometimes they explicitly contradict the explanations of authorities (e.g., government officials or scientists); other times they arise prior to an authoritative explanation, to fill an informational vacuum. A key feature of CTs is their nonfalsifiability—it is difficult to prove the absence of something. For someone who believes the theory, the lack of tangible proof of the presumed conspiracy is evidence of just how deep the cover-up is and how devious the perpetrators are. Contrary to the popular conception that people who believe CTs are a small group of tinfoil

There are two dominant approaches to measuring CT beliefs. The first is to assess the strength of endorsement of specific CTs that are currently salient (e.g., President Joe Biden’s election win was due to a secret, coordinated effort to steal the election) or that were salient in the past (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald was part of an FBI plot to kill President John Kennedy). Sometimes the focus is on understanding one specific CT; other times the goal is to create an index from responses to a variety of CT questions (e.g., scholars interested in the political antecedents and consequences of CT beliefs will create subscales of “liberal” and “conservative” CTs). The disadvantage to scales of specific CTs is that they can be idiosyncratic from one scholar to the next, thus inconsistencies in findings across studies could be due to differences in the CTs themselves, such as their believability or salience. A second approach builds on the finding that CT beliefs form a monological belief system reflecting a conspiratorial worldview—endorsement of one CT is positively correlated with belief in others. Even mutually contradictory CTs have been shown to be positively correlated (e.g., simultaneously believing that COVID-19 is a Chinese biological weapon and that it was accidently released by a lab in the United States). Scholars have developed standardized scales to

Conspiracy Theories

measure this conspiratorial worldview (alternatively called a predisposition or an ideation), with agree/disagree statements such as, “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.” A key feature of these scales is that the items are ideologically neutral and general enough to be applicable across time and space.

Methodological Note: Causation Scholars studying the antecedents and/or consequences of CT beliefs are primarily interested in making causal inferences—What causes CT beliefs? and What effects do CT beliefs cause? However, the most common approach to studying CT beliefs is to assess beliefs and presumed causes/effects at the same point in time in a cross-sectional survey. Such surveys are useful for discovering correlations between concepts, but they cannot say anything definitive about cause. For example, the negative correlation between CT beliefs and trust in government could be because (1) CT beliefs cause a decrease in trust, (2) decreases in trust cause increases in CT beliefs, (3) both variables cause each other, or (4) some other variable is simultaneously causing both CT beliefs and trust, rendering the correlation between the two variables spurious. An alternative method for assessing the causes of CT endorsement involves experimentally manipulating levels of a theorized cause and measuring the effects of the manipulation on beliefs. The theory that lack of control causes CT endorsement has been tested in a laboratory setting in which people were asked to recall a time in which they lacked control or had complete control; those in the no control condition were likely to explain a given scenario as the result of a conspiracy than their counterparts. Experiments have the advantage of enabling stronger causal inferences, but can have the disadvantage of lacking real-world generalizability, and are limited to studying causes that can be effectively and ethically manipulated by the researcher.

Consequences of Belief in Conspiracy Theories Believing that negative events are the result of the secret machinations of powerful people can have

169

significant effects on behavior and behavioral intentions. With regard to politics, conspiratorial thinking is negatively associated with political engagement. In one study, people who were shown the conspiracy film JFK reported that they were less likely to vote than those who did not watch the film. Others have found negative correlations between CT beliefs and intentions to register to vote, turn out to vote, and contribute money to candidates running for office. Whereas CTs are negatively associated with conventional forms of political behavior, they have been shown to be positively related to unconventional behaviors, such as engaging in a protest to express dissatisfaction with those in power (who are presumed to be engaging in conspiracies). CT beliefs have other deleterious personal and societal effects. A number of correlations studies have demonstrated negative relationships between belief in health-related CTs (e.g., birth control is a form of genocide against African Americans) and protective health behaviors such as practicing safe sex and going to the doctor. In the context of COVID-19, CT beliefs about the virus are negatively associated with masking and social distancing, and are positively related to vaccine skepticism and resistance. More direct causal evidence comes from experiments that manipulate the salience of specific health-related CTs and measure health behavior intentions. Beyond the health domain, one experiment exposed respondents to either a narrative arguing that climate change is a hoax, an argument refuting the CT, or no argument. Those who read the CT narrative indicated less willingness to engage in proenvironment behaviors such as reducing their carbon footprint. On the attitudinal side, CT beliefs are correlated with distrust in scientists and scientific findings and recommendations, distrust in government, and support for political violence and political extremism. People who endorse CTs are also more likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroups. For example, anti-Jewish CTs (that posit that powerful Jewish actors are pulling the strings) is related to anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese attitudes among Malaysians. Similar anti-Jewish findings have been demonstrated in Poland and the United States. Although the bulk of this work is correlational, it seems to suggest that CTs bolster an “us vs. them” view of the world.

170

Conspiracy Theories

Antecedents of Belief in Conspiracy Theories The antecedents of CT beliefs are myriad and can be organized into three categories: (1) the need to restore control or certainty, (2) the need to protect or bolster one’s identity, and (3) demographics and personality characteristics. Need to Restore Control/Certainty

Extremely negative, surprising events such as a terrorist attack, a school shooting, or a pandemic are destabilizing—they can cause people to feel uncertain about their future, and increase feelings of powerlessness and anxiety. One way to attempt to restore control or certainty, and to reduce concomitant anxiety, is to seek out an explanation for the event. If we can understand our world, we can more effectively navigate it. We engage in sensemaking every day—it is a common, ordinary, and adaptive strategy. However, this search for an explanation can sometimes lead people down the path of a conspiracy. Counterintuitively, believing that a negative event was the result of a conspiracy, may be more comforting than believing it was a random occurrence. A conspiracy theory provides a scapegoat—something or someone(s) we can fight against to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. For example, believing that powerful people built 5G towers to spread COVID-19 (as a form of population control) gives people an action. They can figuratively—and literally (as was the case in the United Kingdom in the spring of 2020)—fight the tower (with apologies to Public Enemy and Spike Lee). Accordingly, correlational and experimental research has demonstrated that people who feel uncertain or powerless are more likely to believe CTs than their counterparts. But this is a double-edged sword. Studies have also demonstrated bidirectional causal relationships between CTs and powerlessness/anxiety. The proverbial cure may be worse than the disease. Need to Bolster/Protect Identity

CT endorsement is also a convenient way to bolster or protect a threatened identity, belief, or value that one holds dear. For example, people on the losing side of politics are more likely to believe CTs

(both election and non-election related) than winners. And Republicans/conservatives [Democrats/liberals] are more likely to endorse CTs that impugn Democrats/liberals [Republicans/conservatives]. CTs also serve social motives—endorsement is related to the need to seem unique to others, and the need to be the first person in one’s social circle who is “in the know.” Experiments also demonstrate that ostracism causes belief in conspiracy theories. Demographics/Personality Characteristics

Education is negatively related to CT beliefs, and racial minorities are more likely to believe CTs than their counterparts—both of these effects are likely explained by the relationship between these demographics and feelings of powerlessness. Age, gender, and income are not reliably correlated with CT beliefs. With regard to personality characteristics, authoritarianism is positively correlated with CT beliefs, as are the dark triad personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. None of the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) are reliably correlated with CT beliefs.

Mitigating the Spread of and Belief in Conspiracy Theories The bulk of the social scientific evidence indicates that once a CT takes hold it is very difficult to “correct” (recall that a defining feature of CTs is their nonfalsifiability). Although some studies have found that fact-checking and other information strategies can reduce people’s belief in the CTs, CTs can still affect people’s thinking even after they have stopped believing it (the “continued influence effect”). One of the most promising corrective avenues emphasizes the role of leaders. Experiments have found that when CTs are refuted by credible, unlikely sources (e.g., a Democratic leader refuting a CT that impugns Republicans), people are less likely to believe the CT. Moreover, there is correlational evidence that despotic and laissez-faire leadership styles are positively related to belief in workplace-related CTs among employees (mediated by increased worries about job security), whereas a

Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences

participative leadership style is negatively correlated with organizational CTs (charismatic leadership was found to be unrelated to CT endorsement). Because of the stickiness of CTs, attempts at preempting them before they take hold are likely to be more effective. Given that CTs thrive among the powerless, some scholars have argued that leaders can mitigate or even prevent CT beliefs by empowering the public—through installing transparent decision-making protocols and emphasizing procedural justice. Other promising work finds that accuracy nudges can be effective at getting people to resist online CTs. Finally, a growing body of research finds that pre-bunking—inoculating people against CTs prior to exposure by warning them that misinformation is imminent and providing preemptive counterarguments—can be an effective strategy. Importantly, and relevant for the study of leaderships, accuracy nudges and prebunking are most effective when communicated by credible sources.

171

Lewandowsky, S., et al. (2020). The debunking handbook 2020. Retrieved from https://sks.to/db2020. doi:10. 17910/b7.1182 Miller, J. M. (2020). Psychological and situational factors combine to boost COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 53(2), 327–334. doi:10.1017/S000842392000058X Miller, J. M., Saunders, K. L., & Farhart C. E. (2016). Conspiracy endorsement as motivated reasoning: The moderating roles of political knowledge and trust. American Journal of Political Science, 60(4), 824–844. doi:10.1111/ajps.12234 Prooijen, J. W. v. (2018). The psychology of conspiracy theories. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Prooijen, J. W. v., & de Vries, R. E. (2016). Organizational conspiracy beliefs: Implications for leadership styles and employee outcomes. Journal of Business Psychology, 31, 479–491. doi:10.1007/ s10869-015-9428-3 Uscinski, J. E., & Parent, J. M. (2014). American conspiracy theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joanne M. Miller See also COVID-19 Pandemic; Dark Triad; Leadership for the Public Good; Political Leadership; Romance of Heroism

Further Readings Berinsky, A. J. (2017). Rumors and health care reform: Experiments in political misinformation. British Journal of Political Science, 47(2), 241–262. doi:10. 1017/S0007123415000186 Douglas, K. M., Sutton, R. M., Jolley, D., & Wood, M. J. (2015). The social, political, environmental, and health-related consequences of conspiracy theories: Problems and potential solutions. In M. Bilewicz, A. Cichocka, & W. Soral (Eds.), The psychology of conspiracy (pp. 201–218). New York, NY: Routledge. Douglas, K. M., Uscinski, J. E., Sutton, R. M., Cichocka, A., Nefes, T., Ang, C. S., . . . Deravi, F. (2019). Understanding conspiracy theories. Political Psychology, 40(S1), 3–35. doi:10.1111/pops.12568 Jolley, D., Mari, S., & Douglas, K. M. (2020). Consequences of conspiracy theories. In M. Butter & P. Knight (Eds.), Routledge handbook of conspiracy theories (pp. 231–241). New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429452734-2_7

CONTEXT-SENSITIVE LEADER PREFERENCES Context-sensitive leader preferences refers to the idea that followers hold different ideas about the ideal leader depending on the context characterizing the situation under which they are forming their leader preferences. In other words, the theory predicts that followers will prefer leaders with different personal characteristics and traits depending on the situation facing their society at a given point in time. The theory is most thoroughly tested and supported in relation to contexts varying with respect to intergroup conflict (i.e., peace and war situations) showing that followers generally prefer more dominant, masculine, and strong leaders during intergroup conflicts. As such, the results resonate well with folk intuitions about “wartime presidents” and historical examples of successful wartime leaders facing severe electoral defeats under more peaceful circumstances, as did British statesman Winston Churchill in the years following World War II. Importantly, recent theoretical work roots the context-sensitive nature

172

Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences

of followers’ leader preferences in human evolution. To understand this line of reasoning, this entry first covers what traits and characteristics followers tend to generally prefer in leaders and subsequently returns to the question of why dominance, strength, and masculinity are more important under intergroup conflict.

Human Followership: Default Preferences for Warm and Nondominant Leaders To understand the context-sensitive nature of followers’ leader preferences, one needs to know the traits and characteristics followers generally prefer in their leaders—that is, the default setting for followers’ trait preferences in the absence of clear and specific contextual circumstances. As explained elsewhere in this volume (see, for instance, Michael Price’s entry on “Service-ForPrestige Theory of Leadership”), leadership and followership constitute omnipresent features of human societies, they are cross-culturally universal, and exist in modern mass societies and contemporary small-scale societies alike. The key reason for having leader–follower relationships in the first place is that leaders solve coordination problems among fellow group members that would be difficult to solve in the absence of any leaders to serve as initiators of and focal points for coordination. However, when appointing one specific individual to serve the privileged position as leader within the group—with increased access to resources, personnel, and so on—followers unavoidably place themselves in the vulnerable situation of getting hurt by ill-intended and dominant leaders who exploit their position at the expense of the ordinary group members (the followers). Consequently, evolutionary and anthropological accounts of leadership suggest that humans evolved to be extremely vigilant against these characteristics in leaders. Christopher Boehm, for instance, suggests that the human tendency to gossip about high-ranking individuals evolved as part of a larger set of strategies to hold leaders under check. These strategies often involve the formation of alliances of a number of followers to balance the power of any high-ranking or leading individual within the group, creating so-called “reverse dominance hierarchies” in

which a collective of lower-ranked followers keeps any potential exploitative leader in check. This leads to the egalitarian and antihierarchical nature characterizing most contemporary small-scale human societies (and assumedly in ancestral human societies as well) with leaders needing to signal good intentions, generosity, and warmth toward followers in the group. Importantly, an interesting parallel in trait preferences was revealed in recent analyses of citizens’ trait preferences in candidates for top political positions in the United States and United Kingdom. Political scientists Lasse Laustsen and Alexander Bor showed that American voters and British participants in a survey experiment put greater weight on warmth compared with other character traits (e.g., competence, integrity, and being a ‘strong leader’) in presidential and parliamentarian candidates, respectively. In other words, modern citizens’ trait preferences in political leaders match insights on follower trait preferences in leaders of small-scale groups. This suggests that psychological mechanisms that evolved to regulate the leader–follower relation in ancestral societies might still be at play in modern large-scale democracies.

The Intergroup Conflict–Leader Dominance Link Based on this default preference for warmth and nondominance in leaders as well as the underlying rationale for this preference, one might wonder why followers should ever come to favor dominant individuals as leaders. However, in this regard it is key to keep in mind that leadership most likely evolved to secure efficient intra-group coordination in the first place. Consequently, external features that hold the power to affect the efficiency or the needed level of intragroup coordination might also affect followers’ preferences for traits and characteristics in leaders insofar as these characteristics improve the leader’s coordination ability. One such external feature is the context or the situation surrounding the group at a given point in time. Theoretically, a range of contexts might affect the achievement of intragroup coordination. Yet, the degree to which a society or a group faces intergroup conflict stands out as particularly relevant for both theoretical

Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences

and empirical reasons. First, widespread scholarly agreement exists that intergroup conflict has comprised an important force throughout human evolutionary history in shaping human sociality as well as psychology. That is, the human mind is to a substantial degree shaped through the forces of natural selection by the existence of, conflict with, and threat from rival outgroups. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that intergroup conflict could also have affected preferences for traits and personalities in leaders. Second, empirical studies support this theoretical idea. Numerous studies find that contexts such as terrorist attacks and aggressive behavior from a neighboring country leads followers to prefer more dominant leaders. For example, Laustsen and Michael Bang Petersen show how Danish participants flexibly adjust their trait preferences in the light of an aggressive threat stemming from Russia and Vladimir Putin. Specifically, Danish participants were randomly assigned to read about a fictitious politician described as either dominant or nondominant and asked to evaluate how well they liked him. As should be expected from the default setting of human followership psychology previously outlined, the nondominant personality description received favorable evaluations. Critically, however, this changed in the reinterview one week later, when participants were informed that Denmark faced a dispute with Russia about resources in the Arctic Ocean. Now, the dominant personality description received favorable evaluations. Importantly, similar results were obtained across various countries and with a range of materials used for evoking dominance impressions spanning verbal descriptions, facial appearances, and voice pitches. Interestingly, the sensitivity to intergroup conflict in leader trait preferences among participants is paralleled in anthropological records of some Native American tribes also having different chiefs depending on the problems facing the tribe (e.g., aggression from other groups, political interactions with other groups, hunting). Finally, one might ask why exactly it is that humans come to prefer more dominant leaders during intergroup conflict. Existing research points to two possible explanations. On the one hand, scholars suggest that more dominant and

173

masculine leaders are preferred to protect the group against outside threats. Alternatively, other researchers suggest that intergroup conflict constitutes an arms race between rival groups about being better coordinated. Thus, having a more dominant leader who is willing to forcefully sanction noncontributors and free riders within the group during intergroup conflicts might constitute an asset in terms of maximizing coordination efforts. In other words, followers come to prefer leader dominance as a way of committing to the coordination during intergroup conflicts. Currently, it remains inconclusive which of the two theoretical mechanisms best account for the link between intergroup conflict and preferences for leader dominance, but recent results seem to speak against the protection-based account.

Individual Differences and Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Until now this entry has focused on what traits and characteristics humans favor in leaders as default and, subsequently, how contexts and situations marked by heightened intensity of intergroup conflict change this default preference toward greater degrees of dominance. Yet, one thing is changing contexts, which should cause everybody to update their leader preferences. However, followers also vary in terms of how conflict-ridden they perceive the social world, and if leadership preferences are indeed contextsensitive, we should expect that the more followers tend to see the world as characterized by intergroup conflict, the stronger preferences for dominant leaders they should exhibit. A series of studies finds strong support for this idea. Employing validated scales for measuring how dangerous, conflict-ridden, and competitive the social world is perceived to be, researchers have demonstrated that stronger preferences for dominant leaders are found among study participants who view the world as more dangerous and competitive. Interestingly, social psychological research further links impressions of the social world as conflict-ridden and dangerous to conservative political orientations and, on this background, studies show that conservative followers generally prefer leaders to be more dominant

174

Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences

compared to liberal followers. Importantly, these conclusions are based on impressions of fictitious as well as real political candidates. For instance, a study by Laustsen found that conservative respondents in the American National Election Studies 1980–2008 vote more based on the relative impressions of two competing candidates’ “provision of strong leadership.” Another study found that supporters of Donald Trump—often depicted as the embodiment of a dominant, strong, and alpha-type politician—score higher in measures of perceptions of the social world as more conflict-ridden (i.e., group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression). In short, these results show that besides contextual changes toward larger degrees of intergroup conflict, predispositions for perceiving the social world as more conflict-ridden also upregulate preferences for dominant leaders.

Context-Sensitivity: Sensitive to What Sort of Contexts? The focus in this entry has been on changing preferences for leaders as a function of varying degrees of intergroup conflict. However, there are good reasons to believe that other types of contexts might also change which traits and characteristics followers prefer in leaders (and how contexts possibly change the relative importance of certain traits from followers’ perspective). This idea obviously raises questions such as, “What are the relevant types of contexts that can change trait preferences in leaders?” One way of addressing this question is to recall the underlying notion of this article: that leadership emerged—evolutionarily speaking—as a solution to coordination problems within the group. Consequently, it seems reasonable to look for other “candidate contexts” from the premise that such contexts, which have existed across human evolutionary history, should hold the potential for affecting intra-group coordination. As already explained, intergroup conflict composes one such evolutionarily relevant context. Another such context is “disease threat.” In fact, a few studies already tested how disease threat possibly molds followers’ preferences for traits in leaders. One theory is that disease threat might cause followers to hold stronger preferences for attractive leaders. The underlying rationale

was that attractiveness is a signal of good health, and because the leader is central for successful intra-group coordination, followers should be particularly interested in having an attractive (and healthy) leader in times of disease threat. Research by Andrew White and others found support for their hypothesis across four studies. Other studies conducted during the 2020–21 COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark did not obtain results in support of the hypothesis. Consequently, future studies are needed to clarify which, if any, effect disease threat contexts exert on followers’ leader preferences. Furthermore, future work might explore a range of alternative evolutionarily relevant contexts in order to uncover how followers’ leader preferences might vary as a function of contexts and situations. Concrete suggestions in this regard could be varying levels of intra-group conflict (between rival alliances within one’s group), population density, group size, and many others.

Conclusion Citizens in modern democracies and followers in contemporary small-scale societies alike prefer warm, trustworthy, and nondominant individuals as leaders. Interestingly, as a second layer on this default setting of follower preferences for traits and characteristics in leaders, contextual changes related to intergroup conflict have led followers to prefer larger degrees of leader dominance. While such results robustly obtain across a range of studies conducted in different countries and with different materials for evoking dominant impressions of leaders and politicians, the underlying theoretical mechanism remains less clear. One explanation centers on the dominant leader providing protection for the in-group, while another explanation theorizes that followers come to prefer the dominant leader for reasons of ensuring the needed levels of intragroup coordination to prevail in conflict against an enemy out-group. In parallel to the link between contexts of intergroup conflict and preferences for leader dominance, studies also find that individual followers who by default tend to perceive the world as more conflict-ridden more strongly prefer dominant leadership. Finally, recent work has

Contingency Theories

sought to broaden the idea of context-sensitivity in followers’ leader preferences by studying how contexts of, for instance, disease threat potentially also affect followers’ preferences for certain traits in leaders. Thus, context-sensitivity not only captures a distinct and important part of human followership psychology and leader preferences; it also points out a range of future avenues for possibly expanding knowledge about these important phenomena even further. Lasse Laustsen See also Dominance and Prestige; Evolution of Leadership; Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership; Warmth and Competence

175

Price, M. E., & van Vugt, M. (2014). The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: The theory of service-forprestige. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 363. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00363 White, A. E., Kenrick, D. T., & Neuberg, S. L. (2013). Beauty at the ballot box: Disease threats predict preferences for physically attractive leaders. Psychological Science 24(12), 2429–2436. doi:10. 1177/0956797613493642 Womick, J., Rothmund, T., Azevedo, F., King, L. A., & Jost, J. T. (2019). Group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression predict support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U. S. presidential election.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 10(5), 643–652. doi:10.1177/1948550618778290

Further Readings Boehm, C. (2000). Conflict and the evolution of social control. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(1–2), 79–101. Laustsen, L., & M. B. (2017). Perceived conflict and leader dominance: Individual and contextual factors behind preferences for dominant leaders. Political Psychology, 38(6), 1083–1101. doi:10.1111/pops.12403 Laustsen, L., & Bor, A. (2017). The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity. Electoral Studies 49, 96–107. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2017.08.001 Laustsen, L., & Petersen, M. B. (2020). Online tallies and the context of politics: How online tallies make dominant candidates appear competent in contexts of conflict. American Journal of Political Science 64(2), 240–255. doi:10.1111/ajps.12490 Laustsen, L., & Olsen, A. L. (2021, October 7). Is a disease leader attractive? Six tests of whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected follower preferences for attractiveness, health and other traits in political and non-political leaders. The Leadership Quarterly. doi: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2021.101574 Little, A. C., Burriss, R. P., Jones, B. C., & Roberts, S. C. (2007). Facial appearance affects voting decisions. Evolution and Human Behavior 28, 18‒27. doi:10. 1016/j.evolhumbehav.2006.09.002 McDonald, M. M., Navarrete, C. D., & van Vugt, M. (2012). Evolution and the psychology of intergroup conflict: The male warrior hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biology, 367, 670–679. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0301

CONTINGENCY THEORIES Over the years an extraordinary amount of research has been conducted in an effort to conceptualize leadership, with various theories and schools of thought emerging. Historically, the two primary veins of research have focused either on how leader traits and behaviors impacted organizational outcomes directly or which contingencies and situational factors could alter and explain the relationships. This latter stream of research—often referred to as the contingency approach to leadership—includes a variety of theories acknowledging the complex role played by the interaction between the leader and the situation. Some of these approaches, such as path– goal theory, focus on the leader’s behaviors, and although touched upon briefly in what follows, they are covered in greater depth in other entries in this encyclopedia. This entry will focus primarily on the contingency model of leader effectiveness and cognitive resource theory, both of which explain the interface of leader trait/personal characteristics and the situation in determining the leader’s effectiveness. The scientific study of leadership took hold at the turn of the 20th century with the “great man” theory, which argued that history was shaped by exceptional individuals who possessed certain characteristics that distinguished them from

176

Contingency Theories

nonleaders. This approach dominated the research, shaping theoretical development and focusing the majority of work on the qualities of individuals (e.g., personality traits, competencies, and behaviors). However, a philosophical shift occurred in the latter half of the 20th century, spurred partially by the philosophical paradigm of the Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the times.” Originally discussed by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1807, the Zeitgeist gained renewed interest for the credence it gave to cultural and social circumstances as important contributors to leader success. It was against this backdrop that contingency theories diverged from earlier work and developed their focus on the impact of situational forces in leader and leadership development. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, researchers developed theories that explored the way in which various situational elements interacted with characteristics of the leaders to determine leader effectiveness. Several theories assessed the role of the leader’s perceived behaviors, for example the normative decisionmaking model, the path–goal theory, and the situational leadership theory. Taking a slightly different approach, Fred Fiedler and his associates presented two theories or models that addressed the interface of a leader’s psychological traits and the situation in determining team outcomes; namely, the aforementioned contingency model of leadership effectiveness and the cognitive resource theory, discussed in the following sections.

Contingency Model of Leadership Effectiveness In 1978, Fred Fiedler put forward the claim that leadership does not occur in a vacuum and that positive outcomes relied on a match between a leader’s traits and the situational factors. The model he developed—the contingency model of leadership effectiveness—measured the leader’s orientation (task vs. relationship) along with situational control and influence, conceptualized as the leader’s sense of control and influence (i.e., power) over the situation. Leader’s work orientation in this theory is a mindset, not a behavioral pattern. It is understood to be a fairly stable characteristic and is measured in the model

through the use of the Lead Preferred Coworker scale (LPC) which distinguishes between leaders who are more task-oriented and leaders who are more relationship-oriented. The second fundamental element of the model, situational control, is composed of three factors, the leader–member relationship, task structure, and the leader’s positional power. Leader–member relationships assess the degree of cohesion among team members and their collective support toward the leader. The task structure is determined through the amount of direction needed to achieve the goal, paired with the leader’s experience and training. Finally, positional power is reflected in the recognized legitimacy of the leader as well as their ability to reward or punish subordinates. Although all three are essential, Fiedler argued that leader–member relationship is twice as important as task structure, which is itself twice as important as positional power in determining that sense of control. With these two factors in mind, the model determines the type of situation in which a leader will perform most effectively, based on their work orientation as determined by their LPC score. Specifically, the model predicts that leaders who report being task-oriented are more effective than relationship-oriented leaders in high- and low-control situations; whereas relationshiporiented leaders, compared with their taskoriented counterparts, thrive in situations with moderate control. When leaders are in situations where the model predicts them to be effective, they are considered in-match, while those leaders who are in situations where the model predicts them to perform less effectively are considered out-ofmatch. Importantly, because leader orientation is considered a stable characteristic, creating situations for a leader to be in-match require shifts in the factors making up situational control. This has led to the development of training programs designed to teach leaders how to change the situation to fit their orientation, a method that has found empirical support for its effectiveness and generalizability as a training model. Although there have been calls for the continued development of the model to include a consideration of such factors as subordinate characteristics, the model has also received some criticisms. Most

Contingency Theories

notably, the model was critiqued for defining leader effectiveness solely through group performance. In response, other outcomes have also been considered and found predictive, namely, team satisfaction and leader stress. To date, several studies have systematically reviewed the empirical evidence of this model and for the most part show positive significant support for its propositions.

Cognitive Resource Theory Cognitive resource theory (CRT) is based on the interaction of certain leader characteristics with the contextual situation to determine effectiveness. Developed by Fred Fiedler and Joseph Garcia in 1987, CRT argues that the relevant leader characteristics are intelligence and experience, and which one is most predictive of effectiveness is determined by situational factors, specifically leader’s stress. Intelligence, one of the most frequently studied and predictive characteristics, has been defined in a variety of ways. For the purpose of this model, Fiedler incorporated Robert Sternberg’s conceptualization of intelligence as being rooted in two primary ways of thinking: fluid and crystallized. Fluid intelligence indicates an ability to reason and solve problems in unique and novel ways and is reflective of the “intelligence” variable in the model, whereas crystallized intelligence refers to the ability to use the knowledge and mastery acquired from previous learning and is similar to the “experience” factor. As mentioned earlier, the situation in this model is defined by the level of stress the leader experiences. Stress can arise from a variety of sources including the task, coworkers, or the leader’s own supervisor. It can also be experienced in different ways (e.g., role conflict or overload). With stress as the situational factor and intelligence and experience as the relevant leader characteristics, CRT posits that leaders who rely on intelligence in low-stress situations will be more effective, while high-stress situations call for leaders to rely on experience in order to be most effective. This is because leaders under high levels of stress end up dedicating some of their limited cognitive resources toward concerns of potential failure and anxieties of self-efficacy—resources that would

177

otherwise be directed toward problem-solving and creative thinking. Research from both laboratory and field experiments has found that under high-stress situations, the leader’s performance was positively related to experience and negatively related to intelligence. Leaders who relied on experience performed better than those who relied on intelligence in high-stress situations. This conclusion may seem familiar to those working in high-stakes occupations like the military or firefighting, where there is an established tradition of constant training and practice to create a foundation of experience to rely on when faced with crises such as armed combat or a bush fire. For low-stress situations, although experience still played a positive role, it was less important than intelligence in predicting performance. In their 2004 metaanalytic review, Timothy Judge, Amy Colbert, and Remus Ilies found further support for the prediction that intelligence is more predictive of effectiveness in low-stress situations, indicating the need for further research in the area. Taken together, these results indicate support for the CRT model. Nonetheless, the model provides evidence that the traits studied under earlier philosophies (e.g., the great man theory) are relevant and predictive; however, their impact on effectiveness is dependent on the situation. In both of the theories just described, the situation is the key contingent factor that interacts with leader characteristics to determine outcomes. The contingency model of leadership effectiveness defined the situation in terms of the leader– member relationship, task structure, and leader positional power; whereas the cognitive resource theory conceptualized the situation in terms of high and low stress. Additionally, the models can be seen to complement one another. When a leader is out-of-match according to the contingency model of leadership effectiveness, they potentially experience stress, which reduces their effectiveness; however, if that same leader has enough experience, the cognitive resource theory suggests that they can rely on that experience to manage the situation until they return to being in-match. In both cases, the models illustrate how effective leaders can choose or manage the situations they are in to find an optimal match with their

178

Cooperation

characteristics, allowing them to lead with ease. This flexibility is a key competency for leaders who are facing an increasingly diverse workforce and ambiguous, complex economic and social situations. Although much of the research on contingency approaches has slowed in recent years, the consistent findings that context and situation matter can be applied to and integrated with newer paradigms of leadership, such as servant leadership, provide the nuance needed to make the theories applicable.

through language and communication. Cooperation is a psychological and social necessity for humans, as well as a foundation for social life. Many sources influence cooperation, including societal norms, including reciprocity, institutional structures, rewards and punishments, and other social processes. Cooperation is vital in leadership for creating an environment where group members work together for the benefit of the group, as well as being an effective tool for leaders to gain the allegiance and trust of followers.

Roya Ayman and Meghan L. Pickett See also Normative Decision-Making Model; Path–Goal Theory; Implicit Leadership Theory; Leader–Member Exchange; Situational Leadership Theory

Further Readings Ayman, R. (2002). Contingency model of leadership effectiveness. In L. L. Neider & C. A. Schriesheim (Eds.), Leadership (pp. 197–228). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Fiedler, F. E. (1978). The contingency model and the dynamics of the leadership process. In L. Bekowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 11, pp. 59–112). New York, NY: Academic Press. Fiedler F. E., & Garcia, J. E. (1987). New approaches to effective leadership: Cognitive resources and organizational performance. New York, NY: Wiley.

COOPERATION Cooperation is a joint and collaborative action involving individuals or groups for the achievement of an individual or collective goal. For cooperative behavior to occur, there must be mutual interest between parties as well as an advantageous outcome for all parties. Cooperative behavior can involve as few as two individuals (dyad) and a group as large as an entire society. Cooperation is a basic form of human contact and social behavior, and cooperative behavior is widely expected for group members. Humans are able to achieve high levels of cooperative behavior

How Researchers Study Cooperation and Human Behavior Researchers in social sciences have used experimental games to observe cooperation, competitiveness, and selfishness. Two of the main games used in this line of research are the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG) and the Public Goods Game (PGG). In both of these games, researchers can look at individual decisions and identify the cooperative or selfish nature of the players. The PDG is designed and analyzed by game theory to observe individuals’ decision-making surrounding cooperative and selfish behavior. The PDG, used since the early 1950s, is the foundation of social dilemma research. Traditionally, this game is played once; however, extensive literature looks at prisoner’s dilemmas in repeated settings. The prisoner’s dilemma refers to two people arrested by police. Each prisoner is detained and kept in a separate space with no chance of communication with the other. The police do not have sufficient evidence to convict the two suspects for the charge but do have evidence for a lesser charge. The police offer each of the suspects the option to defect and betray their partner, or to remain silent. Each player has the opportunity to make a selfish decision (betray: benefiting themselves and hurting the other player) or to cooperate (stay quiet: benefiting both themselves and the other player). If both players choose to cooperate, the outcomes are jointly best, with both players receiving a minimal sentence. Suppose, however, that one person decides to betray and the other to cooperate. In that case, the person who cooperates will receive no

Cooperation

punishment, and the other will serve a more significant sentence than if he or she had both cooperated. If they both behave selfishly and defect, each of them will be punished and serve a prison sentence more significant than if they cooperated, but less significant than if only one person cooperates. Therefore, it is always in the suspect’s personal interest to defect (selfish behavior), resulting in this being the dominant strategy. Yet if both people defect, their joint outcome is less desirable than if both had cooperated. In the PGG, designed for people in a group, each makes an individual decision to allocate tokens (money) to one of two available accounts. One possible allocation is to a private account, where they receive an amount equal to what they deposit. The other option is sending tokens (money) to the group account. All tokens from each group member in the group account are combined and multiplied by a known factor that is more than one and then equally distributed back to ALL group members (the multiplier must be less than the number of group members). The PGG allows examination of selfish behavior whereby the individual has the incentive to free-ride off other players’ contributions. In the PGG, group payoff is maximized when all group members cooperate and contribute all tokens to the group account. However, players’ individual earnings are maximized by selfish behavior (not contributing tokens) and letting other members contribute. Although both games have a strong motivator for individuals to behave in a selfish manner, research has shown that people tend to behave cooperatively in both games. Many studies have shown the baseline level of cooperation in the PDG is greater than 30% and greater than 45% in the PGG. This baseline level of cooperation can be increased by using in-group or familiar partners or group members. Factors such as the ability to communicate, ways to punish, repeated plays, and the presence of a leader will enhance cooperation beyond that of the basic one-shot game for both the PGG and the PDG. Results suggest that prosocial people are more likely to cooperate, even in competitive structures. People who tend to make selfish decisions are often considered individualists or competitors.

179

Why Individuals Cooperate in a Competitive World The results of researchers’ reported results from tests using the PGG and PDG provide strong evidence of cooperative behavior. Exhibiting cooperative behavior is a well-studied quandary in a fiercely competitive world. Humans cooperate for multiple reasons. Direct reciprocity, which takes into consideration the high levels of cooperation that occur between unrelated (not kin) group members, suggests when there are repeated interactions between two or more individuals, people cooperate in hopes that the other members will cooperate in the future. Direct reciprocity requires that individuals must be able to help one another and be willing to reciprocate. Indirect reciprocity considers a one-shot interaction or an asymmetric advantage of one person helping another with no possibility of a reciprocated transaction. Indirect reciprocity can establish one’s favorable reputation as a cooperator that could impact interactions with other individuals. Network or spatial selection theory recognizes that some people interact at greater rates than others. Therefore, cooperative behavior can impact multiple members of a network, so being cooperative can produce advantageous outcomes for all or many members of the network. Group selection operates by making it more likely that a group will survive if its members cooperate with each other relative to a group where members behave selfishly. This theory relies not solely on the individual aspect of cooperation and reciprocity but on the group impact of cooperative and reciprocal behavior. Kin selection is one of the main elements of evolutionary explanations for cooperation. Cooperation is more likely when the individuals are genetic relatives, creating an environment for their kin to flourish. This type of explanation for cooperative behavior explains the altruistic behavior of many species and not just humans.

Cooperation and Leadership Research suggests that leadership offers a substantial way to help people exhibit cooperative behavior. The existence of leadership is helpful in

180

Corporate Social Responsibility

motivating cooperation by laying out well-designed incentives (rewards) for cooperative behavior and punishments (sanctions) for selfish or undesirable behaviors. There is considerable research that indicates if leaders design appropriate and effective incentive structures, followers will exhibit behavior that is more cooperative. Some researchers have adopted the use of punishment as a social-control approach to cooperation. Leaders have the challenge of designing the social-control features in ways where people do not try to hide behavior or create situations where there is no reasonable way to detect noncooperative behavior and reasonably punish the defectors. Another way in which leaders can impact the cooperative nature of followers is by establishing norms of cooperation within their organization. Some research indicates, however, that leaders have the ability to create incentives and sanctions that can shape a norm of cooperative behavior within their group. A different approach that leaders can use to promote cooperative behavior is by appealing to individual attitudes or moral values. Charismatic leadership has been shown to increase individuals’ personal motivators of cooperative behavior resulting in more prosocial followers than noncharismatic leadership. Research indicates that using a personal appeal to activate individual values can be more effective than rewards and punishments in some situations. Creating a group culture and norm of support and value around cooperation can stimulate intrinsic motivation in group members. This group culture can also impact the attitudes of group members. Thus, when a leader can create an environment of trust, shared interests, and thereby promote group welfare, individuals tend to behave more cooperatively. Haley A. Harwell See also Altruism; Behavioral Economics; Competition; Group Norms; Group Process; Intergroup Processes; Organizational Dynamics; Social Dilemmas; Risk-Taking; Trust

Further Readings ¨ Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2000). Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments. American Economic Review, 90(4), 980–994.

Johnson, D. D. P., Stopka, P., & Knights, S. (2003). The puzzle of human cooperation. Nature, 421(6926), 911–912. Nowak, M. A. (2006). Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 314(5805), 1560–1563. doi:10. 1126/science.1133755 Raihani, N. (2021). The social instinct: How cooperation shaped the world. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Tyler, T. R. (2011). Why people cooperate: The role of social motivations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Corporate social responsibility (CSR) encompasses a broad range of activities that corporations voluntarily undertake to increase their benefit to society. Examples include charitable donations, employee wellness programs, and pollution reduction practices. There are several concepts that are important to understanding the implications of CSR. Corporate leaders hold varying views of a firm’s responsibilities to society and of the types of activities that firms should undertake to fulfill these responsibilities. The decisions of corporate leaders about CSR can influence stakeholder relationships and thereby affect firm performance over time. Given the resources and reach of modern corporations, leadership decisions about CSR can also have significant implications for the welfare and sustainability of society, though CSR activities seldom achieve these aims.

Corporate Responsibilities to Society A robust economy underpins a healthy society. Corporations can thus benefit society through their core economic activities of producing and distributing demanded goods and services, and through their auxiliary functions of employment, taxation, and local infrastructure creation. Some leaders view these economic activities as the limit of a firm’s social responsibility. Moreover, some deem that using firms’ resources for CSR is harmful to society in the aggregate.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Firms are not specialists at providing social goods. Diverting corporate resources to CSR can be a relatively inefficient means of creating social goods. It fails to use the comparative advantage of governmental and nongovernmental organizations in providing social services, while also drawing firms’ limited resources away from the economic pursuits in which they specialize. Furthermore, CSR is an undemocratic means of providing social goods. Elected government bodies are designed to determine which social services to provide to communities and at what level. In contrast, reliance on CSR means that the leadership of, say, Walmart makes decisions about the type and depth of social services that exist in a community. Compounding this, agency loss is a substantive concern when public firms engage in CSR. Corporate leaders may choose favored “pet projects” that serve their self-interests, using the resources of their firms’ shareholders. Overall, from this viewpoint, corporate leaders best fulfill social responsibilities by maximizing the financial performance of their firms, the fruits of which empower their shareholders to contribute to societal betterment however they choose. This view that “the business of business is business,” and no more, has dominated corporate leadership for decades and still has many adherents. However, economic inequality, climate change, and other local, national, and global social and environmental problems have worsened, while the size, power, and reach of corporations has grown. This has led to widespread disenchantment with such a narrow view of CSR and produced a rhetorical shift in the dominant paradigm. Many corporate leaders, individually and in coordination across prominent business associations, have made public proclamations about their substantive responsibilities to society, to include the natural environment, and not just to profitability. They have acknowledged that their economic pursuits can generate social and environmental harms and accepted a responsibility to account for and eliminate such harms. Moreover, as they have grown, multinational corporations have become better positioned to solve social challenges in lieu of, or in cooperation with, government agencies, especially in developing countries and on issues that cross sovereign borders. Finally, because stakeholders, to include shareholders,

181

increasingly and often loudly demand an expanded social role for corporations, firms can more easily discern their interests in CSR. At minimum, many leaders now recognize that social and environmental problems threaten corporate stability and profitability, and so it is in their economic interests to address these problems. Many more view CSR as not just responsible but profitable.

Fulfilling Corporate Responsibilities to Society Corporations undertake a broad range of activities to fulfill their social responsibilities. For example, McDonald’s founded the Ronald McDonald House Charities to support families with sick children; Lego offers RE:CODE programs to educate children about technology and sustainability; and Ben & Jerry’s follows Fairtrade standards to further its commitment to helping farmers earn fair wages. Because CSR takes so many forms, and because some corporate leaders view all legal corporate activity as inherently socially responsible, the boundaries of CSR are prone to muddling. Two factors—discretion and social orientation—help to distinguish a corporation’s activities that seek to fulfill its responsibilities to society from its other activities. Discretion

CSR is a discretionary activity in which corporate leaders freely choose to engage. Any activity that a firm is required to undertake is not CSR; rather, it is compliance. However, corporate leaders can find room for discretion even in compliance activities. Tax compliance, accounting practices, and other corporate activities that are governed by reams of narrow regulations still contain gaps between the letter and spirit of the law. These gaps provide ample space for “creative accounting” to exploit loopholes. Corporate leaders often take calculated risks on regulatory enforcement and engage in cost–benefit analyses regarding the merits of violating laws where punishment is likely. Thus, although the absence of wrongdoing does not signal the presence of CSR, when corporate leaders engage in strict legal compliance

182

Corporate Social Responsibility

in settings where such behaviors are more the exception than the rule, such as avoiding tax havens, they may be considered to be, undertaking CSR, given that they are exercising their discretion in a way that produces social benefit. Further muddling the boundaries, in 2013 India passed a law requiring large firms to allocate at least 2% of their net profits to CSR activities. The loopholes in this law are large, though, and the means of compliance are broad. Under the Indian law, corporate leaders choose how to comply, and there are no penalties for noncompliance. Thus, despite being mandated, because firms maintain near-complete discretion, the activities that corporate leaders undertake to comply with this law can be considered CSR. Finally, where there are no legal mandates, corporate leaders can still face pressures so strong that they effectively lose discretion. In some situations, stakeholders hold the power to make firms offers they cannot refuse. Corporate leaders must comply with these demands or face consequences so substantive that their firms and their personal reputations would be destroyed through boycotts, protests, and withdrawal of critical resources. For example, corporations have faced overwhelming demands for divestment from South Africa and to support marriage equality. Corporate actions taken in response to such pressures is generally considered to be CSR, though corporate leaders who act before such pressures are inescapable are more likely to be deemed to be engaging in CSR. Social Orientation

Acts of CSR are “other-serving,” intended to benefit those not directly affiliated with the firm. Any corporate activity that is self-serving, primarily intended to benefit the firm, is not CSR; it is standard business activity. However, since economic advancement and social welfare are intertwined, CSR is often muddled with other business functions. CSR is commonly confused with business process improvements, particularly actions taken to increase environmental efficiency. For example, many corporate leaders tout their investments in reduction of waste and energy use as acts of CSR, under the premise that by producing less waste and using less energy, their firms are reducing

harm to the natural environment. If the environmental benefits are by-products of the firm’s primary aim to decrease its costs, and especially if the firm does not prioritize or even track the environmental impacts, then such programs are not CSR. Corporate leaders would make these investments in the absence of verifiable environmental gains. Moreover, any gains in efficiency may be offset by increases in output, leading to no net reduction in, say, greenhouse gas emissions. Though it is infeasible to determine true intent, if a corporate leader justifies an activity based on cost savings, dismissing any environment benefits as irrelevant or treating them as matters of advertising and public relations, then it is not CSR. Actions taken to improve corporate relations with powerful stakeholders are more confounding. In recent years, many corporate leaders have declared that they manage their firms not for their shareholders but for their stakeholders. This broad movement toward managing for stakeholders is commonly viewed as synonymous with greater CSR. However, broadening managerial concern beyond the welfare of shareholders does not necessarily translate into acts of CSR. Stakeholder demands are myriad and conflicting, requiring corporate leaders to prioritize them. Power is the primary determinant of priority. But those stakeholders who hold the most power over corporations, and so are prioritized, are typically not vulnerable members of society. Moreover, appeasing these powerful stakeholders in order to maintain their support is self-serving behavior. Corporate leaders who do so are focusing on the needs of the firm or themselves, not necessarily on the needs of society. Thus, actions taken to maintain the support of powerful stakeholders without whose support the firm might cease to exist, though commonly considered CSR, should not be classified as such. Rather, these are standard business practices by which corporate leaders manage resource dependencies.

The Effects of CSR on the Firm Although CSR, by definition, is intended to benefit society, it can provide many benefits to firms. There is widespread acceptance of a “business case” for CSR. Thousands of published studies

COVID-19 Pandemic

have found a range of near- and long-term tangible and intangible gains to firms that maintain significant CSR portfolios. Due to a combination of better governance and more favorable stakeholder relationships, firms with strong CSR programs are generally less at risk of suffering crises and quicker to recover if they do. Firms with strong CSR gain stakeholder trust and the benefit of the doubt, which facilitates access to collaborative opportunities that are unavailable to those firms without a record of CSR. However, it takes time to build a favorable reputation through CSR, and firms can suffer losses from investing in CSR in the interim. Furthermore, the misconduct of similar other firms can harm this reputation, the recovery of which is difficult and uncertain and may require complex cooperative actions across an industry or other group of firms. Nevertheless, both scholarship and practice have overwhelmingly deemed CSR to be a wise strategic investment.

The Effects of CSR on Society Despite its central stated intent to benefit society, CSR’s actual benefits to society have seldom been measured and may be minimal. The ongoing existence and growth of many social problems in the face of the omnipresent CSR programs intended to retard or end them provide anecdotal evidence that CSR is not benefitting society in substantive ways. Unfortunately, there is little more than anecdotal evidence to rely on. Though CSR studies number in the thousands, performance measures are overwhelmingly focused on firm financial performance. The minimal number of studies that assess social performance have focused on inputs, not outputs. There is no direct evidence that CSR initiatives have generated the social impacts intended. Corporate leaders often find that symbolic commitments are adequate to assuage stakeholder pressures, leaving little instrumental benefit in undertaking rigorous and costly methods of social impact measurement for specific CSR actions. However, in some mature programs with a history of publicized failure, third-party certification has been introduced. Michael L. Barnett

183

Further Readings Aguinis, H., & Glavas, A. (2012). What we know and don’t know about corporate social responsibility: A review and research agenda. Journal of Management, 38(4), 932–968. doi:10.1177/0149206311436079 Barnett, M. L. (2007). Stakeholder influence capacity and the variability of financial returns to corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review, 32(3), 794–816. doi:10.5465/amr.2007.25275520 Barnett, M. L. (2018). Limits to stakeholder influence: Why the business case won’t save the world. Cheltenham. Edward Elgar. Barnett, M. L., Henriques, I., & Husted, B. (2020). Beyond good intentions: Designing CSR initiatives for greater social impact. Journal of Management, 46(6), 937–964. doi:10.1177/0149206319900539 Barnett, M. L., & Salomon, R. M. (2012). Does it pay to be really good? Addressing the shape of the relationship between social and financial performance. Strategic Management Journal, 33, 1304–1320. doi:10.1002/ smj.1980 De Ruiter, M., Schaveling, J., Ciulla, J. B., & Nijhof, A. (2018). Leadership and the creation of corporate social responsibility: An introduction to the special issue. Journal of Business Ethics, 151, 871–874. Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. New York Times. SM 17.

COVID-19 PANDEMIC In 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a global pandemic. Leadership is emerging as a key factor in determining the success of emergency responses to COVID-19—and by extension, in determining the success of emergency responses to virus outbreaks generally. The rise and fall of COVID-19 cases will, in large part, be shaped by the behavior of leaders and their responses to the pandemic. In most corners of the world, as described in this entry, COVID-19 has disrupted individuals’ personal, social, academic, professional, and occupational lives. In addition, entire systems such as the global economy, international trade, travel,

184

COVID-19 Pandemic

and education have been severely impacted by COVID-19. Individuals who were already disadvantaged, marginalized, or underprivileged by these systems were and are most impacted by this global pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) uses the words “disadvantaged, “marginalized,” or “underprivileged” to describe individuals or communities who, owing to their lower position in a socioeconomic hierarchy, are more vulnerable to health-compromising conditions. On December 30, 2019, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases released a statement to caution the world about a pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. On December 31, 2019, China Country Office was informed of these cases of pneumonia. On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Theories about natural and laboratory spillovers subsequently emerged about the origin of the pandemic. Epidemiologists, virologists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists have indicated that more investigation is still needed to determine its origin. According to data from the WHO’s COVID-19 Dashboard, as of August 2022, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than six million people and has sickened 596 million people around the world. Data from this dashboard indicate that most new cases are in the United States. While some countries are recording rising fatalities, other countries are experiencing robust vaccination campaigns and significant declines in COVID-19 cases. Countries like the United States have already lifted social distancing and mask mandates for vaccinated people. Countries with lower vaccine coverage are currently recording sharp increases in new cases and hospitalizations.

Leadership Based on Shared Responsibility, Science, Equity, and Solidarity in the COVID-19 Era COVID-19 has expanded society’s understanding of successful leadership, which can be defined as a scientific, equity-based approach grounded in shared responsibility and global solidarity. Leadership refers to accountable decision-making at the individual, community, institutional, national, and international levels. A leader refers to those who

practice leadership in community, health, business, education, and the private and public sectors. Shared Responsibility

In a global pandemic, individuals, communities, institutions, national, and international leaders are all responsible for containing viral transmission. In a March 2020 report titled Shared responsibility, global solidarity: Responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19, the United Nations (UN) stated that all members of society are responsible for each other’s health. Essentially, all members of society are leaders in the fight against COVID-19. This report indicates that community accountability in the midst of a global health crisis requires decisive, urgent, coordinated, and responsible action by all individuals. According to the UN, shared responsibility also means that government leaders need to be prepared and ready to respond to health crises, even if they have no or a few cases in their own country. Shared responsibility involves being ready to: • •

• • • •

Test and identify suspected COVID-19 cases; Implement COVID-19-related education, strict quarantine, isolation, and physical distance measures; Provide safe treatments to individuals with COVID-19; Share knowledge with others and help distribute new diagnostics, drugs and vaccines; Offer equitable care to disadvantaged groups; and Adhere to the highest human rights standards.

In short, shared responsibility involves contact tracing, detecting and responding to infectious sources, monitoring quarantine compliance, building capacity for new diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, and other strategies that may limit the spread of health risks. Similar to the UN, the WHO has described shared responsibility as an ethical and moral imperative for individuals and a legal one for countries. The WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR) state that countries’ leaders have a legal requirement to report public health emergencies of international concern. The IHR offers a

COVID-19 Pandemic

legal framework that establishes countries’ rights and obligations in responding to public health emergencies with the potential to cross borders. These regulations, which are legally binding on 196 countries, require that nations’ leaders act responsibly. Shared responsibility, according to the WHO’s IHR, involves creating effective systems that can detect, assess, report, and respond to public health events. The IHR also includes specific measures leaders can implement at seaports, airports, and ground crossings to limit the international spread of health risks. Although all countries agree on the importance of IHR, there are disparities in the ways in which leaders are willing and or able to invest in public health, management, and response systems for disease outbreak. There is evidence that leadership decisions informed by IHR measures result in more positive health outcomes. A 2021 cross-sectional study of 114 countries on the potential effectiveness of the IHR during the COVID-19 pandemic found that countries with higher IHR scores were significantly more likely to have lower COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates. Science-Based Communication

In the COVID-19 era, members of society frequently receive health information from leaders beyond the health professions. These leaders may include teachers, social media influencers, political figures, celebrities, and activists. Thus, to prevent the spread of misinformation by those without health expertise, informational messages have to be science-based, clear, and consistent. This means that leaders in different sectors have to gather and disseminate information from reliable sources such as the WHO and or research institutes with aggregated, real-time incidence, and outcome data. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC), for example, is a continuously updated resource of COVID-19 data that includes information about cases, deaths, tests, hospitalizations, and vaccines to help individuals respond to the pandemic. Leaders can access this easy-to-understand tool to track COVID-19 as it spreads, develops, or is tackled. Moreover, consistent messaging about the importance of hand washing, self-quarantining, social distancing, and other hygienic measures

185

needs to be constantly disseminated by leaders. New Zealand’s prime minister (Jacinda Ardern), for example, received praise from health experts for her open, clear, consistent, and science-based prevention and response communication. New Zealand’s national polls show a relationship between perceptions of her communication style as honest and clear and high levels of trust and confidence in her leadership. These polls are in line with Earle, Siegrist, and Gutscher’s Trust– Confidence–Cooperation framework, which proposes that community members must have trust and confidence in leaders to comply with public health restrictions. If individuals perceive that leaders’ intentions are to protect the community, they develop trust. In addition, past positive experiences with leaders during health crises, strengthens confidence in the health system and its leaders. This framework proposes that when individuals feel confidence in the system, then they feel more motivated to cooperate with COVID-19 restrictions. Equity

The WHO and other reliable public health experts have explained that inequities create health hazards. Thus, successful leadership during and in the aftermath of COVID-19 requires an equitybased approach that is informed by social determinants of health. The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These determinants include factors like socioeconomic status, education, neighborhood and physical environment, employment, and social support networks, as well as access to health care. In 2005, the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health (SDH) urged leaders to tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money, advantage, and resources that create poor health outcomes for communities in vulnerable circumstances. COVID-19 has laid bare the ways in which previous efforts by leaders have failed to adequately address SDH. During COVID-19 criticism of the unequal distribution of power and resources has grown, especially given the rising economic inequities caused by this global pandemic.

186

COVID-19 Pandemic

According to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies, the five richest individuals in the world (i.e., Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk) saw an 85% increase in their combined wealth between March 18, 2020 and January 18, 2021. By contrast, the list of the economically vulnerable grew during the pandemic. According to the International Labour Organization, global workers’ income in 2020 declined by 8.3%, which represents 3.7 trillion dollars. These inequities place those who are lower on the socioeconomic hierarchy at increased risk of contracting COVID-19. Those lower on the socioeconomic hierarchy are often unable to follow all safety guidelines owing to personal, occupational, and professional demands and needs. Because of these barriers, these communities may experience constrictions in their ability to effectively respond to virus outbreaks. Those who are most vulnerable include essential and frontline workers (e.g., agricultural workers picking crops in fields, people cooking and delivering food), individuals fleeing war and persecution, and individuals who are unhoused. For these groups, not being able to self-isolate increases their vulnerability to COVID-19. In the United States, those most likely to be exposed to COVID-19 include low-income populations, women, people of color, those in unhoused communities, and people in front-line and precarious jobs. When these vulnerable communities are exposed, they often encounter barriers in testing and treatment. In the United States, for example, COVID-19 testing centers are more likely to be in affluent suburbs with predominantly white residents. In addition, the digital divide exacerbates health disparities (i.e., the vaccine gap) because the absence of internet access makes it more challenging to schedule a vaccine appointment. For those who do test positive for COVID-19, the high cost of private health insurance, the shortage of bilingual and bicultural health providers, as well as other persistent barriers to healthcare access, can often complicate receiving high-quality care. Leadership that centers the needs of disadvantaged and marginalized communities is critical. According to the CDC, focusing on equity demands creates conditions where all individuals

enjoy a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. In order to support equitable conditions, leaders must first work to understand their possible complicity in exacerbating these inequities and disparities. With increased understanding of their own complicity, they may be in a better position to support others with leadership initiatives that improve access to safe housing, affordable healthcare, financial security, adequate nutrition and education, quality childcare, and healthy social relationships. Solidarity

Leadership based on global solidarity promotes a sense of shared identity and responsibility across borders. This leadership approach promotes the idea that everyone’s health is interconnected. Global solidarity involves the international sharing of health information, diagnostic kits, medical masks, personal protective equipment and ventilators, vaccines and medicines, and other supplies for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. The WHO indicates that for solidarity initiatives to be successful, assistance must be offered promptly, in sufficient quantities, and at an affordable cost to meet global demands. According to the WHO, placing the interests of a few nation-states over those of the international community interferes with the battle against global spread. Although international solidarity is required in the fight against COVID-19, leaders’ efforts have fallen short in several areas, including efforts to increase vaccine production and distribution in less affluent nations. The UNICEF COVID-19 Vaccine Market Dashboard serves as an important resource regarding COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution. Data from this dashboard show that leaders from wealthier countries secured orders for multiple vaccines, which temporarily limited the opportunity for lower-income countries to purchase their own. Vaccine order records show that the United States and Canada, for example, placed orders that could vaccinate their countries four times over and six times over in 2021, respectively. These vaccine orders, which exceeded national needs, disadvantaged lower-income countries and illustrated the drastic inequities between countries.

COVID-19 Pandemic

Lower-income countries were only able to make their first significant vaccine purchases eight months after the United States and the United Kingdom made their first deals. On May 2021, the WHO estimated that of the 900 million doses administered globally, more than 80% were in wealthier and upper-middle-income countries. Countries such as Kenya estimate that by the year 2023, they will have just 30% of its population vaccinated. This imbalance represents losses for community members across borders, including socioeconomic and humanitarian losses. The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) emphasizes that global solidarity benefits the global economy whereas nationalism harms it. The ICC estimates suggest that if developing countries do not receive the required doses of the vaccine, the global economy would suffer losses of up to 9.2 trillion dollars. Beyond the prevention of socioeconomic losses, global solidarity is a humanitarian necessity that leaders must use to contain COVID-19. Leaders from the WHO have indicated that global solidarity must be demonstrated by academics, pharmaceutical companies, and researchers in the form of intellectual property waivers to scale up vaccine production worldwide. Although the WHO has called on these leaders to waive their intellectual property rights, as of August 2022 no vaccine companies have signed up to collaborate with the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), an initiative that encourages companies to share knowledge, intellectual property, and data with manufacturers in less affluent countries. Covax was created by the WHO to ensure fairer distribution of vaccines. Its aim is to equally distribute vaccines to 92 lower-income countries (e.g., Algeria, Malawi, Uganda, Iran, Iraq, Barbados, El Salvador) using cash donations from governments and organizations. As of August 2022, Covax has shipped 1 billion vaccine doses to 144 countries and regions, most of them lower-income countries. The world’s wealthier countries pledged more than 6 billion, a small fraction of what each of these countries has invested in their own country. These statistics demonstrated that leadership efforts across sectors are currently failing to prioritize global solidarity.

187

Conclusion COVID-19 has significantly disrupted individuals’ lives as well as entire social, economic, political, education, and health systems. It has also offered opportunities for leaders to change systems that were broken before COVID-19. Post-COVID-19, leaders around the world will have the opportunity to assess the benefits and risks associated with their current management and containment strategies. What is already clear is that leaders around the world were not ready, prepared, and, in some cases, willing to respond to COVID-19. Inconsistent communication and misinformation from leaders during the pandemic contributed to delayed emergency responses and preventable illness and death. On the other hand, consistent, honest, and science-based messaging has resulted in trust, confidence, and motivation to comply with prevention restrictions. Leadership based on social responsibility, science, equity, and solidarity will be especially important as future coronavirus waves, variants, and vaccine resistant mutations pose a continuing threat around the world. Failure to use this or similar leadership approaches may be detrimental to the world, especially to individuals, communities, and countries who were already disadvantaged, marginalized, or underprivileged before COVID-19. Marginalized communities can benefit from leadership models that are rooted in broad networks, community accountability, and adaptability as challenges emerge in a constantly changing world. Daniela G. Dom´ınguez See also Caring Leadership; Cooperation; Economic Justice; Race, Ethnicity, and Leadership

Further Readings Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). COVID-19. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/ coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html Dom´ınguez, D. G., Garcia, D., Martinez, D., & Hernandez-Arriaga, B. (2020). Leveraging the power of mutual aid, coalitions, leadership, and advocacy during COVID-19. American Psychologist, 75(7), 909–918. doi:10.1037/amp0000693

188

Creativity and Leadership

Earle, T. C., Siegrist, M., & Gutscher, H. (2007). Trust, risk perception, and the TCC model of cooperation, in M. Segrist, T. C. Earle, & H. Gutscher (Eds.), Trust in cooperative risk management: Uncertainty and skepticism in the public mind (pp. 1–49). London: Earthscan. Solar O., & Irwin A. (2010). A conceptual framework for action on the social determinants of health. World Health Organization. Retrieved from https://www. who.int/publications/i/item/9789241500852 Wong, M. C., Huang, J., Wong, S. H., & Yuen-Chun Teoh, J. (2021). The potential effectiveness of the WHO International Health Regulations capacity requirements on control of the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional study of 114 countries. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 114(3), 121–131. doi:10. 1177/0141076821992453 World Health Organization. (2021). WHO coronavirus (COVID-19) dashboard. Retrieved from https:// covid19.who.int

CREATIVITY

AND

LEADERSHIP

The success and survival of firms, both for-profit and nonprofit firms, depend on innovation. Innovation, or the development, production, and deployment of new products or services, is ultimately based on people’s creative thinking. People’s ability to solve the kinds of problems that call for creative thought, however, are strongly influenced by those asked to lead creative efforts. In fact, leadership for creativity may be one of the most complex, yet important influences on firm innovation. As such, the purpose of this entry is to discuss how leaders exercise influence with respect to three key domains known to influence creative performance: (1) the work leaders ask people to do, (2) the leader’s interactions with teams, and (3) the leader’s representation of creative work to the firm. Before turning to how leaders influence follower creativity, however, let us begin by defining exactly what is meant by the term creativity. Creativity refers to the production of original, high quality, Author’s Note: We would like to thank Sven Hemlin, Sam Hunter, Samantha England, and Mark Fichtel for their contributions to this entry.

and elegant solutions to a certain type, or class, of problems. The types of problems that call for creative thinking are held to be novel, complex, and ill-defined or poorly structured. Of course, not all jobs present problems of this type. However, solutions to these kinds of problems are of great value. So how do people go about solving the kinds of problems that call for creative thought? Many models of creative thinking have been proposed over the years. The most widely accepted model holds that creative problem-solving requires the successful execution of eight core processes: (1) problem definition, (2) information gathering, (3) concept/case selection, (4) conceptual combination, (5) idea generation, (6) idea evaluation, (7) implementation planning, and (8) adaptive monitoring of solution implementation. Each of these processes requires execution of multiple cognitive operations, both convergent and divergent operations. Furthermore, effective execution of these operations depends on a complex set of higher-order thinking skills—skills such as forecasting, causal analysis, and constraint analysis. These observations bring us to the next question. What is needed for people to do this work? Perhaps the most clear-cut finding in this regard is creative people need expertise. Expertise provides people with concepts, cases (i.e., experience), and strategies for working through a certain type, or class, of problem—for example, microbiology problems. Not only do creative people need expertise, they also must be motivated to solve the problems at hand due to the substantial investment of cognitive resources required to solve creative problems. In addition, creative people display a unique personality, one characterized by achievement motivation, dominance, autonomy, introversion, and risk-taking. This pattern of personality characteristics, however, is seemingly at odds with the need to work with others to turn creative problem solutions into innovative products and services.

Leadership So how does one get autonomous, domineering, achievement-oriented introverts, the manager’s nightmare, to work with others to produce viable creative problem solutions and successful

Creativity and Leadership

innovations? The most clear-cut finding emerging from the literature is effective leadership seems crucial to follower creativity and firm innovation. Across a number of studies, studies employing different outcome measures of creativity and different measures of desirable leadership behavior (e.g., positive leader member exchange, transformational leadership, servant leadership), a consistent and strong positive relationship has been obtained between positive leader behaviors and creative production. These relationships hover in the 0.30–0.45 range. Indeed, leadership seems to be one of the more powerful predictors of real-world creative achievement. These observations bring to fore a new question. What must those asked to lead creative efforts in firms actually do? According to some researchers, there are generally three major functional activities that must be executed by those asked to lead creative efforts. First, leaders must lead the work. They must identify fundamentals and themes of the work, they must plan work activities and define work missions, and they must evaluate the work completed. Second, leaders must lead project teams, recruiting team members, interacting with followers, and establishing a creative work climate. Third, leaders must lead the firm, garnering top management support, obtaining the support of other organizational units, and importing requisite expertise. Moreover, some research has provided compelling support for this model of the functional activities of those asked to lead creative efforts.

Leading the Work Identification of fundamentals and the themes, or opportunities, to be explored with respect to these fundamentals is a crucial activity if leaders are to structure the work of creative people. What is often lost sight of here, however, is that to understand, in depth, the fundamentals at hand and identify the themes worth pursuing, leaders of creative efforts need substantial technical expertise. Moreover, they need the breadth of technical expertise that will allow them to envision how work in a thematic area might unfold over time.

189

Themes and fundamentals provide the framework leaders use to establish project plans. Effective planning has been shown to be important for the leadership of creative efforts. This point is further supported by research demonstrating that leaders in creative settings, such as microbiological laboratories, delegate many activities, but not planning. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to expect leaders of creative efforts need substantial planning skills—and, likely both a desire and ability to learn from the outcomes of the projects they have planned. Leaders, of course, must get creative people to work on their projects without undermining their autonomy, while ensuring their personal and professional investment in the project. This point is of some importance because it implies leaders of creative efforts must be able to articulate viable professional missions. Indeed, creating and articulating viable missions may prove especially challenging because missions must prove engaging professionally to a rather wide range of followers—followers with different intrinsic interests. As followers begin to execute their missions, they seek feedback from leaders—typically technical feedback. The feedback creative people seek, however, bears on how the work might be improved or how they might go about resolving crises that have arisen in their work. Moreover, research has shown that evaluation and feedback bearing on creative work is not a passive process. It requires not only judgment but also substantial creative thinking skills. Put differently, leaders of creative efforts must themselves possess substantial creative thinking skills. Finally, autonomous followers may, or may not, recognize and be willing to seek feedback. Thus, leaders of creative efforts must actively monitor the work being done by project teams. The need for active monitoring, however, implies that leaders of creative efforts must attend to the work and have the experience that allows them to know what to look for with respect to both the successes and failures of project teams. Indeed, the need for active monitoring implies the leaders of creative efforts must reflect—reflect on both the work and the people doing the work.

190

Creativity and Leadership

Leading the Team Creative work typically occurs in project teams. However, given their autonomy, people cannot be arbitrarily assigned to these teams. Instead, leaders of creative efforts must actively recruit team members. Thus, creative leaders need a network of contacts that allows them to identify potential recruits. More centrally, leaders need to be able to appraise potential recruits with respect to their technical skills, potential career paths, and fit to the team. These observations imply leaders of creative efforts need substantial sociotechnical and interpersonal appraisal skills. Indeed, these skills may be crucial in helping leaders sell the project to potential team members. Prior research has shown that the work climate, or the work environment, is a powerful determinant of success on creative projects. Although many aspects of the environment, such as resource availability, opportunities for participation, and available rewards influence creative accomplishment, meta-analytic evidence has demonstrated the three most important aspects of creative climate are (1) professional challenge, (2) intellectual stimulation, and (3) positive interpersonal exchange. Thus, leaders must articulate the challenges involved in the work and actively encourage team members to work together to address these challenges, building, in the team, a sense of creative self-efficacy. In creative teams, however, establishing such a climate may prove especially difficult due to the autonomous, domineering, and achievement-oriented nature of creative team members. Thus, leaders must model and manage team member interactions in such a way as to ensure positive interpersonal exchange. The foregoing observations imply an obvious point. Leaders must interact with the members of creative teams. Moreover, positive interpersonal exchange between leaders and individual followers has been shown to be positively related to creative achievement. Of special importance in this regard, however, is that creative people must trust the leader and see the leader as one looking out for both them as a professional and their success as a member of the project team. Indeed, to maintain this sense of trust, leaders of creative efforts must be cautious in punishing failure. And to develop

this sense of trust, leaders of creative efforts need not only social skills but also a sense of integrity. For creative people, however, trust also depends on how they “see” the team and the leader’s attempts to advance their careers. One implication of this statement is leaders of creative efforts must be, and serve as, professional models for the members of creative teams. Just as important, however, is that leaders must act to develop the professional capabilities of team members through both internal and external assignments as well as general professional exposure—exposure that may bring new information and new capabilities back to creative teams.

Leading the Firm Even under the best conditions, creative efforts are expensive. The costs of creative work are both direct (equipment is expensive) and indirect (creative work often disrupts organizational routines). One implication of this observation is that creative efforts will survive and prosper in firms that have the requisite resources to invest. In firms, of course, investment is under the control of top management teams. And it has been found that consistent, sustained investment, both financial and social investment, is crucial to the success of creative efforts. Furthermore, to obtain these investments, it appears the leaders of creative efforts must champion to top management teams the value of the creative work being done. Past research has shown such championing to be crucial to the success of creative efforts. More centrally, effective championing requires leaders who both understand firm strategy and can package ideas in such a way as to sell them as something contributing to strategy execution. Thus, leaders of creative efforts must be sales “reps” who understand not only the technical work but also the firm as a whole. A leader’s understanding of the firm as a whole, of course, implies broad exposure of creative leaders and the systematic development of a network of contacts in the firm as a well as in the profession. This exposure, however, is important for another reason. Creative efforts may disrupt the routine operations of certain critical units in a firm—for example, new manufacturing processes may be required. Moreover, key organizational

Creativity and Leadership

units can, and do, from time to time block the introduction of creative ideas. This observation is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the leaders of creative efforts must understand how their project will impact other organizational units. Second, they must consult with, and help, relevant units understand and adapt operations to address the needs imposed by the creative effort. Thus, the leaders of creative efforts must have some significant consulting and teaching skills. Not only must leaders help other units learn about the creative effort, they must themselves learn about the capabilities of these units and the capabilities of the people working in these units. The knowledge that leaders garner in this regard is noteworthy because as creative projects proceed from initial conceptualization to prototyping and fielding, more diverse forms of expertise must be brought into project teams. Exposure to the people working in these supporting units allows leaders to know what expertise they need, who has this expertise, and to establish the credentials with the supporting unit that would permit them to “steal” the needed people. Of course, importing new people, people drawn from different disciplines, into project teams can be disruptive. Extant team members don’t know why these “newbies” are there, and the “imports” don’t fully understand the project or project team to which they are being brought. Thus, leaders of creative efforts must engage in ongoing sensemaking activities intended to help new team members understand the project and the project team, and help extant team members understand the capabilities and value of the new team member to project success. Ultimately, creative thinking is a complex process involving rather complex, albeit expert, people. Leading these people as they pursue creative projects is even more complex. Those asked to lead creative efforts not only need substantial technical skill, they must plan, they must “sell,” they must teach, they must challenge, they must support, and they must build multiple networks of contacts. These observations are noteworthy because they point to a basic conclusion. It will take time and effort to develop the capabilities people need to lead creative efforts. Given the impact of creativity and innovation on firm survival and success,

191

however, investments in the development of those who might be asked to lead creative efforts seem amply justified. Michael D. Mumford and Tanner R. Newbold See also Change; Innovation; Group Effectiveness; Organizational Leadership; Skills; Team Leadership

Further Readings Hemlin, S., & Olsson, L. (2011). Creativity-stimulating leadership: A critical incident study of leader’s influence on creativity in research groups. Creativity and Innovation Management, 20, 49–58. doi:10.1111/j. 1467-8691.2010.00585.x Howell, J. M., & Boies, K. (2004). Champions of technological innovation: The influence of contextual knowledge, role orientation, idea generation, and idea promotion on champion emergence. Leadership Quarterly, 15, 123–143. Retrieved from doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2003.12.008 Hunter, S. T., Bedell, K. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2007). Climate for creativity: A quantitative review. Creativity Research Journal, 19, 69–90. Retrieved from doi:10. 1080/10400410709336883 Lonergan, D. C., Scott, G. M., & Mumford, M. D. (2004). Evaluative aspects of creative thought: Effects of appraisal and revision standards. Creativity Research Journal, 16, 231–246. Retrieved from doi:10.1207/ s15326934crj1602&3_7 Mumford, M. D., & Gustafson, S. B. (2007). Creative thought: Cognition and problem-solving in a dynamic system. In M. A. Runco (Ed.), Creativity research handbook (pp. 33–77). New York, NY: Hampton Press. Mumford, M. D., & McIntosh, T. (2017). Creative thinking processes: The past and the future. Journal of Creative Behavior, 51, 317–322. doi:10.1002/jocb. 197 Mumford, M. D., Scott, G. M., Gaddis, B., & Strange, J. M. (2002). Leading creative people: Orchestrating expertise and relationships. Leadership Quarterly, 13, 705–750. doi:10.1016/ S1048-9843(02)00158-3 Vessey, W. B., Barrett, J. D., Mumford, M. D., Johnson, G., & Litwiller, B. (2014). Leadership of highly creative people in highly creative fields: A historiometric study of scientific leaders. Leadership Quarterly, 25, 672–691. doi:1016/j.leaqua.2014.03. 001

192

Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership

CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, LEADERSHIP

AND

Creativity is the ability to devise meaningful new forms, ideas, and methods. Innovation refers to the implementation of something new or different. Effective leadership of an innovative enterprise is a balancing act. Efforts to stimulate innovation that rely on structures and processes alone are not sufficient; leadership must invest in people and corporate climate. Effective leadership for innovation entails recognizing and leveraging individual strengths, strategically formulating teams and networks, and balancing the opposing forces that inspire and inhibit innovation. This entry discusses the role of innovation leadership in facilitating the creativity of individuals and groups in support of innovation. We will consider the source of creative ideas and innovation at the level of individuals, teams, and network. Challenges are identified, along with solutions and strategies for effective leadership. The entry then goes on to discuss the key elements of a culture of innovation, the factors that inspire and inhibit innovation, and the role of leadership in cultivating a corporate climate of innovation.

The Paradox of Innovation Leadership Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, and the like; and to create meaningful new forms, ideas, methods, or interpretations by means of originality and imagination. Innovation is the implementation of something new or different. Leadership implies a degree of following and conformity on the part of group members; yet creativity and innovation demand change and deviation from the status quo. At first glance, innovation leadership may seem like a contradiction in terms. While that is not exactly the case, there are competing processes and tensions that must be recognized for innovation to succeed. Creativity arises from antagonistic processes, such as divergent and convergent thinking. Innovation is a balance of originality and practicality; structure and chaos; conformity and defiance. With respect to leadership, balance is paramount. Among other things, leaders must

communicate a vision, yet be willing to adapt; solicit free thinking and bottom-up input, yet maintain boundaries and not lose sight of collective goals. Given the complexity of its role, innovation leadership is necessarily multifaceted. In the sections that follow, we will explore the sources of creativity and the dynamics that give rise to creative ideas; leadership in the context of innovation networks; and the role of leaders in cultivating a climate of innovation.

The Creative Engine Creativity arises from individuals and from the interactions between individuals. Armed with an understanding of the processes that generate ideas and drive innovation, leaders can effectively create teams and distribute leadership to create innovation networks. Creative People and Process

Creative ideas are generated, revised, and implemented in cycles and over stages. Furthermore, people differ in their level of skill and comfort with the various processes in creative thinking. An individual’s creative and problem-solving style can be assessed with tools such as Michael J. Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI) and Gerard J. Puccio’s FourSight Thinking Profile. The KAI measures style on a continuum ranging from adaptive (doing things better) to innovative (doing things differently). Adapters are described as convergent (linear) thinkers who conform to constraints and seek solutions that have worked in the past. Innovators are divergent (expansive) thinkers who like to question assumptions and think outside the box. FourSight is an extension of the KAI that posits four styles based on four stages of creative problem-solving: Clarifier (define the problem), Ideator (idea generation, like innovators), Developer (prefer to refine and develop ideas, similar to adaptor), and Implementer (launch the final product or solution). In theory, creative style differs from creative ability. But evidence suggests that an individual’s creative style does influence creative production. For instance, divergent thinkers tend to generate highly original ideas, whereas convergent thinkers

Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership

tend to think more practically. By definition, to be considered creative, an idea or solution must be high in originality (novelty) and appropriateness (practicality). An idea that is too original may be considered outlandish; an idea that is highly practical but not unique is likely to be redundant. A person’s creative style may affect their appraisal, understanding, and appreciation of other people’s ideas and solutions. In car manufacturing, for instance, the original ideas generated by designers may be rejected as impractical by engineers; designers in turn may think the engineers lack appreciation of aesthetics. The originality-practicality trade-off may be resolved by cycles of divergent and convergent thinking and/or by combining input of individuals who have dominant creative styles. A person or persons with more balanced creative style may be able to serve as an interface between individuals who have highly polarized creative styles. An understanding of creative style and group dynamics may enable leaders to strategically group people with complementary creative styles and create intermediary positions to support teams. The company that distributes the FourSight inventory offers tips for organizations to maximize the effectiveness of creative teams. For example, people identified as having a Clarifier style work best when given facts, information, and permission to ask questions. Ideator/Innovators may not appear to take things seriously, yet they can produce wildly creative ideas. Developer/Adapter types are reflective, pragmatic, and cautious. These individuals need time to consider options and develop their ideas. Implementers may come across as impatient but work well when assured that others are working just as quickly. Finally, leadership may be able to minimize conflict and increase collaboration by training managers and team leaders to recognize and appreciate individual differences and neurodiversity in the workplace. For instance, individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) tend to be less influenced by the ideas of others and less susceptible to conformity effects. Inclusion of neurodiverse individuals in a team may reduce the tendency toward groupthink, or the loss of individual creativity due to the emergence of a group mentality.

193

Innovation Networks

An organization of interconnected individuals, teams, and leaders can function as an innovation network. In this context, ideas inspire more ideas. A pool of diverse and distributed leaders is critical. This ensures a combination of pragmatists and abstract thinkers; specialists and generalists. Shared leadership roles may balance the characteristics strengths of front-end leaders (e.g., idea conceptualization; high uncertainty tolerance) and back-end leaders (e.g., discipline and efficiency). Organizations may wish to designate some managers as innovation leaders and provide appropriate training. Requisite skills include the ability to support and involve others (e.g., solicit feedback; secure commitment), the ability to promote teamwork and collaboration (e.g., structuring workgroups), and the ability to proactively search for external ideas and collaborations. Performance-limiting factors in innovation networks include centralized leadership and people who are anti-innovation. In fact, the presence of individuals and leaders who have a negative mindset with respect to innovation may be more detrimental to innovation than the problem of having an insufficient number of innovator types. Among leaders, an anti-innovative mindset is frequently seen in middle management. At this level, managers generally prioritize meeting planned objectives over nurturing innovative initiatives. Yet, middle managers are the most sought-after sources of advice regarding innovation, which may create a bottleneck in the innovative process. To resolve this, upper-level managers must make innovation a priority. One strategy is to create opportunities for middle level managers to meet with senior executives to share ideas that arise from teams. The feedback can then be shared with teams and brought back to upper levels for further discussion. Team members and leaders who have a negative mindset (anti-innovators) may need to be coaxed into the innovative mindset. To this end, team leaders can use the strategy of designing short-term managed innovation projects that yield fast results. A taste of success can be motivating and will bolster confidence in the innovation process. Sometimes, people who have great ideas may not

194

Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership

express these because of a fear of censure or rejection. In group brainstorming contexts, these individuals may be reluctant to voice their ideas in front of others. To a large extent, this inhibition may be countered by an atmosphere that is open-minded, tolerant, and receptive to new perspectives. A team leader might even invite “silly” contributions from group members to spark the brainstorming. Another creative solution is to experiment with techniques like brainwriting—an alternative to traditional brainstorming that uses asynchronous group writing to achieve the same purpose. This method allows for cross-pollination of ideas while reducing conformity effects, groupthink, and social inhibition.

Climate of Innovation Corporate climate refers to the environment and ethos of an organization. Climate is subjective and reflective of people’s attitudes and the dynamics of their interactions. A positive climate enables a network of talented individuals and leaders to work toward collective goals. Creativity flourishes in a culture that is open-minded, tolerant, and appreciative. Innovation thrives when there is freedom to take risks and question the status quo. And leaders can set the tone of an innovative climate. Leaders who inspire innovation in others have a specific mindset: an attitude that engenders trust, engagement, and initiative. To a leader with an innovative mindset, no idea is too absurd to be considered. Such leaders have a high degree of passion, an ability to motivate others, and a high tolerance for uncertainty, risk, and failure. A common pitfall in attempts to stimulate innovation is to pay lip service to the goal of innovation without actually modeling innovative behavior. A leader who is overly critical, values only short-term gains, and maintains a fear of failure will reduce people’s initiative and willingness to take risks. A leader with a negative or anti-innovation mindset may resist change (“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mentality). In contrast, an innovative leader possesses a combination of will and humility that resists complacence after achieving success. Roland Bel neatly summarized key elements of successful innovative leadership with the acronyms

IDEA and ARMS. IDEA stands for inspiring, driving, enabling, and advising. Leaders have a vision for innovation that is simple and powerful (e.g., Steve Jobs at Apple: “Think Different”) and they lead by example (e.g., Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX). Effective leaders also demonstrate empathy and show confidence in the abilities of others. Successful innovative enterprises may have an advisory board to advocate opportunities, guide innovative efforts, and approve strategic investments. The acronym ARMS refers to the roles of lower-level management: advocating, rewarding, managing, and supporting. Team leaders and managers are in a position to champion ideas and advocate for the allocation of resources to implement innovation. Lower-level leaders can also reward inventors for their ideas and products. Furthermore, lower-level managers act as valuable members of an innovation network by forging internal links between units and by seeking outside perspective and collaboration. Creative Spaces

Creative spaces provide contexts for collaboration and idea exchange. Consider the attributes of places that are hubs of creative inspiration: cities, water coolers, maker spaces, and so on. These venues afford movement, stimulation, and diverse inputs and interactions. Attention restoration theory suggests that exposure to nature may stimulate creativity and effective problem-solving. Office spaces can be designed to provide ample natural light. Employees can be encouraged to take outdoor walks or walk indoors along corridors that have glass walls and views of nature. Studies have shown that even exposure to simulated natural sounds may boost creativity. And sleep is critical for all cognitive function and productivity; sleep pods available for cat naps may increase insight, creativity, and brainpower. Other strategies to promote innovation are based on empirically and theoretically grounded methods for boosting creativity. Happiness and humor have been shown to boost insight in problem-solving, for example. Play also facilitates innovation. For example, the Australian software company Atlassian is known for a playful atmosphere that promotes a positive mindset and collaboration among

Criminal Law

employees. Along with innovative people and leadership, creative spaces and activities contribute to a climate of innovation. Holly White See also Creativity and Leadership; Innovation; Group Effectiveness; Team Leadership

Further Readings Anderson, J. V. (1994). Creativity and play: A systematic approach to managing innovation. Business Horizons, 37(2), 80–86. Barsh, J., Capozzi, M. M., & Davidson, J. (2008). Leadership and innovation. McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 36. Bel, R. (2010). Leadership and innovation: Learning from the best. Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 29(2), 47–60. Fagan, M. H. (2004). The influence of creative style and climate on software development team creativity: An exploratory study. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 44(3), 73–80. Paulus, P. B., Korde, R. M., Dickson, J. J., Carmeli, A., & Cohen-Meitar, R. (2015). Asynchronous brainstorming in an industrial setting: Exploratory studies. Human Factors, 57(6), 1076–1094. Puccio, G. J., Treffinger, D. J., & Talbot, R. J. (1995). Exploratory examination of relationships between creativity styles and creative products. Creativity Research Journal, 8(2), 157–172. Schweizer, T. S. (2006). The psychology of noveltyseeking, creativity and innovation: Neurocognitive aspects within a work-psychological perspective. Creativity and Innovation Management, 15(2), 164–172.

CRIMINAL LAW Criminal law is a system of social control through which leaders exercising state power—principally legislators, chief executives, judges, prosecutors, and police—identify wrongdoing, assess guilt, and punish wrongdoers. Rather than allocate benefits and burdens between parties based on a party’s conduct, as tort law and other parts of the law do, criminal law defines conduct that is to be

195

prohibited, with violators subject to punishment. Traditionally, criminal law has focused on barring morally suspect behavior. Over time, its scope has broadened, with criminal law expanding to punish behavior that might be considered wrongful, but not morally condemnable. Leaders who create and administer the criminal law may define conduct they want to eliminate as crime to regulate it out of existence. Conversely, they may legalize behavior they want to encourage or not discourage. Criminalization and legalization may occur in the service of creating a society preferred by elected and appointed officials. Criminal law treats the sovereign—the state or the people—as the wronged party, with cases captioned State v. Defendant or People v. Defendant. Criminal behavior often yields a human victim, but the criminal justice system functionally treats the victim as an abstraction. Though actions that harm the victim are typically at the center of a criminal case, criminal conduct is deemed an affront to good order that offends the sovereign and society. Indeed, some criminal behavior is victimless, with the only identifiable harm being a breach of the peace. State officials in positions of leadership define good order and breaches of that good order through criminal law, with the power to deem specific behavior criminal and subject to punishment providing significant control over the citizenry. The power to create crimes has shifted from judges to legislators. Historically, judges and legislatures created the criminal law. Judges could create new crimes—engage in common law crime making—in the same way they generally crafted the common law, through case opinions explaining what the law is, what the law should be, and how the law should develop. Over time, legislators—as the representatives of the people—have become the primary drafters of the criminal law. Common law crimes often remain part of the criminal law, with legislatures having codified the crimes or adopted them as part of the law of the jurisdiction. Though legislatures alone create new crimes today, judges remain responsible for interpreting criminal law to determine what conduct the legislature has criminalized. When interpreting a criminal statute, a judge may broaden or narrow the conduct the statue covers,

196

Criminal Law

unintentionally but functionally creating a new crime or eliminating an old crime.

Criminal Behavior State officials define criminal behavior to create an ostensibly just society. Criminal law punishes some behavior that is inherently morally condemnable and some behavior that is not. The distinction between those types of behavior has historically been captured in the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum crimes. Malum in se crimes, including murder, arson, rape, and others, were considered violations of the law whether a court or legislature had deemed them so or not. Judges needed merely to announce such violations were criminal because the citizenry could be expected to know, based on basic morality, that the behavior was criminal. Malum prohibitum crimes involved behavior that was punishable because the law deemed it punishable. The distinction, which can be traced to British common law, now matters more in theory than in practice. As English common law was adopted in America, the malum in se/malum prohibitum distinction was used to differentiate common law (judge-made) crimes from statutory (legislature-made) crimes. Now that crime making is solely the legislature’s responsibility, the distinction is often used to comment on whether a legislature has engaged in overcriminalization, with malum prohibitum crimes being deemed crimes that legislatures arguably should not have created or that are not justifiable by their inherent lawlessness. The creation of malum prohibitum crimes is not improper, but it may serve a slightly different purpose than criminalizing malum in se crimes. Malum prohibitum crimes reflect a legislature’s willingness to use its power to engage in social control. Legislatures can criminalize nearly any conduct it wants subject to due process limitations, with criminal punishment being the method used to discourage the behavior. As the prevalence of malum prohibitum crimes expands, the criminal law maintains a core of moral condemnation. However, the criminal code may largely reflect the behavior a legislature desires to punish rather than behavior the people believe must be punished.

Crimes typically require a problematic act or result caused by the defendant (actus reus) coupled with a wicked mind (mens rea). The combination triggers the criminal liability that justifies punishment. Causing the death of another human being is always problematic, but the existence of mens rea may be required to make the act criminal. Intentionally causing the death of another human being may yield murder charges. Recklessly causing the death of another human being may yield manslaughter charges. Accidently causing the death of another human being may trigger no criminal liability or may only trigger civil liability. A legislature may create strict liability crimes that do not require mens rea. Though disfavored, strict liability crimes are lawful. Causing a bad result without mens rea is sufficient for criminal liability in some circumstances. When large groups of people can be harmed through a defendant’s regulatory missteps, such as mislabeling drugs, such acts may be criminal in the absence of mens rea. However, such crimes tend to be punished lightly.

Punishment Punishment is the enforcement mechanism leaders use to control society. Criminal conviction yields punishment which can include a combination of death, incarceration, fines, or probation. In addition, collateral consequences, including forfeiture of gains derived from criminal behavior, loss of voting rights, loss of firearms rights, the deportation of noncitizens and other consequences, may flow from criminal conviction. Though punishment may result from a defendant’s criminal behavior, punishment is a harm inflicted by society on a wrongdoer that must be justified. How leaders justify punishment can influence whether the criminal law is considered legitimate by the people. Typically, four justifications have been offered for punishment: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. Retribution relates to desert. The defendant is punished for retributive purposes because, and only because, the defendant deserves to be punished for engaging in the criminal behavior. Some argue retribution is societal revenge. However, retributivists have argued retribution can be

Criminal Law

justified because the violation of societal rules or the harm caused to a victim calls for a societal response in the form of punishment. The punishment may be necessary to correct the moral imbalance caused by the criminal act and may help ensure nonstate actors do not exact revenge on an offender. Retribution is a backward-looking justification for punishment that attempts to calibrate the punishment to the harm caused. The nonretributive justifications for punishment are utilitarian. They use punishment as the means to serve another penological end. Deterrence tends to be divided into specific deterrence and general deterrence. Specific deterrence uses punishment to discourage the defendant from committing crimes in the future. General deterrence uses the offender’s punishment to discourage others from committing crimes. Incapacitation uses punishment to forestall the offender’s ability to commit additional crimes outside jail or prison during a term of incarceration. Rehabilitation uses punishment as a time during which an offender can reform into a law-abiding person. The justifications for incarceration can overlap or conflict. Punishment may be deemed deserved while also incapacitating the offender. Conversely, a punishment that is calibrated to match the offender’s desert may be a poor match for the time the offender may need for rehabilitation. The infliction of punishment does not ensure the punishment will meet its penological purposes. The justifications merely provide a basis for the punishment. Fair criminal law systems embrace proportionality, the argument that more serious crimes should be punished more severely than less serious crimes. The legislators who create criminal codes and the officials who administer those codes explicitly and implicitly decide what makes one crime more serious and more violative of society’s norms than another crime. Felonies are more serious crimes; misdemeanors are less serious crimes. Under old English common law, felonies were crimes for which the punishment could be death. Misdemeanors were all other crimes. Capital crimes have been pared in recent years, with death sentences falling out of favor in many jurisdictions in modern times. The length and place of possible incarceration tends to differentiate felonies and misdemeanors, with felonies

197

typically carrying a maximum sentence of one year or more to be served in prison and misdemeanors carrying a maximum sentence of less than a year to be served in jail. Though proportionality suggests more serious crimes should afford heavier punishment than less serious crimes, American legislatures are under little legal obligation provide proportional maximum punishment except when deciding which crimes may carry the most serious punishments: life sentences and death sentences.

Enforcing Criminal Law The criminal law is enforced by multiple layers of officials who can shape or misshape it. The legislature provides the basis for and scope of law enforcement by defining what behavior is subject to criminal sanction. The law’s actual enforcement depends on choices made by other actors in the criminal justice system. Those choices constitute the functional scope of criminal law enforcement. The police are the front-line enforcers of the criminal law. Armed with discretion that may be explicitly provided by their police commissioners and commanders, police are not required to respond to every violation of the criminal law they may observe. They may address those crimes outside of the criminal justice system by telling a miscreant to stop violating the law or they may ignore certain crimes altogether. That may functionally exclude some minor crimes from enforcement in some jurisdictions. Prosecutors similarly need not prosecute every crime they encounter. Prosecutorial discretion allows prosecutors to decline to prosecute even when the prosecutor believes criminal behavior has occurred and believes guilt can be proven. The prosecutor may believe the criminal behavior can be better addressed outside the criminal justice system. The choice to allow criminal behavior to go unpunished is a choice that may appear to deform the criminal law in specific cases but actually may allow justice to be done in specific cases. In addition, it may reflect the belief that scarce prosecutorial resources will be better allocated to other criminal cases. Elected executive government officials also structure the criminal justice system. State attorneys general and local district attorneys in charge

198

Criminal Law

of prosecutor offices are often elected. They must decide what types of crime should be investigated and prosecuted. Some crimes, such as murder, will always be investigated and prosecuted when sufficient evidence exists. Other crimes may be considered less important, with the decision to not prosecute such types of cases serving as a policy decision. For example, some district attorneys have decided to decline to prosecute specific drug crimes or sex work crimes as a matter of policy. Such decisions may be made on multiple grounds including budget constraints or the belief that prosecuting such crimes would affirmatively cause other problems in the criminal justice system or society at large. The choices can have additional effects, as a legislative decision to legalize behavior that had been criminal may result from a prosecutorial policy decision to refuse to enforce the law criminalizing such behavior. The chief executive in a jurisdiction generally may counteract the criminal law by eliminating the possibility of prosecution for a crime or canceling the effect of a criminal conviction. An amnesty may deem certain criminal behavior not subject prosecution under specific circumstances. A pardon may be issued before a prosecution to ensure an individual will never by convicted for specific criminal conduct. Alternatively, a pardon may be issued after a criminal conviction to negate it. A postconviction pardon treats a conviction as though it never occurred. That is especially appropriate if facts arise since the conviction that suggest the defendant may not have been guilty. A commutation ends an offender’s sentence before it has been fully served but leaves the conviction that triggered the sentence intact. The decision to counteract the criminal law may be justified by policy or justice. An executive may believe it preferable for the criminal behavior to go unpunished. Amnesty or a preprosecution pardon may be appropriate if the law or the prosecution that would trigger the conviction might be viewed by the public as illegitimate or might cause outrage. A pardon also might be appropriate if an offender’s punishment could be viewed as political or too severe for the crime committed or if the law has changed since the offender was convicted. A commutation may be appropriate if the chief executive believes an offender has been punished sufficiently

for the crime committed. Decisions to counteract the criminal law have long been a part of the sovereign’s power under criminal justice systems, unsurprising given that criminal law treats criminal behavior as an offense against the sovereign. The choice to ignore or negate the effects of criminal behavior is the sovereign’s prerogative.

Determining Guilt If an offender is to be punished fairly, society must be sure the punishment is deserved. Requiring each element of a crime be proven beyond a reasonable doubt before a guilty verdict may be rendered ostensibly provides that comfort. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not have a singular precise definition but is generally considered proof necessary to convince a factfinder every element of the crime has been established to a near certainty. If the burden of proof is not met, the defendant is acquitted. The prosecution bears the burden of proof. The defendant bears no burden and need only argue the prosecution’s evidence is insufficient for conviction. The high burden of proof guarantees that some defendants who have committed crimes will be acquitted, reflecting a heavy preference for acquitting the guilty over convicting the innocent. In the American system, the vast majority of criminal convictions result from pleas. A defendant may plead guilty to a crime and forgo a trial. The plea may reflect a desire to take responsibility for criminal conduct. However, a plea can result from a prosecutor’s offer of reduced charges or recommendation of a lenient sentence. This type of plea bargaining is controversial because it can entice a defendant to plead guilty to a crime the defendant may not have committed or can result in far less punishment than the underlying criminal conduct deserves. The decisions prosecutors and defense counsel make during repeat plea bargaining may create, over time, the de facto punishment that will be provided for that crime in that jurisdiction. In the absence of a plea, the defendant is entitled to a trial. The defendant may be tried with the judge also sitting as the factfinder. If the criminal charges are serious enough, the defendant will be entitled to a jury trial. In a jury trial, the jury serves

Crisis Leadership

as the factfinder and renders the verdict. A jury’s guilty verdict can be appealed. A jury’s not guilty verdict cannot be appealed because double jeopardy limitations bar a prosecutor from retrying a defendant who has been acquitted of the same charges. The limitation on double jeopardy means a jury can effectively nullify the law by acquitting a defendant the prosecution proved committed a crime. Jury nullification is controversial. Some argue the jury is bound by the law to determine whether a defendant is guilty and provide a verdict consistent with that determination. Others argue the jury has historically served as the representative of the citizenry, which is ultimately responsible for determining if a defendant has engaged in conduct worthy of punishment. Those commentators argue jury nullification is a time-honored principle that allows a jury to acquit a defendant even if guilt has been proven, if a law or the prosecution of the crime under a law is fundamentally unjust. The issue remains in flux with many courts recognizing the jury’s brute power to nullify but asserting no right for the jury to do so.

Challenging the Criminal Law The people may challenge unjust criminal laws by seeking direct legislative change. They may seek such change through civil disobedience, which challenges the law by seeking to show the law is unjust. Civil disobedience requires a law be broken and the behavior be prosecuted so the criminal justice system can impose punishment on the righteous lawbreaker. If the public can be galvanized to support the lawbreaker and oppose the law, the law may not be enforced or the responsible legislature may revisit and reverse the law. Henry L. Chambers, Jr. See also Congressional Leadership; Political Leadership; Political Obligation; Presidential Leadership; Wrongful Convictions

Further Readings Barkow, R. E. (2015). Clemency and the presidential administration of criminal law. New York University Law Review, 90, 802.

199

Bergman, P. (2020). Criminal law: A desk reference. Berkeley, CA: Nolo Press. Butler, P. (1995). Racially based jury nullification: Black power in the criminal justice system. Yale Law Journal, 105, 677. Chambers, Jr., H. L. (1998). Reasonable certainty and reasonable doubt. Marquette Law Review, 81, 655. Dressler, J. (2018). Understanding criminal law. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Scheb, J. (2013). Criminal law and procedure. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. Singer, R. G., Baumind, S. B., & La Fond, J. Q. (2021). Criminal law. Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer Publishers.

CRISIS LEADERSHIP Crises are episodes of intense disruption. They are unexpected, sudden, and complex to navigate. Crises can include natural events such as earthquakes or hurricanes and human-made events such as traffic accidents or terror attacks. Crises can also include events such as the unexpected death of a top manager, wildfires, bankruptcies, economic shocks or recessions, corruption and scandals, and global phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders in government, business, and organizations of all types and sizes are faced with a growing number of crises that require quick and decisive action. Crises can take many forms and can occur at many levels, from the local to the regional to the global. The single most effective strategy for crisis management is preparation. Crisis management expert Ian Mitroff suggests the best way to lead in a crisis is to prepare for all possibilities. This may be aspirational (and perhaps impossible), but it is clear that preparation, including well-developed plans, trained crisis responders, and practice or simulations, is imperative to surviving crises. Preparedness programs for natural disasters (e.g., fire, flood, earthquakes), human-made crises (e.g., terrorists, active shooters, work strikes), and financial crises (e.g. banking crises, stock market crashes, bankruptcies) are relatively common in

200

Crisis Leadership

organizations. For example, governments of many nations have units to manage many of these potential disruptions, such as the United States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency and the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations. An effective leadership practice is to anticipate crises and have plans and teams in place to deal with them. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack in order to be better prepared for future crises of that nature. But even the most careful preparation still requires ongoing leadership before, during, and after crises occur. Having procedures in place and striving for preparedness are crucial to surviving crises, and these are foundational functions of management. However, enacting plans and capitalizing on preparedness in the context of a crisis requires intentional, sensitive, responsive, prudent leadership. The sections that follow outline three key leadership challenges presented by crises and offer strategies to address each.

The First Leadership Challenge of Crises: Decision-Making A primary feature of crises is urgency. Because crises are often unexpected and sudden, immediate action is required to mitigate negative effects. This is why preparation is so important, as it gives leaders a head start, and often a plan of action. In the COVID-19 pandemic for example, the United States had a “pandemic playbook” in place, but it was ignored by the Trump administration (which also disbanded the pandemic response unit). The result was a delayed response to the crisis that likely cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The urgent nature of crises means that regardless of whether or not there is an action plan, leaders must often make numerous quick decisions. It is important then that pertinent information, such as input from experts, be gathered quickly, considered carefully, and used to inform decisions. It is also important that leaders have some experience. Leadership scholar Fred Fiedler and associates created Cognitive Resource Theory, which suggests that under stressful conditions, such as a crisis, an experienced leader will outperform a more intelligent leader because the

experience helps the leader make quick decisions and take decisive action. In a crisis, there may not be time to do a full, intellectual analysis of potential courses of action; therefore, leaders must make decisions quickly. The urgency of crises requires leaders to make quick decisions, but they must also make good decisions. Urgency risks cognitive biases. When rushed, leaders can be prone to make hasty, “kneejerk” decisions regarding a course of action to deal with the crisis. Decisions made in a cloud of cognitive bias are more likely to reflect leaders’ predetermined values, attitudes, and beliefs instead of a considered course of action. One way to mitigate cognitive bias is to involve others in decision-making, by gathering experts and by engaging teams in leading crises. However, decision-making teams may also be prone to biases, such as the well-known groupthink effect, whereby decision-makers avoid the critical evaluation process and arrive at an early consensus regarding a course of action (often, the course of action proposed and/or promoted by the leader), ignoring evidence that suggests the chosen course might be disastrous. Crises demand that leaders make good decisions quickly when faced with ambiguity and uncertainty. Even when organizations or nations are well prepared, the complex, unknown, and evolving nature of crises mean that leaders need to make good decisions quickly, when there is no obvious choice. Decision-making is a key challenge to leading through crises. Addressing the Decision-Making Challenge

In crises, leaders need to decide what to do and how to do it, when there is no obvious or easy choice. Phronesis (often called prudence) is the virtue of practical wisdom; it has to do with the ability to discern the best way forward when there is no obvious or easy way forward. Prudence involves sound reasoning, accurate and insightful analysis of a situation, and considering problems from multiple angles. But within the urgency of an unfolding crisis, these processes of careful deliberation must occur quickly. Prudence, like all virtues, is developed with practice, and with practice leaders develop their ability to demonstrate

Crisis Leadership

prudence within the pressing context of crises. Practicing and developing prudence does not mean that leaders need to have all the answers. Rather, practicing prudence means knowing from whom to seek advice and where to source relevant data. Practicing prudence means engaging in constructive conflict, interrogating ideas, challenging assumptions, and sensing the course of action that will best serve the common good. By understanding the importance and complexity of decisionmaking in crises and by consciously cultivating practical wisdom, leaders can develop their ability to discern the best way forward when there is no easy or obvious choice.

The Second Leadership Challenge of Crises: Communication Communication is a core function of all leadership and absolutely vital to crisis leadership. In crises, people look to leaders for information, reassurance, direction, and meaning, all of which are provided through communication. One of the most important things leaders need to do in crises is to make sense of chaos. Often when crises strike, there is great upheaval, unknown, fear, and disruption. A key function of leadership is to make sense of crises by clearly communicating to stakeholders about the facts of the crisis including how serious it is and why it is occurring, as well as what it means and what needs to happen to stay safe and mitigate damage. Leaders need to make sense of what is actually going on; they need to communicate to stakeholders about the facts of the situation as well as what it means for those involved and how best to move forward. What and how leaders communicate throughout the lifecycle of a crisis will influence how stakeholders think, feel, and do and therefore inform how successfully (or not) the team, organization, or nation navigate the crisis. Early in the crisis lifecycle, stakeholders are likely to feel anxious and confused. At this point, leaders need to provide valid and clear information about the facts of the situation as it is unfolding. This stage may include details about why the crisis occurred, its magnitude, and direct effects. A challenge at this stage is to ensure communication is open, transparent, and factual

201

without inciting panic in stakeholders. Leaders’ communication throughout the early stage of a crisis should be focused on providing factual information and clear instructions about what people need to do to stay safe. As the crisis unfolds, leaders’ communications need to change. As the initial shock of the crisis subsides, fatigue can set in among stakeholders, so the crisis leader’s communication needs to adapt. When or if stakeholders start to exhibit fatigue or complacency, the leader needs to provide positive reinforcement, recognition of desired behavior and effort, and success stories to help cultivate members’ resilience. The leader should also involve others in decision-making, using their voices to reiterate key messages. As crises are resolved, and for a sense of normalcy to return, the leader’s communication must change again. At this stage, leaders need to focus on articulating a compelling and optimistic vision for the future. They need to draw lessons from the crisis and turn the story of the crisis into a meaningful occurrence that informs a clear path to recovery and assures stakeholders that future crises will be handled capably. Addressing the Communication Challenge

Throughout the lifecycle of a crisis, from preparation to recovery, leaders’ communication should remain simple, direct, factual, and positive. Crises are complex, but the ways leaders communicate do not need to be. Leaders should ensure what they are saying is said in clear ways that will cut through the noise and be easily understood by diverse stakeholders. Key messages need to be repeated frequently and consistently. In crises, leaders require swift and specific actions from stakeholders. When communicating directions, leaders should do so in a positive way. This means telling people what to do, rather than what not to do. Leaders are required to disseminate information, direction, and reassurance, but they should also listen actively and genuinely throughout crises. Listening to experts will ensure leaders can disseminate better information to stakeholders, and listening to stakeholders will demonstrate that leaders care and are responsive to those they are

202

Crisis Leadership

leading. Listening to stakeholders does not mean that leaders will be able to do everything stakeholders want or solve all stakeholders’ problems, but feeling heard can engender trust and a willingness among stakeholders to cooperate, which is essential to the collective effort required to navigate crises. Just as leaders need to pay careful attention to what they say, they also need to pay careful attention to what they do not say. Nonverbal communication is as important as verbal communication. The way leaders hold themselves, their facial expressions, their cadence, tone, pace of speaking, and visible emotional responses provide vital cues to stakeholders about how genuine the leader is and the importance of the messages the leader is attempting to convey. Leaders need to show concern and care for those people who are affected by the crisis, and remind and ensure everyone that working together will help them get through the crisis. The importance of communication is illustrated by evidence that suggests charismatic leaders are particularly effective in crisis situations. Charismatic leaders, through their effective and emotional communication, have a special bond with followers so that the leader becomes the focal point for information. In addition, charismatic leaders are inspirational and can motivate followers to work together to overcome the crisis.

The Third Leadership Challenge of Crises: Collaborating With and Empowering Others Crises are not survived alone. In most instances, a collaboration of many different entities (i.e., people, departments, organizations) is required to effectively deal with the crisis. Leaders play a central role in encouraging these diverse groups and individuals to cooperate and work together to address crisis-related problems and concerns. Top-level leaders need to decide which aspects of crisis management should be centralized at the top, and which should be delegated to lower-level leaders, because in large entities, too much centralized, top-level leadership may lead to inefficiencies. This may be why research suggests that transformational leaders perform well in crisis situations because transformational leaders get

things done by empowering followers to take on leadership responsibilities. The COVID-19 global pandemic is a good example of the importance of empowering others and getting numerous entities, locally and internationally, focused on solving the crisis. Navigating the pandemic involved scientists working on developing vaccines (partially funded by government); national, state, and local officials mandating lockdowns and social restrictions; health-care organizations mobilizing resources; and individual households voluntarily following restrictions. Leading through crises requires mobilizing and fostering collaboration among people and entities at multiple levels. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates that the success or failure of crisis leadership in various countries and regions was affected by lower-level members feeling empowered to take action. Addressing the Collaboration and Empowerment Challenge

An important first step in facilitating collaboration and empowerment is building and maintaining trust. In a crisis, swift trust is necessary. Crises often require new teams to come together, or to get existing teams to work together in new ways. Developing trust swiftly in teams is essential to ensuring they can work together effectively to navigate the crisis. The concept of swift trust is widely used by crisis researchers and professionals in the disaster readiness and management industries. Swift trust can be developed by employing simple tactics such as establishing role clarity, delineating expertise, using individuals’ names, and actively including and reenlisting these tactics every time new members join the team. A second important element of effective collaboration is the leader’s ability to manage conflict. Conflict can be either productive or disruptive to the team or organization. Conflict is functional and productive when it leads to innovative and positive outcomes, such as in group decision-making. Conflict is destructive when it leads to in-fighting among individuals or factions. The crisis leader’s task is to help regulate conflict, ensuring that conflict stays constructive and respectful. This can be done by focusing on the

Critical Leadership Studies

external threat and getting members to pull together toward the common (superordinate) goal of navigating and overcoming the crisis.

Crisis Aftermath Once a crisis is over, leaders play an important part in helping the collective to recover. This includes restoring a sense of well-being among members. Crises often deplete personal and organizational resources, and in the aftermath of crises it is important that leaders model and communicate the importance of restoring health and vitality, both personally and organizationally. In addition, leaders should derive lessons learned from the crisis and how it was managed. These “lessons learned” will be beneficial in planning, preparing for, and successfully leading through future crises. Ronald E. Riggio and Toby Newstead See also Charismatic Leadership Theory; Collective Action and Leadership; Communication; COVID-19 Pandemic; Empowerment; Groupthink; Leader’s Resources and Followers’ Reactions; Strategic Leadership; Virtues; Wicked Problems

Further Readings Bavik, Y. L., Shao, B., Newman, A., & Schwarz, G. (2021, May 6). Crisis leadership: A review and future research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2021.101518 Fiedler, F. E., & Garcia, J. E. (1987). New approaches to effective leadership: Cognitive resources and organizational performance. New York, NY: Wiley. Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Mitroff, I. I. (2007). Best practices in leading under crisis: Bottom-up leadership, or how to be a crisis champion. In J. A. Conger & R. E. Riggio (Eds.), The practice of leadership (pp. 263–276). San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass. Reyes, D. L., Bisbey, T. M., Day, D. V., & Salas, E. (2021, June 4). Translating 6 key insights from research on leadership and management in times of crisis. BMJ Leader. doi:10.1136/leader-2020–000349

203

CRITICAL LEADERSHIP STUDIES Studies of leadership often concentrate on identifying effective leaders’ qualities and practices. These leader-centered perspectives pay less attention to followers and to the structural, cultural, and discursive conditions and consequences of leadership relations. Questioning this tendency to privilege leaders, critical leadership studies (CLS) highlight the significance of leadership power dynamics, intersecting inequalities, and follower agency and resistance. CLS reveal how power typically takes multiple forms that can be both productive as well as oppressive, covert, as well as overt. They recognize that different forms of power may produce unintended and unanticipated effects such as follower resistance. Critical approaches hold that followers’ practices are frequently more proactive, knowledgeable, and oppositional than is often appreciated. By addressing issues of power, inequality, and follower agency as a set of dynamic, shifting, and interconnected processes, critical perspectives open up new ways of understanding and researching leadership and followership.

Critical Perspectives on Leadership Critical leadership studies is a fairly loose umbrella term drawing on a variety of perspectives from labor process theory, critical management studies, feminism, and postcolonial theory, to Foucauldian analysis, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, radical psychology, and psychoanalysis. These, sometimes competing, frameworks share a concern to critique the situated power relations, intersecting inequalities and subordinate practices through which leadership dynamics are typically enacted. Critical perspectives contend that it is through these interwoven and asymmetrical processes that leadership dynamics are frequently reproduced, rationalized, resisted, and occasionally transformed. They view questions of power, inequality, and resistance as fundamental constructs of leadership dynamics even when the latter are more shared, distributed, or democratically established.

204

Critical Leadership Studies

CLS writers question the view that the extreme power imbalances, status differences, and economic inequalities that often characterize contemporary societies and organizations are desirable and immutable. Often drawing on the more established field of critical management studies, which seeks to open up new ways of thinking about management by questioning traditional orthodoxies, critical perspectives also encourage a concern with dysfunctional, toxic, and destructive leadership and its paradoxical and sometimes unintended effects. Although issues of power are a central concern within critical perspectives generally, what constitutes power, where “it” could be located, and how “it” might be enacted remain contested questions. For example, labor process and critical management theorists tend to concentrate on management and ownership as key sources of power, whilst avoiding or undervaluing the study of leadership generally or the power, influence, and authority of leaders specifically. By contrast, CLS suggest that, for good and/or for ill, leadership, just like management, is a central feature of power and control in societies and organizations.

Power Many studies of leadership tend to take for granted that leaders are in charge and followers simply carry out orders from above. Critical perspectives question these assumptions. They aim to show that power is not so much a dependent variable or a commodity to be used or abused at will, but rather a deeply embedded and inescapable feature of leadership dynamics and of organizational structures, cultures, and relations: power is structural, relational, and practice based. CLS argue that leaders’ power and control can take multiple economic, discursive, and embodied forms. Power can be conferred by hierarchical position, as well as enacted more informally through processes, relationships, networks, and personal agency. While leadership and power are often associated with those in positions of formal authority, critical studies emphasize that leadership can also emerge informally in more subordinated and dispersed relationships, as well as in oppositional organizational forms such as trade unions and revolutionary movements.

Critical studies suggest that power can be exercised in overt, subtle, disguised, and sometimes invisible ways within leadership dynamics. Leaders’ control can be both enabling and disciplinary: It may be positive, productive, and empowering, as well as toxic, corrupt, and destructive. Leaders typically play a key role in defining strategies and visions, shaping structures, cultures, and change programs, monitoring work and performance, providing rewards, applying sanctions, and hiring and firing. They can also exercise power symbolically through modes of communication that define situations in ways that suit their purposes. Leaders may seek to redefine sectional as universal interests and use excessively positive definitions of reality. Power dynamics can also reflect and shape localized microinteractions, for example, being displayed in forms of eye contact, how individuals stand or sit, the gestures they make, the words they choose, and the clothes they wear, as well as in the physical arrangements and features of rooms and the locations in which meetings take place. Equally, the architecture of buildings can convey important messages about power and status. Internally, those in senior positions are typically located on the top floors of buildings, detached and distant from subordinates, and well away from frontline operations. Careful to avoid treating leader’s power and influence as all-determining and monolithic, critical perspectives also recognize that different forms of power can be in tension with one another and may also produce unanticipated and unacknowledged effects: power can be paradoxical and contradictory, with unintended outcomes. Studies also examine the impact of power on leaders themselves. Senior positions typically confer greater autonomy, status, and privilege, but they may also nurture leaders’ hubris, narcissism, and arrogance. This, in turn, can inform a failure to consult—even a disregard for others’ views—and a desire to hold onto power even when support for a leader has faded. Power can be intoxicating in ways that encourage leaders to be more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less empathetic. Power can also be corrupting. Particularly in contexts where leaders enjoy high degrees of autonomy and low accountability, their power can become excessive

Critical Leadership Studies

and they may start to believe they are invulnerable or shielded from any potential costs of deception.

Inequalities Critical feminist research illustrates how leadership power often continues to be gendered. Historically, power has been associated with men and masculinity, and leadership is often conceptualized as a stereotypically masculine endeavor. Challenging taken-for-granted views that white, middle-aged men are inevitably the people in charge who create visions and make decisions, feminist studies demonstrate that gender is an important source of power and influence frequently embedded in organizational structures, cultures, and practices. They show how romanticized notions of the heroic, “tough,” “strong,” and “charismatic” leader are often saturated with images and assumptions of men and masculinity. Despite relatively long-standing antidiscrimination legislation in Western societies, women continue to comprise a small fraction of those occupying senior leadership, management, and boardroom positions. Research demonstrates that the comparatively few women who do achieve hierarchical progress often have to cope with heightened scrutiny (of their bodies, clothes, and physical appearance) and with sexual harassment. Feminist writers emphasize that gender relations also often intersect with other important sources of power, identity, and inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and age. Relatedly, critical studies on men reveal how the category “man” takes many different forms and how “hegemonic” and “subordinate” masculinities typically inform the gendered power relations of leadership and followership. They show how ‘hegemonic masculinity’ shapes leadership decisions, values, styles, language, cultures, relations, identities, and practices in ways that subordinate women and other men and masculinities. For many men, work continues to be a primary site for identity construction. Seeking to prove that they are powerful and tough, men often compete for dominance over women and other subordinated men. Feeling constantly under pressure to prove their manhood, some men are more likely to engage in aggressive and risky behavior, displays

205

of sexuality, and by devaluing women and those men who do not fit hegemonic criteria. Such pressures can be exacerbated by performance systems that pit employees against one another, and workplace cultures that expect long hours working and 24/7 availability. The outcomes for employees of this kind of high-pressure, toxic leadership culture are likely to be reduced morale, increased burnout, and high turnover. Similar arguments can be made in relation to other intersecting inequalities such as race, ethnicity, class, age, religion, disability, and sexual orientation. Critical studies also highlight the embodied nature of leadership power. They demonstrate, for example, that, in many sectors, female and male leaders utilize their bodies as modes of power, influence, and communication, and how corporeality, emotions, and aesthetics may shape leaders’ practices. Recognizing the importance of embodiment reminds us that leadership dynamics are also about flesh, blood, bones, organs, and bodies, as well as being situated in specific times and places—they are both embodied and embedded. It provides a welcome correction to studies that privilege leaders’ minds as if they were entirely separate from their bodies. One significant limitation on leaders’ power is the frailty and impermanence of the human body itself. Studies have revealed the extent to which many American presidents and British prime ministers have experienced mental and/or physical illness whilst in office, as well as the lengths to which those around the leader may go to conceal such illness from the public.

Followership Although they emphasize the importance of power, some critical approaches also recognize that leadership relations are rarely so asymmetrical that they are invariably one-way. They argue that power should not be overstated or seen as all-determining. This raises important issues about understanding followership from a critical perspective. In recent years, research has begun to pay more attention to the role of followers in leadership processes, highlighting their important, proactive role in leader–follower dynamics. Writers have argued that exemplary and star

206

Critical Leadership Studies

followers are a precondition for high-performing organizations—particularly in the contemporary context of flatter hierarchies and greater team-working. While it has often been assumed that followership is freely chosen, critical perspectives contend that followers need to be understood and located in their structural, cultural, and economic context—the asymmetrical conditions and consequences of action. CLS tend to view followers as skilled, proactive, and knowledgeable agents who have at their disposal a repertoire of possible agencies, ranging from deference, unquestioning loyalty, commitment, conformity, and compliance, to indifference, cynicism, disguised dissent, and overt resistance. They also acknowledge that followership can embody many different meanings, including, for example, political supporters, disciples, fans, customers, fanatics, and even social media followers. Within this broad range of possibilities, an employee can be seen as a specific kind of organized follower who sells their labor to an employer. In that sense, employment can be treated as a particular kind of commodified followership that is more contingent and constrained. Studies of follower conformity, compliance, and consent provide insights into the disciplinary character of leadership power. Much of the research on conformity and its damaging effects emerged in the post–World War II period, as writers tried to make sense of the Nazi extermination of six million Jews and the explanation of many of those involved that they were just obeying orders. Critical writers point to the potentially detrimental consequences of follower conformity. Their view of followers as skilled, proactive, and knowledgeable also informs a focus on subordinates’ capacity to express dissent and enact resistance. Critical writers argue that followers are potentially more oppositional than has often been recognized in the leader-centered literature. Considerable research particularly in organization studies indicates that employees often draw on their technical knowledge, strategic agency, and cultural resources to express disaffection in organizations. Studies also suggest that resistance is more likely to emerge when subordinates believe that leaders are exercising control in unfair,

dictatorial, and/or coercive ways. Equally, employees are more likely to resist when they feel their views have not been considered, when they perceive leaders and managers to be “out of touch,” and when they detect discrepancies between leaders’ statements and their practices. If followers perceive such inconsistencies, they can become increasingly cynical about leaders. Despite the efforts of scientific management to deskill workers, employees on the frontline continue to retain technical and cultural knowledge that they can deploy in expressing dissent. Studies show how resistance can take numerous forms whether explicit (e.g., strikes) and/or more disguised (e.g., output restriction). In exceptional cases, subordinates may even (seek to) depose leaders. Research by David Collinson on a UK truck manufacturer discovered that a corporate culture campaign introduced by the new American senior management team to establish trust with the workforce had precisely the opposite effect. Manual workers dismissed senior management’s definition of the company as a team and resisted by “distancing” themselves, restricting output and effort, and treating work purely as a means of economic compensation. They created a counterculture celebrating a working-class masculinity that valued male breadwinner identities, elevated “practical,” manual work as confirmation of working-class manhood, and communicated through aggressive and profane forms of masculine humor, ridicule, and sarcasm. The company’s leaders remained unaware of how their strategies produced counterproductive effects on the shop floor. Where followers are concerned to avoid sanctions, they may resist in more disguised ways. Although employees might be highly critical of leaders’ practices, they may publicly censor their views and camouflage their actions through covert resistance that covers its own tracks. Subtle and routine subversions, such as absenteeism, foot dragging, and disengagement, can be difficult to detect. Employees may even undermine leaders’ change initiatives simply by doing or saying nothing. While silence should not be confused with consent, such inertia can result in leaders making mistakes. Disguised dissent is particularly likely in the current era of intensified surveillance. Under

Critical Leadership Studies

the gaze of authority, individuals are increasingly aware of themselves as visible objects, and, as a consequence, they can become increasingly skilled choreographers of self, using impression management techniques. Critical studies therefore regard follower agency and resistance as important features of leadership processes. Far from being passive and unquestioning, subordinates can express opposition in multiple forms, using knowledge and information in ways that simultaneously enact, but also conceal, their resistance. Disguised dissent incorporates self-protective practices that sometimes blur the boundaries between resistance and consent. Emphasizing the mutually reinforcing nature of power and resistance, critical studies also show how leaders’ control can have unintended and contradictory consequences that they do not always understand or anticipate. This is not to suggest that followers will invariably engage in dissent, or that opposition is necessarily effective; control may produce compliance and even conformity, while resistance can also have unintended and contradictory consequences.

Conclusion Critical leadership studies highlight the neglected importance of power, inequalities, and followership in leadership dynamics. These perspectives address the relational, asymmetrical, and paradoxical character of leadership dynamics. They surface important questions about organizational power relations, conflicts, tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions that are typically underexplored within many studies of leadership. From a CLS perspective, power is fundamental to leadership theory and practice: enacted in the decisions, statements, and claims that leaders make, in their everyday practices and the many ways they influence followers, and through the organizational structures, resources, information, and technologies they have at their disposal. Critical perspectives acknowledge that leaders’ power or powers can take multiple forms and have contradictory and unintended outcomes. They show how leader–led relations contain the potential for conflict and dissent. Leaders cannot simply assume followers’ obedience or loyalty. Critical studies view power and resistance as

207

mutually reinforcing processes that are also inherently ambiguous and potentially contradictory. They raise important questions frequently neglected in many leader-centered studies of leadership. David L Collinson See also Community Leadership; Conformity; Foucault and Postmodernism; Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2012). Critical leadership studies: The case for critical performativity. Human Relations, 65, 367–390. doi:10.1177/ 0018726711430555 Banks, S. (Ed.). (2008). Dissent and the failure of leadership. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Collinson, D. L. (1992). Managing the shopfloor: Subjectivity, masculinity and workplace culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Collinson, D. L. (2000). Strategies of resistance: Power, knowledge and subjectivity in the workplace. In K. Grint (Ed.), Work and society: A reader (pp. 163–198). Cambridge: Polity Press. Collinson, D. L. (2011). Critical leadership studies. In A. Bryman, D. L. Collinson, K. Grint, B. Jackson, & M. Uhl Bien (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of leadership (pp. 179–192). London: SAGE. Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2014). Organizational power in management and organization science. Academy of Management Annals, 8, 237–298. Gagnon, S., & Collinson, D. (2017). Resistance through difference: The co-constitution of dissent and inclusion. Organization Studies, 38, 1253–1276. doi:10.1177/ 0170840616685362 Hearn, J., & Collinson, D. L. (2018). Men, masculinities and gendered organizations. In R. Aldag (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of business and management (pp. 1–35). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janda, K. F. (1960) Towards the explication of the concept of leadership in terms of the concept of power. Human Relations, 13, 345–363. Johnson S. K., & Lacerenza, C. N. (2019) Leadership is male-centric. In R. Riggio (Ed.), What’s wrong with leadership? (and how to fix it) (pp. 107–120). New York, NY: Routledge. Liu, H., & Baker, C. (2016). White Knights: Leadership as the heroicisation of whiteness. Leadership, 12, 420–448. doi:10.1177/1742715014565127

208

Critical Race Theory

Owen, D. (2011). In sickness and in power (2nd ed.). London: Methuen. Riggio, R. E., Chaleff, I., & Lipman-Blumen, J. (Eds.). (2008). The art of followership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Sadler-Smith, E. (2019). Hubristic leadership. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Sinclair, A. (2005). Body possibilities in leadership. Leadership, 1, 388–406. doi:10.1177/ 1742715005057231 Tourish, D., & Vatcha, N. (2005). Charismatic leadership and corporate cultism at Enron. Leadership, 1, 455–480. doi:10.1177/1742715005057671 Wilson, S. (2016). Thinking differently about leadership. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY Critical race theory (CRT) argues that racism is pervasive and systemic in American society, embedded in institutions and structures such as the law, education, policing, and health care. Centering the historical legacy of slavery in CRT analyses enables an examination into the ways the law ratifies racial hierarchies, and in turn, give rise to today’s social injustices. CRT posits that the law is complicit in perpetuating racial disparities because it is seen as serving dominant interests reproducing discriminatory orders that undergird society. While mythologies of race suggest biology is the source of difference, CRT emphasizes that race is a social construction, which continues to be meaningful in race-conscious society. Far from being an exception, racism is a common occurrence, emerging even in the absence of individually mediated acts of racism. CRT affirms for leaders and followers that race remains a salient way of experiencing the world. It offers leadership practitioners an analytical lens for thinking structurally about racism, especially when evaluating its entrenchment and place within social problems that have complicated, far-reaching histories. This entry elucidates the controversy surrounding CRT; details CRT’s origins, foundational ideas, and tenets; and discusses what CRT-informed leadership practice looks like.

The Struggle Around Critical Race Theory Since 2020, conservative politicians and activists have used CRT to stoke public furor over everything from school curricula to public policy. According to The Washington Post, in June and July 2021 alone, Fox News brought up CRT over 1,900 times, a marked increase over the 132 times it was mentioned in all of 2020. Critics charge that this academic approach fosters divisive identity politics, rewrites history, encourages intolerance, and characterizes all whites as racist. Other mischaracterizations include diversity training, reverse racism, race scapegoating, white oppression, Black supremacism, and wokeness. Opponents openly state that they are weaponizing CRT by portraying it as a national threat in order to turn Americans against the idea of systemic racism. Already, there are significant ramifications: 28 states are developing anti-CRT legislation, analyses from the 2021 election point to CRT as a critical issue, and across the United States, school boards are banning books and curricula on racism. For CRT adherents, the timing of this censure is not surprising. Many consider 2020 the year of reckoning with US racial history. For example, cities across the United States saw Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests filling streets as the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black Americans by law enforcement officers resulted in sharper scrutiny of racism in policing. Similarly, increased white support for BLM as well as bestselling books on antiracism and white privilege suggested that white Americans were ready to face the invisible hand of deeply rooted racism in American society. Rather, a backlash against CRT grew in part thanks to media mischaracterizations. According to Kimberl´e Crenshaw, a founder of CRT, the hostility toward CRT reflects the deep entrenchment of racism in American society. Patricia Williams, another central CRT scholar, characterizes these maneuvers as a form of definitional theft.

Critical Race Theory Beginnings CRT’s roots lay in critical legal studies (CLS), a line of legal questioning that emerged in the 1970s and draws on neo-Marxist and economic thought.

Critical Race Theory

CLS challenge the idea that the law is neutral, apolitical, and objective, and instead posits that legal and judicial mechanisms serve the interests of the dominant class. Far from offering a solution to deeply rooted social problems, the law remains complicit in the production, reproduction, and maintenance of social inequality and racial hierarchies, historically and today. At a CLS retreat in the late 1980s, Crenshaw coined the term “critical race studies” to describe work on race, power, and the law. Other individuals central to the development of CRT include Derrick Bell, Williams, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Jean Stefancic, and Charles R. Lawrence III. Together, they have advanced the conversation around the social construction of race and the role law and other institutions play in perpetuating racial inequities. Today, critical race analyses can be found in education, sociology, health science, criminal justice, and history.

Foundational Ideas of Critical Race Theory While CRT shares a generalized critique of legal liberalism with CLS, CRT foregrounds race, racism, and the historical legacy of slavery on US institutions, especially the law. In many ways, CRT is a response to the failure of civil rights legislation in improving the lives of Black Americans and in delivering promised and expected structural changes. For Bell, the reason was clear: racism is so deeply entrenched in US institutions that the system works exactly as intended, reasserting itself after each reform while purposefully rendering racism invisible. Not all CRT theorists share Bell’s assertions, but they acknowledge that law has the potential to perpetuate harm and injustice. Still, as a focus on outcomes is a hallmark of CRT analysis, many scholar activists also see the possibility for the law to act as a tool of social reform, furthering rights, eliminating oppression, and effecting social justice. According to Crenshaw, CRT is best conceptualized as a verb rather than as a noun, as this better captures its dynamic, continuously evolving, and adaptable character. It offers a lens through which to analyze how de facto and invisible racism operates within public policy, the law, education,

209

healthcare, and other institutions. For many scholar activists, CRT is both a practice and an action plan toward achieving a just society where oppression for everyone is eliminated. Critical race research, practice, and activism emphasize a commitment to social justice and the importance of race and racism in everyday experiences. It affirms that race is a social construct, reflecting historical, social, political, and economic processes, rather than biological difference. Racial categories organize human variation into societally determined groups and attribute presumed commonalities and qualities to members. Membership is not voluntary but rather, societally imposed and naturalized. The categories in which we exist serve as schema that shape people’s experiences of risk, opportunity, status, and rights. History garners special attention in CRT analyses as it affords an examination into the processes through which the law legitimates and ratifies racial hierarchies, and in turn, give rise to today’s social injustices. CRT rejects the idea that we live in a postracial society and eschews colorblind analysis, emphasizing that as race is part of the problem, it is also part of the solution. Cloaking hierarchy in words like “standard,” “mainstream,” and “neutral” simply perpetuates and obscures racial disparities.

Five Tenets of Critical Race Theory While critical theory work shares the aforementioned ideas, it does not possess a unified canon of literature. Still, the following doctrines are commonly found in CRT approaches and often referenced as central tenets: the permanence of racism, interest convergence, counter-storytelling, whiteness as property, and a critique of liberalism. Racism is a permanent and persistent facet of American life. In contrast with prevailing mythologies of race, racism is not primarily the domain of “a few bad apples.” Rather, racism is insidiously embedded in institutions, policies, organizations, structures, and systems, resulting in significant racial disparities. This is not to ignore individually mediated racism but to stress that racism is systemic and structural, enduring often as an unintended consequence of good intentions and a liberal belief that the law furthers racial equality. In other words, racism persists even without

210

Critical Race Theory

racists because it is woven through the fabric of society. Discriminatory behavior is also informed by unconscious, internalized racism as common cultural heritage instills ideas of racial hierarchy. Racism is not an aberration but the rule, operating invisibly, unconsciously, and systemically. Early on, critical race theorists observed that whites were benefitting more from civil rights legislation than were Blacks. Indeed, over the course of his career working with landmark civil rights cases, Bell questioned why the outcomes were not the expected structural changes that motivated his participation. For example, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) failed to improve the lives of Black students. Bell’s explanation resulted in the idea of interest convergence, which states that Blacks will achieve civil rights victories only when the interests of whites align with those of Blacks. He challenged the idea that landmark legal decisions indicated a moral awakening in the United States. Instead, the cases served US Cold War interests at home and abroad. At the time, the USSR was exploiting American race relations in an attempt to damage the United States’ worldwide reputation, Black veterans were suffering on account of racism and discrimination, and the South was expecting desegregation to bring economic opportunities. Bell concluded that despite reforms intended to counter racism, racial inequality persevered because of racism’s profound entrenchment. The law was not a sufficient or reliable route for ensuring a just outcome. Interest convergence intersects with other CRT themes such as entrenchment, unconscious racism, systemic racism, and the critique of liberalism. CRT seeks to redress the omission of marginalized populations in legal and other narratives. Thus, it stresses the relevance of lived experiences of racism and self-narration, noting that these everyday narratives should also factor into academic scholarship. Such counter-storytelling practices magnify and validate previously silenced and relegated voices. By decentering dominant narratives, counternarratives illustrate the lack of inclusivity in and relevance of dominant discourses across social categories. In this manner, critical race analyses offer spaces for understanding how systemic racism is experienced on the individual level.

Through the idea of whiteness as property, Harris addresses the historical intertwining and ` transformation of race and property vis-a-vis the law. Harris argues that whiteness, initially constructed as a category of identity, became legitimated into a type of status property conferring metaphysical rights rather than simply being a physical thing. Harris elucidates how this understanding of property includes rights of possession, rights of disposition, rights to use and enjoyment, reputation as status property, and rights to exclusion. Despite civil rights reforms, whiteness remains protected, acting as a form of racialized privilege that offers personal and public benefit. Finally in its critique of liberalism, CRT argues that the legal system replicates inequality even if racial biases are eliminated because it reflects an underlying socioeconomic order where justice is not meted out impartially; stubborn discrimination shores up the endurance of white supremacy. Through the concept of intersectionality, Crenshaw introduces ways to make space for remediation and greater equality through the law. Intersectionality has come to denote the ways in which race intersects with other identities like gender, sexuality, class, and disability. However, within Crenshaw’s work, intersectionality points to a legal blind spot, or conceptual limitation in the law, as the law addresses discrimination through single issues like race or gender. In the 1976 DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case, five women sued over a seniority policy that involved both race and gender discrimination, yet the courts understood their claims in single-issue terms. Here, the concept of intersectionality demonstrates the shortcomings of the courts in addressing the challenges Black women face as both Black and female. Unlike activists who use the term to describe intersecting identities, Crenshaw’s use of intersectionality highlights inadequacies in discrimination law.

Toward a Critical Race Theory Leadership Practice By shifting attention to the interstice of power, race, and the law, CRT encourages leaders to seek enduring solutions and investigate the ways in which institutions, unconscious racism, and

Cuban Missile Crisis

unintended consequences perpetuate injustices and inequities. Moreover, CRT highlights the importance of listening to counternarratives from marginalized individuals throughout the leadership process. Rather than accepting the permanence and invisibility of racism, a CRT-informed leadership practice can seek ways to excavate and make visible racism. This big picture approach—taking into account both lived experiences and structures of racism—complements leadership that seeks social change and a world with racial justice. Elizabeth Faier See also Black Lives Matter; Intersectionality: Race and Gender; Leading Diversity; Power and Culture; Racial Disparities; Social Change; White Privilege

211

his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev as well. Although Kennedy’s leadership was crucial in avoiding war and possible nuclear annihilation, there was clearly a great deal of luck involved. At times, for example, highly stressed Russian submarine commanders could have fired torpedoes at US ships, setting off a catastrophic chain reaction. Still, Kennedy’s actions during a long crisis, fittingly captured in the film Thirteen Days (2000), have important implications for leadership. This entry describes the political context before the crisis and then how Kennedy and Khrushchev reached a peaceful resolution after nearly two weeks of tense negotiation under the most stressful circumstances.

The Cold War Context for the Missile Crisis Further Readings Barr, J. (2021, October 6). Critical race theory was the hot topic on Fox News this summer. Not so much anymore. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https:// www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/10/06/foxnews-critical-race-theory/ Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. New York, NY: The New Press. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York, NY: New York University Press. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (2016). Toward a critical race theory of education. In A. D. Dixson, C. K. Rousseau Anderson, & J. K. Donnor (Eds.), Critical race theory in education: All God’s children got a song (pp. 10–31). New York, NY: Routledge.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is often studied as an example of good leadership on the part of President John F. Kennedy, and more recently by

When Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961 there were two especially intractable issues between the United States and the Soviet Union. One was an old issue, dating back to the start of the Cold War—the status of West Berlin. Russians wanted US armed forces out and had tried to force Americans out by blockading the city in 1948. A massive airlift of food, water, and medicine during the administration of Harry S. Truman kept West Berlin from falling to the Soviets, but the struggle over the divided city was a continuing dilemma that lasted through the eight-year Eisenhower administration and ended up on Kennedy’s desk. The second was a more recent matter, the new communist government in Cuba established by Fidel Castro in 1959 after he successfully led a revolution against the former regime. The second problem came to a crisis during the summer and fall of 1962. Kennedy was under great pressure from Republicans in Congress, the media, and the military for strong action to weaken or even topple the three-year-old Castro regime. Even Democrats applied pressure. An 86–1 vote in the US Senate advocated stronger action. In October it was discovered that the Soviet Union was surreptitiously installing offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. Kennedy felt that action had to be taken to maintain US credibility with both friends and adversaries, as well as the strategic balance of power that had existed throughout

212

Cuban Missile Crisis

the Cold War. There was clear linkage to Berlin. Any action taken against Cuba might provoke a Soviet military attack against Berlin. Clearly the situation was precarious and had the potential to lead to nuclear war.

Finding a Peaceful Solution to the Crisis The action options that Kennedy first considered were an airstrike against the missile sites, a more general air attack on Cuba, an invasion to oust Castro, or a blockade. The pressure for quick military action only intensified as each day passed. Kennedy’s decision-making during this period is especially instructive. He sought ways to delay an irrevocable commitment to using escalating military force. His basic strategy owed much to the failed attempt to overthrow Castro during the previous April, his third month in office, in the so-called Bay of Pigs fiasco. In retrospect the president felt that he had yielded far too much to political pressure and military assurances. He had, in effect, suspended his own judgment and failed to engage himself and members of his administration, including the military, in critical thinking. A year and a half later, Kennedy took a number of unusual steps. He established a group called Excom (for Executive Committee of the National Security Council) to have a series of meetings during which it would discuss and thoroughly vet various options. He absented himself from many of the meetings so as to allow the most open debate without anyone attempting to find favor with him based on their sense of the course of action he preferred. At several points during the ongoing discussions new advisers were brought in to offer fresh perspectives. Kennedy sought expertise and vigorous debate. He also kept trying to assess Soviet intentions and to find ways to help Khrushchev and the Russians find a face-saving way to back away from the brink. Eventually consensus emerged for a blockade or quarantine of Cuba which would stop the arrival of new missiles to the island. The military leaders were not happy. They wanted to attack. But Kennedy refused to give in to them. This was possibly his most important act of leadership—resist pressure for precipitous action that almost surely would lead to nuclear war. Until this

time the presence of the Soviet missiles had been kept largely secret from the public. Now it was time to lead the nation and America’s allies by giving a strong and very clear speech announcing that the United States had unmistakable evidence of the Soviet buildup and outlining a plan of action, including the quarantine. There were several notable elements of the speech. One was Kennedy calmly laying out a series of steps that would be taken to counter the missile buildup. He began this section by saying: Acting, therefore, in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere, and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution as endorsed by the Resolution of the Congress, I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately.

He then enumerated seven steps, the final one calling on Premier Khrushchev to reverse course and work toward world peace. By clearly showing that there was a specific, carefully enumerated and sequenced action plan, the speech was reassuring. The language was resolute but did not lay down an ultimatum. Through the next week Kennedy devised ways to give Khrushchev time to devise a response that would lead to a peaceful resolution. Eventually, through painstaking deliberations and stubborn negotiations under the most stressful conditions imaginable, a deal was brokered. Many individuals at many levels worked to accomplish this goal, but Kennedy was unwavering in resisting pressure to launch airstrikes and an invasion while at the same time finding ways to get the missiles removed. The final deal was that Khrushchev would remove the missiles, the United States would pledge never to invade Cuba, and in a secret arrangement between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the United States promised to remove obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey. This was done in a way that gave Khrushchev room to make concessions but enabled Kennedy to reassure US allies that America had honored and would honor its defense commitments. In a way, Kennedy signaled his overall approach in a September news conference, before the discovery of the Russian missiles, but at a time when the Congress and the media were calling for

Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles

action against Castro. He said that he hoped Americans would “in this nuclear age . . .. keep both their nerve and their head.” That is, they would counter threats with clear-minded thinking and proportional force. He asked them, in effect, not to pressure him into hasty, precipitous action.

The Aftermath of the Crisis The peaceful and largely successful resolution of the crisis paid immediate political benefits. In the midterm elections in early November, Kennedy’s Democratic party reversed the typical loss of seats by the party of the incumbent president. More importantly, the settlement allowed Kennedy and Khrushchev to begin planning ways to reduce tensions between the two superpowers. In an important speech at American University the following June, Kennedy laid out a number of steps that the United States would take to improve relations and invited his Russian counterpart to do the same. He reached out by saying Let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. [. . .] For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Following the speech, both sides took a number of small but meaningful steps to reduce tensions. Each one served as a communication that further cooperation was possible. When Kennedy was assassinated five months later, the promise of the American University speech was unfulfilled. But there had been a beginning. The position that both the United States and the Soviet Union reached as a result of the peaceful settlement of the missile crisis in Cuba was the foundation for that beginning.

Lessons for Leadership There are several key lessons for leadership that can be taken away from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of these, perhaps the most important is signaled

213

by Kennedy’s statement about the importance of keeping both one’s nerve and one’s head during crises. Doing so entails hard work to discipline emotions, especially fear and anger, and to think carefully and critically. It is also important to keep getting advice and counsel from relevant sources, whether those by other people or different kinds of information. What those inputs contribute has to be listened to attentively and evaluated thoroughly. In Kennedy’s case, ultimately he had to depend on his own considered judgments and decisions in the face of extraordinary pressures to act in ways that might have been momentarily satisfying, yet ultimately not only self-destructive but also catastrophic for humanity. George R. Goethals See also Congressional Leadership; Crisis Leadership; Groupthink; Presidential Leadership

Further Readings Dallek, R. (2003). An unfinished life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. New York, NY: Little Brown and Company. Kennedy, R. F. (1969). Thirteen days: A memoir of the Cuban missile crisis. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES LEADERSHIP STYLES

IN

The international flow of goods, capital, and people allowed by technology—that is, globalization—has favored a certain degree of homogenization of preferences, attitudes, and behaviors all over the world. Even though the effects of globalization are undeniable, cultural differences have not disappeared altogether, and different human groups still display unique beliefs and values. For instance, in leadership studies—and in organizational leadership, in particular—it has become almost a truism to say that leadership varies across cultures. Whereas leadership is a universal goal-influencing process, both scholarly evidence and casual observation suggest that there is

214

Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles

heterogeneity in leaders’ behaviors and followers’ expectations across societies, nation states, and other social groups. Understanding these differences and how to manage them is important, especially for organizations relying increasingly on an international workforce and on virtual forms of work connecting daily people from all corners of the world. Thus, this entry takes stock of theories and of empirical evidence related to cultural variation in leadership styles (i.e., the behaviors used by leaders) and implicit leadership theories (i.e., the mental models defining the ideal behaviors and traits leaders should display), focusing specifically on organizational leadership. It also summarizes some recent trends, open questions, and methodological matters related to the study of the links between culture and leadership styles.

Leadership Across Cultures: Theory and Some Results Countless definitions of leadership have been proposed in the social sciences. However, organizational scholars tend to conceptualize leadership as a process of influence involving at least two parties that share some goals. Leadership is, thus, not a position per se (e.g., manager of company, president of country). Leadership is also different from mere coercion, psychological power, or status, and is not only an inherent ability rooted in individual differences (e.g., extraversion, intelligence). In this goal-influencing process, leaders use different leadership styles. For instance, some leaders involve their followers in decision-making processes, whereas other leaders customarily take actions without seeking followers’ consensus. Leaders’ motivational or inspirational appeals sometimes have potent psychological and motivational effects, whereas subject-matter expertise and task-oriented focus is at times preferred. Many antecedents of these different leadership styles may come into play, yet so-called “contingency” or “situational” theories propose that the emergence of different leadership styles depends upon specific contextual factors, like type of task or subordinate abilities. As the business world became more globalized, however, leadership scholars started to ask questions about culture,

that is, the specific contextual variable describing the beliefs, values, and attitudes that are common in any given group and that tend to be transmitted accurately across generations. As most of the leadership literature has traditionally been US- or Western-centric, researchers started to study especially if different leadership styles were similarly effective in various cultural contexts. The systematic study of culture and leadership flourished at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, especially with the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Project (GLOBE). The main phase of GLOBE involved dozens of researchers from 62 societies and collected responses from roughly 17,000 middle managers on almost 130 attributes of leadership. This colossal data collection effort was rooted in the so-called “information processing” view of leadership, which suggests that individuals possess implicit leadership theories, that is, mental models defining the ideal characteristics of leaders. These implicit leadership theories (also known as prototypes) are classically conceptualized as stable memory structures that develop thanks to repeated encounters with leaders in specific contexts. GLOBE focused on one such contextual factor, that is, culture. Thus, GLOBE did not directly measure the occurrence of different leadership styles, but it mapped implicit leadership theories in different societies. The project’s results underline a majority of culturally contingent leader attributes (i.e., attributes that are perceived positively in some societies, yet are viewed as undesirable or unimportant in other cultures, like “sensitive” or “risk taking”), while also highlighting some features that are either unanimously positive (e.g., “decisive,” “intelligent”) or universally negative (e.g., “loner,” “noncooperative”). The project’s researchers also reduced the measured leader attributes into six main dimensions thanks to a second-order factor analysis: 1. Autonomous leadership, referring to an individualistic and self-directed leadership style 2. Charismatic leadership, describing a style rooted in visionary and inspirational behaviors, as well as integrity and decisiveness

Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles

3. Humane-oriented leadership, referring to a modest, generous, and supportive leadership style 4. Participative leadership, which refers to the involvement of subordinates in the decision-making process of the leader 5. Self-protective leadership, describing a leadership style that involves face-saving and leverages status differentials 6. Team-oriented leadership, referring to a leadership style involving collaborative, diplomatic, and team-building behaviors

Across societies, autonomous leadership is seen either as a slightly positive or somewhat negative dimension, whereas charismatic, team-oriented, and—to a lesser extent—humane-oriented leadership tend to be seen as much more effective leadership dimensions. Self-protective leadership does not usually contribute to leadership effectiveness, whereas there is more heterogeneity in the endorsement of participative leadership. Another objective of GLOBE was grouping the sampled societies into distinct geocultural clusters. For instance, the results show that the Anglo cluster (e.g., United States, Australia, England) is characterized by a strong endorsement of charismatic, team-oriented, and participative leadership, whereas followers in the Eastern European cluster (e.g., Slovenia, Hungary, Russia) do not value participative leadership as much. GLOBE also predicted the endorsement of the six global leadership dimensions with specific measures of societal culture (i.e., specific countries’ societal value orientations). The results, for instance, show that participative leadership is viewed as a desirable leader feature worldwide, but less so in societies high on power distance or on uncertainty avoidance. A detailed description of these results can be found in the 2004 book Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies edited by Robert House and colleagues or in related publications. This study still represents the largest project related to cross-cultural leadership, but it has also spawned other research endeavors, like a 2014 study of CEOs and senior executives. Moreover, other researchers have studied the relationship between culture and organizational

215

leadership with different data, focusing also on different leadership styles (e.g., directive leadership) and ideals (e.g., paternalistic leadership). Finally, studies of leadership across cultures have also crossed disciplinary boundaries, bridging, for instance, evolutionary anthropology and leadership studies. In a 2020 article published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Zachary Garfield, Kristen Syme, and Edward Hagen coded more than 1,200 ethnographic texts referring to almost 60 nonindustrial populations, mapping both cultural universals and cultural variation in attributes of leadership among societies that differ from typical “WEIRD” samples (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic).

Cultural Differences in Leadership: Historical Origins, Change, and Transmission Several published results underline systematic correlations between national cultural dimensions (e.g., collectivism, power distance) and endorsement of different styles, attributes, and ideals of leadership across the world. Whereas these correlations are often regarded as largely timeinvariant, culture is not completely static, but evolves over time as a function of the experiences shared by a group. Recognizing that culture can be affected by distal predictors and can change over time opens the path for novel questions related to culturally endorsed leadership styles. For instance, the literature has recently devoted some attention to the deep-rooted origins of cross-national differences in leadership styles. Van de Vliert and colleagues have examined crossnational differences in various psychosocial outcomes as cultural adaptations to specific conditions of the national environment. In a series of articles centered around autocratic leadership, charisma, and delegation, they specifically studied the role of climate as a predictor of heterogeneous leadership styles and ideals, finding generally little predictive power of climate per se, but suggesting an interaction between climatic harshness and economic development. Building also on these results, Sirio Lonati showed that specific historical socioecological factors (i.e., traditional agricultural intensity, which is, in turn, predicted well by

216

Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles

geoclimatic conditions) correlate with the participative leadership ideals currently endorsed in almost 60 countries, as well as with participative practices in actual organizations. More work is still needed before generalizing and confirming these results. Still, these patterns suggest a potential path-dependency between ancient events, environmental conditions, historical forms of leadership, and contemporary leadership, thereby implying a remarkable stability of culturally endorsed leadership styles and implicit leadership theories. One might, therefore, wonder if culturally endorsed leadership styles might ever change, or whether they could remain stable even in case of disruptive societal transformations (e.g., a major economic recession, an epidemic, a social movement, a political regime change). Whereas some empirical findings already stress the temporal and contextual stability of implicit leadership theories within a single cultural context, more research is needed to generalize this result cross-culturally. To this extent, the GLOBE research team is gathering new data from more than 120 countries. Aside from expanding the available data to understudied societies in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, this new project phase will sample middle managers from some of the countries that have already been surveyed in 2004, thus giving the chance of studying questions related to cultural change at the societal level. A related possibility is that individual (rather than socially shared) experiences might also alter one’s culturally endorsed leadership styles and implicit leadership theories. For instance, individuals who move to a new country or to a new region might experience a cultural mismatch that might affect both their behaviors as leaders and their beliefs about what constitutes effective leadership. This perspective opens several questions related to cross-cultural adjustments of migrants and—particularly in organizational contexts—of expatriate managers. Leadership literature has started to illuminate the modes and the pace of these adjustments, yet more remains to be done on this fascinating topic (e.g., more culturally diverse samples, analyses of moderators that affect these adaptation processes). More in general, studying cultural adjustments will probably require a

deeper understanding of how leadership styles and ideals are learnt, diffused among people, and transmitted across generations, both in monocultural and in culturally diverse settings.

Studying Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles: Methodological Considerations Studying the interplay between culture and leadership is an intriguing, but certainly complex, endeavor from a methodological viewpoint. For instance, leadership scholars have long acknowledged issues related to the equivalence of questionnaires administered in different languages. Whereas it is common to examine measurement invariance and employ back-translation techniques, it is still possible that similar terms might be interpreted differently by culturally diverse respondents. For instance, charismatic leadership is a desirable leadership style worldwide, even though Deanne Den Hartog and Robert Verburg discuss in the last pages of their 1997 Leadership Quarterly article how the interpretation of the label “charisma” and of the behaviors of “charismatic leaders” seem to vary across cultures. Specifically, some rhetorical devices might be associated with charisma in some cultures, but not in others. The intuition and exploratory notes of Den Hartog and Verburg are fascinating, yet research in this area remains rather scant. Better understanding of how charisma and other leadership styles are enacted in different cultural contexts could inform leadership theory and provide important implications for practitioners working in multicultural teams. A second question concerns the use of national borders to define cultural groups. This practice is intuitively valid and widespread in many social sciences, which tend to equate nation states, societal groups, and cultural groups. However, this approach also has clear limitations. Some countries are characterized by important cultural variability at the subnational/regional level, whereas other countries are culturally close despite their important geographic distance (e.g., due to common colonial history or migrations). Political economists and evolutionary anthropologists have proposed ways to tackle these difficulties (e.g., empirical methods to account for historical

Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles

migration flows or cultural dependencies between countries), yet these techniques need to make inroads in the leadership literature. A third methodological question concerns causality. Correlations between leadership and various dimensions of national culture (e.g., power distance, individualism) are well known, but it is unclear whether they can be interpreted causally. For instance, Russia and the United States have different national cultures, and leaders in the two countries are expected to display different leadership styles. Based on this observation, it might be intuitive to infer a causal relationship between culture and leadership. However, one needs to recognize that Russia and the United States also have different formal institutions, economic conditions, geography, education systems, demography, etc. If these contextual factors affect both leadership styles and culture, then the estimated correlations between any dimension of national culture and leadership might suffer from endogeneity bias. In other words, national culture (i.e., the deeply held beliefs, values, and attitudes of the residents of a given country) might be confounded with other contextual differences (i.e., the environment where these individuals live). Whereas most contextual factors have likely coevolved with culture, context and culture are conceptually distinct, and specific study designs and statistical techniques developed mainly in economics could be used to empirically distinguish their separate effects on the endorsement or on the emergence of specific leadership styles. Some of these techniques have recently gained traction in leadership studies (e.g., instrumental variables, regression discontinuity). Moreover, bridging the methodological quest for causality with the already-mentioned work on the historical and ecological origins of leadership might also be fruitful, allowing researchers to formalize theoretical models where distal, exogenous variables are used to predict culture, which, in turn, predicts differences in leadership styles. Still, these methodological considerations should not discourage future research on leadership styles and culture. On the contrary, tackling these and other open methodological questions can provide a starting point to investigate long-standing research questions with different

217

methods and samples, as well as to open the path for new queries related to cultural change and cross-cultural differences in leadership styles, or to topics that were not covered in this entry (e.g., global leadership). Globalization—despite some recent economic recessions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growth of nationalistic and protectionist trends—is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and so are global companies, virtual meetings with culturally diverse work teams, expatriate managers, and migration flows. For these reasons, advancing the study of culture and leadership with theoretical clarity, rigorous methods, and even larger datasets is not only an “academic itch” but also a moral duty for all scholars interested in exploring a topic that is relevant for many organizations and individuals. Sirio Lonati See also Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education; Global Leadership; GLOBE Research Program; History; Implicit Leadership Theories

Further Readings Aycan, Z., Schyns, B., Sun, J.-M., Felfe, J., & Saher, N. (2013). Convergence and divergence of paternalistic leadership: A cross-cultural investigation of prototypes. Journal of International Business Studies, 44(9), 962–969. doi:10.1057/jibs.2013.48 Den Hartog, D. N., & Dickson, M. W. (2017). Leadership, culture, and globalization. In J. Antonakis & D. V. Day (Eds.), The nature of leadership (3rd ed., pp. 327–353). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. doi:10. 4135/9781506395029.n13 Den Hartog, D. N., & Verburg, R. M. (1997). Charisma and rhetoric: Communicative techniques of international business leaders. The Leadership Quarterly, 8(4), 355–391. doi:10.1016/S10489843(97)90020-5 Garfield, Z. H., Syme, K. L., & Hagen, E. H. (2020). Universal and variable leadership dimensions across human societies. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 397–414. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.012 Hanges, P. J., Aiken, J. R., Park, J., & Su, J. (2016). Cross-cultural leadership: Leading around the world. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 64–69. doi:10. 1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.013 House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (2004). Culture, leadership, and

218

Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education

organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Lonati, S. (2020). What explains cultural differences in leadership styles? On the agricultural origins of participative and directive leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101305. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2019. 07.003 Van de Vliert, E. (2006). Autocratic leadership around the globe: Do climate and wealth drive leadership culture? Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 37(1), 42–59. doi:10.1177/0022022105282294 Wendt, H., Euwema, M. C., & Van Emmerik, I. H. (2009). Leadership and team cohesiveness across cultures. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(3), 358–370. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.03.005

CULTURALLY RELEVANT LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION Culturally relevant leadership (CRL), as developed by Floyd D. Beachum, is a promising leadership framework that promotes increased awareness of diversity, a recognition of one’s own biases and perceptions, and the ability to make changes and lead in practical ways that increase educational equity. Leaders in schools are endeavoring to develop educational environments that are student-oriented, equitable, and lessen the chances of stereotyping, bias, and/or discrimination. School leaders can use CRL to influence the cultures and social climates of their buildings by using techniques based on three underlying tenets: (1) liberatory consciousness, (2) equitable insight, and (3) reflexive practice. Because CRL reflects demographic changes in American society is a way for these leaders to promote more diverse school interactions and environments.

Demographic Changes in American Society and K-12 Schools The demographic trend in the United States portends a future characterized by greater ethnic and racial diversity. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, by the year 2045, demographers project

that the United States will become a minority-majority nation—a country where those currently categorized as racial minorities will comprise the majority of the populace. Unfortunately, US schools are still highly segregated; many high-performing schools with reputations for being “good” are located in suburban areas, while a great majority of urban schools, with large numbers of students of color, are labeled as “bad.” This contributes to a cyclical problem in which families with social capital, influence, and resources continue to rent or buy homes in suburban areas. At the same time, rapid demographic changes are already happening in urban/ metropolitan areas, especially with young children. As noted by Kfir Mordehay and Gary Orfield in 2017, in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, 36 have surpassed the toddler (age 0–5) majority-minority point. As the country continues in this direction, this could bring significant challenges for schools. First, increasing diversity does not mean automatic integration and the realization of equitable educational outcomes. Second, while the student population is rapidly changing, the masses of teachers and administrators remain largely white. Such a combination of increasing diversity and persisting homogeneity could result in increased microaggressions, cultural collisions, and/or implicit bias. Although it is widely seen as fair, equitable, and necessary to recruit and retain educators of color, the current cadre of schoolteachers and administrators is predominantly white. Although membership in a particular racial or ethnic group is not itself the issue, problems can arise if white educators and school leaders who make important educational decisions act on stereotypes, misjudge, overdiscipline, underteach, and/or have low expectations for students of color. These actions could exemplify what is known as deficit thinking—a belief in the superiority of the dominant culture. When the worldview of educators and school leaders is one that sees difference as deficits, frames their own experience as the predominant experience, or dismisses the cultures and contributions of communities of color, then the result can be devastating and demeaning to everyone involved.

Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education

It should also be noted that many of the race-related problems that arise in schools are not a result of malicious intent. Thus, beliefs, perceptions, ideology, and worldview are key to educational success in the 21st century.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy According to arguments developed with regard to culturally relevant pedagogy, to be effective, teachers should promote more equitable relationships with students, create classroom environments whereby students are able to take more control of their learning, and these teachers should exhibit passion for their work/profession. At the same time, students must experience academic success, develop and maintain cultural competence, and develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.

Liberatory Consciousness Liberatory consciousness in this case is composed of knowledge and awareness. According to the CRL perspective, in order to be effective, school leaders should develop a knowledge of history, oppression, bias, and the connection between schools and society. This knowledge is not always easy to locate. In fact, a person can matriculate through the US K–12 education system and sometimes higher education without attaining adequate information regarding this knowledge. This knowledge facilitates the ability to critique oneself, others, and situations. It allows one to identify oppression, name invisible injustices, and recognize the complex interplay of individuals, institutions, and systems. Awareness, another element of liberatory consciousness, involves recognizing when others are being oppressed or when an injustice is occurring and then giving serious thought to the authenticity of what you may be witnessing. Far too many times, school leaders have minimized race-related incidents, tolerated sexist remarks, or ignored the plight of students with disabilities as they remained socially and physically separated in an isolated part of the school. Liberatory consciousness encourages a shift in a school leader’s mindset toward greater freedom or liberation.

219

Pluralistic Insight Pluralistic insight is the second tenet in CRL. It highlights the notions of attitude and analysis. In terms of attitude, pluralistic insight rejects deficit thinking and promotes an affirming perspective toward all students but especially students of color. The school leaders’ attitudes tend to impact their daily decision-making. Unfortunately, we are all subjugated to forms of complex socialization that impact what we believe and how we act. Thus, school leaders must address their attitudes to ensure that they are making equitable educational decisions. Another important component of pluralistic insight is analysis, which involves seeking out and integrating information. Other guidelines to achieve pluralistic insight include (a) engage and interact with diversity, (b) seek understanding with those who are different, (c) be trustworthy and reliable, and (d) be open.

Reflexive Practice The last tenet of CRL is reflexive practice. This idea positions school leaders as agents of change who use reflection and action to increase the potential for student success. These change agents place a high value on practice, skills, and action. They are driven by a practical understanding that institutional structures that maintain inequity are built and maintained by people. Reflexive practice rejects the stigmatization and denigration of vulnerable student groups and their communities. They give and expect respect as they build authentic reciprocal relationships. Reflexive practice encourages educational innovation, experimentation, and creativity. This can support the leader as they: (1) Encourage and support diverse teaching methods; (2) Create thoughtful learning communities that focus on student learning; (3) Share leadership opportunities and value multiple voices; (4) Connect the school with the community. Floyd D. Beachum, Kadia Nichelle Hylton-Fraser, and Carlos R. McCray See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Discrimination; Educational Attainment; Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership; Majority and Minority Influence; Racism in the United States

220

Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education

Further Readings Beachum, F. D. (2011). Culturally relevant leadership for complex 21st-century school contexts. In F. English (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of educational leadership: Advances in theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Beachum, F. D., & McCray, C. R. (2012). The fast and the serious: Exploring the notion of culturally relevant leadership. In J. Moore, & C. W. Lewis (Eds.), African American students in urban schools: Critical issues and solutions for achievement (pp. 231–247). Bern: Peter Lang Publishing. Ezzani, M., & Brooks, M. (2019). Culturally relevant leadership: Advancing critical consciousness in American Muslim students. Educational Administration Quarterly, 55(5), 781–811. doi:10. 1177/0013161X18821358 Harro, B. (2000). The cycle of socialization. In M. Adams, W. J. Blumenfield, R. Castaneda, H. W. Hackman, M. L. Peters, & X. Zuniga (Eds.), Reading for diversity

and social justice: An anthology on racism, anti-semitism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism (pp. 79–82). Milton Park: Routledge. Love, B. J. (2013). Developing a liberatory consciousness. In M. Adams, W. J. Blumenfield, R. Castaneda, H. W. Hackman, M. L. Peters, & X. Zuniga (Eds.), Reading for diversity and social justice: An anthology on racism, anti-semitism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism (pp. 601–605). Milton Park: Routledge. Mordehay, K., & Orfield, G. (2017). Demographic transformation in a policy vacuum: The changing face of U.S. metropolitan society and challenges for public schools. Educational Forum, 81(2), 193–203. doi:10. 1080/00131725.2017.1280758 U.S. Census Bureau. (2008). An older and more diverse nation by midcentury. Retrieved from https://www. census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/ cb12-243.html

D exploring the idea of the great Dao. Then, the second section of this entry focuses on what one ought to do (by not-doing)—that is, one’s moral obligations—to become virtuous. Finally, the entry concludes with a discussion on what constitutes good leadership according to the Daoist thought, which is exemplified in the image of the sage.

DAOIST MORAL OBLIGATIONS Perhaps no other school of thought harbors a more counterintuitive view of moral obligations than the Taoist/Daoist school. Unlike the explicit and detailed passages portraying the perfect picture of a Junzi, the Confucian term for an ideal moral exemplar in the Analects, the Daoists clearly have no concern for any of the required virtues a Junzi ought to possess. In fact, Daoist moral obligations, as well as Daoist leadership, embrace a rather negative meaning that defies a fixed and positive definition. In a nutshell, the Daoist obligation is to not act, and the perfect Daoist leader does not lead. To illuminate such a uniquely negative perspective of morality, the primary Daoist classical text, the Dao De Jing (also known as Laozi, accordingly named after its legendary author), will be explored. The Dao De Jing, though aimed at teaching morality and ethics, nonetheless deems that the traditionally conceived virtues, such as benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and filial piety, fail to lead anyone to moral excellence. Rather, the very act of promoting these virtues is a sign that the great Dao (the Way) has already been abandoned. Thus, to understand the Daoist morality and leadership, which seems to be full of contradictions, it is necessary to first examine the concept of the great De (the Virtue) expressed in the Dao De Jing, whose meaning is only accessible through

On the Concepts of De and Dao Without a doubt, an adequate understanding of the meaning of virtue is the first order of business if one wishes to gain any access to the moral teachings of Daoism, especially since this Daoist great Virtue seems to have nothing to do with the particular virtues traditionally attributed to a Junzi (the morally superior), such as benevolence and righteousness. It should not come as a surprise that, as the title of the text (The Classic of Dao and De) suggests, the concept of De is intertwined with the concept of Dao. Chapter 21 opens with a definitive statement about the relation between De and Dao: “The visage of the great De follows the Dao and the Dao only” (my translation). Therefore, it becomes clear that one must embark on an exploration of the Dao if one wishes to adequately grasp the concept of De, as De follows Dao only (i.e., to be virtuous is to simply follow the great Way). However, since a thorough study of the concept of Dao exceeds the scope of this entry, only a brief account of Dao with respect to its relation to De is

221

222

Daoist Moral Obligations

offered here. But, even within the limited scope that is set here, the task is far from simple and straightforward; for the great Way, as a concept, can be described as elusive at best, if not downright undefinable. Therefore, the strategy is to not force a clear and distinct definition onto the concept of Dao, but only to highlight those aspects of the great Way that inform the cultivation of the great Virtue. To begin with, it is apparent that the great Way has no fixed form or image and that it cannot be perfectly articulated in language. As “the formless form” and “the image of no thing” (Chapter 14), the Dao, thus, comprehends the opposites equally. That is to say, not only those diametrically opposed concepts should not be conceived as metaphysically incompatible but also their common source ought to be found in the Dao. The having and the having not, the long and the short, the high and low, the difficult and the easy, the beautiful and the ugly, etc., lean on each other, follow each other, manifest each other, and complete each other (Chapter 2). Therefore, if one follows the Dao faithfully, one will naturally see how erroneous it is to be fixed only on the so-called virtues, such as benevolence and righteousness. To devote oneself to the pursuit of particular virtues, one must harbor certain fixed ideas of the good and beautiful and contrast such ideas to the ideas of the bad and the ugly, which also must be fixed as a consequence. Nonetheless, as has been demonstrated in this entry, any metaphysical fixation of the ideas of the opposites misses the great path of the Dao. Or, rather, it is only when the great Dao is abandoned—that is, only when one fails to perceive that the so-called opposites are indeed originated from the common spring—that he or she begins to form the fixed ideas of good and evil and subsequently become obsessed with cultivating virtues predicated upon these ideas. Hence, those of the highest virtue are virtuous precisely because they do not strive for particular virtues, and vice versa, those of lowest virtue are not virtuous due to their fixation of particular virtues (Chapter 38). To sum up, to cultivate false and unnatural virtues is to deviate from being truly virtuous. Moreover, the great Dao also nourishes the myriad creatures. All things rely on the Dao for life, but the Dao does not dominate things as if it is

their master or owner (Chapter 34). Therefore, the highest Virtue, following the Dao in this respect, must also benefit the myriad creatures without competing with them. In this sense, the highest Virtue is like water, which provides life to everything but resides in places that all find repulsive; that is to say, it places itself below everything instead of above them (Chapter 8). This aspect of the great De is particularly pertinent to the concept of nonaction, which is further addressed in the following sections of this entry.

On the Principle of Moral Action: Act by Nonaction Thus far, it is clear that to be virtuous, one must not strive for particular virtues, especially those that are advocated by the Confucianists, for they are unnatural and will distract people from the great De. Opposing the conventional wisdom of Confucianism, the Daoist way to achieve the great Virtue seems to be rather befuddling: to act by nonaction. Chapter 48 declares that one does less and less each day in the pursuit of the Dao, and eventually one does nothing, but nothing is left undone. This instructive is so counterintuitive and it certainly poses great challenges for anyone who wishes to decipher the profound Daoist wisdom. To decode how the great Virtue can be achieved by not acting at all, it is critical to grasp the meaning of nonaction in Dao De Jing. It is safe to assume that by nonaction, the Daoist most likely does not mean a total state of inactivity or stasis. As is clear from the text, the Dao is not static; it moves away and returns—flows left and right (Chapters 42, 34, etc.). Therefore, to be one with the Dao, as is the demand of being virtuous, one cannot be completely immobile either. Therefore, the task at hand is to understand what exactly is entailed by this Daoist nonaction. To address this problem, the concept of self-soness, which is also often translated as self-spontaneity (ziran), can be of help. As it was briefly touched upon previously in this entry, water resembles the Dao in the sense that it provides the source of life to the myriad creatures, including human beings, but places itself below all things. Therefore, the one of the highest Virtue, just like water, nourishes the myriad creatures but does not prize itself to be their master. Simply put,

Daoist Moral Obligations

the highest Virtue is to let the myriad creatures be themselves, to express their self-spontaneity. As the myriad creatures move, the person of the highest Virtue watches them move and observes their patterns (Chapter 16). Not attempting to control the myriad creatures, the people around oneself, and one’s environment is to act by nonaction, and on the contrary, attempting to impose one’s fixed conception of good onto the world to act by action. The theoretical basis for such nonaction can be found in one chapter of Dao De Jing that discusses the relationship between human beings and the cosmos: “And so the Dao is great; heaven is great; earth is great; and the human being too is great. In the cosmos, there are four things that are great and the human being is one among them” (Chapter 25, my translation). Thus, it is clear that human beings, for the Daoist, are not masters of the universe or lords of the myriad creatures; instead the human beings are merely one player in this world, albeit how much importance and relevance humans assign to themselves. If this is the case, on no ground and by no right can human beings dominate the myriad creatures, the world, and each other. Thus, to be virtuous one must practice nonaction and let all things, including ourselves, to be self-so.

On Daoist Leadership: Lead by Following Finally, Daoist moral obligations are investigated through a study of the Daoist leadership. Unlike many other schools of thought (legalism, etc.), Daoism does not prescribe different sets of moral codes to leaders or the people, respectively. Instead, good leaders, according to Daoism, are those who are best at practicing nonaction. These moral exemplars are referred to as sages, and numerous passages are dedicated to describing the characters and the conducts of the sage. The sagely characters can be summarized in the following three points: 1. The sage is not benevolent. Like heaven and earth, the sage treats the people as straw dogs (Chapter 5). A straw dog is an object that is used for sacrifice. When the sacrifice is performed, it is decorated and placed on the pedestal to be worshipped. But after the sacrifice, it is thrown to the ground and trampled upon by everyone.

223

Just as the people treat the straw dog differently according to different situations, the sage also treats the people according to the appropriate circumstances. Different circumstances arise as the Dao moves, so the sage who acts accordingly simply observes the Dao. 2. The sage does not promote the so-called worthiness or cleverness in the people (Chapters 3 and 19). To promote worthiness and cleverness is to lead the people astray and make them deviate from the Dao, as these virtues only come about when the Dao is abandoned (Chapter 18). If the people live according to the Dao, they would be at ease and would not have the need to strive for these artificial and unnatural virtues. Thus, the sage gently guides the people back to their self-so-ness, instead of promoting these fabricated ideas that lure the people away from the Dao. 3. The sage places himself or herself behind the people. That is to say, the sage leads by following (Chapter 6). The reason a leader can become a leader, for Daoists, is precisely that he or she does not strive to become a leader. The sage does not act first; in fact, the sage reduces his or her action so that eventually he or she would not act at all. Not daring to place oneself first in the world (Chapter 67) is one of the necessary conditions of a leader.

Thus, to sum up, the greatest leader, or the person of the highest Virtue, is one whom the people do not even know is there. When living under the best leader (i.e., the sage), the people all say: “This is just who I am, or I am self-so” (Chapter 17). This is a testament to the sage’s sageliness as he or she can refrain himself or herself from action even in the position of great power. The sage resists the urge to make a difference or to leave a mark on those he or she leads; for the sage sees that the highest kind of leadership is not to alter the people externally, or to force a certain way of life onto them, but it is to let the people transform themselves according to the movement of the Dao, to be truly self-so. To conclude, the greatest Daoist leader is someone who excels at nonaction. Zhen Liang

224

Dark Triad

See also Confucian Ethics; Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Ethical Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Moral Character; Philosophy; Religion; Virtues

Further Readings Ames, R. T., & Huai-nan, T. (1994). The art of rulership: A study of ancient Chinese political thought. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002). The Daodejing of Laozi. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Lai, K. (2007). Ziran and Wuwei in the Daodejing: An ethical assessment. Dao, 6(4), 325–337. doi:10.1007/ s11712-007-9019-8 Zhuangzi, & Ziporyn, B. (2009). Zhuangzi: The essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co.

DARK TRIAD The dark triad consists of three related, but distinct, interpersonally aversive personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Dark triad traits have been related to several important organizational outcomes including leader emergence, leadership effectiveness, and leadership styles.

Origins of the Dark Triad The study of deviant or destructive personality traits could be argued to have its origins in work from the early 20th century by Emil Kraepelin in which he documented various types of destructive patterns of personality characterized by the lack of empathy, being erratic in behaviors and mood, propensity to engage in deceit, and suspiciousness of others. This work continued for almost 100 years with researchers typically studying the correlates and outcomes of a single trait. That changed in 2002 when Del Paulhus introduced the idea of a dark triad, a cluster of widely studied personality traits that he argued shared certain characteristics and outcomes. Specifically, this grouping consisted of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Referred to as dark because of their negative connotations and outcomes, these traits were also argued to be subclinical in nature. That is, they were not so severe as to render individuals unable to function in the everyday world. Rather, these characteristics are better understood as personality quirks that may be considered annoying or aversive to others. This followed the logic of a broader set of dark characteristics introduced earlier by Robert and Joyce Hogan which argued that such traits would typically only become interpersonally toxic when either displayed at very high levels or over extended periods. Since the dark triad was introduced, other aversive personality traits (e.g., sadism) have been suggested for inclusion in the set, but the dark triad is still the most widely used set for the study of dark personality in the workplace. Similarly, although several attempts have been made to try to uncover a core or higher order factor driving all three of these traits, there is general agreement that they represent distinct but related patterns of personality. Evidence suggests that the dark triad traits capture unique information about individuals beyond that of normal personality traits such as the Big Five and are therefore useful in enhancing the prediction of important work and life outcomes.

Components of the Dark Triad As noted earlier, there are three components to the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Each of these components is discussed in turn in the following subsections. Narcissism

Narcissism is characterized by feelings of superiority over others, a sense of entitlement, a strong desire for attention, vanity, and a willingness to exploit others. In essence, narcissism combines powerful needs for acclaim and achievement along with a tendency to see others as potential rivals that need to be diminished. This combination of positive and negative elements means that studies of narcissism often find that it can be associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Moreover, the manner in which narcissism becomes

Dark Triad

manifest in behaviors often depends on whether circumstances prompt the narcissist to consider other individuals as potential allies and supporters or rivals. Similarly, research has suggested that the confidence inherent in narcissists allows them to be charming in short-term contexts such as interviews, but that their hostile and selfish interpersonal nature ultimately leads to problems in long-term relationships. Machiavellianism

Machiavellianism is characterized by a willingness to, and taking even an enjoyment in, manipulating others. It is often associated with low levels of empathy and unconventional views of morality as well as a deep cynicism concerning the moral standards and behaviors of others. In essence, Machiavellians believe that the world is full of individuals who are selfishly advancing their own agendas at the expense of others. They justify their own behaviors as a logical response whereby they accept and adapt to the exploitative environment around them. Understandably, Machiavellianism is usually associated with higher levels of paranoia and distrust. At the same time, Machiavellians usually consider themselves to be intelligent and to have superior insights into the motives and hidden agendas of others. Psychopathy

Most models of psychopathy characterize it as a combination of high impulsivity and an inability to experience emotions or empathy. This leads psychopathic individuals to engage in reckless, dangerous, and frequently aggressive behaviors, but to rarely feel bad about the harm they have caused others or to learn from punishments they may have received for their actions. Other models argue that psychopathy also should be characterized as being associated with interpersonally dominant behaviors. Regardless of which model is used, psychopathy is nearly always considered to be the most destructive and dangerous of the dark triad traits. Individuals with higher levels of psychopathy are more likely to engage in unethical, even criminal, behavior and more likely to be

225

unemployed or to have an extensive history of quitting or being fired from jobs.

Measures of the Dark Triad The dark triad, like most personality characteristics, is most frequently studied through the use of self-report measures. However, given the nature of the traits, traditional measures of dark triad traits have been developed in accordance with conceptualizations of them. For example, the most popular narcissism measures typically require respondents to choose between two options where the narcissistic answer entails choosing describing oneself as excellent rather than merely good or between a description that emphasizes their superior abilities over the degree to which they get along with others. Similarly, traditional Machiavellianism measures require respondents to endorse cynical attitudes about others, while traditional psychopathy measures tend to ask respondents about past misdeeds or willing to engage in misbehaviors such as aggression, substance abuse, and even criminal activity. Several recently developed measures of the dark triad have attempted to reduce the scales substantially to make data collection easier but have frequently failed to adequately reflect the differences between the constructs, potentially resulting in false results and higher-than-expected intercorrelations between the dark triad traits. That said, short measures designed to more closely correspond to the theoretical models of these traits do show higher levels of construct validity. Other researchers have attempted to derive proxy measures of the dark triad from normal personality measures such as the Big Five. Although this approach has been shown to have some validity, it too frequently fails to adequately capture the nature and distinctiveness of the dark triad traits. It should also be noted that most of the self-report measures that have been developed for research purposes are not suitable for use in selection setting because their obvious antisocial item content means that applicants can easily determine the more socially appropriate response. Other approaches to studying the dark triad have been attempted. Observer reports of dark

226

Dark Triad

traits have often been suggested as a possibility given that most individuals are not willing to self-report highly aversive traits. However, one frequent problem with this approach is that observer perceptions of undesirable others tend not to be very nuanced. That is, they tend to rate individuals they do not like as being negative on most characteristics. Furthermore, observers do not have access to the hidden thoughts and schemes of individuals who may possess these traits. Similarly, if individuals high on dark triad traits are effective in their manipulations and deceit, their victims may not be aware that they are being exploited or lied to. One other frequently used approach for studying dark traits has been to try to detect them using their written or spoken language on social media, shareholder reports, or other platforms. This approach seemingly has the virtue of being less subject to human response biases, but it is also highly dependent on either human coders or machine learning approaches that may not necessarily have been adequately validated with other more established assessment methods.

Leadership and the Dark Triad Given the aversive nature of the dark triad traits, it is not surprising that most studies have generally found that individuals who score highly on these characteristics are rated as poor leaders by their subordinates and individuals working under such leaders report lower job satisfaction and higher levels of stress. In addition, most studies of the relationship between dark triad traits and leadership styles show that leaders high on these dark traits tend to be seen as more abusive and less ethical, authentic, and transformational. In spite of this, meta-analytic reviews of these traits have revealed that narcissists are actually more likely to be promoted into leadership positions and are no better or worse in terms of leader effectiveness. Similarly, individuals with higher levels of psychopathic tendencies are slightly more likely to achieve leadership positions but are also no more or likely to be effective in leadership roles. That said, subsequent analyses showed that both narcissism and psychopathy have nonlinear relationships with leader effectiveness in that they

seem to have positive effects on leader effectiveness at low levels but become negative at higher levels. Research also suggests that while males typically score higher on all three dark traits, female leaders typically face greater sanctions for exhibiting such dark tendencies. Several other moderators of the effects of dark personality on leadership outcomes have been investigated. For example, the degree of power or autonomy that a leader possesses will often serve as a disinhibiting factor for bad behavior. Specifically, when a leader has a great deal of power, they are less likely to see themselves as likely to be punished for bad behavior and become more likely to give in to their darker impulses. Similarly, the nature of the subordinates that a leader with dark traits is working with can determine how they will interact with them. For example, it is believed that narcissistic leaders may respond more positively to submissive followers because they are less likely to see them as a threat to their position. That said, there is also evidence that individuals with dark personality traits may be attracted to one another as work partners simply because they tend to be tolerant of one another’s behavior than most people. Finally, whether a leader is actually effective in their role may be a key determinant of whether subordinates come to view their behavior as being destructive. For example, it has been demonstrated that when narcissistic leaders are effective, their subordinates tend to view them as being more charismatic. It is only when the narcissistic leaders are characterized by failure that subordinates tend to describe them in negative, narcissistic terms. P. D. Harms See also Autocratic Leadership; Big Five Personality Traits; Narcissistic Leadership; Toxic Leadership

Further Readings Back, M., Kufner, A., Dufner, M., Gerlach, M., Tanja, M., Rauthmann, J., & Denissen, J. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 105, 1013–1037. doi:10.1037/a0034431 Cragun, O., Olsen, K., & Wright, P. (2020). Making CEO narcissism research great: A review and meta-analysis

Death Positivity Bias and Leadership of CEO narcissism. Journal of Management, 46, 908–936. doi:10.1177/0149206319892678 Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D., Gaddis, B., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linear and nonlinear relationships. Personnel Psychology, 68, 1–47. doi:10. 1111/peps.12072 Grosz, M., Harms, P. D., Dufner, M., Kraft, L., & Wetzel, E. (2020). Reducing the overlap between Machiavellianism and subclinical psychopathy: The M7 and P7 scales. Collabra, 6, 17799. doi:10.1525/ collabra.17799 Hogan, R., & Hogan, J. (2001). Assessing leadership: A view from the dark side. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 40–51. doi:10.1111/14682389.00162 Landay, K., Harms, P. D., & Crede´ , M. (2019). Shall we serve the dark lords? A meta-analytic review of psychopathy and leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104, 183–196. doi:10.1037/ apl0000357 Paulhus, D., & Williams, K. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556–568. doi:10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00505-6 Spain, S. M., Harms, P., & LeBreton, J. M. (2014). The dark side of personality at work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35, S41–S60. doi:10.1002/ job.1894

DEATH POSITIVITY BIAS LEADERSHIP

AND

The death positivity bias refers to people’s tendency to evaluate the dead more favorably than the living. The bias was first identified in 2005 by Scott Allison and Dafna Eylon, and it has since been replicated by Kento Tsutsumida in Japan and Milena Drzewiecka in Poland. Compared to the living, the dead are viewed as possessing a higher degree of morality, likeability, and ability. To demonstrate the bias, researchers typically employ a methodology in which participants are first given a biographical description of an individual, often a leader, and then are asked to rate the person’s traits, accomplishments, or legacy. One half of the participants are informed that the individual is still

227

living, whereas the other half are told that the person has passed away. Results of these students consistently show a bias toward increased positive ratings for the dead individual compared to the living individual. Most notably, deceased individuals are judged to be stronger leaders than living individuals. This entry considers explanations for the death positivity bias, real-world examples of the bias, and phenomena related to it.

Explanations for the Death Positivity Bias Explanations for the death positivity bias generally fall into one of four categories. First, researchers have pointed to strong prescriptive norms and customs that encourage favorable verbal descriptions of the dead. Eulogies for even the worst among us almost always focus on positive attributes. An important limitation of this theory is that it does not explain the origin or cause of these prescriptive norms lauding the dead. A second explanation for the bias centers on strong expectations of reciprocity. Reciprocity norms are powerful influencers of social behavior in domains such as cooperation and altruism. The idea here is that people are motivated to speak favorably of the dead with the hope and expectation that doing so will enhance the probability that others will speak favorably of them upon their own death. A third explanation for the death positivity bias is based on evolutionary theory. The argument here is that humans have evolved to glean positive qualities from the dead as a mechanism for enhancing their own and their community’s reproductive fitness. All people encounter others who have undergone suffering, such as underdogs, the downtrodden, and the dying. These suffering individuals serve as positive role models for traits such as courage, resilience, determination, and resourcefulness. Thus, our efforts to understand suffering and learn from it, and our need for heroes who overcome suffering, may inspire us to revere the dead. A fourth explanation for the death positivity bias is based on terror management theory, which posits that nearly all humans are terrified of the prospect of death and eternal annihilation. To mitigate this terror, people construct worldviews that are rich in meaning and purpose. Our fear of

228

Death Positivity Bias and Leadership

death is tamed to the extent that we view ourselves and similar others as important contributors to this worldview. In this way, our anxiety is eased, our self-esteem is heightened, and we find solace in achieving a form of symbolic immortality. Terror management research has shown that people tend to assign higher morality ratings to heroes who affirm their worldviews. Doing so reinforces people’s motivation to believe that heroes are significant contributors to a meaningful world whose contributions will continue to exist after death. Terror management research has also shown that the simple act of thinking about death tends to amplify morality judgments. Thus, heroic leaders who have passed away are seen as especially heroic.

Real-World Examples of the Death Positivity Bias There are numerous examples of the death positivity bias in evaluations of leadership effectiveness. Dean Keith Simonton has published extensive work analyzing the reputations of US presidents, and his research shows a clear pattern of presidents who are assassinated receiving a significant positive bump in reputational scores. Leaders who die young are especially likely to be evaluated favorably. Leaders and celebrities achieve iconic or legendary status by virtue of dying at an early age. Consider the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley, Amy Winehouse, Bruce Lee, Princess Diana, and Tupac Shakur. These individuals enjoyed meteoric young career trajectories and their premature deaths are viewed as denying them further unprecedented greatness. The phenomenon of the death positivity bias being stronger for premature deaths has been called the Billy Joel effect, named after the singer who penned the 1977 song, Only the Good Die Young. Leaders also receive a reputational bump when they suffer a long lingering death. Consider the case of Ronald Reagan, who for years suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. His brave battle with this illness likely heightened praise and muted criticisms of his presidency. Celebrities such as Christopher Reeve, whose injuries left him paralyzed and shortened his life, and Gilda Radner,

who struggled with ovarian cancer, have been heroicized for their courageous suffering. Not all causes of death produce the same level of death positivity bias. Research shows that a long, suffering death produces the strongest bias, followed by death from accidents and death from other natural causes. There is no death positivity bias for self-inflicted deaths, however. This latter effect may be changing as societal condemnation of suicide has begun to wane.

Phenomena Related to the Death Positivity Bias Scholars have identified a number of different psychological and sociological phenomena related to the death positivity bias. First, there is the death polarization effect. This effect identifies the conditions under which the death positivity bias morphs into a death negativity bias. Participants in this research were presented with descriptions of leaders whose actions were either moral or immoral. Whereas dead moral leaders were seen as more moral than living moral leaders, dead immoral leaders were judged as more immoral than living immoral leaders. Thus, death tends to extremitize evaluations of a leader depending on the leader’s perceived level of morality. A second phenomenon related to death positivity is called the frozen-in-time effect. This effect describes people’s tendency to freeze their judgments of a leader once a leader has died. In one study, Dafna Eylon and Scott Allison gave participants descriptions of a leader who either had passed away or was still living. Participants were then given information about the leader that conflicted with their first impression of the leader. The results showed that participants were less likely to change their impressions of a dead leader than their impressions of a living leader in response to this new information. In short, people’s mental representations of living leaders are malleable in response to inconsistent information, whereas their beliefs about dead leaders tend to resist change. A third phenomenon related to the death positivity bias is called the death positivity movement. This describes a social and philosophical movement that encourages people to speak openly about death, dying, and corpses. The movement

Death Positivity Bias and Leadership

represents pushback from the Western bias toward considering death a negative and taboo subject. The death positivity movement encourages people to express their feelings about death through verbal expression and through the creative arts. Famed psychiatrist Irvin Yalom observed: Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality. (Yalom, 2009, p. 116)

In this sense, the death positivity movement is part of the 21st century’s emphasis on wellness and well-being through greater education and awareness of fundamental life and death processes. A fourth phenomenon related to the death positivity bias is what might be called the phenomenon of death positivity unification. The idea here is that the death of prominent individuals or leaders can unify and mobilize followers far more powerfully than if the deaths had not occurred. There are three striking examples of death unification. First, consider the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 citizens, including 415 heroic emergency personnel who died while saving lives at the World Trade Center in New York City. As a result of these deaths, the United States became extremely unified in mourning and in fashioning a response to the attacks. A second example of death positivity unification was seen in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two citizens killed by police officers in the summer of 2020. Floyd and Taylor’s deaths helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. A third example of death positivity unification occurred in response to the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, aspired to sow discord and anarchy throughout the nation, but Lincoln’s death had the opposite effect. Historian David Reynolds has argued that no death in American history has done more to unify the American people than the death of Abraham Lincoln. After Lincoln’s death, the poet Walt Whitman gave a series of lectures in which he argued that

229

The final use of the heroic eminent life— especially of a heroic eminent death—is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race, and to give a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than anything in written constitution, or courts or armies – namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly with that people. (Whitman, p. 314)

In summary, death has a robust psychological effect on individuals and society. At the individual level, the news of someone’s passing triggers overly favorably evaluations of the deceased (the death positivity bias) and renders beliefs about the deceased unmalleable (the frozen-in-time effect). The death positivity bias in evaluations of the dead is stronger for deaths that involve a long, painful struggle, and it is weaker for deaths by suicide. Death also leads to polarized evaluations on the dimension of morality, with the moral dead seen as more moral than the moral living and the immoral dead seen as more immoral than the immoral living. Finally, death is the great unifier. The more heroic the individual who has passed, the more that individual’s death will unite and mobilize a people or a cause. Scott T. Allison See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Heroic Leadership; Implicit Leadership Theories; Romance of Heroism; Terror Management Theory

Further Readings Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2008). Deifying the dead and downtrodden: Sympathetic figures as inspirational leaders. In C. L. Hoyt, G. R. Goethals, & D. R. Forsyth (Eds.), Leadership at the crossroads: Psychology and leadership. Westport, CT: Praeger. Allison, S. T., & Eylon, D. (2005). The demise of leadership: Death positivity biases in posthumous impressions of leaders. In D. Messick & R. Kramer (Eds.), The psychology of leadership: New perspectives and research (pp. 295–317). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Erlbaum. Allison, S. T., Eylon, D., Beggan, J. K., & Bachelder, J. (2009). The demise of leadership: Positivity and negativity in evaluations of dead leaders. The Leadership Quarterly, 20, 115–129. Drzewiecka, M., & Cwalina, W. (February 2020). “The late leader”: Influence of political leader’s death on

230

Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of

their evaluation. Journal of Political Marketing. doi:10. 1080/15377857.2020.1724410 Eylon, D., & Allison, S. T. (2005). The frozen in time effect in evaluations of the dead. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1708–1717. Reynolds, D. S. (2020). Abe: Abraham Lincoln in his times. London: Penguin Press. Simonton, D. K. (1987). Why presidents succeed: A political psychology of leadership. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tsutsumida, K. (2014). A study of the death positivity bias in the evaluation of a painting. Journal of Human Environmental Studies, 18, 31–36. Whitman, W. (1897). Death of Abraham Lincoln. In Complete prose works. Philadelphia, PA: David McKay. Yalom, I. (2009). Staring at the sun. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

DECEPTION ETHICS OF

AND

MANIPULATION,

This entry provides the philosophical tools for understanding the ethical case against deception and manipulation. Given the potential effectiveness of these tactics, such an understanding is all the more important in the context of leadership. After identifying the various means by which leaders may gain follower compliance, the entry continues with an examination of the practices of deception and manipulation in the light of what prominent philosophers of morality and ethics have stated. The final section presents the views of several contemporary scholars on the ethical foundations of leaders’ reliance upon means other than rational persuasion to influence followers.

Assessing the Means of Leadership Leadership involves getting people to do things. Some means, of course, will be both less effective and less ethical than others. For example, there are all kinds of reasons for leaders not to use force to gain follower compliance. One practical fact that speaks against the effectiveness of coercion is that its exercise is quite costly. There are also legitimate ethical norms against the use of coercion, norms embedded in the institutions of democratic societies.

In fact, leaders who too often resort to force expose themselves to the accusation that they are not exercising leadership after all. As Terry Price points out in Leadership and the Ethics of Influence, making people do things is not the same as getting people to do things. It is getting that we associate with the exercise of leadership. Other means for securing follower compliance more easily pass the test of effectiveness, even if there are ethical worries about them. One reason deception and many forms of manipulation work better than force in the leadership context is that their use is hidden from the deceived or manipulated target. By definition, a deceived person does not know that the information on which she is acting is false. She thinks she is acting on good reasons, but her reasons have less power than she thinks because she does not properly grasp the facts. Philosopher Robert Noggle argues that in cases of manipulation, the manipulator often draws attention away from relevant reasons for action and, instead, uses less than ideal considerations to motivate the target of manipulation. Leaders sometimes use deception and manipulation although many of the same moral objections that apply to the use of force also apply to these means of gaining follower compliance. Although deceiving or manipulating targets can look like cases of getting people to do things—and they can feel this way to their targets—use of these tactics is ultimately much closer to making followers do what the leader wants them to do rather than getting them to. What can appear to be an acceptable instance of everyday leadership can thus be something much more worrisome from an ethical perspective.

The Moral Case Against Deception We can define deception as using words or actions with the aim of getting another person to believe something false. Intent is central to the meaning of the concept. Clearly, we can mislead others without deceiving them. Sometimes the explanation for why we cause others to believe something false is simply that we ourselves are ignorant, not that we are being deceptive. So, we do not want to include under the concept of deception all behavior that might lead others to adopt a falsehood. Of course, we can also be to blame for nondeceptive deviations

Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of

from truthfulness—in the case of ignorance, say, because we should have known better. In true cases of deception, philosophers broadly agree that there is something morally problematic about it. There is less consensus, however, about exactly what makes deception wrong. Philosophers in the deontological tradition, such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), hold that deception disrespects the reason associated with autonomous agency. First, as Kant claims in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, deceptive behavior cannot be universalized. It works only in social conditions characterized by mutual trust. If everyone engaged in deception, it would undermine the very conditions necessary for the efficacy of the behavior. That makes deception unreasonable. Second, deception bypasses the reasoning capacities of its target and, therefore, precludes the exercise of autonomous agency. Utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) offer a different set of moral considerations against the use of deception. According to Mill, we have to consider not only the immediate effects of our actions but also their wide-ranging consequences. In Utilitarianism, he offers two reasons for thinking that deception is unlikely to be a utility-maximizing strategy from this perspective. Even when deception would otherwise promote overall utility, it corrupts our character and, therefore, makes us more likely to deceive others in cases in which there are few utility-based reasons for doing so. Deception also threatens the institution of truth-telling on which we all rely. In short, deception is both personally and socially corrosive. To be sure, when we consider the consequences of our actions from the broadest perspective, there will be some cases in which deception is clearly the utility-maximizing action. Mill admits as much and defends the conclusion that whatever the merit of the rule against deception, there must be exceptions to it. To make his point, he refers to commonly recognized examples in which deviations from the prohibition on deception would be justified: the murderer-at-your-door case and the case of medical paternalism. According to Mill, we would be justified in deceiving the murderer to protect his potential victim and, also, in deceiving a patient when the truth about her illness would do her much more harm than good.

231

Kantians have a harder time showing how deception might be justified in any circumstances. First, the very idea that there can be exceptions to the rule would seem to defeat the purpose of a requirement of universalization. Second, even the person intent on killing someone is an autonomous agent deserving of our respect. The most obvious Kantian strategy for dealing with such cases without making an exception is to deny that the behavior in question falls under the prohibition after all. In some works, Kant himself seems drawn to this strategy. Contemporary Kantian Christine Korsgaard goes further and argues that lying to murderers-at-the-door can indeed be universalized and, therefore, that the behavior is justified in the difficult moral conditions in which these potential liars find themselves. Other contemporary Kantians, such as Jessica Flanigan, embrace a more expansive notion of deception and understand it as the moral equivalent of any form of strategic behavior. She holds that this broader prohibition on deception gives rise to a requirement of authenticity in the leadership context. When inauthenticity is justified— for example, to achieve good outcomes such as a more just society—it is a true exception to the rule. Inauthenticity is always wrong, but its wrongness can be outweighed by the moral value that is achieved by engaging in inauthentic behavior. Against requirements of authenticity and the expansive notion of deception on which they depend, other leadership scholars in the Kantian tradition such as Price argue that authenticity is not a moral requirement in the first place and, moreover, that such a requirement is all the more unacceptable in the leadership context.

Manipulation Noggle and other philosophers correctly emphasize that manipulation cannot be fully understood in terms of deception. In other words, manipulation is not the same thing as, or a species of, deception. Equally, deceptiveness does not explain why manipulative behavior is wrong. To be sure, the target of manipulation will often be deceived or, at least, ignorant of critical facts about what is going on. For example, flattery works best when the person being flattered does not know what the

232

Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of

flatterer is up to—namely, using compliments to get the flattered to do what the flatterer wants. But, as Price points out, not all cases of successful flattery are like this. Flattery can be effective even when we know perfectly well what is going on. Awareness that we are targets of manipulation fails to undermine the effectiveness of this tactic in other cases too. Manipulation latches on to our fears, anxieties, and what we care about—in order to get compliance. One reason for our failure to fend off such tactics is that we can detach the wrongness of the manipulator’s conduct from the moral status of our own behavior. For example, when we are manipulated into feeling responsible for some bad outcome, we can still ask whether we should feel that way—that is, whether responsibility really lies with us—regardless of how we came to feel that way. The answer to that question becomes the primary consideration in our determination of how we should act, specifically, whether we ought to do what the manipulator is trying to get us to do. Manipulation thus creates a kind of normative ambiguity that is not always resolved simply by recognizing that the behavior that prompted the ambiguity was manipulative. The same basic questions that arise about the moral status of deception also arise for manipulation. We can ask whether manipulation is always wrong or at least wrong to some extent or other. If we answer in the affirmative, we might appeal to good consequences to justify it, as utilitarians and some Kantians do. If, instead, there are cases in which manipulation is not wrong at all, then there is nothing left to be justified. Marcia Baron defends this conclusion in The Mens Rea and Moral Status of Manipulation, her contribution to Christian Coons and Michael Weber’s 2014 edited collection Manipulation: Theory and Practice. As we might expect, Kantians who worry about allowing exceptions into the moral analysis of manipulation will be inclined to adopt this strategy.

are ordinarily criticizing the behavior in question. One worry, then, is that the negative associations with the word manipulation will lead us to assume that it is always wrong. In A Framework for Assessing the Moral Status of “Manipulation,” another essay in Coons and Weber’s collection Manipulation, J. S. Blumenthal-Barby aims to avoid these confusions by focusing more broadly on influence tactics that depart from the ideals of rational persuasion. Leadership relies heavily on tactics other than rational argumentation. In fact, we would be hard pressed to come up with examples of successful leadership that appeal primarily, let alone exclusively, to the rational capacities of followers. For this reason, leadership scholars go to great lengths to articulate the conditions under which the influence associated with leadership is justified. As in moral arguments more generally, justifications for the exercise of nonargumentative influence typically point to good consequences, the value of autonomy, or a combination of the two. Some leadership theories are essentially paternalistic. James MacGregor Burns’s theory of transforming leadership and Michael Brown, Linda Treviño, and David Harrison’s ethical leadership theory defend the various forms of influence that leaders use on the grounds that these tactics are necessary to achieve the true ends of followers or that the influence exercised by leaders gets followers to be more ethical. Other theories, such as Price’s theory, defend the influence tactics on antipaternalistic grounds: Autonomous agents consent to the influence associated with leadership so that they can achieve the ends to which they are committed. Still other theories such as that of Cass Sunstein draw on the values of both well-being and autonomy to defend influence tactics strong enough to nudge followers to get what they (followers) say they care about but not so strong that followers cannot choose for themselves. Terry L. Price

Remaining Issues Negative connotations associated with the word manipulation tend to confuse our moral analysis. When we make an attribution of manipulation, we

See also Authentic Leadership; Coercive Management; Ethical Leadership Theory; Ethics and Effectiveness; Influence Tactics for Leaders; Leader Exceptionalism; Paternalism; Transforming Leadership

Decision-Making Theory

Further Readings Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. Manhattan, NY: Harper & Row. Coons, C., & Weber, M. (Eds.). (2014). Manipulation: Theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flanigan, J. (2015). The ethics of authentic leadership. In J. Boaks & M. P. Levine (Eds.), Leadership and ethics (pp. 151–173). London: Bloomsbury. Kant, I. (1964). Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals (H. J. Paton, Trans.). Manhattan, NY: Harper & Row. Korsgaard, C. M. (1986). The right to lie: Kant on dealing with evil. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 15(4), 325–349. Mill, J. S. (1979). Utilitarianism. In G. Sher (Ed.), Cambridge, MA: Hackett. Noggle, R. (1996). Manipulative actions: A conceptual and moral analysis. American Philosophical Quarterly, 33(1), 43–55. Price, T. L. (2020). Leadership and the ethics of influence. London: Routledge. Sunstein, C. R. (2016). The ethics of influence: Government in the age of behavioral science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DECISION-MAKING THEORY At its most general level, decision-making possesses three key elements. The first is a preferred goal or set of goals. The second is some means for achieving those preferred goals. The third element refers to the selection of the preferred option or mechanism that may be employed to achieve results. How these elements are characterized and fit together varies from approach to approach and in the justification of each of these elements. Organizational decision-making is also affected by members’ levels of education and personal experience and how they frequently understand or identify decision problems differently. This is due to personal cognitive processing of personal knowledge, values, and experiences. Also, due to time and information constraints, often one of the most plausible solutions would be

233

chosen to solve the problem or attain the identified goal. The effectiveness of the solution depends on a variety of factors, such as how the decision-making processes are distributed, and the context in which it is applied. This entry begins with an overview of models and general approaches to decision-making. Next, organizational structures and processes of decision-making is reviewed, followed by an examination of how tentative solutions and learning can lead to better decision-making. The entry concludes by looking at how the objective knowledge growth framework (OKGF) can be utilized by leaders to help improve the effectiveness of their decision-making skills.

General Approaches to Decision-Making Decisions are frequently made under conditions of risk where the probability of success is known. Decision-makers may, in such instance, recommend a choice that hedges against the worst possible, or imagined, outcome. This is known as the maximin criterion of rationality, the central argument of which was a thought experiment where people were invited to choose principles of justice for a society where they were ignorant of what social position they would occupy. People, it was claimed, would choose principles that would hedge against them being in the worst-off position. Perhaps the dominant perspective on decisionmaking is captured by rational choice models; that is, models that identify certain means as the most rational way of achieving identified goals. Rational choice models of decision-making, however, have several serious problems. One problem is that the value of a goal, or the strength of a person’s preference for it, is sensitive to how the goal is described. A parent’s decision to send their child to what is accurately known as the best school in the city may yield a different result if the school is also accurately described as the school on the corner of Third and Elm Street. Preference for goals is also labile, as goals mostly arrive in clusters rather that as single, isolated aims. For example, the perceived value of paying fees for a favored private school may compete unfavorably if a mortgage is increased on a favored dwelling. In general, our social sciences are not strong enough to identify, with any certainty, what might

234

Decision-Making Theory

happen when a decision is implemented. The sheer causal complexity of successive chains of events compromises our knowledge of ways of bringing about goals. For example, assigning probabilities as to how people will react to the implementation strategy adopted to reach a desired goal is exceedingly difficult, especially where a person’s reaction can be contingent upon seeing how others react, and then on how they revise their reaction upon seeing that person’s initial reaction. All the initial conditions relevant to a decision and all the consequent causal processes following the decision’s implementation are largely unknowable or beyond our cognitive resources. As a result, the task of making optimal decisions cannot be achieved, and decision-makers should aim for satisfactory decisions. So, instead of trying to optimize, one should satisfice the issue with realistic decisionmaking goals. Data-based decision-making, on the one hand, refers to an ongoing process of collecting and analyzing different types of data (summative and formative) to make informed decisions about potential outcomes. Data-driven decision-making, on the other hand, refers to the collection and analysis of data to make specific, often time-sensitive decisions. This type of data is often linked with big data and data analytics, particularly quantitative, statistical analytics. Finally, data-informed decisionmaking is a term used when data and facts are an influential factor, but not the only factor in decisionmaking. For example, organizational leaders may not base their decisions purely on the hard data of quantitative research but also on softer data of qualitative research that may be more descriptive in nature.

Decision-Making and Organizational Structures Although there has been a clear shift since the 1990s from emphasizing organizations as systems toward more leader-centric views where the organizational chart reflects hierarchical structures, these alternatives are not always seen as exclusive of one another. If the biggest difficulty with decision-making in complex organizational contexts is information and cognitive limits to our rationality, then the

conceptualization of organizations as systems offers some advantages. Of the many properties that systems theory posits as accruing to systems, the most important is feedback. Systems function dynamically through time and are able to adjust their behavior in response to feedback from earlier behavior and its consequences. Some organizational policy processes follow this single-loop feedback model. Feedback showing a goal is not being achieved may prompt more action than continuing to apply the same policy. It may prompt a review of that policy and a decision to try an alternate decision. This is sometimes called double-loop learning. The biggest advantage of these arrangements is that they reduce the demand for all relevant knowledge and cognitive resources to be marshalled before a decision is made. Instead, they allow fallible decisions to be made but then allow improvement or correction through feedback about consequences. Despite its advantages in reducing the burden on decision-making, systems views of organizations have an important limitation. Traditionally, systems accounts of organizations were crafted to explain the stability of organizations, even when operating at the edge of their operational parameters. So, a major purpose of feedback loops is much more than correcting errors. It is also able to explain why organizations, disturbed in their functioning, can return to equilibrium. Unfortunately, an organization’s capacity to return to equilibrium also compromises systems theory’s ability to account for change. While it may help deal with the issue of change, shifting decisionmaking from structures and processes of organizations that learn to the skills demanded of individual leaders does not resolve problems of limited knowledge and cognition. This problem is less a matter of the knowledge and cognitive limitations of leaders than about intrinsic unknowable features of the complex realities in which leaders are expected to act. There are some things that leaders cannot know because no one can know them. The solution is to apply a version of organizational learning as learning through feedback to leaders acting in more distributed contexts of decisionmaking, where problem-solving trajectories are realized through many participants solving specific problems.

Decision-Making Theory

235

Distributed leadership represents a conceptual and analytical approach to understanding how leadership may be diffused among the people in a complex organization. Distributed leadership has gained popularity because it emphasizes the how of leadership rather than the what of leadership. When utilizing distributed leadership, a framework that allows leaders to determine how to interact with the various actors in their organizations when making decisions is imperative to the generating of useful knowledge. Thus, the actions of various actors in an organization may contribute to a more comprehensive account of leadership. Although leaders make countless decisions, some of which are inconsequential and programmed such as routine, low-level, quantitative decisions, it is the nonprogrammed decisions that are novel, unfamiliar, ambiguous, and complex. These more complex decisions would benefit from actors’ contributions, assessment, and evaluation of the situation.

elimination, and a new situation continues until a suitable solution is derived. Popper’s schema is useful in providing an explanation of what happens whenever learning takes place, pertaining to decision-making. The process of error elimination functions as a feedback loop and also acts as a problem-solving tool. It is continuous and is often unconscious. As new problems—different from the initial problem—emerge from a process of trial-and-error elimination, they are addressed in the same fashion. Once the attempt is made to solve a problem, the tentative solution exists in the history of the situation and, whether or not the decision-maker has understood, a new state of affairs has been brought about. This new state of affairs will present further challenges for the decision-maker, which may lead to a series of new problems and new tentative solutions. The process continues until a reasonably satisfactory resolution is achieved.

Critical Self-Learning and Organizational Learning: A Popperian Perspective

The Objective Knowledge Growth Framework

This section features Sir Karl Popper’s evolutionary analysis of learning and the nature of learning, ending with an illustration of how learning through trial and error provides leaders with opportunities to challenge, discuss, and question their assumptions or theories, as well as to experiment with solutions to problems they encounter in their organizational practices. Many social scientists strongly believe that learning is inherently social, as learners engage in dialogue with others. There is little argument that individuals learn in a social context and engage with problems, theories, hypotheses, and arguments. One cannot deny, however, that learning is an activity that takes place at the individual rather than at the group level, as well. According to Popper’s evolutionary analysis of learning, all learning embodies the same process of error elimination. In the Popperian schema, a tentative solution is applied to the initial problem. If the tentative solution does not resolve the issue, this and other tentative solutions are eliminated through criticism or implausibility and, this, in turn, gives rise to a new problem. The cycle of tentative solution, error

Theories are most useful for influencing practice when they suggest new ways in which events and situations can be perceived. The distributed perspective of leadership provides a view of who makes what decision in the work of leadership. When used in conjunction with the OKGF, an application of Popper’s schema to the social sciences, it also reveals how leaders are using their decision-making skills to achieve desired results and whether they are effective or not. The OKGF also identifies how leaders may go about refining their decisions when they are unable to solve the identified problem. Distributed leadership theory provides users with a frame to help them and others interpret and reflect on their practice for rethinking and revisiting decisions. As such, the distributed leadership approach may act as a tool but not as a blueprint for transforming leadership practice. In short, a distributed perspective may have implications for how we understand practice and, when combined with the OKGF, may provide an analysis of how to improve practice. In this way, the OKGF helps to illuminate strategic spots by seeking feedback, thus shedding light over a broader landscape that would otherwise be hidden.

236

Democratic Leadership

With respect to distributed leadership, the practice of selling the vision of the organization no longer resides solely on the actions of the leaders, but on the interactions of various actors within the organization, as evidenced by the distributed nature of the decision-making. Furthermore, having a robust structured framework, such as the OKGF, provides these leaders with a more comprehensible description of their decision-making process and how they may resolve their identified problem in a distributed perspective of leadership. The framework also acts as a safety rail for them. Different leaders will (and must) have different answers to the same problems. Problems also exist at different levels, on a continuum between routinization and ritualization. The former erases the need for human agency, while the latter requires it. No decision-making model will provide leaders with the right answers to their dilemmas because different leaders facing the same problems may use opposing theories, options, choices, or solutions and they may be right in doing so due to contextual factors. Similarly, in a busy day or week, leaders may be inclined to take the shortest distance between two points in the decision-making process: problem identification to problem resolution. The implementation of a decision-making model may occasionally introduce unnecessary points along the route to problem resolution and may not be laboriously applied in all decision-making situations. An instinctively pragmatic solution may produce effective results, but, in order to reduce irrational outcomes, the systematic approach employed by a decision-making model is preferable. However, no model is completely problem free in itself. For example, decision-making models needs to be managed, implemented, and sustained locally if they are to provide the maximum benefits to decision-makers. If the model is able to provide decision-makers with good, sound solutions to their problems by helping them to distance themselves from their emotions and confirmation biases, which often distracts them from solving problems, then its use will have been worthwhile. Stephanie Chitpin See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Cooperation; Procedural Justice

Further Readings Heap, S. H., Hollis, M., Sugden, R., & Weale, A. (1992). The theory of choice: A critical guide. Oxford: Blackwell. Peterson, M. (2009). An introduction to decision theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511800917 Simon, H. A. (1945). Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organization. New York, NY: The Free Press. Swann, J. (2012). Learning, teaching and education research in the 21st century: An evolutionary analysis of the role of teachers. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group. Zey, M. (Ed.). (1992). Decision making: Alternatives to rational choice models. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP Democracy means the rule of the people. Yet from its earliest days in Athens, democracy has always had leaders—some good, some bad. Throughout history, various leaders and political theorists have reflected on what constitutes good democratic leadership. Some, like Aristotle, have argued that leaders must moderate democratic excesses, whereas others, like Machiavelli, insist that leaders ought to satisfy the desires of the people. In defending the United States Constitution, James Madison praised it for creating the proper distance between the people and their representatives so that it was not the temporary passions but rather the judgment of the people that would prevail. The relation between leaders and public opinion is therefore critical, particularly with regard to the executive power in democracies. This entry begins by reviewing the origins of democratic leadership in Athens, Aristotle’s beliefs on the subject, and Machiavelli’s view on what could be considered modern democratic leadership, which is further examined. The entry then explores the relationship between an executive in power and popular opinion. The entry concludes with a look at a progressive view of democratic leadership.

Democratic Leadership

Democratic Leadership in Ancient Athens Despite its exclusionary citizenship practices, ancient Athens is widely considered to have been a practical democracy: All adult male citizens were eligible to hold public office, and the majority of these offices were selected not via elections—which were considered aristocratic—but lot. Most important decisions were made by the Assembly, which empowered those leaders capable of persuasive speech. The historian Thucydides even observed that, under the leadership of Pericles, Athens was a democracy in name only. The danger of these demagogues—literally, leaders of the people—was famously dramatized by Plato in his Republic, which showed how an unscrupulous leader can stoke economic resentment among the people in order to institute a tyranny. The solution Socrates proposes, of course, is for philosophers to rule, a controversial suggestion that scholars have tended to deride as, if not ironic, then impractical— and perhaps even abandoned in his later works, like the Laws.

Aristotle and the Moderating Task of Democratic Leadership Plato’s student Aristotle predicted that in the future most cities would be democratic, and so he spent a great deal of time in his Politics analyzing democracies. Like Plato, he observes that most democracies are dominated by the poor multitude, but he also suggests that they are based, in principle, on a particular understanding of justice. Democrats believe that insofar as citizens are equally free, they ought to share equally in all things; oligarchs believe, by contrast, that insofar as the rich are superior in wealth, they ought to be superior in all things. Aristotle finds each of these beliefs to be partially true, if reflective of the particular interests of each group, and thus capable of being reconciled in a mixed regime dedicated to the common good. However, if taken as simply true, each can also lead to the destruction of the regime. Aristotle thus distinguishes between varieties of democracy on the basis of the extent to which they recognize the limits of the democratic understanding of justice. A democracy that absolutizes

237

the democratic principle of justice will make the majority of citizens in the assembly authoritative, undermining the rule of law and transforming the city into a tyranny. Moreover, as Plato warned, this will often result in the elevation of demagogues, who flatter the people rather than serve them; these popular leaders will seek to curry favor by confiscating the property of the wealthy, leading to factional strife within the city and the possibility of an oligarchy replacing the democracy. In a moderate democracy, however, the poor still constitute the majority and thus rule, but they rule with respect for law and are led by the best citizens rather than demagogues. The task of democratic leaders, therefore, is to moderate the democratic understanding of justice, which results in a more just and stable regime. The challenge they face is that democratic citizens seek to live as they wish, resisting moderation. That task is, therefore, easier in a city with a large middle class, which diminishes the tension between rich and poor, and easier still in an agricultural city: Because they are unable to assemble frequently, farmers accept the rule of law and are satisfied with electing wealthier citizens, who have more leisure time, to administer those laws. Insofar as democratic leaders should moderate the democratic claims about justice, they must be moderate themselves. Although Aristotle never proposes that philosophers should rule, he thus agrees with Plato about the importance of the character of leaders. Aristotle advocates including the people—provided they are not vicious—in the city’s deliberative and judicial institutions, but he reserves the city’s highest offices for those who possess the requisite ability. The virtue of prudence, or practical knowledge, necessary for leadership is inseparable from ethical virtue. The importance of virtuous leaders for the success of a political community is a consistent theme in ancient and medieval writers.

Machiavelli and the Origins of Modern Democratic Leadership This belief in virtuous leaders was famously challenged by Niccolo` Machiavelli in his The Prince: Although it might seem desirable that a prince possess all those qualities said to be good,

238

Democratic Leadership

Machiavelli insists that this would instead prove his downfall because those whom he must rule are themselves wicked. Although Machiavelli’s The Prince has often been read as a guide for authoritarian rule, he introduces a democratic purpose for government by advising the prince to side with the people rather than the great. The people’s desire—to avoid oppression and to enjoy their family and property—is both more decent and more easily satisfied than the desire of the great to command and oppress. Moreover, Machiavelli’s account fosters skepticism about the claims of the ruling class to rule for the sake of the common good on the basis of their virtue. As an example, he points to the Roman Senate, which behaved moderately only when threatened, whether by foreign powers or popular tribunes. Precisely because the people cannot trust the qualities of the prince—who may, after all, follow Machiavelli’s advice and feign the attractive ones—Machiavelli proposes institutions that allow the people to reward those leaders who protect their lives and property and punish those who threaten them. Republics and principalities should both serve the desires of the people; the advantage of the former, however, consists in the ability to change leaders, particularly in times of crisis. A good example would be Britain replacing Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill. Although Machiavelli presents the prince’s preference for the people as a means of preserving his authority, his criticism of elites and emphasis on the popular purposes of government have given rise both to the right of the people to govern themselves and more careful attention to the institutions through which they do so. Insofar as Athenian-style direct democracy is impracticable in modern nation-states—and perhaps undesirable insofar as it may lead to oppressive majorities—representative democracies, which resemble ancient republics, have become the norm.

Representation and Modern Democratic Leadership In seeking to understand leadership in modern democracies, there is perhaps no better place to look than the articulation of the principles behind the United States Constitution in the Federalist

papers. In contrast to ancient republics, all offices of the United States government were to be chosen, whether directly or indirectly, by the people themselves. This made officeholders accountable to the people yet prevented any single office from claiming to exclusively represent the voice of the people. Moreover, a system of checks and balances prevented leaders from using power for their own benefit; the motive for using those checks, however, was neither virtue nor devotion to the common good but the self-interest of other leaders. In Federalist No. 51, Madison (writing as Publius) famously claims that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition” (Hamilton et al., p. 268). Yet insofar as officeholders are chosen by the people, there is an expectation that they ought to consider the views of the electorate in making decisions. Speaking to the people of Bristol in 1774, Edmund Burke distinguished between two approaches to representation. According to what is commonly called the delegate model, representatives ought simply to reflect the views of their constituents. The trustee model, however, which Burke favored, holds that although these views demand serious attention, leaders ought to be guided by their own judgment. In fact, most representatives weigh these competing forms of leadership and apply them differently depending on the issue, often with a view toward reelection.

Executive Power and Public Opinion Although the composition of representative assemblies is important, the primary locus of leadership in contemporary democracies is often the chief executive. Thus, the capacity for democratic leadership depends on the way leaders are selected, particularly the role the people play in that process. In his book Presidential Selection: Theory and Development, James W. Ceaser describes five functions of systems for presidential selection. First, assuming ambitious people would seek the highest office, the system should limit the worst effects of ambition. Second, it should promote candidates who would properly use the power of the executive (e.g., whether the president would wield power on behalf of the political party or of the people as a whole). Third, the system should, moreover, produce a leader with the right

Democratic Leadership

239

personal qualities; although such qualities are subject to debate, the mode of selection will affect the kinds of candidates likely to succeed. Fourth, the selection process should conclude with a winner most people consider legitimate. Finally, the system should permit the appropriate amount of choice and change. Over time, the presidential selection process has become increasingly popular. Whereas the Founders envisioned a modest and restrained role for the people, the modern primary system developed in the 1960s and 1970s allows voters, rather than party organizations or party officials, to decide which candidates represent the parties in the general election. The result is a system in which leaders invoke the support of the people—discerned either from election results, the preferences of an opinion poll, or their general sense of what the people want—as a basis for their decisions. The relation of the president, or any democratic leader, to public opinion is, however, rarely a straightforward one. Campaigning for the Senate in 1858, Abraham Lincoln observed that public opinion is everything in democracies; he added, though, that one who shaped that opinion did more than one who established laws or issued legal decisions. As President, therefore, Lincoln did not simply follow public opinion but rather actively sought to shape it. Indeed, Frederick Douglass claimed the secret of Lincoln’s success was his ability to ascertain and then elevate public opinion: Lincoln, he said, “knew the American people better than they knew themselves” (Douglas, 2016, p. 247). Precisely because public opinion can be transitory, Lincoln showed greater deference to more durable instantiations of popular will—like the Constitution—than to its momentary expression.

favored the privileged few and prohibited genuine democratic leadership. Thus, he advocated presidential leadership that reflected the voice of the people, that is, people who wanted or deserved an active national government and strong administrative state, which would lead to a more just and egalitarian society. In order to achieve this, Croly promoted a variety of reforms that would increase popular control of the government, including presidential primaries. Despite the importance of a popularly chosen, and popular, president, Croly emphasizes the development of a bureaucracy capable of formulating policies that will alleviate the problems of suffering and poverty. Invoking Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, he insists that democracy must be not merely government by the people but also government for the people. He hopes that Americans will come to value the results of these policies more than their traditional devotion to individual rights and that popular political processes will both provide leaders with electoral mandates and tighten the bond between citizens. The promise of democratic leadership, therefore, depends not merely on the character of democratic leaders but also on the character of the people whom they lead. The content of civic education necessary for the fulfillment of the progressive vision may differ from what Aristotle, for instance, would recommend, but both would agree on the necessity of civic education for a successful democracy. Popular forms of government, after all, require far more confidence in the people than monarchies, as Madison observed in Federalist No. 55. After the Constitution was ratified, Benjamin Franklin was supposedly asked what form of government it would establish. A republic, he is said to have responded, if you can keep it.

The Progressive View of Democratic Leadership

See also Dark Triad; Ethical Leadership; Moral Character; Political Leadership; Presidential Leadership; Rhetoric; Virtues

In the American context, the progressive movement, inspired by the work of Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life and Progressive Democracy, challenged the constitutional system of separation of powers designed by the Framers and accepted by Lincoln. Croly argued this system

Kevin M. Cherry and Daniel J. Palazzolo

Further Readings Burke, E. (1999). Speech at Mr. Burke’s arrival in Bristol. In I. Kramnick (Ed.), The Portable Burke (pp. 155–157). New York, NY: Penguin.

240

Deontology and Rights

Ceaser, J. W. (1979). Presidential selection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9780691215907 Croly, H. (1998). Progressive democracy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Croly, H. (2014). The promise of American life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Douglass, F. (2016). Oration of Frederick Douglass delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of the freedmen’s Monument in memory of Abraham Lincoln. In N. Buccola (Ed.), The essential Douglass: Selected writings and speeches (pp. 239–248). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hamilton, A., Jay, J., & Madison, J. (2001). The federalist: The Gideon edition. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Lincoln, A. (1989). First Lincoln-Douglas debate, Ottawa, Illinois. In D. Fehrenbacher (Ed.), Speeches and writings 1832—58 (pp. 495–536). New York, NY: Library of America. Weiner, G. (2012). Madison’s metronome: The constitution, majority rule, and the tempo of American politics. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Zuckert, C. H. (2017). Machiavelli’s politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/ 9780226434940.001.0001

DEONTOLOGY

AND

RIGHTS

Deontology is a category of moral theory in which right and wrong are not explained in terms of what promotes the best consequences. A theory is deontological—without an ontology—if it identifies right action without reference only to producing a state of affairs. Because deontology is etymologically built from a negation, it’s not surprising that its scope includes a variety of otherwise distinctive views. A common form of deontological theory is based on rights or claims that people are morally entitled to demand of others as a matter of justice. Theories of deontological rights provide guidance about how to make choices when confronting morally significant trade-offs and so present a resource for leadership ethics. This entry describes the motivations and challenges for theories of deontological rights and suggests how these theories bear on common questions faced by leaders.

Deontological Theories Any moral theory is deontological if it denies consequentialism. Consequentialist theories assert that an action is right if and only if it promotes the best consequences at least as much as any other action would. Exactly what counts as the best consequences will depend on one’s theory of value. Consequentialist theories differ in what states of affairs they regard as value-bearing. The consequentialist’s core commitment is that whatever the valuable states of affairs may be, we can understand right action in terms of what promotes (e.g. realizes, makes more likely, or brings about) those states of affairs. Deontological theories disagree. The family of deontological views is unified by the need to confront a common challenge, according to which one should simply treat one’s favored theory as specifying what counts as valuable, and then promote that value as much as possible. For example, the follower of philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would say that we should treat people always as ends in themselves and never as a means alone. According to the challenge, the Kantian ought to simply maximize treating person as ends in themselves. Consider ordinary ethical decision-making. Faced with a choice to save one person or to save five (ceteris paribus), most people will agree that saving five is the right thing to do. The consequentialist can explain why: It promoted a valuable state of affairs (lives saved) more than any alternative. To meet this challenge, there must be reasons to resist consequentializing one’s moral theory. Consider simply counting the value and disvalue in each person’s life equally, and then aggregating the total value and disvalue to arrive at the right action. In a famous example, T. M. Scanlon considers how such a procedure might go wrong. Scanlon imagines a football match being transmitted to millions of dedicated fans, all of whom have a strong interest in watching. However, as it happens, there’s a problem in the studio sending the signal, and the only way the match can be broadcast is by painfully shocking one person in the transmitter room. The consequentialist may feel constrained to say one ought not interrupt the broadcast to stop a person from suffering—at least

Deontology and Rights

if there are enough people enjoying the match with sufficient intensity. If what’s right is decided by value-making states of affairs, and enjoying the match is valuable, then it will seem that there is some number of people whose enjoyment of the match outweighs the one’s suffering. Yet that seems like a mistake. Contrary to the consequentialist, other people agree that stopping the broadcast is the right thing to do.

Rights Among the various interests that people have, only some justify the use of force or interference. The concept of rights can be used to refer to those moral claims that a person is entitled to demand as a matter of justice. In the case of the transmitter room, the person suffering painful shocks could demand that that broadcast be stopped. To refuse would be unjust. In other words, the issue in question was a matter of rights. Consequentialism went wrong because it elided the distinction between mere interests and rights, instead supposing that all values could be weighed against each other. The ability to recognize rights may look like an advantage for deontology. But the consequentialist still has room to maneuver. For example, one might allow for the existence of rights and hold that the state of affairs we ought to promote is the one in which rights claims are satisfied as much as possible. Or in other words, one could opt to be a consequentialist about rights. A rights consequentialist will say that while we should not torture one person to enable millions of others to enjoy a football match, we should sacrifice one person in order to save five from an oncoming trolley. Deontologists are not satisfied with this revision. A deontological account of rights instead affirms that it is at least sometimes wrong to maximize the promotion of rights. One should not violate someone else’s rights, even if it will result in the greater realization of rights overall or even if it will result in that individual’s rights being violated less in aggregate. The thought that one ought not violate a right, even when nonviolation will result in greater overall violations, has been described as the paradox of deontology. Favoring a right’s

241

lesser satisfaction over its great satisfaction seems intuitively puzzling.

Rationalizing Deontological Rights Many people have the intuition that it is sometimes wrong to violate a person’s rights, even in order to promote the realization of rights overall. If this is correct, one possible explanation is that people have a special moral status that rules out such trade-offs. Building on earlier deontological theories, Frances Kamm refers to this status as inviolability. If people are inviolable, then it is wrong to violate their rights in order to satisfy the similar rights of others. This view invites philosophical controversy. Some might think that it merely relabels rather than resolves the deontologist’s problem. The theoretical idea is that there is some sense in which people would have a lower moral status if their rights could be permissibly violated for the sake of rights in aggregate. Rights are meant to offer people a kind of security in their moral protections. If an individual has a right to something, they have the assurance that it would be morally wrong to deprive them of that thing—not only in the world as it is now, but under a wide variety of other circumstances that might arise. Accepting rights consequentialism would weaken this assurance, as it would allow for possible worlds—perhaps some nearer than others—in which any given person’s rights cease to afford moral protection. That concession, at least according to the deontologist, would degrade the moral status of people. A natural, further question asks what could justify or explain the inviolability of rights. One thing that might be said on behalf of deontological rights is that they cohere with a common understanding of normativity in other domains. Consider, for example, norms about forming and revising beliefs. Ordinarily, people do not try to maximize the number of true beliefs they have. Instead, they follow the norms of belief (believing what the evidence says is true; doubting what the evidence does not support) for any given question. Selim Berker imagines encountering a paradox in which three different propositions seem true, but they are jointly inconsistent. Not all of them can be true, but it is unclear which is wrong. For the

242

Destructive Leadership

consequentialist about belief, Berker suggests that it would make sense to simply believe all of them. After all, one could thereby promote the epistemic value of one’s beliefs overall. But this process is a bad one. A rational agent should not promote their true beliefs but consider each one separately. Perhaps, analogously, moral agents should not suppose that simply promoting overall value is the correct response to conflicts in rights. Normativity in belief and action appear to share a deontological structure. One hypothesized explanation for this unity focuses on the nature of believing and acting. The deontologist and the consequentialist hold implicitly divergent theories of action. So far, this entry has gone along with thinking about actions as directed at realizing some state of affairs or other. When a person acts, they are essentially trying to bring something about. But perhaps not all actions are like that. Howard Nye, David Plunkett, and John Ku distinguish between what they call state-directed and act-directed motives. The former aim at realizing some state of affairs, while the latter motivate an action itself, independent of the state of affairs it produces. A person might want it to be the case that they climbed the mountain (a state of affairs), without wanting to climb the mountain (an action). One might be motivated to feel anger at another person, without being motivated to realize a world in which they were angry with the other person. If motives can be directed at actions rather than only states of affairs, then there may be corresponding reasons to act that are not also reasons to bring something about. And if those reasons are strong enough, it may be wrong to act in ways that bring about the best states of affairs. In that case, consequentialism—including consequentialism about rights—could be false.

Leadership and Deontological Rights Leadership conceptually entails the presence of multiple people for whom choices are required. Whenever there are separate individuals for whom outcomes will vary, there will be questions about when and how the interests of those people can be combined. If there are deontological rights, then there are least some cases in which these interests cannot be combined at all. Instead, morality will

require that certain claims not be violated, (almost) no matter what. Because these claims will be those most closely associated with the moral status of people, discerning them may be especially fraught. For this reason, leaders may not be able to avoid fundamental questions about the basis and content of rights. Ryan W. Davis See also Confucian Ethics; Daoist Moral Obligations; Discourse Ethics; Distributive Egalitarianism; Employee Rights; Ethical Leadership; Trolley Problem; Virtues

Further Readings Berker, S. (2013). Epistemic teleology and the separateness of propositions. Philosophical Review, 122, 337–393. Kamm, F. M. (2007). Intricate ethics: Rights, responsibilities, and permissible harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nye, H., Plunkett, D., & Ku, J. (2015). Non-consequentialism demystified. Philosopher’s Imprint, 15, 4. Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DESTRUCTIVE LEADERSHIP Since the mid-1990s, there has been a growing interest among researchers and practitioners in understanding the dark side of leadership. Prior to the 1990s, leadership was largely viewed as a positive force, marked by its positive intentions, methods, and consequences for individuals, groups, and organizations. Early trait theories of leadership, for example, suggested that leaders possess unique personal qualities that allow them to mobilize other people toward positive group goals. More recent theories of charismatic and transformational leadership further underscored the capacity of certain leaders to inspire followers to transcend their self-interests and enact positive change via their words, imagery, ideas, and behavior. At the turn of the 21st century, however, there was increasing recognition that this

Destructive Leadership

larger-than-life, heroic view of leadership was missing the mark. Accumulating evidence suggested that employees often experience abusive, tyrannical, or otherwise toxic bosses in their work roles, with some estimates suggesting that roughly 65%–75% of employees believe their boss is the worst part of their jobs. Moreover, the early 2000s brought a number of high-profile corporate scandals, such as those at Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, which have been attributed to the unchecked hubris, entitlement, and grandiosity of top executives. Additionally, historical examples, such as the tragic events involving members of religious cult groups (e.g., the People’s Temple in 1976, the Branch Davidians in 1993), the sex abuse scandals in higher education (e.g., Penn State University) and the Catholic Church, and, most notably, the horrific events associated with Hitler’s Nazi Germany, pointed to the need for greater understanding of why leadership goes wrong across organizational settings. Generally speaking, there are two overarching perspectives on destructive leadership, which we refer to as (a) the behavioral or leader-centric view and (b) the process or toxic triangle view. These perspectives are summarized below.

The Leader-Centric Perspective on Destructive Leadership According to the leader-centric perspective, destructive leadership is something that individual leaders do. It involves a set of behaviors that leaders enact, which presumably undermine followers’ motivation, well-being, or job satisfaction and/or sabotage the organization’s goals, tasks, resources, and effectiveness. Researchers have proposed various concepts that fall under this umbrella of destructive leadership, such as abusive supervision (i.e., the sustained display of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors toward subordinates, excluding physical contact) petty tyranny (i.e., the use of one’s power and authority in an oppressive, capricious, and perhaps vindictive fashion), supervisor undermining (i.e., behavior that is intended to hinder, over time, the ability of subordinates to establish and maintain positive interpersonal relationships, work-related success, and favorable reputations), and derailed leadership (i.e., behavior

243

that involves harm not only to subordinates, such as bullying, humiliating, deceiving, or harassment, but also to the organization’s goals and interests, such as engaging fraud or theft, neglecting one’s duties as a leader, or being absent). To date, most of the research in this area has utilized quantitative, survey-based methodology to examine how various subordinate-targeted behaviors—most notably, abusive supervision— relate to employee outcomes. Perhaps not surprisingly, meta-analytic evidence has shown that when employees report experiencing these behaviors from their supervisors, they tend to also report lower job attitudes and decreased well-being. Moreover, experiencing such behavior at work is also linked to more negative attitudes toward one’s supervisor, higher levels of employee counterproductive behavior, and decreased employee job performance. Researchers have also explored how these effects may depend on a range of factors, including followers’ personality characteristics as well as aspects of the national culture. Although most of the existing research has focused on subordinate-targeted acts, some research has also explored how leaders may engage in deviant behaviors that run counter to their organization’s legitimate goals and interests (e.g., accepting financial kickbacks; being under the influence of alcohol or recreational drugs at work; breaking the law at work; falsifying documents; littering the work environment; stealing company funds, property, or other resources). Based on the range of leader-centric concepts proposed, researchers have also attempted to classify these bad leader behaviors into meaningful taxonomies. One notable typology classifies such behaviors into three main categories based on whether they are primarily harmful to subordinates, the organization, or both. First, tyrannical leader behavior involves demonstrating pro-organizational behavior while simultaneously displaying anti-subordinate behavior. Tyrannical leaders are those who act in accordance with the organization’s legitimate goals, tasks, and strategies. Yet, they do so not through positive methods of influence but rather via coercion. Importantly, because tyrannical leaders are, at once, focused on the organization’s goals, yet are also abusive and manipulative toward subordinates, they may be

244

Destructive Leadership

viewed differently by upper management relative to those who are subordinate to them. Such leaders may get results in the short term due to the fear they instill in their employees; yet, over time as they remain in their jobs, such leaders tend to create such distrust, antagonism, and burnout in employees that the performance of their work units is likely to suffer. Second, derailed leader behavior involves demonstrating both anti-subordinate actions and anti-organizational behaviors. Derailed leader behavior is believed to stem mainly from a leader’s focus on personal gain at the expense of both subordinates and the organization. Third, supportivedisloyal leader behavior involves pro-subordinate behavior combined with anti-organizational behavior. These leaders support and motivate their employees, yet also steal financial, material, or time-related resources from the organization. In particular, supportive-disloyal leaders may allocate greater benefits to subordinates than they deserve, encourage employees to break ethical codes of conduct or be inefficient on the job, or lead them toward goals that contrast with organizational goals—all while displaying a demeanor of camaraderie and supportiveness.

The Toxic Triangle Perspective on Destructive Leadership In contrast to the leader-centric perspective, the toxic triangle view maintains that destructive leadership is not just a set of bad behaviors performed by a particular leader. Rather, this perspective suggests that destructive leadership is a complex social process that unfolds between flawed, toxic, or ineffective leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments over time—the product of which culminates in damaging outcomes for teams, organizations, and even whole societies. In other words, destructive leadership is not something that leaders do in a vacuum on their own. Rather, it is something leaders do in conjunction with vulnerable followers and a conducive environment, which allow and even facilitate a leader’s capacity to damage, over time, the group’s collective goals and compromise the quality of life for its constituents.

As such, the toxic triangle perspective distinguishes between bad leader behaviors and destructive leadership processes; while the former is a part of the latter, it is not the latter in and of itself. Relatedly, the toxic triangle perspective is distinguishable from leader-centric views in that it is based on the fundamental idea that leadership, in general, is a group process that is defined by group outcomes; that is, leadership processes are destructive to the extent that they, on average, damage the welfare of the groups they are intended to serve, not whether certain leader behaviors are perceived in a negative light by some followers. Thus, according to this view, destructive leadership involves negative outcomes to the group or organization, with certain processes between leaders, followers, and environmental conditions being more likely to contribute to such outcomes than others. Lastly, this perspective also acknowledges the role of time. As such, determining whether a leadership process is destructive necessitates examining whether the process leads to results that, on balance, harm the group once that process has run its course. Existing work on the toxic triangle view suggests that, beyond the role of bad leaders, there are different types of followers associated with destructive leadership processes. One notable typology distinguishes between two general types of susceptible followers: conformers (i.e., those who are prone to obedience) and colluders (i.e., those who actively align themselves with, and participate in, a leader’s toxic or misguided mission). Within these categories, the taxonomy further differentiates among different subtypes of conformers (i.e., lost souls, authoritarians, and bystanders) and colluders (i.e., opportunists and acolytes). Regarding conformers, lost souls are followers who are vulnerable to personal identification with and exploitation by charismatic leaders due to their low self-concept clarity, negative core self-evaluations, and strong needs for group membership, purpose and meaning, and security. Authoritarian followers, in turn, are marked by rigid, hierarchical values that stress obedience to authority, adherence to traditional societal norms, and hostility toward outgroups (e.g., ethnic minorities, LGBTQ1 people, former criminals). Such followers tend to comply with unethical

Destructive Leadership

orders from toxic leaders because they believe it is their obligation to do so. Lastly, bystanders are perhaps the most common susceptible follower type associated with destructive leadership. These followers are marked primarily by low core self-evaluations and high self-monitoring, characteristics that predispose them toward fear and a lack of self-efficacy to challenge toxic leaders and their regimes. With respect to colluders, the first subtype, opportunists, are followers marked by personal ambition, Machiavellianism, greed, and low selfcontrol—traits that dispose them toward aligning themselves with toxic leaders for the purpose of acquiring financial, political, or professional outcomes for themselves. These individuals are prototypical sycophants who are often drawn to high-profile industries with great opportunities for wealth, power, and status. Finally, acolytes are true believers; that is, they share congruent values and goals with toxic leaders and seek expression of those values via active participation in the leader’s mission. In short, research on the toxic triangle view emphasizes the importance of examining the role of different types of susceptible followers who, for a variety of reasons and motivations, obey, turn a blind eye to, or actively carry out the directives of flawed, toxic, or incompetent leaders. Research on the toxic triangle perspective also considers conducive environmental contexts, circumstances, and conditions within which dysfunctional leader–follower interactions take place over time. In general, these conditions fall into three broad categories: institutional, macroenvironmental, and cultural. Institutional factors include a lack of internal checks and balances within an organization, such as governing boards and other organizational processes and procedures. They also include external checks, such as the media, experts, and governmental regulatory agencies. These institutional checks and balances, when efficient and functional, serve to define, shape, and prescribe healthy practices and behaviors within organizations, limiting the extent to which dysfunctional leader–follower relationships can emerge and persist over time. Macroenvironmental factors include broader social, economic, and technological factors that tend to decrease transparency and checks and balances, as

245

well as heighten followers’ dependence on leaders. Lastly, cultural factors involve the attitudes, beliefs, and values of a group, organization, region, or country that can influence leadership processes. Importantly, a central tenet of the toxic triangle perspective is that knowledge of these factors offers insight into how conducive environments develop, become institutionalized and entrenched in organizations, and, in turn, shape dysfunctional forms of leading and following over time.

Conclusion Taken together, these two approaches offer complementary perspectives on the phenomenon of destructive leadership. Whereas the leader-centric view examines destructiveness from the vantage point of leader behaviors, the toxic triangle view broadens this perspective to consider the dynamics between flawed, toxic, or ineffective leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments that contribute to destructive leadership outcomes for groups, organizations, and even whole societies. Although both approaches are not without their limitations, together they provide valuable insights into the dark side of leadership—insights that can be used by practitioners to develop more effective solutions and preventive remedies in organizations of various forms and purposes. Christian N. Thoroughgood and Katina B. Sawyer See also Autocratic Leadership; Bad Leadership; CEO Hubris; Dark Triad; Narcissistic Leadership; Toxic Leadership

Further Readings Einarsen, S., Aasland, M. S., & Skogstad, A. (2007). Destructive leadership behaviour: A definition and conceptual model. Leadership Quarterly, 18, 207–216. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.002 Krasikova, D. V., Green, S. G., & LeBreton, J. M. (2013). Destructive leadership: A theoretical review, integration, and future research agenda. Journal of Management, 39, 1308–1338. doi:10.1177/ 0149206312471388 Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and

246

Dirty Hands

conducive environments. Leadership Quarterly, 18, 176–194. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001 Schyns, B., & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. Leadership Quarterly, 24, 138-158. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.09.001 Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43, 178–190. Thoroughgood, C. N., Padilla, A., Hunter, S. T., & Tate, B. W. (2012). The susceptible circle: A taxonomy of followers associated with destructive leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 23, 897–917. Thoroughgood, C. N., Sawyer, K. B., Padilla, A., & Lunsford, L. (2018). Destructive leadership: A critique of leader-centric perspectives and toward a more holistic definition. Journal of Business Ethics, 151, 627–649. Thoroughgood, C. N., Tate, B. W., Sawyer, K. B., & Jacobs, R. (2012). Bad to the bone: Empirically defining and measuring destructive leader behavior. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 19(2), 230–255.

DIRTY HANDS The problem of dirty hands refers to the notion that leaders in the course of discharging their public responsibilities cannot avoid committing what would otherwise be considered serious wrongs. The contemporary version of the problem takes its name from Michael Walzer’s influential 1973 article, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” although the image itself obviously has older antecedents. The most extensive discussion of the problem has been in the context of political ethics; however, numerous features of the problem apply to the ethics of leadership more generally—indeed, in some ways it is as much a problem of leadership generally as a problem of politics more specifically. This entry surveys some key features of the problem, considers whether the problem is illusory or genuine, surveys some of the main causes to which the problem is often attributed, and finally explores whether the problem is mainly a concern for leaders or whether it may also implicate the publics that leaders represent.

Key Features of the Problem Walzer offers two paradigm cases of the politician with dirty hands. His first case has become a clich´e not just of philosophical thought experiments but across popular culture more generally: the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. In this case, a wellintentioned official must decide whether or not to authorize the torture of an imprisoned terrorist presumed to have knowledge of where and when a bomb will soon be detonated, at the potential cost of thousands of civilian lives. Walzer’s second case, while less dramatic, is perhaps more familiar in real life: A well-meaning political leader discovers she can only win an upcoming election by making a modestly corrupt bargain with a local boss who controls the margin of victory. These cases, though dissimilar in many ways, share in common a sense that they pose a kind of moral dilemma for the agent. There seems to be no single right thing to do in such cases. In the ticking time bomb scenario, it can hardly be right to commit an act of outright torture, yet it also seems wrong not to do everything in one’s power to prevent the murder of thousands. In the more mundane case of electoral corruption, it seems wrong to make the shady deal, but perhaps also wrong, albeit in a different way, not to do everything one can to win an election on which important stakes may depend. In a moral dilemma, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. That is the essence of the problem of dirty hands. In such situations, we may still be able to arrive at an all-things-considered judgment about what is the best thing to do given the circumstances, but there will remain a residual sense in which we are nevertheless guilty, a sense in which, in order to do the right thing, we have also had to do a genuinely wrong thing. Theorists of dirty hands point to the feelings of guilt we often discover in such cases as registering an appropriate recognition of this residue of wrongdoing. This is the sense in which the political leader is said to have dirty hands; in doing what needs to be done, the political leader has gotten their own hands dirty, such that even the good consequences that follow from their actions do not suffice wholly to wash away the stain of the transgression.

Dirty Hands

Is the Problem Real? Are the kinds of situations Walzer describes genuine moral dilemmas, or do they instead present a kind of ethical illusion? The existence of the problem itself somewhat depends on the belief that values can truly conflict, and this can occur if and only if values are in some way plural in character. Some ethical theories, of course, do not admit of such conflicts; they are monist rather than pluralist in character. Perhaps the most familiar of these is utilitarianism. By holding that the right thing to do always just is whatever maximizes the well-being (pleasure) of all concerned, the utilitarian neatly disposes of the apparent moral dilemma. The residual feelings of guilt that may attend difficult choices are understandable as psychological epiphenomena—indeed they may be quite useful in promoting responsible action and deterring potential abuses of power—but as a matter of ethical analysis, those feelings are nevertheless misguided. On the utilitarian view, one who maximizes the good has by definition nothing to feel guilty about. Deontological moral theories (particularly Kantian ethics)—though quite different from utilitarianism—nevertheless similarly propose a certain hierarchy of values that is capable of resolving the potential conflicts we encounter in the dirty hands problem. For the Kantian, actions based on principles that contradict the categorical imperative—specifically, principles that are not universally valid, do not show intrinsic respect for people, and cannot be reconciled to a kingdom of ends—are excluded entirely (that is, categorically) from consideration by the ethically sound agent. In this sense, Kantian theories are absolutist in Walzer’s sense; Kant approves the ancient maxim, “let justice be done, though the world perish.” If it is wrong to torture, or (more controversially) to tell a lie, then it is always wrong to do. For Kant, the scale of the consequences at stake does not enter into the ethical picture, properly understood. If neither of these potential resolutions satisfies us, however, then the problem is not illusory and remains unresolved, with its own set of consequences. This implies the validity of some version of value pluralism. It signifies that neither the good in the consequentialist sense nor the right in the deontological sense offers a fully sufficient touchstone for

247

our moral calculations. Rather, there is more than one relevant variable to be reckoned with in the moral calculus. Rival moral values cannot all be factored out by a simple algorithm, whether utilitarian or deontological in character. They must instead be balanced with judgment and practical wisdom, they are sometimes incommensurable, and they can conflict in ways that cannot be resolved without irreversible moral loss. This is what it means to have dirty hands—to do wrong in service of what is right in ways that are unavoidably complex, messy, and sometimes even tragic.

Potential Causes of the Problem Those who believe the problem is genuine may nevertheless explain its causes somewhat differently. Perhaps the most salient feature of dirty-handed dilemmas is the scale of the consequences involved. The ticking time bomb scenario captures this quite vividly. It is the vast number of those affected by the outcome that makes the otherwise unthinkable act of torture become morally plausible. Politics by its nature deals in consequences at scale, as does leadership more broadly. Utilitarianism relies on the same intuition, that the more the people are affected by an action, the broader the moral permissions that come into play. Yet the leader with dirty hands, in contrast to the pure utilitarian, has the grace to retain a sense of shame about it. A second possible cause is to be found in the distinctive means of politics: coercive force. Max Weber famously held that states ultimately rule because they claim a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence, yet he also acknowledged that this forces the responsible political leader to assume the substantial ethical risks associated with violence. Deception and manipulation also seem like distinctive means of political action, and they too can constitute another form of coercive force—as Kant observed, deceit coerces the mind rather than the body. In democratic politics especially, the need to secure broad and sustained coalitions makes it difficult to achieve agreement without sometimes misleading or concealing unpleasant realities. A third potential cause is the strategic or competitive dimension of politics. Political interactions are strategic in the sense that what is

248

Dirty Hands

best for us to do depends on our expectations of what others will do in response. The realist tradition from philosophers Niccolo` Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes to the present has pointed out that when others behave badly, it may be pointless (if not positively counterproductive) for us to adhere strictly to benevolent actions in response. Contemporary game theory has systematized many of the rational quandaries this creates. The prevalence of uncertainty plays a major role in this explanation: Not knowing for certain what others will do, our actions must take into account what they might do. Finally, the representative character of politics is also a possible contributing cause to dirtyhanded dilemmas. Leaders do not act merely on their own behalf—they often are asked to choose on behalf of others. A leader who might be willing to forego an advantage or risk a loss to their own well-being for the sake of virtue and compassion might find themselves unable to defend doing so while safeguarding the interests of those who have entrusted themselves to their care. Relatedly, political authority carries with it an expectation that leaders will act with definite partiality in some cases (on behalf of one’s constituents) and with definite impartiality in others (when distributing advantages and disadvantages to one’s fellow citizens), in ways that often run counter to the intuitions of ordinary morality. Public impartiality may make us disregard the promptings of mercy or generosity, whereas the partiality of patriotism might make it seem our duty to disregard universal benevolence or even human rights when they conflict with the safety of our own compatriots.

Democratic Dirty Hands This representative dimension of the problem of dirty hands raises the further question of whether it is only leaders who are entangled in the problem’s moral confusions or whether it also perhaps pertains to the publics on whose behalf they claim to act. Dirty hands, some theorists argue, can be democratic. The image of the Machiavellian prince performing all the necessary evils on behalf of his people so that they can retain clean hands and pure hearts is a misleading one, they suggest. For we can be implicated not only in what we do, but

in what is done on our behalf. This is the question of collective responsibility, which has special resonance in societies that claim to have governments of, by, and for the people. There are dangers involved in either accepting this possibility too readily or dismissing it too lightly. There remain meaningful differences between the kinds of responsibility that leaders assume and the kinds of responsibility associated with citizens—for the people as a whole often lack either knowledge, power, or both with respect to the actions their states undertake. At the same time, however, citizens do benefit from the actions of their state, and at least nominally consent to its agency on their behalf. That relation entails some meaningful degree of responsibility, even if the degree of it is subject to dispute. The concept of dirty hands speaks to a striking and recurring paradox about ethics in public life. Yet once acknowledged, it also poses a constant temptation to make excuses and deflect responsibility—and this is true not only for leaders but also for citizens. In democratic politics, there is always potentially a kind of shell game of moral responsibility at work: It is you who acts, and not me, and that clears me; yet your actions are for my sake, not yours, and that clears you. The relationship between citizens and leaders is admittedly a complex form of shared agency, but this complexity is not the same as a vanishing trick. In some form or other, the moral responsibility for public actions always necessarily remains in someone’s hands. John M. Parrish See also Coercion and Ethics; Collective Responsibility; Democratic Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Ethics of Deception and Manipulation; Moral Pluralism; Political Leadership

Further Readings Beerbohm, E. (2015). In our name: The ethics of democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gowans, C. (Ed.). (1987). Moral dilemmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parrish, J. (2007). Paradoxes of political ethics: From dirty hands to the invisible hand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487439

Disagreement, Ethics of Price, T. (2008). Leadership ethics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511809972 Rynard, P., & Shugarman, D. (Eds.). (2001). Cruelty and deception: The controversy over dirty hands in politics. London: Broadview. Thompson, D. (1987). Political ethics and public office. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walzer, M. (1973). Political action: The problem of dirty hands. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2(2), 160–180. Weber, M. (1958). Politics as a vocation. In H. Gerth & C. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

DISAGREEMENT, ETHICS

OF

Although technology has made communication easier than ever, it has not succeeded in enabling individuals to overcome all their conflicts. In the context of leadership studies, the ethics of disagreement concerns the difficult question of how leaders should exercise power in contexts of acute disagreement. Within Western philosophy, scholarship on this question is perhaps most developed in the field of political philosophy. This entry examines what three traditions within this field have to say about how leaders should go about making decisions in contexts of moral disagreement. While political perfectionists hold that such a decision should conform with external, objective requirements of ethics and institutional effectiveness, social contract theorists emphasize that it must reflect respect for the wishes of followers, and communitarians argue that it should prioritize the promotion of social cohesion and trust within the group. This entry begins by considering the social contract approach, which is familiar to citizens of liberal democracies, and then proceeds to discuss political perfectionist and communitarian alternatives.

Social Contract Theory: Decision by Majority Vote One familiar democratic approach to decisionmaking in contexts of group disagreement is

249

majority vote. At least in the Euro-American contexts, this approach has historically been best explicated by social contract theorists, who argue that a political leader’s authority to impose and enforce policies on their constituents is contingent upon the latter giving the former consent to exercise power in that way. John Locke, a prominent social contract theorist of the 17th century, grounds the importance of consent in what he describes as individuals’ natural right to liberty; he suggests that it is because there is a moral presumption in favor of liberty that a political leader’s proposal to limit that liberty via the imposition of political power must be successfully justified to the individuals subject to that power. Locke’s arguments gain further support from 18th century ethicist Immanuel Kant, who roots the presumption in favor of liberty in respect for individuals’ capacity for rational autonomy. Unlike (say) dogs or hammers, Kant maintains, people have a capacity to understand and appreciate moral and practical reasons and to govern their conduct in accordance with those reasons. Kant suggests that to show respect for this capacity, one ought (at least by default) to give others freedom to make their own choices; in his view, one ought thus not to simply use one’s power to coerce them to comply with one’s own wishes in the way (he thinks) one may legitimately do with dogs and hammers. In the 20th century, prominent political theorist Robert Dahl drew on Locke and Kant’s work to make a moral argument for the majoritarian vote. Applied to a leadership setting, Dahl’s argument suggests that in taking a vote, leaders manifest respect for the rational autonomy of their followers because policies supported by majority vote maximize the extent to which group members can feasibly exercise selfdetermination. Although majority vote may do well as a procedure in manifesting respect for followers’ capacity for self-governance, the outcomes of a vote may sometimes serve to undermine, rather than manifest respect for, individuals’ freedom. When one allows members of a majority to determine policies for a whole group, then one gives them control not only over their own destinies but also over whether and how other members in the minority are able to meet their interests

250

Disagreement, Ethics of

and to enjoy (or not enjoy) their rights and liberties. If voters are not well informed or reflective about the moral and empirical consequences of the policies they vote on, as a result, the policy they settle on may do significant damage to others’ rights and interests.

Political Perfectionism: Decision by Experts In contemporary Western literature on democratic theory, Jason Brennan has become well-known for arguing that—at least when individuals lack knowledge about relevant policies and those policies have significant impacts on others’ rights and interests—leaders are ethically obligated not to defer to the wishes of their constituents, but instead to hand policy-making power over to experts. This epistocratic approach to decision-making is historically associated with Plato, who argued that philosophers’ superior moral and metaphysical insights gave them supreme authority to oversee the political operations of the state. Plato, however, extended the scope of Brennan’s argument in an important way: He argued for the political perfectionist position that political leaders have authority to override the wishes of their followers not only for the sake of protecting others’ basic rights and interests but also for the purpose of promoting the comprehensive development of moral virtue among citizens. Philosophers working within the movement of political liberalism criticize perfectionists for overreaching with respect to the scope of the disagreements that they permit leaders to override. Political liberals argue that citizens can disagree on a wide range of questions concerning personal moral virtue and still be politically reasonable in that they can be fully committed to a political constitution that equally protects everyone’s basic political rights and liberties. Thus, for instance, citizens who believe that, in the private domains of (say) church and family, men and women should be assigned distinct roles can still be politically reasonable insofar as they accept that, in the public domains of business and politics, women should have equal opportunities to pursue the same positions of power as men. Political liberals argue that political leaders should respect such politically reasonable citizens’ exercise of free choice in the private domain rather than try to inculcate in them

more comprehensive moral virtues concerning gender equality. One who applies these philosophers’ arguments to a wider leadership context would be apt to suggest that leaders should stay neutral on controversial ethical questions that fall outside of the scope of the shared operations and mission statement of the group. One would, for instance, suggest that so long as followers in a business setting recognize the authority of women in the office, leaders should put aside their personal disagreements about the role of women in marital relationships. An important objection to the aforementioned antiperfectionist argument is that “the personal is political”—that is, that the shape of people’s private lives can radically affect the ability of institutions to realize just outcomes for all in the public sphere. Feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin, for instance, contends that men who have become habituated to treating women’s voices as less authoritative in private religious and marital domains may form implicit biases and attitudes that prevent them from successfully giving women authorities in the office the deference they deserve. If Okin is right, leaders may have an ethical obligation to step into disagreements that fall outside the purview of the immediate organizational goals of the group.

Communitarianism and Deliberative Democracy While social contract theorists underscore the significance of making organizational decisions in a way that respects the autonomous wishes of diverse followers, and political perfectionists highlight the conflicting importance of ensuring that the outcomes of decisions correctly align with objective demands of morality and justice, a third communitarian tradition within political philosophy draws attention to the value of negotiating disagreements in a way that promotes the social cohesion of the group. While communitarians do not offer a particular decision-making procedure to support their moral goals, they draw attention to how the procedures for decision-making recommended by social contract theorists and political perfectionists (i.e., majoritarian and epistocratic procedures) can undermine important bases of social trust and unity.

Disagreement, Ethics of

Even if a leader who relies on an epistocratic procedure is successful in aligning her decisions with objective standards of ethics and effectiveness, if followers do not trust her expertise (or the expertise of those on whom she relies), they may be prone to resent what they perceive as bias or grasps for arbitrary power on her part. Likewise, even if a vote accurately reflects the majority’s wishes, if those who fall in the minority do not trust that the majority acted for good reasons and in good faith, they may not accept the legitimacy of the results or want to engage with those in the majority in political cooperation in the future. These kinds of deficits of social trust are practically disadvantageous insofar as they undermine leaders’ ability to enforce policies and effectively mobilize followers to pursue group goals. Additionally, however, communitarians argue that the lack of social cohesion that tends to result from such deficits in trust constitutes an important moral loss. They argue that the interpersonal empathy, understanding, and recognition that individuals get within close-knit communities enriches the everyday quality of their lives and constitutes an important component of a well-lived, meaningful life. When disagreement breaks bonds of trust and relationship within a community, as a result, communitarians hold that it undercuts group members’ ability to realize an important, intrinsically valuable moral good. Although communitarians have not traditionally advocated for any particular alternative to majoritarian and epistocratic decision procedures, deliberative democrats have recently argued for a method of decision-making in contexts of group disagreement that can be combined with these other procedures and that goes some distance in addressing communitarian concerns. Cross-applying what they say about political decisions to the formation of group policies, more generally, deliberative democrats suggest that policy decisions should only be made after affected members of a group have had the opportunity to deliberate together about the reasons for and against adopting relevant policy proposals. Although deliberative democrats initially motivate their arguments by alluding to how the giving and taking of reasons manifests respect for others’ exercise of rational autonomy, many also highlight how group deliberation can promote social

251

cohesion and trust within a group. If done well, deliberation can assist disagreeing parties both in intellectually understanding and in emotionally empathizing with the reasons that motivate others to hold opposing positions. This appreciation of others’ perspectives may, in turn, yield benefits for social cohesion in two ways. First, parties might be persuaded to agree with those they initially opposed, and this may help remove some of the underlying causes of antipathy and mistrust. Second, even where agreement and compromise are not immediately forthcoming, gaining a better appreciation of others’ reasons and experiences may help diminish the suspicion that they are acting out of malice or ill will. This enhanced trust may, in turn, motivate disagreeing parties to better tolerate the imposition of policies they oppose in the short term, and to use political cooperation—rather than violence or brute power—to work toward policy changes in the future. Besides manifesting respect for others’ rational autonomy and promoting social cohesion, deliberation also has the potential to advance epistocratic ends. Those who argue for deliberation on epistocratic grounds point to recent work in the social sciences that suggests that cognitively diverse groups often outperform solitary experts in coming up with accurate answers to complex practical questions. However, they also emphasize that a leader who wants to effectively harness the power of cognitive diversity must ensure that those in the majority are sufficiently deferential to alternative perspectives and that minority groups have the institutional support they need to be able to develop and advocate for their own distinct views. Marilie Coetsee See also Coercion and Ethics; Democratic Leadership; Liberalism and Toleration; Moral Pluralism; Multiculturalism Ethics; Religion; Religious Disagreement

Further Readings Brennan, J. (2016). Against democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carothers, T., & O’Donohue, A. (Eds.). (2019). Democracies divided: The global challenge of political

252

Discourse Ethics

polarization. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Dahl, R. A. (2008). Democracy and its critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. F. (2009). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Communitarianism. In Contemporary political philosophy: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/hepl/ 9780198782742.003.0006 Landemore, H. (2012). Democratic reason: Politics, collective intelligence, and the rule of the many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10. 23943/princeton/9780691155654.001.0001 Okin, S. M. (2015). Justice, gender, and the family. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315633794-7 Plato. (1992). CDC Reeve (Transl.), the republic. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

DISCOURSE ETHICS Discourse ethics is an ethical philosophy based on communicative action and reason. It has gained prominence through the works of German ¨ philosopher Jurgen Habermas, among others, and stands in the tradition of the cognitivist-rational ethics, established by Immanuel Kant. However, in contrast to the Kantian philosophy, it does not derive the validity of its ethical norms from individual self-reflection, but, rather, assumes that society and social life constitute themselves through communication. It thereby follows the linguistic turn in philosophy, which means that it studies the implications of language and communication for social phenomena, and develops its modes of operation from a theory of communicative action. The theory of communicative action postulates that individuals coordinate their actions in their social life through communicative exchange processes or communicative action. The aim of communication is thereby to foster understanding among the participating parties. Discourse ethics has received considerable attention in organization and management research, and more recently, in

leadership studies. It is, for instance, leveraged as a procedural approach through which leaders can establish ethical and legitimate decisions in exchanges with their stakeholders and invoked in ideas of responsible leadership. The purpose of this entry is to give a brief overview of discourse ethics. To this end, the entry will first discuss the assumptions of the philosophical concept. It will then highlight some of the criticism and discuss how this critique led to broaden the concept and to inform ideas of deliberative democracy. Finally, it will refer to the implications of discourse ethics for organization and leadership theory.

Introduction to Discourse Ethics A discourse is considered a form of purposive interaction where the affected parties conjointly coordinate their actions through dialogue to try to achieve consensus. Habermas distinguishes between three different forms of discourses: theoretical, moral–practical, and aesthetic. Each form is suited for a specific purpose and based on the exchange of arguments. Participants in the discourse bring forth arguments to substantiate their claims and to convince the other participants (i.e., they make validity claims). Discourses about the objective world, for example, relate to validity claims about the truth of an argument (theoretical discourse). If a person suggests that gravity is responsible for an apple falling from a tree, they (implicitly) make a truth claim about this statement. Statements about the social world refer to claims about what is considered right or wrong in a moral–practical discourse—the discourse Habermas considers fundamental for establishing valid ethical norms. For instance, individuals who claim that “child labor is not to be tolerated” implicitly make a validity claim to what he calls the rightness of their statement. Finally, aesthetic discourses relate to subjective feelings and entail arguments about the truthfulness of one’s feelings (e.g., when claiming a piece of art is inspiring and beautiful). The other participants in the discourse can ask for a verification of the statement through rational arguments. A discourse implies that the participants can justify their position by giving good reasons that persuade the other participants. The outcome of an ideal discourse should be a

Discourse Ethics

consensus among all affected parties, as the participants would have to agree with the most convincing argument evaluated by each participant. Habermas refers to this as communicative rationality. In this case, rational means that discourse participants reach understanding through the exchange of arguments. Argumentation is defined as a type of speech in which participants discuss controversial validity claims, using well-reasoned arguments to substantiate their claims. Arguments entail reasons that are related systematically to those validity claims. However, to arrive at what can be considered ethically right through moral–practical discourses, it additionally requires the speech conditions of an ideal discourse. These rules that classify an ideal discourse can be summed up under the following conditions: First, all participants have equal chances to participate; second, they have equal chances to bring forth their critique; third, they have equal opportunities to express their attitudes and feelings; and fourth, they possess equal possibilities to justify their position without being forced. These rules secure the equal possibilities for participation for all affected parties and the balance of power between the involved people so that the ideal discourse takes place between coequal people under egalitarian conditions. In order to establish ethically legitimate norms, discourse ethics is further based on two principles, which Habermas calls the principle of discourse ethics (D) and the principle of universalization (U). The principle of discourse ethics (D) refers to the discursive process and holds that norms can only be considered valid if all of the discourse participants can, in the end, agree on these norms. The principle of universalization (U) relates to the potential for norms to be valid beyond the discourse participants by taking into account the acceptance of these norms by all those who are affected by it, even if they have not taken part in the discursive exchange. The conditions of an ideal discourse are the foundations for reaching ethically justified norms and solutions. A norm or solution is morally or ethically legitimate when it is the result of a consensus among all affected parties that have evaluated the situation through discourse, in which the best argument has prevailed.

253

Discourse ethics transcends the liability of conceptions of ethics philosophies based solely on the introspection of individuals (e.g., the theories of Kant, George Herbert Mead, or John Rawls) by establishing moral norms through dialogue with all affected. The latter theories are based on the premise that individuals making an ethical decision can arbitrarily assume the position of any other possibly affected party. They would then evaluate the possible arguments of those others from a fictive, impartial moral point of view. This ideal role-taking is characterized in that the individual making a moral judgment tries to assume the perspective of all other possibly affected positions and then decides for themselves from this perspective what is right or wrong for all affected. In the case of discourse ethics, the ideal roletaking is not based on the cognitive anticipation of all other positions and arguments but is reflected in the impartial evaluation of the arguments of all other participants in the discourse at the same time. Moral argumentation thus becomes a public, intersubjective activity between all affected. Practical discourses can fulfill their function only if common, generalizable interests are concerned. In the case of the pursuit of particular, individual value maximization, the solution must necessarily take the form of compromise. Discourse ethics is conceptualized as a procedural ethic where the procedural conditions of a rational discourse enable a consensus through the exchange of arguments and thus lead to ethically legitimate solutions. The contents as well as the outcomes of each discourse are not predefined. Rather, they are determined by the participants of the discourse according to the situation or ethical dilemma that needs to be solved. The participants can also act as an advocate for interests of third parties that cannot take part in the discourse (e.g., to represent the interests of the next generation, of children, or of the environment).

Deliberative Democracy: The Extension of Discourse Ethics as a Response to Its Criticism The discourse ethical approach has been critiqued for the a priori assumptions of its philosophical argumentation and for the demanding conditions of an ideal discourse situation. The philosophical–

254

Discourse Ethics

methodological criticism centers on the universality claims of the theory. The assumptions of discourse ethics are criticized for the fact that their central concepts, such as argumentation, rationality, or reason, which are introduced as necessary for individuals to participate in discourses, can only be used universally if there is a common understanding of them in practical action. This presupposes a common understanding of these concepts and their use across time and geographical locations. However, the understanding of these words is strongly shaped by socialization and can thus have a completely different meaning in different cultures. The enforcement of the discourse conditions, especially for cultures to which such a way of argumentation is alien, can be understood as an imposition on other practices and ways of communicating. Habermas engages with this critique by referring to a shared lifeworld of practices and values societies and communities share and within which also argumentation practices develop. Within a lifeworld, the actors use linguistic rules of communication in order to achieve understanding. These are already in use as part of a lifeworld of a given community. However, they do not have an absolute, but only a relative, validity, as there is no guarantee that they cannot change over time or that they are culturally different. In addition to the philosophical–methodological criticism, the practical applicability of discourse ethics has been questioned. Discourse ethics has been criticized to the effect that its implementation (especially when applied to everyday organizational life) is not very pragmatic and, in some cases, even utopian. First, the conditions of an ideal discourse overly rely on the participants being educated (i.e., being able to engage in an exchange of well-reasoned arguments, relying on reason, and being willing to revise their opinions). Discourses also require time, preparatory information, and the possibility for all affected to participate. These are all scarce resources in everyday (organizational) life, especially when quick decisions need to be made. Finally, the provision of discursive arenas in which those affected by a decision can meet at the same level (i.e., without power asymmetries) is difficult to achieve due to the power potential of the various participating parties. This is especially the case in hierarchically structured organizations.

In response to the critique of the ideal speech situation, Habermas, in his latter works, extended his thoughts to a more encompassing theory of deliberative democracy. Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy draws on the assumptions of his discourse theory. The main aspect of deliberative democracy is the institutionalizing of modes of communication as procedures of the political will formation process. These institutionalized communication procedures take the form of discursive arenas for legitimate decision-making. Consequently, not all societal issues have to be solved in one instance of discourse but can be discussed and validated over a series of public discourses, the results of which are channeled into the political process. Once political decisions have been established through deliberative processes, they can be regarded as valid and legitimate. This relieves the public from a constant reproduction of political decisions. Important in this case is the fact that the possibility remains to revise the processes, as well as the decisions, if new or unforeseen conditions arise. The idea of deliberative democracy has received considerable attention in political theory and beyond. Research in political science has dedicated ample research to the conditions, processes, and outcomes of discourses, refining its original assumptions and extending the rigid conditions of an ideal speech situation.

Discourse Ethics in Organization and Leadership Theory Discourse ethics, and its extension to deliberative democracy, have been most prominently applied in organizational theories related to political corporate social responsibility (CSR). Proponents of political CSR propose a political role for the corporation in cases where states are unable or unwilling to tackle major sustainability challenges. The political role is based on deliberative exchanges with multiple actors to provision public goods and engage in voluntary self-regulation. As such, the discourse ethical approach has been considered a desirable normative basis and decision-making protocol for multistakeholder initiatives and global governance, corporate governance, and stakeholder engagement.

Distributed Leadership

Leadership scholars have drawn on the assumptions of discourse ethics to advocate participative leadership approaches that are less impositional and consider the role of the leader as a facilitator of emancipatory dialogue that can foster genuine exchanges, understanding, and learning, and collaborative action. Research on responsible leadership specifically has advocated the role of leaders as initiators and moderators of stakeholder discourses to foster exchanges, secure the legitimacy of organizational conduct, and facilitate collective problemsolving. Following the discourse ethical assumption that a single individual cannot foresee or anticipate all possible implications, discourses allow for both the exchange of knowledge and valid arguments, and the establishment of norms of good business conduct through communication. In reference to Habermas’s social theory, leadership can make use of communicative action, as opposed to strategic action, when issues of the shared lifeworld are concerned that do not yet have a broad societal consensus or are legally regulated. This is often the case for newly emerging ethical issues or issues relating to corporate responsibility and sustainability. Christian Voegtlin See also Communication; Corporate Social Responsibility; Ethical Leadership; Ethics and Effectiveness

Further Readings Dryzek, J. S., & Niemeyer, S. (2008). Discursive representation. American Political Science Review, 102(4), 481–493. doi:10.1017/S0003055408080325 Finlayson, J. G. (2005). Habermas: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10. 1093/actrade/9780192840950.001.0001 Fryer, M. (2012). Facilitative leadership: Drawing on ¨ Jurgen Habermas model of ideal speech to propose a less impositional way to lead. Organization, 19(1), 25–43. doi:10.1177/1350508411401462 Habermas, J. (1993). Remarks on discourse ethics. In J. Habermas (Ed.), Justification and application (pp. 19–111). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1998). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

255

Patzer, M., Voegtlin, C., & Scherer, A. G. (2018). The normative justification of integrative stakeholder engagement: A Habermasian view on responsible leadership. Business Ethics Quarterly, 28(3), 325–354. doi:10.1017/beq.2017.33 Scherer, A. G., & Palazzo, G. (2007). Toward a political conception of corporate social responsibility: Business and society seen from a Habermasian perspective. Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1096–1120. doi:10.5465/amr.2007.26585837 Stansbury, J. (2009). Reasoned moral agreement: Applying discourse ethics within organizations. Business Ethics Quarterly, 19(1), 33–56. doi:10.5840/ beq20091912

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP Distributed leadership refers to leadership that is shared by multiple individuals with relevant talents and expertise. Distributed leadership offers an alternative view of leadership and contrasts markedly with leadership as it has been traditionally understood. In particular, distribution calls into question some conventionally entrenched assumptions about leadership’s ontology. These mainly concern the unit of analysis. First, the designation of leader has been viewed almost exclusively as befitting an individual agent, who may possess personal characteristics and/or a skill set that, when manifest in her/his behavior, are sufficient to bestow leader status. This individualistic assumption is sometimes referred to as focused, solo, unipersonal, or standalone leadership. The second assumption is that leadership is an influence-based relationship comprising a taken-for-granted division of labor between one individual, the influencing agent, and other people, the recipients of that agent’s influence. The settings that manifest such influence relationships are potentially ubiquitous, and they are evident in interactions within and across all organizational levels, and in all social sectors. Diverse examples of the incidence of influence relationships include leadership in commercial or political transactions, small group engagements, large-scale social movement activities, and inter- as well as intraorganizational networks of relations.

256

Distributed Leadership

Third, the language used to describe and analyze this presumed division of leadership labor depicts it as structured hierarchically and as a binary relationship between two categories of agents: primarily a formally designated position-based leader and subordinate followers, with occasional allowance made for informally exercised leadership. The idea of distributed leadership, by contrast, switches the focus to multiple leaders and pluralities of leadership. This entry focuses on some of distributed leadership’s properties, those mechanisms that determine its manifestation, the significance of distribution for the leadership field, and issues concerned with the empirical investigation of distribution.

Emergence of Distributed Leadership Studies Distributed leadership became an initial focus of interest in social and organizational psychology in the 1950s, although questioning of the orthodox view of focused leadership gathered momentum only in the 1990s. At the onset of the 21st century, a distributed leadership perspective still had fringe recognition status in the field of leadership studies, but by the early 2000s, discussion of, and research into, distributed leadership had taken off when a sizable literature began to accumulate. At that point in time, there were nearly 200,000 Google hits for the phrase distributed leadership, although the accuracy of computer searches to establish the extent of that burgeoning literature was slightly complicated by the existence of such closely related descriptors as shared leadership, collective leadership, collaborative leadership, and coleadership. Evidence of leadership distribution was especially prominent in the fields of education, health, and business. Two decades or so later, by the time at which the idea of a leadership distribution has attained the status of legitimate knowledge in the leadership field, a recent Google search of distributed leadership undertaken for this entry yielded 365 million hits, or about 13% of a total of 2.85 million hits for leadership.

Categories of Distributed Leadership When leadership is distributed, the fixed categories of leader–followers that have long comprised the

standard unit of analysis run into difficulties in the face of evidence of fluctuating decision-making circumstances and an absence of a leadership monopoly. That is, dual membership categories are potentially redundant if and when followers can become leaders and leaders become followers. There are two broad ways in which distribution may be evident. The first is additive. This entails empirical evidence of a division of labor comprising more than one leader, so that N 5 1 becomes N 5 2 or N 5 21. At its most minimal, this additive plurality may simply mean that when one person ceases to lead, another organizational or group member steps into the breach and substitutes by acquiring the mantle of leader. While this minimal plurality represents low-level leadership numerical density (or leadership depth), such density becomes greater as plurality increases. Structurally, there might also be evidence of something less fleeting, as when two or more individuals arrive at an arrangement (a shared understanding, rather than a contract) to jointly exercise the leadership load of a work unit. There are two means by which these options tend to arise. Each option may be articulated as part of an official role or designated position description, or they may also be arrived at intentionally by the self-organizing agents themselves as part of a temporary, semipermanent, or even permanent working agreement. A distinguishing characteristic of leadership as part of the first means is its designed or mandated status, while the shared leadership in evidence via the second means entails its informal and spontaneous emergence. The other category of distribution is holistic, a term that is intended to capture the degree to which distributed relationships solidify into routinized patterns and become institutionalized through time. That is, the leadership relations in the division of labor integrate to a degree that makes those relations supervenient or more than the sum of their parts. Here there is evidence of small number working units or entities in which leadership is pooled and which lead as collective entities. Documented examples include leadership couples (such as coprincipals in a school system or cocaptains of a sports team), three- or four-person constellations, role sets, and varieties of teams. Such formations are far from uncommon. As with

Distributed Leadership

additive distribution, these pluralities may also be emergent, in which case the ties by which the unit members are bound, such as complementary, overlapping, and duplicate attributes, the need for trust, a blend of temperaments and capabilities, and friendship solidify organically in unplanned ways, as the group members’ shared understandings coalesce over time. As a general rule, the greater the number of shared ties or connections (known as multiplexity), the greater the density of leadership. The dynamic that manifests the density of these ties is sometimes referred to as synergy. These small number distributed pluralities may also be planned or result from intentional design (a mode of origin that confers them with legitimate authority), as in the case of an organization that specifically advertises vacancies for, and then subsequently appoints two or more people to, jointly held positions that require the shared exercise of leadership responsibilities. Emergent versions of leadership distribution have attracted particular attention. Emergent leadership arises from an evolving division of labor. Alterations to the division of labor are prompted by an organization’s task environment. External pressures on organizations created by changing market relations, rising unforeseen demands on existing resources, technological advances, and uptake of innovations, for example, are evidence of rapidly shifting environments. Typically, a division of labor responds through task elaboration and differentiation, processes that necessitate decisions about the organization and reorganization of work and work practices. Thus, the augmentation, redefinition, resequencing, or realignment of current tasks, incorporation of new tasks, and a consequent reappraisal of the suitability of current expertise potentially upset standard operating procedures. Because tasks vary in their complexity, the duration necessary for their accomplishment and the number of cooperating employees required, existing patterns of role interdependence, and coordination may be modified. Current work practices may be superseded, for example, or redundancies created and a need for new capabilities assumes priority. Such rapid-fire and fluid circumstances fuel the likelihood of increased impromptu and unrehearsed decision-making and stimulate localized reliance on

257

emergent forms of distributed leadership, anchored in preexisting informal organizational networks of advice, support, and attributed influence. Leadership attribution, distributed or otherwise, is both perception and performance dependent. That is, the idea that an individual, a number of individuals, a grouping, or groupings merit the status of leaders arises from cognitively sourced attributions of influence made by a range of audiences that encompasses colleagues, coworkers, voters, or spectators. Such attributions may be based on firsthand experience of the presumed leader(s) concerned, their expertise, status, seniority, reputations, published writings, third-party reports by others (e.g., peers, journalists) about them, or various visual and informational sources that are deemed reliable and credible. In respect of those people who attribute leadership to others, the accrued data from these sources provide the foundations of implicitly held theories of leadership. These theories, which may be subject to refinement or revision over time, comprise the judgmental yardsticks by which prospective claimants to leadership status are measured or assessed. Once attributed with leader status, subsequent performance by individuals and groupings may reinforce, revise, or even vitiate perceptions of leaders and leadership.

Benefits of Distributed Leadership There are a number of reasons for the attractiveness and significance of distributed leadership. By opening up the possibility of the desirability of leadership distribution, as distinct from the objectivity of its properties as a unit of analysis, these reasons shift the discussion focus in the direction of normativity. First, by decentering the focus of leadership analysis from a position-holder monopoly, especially that of a top-ranked hierarchical incumbent, distribution avoids the conflation of leadership with headship. While not necessarily subverting the leadership of the person in overall charge of an organization or system (i.e., its head), for example, the advantage created by the acknowledgment of distribution is that agents need not experience letdown or betrayal whenever they perceive and experience a leadership vacuum at the top. Instead, comfort is to be

258

Distributed Leadership

had in recognizing leadership’s existence elsewhere in the organizational structure and culture. Second, in societies sometimes typified by commentators as rapidly expanding knowledge economies, distribution can be demonstrated as going some way toward the maximization and better management of knowledge. Substitution of the idea of pooled information rather than its concentration in respect of problem-solving, for example, is (in effect) to recognize that reliance on two (or more) heads may be superior to one and, therefore, a better way of framing problems and arriving at solutions. Third, the multiplication and dispersal of individual leaders and units opens up the possibility that numerous (or potentially even all) organization members may be, or may become, leaders. From a human resources management perspective, therefore, such a climate of expectation has understandable developmental appeal. Moreover, individuals with acknowledged capability of leading are also likely to experience a sense of personal empowerment. However, this point of appeal may be two-edged. A deliberately implemented policy of distribution of decision-making by an organizational head risks being experienced as burdensome because it amounts to off-loading. That is, distributing leadership to others augments their responsibilities while easing the burdens of top echelon members.

Issues of Distributed Leadership Researchers into, and proponents of, distributed leadership confront a number of issues. As noted, leadership arises from the need of human agents to cooperate in the accomplishment of plans, and activity outcomes and goals. But before labeling ostensible cooperative endeavor as an instance of leadership, let alone as distributed leadership, there is a prior question to be answered. From the family of terms available for typifying human conduct in which an agent or agents try (and are able) to prevail on other agents to get things done, why might such conduct count as leadership rather than as something else, such as power, authority, manipulation, coercion, or force? The close association between leadership and influence made by its proponents begs the question of whether and how leadership relates to power, perhaps its closest conceptual neighbor within that family of

terms. While only a small minority of leadership scholars view leadership as power, rather than influence, the question of whether distributed leadership might actually be distributed power (or something else) and, if it isn’t, what its relationship to power may be, remains open. An additional difficulty highlighted by commentators is the risk of leadership disintegration. That is, with the possibility of everyone and anyone potentially being a leader created under conditions of distribution, and as proliferating associated terms like shared, dispersed, or collaborative leadership rely on ever finer categorization for their definition, as they try to empirically capture the nature and distinctiveness of observed action, the line between these terms and existing tried-and-true terminology such as decision-making, teamwork, or even organizational politics becomes increasingly difficult to stipulate. A case in point for distributed leadership is delegated authority, and whether this previously extensively utilized idea has become redundant in organizational usage, only to reemerge in a new guise as distributed leadership. Finally, if part of the prominence accorded distributed leadership has been to query the leader–followers binary then, ironically, to differentiate distributed leadership from time-honored focused or solo leadership is to introduce yet one more dualism or binary. In reality, however, single and plural leaders in conjunction facilitate the accomplishment of cooperatively structured projects and plans and coexist as part of an overall leadership configuration. Peter Gronn See also Collective Leadership; Leadership and Management; Organizational Leadership; Shared Leadership; Team Leadership

Further Readings Bolden, R. (2011). Distributed leadership in organizations: A review of theory and research. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13, 251–269. doi:10.1111/j. 1468-2370.2011.00306.x Buchanan, D. A., Addicott, R., Fitzgerald, L., Ferlie, E., & Baeza, J. L. (2007). Nobody in charge: Distributed change agency in healthcare. Human Relations, 60(7), 1065–1090. doi:10.1177/0018726707081158

Distributive Egalitarianism Denis, J.-L., Langley, A., & Sergi, V. (2012). Leadership in the plural. Academy of Management Annals, 6, 211–283. doi:10.5465/19416520.2012.667612 Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis. Leadership Quarterly, 13(4), 423–451. doi: 10.1016/S1048-9843(02)00120-0 Gronn, P. (2011). Hybrid configurations of leadership. In A. Bryman, D. Collinson, K. Grint, B. Jackson, & M. Uhl-Bien (Eds.), Sage handbook of leadership (pp. 435–452). London: SAGE Publishing. Gronn, P. (2015). The view from inside leadership configurations. Human Relations, 68(4), 545–560. doi: 10.1177/0018726714563811 Lumby, J. (2019). Distributed leadership and bureaucracy. Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 47(1), 5–19. doi:10.1177/ 1741143217711190 White, L., Currie, G., & Lockett, A. (2016). Pluralized leadership in complex organizations: Exploring the cross network effects between formal and informal leadership relations. Leadership Quarterly, 27, 280–297. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.01.004

DISTRIBUTIVE EGALITARIANISM The economic, social, and political institutions that structure society function to produce a distribution of benefits and burdens among its members that profoundly affects their lives. Distributive justice morally evaluates the resulting distribution or how it is produced. Principles of distributive justice indicate how benefits and burdens ought to be distributed. They provide moral guidance for evaluating distributive procedures or outcomes and for making decisions pertaining to them. Much of the philosophical literature focuses on principles that apply at the societal level. These principles are central to political leadership and governmental policy; they also provide guidance for ethical leadership of public or private institutions that affect distribution at the societal level (e.g., schools, universities, corporations). Additionally, ethical leadership usually requires applying principles of distributive justice within institutions. Such principles are context-specific, so may differ from those that apply at the societal level or within different kinds of institutions. They are principles of

259

distributive justice, however, because they capture the fair distribution of benefits and burdens that are relevant within a specific context. Distributive egalitarianism is the view that distributive justice requires equality of some kind in the distribution of certain benefits or goods. Distributive egalitarian theories develop principles that capture different interpretations of this requirement and specify the set of goods—or currency—the principles are to regulate. The purpose of this entry is to explain the central tenets of distributive egalitarianism and outline common ways of interpreting its requirements. Although it focuses on principles that apply at the societal level, the moral basis for distributive egalitarianism carries implications for the fair distribution of goods in other contexts. This entry also identifies influential challenges and alternatives to distributive egalitarianism.

The Moral Basis for Distributive Egalitarianism Distributive egalitarianism stems from a commitment to moral equality, which asserts that all people are equal in terms of fundamental moral value. This idea is consistent with recognizing differences in talent, capacities, and other traits, but it denies that some people are inherently more or less valuable in virtue of those differences. Rather, from the moral point of view, individuals’ lives are equally important. Moral equality is widely accepted among political philosophers, who take it to imply that justice requires the state to treat its citizens with equal respect and concern. Theories of justice interpret what such treatment entails. At minimum, it requires granting citizens equal rights and privileges regardless of religion, race, gender, talent, wealth, or other arbitrary factors. It also requires equality before the law, meaning laws must be impartial in that they do not favor the interests of some (e.g., the wealthy) over others and the same laws apply to everyone equally. Satisfying these requirements secures basic political equality. In principle, political equality is consistent with vast disparities in wealth, material goods, opportunities, and quality of life. These inequalities are often viewed as acceptable when members of

260

Distributive Egalitarianism

society can compete for them on fair terms. Distributive egalitarians argue that many of these inequalities are incompatible with treating citizens as equals and are therefore unjust. Taking this as their starting point, they develop different theories about what the demand of equal treatment implies for the distribution of valuable goods, beyond legal protections, political rights, and formal equality of opportunity.

Strict Distributive Egalitarianism Strict distributive egalitarianism is the most straightforward interpretation. This kind of theory endorses a principle of strict equality that says every citizen should have the same amount of something. Many distributive egalitarians find strict equality implausible on practical or moral grounds. One reason is that strict equality doesn’t consider what individuals deserve, which some take to be morally important. Others claim that it involves intruding upon individuals’ freedom because maintaining an equal distribution over time would require constantly correcting inequalities that arise from their choices. Principles that only require equality initially, at the starting gate, so to speak, avoid such intrusions, but many argue that this would be inadequate for treating citizens as equals since it permits severe inequality and deprivation after the initial distribution. The plausibility of strict egalitarianism depends in part on the currency that is to be equally distributed. The principle of strict equality could apply to inputs. That would be the case, for example, if each school in a district received the same amount of money to spend on its students. Unequal outcomes stemming from differences in how recipients use their equal share of inputs are permissible on this view. So, strict equality of inputs avoids concerns about intruding on individuals’ freedom. Principles that required distributing inputs at regular intervals would also avoid the starting-gate objection. However, it will still be objectionable for those who think the inputs people receive should reflect what they deserve or earn. Some distributive egalitarians reject equality of inputs because they argue that inputs are not valuable in and of themselves. Thus, they favor

whatever distribution of inputs is necessary to produce equal outcomes. A strictly equal distribution of outcomes means everyone ends up in the same condition—that could mean, for instance, that they enjoy equal levels of well-being or are equally wealthy. The freedom-based moral objection obviously applies to strict equality of wealth or resources. It might also carry significant force against strict equality of well-being, not just because maintaining that pattern would require constant intrusions but also because measuring well-being could be intrusive and even disrespectful. The desert-based objection also arises because maintaining equality could require directing a large proportion of resources to citizens who constantly undermine their own well-being by making poor choices, leaving less for those who make better choices. This seems unfair. Additionally, some claim that this is incompatible with treating citizens as equals. If so, strict equality of well-being is the wrong interpretation of distributive egalitarian requirements. Interpreting the relevant outcomes as opportunities helps address this last problem. Securing equal opportunities for all members of society involves eliminating arbitrary obstacles that make it more difficult for some citizens to achieve well-being or other valuable outcomes, but what they actually achieve depends on the choices they make. However, strict equality of opportunity is still subject to concerns about freedom.

Alternatives to Strict Distributive Egalitarianism These moral objections indicate that equality is not the only value that matters for distributive justice. Recognizing this, most distributive egalitarians reject strict equality, regardless of their preferred currency. The dominant view is that treating citizens as equals implies a presumption of equality in distribution of certain goods. That means any inequalities with respect to those goods must be justified. Distributive egalitarians identify various considerations that can justify departures from equality without failing to respect people as equals. They commonly claim that inequalities can be justified if they are deserved or if they stem from individuals’ responsible choices. Luck egalitarianism

Distributive Egalitarianism

captures these ideas. Luck egalitarians propose egalitarian principles that pair the distributive egalitarian idea that individuals are entitled to equal shares of some currency with the idea that personal responsibility—but not luck or factors beyond individuals’ control—can justify disadvantages relative to that currency. Hence, luck egalitarian theories balance equality and personal responsibility by endorsing a responsibility-sensitive distribution of an egalitarian currency. Some luck egalitarians defend their views by claiming that responsibility itself is inherently important or morally relevant to individuals’ distributive entitlements. Others appeal to fairness to defend the ideal that responsible choice can justify inequalities that would otherwise be unjust. The basic idea is that it’s fair for individuals to bear the burdens or enjoy the benefits produced by their own choices, but it’s not fair for them to bear burdens or enjoy benefits produced by factors beyond their control (i.e., matters of luck of circumstance). So, inequalities in the distribution of the relevant currency (e.g., well-being) are fair when they reflect individuals’ responsible choices. This addresses concerns about directing more resources toward those who are responsible for their disadvantage (e.g., low levels of well-being, fewer resources) at the expense of those who have acted more prudently. Although responsibility-sensitive principles are popular among distributive egalitarians, critics claim that the treatment they permit is too harsh. Critics point out that they can justify extreme disadvantage for those who bring it on themselves. For example, a mountain climber who embarks on a dangerous expedition despite the risk isn’t entitled to a life-saving rescue, even if it would be a cheap and easy mission. Similarly, critics observe that responsibility-sensitive principles could instruct paramedics to leave someone to die on the side of the road if they are responsible for their car accident. In response, distributive egalitarians refine their views either by invoking another value—like charity or solidarity—to justify undeserved rescues or identifying a threshold of stakes below which responsibility-sensitive principles do not apply. Another option is to justify departures from equality by appealing to the value of the currency

261

itself. Focusing only on relative shares of a currency (how the shares compare) implies that absolute size or value of the shares isn’t morally important. For example, strict equality of well-being is consistent with very low levels of well-being. Since they take well-being to be very important for individuals, it seems that distributive egalitarians who favor that currency should be concerned with how much people have in absolute terms, not just in relation to others. Some distributive egalitarians formulate principles to accommodate this consideration.

Challenges and Alternative Principles of Distributive Justice Several notable challenges have been raised against distributive egalitarianism. The first comes from relational, or social, egalitarians, who argue that justice requires equality in social relationships rather than distributive equality. According to this view, egalitarian justice should focus on creating a society where people enjoy equal recognition and inclusion. Rather than securing an equal distribution of goods, relational egalitarianism focuses on dismantling status hierarchies that underpin relations of oppression and domination. A different set of critics claim that individuals are entitled to sufficient shares of distributive goods, not equal shares. According to them, economic inequality in our current society is morally objectionable—incompatible with treating people as equals—because some people don’t have enough to lead decent lives, while others have much more than they need. The problem is not the inequality of economic goods per se, but the fact that some citizens are unnecessarily impoverished. What justice requires, on this view, is a distribution that allows everyone to live decent, dignified lives by the standards of their society. Similarly, some critics argue that the aim of distributive justice is to improve the position of the worst-off in absolute terms. The goal is to prioritize benefits for citizens who need them most rather than provide citizens with an equal or sufficient share of goods. This prioritarian view emerged from the now famous leveling-down objection: If equality itself is valuable, then it would be valuable to bring those who have the

262

Diversity

greatest shares of some distributive good down to the level of those who have the smallest shares. That would mean a society in which all citizens are equally poor is better than a society in which some citizens have more than others. This objection carries the most force against strict distributive egalitarianism, which is widely rejected. Those who endorse a presumption of distributive equality can avoid this counterintuitive implication by allowing distributive inequalities that improve the lives of those who are worst off just as they allow inequalities that reflect responsible choice. Such views are often identified as prioritarian, but, insofar as they are committed to the presumption of distributive equality, they are also distributive egalitarian views. Kathryn E. Joyce See also Economic Justice; Income Inequality; Philosophy; Procedural Justice

Further Readings Anderson, E. S. (1999). What is the point of equality? Ethics, 109(2), 287–337. doi:10.1086/233897 Arneson, R. (2004). Luck egalitarianism interpreted and defended. Philosophical Topics, 32(1/2), 1–20. doi:10. 5840/philtopics2004321/217 Brighouse, H. (2004). Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clayton, M., & Williams, A. (Eds.). (2002). The ideal of equality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, G. A. (1989). On the currency of egalitarian justice. Ethics, 99(4), 906–944. doi:10.1086/293126 Swift, A. (2014). Political philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Temkin, L. S. (2003). Egalitarianism defended. Ethics, 113(4), 764–782. doi:10.1086/373955

DIVERSITY Traditionally, in North America and Western Europe, the position of leadership has been occupied by White men. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who introduced the Great Man theory, influenced the early work on leadership in the United States known as the trait

approach. Review of the early work on trait and leadership portrayed a masculine, dominant, and intelligent image of leaders. Although this was based on the assessment of the leader’s personalities and competencies, research also showed that most people hold these masculine characteristics as the stereotype (i.e., expectations) for leaders. Since the start of the 21st century, however, the number of women and people of color in leadership roles has increased. Moreover, evidence shows that women and minorities are not perceived as leaders in the same way as White men. Two elements have impacted this perception of leadership effectiveness: the incongruence of people’s stereotypes of women and people of color and what they believe about a leader and the mismatch of social status or privilege that the leadership position has with the social status of women and people of color.

Gender-Based Stereotypes in Leadership Gender stereotypes are common categorizations based on certain traits that are typically thought to reflect either attributes of men or women. For example, the male stereotype rests upon the notion that most people expect men to be agentic, which includes traits such as dominance, autonomy, and a need for achievement. In contrast, the female stereotype assumes that women are communal, meaning that they have an interpersonal-oriented focus, which incorporates kindness, sympathy, and a need for affiliation. Researchers have widely noted that perceptions of leadership are historically associated with agentic characteristics, or in other words, traits that are typically descriptors of men. Since the early 1970s, scholars have found that to a large extent, both men and women upheld the belief that a manager has characteristics that more closely align with men. This belief not only was validated globally but has also persisted through the first decades of the 21st century. These beliefs, however, have started shifting for women, as more women are reporting the belief that they also have, or can obtain, the characteristics associated with a manager. The resulting impact of which gendered traits are perceived to align with people’s beliefs about typical leaders may influence leadership perceptions,

Diversity

depending on whether the leader’s gender stereotype is aligned with the leadership stereotype. Thus, a lack of congruence occurs when women, who are stereotyped as manifesting communal traits, act agentically in leadership positions. The implications this incongruence may have on the perceived effectiveness of women leaders are manifested in women’s reported experience of gender bias and feelings of discriminatory treatment in the workplace. That is, research findings suggest that a woman behaving similarly to a man is not considered and evaluated the same way, a pattern that is more pronounced for marginally negative behaviors. For example, an outspoken woman is considered aggressive and domineering, whereas an outspoken man is considered a valuable contributor and a go-getter. A woman who is subsequently reprimanded on such grounds may attribute this negative evaluation to gender bias. Owing to her experience of treatment dissimilar to that of her male counterpart, she may also perceive that she was subject to discrimination.

Race-Based Stereotypes in Leadership As with gender, race-based stereotypes have historically influenced various aspects of life. Differentiating characteristics are often ascribed positively to the racial majority (i.e., Whites or European Americans) in contrast to people of color. Historically, as White individuals have come to be dominant in much of the world, societal beliefs regarding the characteristics of a leader have traditionally been aligned with stereotypes ascribed to White men. Although there is a dearth of literature pertaining to the study of people of color and leadership, research points to the unique experiences of people of color in leadership positions in South Africa, Northern America, and Europe. The majority of the evidence supports that minorities, and Black leaders in particular, are often evaluated as less effective and less fit for leadership roles in comparison to White leaders. This finding has been attributed to the incongruence between the leader prototype and stereotypes concerning people of color, not to mention the lack of match between the historical social status of people of color in relation to Whites.

263

Consequences of Race and Gender Expectations for Leader Effectiveness A history of dominance and leadership by force is the background of what we now refer to as leadership in organizations. Some scholars, however, believe that dominant and aggressive leadership is no longer effective. Instead, contemporary scholars of leadership emphasize the importance of relationship and social justice in leadership. Further, when women or people of color are appointed to a leadership role, they are faced with two messages of how to be a leader. On the one hand, they are faced with the traditional view of dominance and high status, which may not match the social status in society that is granted to them. On the other hand, if they stay authentic to their social status and show humility, they may not be taken seriously. Thus, they may face a lack of confidence and support necessary to lead. Even when women and people of color claim leadership, the question remains whether followers will grant it to them. A multiperspective approach has demonstrated that stereotypes and social status can have two potential influences on the perception of a leader’s behavior and effectiveness. First, stereotypes and social status can directly impact the leader’s choice of behavior or the perception that others have of their behavior. Second, stereotypes and status expectations can be a context that influences how a leader’s perceived behavior may relate to how they are evaluated. Further, leadership scholars, across multiple summaries of studies on gender and leadership, have found that men and women leaders are perceived as similar in their considerate and task-focused behavior; however, they are perceived to differ on their use of collaborative and consultative decision-making, as women were seen as more participative than men. Further, men, in contrast to women, can be more authoritarian in their decision-making without receiving a negative evaluation. Thus, the mismatch of the high social status associated with the leadership position and the low social status ascribed to women and people of color may have implications for perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Certain leadership behavior styles are generally found to be most effective; however, subordinates’

264

Diversity Ideologies

perceptions of leaders’ behaviors in relation to effectiveness may be shaped by gender- or race-related factors. A leader’s behavior and style may (a) have a more effective outcome for men than for women leaders who have male or female subordinates and (b) have a more effective outcome for White men than for leaders of color who have White or non-White subordinates. Occasionally, a leader will have to express emotions. Research has shown that male leaders who express anger are considered by their subordinates to be competent and entitled to high status. In contrast, subordinates do not perceive female leaders to be as competent as men when they express anger. Similarly, in studies on ethnicity and expression of anger, Asian American followers rated Asian American leaders who expressed anger lower than European American leaders who expressed anger. These findings demonstrate that when individuals in leadership positions express anger, their subordinates may not perceive them the same way, based on the gender or race of the leader and whether these are in alignment with the leader stereotype. Although transformational leadership is a highly effective leadership style, when women have reported exhibiting transformational leadership behavior, their male subordinates rated them lower on leadership effectiveness. A similar finding was reported for charismatic leadership, where the subordinates’ accomplishments differed according to whether they had women or men leaders, despite both leaders being rated by their bosses as charismatic. As such, male subordinates with charismatic women leaders had fewer accomplishments than did male subordinates with charismatic male leaders. A study that explored the leadership effectiveness of Black leaders with White subordinates found that White subordinates challenged and undermined the authority of Black leaders. Furthermore, leaders of color were rated more negatively than White leaders by both White and non-White subordinates. Taken together, these findings illustrate that the gender and race of both the leader and their subordinate may impact the relationship between perceived leadership style and leadership effectiveness. Roya Ayman and Alexandra Sidney Bullock

See also Cross-Cultural Leadership; Race, Ethnicity, and Leadership; Race, Work, and Leadership; Racism in the United States; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Ospina, S., & Foldy, E. (2009). A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing context, power and the collective dimensions of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(6), 876–896. Schein, V. E. (2001). A global look at psychological barriers to women’s progress in management. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4), 675–688.

DIVERSITY IDEOLOGIES Organizational diversity is increasing—and with it comes the potential both for creativity and success and for intergroup conflict and tension. As such, understanding best practices for approaching and leveraging intergroup differences—as well as their contingencies and boundary conditions—has become an important topic in both psychology and organizational literature. In particular, the topic of diversity ideologies, which are defined as beliefs and practices that dictate how we should approach intergroup differences, has become increasingly popular. Diversity ideologies can refer to an individual’s own beliefs around how to approach differences in diverse settings. But the term can also refer to organizational practices that are explicitly stated in diversity mission statements to communicate the organization’s approach to, and norms around, diversity. Thus, diversity ideologies can be reflected in individual beliefs as well as organizational practice. Diversity ideologies have most commonly been studied in race research. Such research has identified, examined, and contrasted two competing ideologies: an identity-blind ideology (i.e., colorblindness) and an identity-aware one (i.e., multiculturalism). The first ideology, colorblindness (i.e., identity blindness), focuses on deemphasizing differences

Diversity Ideologies

between social groups. Specifically, it is an approach to improving intergroup relations that recommend reducing, eliminating, and ignoring category memberships; transmitting a common identity; and focusing on similarities or individuality rather than group-based differences. The underlying assumption of this ideology is that categorizing individuals by their social group leads to greater prejudice and conflict, not less. Thus, the proponents of a colorblind ideology posit that ignoring social categories should reduce these negative consequences and that transmitting a common core should lead to unification across different groups. The colorblind ideology is not without its critics. Opponents of colorblindness suggest that suppressing social categories is simply not possible because demographic group information, like race and sex, is detected in the brain within milliseconds. Colorblindness is seen as not only impossible but also undesirable, since it ignores the unique cultural identities and traditions of racial minorities, which often offer valuable resources to individuals and, at times, assimilates them into a dominant power structure, in which they are less visible. As such, opponents of colorblindness argue that differences between demographic groups should not be ignored—they should be recognized and celebrated. The other ideology, multiculturalism (i.e., identity awareness), challenges colorblindness, suggesting that ignoring race serves as a mechanism for maintaining intergroup inequality because it overlooks the cultural challenges and experiences of racial minorities embedded in a White-dominated power structure. As such, it argues for an identity-aware approach to difference that advocates for acknowledging, recognizing, and emphasizing intergroup differences to validate group-based identities and inform group-based experiences. An identity-aware approach sees differences not as a source of division but as a source of richness and diversity that strengthens society, validates meaningful identities, and provides a source of safety and support in contexts and settings in which racial minorities are underrepresented. Past work, spanning social and organizational psychology, has found that, for many outcomes

265

related to racial equity, identity awareness is more effective than identity blindness (for a recent ¨ review, see Gundemir, Martin, & Homan, 2019). Multiple studies demonstrate that for White individuals, identity awareness, as compared with identity blindness, leads to more engagement with, and positive evaluations of, minority group members. For example, after having participants reflect on multiculturalism, as compared to colorblindness, Jennifer Richeson and Richard Nussbaum found a reduction in White individuals’ implicit bias; Andrew Todd and Adam Galinsky demonstrate greater perspective taking among White people toward a minority target; Jacqui Vorauer and colleagues show that White people demonstrate more interest and engagement in interracial interactions (via other-directed remarks); and Evan Apfelbaum and colleagues show greater efficacy in White children’s recognition of discrimination. Further, people of color, themselves, tend to prefer identity awareness to identity blindness, and they experience more inclusion and more positive verbal and nonverbal behavior from White individuals who hold identity-aware ideologies. For example, Deborah Holoien and J. Nicole Shelton find that after White individuals were primed with multiculturalism (compared to colorblindness), they displayed less nonverbal prejudice toward their Black interaction partner, who subsequently performed better on a cognitive task. In workplace settings, Victoria Plaut and colleagues found that managers’ endorsement of identity awareness is related to minority members’ organizational engagement and sense of feeling accepted and included. Moreover, Wilton and colleagues showed that racial minorities (racial minority women in particular) perform better on (cognitive) tasks in multicultural settings. Identity awareness, however, is not a panacea. There are contexts, domains, and outcomes for which identity awareness can lose its benefits or even backfire. For example, some research finds that in contexts of heightened tension or intergroup threat, identity awareness can lead to more negative attitudes toward racial minorities and make White individuals feel excluded (e.g., Correll et al., 2008; Plaut et al., 2011). Other work suggests that identity awareness can activate stereotypes

266

Diversity Ideologies

about minority groups, heighten preference for minorities who act consistently with group-based stereotypes, enhance race essentialism, and delegitimize racial discrimination claims. Further, identity-aware ideologies can make racial minorities feel that their group identity is uncomfortably salient or constraining, that it precludes them from other group identities. Moreover, the beneficial effects of identity awareness may be limited to minorities who are highly identified with their ingroup. Despite these moderating factors, the weight of evidence suggests that identity awareness, in contrast to identity blindness, is related to higher quality intergroup relations (e.g., less prejudice, less discrimination, and more policy support) as well as improved intragroup effects (e.g., better performance, increased engagement), whereas support for the benefits of an identity-blind approach is at best mixed. Put simply, in the context of race, research has found that an identity-aware ideology has beneficial effects for racial minorities. But newer research has begun to shed light on the complexities of these approaches, namely in ideological content (or framing) and context, as well as target group characteristics, like whether diversity ideologies are targeted at racial minorities versus women. Across the literature, there are many different conceptions of identity-aware and identity-blind ideologies; while they all share a common intention of either recognizing or deemphasizing intergroup differences, respectively, the ways in which they do so can shape their effects. For example, identity awareness has been interpreted to mean celebration of difference, identity safety, segregation, or inclusion of difference; identity-blind approaches have been interpreted to mean assimilation or homogeneity, emphasis on a combination of homogeneity and individuality, and value in meritocracy. These different conceptualizations change the effects that diversity ideologies can have. For instance, colorblindness and assimilation are both viewed as identity-blind approaches—yet they have opposite effects on stereotyping. Or consider the fact that racial minorities’ leadership self-efficacy benefits from colorblind approaches that acknowledge individual-level differences, colorblindness with a focus on homogeneity has no such effect. In

¨ addition, some recent work by Seval Gundemir and colleagues suggests that certain components of the colorblind approach can be integrated into a multicultural message, which can create unique synergistic benefits. In particular, empirical work shows that ideologies explicitly integrating value-inmerit messages originating from the colorblind perspective with value-in-diversity messages as part of the multicultural approach (termed multicultural meritocracy) can enhance support and positive responses among both majority and minority group perceivers. Another important consideration in this work is context: For example, in contexts where there is heightened intergroup tension, an identity-aware approach can exacerbate intergroup tensions, or in contexts where Black individuals are highly underrepresented, an identity-aware approach has the potential to tokenize and potentially marginalize minority group members. Thus, it is necessary to consider the contexts in which these diversity ideologies are being endorsed and implemented when making claims about when identity-aware ideologies are effective and when they are not. Finally, it is important to consider the social category being targeted. Some work by Ashley Martin and Katherine Phillips shows that for women, identity awareness may actually backfire. For example, men who endorse and are primed with an identity-blind (compared to an identity-aware) ideology are less likely to endorse traditional stereotypes, particularly those around science, technology, engineering, and math. Similarly, women who endorse or are primed with an identity-blind ideology, in contrast to an identity-aware one, are more likely to identify with traditionally masculine stereotypes (leaderlike, assertive), feel more confident, and take more action in male-dominated workplaces. Other work has shown that gender awareness is related to more gender essentialism and benevolent sexism, both of which have been shown to lead to negative consequences for women’s workplace outcomes (e.g., stereotyping, bias). It is also noteworthy that the diversity ideologies literature may have implications for the experiences of other target groups. It is surprising that only a handful of studies have considered

Diversity Ideologies

other social categories, like age and sexual orientation. For example, research by Caroline Iweins and associates suggests that an identity-aware climate can positively impact older workers, increasing their proactivity and reducing their turnover intentions. Moreover, some scholars, such as Michelle Hebel and colleagues, suggested that the diversity ideologies framework should be extended to better understand the perceptions and experiences of groups with relatively concealable characteristics (e.g., LGBTQ1 individuals). Together, it seems that celebrating, recognizing, and highlighting differences is not only a popular but also an adaptive approach to navigating organizational diversity; however, care and attention should be paid to what is being highlighted through identity-aware messages and how these ideologies affect different groups or play out in specific contexts. To maximize its benefits, a diversity ideology needs to consider the complex needs of the involved parties as well as the specific context and then be tailored accordingly. ¨ Ashley Martin and Seval Gundemir See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Diversity; Gender Stereotypes; Leading Diversity; Race and Ethnicity; Racism in the United States; Stereotype Threat

Further Readings Apfelbaum, E. P., Norton, M. I., & Sommers, S. R. (2012). Racial color blindness: Emergence, practice, and implications. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(3), 205–209. ¨ Gundemir, S., Dovidio, J. F., Homan, A. C., & De Dreu, C. K. (2017). The impact of organizational diversity policies on minority employees’ leadership self-perceptions and goals. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 24(2), 172–188. ¨ Gundemir, S., & Galinsky, A. D. (2018). Multicolored blindfolds: How organizational multiculturalism can conceal racial discrimination and delegitimize racial discrimination claims. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(7), 825–834. ¨ Gundemir, S., Martin, A. E., & Homan, A. C. (2019). Understanding diversity ideologies from the target’s perspective: A review and future directions. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 282. Hahn, A., Banchefsky, S., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2015). Measuring intergroup ideologies: Positive and negative

267

aspects of emphasizing versus looking beyond group differences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 1646–1664. Hebl, M. R., Martinez, L. R., Skorinko, J. L., Barron, L. G., & King, E. B. (2014). How diversity ideologies influence LGBT employees: To be or not to be; and to see or not to see. In K. M. Thomas, V. Plaut, & M. Tran (Eds.), Diversity ideologies in organizations (pp. 151–176). Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis. Iweins, C., Desmette, D., Yzerbyt, V., & Stinglhamber, F. (2013). Ageism at work: The impact of intergenerational contact and organizational multi-age perspective. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 22, 331–346. Kirby, T. A., Silva Rego, M., & Kaiser, C. R. (2020). Colorblind and multicultural diversity strategies create identity management pressure. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50(6), 1143–1156. Leslie, L. M., Bono, J. E., Kim, Y. S., & Beaver, G. R. (2020). On melting pots and salad bowls: A meta-analysis of the effects of identity-blind and identity-conscious diversity ideologies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105(5), 453–471. Martin, A. E., & Phillips, K. W. (2017). What “blindness” to gender differences helps women see and do: Implications for confidence, agency, and action in male-dominated environments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 142, 28–44. Martin, A. E., & Phillips, K. W. (2019). Blind to bias: The benefits of gender-blindness for STEM stereotyping. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 82, 294–306. Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., & Goren, M. J. (2009). Is multiculturalism or color blindness better for minorities? Psychological Science, 20(4), 444–446. Richeson, J. A., & Nussbaum, R. J. (2004). The impact of multiculturalism versus color-blindness on racial bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(3), 417–423. Todd, A. R., & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). The reciprocal link between multiculturalism and perspective-taking: How ideological and self-regulatory approaches to managing diversity reinforce each other. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(6), 1394–1398. Wilton, L. S., Apfelbaum, E. P., & Good, J. J. (2019). Valuing differences and reinforcing them: Multiculturalism increases race essentialism. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(5), 681–689. Wilton, L. S., Good, J. J., Moss-Racusin, C. A., & Sanchez, D. T. (2015). Communicating more than diversity: The effect of institutional diversity statements on expectations and performance as a function of race

268

Dominance and Prestige

and gender. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 21(3), 315. Vorauer, J. D., Gagnon, A., & Sasaki, S. J. (2009). Salient intergroup ideology and intergroup interaction. Psychological Science, 20(7), 838–845.

DOMINANCE

AND

PRESTIGE

In 1532, Niccolo` Machiavelli posed a basic question that all leaders must confront: Is it better to be loved than feared, or be feared than loved? Machiavelli’s answer: “Fear is a better, more effective means to maintaining power.” Fast forward almost 500 years later. “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” remarks Donald Trump in 2016 in an interview as candidate for the U.S. presidency. Trump’s approach to leadership and his above-all emphasis on strength would have impressed Machiavelli, who also prioritizes strength over all else, including morality. Despite the persistence of these centuries-old ideas, they miss the mark. Decades of scholarship reveal that love and fear are both powerful motivations of followership. Contrary to Machiavelli and Trump’s convictions about power, love and fear are not only both important bases for acquiring and exercising status and power, but, if anything, love is an essential (if not more effective) ingredient to stable power across time and situations. This entry offers an examination of recent research on the effectiveness of dominance and prestige in both formal and information leadership roles. It also reveals how dominant leadership can at times also be a source of prestige. The entry concludes by describing the limits of dominance in leadership and how research reveals it is not a sustainable, long-term leadership style in successful groups.

Dominance and Prestige In diverse species—from fish and birds to chickens and chimpanzees—social status accrues to individuals who are more able to inflict costs on others. Not only do these dominant individuals gain coercive influence over others’ behaviors but they also enjoy more privileged access to contested

resources such as food, spaces, and mates, which translate into reproductive gains and lead to higher fitness. Much like their primate relatives, humans, too, yield to more dominant individuals who impose force, intimidation, or threat and begrudgingly comply with their requests. In this sense, the pattern of conflict and conflict avoidance determine who gains power and who remains powerless in humans and other species alike. Yet, the forms in which dominance is expressed in humans tends to be more muted and psychological than physical in nature. Threatening to withhold the year-end bonus, speaking over, or putting down or ridiculing others are all-too-familiar moves from the dominance playbook. Alongside dominance, however, there exists a second avenue to social status in human social groups and societies—people care deeply about who is competent, who has knowledge, and who can contribute to collective goals. These prestigious individuals are respected and revered, and their opinions and wishes are deferred to out of choice and free will, in exchange for learning opportunities or their services in generating benefits for the group.

Dominance and Prestige: Two Avenues to Influence and Informal Leadership These two means to getting one’s way—dominance (inducing fear and using coercion) and prestige (earning respect and exercising persuasion)— influence who is deferred to (whether to avoid harm or to gain some benefit) and how decisions are made within a group and thus are fundamental means by which informal leaders emerge. Three research studies, using different kinds of methodology, provide insight into how these two types of status affect informal leadership. In 2013, Joey Cheng and her colleagues brought a few hundred participants to a laboratory and assigned them to small, minimal groups of four to six individuals to observe how hierarchies emerge in real time. They found that individuals who managed to cultivate fear or earn respect emerged as informal leaders, spontaneously and rapidly—they became the most prominent, visible, and central members of the group (as revealed by the greater attention they received in the form of more eye gazes), and they

Dominance and Prestige

steered the course of group discussions and wielded exceptional influence over the group’s collective decisions. Also, in contrast to dominant individuals, prestige-based leaders were deemed socially attractive by followers who desired to hang around them. This distinction is consistent with other studies indicating that prestigious individuals tended to be generous and kind and humble rather than aggrandizing like the dominants and sought out for advice on a variety of topics. But how do more dominance-based leaders fare in the long run? Are they more able to maintain their power and influence than prestige-based leaders, as Machiavelli would believe? Here is where new research conducted by Kaylene McClanahan and her colleagues in 2021 offer key insights. Following project teams of working professionals who collaborated intensely over a one-month period to meet their deadline, these investigators demonstrated that people who were deemed dominant or prestigious emerged as informal leaders not only in the first hour of coming together as a group, but their disproportionate influence maintained over time and persisted well after the project’s conclusion. But, as previously mentioned, important differences exist in the nature, or kind, of influence exercised. Groups members willingly paid deference to prestigious leaders, but were privately disinclined to defer to dominant leaders, whose wishes they merely complied with to avoid the costs of conflict or further harm. Similar insights come from a 14-year long study of power and influence in the workplace. Cameron Anderson and his colleagues showed in a 2020 study that employees who intimidated or struck fear in coworkers (dominant) as well as those who were skilled and competent (prestigious) gained more power and influence in their organization. Crucially, however, in both of these studies of power over time, although dominance is a basis for acquiring informal leadership, prestige has a stronger effect on long-term influence relative to dominance. What may explain the greater role of prestige compared to dominance? Scholars have proposed that the interplay of several factors has increased the relative importance of prestige in human societies—including human’s greater cooperation

269

and dependence on each other for knowledge acquisition, food production, and raising offspring; the rise and spread of meritocratic institutions; the proliferation of social norms that favor egalitarian behavior; and the ability to vote with one’s feet in the face of coercion. As such, it can be said that Machiavelli overestimated the power of fear and underestimates the power of love. Prestige provides an equally (if not more) viable means to maintaining power as dominance.

When Dominance Is a Source of Prestige Although dominance and prestige are distinct tactics to social status and informal leadership, they need not operate independently. In fact, the influence of many high-status people is rooted precisely in both processes. There are many contexts that lead to overlapping forms of status, one being that the traits, attributes, and motivations that generate coercive threat may also signal other locally valued abilities worthy of emulation or deference, thus commanding respect. Consider how, for example, physically larger individuals (dominance) may be seen as capable of supplying benefits for in-group members; these benefits may be in the form of punishing in-group free riders, spearheading intergroup conflicts, or at compelling others into providing coalitional support. This means that physical stature cues not only dominance but also prestige. Beyond physical stature and size, many other traits related to coercive capacity (dominance) can also elicit prestige-based deference. This includes direct and indirect cues of physical strength and mental steadfastness such as competitiveness, risk-seeking, bravery, emotional states such as anger, and vocal and facial markers of dominance (e.g., low voice pitch, wider face). The point is that individuals who possess these dominance cues will evoke some degree of prestige-based status, and both forms of status will form the basis of these individuals’ overall influence.

Dominance and Prestige in Formal Leadership When it comes to formal leadership, the same dominance and prestige processes also contribute to the influence of leaders who are formally recognized

270

Dominance and Prestige

by the group, community, or institution. But unlike informal leaders whose influence and status can be more ephemeral, situational, and context-specific, institutional hierarchies often grant formal leaders, managers, and authorities legitimized power and control over rewards and punishments, thus evoking coercive threat. Meanwhile, formal leaders may nevertheless be assumed to have achieved their position via skill or may genuinely demonstrate skill and success or can effectively contribute to collective action, and thereby command respect. This explains why many authorities—such as CEOs, teachers, and police—often pose a certain degree of coercive threat, even if they refrain from dominance and primarily rely on prestige-based influence. Formal leadership inherently creates some baseline degree of dominance onto which respect or fear is further cultivated.

The Limits of Dominance Of course, a leader is a leader only when they have followers. Because the influence of dominancebased leaders is maintained by followers’ avoidance of harm (rather than the provision of benefits, as in prestige-based leaders), coercive dominants are tolerated only to the degree that they continue to possess relative power to inflict costs, and the price of subordination is outweighed by the risks of challenging the status quo. This is true for formal leaders but even more so for informal leaders, whose status and influence may be more temporal and subject to continual negotiation with each collective action. So, all leaders who rely on some dominance to maintain their power confront a similar challenge: Subordinates may form leveling coalitions to counter their despotism. For subordinates, collectively forming an alliance against the dominant is sensible as this reduces the costs of an otherwise individually very costly act, including lowering the risk of injury and retaliation. Several key motivational forces and moral values steer people toward leveling coalitions—preference for egalitarianism and autonomy, inequity aversion, and a distaste for displays of arrogance and aggrandizement. To see the bounds that norms place on coercion and oppression, consider a 2019 study by Daniel

Redhead and colleagues. They set up a longitudinal study of small collaborative student project groups with strong egalitarian and anti-aggression norms and tracked how people’s influence unfolded over time. Their finding was that in groups with beliefs and norms that support egalitarian behavior, dominant individuals rose to influence when power was up for grabs, when the groups initially formed, but their impact over group decision-making declined rapidly. In fact, coercive individuals ceased to be influential by the four-week mark, even though they never stopped being feared. In this egalitarian context, only prestige provided a stable avenue to long-term influence. In this way, coercing one’s way to power is a more precarious strategy that may yield variable results across contexts. This study also highlights the constraints imposed on dominance by egalitarian norms. Purely coercive strategies to leadership will be muted and generate lower returns (that is, less successful) in groups and institutions with strong social norms that promote egalitarian behavior and suppress aggression. What practical advice for leaders and organizations flow from this understanding of dominance, prestige, and leadership? After all, while force and coercion might allow a leader to fiendishly extract compliance and submission, only a respected leader can truly persuade and inspire deference, motivation, and loyalty among the people they are leading. One answer: creating egalitarian, antidominance norms and institutions is one of the most promising tools for suppressing dominance, promoting prestige-based leadership, and building more positive groups, teams, and organizations. Joey T. Cheng See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Followership; Leader Emergence and Performance; Political Leadership; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Anderson, C., Sharps, D. L., Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2020). People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work. Proceedings of

Dominance and Prestige the National Academy of Sciences, 117(37), 22780–22786. doi:10.1073/pnas.2005088117 Cheng, J. T. (2020). Dominance, prestige, and the role of leveling in human social hierarchy and equality. Current Opinion in Psychology, 33, 238–244. doi:10. 1016/j.copsyc.2019.10.004 Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(1), 103–125. doi:10.1037/ a0030398 Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400873296 Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission.

271

Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. doi: 10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4 McClanahan, K. J., Maner, J. K., & Cheng, J. T. (2021). Two ways to stay at the top: Prestige and dominance are both viable strategies for gaining and maintaining social rank over time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(10), 1516–1528. https://doi. org/10.1177/01461672211042319 Redhead, D., Cheng, J. T., Driver, C., Foulsham, T., & O’Gorman, R. (2019). On the dynamics of social hierarchy: A longitudinal investigation of the rise and fall of prestige, dominance, and social rank in naturalistic task groups. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(2), 222–234. doi:10.1016/j. evolhumbehav.2018.12.001 Zeng, T. C., Cheng, J. T., & Henrich, J. (2022). Dominance in humans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377(1845), 20200451. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0451

E distributive justice, including why he believed that economic justice was morally justified, and concludes with some contrarian viewpoints to Rawls’s views.

ECONOMIC JUSTICE The term economic justice most commonly refers to the question of distributive justice—how shares of resources should be allocated within a just society. Investigation of that question implies engagement with broader theories of social justice and their implications for political–economic systems. The term, however, also may refer to claims of justice within a specific workplace or in workplaces generally, as when employers are described as being exploitative and unfair to labor by labor union organizers advocating for employees within capitalist enterprises. In popular usage, both meanings are often invoked, sometimes interchangeably. For instance, the term economic justice is often invoked in specific conflicts related to labor union activities, but also may be invoked by organizers in broader efforts at legislative change (such as living wage campaigns, the fight for $15 minimum wage campaign, and similar efforts). While distributive justice has been a primary concern of major philosophical theorists of social justice like John Rawls, concern with distributive justice does not compose the whole of social justice. Contemporary theorists of social justice informed by Rawls also pay primary attention to questions of group identity, diversity, and pluralism, as well as more nuanced attention to questions of justice and citizenship. This entry provides an in-depth review of Rawls’s view of

The Rawlsian Paradigm of Distributive Justice In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls (1921–2002) articulated a philosophical alternative to utilitarianism (the position that society should strive to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people) that would better express both the grounds for and the aspirations of liberal democratic societies. Rawls’s ambition was to specify a public philosophy that would recognize the primacy of justice—regarded as the first virtue of social institutions—and better match our moral intuitions about the worth and importance of each human life. Utilitarianism, charged Rawls, failed to recognize and respect the distinction between persons, and therefore sanctioned or even required sacrificing the well-being of individuals to that of the group. Intuitively, Rawls contended, we believe that individuals “possess an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” If this is the case, then maximizing aggregate welfare (the presumed policy goal of utilitarianism) cannot be an adequate account of justice. Rawls advanced the alternative justice as fairness, with the aim of providing an account of

273

274

Economic Justice

social justice that would, from the start, rule out outcomes that discarded some people’s lives in the name of a greater good. To illustrate his view, Rawls famously developed the Original Position thought experiment to demonstrate the reasoning leading to justice as fairness. In the Original Position, representative persons (parties) of a larger society would come together to reach agreement on the principles of justice guiding the organization of that society, ignorant of their own place in the social order, their identity, and even their personal preferences. They also would be ignorant of the facts and features of their own society. These persons, however, would understand that they each have an interest in living a life of their own direction and, having the resources and social support to do so, they would understand certain presumably universal facts of social cooperation (for instance, that people need social respect to thrive and that people often respond to economic incentives). Rawls argued that the parties in the Original Position would adopt two principles of justice: a principle of liberty that would encompass a bundle of personal, civic, and religious liberties, secured within a democratic political system; and a principle of equality consisting of fair equality of opportunity with inequalities of outcomes limited to those benefitting the least well-off group. Much of the substance of Rawls’s concern with social and economic justice falls under the umbrella of fair equality of opportunity. Opportunities for college admissions, jobs, and other competitive positions should not only be equally open to all, but society should actively act to cancel out or minimize inequalities in the capacities of different groups and differently placed individuals to compete for such positions. For instance, there should be a public education system to allow all to develop their capabilities, and that system should devote more resources and support to those from the least advantaged circumstances. This commitment to fair equality of opportunity might sanction additional policies aimed at ensuring children in less-resourced households have the same opportunity as the most privileged to develop and utilize their skills and talents. Rawls believed that self-respecting people in the Original Position could never agree to arrangements that might deny them (or their offspring) true

equality of opportunity, just as self-respecting people in actual democratic societies commonly fight for it where it is absent. But Rawls—informed by his additional assumption that the parties in the Original Position would not be motivated by envy—believed that upon reflection, people can accept some level of economic inequality—inequality of outcome—as useful to having a more prosperous society in which all benefit. If highly prosperous societies established a floor (including a minimum income) below which even the poorest persons could not fall, while also providing equal educational and related opportunities to all, then even the worst-off group within a richer, more unequal society likely would be objectively better off than it would be in a significantly poorer but more equal society. It would, therefore, be rational for the parties in the Original Position to accept as just some degree of economic inequality, provided that this inequality contributes to (rather than detracts from) the well-being of the least well-off group. Operationalizing the well-being of the least well-off in practice might involve adoption of specific economic rights (such as a right to employment or a minimum income, a right to health care, and potentially much more) depending on the judgment of democratic legislatures. Rawls envisioned that there might be legitimate disagreement on the most appropriate means of maximizing the well-being of the least well-off in any particular circumstance, which should be worked through via familiar democratic processes, but that in a stable just society there would be widespread moral consensus that maximizing the position of the least well-off group must be the aim of policy and institutional design.

The Moral Grounding of Rawls’s View Rawls’s view carries the implication that most traditional justifications for significant economic inequality are not valid. Inequalities resulting from the accident of birth (i.e., inheritance) are clearly arbitrary and carry no moral weight. Since talent and skills are distributed randomly and since they depend on social circumstances for their cultivation, they also carry no moral weight, according to Rawls. Instead, the different talents and skills

Economic Justice

embodied in individuals should be treated as a common pool of assets to benefit everyone. Rawls also states that greater effort itself does not entitle one to a greater share of goods and resources, since even willingness to make an effort is shaped by social forces beyond the individual’s control. According to Rawls, the only valid justification for policies and arrangements that generate significant economic inequality is if those policies and arrangements bring greater benefit to the least well-off group, over the long run, than more egalitarian arrangements. Rawls allows that there may be social benefit to providing persons who work hard, who have special talents, or who have entrepreneurial energy with greater economic reward through familiar market processes or through institutional rules (such as those governing university admissions). Rules that allow those with special talents, or who work especially hard, to gain additional benefits can be morally justified if they lift society’s overall prosperity. In short, Rawls rejects any notion of pre-institutional desert, that is, the idea that our abilities, our moral character, or our accomplishments can, in themselves, justify a greater share of economic goods. The only thing that can justify individuals receiving a greater share of economic goods are the institutional rules themselves, which must be established (and revised over time) so as to maximize the position of the least well-off group. In this way, Rawls argues for a quite stringent conception of economic equality that he regarded as likely consistent with widespread use of markets but definitely inconsistent with known forms of capitalism.

Critical Responses Rawls’s arguments have generated an enormous amount of debate. In an early response, libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick argued in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) that the endstate distribution of resources was morally irrelevant so long as particular resources were all acquired and traded in a morally legitimate manner. Nozick also questioned whether Rawls’s commitment to treating talents as a common asset was not another version of treating people as means to an end (the same fault of which Rawls

275

charged utilitarianism). Critics of Nozick’s argument challenged his apparent view that market transactions under capitalism (including in the labor market) are fair, voluntary, and free from force or fraud. Scholars who broadly shared a liberal egalitarian viewpoint were troubled by Rawls’s dismissal of individual merit and effort as morally relevant. One criticism was based on the distinction between inequalities resulting from luck (the luck of birth, or the luck of the market place) and differences in effort. This view aimed to vindicate strong redistributive policies (such as establishing a minimum income floor) without challenging the deeply held view that there should be a correlation between effort and reward. Another criticism of Rawls was that it was a mistake to seek a single principle of distributive justice applicable across all goods. Instead, the appropriate distributive principle for a given good depends on the nature of the good itself as it is collectively understood by the community at a particular point in time. It is possible to distinguish among goods that by their very nature must be distributed equally (such as a right to vote), goods that should be distributed on the basis of need (such as health care and to an extent food), and goods that can be distributed unequally (that is, on the basis of preferences and ability to pay for them). Despite criticisms, the Rawlsian paradigm remains exceptionally influential in both philosophical discussions of economic justice and public policy scholarship and practice. An important thrust in recent Rawlsian-informed scholarship has been a renewed focus on the idea that achieving economic justice will not require new metrics but a different political– economic system. Thad Williamson See also Community Wealth Building; Procedural Justice; Property-Owner Democracy; Social Justice

Further Readings Allen, D., & Somanathan, R. (2020). Difference without domination: Pursuing justice in diverse democracies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/ chicago/9780226681368.001.0001

276

Economic Recovery and Leadership

Anderson, E. (2019). Private government: How employers rule our lives (and why we don’t talk about it). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.7710/ 1526-0569.1624 Dworkin, R. (2002). Sovereign virtue: The theory and practice of equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv1c3pd0r Miller, D. (1999). Principles of social justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state and utopia. New York, NY: Basic Books. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY LEADERSHIP

long run. With economic policymaking being under the purview of leaders, leadership is an essential ingredient in ensuring a healthy economy. Leadership within economic policymaking comes from two groups: the fiscal authority, usually the legislative and executive branches of government, and the monetary authority, usually the central bank. In many countries these are separate, and often also independent, groups. For example, at the federal level in the United States, the president and Congress are responsible for fiscal policy and the Federal Reserve System is responsible for monetary policy. This entry primarily focuses on countercyclical fiscal and monetary policymaking, that is, policymaking during bad times, and the role of leadership in making these policies.

AND

Recovery from an economic recession requires leaders to make policies that address the immediate economic concerns while considering how these policies will affect the economy in the long term. This entry outlines how fiscal and monetary policy is used to help nations recover from recessions and the importance of leadership in such policymaking. During a recovery, policy makers face a variety of trade-offs, especially between short-term and long-term goals. Often, solutions to short-term economic problems have a detrimental effect on long-term outcomes, and vice versa. Effective leadership requires that both short-term and long-term goals be weighed appropriately. This entry also discusses how central banks are structured to be independent and how central bank credibility is essential to ensuring long-term stability during economic recoveries.

Leadership Within Economic Policymaking Economic policymaking has two overarching goals: the mitigation of short-term economic fluctuations—recessions and expansions—and long-term economic growth. In the absence of good economic policymaking, the economy would experience more frequent and wider fluctuations in the short run and a more unpredictable economic growth path in the

Fiscal Policy One way to affect economic decision-making, and thus the economy as a whole, is by changing taxes and/or government spending on goods and services. Fiscal policy refers to the act of changing taxes and government spending to affect the economy. Tax Policy

Tax policy can be crafted to either encourage or discourage spending. Higher taxes lead to lower spending and lower taxes lead to higher spending. A government may wish to encourage or discourage spending for a variety of reasons. For example, the government may wish to provide subsidies (i.e., a negative tax) to education to encourage more of the populace to acquire an education. The reason for this may be that the government believes education has a positive externality on society. One major use of tax policy is to encourage private spending during bad times. Higher spending leads to both lower unemployment and higher gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Examples of tax policies during bad times to encourage private spending include providing tax rebates directly to consumers, cutting income taxes, providing direct and indirect tax incentives to businesses to keep employees employed, and reducing sales taxes.

Economic Recovery and Leadership

In addition to providing direct tax incentives, the government may also use other indirect forms of directly transferring money to the consumers and businesses. For example, in recent recessions, governments have provided funding to extend unemployment benefits. These benefits provide payments to a subset of unemployed individuals for a fixed number of weeks. Government Spending Policy

Government spending policy refers to the act of the government directly purchasing goods and services from the economy. Similar to tax policy, the government employs such policy for a variety of reasons. For example, the government may increase spending on the highway infrastructure to reduce the cost of transportation and thus commerce, thereby encouraging long-term economic growth. Government spending policy also plays a crucial role in economic recoveries. In addition to incentivizing consumers and businesses to spend through tax policy, the government can also spend directly. This increased spending leads to a multiplier effect through both increased employment and increased wages. Fiscal Policy and Leadership

Leadership plays a crucial role in crafting effective fiscal policy during economic recoveries. The main goal of the fiscal authority during an economic crisis and subsequent recovery is to encourage continued spending. The continued spending is necessary to keep unemployment rates from getting too high and to ensure that GDP growth does not turn negative. However, fiscal policy that encourages spending in the short run—lower taxes and higher government spending—comes at the cost of increased government debt in the long run. Consequently, leaders have to very carefully weigh the pros and cons of short-term fiscal stimuli versus the long-term cost of government debt. Another trade-off faced by the fiscal authority is that between unemployment and inflation. Fiscal policy during recessions acts to increase spending to offset decreases in demand caused by the recession. If such fiscal policy is very aggressive, it can act to

277

not only offset decreased demand but also further increase it. Increased demand can lead to higher prices, and thus sustained higher inflation. Whereas depressed demand and high unemployment are usually short-term concerns, inflation is a longer-term concern, thus once again illustrating another trade-off between the short term and the long term. Given long-term versus short-term trade-offs induced by debt and inflation, forward-looking leadership is important during economic recoveries. Given the relatively short election cycles faced by the fiscal authority (i.e., the legislative and executive branches of government), there is incentive to overweigh positive short-term outcomes at the cost of worse long-term outcomes. For example, a politician may prefer a fiscal policy that aggressively lowers unemployment in advance of an election, a so-called political business cycle, even if the long-term cost is sustained inflation. Forward-looking leadership and policies encouraging leaders to think long-term help reduce such outcomes. Another intratemporal trade-off faced by leaders is that the benefits of fiscal policy are often not uniformly distributed. For example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allocated over 10% of the roughly $800 billion allocated in the act to the education sector, which is significantly larger than the size of this sector in the economy. Consequently, fiscal policy during an economic recovery produces some winners and losers. Leadership plays an important role in determining this distribution of benefits toward the larger aim of helping the whole.

Monetary Policy Another way to affect economic decision-making and thus the economy as a whole is by changing the money supply and allocation of liquidity and credit in the economy. This type of policymaking is referred to as monetary policy. Central banks are usually the main authority responsible for monetary policy. Monetary Policy Tools

Changes in the money supply and allocation of credit influence various interest rates in the

278

Economic Recovery and Leadership

economy. Interest rates are an important determinant of spending. Lower interest rates cause consumers to save less and spend more. In addition, lower interest rates also encourage business to borrow toward investment in capital. The increased spending induced by lower interest rates thus also leads to lower unemployment because of the increased need of labor to produce the goods and services being demanded. Monetary policy is regularly used during recessions and expansions as a way to reduce wide fluctuations. During bad times, the central bank acts to counteract overall decreased spending by reducing interest rates to encourage spending, while during good times, the central bank does the opposite to counteract excessive spending. Monetary policy has a very short policy lag (i.e., the time between identifying the problem and enacting a policy in response is short). This makes it a very effective tool especially during economic crisis and recoveries. Changes in interest rates can be implemented very quickly, and in response, economic decision-making changes quickly too. Historically, the monetary authority has been the quickest to respond to economic downturns. Fiscal interventions generally take time to be formulated and approved by the legislative and executive branches. The monetary authority can adjust liquidity and allocate credit in a variety of ways. The traditional ways have been to alter interest rates at the discount window, the federal funds market, and REPO and by directly altering the money supply by changing the reserve requirement itself (i.e., the amount of money financial institutions must hold at the federal reserve bank). Recent economic recoveries have pushed the limits of the traditional monetary policy tools. For example, since the Great Recession of the late 2000s, interest rates have been very low, staying at close to 0% for long periods of time. In response, monetary authorities around the world have innovated by buying different types of assets and thus altering interest rates in those asset markets, toward affecting interest rates more generally. These assets have included things like federal debt and mortgage-backed securities. The creation and use of nontraditional monetary policy tools is a great example of the importance of

good leadership for monetary policymaking. It also illustrates the importance of creative leadership in economic decision-making, especially during economic downturns and recoveries. Central Bank Independence

Trade-offs are inherent in any economic policymaking. Similar to the fiscal authority, the monetary authority also faces a trade-off between low unemployment and persistent inflation. If the monetary authority encourages spending too aggressively, it will not only reduce unemployment but also increase demand too much, causing higher prices. However, unlike the fiscal authority, the monetary authority faces fewer noneconomic trade-offs such as pending elections. This allows them some level of independence in making policies. In many countries, laws further separate the monetary authority from the trade-offs faced by the fiscal authority by making them legally independent entities. For example, in the United States, the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve System are appointed for 14-year terms to isolate them from pressure by the legislative and executive branches. This independence is crucial for effective policymaking as it ensures a leadership system whereby both the short-term unemployment goals and long-term inflation goals are appropriately weighed. Laws that result in central bank independence represent a unique leadership style. The legislative and executive branches recognizing their inability to properly weigh the short-term and long-term trade-offs have work to create an independent entity with significant economic power to ensure that these trade-offs are appropriately weighed especially during economic recoveries. Central Bank Credibility

Credibility and reputation are very important for effective monetary policymaking. The main reason for this is that central banks face a trade-off in keeping prices stable. Keeping prices stable often requires central banks to make policy that limits spending, in turn either increasing unemployment or halting the decrease in unemployment. Central banks often face public pressure to not implement

Educational Attainment

such policies. If the central bank bows to such pressure, prices will persistently rise. Consequently, using monetary policy to reduce prices results in a game of chicken—which will happen first: will the economy cut back spending reducing inflation or will the central bank bow to pressure and back off spending–reducing policy. Credibility ensures that the economy believes the central banks’ commitment to price stability, thereby ensuring that the economy will cut back spending. Strong leadership and trust play a very important role in central bank credibility. In the absence of such credibility, it becomes very hard for the central bank to influence prices and ensure price stability during times of economic crisis. Identifying Shocks

Recessions can be caused by a variety of reasons. Broadly speaking, the reasons can be broken into shocks that affect demand, such as a loss in consumer confidence; shocks that affect short-run supply, such as an oil price shock; and shocks that affect long-run supply, such as war. In each case, the policy response to ensure a robust recovery while keeping stable prices is different. For example, in response to a loss in consumer confidence, lowering interest rates can both lower the unemployment rate and allow for price stability; whereas in response to war, lowering interest rates would decrease unemployment but also cause prices to rise. Leadership that is able to disentangle the underlying reasons for a recession and make appropriate policy is very important to ensuring a stable recovery, especially when there is debate around the underlying reasons for the recession. International Organizations

Along with the monetary and fiscal authorities within a country, international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank also play an important role during an economic recovery. Their main role revolves around lending assets to governments that face shortfalls and also in providing educational support. These loans often come with stipulations on how the funds can be used, how the loan will be repaid, and/or a set of economic policies the country must

279

implement. Leadership in both the recipient country and the international organization work on these agreements together. In this sense, leadership from leaders across different origins also plays an important role during economic recoveries. M. Saif Mehkari See also Bureaucracy; Economic Justice; Global Business Leadership; Monetary Policy; Regulating Private Sector Leaders

Further Readings Besley, T., Montalvo, J. G., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2011). Do educated leaders matter? The Economic Journal, 121(554), 205–227. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011. 02448.x Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A. (2005). Do leaders matter? National leadership and growth since world war II. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), 835–864. doi:10.1093/qje/120.3.835 Taylor, J. B. (1993). Discretion versus policy rules in practice. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 39, 195–214. doi:10.1016/01672231(93)90009-L

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT In the latter decades of the 20th century and first two decades of the 21st century, American society saw an unprecedented increase in the number of college-educated people, in general, and collegeeducated leaders, in particular. According to the United States Census, in 2020, 37.5% of those living in the United States held a college degree, as compared to 25.6% in 2000 and only 4.6% in 1940. The 21st-century United States can be characterized as a schooled society—a society that is shaped by and organized around education. This remarkable increase in the power that education, educational institutions, and educated populace wield within our society has had an impact on how leaders emerge, what characteristics they tend to possess, and how they lead. To consider the effects of educational expansion on leaders and

280

Educational Attainment

leadership, this entry begins by discussing the educational attainment levels of those in leadership positions. It then proceeds to outline how college attendance might benefit leaders and, in the final section, presents a discussion of instances where evidence is inconclusive in terms of these potential benefits.

degree. Although critics of higher education often point to a few high-profile CEOs who do not hold a college degree, such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, as a demonstration that a university diploma is not required to achieve high occupational status, these scattered examples are rare exceptions. Similarly, the average national political leader globally—be it in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch of government—has attained a college degree or more. In the United States, over-time data for the educational level of members of Congress provide a good example of increased educational attainment on the part of leaders, as well as of educational differences between legislators and those whom they represent. Figure 1 shows the percentage of House Representatives and Senators, alongside the percentage of those 25 years old and older in the general population, who have attained a college degree. As Figure 1 shows, in the 112th Congress—this is the Congress that started its first legislative session in 2011—99% of Senators and 92% of House Representatives held a college degree. This is compared with 30% of the population aged 25 years and older who held a college degree during the same period. Similarly, 50 years prior, during the 82nd Congress, 77% of Senators and 65% of House Representatives held a college degree,

Educational Attainment Levels of People in Leadership Positions Leaders in the 21st century are more educated than ever before, both in the United States and globally. While this increase is partly explained by the rising levels of educational attainment in the general population, leaders in the 21st century are also expected to have a skill set, the acquisition of which colleges tend to facilitate. This skill set includes both hard and soft skills, further bolstered by the signaling and legitimizing power of possessing a college degree. The almost universal attainment of college degrees by those at the top of the corporate ladder is an example of such educational expansion. In 2004, 98% of Standard and Poor’s 500 chief executive officers (CEOs)—executives of the largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges—had a bachelor’s

Percent with College Degree 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 82nd

87th House

Figure 1

92nd

97th Senate

102nd

107th

112th

General Population

College Attainment for Members of Congress and the General Population

Source: Volka Chykina. Based on data from the 2012 Congressional Research Service report for Congress and the Current Population Survey.

Educational Attainment

compared to 7% of the general population. While the numbers of Senators and House Representatives who held a college degree have been high historically, in the 21st century, almost every Senator and House Representative has had the opportunity to consume the knowledge, master the skills, and partake in cocurricular activities that colleges have to offer.

Positive Effects of College Attendance on Leader Emergence and Leadership Skills Universities themselves recognize producing graduates who are able to lead as one of their goals. An examination of mission statements from 303 universities ranked in US News and World Report in 2018—these are nationally known standard bearers in education—showed that 110 universities mentioned cultivating leadership skills and aptitudes within their student body as part of their mission. These stated goals, among others, included references to the importance of learning how to lead in responsible and ethical ways; emphasizing experiential learning to enrich student leader capacity; and highlighting the importance of servant leadership (mostly in religious institutions). While there is no guarantee that these commitments are more than nominal, there is evidence that universities do engage in strategic thinking in terms of what they include in mission statements, and those statements reflect universities’ priorities to a certain degree. Further, if examining concrete commitments that universities might have to leadership development, every one of top 50 universities ranked by US News and World Report in 2018 offered some form of a leadership development program to its student body. Universities also employ professors whose research agendas focus on the study of leadership. These researchers examine various leadership-related theories and conduct studies that investigate which leader behavior and leadership strategies are ethical and effective, thereby defining and redefining what leadership is and what it should be. Exposure to these concepts likely makes students think more intently about leadership in terms of how they can emerge as leaders, build a followership, and be effective

281

leaders. This also means that universities see enhancing leadership capacity within their student body, as well as actively contributing to knowledge production in the field of leadership studies, as their mandates. In addition to offering courses and cocurricular activities dedicated specifically to leadership-related issues, colleges make students better positioned to lead through other offerings and activities that do not advance leadership development as their explicit goal. For example, many colleges have diversity coursework requirements whereby students can engage with the ideas behind diversity, equity, and inclusion. Researchers have found a direct link between being enrolled in such courses and developing leadership skills and abilities. Further, campuses are often sites of contentious politics, ripe with opportunities for making sense of group dynamics, organizing, and leadership emergence. The ability to bring together and lead groups that can develop as a result of these activities is an essential leader characteristic. Further, perspective taking, cultural awareness, and awareness of bias are qualities that can be learned and practiced in college as well. For many students, living on a college campus is the first time they experience a multiethnic, multicultural environment. Studying and interacting with students from a different racial and ethnic backgrounds is associated with increased leadership ability in college. These increased leadership skills also appear to persist past college graduation and into the labor market. Additionally, college education can serve as a positive signal of leader competence to outside evaluators. For example, international credit and grant-giving organizations appear to find leaders more trustworthy who are trained at elite institutions, especially when they are trained in economics, thus providing them with more generous funds. Looking beyond the attainment of bachelor’s degrees, Master of Business Administration degrees are a known signaling device for those aiming to become CEOs. As such, when considering the positive benefits of obtaining a college degree, one needs to consider not only leadership skills and abilities that they might gain while in college but also the positive signal that their credential might be sending.

282

Educational Attainment

Potential Problems With Equating a More Educated Leader to a More Effective Leader While positive benefits of leaders becoming more educated abound, being a more educated leader does not necessarily equate to being a more effective leader across all dimensions of effectiveness. One of the areas where research has not come to a definite conclusion regarding education and leader effectiveness is whether more educated leaders produce better economic returns for their organizations and countries. In fact, some studies find positive effects of leader education on economic development and growth and other studies find null effects. Leader corruption levels also do not appear to vary depending on leader education. Further, there are problems that might arise from the tendency toward having highly educated leaders, owing to differences in educational attainment levels between leaders and their followers. More specifically, the educational gap between those in positions of power and their followers might result in leaders’ decreased ability to understand the everyday experiences of their followers. For example, as noted previously, the educational divide between members of Congress and those whom they represent is large. One of the strongest predictors of enrolling in college and obtaining a bachelor’s degree is familial wealth. Although politicians love to tell stories about pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, the reality is that most members of Congress have spent their youth in (often elite) educational institutions, followed by high-level jobs, and then election to Congress. In fact, empirical analyses of members of Congress show that in the 21st century, only a handful had working-class jobs before they started in Congress. This likely makes members of Congress more disconnected from those whom they represent in a range of ways and raises questions about whether they can effectively craft policies that benefit their constituents. The educational divide between other leaders and their followers may present the same dissonance problem for those who lead and those who follow. This is because education not only changes one’s life trajectory in terms of income and experiences but also alters their perception of self and how they see the world, which potentially makes

leaders less attuned to the lived experiences of those who have not been as fortunate to have access to college halls. As such, 21st-century leaders are more educated than the previous generation of leaders. In fact, attainment of a college degree has become a precondition to occupying certain positions of leadership. The benefits to leaders of attaining a college degree abound; yet, leader effectiveness for college-educated leaders is increased only in certain dimensions, and universal positive effects of increased leader education levels should not be assumed. Volha Chykina See also Effective Leadership; Higher Education; Leadership Development for College Students; Leading Diversity; Skills.

Further Readings Baker, D. (2014). The schooled society: The educational transformation of global culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Carnes, N., & Lupu, N. (2016). What good is a college degree? Education and leader quality reconsidered. The Journal of Politics, 78(1), 35–49. doi:10.1086/683027 Flynn, P. M., & Quinn, M. A. (2010). Economics: Good choice of major for future CEOs. The American Economist, 55(1), 58–72. doi:10.1177/0569434510 05500107 Hurtado, S. (2001). Linking diversity and educational purpose: How diversity affects the classroom environment and student development. In G. Orfield (Ed.), Diversity challenged: Evidence on the impact of affirmative action (pp. 187–203). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group. Grumbach, J. M. (2015). Does the American dream matter for members of congress? Social-class backgrounds and roll-call votes. Political Research Quarterly, 68(2), 306–323. doi:10.1177/1065912915572902 Krcmaric, D., Nelson, S. C., & Roberts, A. (2020). Studying leaders and elites: The personal biography approach. Annual Review of Political Science, 23, 133–151. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-050718– 032801 Reyes, D. L., Dinh, J., Lacerenza, C. N., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., & Salas, E. (2019). The state of higher education leadership development program evaluation: A meta-analysis, critical review, and recommendations.

Educational Leadership The Leadership Quarterly, 30(5), 101311. doi:10. 1016/j.leaqua.2019.101311 Soria, K. M., Werner, L., Chandiramani, N., Day, M., & Asmundson, A. (2019). Cocurricular engagement as catalysts toward students’ leadership development and multicultural competence. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 56(2), 207–220. doi:10.1080/ 19496591.2018.1519439

EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP Since the mid-19th century, a systematic approach to establish state-funded schools to be universally available to children was implemented in the United States with the purpose of creating a literate, morally astute, and productive citizenry. Horace Mann, known as the father of American education, and other reformers who felt passionately about supporting the growth of a free, just, and educated society advocated for common schools that were free of religious and political influences and were taught by well-trained and professional teachers for better social outcomes. With a set of multifaceted goals, including promoting democracy, boosting the economy, and eliminating poverty, crime, and other societal problems, common schools grew more rapidly in densely populated areas, but remained unavailable to children of color, girls of all races, and children with special needs. Since that time, the evolution of the American education system has been steady and significant. A variety of schooling options including public, private, independent, parochial, magnet, and charter schools exist for all students with the legal and moral obligation to remain free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or socioeconomic status. Although many improvements and variations have emerged from this original blueprint for schools, one thing remains true: schools remain a place to unite and educate all leaders of tomorrow and, as such, require research, analysis, support, and engagement of school stakeholders to ensure success in perpetuity. This entry first reviews the components that make up the mission of public and

283

independent schools in the United States. It then reviews research that reveals that capable, competent, and confident teachers as well as strong leadership from principals are critical components to student achievement.

Mission of American Educational System Though strategies for success vary widely, the six core components of the mission of public schools differ little from the outset of the 20th century including to provide universal access to free education, guaranteed and equal opportunities for all children, an opportunity to unify diverse groups, preparation for citizenship in a democratic society, a pathway to become economically self-sufficient, and improved overall social conditions for all people. While private schools are empowered to craft and work toward their own version of greatness, the National Association of Independent Schools, representing the largest group of independent schools in the nation, identifies its vision and mission as one where all learners find a pathway to success through thinking independently, leading change, embracing diversity, championing inclusivity, and empowering the community to create a more equitable world. With the responsibility of educating some 48 million children in public schools and nearly five million children in private schools throughout the United States, teachers and school leaders in both public and private schools alike have a hefty charge. Yet, many schools struggle to achieve and fulfill all parts of their mission. For this reason, it is necessary for education practitioners, leaders, and supporters to continuously and consistently gather knowledge about, implement, and reflect on best practices for success.

The Power of Teacher Impact Widely researched are the most and least effective strategies that contribute to academic excellence and failure, respectively. John Hattie, a popular education researcher and director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, devoted years to exploring the greatest influences on school and student success in a compilation of studies he titled

284

Educational Leadership

Visible Learning. Through a meta-analysis of more than 800 studies, Hattie determined the two factors with the most significant and direct influence on student achievement are collective teacher efficacy, or the collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students, and teacher estimates of achievement, or teacher beliefs regarding the potential success of students based on past experiences. With substantially greater effect sizes than all the other factors, Hattie’s research establishes that teacher mindset is the first critical component of educational success. Teachers must believe in themselves and also in their students for learning to occur. Considerable research supports Hattie’s assertion that teachers who strongly believe in their ability to stimulate and impact student learning have higher expectations, which result in increased student achievement. When teachers band together as a cohesive, functional instructional team with shared responsibility for and a collective belief in their power to promote student growth, the resulting success is multiplied. Teachers in similar environments also report greater levels of job satisfaction, increased motivation, and overall positive school culture and climate. Teachers, alone, cannot cultivate school- or division-wide culture and, so, the necessity, impact, and influence of school leaders are also worth consideration and analysis.

The Impact of School Leaders In its most recently updated study, the Wallace Foundation sought to examine the substance and to what degree of impact effective principals have on student outcomes. Through a synthesis of more than 200 studies, researchers concluded that there is no greater strategy to improve K12 education with the greatest return on investment than to strengthen the leadership landscape of principals, heads of school, and other school leaders. More specifically, a closer look at six of the most rigorous studies conducted revealed that the effect size of principal practices on increased student achievement were nearly as large as the effect size of teacher practices identified in similar studies. Averaged over all the students in a school, rather than in just one classroom, the effect size of principal practices was far greater.

Further, data disaggregated in the Wallace Foundation Report suggest that effective principals exhibit four target behaviors: engaging in highly impactful instructional activities, such as teacher evaluation and feedback; establishing a productive climate; building collaborative and professional learning communities; and strategically managing personnel and resources. The roots of these leadership behaviors are grounded in three broad categories: people skills, organizational skills, and instructional skills. A focus on strengthening these skills with subsequent mastery of the listed leadership behaviors directly impact all school stakeholders—most notably students and teachers. Moreover, leaders who excel in building relationships, supporting instruction, and analyzing data to drive strategic improvement will have an immediate and positive effect on teacher experiences and beliefs and promote collective teacher efficacy.

Instructional Leadership Years of research show that the single greatest factor on student achievement is a capable, competent teacher. Responsible for the recruitment, classroom assignment, retention, and continuous evaluation of all teachers, principals have an even broader influence on student achievement. While a classroom teacher is responsible for only the students assigned to their classroom or section, the principal is responsible for the entire student population throughout the school. Yet, skilled teachers and principals both play a very important role in student success. Students with effective teachers and leaders gain at least two to three additional months of learning than students who do not. This symbiotic relationship between teachers and school leaders is mutually beneficial to the teaching, learning, and leading that occur in classrooms and result in overall student success. Thus, leadership to support classroom instruction, or instructional leadership, is an essential element for teachers and leaders alike to advance the mission of schools. Instructional leadership can be defined as any act to support and advance curriculum, instruction, and assessment that contributes to student achievement. Principals and heads of school exhibit sound instructional leaderships skills by

Educational Leadership

providing clear, robust, transparent support for teachers to ensure effective teaching while also procuring appropriate and necessary resources to maximize teacher effectiveness. Assistant principals, central office personnel, and instructional coaches also serve in vital supporting roles to determine the needs for and allocation of human, capital, material resources as additional, collaborative leaders of learning. A foundational component of any form of leadership, especially those in school-based systems, is the establishment of relationships. Principals establish relationships with teachers, students, parents, and other school stakeholders, and teachers invest time and energy to foster relationships with their students and their families. Relationships begin with clear, direct, and effective communication. Research on empathetic listening for leaders suggests that the average human spends approximately 80% of the day communicating, with nearly half of that time spent listening to others. Successful leaders listen first and most often to better understand those whom they serve. When people are heard, they feel seen; when people are seen, they feel valued; when people are valued, they feel motivated to vigorously work toward achieving their goals. Strong communication skills empower principals to effectively build relationships, which serve as the basis for instructional leadership. Instructional leadership also requires a deep understanding of the complexity of teaching. Leaders of learning must first recognize and support teachers through emotional, physical, and cognitive demands that far too often complicate and potentially jeopardize their path to success. Next, school leaders should be well versed in what teachers should know and be able to do. In her text, Charlotte Danielson presents a framework of ideal teacher behaviors and skills that promote and improve student learning. Based on empirical studies and theoretical research, this framework for professional practice includes four domains: planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. Correlated with many state and national standards for teaching, the four domains clearly and definitively outline best practices for novice and seasoned teachers and their respective leaders. The first domain focuses on planning and preparation

285

and involves knowing the content, understanding student learning styles, and designing both instructional and assessment opportunities that are aligned. The second domain details the classroom environment with an emphasis on how teachers can establish a culture of learning through respectful interaction, clear expectations for learning and achievement, and support for student behaviors. Solely devoted to instruction, the third domain includes setting a direction and purpose for learning, engaging students in learning through effective questions and discussions in whole and small groups, monitoring learning through both teacher-crafted and student self-assessments, and providing feedback and being responsive to all student needs. The fourth and final domain highlights professional responsibilities of a reflective practitioner who commits to professional development with colleagues and connects and communicates with parents and community members as they serve as an advocate for all students. These detailed and clearly defined criteria for effective teaching serve as a guide for all leaders of learning.

Teachers as Learning Leaders Extensively examined and researched in recent years is the role teachers play in instructional leadership. As skilled and knowledgeable as any one principal or school leader may be, it is impossible for one person to independently fulfill every need and accomplish every goal in a school alone. The principal must work in tandem with teachers, teacher leaders, and coaches to propel instructional growth. Also, and most obviously, if any considerable change or improvement of any problem of practice in the classroom is to occur, those responsible for that instruction—the teachers—should be involved. Teachers play an invaluable role in the process of leading instruction in their own classrooms with students and in professional learning teams with other education colleagues. Teacher leaders are critical to the success of any substantive improvement efforts. Teacher leaders also facilitate healthy educational changes in the school, school division, and greater community. In an ideal environment, the roles of teachers and leaders are intertwined and mutually

286

Effective Leadership and Selflessness

beneficial. Leaders support teachers and students; teachers provide meaningful instruction to and provide supports for kids; and teachers collaborate with and lead other teachers. Strong schools are one of the backbones of American society and are critical to its future success. The mission and vision of public and private schools are still important and necessary components for success in an ever-evolving world. Research demonstrates that society must reaffirm its commitment to all children throughout the nation by supporting their teachers and principals to design, promote, and sustain learning as instructional leaders. Dana R. Jackson See also Community Leadership; Educational Attainment; Higher Education; Humane Education; Student Development

Further Readings Brown, V. (2016). What happens when you really listen: Practicing empathy for leaders. Center for Courage and Renewal. Retrieved October 1, 2021, from https:// couragerenewal.org/wpccr/empathetic-listening-forleaders/ Danielson, C. (2007) Enhancing professional practice: A framework for teaching. (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Grissom, J. A., Egalite, A. J., & Lindsay, C. A. (2021). How principals affect students and schools: A systematic synthesis of two decades of research. New York, NY: The Wallace Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.wallacefoundation.org/principalsynthesis Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London: Routledge; Taylor & Francis Group. Kober, N. (2007). Why we still need public schools: Public education for the common good. Center on Education Policy. Retrieved October 1, 2021, from https://files. eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED503799.pdf Levin, B., & Schrum, L. (2017) Every teacher a leader: Developing the needed dispositions, knowledge, and skills for teacher leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Neem, J. N. (2017). Democracy’s schools: The rise of public education in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP SELFLESSNESS

AND

For millennia, many of humankind’s greatest thinkers from cultures worldwide have speculated about what makes only some leaders effective and very few great. From Thucydides and Plato in ancient Greece, to Mencius and Han Fei Tzu in ancient China, to ibn Khaldun, Niccolo` Machiavelli, and Thomas Carlyle in the last millennium, a wide range of views have been proposed on the nature and attributes of effective leaders. By the dawn of the 20th century, however, little or no consensus had emerged on what, if anything, systematically determines the effectiveness versus the ineffectiveness of individual leaders, much less what characterizes great leaders. Are there common traits, behaviors, or any other innate factors that can be identified as driving ineffective versus effective versus exemplary leadership? Alternatively, are there other, more promising ways to identify what drives effectiveness using the lenses of other disciplines? The balance of this entry first summarizes the largely fruitless efforts undertaken in the 20th century to answer these questions through the application of management science. It then addresses what the most promising results have been from other disciplinary perspectives over the past 50 years.

Exploring the Application of Science to Leadership With the emergence of large industrial enterprises in the private sector and modern state bureaucracies in the public sector during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was new impetus for developing more effective leaders. And with the rise of modern statistics, psychology, the social sciences, and management science during the same period, there was hope that the new scientific methodologies being developed in tandem might be the keys to doing so. The initial efforts, largely conducted by social psychologists and management scientists, focused on the creation and statistical analysis of large data sets composed of the traits and/or other key attributes of actual leaders, in the hope they might reveal concrete evidence of

Effective Leadership and Selflessness

the variables that drive effective versus ineffective leadership. Because these studies are discussed in other entries of this encyclopedia, they will not be summarized here, except to note that despite the many studies undertaken over several decades during the middle of the 20th century, they had little success in explaining what drives effective leadership. There were also great hopes on the part of management scientists that with the help of advances in decision science, computer technology, and information management following World War II, the work of leadership and management (as described in the entry on Leadership and Management) could be substantially reprogrammed and thereby made far more effective, whatever the traits, behaviors, and other personal characteristics might be of those playing these roles. Unfortunately, these efforts also proved largely fruitless. This does not mean, of course, that the efforts of management scientists such as Herbert Simon, James March, and many others did not provide new tools which, properly applied, could improve leadership and management decision-making. Indeed, Simon eventually won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research into decision-making within economic organizations and shared the 1975 Turing Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence and our understanding of human cognition. However, these new tools proved to be only aids to the individuals playing leadership and management roles, whose work overall turned out to be far from programmable, as another distinguished management theorist, Henry Mintzberg, concluded in the early 1980s. Although many theorists during the first seven decades of the 20th century had posited what those playing these roles should do, very few had undertaken empirical research on what they actually did. Moreover, in those latter cases, their research methods tended to be one-dimensional, the sample sizes were frequently small or limited to one organizational level, and the research often focused on activities versus the work content of the individuals being studied. Thus, when Mintzberg used a wide array of research methods to conduct a completely empirical study of the activities and

287

work content of key individuals at different hierarchical levels in organizations ranging from businesses to governmental entities to hospitals to street gangs, it was a groundbreaking study. The results were published in his book The Nature of Managerial Work in 1973. Among his chief conclusions was that the highly fragmented, unrelenting, and complex nature of a manager’s work, combined with a lack of time to reflect, made the risk of superficiality in decision-making very high. He also found that most of a manager’s work was “nonprogrammed” and indeed that “there is no science in managerial work” (pp. 4–5) as it then was being practiced. Nonetheless, he concluded optimistically, if management scientists better understood the work of managers, they could help them avoid superficiality by redesigning parts of their work and by providing more useful information and analysis for making decisions, especially in developing strategy. Within a decade, however, Mintzberg was expressing doubts about his earlier conclusions. In a speech given in 1982 and published in 1989 under the title “Society Has Become Unmanageable as a Result of Management,” he confessed that he was now questioning: (1) his conclusion that the risks of superficiality could be lessened through management science; and (2) his hope that there might be viable ways to develop robust strategies in large organizations, despite these risks and the failures of traditional strategic planning. Instead, he worried, professional management as then taught in the leading business schools was creating a society of large, entrenched, and ineffective bureaucracies, run by professional managers, that stifled innovation and human commitment, greatly increased the risks of superficiality, and even fostered an amorality that could sometimes lead to social immorality in the blind pursuit of an organization’s narrow goals. Although bureaucracies are effective in providing certain goods and services efficiently, he argued, and planning and analysis have important roles to play, they must not be allowed to drive out intuition and judgment based on a deep understanding of an organization’s constituencies, circumstances, and capabilities. In other words, much of the most important work of managers is not systematic or programmable, and critical to their success is using

288

Effective Leadership and Selflessness

the appropriate balance of analysis and intuition in making key decisions.

Refocusing on the Core Activities and Skills of Effective Leaders Whether in reaction to the limitations of management science or not, at roughly the same time scholars from other fields began refocusing the debate on what makes leaders effective around the core activities of leadership and the skills required to implement those activities successfully. This section will briefly summarize the hypotheses of several of these scholars, whose contributions over the next four decades built upon each other’s, whether wittingly or unwittingly, and together formed the basis for a relatively comprehensive hypothesis on what makes leaders effective, which undoubtedly will be tested by further debate. The first and perhaps most notable contribution was made by Pulitzer Prize–winning political scientist James MacGregor Burns, who published his book Leadership in 1978. The impact of this book is credited by many for the establishment of the contemporary field of leadership studies, and in it he introduced a series of concepts that have shaped the study of leadership ever since. Among these are the concepts of transforming versus transactional leadership, the critical distinction between leadership and coercion, the dynamic relationship between leaders and followers, the role of morality in leadership, and the multidisciplinary nature of leadership studies. Most pertinent to the discussion about effective leadership was Burns’s emphasis on the vital importance of leaders’ ability to persuade their followers and how the greatest leaders can raise their followers to a higher level of moral aspiration through their inspiring, transforming vision. The cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner echoed the importance of a leader’s persuasiveness and vision in his 1995 book Leading Minds. In it, he posited that effective leaders are those who understand both their followers and the context of a given situation and then relate stories to those followers that in turn affect their behavior and actions. Effective leaders, he went on to say, can range from ordinary to visionary, depending upon how creative the story is that they are telling and

how persuasively it competes with other, existing stories. As a business school professor focused on organizational behavior, John Kotter, in his 1990 book A Force for Change, took a broader perspective, arguing that there is an important distinction between the tasks of leadership and the tasks of management, both of which are critical for any organization to successfully achieve its mission and goals. As described in greater detail in the entry Leadership and Management, Kotter stated that the purpose of leadership is to produce movement through, using his words, three core processes: establishing direction, aligning people, and motivating and inspiring. In addition, he posited, three core management processes are critical to successfully implementing the direction established: planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, and controlling and problem-solving. Both sets of processes, he argued, are critical to long-term success. With too little leadership, organizations can become stifling bureaucracies that lack innovation and exhibit all the dangers of professional management that so worried Mintzberg. However, without the consistency and order provided by effective management, chaos can result, leading to the failure of any vision. What, though, does effective leadership look like when the vision and strategy for achieving it are unclear to everyone, including the leader? As a psychiatrist and founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Ronald Heifetz taught many mid-career executive students from government, military, businesses, and nonprofits worldwide, whose home organizations had faced such testing situations. Having forged and refined his response to this question through a decade of discussion with his students, Heifetz argued in his 1994 book Leadership Without Easy Answers that in such cases, a leader must facilitate a problem-solving process that enables the best vision and strategy to emerge. He termed this adaptive leadership, which he contrasted with a technical challenge where the answer is already known. Doing this well, in turn, necessitates a careful framing of the adaptive challenge and the key issues to be addressed, the creation of what he called a holding environment within which all who have valuable perspectives can participate in the

Effective Leadership and Selflessness

problem-solving process regardless of their hierarchical positions, a thoughtful sequencing and pacing of the work, and firm leadership of the entire process during what is typically a crisis for the organization in question. Finally, in their 2013 book On Effective Leadership, G. Donald Chandler III and John W. Chandler proposed a comprehensive framework that aimed to synthesize the contributions of the foregoing scholars and to add several additional, important elements. Effective leadership, they argued, rests on three pillars, each of which is critical to success. The first is the ability to develop a compelling, well-conceived vision and accompanying strategies that balance intuition and analysis, in Mintzberg’s terms, and that best position the leader’s organization for successful achievement of its long-term mission and goals. Moreover, in those crises where there is no clear answer, an effective leader must be able to facilitate a problem-solving process that results in the best answer possible, as Heifetz proposed. And in all cases, the most effective leaders will involve all of those who can valuably contribute, both to ensure the emergence of the optimal outcome and to build widespread ownership for and commitment to its implementation. The second pillar, just as Burns, Gardner, Kotter, and Heifetz all suggested in one form or another, is the ability to communicate persuasively through a powerful story that aligns the various constituencies critical for success behind the strategic direction and keeps them on track through the inevitable challenges that will confront them. Once again, the most effective leaders will not only relate this story personally via all relevant mediums through speech, writing, and/or embodiment but also artfully involve other owners of the strategic vision in relating the story as well, thereby building the broadest possible commitment to its achievement at every level in the organization. The third pillar of effective leadership for the Chandlers is the ability to build and manage a capable supporting organization which can successfully implement the vision and achieve its goals. Doing so, they posited, requires not only the three management processes specified by Kotter but also three more elements of effective organizations that were included by Thomas Peters and

289

Robert Waterman in their 1978 book In Search of Excellence: (1) the nurturing of a strong, positive culture; (2) the ongoing support of the institutional skills underlying the vision; and (3) continual enhancement of the information, reward, and other systems that track, incent the appropriate behavior, and otherwise support effective decision-making and implementation. Indeed, for the Chandlers, a capable supporting organization is so critical to effective leadership that it, and thus effective management as well, is one of the three pillars on which effective leadership rests. This positioning does not mean in their view that every senior leader must personally manage the organization. Not only do some leaders not possess these skills but those who do will ordinarily not have the time to apply them in a large, complex organization. It does mean, though, that an effective senior leader must recognize the critical importance of management and surround himself or herself with others who have the necessary skill sets to ensure that a capable, supporting organization is in place. Said another way, as Kotter observed as well, in every organization there are many people occupying leadership positions at multiple levels who are critical to the organization’s effectiveness. The most effective senior leaders will ensure that these are effective leaders with the varying mixes of leadership and management skills necessary to help develop the vision, communicate it persuasively, and implement it effectively. Finally, the Chandlers’ framework proposes a fourth element, one not mentioned by the foregoing scholars, that the Chandlers position metaphorically as the foundation on which the three pillars supporting effective leadership rest. It is the degree of a leader’s selflessness, which, they posit, ultimately drives the trust and faith that followers have in any leader. Does this mean that an effective leader must be in some absolute sense purely selfless or that true selflessness is even possible? No, the Chandlers responded. Whereas new findings in evolutionary biology and psychology suggest that the latter may be more plausible than most would intuitively believe, in practice almost every leader has a strong ego and level of ambition, and the most successful ones are often even more driven. Nonetheless, the Chandlers argued, the litmus test for selflessness in the context of a

290

Effects of Power

leader’s effectiveness over the long term is whether followers believe that their leader would choose to serve their interests rather than his own personal interests, if the two were ever in conflict—in short, whether the leader’s character under duress would tilt toward selflessness, not selfishness. In the shorter term, of course, such a conflict may never arise, and the followers’ assumptions about the leader’s motivations may be naively wrong. Moreover, in some contexts, there will be little emotional commitment and low expectations on the part of the followers, for example, in the employees of a bureaucratic institution in a stable environment, where no conflict may arise even over a long period. But the more ambitious the strategic vision, the more unstable the environment, and/or the higher the emotional commitment and expectations of the followers; the history of political demagogues, corporate charlatans, glory-seeking generals, and many less egregious examples of selfish leaders suggests that leaders’ core motivations often are revealed eventually, and when they are selfish, trust dissipates quickly and irrevocably. For the same reason, the Chandlers conclude, selflessness is essential in exceptional leadership. They defined the latter term as leadership that enables the achievement of a difficult and worthy goal that may be transforming in the moral terms Burns describes such leadership; is always socially useful using Heifetz’s term even if the goal may be morally neutral; and demands enormous commitment on the part of both leader and followers to achieve success. Given the stakes and pressures of accomplishing such difficult goals, any conflicts of interest are much more likely to emerge, which would doom success, as would any immorality in the means employed by the leader. As such, exceptional leadership comes closest to what Carlyle presumably had in mind when he conceived of the role of heroes in history. There may be no unblemished great men or women in the real world, but there are exceptional leaders who have achieved great things in all walks of life—from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr. to Nelson Mandela—which give the rest of us great hope. G. Donald Chandler, III

See also Big Five Personality Traits, Leaders’ Stories, Leadership and Management; Trait Theories of Leadership; Transforming Leadership

Further Readings Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Chandler, III, G. D., & Chandler, J. W. (2013). On effective leadership: Across domains, cultures, and eras. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gardner, H. (1995). Leading minds. New York, NY: Basic Books. Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Kotter, J. P. (1990). A force for change: How leadership differs from management. Riverside, CA: The Free Press. Mintzberg, H. (1973). The nature of managerial work. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Longman. Mintzberg, H. (1989). Mintzberg on management: Inside our strange world of organizations. New York, NY: The Free Press.

EFFECTS

OF

POWER

What does it mean to say that leadership involves power? One answer is that leaders must have sufficient power to produce their desired outcomes. Another related but distinct answer is that leaders must have some degree of power over their followers. Both aspects—power to and power over—are essential to understanding leadership; however, neither one describes a leader’s power per se. Instead, a leader’s power is the extent to which they control resources valued by their followers. Researchers exploring power, conceptualized as having resource control, have identified a number of psychological effects that have implications for leaders and leadership. These findings can be summarized as follows: On the one hand, resource control gives leaders power to take action and accomplish their goals; on the other hand, resource control grants leaders power over others

Effects of Power

and in doing so leads them toward dominance in their behavior. With these results side by side, it is clear that power has the potential to enhance leadership efficacy by driving goal-oriented action (through its power to), but that power simultaneously tends to undermine leadership by degrading a leader’s consideration for and treatment of their followers (through its power over). It is leaders’ control over resources that produces both the power to and the power over effects. Because the powerful are less dependent on others for valuable resources than vice versa, they are freer to act. At the same time, this lack of dependence on others reduces the incentives for the powerful to show genuine interest in, take the perspective of, and feel empathy for others. This entry explores these two facets of power and their effects.

Power To Power orients leaders toward agency and action. Experimental studies in which some participants are randomly assigned to a high-power condition and other participants are assigned to a low-power condition are particularly effective at isolating this behavioral tendency. In strategically ambiguous situations, from the seemingly trivial (whether to hit [take a card] or stand [decline a card] in a game of blackjack) to the consequential (whether or not to make the first offer in a negotiation), individuals randomly assigned to be in a position of power are more likely to take decisive action than low-power individuals. These results suggest that even when there is some downside risk of taking action, power still increases the likelihood of moving forward. This approach to risk among powerholders is further corroborated by research showing that high-power individuals prefer to take on more risk, engage in riskier negotiation strategies, and even find risky sexual behavior more appealing. There appear to be a few reasons why power increases action. Perhaps the utmost important reason is that power increases the correspondence between currently held goals and behavior, and goal-directed behavior often requires taking action. Consider, for example, this situation presented to participants in one study: a fan blowing

291

uncomfortably toward their faces while seated at a table. In both the high-power and the low-power condition, participants could choose to leave the tabletop fan alone, or they could remove the uncomfortable stimulus in some way (e.g., redirect the fan, turn it off, or unplug it). The situation was constructed so that everyone would want the fan to stop blowing on them (i.e., they all had the same goal), but it was ambiguous whether they could or should act on the fan. In this study, high-power individuals were significantly more likely to do something about the fan and reduce their discomfort. Similarly, power seems to make individuals more efficient in goal pursuit by reducing the time needed to decide which goal to pursue, providing more cognitive flexibility in finding ways to accomplish their goal, and ultimately increasing their likelihood of taking action to complete their goal. The other psychological mechanisms that likely contribute to power increasing action involve a greater desire for control, decreasing the brakes on action, and an overall boost in confidence. First, power strengthens individuals’ preference for control. In one study, participants were told that correctly predicting the outcome of a six-sided die roll would earn them a reward. They were then given the following choice: roll it themselves or have someone else roll it. Even though winning probability is unaltered by who rolls the die, high-power participants were nearly twice as likely to roll it themselves. In this case, electing to act gave powerful individuals an illusion of control over the outcome. Had they deferred to someone else, they would have ceded control. Second, power weakens the inhibiting role that ordinarily constrains individual behavior. Ignoring potential constraints also seems to explain powerholders’ greater tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a project (i.e., to commit the planning fallacy). Third, power increases confidence. This increase in confidence leads powerholders to dominate conversations, speak with greater conviction, and discount others’ input. To summarize, having control over valuable resources gives people the power to behave in accordance with their goals. Power leads individuals to neglect sources of threat and constraint that might imperil their goals, elevates their confidence

292

Effects of Power

in completing their goals, and ultimately increases the tendency to take bold action to fulfill their goals. These consequences of power are all potential benefits to leaders, particularly those who are trying to significantly change the status quo. Additionally, there is another effect of power on goal pursuit that has implications for leaders: Low-power individuals exhibit a willingness to sacrifice and subordinate their own goals to help high-power individuals pursue their goals. This finding implies that a power difference between leader and followers would afford leaders the support of their followers in working toward bold objectives. Unfortunately, the interpersonal consequences of power (the power over) put leaders at risk of alienating their followers and losing support for their goals.

Power Over Given the many resources they control, leaders could prioritize the needs, goals, and opportunities of those who are dependent on them. However, these are not the tendencies associated with having power over others. Instead, power steers leaders toward devaluing others and treating them unfairly in several ways. Power tends to decrease consideration of others’ points of view or perspective-taking. In one experiment, when participants were asked to draw the capital letter “E” on their forehead, those in the high-power condition were more likely to draw a self-oriented E, one that would appear backwards to observers, than low-power participants. Not only does power seem to cause a neglect of others’ perspectives but it also reduces compassion in response to others’ suffering. Ironically, leaders’ ability to focus on accomplishing their goals—a function of their power to—interferes with their ability to focus on others’ needs—a result of their power over. This intersection of power to and power over leads the powerful to see others as instruments or objects to be used in the pursuit of their goals. When their goal is task-oriented, power diminishes individuals’ ability to differentiate others based on their unique characteristics (i.e., to know them as individuals); however, when their goal is socioemotional (e.g.,

making social connections), high-power individuals are equally effective as low-power individuals at getting to know another person. These findings suggest that power alters the type of attention more than the amount of attention paid to others. That is, powerholders’ cognitive processing of other people is based on identifying how those others could be used by the powerholder to accomplish a goal. In this sense, power leads to objectification. Although power is often linked to sexual objectification in popular media, research suggests this is a particular form of seeing others through an instrumental lens. Indeed, power increases sexual objectification only when powerholders’ current goals are sexual in nature. Objectification and other ways in which leaders devalue others as individuals is tied to how powerful they currently feel and how powerful they typically feel. Among individuals who report not ordinarily feeling very powerful (i.e., they have low chronic power), those who temporarily experience heightened power in a particular situation or relationship are more likely to sexually aggress compared to those who experience no such acute increase in power or those with high chronic power. The importance of a leader’s momentary sense of power also shows up in studies of abusive supervision, which find that managers behave more abusively toward their employees on days when they feel most powerful. This instrumental lens of the powerful also creates other tendencies that are potentially corrosive to leader–follower relationships. For example, in situations where a follower does a favor for a powerful individual, powerful individuals tend to look at such behavior with skepticism, as instrumentally motivated, believing it to be inauthentic and supplicating. These cynical attributions, in turn, tend to erode trust between high- and low-power individuals.

Individual Differences and Situational Factors The tendencies described previously are just that—tendencies. They are the effects of power that are expected of leaders, on average. Of course, leadership involves many other factors than power, and a more nuanced understanding of the

Effects of Power

role of power in leadership would account for at least some of these factors. Indeed, emergent research supports this more nuanced view of power, and these studies also offer important lessons for leadership. With respect to the detrimental effects of power over, the negative relationship between power and perspective-taking is significantly reduced, if not eliminated, among individuals who are chronically other-focused. Similarly, among individuals who score high on a dispositional measure of empathy, power actually increases accuracy at inferring others’ feelings and mental states (i.e., empathic accuracy). Furthermore, a prosocial orientation is positively associated with empathic accuracy among high-power but not low-power individuals. Demonstrating another way in which the self-interested side of power can be tempered, among people who are dispositionally communal, power tends to increase generosity. Echoing the finding that power increases the correspondence between goals and behavior, a key insight that emerges from research on power and these various individual differences is that power tends to increase the correspondence between individual differences and behavioral expressions of those dispositions and values. In a direct test of this phenomenon among formal leaders, a CEO’s political ideology was found to predict the extent to which their organizations engaged in corporate social responsibility practices. These results have important implications for leadership selection. They suggest that great care should be taken to choose people who are chronically other-focused for positions of leadership. Researchers have also found that some situational factors reduce, or even eliminate, the self-oriented tendencies typically associated with power. For example, when leaders compete against an outgroup, they tend to engage in more self-sacrifice for the benefit of the ingroup than when there is no threat from an outgroup. If high-power individuals take a moment to focus on the experiences of other people, they tend to feel a heightened sense of responsibility for them and treat them with greater consideration and fairness. These findings suggest that leadership training should emphasize the importance of perspective-taking. Other research targets organizational structures

293

and practices, suggesting the importance of implementing systems of accountability. One study, for example, found that requiring powerholders to explain the reasoning for their decisions increases the extent to which they treat others fairly. In many organizations, leaders are held accountable for, or are required to justify, some of their most consequential decisions, and this process helps rein in some of the most destructive effects of power.

Conclusion Leaders usually have more control over resources than their followers do. This resource control describes their power, which manifests in two ways: as power to and power over. These are not the only two behavioral clusters that capture the effects of power, but they are two of the most instructive for leadership. On the plus side, power allows leaders to take action, to proactively tackle substantial organizational and societal challenges. However, leaders’ power over followers often leads them to misperceive what those people need and to treat them callously. The key to effective leadership is to harness the power to while transforming the power over into a power for others. Joe C. Magee and Adam D. Galinsky See also CEO Hubris; Destructive Leadership; Dominance and Prestige; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions; Organizational Leadership; Power and Culture; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Blader, S. L., & Chen, Y. R. (2012). Differentiating the effects of status and power: A justice perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 994–1014. Foulk, T. A., Lanaj, K., Tu, M.-H., Erez, A., & Archambeau, L. (2018). Heavy is the head that wears the crown: An actor-centric approach to daily psychological power, abusive leader behavior, and perceived incivility. Academy of Management Journal, 61, 661–684. Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Rus, D., Rothman, N. B., & Todd, A. R. (2014). Acceleration with steering: The synergistic benefits of combining power and

294

E-Leadership

perspective-taking. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5, 627–635. Guinote, A. (2007). Power affects basic cognition: Increased attentional inhibition and flexibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 685–697. Magee, J. C., Milliken, F. J., & Lurie, A. R. (2010). Power differences in the construal of a crisis: The immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 354–370. Maner, J. K., & Mead, N. L. (2010). The essential tension between leadership and power: When leaders sacrifice group goals for the sake of self-interest. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 482–497. Overbeck, J. R., & Park, B. (2006). Powerful perceivers, powerless objects: Flexibility of powerholders’ social attention. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 99, 227–243. Tost, L. P., Gino, F., & Larrick, R. P. (2013). When power makes others speechless: The negative impact of leader power on team performance. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 1465–1486. ¨ Van Kleef, G. A., Oveis, C., Van der Lowe, I., LuoKogan, A., Goetz, J., & Keltner, D. (2008). Power, distress, and compassion: Turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychological Science, 19, 1315–1322. Williams, M. J., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Guillory, L. E. (2017). Sexual aggression when power is new: Effects of acute high power on chronically low-power individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112, 201–223.

E-LEADERSHIP Little has remained unchanged due to the onslaught of information and communication technologies (ICTs) over the past 100 years. The topic of leadership is no exception. Leadership is about influencing others. ICTs are changing this influence process and the relevant understanding and skills required to influence others by changing the medium of influence. But ICTs are not inert. They are developed and used within a context—the culture, the system of performance measurement and rewards, and users’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes—that is tightly connected to the leadership that permeates it. Consequently,

ICTs are shaped by leadership. The term e-leadership captures the mutual dynamic between leadership and ICTs. This entry focuses on this dynamic by discussing the effect of ICTs on leadership followed by a discussion of the effect of leadership on ICTs.

The Effect of ICTs on Leadership Some scholars argue that the increasing use of ICTs does not change leadership. They are correct in that ICTs have not changed the core behaviors and qualities that leaders need to display. Leaders have to continue to offer a vision, display charisma, and provide structure in the age of ICTs. They still need to show competence, care, and benevolence and be relatable and engaging with others. However, these scholars fail to acknowledge that the fundamental processes and the skill sets that enable leaders to display core behaviors and qualities are no longer the same in the age of ICTs. ICTs affect leadership by changing the medium of influence. By doing so, they alter the processes that underlie leadership. Specifically, ICTs alter the cognitions and emotions as well as the norms, values, and culture of collectives that underlie the influence process. By enabling new ways of collecting, processing, and using information, often that which was previously unavailable, they are changing how leaders derive their influence. ICTs powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling automation that changes the nature of work, the workers who are employed and their expected competencies, and the decisions we make. Consequently, they are redefining the source, the mechanism, and the target of influence. Indeed, it is reasonable to question what work will remain for leaders to influence and what decisions will remain for them to make in the future. Since a significant part of their leadership is now exercised through ICTs, leaders today also have to understand the benefits and challenges presented by the ever-changing ICTs. They have to be skillful at using them separately or in combination with traditional methods of interacting with others. ICTs have largely derived their ability to impact leadership from the networks to which they have given rise. Starting with local area networks

E-Leadership

(LANs) that were developed in the late 1990s, the networks evolved into Internet-based networks in the mid-1990s. The early aughts ushered in networking enabled by social media, while the late ones saw the beginnings of powerful cloud computing platforms. Because each stage of evolution introduced new effects of ICTs on leadership, the different stages offer a way to organize what is known about how ICTs affect leadership. .

Leadership in Same-Place IT-Supported Meetings LANs enabled the development of group support systems (GSS) to support same-place meetings. These are networked systems that provide a terminal to every group member in a face-to-face meeting to collect their input. In addition to enabling parallel input and structure for interaction, they enable anonymous input. Findings from laboratory experiments suggest that GSS-enabled anonymity makes a significant difference for leadership. Specifically, while anonymity enhances the effects of transformational leadership that rely on group salience, it may replace the effects on some outcomes such as idea flexibility. Anonymity has been found to reduce the impact of transactional leadership, probably by making contingent rewarding less potent. Its presence may also cause directive leadership to be seen as informational instead of controlling. Not surprisingly, when a GSS does not make the input of group members anonymous, a leader’s higher status from outside settings is carried into the GSS-supported meeting. With the availability of smartphones, it is possible to use them to support same-place meetings. They have been largely used to enable back-channel communication or that which happens at the same time as the main communication but is secondary to it. In a same-place meeting, back-channel communication can occur between the leader and followers, the leader and outsiders, the followers and outsiders, and one or more followers and other followers. Such communication has the potential to alter the leader’s direction, the motivations, relationships, and capabilities within the group, and also the group’s structure (e.g., a new leader can emerge, new coalitions or cliques

295

can form). Studies suggest that in a classroom setting in which the teacher takes the role of a leader, back-channel communication among those in the class enhances student participation and engagement while also providing valuable feedback and direction to the teacher. It also enables the students to share leadership with the teacher.

Leadership in Virtual Teams As LANs got connected to the larger Internet, it became possible for organizations to tap into distant human resources and use virtual teams. These teams offer both challenges and opportunities for leaders to have an impact. Virtuality leads to process losses that can make it challenging for some of the leadership effects seen in face-to-face settings to emerge. For instance, probably due to the lack of nonverbal cues in virtual teams, extraversion and emotional stability have been found to predict transformational leadership in face-to-face teams but not in virtual teams. It is challenging for a virtual team’s leader to monitor member performance, implement solutions to problems that arise, and perform mentoring and developmental activities. To overcome these challenges, a leader needs to employ substitutes for these functions and distribute them to the team. In fact, motivation, satisfaction, and performance of team members have been found to improve when virtual team members provide feedback about the team’s process to the team. Virtuality may also offer opportunities for leaders to compensate for process losses that it gives rise to and, therefore, to have an even stronger impact than in face-to-face teams. Indeed, transformational leadership has been found to lead to better performance in virtual teams than in face-to-face teams. Also, empowering leadership—that which shares power with team members and creates a facilitative and supportive environment—has been found to have a stronger effect on team collaboration in virtual teams that are more dispersed. Evidence also indicates that when dispersion among members of a virtual team increases, inspirational leadership predicts member commitment to the team and trust in others even more strongly. Increase in dispersion seems to reduce attention to interpersonal differences and make team members more sensitive to

296

E-Leadership

leadership that emphasizes the team, its social identity, and its vision. Some argue that effective leadership in virtual teams is not about dialing up or dialing down leadership behaviors that we observe in traditional settings. They have, instead, called for a different kind of leadership. They claim that virtual work introduces various paradoxes or tensions due to technology dependence, geographic dispersion, and human capital. Leadership that synergistically exploits these paradoxes (i.e., paradoxical virtual leadership) is essential for effective functioning of virtual teams.

Leadership in the Age of Social Media The introduction of social media on the Internet changed an organization’s hierarchical relationship with external stakeholders such as current and potential customers and the general population to a more egalitarian one. From being the main provider of content in its relationship with its stakeholders, an organization evolved into being an enabler of community in which the external stakeholders influenced it in unprecedented ways. According to relevant findings, leadership in the age of social media is likely to be emergent and informal; it is others who recognize someone to be a leader. Furthermore, even when there are formal hierarchies, governance is likely to be bottom-up. Leadership emergence is predicted by visible actions and the quality and quantity of text communication. There is also potential for unique challenges introduced by the nature of work of an online community (e.g., one focused on making computer-animated movies) to neutralize a leader’s efforts. When social movements employ Twitter, micro-operations of individual participants (i.e., tweets, retweets, posting links, adding multiple hashtags, etc.) substitute for collective action that is normally inspired by a traditional movement’s leader. These micro-operations help weave together smaller networks into a larger one and enable coherence and rationality in actions.

Leadership in the Cloud Computing Era Cloud computing platforms enable computing that is often backed by AI and can be initiated from

anywhere via a variety of devices. These devices include smartphones and everyday things such as speakers that previously never had any ability to compute. This stage of evolution of ICT networks has changed the nature of work. It has swung the pendulum of power back toward organizations in more than one way. It lets organizations replace human labor. It also gives them an unmatched ability to develop tools that turn the digital footprints left on them by individuals into predictions of what they will like or do and thus influence their thoughts and behaviors. AI-based cloud platforms that support or substitute decision-making by organizational leaders may have both positive and negative effects. Such platforms are expected to improve decisionmaking by minimizing irrelevant social constraints, discovering latent patterns from historical data, mitigating agency problems, and separating what the followers may see as unpalatable decisions from the human leader(s). On the negative side, these platforms are unable to balance quantitative considerations with qualitative considerations and may not be accepted by followers. It is also not possible to hold a human leader accountable for decisions made by such platforms, especially when the human leader does not hold the veto power. If veto power is given to a human leader, it should be done in a thoughtful way, such as by logging the use of veto, to prevent the positive consequences of these platforms from being compromised. Attention is being given to what is likely to promote the acceptance of computer leaders by human subordinates. It has been argued that in addition to the concepts of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of computer leaders, which have been borrowed from the literature on acceptance of technology, legitimacy attributed to the computer leader will play a critical role in fostering acceptance. Legitimacy stems from social norms regarding the use of computer leaders and the effect that such use has on one’s image, and leadership-related system characteristics that indicate the instrumental value, relational value, and moral value of the computer leader. There is evidence that in some disciplinary and mentoring situations, a computer leader may be seen as having greater integrity and transparency while

E-Leadership

also being less adaptable and benevolent. The first two effects improve trust in the computer leader and its acceptance. The latter two weaken them. Additional insights for the effects of AI-based cloud platforms on leadership arise from findings related to Uber’s cloud computing platform for managing its drivers. This platform connects drivers and passengers with each other, lets passengers rate the performance of drivers, and influences drivers by providing them incentives. By carrying out these functions, the platform does away with a layer of supervisors who would have managed the drivers. It also allows Uber’s leadership to treat drivers as its customers and bypass laws and actions it would have to adhere to had it treated the drivers as its employees.

The Effect of Leadership on ICTs Due to ICTs permeating almost every aspect of work life, organizational leaders have to be more active in their initiation, implementation, assimilation, and management. Senior leaders, for instance, have been found to influence the assimilation of ICTs by manipulating institutional structures of signification, legitimization, and domination. To be more active, leaders need to have certain qualities. Since ICTs are used to solve organizational problems, their case must be typically made by organizational leaders who are not ICT specialists. Intentions to engage in such initiation have been found to be a function of a leader’s ICT competence and experience with ICT projects and their management. After an ICT is initiated, it must be implemented. Findings suggest that relevant leadership, existing at various levels in the organization, is critical for implementation success. Leadership, often transformational in nature, is needed at the project level as well as for making complementary changes in different parts of the organization (e.g., how workers are influenced, decentralized decision-making, changes in rewards systems) so that the ICT being implemented succeeds and it gets assimilated in the organization’s functioning. In small- and medium-sized enterprises, the following qualities in top and middle managers have been found to be critical for strategic change and transformation that enables a business and its information

297

technology function to be aligned: agile leadership, hybrid skills (in business, strategy, and ICTs), having an architectural view, digital entrepreneurship, value creation ability, and value protection ability. To ensure that leaders have the qualities they need to be more active in the initiation, implementation, assimilation, and management of ICTs, attention will have to be given to how they are developed. In organizations that decide to use social media, leaders would need to be developed differently to enable them to lead the organization’s transition to a networked organization. Specifically, social media allow leaders to increase their contact and be more social with internal and external stakeholders while also creating new challenges for them in the form of increased criticism, vulnerability, and loss of control. Therefore, the ways to develop leaders in traditional settings or settings dominated by older electronic channels such as email are likely to be inadequate. Leaders need to be convinced about the new social applications, sensitized to their own role and challenges during implementation, and coached for the skills and style they will need to exhibit. In organizations that deploy AI-based cloud platforms, since such platforms can influence employment and behaviors of others, leaders would need to be developed so that they are able to decide where to draw boundaries when they divide the work between humans and machines or when they seek to influence others. In addition to educating leaders about the business implications of their decisions, they would also need to be developed to consider the ethical implications of their decisions. Surinder Kahai See also Distributed Leadership; Networks and Networked Organizations; Social Media; Team Leadership; Virtual Leadership

Further Readings Avolio, B. J., Kahai, S., & Dodge, G. E. (2001). E-leadership: Implications for theory, research, and practice. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(4), 615–668. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(00)00062-X Avolio, B. J., & Kahai, S. S. (2003). Adding the “E” to e-leadership: How it may impact your leadership.

298

Embodied Leadership

Organizational Dynamics, 31(4), 325–338. doi:10. 1016/S0090-2616(02)00133-X Avolio, B. J., Sosik, J. J., Kahai, S. S., & Baker, B. (2014). E-leadership: Re-examining transformations in leadership source and transmission. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 105–131. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2013. 11.003 Bell, B. S., & Kozlowski, S. W. (2002). A typology of virtual teams: Implications for effective leadership. Group & Organization Management, 27(1), 14–49. doi:10.1177/1059601102027001003 Kahai, S. S. (2012). Leading in a digital age: What’s different, issues raised, and what we know. In M. C. Bligh & R. E. Riggio (Eds.), Exploring distance in leader-follower relationships: When near is far and far is near (pp. 63–108). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis/Routledge Publishing. Kahai, S., Avolio, B., & Sosik, J. (2017). E-leadership. In Hertel, G. Stone, D., Johnson, R., & Passmore, J. (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell handbook of the psychology of the internet at work (pp. 285–314). Chichester: Wiley. doi: 10.1002/9781119256151.ch14 Purvanova, R. K., & Kenda, R. (2018). Paradoxical virtual leadership: Reconsidering virtuality through a paradox lens. Group & Organization Management, 43(5), 752–786. doi:10.1177/1059601118794102

EMBODIED LEADERSHIP Leading is accomplished by and between human bodies. This fact is often overlooked in leadership theorizing. However, as one of the first scholars to focus on the embodied aspects of leadership, Amanda Sinclair, writes, “leadership works at visceral and sensual levels, activating appetites and desires” (2005, p. 387). We know this intuitively: consider how the U.S. former President Barack Obama’s grace and ease attracted followers from all over the world; remember the way in which Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was universally praised for the steadiness conveyed by her bearing, or how Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to be photographed shirtless spoke volumes about his desire to be perceived in a certain way. As well as being the foremost representation of who a person is, aspects of an individual’s body

such as gender, race, degree of able-bodiedness, and age all affect how they are able to take up the leader role. Potential followers almost automatically draw conclusions about an individual’s capacities to do what is needed on the basis of their perceptions of the leader’s physical form: does the individual appear up to the task? More subtle, perhaps, is the assessment of whether a particular leader’s body indicates their prototypicality in relation to followers’ identities. Based solely on her gendered body, a woman hoping to lead groups of men will face different challenges than a man leading other men. In this way, the notion of embodiment brings into sharp relief the relationality at the heart of leadership.

Relational Aspects of Embodied Leadership Although central to most leadership theories is the relationship between leaders and followers, many of these theories (such as charismatic leadership, transformational leadership, or servant leadership) pay much more attention to leaders than to followers. It is only with the onset of more relationally based theories of leadership that the critical role played by followers has become increasingly foregrounded. Even so, much of the attention on leader–follower relations remains at a rational level and investigates the degree to which a leader is able to influence or inspire their followers without looking more deeply at how the ability to influence or inspire is generated. This focus also assumes that such influence is a one-way process, from leaders who influence to followers who react to a leader’s wishes in a rather unquestioning way. The notion that within human relationships such as leadership, individuals’ bodies play a more critical role has its first outing in the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. His ideas about how individuals present themselves and how that presentation is perceived provides the groundwork for much subsequent work on embodied leadership. Goffman’s ideas find practical application within the numerous marketing agencies used by political candidates for their advice about the best cut of suits or colors of ties to wear in order to be seen as likable, serious, or patriotic. At a deeper level of application, Goffman’s notions have informed writing about the performative nature of leading,

Embodied Leadership

particularly in relation to the activities leaders choose to foreground and background in order to create particular leader personas. For instance, given that so much of John F. Kennedy’s charisma was grounded in his image as a courageous, physically active, and almost prince-like man, he and his minders did all they could to prevent news of the debilitating nature of his back injuries from being widely known. Considering leadership as an embodied phenomenon brings into high relief the central role of perception in making leadership happen between leaders and followers. This circle of perceptual importance includes how followers perceive situations they find themselves in and, given that, who might best fulfill the role of leader. For instance, in her article Body possibilities in leadership, Amanda Sinclair (2005) introduces two leaders whose bodies are unconventional in relation to expectations of the kinds of bodies which would more typically fill leadership positions within Australia. Appointed Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police in 2001, Christine Nixon was the first female Australian police chief. Voted Queenslander of the Year in 2004, Chris Sarra was a high-profile Aboriginal principal within the Australian school system. Sinclair’s exploration of the challenges each faced both because their bodies were different from those of White males, and because of the way in which they used their bodies, reveals the critical role played by bodies in the leadership process. The realization that having a body which is different from that taken to be the norm (i.e., White, male, heterosexual, able-bodied) when leading creates specific challenges is further supported by Claire O’Neill’s study of the way in which women experience their bodies within leadership relations. In an effort to understand the way in which their gendered bodies affected their experience of leading, O’Neill invited women to reflect on photographs which in some way represented those experiences. Drawing from the phenomenologist Drew Leder’s work, she considered the privileges male bodies have in becoming invisible within organizational settings and shows how women often labor under the unavoidable demand of being gendered in ways that makes their bodies more apparent and paradoxically less

299

potent when taking up leader roles. It is interesting to reflect on how these results might apply to other bodies which are considered outside of the norm of White, able-bodied maleness. What is important about both Sinclair’s and O’Neill’s work is that by focusing on leader bodies which are different from the norm, the role leaders’ bodies play more generally in creating leadership becomes much more apparent. Other scholars have furthered that notion by examining the role anyone’s body plays in creating effective leadership. For instance, Donna Ladkin and Steven S. Taylor argue that embodiment is central to creating a leadership performance which is perceived to be authentic. Drawing from the field of theater, they suggest that in order for a leader’s performance to be perceived as authentic, it must connect with something that is felt within that leader’s body. They note how human beings are very adept at discerning tiny physical signals which convey coherence or incoherence between what people are saying and what they are feeling (for instance, when someone is truly happy, muscles in their face involuntarily move in ways that cannot be controlled). Because of this, followers can often read whether or not their leaders truly believe the things they say. Here again, the relational aspect of leadership comes to the fore, as Ladkin and Taylor clearly position the achievement of a leader’s authenticity as something that is important for followers in order that they can trust their leaders. Delving even more deeply into the dynamic of leader and follower bodies in relation to one another, Ladkin draws from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to consider how his ideas of embodiment might enrich leadership theorizing. In particular, she elaborates on how Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, the most fundamental stuff of human interaction, might provide a way to think about the in between space of leadership relations. Through this exploration, Ladkin considers new questions, such as “How might a leader grow the ‘flesh’ between herself and her followers?” or “How might leaders and followers sense and describe the flesh between them?” Such questions open up new ways of thinking about the glue that holds leaders and followers together in generative relationships.

300

Embodied Leadership

The Leader’s Body as Somatic Site A second strand of theorizing among those writing about embodied leadership concerns how increased awareness of the body can be used as a source of information and insight critical to the effective accomplishment of leading. Writers such as Claus Springborg offer ideas about how leaders can use the sensory-based knowledge their bodies collect to increase their awareness of the contexts in which they operate, and perhaps more importantly, how their followers are experiencing those contexts. Organizations that separate their leaders out by providing them with offices on the top floor of buildings (sometimes with their own private elevator) inadvertently prevent them from garnering vital dismiss vital information about how the organization is doing. Without being intentionally present, leaders can’t sense the buzz of a place or the ups and downs of how people are interacting. There is very little that substitutes for actually being present, bodily, with other human beings, especially those one is trying to influence through leadership. In order to benefit from sensory knowledge, leaders have to be conversant with their own bodily awareness. Hamill’s work introduces foundational practices of breathing and muscle tension awareness which leaders can use to become more grounded in their own physical reality and the wisdom it offers. Hamill points out the importance of attending to jitters in one’s tummy, the tension across shoulders and in the jaw, and the visceral responses the body has to different people in order to benefit from these somatic signals. Leaders regularly have to convey bad news, and the body musculature can arm itself against such difficult a challenging task by habitually tensing. Blocking unpleasant feelings that arise from firing staff, for instance, may seem to make life as a leader easier. However, regularly doing so cuts leaders off from vital sensory information. Obstructing the flow of feeling ultimately hinders individuals from being able to connect meaningfully with others. Such connection is a central aspect of effective leadership. So, how can leaders feel what they are feeling, as uncomfortable as it may be, but then find ways of expressing it in way that reflects effective leadership?

This is the type of question pursued by the scholar Steve Taylor in his quest to discover how leaders might be more vulnerable in their practice. He suggests that such vulnerability begins with allowing oneself to feel emotion as it moves through the body. This requires both the ability to relax long-tensed muscles and sensitivity to what is going on within one’s physical being. Next, the leader has to be able to correctly identify that feeling and find a way to express it, which is in keeping with the demands of the leadership role. This is challenging but rewarding work, as Taylor illustrates through case studies of leaders with whom he has worked who have deepened their connections with followers through increased bodily awareness. The study of leadership as an embodied practice is ultimately about consciously attending to the human, breathing, feeling, body which has always been at the center of leadership relations. In doing so, this appreciation offers the possibility of fostering meaningful connections between leaders and those who would follow them. It is a means of tapping into our most immediate experience and attending to leadership as it unfurls from moment to moment. Donna Ladkin See also Emotion and Leadership; Empathetic Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships

Further Readings Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Doubleday. Hamill, P. (2013). Embodied leadership: The somatic approach to developing your leadership. London: Kogan Page. Ladkin, D. (2013). From perception to flesh: A phenomenological account of the felt experience of leadership. Leader, 9(3), 320–334. doi:10.1177/ 1742715013485854 Ladkin, D., & Taylor, S. S. (2010). Enacting the ‘true self’: Towards a theory of embodied authentic leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(1), 64–74. doi:10.1016/ j.leaqua.2009.10.005 O’Neill, C. (2019). Unwanted appearances and self-objectification: The phenomenology of alterity for women in leadership. Leadership, 15(3), 296–318. doi:10.1177/1742715018816561

Emotion and Leadership Sinclair, A. (2005). Body possibilities in leadership. Leadership, 1(4), 387–406. doi:10.1177/174271500 5057231 Springborg, C. (2010). Leadership as art: Leaders coming to their senses. Leadership, 6(3), 243–258. doi:10. 1177/1742715010368766 Taylor, S. (2014). Open your heart. In The physicality of leadership: Gesture, entanglement, taboo, possibilities (pp. 239–252). Bingley: Emerald Group.

EMOTION

AND

LEADERSHIP

As a basic part of human experience, emotions are felt and expressed routinely in the workplace. Leader emotions have been shown to influence a range of perceptions, attitudes, behavior, and performance in work contexts. In addition, leaders must often regulate emotions, their own and those of others, to facilitate group interactions, organizational functioning, and goal accomplishment. Research integrating the rich, long-standing disciplines of emotions and leadership has focused on affective events, leader emotional displays, outcomes associated with leader emotion displays, mediators and moderators of these relationships, and emotion regulation. Leadership jobs and roles are multifaceted, requiring leaders to balance numerous tasks, people, and change-oriented responsibilities. Ideally, leaders create environments conducive to sustaining an organization’s mission, goals, and success while developing and maintaining a thriving workforce. Given the social complexity of organizational life, emotions play an important role in leader effectiveness. Emotions can inspire, motivate, focus, and energize employees, resulting in desirable work attitudes, behavior, and performance. However, emotions also have a dark side that can lead to undesirable outcomes for leaders and followers. While research on leadership and emotions has emphasized the benefits of positive emotions and the drawbacks of negative emotions, recent research reveals a more nuanced view. Emotion and leadership scholars commonly differentiate affective states (specific emotions and moods) and traits (dispositions). State emotions

301

like happiness, anger, fear, and surprise have identifiable causes, a range of intensity, and tend to be short-lived. Alternatively, mood states are less intense, are described as good or bad, and can last longer than discrete emotion states. Trait positive affect and trait negative affect are internal, stable attributes that predispose people toward experiencing positive and negative states. Cognitive appraisal and functionalist theories of emotion suggest that discrete emotional states coincide with different patterns of situational appraisal (e.g., valence, certainty, control, self vs. other responsibility, goal obstruction) and that negative and positive emotions serve adaptive, valuable functions.

Affective Events, Leader Emotions, and Emotional Climate Affective events theory (AET) offered one of the first frameworks to connect workplace events with emotions and their outcomes. AET proposes that the work environment provides a context for various kinds of affective events to occur. Appraisals of these events activate emotional dispositions and trigger discrete emotion states. Trait affect and specific emotions influence affect-driven behavior (i.e., verbal and nonverbal displays of emotion), attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction), and judgment-driven responses (e.g., decisions about how to handle a work event). Leaders are frequently confronted with affective events that are internal or external to the organization. Some examples include technical problems, employee conflicts, budget shortfalls, promising new opportunities, and goal accomplishment that can result in frustration, anxiety, excitement, happiness, or other emotional states. How leaders manage, display, and respond to these emotional states communicates information to followers, models a type of management style, and shapes organizational norms and rules about allowable and/or desirable ways to display emotion. Over time, this shapes an organization’s emotional culture and climate. Leaders who respond to problems with anger and accusations may unknowingly create a climate of fear, leading to unproductive employee behaviors like hiding problems, sharing less information, and minimizing effort on work tasks. Leaders who show concern and interest when problems arise may create

302

Emotion and Leadership

a compassionate climate where employees support each other, proactively respond to challenges, and are motivated to perform well. The multilevel view of emotion and leadership suggests that a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between emotions, emotion processes, leadership, and outcomes requires research at multiple levels of organizational analysis: (a) within-person variations in emotion states and processes; (b) across-person differences in emotion traits, states, and capabilities; (c) roles and impacts of emotions and emotion regulation in interpersonal interactions; (d) emotional contagion and group-level emotion, and (d) organizational climate. This model brings together a number of key theories and research on emotion processes central to understanding how emotions exert influence in leadership contexts.

Emotion Processes Several emotion processes have been studied in leadership contexts which serve as key mediators or mechanisms through which leader emotions exert influence on followers, groups, and organizations. Emotional Contagion

One of the more direct ways that leader emotions have impact in organizations is through emotional contagion. Positive and negative emotions have a way of spreading, across people and groups. Research suggests that emotions spread through a two-step process whereby individuals subconsciously mimic an emotion observed in another person or group (e.g., smiling when others are smiling) that results in experiencing a feeling congruent with that smile (e.g., happiness). There are more types of negative emotions than positive ones and they tend to spread more easily than positive ones. Negative emotions often exert stronger effects than positive ones given their contributions to evolutionary fitness (value for survival) because negative events pose greater threats to survival than positive ones. Spreading negative emotions associated with threats increases awareness of and ability to avoid or confront them. In organizations, emotional contagion occurs from leaders to individual followers and groups,

and vice versa. However, given the nature of their roles, leaders experience a larger volume of negative affective events than followers and, accordingly, have comparatively greater potential to experience and spread negative emotion. Thus, it is especially important for leaders to be aware of their own emotional states and displays of emotion given that they can have direct influences on follower emotional experiences and outcomes associated with these. Cognitive Inferences

Drawing on the emotions as social information (EASI) model, recent research has identified the importance of followers’ cognitive interpretations of leader emotion displays. In addition to leader emotions exerting effects through emotional contagion, research and theory suggest that a second route of influence occurs through the inferences or situational interpretations that followers make based on leader emotion displays. When followers or others are motivated to understand why a leader is showing a particular emotion, the cognitive interpretation route of influence is activated. The motivation to process a leader’s emotional display is influenced by factors such as the nature of the relationship one has with the leader, interdependence with the leader, emotion display rules in the organization, and the nature of the affective event that triggered the emotion. When a leader’s emotional display aligns with or seems appropriate given these factors, activation of the cognitive interpretation path is likely. Attributions About Leaders

Studies have also shown that leader emotion displays influence not only understanding of affective events and situational meaning but also attributions about the leader. For example, many studies have shown that positive leader emotions have results in greater attributions of charisma to the leader. Recent research has also shown that followers attribute greater sincerity to leader motives when leaders express other-focused emotions versus ego-focused emotions, and these attributions influence perceptions of leader effectiveness. In addition, followers made more positive attributions about leaders expressing anger related to integrity-based violations

Emotion and Leadership

versus competence-based violations. Findings on how leader emotions influence emotional contagion, cognitive inferences, and attributions are closely related to findings about the outcomes of leader emotions.

Outcomes of Leader Emotions A variety of outcomes have been associated with leader emotions in field and lab-based research such as attitudes about leaders, attitudes about work, task performance, extra-role performance, decision-making, and more. Leader emotions have shown direct relationships with outcomes but also exert influence through mediating and moderating variables. Leader displays of positive affect or emotions relate directly to a variety of positive outcomes including prosocial behavior, reduced employee turnover, perceptions of the leader as charismatic, perceptions of transformational leadership, positive affect in individual followers and groups, team coordination, leader emergence, positive evaluations of the leader, liking of the leader, and creative idea generation. Positive emotions may facilitate development of trust, communication, and higher quality leader–member exchange (LMX) relationships among leaders and followers. In addition, differential LMX has the potential to result in positive emotions for some followers and negative ones for others, especially if the differences in leader–member relationships are seen as unfair. Displays of leader negative affect or emotions also relate directly to a variety of negative and positive outcomes. Relative to positive displays, negative leader emotion displays are associated with lower perceptions of leader charisma, less favorable evaluations of the leader, greater negative affect in individual followers and groups, and less liking of the leader. Positive relationships with leader negative emotions include group effort, leader emergence, competence, status, and analytical task performance. Leader anger displays when providing negative feedback can lead to negative outcomes, both in terms of perceptions of the leader and employee performance after the feedback. Disappointment displays may have better outcomes in terms of efforts to improve post-feedback task performance.

303

Some of these relationships have been shown to operate through the mediators of emotional contagion to followers and follower cognitive inference; however, a variety of factors moderate the relationship of leader emotions to outcomes. Matches between the nature of leader emotions and the task at hand produce stronger effects on outcomes than when the task is inconsistent with the leader’s emotional display. Matches of leader emotion with follower emotion, follower selfregulation style, and follower personality traits also show stronger effects on outcomes than when there is a mismatch. Other moderators like leader gender reveal that female leaders are judged more harshly than male leaders after displaying anger because anger is inconsistent with female gender role expectations. These mediators and moderators present a complex picture of how specific leader emotions spread, are interpreted by followers, and exert differential influences on a range of outcomes. More research is needed to determine how these processes function together to influence leader emotion–outcome relationships.

Leader Emotional Labor and Emotion Regulation One of the ways leaders can alter the expression and impact of emotions is through emotion regulation. Organizational rules about appropriate emotion displays require members to engage in emotional labor or regulate emotions to align with display rules. Until the early 2000s, emotional labor was studied primarily with frontline service industry employees. However, research has shown that due to the variety of interactions and responsibilities leaders encounter, leading with emotion labor is frequently required. One approach, surface acting, involves hiding true emotions (e.g., repressing frustration with a new subordinate’s slow work pace as they learn the job) and/or displaying emotions not felt (e.g., showing enthusiasm to encourage subordinates despite feeling tired or stressed). Surface acting may be required in the short term, but long-term use of this strategy increases stress and negative health outcomes. A second approach, deep acting, involves reappraising the situation in order to feel

304

Emotional Intelligence

differently about it. For example, recalling what it was like to be a new employee learning the ropes could turn frustration into sympathy. Other regulation strategies such as changing a situation to lessen or heighten its emotional impact, or diverting attention away from the emotional aspects of a situation, also show promise for leaders. Finally, expressing emotions authentically has gained attention in the leadership research and has been associated with both positive (being seen as more genuine) and negative (going again display rules) outcomes. Emotional intelligence abilities have been widely researched in relation to leadership and these facilitate the ability of leaders to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions effectively. Leaders also facilitate emotion regulation in their followers. Studies have shown that when employees engage in surface acting (i.e., displaying fake emotions or hiding authentic ones), they experience less job satisfaction and more stress. Leaders can act as mood managers, helping employees to cope more effectively with disruptive negative emotions and emotional labor demands. Transformational leadership behaviors such as inspirational motivation (charisma and emotion expression), idealized influence (role modeling), individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation have been related to more positive emotional states in followers, although more empirical research is needed to understand exactly how these behaviors facilitate follower emotion regulation.

Final Thoughts While there is a larger amount of research on the positive effects of positive leader emotion displays, research examining different kinds of negative emotions in different contexts reveals a more nuanced picture of the negative and positive effects of negative leader emotion displays. However, sustained negative emotions from leaders or followers could create an environment that erodes performance, relationships, and organizational climate over time. There remains a need for research studying the effects of emotions in leadership contexts over extended periods of time. Given the demands of leadership jobs, leaders face

substantial emotional labor demands, requiring ongoing emotion regulation for themselves and their followers. Research revealing what forms of emotion regulation are most beneficial for leader and follower outcomes is promising along with initial success of efforts to train emotion regulation capabilities. Shane Connelly See also Emotional Intelligence; Empathic Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leader–Member Exchange; Leadership and Management; Trait Theories of Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Ashkanasy, N. M., & Humphrey, R. H. (2011). A multi-level view of leadership and emotions: Leading with emotional labor. In Sage handbook of leadership (pp. 363–377). London: SAGE. Barsade, S., & O’Neill, O. A. (2016). Manage your emotional culture. Harvard Business Review, 94(1), 58–66. Bono, J. E., Foldes, H. J., Vinson, G., & Muros, J. P. (2007). Workplace emotions: The role of supervision and leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(5), 1357. Cropanzano, R., Dasborough, M. T., & Weiss, H. M. (2017). Affective events and the development of leader-member exchange. Academy of Management Review, 42(2), 233–258. doi:10.5465/amr.2014. 0384 Gooty, J., Connelly, S., Griffith, J., & Gupta, A. (2010). Leadership, affect and emotions: A state of the science review. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 979–1004. Van Knippenberg, D., & Van Kleef, G. A. (2016). Leadership and affect: Moving the hearts and minds of followers. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 799–840. doi:10.5465/19416520.2016.1160515

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE Emotional intelligence (EI) has been touted as the most important predictor of success. EI is defined and measured in several different ways, however,

Emotional Intelligence

and the claim does not stand up to close scrutiny. This entry examines the origins, alternative definitions, and the measurement of EI and aims to present a balanced view of its importance to a certain form of effective leadership.

About Emotional Intelligence EI includes the ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one’s own and others’ emotions and the ability to use this information as a guide to thinking and behavior. It has been widely claimed that EI, when referred to as EQ for emotional quotient, is twice as important as IQ, is the most important aspect of high-performing leaders, and can be readily increased. Although such claims are widespread, there is little support for them, given that EI has been defined and measured in disparate ways, from a collection of standard personality traits such as optimism and assertiveness, to a set of leadership competencies such as influence and teamwork, to a set of abilities such as perceiving emotions and managing emotions. Foundations of Emotional Intelligence

The philosopher Ren´e Descartes’ (1596–1650) statement that “I think, therefore I am” profoundly influenced Western thought. Centuries later, sociologist William H. Whyte’s classic book The Organization Man described effective businesspeople as logical, reasoned, and rational decision makers. He found that emotions deflect objectivity and are a force within individuals which need to be controlled. But others began to examine the nature of emotions and whether they were always irrational and destructive. Charles Darwin’s work on emotions had suggested emotions were a form of information and allowed people, and nonhumans, to communicate effectively. The 20th century saw work on the influence of emotion on cognition by Bower and others and investigations by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on the helpful role of emotions in decision-making. In response to these and other streams of research, a model of EI was formulated by two psychologists, Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey, in a pair of articles published in 1990. The notion

305

received scant attention until written about in a trade book called Emotional Intelligence published in 1995. The book was well-written and engaging, but it stretched the concept of EI well beyond its original intent and scope and defined EI as almost any trait or skill not defined and measured by analytical intelligence or IQ. The original conception of EI, sometimes referred to as the ability model of EI, was revised in 1997 by Mayer and Salovey and consists of four related abilities: emotion perception, emotion facilitation, understanding emotion, and managing emotion. Conceptions of EI and EQ

Each of the approaches to EI is associated with different measurement approaches. Multiple measures of EI have been developed since 1990, and two main approaches have emerged. One is called the mixed model, which measures a mixture of skills and traditional personality traits, sometimes ranging from self-rated leadership to empathy, to teamwork, to decision-making. The second approach is the ability model, which focuses on a set of cognitive abilities. Terminology differs, with mixed models often employing the EQ label and the ability models labeling their work as EI. How these models define EI varies a great deal and they also have been operationalized in different ways, with mixed models usually being measured using self-report scales of personality traits and ability models measured objective or performance-based assessments of emotion-based skills. Some of the more commonly employed EI and EQ assessments are listed in Table 1, grouped by approach to EQ and EI. The mixed or self-report models are based on popular depictions of EI and include three different constructs: perceived emotional abilities, competencies, and personality traits. Mixed-model approaches are often referred to as trait or personality approaches and use self-report questions to report levels of EI (e.g., “I manage my emotions well”). There are many associated problems with self-report survey instruments, since sometimes nonintellectual features add construct-irrelevant variance to people’s self-estimated abilities, rendering their judgments invalid as indices of their actual abilities. In fact, research indicates that

306

Emotional Intelligence

Table 1

Measures of EQ and EI

Measure

Items Dimensions

Sample Item

Mixed Model Measures Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS)

TEIQue

16

Self-Emotions Appraisal Other’s Emotions Appraisal Use of Emotion Regulation of Emotion

153 Well-Being Self-Control Emotionality Sociability Independent Facets

Indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with each of the statements (7point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). I really understand what I feel. I always know whether I am happy or not. Please answer each statement below by putting a circle around the number that best reflects your degree of agreement or disagreement with that statement (7-point scale from Completely Disagree to Completely Agree). On the whole, I’m a highly motivated person. I generally don’t find life enjoyable.

Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi 2.0)

133 Intrapersonal Interpersonal Stress Management Adaptability General Mood Self-Actualization

Responses to each item were provided using the following rating scale: 1 5 Never/Rarely; 2 5 Occasionally; 3 5 Sometimes; 4 5 Often; 5 5 Always/ Almost Always I I I I

Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI)

72

Self-Awareness Social Awareness Self-Management Social Skills

am generally a happy person. feel I have something to contribute. pay attention to how I am feeling. am fun to be with.

1 5 Never; 2 5 Rarely; 3 5 Sometimes; 4 5 Often; 5 5 Consistently; 6 5 Don’t Know Coaches and mentors others

Ability Model Measures Multi-Factor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS)

402 Perceiving Assimilation Understanding Managing

A person is sad and then is relieved. Afterward, what are the likely ways the person might feel? Circle a number for each one: 1 5 Extremely Unlikely; 5 5 Extremely Likely Surprise Satisfaction Pleased Shame

Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test MSCEIT

141 Perception of Emotions Emotional Facilitation of Thought Understanding

Tom felt anxious and became a bit stressed when he thought about all the work he needed to do. When his supervisor brought him an additional project, he felt:

Emotional Intelligence

Table 1

307

(Continued)

Measure

Items Dimensions

Sample Item

Emotions a. overwhelmed Managing Emotions b. depressed c. ashamed d. self-conscious e. jittery Situational Test of Emotion Management (STEM)

44

Emotion Regulation Lee’s workmate fails to deliver an important piece of information on time, causing Lee to fall behind schedule also. What action would be the most effective for Lee? a. Work harder to compensate. b. Get angry with the workmate. c. Explain the urgency of the situation to the workmate. d. Never rely on that workmate again.

Situational Test of Emotional Understanding (STEU)

42

Emotion Understanding

A supervisor who is unpleasant to work for leaves Alfonso’s work. Alfonso is most likely to feel? (a) joy, (b) hope, (c) regret, (d) relief, (e) sadness.

Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECo)

110 Emotion Recognition Emotion Understanding Emotion Regulation Emotion Management

You are a project leader in a small company. One evening you bump into the general manager, with whom you have a very good relationship, at the printer. He seems very upset and when you ask him whether something is wrong, he replies that the company has been in the red already for some months because of the financial crisis. He seems extremely worried and says that he does not want anyone else to know about it until he has worked out a solution. What do you do? A. You tell him that good managers are not worried but see crises as challenges. He should fight for the company. (3 additional response options)

Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test 2.0 (MSCEIT 2) (Mayer et al., 2022)

83

Watch the video. Which emotion is best expressed by the person in this picture? a. Anger b. Anxiety c. Anticipation d. Despair

Perception of Emotions Emotional Facilitation Understanding Emotions Managing Emotions

the relationship between self-reported ability tests and actual ability ranges from r 5 0.15–0.25, which means people often have little idea of their actual abilities. Another issue with people’s self-estimated abilities reason is that participants

can increase their EQ scores when motivated to do so (and cannot do the same for the ability model scores with the same motivation). In addition, as Richard D. Roberts and colleagues note, the overlap that exists between the EI self-report scales

308

Emotional Intelligence

and existing personality scales is a serious challenge to the conceptualization of EI as a cognitive ability rather than a set of traditional personality traits. Ability models have been called the gold standard in intelligence research because intelligence refers to the actual capacity to perform well at mental problems, and not just beliefs about one’s capacities. The reason is that the ability test asks participants to take relevant questions and measure their answers against a criterion of correctness. The ability models conceptualize EI as a set of mental skills that can be assessed with a performance test, which has reasonable correlations with conventional psychometric intelligence measures such as General Mental Ability (GMA), while the self-report or mixed models have weak correlations with GMA. The empirical evidence points to the ability model and, in particular, the Mayer– Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) model as an effective measure of EI. The MSCEIT is an ability-based assessment that measures the ability to manage emotions, asking participants to rate a number of possible actions on the scale, ranging from very effective to very ineffective. Significant limitations of MSCEIT include how the scoring keys were developed, the lack of consistent factor structure support, and poor face validity for leaders. EI Is a Broad Intelligence

There are many kinds of intelligence, from verbal to visual to processing speed, and these are often referred to as broad intelligences as described by the Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) model. To be considered a broad intelligence, EI needs to fulfill the Goldilocks criteria of being just right, that is, correlated positively with other intelligences but not so highly correlated that it is measuring the same intelligence. EI, defined and measured as an ability with MSCEIT, does appear to meet these criteria based on an extensive study of multiple measures by MacCann and colleagues. By contrast, mixed-model measures often correlate quite highly with the Big Five personality traits (i.e., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism).

EI and Leadership

What constitutes effectiveness in the how of leadership has befuddled behavioral and political scientists for close to half a century. Geopolitical contexts appear to topple leadership theories that fit one era but are redundant in the next. In business, arts, education, sports, and science, the profiles of employees (enter Generation Z) are changing, and there is an active shift from hierarchal leadership to agile and systems thinking, which will further prompt empirical research to assess whether contemporary leaders will need to be experts or servants. However, we do know that the ability to advantageously deal with one’s own emotions and those of others in problem-solving and decision-making is relevant whether you are a traditional or servant leader. EI as a predictor of significant outcomes across diverse samples of real-world domains and allows busy and often under-resourced professionals to deal with emergent problems using creativity and imagination alongside evidence and- expert-based problem-solving methods. Management of certain emotions and behaviors is seen as key determinants when matching organization values with those of employees. However, on the shadow side, there are examples of the skills of EI being used for manipulating followers across a spectrum of political and business domains. For example, some people skilled in emotion regulation, and who scored high on Machiavellianism, were more likely to use EI to create negative work environments. We see this played out by political leaders, notably during elections such as those for the U.S presidency and Senate. They offer a grand illustration of leaders who often engage followership through false appeasement using emotional skills to communicate their message and brand. In the era of hyper-transparency and trial by social media, such appeasements are rapidly toppled with rapid abhorrence if a hint of immoral or unacceptable behavior emerges. Such is society’s demand for an iconic and heroic leader followed by its insatiable desire to subsequently tear down such an icon. What EI Predicts

EQ has been touted as being twice as important as IQ and yet the claim is unfounded. It is based on

Emotional Intelligence

reports of analytical intelligence, or IQ, accounting for a large proportion of success in life outcomes but leaving perhaps up to 80% of that variation unaccounted for. Mixed-model measures of EI have high degrees of overlap with Big Five personality traits and thus often have high correlations with various leadership criteria. The key corelates of ability EI relevant to leadership include stress tolerance, creating positive work environments, and both achieving goals (the what of performance) by communicating with people and mentoring them (the how of performance). This last result is important: ability EI does not interfere with achieving goals and in fact slightly boosts objective goal attainment. However, leaders scoring higher on ability EI achieve these goals without the need to be the stereotypical brash and insensitive leader who makes for good press. You can act with decency and still hit your targets, or as Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is widely quoted as having said, successful organizations “do not tolerate brilliant jerks.” EI In Practice

The four abilities of the MSCEIT EI model are arranged so that the more basic psychological processes (e.g., perceiving emotions) are the foundation, whereas the more advanced processes (e.g., regulation of emotion) are at the top of the model and are said to be dependent on the lower level abilities. Those leaders who can easily demonstrate the four skills perceive, facilitate, understand, and manage emotions in themselves and others can be a rarity in public life and garnish universal admiration. Following the Christchurch mosque shooting in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2017, Prime Minister Jacinta Arden demonstrated both basic and advanced psychological processes of EI, as she physically and warmly embraced the survivors and victims, allowing us to witness and her to identify their pain, all while symbolically wearing the hijab to share an understanding and respect of their important traditions, which had made them targets. Her unscripted ability and lack of self-consciousness offers a thoroughly emotionally intelligent response, and she used these feelings to act with rationality to implement strict gun legislation and decommission of automatic weapons in her country. One could say

309

her management of these emotions in others was merely a normal human reaction and equally an emotionally intelligent one. Can EI Be Increased?

As noted earlier, there are two major approaches to EI: trait EQ and ability EI. Popular literature often suggests that EQ, unlike IQ, can be readily increased. Some studies do support the notion that EQ can be increased, but these studies employ self-report scales of personality traits and participants are aware that they have received intensive EQ training. Thus, simple demand characteristics may be responsible for increases in self-reported optimism, assertiveness, influence. or happiness (traits measured by various EQ scales). The more complex question is whether EI, conceived of and measured as a broad intelligence, can be increased. For that matter, can any intelligence be increased? There are now enough studies of ability EI interventions to answer this question, and it does seem possible to slightly increase ability EI, but such increases require significant resources and time. An alternative approach to addressing EI deficits in leaders is to identify specific areas in need of development and target the specific areas of deficiency. For example, if a particular leader scores low in perceiving emotions in others, then a personal development plan can be constructed to demonstrate how to better perceive emotions in others by studying facial expressions. Busy leaders may not have the time to invest in such in-depth development and instead can focus on remedial or compensatory strategies such as checking in with peers after a meeting to calibrate reaction and interpretation on how the meeting went. Likewise, leaders who are not naturals at emotion management can be taught in-the-moment strategies such as inserting a pause before replying to an angry email. Future Directions for Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

With both traditional and neo-liberal capitalism coming under fire for its disregard of the planet and its people, organizations are turning toward purpose over profit with impact investment at an all-time high. Environmental, social, and

310

Empathic Leadership

governance criteria are defining the agenda for most, led by global bodies such as the UN, which created the Sustainable Development Goals to eliminate world poverty and create a fair and equal world for all by 2030, while the Paris Agreement on climate change aims to reverse global ecological demise. It could be said that EI appears to have found a solid home for it to flourish, as opposed to when the concept was founded in 1990, when EI had to exist within the small spaces between the powers and hierarchies within traditional organizational structures. Now, as the fundamentals of organizational design are changing rapidly to meet the global demands of hyper-transparency of organizations and their supply chains, putting purpose before profit will propel all stakeholders into an awareness of who they want to work for and how they want to consume. Employees, and society generally, are beginning to demand an organizational context that has respect for planet and people. The emphasis is beginning to turn toward relationships before the traditional metrics of commerce, utility, or profit. EI can only help to further that ambition. Kerrie Fleming and David R. Caruso See also Emotion and Leadership; Empathic Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Inclusive Leadership; Transformational and Visionary Leadership

Further Readings Caruso, D. R., & Rees, L. T. (2019). Developing leaders of character with emotional intelligence. Journal of Character Development, 6, 43–51. ˆ e, S., DeCelles, K. A., McCarthy, J. M., van Kleef, G. Cot´ A., & Hideg, I. (2011). The Jekyll and Hyde of emotional intelligence: Emotion-regulation knowledge facilitates both prosocial and interpersonally deviant behavior. Psychological Science, 22(8), 1073–1080. doi:10.1177/0956797611416251 Daus, C. S. (2005) The case for the ability based model of emotional intelligence. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(4), 453–464. Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1993). The intelligence of emotional intelligence. Intelligence, 17(4), 433–442. doi:10.1016/0160–2896(93)90010–3 Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits?

American Psychologist, 63(6), 503–517. doi:10.1037/ 0003–066X.63.6.503 Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2016) The ability model of emotional intelligence: Principles and updates. Emotion Review, 8(4), 290–300. doi: 10. 1177/1754073916639667 Roberts, R. D., Zeidner, M., & Mathews, G. (2001) ‘Does emotional intelligence meet traditional standards for an intelligence? Some new data and conclusions’. Emotion, 1, 196–231. Sheldon, O. J., Dunning, D., & Ames, D. R. (2014) Emotionally unskilled, unaware, and uninterested in learning more: Reactions to feedback about deficits in emotional intelligence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(1), 125–137.

EMPATHIC LEADERSHIP This entry offers an overview of empathy as a key component of leadership, with attention to the insights offered by what research has shown in the past few decades. In 1963, psychologist Robert L. Katz best illustrated the meaning of empathy when he wrote, “When we experience empathy, we feel as if we were experiencing someone else’s feelings as our own. We see, we feel, we respond, and we understand as if we were, in fact, the other person” (p. 3). Although much of the early research on empathy was done with regard to therapy and counseling, prominent leadership scholars and authors began to argue for the crucial role of empathy to leadership. Robert K. Cooper and Aman Sawaf reviewed studies that found that empathic behavior was the key difference between successful and unsuccessful leaders. In 1997, they explained the benefits of leading with empathy this way: Empathy and compassion connect us with others through the shared language of feelings and experience, one heart to the next, beneath the words, behind the posturing and gestures. Through feelings of empathy and compassion we help ourselves learn and grow, and we also enable others to begin to feel safe enough to talk about what is really going on in their lives—to

Empathic Leadership

tell their stories—without fear of being judged, criticized, or abandoned. It is then that we begin to empathize with them, and extend compassion and support to them, rather than remaining distant or unaffected, or sympathizing about them. And, more often than not, such empathy and compassion are, sooner or later, returned to us in kind. [p. 48]

Types of Empathy There have been many different conceptualizations of empathy. Considerable evidence provides support for the distinction between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. With cognitive empathy, one recognizes another’s emotions but does not feel what the other person is feeling, whereas with affective empathy, one shares to at least some degree the other’s feelings. This is an important distinction because the two types of empathy can have different relationships with other variables, such as prosocial helping. Empathy has also been conceptualized as a key component of emotional intelligence, and many of the articles on empathy and leadership have examined empathy subscales that are part of a more comprehensive emotional intelligence scale.

Leader Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Employee Well-Being Researchers have labeled the belief that empathic people are more likely to perform prosocial behaviors the empathy–altruism hypothesis, and this hypothesis has been verified by numerous studies. Because of this focus on empathy’s altruistic effects, it is not surprising that so much of the research on empathic leadership has examined the beneficial effects of leader empathy on subordinates. For example, researchers Brent A. Scott, Jason A. Colquitt, E. Layne Paddock, and Timothy A. Judge used a daily diary study to examine the effects of manager empathy on employees’ well-being. They found that employee groups that had empathic managers suffered fewer somatic complaints; moreover, their daily goal progress was more strongly related to positive affect. Their study is a powerful demonstration of the effects of leader empathy on employee well-being.

311

As stated earlier, empathy is a key component of emotional intelligence, and the research on leader emotional intelligence is consistent with the above studies specifically on empathy. Researchers Chao Miao, Ronald H. Humphrey, and Shanshan Qian have done a series of meta-analytical studies on emotional intelligence. These have demonstrated that leader emotional intelligence is positively related to subordinate job satisfaction. Moreover, they confirmed that emotionally intelligent leaders are more likely to have subordinates who perform organizational citizenship behaviors, a key type of prosocial behavior at work.

Empathy and Leadership Styles Task and Relations Leadership

Most of the major models of leadership have features that correspond to two key dimensions of leadership, task and relations leadership, and these also correspond to the two major dimensions of personality. For example, the Ohio State leadership model states there are two major types of leadership behaviors, initiating structure and consideration. These correspond well to the two fundamental dimensions of traits and judgments about people: the competency dimension (intelligent, energetic, motivated, etc.) and the warmth dimension (sociable, friendly, caring, etc.). Although empathy may not capture all aspects of the warmth dimension, it might be a close approximate to the heart of the warmth dimension, and thus a concise measure of one of the two main dimensions of personality that people are judged on. Likewise, empathy may be at the core of leader consideration behaviors. Janet B. Kellett, Ronald H. Humphrey, and Randall G. Sleeth found that there are two routes to leadership, one through displays of empathy and the other through cognitive ability and complex task performance. Their results demonstrated that empathy was an excellent predictor of leadership emergence. In a subsequent study, they created a measure of interactive empathy especially appropriate for leaders. Because many measures of empathy were developed for psychological counseling purposes, such measures tended to focus exclusively on negative emotions, and they were also passive in nature, focusing on feeling others’

312

Employee Rights

pain in a passive manner. The interactive empathy scale measured whether leaders were successful in taking initiative in creating a two-way interactive bond with other group members. In their study, both cognitive ability and complex task performance predicted task leadership, but not relations leadership. In contrast, interactive empathy predicted both task and relationship leadership and was the best predictor overall of leadership emergence. These findings have been further supported in subsequent studies by other authors. Transformational Leadership

Various studies have found that empathy has important relationships to transformational leadership. Moreover, some studies have found that empathy mediates the positive effects of transformational leadership on other variables, such as performance.

Leader Empathy Around the World Two large international studies confirm the importance of empathy to leadership around the world, although they did find cross-cultural differences. William J. Chopik, Ed O’Brien, and Sara H. Konrath did a study of 104,365 adults located in 63 countries. Their worldwide survey found that both empathic concern and perspective taking were related to volunteerism, helping, and a composite measure of empathic acts. Golnaz Sadri, Todd J. Weber, and William A. Gentry studied empathic emotion and leadership performance in 38 countries, and they found that leaders who performed behaviors that signal empathic emotion (as evaluated by subordinates) were rated as better performers by their own managers. They also found that power distance was an important cross-cultural moderator of the leader empathy to performance relationship.

leader–member exchange relations. Worldwide studies have confirmed the importance of empathy to overall leader effectiveness and to prosocial behaviors. Thus, organizations’ best interests are served by seeking to hire empathic leaders and by developing an empathic organizational culture. Ronald H. Humphrey, Chao Miao, and Shanshan Qian Further Readings Chopik, W. J., O’Brien, E., & Konrath, S. H. (2017). Differences in empathic concern and perspective taking across 63 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(1), 23–38. Cooper, R. K., & Sawaf, A. (1997). Executive EQ: Emotional intelligence in leadership and organizations. New York, NY: Grosset/Putnam. Katz, R. L. (1963). Empathy: Its nature and uses. New York, NY: Free Press of Glencoe. Kellett, J. B., Humphrey, R. H., & Sleeth, R. G. (2002). Empathy and complex task performance: Two routes to leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(5), 523–544. Kellett, J. B., Humphrey, R. H., & Sleeth, R. G. (2006). Empathy and the emergence of task and relations leaders. The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 146–162. Miao, C., Humphrey, R. H., & Qian, S. (2018). A cross-cultural meta-analysis of how leader emotional intelligence influences subordinate task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of World Business, 53, 463–474. doi:10.1016/j.jwb.2018. 01.003 Sadri, G., Weber, T. J., & Gentry, W. A. (2011). Empathic emotion and leadership performance: An empirical analysis across 38 countries. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(5), 818–830. Scott, B. A., Colquitt, J. A., Paddock, E. L., & Judge, T. A. (2010). A daily investigation of the role of manager empathy on employee well-being. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113(2), 127–140.

Concluding Remarks As this concise review has noted, leader empathy is important to employee well-being. Moreover, leader empathy is an important element of relations and consideration-style leadership and is also related to transformational leadership and to high-quality

EMPLOYEE RIGHTS Human beings spend a great part of their lives working. Working is obviously important for economic reasons but also for (social) recognition

Employee Rights

and sense-making reasons. Most people work as an employee. They are hired by another person or by an organization to perform supervised tasks in return for a salary. As being an employee has become the standard situation for most working human beings, the conditions under which work has to be performed are extremely relevant to human life. As a consequence, employee rights are also an extremely relevant moral topic. The importance of employee rights is reflected in many crucial international organizations having made public statements on their importance. The importance of employee rights is also reflected in specialized journals being dedicated to the subject. This entry provides an overview of the three general types of employee rights, explores the normative frameworks of employee rights, and concludes by considering ways in which moral employee rights are grounded.

Types of Employee Rights Employee rights are not secured in the world today. Even some of the most basic ones like the prohibition against coerced labor or the right to a safe working environment are violated in many countries. These violations also occur in what are traditionally called developed countries. For example, in the United States, many employees are still subjected to an employment-at-will restriction. The first type of employee rights condition is the phase in which citizens (or human beings in general) enter the work force (i.e., become employees). Some of these rights protect the citizens from the prospect of not being able to get a job at all, while other rights of this type protect human beings from certain kinds of work or some citizens from having to enter the work force at all. Employee rights in this category include the right against discrimination or forced labor, including prohibitions against child labor, and the right to an employment contract. The second type concerns employee rights that protect the employee during negotiations over the terms of the contract. Important rights in this category are protection from employment at will, the right of association and collective bargaining (which includes the right to establish labor unions), and the right to strike. Other rights

313

include that of equal pay for an equal job, parental leave, protection from excessive and mandatory overtime, and the right to a just and living wage. The third category concerns employee rights that protect the employee while at work. These rights include a safe working space, adequate training, and the right to complain about working conditions.

Normative Frameworks for Understanding Employee Rights Employee rights are rights morally speaking, if they ought to be rights from the most fundamental perspective from which human beings can interpret the world. Recent work in moral philosophy emphasizes the importance of traditional moral employee rights, as these rights are far from being guaranteed in today’s world, in which child labor, coerced labor, unsafe working conditions, and employment at will are still common. Besides that, new moral employee rights are introduced, explained, and grounded in developments in working conditions. These new employee rights include the right to privacy (including a right to nonsurveillance) and a private life, the right to meaningful work, the right to put expertise above duties as an employee, and the right to inform the public about institutional misdeeds and abuses (whistleblower rights). Legal employee rights are those guaranteed in the positive laws of a country. A legal right can be claimed with the force of the law. As legal systems differ per country, legal employee rights differ per country. Countries also vary in how well their legal systems work. Many employees all over the world experience trouble claiming the rights their legal systems claim to guarantee. Employee rights embedded in international law (like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) are the legal rights that the world community thinks ought to be guaranteed in all positive legal systems. Employee rights embedded in international law are very important for the realization of employee rights. Yet, they are not themselves directly enforceable. They need to be acknowledged, ratified, and interpreted by national legal systems. Consequently, there is a serious gap between what ought to be employee rights according to

314

Employee Rights

international law and what happens to be employee rights in real life. Not all legal systems acknowledge as legitimate all bodies issuing employee rights; not all legal systems have ratified all declarations of employee rights, and some countries interpret international declarations in their own way. Contractual employee rights are the rights that are guaranteed to employees as a result of their negotiations with the employers. Contractual employee rights can also be a way in which responsible employers aim to demonstrate and guarantee their responsibility. Contractual employee rights are limited to dimensions that the legal system of a country considers negotiable between employer and employee. Hence, if a legal system forbids child labor or working weeks of more than 48 hours, then the contract between an employer and their employees cannot allow child labor or a working week exceeding 48 hours. If the legal system does not forbid provisions for job security, they can be guaranteed as contractual employee rights. Some moral philosophers (legal naturalists) will argue that moral employee rights ought to reflect and be the basis of legal employee rights. From this perspective, in the best possible society, legal employee rights fully overlap with moral employee rights. Others (e.g., Kantians, followers of philosopher Immanuel Kant) will argue that the relationship between moral and legal employee rights will be and should be partial and in need of translation. As international law is closer to morality than legality, the relationship between morality and international law is also closer. The relation between employee rights and contractual employee rights is somewhat complicated from the moral perspective. On the one hand, contractual employee rights can advance moral employee rights. On the other hand, with regard to their nature or form, contractual employee rights are radically different from moral employee rights. By definition, a contract right is negotiable, whereas a moral employee right is not. Moral employee rights set up fundamental, absolute, or categorical limits, binding all parties; contractual employee rights, however, are negotiable rights.

The Grounding of Moral Employee Rights A crucial issue in reflection on moral employee rights is their (moral) grounding. Moral rights can be grounded in prudence. According to this line of argument, it is ultimately in the enlightened self-interest of the employer to recognize and respect employee rights. Employee rights can also be morally grounded in the value of humanity or justice. In that case, employee rights are considered to be a consequence of or based on basic human rights. Another way to morally ground employee rights builds on the basic problem of a power asymmetry in the employer–employee relationship. In the empirical world, the employer and the employee do not meet as equals when they negotiate. Hence, employee rights are necessary to create an equal playing field. The reality of these power differences were clearly perceived by 19th century liberalism where a distinction was made between a free laborer and a wage laborer. It was argued that the wage laborer should be denied certain political rights (such as a right to vote) because it was considered impossible for a wage laborer to stand up against their employer. A final way to ground employee rights points at the fact that it is impossible for employees to distance themselves from the labor power that they are selling. Even if selling labor power is considered to be like selling a product, selling labor power is actually something completely different from selling a thing because it involves the body and mind of the laborer. Hence, contracts that involve people selling their labor power are very special contracts in that they involve human beings who are living their life while working. The special circumstances of contracts that involve selling working power justifies employee rights, morally speaking. Over the last decades, the discussion over the grounding of employee rights has been very important politically, as employee rights were and are often endangered because of an increasingly dogmatic liberal or libertarian view that held that property rights trump each and every other possible moral right. It seems safe to assume that if both employee rights and property rights are saddled with an equal burden of grounding, for example in (the value of) humanity or in human

Empowerment

rights, many of the employee rights now advocated by international bodies make perfect sense. Wim Dubbink See also Black Lives Matter; Civil Rights Movement; Commodification; Corporate Social Responsibility; Responsible Leadership

Further Readings Bowie, N. (2013). Business ethics in the early 21st century. Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6223-7 Bernacchio, C. (2021). Virtue beyond contract: A MacIntyrean approach to employee rights. Journal of Business Ethics, 171(2), 227–240. doi:10.1007/ s10551-020-04435-2 Ciulla, J. (2000). The working life: The promise and betrayal of modern work. New York, NY: Times Books. Martin, K., & Freeman, R. E. (2003). Some problems with employee monitoring. Journal of Business Ethics, 43(4), 353–361. doi:10.1023/A:1023014112461

EMPOWERMENT Empowerment is a popular construct in organizations, proposing that giving workers greater authority, responsibility, and autonomy can benefit both the person and the employer. Empowerment has been a subject of considerable scholarly research in leadership in recent years, as it is typically initiated and enacted by leaders in the hopes of increasing follower motivation and performance. This entry examines the constructs of empowerment and empowering leadership with a focus on their links to important organizational outcomes, including employee job satisfaction and task performance. Issues surrounding how these constructs are measured as well as the potential downsides of empowerment are explored, and the entry concludes with suggestions for future directions on empowerment research.

What Is Empowerment? As organizations look to adapt to a constantly changing environment, they become more dynamic

315

in structure, often leading to a flattening of hierarchies. Flatter organizational structures naturally lead to the increased use of empowerment from superiors, providing subordinates with more independence, responsibility, and autonomy in their work. In its true form, empowerment is a sharing of power between leader and follower that is expected to motivate employees by making them feel more invested and responsible for their own work. There are two general approaches to understanding empowerment. The first is the sociostructural approach in which empowerment is seen as a set of structures, policies, and practices that are designed to decentralize power and authority throughout the organization. Some of these practices include open information sharing, decentralization, participative decision-making, extensive training, and contingent compensation. The greater level of input and control provided by these practices, along with the social support from their superiors, empower employees to feel they have a greater impact in their organization. For the organization, this may result in faster client response times, better client service, and reduced turnover. In other words, the sociostructural form of empowerment is that which is provided by the external organizational context rather than the internal psychological context. The second approach is psychological empowerment, which involves increasing the intrinsic task motivation of employees by giving them a sense of control over their work and a proactive orientation to their work role. Psychological empowerment manifests in four cognitions: meaning, self-determination, competence, and impact. Meaning involves the alignment between the demands of one’s work and one’s own beliefs, values, and standards. Self-determination is one’s sense of choice concerning the initiation or regulation of one’s actions. Competence is one’s belief in one’s capability to successfully perform work activities. Impact is the belief that one can influence strategic, administrative, or operational activities and outcomes in one’s work unit. All of these cognitions affect the worker by engaging them more meaningfully in their work, thereby increasing their self-efficacy and confidence as well as morale. Thus, psychological empowerment is an employee’s psychological reaction toward the

316

Empowerment

employee engagement practices captured in the sociostructural approach. Empowerment has been found to be theoretically similar across the individual and team levels. Team psychological empowerment involves shared perceptions among team members regarding the team’s collective level of empowerment. Empowering leadership at this level involves behaviors such as encouraging the team to set its own goals, self-manage its tasks, and involving the team in decisions that affect its members. There is limited research considering psychological empowerment at the organizational level, but it is important to note that organizational-level factors, such as organizational culture and structure, could be linked to both individual and team psychological empowerment as well as the use of empowering leadership. Future research is needed to explicate these relationships. Empowering leadership encompasses a specific set of leader behaviors that it is hoped fosters psychological empowerment. It involves a process of sharing power and allocating autonomy and responsibilities to followers, teams, or departments through leader behaviors in order to enhance internal motivation and achieve work success. Researchers have proposed five key dimensions of empowering leadership: leading by example, participative decision-making, coaching, informing, and showing individual concern. Simply delegating is not enough—a leader could delegate only menial tasks that do not meaningfully develop the follower’s self-esteem and competence or share significant responsibilities without providing sufficient support and mentoring to ensure success. Neither of these would result in desired outcomes—for the employee, the leader, or the organization. Empowering leadership has some commonalities with other leadership constructs such as transformational leadership, leader–member exchange (LMX), and participative leadership but has been shown to be empirically and conceptually distinct from these other constructs. The primary dimensions of empowerment include sharing or providing autonomy to followers as well as involving followers in decision-making, facets that are not captured by other constructs. Furthermore, meta-analytic evidence has shown that empowering leadership is a

significant predictor of critical individual outcomes, such as creativity and trust in the leader, beyond what is predicted by transformational leadership or LMX.

Why Should Leaders Be Empowering? Successful organizations understand that performance will be maximized if many decisions are made by the people who have the best information at local levels, where they can be implemented quickly and effectively. Empowering leaders distribute decision-making, sharing power and authority within predetermined limits. Research has shown that such empowerment is significantly positively related to a number of desired organizational outcomes, including employee job satisfaction, organizational commitment, task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and innovation at work, while also being negatively related to turnover intentions, job strain, and burnout. Psychological empowerment has also been shown to be a mediator between empowering leadership and individual outcomes, such that empowering leadership leads to the individual outcomes of interest through its effects on the psychological empowerment of those individuals. These findings have also been supported at the team level, with team psychological empowerment mediating the relationship between team-level empowering leadership and team performance. By empowering, leaders can increase the intrinsic motivation of their employees, which in turn can lead to higher levels of job satisfaction, engagement, creativity, work performance, and extra-role behaviors. The theoretical support for this argument stems from self-determination theory, whereby in fulfilling employees’ psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, leaders can raise employee levels of intrinsic motivation, which in turn leads to improved outcomes. In addition, freed of some responsibilities now delegated to staff, empowerment allows leaders to focus on broader organizational strategies and opportunities rather than activities that can be handled as well, if not better, by others. One important outcome often associated with empowering leadership is greater worker

Empowerment

creativity. Increasing followers’ sense of competence and self-reliance, as well as the autonomy to make new choices, provides the foundation needed to pursue novel ideas. As organizations seek to increase innovation in response to changing environments, empowering leadership can be critical to achieving that goal.

How Is Empowerment Measured? Several empowerment measures have been developed and used in empirical research. Different measures are used to examine individual-level psychological empowerment and empowering leadership behaviors, although both are assessed by surveying followers rather than leaders. Psychological empowerment can be measured by asking employees whether they perceive their work to be important, whether they have a sense of perceived control and competence, and whether they perceive their work as having impact and making a difference to the organization and/or its clients. Commonly used measures of empowering leadership ask followers to indicate the extent to which their leaders exhibit certain empowering behaviors, including participative decision-making, coaching, informing, showing concern, leading by example, and interacting with the team. In addition to research use, organizations can use these assessments as part of a leader’s development process to encourage leaders to expand their skills. Sometimes the leader might be asked to take the assessment of their own behavior in addition to followers, providing leaders with a comparison of how empowering they think they are with how their followers perceive their attempts at empowering them. Such multiple perspectives can be beneficial, as leaders may overestimate their effectiveness in engaging their followers in a more collaborative relationship. There is a need for better understanding of how empowerment can be assessed at the organizational level in terms of how an organization creates a culture that encourages leaders to be more empowering. This kind of culture must come from the most senior leadership, who need to encourage empowerment rather than mere delegation of tasks, which distributes work but not necessarily

317

the shared authority, control, and accountability that comes with true empowerment.

The Dark Side of Empowerment While there is substantial evidence for the positive effects of empowerment, negative outcomes have not been investigated to the same degree as positive ones. This could be problematic given the potential for empowerment to have negative effects. Specifically, while true empowerment gives greater autonomy to employees, this greater autonomy could lead to cognitive distraction from the performance of job tasks. Evidence suggests that everyone does not want to be empowered, particularly if it is seen as the leader outsourcing responsibilities to others without providing the mentoring and support for successful accomplishment. Thus, individuals with higher levels of autonomy may experience higher stress given potential extra work and the possibility for decision-making that may be difficult or uncomfortable for some subordinates. This increased work-related strain and individual stress may be accompanied by role stress, given the additional assignments and responsibilities inherent in empowerment. All of these stressors may contribute to reduced work role performance overall for those unprepared or uninterested in assuming additional responsibilities. Given this, research is needed on the boundary conditions of empowerment. Some have argued that the relationship between empowerment and positive outcomes, such as task performance, is nonlinear—good only up to a point, with the prospect of overwhelming followers once it reaches a certain level. There can also be an ethical issue with empowerment, where a leader’s promise of greater freedom of action and choice does not match up with what is delivered. Many employees today snicker at hearing the word empowerment, seeing it as simply the leader offloading undesirable tasks without developmental or motivational value to the employee, trying to motivate them without giving them any substantive responsibilities or autonomy. Such bogus empowerment can only backfire. True empowerment changes the power relationship between leader and follower to a more collaborative one, a reciprocal relationship typified by enacting power with rather than power over others.

318

Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing

Future Research Additional research on empowerment and empowering leadership is needed, especially on the antecedents, boundary conditions, and moderators of these constructs. Although some research has tested potential moderators of empowerment relationships in order to gain a better understanding of its dynamics, more is needed. Meta-analyses have found both culturally distinct geographic region and industry to be significant moderators. The correlation between empowerment and task performance has been shown to be higher in Asia as opposed to North America, perhaps due to the greater expectation in Eastern cultures that the leader will provide assistance and support. Further research is needed to understand exactly how cultural differences affect follower responses to empowerment. Although empowering leadership has been shown to be beneficial in a variety of industries, the relationship between empowerment and job satisfaction has been shown to be stronger for employees in the service industry as opposed to manufacturing. Interestingly, this increase in job satisfaction for service workers did not contribute to greater task performance, perhaps due to the low correlation between employee attitudes and performance outcomes prevalent in the service industry in general. More research is needed on these and other potential moderators such as worker education and interest in development. While there are many positive consequences to the use of empowering leadership, one must be cautious about a one-size-fits-all approach, as questions remain about when and where the use of empowering leadership is most effective and where it might be potentially harmful. Lastly, further research is needed on the appropriate levels of analysis for empowering leadership. As mentioned, the concept of empowerment has been examined primarily at the individual and team levels, but investigation at the organizational level is lacking. Incorporating multiple levels into the research on empowerment and empowering leadership should yield an even better understanding of the construct and its application. Abbey L. Salvas and Lynn R. Offermann See also Leader–Member Exchange; Leader–Follower Relationships; Shared Leadership; Team Leadership

Further Readings Arnold, J. A., Arad, S., Rhoades, J. A., & Drasgow, F. (2000). The empowering leadership questionnaire: The construction and validation of a new scale for measuring leader behaviors. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21, 249–269. Cheong, M., Spain, S., Yammarino, F., & Yun, S. (2016). Two faces of empowering leadership: Enabling and burdening. Leadership Quarterly, 27(4), 602–616. Cheong, M., Yammarino, F. J., Dionne, S. D., Spain, S. M., & Tsai, C. Y. (2019). A review of the effectiveness of empowering leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 34–58. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.08.005 Kim, M., Beehr, T. A., & Prewett, M. S. (2018). Employee responses to empowering leadership: A meta-analysis. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 25(3), 257–276. doi:10. 1177/1548051817750538 Lee, A., Willis, S., & Tian, A. W. (2018). Empowering leadership: A meta-analytic examination of incremental contribution, mediation, and moderation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(3), 306–325. doi:10. 1002/job.2220 Seibert, S., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. (2011). Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(5), 981–1003.

ENDOGENEITY THEORIZING

AND

ENDOGENOUS

The word endogeneity has recently entered the jargon of leadership scholars to indicate a suite of statistical problems that include omitted variable bias, reverse causality, common method variance, and other internal validity issues that engender a correlation between predictor and disturbance in a regression model. Endogeneity is a debilitating methodological problem because it prevents researchers from making accurate causal claims— the cornerstone of any social science. Leadership scholars have started to recognize endogeneity as a crucial problem for the field in the past decade, initiating a considerable collective effort devoted

Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing

to a systematic rethink of statistical methods, study designs, and theories used in leadership research. This effort is fundamental for the study of leadership to inform practice and to take up its rightful place as a true science. This entry discusses the endogeneity problem and summarizes some of the countermeasures adopted in the leadership field. What follows will focus especially on how coping with endogeneity requires not only appropriate statistical remedies but also causal clarity in leadership theories. Endogeneity is not only rooted in purely methodological problems; it can emerge from various forms of endogenous theorizing too, that is, theories that confuse the explanandum with the explanans. Endogenous theorizing stems mainly from unclear definitions that confuse inputs and outputs, underdeveloped nomological nets, and a failure to identify the ultimate causes of key constructs in leadership theories. The next section briefly formalizes and reviews these issues, first introducing the statistical concept of endogeneity and focusing then on various forms of endogenous theorizing. The entry goes on to exemplify how this issue bedevils many broad concepts in leadership research, and especially those that are measured via perceptual questionnaires. The last section provides a summary of suggestions at the interface of leadership theory and methodology so as to tackle the endogeneity problem.

Endogeneity Leadership scholars are often interested in quantitatively testing theories linking, at minimum, a presumed effect y to a presumed cause x. Classically, x is said to have a causal effect on y if (i) x is temporally precedent to y, (ii) y and x are empirically associated, and (iii) the relationship between y and x does not have alternative explanations. Whereas the validity of condition (i) is usually (but not always) easily shown, probing condition (ii) requires collecting data and measuring statistically the relationship between x and y. For instance, leadership researchers customarily specify simple regression models like y 5 b x 1 e, where b represents the average effect of a marginal increase of x (e.g., leadership style) on y (e.g., follower

319

performance) calculated with Ordinary Least Squares or other estimators, and e is the disturbance term that contains all unobserved causes of y that are not captured in x. Condition (ii) is intuitively met if b is different from 0. However, b is causally interpretable only if condition (iii) is also valid, that is, if the relationship between x and y is not driven by unmeasured variables contained in the unobservable term e. When x correlates with e, x is endogenous and the estimated association between x and y is not causally interpretable because b will include both the effect of x and the effect of all unobserved effects of y that correlate with x. The stronger the correlation between e and x, the more biased the estimated b will be, providing either an upward- or downward-biased estimate of the true causal effect of x. Several instances can be shown to produce endogeneity: 1. Omitted variables: If a researcher fails to include in a model some predictors that are correlated both with y and with x, these unmodelled causes (also known as omitted variables or confounders) will be pooled in the disturbance, thereby leading to a correlation between x and e. As an example, a researcher could find that followers’ satisfaction is explained by a specific style employed by her or his leader. However, this association might be driven by many confounders. For instance, leaders in large teams might employ different styles compared to leaders in smaller teams; in turn, working in big or small teams might also affect followers’ satisfaction. Similarly, specific situational factors might cause leaders to exhibit specific styles, while also influencing followers’ satisfaction. Finally, variables at the leader level (e.g., ability or personality) could affect both the style and the outcome. 2. Reverse causality and simultaneity: Reverse causality refers to a situation where the researcher hypothesizes that x affects y, while in fact y affects x. For instance, a researcher might hypothesize that a leadership style affects firm profitability, yet firm profits might also affect leadership styles (e.g., more profitable firms are able to pay larger salaries and bonuses, thus attracting leaders who employ particularly

320

Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing

effective styles). A similar issue is simultaneity, which emerges when x causes y, while y also causes x. For example, a leader might delegate less if followers are not trustworthy, and followers could become less trustworthy if the leader does not empower them. 3. Other sources of endogeneity: Many other sources of endogeneity have been discussed in leadership research, including for instance, measurement error in the regressor, common method variance, and selection effects. Whereas these and other instances are not reviewed in this entry, interested readers can refer to the Further Readings section for relevant literature on these topics.

Endogenous Theorizing Endogeneity is a methodological problem rooted in faulty designs, imperfect measurement, or flawed statistical analyses. However, it would be inaccurate to portray endogeneity as a purely methodological headache that can be detected, solved, and discussed only with statistical tools. Given that the disturbance in a regression model cannot be directly observed, empiricists can mainly argue theoretically—and only indirectly test—if a correlation between e and x could be a problem in their specific empirical setting. Whereas rigorous theory is a fundamental ally in stomping out endogeneity, some impactful articles have recently lamented conceptual ambiguities and omissions from the nomological nets of well-known leadership theories. These theory-related concerns have direct implication for empiricists because spurious correlations are likely to emerge when a conceptual framework mixes up theoretical inputs (i.e., causes) and outputs (i.e., effects) and does not clarify potential confounders of the theoretical relationship of interest. We hereby refer to this suite of theoretical limitations as endogenous theorizing. A first form of endogenous theorizing revolves around the ambiguity of some constructs that are widely employed in leadership research, like transformational, servant, authentic, ethical leadership or leader–member exchange (LMX). Some authors have noted that these constructs have unclear definitions and tend to be defined by the effects they have on leaders, followers, or organizations. That is,

these constructs imply quasi-tautologies where inputs and outputs are confused—a conceptual problem related to reverse causality and simultaneity. For instance, if one conceptualizes charisma as an exceptionally effective or inspiring leadership style (which is what was usually done in the past), it is almost tautological to predict that charisma will generate positive outcomes like better follower performance. That is, it is unclear if a leader is effective because of her charisma, whether a leader is attributed charismatic qualities because of her effectiveness (i.e., reverse causality) or if charisma and performance are affecting each other in a loop (i.e., simultaneity). Compounding this theoretical issue is the perceptual—rather than behavioral—nature of many measures used in leadership research. Researchers often employ perceptual questionnaires requiring a summary evaluation of a rated behavior, which is often unclear, ambiguous, and highly abstract. Thus, constructs tend to be measured as a m´elange of behaviors, perceptions, measurement artifacts, and outcomes that makes it impossible to cleanly link the measured construct to other outcomes. This conflation problem can be immediately understood: For instance, if charisma is conceptualized as an exceptionally effective leadership style and leader’s charisma is assessed via a questionnaire by an observer, it is not clear what causes an observer to rate a leader as being charismatic. It could be because the leader acts charismatically, or because an observer knows that the leader has engendered good outcomes, or because the leader is smart, attractive, extraverted, and so on. Other explanations at the follower level (e.g., the follower was in a good mood when providing the rating) or at the contextual level (e.g., access to bonuses and extra resources provided to leaders, which gives them a halo effect) might also play a role. Finally, given that many leadership theories focus either on inherently positive leadership styles (e.g., ethical leadership) or on negative leadership styles (e.g., abusive supervision), it is likely that raters of a positive leader or of a negative leader will almost invariably rate the leader as having either positive or negative outcomes. A second problem concerns theoretical predictions failing to specify the common causes between inputs and outputs and failing to identify

Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing

the upstream causes of each theoretical construct—a topic that is tightly related to omitted variable bias. For instance, relational transparency (i.e., a dimension of authentic leadership) might be hypothesized to cause leader effectiveness. Even under the heroic assumption that authentic leadership can be perfectly observed, and that measuring it does not lead to the conflation problem, many potential omitted variables could confound the relationship of interest: A leader might openly share his or her feelings and thoughts also because of unobserved leader-level (e.g., personality), followerlevel (e.g., performance), and organizational-level factors (e.g., specific organizational policies or cultures). Without controlling for such factors, the empirical association between relational transparency and leader effectiveness can be interpreted causally only if one is ready to make the untenable assumption that they are uncorrelated with all unobserved factors. Still, similar arguments can be easily transposed to all leadership styles. This issue becomes more apparent when one notices that some leadership constructs are studied both as dependent variables and as predictors in different publications. Whereas conceptualizing a construct both as a cause or as an effect of other constructs is not problematic per se, failing to model common causes shared by a predictor and an outcome will necessarily create an endogeneity problem. For instance, if a given leadership style is found to be explained by a specific antecedent in a given publication (e.g., organizational context → leadership style), studying how the same leadership style affects a group outcome (e.g., leadership style → group performance) without accounting for its antecedent in a correct causal specification might lead to a causally uninterpretable effect because the unmodelled antecedent might be the ultimate cause of both the leadership style and the group outcome.

From Problems to Solutions: The Interplay Between Methods and Theory Methodological solutions to the endogeneity problem exist and have been studied extensively in the statistics and economics literature. All these methods share a common intuition: Endogeneity can be easily solved if the predictor x is

321

randomized to individuals, groups, or any other unit of analysis. If x is allocated in a random fashion, it will have no correlation with e by design, allowing to draw causal inferences from simple regression models. Thus, randomizing predictors—rather than merely observing them in the field and correlating them with some outcome—should be the golden rule to obtain causally interpretable estimates in leadership research. For instance, if a researcher is interested in the link between charisma and group performance, a clean solution to the endogeneity problem is to randomize charisma in a laboratory or field experiment. This solution might seem straightforward; however, determining exactly what must be manipulated in an experiment might not be so simple if theories and definitions of charisma are ambiguous. For instance, the modern charisma literature has begun to directly manipulate verbal and nonverbal signaling behaviors of leaders, circumventing the problem of conceptualizing charisma as a quasi-tautology. However, given the haziness with which some constructs are defined in our field, often in terms of their outcomes, it might be impossible to manipulate them cleanly. For instance, it is impossible to randomize a leader to be trustworthy or to randomize followers to good LMX relations. Being at their core outcomes rather than predictors, some constructs cannot be randomized. Yet, their causes can be randomized, and these constructs can be legitimately studied as outcomes. Tackling endogeneity with experimental work requires the upmost conceptual clarity, especially when it comes to the exact leader behaviors that define a specific leadership style. By the same token, experimentalists should operationalize constructs with care, taking appropriate requirements to design experiments that are free from endogeneity and are focused on behavioral outcomes rather than only intentions or perceptions. They should also ensure proper and fair comparisons in terms of the experimental versus the baseline manipulations, ensure that demand effects are held constant in different treatments, and examine participant decisions or behaviors in consequential settings, whether in the field or the lab. The experimental logic remains precious to solve the endogeneity problem even when

322

Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing

randomization is not possible for logistical, financial, or ethical reasons. Leadership researchers have started to employ quasi-random variation or natural experiments, that is, situations where x is not randomly assigned by the researcher but is allocated in ways that mimic random variation. These techniques—brought to the fore by the three Nobel Prize winners in Economics of 2021—rely on employing, for instance, institutional changes (e.g., a political reform), natural events (e.g., a hurricane), human-triggered events (e.g., a terroristic attack), or stable individual differences (e.g., genes, facets of personality of leaders and of followers) as plausibly exogenous predictors of leaders’ behaviors or followers’ perceptions that could be used as distal causes to purge endogeneity bias. The application of these empirical techniques could go hand in hand with advancements in leadership theory. Theorists could provide a fundamental input by discussing the conceptual endogeneity of some constructs directly in their theoretical pieces. For instance, if one hypothesizes that any given leadership style affects group performance, the leadership style could be flagged as possibly endogenous already in the theoretical model. Simultaneously, theorists could help empiricists by formalizing upstream predictors that— while affecting a specific endogenous variable—do not directly cause the dependent variable of interest and are either randomly assigned, cyclically determined, or at least stable over time (e.g., leader stable traits → leadership style → group performance). On the contrary, further theorizing on the intermediate mediators between endogenous predictors and outcomes (e.g., leadership style → group cohesion → group performance) is likely futile, at least from a causal viewpoint, because such models are likely to heighten the endogeneity problem rather than solving it. As a last resort, it is also important to remind that endogeneity concerns could be alleviated even in field studies by including the most important omitted causes that determine y and are correlated with x. Theorists could aid empiricists by explicitly listing operationalizable omitted variables that should be considered when testing the main predictions of a theory. Of course, empiricists should then make honest attempts at falsifying the

relationship between x and y when including such variables individually or jointly. Whereas including all potential omitted variables is practically impossible, clearing the air from the most apparent confounders in field-studies (e.g., with fixed effects in panel data models) could increase importantly the causal interpretability of empirical research. In sum, the guidelines sketched in this last section are, hopefully, stimulating for scholars interested in tackling the endogeneity issue and rising to the conceptual challenges set by several critical voices. Whereas endogeneity represents one of the most daunting challenges for the social-scientific study of leadership, this entry does not imply that the field should abandon the study of endogenous constructs or the analysis of endogenous predictors. Quite the contrary, endogenous constructs are often the most interesting ones and their study offers the opportunity of broadening the theoretical and methodological tool kit of leadership researchers, with the objective of brining a more comprehensive and causally solid understanding of the leadership process. This entry—together with many primary sources—will hopefully help scholars in this challenging task. Identifying causal relations is the only way to properly inform theory and practice. Stomping out endogeneity is not only the moral thing to do but also the economic thing to do. Sirio Lonati and John Antonakis See also Authentic Leadership; Charismatic Theory; Leader–Member Exchange (LMX); Prozac Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Alvesson, M. (2020). Upbeat leadership: A recipe for—or against – “successful” leadership studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(6), Article 101439. Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3(1), 293–319. Antonakis, J., Bendahan, S., Jacquart, P., & Lalive, R. (2010). On making causal claims: A review and recommendations. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 1086–1120.

Entrepreneurial Leadership Antonakis, J., d’Adda, G., Weber, R. A., & Zehnder, C. (2021, December 28). Just words? Just speeches? On the economic value of charismatic leadership. Management Science. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2021.4219 Banks, G. C., Woznyj, H. M., & Mansfield, C. A. (2021). Where is “behavior” in organizational behavior? A call for a revolution in leadership research and beyond. The Leadership Quarterly. 101581. Fischer, T., Tian, A. W., Lee, A., & Hughes, D. J. (2021). Abusive supervision: A systematic review and fundamental rethink. The Leadership Quarterly, 32, 101540. Gottfredson, R. K., Wright, S. L., & Heaphy, E. D. (2020). A critique of the leader-member exchange construct: Back to square one. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(6), 101385. ¨ Guntner, A. V., Klonek, F. E., Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., & Kauffeld, S. (2020). Follower behavior renders leader behavior endogenous: The simultaneity problem, estimation challenges, and solutions. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(6), 101441. Lonati, S., Quiroga, B. F., Zehnder, C., & Antonakis, J. (2018). On doing relevant and rigorous experiments: Review and recommendations. Journal of Operations Management, 64(1), 19–40. Sieweke, J., & Santoni, S. (2020). Natural experiments in leadership research: An introduction, review, and guidelines. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(1), 101338.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP In a living museum of leadership, we might find entrepreneurs housed in a section reserved for special collections. For many years, scholars exploring leadership and those studying entrepreneurship were not quite sure what to make of one another. It was clear that those who had success as entrepreneurs were leading something but was that something a movement, a team, an organization, or all of those things? This entry considers the complex relationship between entrepreneurship and leadership by examining research on the topic, particularly with regard to organizations and their traits as well as the behavior of their leaders. The entry also offers two examples of organizations

323

that enjoy success due largely to entrepreneurial leadership. Entrepreneurship is typically characterized by new entry. This new entry might occur in the establishment of a new venture to enter an existing market, setting up a ripe opportunity to study leadership from the origin of a company’s existence. Of course, nearly half of all new businesses fail within five years and many of those that survive are sole proprietorships or extremely small firms, so leadership lessons might be difficult to determine. Entrepreneurship could also take the form of an established business noticing or anticipating changes in consumer demand and creating a new offering and getting it to market, a fairly common occurrence in firms that grow organically. In some cases, firms (like Google) create products or services that launch entirely new industries. These examples could also be described as entrepreneurship, and they provide rich ground for studying successful leadership. The activities associated with entrepreneurship in both new and existing businesses are often described using some combination of individual factors, organizational characteristics, and environmental elements. For example, we know a bit about the personality traits that separate entrepreneurial leaders from others. In addition, we can identify certain organizational structures, routines, or processes that seem to generate new entry more often. Finally, firms that operate in rapidly changing environments and have access to particular resources seem to have a higher likelihood of engaging in entrepreneurship.

Organizations, Traits, and Leader Behavior In the earliest integration of entrepreneurship and leadership, scholars focused on organizations rather than the individuals leading those organizations. Among the most fruitful streams of research was the one centered on entrepreneurial orientation (EO). EO represents a firm’s overall posture toward entrepreneurial opportunities. It provides a sense of the degree to which three key factors are present in an organization: innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking.

324

Entrepreneurial Leadership

Innovativeness reflects a firm’s support for new ideas, experimentation, and creative processes that lead to new entry. Innovative firms insist on going beyond existing routines, trying new technologies and developing new applications of old ones. Closely tied to this is a firm’s proactiveness, which reflects its orientation toward the future and its willingness to engage in aggressive competition by anticipating future demand and designing and introducing products and services to meet that demand. Finally, risk-taking reflects a firm’s willingness to make large investments in activities that have relatively uncertain returns. The link between EO and firm performance has been described as moderately large by scholars who have reviewed the many studies conducted to date. However, to better understand this important link, identifying specific behaviors and traits of leaders is crucial. Simply having an EO is not enough to ensure success. What role does the personality of a leader play in shaping a firm’s orientation toward new business opportunities? Separately, how do specific actions by the CEO and top management team lead to higher performance? Core self-evaluation (CSE) is a broad personality trait that captures the common elements among a person’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, locus of control, and emotional stability. In the workplace, it has been tied to higher levels of commitment, motivation, satisfaction, and individual performance. Simply put, confident leaders who believe they can get things done tend to be more attached to their work and their organization, leading to better outcomes. Using a longitudinal design, scholars from the University of Connecticut surveyed more than 100 CEOs of firms in Ireland in order to measure their CSEs. Then, a year later, they collected feedback from top management teams of the same firms in order to learn more about the firm’s EO. They found a strong tie between higher CSEs of the CEO and the company’s posture toward pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly in situations in which industries were undergoing rapid change. This marked an important first step in understanding the potential impact of a CEO in shaping

a firm’s stance toward pursuing new business opportunities. The makeup of the leader matters. It did not, however, provide insight about the particular processes employed by more successful firms nor the specific behaviors of entrepreneurial leaders who were more fruitful in their entrepreneurial endeavors. Subsequent empirical work began to shed light on the relationships among some of these variables. A study of 110 manufacturing firms showed a positive effect of EO on the growth rate of firms. More importantly, it showed that this tie was strengthened in firms where major operational and strategic decisions were made in a more autocratic way and strategic processes were more iterative than planned. The first finding may seem surprising. Generally, a more participative decision-making process is viewed as a preferred manner of gaining followers and achieving results. However, the ability of a firm to proactively pursue emerging business opportunities requires some level of efficiency in decision-making. Inviting too many voices into the conversation might delay important choices and lead the firm to miss out on a chance to capitalize in the marketplace. Leading entrepreneurial firms is not the same as leading a project team or political party. A few years after the manufacturing study was published, Andreas Engelen and his colleagues examined the impact of transformational leadership in firms with an EO. Using a database of small and mid-size firms from six countries, the scholars measured specific behaviors of top management teams to see whether certain actions might boost firm performance in corporate cultures marked by a high degree of EO. Their approach acknowledged that for a firm to achieve success, it would need rank-and-file employees to carry out the work of identifying new opportunities and implementing the practices that lead to growth. Lower level employees who have customer-facing roles are often the first to spot new strategic opportunities. However, if their leaders have not created cultures in which they have outlets to share their ideas and embrace entrepreneurial action, the firm will fall short of its potential.

Entrepreneurial Leadership

Their sample involved companies with 500 or fewer employees. The CEO of each firm was asked to fill out (or designate someone to fill out) a short survey designed to measure both the firm’s EO and the degree to which top management engaged in various leadership behaviors. The authors also collected data on the firm’s performance relative to other firms in its industry. The 24 behaviors included in the survey were classified into six categories of transformational leadership. For example, articulating a vision was captured with items such as, “Top management paints an interesting picture of the future of the firm” and “Top management is able to get others committed to its dreams.” Other categories involved leading by example and fostering a spirit of teamwork. Across the six countries, the scholars found consistent evidence showing that the behaviors of top management teams are what allows firms to take full advantage of their EO. A combination of four types of behavior seems to be the key to unlocking high performance: articulating a vision, modeling proper behavior, expressing and maintaining high expectations, and displaying support for employees. (Two categories did not show up as significant: offering intellectual stimulation and fostering a spirit of teamwork.) If just one or two categories of behaviors is evident, performance may not rise. Some entrepreneurs, like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, are visionaries but struggle to offer appropriate support to employees. Others offer strong support to employees but fail to model appropriate behavior in their own conduct. Succeeding in entrepreneurial activities requires a unique combination of leadership behaviors.

Illustrative Examples: The Martin Agency and 7-Eleven The Martin Agency is an advertising firm based in Richmond, Virginia. It has won numerous awards for its creative work and been named Agency of the Year on multiple occasions. You would recognize the company’s work in the famous gecko campaign for Geico, an insurance firm that later used Martin’s cavemen idea as well, and the very successful whiteboard campaign that Martin designed for UPS.

325

The culture inside The Martin Agency, often described as good and tough, contains many characteristics of transformational leadership. The firm’s top management has long insisted that people are good to each other and tough on the work. The latter aspect is indicative of the focus on high expectations. The former shows the importance of being supportive to employees at all levels of the organization. The firm thrived under the direction of long-time chairman John Adams, who was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2015. Adams has said that one of the innovative features of the firm’s culture was its willingness to stick creative ideas on the wall (literally) and have passers-by offer improvements. Expectations were extremely high, and support was ongoing. Near the end of his career, Adams claimed that one of the most fulfilling parts of his job was watching colleagues accomplish things they never thought they could. Seeing them surprise themselves is what gave him joy. Convenience store chain 7-Eleven has a similar culture that allows employees across the firm to share ideas for potential growth. Leaders encourage innovators within the company to share ideas even if they are in the earliest stages of development so others can contribute their own perspectives. Years ago, one nugget led to the creation of the Coffee Cup Poll, which allowed customers to select a different color cup depending on their preferences in an upcoming election. By turning a common occurrence (buying a cup of coffee) into a competition, the firm boosted sales and increased engagement among its customer base. That first idea was followed by the development of a new app tied to the Poll, providing customers additional chances to interact with the company. To those who study leadership, entrepreneurs may at first seem like odd creatures. But, by spending a bit of extra time wandering through that special collections section of the museum, observers are bound to generate new insight. The actions of leaders in small firms are likely to have an outsized impact, particularly in cases where founders remain involved in decision-making. They might therefore offer lessons to all who study leadership. Richard Coughlan

326

Ethical Consumerism

See also Big Five Personality Traits; Creativity and Innovation; Innovation; Leader Self-Efficacy; Organizational Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Engelen, A., Gupta, V., Strenger, L., & Brettel, M. (2015). Entrepreneurial orientation, firm performance, and the moderating role of transformative leadership behaviors. Journal of Management, 41(4), 1069–1097. doi:10.1177/0149206312455244 Lumpkin, G. T., & Dess, G. G. (1996). Clarifying the entrepreneurial orientation construct and tying it to performance. Academy of Management Review, 21(1), 135–172. doi:10.2307/258632 Reid, S. W., Anglin, A. H., Baur, J. E., Short, J. C., & Buckley, M. R. (2018). Blazing new trails or opportunity lost? Evaluating research at the intersection of leadership and entrepreneurship. The Leadership Quarterly, 29, 150–164. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2017.11.005 Simsek, Z., Heavey, C., & Veiga, J. F. (2010). The impact of CEO core self-evaluation on the firm’s entrepreneurial orientation. Strategic Management Journal, 31. 110–119. doi:10.1002/smj.800

ETHICAL CONSUMERISM To try to consume ethically is to select or avoid goods on perceived moral grounds related to their production, use, or disposal. Ethical consumerism is relevant to leadership in at least four main ways: as an example of how organizations can exert noncoercive influence on individuals and society; as a source of case studies and dilemmas in leadership; because of the strict lifestyle and consumption standards leaders are held to; and because of the high bar for justification for leading, rather than following boycotts.

Politics Through the Market Would-be leaders of ethical consumerism often seek to enact social change through the mechanism of the market. In this way, ethical consumerism is a hybrid practice. Conventional (nonviolent)

political movements typically try to enact social change through the institutions of politics—influencing elections, supporting legislation, pursuing litigation, or influencing regulations. Ethical consumption movements also try to enact social change, but through an institution that is typically justified by its ability to create efficient outcomes, not necessarily just outcomes: the market. History of Ethical Consumerism

Ethical consumerism has a long history. Notable campaigns include some of the earliest known boycotts, such as the boycott in England of sugar grown by enslaved laborers at the end of the 18th century and the boycott of British goods during the American revolution. Notable 20th-century boycotts include the Montgomery Bus Boycott at the outset of the U.S. civil rights movement, the boycott of salt in India to protest British political occupation, and the boycott of Nestl´e products in protest against their marketing of infant formula in the global South. Ethical consumerism also concerns purchasing what are perceived to be purer products, not just shunning tainted ones. Currently, there are a host of labels and accreditations for products made from cage-free eggs, slavery-free cocoa produced without enslaved labor, apparel made by workers who are paid fair wages, organic produce, conflict-free minerals (those not sold to perpetuate fighting in a conflict zone), and a whole range of carbon-free or carbon neutral products. Would-be ethical consumption leaders encourage consumers to select (aka buycott) these products. Contested Campaigns

We should not assume that all attempts by consumers to choose products for reasons beyond price and quality are just. To take an extreme case, many of those boycotting Jewish-owned businesses in 1930s Germany probably believed they were practicing ethical consumerism. Some of the examples noted earlier, not to mention boycotts and buycotts of firms associated with political parties, policies, or social ideals, are also somewhat controversial. Thus, these examples are best

Ethical Consumerism

327

referred to as attempts at ethical consumerism and would-be leaders of ethical consumerism.

conceptual space concern exactly what hypocrisy is and why (if at all) it is a bad trait.

Ethical Consumerism and Leadership

Organizations as Ethical Consumers and Leaders

Ethical consumerism might seem to be only tangentially connected with leadership, but the two topics are in fact rather closely related.

A third way in which leadership and ethical consumerism intersect is through what may be labeled the exercise of influence by organizations. Large companies and governments have significant purchasing power. Their decisions to select certain products over others on ethical grounds can have huge influence on the production of those goods and the financial fortunes of those who produce them. Whether this kind of influence refers more to the coercive side (management) or the noncoercive (leadership) is open to debate. But large organizations, if they have an ethical procurement policy, are in effect practicing ethical consumerism on behalf of their customers or members. They also send signals to the general public about which products might be considered bad enough to shun and good enough to pay more for. In these latter two ways, large organizations exercise clearly noncoercive influence over society and its production, and so attempt to undertake leadership roles in ethical consumption. Research on leadership has almost exclusively focused on individuals as leaders. There is a lot to be gained by thinking about organizations as leaders in domains such as ethical consumerism.

Dilemmas of Leadership

One way in which the two topics combine is as an interesting case studies and dilemmas for leadership. Consider the options when a business finds itself the target of a boycott that the leader might take to be unjustified. Business leaders often have the choice of bowing to the demands of the boycotters despite their own misgivings, or risk the financial hit, possible layoffs, and reputational damage by continuing whatever practice has aroused the ire of a sector of the public. Further, where a firm faces both boycotts and counter-boycott buycotts from opposing groups in a polarized society, an even more difficult test of leadership emerges. The risk of this difficult situation might lead some organizations to avoid taking political stances at all. This issue links to the debate in business ethics about whether corporations are the appropriate type of institution to take political standpoints.

A Stringent Bar for Leadership? Lifestyle and Hypocrisy

Another way in which the topics intersect is when leaders’ own lifestyle and consumption is scrutinized and used to discredit the leaders’ authority. An example is the widespread criticism that climate change campaigner Al Gore faced when the details of his (very high) personal energy consumption were made public. Such criticism might be unfair if the leader is promoting policy changes over lifestyle changes, but leaders need to be cognizant that even perceived hypocrisy might harm their ability to lead on an issue that has an ethical consumerism dimension. Current research in social psychology focuses on just how strong these countervailing effects of high carbon footprints are on leader’s messages around political changes associated with climate change. More theoretical issues in this

Finally, it is worth thinking about the role of leadership not in responding to or participating in boycotts and buycotts but in calling for followers to join boycotts and buycotts. Historically, NGOs such as Greenpeace, Save the Children, and the Rainforest Action Network have vigorously called for others to boycott various firms or products. Politicians seem increasingly comfortable in calling for boycotts, and with the advent of social media, individual calls to boycott a product or firm can go viral and have a significant effect on the world. This effect is not always positive. One reason for this is epistemic. Even when the cause is just, boycotts which involve technical issues, such as the boycott Greenpeace called over Shell’s sinking of the Brent Spar oil rig, can be based on misinformation or faulty assumptions. Unlike more conventional institutional means

328

Ethical Leadership

of changing society such as electoral politics or regulation, there are few built-in checks and balances that try to mitigate unintended consequences and produce evidence-based decision-making. It is also widely noted that boycotts also have some risk of adversely affecting innocent employees involved in those who make the product. Furthermore, once boycotts have begun, their decentralized nature makes them almost impossible to call off by a hierarchical figure. They take on a life of their own. All these imperfections have led some theorists to wonder whether ethical consumerism is a kind of unjustified vigilantism. Others deny the drawbacks of ethical consumerism are so worrying or believe the ends justify the means. Whatever one’s position on the permissibility of boycotts, there is some reason to think that these acts of calling a boycott might need to meet a higher standard of justification than the acts of following a boycott. After all, in liberal market democracies, many think that consumers are sovereigns of their own domain. Individual consumers can choose to purchase or avoid products for any reason (or no reason), however frivolous. But it can’t be the case that every boycott or buycott is justified, and the considerations above merit a cautious approach by those who would lead boycotts. So the most important ethical decisions in ethical consumerism might just be those not about what we buy or avoid, but what we (try to) lead others to buy or avoid. Ethical consumerism raises several interesting issues for leadership. Not least among these are considerations of how large organizations can influence other members of society in their purchasing decisions, dilemmas that arise regarding leadership, the interplay of private lives and public leadership, and the specific responsibilities associated with leading ethical consumerism campaigns. Ewan Kingston See also Dirty Hands; Ethics of Disagreement; Moral Imagination; Procedural Justice; Sustainability

Further Readings Barry, C., & MacDonald, K. (2018). Ethical consumerism: A defense of market vigilantism. Philosophy &

Public Affairs, 46(3), 293–322. doi:10.1111/papa. 12124 Beck, V. (2019). Consumer boycotts as instruments for structural change. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 36(4), 543–559. doi:10.1111/japp.12301 Berkey, B. (2021). Ethical consumerism, democratic values, and justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 49(3), 237–274. doi:10.1111/papa.12191 Hussain, W. (2012). Is ethical consumerism an impermissible form of vigilantism? Philosophy & Public Affairs, 40(2), 111–143. Retrieved from https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1088-4963. 2012.01218.x Kingston, E. (2021). Shopping with a conscience? The epistemic case for relinquishment over conscientious consumption. Business Ethics Quarterly, 31(2), 242–274. doi:10.1017/beq.2020.13 Radzik, L. (2017). Boycotts and the social enforcement of justice. Social Philosophy and Policy, 34(1), 102–122. doi:10.1017/S026505251700005X Tomhave, A., & Vopat, M. (2018). The business of boycotting: Having your chicken and eating it too. Journal of Business Ethics 152(1), 123–132. doi:10. 1007/s10551-016-3336-y

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP Ethical leadership requires leaders to abide by the same moral standards that apply to people more generally. But there are a few distinctive moral challenges that leaders face. Leadership can obscure people’s moral judgment, leaders make decisions on behalf of other people, and their decisions often have a bigger impact than do those of nonleaders. For these reasons, which are addressed in detail in what follows, leadership is especially morally fraught.

Ethics and Perceptions Leadership doesn’t guarantee moral praiseworthiness. Instead of saying that history’s most notoriously evil leaders weren’t actually leaders, or that they weren’t good leaders, it’s more accurate to say that they weren’t ethical leaders. A person can occupy a position of authority over others, and they can be effective at achieving their goals, while still failing to act ethically.

Ethical Leadership

Elsewhere, leadership scholars sometimes characterize ethical leadership as leading in a way that people think is ethical. There are many surveys and measures that researchers and consultants use to assess ethical leadership, but these tools can only tell people whether a leader is perceived to be ethical by members of his organization. Surveys and scales cannot tell people whether a leader is actually ethical. Often, perceptions of ethical decision-making differ from actual ethical decision-making. For example, people who work for an immoral company or an unjust ruler’s administration may report that their leader is ethical either because they have false moral beliefs or because they are uncomfortable expressing disapproval of their leader. In cases like this, people’s reported perceptions of a leader are unreliable. Or consider the fact that leaders throughout history have made disastrous moral errors, which people at the time viewed as ethical. Leaders enslaved people, denied the moral status of women and foreigners, waged unjust wars, and committed genocide. Survey results reporting whether a leader is perceived to be ethical are therefore an unreliable guide to leadership ethics. Similarly, democratic support and commercial success are also insufficient indicators as to whether a leader is acting ethically, since voters and consumers also can make moral mistakes. In response to this argument, one may reply that it would be wrong for consultants, coaches, researchers, or other scholars of leadership to pass judgment on a leader’s behavior because to do so would be to hold the leader to controversial ethical standards that they do not accept. Or, one may argue that it is intolerant to claim that a leader is unethical just because they subscribe to a different moral theory and that leadership scholars should be open-minded in the face of moral disagreement. But the claims that people should avoid passing judgment, be tolerant, or be open-minded are all moral claims. In this way, even arguments against holding leaders to independent moral standards accept that people’s conduct should be evaluated in light of independent moral standards.

329

Ethical Decision-Making In order to know whether a leaders’ choices are ethical, people should engage in the same kinds of first-order deliberation they use to determine whether their own choices are ethical. This means that people should consider whether leaders are violating rights, whether they are promoting overall well-being, whether they are acting in a way that is virtuous, and whether they are conforming to whatever other standards morality requires. One may object to using the tools of moral philosophy to know whether a leader is acting ethically, on the grounds that using a philosophical approach to understand ethical decisionmaking and leadership involves value judgments that are unscientific; rather, leadership should be evaluated primarily in a value-neutral, scientific way. But this objection is self-defeating because scientific reasoning cannot establish that leadership should primarily be evaluated in a valueneutral way; hence, that claim is itself a value judgment. Of course, it is not always clear whether a leader’s behavior is ethical because it’s not always clear what ethics requires. After all, people disagree about the nature of morality and what morality requires. Then again, people also disagree about whether the presence of disagreement should undermine one’s moral beliefs. And the fact that moral requirements are often difficult to discern doesn’t mean that there aren’t right answers about what morality requires, just as the fact that it’s often difficult to understand scientific processes doesn’t discredit the claim that there are facts about the nature of the universe. In order to know whether a leader acted rightly, people ought to engage in philosophical deliberation, asking questions like “Would it have been permissible for someone else to have acted in this way?” or “If the leader hadn’t acted in this way, would the alternatives have been morally worse?” Philosophers sometimes describe moral reasoning as a aiming to reach reflective equilibrium, which refers to the process of weighing theoretical intuitions about the value of things like rights,

330

Ethical Leadership

well-being, and character, and intuitions about what people should do in specific cases, aiming to arrive at conclusions that are consistent and supported by sound reasoning.

Treatment and Selection Moral requirements apply with equal force to leaders and nonleaders alike. Becoming a leader doesn’t make someone exempt from the requirement to be honest, for example. Yet leaders sometimes act as if they are subject to different standards of morality, or as if the rules don’t apply to them at all. When leaders hold themselves to different moral standards, they are denying that they have the same moral status as other people. Leaders may think that they are exempt from moral standards because becoming a leader changes their moral views (treatment) or because the kinds of people who become leaders are more likely to make moral exceptions for themselves (selection). Both phenomena explain the distinctive aspects of the moral psychology of leadership. People who become leaders may come to think that they are held to different moral standards for several reasons. First, leaders may be prone to ethical failure because they think they can get away with wrongdoing in virtue of their heightened influence or ability to control resources. This is sometimes referred to as the Bathsheba syndrome, named after the biblical story of King David and Bathsheba. In some cases, people who are very powerful may lack the strength of will to do the right thing because it is very unlikely that they will suffer punishment or other negative consequences for their wrongdoing. Leaders may also be prone to ethical failure if they think that they are held to different standards of permission and obligation than other people. Leaders may think this because they occupy a role where they are given privileges and responsibilities that other people are not. This doesn’t mean that leaders are morally exceptional, however. It only means that moral requirements apply in different ways depending on the context. Special privileges, permissions, and responsibilities may accompany a specific leadership role, although the person who occupies that role is not morally exceptional.

In addition to these treatment effects, the kinds of people who seek power and leadership positions may be systematically different from people who do not aspire to become leaders. That is, the kinds of people who view themselves as fit to occupy an exceptional role in an organization as a leader may also see themselves as exceptional in other ways, including morally exceptional. People who choose to become leaders may also be more narcissistic, meaning that they have an inflated sense of their own importance and ability to lead. Additionally, those who succeed at gaining power in competitive contexts may be more Machiavellian, meaning that they are more willing to manipulate people or violate moral rules in order to obtain and hold power. Leadership is morally risky. For this reason, morally conscientious people may respond to the moral risks associated with power and influence by avoiding leadership roles. But this would exacerbate the selection-related causes of leaders’ ethical failure by leaving people who were indifferent to morality to take on the task of leadership. In order to avoid or mitigate the chances of ethical failure, members of organizations can try to counteract these treatment and selection effects in several ways. Structuring institutions in ways whereby leaders are subject to strict transparency requirements and oversight can prevent leaders from viewing themselves as immune from accountability. People can also clearly specify that responsibilities and privileges accompany a leadership role and encourage all members of an organization to engage in independent moral deliberation.

Ethical Challenges for Leaders Although leaders are held to the same standards of permission and obligation as everyone else, there are a few things about leadership that make ethical decision-making especially fraught. First, leaders often make decisions on behalf of other people, including people who cannot consent and people who disagree with their leaders’ choices. Second, leaders’ decisions often have a bigger impact than decisions that people make when they are not in a leadership role. These aspects of the leadership context heighten the moral stakes of leadership.

Ethics and Effectiveness

Leaders’ first distinctive challenge is that they are making choices on behalf of people who do not or cannot consent to them. For example, political leaders make decisions for citizens who did not vote for them and who disagree with their leaders’ choices. Political leaders’ decisions also affect noncitizens in many cases. Political and business leaders make decisions that affect future generations as well, such as decisions that change the environment or introduce new risks in a community. However, this may imply that leadership is almost always, in a sense, unethical because it is generally wrong to interfere with or harm people who do not or cannot consent. If so, then people who become leaders must then consider whether the benefits they provide are worth the moral costs. Or this insight may call into question the view that interference with someone generally requires their consent. Instead, one may argue that leaders who make decisions on behalf of nonconsenting others incur special duties to promote those people’s interests or well-being. Another distinctive challenge associated with leadership arises because the stakes are so high for leaders. Rather than making decisions for themselves alone, they are deciding for an entire organization, community, or population. If morality requires leaders to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, then this feature of leadership makes it more morally risky because the costs of moral failure are greater. Moreover, leaders may also have a distinctive opportunity to do good in the world because they are well placed to benefit large numbers of people. For this reason, the aforementioned ethical risks of leadership may be matched by the promise of leadership. Furthermore, if morality requires that people refrain from forming relationships of domination, then leaders face a distinctive ethical challenge in this sense as well. A relationship of domination is one in which an authority figure has the power to arbitrarily interfere with someone in ways that do not track their interests. Political leaders and bosses may stand in relations of domination with citizens or employees even if they never directly interfere with them, to the extent that power asymmetries make it impossible for leaders to relate to others as equals.

331

Concluding Remarks A leader is ethical to the extent that they act virtuously, promote the morally best outcome, and do not violate moral requirements. Because people still aren’t certain about what morality requires, neither are they certain about what ethical leadership would look like. Yet by identifying historical leaders’ ethical failures, it is clear that people’s perceptions of ethics are not a reliable guide to moral decision-making. Moreover, leadership is morally risky, and people who occupy leadership roles are distinctly vulnerable to ethical failure. Nevertheless, in virtue of their ability to influence large numbers of people, leaders also have a distinctive opportunity to create a better, more just world. Jessica Flanigan See also Dirty Hands; Liberalism and Toleration; Moral Imagination; Moral Risk

Further Readings Ciulla, J. B. (Ed.). (2014). Ethics, the heart of leadership. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Flanigan, J. (2018). Philosophical methodology and leadership ethics. Leadership, 14(6), 707–730. Price, T. L. (2008). Leadership ethics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ETHICS

AND

EFFECTIVENESS

Ethics and effectiveness is not a leadership theory or a construct. It is a heuristic for exploring issues in leadership ethics and other areas of professional ethics. Most empirical research in leadership studies ultimately aims toward understanding what constitutes effective and ineffective leaders and leadership. We depend on leaders in formal and informal roles to get the job done (effectiveness) and take responsibility for organizations or groups (ethics). Some leaders successfully motivate people and groups to achieve desired outcomes. Yet, highly effective leaders sometimes behave unethically regarding how or what they do. Other

332

Ethics and Effectiveness

leaders may be very ethical but fail to be effective because of an aspect of their leadership abilities or inauspicious circumstances. We would not typically characterize a good leader as unethical but effective or ethical but ineffective. They should be both, so understanding the interplay between ethics and effectiveness is essential for understanding leadership. The following examines the origin of the ethics and effectiveness heuristic in leadership studies, its philosophical roots, and its implications for research.

The Hitler Problem In 1995, Joanne B. Ciulla used ethics and effectiveness to frame the area of leadership studies of leadership ethics. She derived the idea from the simple observation that if you read history or ask people who they think are great leaders, you might end up with a list that included people such as Adolf Hitler and Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi. How you characterize good leadership depends on how you answer the question, “Was Hitler a good leader?” Ciulla called this the Hitler problem. If great leaders are those who, in a particular context, can motivate, organize, and move people toward a goal, then both Hitler and Gandhi were great leaders. Here we judge leaders by how well they perform and their ability to get the desired results. However, this stunted view of leaders fails to consider the ethics of how they lead and the goals they pursue, which is why studying leader effectiveness without assessing the ethics of leaders is incomplete.

Ethics and Effectiveness in Leadership Studies Leadership scholars have implicitly or explicitly tackled the problem of ethics and effectiveness. In 1979 and later in 1998, James MacGregor Burns argued that Hitler brought about change but was not a transforming leader because he did not possess the requisite ethical virtues, ethical values, and moral values of transforming leadership. Burns’s theory characterizes a leader’s ethics and effectiveness as so intertwined that he not only does not think Hitler was a great leader but says Hitler was not a leader at all. Burns, like the

ancient Greeks, prefers to call someone like Hitler a tyrant. Bernard M. Bass takes a different approach. His 1985 theory of transformational leadership focused on change and leader effectiveness. Bass was somewhat neutral on ethics, so in his early work, Hitler looks like a transformational leader. However, there were normative undertones to Bass’s idea of a transformational leader that made calling Hitler one problematic. In his later work in 1999, Bass sidesteps the Hitler problem by categorizing unethical leaders like Hitler as pseudotransformational leaders. Both Bass and Burns tried to exclude unethical leaders from their theories of effective leadership. The ethical leadership construct of Michael E. Brown, Linda K. Treviño, and David A. Harrison seems to capture elements of the ethics and effectiveness of leaders in their questionnaire, which measures respondents’ perceptions of how a manager leads and the manager’s ethics as a person. Their ultimate goal is measuring how respondents’ perceptions of ethical leadership relate to organizational effectiveness. Their construct does not address the Hitler problem but instead contains the hypothesis that there is a correlation between ethical and effective leadership.

Machiavelli and the Dirty Hands Problem Ethics and effectiveness underlie Niccolo` Machiavelli’s (1469–1527) discussion of leadership in The Prince. Machiavelli does not argue that princes ought to behave unethically, but rather that they cannot and should not always behave ethically because of their moral obligations as leaders. He says acting honorably toward enemies who are not honorable is a recipe for disaster when you are responsible for protecting the lives of those who live in your city-state. Machiavelli says that princes sometimes must be ruthless. His idea that the prince’s ends sometimes justify the means is not a repudiation of ethics. Instead, Machiavelli offers an astute observation about one unique ethical aspect of leadership. Because leaders are responsible for the well-being of organizations or groups of people, leaders can do great harm if they fail to be effective. Whereas Brown, Treviño, and Harrison’s research attempts to show how being ethical

Ethics and Effectiveness

leads to effective leadership, Machiavelli implies that being an ineffective leader when the lives and well-being of followers are at stake may be unethical. In other words, it can be more ethical to protect your people than it is to tell the truth and keep promises to your enemies. In contemporary philosophy, the dirty hands problem is similar to that of Machiavelli’s Prince; only it has a personal twist. Sometimes leaders are forced to do bad things to do good things for their constituents. Michael Walzer writes that in the dirty hands problem, it is vital that leaders feel disgusted by their behavior so they do not fall into regularly casting ethics aside to be effective. The German sociologist and historian Max Weber (1864–1920) said that doing bad to do good can be part of a leader’s job. In Politics as a Vocation, he says leaders need an ethic of responsibility to deal with cases where it would be ineffective and irresponsible to act ethically. Weber warns potential leaders that because unethical behavior is sometimes necessary to be effective, they should beware of what could happen to their souls.

How Moral Theories Unite Ethics With Effectiveness Most moral theories characterize ethics and effectiveness as ultimately intertwined. For instance, there is a sense in which utilitarianism is inherent in the very idea of leadership. Generally speaking, the job of a leader is to promote the greatest good of a group or organization and achieve its goals. As a consequentialist theory, meaning one that bases the morality of an act on its consequences, utilitarianism presents a unified view of ethics and effectiveness. That is, ethical leadership would be leadership that effectively promoted the greatest good for followers, organizations, groups, and so on. In virtue ethics, a virtue is an excellence. Hence, leaders’ morality rests on their moral habits and doing their jobs well. Incompetent leaders lack the ability to do their jobs well. Doing a job poorly shows a lack of technical and moral virtues. The ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle offer numerous examples of virtues and moral and technical excellence in various occupations, from horse trainers to physicians. For instance, in the Republic, Plato tells us that the craft of a ship’s

333

captain is to rule over the sailors on his ship and prescribe actions that are in their interests. If the captain acts in his own interests and not that of the sailors, he fails in his craft or is ineffective. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) ethics would appear to be indifferent to effectiveness because, for him, ethics is about acting on moral principles, regardless of the consequences. When we consider the duties that leaders have to constituents and organizations, we see that failure to fill their obligations is rarely just an ethical failure; it renders such leaders ineffective. For example, it is unethical for a mayor to ignore the duties that come with the job, such as ensuring that citizens are safe, the streets are clean, and so forth, because she is not doing what she is supposed to do or promised to do as mayor. Kant’s ethics offer another valuable insight for assessing leaders. A leader may act on her duties, but her actions may not turn out as expected, which is why Kant says ethics should rest on moral principles and not consequences. Kant thought that ethics should depend on a person’s good will to shield moral judgments from the variables and externalities that may affect the outcomes of their actions. Nonetheless, sometimes leaders appear to be ethical and effective because they are fortunate. They may be reckless and uncaring and make risky decisions that turn out well, or they may be conscientious and careful but their decisions turn out badly. Fate and unforeseeable factors beyond leaders’ control can determine how we judge a leader’s ethics and effectiveness. Philosophers such as Bernard A. O. Williams call this moral luck, which is when we praise or blame people for things over which they had little control. Moral luck is the ethical counterpart to James R. Meindl and others’ research on the romance of leadership. From both of these perspectives, people perceive leaders as agents who have more control over events than they actually do.

Conclusion There are many ways that the ethics and effectiveness heuristic can be helpful to leadership scholars. First, the heuristic helps scholars clarify when they are making descriptive and/or normative claims. The leadership literature is filled with descriptive

334

Evolution of Inequality

statements about what leaders are, but mostly these are normative statements about what leaders ought to be. Consider the following: First, the assumption is not necessarily true that when a leader fits the profile of a transformational leader, it means she or he is also an ethical leader. A theory that says only ethical leaders are transformational begs questions about the ethical criteria and how they relate to a leader’s ability to bring about change effectively. Second, ethics and effectiveness help highlight the inherently normative nature of a leader’s role. A leader’s job entails taking responsibility for groups, organizations, communities or political entities, and so on. Third, some of the most difficult challenges leaders face concern conflicts between ethics of how and why they do things and the necessity of realizing their goals. Fourth, and finally, the ethics and effectiveness heuristic helps scholars focus on a primary objective of most leadership research, understanding the nature of good and bad leadership. As we have seen from the Hitler problem, you cannot do this without considering both ethics and effectiveness. Joanne B. Ciulla See also Deontology; Dirty Hands; Romance of Leadership; Effective Leadership Theory; Moral Risk and Luck; Ethical Leadership; Transforming Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Bass, B. M., & Steidlmeier, P. (1999). Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership behavior. Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 181–217. doi:10.1016/ s1048–9843(99)00016–8 Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002 Burns, J. M. (2021). Leadership. Harper torchbooks. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Ciulla, J. B. (1995). Leadership ethics: Mapping the territory. Business Ethics Quarterly, 5(1), 5–28. doi:10. 2307/3857269 Machiavelli, N., (2003). The prince. Bull, G., Trans. (Reissue ed.). Penguin Classics. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Walzer, M. (2009). Political action: The problem of dirty hands. In Walzer, M., & Miller, D. Thinking politically: Essays in political theory (pp. 278–295). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Weber, M. (2004). Politics as a vocation. In Owen, D., Strong, T. B., & Livingstone, R. Eds. The vocation lectures (pp. 32–94). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Williams, B. A. O. (1982). Moral luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

EVOLUTION

OF INEQUALITY

Differentials in wealth and decision-making power are now ubiquitous. Although it is tempting to accept inequality as somehow part of human nature, there is significant variation in the levels of inequality across human cultures, from very limited to very steep. Moreover, it is difficult to explain why an individual would voluntarily accept a subordinate position when evolutionary theory generally predicts striving for increased resources, status, and reproductive success. The questions of how and why inequality evolved thus continue to vex evolutionary social scientists. Is human inequality novel or does it persist across the evolutionary history of the species? On the one hand, looking toward chimpanzees and bonobos, which are humans’ closest living relatives and therefore likely to share certain traits, offers a bleak view of human nature. Chimpanzees and bonobos display persistent dominance hierarchies and large differentials in health and reproductive success. On the other hand, analysis of contemporary foragers (i.e., hunter-gatherers) who, by ethnographic analogy, are assumed to share features of environments and lifestyles that also characterized those of prehistoric humans, offers a different view. Relevant evidence is often summarized under the term egalitarian, to depict general tendencies for foragers to eschew persistent status and wealth differentials. Instead, cultural norms and institutions often militate against inequality, reining in would-be aggrandizers through ostracism and preferences for humility and widespread sharing. Taken together, these lines of evidence suggest humans have potential for inequality (realized among many modern nation-states) as well as an ability to build norms and institutions that keep inequality in check (more common in contemporary foragers). This entry illuminates the evolution of persistent, institutionalized inequality, defined

Evolution of Inequality

as “differential access to power or resources involving institutionalization of status hierarchies by hereditary privileges or positions such as social classes, castes, hereditary titles, or heritable differences in wealth.” Archaeological evidence generally supports the view that persistent inequality in material wealth and political decision-making appears to have been largely limited in size and scope until 10,000–12,000 years ago. This timing offers some clues as to what factors may promote versus impede the evolution of inequality, as it coincides with a reduction in climate variation that may have provided the stability that facilitated widespread transitions toward agriculture for the beginnings of persistent, institutionalized inequality we know well today.

Agriculture and Inequality The contemporaneous evolution of agriculture and inequality offers support for the hypothesis that agriculture, per se, causes inequality. There are many pathways through which this relationship could develop, including production surpluses, less need for widespread sharing to reduce risks of nutritional shortfalls associated with foraging, and population expansion and settlement density resulting from increased fertility, which increase competition for resources. However, evidence of inequality among some hunter-gatherer societies, including in association with highly productive marine and freshwater resources, as well as many relatively egalitarian horticultural societies, suggests that agriculture is neither necessary nor sufficient. A more general model of the evolution of inequality posits that three factors—economic defensibility (ED), circumscription, and intergenerational wealth transmission (IWT)—provide the causal underpinnings for other factors that have empirically been shown to cause or escalate inequality. ED refers to the extent to which individual benefits of exclusive use exceed the costs associated with resource defense (claiming property rights). ED is enhanced by higher density and predictability of resources. Environments that are circumscribed (i.e., exhibit steep resource gradients) make it easier for resource owners to control subordinates who lack better options. IWT is facilitated by forms of wealth that are more easily

335

passed to descendants, as well as by norms and institutions that facilitate such transfers; this codifies inequality by making it possible for lineages to hold on to wealth while excluding others. Although economists often focus primarily on tangible assets, income, and debt, evolutionary scholars recognize the importance of many different types of resources to securing health, well-being, and reproductive success. Noetic wealth is wealth in knowledge or educational capital; somatic wealth is wealth that contributes to physical well-being, such as height, body fat, or immune function (i.e., embodied capital); relational wealth is wealth in social partnerships or social capital; finally, material wealth includes income, assets, and tangible goods (e.g., houses, cell phones) that help to support livelihoods. Material wealth, which carries the very high potential for ED and IWT, is especially prone to inequality, whereas embodied wealth, which has relatively low levels of IWT, is less unequal. Thinking in these terms clarifies that agriculture should be expected to be associated with inequality, even if agriculture, per se, is not causal. Intensive agriculture reliant on plowing and/or irrigation produces food at far greater scales than other forms of subsistence (e.g., foraging, horticulture). Productive, arable land and any associated surpluses are relatively easily defended and transmitted from one generation to the next. The model also clarifies why inequality often appears in the absence of agriculture, such as among Northwest Coast Native Americans, whose use of fishing weirs and control of defensible salmon runs were associated with greater levels of inequality than among foragers residing in more homogenous or less productive environments.

Patrons, Clients, Leaders, and Followers Who, specifically, stand to gain from the conditions that favor inequality and who are poised to submit to the authority of others? Managerial mutualism and patron–client are two of the best-known models that consider the conditions that enable some individuals to benefit while excluding or exploiting others. Each posits that, at least initially, the net benefits of hierarchical cooperation outweigh any associated costs.

336

Evolution of Inequality

However, whereas managerial mutualism focuses on the potential for leaders to overcome collective action problems (CAPs) in ways that are beneficial to groups, patron–client models focus on the conditions that render staying in a subordinate position a better alternative than leaving and trying one’s luck elsewhere. Finally, related scholarship focuses on the specific characteristics that make some individuals more or less likely to serve in authoritative positions and on the potential for political influence (leadership) to transition to coercion (dominance). At the heart of the managerial mutualism model is the observation that cooperation is subject to constraints that can make it difficult to achieve. Such CAPs include selfishly motivated behaviors like free-riding on others’ efforts, problems organizing appropriate efforts (e.g., not showing up or not contributing effectively), and member–joiner conflicts that result when a person gains more from joining activities than existing members do from the would-be joiner’s efforts. Increases in group or settlement size, as was likely in the wake of agriculture, exacerbate CAPs. Managerial mutualism arises when leaders are rewarded for providing services that help to overcome these CAPs, such as directing efforts to ensure efficacy or issuing punishments when individuals do not perform as expected. Leaders may also produce group-level benefits associated with redistributing wealth and buffering against group risks such as crop failure. Patron–client models focus on resource asymmetries that are used by elites to advantage themselves in systems of exchange with subordinate individuals. In heterogeneous environments, elites can leverage control of relatively high-quality or stable resource patches (e.g., fertile floodplains, productive fish habitats) to secure labor or other forms of support from subordinates in exchange for access to these high-quality resource patches. These systems are clearly more conducive to coercion than managerial mutualism, as subordinates are constrained by lack of resource control or outside options (i.e., their decisions are circumscribed). How coercive these systems are likely depends on the reasons enabling resource control—differential competitive ability (e.g., due to weapons, knowledge, social networks) may be

more likely to generate coercive systems than those due to priority of access or temporary differences in kin-group size. Thus, resource heterogeneity, along with ED, together allows for systems of inequality to emerge. They are maintained in a persistent fashion when transmission patterns are institutionalized, such that inequalities perpetuate across generations. Managerial mutualism and patron-client relationships may often reinforce each other. When leaders have greater coercive capacity (because they are also wealthy patrons or can draw on more coalitional support within their communities) they may be more effective in punishing free-riding, motivating contribution to collective action, mediating conflicts, or negotiating with outsiders. These benefits to group members from powerful leaders are also accompanied by increased risk of exploitation. Thus, group members tend to scrutinize their leaders for indication of unfairness in decision-making, which can be used to mobilize the community to effect change in leadership. Such leverage on the part of community members over their leaders weakens as wealth inequalities widen. Furthermore, institutionalization of leader powers and leader succession can arise initially to make leadership more efficient but then provide leaders the capacity to expand their powers. With greater inequality in political decision-making comes greater material inequality and reproductive disparities, as leaders (often men in many conspicuous domains) claim special privileges in terms of polygyny or access to resources.

Effect of Competition Among Groups on Inequality The evolution of inequality affects and is affected by interactions not only among individuals but also by intergroup interactions. For example, warfare and other processes can promote inequality when unequal groups with effective hierarchical structures outperform equal ones. Indeed, warfare has led to the dissemination of coercive political, religious, and legal institutions because those same institutions underpin collective action that promotes success in warfare. The emergence and spread of state-level authority, particularly in Eurasia, can be tied to geographic

Evolutionary Leadership Theory

regions that experienced more frequent warfare. In addition, particular forms of agricultural production interacted with warfare in the spread of states. Because they were more easily taxed, plant domesticates like rice and wheat facilitated better financing of state governments and their militaries.

Implications for Modern Society and Other Considerations Is it possible to reduce inequality? How? Any answer to these questions is complex. Contemporary inequality arises within heterogenous ecological contexts with varied and complex histories that reflect not only individual motivations to acquire status and resources but also group-level norms and institutions. Variable institutions (e.g., taxation regimes, social welfare policies) within similar ecological contexts give rise to significant variation in wealth disparities across modern nation-states, suggesting that understanding what drives institutional change will be critical to understanding the factors that shape inequality generally and within a given context. Although institutions may initially evolve as a way of minimizing transaction costs, as individual circumstances become increasingly differentiated, the costs and benefits of institutions also become unequal. Some scholars suggest that sustained declines in inequality only follow major events like mass mobilization warfare, epidemics with high mortality rates, government collapse, or violent revolutions. However, the effects of these events are conditional on how much initial leverage citizens have over elites. Achieving lasting declines in inequality through less catastrophic means can be difficult, since elites often benefit more from, and have more say in regulating, institutions. To constrain the power of elites, nonviolent protest movements fare better not only by involving a large fraction of the populace but also through frequent events to increase their disruptive effects. An evolutionary view suggests that reducing inequality must consider biological and cultural adaptations, including those that affect how people codify inheritance (e.g., through kinship), how people respond to ED, and how people deal with CAPs and intergroup relationships. In general,

337

inequality has arisen within the context of broader evolved tendencies to convert resources to status and reproduction and to do so in cooperation with preferred partners. In other words, contemporary inequality has been built by these tendencies and presumably can be unbuilt by understanding how they were produced by evolutionary processes at multiple interacting levels ´ M. Mattison, Christopher von Rueden, Siobhan and Eric Alden Smith See also Dominance and Prestige; Evolution of Leadership; Income Inequality; Patriarchy and Its Origins; Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership

Further Readings Chenoweth, E., & Belgioioso, M. (2019). The physics of dissent and the effects of movement momentum. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 1088–1095. doi:10. 1038/s41562-019-0665-8 Currie, T., Turchin, P., Turner, E., & Gavrilets, S. (2020). Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 34. Garfield, Z. H., von Rueden, C., & Hagen, E. H. (2019). The evolutionary anthropology of political leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 59–80. Mattison, S. M., Smith, E. A., Shenk, M. K., & Cochrane, E. E. (2016). The evolution of inequality. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 25(4), 184–199. doi:10.1002/evan.21491 Smith, E. A., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Bowles, S., Gurven, M., Hertz, T., & Shenk, M. K. (2010). Production systems, inheritance, and inequality in premodern societies: Conclusions. Current Anthropology, 51(1), 85–94. doi:10.1086/649029

EVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP THEORY Leadership is a significant aspect of human organization and a widely studied topic across the biological and social sciences. Leaders—individuals with a greater-than-average influence on group behavior and decision-making—promote the

338

Evolutionary Leadership Theory

welfare of groups by coordinating their actions with followers to secure resources and avoid dangers. In essence, leadership and followership are social roles that help groups deal with various environmental risks, from threats to their security to opportunities for exploration and exploitation. Although some scholars doubt the significance of leadership, indicating that the role of individual leaders is over-glorified, there is no indication that the need for leadership has lessened in the 21st century. From an evolutionary perspective, leadership poses somewhat of a puzzle. Why are certain individuals prepared to take on a leadership role, risking either physical (injury), economic (money), or reputation (status) damage? Why are certain individuals, the followers, prepared to give up their autonomy to follow, temporally or structurally, the orders and activities of another individual, the leader? What are the evolutionarily relevant contexts that were selected for leadership and followership in the first place? And what are the similarities and differences between leadership in humans and nonhumans? This entry reviews selected literature on all of these questions through the lens of evolutionary leadership theory (ELT). Its focus lies in understanding the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to the execution of leadership and followership behaviors by studying the adaptive challenges that humans recurrently faced throughout evolution. It first discusses various theoretical models for the evolution of leadership and followership by addressing the costs and benefits associated with these roles. Second, key aspects of the environmental contexts that are selected for leadership and followership adaptations are explored. Third, the entry draws some conclusions and implications of viewing leadership through an evolutionary lens (e.g., leadership and gender).

Evolutionary Models of Leadership and Followership ELT offers a unifying framework to understand the selection pressures favoring the execution of leadership and followership roles and the cognitive mechanisms supporting it across taxa. ELT

assumes that individuals engage in leader–follower relations because ultimately there are reproductive benefits associated with taking on these roles that offset any costs, for example, giving up personal autonomy. Evolution through natural selection involves trade-offs, whereby traits are selected because they provide their bearers, on average, greater benefits than costs—for instance, for newborns having a large skull is on average more advantageous than a risky, painful birth for mother and child. A simple game theoretical model, the stag hunt game, can explain the emergence of leadership and the trade-offs involved. Two hunters can choose between two strategies: Hunt a stag or a rabbit. A stag can be hunted successfully only if both players coordinate their activities, whereas hunting a rabbit is an individual activity that requires no coordination. Cooperating on hunting the stag gives both individuals a better payoff potentially, but it is also risky because their coordination might fail. If the hunters can communicate with each other, coordination is more likely, and if one hunter can persuade the other to join, then a leader–follower relationship naturally emerges. There are various evolutionary theories that explain the emergence of leadership in such situations. First, it may be that leaders, on average, gain a direct, disproportional benefit from successful coordination. Such is the case when the hungriest hunter takes the initiative to hunt the stag or, in the modern world, when a team member takes charge of a team project in order to obtain a promotion at work. Second, it is possible that some forms of leadership emerge because this role generates indirect benefits for them through helping close relatives. In lionesses, individuals take the lead in protecting relatives from intruders as they live in close-knit family groups, consisting of sisters and their offspring. Beyond kin-directed benefits, leadership may also be based on reciprocal exchanges, whereby followers may compensate their leaders for their efforts by allowing leaders to claim a fee for their services through a greater share of the spoils. In addition to these tangible benefits, leaders may also accrue social benefits in terms of an increase in status, power, and political support. One such reciprocal model is the service-for-prestige theory

Evolutionary Leadership Theory

of Michael E. Price and Mark Van Vugt, which asserts that these reciprocated benefits accrue principally during times of need, such as in a war or economic depression, whereby good leadership is particularly vital. A different evolutionary model of leadership is derived from costly signaling theory. Attempts to enact leadership may serve as an honest signal of someone’s personal qualities such as their strength, stamina, or intellect, which motivates followers to reward these leaders in terms of friendships or mating opportunities. As Christopher Von Rueden has shown, in small-scale societies, good hunt leaders and brave warriors indeed have more wives and surviving children. Beyond these individual selection models, leadership may also emerge through multilevel selection evolutionary processes. In the face of competition between groups, having a leader enables group members to cooperate more intensely and scale-up their activities, for example, in hunting even bigger animals than a stag. Here the indirect benefits for the leader are not derived from helping their relatives, but simply from being a member of a cohesive, well-functioning team vis` a-vis other teams. Finally, nonadaptive explanations for leadership are possible. It may be that leadership is a cultural role that provides no reproductive benefits but follows from social norms such as the expectations that, for instance, the team leader organizes the Christmas dinner, because it is considered part of their job. It may also be that leadership is simply a by-product of other (personality) traits that by themselves are adaptive, such as intelligence, extraversion, or conscientiousness. By being particularly smart or outgoing, a person may just happen to find themselves in situations where they are identified as the leader of a team. What about followership? Why would anyone give up their autonomy to join a leader in the pursuit of their goals? There may either be direct or indirect benefits associated with taking on a followership role; for instance, it pays for individuals to be part of a group but to wait and see if someone else is willing to risk moving first in a dangerous situation like an emergency. Followers may also profit indirectly from leadership activities performed by their close relatives, for instance,

339

when children are protected by their parents, promoting their inclusive fitness. It is also possible that individuals lack certain physical or mental capacities that make it impossible for them to attract followers. Thus, by following they simply make the best out of a bad situation. In sum, various evolutionary hypotheses that fit under the umbrella of ELT can account for the emergence of leadership and followership, although they make different predictions as to the (reproductive) benefits and costs associated with these roles. These predictions need to be further tested in research. Furthermore, these models must take into account both the contexts and cues for the establishment of leader–follower relations.

Who Leads and Who Follows? ELT suggests that there are certain generic traits—physical, behavioral, and psychological— that increase the likelihood that someone emerges as a leader. Many of these traits are to some degree inheritable, suggesting that there is genotypic variation in leaders and followers within human populations. Taking the hunting game as an example, these traits make it, on average, more likely that an individual (a) recognizes the benefits of coordination, (b) initiates appropriate action, and (c) is able to attract followers. First, some people may be more motivated to take the lead because they have a higher-than-average interest in the outcomes of successful coordination (e.g., the most ambitious team member). In addition, individual differences in autonomy and the need to belong predict who leads and who follows. Those who are less concerned about group cohesion will, on the whole, be more likely to be first movers. Supporting this motivational model, leadership correlates positively with such traits as autonomy, ambition, and stubbornness and negatively with agreeableness. Second, leadership emergence is associated with all kinds of traits that indicate a greater propensity for (social and physical) risk-taking, since moving first is the risky option in a coordination situation. Meta-analytic reviews show that extraversion correlates reliably with leadership emergence, and this trait is an indication of social risk-taking.

340

Evolutionary Leadership Theory

Furthermore, research on the babble effect, so called, shows that the most talkative group member—regardless of the quality of their contributions—is often regarded as the group leader. Animal behavior research confirms the association between risk-taking and leadership: When a pair of stickleback fish coordinate their movements to forage, the bolder of the pair emerges as the leader, and the shier one as the follower. Third, taking on a leadership role may be a function of dominance. Dominance may be derived from the social rank or legitimate power of an individual (being the manager in a company or the alpha in a primate society) or from trait variation in social or physical dominance. For instance, height and weight are positively associated with top leadership positions in politics and business, and so are personality differences in interpersonal dominance. Dominance cues predict leadership because they signal the ability to impose costs on reluctant followers. Fourth, leadership correlates with indicators of competence. Having unique expertise increases the likelihood that someone will be seen as an effective leader and thus attracts followers. An important ancestrally relevant cue of competence is age. In both human and nonhuman societies, older individuals are more likely to be followed. In elephant groups, the younger ones will line up behind the eldest female (the matriarch) during migration, presumably because she has the deepest knowledge about the dangers and opportunities ahead. Yet, the correlation between age and leadership may only be found in domains that require experience, training, and wisdom. For instance, in choosing a national leader in a period of a rapid economic or energy transition, a younger-looking candidate is often preferred. Supporting the competence model, meta-analytic findings show a consistent relationship between leadership and indicators of intelligence (e.g., IQ scores, cognitive and verbal fluidity). Anthropological research finds an association between leadership in small-scale societies and someone’s neural capital. The competence hypothesis indicates that individuals emerge as leaders because they provide a computational service to groups, seeing opportunities for coordination and collective action that others do not see.

The Context and Ecology of Leadership Notwithstanding the broader trait associations implied by these motivational, competence, dominance, and risk models of leadership, the question of who leads is also determined by situational contingencies. ELT delineates that not all coordination problems are alike and that specific challenges, recurrent in human evolutionary history, required different adaptive responses from groups, selecting for different types of leaders. These situations or ecologies activate different follower needs and elicit different mental models—or implicit theories—of leadership in the minds of followers. A broad distinction must be made between those leadership contexts that primarily pose a threat and those that present an opportunity. Research shows that in the face of a threat or crisis, like an intergroup conflict or natural disaster, a dominant, authoritarian leader emerges, given that these leaders are seen as more effective in raising and enforcing group contributions from followers. Opportunities, for example, in the access to new, valuable resources like food, money, and mates select for a different kind of leadership, more egalitarian, risk-taking, and charismatic, as these leaders must be able to mobilize enough followers to join their enterprise. There is evidence that such entrepreneurial leaders are indeed younger, more inspiring, and have risk-taking personalities. A more nuanced distinction can be made between contexts on the basis of what follower needs they activate. A triad model was proposed in 2020 by Wendy de Waal-Andrews and Mark van Vugt—based on classic philosophical theories—to distinguish between three different core follower needs, (a) aggression-protection, (b) guidance, and (c) justice, that correspond roughly to three different risks that (ancestral) human societies faced. First, early humans faced frequent violent deaths from tribal conflicts. A leader who could protect the group by swiftly organizing group defense or attacks against threatening outgroups would benefit their survival. The prediction from this protection motive is that followers upregulate their preferences for a strong, dominant leader upon receiving cues of an impending intergroup

Evolutionary Leadership Theory

conflict. Several studies find support for this. Asking people to vote for a leader in a hypothetical national election shows a stronger preference for a dominant, masculine-looking leader in war than in peace. Conversely, when a conflict needs to be de-escalated, voters prefer a nondominant, more feminine-looking leader. In competitive business environments, teams prefer a physically strong male as their representative. Finally, individuals high in authoritarianism and social dominance orientation—whose aggressive–protective needs are chronically activated—have a stronger preference for dominant leadership. A second core follower need, according to the triad model, is guidance. Ancestral human groups needed to move regularly, for example, to access vital resources such as food and water. An individual who could guide them to the right place would greatly enhance their survival prospects. The prediction is that in situations that require direction and guidance—either for a physical move or a strategic change—followers upregulate their preferences for a directive, charismatic leader. This is supported by studies showing that when followers are inexperienced or immature, they want a leader who tells them what to do. People also preferentially copy the behaviors of expert leaders, and this so-called prestige bias emerges at a young age. Times of crises and uncertainty have been found to increase the appeal of a charismatic leader offering a vision. Employees with a chronic need for guidance—for example, from cultures high in uncertainty avoidance—indeed benefit more from having a transformational leader A third core need is the desire for justice among followers. Conflicts over access to resources are inherent to any human organization and could undermine team cohesion. A leader able to prevent or resolve internal disputes peacefully would be of great benefit. The prediction from this model is that in situations involving internal disputes, followers upregulate their preferences for leaders who are fair, trustworthy, and of the highest integrity. Political science studies show that voters dislike politicians who make decisions based on their self-interest. When voters fear exploitation by their leaders, they prefer a more trustworthy, non–dominant-looking person in charge. Other research shows that in societies with a high degree

341

of economic inequality, people prefer a leader who is able to curtail social unrest. Finally, individuals from collectivistic cultures—who are particularly concerned about a fair distribution of outcomes—prefer fairness in their leaders more.

Conclusions and Implications Despite the accumulating evidence for ELT and for universal adaptations for leadership and followership, a number of contentious issues remain. First, why are patterns of leadership and followership different between humans and nonhumans? In nonhuman primates, leadership is often enacted by the dominant alpha, presumably as a by-product of their greater physical power. Yet in small-scale human societies, there are stronger antidominance sentiments, and leadership roles are distributed among various people. In addition, owing to the superior cultural capacities of humans (language, imagination), they can create large, symbolic groups (e.g., religions, states, and corporates) held together by leaders with either charismatic or legitimate powers—managers. An interesting question is when these major evolutionary transitions—from dominance to leadership to bureaucratic management—occurred and why. Second, ELT distinguishes different kinds of leadership based on deeper evolutionary motives that do not neatly map onto existing nonevolutionary models. Evolutionary models suggest that different leaders emerge depending upon what core follower needs are salient in a particular context or ecology (protection, justice, guidance). If followers are in need of guidance, then they select a prestigious, charismatic individual as their leader, whereas in case of danger, they rally behind a dominant individual. Although the prestige-dominance model shares some similarities with other dichotomies such as transformation-transactional, task-relations orientation, and leadership-management, there are also subtle differences that need to be further investigated. Third, ELT argues that leadership is a coordinating mechanism that aids groups in mitigating various social and environmental risks. Yet ELT also makes clear that there are many different kinds of evolutionary risks—threats and opportunities—that select for different leadership styles

342

Executive Compensation

and mental models of leadership. For instance, a war situation is probably processed differently by followers than an economic one (recession), health (COVID-19), or environmental crisis (climate change). Each challenge likely elicits a different set of ideal leader attributes. In a war situation, followers prefer a more aggressive, masculine leader, but during a pandemic they may want a more directive, compassionate, feminine leader. Future studies are likely to examine how different kinds of threats and opportunities shape people’s mental models of leadership. Fourth, does an evolutionary approach have something to say about opportunities for female leadership? In modern human societies, male leadership has been the norm in business, politics, and education. A comparative analysis among 90 species of mammals suggests that males are more likely to lead during intergroup conflict, but females during group movements. Anthropological studies reveal that in small-scale societies, women are more likely to take on leadership roles that are less conspicuous than those of men—for instance, sorting out family finances rather than public speaking. This suggests that the context matters. Thus, if we want to study the full range of leadership, including places where women lead, we should move away from only studying leadership in RARE (rational and regal) organizations—like the big corporations.

Little, A. C., Burriss, R. P., Jones, B. C., & Roberts, S. C. (2007). Facial appearance affects voting decisions. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28(1), 18–27. Price, M. E., & Van Vugt, M. (2014). The evolution of leader–follower reciprocity: The theory of service-forprestige. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 363. Smith, J. E., Ortiz, C. A., Buhbe, M. T., & van Vugt, M. (2020). Obstacles and opportunities for female leadership in mammalian societies: A comparative perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101267. Van Knippenberg, D., & Van Kleef, G. A. (2016). Leadership and affect: Moving the hearts and minds of followers. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 799–840. doi:10.5465/19416520.2016. 1160515 Van Vugt, M. (2006). Evolutionary origins of leadership and followership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 354–371. Van Vugt, M., & Smith, J. E. (2019). A dual model of leadership and hierarchy: Evolutionary synthesis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(11), 952–967. Van Vugt, M., & von Rueden, C. R. (2020). From genes to minds to cultures: Evolutionary approaches to leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101404. Von Rueden, C., Alami, S., Kaplan, H., & Gurven, M. (2018). Sex differences in political leadership in an egalitarian society. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(4), 402–411. Von Rueden, C., Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2011). Why do men seek status? Fitness payoffs to dominance and prestige. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1715), 2223–2232.

Mark van Vugt See also Appearance; Cooperation; Leadership in Nonhuman Animals

EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION Further Readings de Waal-Andrews, W., & van Vugt, M. (2020). The triad model of follower needs: Theory and review. Current Opinion in Psychology, 33, 142–147. Bastardoz, N., & Van Vugt, M. (2019). The nature of followership: Evolutionary analysis and review. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 81–95. Bowles, S. (2006). Group competition, reproductive leveling, and the evolution of human altruism. Science, 314(5805), 1569–1572. Cartwright, E., Gillet, J., & Van Vugt, M. (2013). Leadership by example in the weak-link game. Economic Inquiry, 51(4), 2028–2043.

Executive compensation is the pay that employees at or near the top of organizational hierarchies receive for doing their jobs. It comes in many forms, including salary, bonuses, grants of restricted stock and stock options, long-term incentive plans, contributions to retirement accounts, and the use of company property. While most employees receive most of their pay in guaranteed forms like salary, executives receive most of their compensation in contingent forms like stock grants. Executive compensation can be treated as a corporate governance issue. How much and in what way executives

Executive Compensation

are paid determines in part what they do, which determines in part how well firms perform. It can also be treated as a moral issue. Paying executives too much or too little may contribute to harmful social outcomes.

Executive Compensation in Context A fact often observed, especially in the popular media, is that executives get paid a lot of money. According to the AFL-CIO’s Paywatch database, in 2019, CEOs of S&P 500 companies received, on average, $14.8 million in total compensation, which is 264 times the pay of the median U.S. worker. Some CEOs are paid enormous sums. Alphabet (the parent of Google) CEO Sundar Pichai was paid $280 million, Intel CEO Robert Swan was paid $66 million, and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su was paid $58 million. These numbers are sometimes deceiving. Pichai’s $280 million compensation package was the result of a one-time stock grant. But the numbers are still high. The 400th highest paid CEO in the S&P 500, Donald Macpherson of W. W. Grainger, Inc., received $7.6 million in 2019. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the annual mean salary in the United States in 2019 was $53,490, which means that Grainger was paid 142 times as much as the average U.S. worker. Corporate executives are not the only people who are paid a lot. Professional athletes, entertainers, and hedge fund managers can all make tens of millions—in the case of some hedge fund managers, hundreds of millions of dollars—per year. In addition, not all corporate executives are paid a lot. According to the BLS, there were over 200,000 chief executives in 2019 in the United States, with an annual mean pay of $194,000. When evaluating executive compensation, one must specify whom one has in mind by executive and what, if anything, is distinctive about their pay. The executives most often in question in discussions of executive compensation are the CEOs of S&P 500 companies. One reason these individuals are different than, say, professional athletes or entertainers, or heads of small companies, is that they control multibillion-dollar organizations. We might be concerned about them for the same reason we are concerned about airline pilots

343

or captains of oil tankers. Much depends on how well they do their jobs.

Executive Compensation as a Governance Issue Executive compensation can be treated as an element of corporate governance. How firms perform is determined in part by what executives do, and what executives do is determined in part by what they are paid to do. It is not simply a matter of offering enough money to attract a talented person to the firm and keep them there. It is about structuring the executive’s pay so that the choices he or she makes benefit the firm. In this way, executive compensation can be seen as a solution to a principal–agent problem. The executive is the agent who works on behalf of the firm’s shareholders, who comprise the principal. Each party is presumed to act in their own interest. But their interests may diverge. An executive may wish to acquire another firm to increase his power and status. This may be bad for shareholders, if it results, as acquisitions sometimes do, in increased costs and worse performance. An executive may refrain from instituting necessary layoffs to avoid workers’ wrath. Although shareholders—or rather their representatives, corporate boards—can fire the executive for poor performance, but by then the damage may be done. Moreover, the board may not always have the knowledge or experience to evaluate the quality of the executive’s decisions. These problems are ameliorated by tying the executive’s pay to firm performance, and specifically, to the firm’s stock price. The executive does well only when shareholders do well. Doing well is measured objectively by stock price. Understanding executive compensation as a solution to an agency problem contributed to a sharp rise in the 1990s in the percentage of executive compensation that is paid in grants of restricted stock and stock options. In 1992, CEOs in the S&P 500 received 25% of their pay in grants of restricted stock and stock options. This percentage rose to 56% in 2000 and 60% in 2014. In 2014, these CEOs received only 14% of their pay in the form of salary. It is widely believed that firms should be managed to maximize shareholder value. This is

344

Executive Compensation

why executives are paid mostly in stock. Those who think that firms should be managed to achieve other objectives will think that executives should be paid differently. A stakeholder theorist who thinks that managers should balance the interests of all stakeholders will believe that executives’ pay should be tied to the benefits they create for all stakeholders. The executive who receives the compensation may not be the only person influenced by it. According to tournament theory, organizational hierarchies should be seen as a kind of tournament, where outsize prizes go to the victors—that is, the CEOs. On this view, high pay for a CEO motivates not just the CEO himself or herself, but those around him or her who wish to become CEO one day. Similarly, minor league baseball players are motivated not by the puny salaries they earn but by the prospect of being called up to the major leagues. In this way, tournament theory posits a positive externality of executive pay. There may also be negative externalities. Paying the top executive a lot more than his or her subordinates may lead to jealousy or infighting, which may in turn decrease organizational performance. Whether corporate boards should treat executives as winners of tournaments or as team players may depend on whether individual performance or teamwork is more important in a certain firm. For executive compensation to be an effective tool of corporate governance, executives and boards—the people who pay them—must bargain at arm’s length. Few question whether executives do a good job representing their own interests in negotiations. However, there has been debate about whether boards do a good job of representing their firms’ interests. Some believe that executives’ pay reflects their power over boards. Chief executives also sometimes serve as chair of the board and can play an outsize role in the selection of other board members. The board may be reluctant to engage in the kind of hard bargaining that they should, for fear of earning the CEO’s disfavor, and being removed from the board. In contrast to this managerial power view, those who endorse an optimal contracting view see executives’ pay as the product of unforced agreements between executives and boards in a competitive market for scarce talent. Put simply,

on the optimal contracting view, executives are paid a lot because they are worth a lot.

Executive Compensation as an Ethical Issue Executive compensation raises ethical as well as governance issues. We can see some of the ethical issues as the ethical aspect or face of the governance issues. However, executive compensation raises additional ethical concerns as well. Consider first the dispute between the managerial power and optimal contracting views. If a board does not bargain at arm’s length with the executive, then it may end up paying too much for his or her services, or it may fail to structure his or her pay optimally. The board may agree, for example, to too much fixed pay and not enough variable pay. This is a problem for the firm’s performance. Nevertheless, it is also an ethical issue. If a board does this, it violates a moral obligation to do what is best for the firm. It is widely agreed that corporate boards should not award executives excessive compensation. It is commonly assumed, however, that executives are free to seek excessive compensation. The idea is that, in their role as executives, they should do what is best for the firm, but when bargaining for their own pay, they are free to seek the best possible deals for themselves. This assumption can be questioned. We might think that executives should exercise at least some restraint when they make pay demands, given the position of trust in the firm they seek to occupy. Consider second the incentive effects of compensation. The move away from fixed pay to variable pay, especially restricted stock and stock options, was prompted by the idea that executives of large corporations should act like entrepreneurs, taking risks and attempting to grow their businesses. On this view, executives should be paid like entrepreneurs, not government bureaucrats. However, inviting executives to take risks with large organizations on whose welfare many people’s livelihood depends raises ethical concerns. The problem is not just that, if the business fails, shareholders and workers will lose wealth and jobs, respectively. Society as a whole can suffer. This problem was dramatically illustrated by the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Executives in the

Executive Compensation

financial services industry were incentivized by their compensation to take enormous risks. If the bets paid off, they could personally earn huge paydays. If they did not, the losses would be suffered not by them but by their firms. The problem was that the losses from some bad bets were so large that they could not be absorbed by individual firms. Because financial institutions are connected through a complex web of loans and insurance schemes, when one fails, others are at risk of failing. The whole system nearly collapsed and had to be rescued by governments around the world at a cost of trillions of dollars. A third ethical issue raised by executive compensation is perhaps the most obvious. High pay for executives contributes to inequality in society, which some find objectionable. To be sure, other people—entertainers, athletes, and hedge fund managers—are paid a lot too. However, this does not mean there is nothing to be concerned about; it just shows that the problem is a general one. Inequality is a complex topic that cannot be fully addressed here, but we can begin to sketch the territory. Few think that all inequalities are unjust. The fact that just a handful of people win Nobel Prizes does not make awarding one wrong. Indeed, the whole point of the Nobel Prize is to recognize excellence, so it would be self-defeating to award it to everyone (or no one). Inequalities in pay do not seem automatically unjust either; however, it has been argued that executives do not deserve the high pay they receive, however productive they are. To substantiate this objection, a standard of productivity that is independent of willingness to pay must be defended. Firms are undeniably willing to pay huge sums for executives’ labor. Even if executives are worth in an economic sense what they are paid, some will still find their pay objectionable. A major concern is that inequality in income can be translated into other inequalities. People might object to high pay for executives on the grounds that it results in their having too much political power or that it undermines social ties. There are a number of ways to reduce executive compensation, but they may have associated

345

problems. One solution is to place limits on what firms can pay executives, that is, enforce a maximum wage. According to conventional wisdom, however, price controls are inefficient. Price floors lead to gluts, and price ceilings lead to shortages. A maximum wage is a price ceiling that may cause talented executives to seek other work. A better solution may be to adjust people’s income through the tax code, increasing taxes on those who earn too much and distributing the proceeds to those who earn too little. Jeffrey Moriarty See also Corporate Responsibility; Economic Justice; Efficacy; Poverty and Inequality; Procedural Justice; Stakeholder Theory.

Further Readings Bebchuk, L. A., & Fried, J. M. (2004). Pay without performance: The unfulfilled promise of executive compensation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bebchuk, L. A., & Spamann, H. (2010). Regulating bankers’ pay. Georgetown Law Journal, 98(2), 247–287. Boatright, J. R. (2010). Executive compensation: Unjust or just right? In G. Brenkert & T. L. Beauchamp (Eds.), Oxford handbook of business ethics (pp. 161–201). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Conyon, M. J., Peck, S. I., & Sadler, G. V. (2001). Corporate tournaments and executive compensation: Evidence from the UK. Strategic Management Journal, 22(8), 805–815. Edmans, A., Gabaix, X., & Jenter, D. (2017). Executive compensation: A survey of theory and evidence. In B. E. Hermalin & M. S. Weisbach (Eds.), The handbook of the economics of corporate governance (Vol. 1, pp. 383–539). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Jensen, M. C., & Murphy, K. J. (1990). CEO incentives: It’s not how much you pay, but how. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 3(3), 36–49. Moriarty, J. (2009). How much compensation can CEOs permissibly accept? Business Ethics Quarterly, 19(2), 235–250. doi:10.5840/beq200919212 Scanlon, T. M. (2018). Why does inequality matter? New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

346

Exemplary Leadership

EXEMPLARY LEADERSHIP Leaders get people moving. They energize and mobilize. They take people to places they have never been before. In uncertain and turbulent times, leadership is the only antidote to chaos, stagnation, and disintegration. Change is the province of leaders. It is the work of leaders to inspire people to do things differently, to struggle against uncertain odds, and to persevere toward a distant yet compelling image of a better future. Without leadership, there would not be the extraordinary efforts necessary to solve existing problems and realize unimagined opportunities. Without leadership, exciting future possibilities will neither be envisioned nor attained. This is as true for leaders in business, government, and communities as it is true for those readers who is still in school or preparing for their career. Everyone has the capacity to lead, whether or not they are in a formal position of authority or even part of an organized group. It is not about being a president, captain, director, editor, CEO, general, or prime minister. It’s not about celebrity, wealth, or even age. It’s not about your family background or the neighborhood you come from. It’s about knowing your values and those of the people around you and taking the steps, however small, to make what you do every day demonstrate that you live by those values.

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership For more than four decades, researchers have been asking people all over the globe to describe their personal-best leadership experience. After analyzing these leadership experiences, and testing them against empirical evidence, scholars have found that people who guide others along new journeys follow surprisingly similar paths. Although each experience was unique in its individual expression, there were clearly identifiable actions that made a difference. When getting extraordinary things done with others, people engage in what James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner identified as The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. These practices are not the private property of the people Kouzes and Posner studied. Nor do

they belong to a few select shining stars. Leadership is not about personality, popularity, or age; it’s about behavior. The five practices are available to anyone who accepts the challenge of taking people to places they have never been before and moving beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary, regardless of your setting, environment, or circumstances. Leadership knows no ethnic or cultural borders, no racial or religious bounds, and no differences between young and old. The Five Practices have passed the test of time, even though the context of leadership has changed dramatically since Kouzes and Posner—the authors of this encyclopedia entry—began their research. Technological advances, shifts in the world’s economies, and social changes all influence the context in which one will lead. We also expect that such changes will continue at a rapid pace. And yet, while the leadership environment has changed, our research confirms that the fundamental behaviors, actions, and practices of effective leaders have remained essentially the same and are as relevant today as when we first began their study of exemplary leadership. Model the Way

Titles are granted, but it’s your behavior that earns you respect. Exemplary leaders know that if they want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, they must be models of the behavior they expect of others. To effectively model the way, you must first be clear about your guiding principles and find your voice. When you understand who you are and what your values are, then you can give voice to those values. But your values aren’t the only values that matter. In every team, organization, and community, there are others who also feel strongly about matters of principle. As a leader, you also must help identify and affirm the shared values of the group. Leaders’ actions are far more important than their words when others determine how serious leaders really are about what they say. Words and actions must be consistent. Exemplary leaders set the example by aligning actions with shared values. Through their daily actions, they demonstrate their deep commitment to their beliefs and to the groups they are part of. One of the best ways

Exemplary Leadership

to prove that something is important is by doing it yourself and walking the talk. Inspire a Shared Vision

People describe their personal-best leadership experiences as times when they imagined an exciting, better future for themselves and others. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They had absolute personal belief in those dreams, and they were confident in their abilities to find a way to make extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, every big event begins with a dream. Leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities. You need to make something happen, to change the way things are, to create something new and exciting. In some ways, this means having a realistic sense of the past, as well as a clear vision of what could be for any project regardless of size and scope, much as an architect draws a blueprint or an engineer builds a model. You can’t command commitment; you have to inspire it. You have to enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations. You can do this by talking to others and, even more important, listening to what motivates them. You enlist others by helping them feel they are part of something that matters, something that will make a difference, and something that is important to accomplish together. When you express your enthusiasm and excitement for the vision, you ignite a similar passion in others. Challenge the Process

Every single personal-best leadership case involved a change from the status quo. Not one person claimed to have achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. Challenge was the crucible for greatness. The challenge might have been launching an innovative new event, tackling a problem in a different way, rethinking a service their group provides, creating a successful campaign to get people to contribute to an environmental cause, starting up a brand-new civic initiative, or achieving a revolutionary turnaround of a struggling business or city council policy.

347

But leaders aren’t the only creators or originators of new ideas, projects, services, or processes. In fact, it’s more likely that they’re not. Innovation comes more from listening than from telling. You must constantly be looking outside of yourself and your group for new and innovative ways to do things. You need to search for opportunities by seizing the initiative and by looking outward for innovative ways to improve. Because innovation and change involve experimenting and taking risks, as a leader, you need to encourage experimentation and idea generation, recognize and support the best of those ideas, and challenge the system. Mistakes and failures will be inevitable, and one way of dealing with the potential risks and failures is by constantly generating small wins. There’s also a strong correlation between the actions of leaders and the process of learning: the best leaders are the simply the best learners. Leaders are constantly learning from their errors and failures and helping the groups they are part of to do the same. Enable Others to Act

A grand dream doesn’t come true through the actions of one person. No leader ever got anything extraordinary done by working solo. It requires a team effort. It requires solid trust and strong relationships. It requires group collaboration and individual accountability. Leaders foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships. They believe in the potential of others and the power of collaboration. They bring people together and trust that “together we achieve more.” Leaders do what it takes to give people the confidence and competence to face the challenges ahead, support each other, and move together toward success. They engage all those who must make the project work—and in some way, all who must live with the results. People don’t perform at their best nor stick around for long if they feel unimportant, weak, or alienated. By promoting the development of personal power and ownership, and by giving your power away, you make others stronger and more capable. When you strengthen others by increasing

348

Exemplary Leadership

self-determination and developing competence, followers are more likely to give it their all and exceed their own expectations. By focusing on serving the needs of others, and not your own, you build people’s trust in you as a leader. And the more people trust, the more they take risks, make changes, and keep initiatives alive. When people are trusted and have more choice, more authority, and more information, they’re much more likely to use their energies to produce extraordinary results. Encourage the Heart

Achieving major change is a long and bumpy road. People become exhausted, frustrated, and disillusioned and are often tempted to give up or disengage. They may ask, “Is all this work really worth it?” Genuine acts of caring give people the heart to keep going. Leaders recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence. It can be one to one or with many people. It can come from dramatic gestures or simple actions. It’s part of your responsibility as a leader to create a spirit of community—a place where people can celebrate the values and victories together. Recognition and celebration aren’t necessarily about fun and games, though there is a lot of fun when people encourage the hearts of others. Neither are they necessarily about formal awards. What’s critical is that they are perceived as sincere. Encouragement is valuable and important because it links the actions people take with the successes they achieve. Make sure people also appreciate how their behavior is connected with personal and shared values. Celebrations and rituals, when done sincerely and from the heart, give a group a strong sense of identity and team spirit that can carry it through tough times.

Research on leadership effectiveness, involving more than three million respondents, demonstrates that the more you use The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, the more likely it is that you’ll have a positive influence on others and on their efforts and commitment to their group, team, project, or cause. That’s what all the data add up to: If you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and on communities, you’d be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can be. Another finding from the constituents of leaders is that the more frequently their direct reports and colleagues/peers reported that their leaders were engaging in The Five Practices, the more they reported being satisfied with that person’s leadership and proud to tell others that they were working with this leader. There is a significantly robust correlation between the likelihood of “recommending this person to others as a good leader” and the extent they were seen as engaging in The Five Practices. People using these leadership behaviors most often, in comparison to those using them least often, had constituents who reported being two to three times more likely to feel appreciated and valued, to agree that their efforts were making a difference, and to indicate that they were highly productive. Research also revealed something else that’s extremely important: The effective use of The Five Practices is not affected by gender, ethnicity, age, education, industry, function, or nationality. To sum it all up, effective leadership in organizations depends not on who you are, your title, position, or role but on how you behave. Barry Z. Posner and James M. Kouzes Further Readings

The Five Practices Make a Difference Exemplary leader behavior makes a profoundly positive difference in people’s commitment and the way they do their work. Those who more frequently use The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are considerably more effective than those who don’t. The way you behave as a leader is what explains how hard people work and how engaged they feel.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2016). Learning leadership: The five fundamentals of becoming an exemplary leader. Somerset: Wiley. Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations. Somerset: Wiley. Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2021). Everyday people, extraordinary leadership: How to make a difference regardless of your title, role, or authority. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

F FEMININE MYSTIQUE, THE

The Influence of The Feminine Mystique and Its Juncture With Leadership

In Betty Friedan’s influential book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Friedan contended that the feminine mystique of the dutiful housewife living a fulfilled, happy life of domestic bliss was a myth, and many women were unhappy in their personal domestic lives, with little opportunity to convey their feelings. Women who aspired for more or who were not happy with a domestic life were not seen as feminine. This myth was perpetuated through the education system and in magazines run by male editors of the era. Friedan’s book is often attributed as having begun the second wave of feminism, which made it acceptable for women to have careers and aspire to leadership positions. As such, The Feminine Mystique is an important milestone in the history of leadership and women’s role as leaders. As important as the book was, it was also a book of its time and in a modern context suffers from a narrow, noninclusive view of how a woman’s life was defined. The Feminine Mystique did not discuss the differences in women’s experiences as women of color or in different identities than that of White, middle-class women. This entry provides an overview of what Friedan contributed to feminism and women’s participation in leadership and how the understanding of feminism and leadership has progressed since, including a perspective from First Nations women of color in Australia.

Friedan’s book was extremely influential in guiding the second wave of the feminist movement. The work enabled populations of women to consider where their fulfillment lies in their lives and what they may feel has been missed in the expectations of womanhood that society has perpetuated. Yet another interesting aspect of The Feminine Mystique was its explanation of the ways women were perceived in career-minded roles during the 1930s. It appears that representations of career-minded women had changed, replaced with more domicile images from male-dominated, patriarchal systems. The impact that years of patriarchy has had on women entering into leadership positions, or, rather, on there being space for them to enter, has been demonstrative in terms of the low numbers of female leaders in areas of business, government, and industry in many parts of the world. Globally, there is a growing discussion on both the role of leadership and those who are granted these positions of power and dominance. In 2020, a report completed by nonprofit organization Catalyst stated that 29% of women held senior management roles within the business sector worldwide. Men remain dominant in senior management, which can regularly be a direct line toward executive leadership positions. Describing the trajectory toward leadership in business as a somewhat leaky pipeline, this statistic indicates that, for many women, leadership is far from

349

350

Feminine Mystique, The

their reach. Politically, there also appears to be reticence among women to holding high positions of power, although some countries, such as Norway and Sweden, demonstrate that female leadership positions are not an issue for their constituents or for the structure of political leadership itself. From foundational texts involving leadership toward more recent developments, there are multitudes of studies that could be explored. Leadership can come in numerous forms, however, from the captain of a football team, the leader of an army, the CEO of a company, or the advocacy of those working to implement change in society. While society has shifted in its understandings of what it means to lead, global society has not yet translated the theoretical knowledge of leadership into a practical adaptation with diverse identities inhabiting leading roles.

Diversity in Leadership Statistically, there are fewer women of color undertaking leadership roles across numerous domains. Business and industry statistics suggest there are growing movements toward parity in some countries, yet there are still pay gaps between the sexes and, for many women, a reluctance to enter leadership positions. For women of color, these leadership positions hold an additional degree of difficulty in dealing with racism and discrimination, creating a double burden in performing leadership duties. As is regularly witnessed from women in high-profile leadership positions, there can be a double standard regarding workplace performance and what is often presented as female-oriented responsibilities in raising children or the desire to have a child while working in leadership. Yet there have been instances of high-profile women able to do both simultaneously, such as Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern. Women of color have held these positions while also dealing with stereotyped notions of them as being representative of their race or seen as too political in their perspectives of feminism, equality, and human rights.

The Limitations of The Feminine Mystique and Its Implications The Feminine Mystique did much to highlight the role of women within society, yet has many limitations, including the silencing of voices that experience multiple burdens in the structural barriers that exist for women, far beyond that of choosing between that of housewife duties or a career. As bell hooks’s (Gloria Watkins) 1984 publication Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center demonstrated, women of color must deal with the issue of daily survival for themselves and their families, and the opportunities for those in choosing home duties over a career are especially lacking for these women. In discussing Friedan’s work, bell hooks theorizes that Friedan overlooked non-White women and those from lower socioeconomic strata. The concept of many different experiences for women was missed, as were different understandings of feminine leadership. Since The Feminine Mystique was published, much more work has been centered on what women of color must endure in order to lead without a voice in the fight for change. bell hooks also suggests that feminism from the perspective of White women tends to dominate the discussion and appears to neglect whether their experiences are different from marginalized women’s spaces. White women’s feminist ideas appear to ignore the elements of race and class for many women. Kimberl´e Crenshaw’s theoretical work on intersectionality has assisted many in the feminist movement to build an understanding of the additional barriers some women face in society. The theory demonstrates there are different identities that interplay in how society works for and against them within various structures and systems. These intersections of gender, race, and class are not simply identity categorizations, but, rather, they demonstrate the many areas in which these women must navigate, and feminism is one area where intersectionality is a consideration. Crenshaw suggests that by being aware of intersectionality, there is a stronger acknowledgment of difference, and that this supports understanding the collective politics of a marginalized group. Another limitation of

Feminine Mystique, The

Friedan’s work is that third-wave feminism demonstrates the radical ability to choose both the mystique model of womanhood and the choice of leading in a chosen career or a combination of both. Not only that, but third-wave feminism allows women to unashamedly embody many of the tropes that previous waves of feminism have denigrated, including that of a woman strongly representing her sexuality without shame, for instance, in building better workplace safety around the sex worker industry. Feminism in the modern era is also making space for nonbinary and trans people, although controversy abounds over some feminist voices suggesting that trans and nonbinary women should be silenced. This area of debate marks the latest area in which the definition and understanding of feminism is evolving.

A First Nation’s Perspective From Australia Black and Indigenous women of color globally have strongly argued that their voices be heard in the space of feminism and leadership. The argument that Black women’s voices are often ignored within feminism was discussed by Indigenous Australian academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her 2000 book Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, which provides a seminal account of Black feminist ideas. The inability of dominant culture to see Black women’s struggle and resilience is an issue that connects to the lack of leadership positions held by First Nations women. The concepts of feminism, race, and leadership somehow become confusing in the face of whiteness and construction of leader roles. The position of women within these roles, and the ways in which they perform them, is also uncertain and unfixed. From the perspective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in Australia, however, women have always played pivotal leading roles within their societies. There have been matriarchal cultural roles within these societies for 60,0001 years, yet it is only within modern-day definitions of leaders that society is able to see these women’s leadership come into view regarding the activism and advocacy they have done for societal change.

351

One example is Shirly Cohen Smith (known as Mum Shirl), who in the 1970s saw the need for assistance with welfare, legal rights, the care of children in foster care, appropriate health service delivery, and the arts. Women like Mum Shirl have pushed society into doing better for generations, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women regularly work, quietly and without acknowledgment, for decades providing service to the greater population while also facing barriers relating to race and gender. Just as there are numerous Black, Hispanic, and Native American women doing the same within the United States, and ethnic citizens attempting to lead in the United Kingdom, these women of color are working in government, politics, the media, universities, and across many often-invisible roles that assist the greater community. Some have engaged in leading work firstly from familial connections to their cultural understandings and some out of necessity to change systems. Others have built a history of public service and hold representative roles within government. Leadership for these women can take on many forms, and their leadership illustrates that, unlike The Feminine Mystique, there can be a multitude of representations of women working across domestic and career roles.

Models of Women and Leadership in the Postmodern Era Since The Feminine Mystique was first released in 1963, new directions in feminism and overall society have occurred. The women’s empowerment movement, the #MeToo movement of the 2010s and 2020s, and changing trends in women’s and gender diverse peoples’ rights have come more strongly into focus, as have models of leadership. Leadership as a field of study has also gone through many changes, expanding from the foundational texts of James MacGregor Burns and Bernard Bass into ideas of cross-culturalism, identity, and of leadership beyond military and business-based industries toward those leading in advocacy and human rights. For women of color, nonbinary peoples, and those who occupy other intersections, undertaking leadership can be

352

Feminism

difficult terrain that requires understanding, support, and great strength in order to succeed. Tess Ryan See also Feminism; Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership; MeToo Movement; Women’s Movement

Further Readings Bass, B. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organisational Dynamic, 18(4), 19–31. Bass, B. (1997). Does the transactional-transformational leadership paradigm transcend organizational and national boundaries? American Psychologist, 52(2), 130–139. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Collinson, D. (2006). Rethinking followership: A post-structuralist analysis of follower identities. Leadership Quarterly, 17(2), 179–189. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1300. Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. hooks, b. (1984). From margin to center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 765–780. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000). Talkin’ up to the white woman: Aboriginal women and feminism. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Thornton, G. (2020). Women in business 2020: Putting the blueprint into action. Retrieved from https://www. grantthornton.global/en/insights/women-in-business2020/women-in-business-2020-report/

FEMINISM Feminism, generally defined as advocacy for rights and opportunities for women, has shaped everyday women’s lives in profound ways. Four waves of feminist movement in the United States thus far have created gains for women by fundamentally changing the ways in which women can

participate in society, receive compensation for their contributions, and make choices in their lives. Feminism developed through the vision and leadership of women who created and led the movement through these four waves. Furthermore, as feminism gained legitimacy, it created opportunities for women to become leaders in many areas of life, including business, government, sports, education, and science. Over time, feminists have focused on advancements for women in areas such as securing the right to vote; ensuring reproductive rights; creating broader opportunities in the workplace across industries; addressing unequal pay for equal work; shattering the glass ceiling or limits on the level to which women can advance in any particular industry; advocating for widespread parental leave policies; demanding affordable, quality childcare options; addressing high incidence of domestic violence and sexual abuse, assault, and harassment; holding domestic and sexual abusers to account; and many other crucial projects that have changed the quality of women’s lives. This entry reviews the various schools of feminist thoughts and the feminist movement waves.

Schools of Feminist Thought Although many people think that feminism is monolithic, there are several approaches that fall under the larger umbrella of feminism. This section discusses several of these approaches: liberal feminism, radical feminism, socialist feminism, intersectional feminism, and cultural feminism. Liberal Feminism

Arguably, the most mainstream definition of feminism posits that women should be equal to men in economic, political, and social realms. This definition comes from the liberal feminist school of thought, which seeks to raise the opportunities for and advancement of women to match those of men in the current society. Liberal feminists have pushed for reforms in law, policy, and practice that are designed to improve women’s lives, to allow women to live free of violence, and to expand the choices that women can make in their own lives. This can be seen in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the Violence Against Women Act of 1994,

Feminism

and Roe v. Wade of 1973, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022. For liberal feminists, the extreme conditions and inequalities that women face in society demand a greater focus on equality, fairness, and justice for women. They have, therefore, focused on raising societal awareness of these conditions and inequalities and then taken action to right these wrongs through both collective and individual action. They have also made efforts to attain leadership positions as a means of guiding political and social policies in directions that would promote opportunities for women. Although much of the work on feminism has developed in the United States, the feminist movement can be viewed as an international phenomenon, both in terms of the development of theories of feminism as well as the practical implications of how feminist thought can impact women in widely different cultures and countries and at diverse levels of economic development. Feminist international relations emerged in the 1980s and focuses on better understanding global politics with regard to wars, diplomacy, and economic policies. This approach considers the role that gender plays in conceptualizing global issues including the meaning of government, social exchange, and war. Liberal feminists tend to focus on gains for individual women, while radical, socialist, and intersectional feminists set their goals at a more structural level. This means that feminists in all of the latter categories believe that reforms in law, policy, and practice do not go far enough, and that these types of change initiatives are usually most beneficial for White women. Activists in these approaches to feminism could be considered leaders who use different strategies to mobilize their constituents and create opinion change. However, radical, socialist, and intersectional feminists seek to transform or eliminate patriarchy as a system of oppression. Patriarchy is a social system that creates solidarity and interdependence among men, which thereby allows them to dominate women. In other words, these feminists seek foundational change in the structures of society. As such, they would be motivated to obtain leadership positions; however, one of their underlying goals would be to use any power and authority

353

they can achieve to undermine the system within which they operate. Furthermore, to the extent that existing leadership theories and practices can be understood as operating with a traditional patriarchy, they would desire to undermine and reject them. Radical Feminism

Radical feminists believe that violence and threats of violence control women everywhere. By examining violence against women and other mechanisms that allow men to dominate women, radical feminists center on an analysis of patriarchy, which pervades societal institutions such as schools, universities, churches, families, and communities. By analyzing where patriarchy lives within institutions, radical feminists seek to identify root causes of women’s oppression and to end the entire system of patriarchy. As patriarchy is exploitative to its core, radical feminists believe that it has to be eliminated or transformed into new ways of relating to each other that extend beyond relations of domination and subordination. Scholar bell hooks, in the 2000 book Feminism Is for Everybody, asserts that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression. In this definition, she stresses the collective effort needed to end an entire system of oppression, which would thereby benefit all women. She argues that any attempt to make women equal to men begs questions like “Which men are we trying to be equal to?” As men across races and social classes certainly are not equal, the liberal feminist definition, for hooks, lacks a critical analysis of racial and class differences among women. She further suggests that any form of feminism that seeks for women to become equal to men will leave the oppressive underlying system intact. Because of the critical analysis of oppressive societal structures embedded in radical feminism, many women of color were drawn to this form of feminist thought during the second wave of feminist movement in the United States. Socialist Feminism

Socialist feminists analyze the ways in which patriarchy and capitalism mutually support each

354

Feminism

other as interlocking systems of oppression. In particular, socialist feminists integrate radical feminism and Marxist theory to examine the myriad ways in which women’s labor is devalued, undervalued, and often unpaid within capitalism. Socialist feminists examine issues such as women’s contributions to the U.S. economy, the wage gap, comparable worth, and ways in which women’s sexuality is controlled, to consider the harmful effects of interlocking capitalist and patriarchal exploitation in women’s lives. Intersectional Feminism

For intersectional feminists, systemic racism or White supremacy, capitalism, heterosexism, and other exploitative systems intersect with patriarchy, and all of them must be transformed or eliminated. This form of feminism was named after Kimberl´e Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989, arguing that gender and race cannot be divided into simple additive categories. A Black woman cannot simply isolate her race or her gender as the most oppressive factor in her life, as both systems of oppression work together in ways that affect the lives of women of color. Similarly, a woman’s social class, sexuality, age, abilities, and nation of origin shape her life in profound ways, creating spaces of both privilege and penalty in her life. Intersectional feminism today may take the form of Black feminist thought, Chicana feminist thought, Native feminist thought, Asian American feminist thought, and many others that amplify the voices of women from many races and ethnicities. For intersectional feminists, simply eliminating patriarchy would not offer liberation for all women; systemic racism or White supremacy, heterosexism, class exploitation, imperialism, and other forms of oppression must also be eliminated alongside patriarchy before all people are truly free. Cultural Feminism

Cultural feminism asserts that women and men are fundamentally different from each other and that women’s inherent qualities, characteristics, and ways of being are needed in the public arena.

This form of feminist thought was prevalent in the late 1800s through 1920 in the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, as women sought the right to vote. Certainly, strains of cultural feminism have persisted in U.S. society ever since. Whenever someone argues that women are nurturing and caring, and that these qualities are needed to effectively address social problems, that is cultural feminism.

Waves of Feminist Social Movement in the United States The first wave of feminist social movement in the United States was the women’s suffrage movement (1848–1920), which sought the right to vote for women. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is widely considered the event that kicked off this wave of women’s movement, and it is also considered the first women’s rights convention held in the United States. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention, were abolitionists who met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Both women were barred from the convention floor because of their gender, and their collective indignation led them to organize the Seneca Falls Convention near Stanton’s home in upstate New York eight years later. In this wave of the feminist movement, suffragettes gathered, marched, gave speeches, signed petitions, and argued again and again that women deserved the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The first wave of the feminist movement was characterized both by strong alliances with the abolitionist movement and by racism that kept women of color and their concerns and agendas from being centered within the movement. In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The second wave of feminist social movement in the United States, from the 1960s through the early 1980s, sought further advancement for women beyond the right to vote. The second wave of feminism started when Betty Friedan published her influential book The Feminine Mystique in 1963. She cofounded and was elected the first president of the National Organization of Women (NOW). The women’s liberation movement falls

Feminism

under this wave, and both liberal and radical feminists organized and sought gains for women in large numbers during this period. Liberal feminists sought legal, economic, political, and social advancements for women and tended to be the dominant type of feminist portrayed by mainstream media. Because the second wave of feminism focused on establishing equality with men with regard to legal, economic, and political areas, its goals were strongly aligned with providing women with opportunities to achieve leadership positions. At the same time, radical feminists of color were incredibly politically active, and they built coalitions designed to move beyond liberal reforms into greater structural change for all women. Women like the Combahee River Collective, made up of Black lesbian feminists who had faced sexism in the Black liberation movement and racism in the women’s liberation movement, formed their own organizations (circa 1974) that would center the concerns, agendas, and voices of Black women. The third wave of feminist movement, spanning from approximately 1990 through about 2010, focused on including the voices of women from different social locations, which is a person’s place in the social structure based on their placement in a combination of categories around race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexualities, age, and others. This wave, characterized by a level of inclusion that had not been present in the earlier waves of feminist movement, did not have as central a focus as the previous two waves, as women in this wave held a variety of different concerns and agendas, based on social location. Intersectional feminism became very prevalent within this wave, as the omissions and mistakes of former waves became clear to many third-wave feminist activists. As the examination of systemic racism became far more prevalent within feminist movement, the examination of the personal experiences and narratives of women from diverse backgrounds also became central. During this wave, issues such as sexual assault, sexual harassment, sex trafficking, pornography, queer theory, ecofeminism, and outsider-within epistemologies were brought forward as multiple voices were included in this disparate movement.

355

The fourth wave of feminist movement began around 2012 in the United States and continued the focus on inclusion and intersectionality. This wave is more virtual, as so much of movement activism occurs on social media and conveys organizing information and principles through the Internet. Because the Internet is a space where anyone can post, the multiple, intersectional voices that characterized third-wave feminism have continued, amplified by social media. Instead of depending on traditional publishing venues, the sharing of feminist thought has been democratized and is therefore open to anyone with a feminist concern they want to share. For example, the #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke to address oppression faced by girls of color, became a viral hashtag in October 2017. At that time, actress–producer Alyssa Milano began tweeting about allegations of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse, and she subsequently asked women to simply post “#MeToo” on social media if they had faced any kind of sexual abuse, assault, or harassment throughout their lives. The numbers of women who posted #MeToo were staggering to onlookers who had no idea how many women in their lives had experienced these forms of exploitation. In the #MeToo movement, alongside women, a number of nonbinary and trans* folx joined in, as well as men, to show how widespread sexual abuse is in U.S. society. Cynthia M. Ganote See also Diversity; Economic Justice; Feminine Mystique; Gender Stereotypes; Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth; MeToo Movement; Patriarchy and Its Origins; Sexual Harassment; Women’s Movement

Further Readings Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–168.

356

Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society

hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center (2nd ed.). London: Pluto Press. Hartmann, H. I. (1979). The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: Towards a more progressive union. Capital & Class, 3(2), 1–33. doi:10.1177/ 030981687900800102

FILM AND LEADERS IN POLITICS, SPORTS, AND SOCIETY Film inspires, influences, and educates, so its representation of leaders and the qualities of leadership have a powerful impact on culture, communities, and individuals. Business and management use films to train those who aspire to be effective leaders. Because Hollywood continues to dominate the global film industry, it occupies an important role in the representation of leadership in films that focus on political and historical leaders, sports figures, and social justice advocates, including some films that illustrate the characteristics of poor leadership.

Politics and History What is common to all films about leadership is conflict. Film leaders face resistance, obstacles, and attacks and through these challenges demonstrate their abilities or lack thereof. The American presidency serves as one of the most popular and successful settings to investigate leadership on film. The American President (1995), a romantic comedy, offers one of the most idealized views of the role. Facing reelection, the unmarried president is tempted to compromise. Thanks to a love interest, however, the president realigns his election campaign to his values, retains his integrity, makes the right choices regarding crime and climate change, and wins the election. Portrayals based on real-life events also trend toward optimistic endings, no matter how dire the consequences may appear earlier in the film. Based on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days (2000) pits John F. Kennedy’s personal commitment to peace against a formidable cold war enemy. The film illustrates what playwright Arthur

Miller defined as the essential characteristic of American presidents: They need to look like they go to church on Sunday, but they must be willing to drop the bomb on Monday. The film demonstrates John F. Kennedy’s integrity and his willingness to make tough decisions, even those that violate his commitment to peaceful conflict resolution. Although the crisis is resolved peacefully, John F. Kennedy did support a military alternative. The film concludes with his famous A Strategy for Peace speech, which not only absolves Kennedy of even thinking about a violent solution to the situation but also serves to highlight the film’s preference for a world leader as a peacemaker, not a warmonger. Lincoln (2012) avoids hagiographical representation of this murdered leader by including the mundane realities of political work. Lincoln was a visionary, but he was also a tireless politician entrenched in the unglamorous and often thankless details of government and policy. The film also suggests that the American democratic system supported his success. Here, then, film leaders rely on not only people but also structures to succeed. In light of Lincoln’s assassination, it is clear that while political systems helped end slavery and the Civil War, not all Americans supported these outcomes. The film ends with Lincoln’s second inaugural speech urging reconciliation, yet another example of Hollywood’s preference for leaders who negotiate conflict peacefully. Hollywood deems lack of self-knowledge and restrains the causes of poor leadership, as evidenced in two recent films about the American presidency, Frost/Nixon (2008) and W (2008). Nixon underestimates his journalistic opponent and overestimates his own media savvy, ironically ignoring his earlier loss during the first televised presidential debates. W suggests that George W. Bush did not want to be president but did so to appease familial expectations, resulting in one of the most challenging presidencies during a difficult period in recent American history. Perhaps as an example of leading from the middle, The Butler (2013) offers an unusual view of the American presidency and civil rights. Told from the perspective of Eugene Allen, an African-

Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society

American butler who served under eight presidents, the film highlights Allen’s leadership qualities: his work ethic, his persistence, and his love of his country. All earn him an invitation to the presidential inauguration of Barack H. Obama. Allen not only overcomes racial stereotypes but also demonstrates that true leadership need not happen publicly. His private service in the White House supported numerous presidents. Hollywood world leader films generally uphold some version of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) great man theory, which proposed that significant historical change occurs because of the work of great people. In Darkest Hour (2017), wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, defeats the Nazis and enables the Allies to triumph. In Elizabeth, the young Renaissance monarch overcomes war, sabotage, and a poor public relations image, which ultimately established not only her but also England as a world power. Selma (2014), about Martin Luther King Jr.’s march for civil rights, and Gandhi (1982) suggest that while great men can do a lot, they cannot accomplish it all on their own.

Sports In sports films, heart, hard work, and sometimes supernatural intervention create leaders. The Oscar-winning film Rocky (1976), for example, offered hope to a generation discouraged by the realities of the 1970s. Rocky’s determination not necessarily to win but to compete imbues him with a superhuman ability to withstand any and all punches. While Heaven Can Wait (1978) offered an otherworldly view of football, it is the great America pastime that offers the most examples of leadership by magic, superstition, and dumb luck. The Natural (1984) presents Roy Hobbs’s childhood in a fashion similar to that of Superman. Using the wood from a tree struck by lightning near the place where his father died, he wins games and overcomes a bribery scandal. In Field of Dreams (1989), a farmer hears voices, builds a baseball diamond, and hosts the ghosts of baseball legends at his games. Based on the real-life story of Billy Beane, Moneyball (2011) pits a new statistical way of

357

recruitment against baseball’s traditional methods. Beane’s leadership qualities, then, include not only persistence and determination but also recognizing and implementing change. Most importantly, Beane’s methods work, showing that getting results are among the most important characteristics of a leader. For many, sports become the place where leaders who have been denied access to support systems appear. Named after African American baseball star Jackie Robinson’s number, 42 (2013) charts the leadership of not only Robinson but also Brooklyn Dodgers’s owner Branch Rickey and fellow teammates such as Pee Wee Reese. All stand up for racial equality and successfully integrate American baseball. Invictus (2009) shows how a rugby team united a country through the leadership of Nelson Mandela and coach Francois Pienaar, who took an all-White South African team and crafted it to represent a racially diverse but now united South Africa. After agreeing to play softball during the World War II, the women in A League of Their Own (1992) learn that they not only have what it takes to play softball but they also gain a sense of their personal power. Playing, winning, and losing develop leadership skills that help some learn to read, some to leave abusive relationships, and for all of us to learn that “throwing like a girl” is a compliment.

Social Justice Whereas the paths to success in sports films are fairly clear—play, win, or at least survive the game—the social justice arena is murkier. Successful leaders in such films are often outsiders, even criminals. Based on a real-life story, Erin Brockovich (2000) chronicles the work of an unemployed single mother whose tenacity and nearly self-destructive candor exposes an energy company’s toxic dumping. Although most leadership books would not condone her methods, they work in this film. Brockovich speaks truth to power, persists, and sacrifices personal comforts for the common good. Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) successfully redeems the negative stereotypes associated with the American Black Panther movement by

358

Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society

focusing on Fred Hampton’s relentless pursuit of racial equality and recognition for the African American community and William O’Neal’s devastating betrayal, which led to his murder. Here, through his establishment of educational, health, and food programs, Hampton embodies a leader who understands the daily needs of his constituencies while working toward more long-term goals. Based on the biography of AIDS patient and activist Ron Woodroof, The Dallas Buyers Club (2013) also transforms a criminal into a hero. By illegally selling a promising AIDS drug, AZT, Woodroof not only extends individual lives but his work also accelerates the development of more effective AIDS treatments when the country and the world were content to let AIDS sufferers perish. Leaders, then, often bend the rules because the prevailing system or community is often unaware, uninformed, incompetent, or corrupt. The film noir genre is filled with private detectives, often outcasts marginally associated with the criminal justice system, who solve crimes and establish law and order more effectively than the socially sanctioned leaders. In Double Indemnity (1944), for example, an insurance man with intuition like a bloodhound bests his boss and solves a murder. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) uses an unlikely teen to rid the world of a serial killer. Women in leadership films are often depicted breaking the glass ceiling. Recently, Hidden Figures (2016) addressed not only stereotypes about African Americans but also female math phobia, showing the women mathematicians and the math behind astronaut John Glenn’s first space launch in 1962. Silence of the Lambs (1991) challenges the lead female character Clarice Starling to work with the male-dominated FBI and catch a serial killer, both of which require truth-telling, tenacity, courage, and stamina. The romantic comedy Working Girl (1988) and Mean Girls (2004) demonstrate that other women often thwart female leadership, with Mean Girls offering suggestions for change. Women must recognize the problem, work with other women, communicate, and support one another for the greater good. Salt of the Earth (1954), created by a several blacklisted artists during the era of the House

Committee on Un-American Activities and anti-communist public mania, offers a unique leadership situation—leaders being led. Mexican American men strike because of poor working conditions in a California mine. When the men land in jail, the women volunteer to walk the picket lines. The men resist—this is man’s work. The women, however, insist, and in the end, they win the strike, showing the men and audiences that women can and should lead.

Conclusion As depicted in Hollywood films, leaders who are self-aware possess integrity, grit, determination, a commitment to the common good, and an understanding of the needs of their constituencies. Although these films reward results, they are not always necessary; instead, the willingness to play the game and fight the good fight are often just as important as the bottom line or the final score. Many leaders in film are portrayed as good and noble, but there among them are those who take matters into their own hands when necessary, breaking the law and disturbing the status quo to create a better world. Although traditionally Hollywood has tended to depict great men, it has begun to focus more on women and minority group leaders, thereby assuming a leadership role in the realm of diversity. Ann C. Hall See also Diversity; History; Leadership and Empathy on the Screen; Social Justice; Theater and Leadership

Further Readings Bogle, D. (2019). Hollywood black: The stars, the films, the filmmakers. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press. Clemens, J. K., & Wolff, M. (1999). Movies to manage by. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Great movies on leadership and management. (2014). IMDB.com. Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/list/ ls058431361/ Miller, A. (2001). On politics and the art of acting. National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved from https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jeffersonlecture/arthur-miller-biography

Film, Television, and Social Change Rollins, P. C., & O’Connor, J. E. (Eds.). (2003). Hollywood’s White House: The American presidency in film and history. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.

FILM, TELEVISION, CHANGE

AND

SOCIAL

Film, or cinema, is a significant art form through which to explore leadership. Humans have shared stories of leadership since our beginnings, through cave paintings, oral histories, religious ritual, literature, music, theater, and other arts. In modern history, humans turn to the visual storytelling of film to provide meaning about the human condition. The arts help humans make sense of their lives and socialize them to the norms and cultural expectations of the times in which they live. Importantly, the arts can also serve as a catalyst for social change. Films—and television series— allow people to see, hear, and become emotionally invested in people, including fictional characters they may never meet in their actual lives or environments. Viewers identify with protagonists, and sometimes antagonists, in ways that can prompt them to reflect on how they would behave in a similar situation or prompt them to take action on issues of social justice. Acknowledging leadership as an embodied, relational, and emotional construct leads to the realization of the power visual texts command to explain, model, and enhance comprehension and experience of leaders, followers, and the act of leadership.

Leadership and Film Leadership, as a set of behaviors and actions in connection with others, is demonstrated through film fiction in ways that can influence how people understand and interact with leaders in the real world. Leaders in films can also influence the desire to be a leader and determine how someone might behave in that role. In essence, leaders in films can act as role models that people often compare to the leaders they encounter in their real lives. This may not be fair to real-world leaders, as

359

many film leaders are idealized representations, but the comparison is made, nonetheless. Additionally, the production of films in the 21st century is often centered in the United States, which has a specific cultural approach to leaders, followers, and leadership that influences what stories get told, who tells the story, and where the story is shared. Historically, films have portrayed leaders as White men with legitimate positions of authority and power. These leaders are often identified through the great man theory of leadership that describes leaders as male, unique, frequently authoritarian, and skilled in leadership behaviors that other White men can never attain and that people of color or White women are simply barred from achieving. These portrayals mirrored their time and remain difficult to unravel in a contemporary context. These leadership images are embedded in the collective consciousness, as they play upon many centuries of human storytelling where societal power and authority was predominantly male. Examples of films containing this type of film leader would be Patton (1970), Triumph of the Will (1935), Henry V (1944), True Grit (1969), and Citizen Kane (1941). Yet beginning in the latter part of the 20th century, films started to explore the stories of leaders from more diverse perspectives. Some films fell into the trap of the White Messiah motif, where White men were prominent in the film narrative as leaders within communities of racial or ethnic minorities, such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and Avatar (2009). But other films maintained a strong vision of leaders and leadership embodied in women, racial and ethnic minorities, the disabled, LGBTQ people, as well as the young and the old. Films that are indicative of these diverse perspectives include Norma Rae (1979), Hidden Figures (2016), The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Stand and Deliver (1988), Milk (2008), Hunger Games (2012), He Named Me Malala (2015), Remember the Titans (2001), Fargo (1996), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and Whale Rider (2002). Primarily, films depict leaders with positive images, reflecting the positivity bias within much of the research and stories about leaders and leadership. Viewers see affirmative behaviors and relationships between leaders and followers as the narrative moves toward a satisfying conclusion.

360

Film, Television, and Social Change

The role modeling is comfortable, perhaps even timeworn, and casual viewers may not even be aware of the socionormative components of the film. Importantly, these narratives may present the leader with human flaws and complexities that add to the understanding of the many challenges leaders face and overcome in their relationships with followers and in pursuit of goals. But not all films depict leaders and leadership in a positive manner, which is a valuable means for exploring the influence of film on the understanding of leaders. The antagonist, or villain, of a film is often a person of legitimate authority or power in a position of leadership, even though their behaviors are in direct opposition to the ideal or even socially acceptable version of what constitutes leadership. They are seen as authoritarian, tyrannical, dangerous, and a threat to the protagonists and well-being of the society or organizational setting of the story. These types of negative portrayals are easy to spot and easily rebuffed due to the viewer’s general perceptions about role models and behaviors that they have already been socialized to accept or reject. There are films, however, in which the leader portrayal is more multifaceted, so that deciphering the positive attributes from the negative, or dark side, attributes can be complicated and challenges the ethical and moral foundation of collective understanding about leaders and leadership. The dark side of leadership is prominent in various films, such as The Devil Wears Prada (2006), V for Vendetta (2005), The Godfather trilogy (1972–1990), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and the Star Wars saga (1976–2019). Unlike characters who are simply one-dimensional villains, these leaders—Miranda Priestly, V, Vito Corleone/ Michael Corleone, Jordan Belfort, and Darth Vader—are presented in ways that influence the viewer toward a strong identification with the characters, such as admiration, a desire to emulate their lifestyle, or simply being enthralled by their charisma and indiscriminate exercise of power or wealth. Regardless of their abusive behaviors, illegal activities, and commission of atrocities such as murder, torture, and genocide, viewers empathize with them and overlook the negative aspects of their behaviors. Indeed, Darth Vader has become a cherished icon of popular culture. Films that demonstrate the dark side of leadership can be

instructive for understanding how people are drawn to toxic narcissistic leaders who will act in unethical, immoral, and illegal ways to reach their personal goals at the expense of collective goals and outside social boundaries. Film is further instructive for demonstrating shared leadership, emergent leaders, and the resolution of conflict. Not all leaders occupy a legitimate position of authority or have complete autonomy for decision-making. Shared leadership within a team structure can be a difficult concept for some people to navigate in their organizational lives, given that the default thinking about leaders is that of an individual in a position of authority and, consequently, the ability to make decisions or resolve conflicts within a group. Films can not only model how groups function but also demonstrate how an individual emerges from a group to be a team leader and influence the group toward its common goals. This is particularly effective when the emergent leader has had no previous expectation or intention of becoming a leader or who may be an outsider. This story line strengthens the understanding for a viewer that leadership can be learned and practiced by anyone who may have referent or expert power within a group. Finally, films also depict the contentious stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, and performing, as defined by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. The opportunity to view how teams function and resolve conflicts is noteworthy, particularly because conflict and overcoming obstacles to reach a goal are the foundation of all narratives. Examples of films that demonstrate team leadership and conflict resolution include The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), Remember the Titans (2001), Apollo 13 (1995), A League of Their Own (1992), Galaxy Quest (1999), The Magnificent Seven (1960/2016), and the Harry Potter series (2001–2011). A significant element of using films as a window for reflection on leaders and leadership appears in terms of intersectionality and diversity. Exploring the lives of others in ways that one does not personally experience generates greater understanding, empathy, and cultural intelligence and informs relational leadership practice. Films can expand a viewer’s knowledge and allow questions to be constructed surrounding issues of race, gender, class, faith, and ethnicity. Viewers can begin not only to question but also put aside their

Film, Television, and Social Change

biases and assumptions about those whom they perceive to be different from themselves. A strong argument can be made that science fiction films are well suited to discussions on multiculturalism, tolerance, class privilege, race, and gender, given that they examine and reflect contemporary real-world hopes and fears. Conversations and reflections about the social constructs of alien civilizations, future dystopic or utopic human societies, gender diversity, surface-level diversity, and more can be initiated through science fiction films. Implicit and explicit biases about fellow humans and sociopolitical environments are mitigated. Viewers experience the embodiment of leadership in ways that diverge from customary social representations and increase their ability to perceive and interpret leaders and leadership behaviors more deeply. As enlightened understanding develops, reflections can transfer the new perceptions back onto the reality of their own lived experiences and relationships with the expectation of personal changes in attitudes that inspire organizational and social changes. Examples of science fiction films that explore important issues of diversity and social justice include District 9 (2009), Avatar (2009), Brother from Another Planet (1984), Elysium (2013), 1984 (1984), and Gattaca (1997).

Television Consideration must also be given to television series that offer depictions of leaders and leadership practices. Nearly all television shows have at least one character who is a leader or in a position of authority. Even if that character is not the protagonist, the story line often explores the relationship of the protagonist with the leader. Television shows are also a more intimate personal experience for the audience, who watch in the privacy of homes over the course of many seasons, and viewers can become highly invested in the characters. The dedication to compelling characters remains strong in the 21st century, as streaming services and binge-watching television series become increasingly popular. Indeed, the long-form narratives of television can prove compelling and relevant to discussions of leaders and leadership as the narrative arc progresses over several seasons and viewers can witness in greater depth the complexity and development of a leader’s skills, qualities, and

361

relationships with followers. Examination of positive and negative attributes is also more apparent in many TV series, adding to the understanding of leaders. A few examples of television series about leaders and leadership include Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009), The Walking Dead (2010–2022), The Office (2005–2013), Game of Thrones (2011–2019), Madam Secretary (2014–2019), and the various series of the Star Trek franchise, which are interesting to view with a historical lens delineating the development of societal perceptions of race, gender, and leadership across the decades each series was produced.

Conclusion Although many films have been included here as examples, this is by no means an exhaustive list; readers will want to view more to increase their understanding of leaders and leadership. Other notable films about leaders and leadership include Suffragette (2015), Elizabeth (1998), The Queen (2006), Glory (1989), Gandhi (1982), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), The Post (2017), The Founder (2016), The Iron Lady (2011), Everest (2015), Avengers: Endgame (2019), Matrix Trilogy (1999–2003), and Wonder Woman (2017). Additional television series include Parks and Recreation (2009–2020), Falling Skies (2011–2015), Babylon 5 (1993–1998), and Money Heist (2017–2021). There are many other examples to be found as positive and negative representations of leaders flourish throughout film and television. Reflecting upon and developing one’s own leadership practices while accurately evaluating the practices of the leaders encountered in organizations and societies is facilitated through examining films. As depictions of leaders thrive in popular culture and streaming services increase access to films and television series produced outside of the United States, understanding how to identify, perceive, and interpret leaders and leadership behaviors becomes increasingly important. Kimberly Yost See also Film and Leadership in Politics, Sports, and Society; Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership; Leadership and Art; Leadership and Literature; Leadership and Music

362

Followership

Further Readings Bezio, K. M. S., & Yost, K. (2018). Leadership, popular culture, and social change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399. doi:10.1037/h0022100 Yost, K. (2014). From starship captains to galactic rebels: Leaders in science fiction television. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Yost, K. (2016). Mediating the future: Women political leaders in science fiction television. In C. Elliott, V. Stead, S. Mavin, & J. Williams (Eds.), Gender, media, and organization: Challenging mis(s)representations of women leaders and managers (pp. 197–208). InfoAge. Yost, K. (2017). Star-Crossed: Imagining leadership in science fiction narratives. In J. Storey, J. Hartley, J. Denis, P. t’Hart, & D. Ulrich (Eds.), Routledge companion to leadership (pp. 437–439). New York, NY: Routledge.

FOLLOWERSHIP Followership is the study and practice of how people engage with leaders to cocreate leadership and its outcomes. Followership recognizes the agency people have in follower positions and roles and the power followers have in co-constructing leadership. In so doing, it helps us to understand how followers interrelate with leaders to coproduce leadership outcomes, for better and for worse. As a field of study, followership is subsumed under the larger metatheory of leadership. It emerged out of the need to overcome the problem of the romance of leadership, the tendency to attribute all leadership outcomes, both good and bad, to leaders. The romance of leadership is a hero view that glorifies or demonizes leaders while failing to recognize the critical role followers play in empowering leaders and contributing to leadership outcomes. Followership theory corrects this problem by providing a more balanced approach to leadership. Instead of passive recipients of a leader’s influence, followers are seen as full partners in the leadership process, making choices, engaging in

certain types of behaviors, and bringing identities, personalities, and relational needs that affect the leadership relationship and its outcomes. In this way, followership helps move the focus in leadership theory from a one-way downward influence process of leaders leading and followers following to the recognition that leadership is a two-way exchange in which individuals dynamically influence (lead) and respond to (follow) one another to co-construct leadership and coproduce leadership outcomes. This entry begins by defining followership in relation to leadership. It then explains how this leadership–followership relation works to both co-construct identities and roles and coproduce leadership outcomes. Co-construction means creating leadership through the leader–follower relation, and coproduction means using this leader–follower relation to generate outcomes. The final sections address followership in practice and overview key areas in need of future work in followership research and practice.

Defining Followership Followership is broadly defined as the characteristics, behaviors, and identities that followers bring to the leadership process and the way that followers engage with leaders to cocreate leadership and its outcomes. Early writers on followership emphasized the hierarchical view and power differentials between leaders and followers, categorizing the follower as submissive and the leader as holding all the power. In more recent iterations, followers are seen as holding much more power. For example, followers today have tremendous influence on leaders across a range of settings, including organizations, politics, and the broader society. While research has now largely debunked the assumption that all followers are submissive, the notion of unequal power and influence dynamics are still central to definitions of leadership and followership. Leaders and followers interact in asymmetrical influence relations, with one party having more influence (leading) and another party accepting and going along with that influence (following). Some followers are happy to take direction and follow orders without much input,

Followership

but others seek to engage with leaders in collaborative ways that enhance the coproduction of leadership outcomes. Regardless of follower style, however, one thing is made certain in followership research: Without followers there are no leaders. Unless someone is willing to grant leadership to another and act as a follower in relation to them, there is no leadership.

363

the most knowledge or power, social identity theory suggests that followers bestow power onto a leader who most demonstrates the prototypical characteristics of the group. In essence, followers decide to endorse the agenda and goals of the group member who most closely resembles their shared prototype of a leader. Implicit Leadership Theory

Leadership–Followership Co-Constructions Followership is at its core a relational theory and phenomenon. It recognizes that leadership is a cocreation of leaders and followers working together in asymmetrical exchanges to get things done. In these exchanges, one party takes on a leader or leading identity, role, or behavior and the other takes on a follower or following identity, role, or behavior. These asymmetrical exchanges are dynamic, meaning that leaders do not always lead and followers do not always follow. Instead, the most effective leadership co-constructions are those in which each party, regardless of formal position or title, knows when to step in (lead) and step back (follow) to capitalize on what they bring to the exchange for the best outcomes. How they do this depends on characteristics followers (and leaders) bring to the relationship, including follower identities, schemas, and role orientations, that influence choices they make in how to co-construct leadership. Follower Identity

Follower identity is how followers see and define themselves. It helps address the questions of “Who am I in this situation?” and “What should I do?” Follower identity is defined as one’s working self-concept that includes followership schemas, past experiences, and how a person sees themself as a follower in the future. Follower identity influences not only the way individuals identify themself as a follower but also the way they choose to interact in relation with leaders. For example, the social identity theory of leadership describes how followers’ identity with a group and the prototypical characteristics of group members create the context for a leader to emerge. Instead of suggesting that the leader is the one with

The social identify theory of leadership is consistent with the concept of prototypical and anti-prototypical traits identified in implicit leadership theory (ILT). ILT states that the schemas individuals hold about what a leader looks like and how they should behave influence their choices about whether and how to follow a leader. In organizational settings, a prototypical schema, or ILT, involves expectations that leaders are charismatic, intelligent, attractive, dedicated, sensitive, and strong. Anti-prototypical ILTs involve expectations that leaders are tyrannical and masculine. In society, ILTs tend to be more fluid, with some followers holding prototypical schemas for masculine and powerful leaders who will fight for them to get things done, while others hold prototypical ILTs of more feminine and higher purpose-driven leaders who will work for the greater good. ILTs help followers make sense of the social and organizational context. They help followers recognize and categorize someone as a leader and assist in making attributions about whether the leader is good or bad even in the absence of performance information. For example, when leaders match a follower’s ILT, then leadership is co-constructed, and the leader and follower engage in a leadership relation. When the leader does not match the ILT, followers may not acknowledge the other as an effective leader or may struggle to engage effectively with the leader. In this case, leadership may not be constructed, and if it is a formal hierarchical relationship, it will construct management rather than leadership. Leader and Follower Identity Construction

Identities and schemas (ILTs) influence how individuals claim and grant leader and follower

364

Followership

identities to one another. For an individual to be seen as a leader, they must make a leader identity claim (“I will be the leader”) while another offers a leader identity grant (“You can be the leader”), while at the same time the other must make a follower identity claim (“I will be the follower”) that is granted by the leader (“You can be the follower”). When these things align, leadership and followership are co-constructed. When they do not align—for example, when no one chooses to step up as a leader or when multiple people compete for leader claims and grants— claims and grants need to be negotiated, or leadership and followership will not be effectively co-constructed.

Leader–Follower Coproductions Coproduction approaches focus on how leader– follower relational dynamics affect outcomes once leadership and followership identities and roles are constructed. These approaches view followers as active participants in the leadership process and attribute outcomes not only to leader characteristics and style but also to follower characteristics, traits, and effectiveness in working with leaders to accomplish outcomes. They recognize that followers can have powerful impacts on leadership co-constructions and outcomes. Implicit Followership Theory

Implicit followership theory (IFT) extends the concept of ILTs to followership. It focuses on the implicit beliefs or schemas that individuals hold about follower traits and behaviors. Prototypical IFTs are associated with traits such as being industrious, having enthusiasm, and being a good citizen. Anti-prototypical IFTs are associated with being insubordinate, incompetent, or showing conformity. Leader IFTs influence how they classify others as a good or bad follower. Research has shown that leader IFTs are associated with various relational, individual, and organizational outcomes. For example, followers who match a leader’s IFT tend to have higher leader–member exchange, employee creativity, career success, and job performance.

Follower Role Orientations

Follower role orientation is rooted in role theory and addresses specific beliefs about how followers should behave while interacting with leaders in a follower position or role. It identifies three types of followership role orientations. The first is a passive orientation, which includes beliefs that followers should be passive and deferent and that the role is best performed by executing a leader’s directives in an effective and diligent way. The second is a coproduction orientation, which involves the belief that followers should actively contribute to the leadership process by sharing information, collaborating in decision-making, and challenging the leader when necessary. The third is an antiauthoritarian orientation, which involves the belief that followers should resist a leader’s influence to protect themselves from being manipulated and dominated. Antiauthoritarian follower role orientations are associated with non-followership. When individuals act on an antiauthoritarian orientation, they are choosing not to follow, which means that are not giving their leader power over them and leadership is not being co-constructed. In this case, the relationship is one of manager–subordinate rather than leader–follower. Follower role orientations are associated with how followers behave and how leaders see the follower’s behavior. Research shows that coproduction orientation is associated with more voice to the leader and more proactive problem-solving, and leaders rate followers with a coproduction orientation as more contributive and effective overall. Passive orientation is associated with silence (failure to voice) and upward delegation, meaning that employees pass problems upward to their leaders rather than try to identify solutions, and leaders see them as less effective performers and offering lower contribution to leadership outcomes. Followership role orientation shows that followers who want to be more effective and productive partners to leaders should bring a coproduction orientation to their work, but whether this works, and whether followers are able to act on their role orientation, depends on leadership and contextual factors. When followers find themselves in situations with climates or leaders who are counter to the role orientation,

Followership

they can experience more negative personal outcomes, including higher dissonance, stress, and burnout. Toxic Illusio

Followers are not only involved in positive leadership coproductions, they also hold primary responsibility for the cocreation of toxic leadership and its harmful outcomes, a phenomenon known as toxic illusio. Toxic illusio is the tendency of followers to believe in a toxic leader’s game and to participate in its co-construction. Followers do this because they have high personal uncertainty in their lives—they believe the world is against them in some way and that the leader is uniquely standing up for them. Leaders feed this dynamic by fostering strong us versus them in-group and out-group identities. Each needs the other for the co-construction to work, as followers put leaders in positions of power and leaders provide capital and sources of power the followers would not have otherwise. The moral problem of toxic constructions is that they push too far in favor of the in-group in ways that are harmful, and even deadly, to the out-group. The outcomes of toxic leadership are fundamentally detrimental to the welfare of humanity and could not occur without the ardent support of their followers. They can be seen in examples of toxic leadership ranging from political (Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Adolf Hitler) to business (Theranos fraud case, discrimination at Uber) and everyday workplaces (toxic climates and cultures). By joining and sustaining the leader’s toxic illusion, individuals are not innocent bystanders or passive followers, but willful, self-interested agents in the leader’s toxic game. In this way, the toxic illusio is an example of not only toxic leadership but also toxic followership.

Practitioner-Based Perspectives on Followership Two practitioner models of followership behavior have been widely popular since the 1990s. The first is a model advanced by Robert Kelley that specifies styles of followership behavior along two continua from passive to active and critical to

365

noncritical thinking. Followers who are passive and noncritical thinkers are classified as sheep, engaging in predominantly obedient behaviors such as silently taking direction, deferring to the leader, and remaining blindly loyal to the leader and the leader’s initiatives. At the other end of the spectrum, exemplary followers are active and critical thinkers who offer opinions, question decisions, and take initiative to offer creative solutions to problems. Although some research has been conducted on Kelley’s model, there is limited research evidence to validate the different styles or draw conclusions about how each style supports or detracts from the leadership process. A second model that has gained traction from a practitioner perspective was advanced by Ira Chaleff and describes the behavior of courageous followers. According to Chaleff, courageous followers need to question their leaders’ actions and decisions, speak truth to power, and deliver sensitive or unpleasant information in order to help organizations be more ethical and successful. Followers can use styles that fall into four different classifications including implementer, partner, individualist, and resource, depending on the extent to which they support and challenge the leader. Underlying this approach is the assumption that leaders need followers who vigorously support the mission and are willing to challenge leaders to maintain effective and ethical functioning of an organization.

Future Research Directions Although research on followership continues to grow, there is much we need to learn about the characteristics and behaviors of followers and the impact they have on leadership. As followership research continues to develop, there is the risk of following the mistakes that have been made in leadership scholarship by placing too much emphasis on the follower and not enough emphasis on the process or relationship. As such, followership is an element that should be incorporated in the larger theoretical framework of leadership, and followership should be positioned as a necessary variable in leadership research. Within the role-based coproduction perspective, researchers have begun balancing the focus on

366

Foucault and Postmodernism

leaders and followers by examining the congruence between leader and follower IFTs and the effects that congruence, or lack thereof, has on relationship quality, performance, and follower engagement. Building on this research, it would be beneficial to understand the effect that congruence of leader and follower role orientations has on followers’ ability to act in alignment with their role orientation. For example, coproduction followers working for an authoritarian leader or in a high power distance context may find it difficult to act in alignment with their role expectations, forcing them to temper their actions in alignment with the environment. Testing these propositions would be fruitful for understanding how misalignment with a leader, or within a specific context, may negatively affect stress, well-being, or self-assessments of effectiveness. Utilizing the co-construction approach, researchers could study the way individuals claim a followership identity, how their behavior follows identity claims, and their assessments of leader– follower relational effectiveness. Work in this area has already started with researchers investigating how individuals negotiate the interactional identity process and the risks associated with claiming a follower identity. Future research could explore how claiming a follower identity is perceived by the leader or whether individuals initially claiming a follower identity later switch to claiming a leader identity. Finally, given that there are few theories regarding follower behavioral styles, researchers could conduct validation studies on the models advanced by Kelley and Chaleff in an attempt to understand both how followers assume and enact different followership styles and how leaders respond to different followership styles. Such research might develop scales to measure followership styles, validate measures for construct and criterion validity, and examine the combined effects of varying leadership and followership styles on work group and organizational effectiveness. Mary Uhl-Bien and Melissa Carsten See also Implicit Leadership Theory; Leader–Member Exchange; Romance of Leadership; Leadership and Management; Social Identity Theory

Further Readings Carsten, M. K., Uhl-Bien, M., & Huang, L. (2018). Leader perceptions and motivation as outcomes of followership role orientation and behavior. Leadership, 14(6), 731–756. doi:10.1177/1742715017720306 Carsten, M. K., Uhl-Bien, M., West, B., Patera, J., & McGregor, R. (2010). Exploring social constructions of followership: A qualitative study. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(3), 543–562. Chaleff, I. (2003). The courageous follower: Standing up to and for our leaders (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. DeRue, D. S., & Ashford, S. J. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 627–647. doi:10.5465/ amr.35.4.zok627 Hogg, M. A. (2001). A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(3), 184–200. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0503_1 Hollander, E. P. (1992). Leadership, followership, self, and others. The Leadership Quarterly, 3(1), 43–54. Kelley, R. (1992). The power of followership: How to create leaders people want to follow, and followers who lead themselves. New York, NY: Broadway Business. Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78–102. Mergen, A., & Ozbilgin, M. F. (2021). Understanding the followers of toxic leaders: Toxic illusio and personal uncertainty. International Journal of Management Reviews, 23, 45–63. doi:10.1111/ijmr.12240 Oc, B., & Bashshur, M. R. (2013). Followership, leadership and social influence. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(6), 919–934. Sy, T. (2010). What do you think of followers? Examining the content, structure, and consequences of implicit followership theories. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113(2), 73–84. Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 83–104.

FOUCAULT

AND

POSTMODERNISM

The French thinker Michel Foucault is one of the most cited authors within both the social sciences

Foucault and Postmodernism

and the humanities. His thinking encourages the deconstruction of assumptions about how power works as well as how knowledge is constructed through power relations. These ideas challenge many traditional theories of leadership that often take for granted power relations between leaders and followers as unidirectional. This entry introduces some of Foucault’s key ideas, elaborates on how they relate to postmodernist thought, and suggests ways in which they can inform the theory and practice of leadership.

A Brief Introduction to Michel Foucault Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is recognized as one of the most radical thinkers of his generation. Although he himself often defied definition, he has been characterized as an intellectual, philosopher, historian of thought, and activist (particularly in relation to Gay Rights). Foucault’s output spans multiple domains, from academic treatises to popular publications. His intellectual curiosity led him to revisit his views continuously, which means that his later writings often seem to contradict his earlier work. Reading Foucault can thus be both stimulating and frustrating, and, for those engaging with his writings, it is important to understand which Foucault one is reading. Foucault is most often associated with the philosophical branch of thought known as postmodernism. In opposition to the modernist approach, which seeks once-and-for-all definitions, the identification of causal relations—which can enhance humans’ ability to control the world around them—and certainty, postmodernism sees truth as contingent, that which is considered to be knowledge to be the result of power relations and recognizes language as a fluid signifier for making sense of the world, which is itself subject to contextual dynamics. Like Foucault, postmodernism defies definition more easily than it is defined. (Foucault, as well as others who orient themselves toward postmodernism, would be horrified to find their thinking solidified in a publication such as this encyclopedia. In fact the creation of an encyclopedia is itself a modernist activity, indicative of the belief that knowledge is the sort of phenomenon that lends itself to definitions and 2,000-word summaries.)

367

Before considering the way in which Foucault’s ideas can be brought to the domain of leadership, let us consider the three main strands of his thought. Foucault’s Archaeological Phase

During this early phase of his writings, Foucault developed an understanding about the way systems of thought are as much a product of discursive formations as they are a culmination of the ideas offered by individual contributors. By discursive formations, Foucault meant the ways in which knowledge is organized and codified. This thinking is captured in his text The Order of Things: The Archaeology of Human Sciences, which was published in 1966. In applying this idea to leadership, an archaeological account would notice the role certain journals play in producing a particular version of leadership. Even more importantly, those operating from this perspective would attend to the gatekeeping role editors play in determining what views of leadership are worthy of publication. Larger contextual factors, such as citation indexes and impact factor metrics, would be considered in relation to how they shape the field. Foucault’s archaeological thinking would encourage those studying this phenomenon to consider the dissemination processes and social dynamics that contribute to certain theories gaining popularity while others languish. Foucault’s Genealogical Phase

The second phase of Foucault’s work moves on to consider power dynamics more explicitly. This phase of work emerged from Foucault’s appreciation that archaeology provided no way of explaining how transitions were made between one dominant mode of thought and another. By showing how changes in a system’s discourse are connected to a system’s power structures, Foucault was able to illustrate the connection between power and what is thought of as knowledge. It was also during this phase that Foucault developed his ideas about disciplinary structures (an idea which has subsequently informed organizational studies theorizing). His texts Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vols. 1 and 2, trace how

368

Foucault and Postmodernism

self-discipline replaced the overt disciplining of the body that had been prevalent in Europe until the late 19th century. Other radical views about power were also expanded within these writings, including the understanding of power not as a possession of an individual but rather as an emergent property of social interactions. An important implication of this rendering for leadership is the understanding that rather than being something to squash, resistance is important within systems because it reveals where power is operating. In relation to leadership theorizing, Foucault’s genealogical output challenges leadership scholars to reflect on the ways in which much leadership theorizing could itself be construed as a disciplining construct, in the very way that it separates communities into leaders and followers. As such, much conventional theorizing encourages us to believe that followers are supposed to act in certain ways, to take direction and align with the purpose that the leader sets. However, scholars such as Donna Ladkin and Joana Probert have also used Foucault’s writings from this phase to problematize the assumption that power within leadership relations acts in a unimodal way (from leaders who have power to followers who do not). In particular, they highlight the fluid ways in which power moves within communities with the result that the outcomes of leadership are often indeterminate and cannot be predicted in the ways prescribed by much leadership theorizing. This appreciation of indeterminacy and contingency is very aligned to postmodern ways of understanding how the world works. Foucault’s Ethical Phase

In the final phase of Foucault’s output, he returned to early Greek writings to explore questions of ethics, particularly by asking how one might live ethically despite the constraints of the disciplinary structures in which one operates. Among the ideas he worked with, the notion of self-care (Greek: epimeileisthai sautou) has particular resonance for the practice of leading. It is critical to point out that the kind of self-care to which Foucault and the Greeks referred is very different from 21st-century understandings more

aligned with self-coddling or navel-gazing. Instead, self-care is more akin to self-interrogation, where the individual only becomes a subject through deep reflexivity about their choices in the face of disciplinary structures and life circumstances. Furthermore, the notion of the self at the heart of this version of self-care is communally, rather than individually, based. Because of this, self-care is a way of caring for the community and society in which one lives as much as it requires one to look out for one’s individuality. Following from this, Foucault’s third phase of writing also delves into issues of governance and how individuals might best prepare themselves for governing others. Nathan Harter’s book Foucault on Leadership: The Leader as Subject provides an elaborated account of how these ideas might be incorporated into thinking about how leaders should be developed.

Applying Foucault’s Ideas to Leadership Whereas since the 1990s Foucault’s writings have been used extensively to inform the field of organization studies, apart from being cited by critical leadership scholars, his works have not been as influential as they might be within more mainstream leadership theorizing. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that much leadership theorizing focuses on trying to determine recipes for leadership success in quite modernistic terms. Indeed, the pursuit of recipes for effective leadership itself could be seen as a modernist project, and one which is in direct opposition to both Foucault’s project and that of postmodernism. One leadership context in which Foucault’s ideas have been applied is that of educational leadership. This perhaps is a result of the fact Foucault himself studied educational systems as places where disciplinary structures operated with pronounced intentionality (similar to prisons and insane asylums). Within educational scholarship, scholars have explored the disciplinary intent of curricula, how the very structure of school terms themselves shape learning experiences, as well as how exams (particularly standardized ones) can hinder meaningful learning through the way in which they prescribe and test the accumulation of concepts and principles. From a Foucauldian perspective, educational leaders are alerted to the

Foundational Lawgiving

invisible structures which color learners’ experiences and consider how they might be revealed and subverted. Foucault’s thinking, as well as postmodernism more generally, challenges much that is held dear within leadership thinking: the assumption that leaders exert power on followers and influence them unquestionably; the possibility of no-fail leadership recipes; and even the idea that who is acting as a leader and who is acting as a follower can be readily identified. However, by engaging with this radical thinking, scholars of leadership and those who practice it may find new ways of understanding this phenomenon. Indeed, given the inability of leadership scholars to agree upon its final definition, perhaps leadership lends itself to postmodernism more readily than one might imagine. Donna Ladkin See also Coercion and Ethics; Ethics of Deception and Manipulation; Philosophy; Social Identity Theory; Social Motivation

Further Readings Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. (Trans. A. Sheridan). London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1985). The history of sexuality 2: The use of pleasure. (Trans. R. Hurley). New York, NY: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1996). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York, NY: Vintage. Foucault, M. (2001). The hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France 1981–1982. F. Gros (Ed.), London: Picador. Harter, N. (2016). Foucault on leadership: The leader as subject. London: Routledge. Ladkin, D., & Probert, J. (2019). From sovereign to subject: Applying Foucault’s conceptualization of power to leading and studying power within leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(4), 1013. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.101310

FOUNDATIONAL LAWGIVING The concept of foundational lawgiving encompasses two distinct but closely related subjects of

369

political leadership. On the one hand, we may speak of the establishment of a collective order by means of positive law—that is, a code of written, fundamental statutes that originally constitutes the body politic. The Constitution of the United States of America framed and ratified in the late 18th century is a prime example of this, as is the postapartheid Constitution of the Republic of South Africa in effect since the late 20th century. On the other hand, by foundational lawgiving, we may speak of a grander phenomenon than the drafting of a written constitution at a discrete point in time. In this broader meaning, it refers to the process whereby a loose grouping of people, who may not have much common history with one another, come together into a clear, well-defined association with a sense of peoplehood common to them all. This second meaning is surely both more complex and more nebulous than the first, yet the questions it raises about political leadership may be the more illuminating ones to consider. This entry goes on to examine texts that prove to be rich sources of foundational lawgiving in areas of study such as political philosophy, literature, and religion. The entry concludes by offering guidance about ways in which students of leadership studies can apply what can be learned about foundational lawgiving from these texts. This broader significance of foundational lawgiving also incorporates a broader, and less commonly used, conception of that thing that is given, the law. Thinking beyond the idea of a statute, which is a written legal rule that one can locate in a code somewhere, the full concept of law conveys something more general; it is a guideline for human life, meaning most obviously behavior but also perhaps phenomena that are not usually classified as behavior, such as desire or thought. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 429–347 BCE) went so far as to suggest that law is a guideline for being. Plato’s specific formulation, expressed in his text Minos, is that law “wishes to be the discovery of what is.” Another way of clarifying this point is to consider what is meant in the idea of a norm, which is a common synonym of law rooted in the Latin word norma (i.e., a rule or a standard). The English word normal is the adjective related to the noun norm, and it describes what behavior, thinking, activity, and so forth are

370

Foundational Lawgiving

considered to be typical in a specific condition of being at a specific time. Consequently, the richer understanding of foundational lawgiving as a theme for political leadership entails the process of influencing people by means of laws in the broader sense, including most importantly those that are unwritten. It assumes, moreover, that human beings are not susceptible to being influenced in these essential ways through the legislation of written statutes. While this formulation has the potential to sound, again, somewhat nebulous, there are plain, real-world examples to demonstrate that concept. The uncodified constitution of the United Kingdom is perhaps the most recognizable example of how a political organization can be ordered and securely guided through unwritten foundational laws. And there are many other elements that come together to make up the category of unwritten law: habits, traditions, customs, mores and morals, rites, public opinions, qualities of culture, and so on. These things are almost never written down in any book, but we know them as law insofar as they provide a reasonably stable guide or standard for human life.

The Analysis of Foundational Lawgiving in Political Philosophy The most developed and profound treatment of foundational lawgiving is located in key texts from the tradition of political philosophy, in addition to other humanistic works that share a close relation to that tradition, such as dramatic literature and religious texts. Moreover, the authors in this vein illuminate the manner in which we ought to think of this process as a kind of leadership, and in language that is squarely at home in leadership studies. Perhaps the best source from the ancient world is Plutarch (46–119), a Greek moral philosopher and historian well-known for his comparative biographical sketches of the most celebrated leaders from Greece and Rome. American transcendentalist thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson has referred to Plutarch’s work Parallel Lives as a bible for heroes. The Life of Lycurgus, for instance, reflects on the character and deeds of the illustrious foundational lawgiver for the ancient

city of Sparta. Plutarch highlights a number of essential character traits of Lycurgus, homing in on this leader’s exceptional virtues: an innate, commanding sense of justice and morality; surpassing wisdom and foresight; and irreproachable private virtues like gentleness, sobriety, and industriousness. Lycurgus leveraged these virtues, which were eminently visible to his followers in Sparta, to influence a wholesale transformation of Spartan politics and society, as if wiping the old habits and traditions away so as to build again from the ground up according to his own design. Plutarch argues that the renowned durability of Spartan laws—they lasted unchanged for half a millennium—derived from the foundational lawgiver’s success in cultivating the kind of citizens who could accept laws that were the best simply. By contrast, Athenian lawgiver Solon accepted the condition of his fellow citizens as a given and distributed to them the best laws that they could handle. Athens experienced, consequently, great instability once Solon left the city. Though Plutarch is the locus classicus for the theme of foundational lawgiving in ancient literature, his work is not the only source. Plato also discusses these ideas, considering Lycurgus specifically, in his dialogue Laws, and the The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon (ca. 430–354 BCE) is a meditation on the leadership story of the founder of Persia. Peter Drucker (1954) has referred to this last text as not only “the first systematic book on leadership” but also “still the best book on the subject” (p. 159). Florentine philosopher Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527) is both the original architect of modern political philosophy and a key source on foundational lawgiving. One of the central problems that Machiavelli explores in his work involves the conditions in which enterprising leaders establish new modes and orders—this being the major theme of his slim volume The Prince, one of the most influential texts on leadership to which we have access. Referring to the example of individuals like Romulus, Cyrus, Theseus, and Moses—all of whom he identifies as armed prophets—Machiavelli notes that these men owed their success to no one but themselves, for they all brought extraordinary virtue to the task of founding nations. Yet Machiavelli’s novel concept of virtue does not

Foundational Lawgiving

match the traditionally moral concept that, say, Plutarch insisted was characteristic of Lycurgus. Rather, the virtue of all great founders, according to Machiavelli, is a complex fusion of cleverness and violent anger. Stated another way, the essential elements of all foundational lawgiving are force and fraud, and Machiavelli exhorts leaders to be flexible in using these weapons according to circumstances. This emphasis on flexibility or adaptability is one way in which Machiavelli’s work has foreshadowed the development of situational approaches to leadership. Following in the Florentine’s footsteps through the march of modern philosophy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), although this philosopher from Geneva modified a number of Machiavelli’s key insights. For example, Rousseau’s doctrine of the lawgiver, discussed most directly in his On the Social Contract and On the Government of Poland, has no role for violent force as one of the tools available to the founding leader. Rather, the lawgiver emerges as a genius of subrational persuasion, a technique in which he is able to speak to, and shape, the affective side of the human soul so as to prepare people for the laws. In Rousseau’s radical view, the lawgiver must be capable of transforming humanity away from its natural tendency for self-love, toward a more patriotic love of the common good guided by what Rousseau calls the general will. Just like Machiavelli, however, Rousseau analyzes the example of Moses as being in many ways the quintessential paradigm of foundational lawgiving. And while the books of the Hebrew Bible featuring Moses are not, strictly speaking, works of political philosophy, his example is crucial to any discussion of this topic. The story of Moses is replete with universal themes that are relevant to leadership, such as the challenges of developing a connection with one’s followers; the elements of a long-term education into the role of leadership; a passionate, even indignant concern for justice; and the problem of communication between leader and follower (i.e., the Hebrew people), and also between leader and other leaders (i.e., Pharaoh). In Exodus, especially, readers witness the story of the Hebrew people’s liberation. Having lived in the dreadful condition

371

of slavery in Pharaoh’s Egypt for generations, the Hebrews were emancipated from their servitude by the strong hand of God, directed by the leadership of Moses and his brother Aaron, who served as Moses’s chief deputy. Moses is responsible for taking this group of people, living together with only a basic familial connection, and stamping on them a unique way of life. In other words, he serves as the founder of the nation of Israel and is widely recognized as such. Exceedingly important to this story is Moses’s giving of the Decalogue to the people at the base of Mt. Sinai—the 10 divine imperatives serving as foundational laws for Israel—not to mention his giving also the collection of particular laws known as the Book of the Covenant.

Relevance and Application: The Problem of Legislation What, finally, is the specific guidance that students of leadership should take from texts like these on foundational lawgiving? After all, nowadays it is not often, or ever, that people encounter the likes of Lycurgus or Moses, and it would be foolhardy for people to place their hopes for political leadership in individuals like these coming on the scene. It is also accurate to say that authors like Rousseau and the writer of Exodus, for example, did not intend for their writings to be a how-to textbook for leaders, the careful study of which would transform them into the next great lawgiver. Whether their desired end was philosophic speculation or religious devotion—or something else—these authors did not assume that the lives of such larger-than-life figures could simply be emulated. That said, there are a number of important points of relevance for leadership from this discussion of foundational lawgiving. The literature in leadership studies has long been very attentive to the importance of context, and the theme of foundational lawgiving is a natural complement to discussing the circumstantial aspects of leadership. Indeed, the multifaceted concept of unwritten law helps to clarify the different aspects of the societal context that leaders must confront, whether it is to try to shape these phenomena somehow or simply

372

Foundational Lawgiving

to be sensitive to the role they play in the interaction between leaders and followers. Most of the discussion surrounding foundational lawgiving tends to hit on political themes. But Drucker’s evaluation of Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus, from the perspective of theories of management, shows that these ideas are applicable to the foundation of other organizations, such as the business firm, and their own structures of leadership. And certain other models well established in the field of leadership studies are in rich harmony with the concept of foundational lawgiving. Howard Gardner’s storytelling model developed in Leading Minds, for instance, includes a category called visionary leadership, in which the leader transforms a person by creating a wholly new story of identity for them. Classic examples, for Gardner, are religious leaders from the past, including Moses, but also leaders from the 20th century like Mahatma Gandhi and Jean Monnet. The concept of foundational lawgiving speaks directly to the quest to make such leadership examples intelligible. Most important, thinking through the idea of foundational lawgiving helps us to comprehend more completely the tense relationship between public leadership, on the one hand, and the specific condition of the people who are being influenced, on the other hand. It helps us, consequently, to understand the limits of what is possible in and through public leadership, thereby broadening our intellectual horizons about these important topics. In this way, the analysis of foundational lawgiving reveals what we could accurately refer to as the problem of legislation, that is, positive law is incapable of achieving the human ends that are expected of it, even though it is understood to be the chief tool at the disposal of the lawgiver. The lawgiver always and everywhere encounters individuals as they are, not necessarily as the lawgiver needs them to be. Recognizing this permanent truth about human affairs does not require us to counsel deep pessimism about the grandest projects of leadership. Instead, it is to recognize, with clear eyes, the limitations to the reforms that we can expect in and through political

leadership. And it may help us to understand the underlying reasons for certain instances of failure in foundational leadership, such as the massive challenge of developing stable democratic institutions in Iraq after the United States–led invasion in 2003. This moderating influence can be of great benefit to theoreticians and practitioners alike. Brent Edwin Cusher See also Democratic Leadership; Leaders’ Stories; Persuasion; Philosophy

Further Readings Cusher, B. E. (2014). How does law rule? Plato on habit, political education, and legislation. The Journal of Politics, 76(4), 1032–1044. doi:10.1017/ S0022381614000590 Cusher, B. E. (2016). A master of the art of persuasion: Rousseau’s Platonic teaching on the virtuous legislator. In G. C. Kellow & N. Leddy (Eds.). On civic republicanism: Ancient lessons for global politics (pp. 226–245). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. doi:10.3138/9781442625464-014 Cusher, B. E., & Menaldo, M. A. (2021). Philosophy and leadership: Three classical models and cases. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780367853433 Drucker, P. (1954). The practice of management. New York, NY: HarperBusiness. Harvey, M. (2004). Moses (c. 13th century BCE). In G. R. Goethals, G. J. Sorenson, & J. M. Burns (Eds.). Encyclopedia of leadership (pp. 1029–1032). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Liebert, H. (2016). Plutarch’s politics: Between city and empire. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316563120 Kass, L. (2021). Founding God’s nation: Reading exodus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. doi:10.2307/j. ctv1b0fw7c Kelly, C. (1987). “To persuade without convincing”: The language of Rousseau’s legislator. American Journal of Political Science, 31(2), 321–335. doi:10.2307/ 2111079 Mansfield, H. C. (1966). Machiavelli’s virtue. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Menaldo, M. A. (2018). Leadership and the virtue of deception in Niccolo` Machiavelli’s the prince. In B. E.

Full-Range Leadership Theory Cusher & M. A. Menaldo (Eds.). Leadership and the unmasking of authenticity: The philosophy of self-knowledge and deception (pp. 90–112). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. doi:10.4337/ 9781786430991.00010 Wildavsky, A. (2005). Moses as political leader. Jerusalem: Shalem Press.

FULL-RANGE LEADERSHIP THEORY The origins of full-range leadership theory (FRLT) can be traced to the work of James Burns, who, in his 1978 book Leadership, divided leadership styles into two types: transforming and transactional. In its early form, this framework appeared as a general theory for application to the political context. In the 1980s and 1990s, the theory was developed by Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio into the FRLT that is now known as an organizational leadership model. Although many other scholars have contributed to the development of the theory, Bass and Avolio have been the most prominent and it was the publication of their instrument, the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, that has made FRLT one of the most popular and useful leadership theories among organizational scholars for some years. This entry provides a thorough overview of the history and development of FRLT, including its application. It concludes with a section on the need for a new approach leadership in the 21st century.

Breaking Down Full-Range Leadership Theory Early versions of FRLT divided leadership styles into transformational leadership and transactional leadership. In transformational leadership, the leader motivates their subordinates by using factors that are intrinsic to the work, by giving them a vision of a better future and the sense of fulfillment that comes from being a part of something greater than themselves. On the other hand, transactional leadership is where the leader manages planned processes and motivates subordinates using extrinsic factors by giving rewards for appropriate behavior. Later versions of FRLT add a third

373

leadership style—passive or laissez-faire leadership, which is often described as an absence of leadership. In a recent search of the Business Source Premier database on the author-supplied keywords field, the authors found that for every one article on passive or laissez-faire leadership, there were five on transactional leadership and 30 on transformational leadership. These statistics demonstrate the extent to which transformational leadership caught the imagination of researchers, who tended to see it as a panacea that would cure all business ills and guarantee excellence, in the early 21st century. FRLT can be seen to be a part of the humanist movement in management theory that was originally stimulated as a reaction to scientific management. Whereas scientific management assumes that workers, left to their own devices, perform at less than their maximum capability and that they are motivated by extrinsic factors—usually financial gain—humanist management theory assumes that employees are motivated by a mix of extrinsic and intrinsic factors including things like a sense of belonging and pride in doing a good job. Among the members of this school of thought is Abraham Maslow, who postulated a hierarchy of needs that has, at its base, the need to fulfill the necessities of life such as food and shelter, moving up to social needs such as a feeling of belonging, social esteem, and finally to self-actualization, which is a drive to make maximum use of the individual’s talents. Whereas transactional leadership might be seen as facilitating the lower level needs, transformational leadership might be seen as facilitating the higher level ones. More recently, many researchers have chosen to focus on specific aspects of leadership. For example, there is servant leadership, where the leader pays attention to the individual needs of subordinates and how to empower them, and authentic leadership, where the leader is completely open with subordinates and has their exemplary personal qualities on permanent display. These have gained popularity because of recent developments in the social situations of organizations. With an increasingly educated, sophisticated, and specialized workforce that is likely to be motivated by employee empowerment, servant leadership will probably be effective. With the deluge of corporate scandals of recent decades, there has been a perception that more openness is required of leaders. Each of these focused

374

Full-Range Leadership Theory

theories has their strengths, but their weakness is that they are not universally appropriate, which is the strength of theories such as FRLT and the competing values framework.

Application and Development It is important to describe how FRLT has been applied and how it might be further developed to make it even more useful in the future. Transformational leadership has four dimensions: charisma or idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration. Charisma or idealized influence is where the leader behaves in a way that inspires followers to see them as a superior person or role model. Inspirational motivation is where the leader gives them a vision of a wonderful new state of things that they can work toward that is inspiring for them to be a part of without thought of personal rewards. Intellectual stimulation is where the leader challenges their followers to think of new ideas and adopt an innovative approach. Individual consideration is where the leader acts as a mentor, taking account of each of their followers’ needs and developing them personally and professionally. Bass noted in Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations (1985) that transactional leadership has three dimensions: contingent reward, management by exception: active, and management by exception: passive. Contingent reward is where the leader uses formal or informal, spoken or unspoken, contracts to motivate followers. Management by exception: active occurs when the leader takes action if the contract is not satisfactorily fulfilled. However, management by exception: passive occurs when the leader does not act on an unsatisfactorily fulfilled contract unless it causes problems. In the early formulations of FRLT, described by Burns, transformational and transactional leadership were seen as mutually exclusive. Bass and Avolio insisted that the transformational style builds on the transactional style and they termed this the augmentation effect. Thus, transformational leadership is more than charismatic leadership where followers are attracted by the personality of the leader from the outset, but builds on a relationship that followers have already found worthwhile at the transactional level. So, the best leaders use a mix of both styles.

Since in this model the two leadership styles are separate entities, which can be measured separately, either can be weak or strong independently from the other. To the extent that these active leadership styles are absent, we have the laissez-faire, or passive, style. The methodological aspect of FRLT is nomothetic, meaning that the theory applies to all people, and it is positivist, meaning that it can be measured as a construct. Data may be compared with that of other constructs from the same sample to find useful correlations. For example, it is useful for practitioners to know about the relationships between transformational and transactional leadership and organizational effectiveness. It is an approach that has produced much of value, for example, the knowledge that transformational leadership is positively correlated with organizational effectiveness. The weakness of positivism from our viewpoint is that it conflates understanding with prediction so that prediction is seen as the same as understanding. This conflation has tended to prevent people from seeing relationships between phenomena. Instead, FRLT can be taken into the realist paradigm where there is a focus on abstract models or concepts that represent real entities that are not directly observable, entities such as social class or community. Treating leadership as though it was a discrete phenomenon is too limiting, suggesting that leaders should be considered a central aspect of all organizational life. The term organization itself is difficult to define. There are many entities in the world that are referred to as organizations and it seems, at first sight, that these are concrete entities. Yet the more closely they are observed, the more it is apparent that these social entities are bags of disparate phenomena with nothing concrete at the center. It has been said that there is no such thing as an organization but only an organizing process. However, there is a concept enshrined in the word organization and this concept may be reduced to a group of people who engage in activities that are directed through a system of authority and responsibility. This definition places leadership at the heart of the concept of organization. By linking the constructs of leadership and organization in this way, a more realistic and useful viewpoint is achieved. There are many types

Full-Range Leadership Theory

of organizations, suggesting that a truly FRLT will have to account for this variety. Additionally, organizations are found in a wide variety of different contexts and our theory will have to cope with this as well. Most theories currently in use in the business and management arena were developed in the United States, or other Western countries, and have been used disproportionately in large Western organizations. Management theory has always evolved to respond to the needs of different stages of economic development. In the early years of management theory (approximately 1900–1960), the main focus was on how to obtain the most value from workers doing menial, manual work, and scientific management exemplifies this idea. As the West began to move into its postindustrial phase in the late 20th century, there was a new concern among management theorists with how to obtain the best from highly skilled and educated knowledge workers. Humanist management theory was well placed to help since it is focused on how to motivate staff using intrinsic factors such as the satisfaction to be gained from the work itself. Theorists such as Frederick Herzberg, whose model can be seen as a more sophisticated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, argued against trying to motivate this type of employee by using financial incentives but instead to use opportunities for personal growth from growing into a job. These are the employees who respond positively to transformational leadership. However, with the increasingly sophisticated use of digital technologies, and with it increasingly competitive marketplaces, there is a need for organizational agility where employees need to have a large degree of autonomy and, for this reason, new ways of looking at leadership are required.

New Approach to Leadership A new approach to leadership should take into account the nature of the work being conducted in the organization. In some cases, perhaps an assembly line, the typical worker may only expect money from their work and obtain their fulfillment from after-work activities. Here an emphasis on the transactional in the transactional–transformational mix may be the most appropriate approach to motivation and leadership. In others, perhaps in a functional

375

department of a large corporation with a progression ladder based on qualifications, skills, and experience, a more transformational approach may work best. However, in a 21st-century organization where agility is required, there may be a need to trust highly skilled and innovative employees to just get in with their work without interference. This is where laissez-faire leadership comes into its own, not as a negative factor but as a positive one. Scholars have pointed out that laissez-faire leadership has been partially misunderstood and unfairly neglected in the past. It has always had its place in such organizational contexts such as professional practices and in highly skilled teams, such as surgeons, but its significance is increasing. Laissez-faire is leadership with a light touch, perhaps mixed in some cases with a measure of individual consideration and management by exception: passive. In other words, laissez-faire leadership can resemble servant leadership. To manage large yet agile organizations in the future, a full-range leadership that has been modified in ways that best suit the modern organization is needed. Alireza Nazarian and Peter Atkinson See also Leadership and Management; Organizational Leadership; Transformational and Transactional Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Avolio, B. J., & Bass, B. M. (1991). The full range leadership development programs: Basic and advanced manuals. Binghamton, NY: Bass, Avolio & Associates. Avolio, B. J., & Bass, B. M. (2004). Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire manual. Menlo Park, CA: Mind Garden Inc. Banks, G. C., McCauley, K. D., Gardner, W. L., & Guler, C. E. (2016). A meta-analytic review of authentic and transformational leadership: A test for redundancy. The Leadership Quarterly, 27, 634–652. Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York NY: Freepress. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. London: Harper and Row. Greenleaf, R. K. (2002). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Yukl, G. A., & Gardner, W. L. (2020). Leadership in organizations. Harlow: Pearson.

G age of 2 years, children are aware of physical differences, can sort objects into gender categories, and start to express their gender identity. By age 3, most children will label themselves as a boy or girl, and associate objects, activities, and occupations with gender. By age 5, gender stereotypes will affect values, self-perceptions, and self-esteem. Stereotypes influence emotional expression and socialization. Gender-based associations expand during elementary school to include roles, personality attributes, school subjects, and sports. When asked to draw a surgeon, most elementary school students will draw a male. Research suggests that children not only internalize these role and occupation associations, but also that they do not grow out of them. Pre-teens demonstrate greater flexibility in their thinking, but gendered expectations have been shown to be rigidly enforced at the start of adolescence. Parents not only model gender roles, but also treat children differently based on gender. Fathers have been shown to use more physical methods of control and encourage more active play with sons. Parents are more likely to discuss relationships and social topics with daughters and science topics with sons. Parents are more likely to assume that sons are angry and daughters are sad despite evidence that children experience different emotions with similar frequency. Parents are more likely to discuss emotions and use emotional language with daughters and do so at a younger age. Children learn gender stereotypes from their families through gender markers in language such as “fireman” or “chairman.”

GENDER STEREOTYPES Gender stereotypes reflect expectations about how people typically act and should act based on their gender. They also reflect gender-based expectations about characteristics, roles, and attributes. Gender-based expectations are influenced by cultural and social norms and vary over time. Evidence suggests that gender stereotypes have remained relatively stable despite the women’s movement and efforts to increase gender equality. Gender stereotypes are pervasive, influencing assumptions and preconceptions about others, as well as how individuals conceptualize their own gender. Assumptions underlying gender stereotypes can limit people’s ability to pursue their own interests, romantic and sexual preferences, lifestyles, and careers, including positions of leadership. Stereotypes, whether seemingly positive or negative, can cause harm and perpetuate gender-based bias and discrimination. This entry begins with an overview of the origins of gender stereotypes. Then, the entry discusses gender stereotypes with regard to professional outcomes. Lastly, this entry focus on leadership, primarily barriers to leadership, resulting from gender stereotypes.

Origins of Gender Stereotypes in Western Societies Gender stereotypes are established early. At one year, infants can distinguish faces by gender. By the

377

378

Gender Stereotypes

Social and cultural norms as well as the media reinforce gender stereotypes. Men are encouraged to speak up, while women are expected to be soft-spoken. Gendered expectations are associated with physical appearance. Feminine presentations are associated with gracefulness, makeup, and beauty. Masculine presentations are associated with height, broad shoulders, muscular appearance, and strength. Physical appearance has been shown to play a significant role in activating gender stereotypes. Studies suggest that people judge women more for their looks than their ability and intelligence, and that their physical presentation may be associated with perceptions of lower intelligence. Despite the perception of differences, studies have shown that gender differences are overinflated and that there is greater similarity than difference across genders. Within academic settings, there are longstanding expectations that boys will excel in math and science and girls will do better in language arts. A large meta-analysis found that children perform equally well in mathematics and that parent and teacher expectations had a stronger association with performance in math and confidence than gender. Gendered expectations also influence classroom participation and academic achievement. Boys are more likely to be called on in class and permitted to speak for longer. Boys are more likely to be praised for sharing their ideas, while girls are praised for being well behaved. These behavioral expectations may lead girls to be more compliant and quiet in class, or to face greater discipline for speaking up and acting out. Studies have shown that girls are encouraged to develop and demonstrate more pro-social behaviors. Stereotypes about masculinity in the United States have been shown to be negatively related to academic achievement, with hypermasculine boys perceived as less intelligent and more likely to be suspended. Social learning theory posits that reward, punishment, and reinforcement of behaving in concordance with gender stereotypes leads to the formation of gender roles. Gender stereotypes can be internalized and negatively influence academic performance through stereotype threat. Women taking a math test, after being told that men traditionally perform better on the test, did worse than women

who were told that the test was not associated with gender differences. Stereotype threat not only affects academic performance, but also may lead to disengagement from specific academic domains.

Gender Stereotypes and Professional Outcomes Gender stereotypes and the resulting gender bias have been shown to negatively affect women at every stage of their education and career. Women are less likely to apply for a position when they do not have the majority of qualifications compared to their male colleagues. They are also less likely to be encouraged to apply or run for positions, including leadership positions. Job descriptions are often written in ways that reflect implicit bias favoring male applicants. Studies of r´esum´es with identical experiences but different names (male vs. female) have shown that women are viewed as less competent and hirable than their male colleagues. While family is often considered an asset in applications for men, it is a hindrance for women. Letters of recommendation for women also reflect bias that affects hiring and promotion decisions. Letters for women are shorter and less likely to mention concrete examples of their work. Letters for women are more likely to include minimal assurance or doubt raisers compared to letters for men. They are also more likely to highlight effort instead of accomplishments. Personal life and stereotypes are more often discussed in letters for women, regardless of who is writing the letter. Studies have shown that raw talent is associated with men, while successful women are considered lucky or hard-working. This bias is also an internalized one. Women will underestimate their performance, whereas men will overestimate it. Male managers have been shown to attribute their success to their ability, while women managers attribute it to hard work and are more likely to recognize the contributions of their subordinates. These same biases are also present in school and employment evaluations, influencing grades, promotions, and raises. The stereotype that women are more communal and men more agentic has been shown to be consistent cross-culturally. Despite progress, women are still expected to demonstrate

Gender Stereotypes

communal traits such as being helpful, caring, and emotionally intelligent. Agentic traits, such as assertiveness, confidence, and directness, are more desirable in men. Women may be criticized if they demonstrate more agentic traits. For example, women advocating for themselves during negotiations is negatively perceived, while men are rewarded for being assertive and clear. Women with agentic traits will be evaluated less favorably. Social role theory described by Alice Eagly posits that gender stereotypes reflect divisions of labor related to gender within a society. Here again, communal traits play a part in career choices and role obligations. Women are expected to play a greater role in family life, child care, and household duties. Despite entering more traditionally male-dominated fields over the past few decades, women are most often employed in careers reflecting caretaking roles such as teaching or nursing. Fields dominated by women are less prestigious, less well compensated, and have fewer advancement opportunities. Even in high-income careers such as medicine, specialties dominated by women are generally less well compensated. In academic settings, women are not only paid less than their male colleagues with comparable experience are, they are also promoted less quickly. Some companies justify paying men more because they are perceived as the breadwinner. Women also face discrimination and pay reduction associated with assumptions about time-off requests or leave for pregnancy or caretaking responsibilities. They may be penalized for taking time off for family and face role conflict as they navigate their competing roles of employee, parent, and partner. Expectations associated with gender roles also play out more subtly in the workplace. Women are expected to do the majority of the “office housework” such as planning parties, getting coffee, taking notes, or serving on committees. These tasks set them up to miss valuable opportunities. Women also spend more time mentoring colleagues, behaviors that are typically performed in private and therefore invisible to superiors. In line with agentic and communal expectations, men who help are praised, favorably viewed, and more likely to be recommended for promotions, raises, or bonuses. Women who decline to help are viewed less favorably. In one

379

study, women who agreed to help were rated as favorably as men who declined, suggesting that gendered expectations lead us to value the help of women less than men. This is related to the “performance tax,” which describes the higher ability and performance standards for women compared to men to achieve the same outcomes and ultimately affects promotion and pay. In meetings, men speak more and interrupt women when they speak. This has been demonstrated at even the highest levels of leadership, such as the Supreme Court, where the argument structure was changed because female justices were interrupted more by both male justices and advocates. Women’s ideas are often ignored until repeated or claimed by a man. In the White House, female staffers would repeat the points made by other women to amplify their ideas and give accurate credit. Women who do speak up in board meetings may be perceived as confrontational, annoying to colleagues, and penalized.

Gender Stereotypes and Barriers to Leadership The strong and pervasive gender association with agentic and communal traits contributes to gender bias faced by women seeking leadership positions. Agentic traits are associated with leadership and success. Thus, women will not be perceived as well suited for leadership as male colleagues. They will also be perceived as lacking the necessary skill set for leadership. If they do demonstrate agentic traits as leaders, they will be negatively perceived for violating gender stereotypes. Women in leadership face greater criticism and scrutiny and are more likely to have their competence questioned. Gender stereotypes are also associated with how women and men navigate hierarchy and leadership. The glass ceiling, which describes the invisible barriers women face when advancing within a hierarchy, is thought to reflect beliefs about leadership and agency. Although progress has been made over the past several decades, women remain under-represented in the top leadership positions. When women are promoted to top leadership positions, it is often during times of crisis or turmoil when companies are willing to take a risk. The glass cliff describes the trend of

380

Gender Stereotypes

promoting women to senior leadership positions when companies are failing. Gender discrimination describes unequal treatment based on sex or gender identity that reflects beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors resulting from gender stereotypes. Importantly, it underpins gender inequality, the ongoing discrimination that leads one sex or gender to be prioritized over another. Globally, gender inequality has been shown to start early and affect development. It has been shown to negatively affect health, empowerment, and employment. Individuals who violate gender stereotypes may be targeted for failure to conform. Bullying, harassment, and violence are common for gender-diverse youth. Sexual harassment describes verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature, unwanted sexual behavior, and requests for sexual favors. Gender harassment includes offensive comments about a person’s sex or gender. Sexual harassment may occur in any social setting, creating a hostile and unsafe environment. A study in coal miners found that individual strategies for coping with sexual harassment were not effective and had negative consequences, including greater sexual harassment. When individuals seek help through reporting, they may face backlash and retaliation. Gender-based violence describes harmful acts, threats of violence, or coercion inflicted on someone because of their sex or gender identity. Rigidly held gender stereotypes of adolescence contribute to the perpetration and response to gender-based violence. Greater endorsement of gender stereotypes by male adolescents has been associated with perpetration of gender-based violence. The association continues into adulthood. Strongly held gender stereotypes also contribute to rape culture, which is an environment where sexualized violence against women is prevalent, normalized, and excused by the cultural and societal attitudes and media. The fear created by rape culture oppresses those who fear being targets of sexual violence and exacerbates inequities related to sex and gender identity. Cultures that hold strongly to gender stereotypes may blame the survivor for gender-based violence and uphold the behavior of the perpetrator with comments like “boys will be boys” or “she was asking for it.” Perpetrators may face limited or delayed consequences, while survivors face

numerous barriers to reporting, scrutiny, retaliation, and disbelief by the justice system. This reflects the fact that gender stereotypes also affect participants within the justice system, influencing objectivity and expectations. Gender-based violence can also be used purposefully to oppress a group during a conflict or in combination with hate speech and disinformation to censor the expression of sex and gender minorities. Gender stereotypes and discrimination further influence how laws are written and what is or is not criminalized. For example, marital rape may not be criminalized because of gender stereotypes related to property and ownership within marriage. Women may not be allowed to hold land deeds or ownership rights because they are not accepted as the head of household. Recently, gender-based violence has been framed as a human rights violation. This reframing acknowledges that women and gender diverse individuals are exposed to violence, not by accident, but because of discrimination, and structural and systemic causes. Importantly, gender stereotypes and the resulting discrimination and gender-based violence interact with other forms of oppression to perpetuate and exacerbate existing inequalities. Growing inequality and disparities associated with events such as economic stress or global pandemics lead to an increase in gender-based violence. Although a majority of the extant literature defines sex and gender as a binary, sex and gender exist on a continuum, and sex and gender diverse individuals face gender-related discrimination and violence. Discussions of gender stereotypes should include the experiences of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA1) community. LGBTQIA1 individuals may not conform to gender stereotypes. They experience discrimination in educational settings, within the workforce, and when seeking health care. They are often targets of gender-based violence and may face restrictions on their freedom of expression, association, and assembly. LGBTQIA1 individuals have been banned from participation in sports and excluded from families and communities. The discrimination and gender-based violence they face may limit their attainment of leadership positions and opportunities for advancement compared to their non-LGBTQIA1 peers. For example, many

Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth

LGBTQIA1 individuals have left careers and training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics because of bias, harassment, and discrimination. Gender identity and sexual orientation are not consistently captured in educational, employment, or health care settings, making it difficult to capture and describe the distinct barriers and forms of discrimination that LGBTQIA1 individuals routinely face. Leaders need to consider the potential barriers related to gender identity in every aspect of their work. Mollie C. Marr See also Feminine Mystique; Feminism; Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth; LGBTQ1 Social Movements; Men and Masculinities; Me Too Movement; Patriarchy and Its Origins; Sexual Harassment; Stereotype Threat; Women and Men as Leaders; Women’s Movement; Women’s Values

Further Readings Eagly, A. H. (1987). Sex differences in social behavior: A social-role interpretation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Ellemers, N. (2018). Gender stereotypes. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 275–298. doi:10.1146/annurevpsych-122216-011719 Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581–592. Krook, M. L. (2018). Violence against women in politics: A rising global trend. Politics & Gender, 14(4), 673–675. doi:10.1017/S1743923X18000582 Steele, C. M. (2011). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

GLASS CEILING

AND THE

LABYRINTH

In the decade of the 2020s, more women than ever before have risen to prominent positions of leadership, but compared with men, they still remain underrepresented. Metaphors, which can organize thinking and change attitudes, have been proposed to reflect women’s experience as leaders. The glass ceiling represents an invisible barrier that prevents women from entering the highest levels of

381

leadership. The labyrinth suggests that women may face a maze of challenges to success. Other metaphors have reflected the specific obstacles that women face while seeking or occupying leadership roles. For example, the maternal wall or motherhood penalty reflects women’s difficulties balancing parenting and career, and the glass cliff implies that women’s desirability as leaders increases to the extent that the leadership role is especially precarious and prone to failure. The sticky floor signifies that women can be stuck in low-status positions with no opportunities for leadership. Tokenism focuses on the consequences of having one or few female leaders within an organization, resulting in stereotyping, disempowerment, and discrimination. The relative absence of women leaders has also been attributed to men’s glass escalator that facilitates their speedy rise to high levels of authority in female-dominated occupations. These metaphors convey particular challenges faced by women, but, individually, they fail to capture the full complex of obstacles that women encounter when seeking or attaining authority. Indeed, only the glass ceiling and the labyrinth have gained widespread use in generally illustrating women’s leadership.

The Glass Ceiling The glass ceiling has been the most popular metaphor for women’s lack of leadership opportunities. The glass ceiling gained popularity when it was referenced in a Wall Street Journal article in 1986. The image of an invisible barrier blocking women’s advancement to the highest levels of leadership resonated with the public, the media, and scholars, and became synonymous with barriers to women’s leadership. Evidence of the ubiquity of the metaphor can be found in online searches: In 2022, a search on Google Scholar yielded nearly 100,000 sources, and a general Google search yielded over eight million hits, few of which refer to buildings. In spite of its popularity, the glass ceiling does not provide an ideal symbol of women’s leadership. The image itself suggests that women face few challenges until they reach the penultimate level of leadership, at which point there is no way to the top. The implication is that no woman can

382

Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth

attain the highest leadership position in her field, an assumption belied by the presence of women CEOs in the Fortune 500 and women leading nations as heads of state. Moreover, women do experience challenges before nearing the highest level of leadership, even early in their careers. Another weakness of the glass ceiling metaphor is that it has no capacity to represent the varied experiences of women leaders. It remains identical for all women, but women’s experiences as leaders are not homogeneous. Some women struggle and never attain a position of authority, whereas others do. Women vary in background, ethnicity, family income, and wealth as well as access to networks and other factors that intersect with their gender to amplify or weaken their leadership opportunities. Finally, for a woman to reach the highest level of leadership implies that she had to smash and thereby destroy the glass ceiling, suggesting that one successful woman would clear the way for other women to follow. Yet, this is not necessarily the case.

The Labyrinth The metaphor of the labyrinth can be used to capture the multifaceted and convoluted routes that women often take on their path to leadership, referring to this image in its colloquial form—as a maze with many paths, some leading to the center, where the highest level of leadership resides, and some going nowhere and leading to dead ends. This image recognizes that women can and do become leaders. Some go all the way to the center and some make it part way, achieving a degree of authority but not the highest levels. At the same time, the image illustrates how easy it is for women to get stuck along the way and never advance at all. In this way, the labyrinth represents all women, regardless of their career trajectory. Another strength of the labyrinth as a metaphor is that it reflects a myriad of challenges that women face throughout their careers when seeking leadership. Women typically advance more slowly than men and experience more setbacks along the way. Navigating a labyrinth requires effort, time, and careful planning. Its full complexity remains obscure from the outside, and success in reaching the center often requires persistence after taking

false turns and being led down mistaken paths. The route can also sometimes be facilitated by others who have succeeded—mentors, sponsors and allies who leave crumbs along the path to aid women in finding their way. In contrast, men’s route to leadership can be construed as a road. There may be hills and turns along the way, but the route for men is relatively clear and direct. The ambiguity and complexity of the labyrinth mean that women have more difficulty than men in becoming leaders, and that success is difficult, but not impossible.

The Status of Women Leaders Consistent with the labyrinth metaphor, women have greatly increased their status and authority in the United States and many other nations. Women’s labor force participation, relative to men, is at its highest—47% of those in the U.S. workforce are now women. Women’s incomes have also increased, and women have surpassed men in education. Starting in the early 1980s in the United States, women began to enter and complete college at a higher rate and to obtain more master’s degrees. By the early part of the 21st century, women were also earning more professional and doctoral degrees than men. The status and prestige of women’s jobs has also improved. Women in 2020 held the majority of all U.S. professional positions. More women than ever before own and run companies. In 2020, 45% of managers were women and 29% of U.S. organizations had female CEOs. These percentages are the highest ever and demonstrate remarkable gains. Women also have increased their political leadership. As of 2021, 27% of the seats in the U.S. Congress and 33% of the seats on the U.S. Supreme Court were held by women, and a woman of color was vice president. The United Nations reports that women’s status has also improved around the world. More women have paid work than ever before, and women’s increasing levels of education is present in many countries. Although men’s participation in tertiary education has historically been greater than women’s, this has changed, so that by the early 2000s, women’s participation consistently exceeded men’s in the majority of nations.

Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth

Internationally, more women are employed, women’s incomes have increased, and women have greater business and political leadership. In 2019, 28% of managerial positions were held by women worldwide and 18% of organizations had female CEOs. Women on average held 25% of parliamentary seats at the end of 2020, the highest percentage ever. In 2020, 20 nations had a woman as head of state or government, a number that has increased over 60% since 1995. Women also serve in the roles of president of the European Commission and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Women’s rising presence as leaders at the highest levels has influenced people’s assumptions about what constitutes effective leadership. People no longer rate female leaders as less effective than their male counterparts in general. Also, whereas historically stereotypical masculine characteristics have been seen as especially desirable in a leader, stereotypical feminine characteristics are increasingly seen as important, too. Moreover, research has demonstrated that transformational leadership and the use of contingent rewards for good performance are highly effective styles of leadership across a wide variety of domains. Transformational leadership is not stereotypically masculine or feminine, and this style, along with contingent rewards, is somewhat more common among female than male leaders. Despite these advances, women remain underrepresented in political and organizational leadership, especially at the highest levels. Although more than a quarter of U.S. organizations have female CEOs, women are still rare as leaders of the largest corporations. In 2021, 7% of the Fortune 500 CEOs were women. This is the highest percentage ever, but still only a small minority of those holding the top positions of corporate leadership. Likewise, in 2020, women held only 3% of CEO positions in the Global 500. Focusing on political leadership, although more women than ever before lead countries, only 10% of national governments are headed by women. Women’s advancement has been steady, but slow, and they continue to experience challenges to their leadership, obstacles that are even more pervasive for women of color or other marginalized identities. Consistent with the labyrinth

383

metaphor, contemporary female leaders face less obvious or insurmountable barriers than those faced by women in the past, yet such obstacles remain.

Challenges That Form the Labyrinth Domestic Responsibilities

Research shows only a small overall difference between women and men in motivation to lead or desire for pay and advancement. Still, there is one area where women and men clearly differ. In the United States and in every country that has been studied around the world, women continue to devote more time to caring for children and other family members than men do. Men have increased their investment in time with children, particularly in the United States and in many European countries. But overwhelmingly, women are the primary caretakers of children, even in countries such as Norway and Sweden, which provide paid paternal leave in additional to maternal leave. Becoming a parent typically reduces the amount of time that women spend in paid employment but increases men’s paid work. Parenthood also increases women’s unpaid labor such that their total hours of paid and unpaid work are greater than men’s. As a result, women are more inclined than men to take breaks in employment or work part-time as a result of having children. Taking time off to care for family is more costly in terms of pay and advancement than other types of leaves. This is true for both women and men, but because women are the ones to take family leaves, they bear the brunt of the consequences in terms of reduced income and promotion. Moreover, although family-friendly policies, such as guaranteed paid family leave, increase women’s workforce participation, they can actually undermine women’s advancement because women, more than men, take advantage of these policies.

Stereotypes and Discrimination

Studies have shown that people perceive women to be especially communal, helpful, and warm, and men to be especially agentic, strong, and directive. Even though women’s traits are increasingly seen

384

Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth

as desirable in leaders, people still consider men’s traits more than women’s to be particularly conducive to good leadership. Studies around the world have established that people, and especially men, see effective and successful leaders as highly agentic and much less communal. Thus, when people think of an ideal leader they tend to think of a man. Women cannot overcome the stereotype that they lack agency simply by behaving agentically, because people generally prefer women to be communal and to avoid too much strong masculine behavior. Research has shown that, unlike men, women are penalized for agentic behaviors, such as being critical, expressing anger or intimidation, or bragging. Women also experience discrimination in hiring and promotion contexts, receiving less-favorable evaluations, slower advancement, and lower pay when controlling for comparable performance and human capital. Consequently, female leaders confront a double bind: On the one hand, they are thought to be too weak and unassertive to be good leaders, but on the other hand, too domineering and assertive to be good women. Organizational Culture

Because men have historically led organizations, organizational cultures have evolved with men as the prototypes of ideal leaders. Historically, men have had few domestic responsibilities and could devote themselves fully to their careers. This division of labor allowed professional and managerial positions to become increasingly time consuming. Moreover, modern communication technology makes high-level workers available to their jobs 24/7, increasing time pressures even more. The resulting extremity of time demands of high-level leadership roles conflict with women’s greater domestic responsibilities. Because women are thought to be too burdened by domestic responsibilities or otherwise less interested in or suited to very challenging work, they are less likely than men to be offered the types of desirable developmental work that lead to advancement. Men hold more line managerial positions, have greater access to organizational resources, and receive more opportunities for travel and relocation than women do. Women less

often receive the very challenging assignments that can lead to promotions. Advancement does not derive merely from merit and hard work. Social capital, in the form of networks, mentors, and sponsors, is one of the most important predictors of pay and promotion. Given that the most powerful networks and mentors are male-dominated and that both men and women tend to associate more with those of their own gender, men have greater access to the types of connections that lead to advancement.

Women Navigate the Labyrinth Obstacles remain challenging to women leaders, but, more than ever, women have found ways to navigate the labyrinth and attain high levels of leadership. They, more than men, lead using a transformational style and motivating others with contingent rewards. They have also been helped in their navigation by some changes in organizational culture, including the establishment of mentoring, sponsorship, and network programs at some forward-thinking organizations. The growing visibility of female leaders in politics and business has shifted stereotypes about leadership so that a blend of feminine and masculine behaviors is increasingly emblematic of effective modern leadership, making leadership opportunities more available to women. Because of these changes, women chart an easier path through the labyrinth than in the past. But because parity remains a distant goal, women still negotiate a labyrinth when making their way to positions at high levels of authority. Linda L. Carli and Alice H. Eagly See also Gender and Leadership; Gender Stereotypes; Glass Cliff; Transformational and Transactional Leadership; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Carli, L. L., & Eagly, A. H. (2018). Leadership and gender. In J. Antonakis & D. Day (Eds.), The nature of leadership (3rd ed., pp. 244–271). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

Global Business Leadership Landau, M. J., Meier, B. P., & Keefer, L. A. (2010). A metaphor-enriched social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 1045–1067. doi:10.1177/014616720 4267988 Lyness, K. S., & Grotto, A. R. (2018). Women and leadership in the United States: Are we closing the gender gap? Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 227–265. doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104739 ¨ Morgenroth, T., Kirby, T. A., Ryan, M. K., & Sudkamper, A. (2020). The who, when, and why of the glass cliff phenomenon: A meta-analysis of appointments to precarious leadership positions. Psychological Bulletin, 146(9), 797. doi:10.1037/bul000023 United Nations. (2021). The world’s women 2020: Trends and statistics. New York, NY: United Nations Economic and Social Council. Retrieved from https:// worlds-women-2020-data-undesa.hub.arcgis.com

GLOBAL BUSINESS LEADERSHIP At its core, a global business leadership role requires the leader to manage and leverage diversity of thought and action. This entry first explains the roles, activities, and processes in which leaders in global roles engage to achieve their global objectives in the face of the unique challenges they experience. It then examines the individual level predictors of effectiveness in such roles and the constraints that global leaders face in leveraging the individual attributes that are critical to their success.

Demise of Globalization? Since 2015, and especially following the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency and Brexit in the United Kingdom (when the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union [EU]), there has been much discussion of the demise of globalization. As Mohamed El-Erian, President of Queen’s College at Cambridge University and chief economic adviser at Allianz corporation, put it, “There will be less globalization. In fact, I think we have entered an era of deglobalization” (August 2019). Despite such declarations, the facts and statistics paint a different picture. The 2020

385

DHL Global Connectedness Report, the most recent report on the extent of globalization, shows that the globalization index in 2019 was in fact higher than the index in 2015. Compared to 2015, the amount of global trade in merchandise and services, the extent of global information flow, and the number of travel and migration cases increased in 2019, reflecting a higher level of overall global exposure across countries. In short, the world of business continues to globalize despite hiccups and obstacles, a sentiment that is supported by the latest findings by the Gallup organization: “The future will belong to millennial leaders—who tend to be increasingly globally oriented and eager to explore the world—and millennials’ inclination to identify themselves as global citizens will further the push for a global viewpoint. A perspective that is unrestricted and unimpeded by a local economy or a local government” (Gallup, 2019).

What Is Global Business Leadership? As corporations increase and expand their global footprint, they increase the opportunities and the requirements for their employees and managers to engage with individuals and groups from different parts of the world. They require their leaders across the organization to work effectively with a variety of stakeholders such as direct reports, suppliers, customers, and others in order to achieve the organization’s global ambitions. At its core, a global business leadership role requires the leader to manage and leverage diversity of thought and action. Global leaders typically need to engage people from geographically and culturally diverse backgrounds. They need to successfully influence a multiplicity of stakeholder groups by understanding and responding to the diverse priorities and ambitions held by different stakeholders in different countries. Global business leadership roles are typically defined in one of two ways. First, what is termed expatriate leadership is characterized based on the geographic location of the leader. Expatriate leaders live and work outside their own country, some for a short period of time or up to one year, and others for an extended period of time. According to a recent report, there were almost

386

Global Business Leadership

57 million expatriates working across the world in 2017. The second type of global leader roles is defined in terms of the diversity of the stakeholders to deal with, regardless of the leader’s location. “Global domestics” are based in their home country, but the majority of their responsibilities and/or interactions tend to be with individuals in, or from, other countries. A typical example is a manager of a global project who is based in his/her own country but has team members in several countries. Over the past few years, companies have been increasingly using the global domestic roles to expand their global reach and their local responsiveness. There is evidence that success in global leadership roles requires specific competencies. In a recent survey of 1400 organizations, almost 48% of the respondents considered developing global capabilities in their leaders a high or very high priority. At the same time, only one-third of the respondents reported high or very high effectiveness in developing global leaders. Over the past two decades, a number of studies have examined global roles and effectiveness, and a variety of competencies have been identified as requirements for effectiveness in such roles. For example, Big Five personality traits, adjustment to stress, and strategic perspective have been offered as potential predictors of success. Despite this work, there is still a general lack of consensus on a theoretical framework that can guide future research in this area. The starting point in exploring the predictors of effectiveness in global leader roles is offering a clear definition of what effectiveness means and how it can be measured. Given the aforementioned definition of global leadership roles, effectiveness in such roles can be conceptualized in terms of the leader’s ability to build long-term, sustainable, and trusting relationships with a wide range of stakeholders with diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds. There is strong evidence that trust facilitates human relations and enhances the parties’ ability and willingness to collaborate, so a global leader’s ability to build trusting relationships is likely to facilitate his/her ability to achieve the organization’s goals. However, in a global role, the leader is interacting with individuals and groups whose criteria for building trust can be quite different from the

leader’s own. Recent research has shown that when asked about what it takes to trust a new colleague, American, German, and Dutch managers tended to exclusively focus on the colleague’s performance and track record. In contrast, many managers in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America shared other requirements in addition to performance. Such attributes as family connections, friendliness, politeness, emotional connection, and fit with the group were offered as additional important criteria.

A Theoretical Framework for Global Leader Effectiveness Two theoretical streams of work can help us develop a theoretical framework for understanding effectiveness in global roles: the social cognitive theory (SCT) and the contact theory. SCT postulates that people are active agents who both influence and are influenced by their environment. They learn desirable and undesirable behaviors by observing others and reproducing learned behaviors. Contact theory suggests that increased contact among diverse groups can enhance positive attitudes and reduce negative perceptions among them.

Global Mindset: A Prerequisite for Effectiveness in Global Leadership Roles Consistent with SCT and the extant literature, the notion of global mindset consists of both cognitive and affective attributes. In the face of increased complexity, ambiguity, and diversity of the global context, leaders in global roles require a particular set of cognitive attributes and skills that will help them interpret and react to global forces and adapt to local requirements. They typically need a mental schema that enables them to make sense of their multi-country environment and helps them identify potential courses of action. Similar to leaders in domestic roles, such a schema consists of industry-level knowledge. However, due to the diversity of how business is conducted across countries, it also involves societal knowledge of macrosocietal phenomena such as the cultural, political, and regulatory environments in multiple countries. An example of diverse cultural practices is the diversity of trust criteria used by individuals in different countries reported earlier.

Global Business Leadership

An important aspect of global roles is the need for travel. Global roles are likely to encompass the stress of continual and extensive physical mobility and travel around the globe. Furthermore, global leaders typically need to participate in frequent work-related activities such as global conference calls during non-work hours. Global face-to-face and virtual interactions with diverse individuals and groups are likely to lead to the need to make decisions in unfamiliar and complex contexts. Both travel and off-time activities tend to separate global leaders from their families and disrupt their personal networks. Accordingly, global leader roles are likely to demand self-monitoring and self-regulation, which, along with extensive physical mobility, frequent off-time requirements, and personal network disruptions, are likely to result in fatigue and exhaustion. Lack of energy has been shown to reduce success in global roles. Affective attributes play an important role in the interface with an individual’s global environment by acting as a strong source of energy and motivation. Interest, curiosity, passion, and openness toward people from around the world and diverse ways of doing things in different parts of the world have been shown to generate motivation and energy to engage with global stakeholders. Additional research shows that such affective attributes like fun, excitement, and lack of fear or stress in cross-cultural interactions result in increased levels of energy and enhanced cultural flexibility. To summarize, cognitive attributes embedded in global mindset are likely to generate the ability to make sense of novel global environments and develop appropriate courses of action. Affective attributes of global mindset help leaders enjoy a heightened level of energy due to the joy and excitement of dealing with diversity of thought and action. Latest research findings clearly support the positive role of global mindset as a predictor of success in global roles.

Exposure to Cultural Diversity as an Antecedent of Global Mindset SCT suggests that exposure to one’s surroundings— either interacting with others or observing their behavior—is at the core of individual development. Knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors are

387

continuously developed as a result of life experiences. Recent research in organizational neuroscience suggests that individual learning takes place through a change in neural structure and function caused by sustained and intense exposure to one’s environment. Contact theory postulates that increased contact among diverse groups will have positive effects on the views of one group toward the other. More importantly, the positive effects of intergroup contact typically generalize beyond group members and favorable attitudes toward the immediate participants turn into positive attitudes toward other groups not involved in the contact. Putting together both SCT and contact theory leads to the understanding, supported by research evidence, that the development of a global mindset requires long-term, sustained, and intense exposure and experience with cultural and geographic diversity. Individuals typically experience such an intense exposure through their work experiences and/or their life experiences. There is strong evidence for the impact of work experiences as the primary source of individual development and learning. There is also some preliminary evidence that prior exposure to multicultural diversity in work settings can be beneficial for individuals in global roles. Current research, although not as extensive, also supports the importance of non-work experiences across one’s lifespan in relation to global leader effectiveness. Such cross-cultural experiences as studying abroad, vacationing in foreign countries, international volunteerism, and family diversity can all help develop one’s global mindset. Research further shows that more intense, high-contact experiences are more effective than low-contact, less intense experiences. The latest research findings confirm that high-intensity exposure can produce dramatic and long-term effects on learning and motivation. It shows that high levels of learning of other languages, receiving formal education in countries other than one’s origin, living in other countries for a significant period of time, and forming personal bonds with individuals and families from other countries are strong predictors of the strength of the cognitive and affective attributes in global mindset and effectiveness in global business leadership roles.

388

Global Business Leadership

The Role of the Leader’s Own Home Culture As pointed out previously, to be effective in the face of unfamiliar and ill-defined situations, global leaders need to formulate novel actions and adapt to the realities they face. While a strong stock of global mindset can facilitate success in such environments, current research shows that its impact is in fact moderated by the nature of the global leader’s own home culture—the culture in which he/she grew up. Of specific importance is the extent to which the home culture is tight or loose. Tightness-looseness refers to the strength of social norms and the degree of sanctioning in a society. Tightness refers to clarity and pervasiveness of societal norms, and looseness refers to the extent of tolerance toward deviance from the norms. In tight societies, parents and educational institutions emphasize obedience and monitor their children’s behavior. In contrast, parents and educational systems in loose societies encourage more exploration and tend to prefer more lenient punishments. Current research shows that leaders who grow up in relatively tight cultures tend to be more constrained in their ability to leverage their global mindset in global roles for three possible reasons. First, they are more likely to develop a more rigid mental schema as compared to those from loose cultures, and consequently, tend to rely on established procedures and automatically filter out pieces of information from their global context that do not correspond with the worldview and norms that are ingrained in the home culture. Second, tightness of home culture may result in higher emotional and physical costs associated with showing flexibility and exhibiting behaviors that are suitable for the global realities but are counter to home country culture, resulting in fatigue and exhaustion. Third, global leaders are likely to face challenges that require novelty and innovativeness in their decision-making and acting. Individuals who grow up in tight cultures tend to show reluctance to engage in innovative thinking and risk taking due to their cultural norms that emphasized conformity and sanctions. To summarize, the global leader’s own upbringing and cultural experience is shown to have an impact on his/her ability to leverage his/her global

mindset to be effective in global roles. While having a strong global mindset is a predictor of success, the leader’s ability to leverage his/her global mindset is partly controlled by the culture in which he/she was raised.

Future Directions Despite obstacles and challenges, corporations will continue to pursue their global ambitions in search of new markets, new talent pools, and new sources of capital. Global trade will continue to grow because of the existence of opportunities all over the world. Global business leadership is a relatively recent concept and our understanding of this increasingly important topic will evolve with continuing theoretical and empirical work. Compared to domestic leaders, global leaders face increased uncertainty, novelty, complexity, and diversity and require a strong global mindset to succeed in the face of their global challenges. They need a set of cognitive and affective attributes that can help them navigate the complexities of global roles and enhance their energy and motivation to deal with them. But it is important to keep in mind that the cultural upbringing of the leader will influence the extent to which they are able to take advantage of their strong global mindset. Mansour Javidan See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Diversity; Global Leadership; GLOBE Research Program; Leadership and US International Relations

Further Readings Beechler, S., & Javidan, M. (2007). Leading with a global mindset. Advances in International Management, 19, 131–169. doi:10.1016/S1571-5027(07)19006-9 Caligiuri, P., & Tarique, I. (2012). Dynamic cross-cultural competencies and global leadership effectiveness. Journal of World Business, 47, 612–622. doi:10.1016/ j.jwb.2012.01.014 Chua, R. Y. J., Roth, Y., & Lemoine, J. F. (2015). The impact of culture on creativity: How cultural tightness and cultural distance affect global innovation crowdsourcing work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 60, 189–227. doi:10.1177/ 0001839214563595

Global Leadership El Erian, M. (2019). Nails it - Economic analyst El-Erian: The era of “de-globalization” is here. . . - The last refuge. Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https:// theconservativetreehouse.com Gallup. (2019, February 8). The future of leadership development: A global mindset, Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/ 246551/future-leadership-development-global-mindset. aspx Gelfand, M. J., Nishii, L. H., & Raver, J. L. (2006). On the nature and importance of cultural tightness-looseness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 1225–1244. doi:10. 1037/0021-9010.91.6.1225 Gupta, A. K., & Govindarajan, V. (2002). Cultivating a global mindset. Academy of Management Executive, 16, 116–126. doi:10.5465/ame.2002.6640211 Javidan, M., & Bowen, D. (2013). The “Global Mindset” of managers: What it is, why it matters, and how to develop it. Organizational Dynamics, 42, 145–155. doi:10.1016/j.orgdyn.2013.03.008 Javidan, M., Waldman, D., & Wang, D. (2020). How life experiences and cultural context matter: A multilevel framework of global leader effectiveness. Journal of Management Studies, 58, 1331–1362. doi:10.1111/ joms.12662 Levy, O., Beechler, S., Taylor, S., & Boyacigiller, N. (2007). What we talk about when we talk about “global mindset”: Managerial cognition in multinational corporations. Journal of International Business Studies, 38, 231–258. doi:10.1057/palgrave. jibs.8400265 Mendenhall, M. E., Reiche, B. S., Bird, A., & Osland, J. S. (2012). Defining the “global” in global leadership. Journal of World Business, 47, 493–503. doi:10.1016/ j.jwb.2012.01.003 Osland, J. (2013). An overview of the global leadership literature. In Mendenhall, M. E., Osland, J. S., Bird, A., Oddou, G. R., Maznevski, M. L., Stevens, M. J., & Stahl, G. (Eds.), Global leadership: Research, practice, and development (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. 40–80. doi:10.4324/9780203138014-9

GLOBAL LEADERSHIP The study of global leadership is an emerging field of research. It has become more significant and predominant in the literature on leadership as both

389

scholars and practitioners have acknowledged the importance of context to and for effectiveness in leadership as the most important of multiple drivers. At the highest level, context can mean that leadership purpose is to respond to challenges that can only be defined in global terms. Global leadership is not a mere extension of leadership into new, larger, and more complex terrain; it is a different phenomenon, a new way of thinking and acting within a new frame of reference. Global leadership is defined through global problems, unbound from a single cultural reference point, comfortable with applying a global perspective to sometimes highly localized settings. This entry examines the process of global leadership and responding to global challenges, highlighting key components required for successful leaders in a complex, global system.

Global Leadership Managing Complexity By acknowledging a greater complexity resulting from the dynamics of globalization, reviewers of leadership in the 21st century are now more likely to begin with global perspectives, and of core interest is what “good” leadership looks like in a global context. In this way, a dual interest arises: an interest in global perspectives on leadership as well as an interest in the importance of the global perspective of leaders. It is also important to distinguish clearly between leadership and leaders. Definitions of global leadership are ambiguous and contested. They embrace both perspectives on leadership itself and the relationship between leadership and global, as opposed to very local, challenges. They also include global perspectives of leaders and the extent to which these influence, or are influenced by, multiple, complex, and diverse cultures, contexts, and constituents. So, the term global leadership includes both the application of leadership to local, international, or global contexts, as well as the nature of leadership as a phenomenon or process. These are very different and reflect how far we have moved from thinking about extending leadership from the local to the global, toward conceptualizing leadership in a way that draws from diverse cultural frames of reference to strengthen their impact.

390

Global Leadership

The Process of Global Leadership This interest in the ability of leadership to navigate in global contexts and interest in leadership abilities to draw on global experiences to strengthen applications at a local level take us to the ambiguities in definitions. Most definitions of leadership highlight it as an activity or process that has several interconnected constituents who work in a particular organization or context and have a common purpose or aim. In this view, leadership is not simply the behavior or qualities of the person in charge (i.e., the leader). We can identify leadership as a phenomenon—a process or set of activities—that comprises a set of interconnected collaborators: a leader, followers, and other stakeholders. This collaboration works within a common frame, a common purpose; so, leadership is more than the “leader” or the behavior of the leader. Interestingly, most of the literature on leadership focuses on the person of the leader, seeking to highlight (and promote) the qualities of effective leaders. This is typically done through observing the best, most successful leaders and watching how they operate in the hope of specifying the “key ingredients” of a successful leader. This same interest is also applied to global leadership and global leaders. Perceptions about the latter—about the determinants of successful global leaders—are changing. No longer are global managers, transferred from one country to another, seen as good examples. Rather, effective global leaders are seen as those who are able to work transculturally as well as engage in cross-cultural problem-solving. Interest in global leadership arises as overall leadership effectiveness becomes challenged within a world that is much more connected, interdependent, and complex, and where, as a result, leadership generally finds it difficult to be successful as a process without overt recognition of this wider, multi-faceted context. This implies an understanding of global leadership as a process that views it from a local context and, in seeking to be more effective, works to include realities and influences from a global context.

Responding to Global Challenge As already indicated, an important alternative is to focus on global leadership from the perspective of

the global context as a starting point, in which the purpose of leadership is to respond to challenges that can only be defined in global terms, such as climate change mitigation or adaptation, public health, terrorism, or mass-migration. From this perspective, the study of global leadership would be restricted to the need to make sense of and manage changes to a global order, working multilaterally, beyond local or national borders. This global context describes a dynamic and highly interdependent set of global pressures and trends that affect all sectors of society, be they government or nongovernmental organizations, or profit- or nonprofit enterprises. Here, the purpose of global leadership is, at least, to manage the associated risks and, at best, to convert the risk into opportunities for sustainable development outcomes. Currently, these challenges for global leadership are framed in terms of sustainable development encoded at a political level in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). These set priorities for global leadership over 15 years through 2030. Global leadership, then, is a genuine 21stcentury concern, as global leaders pursue their role of making sense of an increasingly complex context and help to make the positive changes that are deemed required. Reviewing the success or otherwise of leadership responses to challenges facing the world has created real interest in global perspectives in leadership and the new research agenda that is associated with this imperative. Research includes assessing the universality of characteristics that have been associated with good leadership, and how globalization is changing leaders’ perspectives and required competencies.

Leadership With Global Acuity As global leadership is not a mere extension of leadership into new, larger, and more complex terrain, it is more defined through the context of global problems, and comfortable with applying a global perspective to sometimes highly localized settings. The benefits of such renewed global mindsets can be applied equally to very specific local challenges—how, for example, work-based employee relations can be improved by reference to workplace practices in many and diverse

Global Leadership

cultural and geographical settings, or to global challenges that recognize few local boundaries as with the UN SDGs. This sets out a new and distinctive context for leadership with a need for both radical and incremental change in approach to reflect an unprecedented time of amplified complexity fueled by an unyielding and accelerating pace of change with unprecedented pressures from changes in power relations, technologies that disrupt as well as offer solutions, and global interdependencies. These are framed in a global context that is less secure and better informed, but at the same time pervasively misinformed by new media and mass communications; a context that operates with declining levels of trust and fewer trusted institutions; a global context more unequal and less fair despite being more connected and interdependent; and one fraught with significant ethical dilemmas.

Interconnections and Complex Systems This is an era in which the new and very distinctive interconnections, interdependencies, and complex adaptive systems that frame all the actions of leadership, at all levels, bring shared missions. In the development of the Davos Agenda 2021, leaderships represented at the World Economic Forum agreed upon the urgency of placing people at the heart of a collaborative world and of the importance of ensuring that multilateral frameworks work for everyone. Many agreed with an ongoing struggle to preserve democratic participation. Heightened attention to global leadership places the consequences of this changed context at the heart of discussions: Consequences for leadership that brings potentials for success and failures, achievements, and disappointments and that actively seeks ways of supporting leaders to navigate challenges more effectively and of future proofing better leadership. This emerging field of research is building understanding around three related agendas. First, leadership is increasingly located and judged within complex socio-economic and environmental risks and opportunities that are, by interconnections and interdependencies, global. Second, scholars and practitioners focus significantly on effectiveness—on the attributes of “good” leadership, which both helps the navigation of

391

complexity and helps make positive change when needed. Leadership literature offers countless lists of supposedly universal leadership qualities, placing emphasis on such community behaviors of inclusivity, participation, and collaboration. Exhibiting these behaviors in and for a global context is challenging given the diversity of cultures with which to negotiate and accommodate, and the multiple and differential specificities of problems at local and global levels. Finally, in the global context, “global acuity” is a critical leadership attribute to cultivate, developing skills of open-mindedness, inclusivity, long-term and systemic thinking, and an ability to navigate complexity. Conclusions in the World Economic Forum’s annual surveys on the global agenda reinforce general agreement about the qualities required for effective leadership in this context. The application of a global perspective is regarded as the critical attribute. Cultivating a global mindset within leadership was also a strong conclusion from researchers at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School, who observed global executives and managers on individual qualities deemed essential for the leaders of tomorrow. The global perspective of leadership identified included knowledge and awareness about diverse cultures, socio-economic and political systems, being comfortable with people who are different, and understanding practices, both social and business, in other countries, systems, and environments.

Global Leaders as Curious Negotiators Within the phenomenon of global leadership, and through the process of interconnected collaborators, the individual leader will play a critical role. The willing subscription to a common purpose and the influence-relationship between leaders and collaborators are supported by skills and competencies of effective leaders. These are, for the most part, about the creation and management of relationships; the ability to work with colleagues from other cultures and countries, working in second languages, using locally sensitive negotiation, and influencing approaches and embracing the interdependence between global and local. Most of these attributes are beyond international. Global leadership is more than working between countries or cultures, it views

392

Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership

the global as a whole system terrain, impossible to disaggregate except at the front line of product or service delivery. In its best practice of global leadership, the differences in people and cultures that many struggle to experience and negotiate are seen as assets, allowing mobilization of levels of global awareness and experience-sharing that transcend the relative simplicity of working with comfort in well-known, well-trod, and predictable locales. Successful global leadership supported by effective global leaders is characterized by all those traits of empathetic, cultural awareness and sensitivity to complexity of context, but above all builds strong bridges between cultures, and makes strong connections with both individuals and organizations across boundaries. This links global leadership strongly to systems thinking and global leaders to a strong need for curiosity and humility. Systems leadership places significant focus on this connecting and cultivating of shared visions for positive change—and an outcome produced by working jointly with all stakeholders within the global terrain. Effective systems operations show strong accountability and mechanisms for being clear about tasks, roles, and scope. The connecting across boundaries underlines, for global leadership, the complexity involved. Global leadership, inspired by global leaders, must successfully navigate nationalities, national systems, languages, and cultures, and work across gender, age, belief, professional boundaries, in-groups and out-groups, and teams and individuals. Global leadership must excel in working with communications, modern attitudes and ways of thinking, and the management of priorities. This is indeed still a new science: for more than 20 years, surveys documented the critical importance of global leadership and the scarcity of global leaders in business. An important study in 2009 by the Centre for Creative Leadership found that 86% of senior executives believed it is important to work effectively across cultural and geographic boundaries in their current leadership role. Yet only 7% believed they are effective at doing so. There is no reason to suppose that this would not apply also to the public and not-for-profit sectors. This development of global leadership continues to be a work in progress. Michael Hardy and Cynthia Cherrey

See also Bad Leadership; Caring Leadership; Collective Responsibility; Crisis Leadership; Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Empathetic Leadership; GLOBE Research Program; International Leadership Association

Further Readings Cabrera, A., & Unruh, G. (2012). Being global: How to think, act, and lead in a transformed world. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Chhokar, J. S., Brodbeck, F. C., & House, R. J. (Eds.). (2008). Culture and leadership across the world: The GLOBE book of in-depth studies of 25 societies. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Hickman, G. (2010) Leading change in multiple contexts: Concepts and practices in organizational, community, political, social, and global change settings. SAGE. Thousand Oaks, CA doi: 10.4135/9781452274706 Javidan, M. (2010, May 19). Bringing the global mindset to leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review. Mendenhall, M. E., Osland, J. S., Bird, A., Oddou, G. R., Maznevski, M. L., Stevens, M. J., & Stahl, G. K. (Eds.), (2018). Global leadership: Research, practice and development. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9781315232904 Perruci, G. (2019). Global leadership: A transnational perspective. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9781315161945 Perruci, G. (Ed.). (2021). The study and practice of global leadership. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. doi:10.1108/ S2058-88012022 Pfeifer, D., & Jackson, B. (2008). Cross-cultural leadership (pp. 32–35). In A. Marturano & J. Gosling (Eds.). Leadership: The key concepts. London: Routledge. World Economic Forum. (2021). The Davos agenda 2021. Geneva World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/events/the-davos-agenda2021

GLOBALISM, NATIONALISM, LEADERSHIP

AND

Since 2016, with the Brexit vote to withdraw the United Kingdom from the EU, and the election of Donald J. Trump to the American presidency,

Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership

some have argued that the most fundamental divide in political life is between globalists and nationalists, and that these two contrasting worldviews have supplanted the categories of “left” and “right” otherwise so often associated with partisan politics since the time of the French Revolution. Globalists and nationalists each offer visions about how to order and organize social, political, and economic life. This entry considers the worldviews of globalist and nationalists, and their implications for leadership. Globalists believe that transnational institutions, laws, and governance structures are both necessary and best for securing the rights of, and providing prosperity to, the world’s peoples. Thus, the nation is an obstacle to achieving their goals, and leadership, they argue, really ought to think in terms of a global community and the welfare of humanity at large. Nationalists, by contrast, hold that liberty and justice are best preserved and left to flourish by way of distinct national states with their own laws, institutions, and modes of self-government. Thus, the nation is instrumental to achieving their goals, and leadership, they argue, really ought to think in terms of the national community and of the welfare of the nation’s people above all. Different leaders are persuaded by one or the other—or some combination—of these two worldviews, and we readily speak today of both global and national leaders. For while the world is constituted by nearly 200 unique states with their respective territories, peoples, laws, and customs, one likewise finds a great number of international institutions and trans- or multi-national organizations of governmental, non-governmental, and corporate varieties. The alternative theories and practices of global and national leadership represent different responses to questions including the scale and scope of leadership, the locus of just authority, the degree and kinds of loyalty, the extent and possibilities of community, as well as many other related issues. The arguments on either side of the globalist-nationalist debate, as well as the challenges posed by this division, are unavoidable for contemporary leadership studies. However, while the debate over globalism and nationalism may seem to be a novel development—an apparent consequence of what we now call “globalization”

393

(a word itself only coined in the mid-20th century)— it is really but the latest manifestation of an older problem. Indeed, it is a problem arguably as old as politics itself, namely, that of the kind of body or framework a community ought to take, the forms of which run from being more particular to those that are more universal.

The Tension Between the Universal and the Particular City and Empire

Political life, properly speaking, began in the West in the ancient Greek cities. Our very language of politics derives from the Greek word for city: polis. The ancient poleis (or cities) consisted of small, largely homogeneous populations of citizens who participated directly in legislating, ruling, and defending their communities. The polis was something of an anomaly in the course of human events, for more often than not the earth’s peoples lived under some form of despotism; most individuals were excluded from political decision-making and leadership while the great masses were regularly subjected to servitude. Life in the ancient city instead granted the rare possibility for individuals (albeit male and typically only those domestically born and of some means) to take turns in leading and being led—to be responsible for their individual and collective destinies. The small-scale polis thus expanded opportunities for leadership, notwithstanding the erstwhile restrictions on citizenship. However, these particular cities were eventually consumed by warfare both within and between them while ultimately being conquered from without by an expanding empire from Macedonia—an empire thereafter driven by Alexander the Great’s ambition for universal rule of the known world. While scholars debate Alexander’s ultimate motivations and the nature of his empire, suffice it to say it was no simple despotism; however, much of this imperial project rested on his personality and loyalty to him as leader. Alexander was moved by a notion of human unity, and some even suggest he inaugurated a nascent form of ancient globalization. He expanded trade from Greece to

394

Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership

India while mixing and mingling the variegated customs and habits of peoples across Eurasia without altogether homogenizing them into a single culture. At any rate, the tension between the universal and the particular was alive and well in the ancient world in the encounter of the small-scale cities with the vast and expansive empire, the former of which was best analyzed and defended by the political philosopher Aristotle and the latter of which was best realized by Alexander, who was once Aristotle’s student. One might say that the leadership of philosophy failed to persuade, or deter, a spirited political leader from desiring to rule the entire globe. The interplay of these two polar opposite political bodies continued throughout Western political history, with the obvious example of Rome that began as a small republican city and transformed itself into a large imperial power, thus running the gamut from the most particular to the most universal of political forms. Well after Rome’s collapse, both alternatives continued to live on as preferences in the minds of different political philosophers and political leaders. The Nation

The particularity of the city offered the possibility for participatory citizenship and proximity to leadership, but was also associated with exclusion, faction, and warfare. The universality of the empire offered greater likelihood for peace and inclusion, but membership granted minimal opportunity for political participation while leadership was distant. These tradeoffs were in some sense mitigated by the creation of the modern nation or nation-state—a political body between the city and empire in scope, scale, and structure. Both the origin and the definition of the nation are matters of significant debate, and by no means in academic circles alone, for historical narratives about different peoples can be a contentious affair for leaders and citizens alike. Some trace the nation to premodern circumstances, as in the case of the ancient Israelites—who considered themselves a distinct nation in contrast to the surrounding empires—while others argue it is of modern origin and the consequence of 18th and 19th century ideology, buttressed by the modern

state and industrial economies. What is more, scholars often demarcate “ethnic” forms of the nation that are rooted in notions of culture, language, and kinship, in contrast to “civic” forms that rest more in ideas of citizenship, principles, and institutions. The historical reality of communities, however, is much more complex than this binary distinction suggests. National leaders have nevertheless appealed to one or the other—or even both—form of nationalism to establish as well as rally groups of people to their behest. Insofar as nations remain distinct from one another, with their own governing institutions and legal structures deemed legitimate by their members, it is plausible to propose that each such nation is a particular manifestation of universal humanity. Fundamentally, all human beings share in some things—in the fact of being human and thereby belonging to humanity. Nevertheless, there are not insignificant differences across the earth’s peoples, who share things unto themselves that are not shared with outsiders—this list includes, but is not limited to, things like history (i.e., past glories and sufferings), ancestry (i.e., natural or adopted), principles and ideas (i.e., of justice or order), beliefs (i.e., religious or secular), and values (i.e., cultural or otherwise). In many ways, globalists seek to build on the most broadly but perhaps thinly shared things that all individuals have in common, while nationalists seek to build on the more substantive but sometimes overly exclusive things that some individuals share. This contrast is yet another way of indicating the irresolvable tension between the universal and the particular, which the nation at best mediates but by no means solves. Leaders therefore play a very important role in mitigating the tendency toward extremes (or exacerbating it, as the case may be). By way of their speech and deeds, they guide a particular people to embody better or worse aspects of universal humanity. The present configuration of a world divided between a multitude of nations and states offers a diverse range of regimes, or ways of life, by which peoples live together in community with others. So much becomes apparent through comparative study of different nations, even between those as seemingly similar to one another as, for example, the United States and Great Britain. This kind of diversity is celebrated by today’s nationalists, who

Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership

believe that different peoples and their representative leaders can and should decide things differently for themselves. This also implies that nations should at best take a very limited approach to intervening in the affairs of others, even in the face of injustices, so as not to violate sovereign control. This same variety is therefore sometimes lamented by today’s globalists, who are concerned that without a single and universal standard of justice enforced the world over, by way of international law and human rights, some people may suffer under unjust regimes. Present problems, globalists further argue, from climate change to pandemics and related humanitarian crises, necessitate unified responses at the direction of global leadership. Thus, while nationalists are skeptical about the use of international and transnational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, globalists see these as imperative for achieving the necessary unity to address common, global problems. The European Union

The European Union (EU) is sometimes cited as an example to demonstrate the ways in which the limitations of the nation may be overcome to establish greater universality in law, regulation, and policy in a host of areas—that is, to bring greater unity and uniformity amidst different and many previously hostile nations. At least in principle, the EU’s institutions exist for leaders to work together to deliberate about what is good and just for Europe as a whole. However, the EU also demonstrates the ongoing challenges facing European leaders who must yet contend with a set of national leaders. Most peoples in Europe continue to readily identify with the latter, and this creates a degree of confusion in allegiance or loyalty, as well as at times a contestation among ranks of different leaders. Despite the EU’s achievements in bringing about greater circulation of goods, services, capital, and people across its member states, the democratic principles of consent and accountability remain much stronger at the national level. Consequently, the EU is criticized for lacking legitimacy and is considered by its detractors to be a top-down effort to replace political leadership with unelected bureaucratic rule. Moreover, given that the EU was not founded with a single political

395

act by way of a clearly ratified constitution, but instead has developed over time through a series of treaties and bodies of regulation and law, the precise location of sovereignty is not always clear. This matter is hotly debated when triggered by the necessity for major decisions regarding foreign policy or immigration, amid unexpected crises such as economic depression with disparate effects across the various member states, or a global pandemic where each nation scrambles to protect their own populations with disparate vaccine production capacity across the EU. The difficulties facing the EU further stem from the fact that there are conflicting visions over just what kind of political body it is or ought to be— whether an empire of some sort, a new entity of supranational form, a federation of nation-states, or some other possibility altogether. At different moments it could be argued to be closer to any one of these forms, and various leaders are committed to advocating one such vision against the others. So long as the EU remains undetermined as a clearly constituted framework, it could lack the cohesion and capacity for action. This leads to greater likelihood of failure in leadership and frustration among citizens who are unclear as to where ultimate decision-making power resides and how to hold those who fail accountable. Whatever the future holds for the EU, its short history highlights the irresolvable tension between the universal and the particular in political life, and the layers of communities and multiplicity of identities with which modern leaders must contend.

Leadership in a More Unified and More Fragmented World Globalization and Democracy

The complexity of a phenomenon like globalization makes it hard to decipher its ultimate meaning, not least because, paradoxically, the world seems at once to have achieved greater unity while simultaneously fracturing anew. To the extent that digital technologies have shrunk the distances between people and expanded networks of commerce and communication, the measures on freedom and democracy over the first two decades of the 21st century show marked declines and a

396

GLOBE 2020

concomitant rise in tribalism and polarization. Authoritarian rule is expanding while the unipolar moment of American global dominance seems to be receding as peer competitors like China are growing in geopolitical prominence. Questions about the nature of globalization, as well as whether the Western liberal democracies can or should lead it, are central to the globalist-nationalist divide. To the extent that there are varieties of globalization and multiple pathways for its future direction, individual nations are perhaps best positioned to shape and direct it. The nations of the world are, to be sure, far from equal in their power, competence, and wealth, and the political consequences of these discrepancies cannot be overlooked. As states are defined by the fact of sovereignty, not all can exercise it to the same extent. On the very basis of sovereignty and its discrepancies, national leaders retain some of the greatest potential for influencing globalization, as much by pursuing their national interest and strategic objectives as by entering into multilateral treaties or other forms of cooperative agreements. If the events of 2016 (Brexit and President Trump’s election) have reminded the leadership class of anything, it is that citizens are not moved by economic interests or benefits alone; matters of culture as well as public esteem remain significant in the minds of large portions of democratic electorates. Thus, globalization cannot be reduced to an economic phenomenon of integrating markets or delivering maximum aggregate prosperity, even as it is this as well. The promise of democracy— that citizens are empowered through their representatives to have a say in their collective fate as a nation—will continue to be at odds with some of the promises of globalization, or the further unification of humanity. For modern democracy was born in and through the nation, and its operation continues to rely on a national framework. The fundamental precondition of democratic freedom remains the rule of law, and there is not (yet) an alternative political body or form that can fully substantiate democratic liberties with the necessary consent and legal support required. Globalist leaders who believe that the most effective policy solutions require universal or global implementation will continue to work to build consensus in partnership with national leaders to persuade the various peoples of the world of the goodness and

justice of their proposed policies. There is therefore bound to be an ongoing dynamic—or dialectic—of unity and fragmentation in the future. But so much only recalls the tension between the universal and the particular as an intractable problem of political life—a tension at the core of the human political condition with which students of leadership must continue to contend. Trevor Shelley See also Democratic Leadership; Global Leadership; Leadership and US International Relations; Political Leadership; Political Obligation

Further Readings Beck, U. (2006). Cosmopolitan vision. Cronin, C. (Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Haidt, J. (2016). The ethics of globalism, nationalism, and patriotism. Minding Nature, 9(3), 18–24. Hicks, D. A., & Williamson, T. (Eds.). (2012). Leadership and global justice. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. doi:10.1057/9781137014696 Manent, P. (2006). A World beyond politics? A defense of the nation-state. LePain, M. (Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Manent, P. (2013). Metamorphoses of the city: On the western dynamic. LePain, M. (Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/harvard. 9780674726437 Rabkin, J. (2005). Law without nations? Why constitutional government requires sovereign states. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/ 9781400826605 Rodrik, D. (2011). The globalization paradox: Democracy and the future of the world economy. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co. doi:10.1355/ae28-3k Yack, B. (2012). Nationalism and the moral psychology of community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226944685.001.0001

GLOBE 2020 GLOBE 2020 is the latest phase of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project. An expanded version of

GLOBE 2020

its predecessor, GLOBE 2020 is a large-scale multi-method research program that continues to focus on the interrelationship between societal culture and organizational leadership. GLOBE 2020 includes the same constructs as before, along with a number of new ones, with data from more countries and respondents—142 countries and 59,987 professional and managerial respondents. This entry describes the theoretical framework of the project, its foundations in studies of leadership and its relationship to cultural norms and influences, and continues with discussions of the cultural contexts of particular societies and the various dimensions of leadership that play a role in determining what constitutes perceptions of effective and ideal leadership, including such factors as religiosity and gender. This is followed by a section that explains the project’s survey design and the instruments used, before concluding with a brief look at the statistical and psychometric analyses currently underway in preparation for the dissemination of GLOBE 2020’s findings to academic and managerial audiences worldwide.

The GLOBE Project Much has changed in the world since the initial GLOBE study, which was conducted in the early 1990s. Given the realities of the early 21st century, it is critical to reexamine the relationship on an even broader scale because societal, technological, and organizational changes over the past 30 years are likely to result in new leadership imperatives. The GLOBE project has found that leadership is culturally contingent, and to fully understand leadership processes in any country, from perceived value of leadership to actual leadership effectiveness, one should have an intimate understanding of the country’s culture. In line with this premise, the basic GLOBE theoretical framework regarding leadership was labeled culturally endorsed leadership theory (CLT). It was built on the foundation of implicit leadership theory, as explained by Robert G. Lord and his colleagues in the review cited at the end of this entry. Empirical research supported this theory, since beliefs about ideal leadership and the concomitant implicit assumptions regarding leaders (ILT) have been found to influence many aspects of organizational

397

life including leadership selection, ratings of leaders, and subordinate job satisfaction and performance. In earlier phases of GLOBE, researchers designed an instrument containing leadership attributes reflecting a variety of skills, styles, behaviors, and personality traits. Statistical analyses using data from surveys of more than 17,000 managers in 62 countries resulted in two levels of leadership dimensions. The first level consisted of 21 primary leadership dimensions such as visionary, diplomatic, and inspirational leadership. A second-order factor analysis of these 21 primary dimensions produced the second-level leadership dimensions, referred to as six culturally endorsed leadership theories (CLTs). The six dimensions are briefly defined as follows: Charismatic/value-based leadership reflects the ability to inspire, motivate, and expect high performance outcomes from others based on firmly held core values. Team-oriented leadership emphasizes effective team building and implementation of a common purpose or goal among team members. Participative leadership reflects the degree to which managers involve others in making and implementing decisions. Humane-oriented leadership reflects supportive and considerate leadership along with compassion and generosity. Autonomous leadership refers to independent and individualistic leadership attributes. Self-protective leadership focuses on ensuring the safety and security of individuals and the group through status enhancement and face-saving.

The GLOBE 2020 research program continues this stream of leadership research and focuses on the following topics: The relationship between societal culture and beliefs about ideal leadership. It focuses on this relationship while adding new dimensions of leadership. It also examines the relationship in a much larger global sample which includes African and Middle Eastern countries. The stability of CLT perceptions from the mid-1990s to 2020. Given the plethora of societal, global,

398

GLOBE 2020

economic, and technological changes over the past 25 years, it examines the extent and nature of change in perceptions of ideal leadership in the original GLOBE sample of 62 cultures. Two new cultural dimensions: Religiosity and generalized trust were included as two additional cultural dimensions. Two new leadership dimensions: Ethical leadership and paternalistic leadership were added, owing to their increasing prevalence in the literature and in some regions of the world. Gender: Complexities related to gender, culture, and leadership can now be addressed at a scale that has never been possible before. GLOBE 2020 will offer new and contextualized findings on differences between male and female leaders’ perceptions of ideal leadership qualities.

effective leadership is not completely and exclusively contingent on national culture. The challenge is to determine when, where, how much, and why national culture plays a role in determining ideal leadership.

Religiosity as a New Cultural Dimension While religion plays an important role in the day-to-day lives of people in many countries, it is an underexplored construct in terms of its implications for people’s perceptions of ideal leadership and antecedents of interpersonal trust. For example, do citizens of highly religious societies desire leaders who demonstrate certain leadership attributes such as honesty? Or do people in religious societies use idiosyncratic bases of interpersonal trust in contrast to those in less religiously oriented societies?

The Relationship Between Ideal Leadership and Country Culture

Role of Gender

Empirical research shows that cultural context is critical in influencing CLT variation. But why? The answers are both simple and complex. Simple if you consider many anecdotal examples describing how authority figures are viewed in different cultures as kids grow up. In countries with relatively high power distance practices (e.g., Russia and Iran), children typically learn that parents are the decision makers in the family and expect respect and deference. In such cultures, the CLT reflects elements of power and autocratic leadership. As adults, employees in organizations in such cultures tend to be more accepting of authoritarian practices and autocratic leadership styles. The complete answer regarding cultural influence on leadership, however, is more nuanced. Earlier GLOBE research (discussed in the 2004 and 2014 articles by House and colleagues listed in the Further Readings section at the end of this entry) found strong similarities in leadership attributes thought to be effective and ineffective in diverse cultures. On the positive side, attributes such as trustworthy and decisive and on the negative side loner and dictatorial were found to be universal. In contrast, there were substantial differences in other attributes which varied in effectiveness across cultures. Thus, while cultural context does influence many aspects of leadership,

A substantial body of research exists on leadership differences among men and women in leadership positions. Studies have shown that female workers prefer worker-centered leadership that is relationally oriented more than males do, and also that the ideal leadership style preferred by female leaders differed from what male managers viewed as ideal leadership. Female managers showed stronger preference for participative, team-oriented, and charismatic leadership styles, while humaneoriented leadership was valued equally by both genders. The empirical research in this area has two shortcomings: First, it is predominantly set in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, and does not examine the role of national culture in great depth. In cultures where men are found in leadership positions disproportionately to women, even in femaledominated fields, it can be culturally difficult for people to envision women in leadership and perceive them as effective in these roles. In this way, prototypes play a crucial role in evaluating individuals as leaders, creating significant gender-based challenges for women when men are afforded leadership attributes because of their gender. Recent research by Amanda Bullough and colleagues showed the significance of in-group collectivism in

GLOBE 2020

predicting women’s roles in business when in-group is strong enough to provide support but not so limiting as to obstruct individual pursuit of women’s career and business goals. Second, the literature generally focuses on gender differences without attention to various moderators that might influence the conditions under which men and women have similar or dissimilar views on ideal leadership attributes. For example, there is little evidence on whether the length of experience in leadership roles affects men’s and women’s views. For example, do men and women with comparable extensive leadership experience have similar views on ideal leadership? GLOBE 2020 is designed to address both shortcomings. It will examine the link between dimensions of culture and the contrast between men and women’s views of ideal leadership. For example, do men and women have comparable views of ideal leadership in high performance– oriented cultures? Or in gender differentiated cultures? GLOBE 2020 will also examine the role of other moderating variables to provide a contextualized understanding of gender differences in perceptions of ideal leadership. Because of the number of countries and professional and managerial respondents in diverse organizations and sectors, GLOBE is able to address questions related to influence of gender combined with age, experience, and organizational level, as well as industry and organizational type, on individual perceptions of ideal leadership. For example, GLOBE explores a hypothesis that as male and female leaders gain more experience (i.e. age, level in hierarchy), their perceptions of effective leadership styles converge (e.g., good leaders are assertive and nurturing) and gender gaps in perceptions of ideal leadership narrow. In short, GLOBE 2020 is designed to make major theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on gender differences by contextualizing the topic in unprecedented ways that could pave the way for future research in this important area.

Leadership and Interpersonal Trust Interpersonal trust is a new focus of GLOBE 2020. Research has found trust to be a predictor of

399

leader effectiveness. Also, because leaders inspire followers to accomplish organizational goals, followers who believe in their leaders’ benevolence and sincerity are more likely to accept the leader’s vision and to expend the effort to accomplish their goals. Other researchers have examined trust as an outcome of leadership, finding that transformational leadership resulted in higher levels of employee trust in leaders. Transformational leaders’ actions and words help build their employees’ willingness to accept leaders’ benevolence, consistency, and integrity and therefore trustworthiness.

Interpersonal Trust: A Cross-Cultural Perspective to Maximize Leadership Effectiveness Despite substantive findings regarding the importance and consequences of interpersonal trust, the field of international management has paid limited attention to the topic of trust. Srilata Zaheer and Akbar Zaheer encouraged further research on this topic recognizing that the nature of trust and institutional and cultural bases of trust differ across national country contexts: When partners to an international collaboration come from asymmetric trust contexts, they bring with them different motivations and expectations of behavior. Specifically, they may be more or less willing to invest in trust-building and in other governance mechanisms, with implications for theory and practice of international management. While strategic asymmetries between parties to international collaborations have been studied at some depth, it is time to examine social asymmetries between exchange partners. (2006, p. 28)

While there has since been some research on trust in interorganizational relations in cross border context, the literature on interpersonal trust in international context is limited and would benefit from further theoretical and empirical work. Patricia M. Doney and colleagues offered a theoretical framework linking Geert Hofstede’s four cultural dimensions to antecedents of

400

GLOBE 2020

interpersonal trust. Studies show that Asian bank managers hailing from family collectivist cultures tended to view family members and people of same ethnicity as more trustworthy than did American managers. Other research shows that Turkish and Chinese subjects found that Turks viewed similarity of identity as a trust antecedent in their supervisor, while the Chinese reported delegation of authority as a trust antecedent. Although these and other similar studies provide valuable insights into links between culture and trust antecedents, they have two major limitations: First, they tend to focus on one cultural dimension, mostly family collectivism; second, they are based on a small sample of countries, and mostly two-country studies. GLOBE 2020 offers a theoretical framework to test a series of hypotheses linking antecedents of interpersonal trust to national culture. It will use substantial data collected from 142 countries to examine the relationship between national culture dimensions (e.g., performance orientation) and antecedents of interpersonal trust. Such findings will illuminate what trust building approaches are likely more effective for those working in different countries having different cultural profiles.

GLOBE 2020 Survey Design Country Co-Investigators

As in previous GLOBE phases, the researchers conducting the local studies were called country co-investigators (CCIs). CCIs were top academic professionals in their country with expertise in a wide range of disciplines such as business, international management, and organizational behavior. A total of 423 CCIs collected data in 142 countries. GLOBE 2020 Instrument

The program used an updated version of the GLOBE survey including original GLOBE items as well as new items related to original GLOBE constructs, in addition to items for new culture and leadership dimensions. The GLOBE instrument was translated in 138 versions of 60 languages (e.g., multiple versions of French language

as used in different countries) using a new and unique translation/back translation protocol. With a few exceptions, the surveys were hosted for each CCI in the Qualtrics web platform and were conducted digitally. GLOBE 2020 Sample

With a few exceptions, a representative sample of 300–500 managers and professionals participated in the study in each country. As of December 15, 2021, over 100,000 responses had been received in 142 countries. Following a rigorous data cleaning and retention protocol, the current database consists of 59,987 retained cases. The participating countries account for over 99% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and more than 96% of world population, making GLOBE 2020 the largest multicountry study of culture and leadership ever accomplished in the social sciences. The sample consists of managers at all hierarchical levels (front-line, middle, upper) in addition to individuals having managerial responsibilities who may not identify as managers (e.g., business owners, entrepreneurs, self-employed, administrators, and deans). To increase generalizability, the sample also includes professionals from many different industries. Respondents are either citizens of their respective countries or have resided there for a long time and work in private, public, and nonprofit sectors.

Goals and Future Prospects GLOBE 2020 embarked on a unique intellectual journey to satisfy scholars’ curiosities, raise and answer new and intriguing questions, advance rigor in cross cultural research, create a long-lasting and massive network of passionate and dedicated fellow scholars around the world, and build a unique database of managers and professionals in 142 countries. Researchers are currently conducting the required statistical and psychometric analyses to finalize GLOBE 2020 scales on dimensions of cultural practices, ideal leadership, and interpersonal trust. GLOBE 2020 researchers plan to disseminate their findings to academic and managerial audiences through conferences and publications in top-tier academic and

GLOBE Research Program

managerial journals. It is the hope of GLOBE 2020 researchers that their findings will shed light on new and innovative ways for scholars, policy makers, professionals, managers, and organizations to view and react to the diversity that exists among the peoples of the world. Mansour Javidan, Peter W. Dorfman, Rick Cotton, Amanda Bullough, and Medha Satish Kumar

401

Masuda, T., Batdorj, B., & Senzaki, S. (2020). Culture and attention: Future directions to expand research beyond the geographical regions of WEIRD cultures. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, article #1394, 1–15. Paris, L. D., Howell, J. P., Dorfman, P. W., & Hanges, P. (2009). Preferred leadership prototypes of male and female leaders in 27 countries. Journal of International Business Studies, 40, 1396–1405. Zaheer, S., & Zaheer, A. (2006). Trust across borders. Journal of International Business Studies, 37(1), 21–29.

See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Style; GLOBE Research Program; Power and Culture; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Bullough, A., Renko, M., & Abdelzaher, D. (2017). Women’s business ownership: Operating within the context of institutional and in-group collectivism. Journal of Management, 43(7), 2037–2064. Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611–628. Doney, P. M., Cannon, J. P., & Mullen, M. R. (1998). Understanding the influence of national culture on development of trust. Academy of Management Review, 23, 601–620. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. House, R. J., Dorfman, P. W., Javidan, M., Hanges, P. J., & de Luque, M. F. S. (2013). Strategic leadership across cultures: GLOBE study of CEO leadership behavior and effectiveness in 24 countries. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Junker, N. M., & Van Dick, R. (2014). Implicit theories in organizational settings: A systematic review and research agenda of implicit leadership and followership theories. Leadership Quarterly, 25(6), 1154–1173. Lord, R. G., Epitropaki, O., Foti, R. J., & Hansbrough, T. K. (2020). Implicit leadership theories, implicit followership theories, and dynamic processing of leadership information. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 7, 49–74.

GLOBE RESEARCH PROGRAM The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) program is a multiphase research study that measures and analyzes societal desired leadership, as well as both cultural values and practices. GLOBE developed and assessed six global measures of leadership and nine dimensions of societal culture, offering unique cross-cultural insights. This entry presents the purpose, phases, and findings of the GLOBE project, focusing mainly on leadership aspects. The results of the GLOBE project help individuals identify, discern, and interpret traits of those with whom they interrelate, the cultural environment in which they interact, and the behaviors they exhibit to effectively lead. Takeaways and key insights derived from the multiple phases of the research are discussed.

About the GLOBE Project The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project is an ongoing research program that originated in the early 1990s, initiated by Prof. Robert J. House at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He brought together social sciences scholars from around the world to research leadership and societal culture globally. The Phases of GLOBE

Phase 1. Investigating theories of leadership and culture respectively, the first phase of the GLOBE

402

GLOBE Research Program

project examined relevant preceding literature. Through this review of literature, focus group interviews, and grounded theory research on these topics, survey instruments were developed to measure culturally desired leadership ideals and cultural attributes of societies. Phase 2. The second phase of the GLOBE project surveyed 17,000 middle managers in more 950 organizations across the three industries of financial services, food processing and telecommunications within 62 societies. Data were gathered between 1995 and 1997 with assistance from 200 country coinvestigators. GLOBE scholars ascertained the measurement quality (reliability, validity) of the survey instrument. They then tested hypotheses regarding universally effective and ineffective, as well as culturally contingent leadership dimensions. Further, they assessed the relationship between cultural dimensions and aspects of both the human condition and economic competitiveness of countries. GLOBE profiled each society based on six global leadership dimensions and the nine dimensions of societal culture, which were measured through cultural values and practices. Phase 3. In the 2000s, the third phase of the GLOBE project examined the impact and effectiveness of CEOs in a variety of industries, collected through the assistance of 70 GLOBE researchers across 24 nations. This was accomplished by interviewing and assessing more than 1,000 CEOs and surveying over 6,000 top management team members (TMT) reporting to the CEOs, from entrepreneur and non-entrepreneur organizations. Using sophisticated statistical modeling, GLOBE scholars show that CEOs tend to exhibit behaviors that are congruent with culturally desired leadership ideals in their societies yet differ across cultures. Examining relationships with actual firm performance and effectiveness of TMTs of the CEOs, these researchers provided evidence that leadership matters, executive leadership matters greatly, and that societal cultures influence the kind of leadership that is expected and effective in organizations.

ongoing research program. Collaborating with almost 500 researchers, GLOBE 2020 surveyed more than 150 countries using redesigned and validated measures of cultural practices, leadership ideals, and additional constructs of trust and religion in 150 countries. A primary issue examined through this study is the extent to which the societal cultures in the original GLOBE study have changed, as well as the drivers of this change. Another issue addressed in GLOBE 2020 research is to determine the role societal culture plays in how much people trust each other, as well as institutions, across different countries. Garnering a more representative global sample of countries, the 2020 phase of GLOBE expanded its research into less-investigated regions such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). With the exception of Antarctica, all continents are included in this research; therefore, this covers more countries than any other study of societal culture. Scholars in previous GLOBE phases sought to survey a substantially larger sample of female managers and leaders; however, contextual constraints (i.e., lack of inclusion of women in business) proved challenging for this. The GLOBE 2020 sample includes more female leaders than in earlier GLOBE research to explore whether gender differences effect perceptions of outstanding leaders cross culturally. Future GLOBE Research

In future research studies, GLOBE scholars will look to address how human resource practices are effectuated within organizations across societies. Further, they aim to better understand the role that emotions play in the leadership process and for cultural practices. Another future focus for GLOBE is to create means to easily share data and research results, as well as to apply the findings in practical ways for practitioners to use.

GLOBE and Leadership Cultural Leadership Ideals and Effectiveness

GLOBE 2020

Building on the last two decades of the GLOBE project, the next phase is an extension of this

GLOBE has sought to understand what characteristics of leadership are culturally desired (i.e., viewed positively and deemed effective),

GLOBE Research Program

which ones are effective across cultures and which ones may be considered as inhibiting performance. In other words, GLOBE has explored the implicit leadership theories that we all, as laypeople, carry with us and compared them across cultures. GLOBE refers to as them as Culturally Endorsed Implicit Leadership Theory (CLT), building off a large body of existing research on Individual-level Implicit Leadership Theory (ILT). From the first and second phase of GLOBE, 21 first-order dimensions of leadership emerged, which clustered into six higher-order global leadership dimensions. The 21 primary dimensions of leadership (Primary CLTs) are: visionary; inspirational; selfsacrifice; integrity; decisive; performance oriented; collaborative team orientation; team integrator; diplomatic; non-malicious; administratively competent; self-centered; status conscious; conflict inducer; face saver; procedural (bureaucratic); nonautocratic; participative; modesty; humane orientation; and autonomous. These dimensions factor into six more-general global leadership dimensions (Global CLTs): Charismatic/value-based; team oriented; selfprotective; participative; humane oriented; and autonomous. Charismatic/value-based leadership reflects ability to inspire, to motivate, and to expect high performance outcomes from others based on firmly held core values. This global CLT holds six primary CLT dimensions: (a) visionary, (b) inspirational, (c) self-sacrifice, (d) integrity, (e) decisive and (f) performance oriented. Team-oriented leadership emphasizes effective team building and implementation of a common purpose or goal among team members. There are five primary CLT dimensions attributed to this leadership style: (a) collaborative team orientation, (b) team integrator, (c) diplomatic, (d) nonmalicious, and (e) administratively competent. Participative leadership reflects the degree to which managers involve others in making and implementing decisions. Incorporating two primary CLT dimensions: (a) participative, and (b) non-autocratic. Humane-oriented leadership reflects supportive and considerate leadership but also includes compassion and generosity. Reflecting two primary

403

CLT dimensions: (a) modesty and (b) humane orientation. Autonomous leadership refers to independent and individualistic leadership attributes and is relatively novel. This global CLT is measured by a single primary CLT labeled autonomous leadership, consisting of individualistic, independence, autonomous, and unique attributes. Self-protective leadership is a newly defined global CLT focusing on ensuring the safety and security of the individual and group through status enhancement and face saving. This includes five primary CLTs: (a) self-centered, (b) status conscious, (c) conflict inducer, (d) face saver, and (e) procedural. Among the six Global CLTs, charismatic/ value-based and team-oriented leadership are seen as universally effective and desirable across cultures. By contrast, autonomous and selfprotective leadership are largely viewed as either relatively neutral or undesirable and ineffective depending on the country. The evaluation of humane oriented and participate leadership varies across cultures from positive and desirable to neutral and even undesirable. Further, GLOBE identified 22 specific individual leader attributes deemed universally desirable by all GLOBE nations, including the traits of being honest, decisive, motivational and dynamic; whereas eight attributes were identified as universally undesirable such as leaders being loners, irritable, egocentric, and ruthless. Phase 3 of GLOBE established that CEOs are more effective and perform better when they act and behave in line with cultural expectations about leaders; hence, global CLTs that are strongly endorsed in societies emanate from highly effectual CEOs. Subsequent research linked country differences in CLTs to numbers of women who assume leadership roles in politics and business in a country, especially pertaining to the CLT charismatic leadership. Notably, expanded research demonstrated that specific CLTs align with entrepreneurship. Further studies relating to societal expectations of leaders show that more businesses are started in countries endorsing the global CLT charismatic leadership and in countries which view the global CLT self-protective leadership as relatively more positive.

404

GLOBE Research Program

Why Do CLTs Matter?

Especially for strategic leadership, GLOBE research on CLTs illustrates that leaders need to understand, be aware of, and align their behavior with the CLTs that are deemed desirable in a society. CLTs have implications for what type of leadership behaviors should be reinforced and developed; for instance, charismatic and team-oriented leadership, which are viewed positively and deemed effective around the world. CLTs can also offer important guideposts for expatriates and manager relocating to another culture, or for those working across multiple cultures. Consider, for instance, self-protective leadership. This global CLT combines self-interested and status-conscious actions by the leader with face-saving and acting paternalistically toward followers. Whereas this is more acceptable in Southern and Confucian Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures, it is frowned upon and viewed negatively in the more egalitarian Germanic, Northern European and Anglo cultures. Thus, a manager moving from a Southern Asian to a Germanic or Anglo culture may face backlash if they act in a self-protective manner and may no longer be able to achieve the same success in their business as they did in Southern Asia.

GLOBE and Societal Culture In phases 1 and 2, GLOBE researchers developed and validated scales to assess national or societal culture, collecting data for 62 societies (59 countries). Both cultural values and practices were measured on nine cultural dimensions, which are as follows: In-Group Collectivism assesses how individuals express pride in, loyalty to, and cohesiveness with their families and preferred groups Institutional Collectivism assesses institutional practices for distributing resources and rewards associated with collective practices Power Distance assesses the degree of acceptance that power or privilege is stratified and concentrated at higher levels in society Uncertainty Avoidance assesses preference for stability and predictability over change and uncertainty

Performance Orientation assesses the extent to which achievement and excellence are emphasized and rewarded Future Orientation assesses how planning and investing in the future is favored over short-term action and immediate gratification Gender Egalitarianism assesses the extent to which gender equality is emphasized and gender role differences are minimized Humane Orientation assesses how fair, generous, altruistic, and kind individuals are in social interactions Assertiveness Orientation assesses how dominant, confrontational, and firm individuals are in social interactions.

Distinguishing Cultural Values From Practices

In this pioneering research, GLOBE phase 1 examined values alongside practices approaches to studying culture. The former conceptualized as ideals (i.e., how culture “should be”) and the later as assessments of typical behaviors one encounters and observes (i.e., culture “as is”) in societies. GLOBE phase 2 found the CLTs, which are seen as more or less desirable, are related to cultural values, although not cultural practices. Reflections of culture ideals are the societal cultural values and when combined with CLTs they shape views of ideal leadership (e.g., types of leadership attributes and behaviors that are deemed desirable and effective). Intriguingly, seven of the nine cultural dimensions display negative correlations between the cultural values and practices approaches; the exceptions to this are gender egalitarianism and in-group collectivism. GLOBE interprets this inverse correlation to a so-called deprivation or dissatisfaction effect. To illustrate, societies ranking higher on practicing unequal power distribution (higher power distance) indicate a desire or value for less power hierarchy (lower power distance) in their culture. Furthermore, GLOBE and subsequent research has found that cultural practices most consistently relate to objective, behavioral, and observational outcomes from innovativeness to entrepreneurship; whereas cultural values relate more closely to

Group Effectiveness

attitudinal measures. Thus, cultural practices offer an important way to understand culture as lived and applied in a society. Advancing our comprehension of national culture, this complements existing approaches which typically focus on cultural values. In conclusion, GLOBE has provided empirical evidence of how leadership is viewed and comported throughout the world. While the findings of GLOBE are thought-provoking, global stakeholders benefit from taking the insights and turning them into conscious actions. The application of GLOBE is where the real value originates. Mary Sully de Luque and Ute Stephan See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Charismatic Leadership; Effective Leadership; GLOBE 2020; Implicit Leadership Theory

Further Readings Dorfman, P., Javidan, M., Hanges, P., Dastmalchian, A., & House, R. J. (2012). GLOBE: A twenty-year journey into the intriguing world of culture and leadership. Journal of World Business, 47(4), 504–518. doi:10. 1016/j.jwb.2012.01.004 GLOBE Project. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from https:// globeproject.com House, R. J., Hanges, P. M., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P., & Gupta, V. (2004). Culture, leadership and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Javidan, M., Dorfman, P., Sully de Luque, M., & House, R. J. (2006). In the eye of the beholder: Cross cultural lessons in leadership from Project GLOBE. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(1), 67–90. doi:10.5465/ amp.2006.19873410

GROUP EFFECTIVENESS Group effectiveness refers to the quality of a task-oriented group’s performance relative to some standard, typically the performance that would be generated by an individual working alone. This is a critical comparison because there is little point in using a group if it cannot reliably

405

outperform one highly skilled individual. This entry discusses research on the effectiveness of groups and how a leader might go about improving group effectiveness.

Groups Versus Individuals The belief that groups are better than individuals for task performance has existed for millennia. For example, the ancient Greek ekklesia, a municipal body in which all male citizens of the city discussed issues and collectively decided on policy, originated approximately 2,600 years ago. It is, then, no surprise that researchers have studied group decision-making and physical performance for close to a century. The consistent finding has been that groups typically do better than the best member of the group working alone but fall considerably short of what is possible given the resources that the group has available. Put another way, the group consumes resources that are not available to an individual yet produces only a slightly better output than the individual. The group is thus inefficient. Why is this? Group inefficiency is influenced by many factors, but the most common is the phenomenon of process loss. Process loss occurs when group members fail to adequately organize their efforts (termed “coordination loss”) or lose interest in the task (“motivation loss”). Common examples of coordination loss include bias toward certain types of information and away from other types; failure to explicitly establish a common understanding of the purpose and goals of the task; lack of objectivity about decision options; and unwillingness to identify or discuss the negative aspects of a decision option. These problems can be magnified by the composition of the group. The mix of personalities, skill levels, or areas of expertise can impact the ability of a group to perform to its full potential. One group member may lack needed talent, limiting the depth of analysis the group can conduct. Someone may have strong personality traits relative to others that allow that person to dictate the decision process. There may be members whose expertise needlessly overlaps while other areas of relevant expertise go unrepresented. Motivation loss occurs when an individual group member decides not to expend full effort on

406

Group Effectiveness

the group task. This can of course happen if the decision topic is uninteresting, but it also arises for a variety of more strategic reasons. The group member may realize that their specific contribution will not be detectable in the single group product, which means they can share credit for the group’s accomplishment without having had to work hard. The person’s talent level may be clearly higher than others and the person may fear that they will be expected to do the bulk of the work. The person may feel that their assigned task is not important or valued. Any of these can cause a group member to scale back on effort. However, the group task can also induce motivation gains under which group members increase their effort above their expected level. This most often arises when the task is important to the person and other group members are unable or unwilling to contribute much toward completion of the task. The person may compensate for others’ lack of ability or interest by devoting an inordinate amount of resources to the task.

Improving Effectiveness Coordination and motivation issues arise in talented, well-managed groups as well as in poorly constructed or led ones. Motivation loss is relatively straightforward to address, though not necessarily easy to correct. Identifying and recognizing individual contributions to the group effort is a useful step, both for protecting against anonymity effects and for highlighting the value of the person’s work. However, the nature of the recognition needs to be carefully considered, and a mechanism needs to be used that is internally valued by the group member and spurs them to continue to work hard. Recognition that is more symbolic—a performance excellence award, for example—can have the opposite effect of reducing motivation, if the group member becomes ineligible for future recognition or feels that the recognition is accorded too broadly. Complicating matters is that recognition that one person sees as external may have internal value to another person. While one person may consider a performance award to be just a piece of paper to file away, another may feel compelled to demonstrate that they deserved the award by continuing to give

maximum effort. Motivation loss can also be managed by matching, as best one can, task needs with group member interests. Allowing group members to work on subtasks that they find intrinsically interesting will help sustain effort. Rarely can this be offered to everyone, as a group task will almost always have some components that are universally unappealing. But it is often within the capability of a group leader to minimize the number of group members who find their assignment uninteresting, and this step should be taken. Coordination loss is a far more difficult problem, one for which researchers have struggled to find solutions. Problems like subjectivity and information bias are within the person and are not rectified merely by telling group members to consider multiple options or to think carefully about the information. Research clearly shows that groups prefer to deal with few decision alternatives and will quickly eliminate additional options, sometimes on the basis of trivial details, in order to reduce the choice set to two or three finalists. Group members can become ego-involved in the process by equating rejection of their favored alternative with disrespect of their professional judgment. Similarly, once the group work is in process, group members typically resist the introduction of information that was previously unknown to them. The reasoning is that if the information is truly important, it would have been shared in advance of their entering the group, because capable people should be fully informed. At the collective level, groups are usually reluctant to revisit a rejected alternative because doing so may imply that they were not careful when originally evaluating that alternative. These are likely familiar examples because coordination loss is pervasive. It occurs in veteran groups of experts as well as ad hoc groups. Consider, for example, NASA’s unwillingness to postpone the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle launch. Officials were told 12 hours in advance by Morton Thiokol engineers that the O-rings might not work in freezing temperatures. The temperature at launch was below freezing, and foot-long icicles were found on the tower during the pre-launch walkthrough. In the aftermath of the explosion, which killed the seven crew members,

Group Effectiveness

evidence emerged of a belief among NASA decision makers that they knew everything important about shuttle launches and the new information from Morton Thiokol was insignificant. At the same time, NASA was under pressure to demonstrate to Congress its relevance or face substantial cuts and perhaps elimination. This would almost certainly result in a bias toward information supporting a launch and against information supporting postponement. Managing coordination loss is a challenge, and to date researchers have not discovered consistently effective interventions. Advance provision of all relevant information to all group members is helpful, and a devil’s advocacy discussion model, under which people are required to argue against their preferred alternative, can sometimes enhance objectivity. Researchers as yet have no recommendations for how to prevent ego involvement in the decision, though there is some evidence that a high level of task involvement reduces the likelihood of ego involvement. Thus, it may be that addressing motivation loss will help reduce defensiveness.

Implications Although a leader likely cannot eliminate ineffectiveness, there is much they can do to reduce it. First, the leader should think carefully about whether the task truly requires collective effort or can be satisfactorily completed by one individual. Straightforward, low-impact tasks probably do not require the added benefit collective work can provide. If a group is indeed called for, the leader should select members in response to task needs. Ideally, member skills will be complementary and collectively will cover everything necessary for high-quality task completion. The leader should be discerning when identifying the necessary skills. A common impulse is to include in the group anyone who has even a passing interest in the task topic. This strategy typically does more harm than good, as overly inclusive groups are vulnerable to the development of factions and subsequent conflict between factions. It is better to assemble the smallest possible group that can entirely meet task needs. As well, the group needs structure and guidance, but at a level aligned with group

407

member needs. A group of inexperienced people who are still refining their skills should have active and involved leadership (though not micromanagement). As the level of talent and experience in the group increases, the leader should become more hands-off, though even a group of veteran experts will still need an operating framework. The initial wave of theories about group decision-making processes in the 1950s conceived of the group as a type of machine. While the individual parts or members might have unique features that alone could compromise performance, the impact of these features should be neutralized when all parts are working at once. A single bulging capacitor will not conduct much current, but if it is surrounded by structurally sound capacitors, the electronic device should work fine. Similarly, it is tolerable for one group member to have a biased take on information if the remaining members are objective about the information. The idea that the mere act of grouping corrects individual decisionmaking biases lingers today. In addition, there will often be task-irrelevant factors that influence the composition of the group, for example a political need to have a unit or subgroup represented in the group even though that representative will not contribute much to the task. These dynamics can make it difficult for a group leader to be proactive at addressing the issues discussed in this entry. The goal should be to increase the group’s effectiveness rather than to make it operate like a well-oiled machine. Craig D. Parks See also Collective Action; Group Process

Further Readings Baumann, M. R., & Bonner, B. L. (2017). An expectancy theory approach to group coordination: Expertise, task features, and member behavior. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 30, 407–419. doi:10.1002/bdm. 1954 Bowman, J. M., & Wittenbaum, G. M. (2012). Time pressure affects process and performance in hidden-profile groups. Small Group Research, 43, 295–314. Gubler, T., Larkin, I., & Pierce, L. (2016). Motivational spillovers from awards: Crowding out in a multitasking

408

Group Norms

environment. Organization Science, 27, 286–303. doi: 10.1287/orsc.2016.1047 Jian, L., Hollingshead, A. B., & Lin, J. C. (2021). Second-guessing in group decision making. Communication Research, 48, 819–844. doi:10.1177/ 0093650218800221 Neckermann, S., & Frey, B. S. (2013). And the winner is. . .? The motivating power of employee awards. Journal of Socio-Economics, 46, 66–77. Stasser, G., & Abele, S. (2020). Collective choice, collaboration, and communication. Annual Review of Psychology, 71, 589–612. Super, J. F., Li, P., Ishqaidef, G., & Guthrie, J. P. (2016). Group rewards, group composition and information sharing: A motivated information processing perspective. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 134, 31–44. Uitdewilligen, S., & Waller, M. J. (2018). Information sharing and decision-making in multidisciplinary crisis management teams. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39, 731–748. doi:10.1002/job.2301 Xiao, Y., Zhang, H., & Basadur, T. M. (2016). Does information sharing always improve team decision making? An examination of the hidden profile condition in new product development. Journal of Business Research, 69, 587–595. Yan, B., Hollingshead, A. B., Alexander, K. S., Cruz, I., & Shaikh, S. J. (2021). Communication in transactive memory systems: A review and multidimensional network perspective. Small Group Research, 52, 3–32. doi:10.1177/1046496420967764

GROUP NORMS Group norms are the standards or rules of behavior in a group. They are generally intended to promote group effectiveness and prevent dysfunction. Norms work exceedingly well if they are clearly communicated, consistently applied, and regularly reviewed for currency and relevance. If any of these qualities are not present, norms can have the opposite effect of worsening the group environment. Sharing, enforcing, and reviewing are easy with codified or formal norms and difficult with habitual or informal norms. Despite this, there are many examples of formal norms being neglected and informal norms being carefully

monitored. This entry reviews the importance of norm communication, consistency, and review, and the impact on groups when these are not done.

Communicating Norms Group members cannot follow norms if they have not been told of the norms. This may seem an obvious statement, but numerous studies have shown that norm socialization of new group members is frequently downplayed or ignored. Group leaders often assume that their norms are no different from those of other groups and thus expect that the new person will already know how to approach most matters. For those norms that are idiosyncratic to the group, it is thought that the new person will be taught them as needed. While this does happen, more often the new member will ask experienced members for instruction, and the new person will learn not the norm proper but rather the colleague’s interpretation of the norm, which may be quite different. This is a primary contributor to the emergence of group inefficiency and shadow processes. Informal norms are not recorded and so must be shared verbally or through observation. Informal norms that are capable of being explained tend to be of central importance to the group. Cultural norms are an excellent example. An informal norm at this level of importance has likely existed for a long time and has been refined to the point where there is a universal understanding of how the norm operates. As such, the likelihood of faulty transmission to a new group member is low. By contrast, informal norms that must be learned through experience tend to be more peripheral. A traveler using an unfamiliar public transport system will likely watch other passengers to discover how to embark, show a boarding pass, and signal a need to exit. Observational learning of norms is vulnerable to error and lack of comprehension. Left uncorrected, this can result in the person internalizing incorrect behaviors. Subgroups within a larger group will typically have some norms that are peculiar to the subgroup. While these can be formal, most of the time subgroup norms will be informal. Further, they can sometimes run counter to collective-level norms. Consider, for example, a construction

Group Norms

company with an explicit policy that workers on site must wear steel-lined boots, and the masonry unit within the company that has an informal policy to not wear safety footwear, on grounds that their weight makes it exhausting to climb scaffolds. The next section takes up the question of why a subgroup would maintain a norm that contradicts overall norm.

Norm Enforcement and Violation Norms gain much of their influence through the (implicit or explicit) threat of sanctions for failing to comply with them. A law that states you will be fined if you exceed the posted speed limit is an explicit sanction; being laughed at for wearing outdated clothing is an implicit one. It follows that norms will lose their influential power if they are inconsistently enforced. Such sends the message that the group does not consider it necessary to always behave in the way the norm prescribes. This may not be the true explanation for why the norm is irregularly enforced—the group may lack the resources needed for consistent enforcement, for example—but it is almost always assumed to be by group members. For example, studies of motorists who regularly exceed speed limits document an inference that posted limits are more of a recommendation than a rule, because speed patrols are irregular and widely spaced. These drivers believe that, if officials were truly concerned with making sure that people adhere to speed limits, patrols would be omnipresent. That patrolling is in truth inconsistent because of personnel shortages in law enforcement does not change their belief. Enforcement of informal norms is typically undertaken by the group members themselves, while enforcement of formal norms is handled by group leaders, who may delegate enforcement authority to others, a policing unit or human resources office, for example. Indeed, with formal norms, group members are often told to “not take the law into their own hands.” The previous section provides the example of a subgroup norm that contradicts the collective norm. There are a few reasons why a group member or subgroup might oppose a collective norm. Norm violation can cause a person to stand

409

out and may confer status as a free spirit, powerful person, or new thinker. A group member may behave counter-normatively if they suspect that the group is succumbing to groupthink or is losing focus on the task at hand and wants to get the group back on track. Finally, norm violation can serve as a method of calling attention to an outdated collective norm. Here the violator is hoping to have the opportunity to explain why they are not complying with the norm. In this situation, the violator can come to be seen as a hero by others who feel harmed by the norm and want it changed or eliminated. Martin Luther King, for example, was arrested 29 times for behaviors that technically were outlawed but in truth violated Southern racial norms.

Review and Revision of Norms The preceding discussion implies that norms can outlive their usefulness if they are not responsive to changing conditions. This requires that norms be regularly evaluated and that there be willingness to revise them, or perhaps do away with them. Groups that fail to do so risk losing strength or even a reason for existence. A business that requires male employees who do not interact with the public to nonetheless wear a jacket and tie, a social group that continues to vacation in a location that is no longer interesting because “we always go there,” and a task group that conducts scheduled meetings despite not having an agenda are examples of groups that need to examine their norms. While it may not be difficult for group members to identify norms that need to be revised or discarded, it will likely be far more difficult to accomplish this change. Established norms are durable. This can be because people do not want to lose the predictability and regularity that an established norm provides, people do not want to or feel unable to learn new behaviors, or because questioning the usefulness of a norm can imply that one’s inferences about the world are not valid. The reader may have noticed that, while earlier this entry stated that group norms are intended to regulate group performance, it has not asked how groups decide which aspects of their routine require regulation. Why does the task group feel it necessary to meet when there is no agenda? What

410

Group Norms

led the group of friends to conclude that the best vacation strategy was for all of them to travel together to the same location every year? The issue of how groups decide what to regulate is a longstanding one in the study of group norms and one that is poorly understood. This lack of understanding has implications for norm review and revision. A norm that was established in response to a critical need is going to be more resistant to change than is a norm that was created for a more frivolous reason. Complicating matters is that current group membership may know the norm’s apparent importance but not why it is considered important. As an example, Marks and Spencer, a United Kingdom-based department store chain founded in 1885, faced a severe decline in sales and store traffic in 1999 in part because they stocked only goods made in the United Kingdom. Despite this, many members of their executive leadership group argued to continue the practice on grounds that an important part of the chain’s image had always been that they stocked only domestic goods. No one, however, knew when the chain committed to this policy or what issue it was intended to address. Marks and Spencer was able to change the norm only by removing some members from the executive group. If the group is amenable to norm change, the change needs to be attempted in a structured manner, with an explanation of why the current norm needs to be changed, a proposal of a revised norm that is not profoundly different from the existing one, a demonstration that group members can successfully adopt the revised norm, and assistance with doing so. Marks and Spencer understood that customers wanted a broader range of product choices, but converting from only domestic to a domestic-international brand mix was considered too radical for many board members. Removing those members was certainly an option, but an alternate approach would have been to add only select, highly popular international brands to inventory, encourage placement of domestic brands in the most visible display areas, and create a display rubric that all stores can use. Once managers saw that this somewhat revised norm resulted in increased sales, they likely would have encouraged further refinements.

Implications Group leaders should be aware of group norms but not treat them as fixed and untouchable. An obsolete norm can harm rather than help the group process. Norm violators will eventually call attention to truly problematic norms, but a proactive leader can avoid this by monitoring norms and acting before they become a problem. Group members may resist norm change, but leaders can minimize resistance by gradually evolving the norm rather than implementing fundamental change. Craig D. Parks See also Conformity; Group Effectiveness; Group Process; Group Satisfaction; Organizational Leadership; Social Change

Further Readings Adarves-Yorno, I., Postmes, T., & Haslam, S. A. (2007). Creative innovation or crazy irrelevance? The contribution of group norms and social identity to creative behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 410–416. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2006.02.013 Cuganesan, S., Steele, C., & Hart, A. (2018). How senior management and workplace norms influence information security attitudes and self-efficacy. Behaviour and Information Technology, 37, 50–65. doi:10.1080/0144929X.2017.1397193 Dai, G., Meuse, K. P. D., & Gaeddert, D. (2011). Onboarding externally hired executives: Avoiding derailment-accelerating contribution. Journal of Management and Organization, 17, 165–178. doi:10. 5172/jmo.2011.17.2.165 Horne, C., & Mollborn, S. (2001). Norms: An integrated framework. Annual Review of Sociology, 46, 467–487. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054658 Kahlow, J., Klecka, H., & Ruppel, E. (2020). What the differences in conflict between online and face-to-face work groups mean for hybrid groups: A state-of-the-art review. Review of Communication Research, 8, 51–77. doi:10.12840/ISSN.2255-4165.023 Moser, K. S., & Axtell, C. M. (2013). The role of norms in virtual work: A review and agenda for future research. Journal of Personnel Psychology, 12, 1–6. doi:10.1027/ 1866-5888/a000079 Raymond, L., Weldon, S. L., Kelly, D., Arriaga, X. B., & Clark, A. M. (2014). Making change: Norm-based

Group Process strategies for institutional change to address intractable problems. Political Research Quarterly, 67, 197–211. doi:10.1177/1065912913510786 Van Kleef, G. A., Gelfand, M. J., & Jetten, J. (2019). The dynamic nature of social norms: New perspectives on norm development, impact, violation, and enforcement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 84, article no. 103814. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2019.05.002 Wolf, B., & Zuckerman, P. (2012). Deviant heroes: Nonconformists as agents of justice and social change. Deviant Behavior, 33, 639–654. doi:10.1080/ 01639625.2011.647587

GROUP PROCESS Group process refers to how a group performs its task and generates a final group product. The product may be tangible or intangible. A skilled group can potentially overcome a flawed process to generate a quality outcome, but such effort will almost always consume additional time and resources, with no guarantee of success. The group leader needs to have some involvement in the process so that flaws get corrected in real time, but not so much involvement that micromanagement emerges. In this entry, we will review the essential elements of group process and consider the outcomes when a leader is too hands-off, overinvolved, and appropriately involved.

Establishing the Group Process To accomplish a task, group members need to know what needs to be done, by when it needs to be done, and how to go about doing it. This may seem an obvious statement. However, too often leaders wrongly assume that group members know the answers to these questions, and that their answers match those of the leader. Indeed, when group process breaks down, it is typically because the leader and members are out of sync on one or more of the process elements. Any leader who has been surprised by some aspect of a group’s approach to a task has had this experience. The leader needs to walk a fine line, however. An over-explanatory leader runs the risk of appearing

411

to micromanage the task or coming across as patronizing. A task group needs to know that majority preference is sufficient to reach a decision, but they do not need to be told how to determine if a majority exists. The challenge for the leader is learning what group members can be assumed to know and where they need instruction. A typical pattern is for leaders to assume that group members with whom they have worked in the past understand completely what to do and that unfamiliar group members have no idea what to do. In truth, both types of members will likely enter the group with accurate expectations for some portions of the process and inaccurate or no expectations for other portions. Further, the diversity of experiences that the group members bring to the task makes it likely that informational needs will differ across persons. A well-documented example of this dilemma is from medicine. Many studies have revealed profound differences in process expectation among the physician, nurse, and specialist members of a medical team: How does the team decide what the next step in the treatment protocol should be, is the patient’s short-term comfort a relevant factor in decision making, who makes the call on altering the patient’s pharmaceutical dosage. Medical errors can, and often do, result from the team members having differing expectations for the group process. Groups can benefit from team training that is designed to instill a common understanding of tasks and how to approach them. Such training is particularly important for critical tasks and challenging situations. Juries, for example, always receive instruction on what they need to decide and how information is to be evaluated before they begin deliberation. Effective team training requires more than definitions and procedural checklists, however. Ad hoc training sessions often fall prey to the problem of under-/oversimplification. Under-simplified training typically emerges around concepts for which the group leader is an expert but group members are unfamiliar. In such situations, what seems like an elementary explanation to the expert can still be overly technical for the novice. As an example, successful appeals of jury decisions in the United States legal system are typically grounded in the claim that the judge’s instructions to the jury were inappropriately complex and resulted in juror

412

Group Process

confusion. Consider a judge’s directive to “weigh aggravating and mitigating factors” when making a sentencing decision. Research has shown that legal experts consider this a simple instruction, but laypeople find it puzzling: How does one “weigh” factors? What reliably distinguishes an aggravating factor from a mitigating factor? What if a factor can reasonably be considered either aggravating or mitigating? This is a good example of under-simplified group process training. Training that is too elementary presents a separate set of problems. Over-simplified training almost invariably discards important procedural nuances, paradoxically ends up confusing group members, and can impact group member confidence—this is being presented in a simple way, so I should understand it, but I don’t. As well, training that feels remedial to group members can induce resistance on grounds that their intelligence is being insulted or competence is being questioned. In some situations, the group leader may have to follow a standardized training model that mandates elementary instruction. An example of such is federally required safety training. Here, the leader can reduce group member reaction to the simplistic structure by emphasizing its mandatory status. This conveys that the training is organized as it is for reasons beyond the leader’s control, not because the leader doubts the group members’ skills and abilities. When the leader has the freedom to build the group training program, he or she needs to find a proper balance between the two extremes described. This can be accomplished by conducting a training needs analysis. Basically, a needs analysis identifies the task-relevant skills and knowledge that a person holds and what he or she needs to be taught. Needs analysis has long been an essential part of individual workplace training but the method is readily applied to group process training. To do so requires recognition that some group members need more training than others and a group structure that does not stigmatize the members who require extended training. There is much evidence that group members who are seen as “weak links” are perceived negatively and continue to be so even after demonstrating skill improvement. Establishment of a supportive atmosphere is crucial if a needs analysis approach to group training is to be adopted.

The Special Role of Communication

The primary advantage to using task groups rather than isolated individuals is the possibility of communication and coordination. Group members can expand the set of available information by sharing what they know, can simplify interpretation of information by discussing and reaching consensus on what the information means, and can develop plans for efficient and thorough task accomplishment. Unfortunately, task groups rarely take full, or even partial, advantage of their interactive capability, which can result in a significant gap between the group’s potential and actual performance. Group training programs, thus, should have communication dynamics as a central component. As with other process elements, it is common for group leaders to assume that members of standing groups with a task history understand how to interact with each other and have an effective process for doing so. In fact, veteran groups can have communication issues that are as problematic as those that arise in new and ad hoc groups. A member may have gained a reputation for stubbornness and inflexibility; one may have developed a tendency to dominate conversation; another may tend to take discussion on irrelevant tangents. It is, thus, a good idea to include a communication aspect in any group training session.

Group Leader Involvement in Process Regardless of whether or how thoroughly group members have been trained on process, the group leader needs to decide to what extent he or she will be involved in the group’s work. As with training, group leaders often assume that the group can accomplish nothing without the leader actively participating in the task, or that the leader can safely leave group members to their own devices and reconnect with them only when the task is completed. While there may be an occasional task for which these are safe assumptions, in most situations there is a degree of leader task involvement that fosters the best level of group performance. Over-involvement, or micromanagement, can have a host of long-term consequences for group functioning. Efficiency and productivity decrease; group

Group Satisfaction

member creativity is stifled; support for the group leader diminishes and he or she can come to be seen as an insecure perfectionist; group member morale decreases as they come to feel untrusted and incompetent; and member intent to leave the group increases. At the other end of this continuum is underinvolvement, often referred to as a laissez-faire approach to leadership. Such leaders often believe they are empowering group members by leaving them alone, and for very well-defined tasks this can be true. Most often, a laissez-faire style induces role conflict and ambiguity in group members. The resultant stress compromises not only group performance but also group member well-being. Indeed, there is some evidence that a group headed by a laissez-faire leader would typically be better off with no assigned leader at all. How does the leader determine the right amount of task participation? Guidance is beyond the scope of this entry, but there is an extensive scientific literature on how to match leadership philosophy to a task group’s needs, and there are numerous excellent works that summarize this literature for the practitioner. A website that serves as an entry point for much of this work is included in the Further Reading list.

Implications Group process is often an afterthought for a leader, if thought about at all. It is tempting to simply assume that experienced group members will know what to do and how to do it, and that novice members will have no idea how to approach the task. In fact, small disruptions to the group process can result in large declines in group efficiency, productivity, and outcome quality. If the group is struggling, the temptation will arise for the leader to become involved in all aspects of the task; if the group is proceeding well, the leader may feel that it is safe to forgo further contact with the group until the final product is generated. However, each of these strategies can have significant short- and long-term negative effects on the group. A leader has the best chance of minimizing process disruptions by investigating the process training needs of each group member regardless of experience, being willing to provide and support

413

differential training across members rather than a single omnibus training program, and discovering what degree of active leadership the group requires for this specific task. These are effortful endeavors but will regularly result in efficient and high-quality group performance. Craig D. Parks See also Bad Leadership; Situational Leadership; Transformational Leadership.

Further Readings Salas, E., Diaz Granado, D., Klein, C., Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Goodwin, G. F., & Halpin, S. M. (2008). Does team training improve team performance? A metaanalysis. Human Factors, 50, 903–933. doi:10.1518/ 001872008X375009 Schmidtke, J. M., & Cummings, A. (2017). The effects of virtualness on teamwork behavioral components: The role of shared mental models. Human Resource Management Review, 27, 660–677. doi:10.1016/j. hrmr.2016.12.011 Skogstad, A., Einarsen, S., Torsheim, T., Aasland, M. S., & Hetland, H. (2007). The destructiveness of laissezfaire leadership behavior. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12, 80–92. doi:10.1037/10768998.12.1.80 Smith, A. E., & Haney, C. (2011). Getting to the point: Attempting to improve juror comprehension of capital penalty phase instructions. Law and Human Behavior, 35, 339–350. doi:10.1007/s10979-010-9246-0 The website. Retrieved from https://www.toolshero.com/ leadership/ provides numerous resources for education on matching leadership style to group process.

GROUP SATISFACTION Group satisfaction refers to the general reaction within the group to the group experience. Satisfaction all by itself does not seem to have a strong influence on behavior. People regularly exit effective groups that they found enjoyable and remain in ineffective, unpleasant groups. Furthermore, whether satisfied group members are consistently more productive than dissatisfied group members

414

Group Satisfaction

has been debated by researchers for at least 60 years and remains unsettled today. Despite all of this, satisfaction is an important construct for the understanding of group performance because it is a trigger for a variety of other behaviors. Whether or not a person is satisfied with their experience in a group can induce task contributions that go beyond what was expected of the person, good performance but unwillingness to engage interpersonally with other group members, a reduced level of performance, or active attempts to disrupt group functioning. This entry looks at the major determinants of group satisfaction, how satisfaction and dissatisfaction influence group member behavior, and discusses how a group leader can help improve member satisfaction with the group experience.

this. Leaders can help themselves by reviewing the needed skills with group members before the task begins and identifying who brings which skills to the group. Increasingly, group demographics can be a source of dissatisfaction for group members. People want to see adequate representation of subgroups, be they individual-level (e.g., gender, race) or collective-level (e.g., organizational unit, constituency). In some cases, satisfaction will be high if a historically underrepresented subgroup is overrepresented (e.g., a decision-making group in a mixed-gender organization that is comprised entirely of women). Group composition can pose problems for the group leader if there is tension between representation and task needs. Group Process and Satisfaction

Influences on Satisfaction Group satisfaction is impacted by factors both tangible and intangible. Some, like the presence of a group member with unpleasant personality traits, are difficult to identify in advance of the group task. However, there are other factors that can be addressed, in whole or in part, up front. These include the composition of the group, the process the group uses to complete its task, and group modality. Satisfaction and Group Composition

Members of task groups have expectations about who their fellow group members will be. When these expectations are not met, dissatisfaction can result. The mix of people may be objectively defensible and even desirable, but this will be of little consequence if group members feel the group was not assembled properly. Differences of opinion have historically centered on the breadth of task-relevant skills across group members, with members reacting negatively if what they consider to be a critical skill seems to be absent. This will lead to the perception that someone is going to have to cover the missing skill as best they can, which results in added workload for that person and likely a diminished quality of output. It may be that the skill in question is not present because it is in truth inessential, but it should not be assumed that group members will come to realize

The question of how a group can best execute a task is one of the oldest in the study of groups and remains a largely open question today. It is a particular issue for decision-making groups, who need a decision criterion (e.g., unanimity, simple majority), an information exchange structure, and a common understanding of what they need to accomplish. These will sometimes be dictated by the authority to whom the group reports, sometimes left to the group to establish, and sometimes divided between the reporting authority and the group. Problems can arise on all of these dimensions. The decision criterion was too lenient or strict; the discussion structure allowed a few people to dominate the conversation; members had differing understandings of what they were to focus on. Each of these is a regular cause of dissatisfaction with the group experience. As with demographic breadth of membership, tension between preference and need can arise when the group leader tries to address process. For example, the unanimity decision rule is generally unpopular and difficult to achieve, but for critical issues the leader will likely want an action that everybody supports. Once again, leaders can reduce the chances of dissatisfaction emerging by explicitly stating what the group is to produce, explaining why the assigned decision rule is most appropriate for the task, and reviewing good strategies for information exchange.

Group Satisfaction

Group Modality

The setting in which the group does its work is a relatively new issue, one made more urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic. The advent of virtual networking opened the possibility of groups doing their work in a geographically dispersed, often asynchronous manner. Operationally this offers time and resource advantages over in-person assembly. The development of secure conferencing software allows for discussion of sensitive topics in the virtual format. The initial wave of research on virtual group productivity revealed that it can meet and sometimes exceed that of in-person groups provided certain steps are taken (e.g., incorporation of a text-based chat tool). This work also suggested that participants might not always enjoy the virtual format. With the pandemic forcing groups to convert to virtual meetings, research into group member preference for the online modality has flourished. This work has shown that, although group members recognize the benefits of virtual meetings, there are many factors that can make the experience a dissatisfying one: The loss of nonverbal cues that signal how a colleague is reacting to something; visual distractions in the background of others’ screens; use of conferencing software that the group member does not like; technology disruptions; and the elimination of transition time between meetings have all been identified as key contributors to a frustrating experience. The experience has become so common that the term “Zoom fatigue” has been coined as a shorthand reference. These frustrations can in turn lead to a perception that virtual groups are not as efficient as in-person groups. The newness of this issue means that researchers have not yet been able to develop and test strategies that leaders can use to combat dissatisfaction with the virtual experience. Encouraging the use of backgrounds and planning the meeting to run for 50 rather than 59 minutes are two simple steps that can help. If the group is small, consider whether the task can be done via conference call rather than video. Strategies for addressing the more complex frustrations await development.

415

Consequences of (Dis)satisfaction The frustrations just described often culminate in group members feeling dissatisfied with the final group output, in that a better-quality product would have resulted had these frustrations not occurred: More options could have been considered; analyses could have been conducted at greater depth; greater care could have been put into execution of the task. These reactions can arise even if the product is objectively satisfactory. Sometimes group members will attribute their dissatisfaction to some of the situation-specific factors described earlier, conclude that the group was not set up for success, and move on. However, members may also conclude that groups are just too vulnerable to disruption to be relied upon for all but the most impactful of decisions. In this situation, a “lone wolf” tendency can emerge, under which a person not only dislikes working in groups but may work to sabotage a task group to which they belong, so as to highlight the perceived weaknesses of the group format. Examples of such behavior include failing to complete assigned tasks on time or at all, completing tasks in an idiosyncratic manner that does not mesh with the agreed-upon framework, publicly disparaging group members or the task, and executing tasks that have been assigned to others even if the others have already completed those tasks. Lone wolves believe that they, working alone, can generate a task product of at least equal, and often better, quality than that which a group would produce. Interestingly, this is often an accurate assessment. Lone wolves will devote considerable time and energy to their projects, typically with strong results. Unlike the direct impact of dissatisfaction on diminished interest in the group format, the impact of satisfaction with the group experience on future interest is not straightforward. This is because satisfaction can result from two different experiences: Observation that the group’s product is of superior quality to anything any one of them could produce working alone; or discovery that some group members will work harder than others yet all get equal credit for the group’s success. The former experience is likely to encourage a

416

Groupthink

preference to work in task groups in the future, whereas the latter may instill an opportunistic mindset such that the person will only join task groups that contain people whose efforts can be exploited. It is, then, insufficient to say that we merely want group members to be satisfied with the experience. We want them to be satisfied for the right reasons.

Implications Seemingly minor operational factors can have a major impact on to what extent group members find the experience satisfying. The group leader needs to think carefully about who should be in the group, how the group should do its work, at what point the group can conclude that the task is done, and what communication modality should be used. The leader does not need to acquiesce to group member preferences but should explain the choices that have been made. If the group is ad hoc, it is a good idea to exit-survey the members to assess satisfaction and why members feel as they do. The leader should not assume that satisfied participants are so because they now understand the potential for groups to deliver best-quality products. Craig D. Parks See also Networks and Networked Organizations; Procedural Justice; Schemes, Scripts, and Mental Models; Virtual Leadership

Further Readings Bailenson, J. N. (2021). Nonverbal overload: A theoretical argument for the causes of zoom fatigue. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2, doi:10.1037/tmb0000030 Baillon, A., Bleichrodt, H., Liu, N., & Wakker, P. P. (2016). Group decision rules and group rationality under risk. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 52, 99–116. doi:10.1007/s11166-016-9237-8 Betts, K. R., & Hinsz, V. B. (2010). Collaborative group memory: Processes, performance, and techniques for improvement. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 119–130. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009. 00252.x Brown, M. I., Prewett, M. S., & Grossenbacher, M. A. (2020). Distancing ourselves from geographic

dispersion: An examination of perceived virtuality in teams. Group Dynamics, 24, 168–185. Dixon, A. L., Gassenheimer, J. B., & Barr, T. F. (2003). Identifying the lone wolf: A team perspective. Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, 23, 205–219. doi:10.1080/08853134.2003.10748999 Standifer, R. L., Raes, A. M. L., Peus, C., Passos, A. M., Santos, C. M., & Weisweiler, S. (2015). Time in teams: Cognitions, conflict and team satisfaction. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 30, 692–708. Van Lange, P. A. M., Joireman, J., Parks, C. D., & van Dijk, E. (2013). The psychology of social dilemmas: A review. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 120, 125–141.

GROUPTHINK Groupthink refers to the process that leads a group of capable and talented members to render a poor, often disastrous, group decision. The term was coined by Irving Janis in 1972 following his investigations of bad American foreign policy decisions in recent history. The decision by the Harry S. Truman administration to invade North Korea and the Lyndon Johnson administration’s commitment of ground troops to the defense of South Vietnam are examples of cases that Janis analyzed. The groupthink model has also been used to explain puzzling business decisions. In fact, groupthink analysis rather quickly became a more frequently applied model in the business world than in political science. Groupthink was invoked, for example, to explain why the Ford Motor Company pursued development of the Edsel and why the Marks and Spencer department store chain persisted with century-old operating policies in the face of a serious financial plunge in 1998. In the 21st century, groupthink has been implicated in many political and business decisions that proved to have long-term consequences. Examples include the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, the decision by leadership of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac home loan organizations to invest heavily in subprime mortgages, and the accounting fraud scandals at WorldCom and Enron. This entry examines how

Groupthink

researchers diagnose groupthink, presents characteristics of groupthink, and highlights prominent research on the topic. The entry concludes with suggestions for how leaders can help curtail groupthink.

Diagnosing Groupthink Groupthink is an after-the-fact model. That is, it is applied after the bad decision has occurred and is used to trace how the group committed to the decision. It is necessary to approach groupthink in this way. It is unlikely that a real group making a critical decision would allow researchers to observe them in process. Further, if researchers did get permission to study such a group, the researchers would have to let the group execute the bad decision and potentially do damage; they could not intervene. Such behavior by a researcher is ethically questionable. Because groups cannot be studied in process, analysts ultimately must infer the factors that might have contributed to the poor decision. It is generally thought that a set of phenomena have the potential to induce some broader characteristics in the group, and these characteristics in turn produce a poor decision. These phenomena include high cohesiveness, which can discourage criticism and dissension within the group; stress induced by the criticality of the decision; low collective self-esteem, resulting from recent group failures or moral dilemmas; a charismatic group leader whose personal preference is known; insulation from outside opinion; lack of group member diversity; and a tendency to approach decision tasks in a nonsystematic way. Some combination of these factors makes the group vulnerable to problematic behaviors that can take it down the wrong road: Belief that the group is infallible and inherently moral; denigration of outgroups that argue for a course of action other than the one favored by the group; interpretation of group member silence as agreement with the proposed action; self-editing of one’s comments to fit the tone of discussion; and the active suppression of dissent with group members putting themselves into the role of enforcers or “mindguards.” Groupthink can occur when at least some of these behaviors are performed.

417

The challenge is that the mere presence of these phenomena does not guarantee groupthink will occur. Indeed, many of them are often desirable in a group. High cohesiveness can lead to familiarity among group members and a mutual understanding of which options can and cannot be considered. Charismatic leaders are inspirational and are often necessary for bringing about needed change. Insulated groups are protected from irrelevant input and crowd mindsets. Lack of a structured decision process allows groups to be flexible and responsive to rapidly changing conditions. The issue is not so much observing that a group has some of these characteristics as it is determining whether the characteristics will help or harm the group in the situation at hand. The Johnson administration that committed to ground combat in South Vietnam had been the driving force behind passage of the Civil Rights Act the previous year. Two years after Ford ended production of the Edsel, it introduced the Mustang as a concept car. What happened across each of these pairs of decisions? Why did the qualities that served the group well in one situation hurt them in the other? These are critical questions that groupthink theory is not yet able to answer.

Characteristics of Groupthink As noted, the presence of one or more of these phenomena is presumed to induce the group to undertake actions that have the potential to contribute to a poor decision. As with the phenomena themselves, we need to be careful to avoid implying that these actions guarantee a bad decision. No one would criticize a group that immediately recognizes the best choice option and quickly commits to it, but as we will see, such a process involves a number of steps that are considered characteristic of groupthink. With this in mind, let us review these characteristics. The first is failure to consider equally all possible courses of action. Most decisions are potentially resolvable in numerous ways, and it is not uncommon for an option to seem unacceptable at first glance only to reveal its benefits after deeper examination. Groups vulnerable to groupthink may begin the task with a (stated or implied) desire to quickly eliminate most options and

418

Groupthink

carefully consider just a small subset of possibilities. To accomplish this, options will typically be rejected for shallow (“This sounds difficult.”) or irrelevant (“We would have to use Excel rather than QuickBooks.”) reasons. If the group is also unwilling to revisit a rejected course of action, then eliminated options are gone forever, even if later analysis suggests that a rejected option is worth a second look. Refusal is often grounded in the argument that reconsidering one option opens the door for bringing back every other rejected option, and there is neither time nor energy for this. Besides seeking to quickly cut down the list of choice options, groups may also fail to recognize every goal that the decision needs to accomplish. Most decisions have multiple repercussions. Some may be unpredictable, but many can be identified with effort. If a group sees its task as being driven by just one or a very few needs (“We need to design a car that will enter us into the electric vehicle market.”) it runs the risk of making a decision that ultimately does more harm than good. Related to this is failure to fully consider risks. Most decisions have a risk-reward balance and the objectively best option is usually the one that has the most tolerable balance. Groupthink, however, emphasizes reward only, and groups stuck in groupthink may ignore that a high-reward decision also carries high risk. If the group has also failed to make contingency plans, then there is no fallback if the risks manifest. Because going back to the drawing board is an admission of failure, the group will typically redouble efforts to turn the bad decision into an acceptable one. Finally, groupthink can magnify biased handling of information. Initial personal preferences often impact information processing. Under normal circumstances we tend to emphasize positive information about a favored choice and discount negative information about the choice. Groupthink can make this tendency more extreme. Group members may simply ignore negative information about the favored alternative. If it cannot be ignored, the information may be misrepresented as more negative and one-dimensional than it actually is or its accuracy may be questioned. Positive information may be treated in the opposite manner, taken as unquestionably correct and either conclusive or nearly so.

Again, there are situations in which the best decision will be made with some of these dynamics in force. If there is an obvious subset of good options, reviewing the subpar choices is a waste of time. If all realistic risks are tolerable, a risk-reward analysis is unnecessary. Existence of a Plan B may undermine confidence in a sensitive decision. The need is to develop tools to help groups diagnose when these dynamics can and cannot be ignored.

Research on Groupthink As we have already noted, groupthink is a difficult topic to study in real groups. It is additionally very hard to simulate groupthink conditions in a laboratory. Ad hoc groups assembled from a random sampling of people will not have the characteristics that we discussed in the previous section, and any decision such a group would be asked to make will not have the high stakes component that makes groupthink so destructive. Finally, the model as a whole is sufficiently complex that, even if we could observe a real group in the process of making a decision, there are more aspects of the process that would have to be carefully observed than researchers could reasonably manage. As a result, there exist few scientific tests of groupthink, less than two dozen in the 50 years since the model first appeared. The only proposition that has relatively clear support is the notion that insulation from outside opinion is problematic. Decision quality can be improved by getting input from individuals who are not group members and have no stake in the quality of the decision. Such input can often be difficult or infeasible to obtain, if knowledgeable yet independent individuals are not at hand or the decision task needs to be kept confidential. An alternative strategy that is growing in popularity is to purposely build diversity into the group. This could include diversity of opinion, background, expertise, or perspective. The most commonly cited example of a purposely diverse decision-making group is President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, for which he selected the three people who had opposed him for the presidential nomination and who had each been dismissive of his leadership qualities: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. Whether diversity is an effective substitute for outside opinion is yet to be tested. It has been argued that

Groupthink

the diverse group members will eventually find it undesirable to maintain their independence and will migrate toward the predominant group approach to issues. Another factor that has received some research attention is leader preference, and here the findings are complex. In general, group members will indeed follow the preference of a dynamic and popular leader. If the leader is unfamiliar and does not share a personal preference, the group is likely to consider and evaluate multiple options. However, there are numerous qualifications to this basic pattern. If the group leader favors the best alternative, it is best for the leader to say so, as groups with an impartial leader may talk themselves into a poor choice. Leaders who have little credibility or respect and express a preference may cause group members to assume the preference is necessarily poor and lead them to pursue other options. If the leader was espousing the best course of action, this is problematic. If the leader of a longstanding group presents neutrality on an issue, group members will often try to infer what the leader’s preference might be from their past experiences with the leader. This last phenomenon was an ongoing issue for President John F. Kennedy, who worked hard to conceal his preferences for major policy decisions only to have cabinet members regularly guessing at what he wanted to do. Group cohesiveness has also been studied to some extent but the results have been inconsistent. Some studies find no effect of cohesion on decision quality, some demonstrate it to be a primal influence on the decision, and still others find it to be a factor only under certain conditions. This inconsistency is most likely due to variability in how researchers treat “cohesion.” Cohesion has many facets and Janis did not indicate which he believed were related to groupthink. Cohesion can be based on attachment (“How well do group members get along with each other?”), identification (“To what extent do group members see themselves as similar on important characteristics?”), commitment (“How important is it to group members that the group be successful?”), membership (“To what extent is group membership stable across tasks?”), or networking (“How often do group members interact with each other during a typical day?”), and each of these facets has been invoked as

419

potentially relevant to groupthink. Complicating matters is that cohesion is affected by both individual- and group-level dynamics. Thus, determining if and how cohesion influences groupthink has proven to be very difficult. You can see, then, that we understand very little about how groupthink develops. Some theorists believe that the model needs updating to account for emerging contributors to the group process, like the availability of group decision support systems or the treatment of data analytics as a primary diagnostic decision tool. Addition of such variables is quite likely necessary but adds to the challenge of understanding groupthink dynamics.

Implications for Group Leaders We have seen that the group leader potentially plays an active role in the occurrence of groupthink, but that role is complex. Given this, what can a group leader do to help the group avoid making a disastrous decision? As previously mentioned, the group leader will typically do well to conceal his or her preference, recognizing that the group members may nonetheless attempt to infer it, and a strong leader who favors the objectively best option may actually harm the process by remaining silent. The most straightforward advice is for the leader to tolerate dissent, actively encourage discrepant viewpoints, and support critiquing of one another’s ideas. This will not guarantee a quality decision will be reached, as the group decision-making process is affected by a host of factors, but it can help the group avoid abject disasters. The leader should also not hesitate to seek opinions from individuals outside of the group, though this may be impractical if the issue is sensitive or classified. A famous example of the impact of outside opinion occurred in 2018, when PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi shared in an interview that the company was working to develop a formulation of Doritos that had less crunch and powder and could fit in small bags. These would be marketed to women as snacks that are not noisy, do not stain the fingers, and can be carried in handbags. Within 48 hours, PepsiCo announced that they were aborting the project amidst considerable public backlash and questions about why they did not first ask women if eating Doritos

420

Groupthink

indeed caused problems for them. While we do not know how the company made the decision to pursue this, the concept was almost certainly evaluated by a product development committee. Talking with women who are not PepsiCo employees may have seemed awkward to the committee but would have saved money and credibility. A topic of much recent discussion is group composition, specifically diversity. As we noted earlier, diversity is indeed important as long as there are not too many dimensions along which the members are diverse. As well, the basis for diversity needs to be task relevant. It is no good ensuring representation of all units if there is no reason to expect that the units may differ on preferred course of action. Perhaps most important, the group leader needs to promote openness to differing points of view. A troubling finding that is emerging in the medical literature is that patient care errors in medical teams are often attributable to groupthink resulting from differences in professional status: The physician states a preferred course of action, and others are hesitant to question it. Leaders can combat this by teaching the group how to distinguish debate from personal attack. The leader can also have pre-meeting conversations with each member to learn their preferences and then take the lead on introducing those preferences into discussion. Groupthink is a difficult phenomenon for leaders. It happens, but we cannot predict when, how, or why. Controlling all possible causes is not a good idea because those causes are often advantageous rather than problematic. A leader has the best chance of avoiding groupthink by being facilitative of others, inscrutable as to personal preference, and willing to go outside of the group to hear potentially counter responses. Craig D. Parks

See also Diversity Ideologies; Group Effectiveness; Group Process; Leader-Follower Relationships; Political Leadership

Further Readings Badie, D. (2010). Groupthink, Iraq, and the war on terror: Explaining US policy shift toward Iraq. Foreign Policy Analysis, 6, 277–296. doi:10.1111/j.1743-8594.2010. 00113.x Breger, M. L. (2010). Making waves or keeping the calm?: Analyzing the institutional culture of family courts through the lens of social psychology groupthink theory. Law and Psychology Review, 34, 55–90. Burnette, J. L., Pollack, J. M., & Forsyth, D. R. (2011). Leadership in extreme contexts: A groupthink analysis of the May 1996 mount Everest disaster. Journal of Leadership Studies, 4, 29–40. doi:10.1002/jls.20190 Cleary, M., Lees, D., & Sayers, J. (2019). Leadership, thought diversity, and the influence of groupthink. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 40, 731–733. doi:10. 1080/01612840.2019.1604050 Forsyth, D. R. (2020). Group-level resistance to health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic: A groupthink approach. Group Dynamics, 24, 139–152. doi:10.1037/gdn0000132 Hauer, K. E., Edgar, L., Hogan, S. O., Kinnear, B., & Warm, E. (2021). The science of effective group process: Lessons for clinical competency committees. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 13, 59–64. doi:10.4300/JGME-D-20-00827.1 Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston, MA: HoughtonMifflin. Pratkanis, A. R., & Turner, M. E. (2013). Methods for counteracting groupthink risk: A critical appraisal. International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management, 2(4), 18–38. doi:10.4018/ijrcm. 2013100102 Rose, J. D. (2011). Diverse perspectives on the groupthink theory: A literary review. Emerging Leadership Journeys, 4, 37–57.

H HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY LEADERSHIP

provide funding and can help secure additional funding, synthesize data, and widely disseminate findings. Furthermore, partnerships between researchers and practitioners can ensure that relevant and actionable findings are delivered to the communities of people who would most benefit. In shared leadership, although there may be a larger, national or international level to the organization, leaders operate at local levels. In this capacity, they are trusted within the group but do not govern the group. Each individual group functions independently in ways that consistent with the larger mission of the organization and meets the needs of its individual group members. Shared leadership operates in health psychology with regard to organizations related to addiction and trauma recovery, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). A key element of AA, directly consistent with the concept of shared leadership, is the process through which individuals participating in the program have the opportunity to become sponsors for those newer members starting on their road to recovery. This component of AA leverages the lived experience of its members in the service of helping others who are either new to recovery or may be experiencing struggles that require the help of other group members. Health psychology requires the role of individual leaders. Health psychologists have proposed that individuals who employ a transformational style of care, derived from leadership theory, are those who both provide health and treatment goals relevant to improved patient outcomes as

AND

Leadership in health psychology takes many forms across both large-scale and smaller settings. At the macrolevel, governments and international public health organizations (e.g., World Health Organization) regulate public health policy and influence public health agendas. Leadership also takes the form of administrators and health psychologists who work within large health systems, nonprofit organizations, public health clinics, private industry settings, and universities. Individuals within treatment groups can play vitally important roles in treatment programs and organizations. Broadly, leadership within health psychology has been identified as both a positive (e.g., providing guidance) and negative (e.g., lacking in vision) force. Further, a lack of leadership can be detrimental to growth and result in the continuation or worsening of existing problems. The purpose of this entry is to describe strengths and weaknesses in current leadership involving health psychology issues.

Positive Leadership in Health Psychology A key area within the health psychology and leadership operates at the institutional level with government organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These organizations

421

422

Health Psychology and Leadership

well as motivate patients to be personally engaged in the pursuit and completion of those goals. Transformational leadership includes four key components. Idealized influence refers to leaders serving as an example for their patients by displaying various aspects of health behaviors that they want their patients to exhibit. Inspirational motivation refers to creating a compelling vision for the patients’ health outcomes and communicating that vision in a way that resonates with each patient. Intellectual stimulation requires patients to think about their health problems, concerns, and solutions in new and innovative ways. Individualized consideration requires that health care providers personalize patient care by making meaningful distinctions between patients and recognizing each person as an individual.

Problematic Leadership in Health Psychology Whereas effective leadership is a positive force within health psychology, problematic leadership can impede progress toward better health outcomes. Examples include creating governmental policy and programs that have unintended, negative health consequences; inaction on the part of leaders to address a public health issue, and situations where leaders of an organization or group do not meet the needs of a population as a whole. Governmental social policies directly and indirectly influence social determinants of health (i.e., circumstances in which we are born, grow, live, work, die), access to health care and resources, and health outcomes. However, leaders who create and enact social policies do not always consider health implications as a potential outcome and do not always evaluate the health impact of programs. Policies can have unintended negative health effects or can exacerbate existing disparities within a population. Further, policies may have differential impact on subgroups within a population. The National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) which evaluated randomized controlled trials of the state welfare-to-work programs of the 1990s demonstrated positive economic impacts for those who immediately began working compared to the basic skills acquisition treatment group and the control group.

Health variables were not measured across all sites; however, for sites with health data, those in treatment groups were more likely to experience initial declines in health insurance coverage for the first two years of the program compared to controls. Additionally, those in the treatment group experienced a significant increase in depressive symptoms compared with controls at one site after two years. Although these negative impacts disappeared at the five-year evaluation, these initial declines speak to the need for those active in instituting policy and governmental programs to consider potential health implications for a program. When leadership does not reflect the given population or group, negative outcomes for the group can result. A lack of diversity at the leadership level poses a number of issues for subordinates and followers, such as a lack of evolution of mentorship styles, expectations, opportunities, and trainings needed to best meet the needs of constituents. Areas where a lack of diversity can influence health and health leadership include racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender, parental status, sexual and gender minorities, and those with disabilities. Minority individuals may report feeling as though their needs are not reflected in the interventions intended to help them. Angelo DiBello and Teresa Preddy See also Bad Leadership; Community Leadership; Democratic Leadership; Effective Leadership; Global Leadership; Health, Well-Being, and Leadership

Further Readings Brown, C. E., Boness, C. L., & Sheerin, K. M. (2021). Supporting students in health service psychology training: A theory-driven approach to meeting the diverse needs of trainees. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 16(1), 78–86. Glickman, L., Galanter, M., Dermatis, H., & Dingle, S. (2006). Recovery and spiritual transformation among peer leaders of a modified methadone anonymous group. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 38(4), 531–533. Huynh, H. P., & Sweeny, K. (2014). Clinician styles of care: Transforming patient care at the intersection of leadership and medicine. Journal of Health Psychology, 19(11), 1459–1470.

Health, Well-Being, and Leadership Inceoglu, I., Arnold, K. A., Leroy, H., Lang, J. W., & Stephan, U. (2021). From microscopic to macroscopic perspectives and back: The study of leadership and health/well-being. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(6), 459–468. Nielsen, K., & Taris, T. W. (2019). Leading well: Challenges to researching leadership in occupational health psychology—and some ways forward. Work & Stress, 33(2), 107–118. van Dierendonck, D., Haynes, C., Borrill, C., & Stride, C. (2004). Leadership behavior and subordinate wellbeing. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 9(2), 165–175. Zineldin, M. (2017). Transformational leadership behavior, emotions, and outcomes: Health psychology perspective in the workplace. Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 32(1), 14–25.

HEALTH, WELL-BEING, LEADERSHIP

AND

Leadership styles and organizational structures have important and underappreciated effects on employee and workplace health. Health is defined here to include physical, mental, and social dimensions. This entry describes the large body of emerging workplace health research concerning burnout, stress in hierarchal organizations (e.g., health care and military), and employee health interventions.

Leadership Styles and Health and Well-Being Leadership styles play an important role in the health and well-being of employees. Previous research supports the existence of three leadership styles with employee health effects: transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire. Transformational Leadership

Transformational leaders inspire and motivate employees in ways that go beyond exchanges and rewards for meeting performance goals. Transformational leaders foster supportive relationships in the workplace, encourage opportunities for

423

learning and growth, and serve as positive role models to employees. Transformational leaders also provide personalized attention to employees, give clear feedback, and aim to understand employee needs and frustrations. Research suggests that transformational leadership styles increase intrinsic motivation among employees by creating a clear vision for the company and inspiring employees to strive beyond the minimum expectations for their positions. Transactional Leadership

In contrast, transactional leadership is based more on exchanges (i.e., transactions) between leaders and employees rather than on supportive relationships. Employees under a transactional leader are given extrinsic rewards (e.g., a bonus or promotion) when they meet work-related goals or performance criteria. Unlike a transformational leadership style, the transactional style usually discourages creativity, and there is little focus on building meaningful relationships between leadership and employees. Transactional leaders may have difficulties finding rewards that motivate all employees equally given that some employees are more motivated by internal reinforcement (e.g., a sense of personal accomplishment and making a difference) rather than extrinsic reinforcements that usually have monetary value. Laissez-Faire Leadership

Laissez-faire leadership is considered a “hands off” approach, in which employees have the ability to make decisions without guidance from leaders. These leaders may be difficult to contact and seem uninvolved to employees. This leadership style lacks structure, which may prove difficult for employees who benefit from clear directions, reinforcement, and/or personalized attention from leadership, or who have difficulty meeting deadlines and goals independently. A Comparison of Leadership Styles

Leadership research supports the use of a transformational leadership style over the transactional or laissez-faire styles for promoting

424

Health, Well-Being, and Leadership

employee health. Employees are more likely to benefit from a work environment where they believe their leaders have strong values and act in accordance with these values, where leaders communicate clearly, and where employees feel intellectually challenged. These characteristics are more common in settings with transformational leaders. The research-supported workplace benefits of a transformational leadership style include reduced turnover rates and absenteeism among employees, better mental health outcomes, and increased productivity. In contrast, transactional and laissez-faire leadership styles have been associated with higher levels of work stress and occupational burnout. With burnout rates increasing across many professions (see the following section), the potential contributions of leadership styles are important to consider.

Mental Health Consequences

Research has also shown that work stress is associated with mental health conditions that may warrant psychological intervention, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. Employees with work stress and co-occurring mental health conditions are less likely to seek out mental health care when structural barriers exist in the organization. Structural barriers include poor access to counseling services, absence of employee wellness programs, and the direct cost of treatment for employees. Employees may also fear that disclosing the presence of a mental health issue or seeking out mental treatment may result in consequences such as license revocation, demotion, loss of privileges, or job loss. Research indicates that structural and perceived barriers are especially common in work environments with strong hierarchical systems.

Work Stress and Job Burnout When occupational stress becomes chronic, individuals may experience a psychological syndrome referred to as job burnout. Job burnout is characterized by physical or emotional exhaustion, and may lead to a sense of failure and self-doubt, disengagement from the job, absenteeism, jobrelated errors, work–home conflict, and an increased risk of metabolic diseases. Burnout has also been associated with reduced productivity and work ability (i.e., the ability to cope with the demands of the job), as well the intent to change professions and early retirement.

The Consequences of Work Stress Physical Health Consequences

Substantial research demonstrates a relationship between work stress and cardiovascular health outcomes. For example, the INTERHEART Study, an international case-control study, found that individuals with myocardial infarction (MI) reported a higher prevalence of work stress. The INTERHEART investigators found that when compared with heart-disease free controls, twice as many individuals with MI had experienced prolonged work stress during the previous year.

Environments Where Hierarchies and Leadership Cultures Affect Well-Being Hierarchical organizations are defined as organizations with clearly defined chains of command or authority levels. Research indicates that hierarchical organizations are associated with greater work stress, and in turn, negative physical and mental health outcomes. Amazon (an E-commerce company) is a modern example of an organization with a well-defined hierarchical structure. The individual CEO of Amazon is at the top of the hierarchy. In larger numbers, warehouse workers and delivery drivers play integral roles in the daily operations of the company but comprise the bottom of this hierarchy. The latter employees earn lower wages while working under time constraints to ensure timely product deliveries. Although even high-ranking employees in hierarchical organizations experience work stress, workers on the lower end are less likely to have resources and support to buffer against the negative physical and mental health effects of work stress. Other modern examples of hierarchical organizations with employee health consequences include health care, the airline industry, and the U.S. military.

Health, Well-Being, and Leadership

Health Care Settings

Health care workers are vulnerable to adverse physical and mental health effects because they work in settings characterized by high work stress, irregular work hours, and time-consuming administrative work. The nature of health care, including the hierarchical structure, competitive culture, and need to prioritize patient health, may also contribute to negative health consequences. Although these professions are associated with high status and high pay, health care employees experience high rates of mental health problems such as depression, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. Beyond the direct health effects on the employees, depression and sleep deprivation among health care providers have been shown to significantly increase the incidence of medical errors. Burnout affects 30%–60% of all physicians, with resident physicians typically reporting the highest burnout rates.

425

stress. These consequences are partly attributed to work-related stressors frequently experienced by military personnel, including shiftwork, social isolation during deployments, and physical and emotional trauma. The hierarchical structure within the military emphasizes authority and rank. When conflicts between military supervisors and employees occur, resolutions tend to be made in favor of the supervisor. Owing to a combination of stressful experiences, injuries and disabilities, and chemical exposure during deployments, the prevalence of conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, diabetes, obesity, and chronic pain are higher among active-duty personnel and veterans than among civilian populations.

Promoting Workplace Health Workplace Wellness Programs

In contrast to lower-hierarchy medical residents, airline pilots are an example of employees susceptible to poor physical and mental health outcomes despite being near the top of their workplace hierarchy. Airline pilots face intermittent periods of high work stress, shiftwork, and frequent time zone changes. Among pilots, there is a hierarchical structure, with most airlines using seniority to determine leave allocation, holiday leave, and assignment of aircraft and destinations. Airline pilots undergo a rigorous selection process and once selected, require annual medical reviews throughout their careers. Despite this process, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse remains common among this profession, adversely affecting the health of the pilot as well as their staff and passengers. Many aviation injuries and fatalities have been attributed to pilot ingestion of drugs or alcohol prior to a flight.

Workplace wellness programs are an innovation aimed at improving the physical and mental health of employees. Wellness program content varies and may target employee mental health or behavioral risk factors such as tobacco and alcohol use, obesity, physical activity, and diet. Evidence regarding the efficacy of employee health programs, however, is mixed. A randomized clinical trial of a workplace wellness program found that employees reported improved health behaviors, including regular exercise and active weight management. However, the program did not generate differences in clinical measures of health (e.g., cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose levels), mental health outcomes, health care spending or utilization, or employment outcomes. These findings suggest that wellness programs show early promise for improving some types of employee health outcomes. However, additional highquality research is needed. As of this writing, few studies have used gold-standard methods such as randomized controlled trial designs to examine the effects of wellness programs.

The U.S. Military

Workplace Wellness for Leadership

U.S. military personnel and veterans comprise another group vulnerable to physical and mental health conditions resulting from work-related

Research suggests that workplace interventions should target the health behaviors of leaders in addition to general employee populations.

The Airline Industry

426

Heroic Leadership

Leaders play an influential role in health promotion in the workplace and may model either healthful or unhealthful behaviors to employees. Because employees may adopt coping styles modeled to them by leadership, interventions for leaders may emphasize the importance of personal self-care and techniques to cultivate a healthy work environment. Organizational health interventions may focus on changing the work environment itself to ensure leaders have adequate opportunity to practice self-care, as well as enough resources to promote healthy conditions for employees. These interventions aim to create environments where health promotion is modeled by leaders and is a valued part of the everyday work culture. Ashley S. Emami and Thomas R. Rutledge See also Effects of Power; Health Psychology and Leadership; Racial Disparities; Trauma; Wellness and Leadership

Mihailescu, M., & Neiterman, E. (2019). A scoping review of the literature on the current mental health status of physicians and physicians-in-training in North America. BMC Public Health, 19. doi:10.1186/ s12889–019–7661–9 Pasha, T., & Stokes, P. (2018). Reflecting on the Germanwings disaster: A systematic review of depression and suicide in commercial airline pilots. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 9. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00086 Rosengren, A., Hawken, S., Ounpuu, S., Sliwa, K., Zubaid, M., Almahmeed, W. A., . . . INTERHEART investigators. (2004). Association of psychosocial risk factors with risk of acute myocardial infarction in 11119 cases and 13648 controls from 52 countries (the INTERHEART study): Case-control study. Lancet, 364, 953–962. doi:10.1016/S0140–6736(04)17019–0 Song, Z., & Baicker, K. (2019). Effect of a workplace wellness program on employee health and economic outcomes: A randomized clinical trial. Journal of the American Medical Association, 321(15), 1491–1501. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.3307

Further Readings Arnold, K. A. (2017). Transformational leadership and employee psychological well-being: A review and directions for future research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 381–393. doi:10.1037/ ocp0000062 Buckman, J. E., Sundin, J., Greene, T., Fear, N. T., Dandeker, C., Greenberg, N., & Wessely, S. (2011). The impact of deployment length on the health and well-being of military personnel: A systematic review of the literature. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 68, 69–76. doi:10.1136/oem.2009.054692 Dewa, C. S., Loong, D., Bonato, S., Xuan Thanh, N., & Jacobs, P. (2014). How does burnout affect physician productivity? A systematic literature review. BMC Health Services Research, 14. doi:10.1186/ 1472–6963–14–325 Erskine, J. A. K., & Georgiou, G. J. (2017). Leadership styles: Employee stress, well-being, productivity, turnover and absenteeism. In P. Fauquet-Alekhine (Ed.), Understanding stress at work (pp. 28–40) Saumur: Larsen. Klug, K., Felfe, J., & Krick, A. (2019). Caring for oneself or for others? How consistent and inconsistent profiles of health-oriented leadership are related to follower strain and health. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. doi:10. 3389/fpsyg.2019.02456/full

HEROIC LEADERSHIP Heroic leadership refers to the pinnacle of leadership. It features the qualities of doing exceptional good, incurring significant self-sacrifice, and taking extraordinary risk. Heroism researchers define heroic leadership as doing the right thing at a critical moment, with the right thing reflecting both great morality and great competence. As explained in what follows, there are two aspects of heroic leadership: (1) what heroic leadership looks like in terms of leaders’ decisions and actions and (2) how followers mentally construct heroic leadership. These two elements are not mutually exclusive. A leader’s appearance and actions can shape followers’ mental constructions, and followers’ mental constructions of leadership can steer them toward “seeing” heroic traits in leaders that do not exist.

Characteristics of Heroic Leadership Heroic leaders make choices that involve extraordinary personal, financial, or political risks. They must be ready, willing, and able to act decisively in

Heroic Leadership

situations that require immediate action. Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo suggest that the label of heroic leader should be reserved for “larger-than-life figures” who take larger-than-life gambles to achieve heroic aims. These aims include advancing socially just principles, transforming societies, leading military into just conflicts, placing organizations at monetary or safety risk to uphold a moral ideal, or helping nations resolve existential crises. In 2010, William Cohen proposed eight universal laws of heroic leadership. These laws consist of heroic leaders showing integrity, acquiring knowledge, declaring expectations, showing strong commitment, exuding great optimism, caring for their followers, putting duty before themselves, and getting out in front “where the action is.” These eight universal laws are consistent with research by Scott Allison and George Goethals, conducted in 2011, revealing the great eight traits of heroes: heroes are wise, strong, caring, selfless, resilient, reliable, charismatic, and inspiring. In 2015, Elaine Kinsella and her colleagues identified 12 central characteristics of heroes: bravery, moral integrity, conviction, courage, self-sacrifice, protection, honesty, selflessness, determination, saving others, inspiration, and helpfulness.

Theories of Heroic Leadership The heroic leadership dynamic (HLD) is a theory of heroic leadership that focuses on the needs and motivations of the followers of a heroic leader. The HLD is derived from the seminal work of James McGregor Burns, who was the first leadership scholar to emphasize the critical role of leaders in meeting followers’ needs. In 1978, Burns argued that leaders themselves have motives and purposes that inspire them to mobilize followers. The success and effectiveness of this mobilization resides in the leader’s ability to meet the psychological needs of followers. Such an undertaking must awaken, engross, and fulfill the motives of followers. There are two components of the HLD. The first component emphasizes the importance of the basic human need for heroic leadership. The HLD proposes that one’s current life circumstances may determine the type of heroic leader that one

427

needs. From this perspective, young football players need accomplished football heroes, and cancer victims need cancer survivor heroes. People’s choice of heroes can be predicted from their stage of development, or from where they are developmentally positioned within psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Each level of the hierarchy may correspond to a different type of hero to which someone at that level may gravitate. The second component of the HLD is the idea that humans are dynamic beings. People change. Our choices of heroes evolve to reflect our own maturation process across the lifespan. The heroic leadership imperative refers to the idea that leaders are best able to mobilize followers when three levels of followers’ needs are met. The three levels are individual needs, collective needs, and transcendent needs. Individual needs are patterned after Maslow’s hierarchy of physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem needs. Belongingness needs are met through achieving social connection. Esteem needs can be met in many ways. People can make favorable comparisons with others that self-validate and self-enhance; they can elicit positive feedback from others, enjoy more successes, or lower their aspirations. The second level of needs, according to the heroic leadership imperative model, focuses on leaders meeting the group and collective identity needs of followers. According to social identity theory, people derive their self-esteem by inflating their evaluation of the groups to which they belong in comparison to other groups. Individuals who emerge as group leaders are those who are judged as “prototypical”—individuals who best represent the group’s ideals about how members should think, feel, and act. The third level of needs are transcendent needs, referring to followers’ needs to seek extraordinary lives of universal significance. Human beings are motivated to live a life of deep meaning and to strive to become part of something larger than themselves. Leaders who tap into this longing are best able to move and mobilize followers. The leadership imperative is called a heroic imperative, but it can be used for good or for evil purposes. The imperative can be heroic if the

428

Heroic Leadership

leader’s goals are ethical and unifying, and the imperative can be villainous if the leader has unethical and divisive objectives. The human need for heroes can be so strong that it may skew people’s perceptions of leaders who claim to be able to meet followers’ needs. Charisma, false promises, and appeals to lower tribalism needs can induce people to follow evil leaders. Powerful leaders, whether heroic or villainous, are skilled at surveying the degree to which their followers’ needs are being met at all three levels, from the most basic physiological needs to the highest and most transcendent needs. Strong and discerning leaders are able to identify gaps in followers’ needs and make promises to fill them. Sometimes making promises is all a leader needs to do to captivate followers. Leaders who show extreme confidence in their vows to meet all three levels of followers’ needs may be able to move and mobilize followers without actually meeting those needs, or without meeting the needs in a way that promotes the well-being of all group members.

Mental Constructions of Heroic Leadership People hold mental constructions of heroic leaders, and these constructions contain information and expectations about what heroic leaders should look like and what they should do. These constructions of heroism derive from many sources: early socialization, parental influence, societal influence, and political party. Carl G. Jung, a psychoanalyst, theorized that the image of a hero stems from an archetype buried deep within our collective unconscious. From this perspective, millions of years of evolution have prepared us for encounters with heroes, as well as with villains. In 2019, Goethals and Allison proposed the idea that people harbor a romance of heroism. The romance of heroism is different from the romance of leadership, which refers to the tendency of people to assign too much credit to the leader for group successes and too much blame for group failures. The romance of heroism describes the human longing for heroes, a longing that leads to romantic notions about who heroes are and when they should emerge. The longing for heroes has a strong motivational component that may cause people to perceive heroic qualities in a person that

are not actually present. This desire and drive to designate people as heroes may be subject to distortion and to motivated perception under conditions of uncertainty. The tendency to exaggerate or invent qualities in others as a consequence of having strong motives can contribute to our construction of villains as well as heroes. The romance of heroism is especially manifest in situations characterized by high uncertainty and mystery. When encountering mysterious people, we are most likely to use perceptual, cognitive, and motivational resources to unravel the mystery. The mystery resolution process includes principles of gestalt organization that allow us to fill in gaps with our own preferred way of viewing the world. Our pre-existing impressions, prototypes, archetypes, and implicit theories of leadership all play a role in shaping the way we interpret people. Several key motivational forces steer people toward desired conclusions about mysterious others. These motivations include our need for achieve closure in our perceptions, our drive to spread rumors to justify our fear of uncertainty, and our romantic ideas about how leaders should look, behave, and shape group outcomes. One illustration of the romance of heroism can be found in the Warren Harding error, first described by Malcolm Gladwell. When Harding ran for U.S. president in 1920, voters were captivated by his good looks and smooth baritone voice. In short, people wanted a president who matched their mental representations of a heroic leader, and Harding fit the bill. Dean Simonton’s study of historians’ reputation ratings of U.S. presidents indicated that people compare what they know about individual presidents with their image of an ideal or archetypical leader. If the match is strong, people give strong evaluations of the president. Simonton concludes that leader archetypes have transhistorical and cross-cultural relevance and may even involve a “sociobiological substratum.” Another example of the romance of heroism can be found in voters’ preferences for Donald Trump for U.S. president in the 2016 and 2020 elections. White Christian evangelical voters longed for a candidate who endorsed their biblical views and who made promises, in the form of “Make America Great Again,” to return the

Higher Education

nation to a time when white Christians dominated U.S. politics. In this sense, Trump was able to capitalize on the HLD’s emphasis on meeting followers’ collective identity and transcendent needs. Trump was viewed as “the chosen one,” a moniker that he eagerly adopted to appeal to the religious needs of his evangelical followers. Many followers of Trump held romanticized views of him, even deifying him as God’s enforcer of American exceptionalism. One truism about heroic leadership is that it is in the eye of the beholder. One person’s hero is another person’s villain. As mentioned before, the heroic leadership imperative, with its emphasis on meeting individual, collective, and transcendent needs, can be used to achieve either noble or heinous aims. How can followers discern the difference between heroic versus villainous leadership? Scholars have proposed that the litmus test for distinguishing good versus evil leaders resides in whether the leader promotes unification and wholeness. Heroes unify people; villains divide people. Heroes include, whereas villains exclude. Heroes see the good in all groups of people; villains identify groups to scapegoat. Heroes promote psychological and collective wholeness by building and repairing bridges between disparate racial, gender, age, and socio-economic groups. Villains do not build these bridges; they destroy them—all in the name of their version of the collective good. Our most heroic leaders take great risks and make significant sacrifices in achieving the heroic aims of social unification and well-being for all human groups. Scott T. Allison See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Implicit Leadership Theories; Leader Emergence and Performance; Responsible Leadership; Transformational and Visionary Leadership

Further Readings Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2013). Heroic leadership: An influence taxonomy of 100 exceptional individuals. New York, NY: Routledge. Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2020). The heroic leadership imperative: How leaders inspire and mobilize change. Bingley: Emerald.

429

Allison, S. T., Goethals, G. R., & Kramer, R. M. (Eds.). (2017). Handbook of heroism and heroic leadership. New York, NY: Routledge. Cohen, W. A. (2010). Heroic leadership: Leading with integrity and honor. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Franco, Z. (2017). Heroism in times of crisis: Understanding leadership during extreme events. In S. T. Allison, G. R. Goethals, & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), Handbook of heroism and heroic leadership. New York, NY: Routledge. Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2019). The romance of heroism and heroic leadership: Ambiguity, attribution, and apotheosis. Bingley: Emerald. Goethals, G. R., Allison, S. T., Kramer, R., & Messick, D. (Eds.). (2014). Conceptions of leadership: Enduring ideas and emerging insights. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Simonton, D. K. (1987). Why presidents succeed: A political psychology of leadership. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

HIGHER EDUCATION Higher education consists of a wide variety of institutions with different missions and structures of governance. To add to the complexity, there is rapid change within higher education and several recent trends forcing leaders to adapt and respond. This entry profiles the complexity of the organizational landscape, identifies a few of the most significant changes underway, and concludes by discussing the leadership approaches appropriate for these settings.

Organizational Diversity To understand leadership in higher education, it is essential to understand the nature of the organizations where leadership occurs. They are complex and diverse. The U.S. Department of Education recognizes more than 6000 nonprofit and for-profit postsecondary institutions, defined as those eligible to receive various forms of federal assistance. They vary greatly in size. Some teach just a few dozen students. Others enroll tens of thousands. Some are highly specialized, focusing

430

Higher Education

on vocational and technical subjects, while others offer undergraduate and graduate studies across a wide range of academic and professional fields. Some support research; others devote their efforts mainly to teaching. Public or state-supported institutions exist alongside private or independent colleges and universities. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions is one longstanding and widely used taxonomy. It consists of the following categories: Doctoral Universities Master’s Colleges and Universities Baccalaureate Colleges Baccalaureate/Associate’s Colleges Associate’s Colleges Special Focus: Two-Year Special Focus: Four-Year Tribal Colleges

Because of the vast differences among organizations in scale, mission, culture, and student profiles, leaders face one overriding task: understanding their own sector of higher education as well as the distinctive history and configuration of their own institution.

Recent Trends As higher education has evolved in recent times, the following characteristics are worth noting. Multiple Constituencies

Students are the most obvious constituents and the ones that first come to mind for the general public. But faculty, alumni, employees, parents, the local community, donors, foundations, policymakers, research sponsors and even governing boards also count as constituents. Each group might be forgiven if, at times, it sees itself as the sun around which the others revolve. Higher education depends on their support, whether tangible monetary support or intangible support for institutional mission and status. Because these stakeholders consider themselves part of the enterprise, they claim, legitimately, the attention of institutional leaders. Their multiple and often conflicting demands weigh heavily upon the decision-makers.

Increasing Specialization

As organizations grow more complex, there is increasing specialization. Faculty separate into academic disciplines (such as biology, history, and literature) and professional fields (such as law or medicine), and even sub-fields or creatively configured interdisciplinary areas. Administrative functions have also become professionalized and specialized. The operational divisions of finance, advancement, legal, athletics, student affairs, and enrollment management—to name just a few— now have their own highly developed career tracks and credentialing processes. As a result, faculty and administrators can call upon sources of authority independent of the entity that actually employs them. A biologist is not only a faculty member at a university but also a member of a community of experts spread across many other institutions. A dean of students will have advanced degrees in the field and membership within an association such as the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. A Complex Legal and Policy Environment

Higher education relies on external support, usually in the form of governmental assistance, research funding, tax advantages, philanthropy, or ultimately, tuition-paying students. With that support comes accountability. Colleges and universities—whether they are public, private, or for-profit—are constrained by regulations, reporting requirements, and legal exposure. Organizational theorists would describe the boundaries of the institutions as porous. Public policy, broadly defined, is necessarily high on any leader’s agenda. A leader must increasingly take into account external demands while continuing to navigate the tricky terrain of internal demands. A Rapidly Changing “Business Model”

Revenues and expenses differ across the many types of higher education institutions. For a few financially strong universities, endowments support a range of operations. Most others, however, rely primarily on tuition fees from students. Students, in turn, depend on their own family means,

Higher Education

or financial aid from an institution directly, or government loans or grants. No matter the relative financial strength of the institution, all face rising costs, which leads to rising tuition fees, which leads to broader societal concerns over access, affordability, and equity. Technology, often seen as a solution to the rising cost structure, is just as often part of the problem. As in the field of medicine or other “knowledge-based” services, the latest technology is almost always expensive, and for those seeking the best in service, essential. Drivers of cost are typically more powerful than drivers of revenue. Mission Complexity

In 1947, in the wake of World War II, The Truman Commission on Higher Education issued a historic report, noteworthy for calling upon higher education to assume responsibility for educating future citizens and strengthening democracy. Times and societal needs change, however, and while that piece of higher education’s mission has certainly not vanished, strengthening the economy has also come to the fore. Universities educate productive citizens, sometimes with an emphasis on “citizens,” sometimes with an emphasis on “productive.” Responding to the societal expectations while also holding fast to a foundational and timeless mission is constantly on the minds of leaders. Universities are value-laden organizations. They seek truth, model public discourse, and educate strong and independent individuals while also demonstrating the importance of strong communities built on mutual commitments. They also prepare students for the workforce and a competitive economy. Those are not mutually exclusive missions, but there can be tensions. Diversity Among Students and Leaders

In the United States, students in higher education are increasingly diverse, reflecting the changing demographics of society. In 2018, African American students comprised 14% of higher education enrollment. Hispanic students comprised 11%, and they constitute the fastest-growing student population. Women now comprise 60% of postbaccalaureate enrollment. Among college and university leaders, there is also increasing diversity,

431

although, as with students, still not nearly in proportion to the general population. In 2016, 30% of presidents were women. Only 8% of the presidents were Black, Afro-Caribbean, or African American, and only 4% were Hispanic/Latino(a). Expanding access and ensuring that students, faculty, and administrators from previously underrepresented populations are welcomed on their campuses is a growing aspect of modern leadership.

Leadership Approaches A scholar of organizations once characterized universities as “organized anarchies.” They have complicated structures, no clear chain of command, diffuse authority, and a culture of shared governance. They are places where differences of opinion are seen as strengths not weaknesses. They cannot be true anarchies, of course, but neither can they become so structured that they stifle creativity and expression. A. Bartlett Giamatti, the president of Yale from 1978 to 1986, captured it best by describing them as “free and ordered spaces.” That creates yet another overriding task for a higher education leader: how to embrace and even encourage intellectual expression and the clash of ideas in unstructured and even disruptive circumstances, while also ensuring the stability, sustainability, and efficiency of the enterprise. How can colleges and universities be both “free” and “ordered?” The pursuit of education requires acceptance of some disorder—the flexibility to move to interesting yet unexplored topics, the inevitable but also desirable clash of perspectives, the autonomy of the teacher and the expert, and the stops and starts of any intellectual investigation. Yet all this must occur in an ordered context where license is accompanied by responsibility to others and where basic organizational requirements of sustainability, fiscal or legal, cannot be ignored. What does this mean for leadership? In such complex organizations, there is a constant need for leaders to explain not only what the institution is trying to accomplish but also why. Colleges and universities are indeed missiondriven. So, a leader must justify goals in relation to the values being pursued. That places a heavy

432

Higher Education

emphasis on a leader’s ability to exercise informal power alongside formal authority. The ability to persuade others—to articulate goals and objectives in language understandable to all the constituencies—is essential to achieving mutual understanding, especially when achieving perfect agreement is impossible. Another essential task is to hold the community together. Clark Kerr, a noted observer of higher education who drew heavily from his experience as president of the University of California in the 1960s, famously warned that universities were becoming multiversities. Physicists might put it in terms of centrifugal forces overwhelming centripetal ones. Leaders must find the equilibrium between those opposing forces by building unity while acknowledging and even celebrating the differences. Finding common ground in the midst of the complexity and the multiple constituencies is never obvious. The leader must manage the search. Leading any complex organization, especially one in higher education, is both a science and an art. Embracing only the science is for those with a very low tolerance for ambiguity. In these value-laden organizations a fixation on only the neat, the tidy, the easily explained, and the perfectly rational is a path to a short tenure. Embracing only the art, however, is a sure sign of hubris. It comes from an intellectual arrogance that leadership is simply a matter of judgment, style, common sense, and intuition—qualities reserved for uniquely capable individuals, often self-identified. Those who choose to make decisions without carefully weighing evidence and countervailing opinions are on the road to failed leadership. In systems of shared governance and diffuse authority, process often matters as much as outcome. It is not sufficient to do only the right thing; it must also be done the right way. Reconciling a commitment to expansive and inclusive governance while also seeking a preferred outcome is a frequent challenge for any higher education leader. Neither the science nor the art of leadership can determine exactly what to do in such situations. But together they help the leader understand that such situations can exist, sometimes in disguised forms, sometimes calling upon the science to reveal them and sometimes the art.

One final and essential task for leaders in higher education is to shape the institutional agenda. And to succeed in that endeavor, the leader must have the capacity for judgment—that is, the capacity to determine what is important and of the highest priority, not only for the leader personally but also for the institution. That is exceedingly difficult. The diverse constituencies all have their own opinions about what should be the highest priority and the shape of the agenda. And the increasing velocity of information and communication—and the risk of disinformation and misinformation— means the agenda can be highly volatile. Sometimes the leader may be tempted to overreact; sometimes to underreact. Judgment is indispensable in finding the balance, and therefore helping the organization stay on track, adapting to changing circumstances while clarifying and remaining true to a core mission. Kenneth P. Ruscio See also Diversity; Educational Attainment; Educational Leadership; Leadership Development

Further Readings American Council on Education. (2017). American college presidency study, summary profile. Retrieved from https://www.aceacps.org/summary-profile/ Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. (2022). American Council on Education. Carnegie Classifications j Definitions (acenet.edu) Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972, March). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25. Giamatti, A. B. (1990). A free and ordered space: The real world of the university. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks. Ruscio, K. P. (2017). Organized anarchies: The role of the president in today’s university. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 49(2), 26–29. Truman Commission on Higher Education. (1947). Higher education for democracy: A report of the president’s commission on higher education. Establishing the goals (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

History U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data

HISTORY Leadership studies are dominated by the social sciences, although humanistic explorations of the meaning of power and influence can be particularly instructive. Examining how the discipline of history informs leadership studies, as opposed to an overview of historical leadership, serves as the framework for this entry. This distinction is rooted in articulating how the methods of historical analysis provide a complementary and often persuasive angle for how to approach the study of leadership, rather than a selective assessment of either historical leaders’ goals, outcomes, and strategies, or a chronological account of theories of leadership. It necessarily relies on a reflexive definition of history: the construction and interpretation of the past through sensory evidence. This disciplinary framing attempts to move beyond the Great Man theories of history and leadership by centering both history and leadership as processes, not products. In 2007, Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke penned an article about the “five C’s of historical thinking” in Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. While their article was aimed at teaching history, its methodological framework serves as a productive way to articulate how historical analysis can enhance the study of leadership. By elaborating on how the five C’s shape the conclusions historians draw about leaders in the past, it is possible to extrapolate the value of the five C’s to informed insights about leadership in the present and future. Drawing from Western and U.S. historical examples when necessary, this entry is broken down into the five C’s and proceeds accordingly.

Change Over Time On a basic level, change over time is predicated on a spectrum, bookended by oppositional perspectives: people in the past are essentially the same

433

as people in the present or people in the past are fundamentally different from people in the present. Most historians fall somewhere in the middle, articulating the belief that, while each historical era is unique, some common themes seem to endure across time and space. One of these themes that informs leadership studies is the presumption of social organization. At the most basic level, history suggests that people—from prehistoric times until the advent of modern society—have always cohered themselves into some sort of collective unit (be it a family, community, nation-state, etc.). Within this unit, the relationships between individuals have ranged from egalitarian to totalitarian, underpinning a belief that expressions of leadership have persisted throughout history. This is not to suggest that reading modern leadership theories onto past communities is appropriate, let alone productive, but that the interplay of power, influence, and interpersonal relationships is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human in a given society. Change over time, then, can be seen in how canonical thinkers on leadership articulated distinct visions of what it means to lead based on their particular contexts, while still recognizing that the negotiation of power is a key component. Consider the idealized leadership offered in Plato’s Republic compared to the practical advice promulgated by Machiavelli’s The Prince. Written more than 1900 years apart, both authors recognize that power is needed to lead, though they disagree on where said power should come from and how its outcomes should be measured. An ocean away, the Iroquois Confederacy—a multinational government that balanced autonomy and collaboration between five (and later six) Native Nations in North America—served as a tangible model of republican ideals for European colonists and American patriots. During the Age of Revolution, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others imagined power dynamics that challenged those of past rulers, namely hereditary monarchs, but they did not deny that power itself was still necessary in any alternative vision of leadership, even if said power could be negotiated between and among followers. Although it is logical to assert that this negotiation of power is visible in the founding documents of various countries that underwent fundamental changes at this time—including the

434

History

U.S. Constitution (1787), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the Constitution of Saint-Domingue (1801)—it is not limited to the formal context of established governments or political leadership. For example, technological advancements permit an assessment of leadership changes from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution. Standardization, machination, urbanization, globalization, and other forces have shifted Western society’s understanding of titans of industry. Once the moniker of John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Mellon, and their early 20th-century counterparts, the very meaning of industrial titan has expanded to include digital tech giants like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Still, the common thread of negotiating power— particularly in terms of access to goods, information, and/or people—suggests that 21st-century titans share characteristics with their predecessors. In recognizing that the unique circumstances of contemporary society do not preclude strong commonalities with the larger continuum of human civilization, it becomes apparent that leadership’s historical foundations offer productive insights for the discipline of leadership studies.

Context Understanding context is as essential in the present as it is for the past. In appraising historical leaders, it is common to simplify their goals, outcomes, motivations, and actions in the name of teleological narration. The romance of leadership, a byproduct of this tendency, has meant that leaders— both past and present—are disproportionately implicated in both the successes and failures that accompany their role. By taking context into account, historical analysis permits a more nuanced assessment of how and why leaders make certain decisions, construct certain agendas, and behave in certain ways. This is not to suggest that interpreting context allows historians to delve into the psyches of historical actors, but that it affords a more robust way to imagine the social, political, economic, and cultural constraints that affect one’s capacity to lead. Not surprisingly, this approach is instructive for reckoning with evaluations of contemporary leaders.

Consider, for example, the context surrounding one of the most recognizable and symbolic leaders in United States history: George Washington. Known as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, one of the signatories of the U.S. Constitution, and the first president of a fledgling representative democracy, Washington’s glorification as a military and political leader typically overlooks the role that he actually occupied for most of his life—that of slave owner. Yet Edmund Morgan’s seminal work, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, contextualizes Washington’s world to articulate the complicated reality that American independence was quite literally and metaphorically purchased using enslaved labor. That Washington owned hundreds of enslaved people and advocated for republican equality is an American paradox, but it is not one that made him particularly unique. In company with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and a majority of other Founding Fathers, Washington’s slaveholding status represented not only a norm in colonial America for the aristocratic classes, but also an essential context for expressions of power in the early Republic. This is not to suggest that managing a plantation like Mount Vernon was parallel to overseeing a country, but that the context of a society predicated on slavery helps historians understand how Washington and others defined their myriad and often overlapping leadership roles. While historians use the framework of context to interpret the constrained choices historical actors made (or were forced to make), it is also a useful way for leadership studies scholars to question the over-ascribed agency of individual people in positions of power. By reckoning with the specific context of a company, country, society, and/or era, it becomes easier to analyze—as opposed to explain—how Adolf Hitler rose to power, how Enron crumbled from the inside, and how Donald Trump became president, for example.

Causality Both historians and leadership studies scholars seek to understand the causes of various outcomes. Many leadership theories, for example, explain how certain results are achieved on the basis of

History

some observable conclusions. Take, for example, the Full Range of Leadership model. Having observed its successes in the past, it is reasonable to believe that applying any one of its leadership styles to a new scenario will lead to similar results. Given the limitations of the previous two C’s however, historical analysis encourages cautious application of wide-sweeping cause-and-effect narratives simply based on previous experience. This caution comes from the limitations of the discipline: Historians cannot alter the past in order to test different hypotheses. While new evidence about the past may be uncovered, it cannot be created. As a result, historians appraise an incomplete set of sources to argue—and therefore disagree—about causation. For example, historians agree that a storm of events and ideologies coalesced to cause the American Civil War. The extent to which historians argue that slavery was the cause—as opposed to one of many causes—of the war is based not only on the sources consulted and the historian’s interpretive lenses, but also on the ways contemporary society shapes assessments of the past. During the Great Depression, for example, historians framed many of their causation arguments around economics, including those related to the Civil War. This does not necessarily mean that they discovered new sources, but that they approached old sources through the lens of what defined their society at the time. Thus, at the same time that historical analysis attempts to explain the past, it also implicitly explains the present. It is this framing of causality that offers insights for leadership studies. For example, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 on live television, the causes of the catastrophe were not immediately apparent. After President Ronald Reagan appointed the Rogers Commission to investigate how such a disaster could have occurred, the findings ultimately revealed a failure in the O-ring seals, exacerbated by the colderthan-usual temperatures of the launch day. Yet blaming the tragedy on mechanical parts alone does not adequately convey the organizational problems that allowed the inclusion of faulty materials in the first place. It is now well documented that the Challenger explosion was caused by myriad flaws in the culture of NASA and its contractors—flaws that prevented known defects

435

to escalate up the chain of command and instead accepted a level of flight risk that came to raise serious ethical questions. Today, the Challenger flight serves as a productive case study in leadership and organizational ethics precisely because the causes of the devastation are complicated enough that no single person, event, or moment fully explains the outcome of that fateful January day in 1986.

Contingency Whereas causality is useful to both historians and leadership studies scholars who seek to explain the existence of certain outcomes, contingency considers an ad nauseam approach to the past (and, by extension, the present). Often summarized as the “butterfly effect,” contingency embraces the reality that nothing is inherently predetermined. Instead, a specific set of circumstances leads to a particular outcome, but changing one element of this circumstantial formula can alter the result. And, by default of choosing to “start” said formula at a particular moment in time, the output is necessarily dependent on the constrained variables that have been selected. Although this articulation of contingency is purposefully vague, a thought exercise in history can prove productive. Many historians agree that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914 was one of the most immediate causes of World War I. Yet his assassination— alongside that of his wife—was not a predetermined event. Although there was no shortage of people who wanted the archduke dead, including members of a secret society known as the Black Hand, the events of that particular day were the result of a series of unforeseen decisions and in-the-moment circumstances, both at the hands of the perpetrators and the victims. Traveling along a motorcade route in Sarajevo, the archduke escaped various opportunities for assassination attempts: at least two Black Hand members failed to act and another threw a bomb that exploded under a different car in the procession. Having arrived at the town hall flustered but otherwise unscathed, the archduke and his wife decided to visit the victims of the bombing at the hospital, rather than proceed with their scheduled program. Somewhere in the change of

436

History

plans, the drivers of the motorcade vehicles did not learn the route had been modified to prioritize the couple’s safety. As a result, a wrong turn and an attempt to correct it provided a precise window for another Black Hand member, who had moved his own position after his colleagues’ failed efforts, to approach the vehicle and shoot its occupants at point-blank range. Based on this account of events, it is clear that the assassination of the archduke was not a given, but the outcome of various factors that were contingent upon one another. Ultimately, then, questions emerge: Would World War I have started without the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? Would the archduke have been assassinated if his driver had not made a wrong turn? Or if he hadn’t rescheduled his plans? Or if he hadn’t traveled to Sarajevo in June? Or if he had never been archduke in the first place (which, given how he acquired the throne, was not predetermined either)? Thus, employing a contingency analysis helps uncover the extent to which, although history is written as if following a preset—albeit messy— line, this is a product of disciplinary convention, rather than the actual reality of the past. Recognizing the nuances of contingency in the past also has merit in the present and in the future. History allows leadership studies scholars to content with the fact that today’s leaders might have been predictable, but they were not predetermined.

historical actors. As the examples offered so far have demonstrated, history is an imprecise reckoning with people in the past and, by default, people in the present. In the context of historical leadership, therefore, complexity centers the humanness of leaders, recognizes their fallibility, and takes seriously the circumstances that surround their influence, outcomes, and motives. In so doing, it moves away from the distortions of both chronicles and nostalgia—two concepts which often blind non-historians into believing that naming presidents or visiting national monuments are, in and of themselves, acts of history. Indeed, the disciplinary flattening of history is not dissimilar to that of leadership studies. In both cases, concepts that unify human experiences are often misconstrued by nonspecialists while the nuance of each is left to scholarly debates. Given the role of complexity, however, this reality is not unexpected. By acknowledging that what it means to be human requires complexity, historical analysis resists simplification and urges leadership studies to do the same. Historical analysis complements and enhances leadership studies. Understanding how historians approach the past challenges the assumption that history is a singular and linear narrative. Instead, the five Cs of history offer a practical framework to assess how historical approaches to leadership encourage a more humanistic methodology in leadership studies. Lauren Nicole Henley

Complexity As the first four Cs have already alluded, one of the most essential frameworks underlying historical analysis is complexity. Arguably, this lens is also readily visible in leadership studies as scholars develop theories, studies, hypotheses, and processes that attempt to consolidate the complex phenomena of leadership into something more easily digestible. Historians, however, caution against oversimplification. This is not to suggest that nothing is transferrable from one scenario to another, but that the uniqueness of the human experience requires finessed extrapolation. Just as people alive today believe their lives are robust, complicated, and often contradictory, so too must that level of nuance be afforded to

See also Civil Rights Movement; Critical Race Theory; Literature; Nostalgia; Religion; Romance of Leadership; Social Change

Further Readings Andrews, T., & Burke, F. (2007). What does it mean to think historically? Perspectives, 45(1), 32–35. Bailyn, B. (1986). The peopling of British North America: An introduction. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. McPherson, J. (1988). Battle cry of freedom: The Civil War era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mombauer, A. (2015). Guilt or responsibility? The hundred-year debate on the origins of World War I. Central European History, 48(4), 541–564. doi:10. 1017/S0008938915001144

Human Trafficking Morgan, E. (1975). American slavery, American freedom: The ordeal of colonial Virginia. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Pinkus, R. L., Shuman, L. J., Hummon, N. P., & Wolfe, H. (1997). Engineering ethics: Balancing cost, schedule, and risk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, D. M. (1976). The impending crisis, 1848–1861. New York, NY: Harper Colophon. Taylor, A. (2016). American revolutions: A continental history, 1750–1804. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

HUMAN TRAFFICKING Human trafficking is a term that has gained recent attention in the media, among scholars, within governments, and across the globe but the term was first used in 1904 in the International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic. Although slavery was abolished in most countries around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, extreme exploitation of humans continues today. The definition of human trafficking continues to be a contentious issue, but the most widely accepted definition comes from the United Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (TIP), Especially Women and Children, also known as the Palermo Protocol. This definition clarifies that human trafficking includes recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring, and receiving a person using threat, force, or coercion for the purpose of exploitation. The Palermo Protocol coincided in 2000 with the United States’ Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which includes the basic tenets of the Palermo definition with the expressed focus on governmental responsibilities to prevent trafficking, protect victims and at-risk groups, and prosecute offenders. Human trafficking as a topic of inquiry is important to the study of leadership in that a number of actors have taken leadership roles to defining and attempting to address the issue across the world. Still, many opportunities exist for innovative ways to think about the issue, and thus address the issue. In understanding the leadership dynamics of human trafficking, this entry sets out to explore the types of trafficking, important

437

stakeholders in the field, political and legal implications, methodological challenges to measuring trafficking, and some of the key debates in the field. Although there is considerable worldwide consensus regarding the definition of human trafficking, the delineation of the types of human trafficking has been a challenge for law enforcement, practitioners, scholars, and policymakers. Despite the established definition, substantial subjectivity remains in the interpretation of human trafficking in complicated real-world circumstances. Typically, human trafficking is divided into two major categories: labor trafficking and sex trafficking. But other less prominent forms of human trafficking exist, including debt bondage, domestic servitude, forced begging, forced criminal activities, forced organ removal, orphan trafficking, child marriage, and child soldiers. Moreover, overlap among these activities often occurs. Identification of trafficking victims and offenders is a particular challenge for law enforcement, as is prosecution of offenders, due to the difficulty in proving trafficking. This difficulty stems from the fact that the survivor of trafficking is often the key, or sole, witness in criminal proceedings. The United Nations and the United States are the two most powerful governmental actors in anti-trafficking, particularly due to their role in developing the widely acknowledged definitions, and their funding of major antitrafficking projects and efforts around the world. The United States, in particular, began to take a prominent role in antitrafficking globally with the creation of its Office to Combat TIP in the Department of State during the presidential administration of George W. Bush. The United States’ annual TIP report began soon afterward. The TIP report ranks countries on a tiered evaluation system based on their anti-trafficking efforts in prevention, protection, and prosecution. To increase the influence of the TIP Report, the U.S. government tied economic sanctions to poor rankings on the TIP report. Although the TIP report has been criticized for bias and a lack of methodological transparency, it is difficult to ignore the impact and influence that the TIP report has had on human trafficking, particularly on how governments respond. The U.S. government has also established the T-visa,

438

Human Trafficking

allowing survivors trafficked into or within the United States to receive legal resident status, with the stipulation that the recipient cooperate with criminal investigations and prosecution of traffickers. Although up to 5,000 T-visas are available each year, typically less than 2,000 cases occur annually, partly due to the complexity of navigating the T-visa process. The number of convictions of traffickers is increasing annually, yet fewer than 1,000 trafficking cases in the United States result in convictions annually, and globally fewer than 10,000 convictions occur. The scope of human trafficking is difficult to measure due to its hidden nature, and estimating the prevalence of human trafficking has become a contentious issue. Unlike formal slavery, such as in the colonial era, trafficking can be short term or may occur multiple times in a survivor’s lifetime. Moreover, survivors of trafficking may even go on to become an offender in the future. A number of scholars and organizations have attempted to quantify the prevalence of human trafficking through diverse methodologies, yet widespread agreement on the methodologies and their estimations remains elusive. Although a growing body of formal and informal literature on human trafficking exists, a much smaller proportion of that literature is empirical, in part due to the methodological challenges of measuring trafficking. This lacuna in our concrete understanding makes it difficult to measure the impact of anti-trafficking efforts as well as to generalize human trafficking experiences across contexts and demographics. A number of risk factors have been identified with human trafficking, such as poverty, wealth inequality, informal migration, armed conflict, corruption, environmental degradation, workplace regulations, racism, and xenophobia. However, these risk factors vary in their complexity depending on local, regional, national, and international contexts. Some countries around the world have been noted as having particularly significant levels of human trafficking over time, and these trafficking trends typically track with socio-political factors. In the research literature, countries may be referred to source (where trafficking victims came from), transit (where trafficking victims are transported through), and/or destination (where

trafficking victims were taken to) countries. For example, Southeast Asia is particularly known for trafficking issues and is referred to as a source, transit, and destination country. This is because Thailand is a relatively wealthy country in Southeast Asia, surrounded by relatively poor countries as neighbors, but also has pockets of extreme poverty within its borders. However, it is important to note that countries such as Thailand developed entrenched sex industries during the American War in Vietnam to provide American soldiers sexual services during their rest and relaxation breaks from the war zone. After the war, the sex industry infrastructure remained, which gave Thailand the reputation of being a sex tourist hot spot. Many countries in Eastern Europe became known as source countries after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, and some Eastern European countries such as the Ukraine remain unstable, pushing migrants to take risky jobs outside their home countries, or to migrate through informal networks where they may be exploited. In Central American countries such as Guatemala, where war has ravaged rural areas, villagers are faced with precarious and difficult situations at home and must weigh the risks of dangerous and challenging migration in hopes of finding better opportunities elsewhere. Human trafficking is a very real peril that they face as they migrate for work to another country. Border regions are also areas where trafficking is purported to occur in larger numbers. Although capital is freer to move across borders due to neoliberal economic policies, immigration and border regimes have become stricter worldwide, forcing many migrants to turn to informal actors and processes in order to migrate for work. These migrants may face exploitative situations and may be vulnerable to traffickers at various points along the migration process. Many governments’ response to this issue has been to increase border security and surveillance, which has been argued to actually exacerbate the problem. One contentious topic related to human trafficking has been the question as to whether legalized prostitution increases or decreases human trafficking, and approaches to the issue differ across the world. For instance, in Scandinavia, the

Humane Education

legalization of prostitution is coupled with the criminalization of the purchase of sex, known commonly as the Nordic Model. Elsewhere, prostitution and the purchase of sex are both legal, and in other parts of the world, both are illegal. Sex worker advocates have argued that in places where prostitution is illegal, sex workers face exploitation not only by clients, but also by police and other officials who use the precarious nature of sex work against the sex workers. However, in places where prostitution and the purchase of sex are fully legal, such as in Amsterdam or Nevada in the United States, sex trafficking has still been acknowledged to occur outside of the formal sex industry. In terms of labor trafficking, a growing awareness of the issue of forced labor within multinational supply chains has brought scrutiny on global corporate manufacturing as well as agribusiness. Many economic sectors have increased accountability on the various actors within their global supply chains and put in place more oversight on their worldwide operations. Fair trade organizations have formed to address labor trafficking and to assure customers that the goods they purchase have not been produced by forced labor. Some industries have their own internal controls that assert the ethical production of their goods and services. However, critics have argued that these efforts serve the business interests more than the laborers within their supply chains and are done superficially without truly verifying the ethical methods used in opaque supply chains. This issue is of particular concern when global corporations contract and subcontract local sourcing and extraction of resources in developing settings without having oversight on those operations. Although slavery is outlawed worldwide, some forms of exploitation that are considered human trafficking, such as debt bondage, remain due to cultural acceptance of the practice. In India, for instance, large numbers of workers working in agriculture or manual laborers for brick kilns are indebted to their employers and thus unable to leave their jobs. One specific type of debt bondage scheme is referred to as the company store model in the United States, and the courts have found employers (from industries as diverse as steel, oil,

439

massage parlors, agriculture, and food service) guilty of human trafficking through debt bondage. This type of human trafficking often involves the employer charging workers for their recruitment to the job, as well as charging workers exorbitant fees for providing them with housing and food. Understanding of human trafficking continues to evolve as a variety of actors further debate and define the issue and determine the best approaches to addressing the issue. Since the issue crosses a variety of academic disciplines, economic sectors, social groups, and societal actors, efforts to end human trafficking moving forward will require interdisciplinary cross-sector collaboration. Bob Spires See also Coercion and Ethics; Employee Rights; Ethical Consumerism; Ethics of Deception and Manipulation; Income Inequality; Racial Disparities; Trauma

Further Readings Bernstein, E. (2018). Brokered subjects: Sex, trafficking and the politics of freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Feingold, D. (2017). Playing the numbers: The spurious promise of global trafficking statistics. Anti-Trafficking Review, 8, 153–156. Retrieved from www. antitraffickingreview.org Kempadoo, K., Sanghera, J., & Pattanaik, B. (2012). Trafficking and prostitution reconsidered (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Spires, R. (2015). Preventing human trafficking. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315602103

HUMANE EDUCATION Humane education is a field of study and approach to teaching that draws connections between human rights, environmental sustainability, and animal protection, with the goal of providing learners with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to address and solve pressing local and global challenges. Humane education is based on the premise that a more just, healthy, and peaceful

440

Humane Education

world is possible, and that learning how to bring about positive change should be one of the most important goals of education. This entry describes and emphasizes the importance of leadership in humane education.

Defining the Field and Practice Humane education has as its foundation the belief that if we reimagine the root system that underlies all other societal systems—schooling—we can prepare future generations to find answers to the challenges we face. Humane education helps learners put core values of kindness, compassion, generosity, responsibility, and integrity into practice in a complex, globalized world in which our daily choices affect humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems across the planet. The goal of human education is to cultivate inquiry and thinking skills so that issues are perceived in all their complexity, and answers to persistent challenges are addressed holistically. Humane education is itself humane; it is engaging, inspiring, meaningful, and relevant to learners’ lives and futures. Humane educators occupy an important leadership position in society by helping others acquire knowledge by preparing them to be enthusiastic and effective researchers able to obtain accurate information about interconnected local and global challenges. An emphasis of humane education is teaching the world to discern fact from opinion and conjecture. Educators help others think deeply by developing their critical, systems, strategic, and creative thinking skills. It is imperative that educators make compassionate and responsible choices by fostering wonder and appreciation for the natural world, empathy for people and animals, and a commitment to doing the most good and least harm. Humane educators focus on solutions by providing opportunities to collaboratively engage in problem-solving, implement ideas, and assess and improve upon them.

A Better World Is Possible While there are potentially catastrophic problems facing the world, including climate change and its many impacts on people, animals, and ecosystems;

loss of biodiversity; a growing human population and its demands upon finite resources; increasing inequities and the myriad problems these engender; polarization and the political dysfunction, interpersonal anger, and societal divisions that work against solutions-oriented thinking and action; and entrenched systems that are unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane, a better world is possible, and evidence for its unfolding are everywhere. Poverty

In the middle of the 20th century, one half of all people lived in extreme poverty. Today less than 10% do. While it is unacceptable that hundreds of millions of people do not have access to adequate food, clean water, and/or shelter, the decline in poverty overall demonstrates not only that progress has been made, but also provides hope that a world without poverty is achievable. Social Justice

In the middle of the 20th century, it was illegal in a number of states in the United States for Black and white people to marry. In some states, husbands could legally rape their wives. Across the globe, access by girls to education was limited, and women were vastly underrepresented in colleges, universities, and in professions other than education, secretarial work, and nursing. In the United States and many other countries, gay marriage wasn’t legal, and the concept of LGBT1 rights was essentially nonexistent. Now, anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional, and racial justice is a beacon toward which most people in society are striving. Gay marriage is legal not only in the United States but also in many other countries. Any kind of rape is illegal in the United States whether stranger, spousal, or date rape. LGBT1 rights, and importantly, conversations about these rights, are happening at lightning speed (such that the acronym itself evolves frequently). Environmental Protection

In the middle of the 20th century, the air and water in many U.S. cities was dirtier than it is today (wildfires in western states notwithstanding). The

Humane Education

Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act were passed by Congress in the 1970s in an effort to diminish pollution and protect other species from extinction. Today, climate change discussions and action to avert disaster—while not yet sufficient to address the problem of a warming planet—are gaining momentum. Animal Welfare and Rights

Growing meat consumption across the globe is increasing concentrated animal farming and slaughter, and, therefore, animal cruelty; no protections exist to stop the abuse of trillions of sea animals through netting, hooking, and suffocation; and populations of these animals are in dramatic decline due to overfishing. At the same time, the commitment to animal rights and animal welfare continues to rise, with most people believing that animals should be afforded protection and/or rights, according to a 2015 Gallup poll. Circuses that use animals have gone out of business. Marine parks in the United States are no longer capturing wild cetaceans. Fur is largely out of fashion. The number of people hunting for sport declines decade after decade. Plant-based and cultivated meat production are on the rise.

Humane Education Seeks a Just, Sustainable, and Humane Future Acceptance of the premise that progress has been made begs the question: how do leaders achieve a fully just, sustainable, and humane future? Humane education is a powerful and strategic approach to achieve this goal. Underlying all other societal systems lies education. While educating young people may seem like a long-term approach to creating change, the effects of humane education that introduces students to real-world issues and problems and prepares them to solve those problems can be immediate. Moreover, if we don’t embrace a purpose of schooling worthy of students’ lived experiences and future needs and fail to make schooling real-world and solutions-focused, problems will persist and likely escalate. Ultimately, education is both cure and prevention, and highly strategic for building a better future.

441

There are many paths to create positive change, of course. An invention or new product might replace a less humane or unsustainable one. For example, the rapid development of plant-based and cultivated meat is likely to obviate the use of animals in farming, which will transform a system that is relentlessly cruel and environmentally destructive. A legal precedent or new law can transform an unjust or inhumane practice or system. A new policy in a corporation can lead to more equitable, environmentally friendly, and/or humane practices. Humane education encourages the development of a variety of approaches to change making, recognizing that when people combine their skills and talents with what they enjoy doing, in service of transforming unjust, unsustainable, or inhumane systems about which they are concerned, everyone wins. Essentially, humane education paves the way for all forms of change making by laying the groundwork for any approach a student might ultimately take throughout their school years, within their future professions, and as engaged citizens dedicated to building a more just, compassionate, and sustainable future.

What Comprises Humane Education? Fostering Compassion and a Sense of Responsibility

Compassion and a sense of responsibility are profound motivators for identifying, addressing, and solving problems that impact people, animals, and the environment, so humane education seeks to foster these qualities and dispositions. It does so through exposing students—in age-appropriate ways—to issues of our time that cause harm or suffering, as well as by engaging students in the process of identifying problems that concern them. By learning about the ways in which dedicated people can make a difference, humane education also instills a sense of responsibility to be a force for good. Teaching Critical, Systems, Strategic, and Creative Thinking

Humane educators often use the term solutionaries to describe people with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to address root and systemic

442

Humane Education

causes of problems and solve them in ways that do the most good and least harm for all people, animals, and the environment. To become a solutionary, people must develop certain thinking skills. There are many thinking skills that comprise “solutionary thinking,” but foremost among them are critical thinking, systems thinking, strategic thinking, and creative thinking. Although these forms of thinking are not linear, without critical thinking as a foundation it’s impossible to become a good systems or strategic thinker. Students need to be able to research carefully; identify legitimate sources of information; analyze graphs, charts, and statistics; evaluate information from stakeholders; and recognize bias. With these skills they can then better understand interconnected systems and recognize feedback loops, causal connections, and the effects of shifts made in one system on other systems. This enables them to better identify effective leverage points for change, and devise solutions to problems that will benefit everyone and have the fewest unintended negative consequences. Creative thinking comes into play to develop innovative ideas.

Creating Opportunities to Make a Difference and Solve Real-World Problems Nurturing compassion and a sense of responsibility and teaching the necessary thinking skills to engage in ethical problem-solving pave the way for action. Action is a necessary component to humane education because learning about problems and devising ideas to solve them, but not acting upon those ideas, can be a recipe for powerlessness. Whether we teach about the challenges of our time or not, young people are acutely aware of the crises and problems we face in the world, and many of them feel that the future is bleak. Thus, humane education offers opportunities for students to work together to put their ideas into practice and to implement their solutions. This approach not only helps solve actual problems that concern students, but also reminds them that change through collaboration is possible. Humane education thus results in a positive feedback loop in which students solve real-world problems, feel empowered and hopeful,

and are motivated to continue creating change. In the process, they gain academic, citizenship, leadership, and other skills and cultivate healthy dispositions for themselves and their communities.

Barriers to the Spread of Humane Education The educational system is slow to change, and, in the United States, varies from state to state. Each state oversees its own educational approach, curricula, and priorities through its department of education. For example, some states are passing laws to curtail what can be taught about structural racism, and some promote alternative theories to be presented to students learning about evolution. While humane education is required in some states, it is ill-defined and limited in scope. Teachers are not taught how to be humane educators, and currently schools do not have humane education departments or job openings specifically for humane educators. The mission of the United States Department of Education, as stated on its website, is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” This purpose does not embrace the core values and goals of humane education. Real-World Crises Are Having an Impact on Educational Leaders

The COVID-19 pandemic upended education. Remote learning increased educational disparities, and many children disappeared from school entirely. Yet, while the global pandemic had a negative impact on students and teachers, it also opened the door to rethinking schooling, curricula, and ways of learning that could ultimately lead to positive changes in schooling. Climate change crises—from fires to more frequent and devastating storms to droughts and flooding—are no longer distant threats but are current realities. They are creating a new sense of urgency to prepare students to be climate-ready and solutions-focused. A racial reckoning, brewing for decades, became a national focus in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020. Coupled with subsequent shootings of unarmed

Humility

Black people by police within weeks, which drew international attention, structural racism quickly became an issue for schools to address. Despite a backlash to teaching about systemic racism and the legacy of slavery, more and more educational leaders are realizing the necessity of building education about racism into the curriculum so that we can strive to finally achieve racial justice and equity. Problem- and Project-Based Learning (PBL) Have Already Been Adopted

Schools have recognized the power of problem- and project-based learning that engages students in real-world issues. Humane education takes PBL to the next level by bringing a systems-thinking approach and ethical component that is “solutionary-focused,” meaning students learn to solve problems in ways that have the fewest unintended negative consequences for all groups. In other words, humane education helps learners address problems in ways that are good for all people, not just some people; all animals, not just those we like or that are good for a whole species but not for individual animals; and on the eco-systems that sustain all life. Since many schools have already adopted PBL, humane education could easily follow as an enhancement and deepening of this approach to teaching and learning. Teachers are witnessing an increase in student anxiety and depression. In a very real sense, teachers are first responders. Schools have the power to address the growing despair that young people are experiencing by bringing humane education into classrooms and curricula, and many educators are embracing their responsibility to young people to better educate, engage, and prepare them through lessons and pedagogy that is meaningful, relevant, purposeful, and positive. As previously described, students gain hope through humane education. Zoe Weil See also Community Leadership; Economic Justice; Ethical Leadership; Responsible Leadership

443

Further Readings Chiedozie, C. J. (2021). Teaching humane education to the children of Lagos, Nigeria. Independently published. Verene, D. P. (2001). The art of humane education. New York, NY: Cornell University Press. doi:10.7591/ 9781501717260 Weil, Z. (2004). The power and promise of humane education. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Weil, Z. (2021). The world becomes what we teach: Educating a generation of solutionaries. New York, NY: Lantern Publishing and Media. Retrieved from https://lanternpm.org/books/the-world-becomes-whatwe-teach/

HUMILITY Humility is a character strength or virtue that is defined as having four necessary and sufficient conditions. First, humility requires an accurate assessment and portrayal to others of one’s strengths and weaknesses. This is a right-sized understanding, not exaggerating strengths or minimizing weaknesses into something arrogant. Nor is it failing to acknowledge strengths while emphasizing weaknesses. Second, humility is characterized by an attitude of being teachable by others. The person seeks to correct weaknesses and increase strengths. Third, humility implies a modest self-presentation socially. Finally, humility involves an other-oriented attitude that seeks to lift others rather than put them down, thereby quieting one’s own ego. The fourth characteristic is sometimes described as simply having a quiet ego without the other orientation, though scholars Everett Worthington Jr. and Scott Allison, in their book Heroic Humility, suggest that humility, as a personal and social construct, needs to quieten the ego by focusing on others’ welfare and flourishing. Humility is a personal virtue, yet it is difficult to imagine what a humble person might be without a social context. In the leadership realm, humility is a key component of effective leaders. Humble leaders

444

Humility

are trusted as having power yet keeping the welfare of those in the organization and customers as a chief value. They are not merely humble by trait. Rather they have learned how to manifest that trait in the role of trusted organizational leader. The remainder of this entry defines different types of humility, reviews the recent burgeoning study of humility, and examines three types of humility within organizations: leader humility, team humility, and organizational humility.

Types of Humility There are several types of humility. State humility is an attitude of humility adopted for a particular situation. For instance, it might help to enter delicate business negotiations humbly. But generally, most people see it as a sixth trait complementing the Big Five personality traits, which is called general humility. As a trait, humility is manifested across situations and maintained over time. Relational humility is humility shown consistently in a particular relationship or type of relationship. For instance, a humble parent is different from a humble child. A humble leader acts differently from a humble worker. Spiritual humility is humility in the face of what one feels is sacred and awe-inspiring, such as God, nature, or humanity. Intellectual humility is humility when discussing ideas and concepts to which one is emotionally committed such that the discussion is characterized by committed civility, tolerance, and respectful acceptance. Thus, (1) political humility, which is discussing emotionally engaging political disagreements, (2) religious humility, which is discussing religion, or (3) general intellectual humility are all forms of intellectual humility. Leaders might show intellectual humility when discussing things like leadership philosophy, strategic direction of an organization, labor disputes, or hiring decision in an organization. It is possible, for example, for a person to be humble in one or more areas but not others. For example, a person could be humble at work with employees, but not be humble with a spouse or children at home. A person might have strong spiritual humility (before God), but not be able to discuss religious disagreements humbly.

The Study of Humility Humility is an ancient virtue, not valued in Greece and Rome, though advocated in Confucian philosophy. In the West, it was first championed within Christianity and popularized by Augustine. In science, its study languished until positive psychology flourished at the turn of the 21st century. In 2000, June Tangney discovered that assessment of humility by self-report, the bread-and-butter of psychology, was risky because one might not be able to report on one’s own humility convincingly. Imagine, for example, a person saying, “On a scale from 0 to 10, I’m a 10 in humility.” The person might truly be accurately assessing her humility, but Tangney’s point was that we do not know whether this is accurate or arrogant. In addition, people might not accurately be able to assess their own humility. An arrogant person might claim extreme humility simply out of lack of self-awareness, and a truly humble person might, for social decorum, underplay his or her own humility. This was the self-report paradox, and it paralyzed the scientific study of humility for the first decade of the 21st century. There may be ways to mitigate the self-report paradox. First, humility assessment items could be hidden among many other personality-assessment items, which was the tack taken in the HEXACO model. Second, other reports could be used to supplement self-report. Third, care could be taken to ensure that assessment of humility was not transparently valuing of humility, such as using a self-report humility instrument to determine whether a person is hired in a team-oriented organization. By the early 2010s, the field generally accepted that self-reports of humility were generally valid. By 2017, Stacey McElroy-Heltzel and his colleagues had found 22 psychometrically supported self-report instruments. Self-reports have been correlated with other reports and objective measures. With regard to humility within organizations, scholars have summarized their findings according to leader humility, team humility, and organizational humility.

Leader Humility Humble leaders do not necessarily view themselves as the driving force of organizational well-functioning. They put their contributions

Humility

into realistic perspective. Angela Wallace and her colleagues observed that leader humility involves three core elements. Humble leaders are accurately aware of their strengths and weaknesses, are oriented to others’ strengths, weaknesses, and contributions without need to take undue credit for organizational accomplishments, and seem open to feedback (i.e., are teachable). Humble leaders are characterized by self-transcendence and low self-focus. Leaders demonstrate their self-awareness by admitting mistakes and showing compassion, accept responsibility for their failures, and recognize their subordinates’ contributions. They model responding to others’ feedback, avoiding public attention unless it contributes to the company’s success, and fostering a climate of safety. The expression of humility by leaders builds a common bond of humanness, which is consistent with the social-bonds hypothesis. Humble leaders create teams that focus on learninggoals, are committed to their jobs, and are satisfied. Subordinates perceive humble leaders to be trustworthy and forgiving, and that results in better leader-worker relationships.

Team Humility and Organizational Humility Substantial research has identified characteristics of team humility and organizational humility, which are inevitably related to the leaders of the team and organization. A good team works together well, which is often a product of humble team members. The characteristics of general humility—owning accurate assessments of strengths and weaknesses, being teachable, presenting oneself modestly, and being oriented to others’ welfare (as at least as important as one’s own advancement)—are displayed by team members. Those qualities are not only modeled by, but also actively encouraged by, good team leaders. Humble leaders help team members feel valued, appreciated, and cared for, and to be more creative. In 2016, Chia-Yen Chiu and his colleagues found that in work teams, leader humility promotes shared leadership. The example and active encouragement of humble leaders help people spontaneously act as leaders and respect and accept interactions among team members when others are

445

leading. Leader-encouraged shared leadership within a team was related to the team’s effectiveness. Other researchers have found that the perceptions of workers’ immediate supervisor’s humility contributed to their perceived psychological safety and engagement in their work. Large organizations are not merely large teams. Rather, organizations are products of higher leadership, which both create and enforce policy supporting humility and which are visible exemplars of humility. Usually, humble organizations have mission and value statements that reflect a humble, other-oriented ethic. A humble organization is humble internally by being open to new ideas and dialogue within and across hierarchy lines. It fosters creativity and cooperation. Moreover, humble organizations are self-aware, teachable, modest, and other-oriented. Otherorientation is both internal to the organization and external. External other-orientation respects shareholders, clients, and the observing public. The organization might seek assistance from other organizations, demonstrating that it is teachable. There are numerous examples of humble organizations that employ strategies to treat everyone in an equal, loving, and respectful manner. One such organization is the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Patients are greeted with reverence and treated with great care. Walls and bulletin boards contain inspirational quotes that elevate patients and staff members internally. Recipients of care are impressed with the way every staff member shows their care, not just as “care-providers,” but as people willing to spend other-oriented time and take a genuine interest in the people who are, at the time, their patients. Physicians, nurses, aides, cleaning staff, and dieticians at the Mayo Clinic treat each other with respect and humility. This even shows up in the affectionate way the employees refer to “Mother Mayo.” All of these humble touches are the direct result of leadership that understands the importance of humility. Everett L. Worthington Jr. See also Conflict Negotiation; Heroic Humility; Organization; Servant-Leader; Team; Virtues

446

Humor

Further Readings Chiu, C. Y. C., Owens, B. P., & Tesluk, P. E. (2016). Initiating and utilizing shared leadership in teams: The role of leader humility, team proactive personality, and team performance capability. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(12), 1705–1720. doi:10.1037/ apl0000159 Collins, J. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap and others don’t. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Davis, D. E., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Hook, J. N. (2010). Relational humility: A review of definitions and measurement strategies, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(4), 243–252. doi:10.1080/ 17439761003791672 Davis, D. E., Worthington, E. L., Jr., Hook, J. N., Emmons, R. A., Hill, P. C., Bollinger, R. A., & Van Tongeren, D. R. (2013). Humility and the development and repair of social bonds: Two longitudinal studies. Self and Identity, 12, 58–77. doi:10.1080/15298868. 2011.636509 Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2004). Psychometric properties of the HEXACO personality inventory. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 39(2), 329–358. doi:10.1207/ s15327906mbr3902_8 McElroy-Heltzel, S. E., Davis, D. E., DeBlaere, C., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Hook, J. N. (2018). An embarrassment of riches in the measurement of humility: A critical review of 22 measures. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(3), 393–404. doi:10.1080/ 17439760.2018.1460686 Ou, A. Y., Tsui, A. S., Kinicki, A. J., Waldman, D. A., Xiao, Z., & Song, L. J. (2014). Humble chief executive officers’ connections to top management team integration and middle managers’ responses. Administrative Science Quarterly, 59(1), 34–72. doi: 10.1177/0001839213520131 Owens, B. P., & Hekman, D. R. (2016). How does leader humility influence team performance? Exploring the mechanisms of contagion and collective promotion focus. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), 1088–1111. doi:10.5465/amj.2013.0660 Owens, B. P., Johnson, M. D., & Mitchell, T. R. (2013). Expressed humility in organizations: Implications for performance, teams, and leadership. Organizational Science, 24, 1517–1538. doi:10.1287/orsc.1120.0795 Tangney, J. P. (2000). Humility: Theoretical perspectives, empirical findings and directions for future research. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19, 70–82. doi:10.1521/jscp.2000.19.1.70

Wallace, A. S., Chiu, C. Y. C., & Owens, B. P. (2017). Organizational humility and the better functioning business non-profit and religious organizations In E. L. Worthington, Jr., D. E. Davis, & J. N. Hook (Eds.), Handbook of humility: Theory, research, and application (pp. 246–259). New York, NY: Routledge. Walters, K. N., & Diab, D. L. (2016). Humble leadership: Implications for psychological safety and follower engagement. Journal of Leadership Studies, 10(2), 7–18. doi:10.1002/jls.21434 Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Allison, S. T. (2018). Heroic humility: What the science of humility can say to people raised on self-focus. American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/0000079-000 Ye, B. H., Tung, V. W. S., Li, J. J., & Zhu, H. (2020). Leader humility, team humility and employee creative performance: The moderating roles of task dependence and competitive climate. Tourism Management, 81, 104170. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2020.104170

HUMOR In business, organizations and politics, leaders and executives typically project a rather somber demeanor where jocularity appears frivolous and inappropriate. Yet, there is a growing recognition that leadership dynamics can be a conducive context for humor: incongruities and paradoxes in leadership are ideal source material for irony. Research reveals that joking occurs in virtually every setting where people congregate and interact. Humor has been recorded in a variety of organizations, from breweries and betting shops to coal mines, factories, and abattoirs. For centuries, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and even mathematicians have tried to explain humor, irony, and satire. Two approaches that provide particular insights into humor in leader–follower relations are the functionalist and critical perspectives.

Functionalist Perspectives Researchers have found that joking is often the prerogative of those in authority. Humor can help leaders send messages about who they are and why

Humor

followers should trust them. Research also indicates that in the presence of superiors, subordinates tend either to refrain from joking or make their humor nonthreatening. Studies document how humor can develop positive workplace cultures, facilitate interaction and communication, increase motivation, and generally build positive relationships. Equally, humor and laughter can create in subordinates a feeling of belonging while masking and softening the authoritarian content of a message. Politicians and their speechwriters also recognize the strategic value of humor. U.S. presidents such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush used humor to project a public image of confidence, authority, and approachability. Robert Orben, speechwriter for President Gerald Ford, argued that self-deprecating humor was a president’s best weapon, enabling politicians to be seen as warm, relaxed, and one of the people. In one famous quote, after being shot in 1981, President Reagan quipped to doctors in the operating room “Please assure me that you are all Republicans.” UK Prime Minister Tony Blair invariably included jokes in his speeches. Downing Street employed professional comedians to add levity to Blair’s speeches. Prime Minister Boris Johnson frequently uses humor and presents himself as a disheveled, clown-like figure, to emphasize affability and approachability. Politicians recognize that making voters smile can be an effective way to secure votes. Humor can also defuse criticism and disarm political foes. In 1984, Reagan, the oldest U.S. president in history at that time, deliberately looked for opportunities during his re-election campaign to make jokes about his age, to allay protagonists’ criticisms and relieve voters’ concerns. In response to a question about his age during a TV debate, he replied “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience” (Reagan, 1984). Even his opponent Walter Mondale had to laugh at Reagan’s witty reversal. This focus on the multiple benefits of humor can be traced to the functionalist approach of social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. He argued that joking relations in tribal societies were

447

vitally important for social order, by reducing tension and avoiding conflict, particularly between those individuals with competing interests who must co-operate to accomplish certain tasks. In his view, the joking relationship was a “peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. . . the relationship is one of permitted disrespect” (1965, pp. 90–91). Exploring family relationships, Radcliffe-Brown found that teasing was especially likely between a husband and his wife’s siblings. By relieving social tensions, the sham conflict of permitted disrespect was important in sustaining social stability, he argued. In recent years, humor consultants have encouraged those in leadership positions to recognize the motivational benefits of laughter. Arguing that humor can be productive when used as a tool of persuasion to solve problems and exercise discipline, consultants view jocularity as enhancing creative problem-solving and humanizing the hierarchy by making those at the top more approachable. They emphasize the functional value to leaders of humor in negotiating, selling, disciplining, and problem-solving. Suggesting that humor can help defuse tense situations, reduce stress, make difficult messages more agreeable and build teamwork, consultants frequently cite medical studies suggesting that laughter can reduce pain, lower blood pressure, enhance respiration, and boost the autoimmune system. Consultants also point to the benefits of followers’ oppositional humor. This “safety valve theory” interprets employees’ oppositional joking as a way of letting off steam, reinforcing rather than challenging the status quo. Like the dissenting voice of the court jester in medieval times, functionalism views subordinates’ jocular resistance as reinforcing social order. Speaking the unspeakable to those in power, the sage-fool’s nonconformist clowning tended to reduce hostility and social tension. The very existence of the court jester, moderating leaders’ tendencies toward narcissism and hubris, implies that those in authority are strong enough to tolerate criticism. This safety valve theory is also evident in the functionalist interpretation of the medieval carnival. Through the temporary inversion of prevailing hierarchical relationships, the carnivalesque culture of popular humor can be viewed as a

448

Humor

subversive satirizing of authority by those in subordinate positions. Writers have argued that the transient nature of this inversion has the effect of reinforcing the status quo. The office holiday party, where subordinates have the license to lampoon their seniors, is one example of such short-lived workplace inversions, providing a comical outlet for tensions and conflicts. Functionalism continues to be a highly influential framework with many studies, writers, and consultants emphasizing the ways that joking relations help to reproduce workplace order and defuse conflict. However, functionalism as a theory of humor (and of society) has been criticized and critical perspectives on leadership and humor have developed alternative approaches.

Critical Perspectives Critical perspectives argue that by prioritizing the needs of the system, functionalism tends to be aligned with the interests of the powerful. In their primary concern to explain humor’s contribution to social order, functionalist theories fail to question either the exercise of top-down control or the asymmetries and inequalities that are their condition and consequence. Far from always being a source of social cohesion, critical perspectives suggest that leaders’ humor can exacerbate social and organizational divisions, tensions, and inequalities. Critical writers reveal how leaders’ various attempts to exercise control by either suppressing or manufacturing humor, can be counterproductive, often triggering forms of follower resistance. Suppressing Humor

Leaders have sometimes viewed the humor of citizens or subordinates as a threat to social and organizational control, requiring censorship through exhortation or legal imposition. In 15thto 17th-century England, religious authorities censored many forms of humor, especially jests against the clergy. Puritans were especially suspicious of popular expressions of humor that they viewed as blasphemous. Suppression itself became the object of mirth. Puritans were ridiculed for their gloomy demeanor and suspicion of laughter

and frivolity. They were mocked for solemnly resolving never to make a joke and for debating at great length whether laughter itself was a sin. Equally, by the end of the 17th century, satire had increased to unprecedented levels, and among the lower classes jocular comment was the main form of political outlet. Dictators have also sought to repress humor, typically viewing jokes as subversive. For example, the Nazi regime in the 1930s attempted a systematic prohibition of satirical forms of humor both in Germany and in occupied countries. Immediately after becoming German chancellor in 1933, Hitler outlawed anti-Reich jokes, and satirical books were banned and burnt. Political jokes were considered a direct attack on the government and perpetrators were imprisoned or killed. Secret Gestapo reports documented the nature and extent of criticism expressed in underground humor. Yet, researchers have revealed how these Nazi controls frequently had the opposite effect with antigovernment jokes being expressed privately, in art, poetry and cabaret routines. Hence, even in totalitarian societies where satire is outlawed, people find creative ways to highlight the inconsistencies and contradictions of their oppressive rulers. Satire is also a common feature of more liberal societies and debunking of people in authority can have significant impact. The lampooning of the powerful through popular satire has a long history. Wit has been used as a weapon of dissent in various countries, sometimes expressed in adult cartoons. British magazines such as Punch and Private Eye, Gary Larson’s anthropomorphic cartoons, and Scott Adams’s Dilbert workplace cartoons all exemplify this genre of social satire often aimed at leaders’ hubris and incompetence. The New Yorker magazine in the 1980s published cartoons emphasizing the ludicrous world of top corporate executives, investment bankers, stockbrokers, and attorneys. The U.S. TV programs like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live exemplify how satirical humor can be used to debunk the powerful. Similarly, organizational research suggests that leaders can become the objects of subordinates’ sarcasm and cynicism, especially when perceived to be out of touch. Employees’ humorous

Humor

resistance has often been aimed specifically at leaders. Workers in a Brazilian telecommunications factory used cartoons, images, and metaphorical representations to ridicule company leaders. Cartoons in the trade union newspaper depicted the company’s top management as autocratic, nepotistic and incompetent, indicating that humor may be a particularly attractive medium for dissent in the workplace because of the disciplinary sanctions more active resistance may provoke. Irony and satire can help disguise dissent, making subordinate opposition difficult for authorities to detect, a kind of resistance that covers its own tracks. Hence, attempts to control and silence laughter frequently prove to be futile, often producing a counterresponse. Manufacturing Humor

Alternatively, leaders may seek to exercise control by deliberately engaging in joking relations. Yet, research suggests that in such cases employees may refuse to engage. Shop stewards in a UK engineering factory distanced themselves from the joking relations instigated by the new U.S. senior managers, preferring to retain a formal distance between themselves and the bosses (Collinson, 1988, 1992). The union convenor explained, “At first these Americans tried to come on a bit, but we didn’t think much of their jokes. . . . If they’ve got a smiling face, you’re not sure what’s behind it so it’s best to keep a distance. . . . We don’t want to get personal with them and we certainly won’t joke with them. They’d love that!” Believing that the U.S. managers’ humor had manipulative intent, shopfloor workers refused to laugh with them. Workers’ “resistance through distance” was expressed in their refusal to engage. Hence, in seeking to manufacture humor artificially, leaders may suppress it. Research also reveals that some leaders may deliberately or inadvertently use humor in oppressive and/or offensive ways. Humor frequently expresses aggression and hostility, with jokes and ridicule often inextricably linked. This is how much of the Muslim world interpreted the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper caricaturing the prophet Muhammad and Islam. The cartoons created a violent backlash across the

449

world that lasted several years and included the murder of journalists. Humor can be a medium for expressing prejudice. Before and during World War II, the Nazis used anti-Semitic cartoons portraying Jews as either manipulative capitalists or subversive communists. At a leading City of London brokers, managers institutionalized a Friday “bad taste” costume day in which employees who arrived late were required to dress up as fictional characters. What began as an attempt to engender a carnival atmosphere in the office deteriorated into an oppressive form of racial abuse. A Jewish employee, whose grandmother had died at Auschwitz, was subjected to anti-Jewish jokes. After being forced to wear a Nazi uniform (paid for by the company), the employee resigned and won a case of racial discrimination against the firm. Leaders’ joking (primarily male leaders’ joking) can also be oppressive toward women. Research demonstrates that men’s identities are frequently constructed through hostile joking. “Having a sense of humor” is often an important criterion on which men assess one another. Considerable evidence now indicates that some men in leadership roles use sexual humor in formal and informal contexts. Studies describe how male leaders deploy sexual innuendo to disguise disciplinary control over women shopfloor workers and use explicit jokes as “icebreakers” in presentations and how sexualized joking between senior men can marginalize and subordinate women, making them feel very uncomfortable. As leaders, men may seek to exercise control through humor and their practices can take gendered and sexual forms. Feminist writers argue that men’s sexual humor is often designed to keep women firmly in their place. Although historically this has tended to be the effect, increasingly it may not be so. A growing number of women (of various ethnicities) have filed antidiscrimination lawsuits against companies after experiencing degrading joking dynamics, and the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment has had a transformative impact on gender relations. Humor consultants’ prescriptions that leaders cultivate subordinates’ joking can also be counterproductive. Research suggests that employees may reject the artificiality of manufactured

450

Humor

happiness and the corporate smile that is central to customer care. One study found that airline attendants engaged in surface acting by smiling “less broadly with a quick release and no sparkle in their eyes.” Another study discovered that after employees were trained to smile, a female customer attacked a checkout operator for “flirting” with her husband and women operators received obscene phone calls. Even by simply tolerating employee humor, leaders and employers can therefore reproduce an oppressive working environment that may be deemed unlawful. There are a growing number of antidiscrimination lawsuits in relation to workplace initiation ceremonies. Studies reveal that women working in male-dominated organizations such as the police force are especially vulnerable to men’s sex joking with leaders often “turning a blind eye” to oppressive humor. Male leaders may even subscribe to a gendered safety valve theory viewing men’s aggressive joking as relatively “harmless horseplay”, a “natural” way of “letting off steam” that enhances organizational stability. Such views enable oppressive joking, may be hurtful to the target of the jokes, may decrease employee and team morale and productivity, and may result in costly court cases for the organization. Far from generating stability, or constructing a fun workplace, these common forms of workplace humor can have the opposite effect and raise significant dilemmas for leaders both as agents of humor and as supervisors of employees’ joking.

Final Thoughts Humor is a significant feature of leadership and followership dynamics and is more complex and ambiguous than it might at first appear. While leaders’ use of humor can enhance communication, understanding and trust, it is also inherently ambiguous and can backfire in numerous ways. A leader’s humor may prompt follower resistance expressed in disengagement or lampooning those in authority. Whether by a superior or a subordinate, oppressive forms of joking can have deleterious results. Hence, although in certain cases it

may generate stability and belonging, humor by those in charge can also have disruptive and damaging effects. Research suggests that joking relations are rarely, if ever, amenable to control in the ways humor consultants propose. In specific circumstances, both leaders’ actions and inactions can reinforce an intimidating workplace environment. The growing legal and financial implications of oppressive joking relations underscore the need for further analysis of the leadership of humor and the humor of leadership. David L. Collinson See also Critical Leadership Studies; Me Too Movement; Men and Masculinities; Power and Culture; Women’s Movement

Further Readings Barsoux, J.-L. (1993). Funny business: Humor, management and business culture. London: Cassell. Collinson, D. L. (1988). Engineering humor: Masculinity, joking and conflict in shop floor relations. Organization Studies, 9(2),181–199. Collinson, D. L. (1992). Managing the shop floor: Subjectivity, masculinity and workplace culture. New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter. Coser, R. L. (1959). Some social functions of laughter: A study of humor in a hospital setting. Human Relations, 12(2), 171–182. doi:10.1177/001872675901200205 Kong, D. T., Cooper, C. D., & Sosik, J. J. (2019). State of research on leader humor. Organizational Psychology Review, 9(1), 3–40. doi:10.1177/2041386619846948 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1965). Structure and function in primitive society. London. Cohen & West. Reagan, R. (1984, October 21). Debate between the president and former vice president Walter F. Mondale in Kansas City, Missouri (debate video recording). Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute. Retrieved from https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/debate-betweenthe-president-and-former-vice-president-walterf-mondale-in-kansas-city-missouri/ Rodrigues, S., & Collinson, D. L. (1995). Having fun? Workplace resistance and humor in Brazil. Organization Studies, 16(5), 739–768. doi:10.1177/ 017084069501600501

I derive from such things as seniority and reputation, can be spent to be, well, idiosyncratic. IC is also called the “credit to deviate” or innovate. When leaders do deviate, that is, nonconform, they may lose credit, but still maintain legitimacy in the eyes of their followers. That is, they may be on thinner ice with their followers. However, not all deviation or nonconformity results in loss of credit. Leaders are expected to innovate, as a way of solving group problems, and sometimes their innovations can build more credit. For example, when President Richard Nixon announced he was visiting China (previously and derisively called “Red China” by Nixon and other Republican politicians), he did not actually lose credit with his party. It may have taken fellow Republicans some time to change their minds, but most did, and decided that Nixon’s pivot toward China was a brilliant strategic masterstroke. The president built more credit. In the early stages of the Watergate scandal, Nixon had enough IC to withstand revelations of illegality. However, as the full record of deceptions and illegal political activities grew longer, Nixon’s ledger ran into the red. He did not have enough IC to maintain legitimacy, and party leaders pushed him toward resignation. It can be seen that IC, which Hollander says followers can accord or withdraw, is essentially another way to think about legitimacy. A leader’s legitimacy is based on how much credit they have with their followers. Their legitimacy can operate to insulate them from the loss of credit. Whereas deviations from group norms suggested by or

IDIOSYNCRASY CREDIT Edwin Hollander’s concept of idiosyncrasy credit (IC) was introduced in 1958 and has endured as one of the most important ideas in the study of leadership. This entry outlines the gist of the IC formulation, its context within a social exchange approach to leadership, and its implications for effective and ethical leadership.

Idiosyncrasy Credit: The Basics The basic idea of IC is that leaders—or for that matter any other group member but particularly leaders—build credit from other group members by contributions they make to the group. In the case of leaders, the two most important kinds of contributions are, briefly, conformity and competence. Conformity to group norms, thereby validating a group’s values and its very identity, builds credit. Leaders are appreciated for such conformity and validation. Likewise, competence in helping the group achieve its goals earns points or credits with followers. Just as other leadership theories point to the importance of leaders maintaining good social relations in groups and aiding in the completion of group tasks, the IC model recognizes the importance of relational needs such as group identity and achievement needs such as task completion. That is part of the story. The other half is that the credit that leaders accumulate through competence and conformity, or the credit they

451

452

Idiosyncrasy Credit

performed by lower status members are seen as just that, deviations, the identical deviations from leaders with IC can be seen as innovations. The deviation may cost the lower status member any credit they have, but for a leader the nonconforming behavior, seen as innovation, may, like Nixon’s shift toward China, ultimately lead to more credit. Finally, IC is something that leaders must use or lose. Again, leaders are expected, among other things, to innovate. A leader who sits on their IC may slowly lose it.

Idiosyncrasy Credit and Social Exchange Hollander placed the concept of IC squarely in the social exchange tradition of leadership studies. The social exchange approach to leadership has been extremely fruitful. It is represented here with the entries on Leader–Follower Relationships, Leader–Member Exchange (LMX), and Procedural Justice, among others. David Messick contributed a thorough analysis of some of the key elements of social exchange that help us understand just how leaders have built credit and legitimacy. He suggests five ways leaders benefit followers, and five corresponding ways that followers benefit leaders. First, leaders provide vision and direction. They point the way, whether they are the leader of a group of baboons trying to find a waterhole or a CEO deciding whether to invest in new information technology. Second, leaders provide protection and security. This may be the alpha male in a primate pack or a political leader who readies a country for war, thus hoping to deter foreign aggression. As a president, Ronald Reagan argued that he could make the American people safer with the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, essentially a missile defense. Third, leaders provide achievement and effectiveness. This idea is less about achieving for the group, although that is important, and more about making followers feel that they are able and effective. In this way leaders gratify followers’ strong effectance motivation, or the need to feel that one can act effectively and get things done in a complex world. Fourth, leaders can provide followers with inclusion and belongingness. A large part of procedural justice

entails treating followers with dignity and respect, and listening to presentations of their points of view. Making followers feel that they are respected signals them that they have value in the group and that they belong. Finally, leaders also provide pride and selfrespect. Leaders can recognize and congratulate the follower’s achievement, as when the U.S. Congress awards its Medal of Honor, the highest honor for women or men in the nation’s armed forces. In return for these benefits, followers reciprocate in a variety of ways. For vision and direction, they provide focus and self-direction. This specific exchange implies voluntary, internalized following, not just doing what one is told. Throughout this model, Messick imagines a mutually beneficial exchange and following by choice, not just acquiescence or compliance. Accordingly, it is not surprising that followers give leaders gratitude and loyalty in exchange for protection and security. Similarly, they exchange commitment and sacrifice for achievement and effectiveness. Finally, followers repay inclusion and belongingness with cooperation and sacrifice, and pride and self-respect with respect and obedience. Looking at the two lists, the things that leaders provide for followers and the corresponding set of benefits given in exchange, we see that followers receive a great deal. Leaders satisfy many of followers’ motives. Messick noted that there is a considerable overlap between the benefits that accrue to followers and psychologist Abraham Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs. We see that human needs for safety, belongingness, and esteem are addressed by leaders, and perhaps even self-actualization, near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy in the form of vision. In return, leaders get a grab bag of benefits that all concern either status or willingly mobilizing to help the cause, as defined by the leader. In effect, the followers give the leader legitimacy, or IC, and in return they are willing to go along with his or her suggestions. Messick’s model offers a more nuanced account of how leaders earn IC or legitimacy and a more complete understanding of what leaders get from followers in return for addressing so many of their needs. In short, leaders get status from followers’ gratitude, respect, and loyalty. They also get real help in the form of effort, commitment, cooperation, sacrifice, and focus. This exchange allows the

Idiosyncratic Deals

group to achieve its goals and maintain positive leader–follower relations in doing so.

Idiosyncrasy Credit, Power, and Ethical Leadership Messick’s model presents a somewhat idealized account of leader–follower exchange. A somewhat more troubling side of the exchange comes when we ask what leaders do with the legitimacy, authority, and power that come from earned IC. There can be more to it than simply helping followers satisfy their various needs. In their entry in this encyclopedia on the effects of power, Joe Magee and Adam Galinsky note that on the positive side, leaders’ “power to” do things often goes into helping followers and groups reach their goals. On the negative side, “power over” followers sometimes leads to abusive behaviors. These include not taking the perspective of other people and thinking about who followers are only in terms of how they can be used to help the leader reach their goals. This basic “power over” dynamic was described by the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in his comparison of a leader with the despotic male leader of the primal horde. Such a person acted freely in his own interests and concerned himself with others only as they served his ends. In addition, he was sexually exploitive. Former governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is often viewed as a relatively recent example of this common dynamic. Another aspect of the problem of power sometimes resulting in leaders’ bad behavior is that by giving leaders IC, followers essentially hand them a free pass for such behavior. As Terry Price discusses in his entry on the problem of leader exceptionalism, leaders often feel entitled to operate outside accepted norms and that followers often enable them doing so by excusing them. The question always comes back to leaders’ own moral commitments and actions. What do they do with the IC they have been granted by their followers? George R. Goethals See also Effects of Power; Leader Exceptionalism; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leader–Member Exchange

453

Further Readings Hollander, E. P. (1993). Legitimacy, power, and influence: A perspective on relational features of leadership. In M. M. Chemers & R. Ayman (Eds.), Leadership theory and research. New York, NY: Academic Press. Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. Messick, D. M. (2005). On the psychological exchange between leaders and followers. In D. M. Messick & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), The psychology of leadership. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

IDIOSYNCRATIC DEALS Idiosyncratic deals, often abbreviated to “i-deals,” refer to voluntary, customized work arrangements that are negotiated between individual workers and their employers and that satisfy both parties’ needs. Organizational leaders and human resource (HR) practitioners often use i-deals as part of the HR strategy to recruit, motivate, and retain top talent and high performers. When such arrangements are applied and managed appropriately, organizational leaders can broaden their talent pool, drive employee performance, reward star performers, and improve employer branding. Employees also benefit from i-deals through having their professional and personal goals fulfilled, feeling recognized and supported by their leaders, and experiencing a sense of control and empowerment at work. Thus, from a leadership standpoint, i-deals represent a powerful, mutually beneficial mechanism with which to motivate and influence followers to contribute to organizational success. This entry describes the different forms that i-deals can take, the potential benefits and costs of using i-deals, and the characteristics of followers and leaders who receive and grant i-deals, respectively.

Forms of I-Deals The concept of i-deals was first introduced in the early 2000s by Denise M. Rousseau, who viewed such deals as a way for leaders to balance

454

Idiosyncratic Deals

flexibility with fairness. A key attribute of i-deals is that individual workers are actively involved in negotiating some aspects of their employment. As such, certain elements of these deals are idiosyncratic or specific to the individual employee and differ from the standard work arrangements received by other workers in similar roles or positions. Notwithstanding the idiosyncratic nature of such deals, research has found that the content of i-deals tends to fall into at least four common categories. Task i-deals pertain to work assignments and responsibilities that deviate from the formal job scope (e.g., working on a project that is outside of one’s official duties but is aligned with the individual’s personal interests), while developmental i-deals relate to special opportunities for skill and career development (e.g., attending an organization-sponsored training program that is not typically provided to workers). Flexibility i-deals involve work arrangements that offer flexibility in terms of work schedule (e.g., starting the workday later) and/or location (e.g., working from home), and financial i-deals relate to financial incentives and compensation arrangements that differ from those received by coworkers (e.g., a pay raise that exceeds the stipulated range for one’s rank). I-deals can also vary in terms of when they are negotiated. Specifically, they can be negotiated prior to one’s employment (e.g., during the process of hiring), also referred to as ex-ante i-deals, or after an individual is already employed at the organization (referred to as ex-post i-deals). Traditionally, ex-post i-deals tend to be more common than ex-ante deals, perhaps reflecting the fact that employees feel more comfortable negotiating for such deals after they have established themselves in the organization and/or have built a relationship with their leader or another key stakeholder. More broadly, employees can negotiate for i-deals with different parties in the organization, including their leader or immediate supervisor, HR representatives, and the business owner.

Benefits and Costs of I-Deals As a motivational tool, i-deals have been shown to bring about multiple benefits to the i-deal recipient and, in turn, the organization. These specialized

arrangements impact a broad range of work attitudes, psychological states, and behaviors in and outside of the workplace. While the specific type of outcome varies across the different forms of i-deals, broader patterns of findings can be observed. In terms of work attitudes and positive psychological states stemming from receiving i-deals, these include greater job satisfaction, higher organizational commitment and LMX, lower intentions to quit, higher work engagement, and lower emotional exhaustion. Receiving i-deals also yields positive behaviors that include enhanced work performance, greater tendency to engage in citizenship behaviors targeted at the organization and coworkers, increased willingness to display voice and proactive behaviors, and a lower propensity to engage in deviant behaviors. Beyond work-related outcomes, i-deals have also been shown to reduce one’s experience of work– family conflict. In general, the primary explanation for why i-deals result in positive outcomes can be gleaned from a social exchange perspective, whereby receiving such exceptional treatments enhances LMX relationships and recipients’ perceived organizational support, which then increases their desire to reciprocate. In addition to this social exchange explanation, i-deals have been shown to increase recipients’ sense of competence and organizationbased self-esteem, which constitute a different, self-concept-based explanation for why i-deals boost recipients’ performance-related behaviors. A balanced analysis should also acknowledge the potential costs associated with i-deals. Other than the more obvious financial and administrative costs to the organization for arranging such specialized deals, the most significant concern pertains to fairness-related social costs. Receiving i-deals can trigger perceptions of unfairness among coworkers and, in turn, complaints and requests for additional compensation, particularly when the i-deals are financial in nature. Developmental i-deals can also generate feelings of envy among coworkers, who then perceive that the organization has a competitive work climate and thus feel ostracized at work. Similarly, an individual’s task i-deals can increase coworkers’ emotional exhaustion and, in turn, their deviant behaviors at work.

Idiosyncratic Deals

Notwithstanding such potential negative consequences, certain conditions can mitigate these costs. First, to the extent that coworkers believe that they will have comparable future opportunities to receive such deals, they are more likely to accept a colleague’s i-deal. Second, employees whose relationships with the organization are predicated on a social rather than economic exchange (i.e., one that emphasizes long-term well-being, mutual concern, and support between the employee and employer) are more likely to believe that they will have similar future opportunities for i-deals. Thus, insofar as leaders can develop a social exchange relationship with their followers, they may be less likely to experience the negative coworker reactions associated with granting i-deals to a select few. As further evidenced that i-deals operate within the broader social context, the enhanced performance typically displayed by an i-deal recipient has been shown to be contingent on the average i-deal received by others in the workgroup, and the degree of team orientation and task interdependence in that group. Specifically, individuals who have more i-deals relative to the average i-deal in the group tend to perform better and engage in more citizenship behaviors, but this performance advantage is dampened when the group has a strong team orientation or a high level of task interdependence. This is because receiving privileged treatment relative to team members is at odds with the emphasis on group harmony and close interpersonal coordination, and thus i-deal recipients may feel conflicted about their special treatment. Such social comparison forces within the group also explain why workgroups where members receive differing levels of i-deals tend to report lower group performance, compared to groups where there is less variability in members’ i-deals. Such variability drives members to be more vigilant about one another’s treatment and to focus more on differences rather than similarities. Consequently, members may be more inclined to compete and less so to cooperate. To the extent that coordination and cooperation are critical to group performance, variability in i-deals is then detrimental to group success. An interesting juxtaposition arises when the median level of i-deals in a group is examined.

455

Specifically, in workgroups where i-deals are prevalent among members, group performance tends to be higher than that of workgroups in which members have few or no i-deals. However, instead of social comparison forces within the group driving this phenomenon, social comparison forces with other groups may account for this finding, such that having high group i-deals increases the group’s status relative to other groups, thereby creating a positive environment in the privileged workgroup and facilitating cooperation and, in turn, performance within that group.

Who Gets and Grants I-Deals In addition to exploring the outcomes of i-deals, researchers have examined the antecedents of such deals, focusing in particular on characteristics of i-deal recipients and the leaders who grant them such deals. I-deal recipients tend to possess certain traits and skillsets that distinguish them from others. Employees who are proactive, individualistic, and have high initiative and goal-striving are more likely to receive i-deals, potentially because they are more inclined to request exceptional treatment. In terms of skills, those with strong political skills and social skills are advantaged, reflecting the fact that such skills can be instrumental in the negotiation process. At the other side of the negotiation table, leaders who have an employee-oriented leadership style, as well as those who have moderate (vs. high or low) levels of justice sensitivity, are more inclined to grant i-deals. Further, leaders who themselves have received i-deals are more likely to grant i-deals to their followers, because they can more easily put themselves in the shoes of the followers and are also more likely to view i-deals as an effective motivational tool. At the dyadic level, high-quality LMX can facilitate successful i-deal negotiation, in keeping with the fact that i-deals are typically negotiated between employees and their leaders. To provide a more nuanced consideration of the i-deals negotiation process, scholars have distinguished between employees asking for i-deals and their actual receipt of such deals, recognizing that not every request is necessarily granted. Not surprisingly, requests for i-deals are more likely to be

456

Implicit Leadership Theories

met for those employees who have higher quality relationships with their leaders. Additionally, male employees were more likely than their female counterparts to have their requests for financial i-deals fulfilled, whereas employees with more industry experience were, counterintuitively, less likely to have their financial i-deals’ requests met. The latter finding may be indicative of the fact that less experienced employees may also be younger and have more job mobility, and thus leaders feel compelled to grant their requests so as to retain them.

I-Deals Beyond the United States and Beyond Businesses Using specialized work arrangements to incentivize employees is a practice that cuts across national borders. Such deals have been found to operate not only in the United States but also in countries such as Belgium, China, Germany, India, and the Netherlands. A consistent finding across cultures is that i-deals are effective in enhancing recipients’ job satisfaction, perceived organizational support, and turnover intentions. At the same time, some cross-national differences have been found. For instance, LMX and proactive personality are more strongly linked to i-deals in Western rather than Eastern cultures, whereas affective commitment is related to i-deals only in Eastern cultures. Demographic differences have also been documented, whereby older workers are less likely to receive i-deals in Western cultures (but not Eastern ones), whereas women are less likely to receive i-deals in Eastern cultures (but not Western ones). While research in i-deals has traditionally been conducted in for-profit businesses, there is some evidence that such deals are also found in government agencies (e.g., public tax administration) and healthcare organizations (e.g., hospitals). More broadly, insofar as i-deals represent a tool for leaders to incentivize and reward exceptional performance, their use and implications can extend beyond for-profit organizations to other forms and contexts of organizing. If used with careful consideration of their potential effects on not only recipients but also others in the social landscape, such as coworkers who meet the

criteria for receiving exceptional treatment, i-deals can be an instrumental part of any organization’s HR and leadership strategy to attract, motivate, and retain valuable employees. Violet T. Ho and Maria Tomprou See also Leader-Member Exchange (LMX); Leadership and Management; Organizational Leadership; Procedural Justice

Further Readings Bal, P. M., & Rousseau, D. M. (2016). Idiosyncratic deals between employees and organizations: Conceptual issues, applications and the role of co-workers. New York, NY: Routledge. Rousseau, D. M. (2001). Idiosyncratic deals: Flexibility versus fairness? Organizational Dynamics, 29, 260–271. doi:10.1016/S0090-2616(01)00032-8 Rousseau, D. M., Tomprou, M., & Simosi, M. (2016). Negotiating flexible and fair idiosyncratic deals (i-deals). Organizational Dynamics, 45, 185–196. doi: 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2016.07.004 Rousseau, D. (2005). I-deals: Idiosyncratic deals employees bargain for themselves. New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Rousseau, D. M., Ho, V. T., & Greenberg, J. (2006). I-deals: Idiosyncratic terms in employment relationships. Academy of Management Review, 31, 977–994. doi:10.5465/AMR.2006.22527470

IMPLICIT LEADERSHIP THEORIES Implicit leadership theories (ILTs) are cognitive structures relating to characteristics of leaders (Lord, Epitropaki, Foti, & Hansbrough, 2020) or everyday theories about leaders that can either refer to typical or ideal leaders (Schyns & Schilling, 2011). ILTs relating to typical leaders describe leaders in general in the sense of an average image of what a leader is like. ILTs relating to ideal leaders refer to characteristics that leaders should have as an ideal role incumbent. Research shows that ILTs are composed of positive as well as negative characteristics that are included in the image of a leader (Offerman,

Implicit Leadership Theories

Kennedy & Wirtz, 1994). While the majority of leadership studies still focus on behavior and behavioral styles, the concept of implicit leadership theories plays an important role in understanding the underlying cognitive processes that cause behavior by influencing perceptions and evaluations in leader–member interactions. This entry discusses the earliest work on ILTs and what has been explored since then.

Origins The origins of ILTs refer back to a study conducted in 1975 by Dov Eden and Uri Leviatan. They provided participants with a description of a fictitious plant without reference to the leader of this plant and found that participants were able to respond to leadership questions and reproduced the same factor structure when actual leaders are described. That is, they had ideas about the leader of the plant that were independent of any real information given to them. The implication is that questionnaire-based descriptions of leadership behavior might only partially capture actual behavior. Early research into the so-called performance cue effect summarized by Robert Lord and Karen Maher in 1991 yielded similar results. Here, participants view group discussions, including a leader, and are given information afterward about the performance of the group. The results of those studies indicate that individuals describe more leader-relevant behaviors in successful groups, even when the actual leader behavior was the same across both groups. This means that the fact that the group was successful triggered the notion that more leadership must have happened. This underlines the evidence about cognitive structures guiding organizational sensemaking. It also reflects that individuals often hold a romantic view of leaders, that is, they believe that if there is success there must have been leadership.

Content, Structure, and Functions Several studies focused on the contents of ILTs, that is, which characteristics are comprised in the image of leaders. In a study in the United States,

457

Lynn Offermann and her colleagues differentiated eight dimensions: sensitivity, tyranny, intelligence, devotion, charisma, strength, attractiveness, and masculinity. While Birgit Schyns and Jan Schilling could not replicate the masculinity dimension in their Dutch research, their study found additional dimensions, namely, pleasant, being a team player, communicative, extraverted, organized, conscientious, honest, and being open for new experiences. Whereas the dimensions to describe leaders are similar across those two studies, research in China (Ling, Chia, & Fang, 2000) yielded completely different dimensions (i.e., personal morality, goal efficiency, interpersonal competence, and versatility). This might hint at the cultural contingency of ILTs. Noteworthy here is that in contrast to the studies in the United States and the Netherlands, in China, only positive characteristics emerged. Combined with research outlined later in this entry on the effects of ILTs, cultural differences in ILTs might partly explain the difficulty for leaders to be successful across cultures. Mostly, ILTs are assessed and defined on a general leader level, that is, the characteristics differentiate between leaders and non-leaders. However, 1984 research by Lord and colleagues highlights that ILTs can differ depending on their level of abstraction. They suggest at least three levels, namely, superordinate level (leader vs. nonleader), basic level (relating to leaders in different contexts, such as business, sports, or politics), and subordinate level (further differentiating those types of leaders, for example, sport leader in football, baseball, or hockey). Here, some characteristics relating to leaders in general should be shared among the lower levels of abstraction, while those levels also include idiosyncratic characteristics for each subgroup of leaders. This is important when people consider applying for leadership positions. Leaders moving across disciplines or moving from, for example, profit to nonprofit organizations might be confronted with very different ILTs, both from their followers and their superiors. Interestingly, a recent study (Kniffin, Detert, & Leroy, 2020) found that individuals differentiate between leaders and managers when it comes to assigning characteristics. Characteristics comprised under the label leaders were “inspire,” “motivate,”

458

Implicit Leadership Theories

and “guide,” while managers were seen to “budget,” “hire,” and “supervise.” This is interesting when combing this result with Lord and colleagues’ idea that when asking about leadership, we might activate an ILT that has not been previously thought of by followers. They argue that if followers have not thought of their managers as leaders, they might use heuristics (such as ILT) to respond to leadership questionnaires rather than relate to the actual leader’s behavior. It is also relevant when assigning labels to supervisors in organizations, as the label leader versus manager might imply different tasks to the supervisor but also incur different expectations from their followers. Implicit leadership theories can serve a variety of functions. Based on their conceptions, individuals make sense of experiences (diagnosis), explain (explanation), predict events and behavior (prognosis), and derive action strategies (technology). Besides these rational functions, ILTs are also used to maintain one’s self-esteem, to legitimatize actions taken (self-presentation), and to preserve the impression of control in complex and ambiguous situations.

Measurement Implicit leadership theories are mainly assessed using questionnaires asking participants to rate the degree to which they agree that typical/effective leaders possess certain characteristics. Other researchers have used open questions, asking participants to name characteristics of typical/ effective leaders. While these measurements are convenient to use and easy to include in general leadership questionnaires to understand the ideas that individuals have of leaders, they have the drawback that they do not tap into the implicit aspect of those theories. Lord and his colleagues in 2020 reviewed implicit measures and gave examples such as a word-fragment test (in which participants are asked to complete fragments of words), implicit association test (in which the reaction time to word is used as an assessment of ILTs), or priming of certain characteristics to see how they influence subsequent ratings. While these assessments might pose some issues when applied in organizations, research could benefit from

considering these techniques to gain at deeper understanding about leaders.

Outcomes The relevance of ILTs becomes clear when thinking about the perception of leaders. As early studies show, we need very little information about a leader to form an image of that person. Similar to stereotypes, when we encounter a person called “leader,” we will fill in the blanks regarding what that person is like. This can be problematic for leadership assessment, particularly when there is little actual information about the leader, such as when rating leaders on higher levels where little direct contact has taken place. Gap filling is also an issue when leaders are evaluated from the outside, such as in cases of CEO performance. Research into romance of leadership by James Meindl and colleagues has shown that individuals often overattribute performance to leaders, ignoring other factors that influence performance. Thus, leaders might be blamed or hailed without considering situational constraints, leading to unjustified bonus payments or groundless replacements of leaders. ILTs also have consequences for the leadership process. Work by D. Scott DeRue and Susan Ashford (2010) highlighted that the congruence between followers’ ILT and their perception of their leader is relevant for them granting the leader influence. If the leader matches the followers’ ILT, they will grant influence, contributing to a successful leadership process. However, this is not the case when the leader does not match the followers’ ILT. As ILTs within a group of followers can differ, leaders might have to adjust their behavior to be able to be granted leadership by different followers. This is particularly interesting when thinking about diverse teams as well as in situations where a leader changes countries (e.g., on an international assignment). Here, the leadership process can be compromised when difference between ILTs are not understood and aligned. At the same time, DeRue and Ashford argued that ILTs are also relevant for claiming leadership. Individuals who perceive that they possess leadershiprelevant characteristics, that is, characteristics

Implicit Leadership Theories

reflected in their ILTs, are more likely to consider a leadership role. Recently, Schyns and colleagues (2020) found indeed that congruence between implicit self-theories and ILTs is related to leadership self-efficacy and motivation to lead. This has implications for leadership development, as both implicit self-theories and ILTs need to be made salient to prospective leaders and to be brought in line to increase their interest in leadership training, development, and exercise. Linking this research to Lord and his colleagues’ categorization approach means that leaders in different areas need to feel that they possess the characteristics they consider relevant for the particular context in which they operate in order to be motivated to lead. For organizations, coaches, and mentors, finding out about a person’s contextrelevant implicit self-theories and contrasting those with relevant characteristics can support their work of creating a pool of talented candidates for leadership positions.

Future Research and Practical Implications Since the start of the present century, huge inroads have been made into the understanding of ILTs and their effects. Here, we suggest a few areas to bring the field further forward. While there seems to be an overlap between ILTs in some culturally more similar countries, we need more research on the contents of ILTs across the globe. This knowledge can help leaders when dealing with culturally diverse groups to successfully claim leadership and be granted leadership. At the same time, it would be interesting to see if ILTs on lower levels of abstractions might be similar across cultures. For example, football leaders in different cultures are confronted with common ILTs across cultures, even when on a leader versus nonleader level those cultures differ substantially in terms of their ILTs. This could mean that, in some contexts, successful leadership processes can be more easily replicated than in others. More research should focus on how these constraints can be overcome to help talented leaders achieve the success they deserve. Research on ILTs has mainly been conducted on an individual level. More research is needed to understand group dynamics. What happens in a group where ILTs differ substantially from each

459

other? Considering what DeRue and Ashford argued, this would mean that the leader has to be able to flexibly react to the expectations of different followers to create a successful leadership process. However, the question is if this would then be considered inconsistent by followers. At the same time, what happens in terms of the interaction within a team of followers if they disagree on their ILTs? Will this disagreement negatively influence their team processes? On a practical level, research into ILTs has shown again and again that ILTs influence the perception of leaders. Thus, organizations are advised to consider ILTs in the process of 360degree feedback to control for perception effects. At the same time, in line with DeRue and Ashford’s idea of claiming and granting leadership, an analysis of prevalent ILTs in an organization can help fuel a discussion on what leadership looks like versus what it should look like to achieve a common understanding between followers and leaders on different levels of the organizational hierarchy and thus improve leadership processes. This could also improve motivation to lead as potential candidates will get a clearer picture of the type of leader the organization is looking for and abstain from trying to achieve an idealized version of leadership, which might prevent them from even trying to pursue a leadership role.

Final Remarks Research has abundantly shown that individuals hold ILTs. We know a leader when we see one and we also know what that leader is like without needing much additional information. We also “know” that a leader has been a good leader when the team has been successful and that they are solely responsible for this success (and also for failure, of course). These considerations have important implications for how leaders are perceived as well as for the process of successful leadership (granting leaders influence) and for leadership development (claiming leadership). ILTs differ between individuals but they are also influenced by culture and context. In short, ILTs add to the complexity of the task of leadership as they require leaders to understand

460

Inclusive Leadership

and flexibly consider the expectations others have toward them. Birgit Schyns and Jan Schilling See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Leader-Follower Relationships; Romance of Leadership; Schemata, Scripts and Mental Models

Further Readings DeRue, D. S., & Ashford, S. J. (2010). Who will lead and who will follow? A social process of leadership identity construction in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35, 627–647. doi:10.5465/ AMR.2010.53503267 Eden, D., & Leviatan, U. (1975). Implicit leadership theory as a determinant of the factor structure underlying supervisory behavior scales. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60, 736–741. doi:10.1037/00219010.60.6.736 Kniffin, K. M., Detert, J. R., & Leroy, H. L. (2020). On leading and managing: Synonyms or separate (and unequal)? Academy of Management Discoveries, 6, 544–571. doi:10.5465/amd.2018.0227 Ling, W., Chia, R. C., & Fang, L. (2000). Chinese implicit leadership theory. Journal of Social Psychology, 140, 729–739. doi:10.1080/00224540009600513 Lord, R. G., Epitropaki, O., Foti, R. J., & Hansbrough, T. K. (2020). Implicit leadership theories, implicit followership theories, and dynamic processing of leadership information. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 7, 15.1–15.26. doi:10.1146/annurevorgpsych-012119-045434 Lord, R. G., Foti, R. J., & De Vader, C. (1984). A test of leadership categorization theory: Internal structure, information processing, and leadership perceptions. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 34, 343–378. doi:10.1016/0030-5073(84)90043-6 Lord, R. G., & Maher, K. L. (1991). Cognitive theory in industrial and organizational psychology. In M. Dunnette & L. Hough (Eds.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1–62). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychological Press. Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30, 78–102. doi:10.2307/2392813 Offermann, L. R., Kennedy, J. K., & Wirtz, P. W. (1994). Implicit leadership theories: Content, structure, and

generalizability. Leadership Quarterly, 5, 43–58. doi: 10.1016/1048-9843(94)90005-1 Schyns, B., Kiefer, T., & Foti, R. (2020). Does thinking of myself as leader make me want to lead? The role of congruence in self-theories and implicit leadership theories in motivation to lead. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 122, 103477. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2020. 103477 Schyns, B., & Schilling, J. (2011). Implicit leadership theories: Think leader, think effective? Journal of Management Inquiry, 20, 141–150. doi:10.1177/ 1056492610375989

INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP Inclusive leadership is a multilevel process that involves leader behavior aimed at empowering, engaging, and motivating all followers, regardless of identity or demography, to perform at their best while being their authentic selves. Inclusive leadership has emerged as an important topic given the increased diversity of organizations and recognition that not all employees receive equitable treatment in organizations. To be effective, leaders must be capable of guiding all of their employees toward achieving group goals. If leaders cannot engage, motivate, or gain insights from certain demographic categories of followers (e.g., women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ1 community, persons with disabilities), then they cannot be considered effective leaders. Yet there are large gaps in engagement, job satisfaction, voice, retention, and psychological distress between majority group members and minority or marginalized group members. As such, inclusive leadership is the essential leadership skill. This entry discusses the role of organizational leaders in establishing and maintaining an equitable workplace, building inclusivity within teams, and at the one-on-one (dyadic) level with individual followers. The entry concludes with observations on some of the positive outcomes of inclusive leadership at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Inclusive leadership really starts within each individual and involves understanding one’s own

Inclusive Leadership

identity, recognizing biases one might hold against certain demographic groups, realizing systemic biases against certain demographic groups, developing the courage to experience discomfort and stand up against instances of inequity, and fostering a deep curiosity to learn from others’ perspectives. It requires effort to learn about how others’ experiences might be different from one’s own and a recognition of the importance of creating an equitable workplace. The move from leader to inclusive leader most often begins with a personal realization of the importance of diversity and inclusion and the reality that without intentionality, injustice and inequity is the norm.

Leadership at the Top It is widely accepted that inclusive leadership at the top of organizations—such as the CEO, president, or executive director—has the biggest impact on inclusion throughout the organization. Top leaders can make diversity and inclusion part of the fabric of the organization by authentically including it in the organization’s vision, mission, and values. At the top of organizations, inclusive leadership involves crafting a narrative around and publicly committing to diversity and inclusion in their personal and professional lives. Diversity also manifests in organizational practices that ensure an equitable workplace. Inclusive leaders are likely to set measurable goals for diversity and inclusion and demand accountability from other leaders in the organization when it comes to meeting those goals. Top leaders also influence human resource and talent practices such as how organizations recruit, pay, develop, and retain talent. Top leadership can also drive pay gap analyses and transparency around pay and demographics within the organization. When top leadership is inclusive, organizations also report a variety or other employment practices focused on fairness and equity, such as programs to enhance the leadership capacity of underrepresented group members, training programs to reduce bias and enhance inclusion, and programs aimed at increasing authentic dialogue and communication throughout the organization. In addition to ensuring fair employment practices, when top leaders are inclusive, organizations are

461

also more likely to have an inclusive culture that values difference and different perspectives.

Inclusive Leadership of the Team Although organizational practices and culture are deeply important to the enactment of inclusive leader behavior, most research on inclusive leadership has focused on the team or dyad level. From this perspective, inclusive leadership is best conceptualized as a relational theory of leadership given its focus on the human connection required to be an effective leader including relating to, showing genuine interest in, and creating trust with followers. This approach focuses on how leaders can effectively build inclusion by meeting employees’ two most basic needs: the need to be one’s unique self and the need to belong. A direct manager often has the greatest impact on an employee’s daily experience around inclusion, making inclusive leadership at the team level vital for overall levels of inclusion. The distinction between inclusive leadership at the team versus the dyad level has not been well differentiated in the literature. At the team level, it is imperative that inclusive leaders create a shared norm of respecting and valuing difference. Inclusive leadership requires leaders to communicate and model the belief that the best decisions will be made by eliciting diverse perspectives and voices. This means that they encourage the expression of diverse viewpoints, seek and reinforce respectful disagreement and dissention, and integrate diverse perspectives into decision-making. In many ways, one of the primary functions of inclusive leadership at the team level is to reduce status differences on the team to facilitate collaboration and problem-solving. Such status differences can be the result of roles on the team (such as a cross-functional team involving nurses and doctors) but also status differences that might come from holding a marginalized identity. The goal of inclusive leaders must be to ensure that all people on the team have equal voice and create norms that encourage members to hear from everyone equally. At the team level, inclusive leaders step in to interrupt bias and micro aggressions aimed at group members. Otherwise, they may inadvertently reinforce it. To encourage supportive team behavior and collaboration, inclusive leaders can set team-level

462

Inclusive Leadership

goals, encourage team member recognition programs, and empower the team to have control over how it carries out its work. Inclusive leaders can also model vulnerability and authenticity, encouraging team members to engage in meaningful dialogue in the workplace. Finally, to show all team members that they are insiders, inclusive leaders should work to be as transparent as possible in sharing information about how decisions are made, such as promotions and pay raises. This information is often shared in an ad hoc way, creating inequities.

Inclusive Leadership at a Dyadic Level At the dyadic level, inclusive leadership requires similar practices as at the team level. Leaders need to communicate and model the belief that difference is valued and respected and that followers can be their unique and authentic selves while still being essential and valued members of the team. They can model vulnerability by sharing personal stories and experiences. However, at the dyadic level, with only a leader and one follower in the room, the idea of listening to diverse views does not make sense. Instead, the task becomes ensuring that employees from marginalized identities or those who have an identity that is different from that of the leader feel encouraged, supported, and valued. It is important at the individual level for inclusive leaders to treat each follower equitably. At the individual level, this really means giving each follower what that follower needs to be successful. Inclusive leaders can work to empower each follower to take ownership of their career development and work with each follower to help them meet their goals. This is particularly important for marginalized group members who may not perceive that they have an equal chance of success within the organization. Another essential aspect of inclusive leadership at the dyadic level is action aimed at forming strong personal connections with each individual follower. In addition to learning from each follower, inclusive leaders seek to learn about each follower as a human being, beyond the work they contribute. This requires the enactment of empathy to try to understand a follower’s lived experiences.

Outcomes of Inclusive Leadership Several outcomes of inclusive leadership have been identified in the literature. One of the most important consequences involves psychological safety, an environment in which team members feel safe to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of punishment or embarrassment. Other outcomes include improved decisionmaking in terms of increased innovation and performance. At the group level, inclusive leadership encourages greater helping behavior, which can be conceptualized as organizational citizenship. Positive outcomes of inclusive leadership at the individual level include greater work engagement, affective commitment, retention and intention to stay, and lower psychological distress. The positive outcomes of inclusive leadership are most strongly pronounced for group members from minoritized or marginalized identities. Because inclusive leadership reduces status differences, it enhances the positive relationship between diversity and team outcomes. Stated another way, inclusive leadership reduces differences in positive workplace outcomes that might otherwise be seen for majority group versus minoritized members. Inclusive leadership, which creates a greater degree of inclusion, can be viewed as bringing individuals who might otherwise have a lower status up to the high-status group. However, if the high-status group does not experience inclusion (e.g., their ideas are not heard), then no one experiences inclusion. Therefore, to be successful, inclusive leaders must work to produce a high average level of inclusive behavior and a low level of differentiation between high- and low-status groups. Stefanie K. Johnson See also Diversity; Empathic Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leaders’ Resources and Follower’s Reactions; Leading Diversity

Further Readings Ferdman, B. M., Prime, J., & Riggio, R. E. (Eds.). (2020). Inclusive leadership: Transforming diverse lives, workplaces, and societies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Income Inequality Johnson, S. K. (2020). Inclusify: The power of uniqueness and belonging to build innovative teams. New York, NY: Harper Business. Mor Barak, M. E., Luria, G., & Brimhall, K. C. (2021). What leaders say versus what they do: Inclusive leadership, policy-practice decoupling, and the anomaly of climate for inclusion. Group & Organization Management, 47, 840. doi:10.1177/ 10596011211005916 Nishii, L. H., & Mayer, D. M. (2009). Do inclusive leaders help to reduce turnover in diverse groups? The moderating role of leader–member exchange in the diversity to turnover relationship. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(6), 1412–1426.

INCOME INEQUALITY Income inequality is both the empirical observation that income varies from one individual to the next and a point of debate regarding the importance of an egalitarian society (i.e., whether the concentration of wealth is inherently immoral). As an equity principle, income inequality raises the question of whether any level of inequality can be justified or appropriate, and if so, how much is morally permissible. Organizational leadership generally results in higher income for leaders than for followers, and to some extent, this disparity is justified by the leader’s contribution to improved organizational performance. Nevertheless, rankand-file team members make it possible for the organization to provide a product that satisfies consumer wants and enable the organization to earn revenue. This entry describes the theory and measurement of income equality and how inequality is influenced by labor markets and public policy.

Theory and Measurement of Income Inequality There are two approaches to measuring income inequality. One is to compare income and population shares by percentiles, for example, the percent of total income earned by the highest earning 25% (quartile) of the population versus

463

the next highest, or the lowest. The second is to use a numerical index known as the Gini coefficient, which is a decimal fraction ranging from 0 to 1 (though it is sometimes represented as a percentage ranging from 0% to 100%, or an index number ranging from 0 to 100). The lower the Gini coefficient, the more equal the income distribution. Because income is not distributed equally, the Gini coefficient will be less than 1. Newly industrializing and less-developed countries typically have higher Gini coefficients, indicating greater income inequality. For the United States, the Gini coefficient is about .40, which is relatively high among industrialized countries and indicates a greater level of income inequality. Simon Kuznets (1901–1985) suggested income inequality rises during the process of industrialization but falls later, an observation formalized as the Kuznets curve. The rationale for the Kuznets curve is that the wealthiest individuals develop, control, and implement emerging technologies during early-stage industrialization, so they initially capture most of the benefits of economic growth. Income inequality eventually falls during later stage industrialization as technological progress is diffused more broadly throughout the economy, to the point where it more broadly improves worker productivity and wages. Over time, technological advances allow lower income-earning workers to share in economic progress through higher wages and a rising living standard. This relationship has been observed generally for industrialized countries since about 1870. Because environmental impact accompanies industrialization and disproportionately affects the poor, Kuznets further observed that during the early-stage transition from an agrarian to an industrialized economy, not only does income become increasingly concentrated but pollution and natural resource depletion occur at accelerating rates. As industrialization and technical progress increase wealth, albeit unequally, life expectancy and the population also increase. The larger population further contributes to economic activity, pollution emissions, resource use, and environmental degradation. However, once the society attains a certain level of affluence, the

464

Income Inequality

environmental impact becomes sufficiently recognized, triggering antipollution regulations and a shift toward less environmentally damaging technologies and practices. As later stage industrialization proceeds, society becomes wealthier and can afford to focus on alleviating and remediating environmental impact.

Segmented and Inefficient Labor Markets Labor markets are segmented because the division of labor in an advanced economy results in such an extreme level of specialization that most employees are not easily substitutable—neurosurgeons cannot be substituted for anesthesiologists, plumbers cannot be substituted for electricians, or coding specialists in one language or application for those in another. This is equally true for highly compensated executives as for rank-and-file workers. The more a worker’s income depends on specialized technical knowledge or other individual characteristics, the more insulated they become from labor market competition, but the more dependent they are likely to be on their current employer. Labor markets are most efficient when they are open, competitive, and transparent. Transparency results from information on compensation and working conditions being widely disseminated and available to all market participants (i.e., to employers and employees alike). Employee compensation should always exceed the highest available wage from alternative employment because if the original employer does not match an alternative wage offer, in most cases the employee will defect. The compensation range is bounded on the upper end by the worker’s marginal revenue product (MRP), which the organization should never intentionally exceed. The MRP is the additional revenue an organization is able to receive by employing the last worker hired. MRP is thus a measure, or at least an estimate, of each worker’s marginal contribution to the organization’s bottom line. Labor markets operate efficiently only when workers can see what they could earn in alternative employment. The threat of potential employee defection helps discipline employers to offer wages that at least approach worker MRP. Though a more efficient and competitive labor

market cannot raise an individual’s MRP, labor market efficiency generally raises the highest alternative wage closer to the MRP and makes workers more aware of their alternatives, thus narrowing the gap between the economically justified maximum alternative wage and the compensation employees actually receive. The economic principle that compensation should never exceed employee MRP justifies a significant degree of income inequality because MRPs vary significantly from worker to worker and from one organization to another, even for workers doing essentially the same job. Workers who can deploy attributes such as physical strength, technical knowledge, design skills, or esthetic talent contribute additional sources of MRP and must receive additional compensation. Finally, employees who contribute leadership, administrative, managerial, and entrepreneurial talent also have to be compensated if the organization is to continue benefiting from their work. Since 1970, increasing executive compensation, especially to CEOs, contributed to rising income inequality according to some measures. The U.S. executive compensation has risen faster than executive productivity, rising almost three times as much as corporate earnings from 1980 to 2004—8.5% annual CEO compensation growth compared with annual corporate earnings growth of only 2.9%. On the eve of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, S&P 500 CEOs received average annual compensation of $10.5 million, 344 times the pay of the average American workers; however, this ratio had fallen from 2000, when their pay averaged 525 times that of average workers. Compensation of some executives may even exceed their MRP, since corporate governance is often dominated by the CEO, and thus is poorly incentivized to limit CEO compensation and ensure it does not exceed the individual’s MRP. Because CEOs direct the organizations they manage, this gives them the monopoly power to extract further wealth from the business’s revenue stream. A new CEO should reorganize the enterprise to make best use of his or her own talents and capabilities and install a top-management team similarly optimized around the CEO’s talents, capabilities, past successes, and strategies. Thus, the CEO has a unique opportunity to redesign the

Income Inequality

organization to maximize the value of his or her contribution and incidentally maximize his or her compensation and monopoly power over the organization. Because this monopoly power is not generally enjoyed by rank-and-file employees other than certain highly compensated creative and technical-scientific specialists, it may contribute further to income inequality. However, the U.S. CEO pay is highly correlated with stock market performance, and American executives provide consistently higher shareholder returns, largely justifying their high compensation. CEO performance added $21–25 billion in market capitalization to the largest 1,000 U.S. corporations in 2004, but captured only about $4 billion in higher compensation—accounting for only about 15%–20% of shareholder value added. This may simply result from the United States’ more efficient, more transparent stock market, with broader investor access, but it also suggests that CEOs overall are fairly competent and add significant value to their organizations, at least in the short run.

Public Policy Approaches to Income Inequality Public policy approaches to income inequality depend largely on whether it is viewed as a value-neutral empirical observation or as a pernicious failure of social justice. The first does not call for a public policy response, but the second does. Furthermore, the appropriate response must consider whether the causes of inequality are inherently unjust, as only these causes call for correction through policy, regulation, or legislation. If income inequality arises because some individuals possess or acquire abilities enabling them to produce greater value, they should be rewarded for it through free exchange, otherwise there will be no incentive to benefit others. It thus becomes important to distinguish between sources of inequality that are morally objectionable and those that are not. For example, enslaved people provided their owners significant income without themselves benefiting in proportion. After emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced many decades of structural discrimination where their rights to their own income and

465

property were not equally protected, either by law or in practice. Even enslaved people who had acquired technical skills (e.g., as mechanics) generally lost access to the capital equipment they were trained to use. Furthermore, most enslaved people would have acquired more education, training, and capital equipment than they were permitted to before emancipation, and due to discrimination, for long afterward. Rent seeking is the pursuit of income based on legal or institutional inefficiencies. One form of rent seeking occurs when an industry lobbies the government for subsidies, favorable tax treatment, restrictive licensing, or regulation that discourages competition. Rent seeking organizations also use bribery and political contributions to encourage elected officials to maintain a favorable legal or institutional environment. These measures provide the lobbying organizations with additional income, without their having to produce any added value for society. Rent seeking may raise incomes within the organization but only at the expense of others in society. Some arguments against income inequality fail to consider whether it has arisen through rewarding growth-enhancing productive activities, which benefit the whole of society, or from unproductive rent seeking, which diminish worker productivity and economic growth. Robert F. Mulligan See also CEO Hubris; Economic Justice; Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth; Leadership for the Public Good

Further Readings Auten, G., & Splinter, D. (2021). Top income shares and the difficulties of using tax data. In D. Furchtgott-Roth (Ed.), United States income, wealth, consumption, and inequality (pp. 125–152). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197518199. 003.0006 Gordon, R. J., & Dew-Becker, I. (2007). Selected issues in the rise of income inequality. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2, 169–190. doi:10.1353/eca.2008. 0011 Magness, P. W. (2019). Detecting historical inequality patterns: A replication of Thomas Piketty’s wealth concentration estimates for the United Kingdom. Social

466

Indigenous International Diplomacy

Science Quarterly, 100(5), 1566–1576. doi:10.1111/ ssqu.12672 Mulligan, R. F. (2019). Executive compensation. Great Barrington, MA: American Institute for Economic Research.

INDIGENOUS INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY This entry examines intertribal diplomatic accords among native peoples created over the last century, assessing the reasons Indigenous leaders chose to convene at the bargaining table and the implications for leadership as they sought to enhance Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, protect territory and relatives, and affect relations with neighboring state and local governments. No matter the subject, negotiators, or time period, each treaty is an acknowledgment of interdependence—the simple, profound reality that we are all kin.

Traditional Diplomatic Relations Prior to European Contact According to oral histories and traditions, the nearly 600 Native nations located within the boundaries of what is now the United States have engaged in diplomatic relations with one another since time immemorial. Evidence of these agreements and the relations they defined was not documented by written word; rather, these societies kept records of major historical events through carefully shared oral histories, illustrations such as petroglyphs and hide paintings, mnemonic devices like wampum belts, and reenactment within extant ceremonies. Analysis of colonial treaties signed with European leaders provides substantial proof, in the form of recalled metaphors, symbols, rituals, and methods, that diplomacy was artfully practiced between Native nations and with other parties. Thus, while pen and paper were unknown, the substance of these bargains was continually recalled, reconstructed, and reenacted to maintain an accurate record of

events. In this regard, a treaty was not a document, but a living promise and an ever-present, shared reality. Arguably, communal construction, witnessing, and maintenance of diplomacy made it more immediate, accessible, and accurate than inked words in an unknown language. Black Elk (1863–1950), a holy man of the Lakota people, illustrated this point by once describing a Hunkapi ceremony between the Lakota and the Arikara. According the Black Elk, the Lakota had stolen sacred corn from the Arikara, setting off a war. In an effort to restore peace, leaders of the two nations agreed to join in the Making of Relatives Ceremony and use the sacred pipe to forge a kinship bond between the two peoples. This pursuit of peace illustrates transformational attitudes and mechanisms that profoundly differ from those of Western diplomats. The ceremony was not simply the means to end a single conflict and carry on as before. For the Lakota and Arikara, attainment and perpetuation of peace was only possible when both parties embraced the sacred, moral duties inherent in kinship relations. The ceremonial activities were imbued with profound spiritual significance. Once a former adversary had been transformed into a family member, betrayal became unthinkable and any community-weakening strife was avoided or dealt with peaceably.

Indigenous Diplomacy With Colonial and U.S. Governments European and later Euro-American colonization brought profound harm, dispossession, and dislocation to Indigenous peoples but, contrary to the popular romantic mainstream narrative, Natives were not noble savages who briefly struggled against and ultimately surrendered to the inexorable power of Manifest Destiny. Indigenous leaders consistently parleyed with colonizers beginning with the 1607 Powhatan Confederacy treaty with the English. Such diplomacy peaked during what is known as the Major Treaty Era (1778–1868), marked by the last formal treaty between the Nez Perce and the United States in 1868. In negotiating their diplomatic affairs with the United States during the major treaty era, Native nations agreed to relinquish their powers to

Indigenous International Diplomacy

negotiate treaties with foreign nations other than the United States. Great Britain, Spain, Mexico, and France were specifically identified as Native nations that had forged agreements with these polities, each viewed at various points across that time as either a threat to the U.S. national security or an obstacle to its expansionist goals. Interestingly, none of the treaties between the United States and the Nations located within its boundaries constrain the ability of Indigenous leaders to forge diplomatic accords with other Native nations. As preexisting sovereign entities, Indigenous nations reserve any powers they did not explicitly surrender, thus, the ability to treat with other Native nations was retained. Intergovernmental agreements were common among these peoples, and since time immemorial, Natives had built powerful confederacies and maintained mutually beneficial relations. However, in the early years of the republic, the United States focused on solidifying its claims to territories held or sought by outside foreign nations. As the new country expanded, colonizing more Native territory, so did U.S. confidence in its ability to quell internal resistance. The specificity of treaty limitation language indicates the United States did not perceive intertribal alliances as a threat to its ambitions. Although Congress officially ended treaty-making in 1868, more than a dozen de facto treaties, deemed “agreements” in a semantic evasion of the ban, were codified from 1872 until 1911. In the decades that followed, while no legal obstacles precluded them from negotiating such accords, very few Native nations openly sought formal alliances. The 1947 Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Mutual Assistance was an exception of note. Signers representing a handful of Native nations agreed to put aside old grievances and focus on conflicts with their common non-Native enemies. Most tribes were reluctant to openly wield sovereignty and self-determination during those years out of concern for federal reprisals, and another 50 years would pass before they began to flex these political muscles. It is important to note that the era of federal treaty-making was marked by invasion, ethnocide, abuse, and exploitation, so it is not surprising that Native leaders were reluctant or unable to engage in overt intertribal diplomacy. Another 100 years

467

would pass before Indigenous leaders would exercise this power via memoranda of agreements, sovereignty accords, and tribal/state compacts. The last quarter of the 20th century saw the rise of social movements for human and civil rights across the country, and a generation of Natives, raised with an understanding of the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination, came of age. They saw the potential power of nation-to-nation relations and worked to resurrect treaty-making. In 2007, Article 37 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirmed Native rights to “the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements. . . .”

Indigenous Diplomacy in the Modern Era Creator gave us many gifts and teachings to survive this world. One of those teachings is everything is interrelated. In the Indian practice, the interrelated world is realized through treaty-making with all my relations (Buffalo Treaty, 2014). It is difficult for outsiders to find information on intertribal agreements. Some were surely produced between 1911 and 1990, but often Native nations kept the information to themselves, or copies were lost over time. This began to change in the final years of the 20th century. Intertribal Reciprocal Agreement Regarding Hunting, Fishing, and Gathering (1997)

The Great Lakes Tribes were among the first to publicly utilize treaties in the modern era. In 1997, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians agreed to formally open their territories to one another for subsistence and cultural purposes. This simple document was important in setting the tone and expectations for future diplomatic agreements. Anishinaabe Akii Protocol (1998)

In 1998, the Anishinaabe Akii Protocol became the only 20th century international treaty negotiated across international borders by Native

468

Indigenous International Diplomacy

nations. The agreement was reached between the 11 Anishinaabe Nations of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Service Commission located within the United States and Canadian-based First Nations represented by the Kabapikotawangag Resources Council. The protocol was intended to reflect the shared history, respect, and urgency of the relationship between this broad-based, yet culturally aligned, set of peoples, their sacred lands, waterways, and resources. The leaders agreed to work jointly toward the “conservation, control, and prudent use of the land, air, water, and all resources including rocks, soil, minerals, fish, flora, fauna and all other life within our traditional territory” (p. 1). Water Protection Treaties (2004–2006)

In 2004, The United States and Canada had begun a joint plan for protection and utilization of the region’s lakes and rivers but had failed to include the region’s Indigenous nations in their discussions. The Great Lakes regional Tribes and their First Nations neighbors met to craft the Tribal and First Nations Great Lakes Water Accord to define and claim their legal governmental responsibilities in any such plan. “We understand that the whole earth is an interconnected ecosystem. The health of any one part affects the health and well-being of the whole. It is our spiritual and cultural responsibility to protect our local lands and Waters in order to help protect the whole of Mother Earth” (p. 1). A similar cross-border water protection treaty for the St. Mary’s River ecosystem was signed in 2006 between the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Garden River First Nation, Bay Mills Indian Community, and the Batchewana First Nation. These documents adumbrated the work that would be done 20 years later on the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation to protect waters from fossil fuel pipeline encroachment. United League of Indigenous Nations Treaty (2007)

Acting explicitly on the basis of Indigenous customary laws, Native leaders from 11 nations located within several larger nation states—North

America, Australia, and New Zealand—convened on the lands of the Lummi Nation within Washington state in 2007 to craft a more broad-based treaty aimed at strengthening their unity, protecting their respective homelands, and fortifying cultural sovereignty. The United League of Indigenous Nations Treaty obligated the signatories to provide mutual aid and assistance to one another and to base their decisions and activities on Native laws, customs, and traditions. Principal areas of concern were cultural properties (including sacred objects and traditional knowledge), climate change, trade and commerce, and border crossings. Northern Tribes Buffalo Treaty (2014)

Another seven years would pass before the next international Indigenous treaty. This one focused on restoring relations between Buffalo and 11 northern plains nations within the United States and Canada. In 2014, talks convened on Blackfeet lands and nations collectively exercising ownership and jurisdiction over 6.3 million acres of prairie grass land agreed to help restore Buffalo within their territories and renew and strengthen relations with one another, acknowledging, “Buffalo is the essence of our holistic eco-cultural life ways” (buffalotreaty.com/treaty, n. p.). Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion (2016)

In an effort to address the well-documented disproportionate impact of climate change on their respective communities, leaders of 50 Native nations located within the United States and Canada convened on the Musqueam lands within British Columbia. There, with the support of Native and non-Native scientists and community leaders, they hammered out a strongly worded document that categorically rejected the expansion, distribution, and use of Alberta tar sands oil. Tar sands oil is a highly polluting crude obtained through fracking. Some Indigenous nations shared how the industry was destroying their lands, fouling waters, and killing wildlife at extraction points. Others were affected by construction of pipelines that threaded through Native lands and waterways across the entire region.

Indigenous International Diplomacy

Companies removed and transported the oil—and the profits—leaving Indigenous communities to deal with the aftermath. Community safety was also an issue. Labor camps built and run by fossil fuel companies, commonly known as “man-camps,” were populated by outside workers. Inadequate rural infrastructure and law enforcement resulted in spiking crime rates and increased numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Scholars have pointed out that this treaty establishes three principles rooted in Indigenous self-determination. First, like its predecessors, it draws from Native customary law and diplomatic values. Second, it evinces the intimate relationship Native peoples have with lands and waters. Finally, the agreement clearly sets Indigenous leadership over the endeavor while embracing a shared decision-making spirit between Natives and non-Natives allies. The Grizzly: A Treaty of Cooperation, Cultural Revitalization, and Restoration (2016)

That same year, Native leaders negotiated the terms of the Grizzly Treaty, pledging to work together to maintain obligations and relationships with their bear relatives. With more than 200 signatories, it is regarded as the most signed treaty in Indigenous history. Decades of threats to weaken protections prompted the effort, which was joined initially by more than 50 federally recognized Native nations and the Assembly of First Nations, an advocacy group representing Natives within Canada. The treaty united them around a shared understanding of the sacredness of the Grizzly and its integral role in cultural and spiritual lifeways. The Wolf: A Treaty of Cultural and Environmental Survival (2021) The wolf has influenced indigenous societal structures through the pack, imparting the communal responsibility to sustain life. The wolf taught many to survive by the hunt and to live in a spiritual compact of reciprocity. The wolf provided guidance for environmental

469

stewardship and ecological balance. The wolf is a teacher, a guardian, a clan guide—a relative. (Global Indigenous Council, 2021)

The Wolf Treaty shares goals, sentiments, and alliances similar to those of the Grizzly Treaty. It describes kinship with all living beings and outlines the obligations of humans as protectors and conservators. Interestingly, the agreement also commits the parties to study the viability of implementation of a Native American Endangered Species Act to advocate for nonhuman relatives. In spite of this strong action, in the waning days of the Trump administration, officials ignored scientific evidence and objections from Tribes and their allies and declared gray wolves were no longer endangered. With President Joseph Biden’s appointment of Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) as the first Native Secretary of the Interior in 2021, treaty signers and supporters have hope that protections will be restored before the wolves are hunted to extinction.

Indigenous Diplomacy as a Model for the Future Even though treaty-making with the U.S. government technically ended more than a century ago, Indigenous nations have come to recognize diplomatic agreements as powerful tools that will continue to unite Native peoples, inspire allies, and elevate issues of shared concern. As of this writing, the two largest federally recognized Indigenous nations located within the United States, the Navajo Nation and the Cherokee Nation, are considering the value of negotiating a treaty of mutual respect and support. Modern treaties exemplify the importance of collective and international Indigenous leadership—leadership that enhances not only the self-determination and autonomy of each Native nation but also acknowledges the inherent self-determination and autonomy of nonhuman animals and entities such as rivers and forests. As Carolyn Kenny, a First Nations citizen, described Native leadership: “We can accept the Earth as our first embodied concept of leadership. We follow Earth. We respond to the guidance of the processes expressed in our own place. Many say

470

Influence Tactics for Leaders

we listen and respond to our Mother. Everything begins here” (Kenny, 2012, p. 3). Indigenous leadership as exercised within the realm of 21st-century international diplomacy builds upon structures, norms, values, and cultural traditions embedded in Native cultures since time immemorial. At its core, this approach is an affirmation of relationships—an acknowledgment of interdependence and a commitment to reciprocity. Coalitions built through diplomacy grounded in this understanding are formalized kinship bonds committing humans to respectfully engage not only with one another but also with the Earth and the great diversity of species that live upon and within it. In these uncertain times of community conflicts, pandemics, and climate change, the knowledge and experiences of Indigenous nations have the potential to transform diplomatic relations and ideas of leadership in ways that benefit all peoples and protect resources for future generations. David Wilkins

communities (pp. 1–14). Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Lightfoot, S. R., & MacDonald, D. (2017). Treaty relations between indigenous peoples: Advancing global understandings of self-determination. New Diversities, 19(2):25–39. Little River Band of Ottawa Indians. (2003, December). Inter-Tribal Reciprocity Agreement (1997). Piikani Nation Treaty. (2017). The grizzly: A treaty of cooperation, cultural revitalization and restoration. Retrieved from https://www.piikaninationtreaty.com Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion. (2015). Retrieved June 5, 2022, from http://www. treatyalliance.org Tribal and First Nations Great Lakes Water Accord. (2004, November 23). Great lakes water accord. United Nations. (2007, September 13). United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/development/desa/ indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-ofindigenous-peoples.html UNPFIP Network. (2012, January 16). United League of Indigenous Nations Treaty.

See also Foundational Law Giving, Transformational Leadership

Further Readings

INFLUENCE TACTICS

Brown, J. E. (Ed.). (1953). The sacred pipe: Black Elk’s account of the seven rites of the Oglala Sioux. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Buffalo Treaty. (2014, September 24). The Buffalo: A treaty of cooperation, renewal and restoration. Retrieved from https://www.buffalotreaty.com DeJong, D. H. (2015). American Indian treaties: A guide to ratified and unratified colonial, U.S., state, foreign, and intertribal treaties and agreements, 1607–1911. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Deloria, V. Jr., & DeMallie, R. (Eds.). (1999). Documents of American Indian diplomacy: Treaties, agreements, and conventions, 1775–1979. 2 vols. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Global Indigenous Council. (2021). The wolf: A treaty of cultural and environmental survival. Retrieved June 5, 2022, from https://www.globalindigenouscouncil.com Kenny, C. (2012). Liberating leadership theory, in C. Kenny & T. N. Fraser (Eds.). Living indigenous leadership: Native narratives on building strong

To be effective, a leader must influence others to carry out requests or task assignments and support proposed changes or new initiatives. The people a leader usually needs to influence may include not only subordinates but also bosses and other people (“peers”) in the organization who can provide useful assistance. Some leaders may also need to influence outsiders such as suppliers or clients. The term “proactive influence tactic” is used to describe the specific type of behavior used in the task-related influence attempts made by a leader. Proactive influence tactics are usually regarded as distinct from impression management tactics and political tactics, even though a few similar tactics are included in more than one type of taxonomy. A “simple request” is often sufficient to influence subordinates to carry out a request or task assignment that is clearly legitimate, feasible, and relevant for the work. However, if a request or assignment is

FOR

LEADERS

Influence Tactics for Leaders

unusual, difficult, or controversial, then one or more of the proactive influence tactics may be necessary to elicit the desired outcome. The proactive tactics are usually necessary for effectively influencing someone over whom the leader has no direct authority (such as a boss, peer, or outsider) to provide assistance or support for a proposed change or new initiative. This entry begins by describing three different outcomes that are useful for evaluating the effectiveness of a proactive influence attempt. Next, 11 different types of proactive influence tactics are described, along with important findings about how each type of proactive tactic is commonly used by a leader. The entry also describes some findings about the effectiveness of each proactive tactic, how different tactics should be combined or sequenced, and some other implications of a leader’s influence behavior.

Influence Outcomes The most useful way to describe the results of a proactive influence attempt made with a single target person is in terms of three different outcomes. Commitment means the target person is enthusiastic and highly motivated to carry out a request or assignment, and it is usually the most successful outcome for a difficult assignment or request. Compliance means the target person is willing to carry out a request or support a proposed change but is not enthusiastic about it and will make only a minimal effort. For a request that is easy to carry out, compliance may be all that is necessary to accomplish the leader’s objectives. Resistance means the target person is opposed to a request or proposal. Resistance can take several different forms: (1) refuse to carry out the request, (2) explain why it is not possible to carry out the request, (3) try to persuade the leader to withdraw or change the request, (4) delay acting in the hope that the leader will forget about the request, (5) appear to comply but try to sabotage the task, and (6) ask higher authorities to overrule the leader’s request. Target person resistance is usually regarded as an unsuccessful outcome, but sometimes it can help a leader recognize the weaknesses in a proposed policy or change and avoid making a serious mistake.

471

Proactive Influence Tactics Research has identified 11 distinct types of proactive tactics used by leaders in attempts to influence other individuals to do something that will help to improve the performance of the leader’s team or work unit. This section describes each proactive tactic and some findings about when it is most likely to be relevant for effective leadership. Rational Persuasion

Rational persuasion involves the use of explanations, logical arguments, and factual evidence to explain why a requested action or proposed change is likely to be successful and will provide important benefits for the team or organization. Rational persuasion is a flexible tactic that can be used for influence attempts with target persons who want their team or organization to be successful. A strong form of the tactic (e.g., a detailed explanation, relevant evidence) is usually more effective than a weak form (e.g., brief explanations, claims made without supporting evidence). Rational persuasion is more effective when it is used by a leader who has high expertise and credibility. Apprising

Apprising involves an explanation of the likely personal benefits for the target person from carrying out a request, making a proposed change, or supporting a new project. Unlike rational persuasion, the benefits described are for the target person rather than for the team or organization. Unlike exchange tactics, apprising does not involve an offer to provide tangible rewards to the target person, it only involves a description of likely intrinsic benefits for the target person (e.g., less stress, more job satisfaction, opportunity to learn new skills and gain more recognition). Apprising is more likely to be effective when the leader is seen as a credible source of relevant information about likely benefits. This proactive tactic is more likely to be used in attempts to influence subordinates, peers, or outsiders than to influence bosses.

472

Influence Tactics for Leaders

Inspirational Appeals

An inspirational appeal is an attempt to develop enthusiasm about carrying out a request or supporting a proposed change or new project by linking it to a target person’s values, hopes, and ideals. In contrast to the type of factual evidence used in rational persuasion and apprising, this proactive tactic involves an emotional, value-based appeal. An inspirational appeal is more likely to be effective if the leader is able to identify values and ideals that are important for target persons and relevant for the influence objective. The effectiveness of an inspirational appeal also depends on communication skills, such as the ability to use vivid imagery and metaphors, manipulate symbols, and employ voice and gestures to generate enthusiasm and excitement. Inspirational appeals are used more often in attempts to influence a subordinate, peer, or outsider than to influence a boss. Consultation

Consultation involves inviting the target person to participate in planning how to carry out a request, revise a strategy, or implement a proposed change. This proactive tactic is especially appropriate when the leader has the authority to make a decision or change but wants to learn if the target person has concerns about it or ideas about ways to make it more successful. However, consultation is unlikely to be effective unless the target person supports the objectives of a proposed project or change and has the skill and knowledge to suggest important improvements. Consultation is used more often in attempts to influence a subordinate, peer, or outsider than to influence a boss. Exchange

An exchange tactic involves an explicit or implicit offer to reward a target person for doing what the leader requests. This tactic is especially appropriate for a request that would involve considerable effort or inconvenience for the target person but would not provide important tangible benefits to the person. An exchange tactic is unlikely to be a relevant proactive tactic unless the

leader has sufficient power to provide a promised reward or benefit and can be trusted to actually deliver it. However, even an offer to provide desirable rewards may not be effective if the target person can find an easier way to get them. Exchange tactics are used more often to influence a subordinate, peer, or outsider than to influence a boss. Examples of rewards or benefits that may be used to influence a subordinate include a pay increase, bonus, promotion, or better job assignment. For an influence attempt with a peer or outsider, the leader may offer something the person is known to want or promise to share the tangible benefits provided by a new project. Collaboration

This influence tactic involves an offer to provide assistance or relevant resources if the target person agrees to carry out a request or approve a proposed initiative or change. Unlike exchange tactics, which involve an offer to reward the target person for carrying out a request, collaboration involves an offer to help the target person carry out a request. Collaboration is especially useful when it would be difficult for the target person to do what the leader wants without some helpful advice, assistance, or additional resources the leader can provide. This proactive tactic is more useful in influence attempts with a subordinate, peer, or outsider than in attempts to influence a boss who already has more power to get resources and assistance. Ingratiation

This tactic includes giving the target person praise for relevant skills, achievements, and contributions to the group or organization before making a request. An example that is sometimes relevant is to acknowledge that the target person is especially qualified to effectively carry out a request. When ingratiation is perceived to be sincere, it tends to make the target person more willing to carry out a request. Praise and compliments are more credible and useful when provided by someone with higher status and more power than the target person. Ingratiation is a more

Influence Tactics for Leaders

473

useful proactive tactic for a leader when the target person is a subordinate or peer rather than a boss.

often to help influence peers, bosses, or outsiders than to help influence subordinates.

Legitimating Tactics

Personal Appeals

Legitimating tactics involve attempts to establish the authority or right of a leader to make a task-related request or change. Examples of the types of evidence that may be useful include documents describing organizational policies and rules, charters, labor agreements, contracts, or laws. Legitimating tactics are relevant when making an unusual request to a peer or outsider who is likely to doubt that it is appropriate. Legitimating tactics are not necessary for routine requests to subordinates but may be relevant when trying to implement a major change or deal with an unusual crisis.

A personal appeal involves an attempt to use the target person’s feelings of friendship or loyalty to the leader as the reason for complying with a request. One example is to describe what is wanted, then ask the target person to do it as a personal favor. Another example is to ask for a favor before saying what the favor actually is. Personal appeals can be useful for some types of work-related requests (e.g., getting assistance or advice, changing a scheduled meeting) or for something unrelated to the work. A personal appeal is only relevant when the leader has a friendly relationship with the target person, and the tactic is only appropriate for a limited range of requests. A difficult request may be ignored by the target person if it is not clearly important to the leader, or if it seems like an attempt to take unfair advantage of their friendship. Personal appeals are seldom necessary for influencing subordinates, and they are difficult to use with bosses.

Pressure Tactics

There are many different types of pressure tactics. The harder types of pressure tactics (e.g., threats, warnings, harsh demands) are more likely to cause resentment and undermine working relationships than softer types of pressure tactics (e.g., persistent requests, reminders that the person agreed to do something). Leaders usually have more authority and power to make credible threats or warnings to a subordinate than to other target persons, but the soft types of pressure tactics can be used with most target persons. The pressure tactics are unlikely to elicit target commitment, but they may elicit compliance with a request. However, resistance is more likely than compliance if the target person strongly opposes a request and resents the use of hard pressure tactics. Coalition Tactics

Coalition tactics involve using other people to help influence a target person to carry out a request or to support a proposed change or new initiative. The leader may only mention important people who support a request or proposal, or the coalition partners may be asked to directly express their support and to use relevant proactive tactics to help influence the target person to do what the leader wants. Leaders use coalition tactics more

Effectiveness of the Proactive Influence Tactics The research on how leaders can effectively use the proactive tactics is still limited. Most studies have measured how much each proactive tactic was used in all influence attempts made over a long period of time by a leader with a specified type of target person (e.g., subordinates), and the researchers assessed the relationship between the tactic scores and indicators of leadership effectiveness. Only a small number of studies used a research method (e.g., lab experiment, influence incidents) that examined how different proactive tactics affect the outcome for a specific influence attempt with a target person. Some studies failed to include all of the important proactive tactics. Few studies examined how the effects of each tactic depend on aspects of the situation, such as whether a leader has the authority, power, and skills required to use the tactic effectively. Despite these limitations, the diverse types of research have provided mostly consistent results about the effectiveness of the 11 proactive influence tactics.

474

Influence Tactics for Leaders

Findings for Individual Tactics

To identify relevant tactics and when to use each one, it is important to determine what outcome (target compliance or commitment) is necessary for a successful influence attempt and the likely reasons for any initial resistance by the target person. The proactive tactics that are likely to be most effective for eliciting target commitment to carry out a request or support a proposal include rational persuasion, consultation, collaboration, and inspirational appeals. Apprising and exchange tactics are moderately effective for influencing compliance by subordinates, peers, and outsiders, but these tactics seldom result in target commitment and are difficult to use for proactive influence attempts with a boss. Pressure, legitimating tactics, ingratiation, personal appeals, and coalition tactics are not likely to elicit commitment, but each tactic can be useful in some situations for eliciting compliance. Combining Tactics

Many influence attempts involve the use of more than one proactive tactic. An influence attempt is more likely to be successful if two or more proactive tactics are used, and the tactics are relevant and compatible. The limited research on tactic combinations suggests that some tactics are more easily combined than others. For example, rational persuasion can be used to clarify why a proposed change is important, and consultation can be used to involve the target person in finding an acceptable way to implement the change. Apprising can be used with rational persuasion to explain why a request is beneficial for the target person as well as important for the organization. An inspirational appeal that involves values and ideals can be combined with a form of rational persuasion that involves explaining why a proposed project or change is feasible and important to the organization. Consultation can be used to elicit target person concerns about the feasibility of a request, and collaboration or legitimating can be used to help alleviate these concerns. Some tactics, however, are usually incompatible. For example, a hard form of pressure tends to undermine the trust necessary for tactics such as consultation and

collaboration. A hard form of pressure is also incompatible with personal appeals or ingratiation because it undermines the feelings of friendship and loyalty necessary for these tactics to be useful. Sequencing Different Tactics

Influence attempts often involve a series of interactions that occur over a period of days or weeks, especially when an initial influence attempt does not elicit the desired outcome. Some tactics are used more in initial influence attempts, and other tactics are used more in follow-up influence attempts. It is prudent to select initial tactics that are likely to yield the desired outcome with the least effort and cost. For many influence attempts with a subordinate, only a simple request or a relatively weak form of rational persuasion is needed. However, if target resistance is anticipated, the initial influence attempt should include one or more tactics such as apprising, inspirational appeals, or a stronger form of rational persuasion. Ingratiation and consultation are likely to appear more credible if used early in the influence process, and legitimating tactics should be used early if the target person is likely to doubt that a request or proposed change is legitimate. Pressure, exchange, and coalitions should be used mostly for follow-up influence attempts made after initial attempts fail to gain compliance because these harder tactics seldom result in commitment, and they involve greater costs and risks. Using Tactics to Resist Influence Attempts by Others

Some of the tactics used for proactive influence attempts are also useful to resist or modify a request made by a boss, peer, subordinate, or client. For example, rational persuasion may involve explaining why a proposed change or new project is not likely to be successful. Apprising may involve explaining why a proposed project or change is likely to result in unfavorable outcomes for the person who suggested it. Legitimating may involve explaining how a request is inconsistent with legal requirements, company rules, or a formal contract. Collaboration may involve declining a request but offering an alternative way

Innovation

to help the person achieve the objective of the request. A coalition tactic may involve getting some important people to help oppose a proposed change. Pressure may involve a threat to resign or to pursue legal action if an unethical request or unacceptable demand is not withdrawn. Other Implications of Leader Influence Behavior

Target person commitment, compliance, or resistance after an influence attempt is not the only useful basis for evaluating a leader’s influence behavior. How and why the tactics are used also affects interpersonal relationships and the way other people view the leader (e.g., ethical, supportive, likable, competent, trustworthy, strong). A leader with strong task and interpersonal skills can use the influence tactics to implement decisions and make changes that will improve performance and benefit members. However, these favorable effects are unlikely to occur unless they are more important to the leader than gaining personal power, wealth, and fame. Any proactive tactic can be used in a way that is unethical. An example is to use rational persuasion that includes false claims and fake evidence. The proactive tactics should be used in ethical ways to accomplish worthwhile objectives, not to influence and exploit others for personal gain. Gary Yukl See also CIP Model of Leadership; Coercion and Ethics; Emotion and Leadership; Power and Powerlessness

475

Yukl, G. (2013). Leadership in organizations (8th ed.). Harlow: Pearson. Yukl, G., & Chavez, C. (2002). Influence tactics and leader effectiveness. In L. Neider & C. Schriesheim (Eds.), Leadership: Research in management (Vol. 2, pp. 139–165). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Yukl, G., Chavez, C., & Seifert, C. F. (2005). Assessing the construct validity and utility of two new influence tactics. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(6), 705–725. doi:10.1002/job.335 Yukl, G., Falbe, C. M., & Youn, J. Y. (1993). Patterns of influence behavior for managers. Group and Organization Management, 18, 5–28. doi:10.1177/ 1059601193181002 Yukl, G., Fu, P. P., & McDonald, R. (2003). Cross-cultural differences in perceived effectiveness of influence tactics for initiating or resisting change. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 52, 68–82. doi:10.1111/1464-0597.00124 Yukl, G., Guinan, P. J., & Sottolano, D. (1995). Influence tactics used for different objectives with subordinates, peers, and superiors. Group and Organization Management, 20, 272–296. doi:10.1177/ 1059601195203003 Yukl, G., Kim, H., & Falbe, C. M. (1996). Antecedents of influence outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81, 309–317. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.81.3.309 Yukl, G., Seifert, C., & Chavez, C. (2008). Validation of the extended influence behavior questionnaire. Leadership Quarterly, 19(5), 609–621. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2008.07.006 Yukl, G., & Tracey, B. (1992). Consequences of influence tactics used with subordinates, peers, and the boss. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 525–535. doi:10. 1037/0021-9010.77.4.525

Further Readings Falbe, C. M., & Yukl, G. (1992). Consequences for managers of using single influence tactics and combinations of tactics. Academy of Management Journal, 35, 638–653. doi:10.2307/256490 Kipnis, D., Schmidt, S. M., & Wilkinson, I. (1980). Intra-organizational influence tactics: Explorations in getting one’s way. Journal of Applied Psychology, 65, 440–452. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.65.4.440 Lee, S., Han, S., Cheong, M. C., Kim, S. L., & Yun, S. (2017). How do I get my way? A meta-analytic review of research on influence tactics. Leadership Quarterly, 28, 210–228. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.11.001

INNOVATION Innovation opens pathways to growth and is necessary for the survival of most organizations. Innovation can also act as an accelerant in the careers of individuals. And yet, innovation is a risky business that often leads to failure. There is a natural, organizational resistance to innovating, instead embracing the status quo. Somehow, this

476

Innovation

resistance must be overcome in order to innovate. The answer to that ‘somehow’ question can be leadership for innovation. There is an emerging body of evidence on how leadership for innovation works in organizations, and this entry outlines how leadership for innovation works at different levels of the organization. This entry explores how leadership can be a way to overcome resistance and clear the path to designing and implementing positive, profitable, and impactful changes in organizations. Innovation can confer a strategic advantage to both individuals and organizations. It is usually an exciting—but nevertheless daunting—task. This entry will examine the styles and elements of leadership that lead to greater innovation performance at the organizational, team, and individual level. Innovation is about creating change, making something new, different, and useful that helps achieve the organizational goals. Within innovation there are two main elements—the new ideas and the successful implementation of those ideas. Both aspects require creativity and a continual process of learning. The goals of innovation can be either commercial or social in value, or a combination of the two. The integrating of commercial and social goals has led to many successful innovations. Many intractable problems in health care, the environment, poverty, and homelessness have been, and can be, improved through innovation.

The Innovation Process The ideas that lead to innovation do not always have to be new; they can sometimes be borrowed or adapted. Often, innovation can be achieved by incremental improvements to a product, service, or process that can be very effective. We see many organizations maintain their revenue through just such incremental changes. Incremental changes can be impactful on financial performance but may not be particularly captivating in the public imagination. This is the type of innovation that leads, for example, to the iPhone 13, as each successive version of the phone builds on the previous version and adds new features and designs—building on success. The other, more glamorous and risky approach to innovation is disruptive innovation, in which

one changes the entire rules of the industry through the innovation process. This type of innovation is the engine of the creative destruction that Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote about in the 1930s—the engine of growth and renewal in capitalism that ran the risk of being choked out by bureaucracy. Examples of this disruptive innovation abound in Silicon Valley—in the Google search algorithm or the Apple launching of the iPod, iPhone, iPad—all three transformative in the industry. Sometimes disruptive innovation leads to the death of rival companies, organizations, and even entire industries, hence the creative destruction. An example of this creative destruction is how Netflix, through its vision of the role of the internet being transformative for how we consume movies, led to the demise of Blockbuster because of Blockbuster’s overreliance on real-estate saturation of locations and late fees as a business model. This model quickly became outdated when the implementation of an internet-based business model overtook the industry and it transformed into the streaming content world of the present day. This is a compelling example of the effects of disruptive innovation that can be considered the “holy grail” of innovation approaches—an end much sought after, but rarely achieved in a way that is sustainable. Creating a system for advancing innovative thought and action throughout an organization allows organizations to meet the demands of a changing world in a way that creates sustainable value. The sections that follow outline how leadership can be the main driver in the innovation process. Specifically, there are three different layers of innovation influence—top management, team leadership, and individual leadership—that research suggests creating a set of interlocking flywheels of innovation that spurs the organization to greater profitability and greater impact of services and products. Let us now outline how the leadership styles and choices at each level have a varying impact on the innovation process. Consider how innovation helps to create value. Some of the ways that innovation can make a difference can be outlined. Innovation can help executives end top management, spot new opportunities, and allow them to pursue those

Innovation

opportunities ahead of competitors. Innovation can also open an existing market by creating new ways to service that market. These could be new designs, channels of distribution, or simply ways to reduce turnaround time for servicing customers. Equally important in innovation is the opportunity for growing new markets. For example, Blue Ocean Strategy, a well-known, systematic approach to innovation, focuses in part on turning noncustomers into customers. Innovation also allows organizations to rethink their services before new entrants into the market take their customers away. Innovation also allows a society to meet its needs in new ways. Examples of this include the new organizational form, the benefit corporation, that has firms incorporated based on the pursuit of a dual mission of both profit goals and social goals. These social goals may relate to the environment, education, health care, and other public goods that can improve society. The innovation that is intrinsic to these benefit corporations comes from the integration of a business approach with the nonprofit community and legitimacy assets. Innovation can often develop from the integration of seemingly opposite ideas or approaches. One area in which there will be a significant volume of innovation is the integration of telemedicine in the world post–COVID-19, which is another area in sustainability. Finally, in a more mundane but equally important area, innovation can help companies improve operations, that is, to do what they already do but to do it even better, also known as process innovation. The following section considers which elements of leadership consistently lead to better innovation performance.

The Vision Thing: How Transformational Leadership Creates Transformational Change It has been established that transformational change at the top executive level leads to greater innovation. As a society, we tend to lavish adoration on the technology and business innovators such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Oprah Winfrey, and Indra Nooyi. Setting aside the examination of whether placing these innovators on a pedestal is good for

477

society, a hallmark of their leadership style is a vision of a transformation of an organization, or in some cases, of an entire industry, or society. What they have achieved through their leadership is establishing a clear vision and commitment to that shared vision throughout their organization. All these leaders are not entirely transformational in their style, as many lack the emotional intelligence component. However, they all have one of the key ingredients of transformational leadership—a vision. Their vision not only inspires creative new ideas, but it also provides the emotional motivation to make it through the daunting uncertainties, anxieties, and inevitable failures of the innovation process. Without this compelling and inspiring vision, the daunting hurdles of innovation cannot be easily overcome. Research by Abdelrahman Zuraik and Louise Kelly establishes there are two main levers of influence transformational leadership can have. One is the direct effect of transformational leadership on the members of an organization, which, in general, leads to a higher level of incremental innovation. So, a CEO leading with a transformational style can be expected to produce much incremental innovation. There is, however, a second, indirect influence of the CEO and other top executives’ transformational leadership on the innovation process, which is through the climate. Interestingly, this indirect influence of transformational leadership has a strong, positive impact on a particular kind of innovation, the holy grail of disruptive innovation. Transformational leadership of the top executives will result in more disruptive innovation— those much sought-after, gaming-changing products, services, or business models.

Climate for Innovation What does a climate for innovation look like? It begins with the communication of the strategy. Everyone in the organization needs to understand the strategic intent and how that strategy impacts their own area. There is also a high level of tolerance of mistakes and failure, where being able to deal with unpredictability and risk is a highly valued skill. In an organization with a strong climate for innovation, there is an embracing of

478

Innovation

the entrepreneurial spirit, and many see themselves as intrapreneurs. In high-innovation climates, managers are willing to support and sponsor innovation. Typically, in a high-innovation climate, one will see many cross-functional teams, and a prioritization of decision-making authority to doers who will move forward even with incomplete information. In terms of how coworkers allocate their time, there is a certain amount of discretionary time that can be allocated to projects that are perhaps not immediately commercially viable, or may be based on wild ideas, hunches, and intuitions. In an innovation climate, there is a focus on the future. New ideas emerge that spill across many boundaries, as the organization embraces the messiness of boundary-crossing work. All these undertakings are most successful when there is a strong focus on customers, there are metrics that measure innovation success in multiple areas, and there is an embracing of transparency and truth all within the building of a strong organizational community. Steve Jobs was more focused and intent on building the greatest company in the world than the greatest products. He knew that his ability to produce hit products depended on what kind of climate he created within his company. He famously wanted to build the corporate office with only two bathrooms, one for each gender, for 12,000 employees, so that ideas could be cross-fertilized across departments as folks ran into each other in the bathroom. Apple’s architects disabused him of this notion; however, it does reveal how much Jobs was prioritizing creating a climate for innovation. Research by Kelly suggests that if a CEO wants to engender a climate for innovation, they would do well to think about those climate dimensions listed previously and to manage with those in mind.

Team Leadership: Ambidextrous Leadership Transformational leadership at the top management level engenders innovation; however, there is a different kind of leadership needed at the team level. Research suggests that there is a type of leadership called ambidextrous, which is ideally suited to engender leadership at the team level

rather than the organization. Kathrin Rosing and her colleagues have developed a mode of ambidextrous team leadership that includes opening and closing behaviors. Opening behaviors occur when the team leader directs the team effort toward exploring new ideas. This exploration, under the direction of the team leadership, can include questioning the very assumptions upon which the definition of the problem is based. Furthermore, the opening behaviors can involve the identification of a robust set of solutions rather than being satisfied with one or two options. Effective opening behavior would mean that the group would engage in double-loop learning. This double-loop learning leads to the exploration of blue-sky ideas that may be based on hunches or have a low probability of success but can also generate surprising and novel solutions. According to this framework of innovation, at the team level these opening behaviors are necessary for team innovation performance. Closing behaviors can be conceptualized as a project-management approach to the team’s task: assigning roles, creating deadlines, and creating feedback loops to allow for adjustments and corrective action. At the team level, the question of vision is not emphasized as much, but there is a focus on deploying the opening and closing behavior, which are both seen as necessary for successful innovation at the team level.

Diversity and Team Leadership In looking at the question of diversity and innovation, a 2020 research study by Abelrahman Zuraik, Louise Kelly, and Vernita Perkins found in an examination of more than 215 American companies that female team leads were not as successful as their male counterparts in achieving innovation performance. When the authors looked more closely at the data, they found the female team leads were not as engaged in opening behavior. The opening behavior aspect of team ambidextrous leadership is a risky undertaking. For example, there is significant risk in exploring blue-sky ideas, as there is a large risk of the team going off track. The women team leads were, in fact, constrained by gendered assumptions about

Innovation

leadership that are not supportive of women leadership engaging in opening behaviors. In that 2020 study, Zuarik, Kelly, and Perkins explore ways that organizations can work to minimize this negative effect on female team leads regarding ambidextrous leadership at the team level.

Individual Self-Leadership In this entry, we have explored the concept of transformational leadership at the top executive level and ambidextrous leadership at the team level. However, it is also important to examine the concept of self-leadership. Individual performers, or frontline employees, can also support the innovation trajectory of the organization and thereby gain promotions and new opportunities. Research suggests personality dimensions provide some insight into one’s innovation potential. There are two personality dimensions, from the Big Five Personality Inventory, most closely associated with innovation. The first is “openness to new experience.” That this personality dimension is linked to innovation hardly needs explanation. Those who are open to new experiences are always trying new foods, traveling to new countries, learning new languages, or joining up with new groups. These activities stimulate their minds and open them to new possibilities. The classic example of this is when Howard Schultz went to Italy when he had just acquired Starbucks and he saw how Italians enjoy their coffee in a social setting. He famously took those insights and translated them into a very successful business empire. But it was his original openness to new experiences that correlates with him taking a trip abroad, and that when he was traveling abroad, he did not judge other cultures, but clearly found them interesting, stimulating, and worthy of study, and in the end, of inclusion in his own business model. The other personality dimension that is highly associated with innovation is extraversion. Extroverts have large, broad social networks that give them a high level of exposure to people working in many different settings and industries with many different insights and perspectives. This is true within the company and outside of the company. This allows the extrovert to have access to new ideas, through socializing and interacting with their diverse

479

and extended network. There are some other personality dimensions such as conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness from the Big Five Personality Traits, as well as the proactive personality, that have an effect and contribute to innovation in a more nuanced fashion. The emerging field of leadership for innovation has demonstrated that leadership plays a key role in innovation outcomes. Furthermore, different levels of the organization have different styles of leadership that are most conducive to innovation. At the top management level, transformational leadership correlates with innovation—both incremental and disruptive innovation. At the team level, ambidextrous leadership that includes both opening and closing behavior helps drive innovation. On the individual level, the personality dimensions of openness to new experience and extraversion, as well as proactive personality, are highly correlated with individual innovative work behavior. Different leadership styles meet the innovation challenges at distinct levels of the organization. Louise Kelly See also Big Five Personality Traits; Community Leadership; Diversity; Self-Leadership; Transformational and Transactional Leadership, Transformational and Visionary Leadership

Further Readings Gerlach, F., Hundeling, M., & Rosing, K. (2020). Ambidextrous leadership and innovation performance: A longitudinal study. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 41, 383. doi:10.1108/LODJ-072019-0321 Mart´ınez-Cañas, R., Garc´ıa-Haro, M. A., Ru´ız-Palomino, P., & Kelly, L. (2021). Social and psychological determinants of value co-creation in the digital era. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 1933. doi:10.3389/fpsyg. 2021.683829 Novitasari, D., Siswanto, E., Purwanto, A., & Fahmi, K. (2020). Authentic leadership and innovation: What is the role of psychological capital? International Journal of Social and Management Studies, 1(1), 1–21. doi:10. 51386/25815946/ijsms-v3i5p103 Rosing, K., Frese, M., & Bausch, A. (2011). Explaining the heterogeneity of the leadership-innovation relationship:

480

Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army

Ambidextrous leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(5), 956–974. Zuraik, A., & Kelly, L. (2019). The role of CEO transformational leadership and innovation climate in exploration and exploitation. European Journal of Innovation Management, 22(1), 84–104. Zuraik, A., Kelly, L., & Dyck, L. R. (2020a). Individual innovative work behaviour: Effects of personality, team leadership and climate in the us context. International Journal of Innovation Management, 24(05), 2050078. doi:10.1142/S1363919620500784 Zuraik, A., Kelly, L., & Perkins, V. (2020b). Gender differences in innovation: The role of ambidextrous leadership of the team leads. Management Decision. doi:10.1108/MD-01-2019-0054

INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE VERSUS STRUCTURE IN THE ARMY As with any longstanding human institution of appreciable size and permanence, there exists within the United States Army a natural tension between institutional culture and structure that makes significant reform a long, complex, and challenging process. Army reform is a process that usually starts from the top—a Presidential administration, Congress, or the Chief of Staff of the Army—with new orders, policies, or bills meant to reshape the Army. Such directives often cause a schism between the Army’s structure and its institutional culture. In some cases, this results in institutional culture appropriating new structures and redirecting them in ways not entirely consistent with their original design and purpose. In other cases, this produces a period in which the new structures underperform while a lagging institutional culture slowly moves in the direction the new structures were intended to bring the institution. Ultimately, this means that institutional change in the Army is a complex, nonlinear process that almost always takes far longer than agents of change envision. This entry explores four aspects of the tension between institutional culture and structure in the Army, and the effects they have on processes of

change and reform in the Army. First, it considers the pace by which external conditions affecting the Army change relative to the pace at which the Army itself can change, as well as the differing paces of structural and cultural change. Next, it considers the human tendency to resist change and the conditions within the Army that militate against generational change. And finally, the entry identifies crisis as the only true accelerant of cultural change.

Differing Paces of Change Tensions between institutional culture and structure in the Army are, in large part, a function of uneven paces of change. Among these, the difference between the pace of change to external conditions that affect the Army compared to the pace at which the Army can change is of paramount importance. Conditions change faster than the Army for two reasons: traditionalism and the pace of technological change. Practices born of necessity take root as tradition and doctrine within the Army, which allows them to outlast the conditions that made them necessary. Additionally, the pace of technological change far exceeds the pace of cultural change within large institutions like the Army. Armored tanks made their first appearance on the battlefield in 1916, but as late as 1941 certain American generals still argued in favor of horse cavalry units. Even today, the Army is still struggling to adapt its organization, equipment, and doctrine to adapt to the ubiquitous presence of unmanned drones on today’s battlefields. Similarly important is the gap between the pace of structural change and the pace of cultural change. Structural change can occur as fast as the right official can sign his or her name to an order or piece of legislation. But the existence of a new structure does not necessarily mean it will operate within the Army as those who created it intended. For example, Secretary of War Elihu Root (1845–1937, in office 1899–1904) created the Army War College and the General Staff Corps in 1903 to rationalize the Army’s professional military education system and create a cadre of the most talented officers in the Army educated and trained in staff operations at the highest levels to

Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army

mobilize, train, and equip forces—as well as plan and execute complex military operations in modern industrialized wars. But the Army War College itself actively resisted and avoided its educational mandate for two decades and the General Staff Corps only began operating in a manner more closely approximating Root’s intentions in 1942, nearly four decades after it was created.

Resistance to Change It may seem counterintuitive that an institution as disciplined and hierarchical as the Army can defer or resist change over a long period of time. But the Army is a human institution, and humans tend to resist change. New structures created to adapt to new external conditions—such as the aforementioned Army War College and the General Staff Corps—will seem uncomfortably foreign, no matter how well intended they are. In an institution that values and often centers itself upon its traditions, new structures that depart from tradition often inspire resistance. That resistance may be active, with conservative factions overtly impeding or lobbying for the dismantling of the new structure. Or it may be passive, with officers appropriating new structures—consciously or subconsciously—to operate in traditional ways or serve traditional ends. This brand of passive resistance is exactly what happened to the Army War College in its earliest years. While an insignificantly small group of officers argued to disestablish the Army War College, those officers charged with establishing and running that new institution ignored its educational mandate and chose instead to operate it as a planning arm for specialized projects that did not fit neatly into any other Army organization’s purview. A common bureaucratic tactic for overcoming such resistance to change is to patiently wait out those who resist change. This approach relies upon personnel turnover—through any combination of recruiting, promotions, and attrition—to remove those resisting change. In effect, this is an institutional form of generational change. The Army, however, is somewhat immune to generational change in the absence of any other significant stimuli. This is a natural byproduct of a large institution that values its traditions, promotes from within,

481

and is led by people who have served within the institution for three or more decades. Those leaders successful enough to rise to the top of the institution often attribute their success to their patterns of thought and behavior in earlier career experiences. And in most cases, their patterns of thought and behavior were shaped and taught by an older generation of officers for whom they had worked while serving at more junior ranks, and who selected for promotion and prime opportunities those officers who reflected the patterns of thought and behavior with which they were most comfortable. Although a very effective system of mentorship and professional development, this system of career progression reinforces and even incentivizes traditional patterns of thought and behavior in ways that transmit personal tendencies to resist change to the institution itself. This condition makes it more likely that new institutional structures will exist in a state of tension with the Army’s institutional culture, but also makes it improbable that time and generational transitions alone will repair schisms between new structures and a traditional culture. Because each new generation of Army officers is a product of the training and mentorship of the preceding generation, which is in turn a product of the training and mentorship of the generation before it, the mere presence of a new generation in the highest echelons of the Army is not enough to move the Army’s institutional culture.

Crisis and Cultural Change Far outweighing the potential for generational change to resolve tensions and schisms between institutional culture and structures are the force and effect of external crises. A naturally traditionalist institutional culture does not often shift on its own accord. Instead, it requires powerful stimuli. This dynamic is apparent in the examples of the Army War College and the General Staff Corps. They were not new ideas when they were implemented in 1903. European armies adopted such schools and staff organizations in the 1860s and 1870s. American officers and politicians had debated the merits of similar institutions since the 1880s but had failed to embrace them due to a prevailing consensus that the structures in place

482

Instrumental Leadership

during the American Civil War (1861–1865) needed no enhancements or improvements. There the matter stood stagnant until several high-profile public scandals and shortcomings in the Army’s mobilization for the Spanish-American War (1898) changed enough minds in Washington, D.C. and within the Army to allow for the creation of the Army War College and the General Staff Corps in 1903. But while the Army’s institutional culture had shifted to a point that allowed these new structures to exist, it had not shifted to an extent that allowed for a complete acceptance of these new structures. Traditionally minded officers responded like white blood cells isolating and attacking a foreign object in the body. Those placed in charge of the Army War College rejected its educational mandate and used it as a planning agency with the aim of training newly appointed General Staff Corps officers by having them do general staff work. Many of those assigned to the General Staff Corps in its early years attempted not only to find ways out of it as soon as they could but also to avoid future assignments with in it. At the same time, officers in the Army’s traditional administrative bureaus lobbied their political connections to influence legislation that drastically curtailed the size and authority of the General Staff Corps in major pieces of legislation passed in 1916. Institutional culture drove resistance to change in the form of attempts to coopt the Army War College to make it function in more traditional ways and to neutralize the new General Staff Corps in its nascent stages. The American intervention in World War I (1917–1918) produced crises that generated more momentum for change. The slow pace of mobilization, some notable failures in training and equipping a rapidly expanding Army, and difficult lessons western-front experiences taught about the complexities of modern industrialized warfare moved junior and mid-grade officers to embrace both the forms and spirit of the reforms implemented in 1903. Once those junior and mid-grade officers reached the highest echelons of the Army in the late 1930s, the long process of cultural change was complete, and the schism between institutional culture and structure in the U.S. Army that had opened in 1903 began to close.

Although the events described in some detail in this entry took place from 1903 through approximately 1942, the same dynamic tensions between institutional structure and institutional culture exists today in the United States Army. As the Army enters a period of reform while turning away from the counterinsurgency missions that governed its organization and operations for much of the first two decades of the 21st century and reorients toward preparing for major conflict against sophisticated adversaries, new structures established to facilitate the transition will face a similar contested and negotiated path to fruition. Rory McGovern See also Military Leadership; Organizational Leadership

Further Readings Clark, J. P. (2017). Preparing for war: The emergence of the modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coffman, E. M. (1986). The old Army: A portrait of the American Army in peacetime, 1784–1898. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Coffman, E. M. (2004). The regulars: The American Army, 1898–1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lee, W. E. (2016). Waging war: Conflict, culture, and innovation in world history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGovern, R. (2019). George W. Goethals and the army: Change and continuity during the gilded age and progressive era. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. doi:10.2307/j.ctvj7wpq8

INSTRUMENTAL LEADERSHIP Instrumental leadership is defined as the application of leader expert knowledge on monitoring of the environment and of performance. It is also the implementation of strategic and tactical solutions to group and organizational problems. Instrumental leadership is rooted in expertise—a seemingly obvious feature of an effective leader that is nevertheless largely neglected in leadership

Instrumental Leadership

research. Instrumental leadership can be seen as the natural complement to charismatic or visionary leadership, which is rather disconnected from actual work and organizational strategy if not combined with managerial expertise. Instrumental leadership also complements the quid pro quo form of leadership—transactional leadership— that focuses on rewards and sanctions and that takes a contractual approach to motivating employees. This entry reviews research on instrumental leadership as an important pillar of leadership focused on the application of task-oriented expertise, whether at the strategic or operational level. The entry outlines the definitions and dimensions of instrumental leadership, and it explains the logic and rationale concerning why instrumental leadership is necessary. In addition, research evidence supporting the effectiveness of and the need for instrumental leadership is detailed. Finally, this entry discusses the implications of instrumental leadership for leadership theory and practice.

Rationale for Instrumental Leadership Leadership scholars in the positive psychology movement suggest leaders should be fair, kind, nice, and empathic; they even suggest that leaders should be authentic, ethical, and “servants” to their followers. Apparently, developing good relationships and being a moral person seems to be the alpha and omega of leadership, and this advice is often echoed in the popular press. Yet when looking at one of the most successful recent corporate leaders—Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla—positive psychology-type leadership advice does not map on reality. Musk comes across as eccentric, even brash and uncouth; barely anybody would call him socially skilled in the relationships with followers or as particularly ethical or servant-like. In many regards, he behaves very differently from conventional prescriptions for leading followers. Musk is, however, charismatic, inspiring, and visionary; these qualities are important for aligning resources toward a vision. Still, if Musk were “only” charismatic or visionary, he might be one of those people with great ideas that never

483

materialize or one who leads the organization down the garden path (e.g., like Jean-Marie Messier, the former CEO of Vivendi, did). An effective leader must also ensure that that right vision is found and that this vision is translated into actionable knowledge—a type of leadership also practiced by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lisa Su, or Anita Roddick. It is this form of leadership, which we call “instrumental leadership,” and that is commonly overlooked in writings about leadership, that is at the heart of Musk’s as well as many other strategic leaders’ successes.

What Is Instrumental Leadership? In an influential 1990 article targeted for practicing managers, David Nadler and Michael Tushman argued that charisma is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for leaders aspiring to steer their organizations toward successful change. These scholars suggested that instrumental leadership is necessary too. For them, charismatic leadership is about envisioning, energizing, and enabling, whereas instrumental leadership is about structuring, controlling, and rewarding people. That is, according to Nadler and Tushman, successful leaders have to master both the soft yet potentially lofty side of charismatic leadership as well as the “nuts and bolts” and down-to-earth side of instrumental leadership. The work of Nadler and Tushman sparked attention among strategic management and change scholars, yet remained largely ignored by classical leadership researchers. It took more than two decades until John Antonakis and Robert House in 2014 drew upon the initial formulation of instrumental leadership, integrated it with existing leadership theories, and formulated an extended and novel version of instrumental leadership. That is, they linked the insights about the strategic importance of leaders with previously influential yet largely neglected theories of leadership. These neglected leadership theories include Ralph Stogdill’s consideration and initiating structure leadership and Robert House’s path-goal theory of leadership, as well as Bernard Bass’s transformational–transactional leadership model; they also drew on insights from John French and Bertram Raven’s sources of leader power.

484

Instrumental Leadership

It is important to consider the definition and dimensions of instrumental leadership as formulated by Antonakis and House, which is the only theory linking leadership and strategy in a large-scale testable manner. According to Antonakis and House, leader expertise goes beyond the current dominant forms of leadership theories (i.e., the charismatic-transformational-visionary, moral, and transactional forms). Instrumental leadership is theorized to have four dimensions: environmental monitoring, strategy formulation, path–goal facilitation, and outcome monitoring. First, environmental monitoring encompasses leader actions directed toward scanning the internal and external organizational environments. Doing so ensures that the strategy is well aligned with and executable in the business environment. Second, strategy formulation refers to leader actions focused on developing policies, goals, and objectives to support the organization’s strategic vision and mission. Strategy formulation is about translating a personal vision into clear and operational goals for the organization as well as its people. Third, path–goal facilitation encompasses leader behaviors targeted toward offering direction, support, and resources, eliminating obstacles for goal attainment and clarifying pathways toward goals. Doing so creates the condition for followers to meet the individual objectives. Fourth, outcome monitoring involves the leader providing performance-enhancing feedback that is useful for goal attainment. That is, outcome monitoring makes sure that employees are on track for meeting their goals, be it with obtrusive or unobtrusive means. The first two dimensions of instrumental leadership—environmental monitoring and strategy formulation—are about identifying and developing a proper strategy. The latter two dimensions— path–goal facilitation and outcome monitoring—are about ensuring effective implementation of the strategy. Taken together, the four dimensions of instrumental leadership are formulated in a logical sequence: first, scanning the environment to collect relevant information for strategy formulation, and then facilitating and monitoring the work of followers to ensure effective strategy implementation. In practice, instrumental leadership

behaviors might follow other temporal patterns too. For instance, an instrumental leader who monitors the performance of an employee might recognize that a certain goal is impossible to achieve for a follower in the current environment, which can lead to reformulating the goal for the follower, potentially even adapting the strategy of the organization to the revised goals, and facilitating the follower’s path to meeting these goals. Such an alternative temporal patterning is in line with the concept of instrumental leadership. Antonakis and House specified which behaviors are instrumental yet left it open in which temporal sequencing these behaviors manifest; what matters is that leaders engage in these behaviors.

Why and How Does Instrumental Leadership Work? Being an instrumental leader is important for two reasons: (1) contributing to the development of sound organizational strategies and (2) making sure that followers effectively contribute to these strategies by executing the needed tasks at hand. It is in this way that instrumental leadership complements previously identified forms of leadership, that is, leading followers fairly in one-on-one relationships, being charismatic or visionary, or using transactional models of leadership. Antonakis and House demonstrated that instrumental leadership explains effectiveness beyond the “full range” transactional–transformational model of Bass; hence, they argued for a “fuller full range” model, similar to Nadler and Tushman’s model, arguing that charismatic leadership alone is not enough. Next to extending the range of leadership behaviors, instrumental leadership reinvigorates functional theorizing that used to be mastered by path–goal theory scholars and that has recently made inroads to team leadership. Leadership scholars in the functional or path–goal tradition suggest that leaders engage in behaviors that complement subordinates’ environments and abilities in a manner that compensates for any deficiencies. Leaders are also urged to perform actions that are instrumental to subordinate satisfaction and work unit performance. Thus,

Instrumental Leadership

functional approaches, including instrumental leadership, do not put leaders’ dispositions or egos center stage, but study functionally oriented behaviors that ensure the organization works. In this way, functional approaches are not either leader- or follower-centric yet study the two in a natural symbiosis. Taken together, the rationale of instrumental leadership complements other dominant forms of leadership and emphasizes the strategic role of leaders too. This latter emphasis is usually seen as the providence of strategy scholars. Practicing instrumental leadership ensures that the right vision is found; charisma sans instrumental expertise would make for a dangerous leadership mix.

Evidence for the Effectiveness of Instrumental Leadership There are two sources of evidence for the effectiveness of instrumental leadership: (1) early studies testing path–goal theory, which is a predecessor of instrumental leadership, and (2) more recent work testing instrumental leadership in its current formulation. First, after the inception of path–goal theory by House in 1971, a substantive body of empirical work tested its precepts, notably the relative importance of leaders’ consideration and initiating structure behaviors contingent on the situation. In 1993, J. C. Wofford and Laurie Liska synthesized this work in a meta-analysis of 120 studies testing path–goal theory and found general support for the respective hypotheses. However, caution is due in interpreting the results of this meta-analysis; path– goal theory lacked a proper measure, which limits the rigor of its tests, and synthesized estimates were usually correlational. Hence, results of the meta-analysis are only suggestive for the effectiveness of instrumental leadership. Second, Antonakis and House developed a 16item questionnaire measure that spans the four dimensions of instrumental leadership: environmental monitoring, strategy formulation, path– goal facilitation, and outcome monitoring. Using experimental designs, they found that instrumental leadership is indicative of prototypically good leadership. Moreover, a large-scale field study indicated evidence for incremental validity of

485

` instrumental leadership vis-a-vis transactional and transformational leadership. In 2014, Jens Rowold found similar results, as has Amanda Goodall and Ganna Pogrebna, in 2015, in related work called “expert leadership.” Despite the evidence that instrumental leadership is effective beyond contractual (i.e., transactional) and vision-based (i.e., transformational) leadership, the empirical rigor is limited by the downsides of using perceptual questionnaires. Consequently, there is a need for methodological innovation to set the stage for measuring and testing instrumental leadership with better behavioral measures. In addition, experimental evidence, especially in the field, is lacking. There is also a need to identify antecedents of instrumental leadership, such as trait predictors or (instrumental) leadership development approaches. Thomas Fischer and John Antonakis See also Charismatic Theory; Effective Leadership; Group Effectiveness; Leader–Follower Relationships; Path–Goal Theory

Further Readings Antonakis, J., & House, R. J. (2014). Instrumental leadership: Measurement and extension of transformational–transactional leadership theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(4): 746–771. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2014.04.005 Antonakis, J., House, R. J., & Simonton, D. K. (2017). Can super smart leaders suffer from too much of a good thing? The curvilinear effect of intelligence on perceived leadership behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(7), 1003–1021. doi:10.1037/ apl0000221 Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York, NY: The Free Press. Finkelstein, S., Hambrick, D. C., & Cannella, A. A. (2009). Strategic leadership: Theory and research on executives, top management teams, and boards. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780195162073.003.0005 French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. H. (1968). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright & A. F. Zander (Eds.), Group dynamics: Research and theory (3rd ed., pp. 259–269). New York, NY: Harper & Row.

486

Intelligences

Goodall, A. H., & Pogrebna, G. (2015). Expert leaders in a fast-moving environment. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(2), 123–142. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2014.07.009 Morgeson, F. P., DeRue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2010). Leadership in teams: A functional approach to understanding leadership structures and processes. Journal of Management, 36(1), 5–39. doi:10.1177/ 0149206309347376 Rowold, J. (2014). Instrumental leadership: Extending the transformational-transactional leadership paradigm. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 28(3), 367–390. doi:10.1177/239700221402800304 Stogdill, R. M. (1962). Manual for the LBDQ-Form XII. Columbus, OH: Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. Wofford, J., & Liska, L. Z. (1993). Path-goal theories of leadership: A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 19(4): 857–876. doi:10.1177/014920639301900407

INTELLIGENCES Had this entry been written in the first decade or so of the 21st century, it might have started off with an obvious statement such as “Intelligence is importantly related to attainment of, and success in, leadership” and then moved on to large numbers of studies showing that various measures of IQ correlate with attainment of and success in leadership, with correlations in the general range of 0.2–0.5. The entry would have been a filler because conventional measures of intelligence correlate with almost anything that requires cognitive processing in the range of 0.2–0.5, or higher if correlations are corrected for attenuation (unreliability of measures), restriction of range, or both. Today, however, the concept of intelligence is viewed by many scholars, although certainly not all, as broader than it once was. This entry will take this broader view, although other scholars still might see intelligence as limited to general intelligence (g) and its subfactors. This entry goes on to define and describe the two sectors of general intelligence, and then discusses the various theories of specific types of intelligence.

General Intelligence General intelligence, as already noted, will correlate with almost any task requiring cognitive processing. Although in modern models of intelligence, such as John B. Carroll’s, there are many subfactors of general intelligence, the two subfactors that have received the most attention are fluid and crystallized aspects of intelligence. Fluid Intelligence

Fluid intelligence is one’s ability to reason and solve problems that are relatively novel or that are more familiar but presented under novel circumstances. It is often measured by tests requiring solution of geometric analogies, series completions, classifications, and matrix problems. Sometimes, the problems involve words or numbers rather than geometric figures. Historically, it was thought that measures using geometric figures, such as the Raven Progressive Matrices, would be “purer,” less culturally influenced measures of fluid intelligence, because they were uncontaminated by knowledge of vocabulary or number. It turned out, however, that figural problems actually show greater cultural effects than do most other kinds of fluid-intelligence tests, presumably because individuals living in less industrialized settings are more likely to learn to think in concrete rather than practical settings. Fluid intelligence is important to leadership because leaders are constantly encountering new, unexpected, and often intricate problems to solve. Unlike managers, whose jobs tend to be more predictable, except in crisis times, such as those of COVID-19, leaders are compensated to chart organizations into the unknown. Lack of fluid intelligence would make such a job more difficult. Because fluid intelligence tends, on average, to decrease with age after the 20s or 30s, there sometimes is concern that leaders may, by the time they ascend to leadership positions, be in a nonoptimal position to lead. There also has been concern that the very acquisition of power may suppress optimal utilization of fluid and other kinds of intelligence. Such concerns were raised when John Stumpf, former CEO of Wells Fargo,

Intelligences

testified before Congress and he seemed to have a startling inability to process information. Crystallized Intelligence

Crystallized intelligence is one’s useable store of accumulated knowledge, both declarative and fluid. It’s both what one knows and what one knows how to do. In Raymond Cattell’s formulation, crystallized intelligence arises from the application of fluid intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is relevant to leadership in that leaders cannot make good decisions if they are operating in the dark: They need to know the terrain in which they are leading in order to advance the interests of whatever group or organization they are leading. It is presumably for this reason that most leaders are those who are more experienced organizationally. The presumption is that they will know more and thus be able to lead more effectively. On the positive side, crystallized intelligence tends to increase with age, at least until the upper 60s or even 70s. So older leaders likely, indeed, will know more than younger ones. On the negative side, knowledge sometimes can interfere with the ability to handle novel kinds of tasks or situations. Experts can get so used to conceptualizing problems in a certain way that they become entrenched and are unable or unwilling to recognize novelty, even when it is clearly evident. So, they respond in ways that are no longer pertinent to the times in which they are operating.

Too Much of a Good Thing We typically think that if someone has more of a specific trait, that equates to greater effectiveness in the desired behavior. For example, we generally think of physicists as more successful to the extent they are more intelligent, or musicians as better musicians if they have greater musicality. Leadership does not appear to adhere to this commoncultural belief with regard to intelligence as one of its constituents. There is a strong quadratic component in the relationship between leadership success and intelligence. Greater intelligence helps up to a point, then shows diminishing returns, and then actually

487

starts to hurt performance. Thus, leaders can have too much of a good thing. Leaders may be most effective when their IQ is about one standard deviation over that of the average member of the group they lead. Why would leaders, to some extent, ideally need to match their followers in intelligence? A fundamental principle of interpersonal attraction is that we are attracted to others like ourselves, at least in ways fundamental to the relationship. If a leader is too much above or below their group in intelligence, their match to their followers is reduced and they may have trouble relating to those followers. An alternative approach, taken by populist leaders historically and in the present, is to pretend to match the followers in intelligence, as when Ivy League-educated legislators in Congress presumably pretended, on the basis of no evidence, to believe that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Encompassing Theories of Intelligence(s) Successful Intelligence

Successful intelligence, according to Robert J. Sternberg, is the ability to formulate, implement, evaluate, and then reformulate, reimplement, and reevaluate as necessary, life goals. This definition implies that successful intelligence, in practice, is somewhat different for each person. The skills a CEO of a large company would need to succeed would be somewhat different from those needed for success in life by an artist or a medical doctor. Successful intelligence comprises four sets of skills that have been proposed as relevant to leadership: creative intelligence, analytical intelligence, practical intelligence, and wisdom. Creative intelligence is used to generate ideas that are novel, and in some way, useful. Analytical intelligence is used to ascertain the quality of these ideas or other ideas. Practical intelligence is used to implement the ideas and persuade others of their value. And wisdom is used to ensure that the ideas help to ensure some kind of common good—by balancing one’s own, others’, and larger interests—over the long term as well as the short term, through the utilization of positive ethical values.

488

Intelligences

For example, Joseph R. Biden came into the office of President of the United States during a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was peaking and the vaccinations were in their infancy. Biden needed to be creative in figuring out how to encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19; analytical in ensuring that his plan for vaccinating 100 million people within the first 100 days of his administration was tenable; practical in devising a way to produce, distribute, and oversee the administration of the vaccine; and wise in ensuring that what he was doing was truly for the common good. In more recent work, Sternberg has suggested a generalization of successful intelligence to what he refers to as adaptive intelligence, by which leaders must not only look at the present common good but also at the future common good for people’s ability to adapt to the conditions of the world. If they look only at the common good of the present generation, they may act in ways to compromise future generations, as has been so long regarding issues such as climate change and pollution. Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner has proposed a theory of multiple intelligences, according to which intelligence is not unitary, with general intelligence. The theory proposes eight distinct intelligences: linguistic, logical–mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. This theory captures intellectual aspects of leadership success that would appear to be missing from models of general intelligence. Linguistic, logical-mathematical, and possibly spatial intelligences would be captured, at least to some extent, by measures of general intelligence. But interpersonal intelligence—one’s ability to effectively understand and interact with others— and intrapersonal intelligence—one’s ability to effectively understand and control oneself—are not measured by conventional tests. Gardner’s theory has some precedent in the structure of intellect model proposed by J. P. Guilford. The model suggested that behavioral aspects of intelligence were just as important as more cognitive ones. It seems extremely reasonable to believe that a leader will have trouble succeeding

unless they have well-developed levels of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. Gardner applied aspects of his model in suggesting that successful leaders have in common six attributes: (1) a story, or central message that they seek to convey; (2) an audience that is ready to hear the leader’s story; (3) an organization that accepts the leader’s leadership; (4) embodiment, or the leaders somehow representing a model of the story they wish to tell; (5) direct/leadership, from specific domains to general ones; and (6) expertise (or, at the very least, the appearance to sufficient numbers of followers of expertise).

Theories of Specific Kinds of Intelligences Whereas Sternberg’s and Gardner’s accounts were presented as full theories of intelligence, other theories have been presented as theories of aspects of intelligence or of supplementary kinds of intelligence. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to monitor and evaluate a person’s own and other people’s emotions. In this model, there are four kinds of skills: perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions. The term was popularized by Daniel Goleman and has been widely studied in the literature on management and leadership. The bulk of the research shows a relation of emotional intelligence to successful leadership, and Boyatzis has made it a major part of his model of “leadership intelligence.” Earlier in this entry, reference was made to John Stumpf’s presentation to the U.S. Congress. Part of what made the appearance (negatively) impressive was not only that Stumpf appeared not to be fully cognitively processing what was going on but also that he appeared oblivious to the effects of his barely coherent presentation on his audience. A leader, in order to be successful, has to tap into the emotions of his followers. Donald Trump, as President of the United States, tapped in very well to the emotions of his core followers, but he also managed, at some level, to understand the emotions of his opposition and to try to turn those emotions against them.

Intelligent Disobedience

Practical Intelligence

Practical intelligence is the ability to adapt to, shape, and select environments. Practically intelligent leaders know, for example, when to adapt to their environment, even if they view it as nonoptimal; when to shape the environment to make the organization better suited to current times and needs; and sometimes, when to select a new environment because they are a mismatch to their leadership position. Practical intelligence is part of Sternberg’s (2020) theory of augmented intelligence, but it also has been studied in its own right. For example, there is a significant relationship between practical intelligence for military leadership and actual military-leadership performance. Social Intelligence

Social intelligence is one’s ability to understand and manage people. It is similar in kind to Gardner’s interpersonal intelligence. Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is the intelligence of groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligence. Good leadership, in part, is working to maximize the deployment of intellectual functioning for the group for which one is responsible. Robert J. Sternberg

489

Cattell, R. B. (1987). Intelligence: Its structure, growth, and action. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers. Cattell, R. B. (1971). Abilities: Their structure, growth, and action. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Gardner, H. (2011). Leading minds: An anatomy of leadership. New York, NY: Basic Books. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Hedlund, J., Forsythe, G. B., Horvath, J. A., Williams, W. M.,Snook, S., & Sternberg, R. J. (2003). Identifying and assessing tacit knowledge: Understanding the practical intelligence of military leaders. Leadership Quarterly, 14, 117–140. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(03) 00006-7 Malone, T. W., & Woolley, A. W. (2020). Collective intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 780–801). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ 9781108770422.033 Rivers, S. E., Handley-Miner, I. J., Mayer, J. D., & Caruso, D. R. (2020). Emotional intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 709–735). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108770422.030 Sackett, P. R., Shewach, O. R., & Dahlke, J. A. (2020). The predictive value of general intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Human intelligence: An introduction (pp. 381–414). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Useem, J. (2017, July/August). Power causes brain damage. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/powercauses-brain-damage/528711/

See also Collective Intelligence; Creativity; Emotional Intelligence;

Further Readings

INTELLIGENT DISOBEDIENCE

Antonakis, J., Simonton, D. K., & Wai, J. (2020). Intelligence and leadership. In M. D. Mumford & C. A. Higgs (Eds.), Leader thinking skills: Capacities for contemporary leadership (pp. 14–43). New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315269573-2 Boyatzis, R. E. (2020). Leadership intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of intelligence (2nd ed., pp. 802–819). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108770422.034 Cattell, R. B. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 54(1), 1–22.

Intelligent disobedience is a choice made to disobey an order based on an assessment of the harm likely to result from obeying. Where authority relationships exist, this requires overcoming cultural expectations of obedience in service to higher values such as safety, truthfulness, and the dignity of others. It is a high-level skill necessary within the leader–follower dynamic to avoid damaging or unethical outcomes. Intelligent disobedience in a business context has been defined as the ability to counter management

490

Intelligent Disobedience

directions or instructions and suggest improvements while defending the integrity of business requirements and organizational goals. This entry reveals the origin of the term intelligent disobedience, considers the conditions and social factors that can affect obedience or appropriate disobedience, examines how societal and childhood acculturation relate to obedience or disobedience, and provides some situational examples of intelligent disobedience.

Authority and Compliance While authority and leadership are not synonymous, those with formal authority are often viewed as positional leaders. For authority to fulfill its role, its orders must result in compliance by those receiving them. Yet, it is self-evident that not all orders are equal in terms of their fit to the organization’s culture and needs, or their potential effectiveness, safety, or even legality. The question then arises: Under what circumstances is it appropriate or necessary to intentionally disregard or disobey the order?

encounters an obstacle that presents a risk to the safety of the human, it ceases following the order. If the dog detects a safe path around the obstacle, it temporarily assumes the lead role. Once the hazard is safely negotiated, it resumes the obedient follower role. It is noteworthy that the training process must not leave the dog confused about when to obey and when not to obey. A very careful regimen is used to build this distinction into the dog’s decision-making patterns. Given that we can develop this capacity in canines, leadership and followership scholars and practitioners have explored how to do this for humans in the many societal configurations in which they receive orders from authority figures. This goal is far from peripheral for achieving the outcomes we seek from effective and ethical leadership. The 20th-century Nuremberg trials after the defeat of the German Nazi government firmly established the principle that “I was just following orders” is not a defense if other options were available.

Criteria for Obedience and Disobedience Origin of the Term

Before answering this question, understanding the origin of the phrase “intelligent disobedience” is in order. Intelligent disobedience is a term of art related to the training of guide dogs to assist individual human beings who are fully or legally blind. After being weaned, these dogs are placed in the care of a volunteer who will socialize the dog in the types of settings in which it will need to operate. The dogs are carefully taught some two dozen commands they will need to understand and obey. At around 18 months, the dogs are sent to schools where specialists train the dog to distinguish between when to obey a command (most of the time) and when to disobey (rare, but crucial). For example, if the dog is given the command “forward” at a street crossing, while a quiet electric car is coming around the corner, it must not obey. In this dyad, the human is the leader who sets the direction for the pair, and the dog executes the orders that will take the human safely to the intended destination. When the dog

The guide dog’s decision not to obey an order in the face of a contextual threat is assisted by the fact that its human “handler” has also been trained to recognize the importance of intelligent disobedience. Humans in a follower role often need to make an obey–resist decision in the face of more complex social structures and power differentials. The authority figure issuing the order may not have been trained to respect valid noncompliance, thus requiring courage on the follower’s part to risk disobeying. Conditions for Appropriate Obedience

One rubric for determining appropriate obedience has been offered by Stefano Passini and Davide Morselli: 1. The system we are part of is fair and functioning. 2. The authority figure setting the rule or giving the order is legitimate and competent. 3. The order itself is constructive.

Intelligent Disobedience

If these requirements are largely met (perfection being unattainable), obedience is the correct response. If they are not met, intelligent disobedience is in order. Distinctions from Civil Disobedience

It is useful to differentiate the better known concept of “civil disobedience” from “intelligent disobedience.” An individual or group may elect to exercise the former (civil disobedience) if the system is intractably unfair or unjust. They willingly assume the consequences for doing so as the price required to bring the perceived injustice to public awareness. In the case of intelligent disobedience, the goal of resistance is not to change the system, but to prevent unnecessary harm from a singular order. If the order is emblematic of a broader injustice, a choice may be made to progress to civil disobedience, but that is a qualitatively separate decision and act.

Social Factors Affecting Obedience and Appropriate Disobedience As is commonly known, the classic study on obedience was conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale University, simulating the administration of shocks to their recipient, disregarding the recipient’s signs of distress and unwillingness to continue. Two out of three (unknowing) subjects of the experiment continued obeying despite signs they were endangering the life of the individual being shocked. What is less commonly appreciated are the many variations Milgram did on the basic experiment to determine what social factors would lower (or increase) the incidence of inappropriate obedience. A number of germane lessons can be derived from the Milgram experiments, including: •

The symbols of authority, without further duress, were sufficient to evoke obedience, against the individual’s own moral sensibility. • Inappropriate obedience significantly diminished when peers (undisclosed confederates of the researcher) objected to continuing the experiment, demonstrating the latent social power of individual conscience and voice.

491

•

A near total cessation of obedience occurred when two researchers appeared to disagree with each other on the safety of the experiment, putting into question the common practice of shielding subordinates from open dissent between positional leaders. • Near total obedience occurred when the subject was assigned a role in which they didn’t personally administer the shocks. This is disquieting information that reflects common bureaucratic behavior. • Nearly all subjects demonstrated significant discomfort, ruling out sadism as a prime factor in destructive obedience.

Psychological Strategies Resulting in Obedience or Disobedience

Subjects in the Milgram experiments needed to resolve the intense psychological discomfort experienced when torn between dangerous commands from authority and the dictates of their conscience. They could do so by increasing resistance and discontinuing their complicity or by lowering resistance and placing responsibility on the authority figure. Both strategies extricated them from discomfort, but only the former choice resulted in an ethical outcome— an important distinction to underscore in the development of ethical leadership and followership.

Obedience Acculturation All societies have deep and multifaceted ways of acculturating their young in the appropriate obedience necessary for acceptance and success in their social systems. The locus of obedience transfers from the society’s strictures to the individual’s internal self-regulation mechanisms. This generally serves society well. However, in the face of illegitimate, incompetent, or immoral leadership, it works against the interest of society and against the well-being of both the subjects and objects of ill-informed or destructive orders. High Power-Distance Cultures

Societies and organizations rarely value or devote resources to preparing their citizens for

492

Intelligent Disobedience

contextual intelligent disobedience. This places a burden on those in the follower role to assume greater risk and employ personal courage in consequential situations. This is even more true of societies that are high power-distance on the Hofstede scale. Those of lower status in society accept the inequality of their status and feel less empowered to speak or act in dissent. In multicultural groups and organizations, these internal cultural differences may not be sufficiently appreciated and result in failures to intelligently disobey that would seem more natural to group members from low power-distance cultures.

Applications of Intelligent Disobedience Increasingly, we are seeing applications of the principles, if not the language, of intelligent disobedience in professional protocols for high-risk situations. The premier example is the aviation industry. A series of fatal commercial airline crashes in the 1970s triggered an in-depth review that identified embedded behavioral norms as a primary cause of inadequate crew communication to avert disaster. Many pilots had military backgrounds. The pilot in the second seat was junior to the flying pilot who captained the aircraft. Black box recordings revealed the junior pilot, or other crew members, observed a potentially fatal error by the captain but failed to override it. When questioning the captain’s actions, they used deferential language that could be ignored. This mitigating language may have been appropriate in normal civil discourse but did not convey the urgency required of the situation. Crew Resource Management

The aviation industry instituted a training program now known as Crew Resource Management (CRM). This consists of a range of simulated exercises to improve situational awareness and crew communication. Most germane to the subject of intelligent disobedience, it included protocols for assertively alerting the captain to the error. If the captain did not take corrective action after two attempts, the nonflying pilot was empowered to declare an emergency and assume control of the

craft. These measures dramatically reduced the incidence of fatal airline crashes and have been adopted by all civil and military aviation. A mega lesson from this experience is the role training and simulations play in overriding the socialization that dictates subordination to command. We note the parallel with the training of guide dogs to override the leader in analogous situations. Adapting the CRM Model

The aviation model has been used as the basis for initiatives to reduce the incidence of errors in other high-risk environments, such as hospital surgery procedures. Surgery, like aviation, is a team activity. The surgeon is generally considered the ranking authority, supported by others with varying medical credentials. In the face of well-publicized surgical errors (e.g., operating on the wrong patient, removing the wrong limb, leaving foreign objects in the patient), protocols were introduced to require every team member, regardless of rank and cultural background, to vocally assent to the instruction given for the operation to begin or end, or to state their objection. This variation of the principles and practice of intelligent disobedience has reduced the factor that rank and culture play in hospital errors. As the overall results are not as clear and uncontested as those in the aviation industry, further research to determine underlying causes is indicated. Changes in Military Culture

Military organizations are structured around hierarchy and compliance to orders. Increasingly, with mobile telecommunications and enhanced observational technology, it is recognized that the war fighter on the ground has better information on which to make decisions than those higher in the chain of command. In the United States and other militaries, specific orders are replaced with “commander intent” that conveys the purpose, key tasks, and desired outcome of an operation. Those in junior positions are expected to make adjustments needed to execute the intent within the rules of engagement. Once again, we recognize an analogy to the guide dog that can better perceive and avoid dangers in the path of the goal.

Intergroup Processes

Childhood Development

493

Further Readings

The habit of obedience is continually reinforced in early childhood acculturation. There is no clear counterpart to balancing this with instruction on intelligent disobedience, such as that occurs in guide dog training. The closest approximation is curriculum that instructs in critical thinking, yet this omits addressing the effect of power dynamics in authority relationships. An unintended, and sometimes tragic, consequence is that children are unprepared to deal with illicit orders from those in whose care they have been entrusted. Methods have been developed to address this that show anecdotal success. Children can be equipped to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate instructions from authority figures and be taught techniques for effectively resisting ones that would be harmful to themselves or others. Given the imperative to protect children from sexual predation, and the need to develop citizens with a discerning relationship to corporate and political authority, this is an area inviting further, well-designed research across age groups and cultures.

Chaleff, I. (2015). Intelligent disobedience: Doing right when what you’re told to do is wrong. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Chaleff, I. (2017). Intelligent disobedience for children. London: IC Publications. McGannon, B. (2018). Intelligent disobedience: The difference between good and great leaders. London: Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315178417 Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Morselli, D., & Passini, S. (2009). Authority relationships between obedience and disobedience. New Ideas in Psychology, 27, 96–106. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych. 2008.06.001 Reason, J. (2008). The human contribution: Unsafe acts, accidents and heroic recoveries. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company.

Final Remarks

The term, intergroup processes, refers to actions and other mechanisms that occur between groups of people. Intergroup processes are strongly influenced by intragroup processes—phenomena that occur within groups. Thus, intergroup processes, such as intergroup relations, stereotypes, and derogation, are informed and influenced by intragroup processes, such as group norms and expectations set by a leader. To complicate matters, intergroup processes are also often inter-subgroup processes, such that two or more subgroups are subsumed within a superordinate group and the relation between these subgroups involves identity and resources. Such processes are demonstrated through large-scale groups. For example, the European Union includes 28 separate member states, and the former Yugoslavia was comprised of several different subgroups (and eventually different countries). It is also true at the inter- and intraorganizational level through joint ventures and separate units, departments, or divisions being expected to collaborate and produce results from tasks that benefit from their distinct skillsets. Although it is

For a society to be considered free, the option to obey or disobey must exist. In well-functioning societies, this freedom should be exercised within an appropriate framework of responsibility for the constructive norms of society and of leader–follower and authority relationships. Intelligent disobedience can be regarded as the capacity to operationalize moral education and accountability. Simulations and other tools to develop intelligent disobedience equip individuals to speak and act on the values they are encouraged to uphold. In a liberal democracy, this will tie closely to the value placed on responsible citizenry and on dignity and justice for fellow human beings. The integration of intelligent disobedience theory and practice into the national character may plausibly serve as a bulwark against authoritarian movements and regimes. Ira Chaleff See also Ethics of Disagreement; Groupthink; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leadership in Dogs; Obedience

INTERGROUP PROCESSES

494

Intergroup Processes

natural to assume the shared superordinate membership would ensure smooth inter-subgroup relations, historical and current events would demonstrate otherwise. Despite shared superordinate group membership, inter-subgroup relations are complicated and often influenced by bias in favor of their own subgroup, distrust of noningroup members, and finite resources. These influences do not always result in hostile inter-subgroup relations, but they can be associated with extreme derogation, hostility, and antagonism between groups. The following portion of this entry first reveals why some conflicts arise among subgroups and then examines theories for reducing intergroup conflict and improving relations, as well as theories focusing on interpersonal relationships with outgroup members, before concluding with suggestions for future areas of research in intergroup processes.

Some Influences of Conflict Among Subgroups Understanding and lessening intergroup conflict has motivated many researchers to investigate intergroup processes. Although there are many more theories and explanations of how to improve intergroup relations relative to explaining why some groups already have positive intergroup relations, this may be due to the sheer devastation that can occur among groups. The war that culminated in the breakup of Yugoslavia or the genocide of Rohingyas, Rwandans, Armenians, and Guatemalans are but a few examples of how groups, either with a leader or influenced by the death of one, can interact with other groups. Although all of these situations are complex, researchers attempt to theorize and understand what can influence conflict to arise among groups. Conflict among groups can be influenced by material goods, abstract concepts, and emotions. Determining the distribution of resources and who deserves them often comes down to a matter of identity. Group identity, comprised of the values, beliefs, and expectations within a group, are complex and malleable to different situations. The malleability of group identity is often influenced by the comparison group because groups try to maximize similarity within the group and the

differences between groups. These same subgroups often are the most likely candidates to threaten a group’s identity, whether by a symbolic threat or a realistic threat. Furthermore, these groups can challenge the relative status of other subgroups and, in doing so, dismiss group values and justify resource distribution. All of these threats are associated with increased conflict among subgroups. Intergroup processes and conflict engage issues of group identity. A group’s identity is a malleable set of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that influence intra- and intergroup interactions. A group’s identity is malleable due to context-specific influences such as which group is the comparison group. This is because the group’s identity is configured to emphasize similarities within the group and differences from other groups. There is well-established evidence indicating the importance of group identity and keeping it distinct from other groups. A group’s leader, an influential group member often with a hierarchical position within the group, can have a strong influence on group identity and intergroup interactions because they are a source of group identity information and are typically trusted to do what is best for the group. Attempts by leaders or group members to change or dismiss group identity and boundaries are associated with increased intergroup hostility as groups seek to maintain distinct group identities. Group identity is also the source of other threats. Intergroup conflict is associated with symbolic and realistic threats. Realistic threats tend to be more material, such as bodily harm or distribution of finite resources, whereas symbolic threats tend to be more abstract, such as the validity or reliability of the group’s values and beliefs. A symbolic threat is different from a distinctiveness threat in that the latter implies similarity between the values and beliefs of two or more groups, whereas the former implies one group’s values and beliefs taking over or replacing the values and beliefs of another group. One possible reaction or anticipation of these threats is intergroup anxiety, which is apprehension over concerns for how the outgroup will treat the group and its members. These threats evoke a more extreme reaction from higher status subgroups and for group members

Intergroup Processes

who more strongly identify with their groups because they have more to lose. Symbolic and realistic threats are more likely to occur among groups with a history of interactions, but still possible to occur with new groups. Although not theorized, a leader, through their influence of group identity, could guide perceptions of and reactions to these threats. Intergroup conflict is associated with changes in relative status among subgroups. Status, associated with the prototypicality of subgroups within the superordinate group, influences identity and resources. For example, biology and psychology are both sciences, but many biologists (and other scientists) do not view psychologists as scientists. This is due, in part, to “natural” scientists believing they better represent, and therefore are more prototypical of, science relative to “social” sciences and use this belief to justify more funding, better reputation, and greater representation in top-tier research journals. In this way, the higher status subgroup is projecting their values and beliefs onto the superordinate group to justify their actions and the current distribution of resources. If subgroup members agree about the superordinate identity and the relative status of the subgroups, then there is no conflict. If, however, there is disagreement about the superordinate identity and lower status subgroup members perceive their treatment as unjustified and discriminatory, then there will be conflict between the groups. This conflict can be further exacerbated by a leader who originates from the higher status subgroup and refers to the superordinate group identity because lower status subgroups already view that identity as excluding their values and beliefs.

Theories to Reduce Intergroup Conflict Researchers have investigated what influences increased intergroup conflict but have also theorized and researched strategies for reducing intergroup conflict. These theories can be inspired by examples of strategies that work, such as country leaders agreeing to an alliance against a common enemy, and strategies that do not work, such as a change in leadership after a strong leader: The death of Yugoslavia President Josip Broz (commonly known as Tito) created a vacuum of

495

power and sparked the beginning of a devastating war and the end of Yugoslavia. Understanding the limitations and applications of these theories not only provides more context and information for researchers but also improves the likelihood of resolving long-standing derogation and dislike between groups. Researchers have developed interpersonal and intergroup strategies for improving intergroup relations. An early and persistent interpersonal theory to improve intergroup relations is through interacting with outgroup members consistently enough to reduce stereotypical thinking, provide an opportunity for trust to grow, and potentially become friends. Another interpersonal theory attempted to better understand support for contacting outgroup members through changing the mindset of group members—instead of perceiving groups as separate within a superordinate group, group members should reframe group membership to all being members of the superordinate group. Taking cues from both theories about contacting and reframing outgroup members, certain group members can be designated boundary spanners whose job it is to interact, collaborate, and communicate with outgroup members to facilitate intergroup relations. Instead of only relying on interpersonal strategies to improve intergroup relations, several theories focus on group identity, norms, and leadership to improve intergroup relations. Two approaches rely on the combined influence of a leader and group identity to improve intergroup relations. Similar to the interpersonal theory, a leader would direct group members to treat each other not as separate subgroups within a superordinate group, but as all members of the superordinate group or members of both the subgroup and the superordinate group. Foreseeing problems with reframing group identity, another theory focuses on a leader who emphasizes the distinction between subgroups is important for intergroup relations and instead adds a facet onto group identity that informs group members that the subgroups have a collaborative relationship. A third theory emphasizes the importance of weathering potential future conflict by not stopping at tolerance of outgroups, but actual liking of outgroups.

496

Intergroup Processes

Interpersonal Theories Given that intergroup conflict occurs between members of different groups, it makes sense there are theories focusing on how those same people can reduce intergroup conflict. To do so, group members are encouraged to interact and develop interpersonal relationships with outgroup members. These relationships can range from neutral to positive (and therefore friendships) and improve intergroup relations through providing more information about outgroup members and relying less on stereotypical information about outgroup members. If the right boundary conditions (e.g., equal status, collaborative task) are met, intergroup contact can improve intergroup relations. Direct contact is not always necessary, and observing or even imagining successful contact can effectively improve intergroup relations. Unfortunately, some of the intergroup biases that are associated with intergroup conflict are also related to increased resistance to the boundary conditions necessary for intergroup contact to be successful. Therefore, while intergroup contact can be beneficial with the right boundary conditions, not all groups can meet those conditions. Another option for group members is to change how they perceive outgroup members through inclusion into their ingroup. Ingroup members are afforded trust, time, and resources, whereas outgroup members are not. Instead of becoming friends with outgroup members, subgroup members should reframe their subgroup identity within a superordinate group to a collective identity as a member of the superordinate group and dissolve subgroup boundaries. Viewing all group members as members of the superordinate group, and not distinguishing by subgroups, will allow the biases afforded to ingroup members to be applied to all group members. Unfortunately, distinct subgroup identity is important to subgroup members and results in resisting any attempts to ignore that distinctiveness. Group members will entrench themselves in conflict with other subgroups within the superordinate group if they perceive their identity as being devalued. Although an attempt was made to address some of the problems of a collective identity through the acknowledgment of both the superordinate group identity and the

subgroup identity in a dual identity, not all subgroup members perceive the superordinate group as representing their values and beliefs, and therefore there are still problems with this theory. Considering the results of intergroup contact and subgroup identity, another push was made to integrate these theories in a situation far more common in certain areas. Boundary spanners, group members who have significant interactions with outgroup members, can meet the required boundary conditions for contact to be helpful and can successfully lean on their dual identity to facilitate intergroup interactions. In this way, intergroup contact and collaboration can be a specific job for a few group members instead of any or all group members. Although a group leader is often a boundary spanner, leaders are not the only group member whose job it is to communicate with outgroups for resources, projects, and general collaboration. Seen more frequently in business, but also in other areas, group members have a direct point of contact for intergroup needs and those specific people can influence intergroup relations by increasing productivity and reducing conflict. Although this perspective does not address some of the problems of holding a dual identity, it does address some of the difficulty of meeting the boundary conditions necessary for intergroup contact to be beneficial for intergroup relations.

Intergroup Theories Group identity often influences intergroup processes and potential conflict, so theorists focused on how group identity can be used to reduce conflict and improve intergroup relations. Instead of subgroup members as the driving force of a collective identity, an intergroup leader can promote a collective identity. An intergroup leader is the leader of a superordinate group comprised of two or more subgroups. Leaders can speak to group identity more influentially than other group members and have more influence over those group members. Therefore, an intergroup leader promoting a collective identity could be more effective than subgroup members doing the same thing.

Intergroup Processes

A leader does not always need to speak to the values and beliefs of the group and instead can speak to the group’s relation with other groups. Intergroup relational identity rhetoric emphasizes that each subgroup within the superordinate group provides an important, distinct, and necessary function, and the collaboration between subgroups requires those distinctions. Promoting a collective identity, relative to an intergroup relational identity, is the difference between advocating a perspective of group identity focused on shared group membership (e.g., Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnia-Herzegovians are all former Yugoslavs) and advocating a perspective of group identity focused on the relation between groups as integral to that identity (e.g., what it means to be Serbian is defined, in part, by the collaborative relation between Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnia-Herzegovians). Focusing on the collaborative and interdependent relations between subgroups avoids problems associated with promoting a collective identity, such as similarity between groups. Changing the perspective of intergroup relations via group identity can be influential, but changing intragroup processes to influence intergroup relations may also be effective. Group norms, unwritten rules within groups, can include expectations for intergroup interactions. These include expectations toward attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors within a group. Typically, these expectations include favoring ingroup members with resources and time whereas outgroup expectations include distrust because ingroup members expect outgroup members to act in ways to benefit their group to the detriment of other groups. Often, the group norms that are associated with negative attitudes and conflict between groups are the ones studied in intergroup relations research, but positive and negative attitudes toward an outgroup are not mutually exclusive and can be held at the same time. Intergroup relations research tends to focus on tolerance as the goal of intergroup relations, but tolerance is not effective at weathering future conflict between groups because it can quickly turn back to negative attitudes. Instead, a leader can promote allophilia, or positive intergroup attitudes, with the goal of liking between groups. Although this is not an easy task, especially

497

because some of the most effective methods of increasing a leader’s power involves increasing intergroup hostilities, it is one that could weather future conflict better than tolerance because it provides enough leeway for groups to not have intergroup relations immediately deteriorating to prejudice.

Future Directions Intergroup processes are often inter-subgroup processes that are marked by conflict and distrust. It is important for intergroup relations to understand the different influences of intergroup processes and limiting features of current conflict resolution methods to improve intergroup relations. Moving forward, taking an inter-subgroup perspective on conflict between (sub)groups and intergroup processes may provide more clarity and avenues of investigating this continuously developing area of research. For instance, most political elections involve extreme conflict and tension between the groups, which then have to come together and collaborate after the election. This results in conflict between the groups and between the groups and the leader who is supposed to represent them. The failing of a joint venture may not be as devastating as the dissolution of a country, but the frequency with which these situations occur demands continued investigation to further our understanding of intergroup conflict, bias, discrimination, and ultimately intergroup processes. Christine Kershaw and David Rast III See also Critical Leadership Studies; Group Norms; Group Process; Intergroup Processes; Social Identity Theory

Further Readings Hogg, M. A., van Knippenberg, D., & Rast, D. E., III. (2012). Intergroup leadership in organizations: Leading across group and intergroup boundaries. Academy of Management Review, 37, 232–255. doi:10.5465/amr. 2010.0221 Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 751–783. doi:10.1037/ 0022-3514.90-5.751

498

International Leadership Association

Pittinsky, T. L. (2005). Allophilia and intergroup leadership (Working Paper #RWP05-038). Cambridge, MA: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Rast, D. E., III, Hogg, M. A., & Van Knippenberg, D. (2018). Intergroup leadership across distinct subgroups and identities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44, 1090–1103. doi:10.1177/ 0146167218757466 Wenzel, M., Mummendey, A., & Waldzus, S. (2007). Superordinate identities and intergroup conflict: The ingroup projection model. European Review of Social Psychology, 18, 331–372. doi:10.1080/ 10463280701728302

INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP ASSOCIATION The International Leadership Association (ILA) is a worldwide professional membership association committed to advancing leadership scholarship, development, and practice. Its goal is to create trusted spaces and resources for its members to explore all aspects of leadership. This entry explains the mission, values, programs, and history of the ILA. The ILA places high value on rigor and relevance at the nexus—the intersection—of theory and practice. It holds that leadership practice cannot be its best without being guided by substantive questions, research, and theory, and that robust leadership must be grounded in principled and effective practice. Advancements in one area enhance the other. This strand of thought, present at the association’s inception in 1999, is at the very heart of the ILA. The ILA’s events, programs, and publications are designed with this in mind, bringing people together to bridge theory and practice and create moments that move people’s thoughts and actions in ways that develop new leadership insights, methods, and approaches.

Mission The ILA’s mission is to advance leadership knowledge and practice for a better world. It aspires to strengthen the ties between those who

study, teach, and practice leadership; serves as a forum where people can share leadership ideas, research, and practices; fosters the capacity for effective and ethical leadership in individuals, organizations, governments, and systems worldwide; and facilitates interdisciplinary research and the development of new knowledge and practices for the benefit of all. A Trusted Space for Leadership Learning

The ILA brings people together across distance and disciplines—virtually and in person—to bridge theory and practice. By creating and holding these trusted spaces, the ILA ensures that the best thinking about the process of leadership is developed and disseminated. A Trusted Source for Leadership Resources

By holding space for research and dialogue, the ILA serves as a principal source for leadershiprelated resources. Through its global conferences, webinars, publications, and online programs, the ILA generates new research, knowledge, and practices of interest to its members and the global community. A Global Leadership Community

The ILA cultivates a network of individuals working in every sector, discipline, and profession across the globe with a deep commitment to leadership that will shape a better future for all.

The Core Values of the ILA The core values of the ILA represent its deepest beliefs and aspirations as a professional membership association. Impact: Creating a multiplier effect that advances the field of leadership and contributes to the greater good. Inclusivity: Embracing and promoting diversity. Integrity: Expecting effective and ethical leadership practices and rigorous scholarship.

International Leadership Association

Interconnection: Bringing people together in meaningful ways to deepen the global web of interdependence. Interdisciplinary: Promoting and influencing leadership as an interdisciplinary field from multiple sectors at the nexus of theory and practice. International: Embracing cultural contexts and facilitating learning and networking across boundaries.

A Professional Membership Association ILA members are individuals, organizations, and students committed to the advancement of leadership knowledge and practice for a better world. Members come from more than 70 countries, with 54% having worked in two or more countries and 40% having lived in two to five countries. Professional roles include researchers and scholars; CEO’s, C-suite executives, and entrepreneurs; coaches and consultants; professors and teachers; human resource professionals, directors, and managers; higher education presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs; leadership program directors and staff; NGO, community, and government leaders; public administrators; and students—particularly doctoral, master, and executive academic programs. ILA Member Communities

ILA Member Communities reflect officially recognized professional interest areas in the leadership field. Facilitated by volunteers, Member Communities bring members together to collaborate with each other, engage in projects and programming to enhance their member experience and develop their leadership capacity, and contribute to the field of leadership more broadly. Some examples of Member Communities include the following: The Leadership Scholarship Member Community brings together seasoned and new scholars and researchers focused on leadership from all disciplines, fields of study, and research approaches. It encourages rigorous and relevant research, fosters transdisciplinary collaboration, and creates opportunities to share research and scholarship.

499

The Business Leadership Member Community serves corporate leaders, consultants, and others focused on leadership development and effectiveness in business settings. It creates opportunities to share perspectives and information about leadership challenges, effective practices, and applied research. The Leadership Development Member Community serves leadership coaches, consultants, human resource managers, program directors, and others focused on applied leadership. It connects members across sectors to examine effective practices, new ideas, and the integration and application of leadership development, theory, and practice. The Leadership Education Member Community serves leadership educators, professors, and teachers working in and/or interested in curricular or co-curricular programs in higher education institutions, primary and secondary schools, and other educational settings. It offers opportunities to share curricula, pedagogies, programs, and research to advance the how, what, and why of leadership education. The Public Leadership Member Community serves those who practice, develop, and study leadership in the public domain. This includes civic, governmental, military, nonprofit/NGO, political and social organizations, and institutions typically characterized as serving the public good. The Women and Leadership Member Community advances women in leadership by bringing together researchers, coaches, educators, practitioners, and students committed to cutting-edge research, practice, and leadership development. The Healthcare Leadership Member Community serves educators, practitioners, consultants, administrators, and scholars from all healthcare-related settings providing opportunities to share conceptual approaches, curricula, programs, assessments, and scholarship to optimize healthcare leadership. The Sustainability Leadership Member Community seeks avenues in which leadership scholars, educators, and practitioners can address social and environmental challenges to transform the field and practice of leadership to include sustainability as a fundamental goal of good leadership. The Followership Member Community is dedicated to the development of knowledge, competencies, and programs concerning the leader–follower relationship.

500

International Leadership Association

The Arts and Leadership Member Community involves researchers, developers, master artists, and practitioners passionate about arts, culture, creativity, design, and equity in leadership. The Philosophy, Religion, and Worldviews Member Community enables philosophers and religious leaders to hone their leadership skills in their respective spheres of influence and provide insights to ILA members. What Makes the ILA Distinctive as a Professional Association?

The ILA is a worldwide community of members who are multisector, multidisciplinary, and cross all cultures and geographies. Its distinctiveness is embedded in its leadership at the nexus of scholarship and practice, in requiring rigor in research and writings, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning, and a global mindset. This unique diversity of thought and global approach fosters groundbreaking conversations about leadership across all boundaries.

Programs, Publications, and Special Projects Programs

By creating spaces for conversations, collaborations, and engagement across the globe, in every sector and in every discipline, ILA members work to cultivate deeper understandings of the world and new insights into how effective leadership can address critical challenges. The ILA’s Annual Global Conference, held in globally significant cities, highlights local cultural context while fostering the exchange of new research, ideas, pedagogies, and practices on leadership from its members around the world. Additionally, keynote speakers—national leaders, renowned scholars, corporate and NGO executives, and others—share their insights and diverse perspectives. The ILA’s regional events and forums convene members to address regional and global issues of relevance. Events have occurred in Auckland, Beijing, den Hague, Lima, Maastricht, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Pretoria, and Shanghai. Specialized conferences and events—both onsite and

online—address complex leadership questions on topics such as women’s leadership, leadership education, healthcare and leadership, diversity and inclusive leadership, and sustainability and regenerative leadership. Hundreds of Leadership Perspectives webinars offer practical takeaways on the latest trends in leadership thinking and practice available live and via the on-demand library. ILA Intersections provides access to members-only resources, the member directory, and lively community-wide discussions. Publications

The ILA cocreates content on leadership through various publications. The ILA’s book series offer contemporary thinking about leadership from a diverse range of scholars, educators, and practitioners working around the globe. Published annually, the Building Leadership Bridges series includes more than a dozen volumes, most recently, Leadership in Action: Allyship, Advocacy & Activism (2020) and Peace, Reconciliation and Social Justice Leadership in the 21st Century (2019). The seven volumes in the Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series focus on enhancing leadership knowledge and improving leadership development of women around the world. Elements in Leadership is a multi-interdisciplinary series published in partnership with Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. ILA members serve as senior editors. ILA members write blogs reflecting on current leadership challenges around the world. Podcasts are cocreated with ILA partners interviewing leaders, scholars, and thought leaders. Videos and other online events, such as global conference keynotes, are accessible via the website. ILA events often lead to impact papers, such as The Power of Purpose Symposium’s series of papers defining, operationalizing, and measuring purpose in organizations. The Women’s Leadership conferences resulted in a series of books and a “Call to Action” declaration. Special Projects

The ILA commissions special task forces to review and cocreate new leadership initiatives. For example, the Global Leadership Project convened a

International Leadership Association

group of global leaders and scholars to make meaning of global leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and its cascading challenges; to promote a global conversation across sectors and geographies about leadership for a collective future; and to create synergy to explore other profound questions through research and dialogue. Another project by the General Principles Task Force in 2020 developed universal leadership principles and guidelines for academic leadership programs. They identified core global leadership principles, across cultures and sectors, on context, content, cultural framework, pedagogy, and outcomes. They created Guiding Questions for Academic Programs drilling down on the context, content, conceptual framework, learning strategies, metrics, and outcomes for the development of new programs and the assessment of established curricular and cocurricular leadership programs at colleges and universities.

ILA History The contributions of many people and institutions coalesced toward cultivating the networks, connections, and intellectual interest required to establish the International Leadership Association in 1999. Like many ideas, it grew from a series of conversations and formal discussions in meetings and conferences. Guided by the vision of political scientists James McGregor Burns and Georgia Sorenson at the University of Maryland, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, with the leadership of program director Larraine Matusak, supported a four-year initiative (1994–1998) to create, for the first time, a community of scholars in the field of leadership studies. Concurrently, these scholars convened the Salzburg Seminar on “Global Leadership: Concepts and Challenges” bringing together academicians and leaders from 50 countries. The goal of the Kellogg Leadership Studies Project (KLSP) was to produce and disseminate knowledge that advanced leadership theory and practice. The KLSP produced a series of working papers by some of the most renowned scholars in the leadership field. At the conclusion of the KLSP, a conference was organized called the “Leaders/Scholars Association: A meeting of the minds between those who study leadership and those who practice it.” Coordinated

501

by Barbara Kellerman and hosted at the University of Southern California by Cynthia Cherrey, the conference endorsed the creation of a professional association bringing together scholars, educators, leadership development professionals, and practitioners with a shared interest in leadership. The Association was to be diverse in thought, discipline, culture, sector, and geography. The International Leadership Association was named as the umbrella organization to support the field of leadership studies. The ILA was officially launched in 1999 at a conference in Atlanta. Since its inception, the ILA’s global annual conference has been in destination cities around the world, including Ottawa, Brussels, Atlanta, Barcelona, Chicago, Vancouver, Guadalajara, and Washington, D.C. Due to the pandemic, the San Francisco conference in 2020 was held as a virtual conference. For its first 10 years, the ILA was based at the University of Maryland’s James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership. In 2011, the ILA was established as a nonprofit corporation in Washington, D.C. and acquired recognition as an independent 501(c) 3 association based in the United States and operating globally. It is governed by an elected board of directors and led by staff and member volunteers. The ILA is the largest international and interdisciplinary global membership organization devoted solely to the study and development of leadership. It is one of the few organizations to actively embrace academicians, practitioners, consultants, private industry, public leaders, not-for-profit organizations, and students. The ILA believes strongly in the importance of leadership worldwide and is committed to growing the leadership profession within, across, and beyond the ILA. Cynthia Cherrey See also Actor Network Theory; Bureaucracy; Connective Leadership; Organizational Leadership; Systems Theory

Further Readings Allen, K., & Cherrey, C. (2000) Systemic leadership: Enriching the meaning of our work. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

502

Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership

Balkundi, P., & Kduffe, U. (2005). The ties that lead: A social network approach to leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.09.004 Bolden, R. (2011). Distributive leadership in organizations: A review of theory and research. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13, 251–269. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2370.2011.00306.x Capra, F. (2002). The hidden connections: Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability. New York, NY: Doubleday. Heifetz, R. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. doi:10.4159/ 9780674038479 Slaughter, A. (2017). The chessboard and the web: Strategies of connection in a networked world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Uhl-Bien, M., & Marion, R. (2008). Complex leadership: Conceptual foundations. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

INTERSECTIONALITY: RACE, GENDER, AND LEADERSHIP In the United States, women of color face oppression based on the categories of gender and race; Kimberl´e Crenshaw defines this as intersectionality. Intersectionality reveals how women of color experience oppression in various contexts and conditions, even within positions of leadership. This entry describes the gendered and racialized experiences of women of color who face copious barriers that influence their ability to attain leadership positions. The entry highlights the disparate impact of historic U.S. laws, finance, education, housing policies, and social dynamics that serve as the foundation for present-day systemic inequalities concerning employment and leadership opportunities.

Intersectionality of Race and Gender Intersectionality emerged from critical legal studies (CLS), which recognized the U.S. legal system as a fundamental tool for shaping and perpetuating societal inequities. Naomi Mezey, in a Stanford Law Review article, suggests that “by making the

legal maintenance of the social order look neutral, natural and even just, law helps convince subordinated classes that the state is the best option for protecting their interests” (p. 1838). Consequently, scholars critiqued how CLS overlooked the intersection of race and gender in shaping the rights of individuals who belong to marginalized groups. Intersectionality entails the nexus between gender and race and how the two shape the various elements of Black females’ experience in the workplace. Notably, the term underscores that Black women’s identities and, therefore, experiences are not confined simply to the binary of Black versus White or male versus female. While Crenshaw based her research into intersectionality on Black women’s experiences, the intersection of race and gender are fundamental in creating the current social, cultural, and political contexts within which all women of color operate. When discussing the issue of race, gender, and leadership, it is important to consider how each of those identities intersect in defining their experiences. This must be considered, precisely, the convergence of layers and systematic methods of sovereignty in their lives.

Systemic Racism The United States was built on a system that exploits and subordinates populations such as Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Latinx, and other people to benefit Whites. Scholars refer to this as inescapable large-scale systemic oppression. The system of oppression or systemic racism includes racial and cultural stereotypes, prejudice, and engineered racialized institutions that oppress and marginalize people of color. Policies, laws, institutional practices, and social interactions uphold this inequitable system. A strategy employed to reinforce this system of oppression is the presumed biological superiority of the white race. For centuries, race scholars concluded that Whites were more pure and intelligent than other races. These racial stereotypes feed into power dynamics in social interactions. For example, stereotypes about Black individuals lacking morality have excused inhumane treatment and influence present-day perceptions.

Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership

Race as a biological construct reinforces the paradigm that many of the divisions we see in society are natural and immutable, and perpetuates the belief that specific groups are superior while others are inferior. Such pseudoscientific ideas have historically rationalized the inferiority and oppression of people of color and reinforced systems of economic and social dominance by whites. Early Civil Rights legislation and constitutional amendments aimed to dismantle systemic racism and discrimination. However, subsequent legislation and court rulings diminished the rights gained by women and people of color. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 15th Amendment granted voting rights and protections to people of color. Nevertheless, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1895) narrowed those rights by establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine. In conjunction with other laws, this ruling legalized and institutionalized White supremacy in all aspects of U.S. society until repealed in the 1954 landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education. Additionally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to dismantle systemic discrimination by explicitly barring discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and employment. Women and people of color have successfully sought legal redress for overt acts of discrimination through this legislation. Yet, after centuries of reinforcement, systemic racism and “a white racial frame” permeate the U.S. society at the individual, social, institutional, and political levels. While the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s gave marginalized groups legal remedies for overt and pervasive acts of discrimination, they still experience oppression through microaggressions or subtler acts of racism and sexism that are more challenging to address. Derald Wing Sue (2010) defines microaggressions as normative explicit or implicit insults that convey derogatory messages that are targeted at a specific individual that is part of a racially minoritized group. Microaggressions occur in three forms: microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations. Microassaults entail overt acts of racism and sexism, such as calling a person of color a racist epithet. Microinsults are subtle communications that express the perceived inferiority of the targeted group. They sometimes

503

manifest as double-handed compliments, such as telling a woman of color that they are smart but implying that they are inferior intellectually. Microinvalidations can be the most detrimental because they deliberately reject and devalue the experiences of racial minority groups. For example, statements like “all lives matter” during the Black Lives Matter movement sought to invalidate Black Americans’ experience of constant oppression and violence in the United States. Studies have found that the stress caused by microaggressions impacts marginalized individuals’ physiological and psychological well-being and affects their performance at work, school, and in their relationships. The subtle nature of microaggressions causes targeted individuals to spend a significant amount of time and mental energy trying to decipher if it was an intentional act of discrimination and how to react. Microaggressions often create a catch-22 scenario for affected individuals. By addressing microaggressions at work, women risk being labeled as “sensitive” or “less capable” than their male counterparts. However, forgoing the slight can have a detrimental effect on self-confidence, work performance, and career paths.

Leadership and Employment: Gender and Racial Disparities White males have primarily held leadership positions and are idealized as possessing the traits of a great leader by which leaders from other groups are measured. A meta-analysis of 69 studies revealed that leadership is closely tied to masculinity traits such as being loud, competitive, forceful, and assertive. Therefore, Whiteness and masculinity have been historically associated with leadership. Those who do not meet these leadership standards confront challenges as they attempt to shift the mindset of being a leader. Often male leaders who are not White confront the “problem of the color line,” where they experience pushback and objections more frequently than white male leaders. For the first 20 years of the 21st century, limited studies have explored the relationship between gender, race, and leadership. Women in leadership positions face different challenges. White female leaders are perceived as

504

Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership

angry or incompetent if they display similar leadership behaviors as white males. However, women of color experience those same challenges and additional hardships due to their color. Race and gender are commodified in systems of colonialism and patriarchal capitalism. Historically, women of color are perceived as less valuable than white women. Structural inequalities coupled with racialized stereotypes heighten the perception of women of color as hypersexual, deviant, unintelligent, and unstable. Latinx women are stereotyped as unintelligent and prone to hyper-reproduction of children. Asian women, although perceived as highly competent, encounter the “bamboo ceiling” when striving for leadership positions, stereotyped as submissive and lacking leadership capabilities. Black women in leadership positions are perceived as dominant and sexual. According to Ashleigh Rosette and her colleagues, these stereotypes serve to “reject job applicants with intersectional identities, limit their advancement, prevent them from receiving various forms of support, isolate them into their own social circles or individual struggles, and exacerbate the organizational detachment” (Rosette, de Leon, Koval, & Harrison, 2018). The media also perpetuates stereotypes and affects women’s ability to access and maintain positions of power and leadership. Media stereotypes and images are often unchallenged, as those who are marginalized are either not given the opportunity or lack the societal power to counter these perceptions. For example, the famous 1915 film Birth of a Nation normalizes racist behavior and socially unequal constructs. Those within hegemonic film leadership positions determine the storyline and continue the dominant ingroup narrative. Melissa B. Littlefield highlights that the media create narratives that influence our perceptions and beliefs, which fosters change in behavior. Reflected in the roles actors are assigned, mass media reinforces stereotypical perceptions of race, gender, and leadership. Seldom are women of color in leadership positions or portrayed as equipped and capable, although research on women leaders of color suggests otherwise. The limited leadership positions held by women and men of color in film and media are also mirrored within the workforce. As of 2018, only

34% of women hold director positions, and only 8% are women of color. These percentages decrease when exploring higher ranking positions such as senior vice president (SVP) roles; only 4% of women of color hold SVP positions, whereas White women hold 19% of these positions. In contrast, the percentage of women of color in entry-level positions is much higher than in leadership roles; individuals of color are likely to work in lower-than-average income positions. Within the field of education, white men primarily hold leadership positions. In higher education, tenured professors or high-level administrators are predominantly men, while the representation of women in these positions is limited. In K-12 education, white men also primarily hold high-ranking positions such as principals or superintendents. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted these employment disparities. Many white women and women of color exited the workforce during the pandemic due to job loss or loss of childcare. Within the first few months of the pandemic, one in 10 women lost their job, including one in six Black women and one in five Latinx women. Though women slowly began to reenter the workforce amid the pandemic, full-time job opportunities for women of color were limited. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, 39% of Latinx women, 37% of Asian women, and 31% of Black women returned to work part-time. Additionally, many who continued to work throughout the pandemic held high-risk, essential-worker positions. Floyd D. Beachum, Tashina Lenai Khabbaz, and Yalitza Corcino-Davis See also Civil Rights Movement; Feminine Mystique; History; Leading Diversity; Liberalism and Toleration

Further Readings Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. doi:10.2307/1229039 Jean-Marie, G. (2006). Welcoming the unwelcomed: A social justice imperative of African-American female leaders at historically black colleges and universities. Educational Foundations, 20(1–2), 85–104.

Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership Kendi, I. X. (2017). Stamped from the beginning: A history of racist ideas. New York, NY: Bold Type Books. Koenig, A. M., Eagly, A. H., Mitchell, A. A., & Ristikari, T. (2011). Are leader stereotypes masculine? A meta-analysis of three research paradigms. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 616–642. Liu, H., & Baker, C. (2016). White knight: Leadership as the heroicisation of whiteness. Leadership, 12(4), 420–448. doi:10.1177/1742715014565127 Mezey, N. (1994). Legal radicals in Madonna’s closet: The influence of identity politics, popular culture, and a new generation on critical legal studies. Stanford Law Review, 46(6), 1835–1861. doi:10. 2307/1229172 Remedios, J. D., & Snyder, S. H. (2015). How women of color detect and respond to multiple forms of prejudice. Sex Roles, 73(9), 371–383. doi:10.1007/s11199-0150453-5

505

Rosette, A. S., de Leon, R. P., Koval, C. Z., & Harrison, D. A. (2018). Intersectionality: Connecting experiences of gender with race at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 38, 1–22. doi:10.1016/j.riob. 2018.12.002 Sanchez-Hucles, J. V., & Davis, D. D. (2010). Women and women of color in leadership: Complexity, identity, and intersectionality. American Psychologist, 65(3), 171. doi:10.1037/a0017459 Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact. (D. W. Sue, Ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Watkins, N. L., LaBarrie, T. L., & Appio, L. M. (2010). Black undergraduates’ experiences with perceived racial microaggressions in predominantly white colleges and universities. In D. W. Sue (Ed.), Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact (pp. 25–57). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Leadership Studies

Editorial Board Editors George R. Goethals University of Richmond Scott T. Allison University of Richmond Georgia J. Sorenson University of Cambridge

Associate Editors James K. Beggan University of Louisville Kristin M. S. Bezio University of Richmond Ronald E. Riggio Claremont McKenna College

Editorial Board Joanne Ciulla Rutgers University

Julian Maxwell Hayter University of Richmond

David L. Collinson Lancaster University

Gill Robinson Hickman University of Richmond

Nurcan Ensari Alliant International University

Crystal L. Hoyt University of Richmond

Jessica Flanigan University of Richmond

Christopher von Rueden University of Richmond

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

Leadership Studies 2 Edited by George R. Goethals University of Richmond

Scott T. Allison University of Richmond

Georgia J. Sorenson University of Cambridge

Copyright © 2023 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

FOR INFORMATION: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044

All trade names and trademarks recited, referenced, or reflected herein are the property of their respective owners who retain all rights thereto. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goethals, George R., editor. | Allison, Scott T., editor. | Sorenson, Georgia Jones, editor. Title: The Sage encyclopedia of leadership studies / edited by George R. Goethals, University of Richmond, Scott T. Allison, University of Richmond, Georgia J. Sorenson, University of Cambridge.

India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 18 Cross Street #10-10/11/12 China Square Central Singapore 048423

Description: Thousand Oaks, Calif. : SAGE, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Leadership Studies is a multi-disciplinary academic exploration of the various aspects of how people get along, and how together they get things done. The fields that contribute to leadership studies include history, political science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and behavioral economics. Leadership Studies is also about the ethical dimensions of human behavior. The discipline considers what leadership has been in the past (the historical view), what leadership actually looks like in the present (principally from the perspectives of the behavioral sciences and political science), and what leadership should be (the ethical perspective). The SAGE Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies will present both key concepts and research illuminating leadership and many of the most important events in human history that reveal the nuances of leadership, good and bad. Entries will include topics such as power, charisma, identity, persuasion, personality, social intelligence, gender, justice, unconscious conceptions of leadership, leader-follower relationships, and moral transformation”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023000513 | ISBN 9781071840849 (hardcover ; 2 volume set) | ISBN 9781071840832 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781071840825 (epub) | ISBN 9781071840818 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Leadership–Encyclopedias.

Acquisitions Editor: Andrew Boney Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Hernandez ´ Developmental Editor: Sanford J. Robinson Production Editor: Vijayakumar Copy Editor: Christobel Colleen Hopman Typesetter: TNQ Technologies

Classification: LCC HM1261 .S3448 2023 | DDC 303.3/7203–dc23/ eng/20230110 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000513 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Proofreader: Benny Willy Stephen Indexer: TNQ Technologies Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Victoria Velasquez

23 24 25 26 27 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Volume 2 List of Entries

vii

Reader’s Guide

xi

Entries L M N O P R

507 603 663 681 689 781

Index

S T U V W 1017

827 915 963 967 981

List of Entries Ableism Accountability Actor–Network Theory Adam Smith and Leadership Adaptive Leadership Aesthetic Leadership Age and Leadership Alienation Altruism Appearance ¨ and Turkish Transformation Ataturk Authentic Leadership Autocratic Leadership

Collective Action Collective Intelligence Collective Leadership Collective Responsibility Communication Community Leadership Community Wealth Building Complexity Leadership Theory Conformity Confucian Ethics Congressional Leadership Connective Leadership Conspiracy Theories Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Contingency Theories Cooperation Corporate Social Responsibility COVID-19 Pandemic Creativity Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Criminal Law Crisis Leadership Critical Leadership Studies Critical Race Theory Cuban Missile Crisis Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education

Bad Leadership Bathsheba Syndrome Behavioral Economics Behavioral Theories of Leadership Big Five Personality Traits Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Biology of Leadership Black Lives Matter and Leadership Board Leadership Bureaucracy Caring Leadership CEO Hubris Change and Leadership Charismatic Leadership Charismatic Theory CIP Model of Leadership Civil Rights Movement Climate Change and Leadership Coalitions Coercive Management Cognitive Biases in Leadership Cognitive Dissonance Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles

Daoist Moral Obligations Dark Triad Death Positivity Bias and Leadership Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Decision-Making Theory Democratic Leadership Deontology and Rights Destructive Leadership Dirty Hands Disagreement, Ethics of

vii

viii

List of Entries

Discourse Ethics Distributed Leadership Distributive Egalitarianism Diversity Diversity Ideologies Dominance and Prestige Economic Justice Economic Recovery and Leadership Educational Attainment Educational Leadership Effective Leadership and Selflessness Effects of Power E-Leadership Embodied Leadership Emotion and Leadership Emotional Intelligence Empathic Leadership Employee Rights Empowerment Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing Entrepreneurship Ethical Consumerism Ethical Leadership Ethics and Effectiveness Evolution of Inequality Evolutionary Leadership Theory Executive Compensation Exemplary Leadership Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society Film, Television, and Social Change Followership Foucault and Postmodernism Foundational Lawgiving Full Range Leadership Theory Gender Stereotypes Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Global Business Leadership Global Leadership Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership GLOBE 2020 GLOBE Research Program Group Effectiveness Group Norms Group Process

Group Satisfaction Groupthink Health Psychology and Leadership Health, Well-Being, and Leadership Heroic Leadership Higher Education History Human Trafficking Humane Education Humility Humor Idiosyncrasy Credit Idiosyncratic Deals Implicit Leadership Theories Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Indigenous International Diplomacy Influence Tactics for Leaders Innovation Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army Instrumental Leadership Intelligences Intelligent Disobedience Intergroup Processes International Leadership Association Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership Labeling Theory Language and Leadership Leader Emergence and Performance Leader Exceptionalism Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leader Self-Efficacy Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Personal Crisis Leaders’ Stories Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions Leadership and Empathy on the Screen Leadership and Management Leadership and US International Relations Leadership Development Leadership for the Common Good Leadership in Children and Adolescents Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals

List of Entries

Leadership in Science Leadership in Violence Prevention Leading Diversity Leading From Below LGBTQ1 Social Movements Liberal Tradition, The Liberalism and Toleration Literature Majority and Minority Influence Manhattan Project Marketing Leadership Me Too Movement Men and Masculinities Military Leadership Mindful Leadership Monetary Policy Moral Character Moral Imagination Moral Language Moral Pluralism Moral Risk Motional Intelligence Multiculturalism, Ethics of Multiple Roles of Leaders Mutiny Narcissistic Leadership Networks and Networked Organizations Neuroscience Nonprofit Leadership Nostalgia and Leadership Obedience Organizational Leadership Panama Canal Treaties Paradoxes of Leadership Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks Path–Goal Theory Patriarchy and Its Origins Pearl Harbor Speech Persuasion Philosophy and Leadership Plutarch Political Identities Political Leadership Political Leadership and Historical Memory

ix

Political Obligation Power and Culture Power and Powerlessness Presidential Leadership Pride and the Psychology of Prestige Procedural Justice Property-Owning Democracy Prosocial Behavior Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership Prozac Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Reconstructive Presidents Regulating Private Sector Leadership Religion and Leadership Religious Disagreement Resilient Leadership Resonant Leadership Responsible Leadership Rhetoric Rhetoric and Persuasion Romance of Heroism Romance of Leadership Rosy Halo and Power Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Self-Leadership September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership Servant Leadership Service Innovation Service-For-Prestige Theory of Leadership Sexual Harassment Sexual Identity Sexuality Shared Leadership Situational Leadership Skills Social Change Social Identities Social Identity Theory Social Media Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics Sports State Aggression Stereotype Threat Strategic Leadership

x

List of Entries

Student Development Sustainability Systems Thinking Task and Socioemotional Leadership Teacher Leadership Team Leadership Terror Management Theory Theater and Leadership Toxic Leadership Trait Theories of Leadership Transactional and Transformational Synergies Transformational and Transactional Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Trauma Trolley Problem Trust

Unintended Consequences of Leadership Theories Virtual Leadership Virtues Visual Arts Voting Rights Act Warmth and Competence Weber on Charisma Wellness White Privilege Wicked Problems Women and Men as Leaders Women’s Movement Women’s Values Workplace Democracy Wrongful Conviction

Reader’s Guide Case Studies

Service Innovation Sexual Harassment Sexuality Social Media Sports Student Development Sustainability Teaching Leadership Team Leadership Theater and Leadership Trauma Trolley Problem Virtual Leadership Voting Rights Act Wellness Wicked Problems Women’s Movement Women’s Values Workplace Democracy Wrongful Convictions

¨ and Turkish Transformation Ataturk Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Black Lives Matter Civil Rights Movement Climate Change COVID-19 Pandemic Cuban Missile Crisis GLOBE Research Program Human Trafficking Indigenous International Diplomacy Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leadership and Empathy on the Screen Leadership and US International Relations Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Science Leadership in Violence Prevention LGBTQ1 Social Movements Literature Manhattan Project Me Too Movement Military Leadership Monetary Policy Mutiny Neuroscience Nonprofit Leadership Panama Canal Treaties Pearl Harbor Speech Philosophy and Leadership Plutarch Political Leadership Presidential Leadership Property-Owning Democracy Race and Ethnicity Reconstructive Presidents Religion Rhetoric September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership

Concepts

Accountability Adaptive Leadership Aesthetic Leadership Alienation Altruism Authentic Leadership Bathsheba Syndrome Big Five Personality Traits Caring Leadership Change and Leadership Charismatic Leadership Cognitive Biases in Leadership Cognitive Dissonance Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles Collective Intelligence Collective Responsibility

xi

xii

Reader’s Guide

Complexity Leadership Theory Conformity Connective Leadership Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Contingency Theories Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Critical Leadership Studies Critical Race Theory Death Positivity Bias and Leadership Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Democratic Leadership Deontology and Rights Dirty Hands Discourse Ethics? Distributed Egalitarianism Diversity Ideologies Effective Leadership and Selflessness Effects of Power Embodied Leadership Emotion and Leadership Emotional Intelligence Empathic Leadership Empowerment Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing Evolution of Leadership Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Followership Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership Group Effectiveness Group Norms Group Process Group Satisfaction Groupthink Health Psychology and Leadership Heroic Leadership Humility Humor Idiosyncrasy Credit Implicit Leadership Theories Inclusive Leadership Influence Tactics for Leaders Innovation Instrumental Leadership Intelligences Intelligent Disobedience Language and Leadership Leader Emergence and Performance

Leader Self-Efficacy Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Personal Crisis Leaders’ Stories Leadership Development Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Leading From Below Majority and Minority Influence Mindful Leadership Moral Pluralism Motional Intelligence Multiple Roles of Leaders Narcissistic Leadership Networks and Networked Organizations Obedience Paradoxes of Leadership Path–Goal Theory Political Leadership and Historical Memory Power and Powerlessness Presidential Leadership Procedural Justice Prozac Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Reconstructive Presidents Resonant Leadership Rhetoric and Persuasion Romance of Leadership Rosy Halo and Power Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Self-Leadership Servant Leadership Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership Shared Leadership Situational Leadership Social Identities Stereotype Threat Strategic Leadership Systems Theory Task and Socioemotional Leadership Terror Management Theory Toxic Leadership Transactional and Transformational Synergies Transformational and Transactional Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Trust Unintended Consequences Virtual Leadership

Reader’s Guide

Warmth and Competence Weber on Charisma Wicked Problems Women and Men as Leaders Cross-Cultural Influences

Confucian Ethics COVID-19 Pandemic Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education Daoist Moral Obligations Diversity Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society Film, Television, and Social Change Gender Stereotypes Global Business Leadership Global Leadership Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership GLOBE Research Program GLOBE 2020 History Indigenous International Diplomacy Institutional Structure Versus Culture in the Army Intergroup Processes Panama Canal Treaties Patriarchy and Its Origins Power and Culture State Aggression White Privilege Women’s Values Ethics

Adam Smith and Leadership Bathsheba Syndrome CEO Hubris Coercive Management Collective Responsibility Confucian Ethics Cooperation Corporate Social Responsibility Daoist Moral Obligations Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Deontology and Rights Dirty Hands Disagreement, Ethics of Discourse Ethics Distributive Egalitarianism

Economic Justice Employee Rights Ethical Consumerism Ethical Leadership Ethics and Effectiveness Evolution of Inequality Executive Compensation Feminism Foucault and Postmodernism Humane Education Idiosyncratic Deals Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Leader Exceptionalism Leadership in Children and Adolescents Moral Character Moral Imagination Moral Language Moral Pluralism Moral Risk Multiculturalism, Ethics of Political Obligation Procedural Justice Prosocial Behavior Racial Disparities Regulating Private Sector Leaders Religious Disagreement Responsible Leadership Sexual Harassment Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics Sustainability Trolley Problem Trust Virtues Wellness Workplace Democracy Wrongful Convictions Evolutionary Approaches

Altruism Biology of Leadership Charismatic Leadership Collective Action Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Dominance and Prestige Effects of Power Embodied Leadership Emotion and Leadership

xiii

xiv

Reader’s Guide

Evolution of Inequality Evolutionary Leadership Theory Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Liberal Tradition, The Liberalism and Toleration Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context Patriarchy and Its Origins Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership Women and Men as Leaders Followers

Accountability Actor–Network Theory Alienation Change and Leadership Charismatic Leadership Theory Cognitive Biases in Leadership Cognitive Dissonance Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles Collective Intelligence Communication Community Leadership Community Wealth Building Conformity Conspiracy Theories Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Cooperation Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles Death Positivity Bias Democratic Leadership Distributed Leadership Dominance and Prestige Educational Attainment Emotion and Leadership Employee Rights Empowerment Film and Leaders in Politics, Sports, and Society Film, Television, and Social Change Followership Foucault and Postmodernism Group Satisfaction Health and Well-Being Health Psychology and Leadership Humor Idiosyncrasy Credit

Implicit Leadership Theories Intelligent Disobedience Intergroup Processes Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions Leaders’ Stories Leadership in Dogs Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Leading From Below Majority and Minority Influence Multiple Roles of Leaders Networks and Networked Organizations Obedience Persuasion Political Identities Political Leadership and Historical Memory Power and Powerlessness Procedural Justice Prozac Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Rhetoric Rhetoric and Persuasion Romance of Leadership Rosy Halo and Power Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Sexual Identities Social Identity Theory Transactional and Transformational Synergies Organizations

Accountability Board Leadership Bureaucracy CEO Hubris Coalitions Collective Action Collective Leadership Community Leadership Community Wealth Building Congressional Leadership Corporate Social Responsibility Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Critical Leadership Studies Decision-Making Theory Diversity

Reader’s Guide

Economic Recovery and Leadership Educational Leadership Employee Rights Entrepreneurship Ethics and Effectiveness Executive Compensation Foundational Lawgiving Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Global Business Leadership Global Leadership Group Effectiveness Group Norms Group Process Group Satisfaction Groupthink Higher Education Humor Idiosyncratic Deals Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Influence Tactics for Leaders Innovation Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army Instrumental Leadership Intelligent Disobedience International Leadership Association Leader Emergence and Performance Leadership and Management Leadership Development Manhattan Project Marketing Leadership Military Leadership Multiple Roles of Leaders Networks and Networked Organizations Nonprofit Leadership Organizational Leadership Property-Owning Democracy Regulating Private-Sector Leadership Resonant Leadership Service Innovation Shared Leadership Situational Leadership Social Media Sports Strategic Leadership Student Development Systems Theory Team Leadership Theater and Leadership

Unintended Consequences Wicked Problems Wrongful Convictions Personal Qualities

Age and Leadership Appearance Bad Leadership Big Five Personality Traits CEO Hubris Charismatic Leadership Charismatic Theory Collapsing Toxic Triangles Communication Creativity Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership Crisis Leadership Dark Triad Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Democratic Leadership Destructive Leadership Dominance and Prestige Effective Leadership Emotion and Leadership Emotional Intelligence Empathic Leadership Ethical Leadership Evolution of Leadership Exemplary Leadership Gender and Leadership Groupthink Health and Well-Being Health Psychology and Leadership Heroic Leadership Humility Intelligences Leader Self-Efficacy Leaders’ Personal Crisis Men and Masculinities Mindful Leadership Moral Character Moral Imagination Motional Intelligence Narcissistic Leadership Pride and the Psychology of Prestige Resilient Leadership Responsible Leadership Self-Leadership

xv

xvi

Reader’s Guide

Servant Leadership Sexual Identity Skills Task and Socioemotional Leadership Team Leadership Trait Theories of Leadership Transformational and Transactional Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Trust Warmth and Competence Weber on Charisma Political Leadership

Adam Smith and Leadership Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Change and Leadership Civil Rights Movement Climate Change and Leadership Collective Leadership Collective Responsibility Congressional Leadership Conspiracy Theories Criminal Law Crisis Leadership Cuban Missile Crisis Democratic Leadership Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership Indigenous International Diplomacy Leadership and US International Relations Leadership for the Common Good Leading Diversity LGBTQ1 Social Movements Liberalism and Toleration Monetary Policy Moral Pluralism Multiculturalism, Ethics of Panama Canal Treaties Pearl Harbor Speech Plutarch Political Identities Political Leadership Political Leadership and Historical Memory Political Obligation Presidential Leadership Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Reconstructive Presidents

Religious Disagreement Rhetoric Rhetoric and Persuasion September 11 Terrorist Attacks Social Media State Aggression Terror Management Theory Voting Rights Act Weber on Charisma Women’s Movement Power

Autocratic Leadership Bureaucracy CEO Hubris Change and Leadership Civil Rights Movement Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Feminine Mystique, The Foucault and Postmodernism Foundational Lawgiving Influence Tactics for Leaders Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leader–Follower Relationships Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions Leading from Below Majority and Minority Influence Moral Character Mutiny Persuasion Political Obligation Power and Culture Power and Powerlessness Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Rhetoric and Persuasion Rosy Halo and Power Toxic Leadership White Privilege Situations and Contexts

Age and Leadership Board Leadership Bureaucracy Collective Action Community Leadership

Reader’s Guide

Congressional Leadership Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences Contingency Theories COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis Leadership Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education Economic Justice Economic Recovery and Leadership Educational Attainment Educational Leadership E-Leadership Higher Education History Humane Education Humility Institutional Culture Versus Structure in the Army Instrumental Leadership Leader Manipulation in Warfare Leadership and Management Leadership and US International Relations Leadership in Children and Adolescents Leadership in Violence Prevention Manhattan Project Military Leadership Mutiny Networks and Networked Organizations Organizational Leadership Personal Crisis and Leadership Regulating Private-Sector Leadership Service Innovation Situational Leadership Social Change Sports Teaching Leadership Team Leadership Theater and Leadership Trauma Virtual Leadership Visual Arts Wicked Problems Workplace Democracy Wrongful Convictions Social Justice

Ableism Big Six of Civil Rights Movement Black Lives Matter and Leadership Change and Leadership

Civil Rights Movement Climate Change Coercive Management Collective Responsibility Communication Community Wealth Building COVID-19 Pandemic Critical Race Theory Deception and Manipulation, Ethics of Disagreement, Ethics of Distributive Egalitarianism Diversity Diversity Ideologies Economic Justice Educational Attainment Employee Rights Ethical Consumerism Executive Compensation Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Foucault and Postmodernism Gender Stereotypes Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Health and Well-Being Health Psychology and Leadership Human Trafficking Humane Education Inclusive Leadership Income Inequality Intersectionality: Race and Gender Labeling Theory Leadership for the Common Good Leadership in Children and Adolescents Leadership in Violence Prevention Leading Diversity LGBTQ1 Social Movements Liberalism and Toleration Me Too Movement Men and Masculinities Multiculturalism, Ethics of Nonprofit Leadership Power and Culture Property-Owning Democracy Prosocial Behavior Race and Ethnicity Racial Disparities Regulating Private-Sector Leaders Relativism Rights

xvii

xviii

Reader’s Guide

Sexual Harassment Sexual Identity Special Obligations Stereotype Threat Stonewall Rebellion Virtues Wellness White Privilege Women and Men as Leaders Wrongful Convictions Styles

Aesthetic Leadership Authentic Leadership Autocratic leadership Caring Leadership Charismatic Leadership Charismatic Theory Caring Leadership Coercion and Power Democratic Leadership Destructive Leadership Effective Leadership and Selflessness E-Leadership Empathic Leadership Empowerment Ethical Leadership Exemplary Leadership Foundational Lawgiving Heroic Leadership Humor Innovation Language and Leadership Leadership and Empathy on the Screen Narcissistic Leadership Organizational Leadership Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks Procedural Justice Prozac Leadership Resilient Leadership Resonant Leadership Responsible Leadership Servant Leadership Skills Social Change Sustainability Task and Socioemotional Leadership Toxic Leadership

Trait Theories of Leadership Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Theories

Actor–Network Theory Adaptive Leadership Authentic Leadership Behavioral Theories of Leadership Big Five Personality Traits Caring Leadership CIP Model of Leadership Charismatic Theory Cognitive Dissonance Theory Complexity Leadership Theory Connective Leadership Conspiracy Theories Contingency Theories Critical Leadership Studies Decision-Making Theory Emotional Intelligence Endogeneity and Endogenous Theorizing Evolution of Leadership Followership Full Range Leadership Theory Groupthink Implicit Leadership Theories Influence Tactics for Leaders Intelligences Labeling Theory Leader–Follower Relationships Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Leaders’ Personal Crisis Liberal Tradition, The Path–Goal Theory Persuasion Political Leadership Proximate and Ultimate Approaches to Leadership Purpose and Invisible Leadership Romance of Leadership Reconstructive Leadership Romances of Leadership and heroism Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models Servant Leadership Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership Social Identity Theory Strategic Leadership Systems Theory

Reader’s Guide

Terror Management Theory Trait Theories of Leadership Transformational and Transactional Synergies Transformational Leadership Transforming Leadership Women and Gender

Cognitive Biases in Leadership Diversity Diversity Ideologies

Executive Compensation Feminine Mystique, The Feminism Gender Stereotypes Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth Inclusive Leadership Intersectionality: Race and Gender Leading Diversity LGBTQ1 Social Movements Me Too Movement

Men and Masculinities Patriarchy and Its Origins Sexual Harassment Sexual Identity Sexuality Social Identities Women and Men as Leaders Women’s Movement Women’s Values

xix

Contributors Ogechi Adele Princeton University

Bradford S. Bell Cornell University

Melissa Carsten Winthrop University

Scott T. Allison University of Richmond

Kristin M. S. Bezio University of Richmond

David R. Caruso Yale University

Miguel Alzola Fordham University

Michelle C. Bligh Claremont Graduate University

Sarah Chace Christopher Newport University

Julie R. Ancis New Jersey Institute of Technology

Kimberly B. Boal Texas Tech University

Ira Chaleff International Leadership Association

John Antonakis University of Lausanne, Switzerland Peter Atkinson University of Roehampton, United Kingdom Roya Ayman Illinois Institute of Technology

Kathleen R. Bogart Oregon State University Richard Bolden University of Exeter Business School, United Kingdom Richard E. Boyatzis Case Western Reserve University

Henry L. Chambers, Jr. University of Richmond G. Donald Chandler, III Williams College Joey T. Cheng York University, Canada

Stewart Braun Australian Catholic University

Cynthia Cherrey International Leadership Association

Brookes Brown Clemson University

Kevin M. Cherry University of Richmond

Alexandra Sidney Bullock Illinois Institute of Technology

Stephanie Chitpin University of Ottawa, Canada

Amanda Bullough University of Delaware

Volha Chykina University of Richmond

S. Gayle Baugh University of West Florida

Athena Cairo Virginia Commonwealth University

Joanne B. Ciulla Rutgers University

Floyd D. Beachum Lehigh University

Jessie A. Cannon Independent Scholar

James K. Beggan University of Louisville

Linda L. Carli Wellesley College

John P. Baker Western Kentucky University Michael L. Barnett Rutgers Business School Timothy Barney University of Richmond Nicolas Bastardoz KU Leuven, Belgium

xx

Marilie Coetsee University of Richmond David L. Collinson Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Contributors

xxi

Crystal Wright Colter Maryville College

Angelo DiBello Rutgers University

Susan T. Fiske Princeton University

Chris Comerford University of Wollongong, Australia

Nancy DiTomaso Rutgers Business School-

Jessica Flanigan University of Richmond

Daniela G. Dominguez University of San Francisco

John W. Fleenor Center for Creative Leadership

William Donaldson Christopher Newport University

Kerrie Fleming Hult International Business School

Jay A. Conger Claremont McKenna College Shane Connelly University of Oklahoma Noshir Contractor Northwestern University

Peter W. Dorfman New Mexico State University

Roseanne J. Foti Virginia Tech

Yalitza Corcino-Davis Independent Scholar

Wim Dubbink Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Rick Cotton University of Victoria, Canada

Patrick K. Durkee University of Texas at Austin

Richard Coughlan University of Richmond

Alice H. Eagly Northwestern University

Thomas E. Cronin President Emeritus, Whitman College

Gareth Edwards University of the West of England, United Kingdom

Dean Croushore University of Richmond

Yasmine Elfeki Virginia Tech

Cynthia M. Ganote University of Louisville

Brent Edwin Cusher Christopher Newport University

Ashley Emami Veterans Administration San Diego Healthcare System

William L. Gardner Texas Tech University

Monti Narayan Datta University of Richmond Ryan W. Davis Brigham Young University David V. Day Claremont McKenna College Angelo DeBello Rutgers University Leslie DeChurch Northwestern University Vlad Demsar Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Alain de Sales University of Queensland, Australia

Samantha E. England Independent Scholar Nurcan Ensari Alliant International University Nathan Eva Monash Business School, Australia Elizabeth Faier Independent Scholar Steven Fein Williams College Alexandra Figueroa Anderson Independent Scholar Thomas Fischer University of Geneva, Switzerland

John D. Foubert Union University Angelique Fu Alliance Manchester Business School, United Kingdom Mel Fugate Mississippi State University Adam D. Galinsky Columbia Business School

Mia Reinoso Genoni University of Richmond Michael A. Genovese, Jr. Loyola Marymount University Camille Gibson Prairie View A&M University George R. Goethals University of Richmond Jamie L. Goodwin Wheaton College Jesse Graham University of Utah Nicola Graham-Kevan University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom

xxii

Contributors

Tricia Gray University of Louisville

Julian Maxwell Hayter University of Richmond

Philippe Jacquart EM Lyon, France

Jeffrey D. Green Virginia Commonwealth University

Lisa Collier Hazelgrove University of Richmond

Sana Jarva Williams College

Druann M. Heckert Fayetteville State University

Mansour Javidan Thunderbird School of Global Management

Keith Grint Warwick University, United Kingdom Peter Gronn Monash University, Australia Carlos Guevara Mann Florida State University Julianne Guillard Virginia Commonwealth University ¨ Seval Gundemir University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Ann C. Hale University of Louisville Sara Hanson University of Richmond John P. Hardt University of Richmond Michael Hardy Coventry University, United Kingdom

Mattie V. Hedgebeth Independent Scholar William B. Heller Binghamton University Lauren Nicole Henley University of Richmond Gill Robinson Hickman University of Richmond Javier S. Hidalgo University of Richmond Amanda S. Hinojosa Howard University Violet T. Ho University of Richmond Kristy Lee Hochenberger Syracuse University Dorothy J. Holland University of Richmond Jeffrey D. Houghton West Virginia University

P. D. Harms University of Alabama

Crystal L. Hoyt University of Richmond

Ashley Harrell Duke University

Ronald H. Humphrey Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Maura Jaye Harrington Center for Nonprofit Management

Samuel T. Hunter Pennsylvania State University

Nathan W. Harter Christopher Newport University

Muzammil Hussain Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Haley A. Harwell University of Richmond

Kadia Nichelle Hylton-Fraser Lehigh University

Jeffrey K. Hass University of Richmond

Dana R. Jackson University of Richmond

Stefanie K. Johnson Leeds School of Business Jen Jones Seton Hill University Owain Smolovi´c Jones The Open University, United Kingdom Hrishikesh Joshi Bowling Green State University Kathryn E. Joyce Princeton University Surinder S. Kahai Binghamton University Devorah Kalekin-Fishman University of Haifa, Israel Jeannine Keefer University of Richmond Louise Kelly University of La Verne Ilan Kelman Independent Scholar Christine Kershaw University of Alberta, Canada Tashina Lenai Khabbaz Independent Scholar Grace J. Kim Independent Scholar Kathryn Kincaid University of Alberta, Canada Ewan Kingston College of Charleston

Contributors

Margaret A. Kneuer Virginia Commonwealth University

Kendra Lowery Ball State University

Joseph McManus Monmouth University

David Ludden Georgia Gwinnett College

Eric J. McNulty Harvard University

Karen P. Kochel University of Richmond

Aaron L. Lukaszewski California State University Fullerton

M. Saif Mekhari University of Richmond

Daryl Koehn DePaul University

Alina Lungeanu Northwestern University

James M. Kouzes Santa Clara University

Tuan Luu Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Laura E. Knouse University of Richmond

Medha Satish Kumar Simon Fraser University, Canada Donna Ladkin Antioch University Roshni T. Ladny Florida Gulf Coast University Gary Lambert Independent Scholar Kelly Lambert University of Richmond Lasse Laustsen Aarhus University, Denmark Zhen Liang DePaul University Jimmy Alfonso Licon George Mason University

Karryna Madison Monash Business School, Australia Joe C. Magee New York University Jon Mahoney Kansas State University Timothy Marjoribanks Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Mollie C. Marr Oregon Health & Science University Ashley Martin Stanford University

xxiii

Chao Miao Salisbury University Carrie Mier Indiana University East Joanne M. Miller University of Delaware Jeffrey Moriarty Bentley University Robert F. Mulligan Western Carolina University Michael D. Mumford The University of Oklahoma Susan E. Murphy University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Alireza Nazarian University of Westminster, United Kingdom Linda L. Neider Herbert School of Business, University of Miami

Hugh Liebert United States Military Academy

Robin Martin University of Manchester, United Kingdom

E. Allan Lind Duke University

´ M. Mattison Siobhan University of New Mexico

Jean Lipman-Blumen Connective Leadership Institute

Kelly Davis McCauley West Texas A&M University

Sirio Lonati NEOMA Business School, France

Carlos R. McCray Montclair State University

Toby Newstead University of Tasmania, Australia

Anthony C. Lopez Washington State University

Rose McDermott Brown University

Thao P. H. Nguyen Independent Scholar

Patricia Denise Lopez Alliant International University

Sarah G. McGinn Williams College

Camilla W. Nonterah University of Richmond

Robert G. Lord Durham University Business School

Rory McGovern United States Military Academy

Lesley D. O’Brien Virginia Commonwealth University

Maike Neuhaus The University of Queensland, Australia Tanner R. Newbold The University of Oklahoma

xxiv

Contributors

Lynn R. Offermann George Washington University ¨ Anders Ortenblad University of Agder, Norway Patrick Gavan O’Shea Human Resources Research Organization Jennifer R. Overbeck Melbourne Business School, Australia

Michael E. Price Brunel University London, United Kingdom Terry L. Price University of Richmond Jonathan T. Pryor California State University, Fresno Shanshan Qian Towson University

Daniel J. Palazzolo University of Richmond

David E. Rast, III University of Alberta, Canada

Andrew Parker University of the West of England, United Kingdom

Heidi Reeder Boise State University

Craig D. Parks Washington State University

Christopher S. Reina Virginia Commonwealth University

John M. Parrish Loyola Marymount University

Ronald E. Riggio Claremont McKenna College

Craig L. Pearce Pennsylvania State University

Jill Robinson University of Redlands

Robert M. Pearl Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Graduate School of Business

Madison R. Romero George Washington University

Kathie L. Pelletier California State University, San Bernardino Jethro Pettit Institute of Development Studies Meghan L. Pickett Illinois Institute of Technology Emily F. Plackowski Independent Scholar Alicia Plemmons Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Barry Z. Posner Santa Clara University Teresa Preddy Independent Scholar

Kenneth P. Ruscio University of Richmond Thomas R. Rutledge University of California San Diego Tess Ryan Australian Catholic University Abbey L. Salvas George Washington University Charles D. Samuelson University of Oslo, Norway Katina B. Sawyer The George Washington University

Jan Schilling University of Applied Administrative Sciences, Germany Chester A. Schriesheim Miami Herbert School of Business David A. Schroeder University of Arkansas Birgit Schyns NEOMA Business School, France Trevor Shelley Arizona State University Shavonne R. Shorter Bloomsburg University Erling Sjovold University of Richmond Stephen Skowronek Yale University Eric Alden Smith University of Washington Jennifer E. Smith Mills College Robert Smither Rollins College Sheldon Solomon Skidmore College Bert A. Spector Northeastern University Bob Spires University of Richmond Brian R. Spisak Harvard University Anthony Stahelski Central Washington University

Tobey Scharding Rutgers University

Allan C. Stam University of Virginia

Doris Schedlitzki London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

Ute Stephan King’s College London, United Kingdom

Contributors

Robert J. Sternberg Cornell University

Maria Tomprou Carnegie Mellon University

Holly White University of Michigan

Patrick A. Stewart University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Stephen P. Turner University of South Florida

Jonathan B. Wight University of Richmond

Mary Uhl-Bien Texas Christian University

David Wilkins University of Richmond

Don Vinson University of Worcester, United Kingdom

Mason B. Williams Williams College

Steven N. Stroessner University of California, Los Angeles Mary E. Stuckey Pennsylvania State University Mary Sully de Luque Arizona State University

Mark Van Vugt Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

xxv

Thad Williamson University of Richmond

Christian Voegtlin Audencia Business School, France

Samuel G. Wilson Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Christopher von Rueden University of Richmond

Suze Wilson Massey University, New Zealand

Chao (Mavis) Tang University of North Texas

Christina L. Wassenaar University of South Alabama

Mary Kelly Tate University of Richmond School of Law

Zoe Weil Institute for Humane Education

Everett L. Worthington, Jr. Virginia Commonwealth University

Liz Stillwaggon Swan University of Colorado Boulder

Chan Thai Santa Clara University Christian N. Thoroughgood Villanova University Leah Tomkins Independent Scholar

Alex Wellerstein American Institute of Physics Patricia H. Werhane University of Virginia Melissa A. Wheeler Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Kimberly Yost Independent Scholar Gary Yukl School of Business, University at Albany Stephen J. Zaccaro George Mason University

Introduction Leadership is central to the human condition. It is almost impossible to imagine human life without it. The same goes for understanding the behavior of individual members of other species. Leadership is everywhere. As for humans, leadership at its most basic is about how people get along and how they get things done. It involves individuals devising organizational structures to achieve their goals. It entails finding the right mix of leaders and followers in such structures, and finding the right people to fill those roles flexibly and effectively. Leading is not only done well or poorly, or effectively or ineptly. It is also done morally, with care for the greater good—or selfishly and destructively. Both leadership and followership are multifaceted. In a complex world, understanding fully what leadership is, as well as what makes it ethical and effective, is becoming only more difficult. Equally important and challenging is understanding the mind, and behavior, of followers. The complexities of leadership itself and the breadth of the field of leadership studies combine to challenge any endeavor to create a comprehensive and coherent encyclopedia of leadership studies. Despite the urgency of understanding leadership in a world where democratic government is now in a protracted struggle with the appeal of autocracy, scholars have been hardpressed to render a clear and relevant account of its fundamentals. This urgent challenge has spurred us to work with our colleagues and with Sage Publishing to produce this encyclopedia. Our goal is to provide readers with an understanding of the complex fundamentals of leading and following so that we can all do better in living and learning in difficult times.

As suggested above, the study of leadership demands understanding not only how leadership is done well but also how it is done ethically. It is about understanding how in the best of circumstances people can find ways of getting along and getting things done, together, in highly moral ways. Reflecting this very general view, we have endeavored to bring together work at the cutting edge of the study of leadership from the many disciplines and perspectives that inform this highly interdisciplinary field of study.

Intended Audience The field of leadership studies is vast. It involves scholars and educators, executives and leaders in business and management, nonprofits, and institutions such as hospitals, the military, and religious organizations. This encyclopedia can be of both interest and utility for all of these groups of people. It can enlighten them about what we think we know, help them think critically about our theories and our evidence, and equip them with the knowledge to act more effectively as both leaders and followers. Most important, perhaps, our work is intended for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. They are the citizens of the future. All of them will both lead and follow at different times and in different circumstances in their lives. The entries in this work can help them think about and perform both effective and ethical leadership. It can help them get along and get things done, sometimes as leaders and other times as followers. We wish them well in whatever paths they choose for the future.

xxvii

xxviii

Introduction

The Editorial Team The associate editors and editorial board members of this project have helpfully shaped both its content and its voice, or what we might call its words and music. The work’s topics and level of presentation represent their fields of scholarly expertise and their experience as teachers and mentors. The three associate editors include a scholar of the humanities, Kristin Bezio of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, a scholar of the social sciences; psychologist James Beggan from the Department of Sociology at the University of Louisville; and Ronald Riggio of the Kravis Institute of Leadership and Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College, a long-time leading scholar of leadership, nationally and internationally. The eight-member editorial board includes a wide variety of diverse perspectives on the study of leadership. That diversity of perspectives is crucial to the potential value of this project. Two of the eight are scholars of leadership ethics, Joanne Ciulla and Jessica Flanigan, who have special expertise in business ethics and medical ethics, respectively. David Collinson ensured that the important perspective of critical leadership studies was included in a significant number of entries. Historian Julian Hayter added a crucial long-term perspective to planning the content of this encyclopedia, especially as it concerns ways that race has shaped the present and our understanding of leadership. Gill Hickman brought deep knowledge of and experience with leadership in organizations. Crystal Hoyt added depth to our understanding of the importance of gender and gender differences in leadership and perceptions of leadership. Nurcan Ensari brought an important international perspective to the project. Finally, we were fortunate to have on board anthropologist Christopher von Rueden, a prominent young scholar concerned with an evolutionary perspective on leadership.

Entries and Authors This two-volume work includes nearly 300 entries authored by over 200 lead authors and many coauthors. Topics were selected based on theory

and research that is taught in leadership studies curricula, on papers presented at international leadership association meetings and conferences, and on articles published in leading journals which either focus on leadership or consider its significance. We are confident that the encyclopedia satisfactorily covers essential topics in the field of leadership studies.

Structure and Organization The entries in this encyclopedia are listed alphabetically. All of them fall into one or more categories that highlight the scope of this project, and its overall content. The categories themselves are listed in alphabetical order here: Case Studies Concepts Cross-Cultural Perspectives Ethics Evolutionary Perspectives Followers Organizations Personal Qualities Political Leadership Power Situations and Contexts Social Justice Styles Theories Women and Gender

A perhaps more useful presentation of the various categories is to explain their interrelationships. Our largest category is Concepts. Well over half of the entries in this encyclopedia introduce and describe a conceptual approach to some aspect of leadership, for example, the entry on the Dark Triad of traits can produce bad leadership. Some of the entries listed under Concepts are general enough to be listed under the heading Theories. For example, Adaptive Leadership and Behavioral Theories of Leadership are classified as both Concepts but more importantly perhaps, Theories. Closely related to Concepts is the category Case Studies. Typically the case studies included here illustrate one or more important concepts, such as the GLOBE Research Program.

Introduction

Other categories were identified according to key elements of leadership. One enduring question in the study of leadership is the relationship of power and leadership. Thus, we include a category of Power in our overall organization of entries, as represented in the entry Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions. One of the most prominent scholars of leadership, James MacGregor Burns, argued that all leaders are actual or potential power holders, but that not all power holders are leaders. Burns went on to distinguish power wielding from leadership, depending on whether the person with power uses it for selfish interests only or to meet the needs of followers as well. Other scholars argue that leaders do not necessarily have power. Reflecting these different perspectives, the relationship of power and leadership is either an implicit or explicit concern in many of our entries. Another group of entries considers leaders, followers, and how their relationships play out in specific situations or contexts. First in this set are entries that focus on the Personal Qualities and Styles of leaders. These include entries on the Big Five Personality Traits that generally contribute to good leadership and an entry on the Dark Triad, traits of some leaders that often produce the worst and most destructive instances of leadership. The entries under Styles include entries on Authentic, Caring, Mindful, and Narcissistic Leadership, that is, some of the good and the bad. Of course, many entries that consider the personal qualities or styles of leaders talk about how they interact with followers. Importantly then, there is a list of entries that focus on Followers, including for example a contribution on Intelligent Disobedience by followers. Then a set considers how leaders and followers interact or relate in our group of entries called Situations and Contexts. Two such entries are Collective Action and Context-Sensitive Leader Preferences. Another important category includes entries that reflect advances in explorations of evolutionary roots of a wide variety of human behavior, including mate preferences and emerging leadership structures in groups. For example, we include an entry on Charismatic Leadership that takes an evolutionary approach. This encyclopedia, as is evident from our team of editorial board members, emphasizes the

xxix

centrality of ethics. Various entries explore just what constitutes ethical leadership, and how does it relate to other aspects of leadership. Thus, one entry considers Ethics and Effectiveness, considering whether unethical leadership must also be ineffective. Closely related to our focus on ethics is a concern with social justice, particularly issues involving race, gender, and class. Accordingly, we have entries listed under the headings Social Justice and Women and Gender. For example, the entry on Women and Men as Leaders is listed under the categories of Social Issues and Women and Gender. Incidentally, it also is listed under Evolutionary Approaches since it addresses whether differences in the numbers of men and women leaders have anything to do with evolution. In this way, Women and Men as Leaders is typical of many entries in this encyclopedia. They touch on many aspects of leadership. Finally, we note that a considerable number of entries explore leadership in two important contexts, politics (Political Leadership category) or organizations (Organizations category). These groups include Congressional Leadership and Board Leadership. Taken together we have endeavored to create a coherent structure of entries which represent the extensive field of leadership studies.

The Reader’s Guide The structure described above was used to create our Reader’s Guide. This lists the various categories and the entries that address some aspect of the category. The fifteen categories are intended as helpful signposts in the landscape of leadership studies. We hope that they will help readers appreciate the dimensions of the field, and the ways we have endeavored to present it.

“See Also” Cross-References Most all of the entries in this work are related, closely or at a distance, to several other entries. With authors’ guidance, we have taken care to provide after each entry several “See also” suggestions of other entries that address the same concerns as the article in question. For those who

xxx

Introduction

wish to get a sense of how a given topic fits within the larger field of leadership studies, these suggestions can be very helpful. We encourage readers to explore as widely as they can in these volumes. One article can lead you to others, and there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained by taking the time to consider the broad and diverse field of leadership studies.

Further Reading In addition to cross-references, each entry lists a number of suggested sources of additional information about the subject of the entry. While we have represented the field of leadership as thoroughly as possible within the limits of two volumes, there is obviously much more to learn. These additional readings open new dimensions of learning that give not only a much fuller sense of leadership and followership but also of the more general concern with how people get along and, together, get good things done. Consulting those readings along with the cross-references can be very helpful in understanding the large, multidisciplinary filed of leadership studies.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the many, many people who have made this project a reality. First, we’d like to thank the nearly three hundred authors who have contributed entries to this encyclopedia. The quality of your contributions is exceptional, and we are deeply indebted to you. Also, most of you were timely in your submissions. This calls for an extra measure of gratitude. Your cooperation allowed us to work gently, personally, and we think effectively with authors who encountered deadline, or as we called them “due date,” challenges. In every way, our contributors have been fabulous. Next we thank our dedicated Editorial Board members: Joanne Ciulla, David Collinson, Nurcan Ensari, Jessica Flanigan, Julian Hayter, Gill

Hickman, Crystal Hoyt, and Chris von Rueden. You did more work than you initially signed on for, agreeably and effectively. This was extremely important in moving the project along at a very steady pace, indeed ahead of schedule. We thank all of you. Our three Associate Editors—James Beggan, Kristin Bezio, and Ron Riggio—were fabulous. Thank you. The work of coordinating with authors, editing, and more general troubleshooting and support were invaluable and essential to completing this work. We are grateful. It was our pleasure to work with several great colleagues at Sage Publishing. First, we are indebted to Andrew Boney for encouraging us to take on this project, and for helping us navigate the complexities of publishers’ contracts. He was also instrumental in introducing us to and handing us off to the excellent team we worked with during the writing and production phases. We are especially grateful to Leticia Guti´errez. Her patient and steady guidance in teaching us the Sage processes for tracking the progress of the project was instrumental in getting our work done. Our developmental editor, Sanford Robinson, has been patient and gentle and at the same time clear and firm. He has been a great colleague in this endeavor. Thank you.

Special Note of Remembrance and Gratitude When we started this project our dear valued colleague Georgia Sorenson, listed as the Senior Editor, was a guiding force. Her knowledge of the field, both its substance and its personnel, was essential in launching the project. Georgia passed away just as the project gained traction. We would not have been able to get under way without her. As a person and professional colleague Georgia was the best. We miss her. George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison University of Richmond

L she comes to be viewed in a manner consistent with that label. People may reconstitute the biography or retrospectively interpret a leader and his or her past behavior to fit the current image. If someone is deemed a bad leader, people will often create a new image of the leader, based on their interpretation of the past behaviors and the biography of that leader, even if those factors were not previously deemed relevant. Labels are always under negotiation. In other words, there is constant bargaining over the status of labels, at a societal level and at an individual level. The powerful have more ability to shape societal labels and to avoid the imposition of labels on themselves. What constitutes an acceptable or unacceptable leader can be negotiated and can change over time. Should an acceptable leader demonstrate strength, empathy, or other personality traits? Individuals also negotiate their acceptance or continued support of a leader, such as through voting decisions. Labeling theory suggests that labeling can strongly mold the individual labeled. An individual might become “caught up” in the role that the labeling describes. That is, the deviance might become highly salient to, or shape, the individual’s overall personal identity, the expectations of others, and the individual’s way of life. In other words, the label can become a master status that trumps all others. Another consequence of labeling is that deviance disavowal becomes difficult. Deviance disavowal

LABELING THEORY Labeling theory offers a relativistic stance toward deviance, suggesting that deviance is relative across time and across groups. A behavior deemed deviant in one cultural context or time may be perceived as normative for another group. Deviance is essentially constructed. Perceptions of what constitutes an excellent or terrible leader might differ across time and place, as well. Rooted in the sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism, labeling theory emerged initially in the 20th century in the substantive area of deviance within sociology and since then has been utilized by other fields. Although the theory did not focus on the origins of deviance, labeling theory did address issues that had been left unexplored, including the relativity of deviance, the processes of labeling, and the impact on those labeled. There are three processes of labeling: stereotyping, retrospective interpretation, and negotiation. Stereotyping, a core process of labeling, refers to the pictures that exist in the mind. Stereotypes are culturally created and individually acted upon. Labels exist in relation to leaders as well. People construct notions of good leaders and bad leaders; they stereotype actual leaders based on the imagery created. Retrospective interpretation is the process of how individuals come to reevaluate a person who has been labeled. Once the person is labeled, he or

507

508

Labeling Theory

refers to the process of leaving a deviant status behind, or becoming an ex-deviant (e.g., ex-convict). Regarding leadership, once a leader has been labeled as unacceptable, it becomes hard for that leader—even if they change—to leave that label behind. Once a president, for example, has become labeled as the national scourge, it is exceedingly hard for that person—should they choose to change what others considered objectionable—to reemerge as a new and improved figure. If an individual has difficulty being accepted by members of society because of labeling, participation in subcultures is a possibility. Human beings are social beings, and if not accepted, they will seek companionship where it comes. In the case of deviants, companionship is often available from other deviants. While this feature might not be as pertinent when applied to the case of leaders, it is possible. For example, the politician might find better acceptance in another political group; perhaps one whose views are a tad more extreme. Thus, deviant subcultures tend to have a way of further immersing a deviant individual in deviant worlds.

Weber and Types of Leadership A seminal sociological theory of power and leadership was developed in the late 19th century by the German scholar Max Weber. He defined power as the ability to impose one’s will even if met with opposition. Weber differentiated three types of authority and leadership. Legal authority is based on the right of the leader who possesses the authority to lead within the confines of the legally established order. In the United States, the presidency is an example. A president is elected under established rules, and if a president stays within the rules deemed appropriate, the president maintains power until a new president is elected. The power is in the office. Labeling theory is pertinent to this type of leadership in the sense that a leader labeled in a positive manner can accomplish more and survive more opposition. On the other hand, even a competent leader with a negative label may have trouble operating effectively. Traditional authority is rooted in the conviction of a group that their traditional way is suitable. The king or queen of a monarchical country would

be a quintessential example of leadership being handed down on familial lines through the years. Particular royal figures have been differentially labeled and reacted to by their followers. The least stable type of leadership—as it is rooted in the qualities of a leader as perceived by followers—is charismatic. Charismatic authority rests in a leader who is believed by a group of followers to have special gifts. In the example of a religious leader, the person is most likely viewed as having supernatural gifts, whereas in the case of a political charismatic leader, the person is deemed to possess superhuman gifts or to be an extraordinary person. Because the power is rooted in the person, should that person die or cease to lead, the charisma must be routinized in the organization to maintain efficacy. With regard to the history of Mormonism, after its leader Joseph Smith—specifically mentioned by Weber—was killed, another leader, Brigham Young, assisted in routinizing the charisma, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints outlasted the death of their original leader. In contrast, in the case of David Koresh, the religious group known as the Branch Davidians dissipated after his death. Charismatic leadership can be a potent form of influence. Consequently, and quite ironically, charismatic leadership can lead to great negative or great positive consequences. The charismatic leadership style of the dictator Adolf Hitler led to horrific consequences. On the other hand, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was also a charismatic leader, led his followers to push society to change for the good. Labels are particularly important with regard to the influence of charismatic leaders. To a group of followers, the leader is labeled as having gifts that justify following him or her; however, these labels are not necessarily accepted by other groups, thus limiting the leader’s influence.

Deviance Typology Deviance has typically been defined as inherently negative behavior. From the normative perspective, deviance can be viewed as a violation of the norms of society. Regarding norms, a person who abides by social norms is conforming; a person who chooses to violate the norms is deviant. However,

Language and Leadership

there are also those who adhere to the idealized level of the norm, rather than to the realistic level. For example, on the norm of charity, a person who gives nothing violates the norm, a person who occasionally gives a bit to a chosen cause conforms at the realistic level of the norm, and a person who lives a life of overwhelming giving and grace is at the idealized level of the norm. In addition to norm violation, it is also important to consider the society’s reaction to the norm violation. It is possible to create a two-dimensional matrix of this. Negative deviance—the primary focus in the field of deviance—refers to underconformity, or nonconformity, which is negatively evaluated. Most criminals would fall into this category. Deviance admiration suggests positive reactions to nonconformity. A number of historic figures from the era of the American Wild West are not considered to be good; they include train robbers and murderers. Regardless, they are still adulated within popular culture; notoriety is a form of fame. Regarding leadership, former president Bill Clinton has at times been viewed by many as a lovable rogue. Rate-busting is overconformity that is negatively evaluated; the most productive worker in a factory, or the smartest student in a school, encounters the real possibility of being stigmatized because of high performance. Finally, overconformity that is positively evaluated constitutes positive deviance. Although outstanding presidents, religious prophets, and saints are unlikely to be called deviant in the traditional sense of the word, they do meet the criteria in that their high performance deviates from an average level of competence. For Christians, Jesus is the clearest example of a positive deviant. Within the realm of political leadership, some leaders are deemed positive deviants, such as Nelson Mandela. This typology allows us to consider how reactions play a role in understanding the influence of leaders. Understanding leader effectiveness requires considering objective performance as well as how others evaluate the leader. Leaders can fall and be negatively evaluated; they may or may not live to rise again in terms of the reactions of others. It is possible that a negatively perceived person of one era will be a hero to the next era; often heroism is enhanced in light of one’s failure to fit into an earlier era. Further, a leader may be

509

differentially perceived based on the context of the definers; it may be in relation to nation, or by other factors, such as party alignment. Both the context and the inherent labeling processes used in assessing leaders are relevant to understanding why a leader may be a negative deviant to one group of people and a positive deviant to another group. Druann M. Heckert See also Charismatic Theory; Coercion and Power; Group Norms; Heroic Leadership; Leadership Style; Relativism

Further Readings Heckert, A., & Heckert, D. M. (2002). A new typology of deviance: Integrating normative and reactivist definitions of deviance. Deviant Behavior, 23(5), 449–479. Merton, R. (1968). Social theory and social structure. New York, NY: Free Press. Schur, E. (1971). Labeling deviant behavior. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization (Trans. A. M. Henderson & T. Parsons). New York, NY: Free Press.

LANGUAGE

AND

LEADERSHIP

This entry provides an overview of the reasons why paying attention to language in the study of leadership is important, the different ways in which leadership research has focused on language, and the different insights this has brought to leadership theory. Before we do so, let us first step back and define the term language. It is usually defined as a system of communication, consisting of words, symbols, gestures, and rules that structure its use in daily life. It is through the active use of language that we are able to make meaning of the world around us and exchange this meaning with others. Language is of principal importance to humankind, as we need it to interact, communicate, and establish a sense of self in relation to others and the wider context. Indeed, in his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that

510

Language and Leadership

language is constitutive of reality: it shapes and steers our interpretation of everything we hear, see, and experience, and our interpretations in turn drive our actions. Language as a system of communication is further specific to a particular context or community, such as a profession or region. As such, an individual working across different languages will need to learn the different words, symbols, and meanings in order to communicate and translate meaning adequately. This includes at times creating new meanings where concepts or words do not travel easily between languages. Recognizing the presence and importance of language and difference between languages further heightens our awareness of the chance for misinterpretation and mistranslation, and the potential this can bear for conflict in and across communities. The following section will consider implications of this definition of language for leadership theorizing and research.

The Importance of Language for Leadership Theorizing and Research First and foremost, we need to recognize that leadership—as a concept—is embedded within a language, and its meaning is shaped by this system of communication. It shapes the way we interpret, talk about, and recognize leadership in ourselves and others, and in turn informs our actions related to leadership. Secondly, we need to consider that a language is a product of historical and social interactions and therefore specific to a community. This is of great importance for the study of leadership as it encourages us to (a) research and capture differences in the meaning and practice of leadership across communities and (b) work against the potential for mistranslation and misinterpretation. This further means recognizing that leadership—although certainly deeply embedded in the English language— may not be present in, or translate easily across, all other languages, or indeed carry importance across all professional communities. It may also not have the same linguistic relationship with other concepts such as management. In addition to focusing on how language shapes meaning and actions connected to leadership, it is

important to recognize the agentic power of individuals and communities to create new, shared meanings. Recognizing and understanding the complexity of communication and seeing it as a fundamental part of the leadership process will also create opportunities for individuals to learn and develop their communication skills. As such, leadership research looking into a leader’s role as a good communicator may inform theory and leadership development practice regarding how leaders may actively engage in meaning-making through skillful communication with others. A focus on the tactical use of rhetoric as a skilled communicator should then also open up avenues for exploring ethical considerations and implications for leadership. Looking further at how communities shape and create meanings through and within their shared language opens up possibilities for leadership research to study social dynamics in leadership processes and the influence of local and societal discourses on this shared meaning-making process. By paying attention to such social dynamics, we may also be able to understand how context influences leadership meaning and practice. This may involve analyses of how environmental, political, and wider social changes influence the words, symbols, and meanings we use and how these connect to leadership as a concept and practice. Finally, through a focus on the nonverbal, emotive, and symbolic aspects of language, leadership research can pay attention to embodied experiences of leadership. Such research at both an individual and a social, interactive level will add much needed insights into the complexities of leadership processes and aspects of self, social identity and relationships in leadership theory and practice. The following section outlines some of the existing research insights into three core aspects of language and leadership: work on communication process and skills, discursive studies of leadership, and work on multilingualism.

Key Streams of Work on Language in Leadership Studies Communication

The first of three main streams of existing research into language and leadership looks at the

Language and Leadership

communication process as a core aspect of leadership and the role of the leader as a skilled communicator. This has included work drawing on philosophy, poetry, and classic writing to advance our understanding of the art of storytelling and rhetoric in leadership and inspired lessons for leader development. This has further included explorations, inspired by Gareth Morgan and Linda Smircich’s 1982 article “Leadership: The management of meaning,” of sense-making or sense-giving as a core role of leaders and a key dynamic within the leadership process. Recognizing the power of individuals (leaders or followers) to interpret and construct meaning—and thereby reality through communication—bears strong implications for considerations of ethics in leadership. Insight gained from this research also helps us to understand the complexities of communication in leadership and the noise experienced in the transmission of information. It brings to the fore key lessons for leadership development, such as being aware that no communication is noise-free, as different values, knowledge, social positions, and other factors will lead to information being received, translated, and shaped into a new meaning by those who receive it. Some offer solutions, such as creating an atmosphere of dialogue where differences are accepted and differing meanings openly exchanged. Adopting this approach is not easy as it requires openness, respect, and an ability to handle and allow potential conflict rather than impose harmony at all costs. Yet, it offers an opportunity to see leadership as embodied, relational, and dynamic, and allows us to explore these aspects through the notion of language. We have therefore seen an increase in leadership research adopting a storytelling or narrative approach to studying leadership. The latter takes seriously the importance of studying leadership as a lived, dynamic experience, and a focus on stories and narratives of research participants enables researchers to access this type of rich information. This then lends itself to theorize on leadership as a socially constructed and dynamic process that is an embodied, subjective experience, and involves the interactions of different actors situated in a place and space in time.

511

Discourse

A second stream of research, usefully outlined by Gail Fairhurst, which is growing and attracting much attention by researchers in the field of leadership and those beyond is focused on discourse. Drawing on the work of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, discourse studies of leadership are looking to understand the way a discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, texts, or general communication brings objects and ideas into being by constructing and shaping the way we see the world and phenomena like leadership within it. As such it is akin to Wittgenstein’s statement that language is constitutive of reality; however, discourse studies usually focus on specific systems of thought or communication within and across particular languages. With a view to leadership, this particularly concerns exploring how such discourses are situated within a specific social, political, and historical space and how they shape the meaning of leadership and influence both lived and ideal, aspired leadership actions. It also may recognize how different levels of discourse overlap, connect, or indeed compete in our sense-making and sense-giving processes. Research in this area tends to fall into two categories, the first one of which is interested in local organizational or professional discourses that pay attention to how leadership is constructed communicatively through social interaction in situ (the local context). In other words, these studies look at instances such as meetings, observations, or even interview or focus group data to explore how participants construct leadership action and leader/follower identities in the moment and in everyday organizational life. This entails looking at the immediate, mundane conversations and interactions that take place in organizations as well as the ways participants may construct themselves or others as leaders and followers in conversation with a researcher during an interview. This body of research has brought much insight into individual and social identity construction, and our understanding of leadership as social interaction, and processes of influencing and meaning making. The second category of research explores those social, political, and historical discourses

512

Language and Leadership

(systems of thought and knowledge) that influence how organizations and whole communities construct and see the world. Here, work on leadership has particularly focused on noting how leadership theory itself is a body of knowledge and thought and how it shapes our understanding of leadership and thoughts on ideal images of leaders and leadership behavior through its presence in textbooks, journal articles, and wider media. We absorb what we see, read, and hear every day, and this discourse starts to shape and normalize what we think leadership is, how we think leaders should behave, and how we think they should act. These discourse studies have added to our understanding of leadership by uncovering how the dominant leadership discourse pervading many societies and organizations systematically presents and reinforces an image of the ideal leader that is White, male, masculine, able-bodied, and heterosexual. This has helped to raise our awareness of systemic inequalities in our assumptions on leadership and empowers individuals and communities to start questioning, disrupting, and changing this dominant discourse. Finally, insights from discourse studies at both local and wider societal levels have potential to inform and advance leadership development. They help us to understand the dynamics at play in leadership development program settings where decisions on theories and models to be included or excluded will have a normative influence on participants as they set out a system of thought on leadership that, once consumed, will influence future leadership actions. Where it is situated in organizations and shaped to align with the organization’s values and processes, development programs can critically be seen as programs of alignment rather than enlightenment as they present a definitive and normative view on what leadership is and should look like. Progressive leadership development programs may work against these normalizing dynamics by creating dialogic environments where different views, theories, and experiences of leadership may be able to stand alongside each other and where participants are allowed to explore and resist particular notions of leadership.

Multilingualism

A final strand of leadership research that has considerations of language at its heart are contributions that see language as a cultural voice. Here, research is informed by concepts such as Michael Agar’s languaculture, which focus on how a language carries a community’s past knowledge and cultural information that informs and shapes habits and behaviors of its members. Adopting an emic approach to culture where researchers are interested in understanding cultural meaning imbued in a language from within the conversations and stories of members of that community, research studies have highlighted quite different conceptualizations and meanings of the phenomenon of leadership within and across different languages. This has brought several contributions to our conceptual understanding of leadership and knowledge of leadership practices across the globe. First and foremost, this research has helped to raise awareness of and give voice to languages other than English. It has highlighted socio-historical, cultural contexts where leadership takes a very different meaning to that based on research conducted in the English language shaped by cultural information unique to these English-speaking contexts. This has also helped to highlight that much of the leadership theory and research captured in textbooks and other publications was originally conducted in English-speaking contexts and is thus not immediately representative of or relevant for other cultural contexts. Indeed, it has shown not only that the words “leader” and “leadership” are very differently understood and linked to culturally unique practices. It also demonstrates that in some communities these words are problematic due to historical events and may not be in active use in today’s organizations in the same way that they are very popular in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. This, then, raises concerns with the universal applicability of some of the popular leadership theories that are based on entirely English language situated research. It also calls into the question the transferability of the leadershipmanagement relationship that is at the core of much academic and organizational discourse in U.K.–U.S. contexts.

Language and Leadership

These contributions have also raised concerns about the lack of attention often paid to language dynamics in leadership research, and they have called for more attention to be paid to how the word “leadership” may travel and be understood differently within and across different languages. Alongside the complexities of how leadership as a concept and practice may translate and travel across languages—or not—this research has also promoted adopting a multilingual approach. This means that researchers recognize the many variations within the culture and a language as a cultural voice of a given community. This helps to raise the awareness that we cannot assume all members of a community share exactly the same meaning of leadership. Instead, it encourages us to recognize that regional variations in a language reflect the regional nuances in culture that shape habits and behaviors—including that of leadership practice. It further encourages us to pay attention to how regional, local cultures overlap with professional and organizational cultures in shaping members’ habits, attitudes, views, and behaviors. An individual’s understanding of leadership may therefore be shaped by a multitude of overlapping and intersecting cultural information as well as their agential power to influence and shape meaning through personal experiences and reflective practice. Leadership research, then, needs to be aware of this multitude of individual and shared meanings attached to the word “leadership” within any community and make space for active explorations of the language their participants use. Otherwise, we run the risk of creating theories that are meaningless to local communities and downplay the complex cultural dynamics that shape local leadership practices.

Future Research This entry has demonstrated the importance of paying attention to language in leadership research by outlining how language shapes meaning and practices connected to the social phenomenon referred to as leadership in the English language. While some areas of leadership research already focus on language, it seems that the field of leadership studies would benefit by becoming more sensitive to language use in order to avoid the pitfalls of mistranslation or misinterpretation

513

when language is being treated as neutral in research. This requires leadership researchers to adopt methodologies that pay attention to language. It may include, for example, a focus on workplace interactions, such as the observation, recording, and linguistic analysis of meetings. In more traditional interview settings, it may require that native speakers conduct the interview in the participant’s mother tongue and avoid imposing the pre-defined language of leadership and management. Instead, interviews may include questions or interactive activities that enable the participants to reflect openly on what concepts are meaningful in their local context. Such interviews may draw on visual methods to facilitate such reflections and focus on the participant’s meaning-making. Where participants speak a different language at work, compared to what they regard as their mother-tongue, such research may also want to explore and give the participants space to reflect on the overlap, differences, and tensions between these languages in relation to leadership. Such linguistic approaches may also explore the interaction of professional and organizational discourses with such multiple languages with a view to understanding organizations as multilingual spaces. Finally, research needs to remain open for exploring meanings other than those promoted through existing leadership discourse and allowing for words and phenomena other than “leaders” and “leadership” to come to the fore where these may be more appropriate within local cultural settings to make sense of organizational dynamics. Doris Schedlitzki See also Foucault and Postmodernism; Moral Language; Rhetoric; Rhetoric and Persuasion

Further Readings Agar, M. (1994). Language shock: Understanding the culture of conversation. New York, NY: Morrow and Company. Cunliffe, A. L., & Eriksen, M. (2011). Relational leadership. Human Relations, 64(11), 1425–1449. Fairhurst, G. T. (2011). Discursive approaches to leadership. In A. Bryman, D. Collinson, K. Grint, B. Jackson, & M. Uhl-Bien (Eds.), The SAGE handbook

514

Leader Emergence and Performance

of leadership (pp. 495–507). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Ford, J., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2008). Leadership as identity: Constructions and deconstructions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grint, K. (2001). The arts of leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatch, M. J., Kostera, M., & Kozminski, A. J. (2005). The three faces of leadership: Manager, artist, priest. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. Nicholson, H., & Carroll, B. (2013). Identity undoing and power relations in leadership development. Human Relations, 66(9), 1225–1248. Schedlitzki, D., Ahonen, P., Edwards, G., Gaggiotti, H., & Wankhade, P. (2017). Working with language: A refocused research agenda for cultural leadership studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(2), 237–257. Schnurr, S., & Schroeder, A. (2019). A critical reflection of current trends in discourse analytical research on leadership across disciplines. A call for a more engaging dialogue. Leadership, 15(4), 445–460. Smircich, L., & Morgan, G. (1982). Leadership: The management of meaning. Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 18, 257–273. Tourish, D. (2014). Leadership, more or less? A processual, communication perspective on the role of agency in leadership theory. Leadership, 10(1), 79–98. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.

LEADER EMERGENCE PERFORMANCE

AND

Leader emergence refers to the process of being perceived by others as a leader. The process of leadership is shaped by who the person is, what they do, the context they work in, and also by others’ leadership perceptions. Being perceived as a leader influences the evaluation of potential and performance and enhances (or limits) a leader’s access to critical resources. Researchers have spent many years studying how group members reach a consensus in their perceptions of a leader in a situation where a formal leader has not been assigned. Those perceptions are part of a process

whereby individual traits, behaviors, skills, and functions are first executed by the leader, then perceived by the followers as leaderlike, in each situation.

Personality, Intelligence, and Individual Attributes Most research has investigated the Big-Five personality traits as predictors of leadership emergence. The Big Five consists of five distinct factors: neuroticism (emotional stability), extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Viewed in terms of these five broad and inclusive categories, personality traits that once yielded only scattered and inconsequential findings in terms of leadership could be studied more systematically. Using this framework, researchers have found that higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness and lower levels of neuroticism were related to leader emergence. General cognitive ability, dominance, honesty–humility, and verbal expressiveness are some of the other traits that have exhibited associations with leader emergence. The importance of social skills in leader emergence has been noted extensively in the literature. Individuals who are tactful communicators have been found to be more adaptable to situational constraints and are therefore likely to emerge as leaders. Similarly, individuals high on emotional expressiveness are able to build better interpersonal relationships, which is associated with subordinates’ productivity and satisfaction with the leader. Other important individual attributes associated with leadership emergence are self-efficacy, self-monitoring, and emotional intelligence (EI). In the leadership context, self-efficacy refers to believing in one’s ability to take on a leadership role and to perform leadership functions effectively. Self-efficacy also influences individuals’ motivation to lead, which is why individuals with high self-efficacy are more likely to take on leadership roles within their groups or emerge as leaders. Individuals who are high-self monitors and high on EI are characterized by social perceptiveness and their ability to regulate and alter their behaviors to fit into different social situations. Individuals high on EI are also able to

Leader Emergence and Performance

regulate and disseminate their emotions and team members’ emotions effectively, allowing them to better understand their group’s emotional states and the underlying reasons for those states. These individuals are rated more positively by their followers and are more likely to be perceived as leaders. Leader emergence is the result of a set of complex and multifaceted behaviors that are often reflected in a combination of skills and attributes. Despite this acknowledgment, a substantial amount of leadership research examines individual differences in isolation from one another rather than as a pattern. Person-oriented approaches are designed to help categorize individuals more accurately into qualitatively and quantitatively distinct subgroups. Some research has shown that subgroups of people sharing similar patterns of attributes interact and engage with the environment in similar ways. Over time, then, individuals within a subgroup are growing and adapting in a similar fashion, thus providing a more realistic and holistic understanding of how leaders behave and more insight into what differentiates emergent leaders from others. A person-oriented approach has found that a pattern of high intelligence, dominance, general self-efficacy, and self-monitoring resulted in higher levels of leader emergence, promotion, and effectiveness ratings. Given the criticisms that surrounded trait theories, early research moved away from leader traits and toward a behavioral perspective. A surfeit of classifications for functional behavioral requirements was developed. Predominantly, leader behavior was often described using two dimensions identified by research performed at Ohio State: consideration and initiating structure. Consideration is the extent to which the leader is concerned with the welfare of the followers and the facilitation of group social interactions. Initiating structure, on the other hand, is the degree to which a leader is task-oriented, with an emphasis on goal accomplishment and establishing robust communication channels. Both behaviors have been found to positively impact leader emergence and follower motivation. The behavioral perspective exemplifies the performance requirement matching mechanism used by leadership scholars to predict leadership outcomes.

515

Implicit Leadership Theories When is an individual recognized as a leader? Implicit leadership theory (ILT) contends that people hold a relatively stable and abstract view (prototype) of what a leader should be and use this view to judge leadership in ourselves and others. Individuals categorize another as a leader or not based on whether the exhibited attributes match those of the abstract view of a leader. An emergent leader is the one who matches on the positive attributes (e.g., intelligent, motivated, and dynamic) and does not match on the negative attributes (e.g., selfish and conceited) that could hinder the achievement of a goal. It is important to note the correspondence between the attributes identified in ILT and the individual differences summarized earlier (see, e.g., Robert G. Lord and colleagues, 2020). For example, the attributes dynamic and motivated reflect core aspects of extraversion and conscientiousness. Match with a leader category influences both ratings of leader performance and organizational outcomes, such as trust and organizational commitment. Typically, people are aware of the outcomes of matching processes, but not the specific way categorization occurs. That is, they merely recognize a person as a leader.

Gender and Leader Emergence When people are asked to close their eyes for and think of a leader, more often than not they generate an image of a male leader. According to ILT, people develop cognitive categories, for how leaders should behave. Those leader categories are usually associated with masculine traits, suggesting that there is a “fit” between people’s expectations for men and their expectations for leaders. This process results in biased perceptions of people who do not match this image of a leader: that is, women. As noted by Crystal Hoyt and Susan Murphy, gender expectations typically associate women with communal traits, such as nurturance and caregiving, while men are associated with agentic traits that emphasize dominance, assertiveness, and confidence. On the one hand, the possession of typical masculine characteristics makes men appear more leaderlike. However,

516

Leader Emergence and Performance

women who exhibit masculine traits are often rated less favorably, because they are seen as deviating from their gender expectations. For example, women who express anger or show dominance have been evaluated more negatively than men who exhibit the same behaviors; such women have been described as cold or harsh. This means that whether women exhibit agentic or communal traits, both situations negatively affect their likelihood to emerge as leaders; an issue referred to as a double bind.

Contemporary Views: Shared Leadership and Context Recent research indicates that leadership can be shared by team members—rotating to the person with the key knowledge, skills, and abilities for the issues facing the group at any given moment— what is called shared leadership. Simply put, shared leadership entails a simultaneous, ongoing, mutual influence process within a group that is characterized by serial leader emergence. There are three situations where sharing leadership seems to be most successful. First, when the tasks of the individuals in a group are highly integrated and interconnected. Second, when the task of the group requires high levels of creativity. Finally, the more complex the task, the lower the likelihood that any one individual can be an expert on all aspects of the task, and the greater the need for shared leadership. The situation also needs to be considered. For example, a person in one situation with one set of group members who attempts to structure and plan for the group (a key leadership behavior in many theories of leader emergence) may be construed as a leader in that setting. However, that same person who engages in the same behavior in a different situation with a different set of group members may be construed as trying to coerce or micromanage the group in a particular direction or in violation of his or her role in the group. Thus, in the second example, neither the person nor his/her behaviors are construed as leaderlike. In times of uncertainty or crisis, individual group members emerge as leaders through helping group members make sense of ambiguous events by modeling particular emotional reactions to

those events. They can assume a leadership role by making an interpretation of the emotional response that best serves the group’s needs, and then modeling that response. By modeling a particular emotional response, the leader not only resolves ambiguity but also catalyzes the group to act. The coronavirus disease that emerged in 2019 (COVID-19) highlights the need for effective leadership in a crisis. Applied psychology research has shown that perceptions of who makes an effective leader can be altered in a crisis. Specifically, women tend to be favored as leaders during a crisis. In general, this appears to be because attributes associated with being a leader when circumstances are routine differ from leadership characteristics needed in a crisis. Recent research examined differences between men and women governors in the United States in relation to COVID-19 deaths. The authors found fewer deaths in states with women governors than in states with men governors. To provide some insight into this finding, the authors conducted a qualitative analysis of governors’ COVID-19related briefings. Compared with men governors, women governors expressed more empathy by expressing greater awareness of the feelings of others and exuded greater confidence. This qualitative difference in briefing messages is consistent with research showing that women, because of their communally oriented attributes, tend to be more sensitive to the needs of those around them and express themselves accordingly.

Emergence in Virtual Teams Organizations continue to widely adopt virtual teams as a primary way to structure work. Virtual teams are groups of two or more geographically and/or organizationally dispersed people who are coordinated primarily through electronic communication technologies to accomplish a common goal. Studies have shown that individuals’ trust in others is impacted by their ability to observe directly what others are doing. How does the virtual environment influence leader emergence? Recent research by Radostina Purvanova and colleagues (2020) has examined the incremental and relative importance of

Leader Exceptionalism

behaviors (such as monitoring and coordinating) and traits (such as extraversion, conscientiousness, and intelligence) to leadership emergence in contexts of low, medium, and high virtuality. Virtual contexts included both geographic dispersion and technology dependence. In low-virtuality contexts, individual attributes such as extraversion, conscientiousness, and cognitive ability carried greater weight relative to action and monitoring behaviors as antecedents of leadership emergence. However, in contexts of higher virtuality, the importance of leadership emergence antecedents shifted away from individual attributes and toward specific behaviors. Most interesting was the finding that both individual attributes and functional task behaviors were important in medium virtuality contexts.

Conclusion Early theories of leader emergence focused on individual differences and trait theories and research consistently suggested an association between personality and general cognitive ability with leader emergence. Despite their popularity, trait approaches were often criticized for their failure to account for situational factors that also affect leader emergence. As such, there was a shift to study what leaders do, rather than who they are. Finally, the contemporary approach to leadership emergence accounts for the contextual environment and the interactional nature of the leader emergence process. Roseanne J. Foti and Yasmine Elfeki See also Big Five Personality Traits; Behavioral Theories of Leadership; Emotional Intelligence; Followership; Gender Stereotypes and Leader Effectiveness; Implicit Leadership Theories

Further Readings Foti, R. J., & Hauenstein, N. M. A. (2007). Pattern and variable approaches in leadership emergence and effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(2), 347–355. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.92.2.347 Hoyt, C. L., & Murphy, S. E. (2016). Managing to clear the air: Stereotype threat, women, and leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(3), 387–399. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2015.11.002

517

Lord, R. G., Epitropaki, O., Foti, R. J., & Hansbrough, T. K. (2020). Implicit leadership theories, implicit followership theories, and dynamic processing of leadership information. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 7(1), 49–74. doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych012119-045434 Purvanova, R. K., Charlier, S. D., Reeves, C. J., & Greco, L. M. (2020). Who emerges into virtual team leadership roles? The role of achievement and ascription antecedents for leadership emergence across the virtuality spectrum. Journal of Business and Psychology, 36, 713–733. doi:10.1007/s10869-02009698-0 Riggio, R. E., Riggio, H. R., Salinas, C., & Cole, E. J. (2003). The role of social and emotional communication skills in leader emergence and effectiveness. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7(2), 83–103. doi:10.1037/1089-2699.7.2.83 Schein, V. E. (1975). Relationships between sex role stereotypes and requisite management characteristics among female managers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(3), 340–344. doi:10.1037/h0076637 Zaccaro, S. J., Green, J. P., Dubrow, S., & Kolze, M. (2018). Leader individual differences, situational parameters, and leadership outcomes: A comprehensive review and integration. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 2–43. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2017.10.003

LEADER EXCEPTIONALISM Moral rules play an important role in virtually all ethical theories. This entry considers the issue of exceptionalism—the idea that there are exceptions to moral rules. This issue is especially important in the context of leadership. Leaders have greater latitude to break the rules and, perhaps, special reasons to think they are justified in doing so.

Origins Strict prohibitions on actions such as lying and promise breaking are most prominent in deontological approaches to ethics, such as the approach of Immanuel Kant. These theories prioritize the notion of duty and hold that actions are right or wrong in themselves. Less well known is the fact

518

Leader Exceptionalism

that John Stuart Mill and other utilitarians, who evaluate the moral value of actions in terms of their consequences, defend the utility-maximizing function of moral rules. Mill goes so far as to argue that it is often better to follow such rules, despite the fact that breaking them would be more conducive to overall well-being in some circumstances. Even the 16th century philosopher Machiavelli, hardly known for his steadfast commitment to moral rules, concedes that it is better for leaders to follow them when they can. Exceptionalism assumes that there is a moral status quo (a set of rules) against which an exception is, or should be, made. The status quo, as well as deviations from it, has both descriptive and normative components. The descriptive component involves this question: Who—in fact—has to follow the rules, and who gets to break them? The normative component allows us to ask: Under what conditions is such rule breaking justified? The strict deontologist denies that rule-breaking behavior is ever justified. For advocates of other moral theories, the answer depends on the values that exception making promotes. Mill claimed, for instance, that we must be willing to set the rules aside when so doing is necessary to avoid great harm. Leadership makes issues of exceptionalism more complicated still—so complicated that it can look like there is a different set of rules for leaders. This is one of Machiavelli’s many insights, and his work is a good place to begin any descriptive account of leader exceptionalism. For Machiavelli, there is a simple answer to the question of who has to follow the rules and who gets to break them. Leaders cannot be expected to follow the rules, yet followers have an important role to play in the process. Because followers’ judgments about leaders’ behavior turn critically on perceived consequences, followers are essentially uninterested in leaders’ means as long as they (followers) think they are getting what they want. Machiavelli was clearly ahead of his time. In the 20th century, leadership scholars provided empirical support for his understanding of the descriptive side of leader exceptionalism. Most important among these scholars is E. P. Hollander. In his 1964 book Leaders, Groups, and Influence, Hollander develops a model to help us understand the factors behind leader emergence.

Individuals, he claims, come to the group with varying levels of status, but their behavior within the group context can also increase their status. With increased status, other group members permit these individuals—now leaders—to break the rules. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that for Hollander, leadership and exceptionalism are the same thing. Part of Hollander’s genius was to distinguish the different kinds of status that give rise to exception making. One type of status is derived from the perceived social standing of group members and essentially unrelated to their role in the narrower group. Here, we might think of the ways in which morally arbitrary categories—race, sex, and so on—make it easier for members of majority groups to use their status to get away with rule breaking. Acceptance of this kind of exceptionalism has important implications for leadership. One explanation for the overrepresentation of members of majority groups in leadership positions is that they have greater leeway at the outset for the kinds of deviance we associate with the exercise of leadership. Hollander’s second kind of status, however, is a function of behavior in the leadership context itself. This kind of status depends on earning credits by way of transactional exchanges within the narrower group and toward the achievement of group goals. Hollander’s studies suggest that group members earn idiosyncrasy credit, which allows certain individuals to deviate from group norms based on displays of early conformity and competence with respect to group tasks. Emerging leaders, that is, show commitment to the group, and they also prove their effectiveness. As a result, these individuals can use their idiosyncrasy credit to engage in additional behaviors that will advance group ends, behaviors that are prohibited more generally for other group members. Two descriptive features of Hollander’s idiosyncrasy credit (IC) model are particularly relevant for understanding the normative components of leader exceptionalism. First, leaders use their acquired credit to break the rules. However, as long as the rule-breaking behavior in which they engage conduces to the achievement of group goals, their accounts are replenished. This aspect of the model points to a possible consequentialist

Leader Exceptionalism

justification. Leader exceptionalism may be justified by its results. Second, spending idiosyncrasy credit is not the only way to lose it. The failure of leaders to use their credit when so doing would be good for the group can equally lead to a loss in credit. This feature of the model further highlights other group members’ responsibility for leader exceptionalism. Followers do more than allow leaders to break the rules; they demand it. The group norms in Hollander’s studies also have a clear ethical component. For example, emerging leaders in these studies consistently violated the democratic principle of majority rule and other agreed-upon norms. However, Hollander’s work does not tie leader exceptionalism directly to ethical failures in leadership. Management scholar Debra Shapiro and colleagues make this connection explicit, as do philosophers such as Terry Price. Hollander credits Price with “clarify[ing] this issue by referring to ‘leader exceptionalism.’ Building on the IC model’s approach to leader-follower relations, his philosophically based analysis explained that leader initiatives are likely to be seen by followers as acceptable rule breaking” (Hollander, 2013, p. 127). Although Hollander himself was always wary of drawing normative conclusions, even of using words such as “transgressive” or “unethical,” he recognized that his important work could be applied in a normative analysis to help us understand ethical failures in leadership.

Explanations of Ethical Failure In both the popular and scholarly literature on leadership, leaders who break the rules do so knowingly and willfully in order to advance their own self-interest. In his book Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership, Price refers to this explanation as the volitional account of ethical failures in leadership. The volitional account settles all normative questions at the outset. Unless we embrace ethical egoism—the view that people are always justified in pursuing self-interest—leaders’ rule-breaking behavior lends itself to straightforward moral condemnation. Because it is wrong for leaders to put their own self-interest ahead of the interests of the group, it is wrong for them to use the power that comes with a position of leadership to break the rules.

519

The volitional account of ethical failures in leadership is also defined by its leader-centric characterization of the source of rule-breaking behavior. Followers bear minimal responsibility for the unethical behavior of leaders. They are responsible only insofar as they are able to stop it and fail to do so. After all, according to this account, leaders break the rules for themselves, not for followers. In addition, given the inordinate power leaders have, it will usually be difficult for followers to police and prevent such behavior. The volitional account of ethical failures in leadership thus gives us little reason to be optimistic about the prospects of ethical leadership and, perhaps, even leadership itself. We give power to leaders to achieve our ends, and they routinely use this power in service of ends of their own. Hollander’s work lays the foundation for an alternative and more complex understanding of ethical failures in leadership. First, the idea of leader exceptionalism raises the question of whether some instances of rule breaking by leaders are ultimately justified. If leaders are allowed to break the rules only when it conduces to the achievement of group goals, it is much easier to make a moral argument to defend leader exceptionalism. Appeals to the good of the group have a kind of moral weight that is wholly lacking in leaders’ appeals to their own self-interest. Follower interests, that is, stand out as potential grounds to justify leaders’ exceptionmaking behavior. Second, this alternative understanding of ethical failures in leadership makes leader exceptionalism a function of group processes, not just individual moral psychology. The status followers accord leaders, not the naked self-interest that tempts us all, explains why leaders break the rules. This shift in explanatory focus also allows us to see followers as a source of justification in a different way. By encouraging leaders to break the rules on their own behalf, followers essentially consent to leader exceptionalism. Consent looms large in moral and political theory. By words or actions, it is possible for individuals or groups to release some actors from moral requirements that would otherwise apply to them. It is fitting, then, that consent would have a significant role to play in the justification of leadership behavior and, in particular, leader exceptionalism.

520

Leader Manipulation in Warfare

Unlike standard accounts of ethical failure, Price suggests, this way of thinking about leader exceptionalism understands its source as primarily cognitive. Leaders come to believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are justified in their rulebreaking behavior. If they are right in their belief, it is because their behavior respects the values of the correct moral theory—including theories that prioritize the value of consent. If their beliefs about justification are wrong, it is because they get the moral theory wrong. When this happens, the same followers whose interests or consent might be used to justify leaders’ exceptionalism now bear some responsibility for leaders’ unethical behavior.

Moral Theory and the Moral Psychology of Leadership John Stuart Mill held that all moral theories make room for justified exceptionalism. Although this generalization is too strong, it is true that even modern-day Kantians readily concede that rule-breaking behavior is sometimes justified—for example, telling a lie to save the life of an innocent person. Still, a serious normative question associated with exceptionalism remains: Under what conditions is rule-breaking behavior justified? Of course, we could answer this question if we had the right moral theory. The prospects of settling on a theory that would be acceptable to all are not good. Moreover, even with the right moral theory, there will also be problems of moral psychology— for example, challenges related to how we think about our behavior within the confines of the theory. You do not have to be a Kantian to accept Kant’s claim that we are all inclined to think of ourselves as justified exceptions. A different solution to the problem of exceptionalism, especially in the leadership context, is a practical one. Given facts about our moral psychology and the particular pressures associated with leadership, we can ask whether leaders are more likely to give too much weight, or too little, to their own grounds for justified exception making. Leaders have especially strong incentives to think of themselves and their behavior as exceptional. Because leadership is intricately connected to both consequentialism and partiality, the possibilities for leaders to come up with reasons for

rule-breaking behavior extend well beyond the reasons available to ordinary individuals. There is a practical argument, then, for accepting that even if leaders are sometimes justified in breaking the rules, they are likely justified much less often than they—and we—will be inclined to think they are. Terry L. Price See also Bathsheba Syndrome; Dirty Hands; Followership; Idiosyncrasy Credit

Further Readings Hollander, E. P. (1964). Leaders, groups, and influence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hollander, E. P. (2013). Inclusive leadership and idiosyncrasy credit in leader-follower relations. In M. G. Rumsey (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of leadership (pp. 122–143). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1964). In H. J. Paton (Ed.), Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers. Machiavelli, N. (1988). In Q. Skinner & R. Price (Eds.), The prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, J. S. (1979). In G. Sher (Ed.), Utilitarianism. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Price, T. L. (2006). Understanding ethical failures in leadership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, T. L. (2008). Leadership ethics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, D. L., Boss, A. D., Salas, S., Tangirala, S., & Von Glinow, M. A. (2011). When are transgressing leaders punitively judged? An empirical test. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(2), 412–422.

LEADER MANIPULATION

IN

WARFARE

Leader manipulation in warfare can be defined as the set of actions, both verbal and nonverbal, used by a leader to change the beliefs, preferences, and behaviors of individuals toward support for warfare against an out-group. Research on leader manipulation problematizes a view of leaders as mere instruments of collective interests. Instead, it seeks to understand how, given a divergence in

Leader Manipulation in Warfare

preference between leader and group, leaders might act to edit or even fully rewrite the preferences of others in the group toward the leader’s own preferences. One caveat that must be established is that words such as manipulation and deception have obvious pejorative connotations, which necessarily impacts a scientific approach to and analysis of these behaviors. Manipulation, however, in a more neutral sense, can be said to occur whenever an individual seeks to alter the preferences of others, whether through friendly suggestion, active negotiation, or brute force. In a political context, manipulation is not necessarily described in nefarious or even narrowly self-beneficial terms. For example, leader manipulation can at times be described in terms of tragic necessity, such as when a leader, by virtue of their institutional access to relatively accurate intelligence, determines that conflict is inevitable and that preparations for it must be made, despite the reservations of a fearful or skeptical yet less-informed public. Indeed, a substantial body of theoretical and empirical research demonstrates that leaders often confer tremendous collective benefits upon groups, for example, by helping to solve collective action problems, particularly where quick and coordinated action is necessary (e.g., some violent conflicts). Notwithstanding this caveat, one cannot simply assume that leaders rise in order to promote collective interests. By problematizing the relationship between the leader and group interests, a new question arises: What are the consequences of a divergence in preference between leaders and followers? Asking why and how leaders engage in manipulation requires knowing who leaders are. At least two aspects of individual capacity are often uniquely present in any given leader. These are agenda-setting power and coordinating power. The first refers to an individual’s ability to identify and clarify group goals, and the second refers to an individual’s ability to shape the public’s motivation and behavior toward those ends. Coordinating power is often the focus of research on manipulation, for the obvious reason that manipulation is often interpreted in its overt coercive form involving, for example, material quid pro quo,

521

threats, and blackmail. However, leaders can also use agenda-setting power to manipulate others. Agenda-setting power and coordinating power are important sources of indirect and direct manipulation, respectively. In what follows, each is discussed in turn. First, and most obviously, leaders can manipulate the public by directly offering both material and intangible costs and rewards. For example, to convince reluctant domestic allies of the utility of violence, a leader may either question their patriotism or offer high office or material rewards in exchange for political support. The importance of immaterial sanctions is not to be underemphasized: verbal accusations of cowardice and the manipulation of shame can be powerful incentives, even in modern politics. For example, the pomp and ceremony surrounding the distribution of medals for various forms of self-sacrifice in wartime are regular and universal reminders of the power of honor and loyalty to drive and sustain political violence. These symbols uniquely and powerfully combine our inherent sociability with the urgency and transcendent nature of sacred values, a psychological potion that has motivated group behavior throughout human history. Second, and somewhat less obviously, leaders are unique in their ability to shape the framing of conflict, and in this way can manipulate preferences more indirectly. In part due to their agenda setting power, and also due to other intangibles such as personal charisma, leaders are able to shape public preferences through their ability to frame the perceived nature of conflict, priming notions of ancient hatreds, cosmic glory, or the supreme emergency of national defense and survival. At least two criteria help to determine when a leader will rely on indirect manipulation in wartime: (1) The divergence between a leader’s private interests and public reluctance must be sufficiently great, such that (2) direct forms of manipulation are insufficient for coalition building. In these cases, the leader’s existing allies alone cannot successfully initiate outgroup conflict, domestic opposition cannot be coerced via any explicit quid pro quo, and the expected benefit of engaging in out-group conflict is perceived by the leader to be sufficiently great, such that abandoning course would entail even greater costs. In other

522

Leader Manipulation in Warfare

words, the power of the pulpit is the last remaining avenue of influence available to the leader in these circumstances. The conditions noted above essentially describe a situation in which leaders expect great gain from war, face great opposition to starting it, and have little direct means available to cajole and coerce. When leaders find themselves in these situations, they can try to frame conflict in such a way as to change the public perspective of what is at stake. Research robustly demonstrates, and intuition easily confirms, that one of the most successful mechanisms for motivating self-sacrifice for political violence is the prospect of group defense. Taken together, this suggests that the dire circumstances described above are likely to cause leaders to misframe wars of offense as wars of defense, given its reliability as a trigger of pro-group sentiment and behavior. Toward this end, there are at least three likely aspects of the conflict frame that leaders will seek to manipulate. The first, timing, is the most straightforward: if the goal is to convince a domestic audience that our group is on the defense, the most obvious way of accomplishing this is by establishing that an attack has already occurred or that one is imminent. Since it can be difficult to convince individuals that another group has attacked when in fact they have not, such arguments about the timing of attacks typically occur along two dimensions. One is the referencing or even fabrication of past or ancient hatreds or injustices. Another is the anticipation of future attacks that have not yet occurred, which is known by the more common label of preventive war. However, such wars of prevention will instead be cast as wars of preemption, again to emphasize the necessity and imminence of defense. A second is aspect of the conflict framing that is subject to manipulation is the nature of in-group/ out-group boundaries. If a leader seeks to involve one’s group in the internal conflict of another group, for example, they may cast one side in that internal conflict as part of one’s own group. For example, one experiment with Europeans found that when the September 11th attacks of 2001 were framed as an attack on “Westerners” rather than on “Europeans,” subjects exhibited greater levels of fear and uncertainty and were more

willing to offer support to victims. In an era in which there is a growing sense that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations from the human rights abuses of their own governments, the temptation to feign solidarity with oppressed out-groups may be too great for opportunistic leaders to pass up in order to initiate conflict. A third aspect of conflict framing is somewhat more nebulous but equally powerful: the invoking of national status, ideology, or quite simply, collective glory. In the modern era, although wars for glory seldom occur, such rationales have not been completely abolished. Those who led and promoted Russia’s seizure of the Crimea and China’s encroachments on the territory of its neighbors, for example, invoked notions of past glory or status in the justification of such expansion. Apropos, in these cases, leaders do not cast these actions as opportunistic seizures (which would indeed only be met with unequivocal outrage) but rather as reclamations of rightful and/or denied status. The era of European imperialism was dominated in part by notions of a White Man’s Burden and civilizing missions, in which expansion was told to have brought benefits to all and was indelibly linked to the greatness of the home nation. In a twist of rhetoric but with similar overtones, wars fought by today’s superpowers are often cast as interventions to defend and promote democracy and even humanity itself. The point—to return to the caveat mentioned earlier—is not that such claims are always or necessarily disingenuous; rather, the point is that these are reliable mechanisms of social motivation that leaders can and will exploit to achieve desired goals. As Mark Twain is reported to have said, history does not repeat itself; it rhymes. Anthony C. Lopez See also Coordination; Followership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Persuasion; Rhetoric

Further Readings Dumont, M., Yzerbyt, V., Wigboldus, D., & Gordijn, E. H. (2004). Social categorization and fear reaction to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(12), 1509–1520.

Leader Self-Efficacy Garfield, Z., von Rueden, C., & Hagen, E. (2019). The evolutionary anthropology of political leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 59–80. Grabo, A., Spisak, B. R., & van Vugt, M. (2017). Charisma as signal: An evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(4), 473–485. Lopez, A. C. (2020). Making “my” problem “our” problem: Warfare as collective action, and the role of leader manipulation. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101294. Schuessler, J. M. (2010). The deception dividend: FDR’s undeclared war. International Security, 34(4), 133–165.

LEADER SELF-EFFICACY This entry reviews the utility of leadership self-efficacy for understanding effective leadership performance. Starting with a definition and boundary conditions, some of the ways in which leadership efficacy contributes to leadership understanding and performance are discussed. First, the background on self-efficacy within social cognitive theory of motivation are reviewed. Second, details of the development of leadership self-efficacy and its relationship to other precursors and outcomes of leader behavior are provided. And finally, the ways in which leadership self-efficacy can be enhanced through various leader development techniques is detailed. Although many individuals may possess the requisite skills and personal characteristics to be an effective leader, a lack of confidence in those abilities can undermine performance as a leader or even the desire to take on an important leadership role. When assuming the responsibilities of leadership, leadership self-efficacy (alternatively referred to as leader efficacy) is a leader’s estimate of their ability to fulfill the leadership role and plays a key role in leadership performance. Leadership selfefficacy is important in understanding leadership because it serves as both a driver of effective leader performance and is the result of important leader development activities.

Origins of Self-Efficacy The psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on his social cognitive theory of motivation provides the underlying basis for the concept of leadership

523

self-efficacy. According to Bandura, self-efficacy is a related to one’s belief in their ability to perform a specific task at a particular level of proficiency or performance. His interest in efficacy was applied to a broad range of contexts and showed that higher self-efficacy was related to increased performance. Increasing performance levels can increase efficacy through positive performance spirals with higher efficacy leading to higher performance and, in turn, higher efficacy. Unfortunately, the converse can also happen, resulting in negative performance-efficacy spirals. Bandura strongly encouraged tying self-efficacy beliefs to specific tasks, rather than relying on a general belief of efficacy across domains. Well-defined self-efficacy measures have helped explain motivation and enhance performance across many areas, including education (student academic self-efficacy, teacher self-efficacy), clinical psychology (psychological adjustment, well-being), sports performance, and other broad categories of workplace task performance and skill acquisition. Bandura’s work on human motivation incorporated what was somewhat novel at the time, that is, the role of human cognitions. Until that time, human learning and motivation research borrowed heavily from animal models that focused almost exclusively on the types of contingencies that would increase a desired behavior or decrease an undesired behavior. Bandura posited that it was important to understand the cognitive thought processes occurring in a social context. Furthermore, he discovered that direct experience was not the only means of acquiring or strengthening a behavior. He offered that selfefficacy and learning are strengthened by four mechanisms: experience with one’s own past performance, vicarious experiences (observing others perform), verbal persuasion (such as coaching or teaching), and emotional and physiological cues that convey lack of anxiety in performing a task.

Developing the Concept of Leadership Self-Efficacy The application of Bandura’s work to leadership appeared in the early 1990s. Leadership self-efficacy was suggested as a mechanism that explained how increased leadership experience

524

Leader Self-Efficacy

levels enhanced a leader’s performance specifically under stress. Previous research had found that the related concept of managerial self-efficacy was associated with improved performance on a management task. However, the development of the construct of leadership self-efficacy beliefs centered on the tasks surrounding interpersonal influence necessary to lead others in a group and included different types of interpersonal challenges in serving in the leadership role. Self-efficacy as an outcome of both learning under stressful leadership conditions as well as buffering against deleterious stress was an outgrowth of Fred Fiedler’s Cognitive Resource Model of Leadership. This theory had shown that increased years of experience and high levels of relevant experience could buffer leaders against stress reactions in challenging situations, and that this experience especially facilitated performance. Furthermore, Fiedler’s earlier work encouraged leaders to match their leadership environment with their own propensity for task- or relationshiporiented leadership. That match of leader motivation to situation, Fiedler found, should increase feelings of leadership self-efficacy and, in turn, leadership performance. In developing a leadership self-efficacy scale, Susan E. Murphy set out to measure a leader’s belief in engaging in leadership at a particular level of performance across different leadership situations that varied in difficulty and looked at different levels of self-efficacy under situational stress. A 2016 review of leadership self-efficacy by Murphy summarized numerous studies showing that although there are some slightly different conceptualizations of leadership self-efficacy reflected in different types of measures, leadership self-efficacy is consistently related to increased leader performance. Research has found that leader self-efficacy is beneficial in numerous contexts and has an impact on effective leadership, goal setting, motivation, leader identity, leadership of change, and performance, as well as the collective efficacy of a team and subsequent group and team performance. However, there is research that also suggests perhaps a curvilinear relationship between self-efficacy and performance, with leaders with extreme levels of self-efficacy having a

negative influence on their own performance and that of their team. Ongoing understanding of leadership selfefficacy has focused on its role in self-regulatory views of motivation that incorporate complex cognitive thought processes necessary for leader role performance. Self-regulation of leader behavior begins with leadership self-schema (i.e., a cognitive framework comprising organized information and beliefs about the self) in which exemplar prototypes of effective leaders are used to assess one’s “fit” to the role of leader and determine the strength and content of one’s leader identity. Recent research has shown that a “fit” between one’s exemplars of leadership and their own leader concept can increase self-efficacy. Other researchers show that a self-efficacious leader is motivated to take on the leadership role or demonstrates what is called motivation to lead. Further work related to self-regulation broadened leader self-efficacy to consider how specific capabilities help leaders engage in actions across various leadership roles, demands, and contexts. This conceptualization of the leader self-efficacy construct, then, included efficacy around thoughts, self-motivation, action, and means, all of which have been shown to be important facets of leadership self-efficacy for leader performance. Therefore, within this self-regulatory view, leader self-efficacy plays a vital role in organizing a leader’s behavior in conjunction with goals, outcome expectations, and perceived environmental facilitators and enablers, as well as environmental impediments.

Relationship to Other Constructs and Outcomes The term leadership self-efficacy has sometimes been used interchangeably with general measures of confidence. However, leadership self-efficacy is distinct in a number of ways. Self-efficacy refers to specific tasks of leadership, while confidence may be more general. Moreover, followers or team members do not necessarily see a leader’s self-efficacy, but they have a good idea of what constitutes the outward behavior of confident leader, which may not be related to internal leader self-efficacy. Self-esteem and generalized self-efficacy have also

Leader Self-Efficacy

been offered in place of leadership self-efficacy. Not surprisingly, characteristics such as high self-esteem, extroversion, and internal locus of control are related to high levels of leader self-efficacy. Although these constructs show some relationships to leadership self-efficacy, they are more general and trait-related constructs than the situational or state-related construct of one’s leadership self-efficacy beliefs. In other words, self-efficacy is a self-assessment of a cognitive state related to the task of leadership. More broadly, developing leader efficacy helps individuals manage their leader behavior in a number of different ways. First, the external confidence that comes from feeling capable of leadership can facilitate decision making. We also know that one often gains confidence in one’s abilities after firsthand experience. This can be the accumulation of different experiences over time or specific, one-time, intense experiences. These “trial by fire” experiences can build strong efficacy. Second, as stated previously, self-efficacy is related to motivation to lead, but this is not a one-to-one relationship, as individuals may be quite motivated to lead but feel they have not had the experience or training and are low in efficacy beliefs. Equally plausible are individuals who have high leader efficacy but do not have a strong desire to assume a leadership role. Understanding those reticent to take on the leadership role is important. There is research, though, that those with high leadership self-efficacy most often emerge as leaders in different research and applied settings, suggesting again the tie to motivation to lead. The construct of leadership self-efficacy seems to be associated with various theories of leadership, service leadership, servant leadership, and transformational leadership, with efficacy playing a mediating role between personality constructs and their application to the leadership style. Some research has not found these relationships but tends not to use specific leadership self-efficacy measures. Future research will need to ensure that the measurement of leader efficacy might be tied to leader behavior and styles under study. Also important is a continued understanding of context for leadership. A 2016 article utilized a crisis-leader-efficacy scale that helped demonstrate how to enhance decision-making under crisis.

525

Moreover, in situations where leadership makes little difference in team performance because of strong organization controls or cultures, selfefficacy for leadership may not be related, as these factors diminish leader impact.

Leader Development and Self-Efficacy Many types of leader development activities not only help in acquiring new or improved leadership skills but they also directly increase one’s leadership self-efficacy. For example, accumulating time in a leadership role or gaining experience across a breadth of leadership situations help leaders perform better in future leadership roles. Targeted leadership training across a range of skills is known to increase leadership self-efficacy, as is observing effective and ineffective role models. Trusted mentors and executive coaches can also guide leaders to focus on effective behaviors. Giving leaders increasingly more demanding developmental on-the-job experiences, coupled with time for reflection, can work to increase leadership self-efficacy and the ability to demonstrate complex leader behaviors. Both breadth of experience across different leadership situations, as well as in-depth, high stakes experiences, work to enhance self-efficacy. Supportive team members will also increase positive efficacy-performance spirals as they accept the leader’s influence in the leadership role. However, leader self-efficacy development over time is not always linear. These drops in leadership self-efficacy occur when leaders recognize the increased on-the-job demands of new leadership roles or are involved in leader development programs that cause them to reassess their leadership efficacy. They may also encounter unsupportive team members who question their authority. This unevenness in efficacy trajectories is to be expected and should be anticipated in leader development programs. In addition to leader development offered by an employer, the role of self-leadership is also a way to make sure development occurs. Self-leadership focuses on the cognitive and behavioral skills to ensure goal directed behavior. Recently, research studies have shown the interplay between leader self-efficacy and self-leadership. This is an important development, as leader self-efficacy is a major

526

Leader–Follower Relationships

component of self-regulation theory. Self-leadership, which is the process of influencing oneself to achieve goals through a set of cognitive and behavioral strategies, has been shown to be effective for attainting a number of positive career outcomes. Self-leadership can be another way to guide and develop one’s efficacy. Taking responsibility for development can both be enhanced by self-efficacy or, in turn, enhance leadership self-efficacy. Learning goal orientation, where leaders believe that leadership skills are something that can be developed and spend time to master these skills, has been shown to be related to higher levels of leadership self-efficacy. Leader self-efficacy also plays an integral role in the process of leadership development. We know that self-efficacy affects task performance through different intervening task engagement behaviors such as persistence, effort, goal setting, strategy usage, and choice. Each of these engagement behaviors directly translate to the process of leader development. In this work there is a distinction between leader performance efficacy and other forms of efficacy that help in the leader development process. It starts with (a) preparatory self-efficacy, which allows a person to learn during leader development; (b) efficacy-performance spirals, mentioned earlier, which can be positive or negative; (c) learning self-efficacy, which is similar to goal orientation toward the ability to learn leadership; and (d) resilient self-efficacy, which corresponds to an unshakable efficacy across circumstances. Each one of these components of efficacy for leader development are important to consider in designing developmental initiatives. In conclusion, leadership self-efficacy has been found to play an important role in leadership performance at individual and group levels. In addition, formal and informal leader development typically develops both leadership skills and leadership self-efficacy to deploy those skills. Susan E. Murphy See also Effective Leadership and Selflessness; Intelligences; Motional Intelligence; Power and Powerlessness; Self-Leadership

Further Readings Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American Psychologist, 37, 122–147. Bandura, A. (2012). On the functional properties of perceived self-efficacy revisited. Journal of Management, 38(9), 9–44. Dyer, L. P. (2019). Leadership self-efficacy: Review and leader development implications. Journal of Management Development, 38, 637–650. Hannah, S. T., Avolio, B. J., Walumbwa, F. O., & Chan, A. (2012). Leader self and means efficacy: A multi-component approach. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 118(2), 143–161. Hoyt, C. L., Murphy, S. E., Halverson, S. K., & Watson, C. B. (2003). Group leadership: Efficacy and effectiveness. Group Dynamics, Theory, Research, and Practice, 7(4), 259–274. Machida, M., & Schaubroeck, J. (2011). The role of self-efficacy beliefs in leader development. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 18(4), 459–468. doi:10.1177/1548051811404419 Murphy, S. E. (2002). Leader self-regulation: The role of self-efficacy and “multiple intelligences.” In R. Riggio, S. Murphy, & F. Pirozzolo, (Eds.), Multiple intelligences and leadership (pp. 163–186). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Murphy, S. E., & Johnson, S. K. (2016). Leadership and leader developmental self-efficacy: Their role in enhancing leader development efforts. New Directions for Student Leadership, 2016(149), 73–84. Park, S. (2016). Development and validation of a crisis self-efficacy scale. PhD dissertation. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee.

LEADER–FOLLOWER RELATIONSHIPS This entry describes the theory and research that has been done on an important evolving topic, the relationships between leaders and followers. Historically, the study of leadership has often focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the leader. However, in recent years there has been a significant movement to recognize and address followers’ roles in affecting organizational success or failure. Rather than simply considering followers as recipients of leader influence or as an afterthought

Leader–Follower Relationships

in assessing leadership outcomes, more recent conceptualizations of leadership view it as a process whereby leaders and followers interact and collaborate to accomplish mutually desired organizational goals, with both roles important for success. Traditionally, in the United States, as in many countries, people have tended to be enamored of leaders. Whether it be managers, politicians, or celebrities, the role of leader has often been idealized and even “romanticized,” attributing primary responsibility for success and failure to the leader alone, with less attention paid to those who helped the leader achieve that success. Early leadership research largely overlooked the role of followers, focusing on the traits that make up a good leader, searching for some magic combination of attributes that would guarantee success in all situations. Failing in that effort, subsequent work focused on leader behaviors, that is, what leaders do in their interactions with subordinates. Seeing the need for both leader and situation, contingency theories emerged to examine combinations of particular leadership styles occurring in different situational contexts. As vital as a leader is to the leadership process, followers are the often-unnamed actors who play substantial roles in both leader emergence and effectiveness. In organizational systems, most leaders are also followers, and many followers perform vital leadership behaviors in their workplaces. The distinction between the two roles can sometimes be quite murky.

The Case for Mutual Influence In 1978, Edwin Hollander published his classic text Leadership Dynamics, locating leadership as a process occurring at the intersection of leader, follower, and context, positing leadership as a relationship between a leader and followers engaged in mutual goal achievement. Other research presented evidence of follower behaviors influencing leader behavior as well as the presumed opposite. For example, in lab studies where followers were trained to only respond to more autocratic leader behaviors, previously more democratic leaders changed to behave more autocratically. In terms of influence, leaders are

527

responsive to followers just as followers respond to leaders. Thus, the leader–follower relationship becomes of critical importance. In organizations, leaders often are given the power to reward or punish followers, a form of power that naturally gives them influence and may compel followers to comply with their wishes. Yet, a job title does not necessarily grant leaders legitimacy in the eyes of followers, and research has found that leaders who are not seen as legitimate have difficulty influencing followers. For example, leaders who are seen as garnering their positions due to nepotism or affirmative action may not have the same degree of influence on followers as the leader who is seen as an expert in the area. Thus, followers have influence, too, in granting leaders the legitimacy to lead effectively and garner follower motivation and effort. Other sources of power such as having expertise or serving as a referent, where people identify with someone and seek to model that person’s behavior, are also not the exclusive domain of leaders. Many leaders have found that the follower who has the greatest expertise may be very difficult to dismiss, even if the leader wants to, thereby diminishing the leader’s coercive power. And as more work is done remotely, or simply not in face-to-face contact with the leader, the ability to influence followers becomes far more dependent on the leader’s ability to inspire commitment in the distant follower rather than simple compliance due to the leader’s ability to observe and monitor. Further, the ability to inspire and motivate tends to draw from the quality of the relationship between the leader and follower, with followers seeing the leader as a legitimate source of influence, someone they respect and wish to emulate and learn from, rather than someone who needs to be obeyed out of fear. Power does not need to be exercised “over” others; the highest quality relationships may be more typified by using “power with” others. In sum, influence is always present and exchanged between leaders and followers, a mutual and recurrent process that can determine the effectiveness of both the leader and the led. This mutuality underscores the importance of the role of the follower and the relations between leaders and followers.

528

Leader–Follower Relationships

Mutual Expectations One factor that may explain the development and maintenance of positive leader-member relations is the expectations that each party has of the other as the relationship begins. Work by Lynn Offermann and others in the area of implicit leadership theories (ILTs) suggests that in thinking about and describing leaders, people’s na¨ıve thoughts describe leaders as having characteristics falling into nine primary categories: sensitivity, dedication, tyranny, charisma, strength, masculinity, creativity, attractiveness, and intelligence. Thus, followers enter leadership relationships with personal ideologies about how they might expect a leader to behave. A match between follower ILT and the leader’s behavior is seen to be helpful in establishing more positive relationships between leaders and followers. Research suggests that congruence between a person’s expectation of a leader and a leader’s behavior can be associated with positive organizational outcomes such as career progression, organizational identification, and follower task performance and job attitudes. Additionally, there is evidence that ILTs influence member perception, memory, interactions, and evaluations of leaders. Leaders who do not fit one’s ILT prototype may be given lower evaluations of their leadership. Similarly, leaders typically hold implicit theories of followership (IFTs)—that is, expectations about the prototypic traits and behaviors that characterize followers. Research suggests that leader IFTs often fall into expecting followers to be either passive, active, or proactive. Passive followers are often categorized as being easy to influence, obedient, and deferent to the leader’s authority with little responsibility of their own. Active followers are expected to be team players: loyal members, eager to offer input. Proactive followers are expected to go above and beyond, to take initiative to accomplish organizational goals. Similar to work on ILTs, Thomas Sy found IFTs to be represented by six main categories: industry, enthusiasm, good citizen, conformity, insubordination, and incompetence. Other research suggests that these expectations are likely to differ by culture, with Eastern cultures espousing greater expectation for follower loyalty and respect for

authority than Western cultures. Despite cultural differences, matching leader–follower IFTs are seen to be related to many interpersonal outcomes such as job satisfaction, trust, liking, and relationship quality. Thus, evidence supports the idea that congruence between ILTs and IFTs impact the relationships between leaders and members. Whether leaders view followers as “follower-like” (based on their expectations) and followers view leaders as “leaderlike” can set the stage for the development and preservation of high-quality relations. The existence of ILTs and IFTs presents challenges for individuals who may not fit the expected prototype, such as women or minority group members in the leadership role, or more proactive followers working with a leader who expects deference.

Active Followership Once engaged in a relationship, viewing followers as co-actors in their relationships with the leader leads to closer examination of followers as active participants in the leadership process. Hollander framed leadership as a type of reciprocal influence exchange occurring between leaders and group members. His model, called the Idiosyncrasy Credit Model, suggests that leaders gain their legitimacy through interactions they have with followers. It is followers who grant the leader the right to influence them, based on the leader demonstrating competence and conforming to the norms and expectations of the group. Credit is given for successful influence and is deducted after failures. Thus, leaders must earn the right to influence followers rather than simply have influence bestowed based on their position. One of the more influential approaches to understanding follower participation in leadership is Robert Kelley’s model of effective followership. Kelley defined the way people follow based on their level of independent critical thinking (ICT) and level of active engagement (AE). Combined, according to Kelley, these two dimensions form five categories of followers: sheep, yes-people, alienated, pragmatists, and stars. Sheep are what many people often think of when they hear the word “follower”—passive individuals who score low in ICT and AE who rely on the leader to think

Leader–Follower Relationships

for them and motivate them. Yes-people are low in ICT but high in AE, often contributing positivity and energy but expecting the leader to provide instruction and vision. Alienated followers think for themselves but can be overly critical, with overall negative energy. These individuals are low in AE but high in ICT. Found in the middle range are the pragmatists, referred to as “survivors.” These followers often ride on the fence and wait to act, adapting their behavior to best support their continued survival in their roles. Ideal followers, according to Kelley, are the stars, those who are high in both ICT and AE. These followers are characterized by individual thought and perform their work with initiative and energy; they are often referred to as self-starters, problem solvers, or effective followers. This focus on followers who demonstrate independent thought is similar to what Ira Chaleff refers to as courageous followership. Courageous followers will support the leader when appropriate but also have the courage to challenge a leader when necessary, in acts of what Chaleff calls intelligent disobedience. In this view, ideal followers provide support along with critical and honest feedback to the leader, “speaking truth to power” as the situation demands. In their relationships with their leaders they are loyal, but not blind, supporters, ready to step in and offer needed corrections that can steer leaders away from poor decisions and outcomes of which they may be unaware.

529

differently but members act differently based on how the leader treats them. Group members who have high-quality relationships with leaders are likely to be granted more autonomy and experience higher levels of job satisfaction, satisfaction with their supervisor, organizational citizenship behaviors, and organizational commitment. They are also likely to show higher levels of performance, which may result in better future prospects for them. However, those benefits are typically earned at the price of higher leader expectations and demands, as leaders rely on those members more heavily. While there is a considerable amount of good evidence supporting the many benefits of establishing high-quality relationships between leaders and followers, there are still many questions as to how leaders can best form these relationships with as many members as possible. The behaviors encouraging these desirable LMX behaviors are not well specified and need further examination. Based on the evolving nature of relationships, it would be important to study relational leader-follower dynamics over a longer period of time, yet there is little longitudinal research taking this approach. In addition, national culture has been found to affect the relationship of LMX with organizational outcomes, with the impact being stronger in more individualistic cultures compared to collectivistic ones. This is an area that also calls for more detailed examination.

Emotional Connections Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) The most common current approach to understanding leader–follower relationships stems from the work of George Graen and his colleagues, known as leader–member exchange (LMX). Prior to LMX, most leadership approaches considered followers as a monolithic group who were largely treated the same by their leaders. LMX suggests instead that leaders have different relationships with different group members, with some members enjoying more high-quality relationships with the leader based on mutual trust and greater shared responsibility, while other members (sometimes called an “out group”) have relationships with the leader that are of lower quality. In this approach, not only do leaders treat various members

After being ignored in organizational research for many years, the importance of emotions to workplace functioning is now more recognized. In terms of leadership, this has led to examining the emotional components of leadership and followership. Work on charismatic, transformational, visionary, and inspirational leadership all note the importance of appealing to subordinates on an emotional as well as rational level in building productive working relationships. Articulating an inspiring vision is said to mobilize followers into achieving results beyond expectations, as followers embrace the goal and direct efforts toward reaching it. These kinds of leadership often build on referent power, where followers see the leader as a model of behavior to be emulated.

530

Leader–Follower Relationships

Indeed, research has shown that one person’s emotions and emotional behaviors often trigger similar emotions and behaviors in those around them, in a form of emotional contagion. Recent work shows that leader positive affect—the tendency to experience positive emotions—can predict leader emergence and effectiveness. Other studies have shown that a leader’s emotional competence—the ability to understand emotions in oneself and others as well as regulate one’s emotions—can have a positive effect on follower performance, particularly on tasks where interdependence is required. In addition, follower perceptions of the quality of their relationship with their leader have been shown to be influenced by how the leader manages follower emotions. Thus, when considering relationships between leaders and followers, it is important to examine their emotional connections as well as other forms.

Future Research As researchers continue to seek a better understanding of leader–follower relationships, greater attention is being given to the challenges posed by the increasing diversity in both leaders and those they try to lead. Today’s groups and organizations increasingly call for leaders and followers who are able to work with people who are different than they are. As noted elsewhere in this volume, demographic differences between leaders and followers are all too often characterized by lowerquality relationships in which leaders give followers lower performance ratings and followers report lower levels of satisfaction, including satisfaction with the leader. One of the known antecedents of higher-quality LMX relationships is the perceived similarity between leader and follower, meaning that leaders and followers may both need to overcome initial biases based on demographic characteristics to find the commonalities beneath, or at least to unite in a common, corporate goal. And achieving that is only the first step, as deeper-level aspects of diversity in terms of personality, attitudes, and work styles will also need to be accommodated and managed if successful working relationships are to be established. Further, as the use and availability of technology continues to rise, there is a growing need to

understand the leader–follower relationship in virtual contexts. Many businesses now offer work-from-home arrangements, allowing employees to work either partially or exclusively from a different location. Other times, teams are assembled across states or countries to recruit needed team member expertise. There has been a considerable amount of research to better understand the obstacles faced by virtual teams, including how virtuality affects relational dynamics and the roles of the leader and follower. Initial evidence indicates that distance may create difficulty in maintaining relationships, increased coordination losses, a lack of connection to the leader and group, and low trust in leadership. Research on virtual communication suggests that physical distance between leaders and followers can create relational distance as well, as communications often become shorter and more task focused. As the frequency of so-called e-leadership continues to rise, there is a continuing need to better understand how leader–follower relationships may change in comparison to traditional face-to-face arrangements, and how leaders can maintain high-quality relationships with followers in situations where their relationships are mediated by technology. In sum, the relationship between leaders and followers continues to be a central focus in studying the leadership process. As characteristics of the people and situational contexts continue to evolve, our understanding of the impact of these new environments needs to advance as well. In any case, it is clear that, ideally, both parties, leader and follower, need to be fully engaged in a positive process of mutual support and influence if organizational and social progress is to be made. Madison R. Romero and Lynn R. Offermann See also E-Leadership; Emotion and Leadership; Empowerment, Followership; Idiosyncrasy Credit; Implicit Leadership Theories; Leader–Member Exchange (LMX); Leading Diversity; Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Further Readings Ashkanasy, N. M., & Dorris, A. D. (2017). Emotions in the workplace. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 67–90.

Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Avoilio, B. J., Sosik, J. J., Kahai, S. S., & Baker, B. (2014). E-leadership: Re-examining transformations in leadership source and transmission. The Leadership Quarterly, 25, 105–131. Bauer, T., & Ergodan, B. (2015). The Oxford handbook of leader-member exchange. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Chaleff, I. (2015). Intelligent disobedience: Doing right when what you’re told to do is wrong. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Hollander, E. P. (2009). Inclusive leadership: The essential leader–follower relationship. New York, NY: Routledge. Oc, B., & Bashshur, M. R. (2013). Followership, leadership, and social influence. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(6), 919–934. Offermann, L. R., & Coates, M. R. (2018). Implicit theories of leadership: Stability and change over two decades. The Leadership Quarterly, 29, 513–522. Sy, T. (2010). What do you think of followers? Examining the content, structure, and consequences of implicit followership theories. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113, 73–84. Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25, 83–104.

LEADER–MEMBER EXCHANGE (LMX) Leader–member exchange (LMX) theory suggests that leaders, through engaging in different types of exchanges, develop different quality relationships with their followers, and that this is highly predictive of workplace outcomes, with effective leadership arising from developing and managing good LMX quality relationships with followers. This entry describes how the theory evolved, how it differs from other leadership approaches, how LMX relationships develop, the main antecedents and outcomes of LMX, theoretical frameworks for LMX, developments of LMX theory, and LMX theory criticisms. LMX theory, first formulated by George Graen and colleagues during the 1970s, is a relationship-based approach where the unit of analysis is the leader–follower dyad, and relationships range from low to high LMX quality.

531

LMX is one of the most popular frameworks for examining workplace leadership.

LMX Theory Development Originally, the theory was referred to as the Vertical Dyad Linkage (VDL) approach to leadership. It focused on the dyadic (paired) relationship between a leader and follower and the amount of negotiating latitude a leader grants to a follower to negotiate their role. Some of these relationships were referred to as “ingroup” and characterized by followers receiving more encouragement and support from the leader; those that were referred to as “outgroup” were seen as being more formal and based on the work contract. In other words, leaders treat followers differently from each other. LMX theory builds upon the VDL approach, but rather than focusing on negotiating latitude, it examines the types of exchanges that occur between the leader and follower. While the term “member” in LMX refers to the one of the pair who is being led by the leader, most researchers tend to refer to this person as the “follower.” VDL was explicitly a dyadic approach while the level of analysis in LMX theory is not so explicit, although commonly it is the leader–follower dyad. The basic premise of LMX theory is that leaders, by engaging in different behaviors with their followers, develop different quality relationships (from low to high LMX quality) with team members, and that this predicts important work outcomes. Research confirms these premises: as leaders do act differently toward different team members, which results in different quality LMX relationships, LMX quality is a reliable predictor of work outcomes. These findings have proved to be the catalyst for examining leadership as a relationship-based approach with an emphasis on the dyadic processes between leaders and followers. LMX theory is different from other leadership approaches in two main ways. First, in LMX theory, the unit of analysis is the relationship between leaders and followers, while in many other leadership approaches it is the leaders’ traits, skills, and behaviors. Second, LMX theory predicts that leaders differentiate between their followers and subsequently have different types of

532

Leader–Member Exchange (LMX)

relationships, while an assumption in the leadership field is that leaders treat all their followers in the same way (termed an “average leadership style” approach). LMX theory draws heavily upon social exchange theory to describe how LMX quality develops. According to social exchange theory, people in a relationship exchange different resources between them (such as money, goods, services, status, information, and love). As the relationship develops, the opportunity arises to exchange more personalized information, and this can lead to better quality relationships. In the context of the workplace, researchers generally consider two main types of resources that can be exchanged between the leader and follower: task or economic exchanges, which are based on the work contract (e.g., information about the job role, performance expectations, what to do when there are work problems) and social exchanges (e.g., providing support, help, and encouragement for work). If the exchanges are mainly task oriented, a low LMX quality relationship develops, which is limited to exchanges that relate to the employment contract and are mainly task-oriented in nature. However, if the exchanges are more social in orientation, a high LMX quality relationship can develop, which is characterized by high trust, interaction, support, and rewards, resulting in follower and leader being loyal to one another and sharing mutual feelings of liking and respect. There has been a considerable amount of research into LMX, and this has provided a comprehensive understanding of the antecedents (causes); the stages of relationship development; the relationship between work-related attitudes, behaviors, and performance; and the factors that mediate and moderate this process.

LMX Relationship Development The Leadership-Making Model describes the process through which leaders and followers develop roles via dyadic exchanges. Three stages make up the Leadership-Making Model. The first stage is the stranger stage (role taking), where the leader and follower have little knowledge of each other and have interdependent roles. The exchanges are

based on the job description and requirements of the work. Leaders provide sufficient resources required for the follower to do their work and, in turn, the follower does only what the job requires. If the relations remain at this stage, there will be a low LMX quality. However, the leader or follower might “offer” to improve the relationship by initiating social exchanges that can lead to a relationship that goes beyond this stage (e.g., the leader might give the follower new opportunities). If this offer is accepted, the relationship can move to the second stage, termed the acquaintance stage (role making). Interactions become more frequent, with social exchanges extending beyond the formal employment contract to include the sharing of information and resources at both personal and work levels. These social exchanges are based on the principle of equity between the leader and follower (i.e., equal value to the exchange of resources) to determine an acceptable role relationship. The third stage is the maturity stage (role routinization). The exchanges between the leader and follower become highly developed, each can count on the other for loyalty and support, and the relationship is characterized by mutual respect, trust, and obligation. When people reach this level of LMX development, their relationships correspond to a high LMX quality.

Antecedents and Outcomes of LMX Quality Research has examined a wide range of potential antecedents of LMX quality but with many inconsistent findings. However, some factors have been reliably linked as antecedents to LMX quality, including followers’ demographic and personality factors (e.g., followers’ level of conscientiousness), followers’ behavior and work competence factors (e.g., followers’ citizenship behaviors), leaders’ behavior and personal characteristics factors (e.g., leaders’ delegation to followers), leader–follower dyadic similarity factors (e.g., leader–follower similarity), and contextual factors (e.g., national culture). In terms of outcomes of LMX, an impressive range of factors have been examined. A high LMX relationship confers many potential advantages for the follower, leader, and organization and therefore should predict work outcomes. Several

Leader–Member Exchange (LMX)

meta-analytic studies have confirmed that LMX quality relates very strongly to a range of workrelated reactions (e.g., empowerment, job and leader satisfaction, organizational commitment, better mental health, and lower turnover intentions), job perceptions (e.g., organizational, justice, lower job ambiguity, and less conflict), and performance (e.g., creativity, task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and negative counterproductive performance). What is impressive in this research is first that the strength of the relation between LMX quality and work outcomes is relatively large; second, that the relation is found across a wide variety of demographic factors and job types; and third, that the relation is found in many cultures around the world. Indeed, research into LMX is global, and the general concept has been adapted to meet cultural norms. For example, in China, a concept related to LMX is Guanxi, which refers to the system of social networks and influential relationships that enhance work activities.

Theoretical Frameworks for LMX While there has been considerable research examining the antecedents and outcomes of LMX, much less focus has been directed toward developing a theoretical understanding of these processes. The dominant approach, as described earlier, has been social exchange theory, as well as the prediction that high LMX quality leads followers to feel an obligation to “pay back” the leader for the positive resources they have received by working hard for the leader. Other theoretical explanations have focused on role and organizational justice theories to explain the relation between LMX quality and outcomes. Since the early 2000s, theoretical research has widened, and significant developments have been made in applying social identity, conservation of resources, and self-determination theories to understanding LMX processes.

Beyond the Leader–Follower Dyad While LMX theory is essentially dyadic in nature (i.e., leader–follower dyads), there has been a refocusing of research to address group-level phenomena to highlight the multilevel nature of LMX. Leaders manage many followers, and each

533

leader–follower dyadic relationship occurs within the context of multiple LMX relationships. The process by which leaders develop different LMX relationships with team members has been referred to as LMX differentiation, which results in specific patterns of LMX quality within the team (e.g., from being all the same quality to being different in quality). A popular way to examine LMX differentiation is to assess the variability in LMX quality among team members (with high scores reflecting differentiated relationships). Research has shown that high LMX differentiation (i.e., the leader has different LMX quality with different team members) leads to poor team processes (such as coordination and conflict) and detrimental work reactions. This shows that the relation between LMX quality and work outcomes is based not only on the quality of the relationship between the leader and the follower but also on the quality of the relationships the manager has with other members of the team. Other ways research is moving beyond the leader–follower dyad includes examining follower–follower relations (CWX: co-worker exchanges), team level exchanges (TMX: team–member exchanges), and inter-team LMX relations.

Criticisms of LMX Research Although LMX theory has proved to be a popular framework for examining workplace leadership and there is considerable evidence for many of its predictions, it has attracted several criticisms. These focus on issues related to definition, conceptualization, and measurement. For example, there have been concerns about whether LMX is a distinctive construct, as there is a considerable overlap between LMX and other leadership constructs (such as transformational leadership). Furthermore, the status of LMX varies considerably between studies, even when examining the same topics—for example, sometimes it is the independent variable, and on other occasions it is the dependent variable and varies from being a mediator to being a moderator. Finally, some scholars have been critical of the fact that the majority of studies lack a theoretical focus and that, as a consequence, these studies lead to an exhaustive list of potential causes and outcomes of LMX.

534

Leaders’ Personal Crisis

The Significance of LMX LMX theory represents the clearest attempt in the field to develop a relationship-based framework for understanding leadership. The approach shifts attention from being solely on the leader (and their traits, skills, and behaviors) to acknowledging the dyadic relations they have with their followers. Considerable evidence supports the view that leaders develop differentiated relationships with their followers and that LMX quality reliably predicts a wide range of important work outcomes. A range of theoretical approaches have been employed to explain LMX processes, and new ones are emerging. Research is developing in many areas specially to recognize the multilevel nature of LMX processes. Robin Martin See also Followership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leadership and Management; Organizational Leadership Team Leadership

Further Readings Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (Eds.). (2014). The Oxford handbook of leader-member exchange. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dansereau, F., Jr., Graen, G., & Haga, W. J. (1975). A vertical dyad linkage approach to leadership within formal organizations: A longitudinal investigation of the role making process. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13, 46–78. Dulebohn, J. H., Bommer, W. H., Liden, R. C., Brouer, R. L., & Ferris, G. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of antecedents and consequences of leader-member exchange: Integrating the past with an eye toward the future. Journal of Management, 38, 1715–1759. Gottfredson, R. K., Wright, S. L., & Heaphy, E. D. (2020). A critique of the leader-member exchange construct: Back to square one. The Leadership Quarterly, 31, 101385. Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6, 219–247. Martin, R., Thomas, G., Legood, A., & Dello Russo, S. (2018). Leader–member exchange (LMX)

differentiation and work outcomes: Conceptual clarification and critical review. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39, 151–168. Scandura, T. A., & Meuser, J. D. (2021). Relational dynamics of leadership: Problems and prospects. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9, 309–337.

LEADERS’ PERSONAL CRISIS Scholars are now studying the effects of personal crises on leadership and the risks to organizations of unaddressed and unsupported crises. Specific theories of leadership are relevant to leaders in crisis, and scholarship encompasses adaptive coping responses, risks, and benefits to leaders as they navigate their crisis, as well as practical approaches to caring for leaders and members through organizations of reciprocal care. Common stressful life events which may affect the leader in intimate areas of their lives include illness, injury, death, or divorce. Yet the relevance of personal crisis to leadership studies continues to be under recognized and there is a lack of research on personal aspects of leadership more generally. Common stressful life events which may affect the leader in intimate areas of their lives include illness, injury, death, or divorce.

Absence of Research on Leaders During Personal Crisis There is limited research on the leader as personin-crisis. Historical literature on several US presidents detail the impact of illness, disability, and death or illness of spouses and children on these leaders. Yet, there is limited research in leadership studies and the social or organizational sciences on personal aspects of leadership in general and personal crisis in leaders specifically. Personal crisis happens to most leaders in their lifetime just as it does to most people. In the results of an online screening survey published in 2020, Gill Robinson Hickman and Laura E. Knouse found that 70% of leaders had experienced a personal crisis while in a leadership role.

Leaders’ Personal Crisis

Still, scholars writing in journals such as the Leadership Quarterly and the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology express frustration regarding the absence of research on the well-being of leaders and how their personal lives affect their leadership roles. Alyson Byrne and colleagues have posited that this lack of scholarly interest seems to be based on several faulty assumptions: that leaders are predisposed to positive psychological health and therefore no research is needed; that findings about the well-being of employees fully apply to leaders; and that the psychological distress of leaders will not be harmful to the organization. The researchers are skeptical of these assumptions.

Risks of Leader Personal Crisis to the Organization Organizations may unknowingly pay a price when leaders struggle with personal crises with little institutional support. For example, many might be surprised by the number of younger to middleaged senior or executive level leaders who leave organizations due to irreconcilable tensions between work and caregiving. Organizations lose institutional knowledge, productivity, social capital, and temporary or full-time employee replacement costs when leaders are unable to work or are distracted due to lack of support for personal crises and caregiving responsibilities. For example, Morten Bennedsen and colleagues’ study in Denmark found a decline in operating return on assets (ORA) associated with the death of a CEO’s family members. The same researchers found considerable loss in ORA during CEO hospitalization of more than five days. What might account for these findings? Higher levels of leader stress and burnout may contribute to fewer transformational leadership practices and higher levels of abusive supervision. In addition, poorly managed rumors of CEO illness may have a more negative impact on company value than wellmanaged information sharing or even unanticipated succession events. Because personal crisis will affect most leaders at some point in their careers, organizations that anticipate these events through their policies and provide resources to their leaders may reduce these negative impacts.

535

Theory Relevant to Leaders in Crisis

Theories from psychology, organizational behavior, and communications may be relevant to understanding leadership in personal crisis. Stevan Hobfoll and colleagues’ conservation of resources (COR) theory holds that crisis events trigger loss of a variety of resources, which are necessary for survival and accomplishing major life goals. Resources include tangible objects and financial resources but also social position, skills, knowledge, and positive attitudes. Personal crisis threatens and depletes a variety of resources, and leaders in crisis must invest even more resources to shore up the losses. If resource loss continues, COR theory predicts that leaders can become depleted and enter an inflexible, defensive mode that actually interferes with efforts to cope effectively with the crisis. As such, COR theory has been used to study the causes and consequences of burnout. COR theory also predicts that infusions of resources during a period of loss are disproportionately more valuable than in times of stability and that people and organizations rich in resources—both tangible and psychological—are more resilient to crisis events. As such, future studies based on COR theory may point toward strategies to recover from crisis and build resilient organizations. Leaders in crisis often struggle with whether to disclose and seek help within in their organizations. Several theories are relevant to understanding the dynamics of these decisions. From social psychology, self-disclosure theory posits that reciprocal disclosure is a primary mechanism through which relationships become stronger and more trusting. Yet, as outlined in communication privacy management theory, personal information can also be conceived of as a commodity that must be carefully managed across the informational boundaries that separate people. Status distance theory incorporates these ideas into the power dynamics of leadership and predicts that when high-power individuals make personal disclosures that violate team members’ expectations of leaders (independent, competent, superior), the perceived status distance between team member and leader decreases. While reduced status distance may make the leader seem less powerful, they may also

536

Leaders’ Personal Crisis

be perceived as more similar to the team members and therefore more trustworthy and relatable, increasing the potential for relationship growth. These theories may be useful in future studies of leaders in personal crisis.

Leaders Coping With Stressful Life Events Drawing upon the disciplines of clinical and social psychology, leader responses to personal crisis can be understood as coping responses, which are actions intended to reduce the threat, harm, or loss associated with a crisis or to diminish resulting personal distress. Some coping responses are more effective than others, and research in psychology is aimed at discovering which kinds of responses are most adaptive in which contexts. Two important dimensions of coping responses are problem- versus emotion-focused coping and approach versus avoidance coping. Problem-focused coping strategies are directed toward resolving the crisis or addressing its harmful effects, while emotionfocused coping strategies are directed toward managing the negative emotions experienced during crisis. Both problem- and emotion-focused strategies can be useful in navigating personal crisis and, at times, emotion-focused strategies may facilitate use of problem-focused actions. Approach coping strategies directly engage with the crisis and its harmful effects, including emotional impacts, in an effort to reduce harm, while avoidance coping strategies serve to provide escape from these negative experiences, at least temporarily. Although both approach and avoidance coping can be helpful in certain circumstances, especially when used flexibly, people who rely primarily on avoidance strategies experience less favorable outcomes and higher levels of psychological distress and even disorder (e.g., depression, post-traumatic stress disorder). When surveying leaders who had experienced personal crisis, Gill Hickman and Laura Knouse found that they reported similar strategies as effective to non-leaders in other research. Seeking and making use of social support is one of the most important and frequently used strategies. Other people can provide a variety of material, informational, and emotional resources when a person experiences a crisis. A majority of leaders in

this research reported successfully using informal sources of support (e.g., friends, family), and many reported gaining support from others in their organization. A majority of leaders also reported using non-crisis related activities, such as staying engaged at work or with hobbies, as a coping strategy. Respite of varying duration, such as vacation days or a leave of absence, was also used by a majority of leaders, as were self-care activities such as healthy eating, exercise, and sleep. A majority of leaders endorsed strategies aimed at changing their perspective on the situation to soothe emotional impact, such as recalling positive memories, focusing on their own self-worth, or engaging in mindfulness practices. Consistent with prior research, successful coping for leaders involves flexible use of multiple strategies supported by a strong social network.

Leadership Risks and Benefits When Navigating Personal Crisis Leaders in personal crisis may be understandably concerned about the impact of these stressful events on their ability to lead and their status in the organizations. Particularly in Western workplace environments, relationships are expected to be more distant and unemotional in order to adhere to “professional” norms. Leader disclosure of personal crisis may violate strong social norms, especially in organizational cultures that promote stark power differentials within rigid status hierarchies between leaders and team members. Furthermore, leaders may fear loss of status or power in their organization, given that knowledge about personal crisis may violate the expectation that leaders should be more independent and competent than team members. Leaders may fear that certain personal crises carry increased stigma—particularly mental health or substance abuse problems stigmatized by society in general. Finally, leaders may be concerned that information about their personal crisis may introduce uncertainty or place undue burden on others in the organization. Leaders who are unable to access adequate resources and social support in their organization face significant personal risks in terms of burnout; poor mental, physical, and spiritual health; and

Leaders’ Personal Crisis

inability to fulfill their role as leaders. In contrast, leaders embedded within supportive organizations where they are able to disclose strategically may be better able to access instrumental and emotional social support from others in their organization. Disclosing to key team members may also reduce leader stress associated with keeping important information concealed from others and may help leaders keep team members informed in case of the need for flexible work arrangements, or simply to explain why the leader seems out of sorts. Thus, leaders who can strategically disclose and seek help may better manage uncertainty and execute an organized response to the personal crisis ` vis-a-vis their leadership role and their team. Participants in Hickman and Knouse’s study suggested several approaches to cope with practical aspects of leadership during personal crisis: (1) develop a plan to handle the crisis; (2) maintain open communication with team members, peers, and supervisors; (3) change work arrangements to deal with the crisis; (4) focus on work when needed and provide clear instructions; and (5) delegate work to capable others and make sure it is completed. Surprisingly, many of these leaders reported a slightly positive impact on their relationships with team members, peers, and supervisors after going through the crisis. This effect needs replication and further study, but it may result from increases in mutual trust due to disclosure by, and provision of support to, the leader, as predicted by status distance theory and self-disclosure theory. This study also found preliminary evidence that the degree of psychological safety leaders perceived in their organization and the degree to which they endorsed trust in their peers and the organization were associated with their perceptions of their overall effectiveness in handling the crisis as a leader. As such, the organizational context may be as important (or more important) to the successful navigation of personal crisis as personal characteristics of the leader.

Organizations of Reciprocal Care Organizations play a vital role in reducing the consequences of personal crisis to leaders, members, and the enterprise itself. Caring in

537

organizations has become an increasing focus in the social sciences. According to Dale Fuqua and Jody Newman, a caring organization refers to a system where personal concern about the welfare of self and others is the norm. Kathleen Allen and colleagues emphasized the role of reciprocal care in their perspective on the purpose for leadership in the 21st century; that is, to create communities of reciprocal care and responsibility, where every person matters and each person’s welfare and dignity is respected and supported. Correspondingly, research on the leader as person in crisis supports the need for reciprocal care between leaders and members combined with the development of organizational programs that promote care and well-being. A culture of reciprocal care begins with psychological safety and mutual trust that originates at board member and executive levels and permeates the organization. Organizations can support leaders and members who experience personal crisis through specific personal crisis support, preparation for personal crisis before it occurs, general work-life support, return-to-work programs, and succession planning for illness and death. Personal crisis support programs include caregiver or referral services for childcare and eldercare; bereavement support groups or specialists; mental health treatment including therapists, psychiatrists, treatment center referrals, and benefits; divorce support groups; and long-term care insurance. Supportive and flexible policies on bereavement leave, sick leave, family leave, and flexible work arrangements help organizations provide added care for leaders and members. Organizations can enhance preparation for personal crisis by offering training programs that normalize personal crisis and promote stress management and self-understanding. Workshops can prepare members to offer social support for colleagues and reduce stigma, especially with regard to mental health. Work-life support programs help leaders and members navigate the responsibilities of work and caregiving. One in six working adults provides informal care for family members. These programs help working caregivers to maintain their careers while supporting family members and reducing the cost of turnover or absenteeism.

538

Leaders’ Stories

An organizational return-to-work program facilitates a person’s ability to resume job responsibilities by helping them gain job control (ability to influence one’s work or autonomy over their work); assess their own ability to do the work (workability); reduce perceived job strain; access professional help for anxiety and depression; and make job-related accommodations. Finally, succession planning prepares organizations and leaders for major events in the lives of CEOs and other executives. A succession plan details the steps an organization will take if an executive dies or suffers a life-altering illness or injury. Gill Robinson Hickman and Laura E. Knouse See also Caring Leadership; Health and Well-Being; Resilient Leadership; Trust; Wellness

Further Readings Allen, K. E., Bordas, J., Hickman, G. R., Matusak, L. R., Sorenson, G. J., & Whitmire, K. J. (1998). Leadership in the 21st century. Empowerment for change: A conceptual working paper. In Rethinking leadership: Kellogg leadership studies project 1994–1997 (pp. 41–62). College Park, MD: The Burns Academy of Leadership. Barling, J., & Cloutier, A. (2016). Leaders’ mental health at work: Empirical, methodological, and policy directions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 394. doi:10.1037/ocp0000055 Bennedsen, M., Perez-Gonzalez, F., & Wolfenzon, D. (2010). Do CEOs matter? Retrieved from https:// www0.gsb.columbia.edu/mygsb/faculty/research/ pubfiles/3177/valueceos.pdf Bennedsen, M., Perez-Gonzalez, F., & Wolfenzon, D. (2012). Evaluating the impact of the boss: Evidence from CEO hospitalization events. IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved from http://conference.iza. org/conference_files/Leadership_2012/perez-gonzalez_ f7878.pdf Brandert, K. T., & Matkin, G. S. (2019). When the crisis is personal: A phenomenological study of women in leadership. Journal of Leadership Studies, 13(3), 56–61. doi:10.1002/jls.21663 Byrne, A., Dionisi, A. M., Barling, J., Akers, A., Robertson, J., Lys, R., . . . Dupr´e, K. (2014). The depleted leader: The influence of leaders’ diminished psychological resources on leadership behaviors. The

Leadership Quarterly, 25(2), 344–357. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2013.09.003 Engel, J. A., & Knock, T. J. (2017). When life strikes the president: Scandal, death, and illness in the White House. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Fuller, J. B., & Raman, M. (2019). The caring company. Harvard Business School. Retrieved from https://www. hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/ The_Caring_Company.pdf Fuqua, D. R., & Newman, J. L. (2002). Creating caring organizations. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 54(2), 131–140. doi:10.1037/10614087.54.2.131 Harms, P. D., Cred´e, M., Tynan, M., Leon, M., & Jeung, W. (2017). Leadership and stress: A meta-analytic review. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), 178–194. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2016.10.006 Hickman, G. R., & Creighton-Zollar, A. (2000). Leadership during personal crisis. In B. Kellerman & L. R. Matusak (Eds.), Cutting edge: Leadership (pp. 59–64). College Park, MD: James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. Retrieved from https://scholarship.richmond.edu/ jepson-faculty-publications/50/ Hickman, G. R., & Knouse, L. E. (2020). When leaders face personal crisis: The human side of leadership. New York, NY: Routledge.

LEADERS’ STORIES Howard Gardner’s important book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership presents an influential approach to understanding leadership. It offers an unusually broad definition of leadership, and it distinguishes leaders who influence by addressing their audience in person, such as Winston Churchill, from those who lead through their work, such as the artist Pablo Picasso. It also classifies leaders as ordinary, innovative or visionary, depending on how far reaching their goals are, as well as how unorthodox their leadership style is. As this entry aims to show, however, Gardner’s most important contribution to understanding leadership is to emphasize the central role of stories, or narratives, in leading, particularly stories about identity, and also the importance of leaders embodying their stories.

Leaders’ Stories

Defining a Leader Gardner defines leaders as individuals “who, by word and/or personal example, markedly influence the behavior, thoughts and/or feelings of a significant number of their fellow human beings” (2011, p. 8). Several aspects of this definition are important. First, compared with some other definitions of a leader, it is quite broad. For example, it has no moral component as some definitions do. Second, it is somewhat imprecise in that the phrases “markedly influence” and “significant number” are open to interpretation. Third, the definition points to the importance both of words—what an individual says or writes—and of behavior; that is, how an individual sets an example through action. In many cases, it is crucial for a leader’s example to act consistently with what they say or write. They must embody their stories. Such leaders do better when they practice what they preach. But indirect leaders, who lead through their, works— of painting, film, or song, for example—need not embody their stories. One of the most original aspects of Gardner’s definition of a leader expands the definition even further. The theory distinguishes direct leaders— those who meet face-to-face with their audiences and speak to them or perform in front of them— from indirect leaders, who lead from behind the scenes. The indirect leader may never be seen or heard. Direct leaders would include orators such as World War II leaders Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as orchestra conductors and directors of stage plays. Such direct leaders typically have to lead by example as well as by words. Again, they must embody their stories. Churchill was a master at sounding determined and optimistic in his manner of presentation as well as in speaking uplifting words and phrases. When leaders fail to embody their stories, they lose credibility or legitimacy very quickly. Elliot Spitzer was elected governor of New York in 2006 largely on the basis of his crime-busting service as state attorney general, where he was particularly aggressive in matters of vice, including going after prostitution rings. When it was revealed early in his term that he was actually “client number nine,” a regular customer of call girls, he immediately

539

suffered a loss of credibility, and in short order resigned as governor.

Ordinary, Innovative, and Visionary Leaders One of Gardner’s most useful ideas is distinguishing different kinds of leaders along a dimension of originality, from ordinary to innovative to visionary. The least original kind of leader is the ordinary leader; such a leader follows traditional norms of leading and can be thought more a manager, one who keeps the trains running on time, and organizations operating in accord with traditional norms. On the other end of the continuum are visionary leaders, who present an entirely new way of thinking whether it be about an esoteric academic subject or something as sweeping as world government. Franklin Roosevelt might be said to have exerted visionary leadership in proposing the basic principles along which a United Nations might be organized. Mohandas K. Gandhi’s nonviolent approach to throwing off colonial rule in India would qualify as visionary. Who would ever have thought such a thing could work? Between ordinary and visionary leaders are innovative leaders. Appropriately, Gardner’s most innovative category is, in fact, that of the innovative leader. These are leaders who take traditional ideas and give them a new twist. Often they take older ideas that have been latent in a culture or organization and bring them forward to redefine ways of thinking and acting. Two examples of innovative leaders are U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who brought forth ideas of American greatness and American exceptionalism that had been eclipsed in recent decades. His story of America was not visionary, but rather it recast the American story along lines that had been forgotten. A second example is Pope John XXIII, whose brief tenure as pontiff (1958–1963) was marked by an openness and emphasis on equality and humanity that had been lost in markedly hierarchical, judgmental church traditions. However, John’s humility and simplicity were deeply rooted in the life and lessons of Jesus. It was difficult for those in the church hierarchy to claim that the direction in which he wanted to lead Roman Catholics had no precedent in church history.

540

Leaders’ Stories

Inclusionary and Exclusionary Identity Stories Gardner emphasizes that the most powerful method of influence is relating stories about identity. Generally, such narratives are about where a group is coming from, where it is going, and what obstacles it faces. In these accounts, leaders and followers are involved in a dynamic journey in which they are the principal heroes and lead characters. Often the leader relates a story about their own identity as well as the group’s. Eleanor Roosevelt clearly embraced her identity as a woman fighting for social justice against restrictive conventional norms and thereby invited others, especially women and people of color, to contest the traditional arrangements or ways of doing things in society. Gardner makes an important distinction between identity stories that are inclusionary, offering or emphasizing commonality and identities that embrace many people, from those that are exclusionary, focusing on differences between ingroups and outgroups. Barack Obama’s famous 2004 speech at the Democratic Party Convention told a classic inclusionary identity story. He said there is not a “black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Donald Trump ran a distinctly exclusionary campaign for president, talking about murderers and rapists immigrating from Mexico. Sometimes the rhetoric could be defended as not explicitly racist, but the identity story was very clear to his followers. Consistent with other theories that emphasize the fact that narratives compete, Gardner notes that one potential leader’s story is related in a context of counterstories. In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden’s inclusive story had to compete with Trump’s exclusionary story, which fanned the resentments of his base toward perceived outgroups and looked down on them. Gardner’s example of Pope John XXIII’s narrative of common humanity of all people of faith, no matter their specific religion, ran counter to Roman Catholic doctrine that often emphasized the view that their domination of Christianity was the only true faith. John was successful while he lived because his own story so clearly had its roots

in the teachings of Jesus, stories which had been largely overlooked by the Church hierarchy.

The Unschooled Mind Potential leaders’ stories are persuasive with different audiences to the extent that they fit the way people think; that is, whether they make sense to the minds of those who hear the story in one way or another. Stories must fit with other ideas that are “in the air” and that are understood by their intended audiences. Furthermore, they must be told at the same cognitive level on which their audiences are processing their stories. Here Gardner introduces the idea of the five-year old or “unschooled mind” as well as more sophisticated ways of thinking. The five-year old mind easily processes stories that paint the world in binary, black-and-white, good-versus-evil stories. Such stories are quite simple, contrasting good guys with bad guys, and ingroups versus outgroups. Political leaders often communicate in simplistic terms to audiences that don’t pay much attention and that respond to simple slogans and sound bites. But other stories appeal to 10-year-old or 15year-old minds. The 10-year-old thinker is aware that there are two sides to any story, and that different groups are not all good or all bad. They emphasize being fair, or “fairness to a fault.” The 15-year-old mind is still more complex, and looks at issues and groups from many sides. Gardner suggests that they “revel in relativism.” Finally, the mature mind can grasp complexities but can also cut through various narratives and claims and then make a judgment. While adults by definition are older than 15, that doesn’t mean that they process potential leaders’ stories with the cognitive complexity of which they are capable. As Sigmund Freud suggested, people often respond to emotion more than reason, and simple, good/bad dichotomies constitute powerful stories for many leaders, especially those who traffic in exclusionary narratives.

Case Studies Gardner illustrates his conceptual approach with sketches of a number of leaders during the

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

mid-20th century. They come from very different fields: academia, politics, the military, business, social movements, and religion, among others. Already noted is Pope John XXIII, who illustrates the idea of the innovative leader, the matter of stories and counterstories, and the distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary leaders. Others who illustrate important concepts are George C. Marshall are Eleanor Roosevelt. George Marshall is known for two critical instances of leadership. The first was his leadership in planning America’s military mobilization both before and after U.S. entry into World War II. His audiences included the American public, the nation’s political leaders, and the men and women in the armed services themselves. He had to persuade these audiences of the need for a well-prepared military under strict civilian control in a perilous world. His story was inclusionary in that he emphasized the common purpose of the military and the nation in response to potential and then actual external threats. After World War II, Marshall served for several critical years as secretary of state under President Harry Truman. During that time he led the effort to persuade the people and political leaders of the United States that both moral and pragmatic considerations suggested the importance of the United States funding the reconstruction of war-ravaged countries in Europe, both allies and former enemies. Gardner describes this highly inclusionary story of America’s role in the emerging world order as nearly visionary. Eleanor Roosevelt, mentioned earlier, provides an interesting contrast to Marshall. As an important woman leader, she made the most of her role as First Lady during Franklin Roosevelt’s administrations, even though she had no formal power. She pushed for the rights of underrepresented and underappreciated groups, particularly women and African Americans. Gardner offers a quote from a memoir by FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell that gives a sense of Eleanor’s influence on the president: “No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt sit down facing her husband and holding his eyes firmly [and saying] to him, ‘Franklin, I think that you should. . .’ or ‘Franklin, surely you will note. . .’ will ever forget the experience” (2011, p. 179). The First Lady knew how to push. Even though her manner and views were more liberal

541

than those of most Americans, she won them over with her candor, hard work, lack of pretentiousness, and obvious empathy for those who had been shortchanged in the American experience. She was an inclusionary leader whose unique style gained the respect and affection of most of the country. George R. Goethals Further Readings Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2016). Hero worship: The elevation of the human spirit. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 46, 187–210. Gardner, H. (2011). Leading minds: An anatomy of leadership. New York, NY: Basic Books. Skowronek, S. (1997). The politics presidents make: From John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

LEADERS’ POWER RESOURCES FOLLOWERS’ REACTIONS

AND

This entry is about the power that a single individual, a leader, has over followers, and how leaders use that power to successfully direct follower performance. First, power and the power bases will be discussed in general, followed by a discussion of follower psychological reactions and outcomes. Then, each of the seven power base sequences will be presented, in the order indicated in Figure 1. For example, legitimate power will be discussed, followed by a specific discussion of the follower reactions and outcomes most related to the use of legitimate power. This entry is focused on the leader–follower, supervisor–subordinate relationship, where leader power is mainly used. The power bases presented in Figure 1 can be conceptualized as tools in a leader’s tool kit. Just as different tools perform different functions, the different power bases can be used in different contexts with different follower personalities leading to different follower outcomes. The figure indicates the likely follower psychological reactions to each of the seven power bases. The psychological reactions lead to the

542

Follower Psychological Reactions

Follower Outcomes

Legitimate power

Instrumental compliance

Compliance

Reward power

Instrumental compliance

Compliance

Information power

Instrumental compliance or Internalization

Compliance, or Commitment

Ecological power

Instrumental compliance, or Reactance, or Internalization

Compliance, or Commitment, or Resistance

Coercive power

Instrumental compliance or Reactance

Compliance or Resistance

Expert power

Internalization

Commitment

Referent power

Personal Identification

Commitment

Personal Power

Figure 1

Power Bases: A Leadership Tool Kit

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

Position Power

Leader Influence Tools

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

likely follower motivational and behavioral outcomes. The figure is not meant to imply that followers always and necessarily react exactly as diagrammed. There are always divergent follower reactions to the use of any power base. The diagram reflects the accumulated best practices and research evidence that shows how most followers react to the power bases. The roles of leader and follower have always been part of human social interaction. Humans form social groups, and the preferred grouping formation is the dominance hierarchy. A hierarchy is formed of status layers, with the lowest-status individuals at the bottom and the alpha individual at the very top. The alpha individual is the group leader, and everyone else is an alpha-follower. The leader has the greatest responsibility for group survival and success. A leader is always confronted with this question: How can they get followers to carry out actions that will result in group and organizational success? This question is never easily answered, for two reasons. First, followers are unique individuals with different attitudes, motivation, traits, and capabilities. It is often difficult to get all followers to align their behavior toward the same goals. Second, environmental circumstances are dynamic, requiring leader flexibility. Both reasons require leaders to use various techniques to align follower performance toward organizational goals. The remainder of this entry focuses solely on this ongoing issue: how leaders use power to successfully direct follower performance.

The Definition, Limits, and Outcomes of Power Power is the capacity of a leader to influence the behavior, motivation, and attitudes of followers, in specific circumstances, for specific time periods. This means that there are limits to the power that organizational leaders have over followers. Organizational leader power is limited by ethical and organizational policy considerations, and leaders only have power over followers when they are at work. The limitations of power are part of the definition of power in an organizational context because leaders can only exercise power over followers within these limits.

543

Power over others exists in asymmetrical contexts, where one person has more status and other persons have less status. Our experience with asymmetrical relationships begins in infancy, with the parent-child relationship, where children first learn about the follower role. The asymmetrical relationship adults are most familiar with is the leader-follower, superior-subordinate relationship. This relationship typically exists in a hierarchical, pyramidal organizational structure, where leaders have higher rank and power and followers have lower rank and power in relation to the leader. Leaders use power to guide and channel follower behavior in appropriate directions. Followers have a choice—either accept the leader’s guidance and not suffer negative consequences, or not comply and suffer consequences. Typical follower psychological reactions to the various power base use should help guide to the leader’s choice of which power base to use. A leader’s use of power, mediated by follower psychological reactions, results in three potential follower outcomes: compliance, commitment, or resistance. Followers who simply behaviorally comply with a leader’s directives are externally going through the motions; they obey without enthusiasm and perform at a baseline level. A committed follower has internalized the leader’s directives and performs appropriately with enthusiasm. Followers who resist leader directives, either blatantly or subtly, are potentially disruptive to organizational goals, and are making themselves vulnerable to negative consequences. Ideally leaders would like all followers to internally commit to their directives. This outcome is unlikely, given the wide range of follower motivation and work ethic. However, if leaders can get most followers to either commit or at least comply, they are basically fulfilling their leadership role. The specific discussion of each power base that follows addresses this question: Which power bases are most likely to get most followers to commit or at least comply?

The Tools of Power: The Seven Power Bases In 1959, social psychologists John French and Bert Raven introduced the power base concept. They argued that social power, when applied, is not

544

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

singular. Leader power over followers is applied differently depending on organizational and environmental circumstances, and on the unique characteristics of different followers. Leaders can respond to these circumstances and differences because they have access to different types of resources and consequences, which they can use to guide follower behavior. These different resources are the basis for each of the different power bases. Power base theory assumes a social exchange between leaders and followers. If followers perform well, they will get access to desired resources; if followers perform poorly, they will suffer negative consequences. Leaders use their control over resources and consequences to channel follower performance. Initially, five power bases were proposed: legitimate power (authority); reward power; coercive power; expert power; and referent power. Later, two additional power bases were included: information power and ecological power.

punishments that the leader controls. “Instrumentally” is defined as calculating how much work is needed to attain rewards and avoid punishments. There is no internalization or personal identification with the leader. Compliance is often based on a follower’s cost–benefit analysis. A follower’s analysis question is: “What is the minimum I need to do to obtain rewards and avoid punishments controlled by the leader?” As a result, instrumental exchange by itself is likely to lead to minimum baseline performance to keep the job and no more.

Internalization, Personal Identification (Psychological Reactions), and Commitment (Outcome)

Followers have varying perceptions about their leaders’ actions, particularly about power base use. Different follower perceptions create different follower psychological reactions to leader power base use. There are three qualitatively different follower psychological reactions: (1) instrumental exchange, (2) internalization, (3) and personal identification. These three reactions lead to different follower motivations and behaviors, resulting in three different follower outcomes: followers can simply (1) comply behaviorally (compliance), (2) comply based on their internal “buy-in” (commitment), or (3) resist.

Followers can reach commitment through internalization, personal identification, or both. Internalization occurs when the follower agrees with the leader’s and the organization’s policies and directives because they coincide with the follower’s attitudes and values. Followers internalize (accept) the plans and directives and adopt them as their own. Their internal belief translates into motivational and behavioral commitment. Their performance is likely to rise above baseline. Personal identification with a leader means that followers mold their attitudes and values to those of the leader, and they model their behavior on that of the leader. They do this because of their positive emotional bond with the leader. In personal identification, the follower wants to emulate the leader and be accepted by the leader. Part of the identification process involves accepting the leader’s directives as one’s own. Personal identification results in personal commitment to the leader, and through the leader to the organization.

Instrumental Exchange (Psychological Reaction) and Compliance (Outcome)

Dissatisfaction (Psychological Reaction) and Resistance (Outcome)

If the leader’s power base use and other actions do not persuade the follower to internalize the leader’s plans and directives, then the follower is not committed to the organization’s goals. The follower complies behaviorally with the leader’s directives and performs the requested actions to instrumentally attain the rewards and avoid the

Resistance can come from dissatisfaction with the leader’s performance or from a variety of other unsatisfying organizational factors, such as dissatisfaction with pay. A deeper analysis of follower dissatisfaction often reveals psychological and sociological issues: fear of change, reactance, habitual comfort zone disruption, lack of work

Follower Psychological Reactions and Outcomes

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

ethic, or financial or personal problems, to name a few. Resistant followers are a test of a leader’s capabilities. Some resistant followers can be converted into good employees through social intelligence, mentoring, and a judicious use of appropriate power bases. While this scenario is optimal, it isn’t always successful, and continually resistant followers need to be disciplined and possibly terminated because resistance can be contagious, leading to negative organizational consequences.

The Position Power Tool Kit As shown in Figure 1, six of the power bases fall distinctly into two types: position power and personal power, with the exception of the information power base. Leaders have legitimate, reward, coercive, ecological, and information power because of the superior position they hold in an organization. The title that leaders hold entitles them to these power bases. Accessing and attaining these power bases does not require any knowledge or skill on the part of leaders; the title guarantees that they have access to these bases. The position power that official leaders have varies. Some (unfortunate) leaders only have legitimate power, others have legitimate power and moderate amounts of reward, coercive, information and ecological power, and others have legitimate power and high amounts of the other four power bases. Whoever fills an official organizational leader position has access to all or some of those five power bases. Their access to these bases has nothing to do with their personal characteristics. Individual leader characteristics can, however, influence how much or little a leader makes use of these power bases, and how well a leader implements these bases. This especially applies to information power. Each of these power bases will be discussed individually.

Legitimate Power (Authority) When leaders have legitimate power (authority), followers comply because they believe that the leader has the right to give orders and make requests and followers have the obligation to

545

comply. Organizational leaders have official titles and statuses granted to them by the organization. Giving leaders titles legitimizes those leaders as valid representatives of the organization. Leaders are part of the hierarchy, most likely reporting to someone of higher rank, and supervising subordinates who report to them. These are known asymmetrical relationships, recognized by both leaders and followers, where it is assumed that leaders have been granted the status to give orders and followers are expected to carry out those orders. Why will most followers automatically obey orders given by an officially designated leader? As stated above, humans begin life as followers in an asymmetrical relationship, as children to parents. From the perspective of a small child, parents are huge, strong, and skilled. In a traditional parent– child relationship, parents or caregivers care for and nurture children, and in exchange children give them love and obey them. Then children enter school, and at each step they are confronted by official authority figures—teachers—who have legitimate power over them. As teenagers they may take part-time jobs, where bosses have legitimate power. By adulthood they have had much experience as followers in asymmetrical relationships. This experience generally leads to the internalized norm of obedience to official authority leaders. The internalization of obedience to legitimate authority is the key ingredient leading to the successful use of legitimate power. Leaders can enhance the effectiveness of legitimate power use by following these guidelines: (1) do not exceed the scope of your authority; (2) verify your authority if necessary; (3) follow proper channels; (4) make polite, clear requests and directives; (5) explain the reasons for a request or directive; (6) insist on compliance if necessary; and (7) follow up to verify compliance. As Figure 1 shows, followers can have two simultaneous reactions to legitimate power, both leading to compliance. The internalized habit of obedience initiates compliance, and followers’ instrumental understanding of the underlying social exchange (work in exchange for having a job) indicates their understanding that leaders have the authority to terminate their employment, which further enhances compliance.

546

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

Reward Power The follower complies to obtain rewards controlled by the leader. People learn what it takes to receive rewards early in life. Parents use reward power to guide their children (“You can’t have any dessert unless you eat your broccoli!”). Children learn to comply with directives to get what they desire. Reward power is used by teachers as well as parents, and by adulthood this social exchange is clearly understood: Followers do what leaders tell them to do and in exchange leaders give followers what they need or want. In organizations, reward power is based on follower perceptions that their leaders actually control desired resources. Leader control over resources varies depending on the type of organization and on the hierarchical rank level of the leader in an organization. Leaders lower in the organizational hierarchy sometimes have less control over follower-desired resources. Nonetheless all leaders, regardless of their rank, have control over one desired resource: praise. Praise is perhaps the most under-utilized reward resource available to leaders. Many leaders, particularly inexperienced leaders, take good work performance for granted; they assume that followers should perform well automatically. This is unfortunate because humans are motivated by authentic, honest praise. Authentic praise requires that leaders track follower performance and distinguish between bad, average, and good performance, so that praise can be paired with good performance. The following guidelines will increase the effectiveness of reward power: (1) do not promise more than you can deliver; (2) explain the criteria for receiving rewards as simply as possible; (3) offer the types of rewards that people desire; (4) offer rewards that are fair and ethical; and (5) provide rewards as promised if performance requirements are met. If used properly, reward power leads to instrumental exchange and compliance.

Coercive Power The follower complies to avoid punishments controlled by the leader. Again, this control is learned early because parents and teachers have coercive power over children. They may use punishments, threatened punishments, and negative

consequences to control children’s behavior. By adulthood it is understood that behavior is often guided by those who control both rewards and punishments. In organizations coercive power has lost some of its motivational potency. In the United States and other western countries, organizational leaders can no longer immediately dismiss employees without cause. Legal progressive discipline policies are in place that take many punishments out of the hands of individual leaders. In modern organizations, coercive power is more likely to be manifested by the application of negative consequences, such as depriving followers of desired rewards. One coercive power resource that all leaders have is criticism, the opposite of praise. Praise is desirable, criticism is not. Inexperienced leaders tend to be overly critical and under-praising. Criticism, like all coercive power resources, needs to be used carefully and sparingly because its use can lead to negative follower motivational and behavioral consequences. Effective criticism requires tracking follower performance so that criticism is paired with poor performance or rules infractions and coupled with proposed solutions to correct the deficiencies or infractions. Coercive power is most appropriate for dealing with disciplinary infractions, rather than performance deficiencies. This use of coercive power is now integrated into the progressive discipline sequence. This sequence escalates punishments based on repeated infractions. Progressive discipline can start with a verbal explanation of the rules and requirements, and the consequences for not following rules or meeting requirements. When infractions occur, the leader should respond to infractions promptly and consistently without showing favoritism. They should thoroughly investigate so as to avoid making rash accusations and erroneously imposing punishments. Leaders should administer warnings and reprimands in private, calmly, without hostility and personal rejection. When giving warnings, leaders should indicate a desire to help the violator comply with the rules and ask the violator to suggest ways they could correct the problem. If infractions continue, leader credibility can be maintained only if escalating punishments are administered.

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

As the foregoing guidelines indicate, coercive power needs to be used carefully by leaders because its use can lead to unforeseen consequences. The goal of power base use is to get followers to either commit or to at least understand instrumental exchange and comply with the leader’s directives. Coercive power, more than any other power base, can backfire and result in follower resistance.

Ecological Power The leader indirectly influences the followers by altering the followers’ work environment. Ecological power, like legitimate, reward, information, and coercive power, comes with the official leader position. The amount of ecological power a leader has depends on their hierarchical rank in the organization; the higher the rank, usually the more ecological power. Ecological power, unlike the other power bases, is a form of indirect influence. There is no direct social exchange between the leader and follower. Ecological power use alters the organizational context, and the changed context alters follower performance. The ability to alter the context stems from leader control over the physical environment, the technology, the workflow, and the elements of a job. Leaders can use ecological power to alter the work context for followers, thereby influencing follower performance. Jobs can be redesigned to increase follower performance and hopefully job satisfaction. The flow of work can be resequenced to increase work efficiency. If followers believe that leaders are making these changes to help them in some way, they are more likely to internalize the leader’s directives and increase their commitment. Ecological power can also be used to both monitor follower performance and alert followers to perform certain job functions, such as machine maintenance. Followers will react to these uses of ecological power with either instrumental thinking or dissatisfaction, resulting in either compliance or resistance.

Information Power The leader has control over access to information and the distribution of information. As data

547

collection has become easier and more prolific, the amount of information available to organizations has grown exponentially. Information has become another resource that leaders can use to influence follower performance. Information power can be perceived as a form of reward power because leaders can differentially give followers access to information based on their performance. Followers will react to this use of information power as they would to reward power, with instrumental thinking and then compliance. Information power is primarily positional, but it can be enhanced by personal motivation. It is positional because leaders, due to their hierarchical position, have access to information that their followers do not. Information power can become personal if leaders proactively scan both internal (within the organization) and external (outside the organization) environments to discover more organizationally relevant information. Control over information is especially useful when a leader is attempting to persuade followers to direct their efforts in a certain direction. As such, information power can be used to supplement expert power, a personal power base. Information can enhance a leader’s expertise credibility, increasing the leader’s ability to influence follower performance. This use of information power is likely to lead to internalization and commitment. Leaders need to resist the temptation to distort information. Distorted information can be used to exaggerate leader effectiveness and cover up leader mistakes. Aside from ethical issues, distortions frequently become known to followers, destroying leader credibility and increasing follower resistance.

The Personal Power Tool Kit: Expert and Referent Power Bases Expert and referent power are personal power bases. Assuming a leadership position does not make a leader an expert in tasks that followers perform. Leaders choose (or not) to devote time and energy to developing expertise. Likewise, assuming a leadership position does not guarantee that a leader will develop positive emotional bonds with their followers, which is the basis of referent power. Leaders need to have certain personal

548

Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions

characteristics to develop positive bonds with followers. A lack of leader skill and expertise contradicts follower perceptions. Followers frequently assume that a leader has expertise—why else would the organization make that person a leader? If leaders do not want their followers to think they are incompetent, they should become expert in two ways: (1) expert in the tasks the followers perform, and (2) expert in effective leadership techniques. Acquiring these two forms of expertise is a personal challenge and task. Leaders who do not rise to the challenge become overly dependent on the positional power bases. This is unfortunate because the use of expert power and referent power are more likely to result in follower commitment, increasing leader effectiveness. This happens because the use of expert and referent power is often correlated with a mentoring relationship between a leader and a follower.

Expert Power It is na¨ıve of followers to initially assume that all leaders are experts. Individuals who become leaders have many motives, and not all of these motives result in the effort required to become expert. Selfish leaders simply want the rewards and perks that come with the title, or perhaps they personally enjoy controlling other people’s lives. They are not particularly interested in becoming effective leaders. Other leaders, referred to as servant leaders, want to be effective leaders because they sincerely want to serve others to the best of their ability. These leaders are likely to put in the time and effort to become expert. Those leaders who do develop expertise soon realize they have the key to credibility in the eyes of their followers. Followers realize that these leaders are not just place-holders. They know what they are talking about, and their actions are likely to benefit the organization and the followers. Given this follower reaction, expertise is a powerful leader resource. Expertise can enhance leader persuasion attempts. Smart leaders do not just give orders; they explain why orders are given. This is persuasion: the use of facts and logic to get followers to move from mere compliance to commitment. The use of expertise and persuasion can increase both follower

understanding and agreement with directives, leading them to internalization and commitment. The following guidelines can enhance follower movement to internalization and commitment: (1) expertise use should focus on specific details and evidence as to how and why a directive is given, and (2) expertise as a power base is further enhanced by listening to followers and asking them for suggestions.

Referent Power Followers want to please a leader when they have positive emotional bonds with the leader. Referent power is the only power base built on a unique emotional connection between the leader and a follower. Referent power is particularly used by charismatic leaders, but charisma is not a widely distributed trait. Fortunately, however, non-charismatic leaders (most leaders) can use referent power. Understanding and implementing social/emotional intelligence can be a gateway to the effective use of referent power. Social/ emotional intelligence can be defined as the desire and ability to understand others, as shown by such activities as active listening, asking questions, asking for suggestions, and showing concern for another person’s issues and problems. These skill sets will help leaders establish positive emotional bonds with followers. The use of referent power is further enhanced by showing acceptance and positive regard, being supportive and helpful, doing unsolicited favors, keeping promises, and making sacrifices for followers. Leaders need to be careful in their use of referent power. Effective referent power use requires that leaders be friendly and transparent. However, friendliness is not the same as friendship. Leaders can be friendly with followers, but not friends. Friends socialize together, and if leaders socialize with followers, they can show favoritism and lose their credibility and effectiveness as leaders.

How a Leader Can Effectively Use the Power Bases An effective leader will personalize the use of all seven power bases, which will blur the distinction

Leadership and Empathy on the Screen

between position and personal power. He or she will become an applied psychologist, applying social/emotional intelligence to power base use, as outlined in this entry. The ultimate goal of power base use is to have all followers become committed. Although achieving this is unlikely, the sensitive use of each power base is the best way to increase follower commitment. Hopefully this entry helps to answer the question posed at the beginning: How does a leader get followers to carry out actions that will result in organizational success? Anthony Stahelski See also Emotional Intelligence; Leadership Development; Leader-Follower Relationships; Leader-Member Exchange (LMX); Leader Self-Efficacy; Power and Culture, Servant Leadership

Further Readings Bass, B. M. (1990). Bass & Stogdill’s handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. Chen, S., Lee-Chai, A. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2001). Relationship orientation as a moderator of the effects of social power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(2), 173–187. doi:10.1037/0022-3514. 80.2.173 French, J. R., & Raven, B. H. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Frost, T. F., & Moussavi, F. (1992). The relationship between leader power base and influence: The moderating role of trust. Journal of Applied Business Research, 8(4), 9–14. doi:10.19030/jabr.v8i4.6119 Kelman, H. C. (1958). Compliance, identification, and internalization three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2(1), 51–60. doi:10. 1177/002200275800200106 Raven, B. H. (1992). A power/interaction model of interpersonal influence: French and Raven thirty years later. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 7(2), 217–244. Retrieved from https://psycnet.apa.org/ record/1993-01370-001 Raven, B. H. (1993). The bases of power: Origins and recent developments. Journal of Social Issues, 49(4), 227–251. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1993.tb01191.x

549

Raven, B. H., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1970). Conflict and power. In The structure of conflict (pp. 69–109). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. Reed, M. I. (1996). Expert power and control in late modernity: An empirical review and theoretical synthesis. Organizational Studies, 17(4), 573–579. doi: 10.1177/017084069601700402 Stahelski, A. J., & Patch, M. E. (1993). The effect of the compliance strategy choice upon perception of power. Journal of Social Psychology, 133(5), 693–698. doi:10. 1080/00224545.1993.9713924 Stahelski, A. J., & Paynton, C. F. (1995). The effect of status cues on choices of social power and influence strategies. Journal of Social Psychology, 135(5), 553–560. doi:10.1080/00224545.1995.9712228 Yukl, G., & Gardner, W. (2019). Leadership in organizations (9th ed.). Harlow: Pearson.

LEADERSHIP SCREEN

AND

EMPATHY

ON THE

This entry articulates the importance of leadership as it is represented and transmitted via the screen, with a focus on how leadership on-screen does (or does not) convey empathy. Its core thesis regards fictional and factual representations of leadership as equally pertinent across screens of all kinds. While this entry prioritizes an analysis of televisual screens specifically, particularly when discussing fiction, the inherent ideas can be applied to understanding leadership on cinematic, social media, and video game screens as well.

Fictional Leadership on the Television Screen We are inundated with a plethora of screen images of fictional leadership before we consider those of the real world. Fiction offers portraits of leadership across the moral spectrum and within an array of vertical power structures: leadership of a small group or an entire nation, for good or evil ends. In providing us images of this wide variety of representations, screen visions are useful tools for making sense of leadership. Several prominent fictional leaders have been the subject of academic

550

Leadership and Empathy on the Screen

study, as well as the way their screen presences in film, television, video games, and social media have specifically led to better conceptualization of leadership. As one example, consider the protagonist of the television series Twin Peaks, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. One of Cooper’s core character traits is his ability to lead in almost any situation. From the moment Cooper arrives in the town of Twin Peaks to solve the murder of Laura Palmer, the local law enforcement—particularly Sheriff Harry Truman—immediately recognize Cooper as the central authority figure of the investigation, not just jurisdictionally but experientially. Cooper asserts leadership through collaboration and action: he respects Sheriff Truman as Twin Peaks’ chief law enforcer, and although Cooper nominally has authority vested by the state to supersede any local authority in leading the investigation— which he makes clear to Sheriff Truman at their first meeting—he is quick to ally himself with Truman as an equal partner rather than a subservient, valuing Truman’s local expertise and defending him when Truman is challenged by one of Cooper’s FBI colleagues. Cooper is a magnetic presence, his take-charge methodology and investigative smarts balanced by his perpetually chipper attitude and esoteric quirks. One of Cooper’s earliest, funniest, and strangest deductive acts is to gather a list of murder suspects by throwing rocks into a bucket, a technique purportedly based on an old Tibetan method. In solving the mysteries of Twin Peaks, Cooper represents a leader that audiences can align with as both a rational, morally good authority figure and a charming, friendly, and entertaining presence. The example of Dale Cooper highlights an advantage that fictional screen leadership can offer audiences, in depicting a leader as someone with the ability to lead while being empathetically relatable. This trait is often missing or inauthentic in real-world leaders. Cooper is not the only fictional television leader to act this way; Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard, Legends of Tomorrow’s Sara Lance, and Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope, among many others, engender simultaneous emotional and authoritative connections with subordinates and team members. These characters showcase the balance of empathy and

authority needed to lead, and they do so in ways that entertain audiences while, hopefully, giving them tenets and ideals to strive for in their everyday lives. The power of fictional leaders can also have a bleed-through effect into the real world via the people who create them. On more than one occasion, The West Wing actor Martin Sheen, who portrayed U.S. President Josiah Bartlet, has been asked several times by fans to run for real political office following his long history of protests and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience during his seven-year-stint as a fictional president. Sheen’s portrayal resonated so well with audiences that many of them forgot he was an actor, not a politician, a fact Sheen himself has been quick to point out during real-world election cycles. In other examples, fictional leadership goes hand in hand with celebrity status to enhance profiles and advocacy for civil causes, with the people behind fictional leaders demonstrating real-world leadership through such advocacy. As one example, Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart is known both for his fictional leadership at Captain Picard and his real-world leadership in confronting issues of domestic violence for organizations such as Amnesty International and Refuge. Fiction has the capacity to demonstrate leadership that is well-rounded, emotionally connective, and authoritatively sound. None of these fictional leaders are perfect, as Cooper, Lance, Knope, Bartlet, and Picard all have their foibles and moments of weakness. But each character demonstrates leadership qualities interweaving command and connection, essential elements of leadership that can often be missing in the mediatized transmissions of real-world leaders who, by contrast, may not appear as well-rounded.

Factual Leadership in the 21st Century There is an arguable surfeit of mediatized leadership on screens in the 21st century, thanks in large part to the multiple avenues available for accessing screen content on both rigid and mobile devices. The overwhelming amount of leadership we see on these screens deserves close scrutiny as a contrast to popular fictional depictions of leadership. Arguably, many contemporary political and

Leadership and Empathy on the Screen

industrial leaders in democratic nations are perceived as lacking empathy, authority, and the ability to lead with substance. Examples of public impact and rupture such as the climate change crisis, feminist and racial protests (including the 2017 Women’s March and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests), and the COVID-19 pandemic put many of these leaders under a mediatized microscope, emphasizing their leadership qualities (or lack thereof) in handling these ruptures with authority and dignity while demonstrating empathetic leadership. It is important to emphasize that not all public leaders lack such abilities, nor do all leaders deserve the same level of scrutiny for their leadership. To categorically list them all would be beyond the scope of this entry. Moreover, leaders being publicly criticized for their appearances on-screen is not novel or unique to a particular subset of deficient leaders. However, the exposure and transmission of leadership imagery on screens, and the public discourse that ensues, highlights a pertinent need to hold accountable those who do lack these qualities, and to discuss what can make public leadership more effective. An example of this kind of leadership can be seen in former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Morrison’s government faced the large-scale global events mentioned earlier, while also dealing with Australia-centric issues such as the 2019–2020 “Black Summer” bushfires and an ongoing series of claims of government ministers committing sexual harassment and assault. A frequent claim lobbied at Morrison and several of his ministers is a lack of proper leadership on two fronts: a lack of emotional connection with constituents and the appearance of being inconsistent with messaging and truth-telling. Screens have captured and transmitted these moments. For example, Morrison’s forced attempts at empathy for victims of the Black Summer bushfires was encapsulated in several clips and images of his visits to fire-ravaged areas, forcing an unwilling woman to hold his hand and inviting vitriolic responses from locals and voters at large who denounced Morrison as an ineffective and uncaring leader. Concurrently, Morrison’s perceived inability to tell the truth consistently has seen

551

many of his past media appearances revived on news and social media screens as evidence of this inconsistency; as one example, a sudden pivot to supporting and encouraging electric cars in Australia in 2021 was at odds with Morrison’s declaration, made on-camera during the 2018 general election, that electric cars would irreparably harm Australia. The screen has been used to highlight Morrison in an unflattering manner, utilizing his media appearances to depict a leader who is the target of frequent critical discourse surrounding his perceived inability to lead effectively. Screens proliferate many kinds of deficient leadership. In addition to political leaders like Morrison, similar criticisms face industrial leaders such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk for their preoccupation with space travel and industrial expansion at the expense of ethical business practices or the combatting of climate change with their vast wealth and resources. Many industrial and political leaders whose roles are disseminated on screens invite scrutiny for their perceived lack of empathy, on national and international scales. Good leadership comes from empathy, and screens make this empathy visible. One prime example of empathetic leadership routinely seen on screens is demonstrated by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose adept use of social media and viral visibility in clips shared by users on Twitter and TikTok is coupled with her consistent displays of empathetic, connective leadership, particularly in the wake of New Zealand-centric events such as the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. While Ardern is not the only example of an empathetic leader on-screen, examples such as hers are few and far between when displays of leadership are fragmented across such a plethora of screens.

The Effect of On-Screen Examples on Leadership There is more to discuss on leadership, empathy, and screens than the scope of this entry permits, but the connection between them is a crucial crosspoint that must be fully understood. Fictional and factual leaders are on-screen daily, and their presence invites critique and application of their

552

Leadership and Management

ideals in everyday life. To better understand the ways we ourselves can utilize the best tenets of effective leadership, we should understand how the examples we see on the screen enable—or prevent—that utility. Chris Comerford See also E-Leadership; Film Leaders in Politics, Sports and Society; Film, Television and Social Change; Theatre and Leadership; Virtual Leadership

Further Readings Bell, E., & Sinclair, A. (2016). Re-envisaging leadership through the feminine imaginary in film and television. In T. Beyes, M. Parker, & C. Steyaert (Eds.), Routledge companion to reinventing management education (pp. 273–286). Abingdon: Routledge. Comerford, C. (2018). Personal heroism through fact and fiction: Safeguarding truth and freedom in the utopia of Star Trek and the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden. In O. Efthimiou, S. T. Allison, & Z. E. Franco (Eds.), Heroism and wellbeing in the 21st century: Applied and emerging perspectives (pp. 86–100). New York, NY: Routledge. Hathaway, C. (2013). Using film, television, and other media to teach management and leadership concepts. Nurse Educator, 27, 239–240. doi:10.1097/01.NNE. 0000435269.45989.66 Kapitan, S. (2020, September 3). The Facebook prime minister: How Jacinda Ardern became New Zealand’s most successful political influencer. The Conversation. Retrieved November 26, 2021, from https:// theconversation.com/the-facebook-prime-ministerhow-jacinda-ardern-became-new-zealands-mostsuccessful-political-influencer-144485 Kiesewetter, J. (1999, October 17). For a pacifist, Martin Sheen plays a pretty good president. The Cincinnati Enquirer. Retrieved November 25, 2021, from https:// archive.ph/20120908045312/http://www.enquirer. com/columns/kiese/1999/10/17/jki_for_pacifist_martin. html Lopez, K. J., Pletcher, G., Williams, C. L., & Zehner, II, W. B. (2017). Ferengi business practices in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—to enhance student engagement and teach a wide range of business concepts. E-Journal of Business Education & Scholarship of Teaching, 11, 19–56. Luscombe, B. (2020, February 20). A year after Christchurch, Jacinda Ardern has the World’s attention. How will she use it? Time Magazine.

Retrieved November 26, 2021, from https://time.com/ 5787443/jacinda-ardern-christchurch-new-zealandanniversary/ McGuire, D., Cunningham, J. E. A., Reynolds, K., & Matthews-Smith, G. (2020). Beating the virus: An examination of the crisis communication approach taken by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during the Covid-19 pandemic. Human Resource Development International, 23, 361–379. doi:10.1080/ 13678868.2020.1779543 Tolbert, R. L., Tschida, D. A., Dixon, M., Cherry, K., Steuber, K., & Airne, D. (2005). The West Wing and depictions of the American Presidency: Expanding the domains of framing in political communication. Communication Quarterly, 53, 505–522. doi:10.1080/ 01463370500102228 Wiest, J. B. (2019). Entertaining genius: U.S. media representations of exceptional intelligence. MediaTropes, 6, 148–170.

LEADERSHIP

AND

MANAGEMENT

In colloquial usage, many use the terms leadership and management as synonyms for the same set of tasks and roles. Yet are they the same? The answer given by most current scholars, as well as many thoughtful practitioners, is no. While effective leadership and management are both essential to any organization’s success, they focus on different, though sometimes related, tasks and may be undertaken by different individuals. This does not mean, of course, that these scholars and practitioners always agree precisely on how the differing tasks should be defined, prioritized, or related. In what follows, this entry first focuses on the emergence of the discipline of management during the Industrial Revolution. It then traces the evolution of our understanding of leadership and management since that time by examining the theories of several scholars and practitioners from different periods of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Emergence of Management The title of this section is misleading in one sense. Just as leadership has always existed in any social

Leadership and Management

group, be it a family, a tribe, or a nation-state, so, too, those social groups have always had to find mechanisms for effectively administering key group functions. Food had to be gathered or grown, taxes had to be collected, and the logistics associated with defending the group and waging wars had to be directed and controlled. Indeed, as the distinguished sociologist Max Weber noted in the early 20th century, there are numerous examples throughout history of the development of large, complex organizations in advanced civilizations to play important administrative roles—in ancient Egypt, during the Roman Empire, within the Catholic Church, and during the Chinese Empire, for example. Yet, in Weber’s view, even the more sophisticated of these organizations were flawed and less effective than they might have been, for many reasons. For example, the senior officials playing these administrative roles typically were courtiers or prelates appointed by the relevant monarch or ecclesiastical authority, served at his pleasure for a temporary period of time, required no special expertise or training, followed no fixed set of rules or regulations, and/or were expected to exploit these roles as a means of compensation. However, with the birth of the modern state and the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, a better and more fully evolved form of these organizations slowly emerged in both the public and private spheres, along with the accompanying discipline of management. Ironically to the 21st century reader, Weber termed these organizations, both before and after the aforementioned evolution, bureaucracies, and despite the negative connotation of the name today, the evolved, modern form of bureaucracy he was studying in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a substantial improvement over what had preceded it. As Weber pointed out, an evolved, well-ordered bureaucracy had fixed rules and regulations, and it kept written records of its actions and transactions. Its officials were governed by these rules and written records (not loyalty to a patron, a political party, personal relationships, or favors), had specified authority based on their hierarchical organizational roles, had to be qualified by expertise or training for their jobs, were full-time

553

career professionals, and were compensated by the institution based on their job levels and seniority through a salary and pension. Thus, when such bureaucratic organizations functioned optimally, Weber stated, they had all the advantages, using his terms, of a machine over non-mechanical modes of production. They were far more objective, predictable, precise, fast, and cost-efficient than the governmental entities and private enterprises that preceded them. All of these qualities, he observed, were required to compete successfully, especially in the capitalist market economy that had grown so dramatically in the 19th century and given the speed of the thenmodern communication mediums of the telegraph and telephone. It is in the foregoing context that the discipline of management as we know it today was born, especially in the large private enterprises that became the dominant economic forces in the United States during the Industrial Revolution. As the eminent business historian Alfred Chandler described the evolution of these enterprises, their size and complexity quickly outstripped the ability of their founders or any single individual to run them effectively. In addition, competitive pressures made constant adaptation and change a key success factor for these enterprises. In Strategy and Structure, his landmark history of large American industrial companies published in 1962, Chandler postulated that these companies had moved through four “chapters” at different rates of speed depending upon their industry: (1) gaining control over the resources critical to success in key functional areas like purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution, which often led to a few large, vertically integrated companies dominating an industry; (2) rationalizing these companies to reduce costs and use their resources most efficiently, which usually resulted in the creation of centralized functional organizations that better integrated product design and enabled more responsiveness to market fluctuations; (3) growing through diversification in response to increasing competition and decreasing profit margins, which in turn depended upon extending existing product lines, expanding geographic distribution, and developing new products requiring similar skills and capabilities;

554

Leadership and Management

and (4) optimizing the performance of these diversified companies through the development of new, more complex organizational structures, which often combined a centralized corporate center and decentralized, semi-autonomous divisions organized around each different customer, product, and/or geographic-focused business. The corporate center’s role typically would be to allocate resources among the divisions and monitor their performance, possibly provide some shared services, and consider further diversification opportunities. The divisions, in turn, normally would control the functions needed to be successful in their markets and would operate relatively autonomously once their plans were approved by the corporate center. The classic example of such an organization and the model followed by many others was General Motors, which was reorganized by Alfred Sloan in the 1920s around the various car lines such as Cadillac, Buick, and Oldsmobile that his predecessor, William Durant, had acquired. As might be guessed, the challenges for the executives running these burgeoning organizations, whether at the top or in the middle ranks, were increasingly complex. Functional expertise first had to be developed, and then these functions needed to be coordinated to develop products and respond to market fluctuations. Strategic decisions had to be made on the allocation of resources over the medium and longer-term, and tactical decisions had to be made on budgets and plans in the short-term. In addition, as diversification proceeded and multi-divisional structures emerged, more general managers were needed who could run entire businesses, while a new breed of senior executives was needed with the skills to allocate capital and other scarce resources across a portfolio of businesses. The net result was the emergence of ever more professional executives and the discipline of management itself. In 1881, the Wharton School of Finance and Economy was established at the University of Pennsylvania to educate this new managerial class, followed by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in 1900 and Harvard Business School in 1908. At the same time, efforts to study and improve the practice of management began both inside and outside of the academy.

One of the best known of these early researchers was Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was also a practitioner; he published his seminal work, The Principles of Scientific Management, in 1911. Many other management theorists and gurus followed in his wake throughout the rest of the 20th century and beyond.

Management Versus Leadership What, then, is management more precisely, and how is it different from leadership? Many of the theorists who followed Taylor focused on describing the roles of management, not leadership per se. Henri Fayol, for example, an engineer and contemporary of Taylor, developed an influential theory of management, originally published in French in 1916, in which he posited the five functions of management as planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding, and controlling. Luther Gulick, a political scientist and expert in public administration, then built on Fayol’s theory while serving as one of the three members of the Brownlow Committee, which advised then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt on the reorganization of the executive branch of the federal government. In a paper published in 1937, Gulick created the POSDCORB acronym, still widely cited more than 80 years later, which described the chief executive’s roles as encompassing Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, COordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting. Although leadership, too, was studied by other theorists in the middle of the 20th century, these studies tended to focus on how leaders behaved, the ways in which they exercised power, and/or what made them effective, rather than distinct leadership versus management roles. One of the first to do the latter, albeit indirectly, was Abraham Zaleznik, a Harvard Business School professor who published a widely read 1977 article titled “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” In it, he postulated that effective managers and leaders are, literally, different personality types. Adopting and adapting concepts from William James’s classic 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, Zaleznik argued that managers are “once-born” personalities, whose socialization

Leadership and Management

has been smooth for their entire lives and who, consequently, are well-suited to maintaining the existing order of an institution, of which they are often the principal beneficiaries. Leaders, in contrast, are “twice-born” personalities, who have had to struggle in life and more often wish to improve that order. He also described in some detail the behaviors that characterize these personality types and suit them to different tasks. In his view, once-born types are much better at preserving control and pragmatically solving problems that threaten that control, while twice-born types are better at proactive risk-taking aimed at improving or even transforming an institution and inspiring others. While Zaleznik never took the next step of identifying more specifically the roles of leadership and management—and he can be critiqued justly for an over-emphasis on the two personality types—his hypothesis indirectly illuminated another potential path of argument, that leadership and management have different, though related, roles. Whether inspired by Zaleznik or not, it was this path that John Kotter, another Harvard Business School professor, followed in his 1990 book, A Force for Change. In it, he focused on the tasks or core processes of management and leadership that must be executed successfully for an organization to meet its goals, not the particular traits, behaviors, or backgrounds of those that play those roles. Management processes, he posited, are those critical to engendering stability and dependability, and they include (in his terms) three sets of tasks: planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, and controlling and problem solving. Leadership, in contrast, is vital to the creation of significant change, and it is exercised through three other key processes, which Kotter termed establishing direction (through vision and strategies), aligning people in the organization around that vision, and motivating and inspiring them to overcome the obstacles blocking the needed changes. Clearly, too, there is a dynamic relationship between the leadership and management processes in Kotter’s model. The vision and strategies developed by leadership must be translated into plans and budgets to be implemented successfully. The organization also must be designed and

555

staffed in a manner best suited to implement those plans, while leadership must align and inspire that staff. Finally, management must monitor progress against the implementation plans and solve the problems that inevitably will arise, which sometimes may even acquire adjustment in the vision and strategies being pursued or other leadership actions. Lastly, Kotter argued, both leadership and management are critical to any organization’s long-term, enduring success. Over-managed and under-led organizations can become rigid, unresponsive bureaucracies that focus on the short-term, avoid risk, squelch innovation, and eventually wither, as so many mature business and non-business organizations illustrate. On the other hand, over-led and under-managed organizations can lead to chaos, bankruptcy, and even scandal, as the shareholders of a few former tech unicorns in the first two decades of the 21st century would testify. Leadership scholars G. Donald Chandler, III and John Chandler would agree with Kotter that leadership and management are different but dynamically related roles that are critical to the success of any organization of any size in every sphere of human endeavor. Indeed, they went even further in their 2013 book, On Effective Leadership, arguing that this dynamic relationship makes effective management an essential element of both effective and exceptional leadership, as the entry titled “Effective Leadership and Selflessness” discusses further. G. Donald Chandler, III See also Decision-Making Theory; Effective Leadership and Selflessness; Global Business Leadership; Innovation; Marketing Leadership; Organizational Leadership; Team Leadership

Further Readings Chandler, Jr., A. D. (1962). Strategy and structure. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Chandler, III, G. D., & Chandler, J. W. (2013). On effective leadership: Across domains, cultures, and eras. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kotter, J. P. (1990). A force for change: How leadership differs from management. New York, NY: Free Press.

556

Leadership and U.S. International Relations

Weber, M. (1958). In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaleznik, A. (1977, May–June). Managers and leaders: Are they different? Harvard Business Review.

LEADERSHIP RELATIONS

AND

U.S. INTERNATIONAL

Leadership by the United States has had an indelible impact on international relations. This entry focuses on U.S. leadership in foreign affairs, from George Washington’s farewell address, to U.S. expansionism in the 20th century, to the challenges of the military–industrial complex after the Second World War, to the legacy of the attacks of 9/11, 2001. The essay concludes with a reflection on the core values of the United States. In terms of what political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. calls “soft power,” or the ability to attract, few countries have been as influential as the United States. From the worldwide spread of American music, cinema, and sports to the ubiquity and permeability of American social media platforms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, to the mythos of the “American Dream,” along with the international order it established after World War II, the United States stands unique on the world’s stage. Although China and the European Union may rival the economic dominance of the United States, no other political entity can match the United States in terms of its sheer military strength. Notwithstanding a rise of anti-American sentiment during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the United States still enjoys most of the world’s confidence to do the right thing responsibly in world affairs.

U.S. Leadership in Foreign Affairs George Washington’s Farewell Address

American presidents have long steered U.S. leadership in international relations, starting with George Washington. In his 1796 Farewell Address, seeking to isolate U.S. interests from Europe,

Washington urged Americans not to entangle their own future prosperity with that of Europe’s. From this point, future U.S. presidents, pundits, and policymakers would, to various degrees, construct their foreign policy designs upon a Washingtonian norm of introversion, isolationism, and noninterference. The Monroe Doctrine in 1823 adhered to a Washingtonian spirit. President James Monroe aggressively expanded US interests in the Western Hemisphere as part of the “Manifest Destiny” philosophy. He did this by invoking Washington’s ideas and arguing that Europe had no right to intervene in US affairs. Expansionism in the 20th Century

World War I The legacy of Washington’s isolationism from European entanglements was steadfast for more than a century. When the First World War broke out in Europe in 1914, then-president Woodrow Wilson campaigned to keep the United States out of war. However, when the sinking of US merchant ships and civilian casualties rose, Wilson reluctantly entered the United States in the global conflict. Wilson’s idealism helped define the 20th century. In asking Congress to declare war in 1917, Wilson argued, “The world must be made safe for democracy” (Wilson, 1917). Near the end of the war, Wilson articulated fourteen points he envisioned were necessary for a sustained global peace. These ideas gave birth to the League of Nations, an international institution that aspired for collective security—that when a nation challenged the status quo, others would rally and help keep the peace. The U.S. Congress never ratified the Covenant of the League, and the League itself failed to prevent the rise of revisionist actors like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the interwar period. However, the structure and ethos of the League survived in the form of a variety of institutional designs sown by the United States after World War II. World War II World War II had a colossal impact on US leadership in international relations, allowing it to

Leadership and U.S. International Relations

brand and forge the global system in a Wilsonian image. In 1945, after the war’s end, the international community was in disarray. Japan had been decimated from fire bombings and two nuclear strikes. Nazi Germany had been leveled as Europe lay in ashes. The Global South began to question its relationship with its former colonizers. Out of this, the United States had been left relatively unscathed. This created a moment for the United States to set the global agenda. Following a Wilsonian drumbeat, the United States helped found the United Nations (UN). The UN was a second attempt at collective security in the wake of the failed League of Nations. The United States had a significant hand in growing nearly every aspect of the UN, from the Security Council (informing global policy to this day) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (forming the modern basis of international law) to the growth of subsidiary organs like the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, all of which influenced world affairs dramatically. The United States essentially created the UN in its image. A cursory inspection, for example, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows a mirror image of core parts of the US Bill of Rights. The United States did more for the world than just forge the UN. The US Congress passed the Marshall Plan in 1948, helping rebuild Europe from the ground up and sowing the seeds of unprecedented and sustained institutional cooperation between France and Germany. This laid the groundwork for the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, leading to the European Union: a common economic market across much of the continent. The United States also joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, ensuring a permanent political and military alliance with Europe. U.S. leadership also overhauled the global economic system toward the end of World War II with the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, ushering in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since their founding, much of the world, especially the Global South, has been influenced significantly by the terms and conditionality of IMF and World Bank loans. Although

557

critics argue the Global South has suffered from “5the Washington Consensus”—a set of economic policies aimed at developing countries—due to the exacting nature of these loan packages and their socioeconomic effects, others contend the IMF and World Bank have helped the world economy in times of crisis, helping avoid economic catastrophe. The Cold War U.S. leadership in international affairs was dominant from the close of World War II, but challengers arose, notably the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or the Soviet Union. With its communist ideology, the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to U.S. political, economic, and military interests. In response, U.S. leaders followed a policy of containment. The thinking behind containment was that Soviet ideals and policies of communism would need to be limited across the globe, lest, like a series of dominoes, other nation-states succumb to the communist ideology and reject core market principles, like those advocated by the World Bank and the IMF. From 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, US leadership was focused on a policy of containment in the fight against communism. In some sense, the cold war, so called, was a hot war—not directly between the United States and the Soviet Union—but instead through a series of indirect, proxy wars. These proxy wars included, among other conflicts, the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, the Vietnam War from roughly 1961 to 1975, and the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, resulting in millions of deaths. The Vietnam War, in particular, cost the United States a great deal in terms of damage to its global image.

The Challenge of the Military–Industrial Complex Historically, the primary drivers of U.S. leadership in international relations centered on U.S. presidents and Congress. That changed with the postwar dominance of the military–industrial complex in the 1950s. President Dwight D. Eisenhower first coined this term in his Farewell Address in 1961.

558

Leadership and U.S. International Relations

In that address, Eisenhower reflected on how, even in peacetime, there seemed a deep and persistent need for corporate and unelected interests to profit from militarized expenditures, and he cautioned against allowing a large military establishment and arms industry to wield too much power and influence. Eisenhower worried that the institutional fabric of the military-industrial complex would seize and harm U.S. interests, siphoning resources away from domestic interests (like building roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools) in the name of preparing for war and fighting wars—perhaps even endless wars. Since Eisenhower’s warning, the military– industrial complex has grown, consisting of an interlocking network of interest groups, think tanks, corporations, colleges and universities, and other privatized interests that, one could argue, benefit from making war rather than acting so as to preserve peace. Some would say this is the chief explanation for why the United States fights today—not for freedom, but profit.

The Legacy of 9/11 The September 11, 2001, attacks created another watershed moment for U.S. leadership in international affairs. On 9/11, nineteen hijackers, directed by Osama Bin Laden, founder of the Islamic militant group Al Qaeda, hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, DC, killing some 3,000 persons. Immediately following the attacks, the U.S. Congress authorized two pieces of legislation, the Patriot Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The Patriot Act allowed the U.S. government to conduct extensive surveillance on its citizens in the name of national security. AUMF permitted then-president George W. Bush to command U.S. forces abroad in Afghanistan against Bin Laden. U.S. leadership in the world after 9/11 changed with the Bush Doctrine—the policy that the United States and its allies had the moral authority to lead preemptive attacks against suspected enemies of the United States. This was also coupled with neoconservatism—the doctrine that the United States

also had the moral authority to foster Western-style constitutional democracy worldwide. Before 9/11, it was standard policy for U.S. leaders, in principle, to wait before committing to militarized interventions until there was an apparent threat or actual use of force against U.S. interests. Following 9/11, the Bush Doctrine changed that tenor, with U.S. leadership arguing it could strike first even on suspicion of a threat to its interests, especially those nations not aligned with Western democratic norms. The Bush Doctrine came to a climax in 2003 when the United States led a multinational coalition against the forces of Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq. Although Saddam Hussein was not connected to 9/11, the Bush Administration fabricated a narrative that Hussein had worked closely with Bin Laden. Therefore, the United States had the right to attack. Some scholars argue that 9/11 also led to a deeper extension of the military–industrial complex, or what would be called the terrorism industrial complex—a system of corporate and political interests that profit not only from fighting the War on Terror overseas but also from fighting domestically, within the borders of the United States. This would include the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 and the Patriot Act, which gave more license for organs like the National Security Agency to surveil the United States domestically to find and root out suspected enemies of the state. This would also be connected to what some see as the paramilitarization of law enforcement within the United States, to the extent that a growing number of law enforcement divisions are now supplied by subsidiaries of weapons contractors that help fight the War on Terror abroad.

U.S. Core Values The Decline of U.S. Standing in the World

Private polling organizations emerged after 9/11, seeking to understand the nature and origins of pro- and anti-American sentiment and policies like the Bush Doctrine. Many polls found global confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world affairs had plummeted before and

Leadership and U.S. International Relations

during the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq. In a sense, much of the globe had come to reject the Bush Doctrine and U.S. moral authority. This was unique in the modern history of the United States. Examining foreign public opinion data from polling organizations like the Pew Research Center, one could argue that many abroad felt aversion to U.S. leadership in world affairs for a time. Global attitudes toward the United States rebounded during the presidency of Barack Obama (2009–2017) but then once again took a nosedive after the election of Donald J. Trump. This correlated with a series of statements and policies President Trump made. Some of these policies seemed to belie those very institutional structures which the United States engineered at the close of the Second World War. This included President Trump withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 and the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018, and seeking to halt funding for the World Health Organization in 2020. Some of the statements that Trump made caused consternation worldwide, including the use of profanity in describing countries in Africa, and rallying domestic public support for the construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Such statements and policies helped disrupt US soft power across the globe, leading some analysts to wonder if the United States was any longer a significant leader of global moral authority. The American Dream Versus The American Nightmare

Notwithstanding a decline in U.S. soft power during the Bush and Trump years, the United States still arguably remains the world’s leader in international relations. U.S. interests continue to dominate the global agenda politically, economically, and militarily. Even with challenges from other superpowers like China and Russia, much of the world still turns to the United States to lead. However, the United States may not have the same influence in the long term if it continues to allow the inherent contradictions that currently exist in its value system. This can be described as “the American Dream” versus what civil rights activist Malcolm X termed “the American Nightmare.”

559

The American Dream refers to the idea that the United States is a place where persons from all walks of life can come to America’s shores and find solace, refuge, opportunity, and even unbridled success. Not unlike the words written at the bottom of the statue of liberty, the American Dream suggests the United States is a place for those poor, huddled masses “yearning to breathe free.” The ideas of the American Dream are inscribed in many foundational American texts, like the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—which includes the protection of, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This principle points to the promise of equity in the democratic experiment in the United States. Many have interpreted Jefferson’s words to mean that if a person works hard enough, they can achieve socioeconomic mobility and perhaps even financial greatness. And yet, there have been inherent contradictions in the American experience. From the outset, in the original draft of the U.S. Constitution, non-White persons were counted as “three-fifths” of a person. Enslaved persons were brought to Virginia from Africa in 1619, leading to more than 250 years of slavery. The wounds of enslavement still haunt the United States. African Americans routinely remain discriminated against, despite the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The future of the United States’ influence across the globe may lie in how strongly it protects democratic freedom domestically as it does abroad. Monti Narayan Datta See also Cuban Missile Crisis; Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership; Panama Canal Treaties; Pearl Harbor; Political Leadership

Further Readings Blackmon, D. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York, NY: Doubleday. Clarke, R. A. (2004). Against all enemies: Inside America’s war on terror. New York, NY: Free Press.

560

Leadership Development

Eisenhower, D. D. (1961). Farewell Address. National Archives. Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/ milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowersfarewell-address Hughes, L. (1995). In A. Rampersad (Ed.), The collected poems of Langston Hughes. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Katzenstein, P. J., & Keohane, R. O. (2007). Anti-Americanisms in World politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. MacMillan, M. (2002). Paris 1919: Six months that changed the world. Westminster: Random House. Malcolm, X. (1964). The ballot or the bullet. Retrieved from https://sites.middlebury.edu/soan365/files/2013/ 02/Malcolm-X-The-Ballot-or-the-Bullet.pdf Nye, J. S., Jr. (2015). Is the American century over? Cambridge: Polity. Pew Research Center. (2022, March). Global indicators database. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch. org/global/database/indicator/6 United Nations. (1948). The universal declaration of human rights. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/ EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf Washington, G. (1796, September 17). Farewell address. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw2. 024/?sp5229&st5text Wilson, W. (1917, April 2). Joint address to congress leading to a declaration of war against Germany. National Archives. Retrieved from https://www. archives.gov/milestone-documents/address-to-congressdeclaration-of-war-against-germany

History Leadership development is an important consideration as many organizations seek to expand the capacity and capabilities of their leaders as part of the organization’s focus on growth and sustainability. Billions of dollars are invested in leadership development activities annually by organizations of all types. As a result of the focus on practical applications, the field of leadership development was dominated historically by those in practice such as consultants and human resource specialists engaged in activities to design and deliver leadership development initiatives in organizations. There was relatively little in the way of theory or empirical research on the validity and effectiveness of these leadership development initiatives and practices. The first decades of the 21st century have seen a great deal more scientific attention dedicated to understanding leadership development processes than at any time in the history of the leadership field. As a result, there is greater appreciation for the importance of using evidence-based practices and processes to facilitate leadership development. Theory on leadership development is being elaborated and refined to better understand, predict, and control underlying development processes. Empirical research is being conducted to provide evidence for what works in enhancing leadership development and in fostering an understanding of why it works.

Models and Frameworks

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Leadership development is a subfield of leadership studies focused on understanding and facilitating the expansion of the capacity of individuals and collectives to engage effectively in leadership roles and processes. This entry will review the primary empirical and theoretical contributions to the scholarship of leadership development focusing on the history of the field, models and frameworks for leadership development, the role of experience in leadership development, how leader identity motivates dedicated leadership practice over time, and the specific practices of feedback, structured reflection, active listening, and coaching.

The field of leadership development is notoriously lacking in theory. There are many reasons for this, but a primary one is that until relatively recently the thinking was that if the best leadership theory could be identified, then the development piece would be a straightforward application of that theory. This assumption ignores the complexities of adult development and that developing leaders are also developing adults. Although not a formal theory, it has been proposed that leader development is grounded at the most basic level in adult development, especially the processes of selection (of goals), optimization (of resources), and compensation (of behavior when obstacles are experienced) that are indicative of healthy aging.

Leadership Development

At the next most observable level, self-regulation processes guide many of the behaviors associated with ongoing development. A major influence on self-regulation is identity; thus, identifying as a leader is an important process in developing over a long period. At the most visible level is expert leader performance, measured in terms of leadership skills and competencies. The framework advanced in this approach is theoretically eclectic, drawing from the different fields of adult development, self-regulation and identity theory, and expertize and expert performance. The overall approach has been described in terms of what it takes to develop an expert leader. Subsequent theorizing on leadership development has extended the expert leader model to incorporate time and levels of analysis. In terms of time, leadership development takes substantial time; thus, it is important to identify proximal indicators that longer-term development is occurring. In terms of levels of analysis, a longstanding recognition is that developing individual leaders is not the same as developing leadership. Having a highly developed leader does not guarantee that more effective leadership will result, because it requires a leader to apply their expertize appropriately in a relevant leadership situation. It is also the case that leadership can reside in a collective, and there is a potential collective capacity for leadership. What is needed is clarity about whether the focus of the development initiative is the individual leader(s) or a collective group or team. At the individual level, proximal indicators of development include leadership knowledge, skills, and competencies as well as self-views in the form of leader identity, leadership self-efficacy, and selfawareness. Distal indicators of individual leader development are grounded in dynamic skills and meaning-making structures and processes proposed in theories of adult development. With collective leadership development, proximal indicators of ongoing development include emergent collective states associated with psychological safety and shared mindsets, along with team learning. Distal outcomes refer to a collective leadership capacity. In both individual leader development and collective leadership development, experience plays a pivotal role in developmental processes.

561

Experience-Based Development A primary contribution in the field is in promoting the notion that leadership is developed most effectively through experience. Nonetheless, all experiences are not created equally when it comes to developmental potency. According to experts in the field, any experience can be made more developmental to the extent it includes the components of assessment, challenge, and support. A related rule-ofthumb is the so-called 70-20-10 heuristic, according to which effective leadership development initiatives comprise 70% challenging assignments, 20% developmental relationships, and at most only 10% formal classroom programs. Formal programs can be helpful in providing assessment data to participants, usually in the form of individual difference profiles on factors such as personality and leadership skills. Developmental relationships are important sources of support, typically by providing timely and honest feedback from trusted sources. Work assignments are integral in providing work-related challenge as part of the developmental process. But it is also the case that experience by itself is less developmental than generating insight into the lessons that are learned from challenging experiences. Enhancing the lessons of experience is a foundational component of effective leadership development. The developmental components of assessment, challenge, and support are not mutually exclusive but operate in ways that reinforce each other. One example from the research literature demonstrates how support can amplify the developmental impact of challenging experiences. In a sample of practicing managers, it was shown that leadership capacity continues to develop even with very challenging experiences as long as there is support in the form of feedback, whereas development plateaus at a high challenge level when support is lacking. Other research has shown that linking structured group reflection with challenging experiences is more developmental than having ad hoc or unstructured reflection processes as part of a leadership development initiative.

Leader Identity Leadership development takes time, potentially substantial time in the form of months or years

562

Leadership Development

rather than days or weeks. This is because the focus of development is on changing well-entrenched aspects of human thinking and behavior. Because of the extensive amount of time needed for leadership development, leveraging ongoing work experiences is preferred to using discrete, event-based programs. For that reason, much of ongoing leadership development needs to be driven by the individual to be able to identify, design, and leverage relevant experiences to engage in practicing leadership. Aspiring leaders need to own their development rather than expecting others to develop them. One mechanism that can facilitate this process is leader identity—thinking of oneself as a leader. People allocate their most valuable resource of time to what they most value, which is internalized as part of identity. Thinking of oneself as a leader, also thought of as holding a leader identity, motivates someone over a long period of time needed to facilitate leadership development through dedicated practice to develop as a more expert leader with enhanced capacity to lead either formally or informally (i.e., without a formal leadership role). Leader identity is one type of self-view that can be intervened on as a way to better facilitate long-term development.

Practices There is no agreed-upon set of leadership development practices used across all of the various leadership development interventions. Part of the expense of many leadership development initiatives is associated with the number of extra features added to an initiative that inflates the overall cost without much in the way of additional benefits. Briefly described in what follows are core evidence-based practices used for leader and leadership development. Feedback

Being able to provide timely, constructive feedback to others is important for leaders at all organizational levels. Being as objective as possible and minimizing defensiveness on the part of the feedback recipient are key. Experts at the Center

for Creative Leadership recommend practicing and using the Situation-Behavior-Impact model of feedback, in which feedback is grounded in a shared situation, the target behavior is described as objectively as possible, and the impact on the feedback giver is stated. Structured Reflection

Reflecting on experience is one way to foreground underlying lessons of experience. There are structured reflection processes such as the after-action review, used by the U.S. Army and other organizations to help understand what went right, what did not go right, and what needs to be done in the future to enhance effective leadership. Active Listening

Learning to listen deeply to another person is essential for enhancing perspective taking and empathy, both of which are key components of effective leadership. The active part of active listening is in using verbal and nonverbal cues to demonstrate to the speaker that they are being heard. Active listening is also important for developing trustworthiness. Coaching

Using a certified, professional leadership coach is an evidence-based way of individualizing leadership development. A professional coach knows how best to use individual assessments, how to interpret assessment results, can assist in identifying leadership challenges, as well as providing support to those being coached. Regardless of the scope of the leadership development intervention, these four practices are highly recommended as foundational to effective development. There are plenty of non-evidence-based practices, so it is always best to ask the leadership development provider to document the evidence behind the practice that is being proposed. David V. Day See also Adaptive Leadership; Coaching; Empathic Leadership; Leader Self-Efficacy; Skills

Leadership for the Common Good

Further Readings Day, D. V., & Dragoni, L. (2015). Leadership development: An outcome-oriented review based on time and levels of analyses. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2, 133–156. Day, D. V., Harrison, M. M., & Halpin, S. M. (2009). An integrative approach to leader development: Connecting adult development, identity, and expertise. New York, NY: Psychology Press. McCall, M. W. (2010). Recasting leadership development. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 3, 3–19. McCall, M. W., Lombardo, M. M., & Morrison, A. M. (1988). The lessons of experience: How successful executives develop on the job. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Van Velsor, E., McCauley, C. D., & Ruderman, M. N. (Eds.). (2010). The center for creative leadership handbook of leadership development (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Wiley.

LEADERSHIP

FOR THE

COMMON GOOD

Against a backdrop of unethical conduct, irresponsible leadership, and distrust of institutions in the West since the 1970s, there are growing demands for leadership and governance that serves the common good. However, the “common good” is hard to define in a precise or comprehensive way. This entry begins with a brief overview of the concept of the common good, illuminating its long pedigree and its irreducibility to a single normative principle or set of principles. Next, a characterization of leadership for the common good is offered, highlighting both its complexity and its suitability for shared power contexts. Finally, the tensions, dilemmas, and paradoxes that attend the practice of leadership for the common good are explored.

The Common Good The concept of the common good has a long yet punctuated history, replete with diverging meanings. Plato, for example, imagined an ideal state in

563

which private goods and nuclear families would be relinquished for the sake of the greater good of a harmonious society. Aristotle defined it in terms of communally shared happiness whose key constituents were wisdom, virtue, and pleasure. Throughout the centuries, Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas examined the common good, as have thinkers from other great faiths. More sustained engagement with the concept occurred in the 17th century with the rise of social contract theory, which held that people ought to forfeit their absolute freedom to live as they wish for the greater good of the security of shared life in a community. Subsequently, 18thand 19th-century thinkers, such as the utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, argued that the right course of action is that which creates the greatest utility for society. In the 20th century, the common good received renewed impetus with John Rawls’s work on justice as fairness. Although the power of the idea of the common good has subsided in recent decades, in the 21st century, intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Hans Sluga, ˇ zek have examined the concept in a and Slavoj Ziˇ variety of affirmative and critical ways. Despite all that has been written on the topic, the precise meaning of the common good remains elusive. Although the concept of the common good—and its synonyms, the public good and greater good—seem familiar and commonplace, these concepts are difficult to define or articulate in a precise or comprehensive way. Indeed, as observed by the philosopher Hans Sluga, the diverse conceptions of the good—such as justice, fairness, equity, happiness, liberty, freedom, security, prosperity—and the variety of tribal, local, national, and global communities for which the good is sought militates against the identification of a single, determinate good. Moreover, the common good appears to be as much about process as outcome. Construed in this way, and consistent with the irreducible complexity of the concept, the common good is, perhaps, better understood as an umbrella term for several interlocking concepts, conditions, processes, and systems that underpin human survival and flourishing. Perhaps the most serious limitation of most historical ideas about the common good is that

564

Leadership for the Common Good

they are silent on the good as it relates to nonhuman species and the natural world. Indeed, the terms “common” and “public” good are tacitly or overtly anthropocentric; that is, they restrict the scope of the good to humans, which is no guarantee of inclusion in the moral circle, as dehumanization research amply attests. In the context of emerging concerns about planetary boundaries and growing awareness that natural systems are the basis upon which all else of value depends, there are now proposals to expand the boundaries of the concept of the common good to include these natural systems (e.g., the greater planetary good). In a sense, the inclusion of nature and natural systems in the definition of the common good is not new. For example, the idea of “the commons”—collective goods to which all group members have free access—is an ancient one. Every society has common-pool resources that can be used by all. Common-pool resources (e.g., air, water, fisheries, a habitable earth) are an incontrovertible part of the common good and their degradation, famously described by ecologist Garrett Hardin as “the tragedy of commons,” contrary to the common good of all users. Public goods, which include tangible (e.g., roads and public utilities) and intangible goods (e.g., representative democracy), are another type of collective good. However, unlike common-pool resources, public goods require the members of a community to contribute some form of capital to create and sustain them over time. Thinking about the common good in terms of tangible and intangible collective goods offers a practical means of rendering abstract ideas about the common good more concrete and therefore measurable and manageable. Think, for example, of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, the idea of the common good invites consideration of how collective goods are created and sustained via coordinated investments of human, intellectual, social and relational, financial, manufactured, and natural capitals goods, as well as consideration of the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that inform, or could or should inform, the distribution of collective goods within and across generations, nations, and species.

Thus, although the common good is neither synonymous with, nor reducible to, collective goods, this approach to the conception of the good offers a helpful way to imagine, measure, and monitor the well-being of the whole. Framed in terms of leadership, especially organizational and institutional leadership, this approach to thinking about the common good invites us to consider the types of value created or destroyed by authorities and institutions, the processes through which authorities and institutions create or destroy value, and the stakeholders for whom authorities and institutions create or destroy value.

Conceptualizing Leadership for the Common Good Instead of the usual noun plus adjective combination that characterizes most scholarly approaches to leadership, leadership for the common good foregrounds its object; namely, the community, society, or the world, and its betterment. This has profound implications for how leadership for the common good is conceptualized. It means that leadership for the common good is not reducible to any single approach to leadership, such as adaptive, ethical, integrative, transformative, responsible or servant leadership, although such approaches might find expression in the practice of leadership for the common good. Moreover, given the range of normative principles associated with the common good and the plurality of meanings associated with some principles—“equity,” for example, is nowadays associated with several meanings, some of which are incompatible—the practice of leadership for the common good is not informed by any specific ethic. Furthermore, given the diversity of communities for which the good is sought, leadership for the common good is neither constrained to specific social contexts, such as communities, teams, or organizations, nor constrained to specific sectors, such as the government, business, or not-for-profit sector. Instead, as posited by leadership scholars John Bryson and Barbara Crosby, leadership for the common good requires leadership to be enacted across several interlocking levels (e.g., team, organization, sector, community) using a raft of practices pertinent to personal, team, organizational,

Leadership for the Common Good

political, and policy leadership. Given that no single individual can reasonably perform leadership at all these levels, leadership for the common good is, by necessity, a collective effort that needs to be shared among actors and institutions. Indeed, according to Bryson and Crosby, leadership for the common good is required precisely in “shared power contexts” in which no single institution or set of institutions have the authority or capacity to govern or manage the complex challenges encountered in these contexts. These contexts, which Bryson and Crosby call “weak regimes,” are characterized by weak inter-actor agreement about the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that guide behavior and expectations. These are the hallmarks of what are other scholars have termed complex contexts and adaptive, wicked, or super wicked problems. Wicked problems are the antithesis of tame or technical problems, which are familiar and can be solved using known decision-making processes and standard operating procedures. Wicked problems are complex, difficult to define, and ever changing. According to leadership scholar Keith Grint, whereas experts are ascribed responsibility for managing tame problems and authorities are expected to use command and control to address crises, responsibility for addressing wicked problems falls to the actors involved. This means that coordination among those actors cannot be patterned by compliance with experts (as in management) or obedience to authorities (as in command). Instead, what is required is leadership, defined as persuading the people involved to assume responsibility for their collective challenges and mobilizing them to act collaboratively to address these challenges. Although there are guidelines to inform the practice of leadership for the common good, and myriad facilitative practices that can be utilized to this end, there are no simple or elegant solutions. Instead, leadership for the common good is characterized more by bricolage—the pragmatic but principled use of the diverse range of things that happen to be available.

Practicing Leadership for the Common Good There is a growing appreciation of the paradoxical nature of leadership, which is complemented by an

565

appreciation of the need to tolerate paradoxes in the context of wicked problems, which political scientists Marco Verweij and Michael Thompson have termed “clumsy solutions.” Consistent with the notion advanced earlier that there is no single, essential common good, the practice of leadership for the common good is best understood as the search for the common good. This search for the common good highlights the importance of engaging the diversity of individual and collective actors that comprise the context, community, or ecosystem within which common ground is sought. Thus, the search for the common good is better characterized as a “bottom up” process of discovery of shared reality and common interests rather than the “top down” imposition of normative principles. This necessarily involves the inclusion, tolerance, and juxtaposition of incompatible perspectives—“necessarily” because in complex, pluralistic societies there are reasonable differences of opinion about what is the right, just, or fair thing to do. Thus, leadership for the common good requires an ability and willingness to overcome our tendencies to parse the world into opposites and to instead live with the attendant tensions, competing values, dilemmas, and paradoxes. As observed by leadership scholars Richard Bolden, Morgan Witzel, and Nigel Linacre, living with paradox requires us to do something that, in descriptive terms, is quite simple; namely, accept that there is no black and white, no right and wrong, and that two or more logically incompatible positions may well be true. Yet, in reality, most people find this difficult. Leadership, and by extension followership, for the common good is essential, but paradoxical, and therefore not easy. There appear to be a host of oppositions and tensions that inform the paradoxes of the common good and leadership for the common good. Most prominent among these is the tension between the individual and the collective, including groups, organizations, communities, and society itself. According to leadership scholars Donelson Forsyth and Crystal Hoyt, the tension between the individual and the collective—politically, between individualism and collectivism—is “the master problem” of social life and is the tension to which many of the problems of modern life can ultimately

566

Leadership in Children and Adolescents

be traced. Closely related to this is the tension between what Verweij and Thompson describe as the four primary modes of organizing, perceiving, and justifying social relations: egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism, and fatalism. Notably, each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Leadership for the common good is truly, as leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz might put it, leadership without easy answers. In summary, although the power of the idea of the common good has subsided in recent decades, this has not always been the case and may not remain so for much longer. As observed by the late historian Tony Judt, there is a pervasive sense that something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today which is reflected in a variety of places, not least in the collapse of public trust in leaders and institutions to act with integrity and serve the public interest. Leadership for the common good offers a way for change agents and positional leaders alike to imagine the well-being of the whole and to reawaken concern for our shared interests, collective purpose, and common future.

Hardin, G. (1998). Extensions of the tragedy of the commons. Science, 280(5364), 682–683. doi:10.1126/ science.280.5364.682 Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Judt, T. (2010). Ill fares the land. New York, NY: Penguin Group. Redekop, B. W. (Ed.). (2010). Leadership for environmental sustainability. London: Routledge. Reich, R. B. (2018). The common good. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Scharmer, O., & Kaufer, K. (2013). Leading from the emerging future: From ego-system to eco-system economies. San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler. Sluga, H. (2014). Politics and the search for the common good. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verweij, M., & Thompson, M. (2006). Clumsy solutions for a complex world. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

LEADERSHIP IN CHILDREN ADOLESCENTS

AND

Samuel G. Wilson See also Adaptive Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Responsible Leadership; Servant Leadership; Trust; Wicked Problems

Further Readings Bolden, R., Witzel, M., & Linacre, N. (Eds.). (2016). Leadership paradoxes: Rethinking leadership for an uncertain world. London: Routledge. Bryson, J. M., & Crosby, B. C. (1992). Leadership for the common good: Tackling public problems in a shared-power world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Forsyth, D. R., & Hoyt, C. L. (Eds.). (2011). For the greater good of all: Perspectives on individualism, society, and leadership. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldman Schuyler, K., Baugher J. E., & Jironet, K. (Eds.). (2016). Creative social change: Leadership for a healthy world. Bingley: Emerald. Grint, K. (2010). The cuckoo clock syndrome: Addicted to command, allergic to leadership. European Management Journal, 28, 306–313. doi:10.1016/j.emj. 2010.05.002

Early in the 20th century, scientists who were motivated in part by the atrocities of World War I began pursuing research agendas that focused on the role of socialization agents, including groups and their leaders, in shaping human behavior. At the same time, public interest in children’s welfare increased, and child development gained traction as a scientific discipline. The recognition that youth operate within peer hierarchies in classrooms and schools gave rise to the perspective that peer systems are an important context for investigating group processes and provided an impetus for the study of leadership in childhood and adolescence. The peer groups that children and adolescents inhabit, and their status within these groups relative to peers, have significant and enduring effects on multiple aspects of adjustment, underscoring the importance of examining the peer system as a critical context for young leaders. As this entry aims to show, leaders within children’s and adolescents’ peer systems are socially dominant; that is, they occupy high-status

Leadership in Children and Adolescents

positions. Their value is largely predicated on peers’ perceptions of what they accomplish for the group. They are also highly influential and goal oriented. In some cases, peer leaders pursue their social goals primarily through their use of socially competent behaviors. In other cases, bullying behaviors are front and center, providing a glimpse into the “dark side” of leadership in childhood and adolescence.

Identifying and Describing Leaders Within Children’s and Adolescents’ Peer Systems The gold standard for determining a child’s or adolescent’s status in the peer hierarchy is sociometry, a method introduced in the 1920s. It involves asking youth to nominate or rate members of their peer group on the basis of a criterion such as “someone who is popular.” In early childhood, the peer group in which status is determined is usually the classroom. Among older children and adolescents, who are no longer in self-contained classrooms, the grade is often the relevant peer group. In each scenario it is optimal, although difficult in practice, for each peer group member to both evaluate and be evaluated by all other members of that classroom or grade. If a child or adolescent receives many nominations or high ratings on the criterion of popularity, there is consensus within the peer system that the child or adolescent is popular. Popularity is the most commonly accepted index of peer group status. Youth become popular—that is, they emerge as peer group leaders—primarily because peers view them as integral to the group’s stable functioning. Leaders typically maintain their status so long as group members perceive them as capable of promoting the basic goals of the group. These goals revolve around maintaining cohesion, having a shared purpose, and demonstrating the ability to develop. The latter goal ensures that belonging to the group remains a desirable objective of members and nonmembers alike. In pursuit of these goals, leaders capitalize on the power afforded to them by peer group members and exert social influence by establishing and enforcing the group’s social norms.

567

Leaders as Norm Setters Social norms, which reflect a consensus among peer group members about what is acceptable, often dictate behavior within a peer system. Peer leaders are key players in deciding group norms and, therefore, by design, social norms align with their interests. Usually, leaders establish norms that simultaneously advance the group’s goals and their own goal of preserving their status within the peer hierarchy. Peer leaders exercise control over the behaviors of those within the group to the extent that they reward acceptable behavior and impose sanctions in response to unacceptable behavior. Rewards and sanctions are likely to be socially oriented and may include, for example, public disapproval and/ or exclusion of a peer who sufficiently deviates from established norms. Leaders’ reinforcement of norms has implications for children’s and adolescents’ social status such that failing to conform with norms is associated with a decline in one’s standing within the peer system. By establishing and enforcing norms, nearly all group leaders exert influence over group processes, but they differ in the strategies that they employ to do so. Socially Competent Leaders

A characteristic of some—but not all—peer group leaders is social competence, which researchers typically conceptualize as the capacity for effective social interactions. Children and adolescents who display social competence engage in effective communication and problem-solving, demonstrate empathy and concern, are helpful and cooperative, and provide others with emotional and instrumental support. They are typically capable of accurately interpreting peers’ intentions as hostile, prosocial, or otherwise, and they exercise self-control, both of which lay the groundwork for socially appropriate responses to peers even in provocative situations. At the same time, youth who are socially competent are assertive, ensuring that their own needs are met along with those of the group. Peer group leaders are likely to employ socially competent behaviors if they assume that establishing and maintaining healthy relationships with

568

Leadership in Children and Adolescents

peers is the most effective strategy for both maintaining their own social status and accomplishing the goals of the peer group. Not surprisingly, perhaps, investigators have determined that peer group leaders who exhibit high levels of social competence tend to be well-liked by peers. Being well-liked and socially competent are not, however, sufficient conditions for effective leadership. In fact, some peer group leaders are neither socially competent nor well-liked. Bullies: The Dark Side of Leadership

Bullying, a subtype of aggression that is unprovoked, premeditated, and deliberate, is characteristic of some peer group leaders. Bullying occurs in multiple forms, including physical, verbal, and/or relational, and involves a power imbalance between the perpetrator and target. Youth dislike—even fear—bullies, yet they view them as powerful and respect their elevated status within the peer hierarchy. Although there is heterogeneity in the individual characteristics associated with bullying behavior, those who bully are often low on empathy and shame, which can function to perpetuate their use of aggression, and they tend to call attention to themselves, a behavior indicative of narcissism. When appraising peers’ intentions, they are prone to making hostile attributions, or assuming the worst about their peers, which increases the likelihood of peer interactions that are characterized by dysregulation and antagonism. And, although the term social competence is not typically applied to leaders who exhibit bullying behavior, researchers agree that these youth are not all together devoid of social savvy. Peer leaders who employ aggressive tactics consider the use of aggression an effective and acceptable strategy for accomplishing their single most important interpersonal goal: to advance their social standing within the peer system. By the use of aggression, bullies communicate dominance and manipulate the peer group. At the same time, they are selectively cooperative, friendly, and helpful. By employing these so-called prosocial behaviors, bullies are strategically diminishing the likelihood of social censure or other negative consequences that their aggressive behavior might otherwise incite. These youth are also calculated in

their use of aggression, targeting peers who are easy marks because they present as psychologically, physically, and/or socially vulnerable. For example, by directing their aggressive advances toward youth who are depressed, submissive, and withdrawn, small in stature or weak, disliked by the peer group or without friends, bullies decrease their risk of retaliation. In turn, they ensure that their targets do not thwart their attempts to gain and/or maintain social status.

Leaders and Their Context For some youth, social competence is the pathway to leadership, but for others it is goal-directed aggressive behavior. Indeed, the strategies peer leaders adopt to achieve their social goals are context dependent. For example, leaders’ use of social competence, more so than aggression, is likely to be effective in contexts in which youth prioritize collectivistic values, including respect for others and cohesion. From a developmental perspective, aggression is more likely to be a marker of high status among peer groups composed of adolescents rather than children. The characteristics of both the leader and the peer context, therefore, are critical components of a dynamic system in which each has implications for the other. Peer systems in classrooms and schools provide an ideal context for the study of leadership because, for most children, they represent their first opportunity to lead. Peer systems are also the primary social context in which children are embedded, with most children entering formal schooling around the age of 5 and pursuing compulsory education for at least a decade after that. The study of children’s and adolescents’ peer systems in school contexts have provided researchers with several important insights about leadership. First, it has been discovered that child and adolescent peer group leaders are, with few exceptions, high-status, goal-oriented, and influential. Second, leaders employ different strategies—for instance, social competence versus bullying—to achieve their social goals. And third, these strategies depend on the characteristics of the peer context, which sometimes facilitate and sometimes constrain leaders as they pursue their own goals and those of the group. Such discoveries

Leadership in Dogs

lay an important foundation for understanding the origins of leadership. Karen P. Kochel See also Emotional Intelligence; Group Norms; Group Process; Leadership Development; Warmth, Competence and Leadership

Further Readings Bukowski, W. M. (2011). Popularity as a social concept: Meanings and significance. In A. H. N. Cillessen, D. Schwartz, & L. Mayeux (Eds.), Popularity in the peer system (pp. 3–24). New York, NY: Guilford. Ladd, G. W. (2005). Children’s peer relations and social competence: A century of progress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Salmivalli, C., & Peets, K. (2018). Bullying and victimization. In W. M. Bukowski, B. Laursen, & K. H. Rubin (Eds.), Handbook of peer interactions, relationships, and groups (2nd ed., pp. 302–321). New York, NY: Guilford. Veenstra, R., Dijkstra, J. K., & Kreager, D. A. (2018). Pathways, networks, and norms: A sociological perspective on peer research. In W. M. Bukowski, B. Laursen, & K. H. Rubin (Eds.), Handbook of peer interactions, relationships, and groups (2nd ed., pp. 45–63). New York, NY: Guilford.

LEADERSHIP

IN

DOGS

The cultural meaning of dogs embodies desirable traits of followers, such as loyalty and obedience. However, dogs act as both leaders and followers, depending on circumstances. Leadership processes operate between dogs and between dogs and humans. In the human-dog relationship, regulation occurs bi-directionally in that humans clearly control dogs but it is also true that dogs guide human beings. This influence exists between individual owners and their dogs as well as in organizational contexts. This entry begins with a history of the domestication of dogs and considers their instrumental and symbolic value. Next, the roles of dogs as followers and leaders are considered. The interdependence between dogs and

569

humans is then explored, as well as how organizations might benefit from the use or presence of dogs.

The Origins of Dogs Dogs were the first domesticated animal in a process that most likely started about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that dogs domesticated themselves because those with a lower fear or aggression response to human beings were better able to benefit from the advantages proximity to people made available. In contrast to wolves, which are cooperative hunters, dogs, especially those near human settlements, function more as scavengers. Estimates put the number of dogs in the world at 700 million to 1 billion. As such, dogs—in comparison to other species of canids—are tremendously successful from an evolutionary perspective. There are three broad categories within the population of dogs. Pets are typically well cared for, free from disease, and live to their maximum possible lifespan. Despite the loving way in which dogs are treated, the personhood status of pet dogs is tentative. Even people who profess to love their dogs may give them away or surrender them to an animal shelter if their life circumstances change. The second group is free-ranging dogs, which refers to dogs socialized to be comfortable with human beings but that live without a human owner. Feral dogs are domesticated animals but have never been socialized to be comfortable with human beings. As a result, they are distrustful of humans and may become aggressive. The absence of human intervention makes the lives of feral and free-range dogs more difficult and, consequently, much shorter. It is not clear that conclusions drawn from the study of one category of dogs will automatically apply to other categories. Despite their phylogenetic (heredity) and morphological (appearance) similarities, comparing dogs and wolves with regard to dominance is as an outmoded way of thinking. Wolf packs are family units led by one breeding pair. Division of labor occurs for the pair such that the breeding male initiates hunting and foraging, and the breeding female initiates pup care. Within a breeding pair, leadership responsibility may vary according to the

570

Leadership in Dogs

season. Individual differences in age, previous experience, alliances, and temperament help to explain a particular wolf’s leadership role. A more cooperative view of wolves’ interactions has replaced the concept of the agonistic wolf pack. A wolf pack tends to be a nuclear or extended family. In contrast, members of a dog family are often unrelated. They may be of radically different breeds that vary in size, weight, and temperament. Similarly, agonistic behavior in wolves under the control of humans may be unrepresentative of wolf behavior in the wild because unrelated members often make up captive packs. Further, constraints of captivity may make it impossible for members to disperse. As a result, dominance challenges may be unrepresentative of their natural way of occurring. It is possible to distinguish between what people believe to be true about dogs from what animal researchers have determined is most likely operating. In some instances, folk beliefs align with scientific research. For example, it is widely accepted and scientifically documented that dogs excel at communicating with people. However, people anthropomorphize dogs by overestimating their abilities and assign them human-like qualities they most likely do not possess. Recent research suggests that sometimes an opposing process of anthropodenial operates such that people deny dogs qualities that empirical evidence suggests they possess. For example, dogs will refuse to cooperate with, and appear to hold a grudge against, human beings who give them inequitable rewards relative to another dog. Although dogs are legally considered property, in practice, people have a complex relationship with dogs. Scientific and lay conceptualizations of dogs have evolved from a dominant–submissive relationship to one that often affords a limited degree of personhood to animals, especially beloved pets such as dogs and cats. Part of this evolution recognizes the mutual influence dogs and people exert over each other. As such, it has become increasingly accepted that dogs can affect human beings and their social world.

Instrumental and Symbolic Value Dogs are esteemed for their instrumental use in the workplace as well as their symbolic value. Dogs

have skills, in some cases at a level superior to human beings. One reason that people defer to dogs is that dogs, in comparison to human beings, possess a much keener sense of smell and acute hearing. As such, dogs excel at searching for victims in natural disasters and detecting drugs or explosives. Dogs can even be trained to detect cancer. Because of these competencies, people use dogs in activities such as police work, airport security, and assisting people with disabilities, especially as guide dogs. Part of the instrumental value of dogs is their symbolic value derived from a 20,000-year partnership with human beings. Dogs provide emotional and interpersonal comfort. Dog ownership correlates with physical and psychological health benefits. Just petting a dog can relieve stress. Dogs facilitate interaction between people. People have feelings for dogs that are parallel to and as intense as the emotions they have for human beings. There is a positive feedback loop in the production of oxytocin for humans and dogs. More recently, dogs have taken on a role as formal providers of emotional support.

Dogs as Followers Because of their relationship to wolves, one popular metaphor used to conceptualize interaction with dogs is the pack metaphor. Dominance can be understood as being a consistent winner in agonistic interactions. In a pack, dominant individuals control the behavior of others. Pack leaders control the movement of the pack. Pack leadership relates to dominance and breeding status. However, there is debate over whether dogs have strong dominance hierarchies. From a pack perspective, a human owner is the alpha that needs to dominate the dog. In contrast, from a symbolic interactionist perspective, if their owners grant dogs “personhood status,” then their owners treat them as persons, or, more specifically, children. With regard to their interactions with humans, dogs are often classified as followers. Whereas submission has a negative connotation for human beings, some experts have argued that it does not for dogs. Dogs are sensitive to cues from human beings. Dogs will defer to human beings to help

Leadership in Dogs

solve problems. They will be less likely to persist on a task but quickly look at a human being for assistance. Dogs will even allow information from a human being to override the evidence of their own senses. Rather than think of dominance as a trait that applies cross-situationally, it is more appropriate to conceptualize dominance as a relationship that evolves over time. Temperament can vary depending on an individual’s physiological state and social circumstances. One way to think of dominance is that it applies to an individual dog’s personality. The ability to form hierarchies may vary from one breed to another. Relationships may not be transitive if the differences between dogs are small. It is not clear that a dominant dog in one group would emerge as dominant in a different group. How people conceptualize dogs will influence approaches they use to train them. Dominancebased training assumes that dogs need to be controlled and forced into a subordinate position using both punishment and negative reinforcement. In contrast, reward-based training focuses on shaping a dog’s behavior through positive reinforcement. A consequence of adopting the pack metaphor is that owners may use too harsh training measures, assuming the dog needs to be dominated and display submissive behaviors. One ramification of adopting a dogs-as-children approach is that people infantilize dogs, and, as a result, dogs have never learned to fend for themselves. As such, they are ill equipped to operate in a leadership role. One downside of adopting an outmoded view of dogs with regard to dominance is that doing so can lead to using training techniques that may actually increase anxiety in dogs about interacting with people. Disagreements over how dogs communicate and think can lead to conflict over what leadership role humans should adopt to best train them.

Dogs as Leaders Consistent leadership operates when the highest-ranking, oldest, or most experienced member of a group has the most influence most of the time. With variable leadership, different individuals

571

exert influence at different times. Studies show that among a group of dogs, leadership responsibilities are not concentrated in a single dog. Every adult dog in a pack may initiate movement of at least three other dogs at some point. Relative to follower dogs, leader and dominant dogs tend to be more trainable, controllable, and aggressive. They also tend to be older. Human beings regularly entrust themselves to the care of dogs. This confidence is especially relevant with the responsibility guide dogs have for their human caretakers. To a lesser degree, support animals influence the wellbeing of humans with whom they are paired. Law enforcement defers to the judgments of K-9 dogs used to sniff out contraband such as drugs or weapons. Dogs can act as leaders when they can facilitate interactions between human beings, with regard to the formation, maintenance, and termination of human relationships. People may use their dogs’ reactions to other people to form opinions of those people, meaning dogs can act as opinion leaders.

The Interdependence of Dogs and People Dogs operate in coalitions with other dogs and with people. Consider dogs A, B, and C. If A and B are playing together, C can intercede to demonstrate dominance over A or B. Alternatively, C may intervene to gain the attention of a preferred play partner, such as B over C. If A and B are fighting, C may assist A against B. A third dog may also console the loser in an aggressive interaction between two others. Although dogs form coalitions to satisfy immediate needs, they will establish coalitions in the present to guard against future threats, a strategy that speaks favorably to their cognitive complexity. Similarly, the fact that dogs have preferences for one person (especially an owner) over another suggests they can form coalitions with human beings against both dogs and people. Dogs will behave jealously toward other dogs and people in processes analogous to mate or friend guarding. One specific form of coalition dogs form with human beings involves livestock guarding and herding, abilities that have been selected for in certain breeds such as the Old English Sheepdog and the Australian Cattle Dog. Herding illustrates

572

Leadership in Dogs

the interdependence that can exist between human beings and dogs. The herding dog is part of a triangular relationship among a human trainer/ herder and livestock (such as sheep or cattle). The human trainer and herding dog work cooperatively to control the flock of sheep or herd of cattle. At the same time, the human exerts influence over the dog while acknowledging the dog may be superior in certain aspects of controlling livestock. As such, trainers adapt to the dogs they are training. The human has to balance two pressures operating on a herding dog. One involves encouraging an individual dog’s development. The second involves exerting restrictive pressure. Herding requires a human being to train a dog to herd. To be a good herding dog, a dog must be able to maintain his or her behavior even when contact is lost with the governing human. Herding dogs are highly valued and respected. A herding dog takes on the role of an assistant, and when he or she retires may be given special privileges such as softer bedding or even the right to sleep indoors. The herding dog and livestock live in a carefully negotiated relationship in that in other circumstances a predator dog would frighten, or even attack, the sheep. Instead, the livestock remain calm despite the presence of a predator. Another classic example of a working dog is that of police dogs (also known as K-9s). Given their heightened sense of smell, they are especially skillful in locating people or contraband such as drugs. Another valued aspect of police dogs is their ability to display controlled aggression. Whereas aggressive behavior is generally unacceptable in dogs, it is a useful behavior of police dogs. There is a movement by police lobbying groups to classify attacks by the public on police dogs as parallel to attacking a police officer, rather than as criminal damage. Such a push further blurs the line between human and animal.

a strong taboo against consuming dogs in many, but not all, cultures. Dogs symbolize values relevant to organizations, such as hard work and loyalty. Leaders use dogs to fulfill their own symbolic and functional goals. Individuals can use dogs to intimidate rivals or display a softer, more humane side. Appearing dog-friendly can be an effective branding strategy. It can make employees more satisfied. Dogs in the workplace can enhance interaction and group dynamics. Dog-friendly policies can increase the quality of applicants who form the pool of future employees. They can also help the company in the eyes of customers or consumers. Given the fact that the Millennial generation is delaying having children and investing more psychologically in their pets, pet-friendly policies may help attract younger workers who are productive, energetic, and ambitious. Large companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon have had liberal pet polices in place for years. Leaders must weigh the potential benefits of bringing dogs into the workplace against potential liabilities. Dogs can impede performance if their presence is a distraction to employees. Further, if more than one dog is in the workplace, new distractions may emerge from problems related to dogs interacting with each other. There is the potential for conflict between employees who want to bring pets to work and those who do not, especially if opposition is rooted in fear or an allergy. Bringing dogs into organizational settings carry risks such as dog attacks, damage to property, the risk of lawsuits, and the potential for conflict between different employees or customers and employees regarding the presence of dogs. James K. Beggan See also Coalitions; Followership; Health and Well-Being; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals

Organizational Processes and Dogs Organizations use dogs for instrumental and symbolic reasons. Most obviously, for industries that involve the production of food, such as beef, poultry, and pork, animals are the raw materials that keep their businesses operating. Society, however, indemnifies dogs from this use, as there is

Further Readings ´ Akos, Z., Beck, R., Nagy, M., Vicsek, T., & Kubinyi, E. (2014). Leadership and path characteristics during walks are linked to dominance order and individual traits in dogs. PLoS Computational Biology, 10(1), e1003446. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003446

Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals Bonanni, R., Cafazzo, S., Valsecchi, P., & Natoli, E. (2010). Effect of affiliative and agonistic relationships on leadership behaviour in free-ranging dogs. Animal Behaviour, 79(5), 981–991. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav. 2010.02.021 Cunha, M. P. E., Rego, A., & Munro, I. (2019). Dogs in organizations. Human Relations, 72(4), 778–800. doi:10.1177/0018726718780210 Greenebaum, J. B. (2010). Training dogs and training humans: Symbolic interaction and dog training. ¨ 23(2), 129–141. doi:10.2752/ Anthrozoos, 175303710X12682332909936 Savalois, N., Lescureux, N., & Brunois, F. (2013). Teaching the dog and learning from the dog: Interactivity in herding dog training and use. ¨ 26(1), 77–91. doi:10.2752/ Anthrozoos, 175303713X13534238631515 Todd, Z. (2018, May–June). Barriers to the adoption of humane dog training methods. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 25, 28–34. doi:10.1016/j.jveb.2018.03. 004

LEADERSHIP

IN

NONHUMAN MAMMALS

The phenomenon of leadership is well studied in humans but also occurs in many nonhuman social mammals, from primates (e.g., chimpanzees, lemurs) to whales (e.g., dolphins, orcas) and carnivores (e.g., lions, spotted hyenas). In many social situations, leaders emerge when one individual or subset of individuals has a disproportional influence on the collective outcome of group decisions. Whereas foundational efforts on leadership in nonhuman species focused simply on individuals (leaders) that moved first and by doing so recruited followers when moving from one area to another, the definition of leadership in nonhuman mammals has been extended to include other domains. Specifically, leaders also emerge in group decisions of nonhuman mammals in the contexts of group foraging (hunting), resolving intragroup conflicts, and during intergroup conflicts that are comparable in many respects to aspects of leadership in small-scale human societies. This entry provides a brief history of the biological study of leadership, describes how leadership attributes vary across

573

contexts, and discusses the insights gained from a comparative framework.

The Nature of Leadership in Nonhuman Animals Historically, studies of leadership in nonhuman animals have focused on flocks of birds, herds of ungulates, schools of fish, and swarms of insects moving from one place to another. These studies have revealed that although one individual (the leader) often moves first and thus recruits followers, simple rules (e.g., following the individuals in front, avoiding bumping into them, and maintaining a similar speed) explain seemingly complex patterns of coordinated group movements. Moreover, these patterns of leadership are highly distributed such that multiple individuals within the group may occupy the role of leader, a finding that differs from what is seen in many large-scale human societies. In contrast, in human societies, there is often one centralized leader (e.g., the president, the CEO, the priest) such that decisions are made at the top (e.g., in a head office) and distributed down the chain of command. Interestingly, seemingly complex collective movements (e.g., group travel) in nonhuman mammals from baboon troops to spotted hyenas often emerge with very little communication and are highly flexible with respect to who occupies leadership roles. More recently, biologists have recognized that nonhuman mammals also exert influence on collective decisions within the domains of group foraging (hunting), intragroup conflict resolution, and intergroup conflicts in addition to group travel. Each of these four domains of leadership in nonhuman mammals is discussed below.

Leadership During Group Movements For many social mammals, group travel represents a consensus decision whereby individuals, often with conflicting interests, must collectively decide when and where to go. In some species with more fluid social structures (e.g., fission–fusion societies), some individuals or small groups of individuals may temporarily fission (break away from the group) and then fusion (rejoin groupmates) at a later time. Regardless of the group structure,

574

Leadership in Nonhuman Mammals

collective movements in mammals occur when two or more individuals maintain spatial proximity while traveling together to a new location, and leaders may influence these (sub)group decisions. We now know a great deal about the collective movements in nonhumans. All available evidence to date suggests that even the most socially complex mammals follow simple rules when navigating from one location to another. Individuals that move first (i.e., leaders) are often those with the greatest needs (e.g., lactating females) or have the greatest knowledge (e.g., elders) about a migratory route or refuge. Followers often follow leaders in the absence of active coercion or signaling on the part of the leader. Instead, followers often follow individuals to maintain group cohesion and often benefit from following these informed leaders to resources or away from danger. For most nonhuman mammals, leadership is distributed among members of the group. That is, rather than relying upon a single centralized leader or leadership team, who emerges as the leader within a given collective movement event for nonhuman mammals is often based upon attributes such as physiological state (e.g., hunger, thirst, reproductive status), sex, and age class. In the context of collective movements, nonhuman mammalian leaders are typically adult females, especially those who are lactating or elders in the group.

Leadership During Group Foraging Leaders in several species, particularly those who hunt collectively, emerge not only when individuals move from one area to another but also must cooperatively gather to locate, capture, and distribute food within groups. Such processes have been well documented in certain mammals, particularly among social carnivorans (e.g., members of the mammalian Order Carnivora). For example, African lions and spotted hyenas often work together to capture live prey that would otherwise be unavailable to a lone hunter, although these two species differ in how leaders emerge and how resources are shared after they are acquired. Importantly, leadership during foraging refers to influence in the decision-making hierarchy (e.g., what to hunt, when to hunt, and

roles, if any, during hunting), whereas dominance refers to priority of access to resources once they are acquired. Whereas lions often assume particular roles (e.g., chasers, drivers) when hunting, spotted hyenas rarely do so. Moreover, lions are egalitarian and share food equally once it is acquired. In contrast, dominance relationships among spotted hyenas quickly influence who gains access to kills after they are acquired collectively. More broadly, to the extent it has been investigated, older mammals often lead members of their group to food, presumably because they are more knowledgeable about local resources. Leadership by menopausal killer whales (post-reproductive grandmothers) represents one of the bestdocumented examples of mammalian leadership in the foraging domain. In orca groups, elder females recruit followers, helping uninformed individuals to locate salmon. This leadership is especially important during times of food scarcity and has profound fitness consequences for individuals, particularly for the young, who often lack the skill or knowledge to acquire or locate food on their own.

Leadership During Intragroup and Intergroup Conflicts Conflicts within (intra-) and among (inter-) groups can strongly influence the fitness of nonhuman mammals. These dangerous encounters can lead to injury or even death. Conflict resolution within groups can also promote group cohesion and efficiency. Intergroup conflicts after particularly dangerous given that they often involve multiple individuals joining forces to settle disputes over territories and access to key resources within them (e.g., mates, food). When it comes to leadership during conflicts, leadership roles are less shared, and leaders exert more power (influence) in nonhuman mammals than those of small-scale human societies. With respect to sex differences in nonhuman mammals, adult males generally intervene in intragroup conflicts involving other adult males, whereas adult females typically do so on behalf of their juvenile offspring or other adult females. During intergroup encounters, however, males participate more often than females across mammals despite some notable exceptions.

Leadership in Science

Conclusion Taken together, leaders influence group-level decisions in mammalian societies in a variety of ways that have important fitness consequences. That is, leaders influence group decisions (e.g., timing, direction, and intensity of collective action) from simply moving and foraging to large-scale conflicts. These contexts are also important for human societies, but leadership in nonhuman mammals is often decentralized and often much more fluid (e.g., who leads is context-specific) for nonhuman mammals. The attributes that contribute to leadership emergence in nonhuman mammals often vary in response to context-dependent interests and knowledge. For instance, the typical pattern across mammals is for adult females to emerge as knowledgeable “guides” during collective movements and adult males to lead as “warriors” during intergroup conflict. Moreover, leaders typically emerge via patterns that closely mirror prestige in human societies—moving first rather than via coercion or force. Understanding leadership within a comparative context can offer new insights into the deep evolutionary roots of leadership, inform our understanding of its general principles, and inform decisions to promote equity in access to leadership positions in human societies. Jennifer E. Smith See also Coalitions; Collective Action; Cooperation; Dominance and Prestige, Leader–Follower Relationships

Further Readings Boinski, S., & Garber, P. A. (2000). On the move: How and why animals travel in groups. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Conradt, L., & Roper, T. J. (2005). Consensus decision making in animals. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 20(8), 449–456. Petit, O., & Bon, R. (2010). Decision-making processes: The case of collective movements. Behavioural Processes, 84(3), 635–647. Smith, J. E., Estrada, J. R., Richards, H. R., Dawes, S. E., Mitsos, K., & Holekamp, K. E. (2015). Collective movements, leadership and consensus costs at reunions in spotted hyaenas. Animal Behaviour, 105, 187–200.

575

Smith, J. E., Gavrilets, S., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., Hooper, P., El Mouden, C., Nettle, D., . . . Smith, E. A. (2016). Leadership in mammalian societies: Emergence, distribution, power, and payoff. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 31, 54–66. Smith, J. E., Van Horn, R. C., Powning, K. S., Cole, A. R., Graham, K. E., Memenis, S. K., & Holekamp, K. E. (2010). Evolutionary forces favoring intragroup coalitions among spotted hyenas and other animals. Behavioral Ecology, 21(2), 284–303. Smith, J. E., & van Vugt, M. (2020). Leadership and status in mammalian societies: Context matters. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(4), 263–264. Van Vugt, M., & Smith, J. E. (2019). A dual model of leadership and hierarchy: Evolutionary synthesis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(11), 952–967.

LEADERSHIP

IN

SCIENCE

The modern scientific research environment is organizationally and economically complex, embodying a tension between the different leadership paradigms demanded by heterogeneous measures of success. Scientific leadership is no longer defined in terms of 19th-century “great man” theory, characterized by the accomplishments, and therefore influence, of singularly and innately exceptional individuals. Even as the 20th century dawned, that view, perhaps blind to the structural advantages enjoyed by early leading lights, was giving way to trait theory, which placed greater emphasis upon traits acquired through rigorous training and practice. Since the 1980s, when modern leadership theories began to explore the more interdependent interactions between leaders, situations and systems as a whole, including the latent leadership capacities of followers, both transactional and transformational models have held sway within the broader context of increasing globalization and an acceleration of technological innovation. The approach perhaps most suited to the responsibilities of today’s leaders, when science is more interdisciplinary than ever, is to examine their role through the framework of actioncentered leadership, the three key components of

576

Leadership in Science

which are achieving a task, building teams, and developing individuals. The purpose of this entry is to describe these major approaches to leadership in the sciences, focusing on higher education and academic leadership in science. This entry then focuses on the role of leadership in accomplishing scientific tasks, building scientific teams, and developing science team members.

The Limits of Earlier Paradigms

leadership requires the creation of a vision to provide a unifying purpose by which to engage followers. Such leaders are therefore often charismatic, with the technology sector yielding a number of galvanizing exemplars along the lines of Apple founder Steve Jobs and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Transformational leadership is purported to produce a higher level of motivation in both leader and led, delivering performance beyond expectations, but also often taking longer to see results.

Trait Theory

While the scientific community continues to place significant value upon training and practice, a more complete picture of leadership is now afforded by the incorporation of character into our understanding, with the story of William Shockley perhaps exemplifying the outcome when a “great man” of science lacks qualities that are difficult to acquire through learning. Shockley, winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, was reputed to have a difficult and abusive leadership style, which was largely responsible for several disaffected employees leaving the firm of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to found a semiconductor division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, which was to become the future industrial base of Silicon Valley. As a professor at Stanford University, Shockley also went on to embrace eugenics and advocate for the voluntary sterilization of people with a low IQ. Transactional Leadership

Transactional leadership is pervasive throughout academic environments. It relies on exchange, whereby an authority figure uses reward or corrective criticism in response to follower performance. Although it can be effective in mature hierarchical organizations with clearly defined structure and goals, transactional leadership favors short-term expected outcomes and promotes conformity at the expense of creativity. Transformational Leadership

In transformational leadership, leaders focus on follower motivation, inspiration, and needs. It has been recognized as beneficial in fostering innovation and change among groups. Transformational

An Action-Centered Approach Fundamentally, the task of science is to build knowledge about the natural world. If one espouses Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 evolutionary view of scientific progress, a “revolutionary” revision to existing scientific belief or practice may appear to demand the unifying vision of a transformational leader. Kuhn proposed that scientific theories evolve in response to successfully solving puzzles, much like an organism might successfully respond to an environmental challenge. For Kuhn, scientific progress is not made toward an ideal, true, or permanent theory, just as evolution does not lead toward an ideal organism, but rather toward to a greater diversity of organisms. There is thus a resistance between the necessary conservatism of what he terms “normal science,” which encompasses most scientists, and a desire for innovation, lionized as “revolutionary science.” In the Kuhnian paradigm, scientific revolutions involve a revision to existing scientific belief or practice, in which a preceding understanding or achievement by normal science is not necessarily preserved. A later period may even find itself at a loss for an explanation previously held to have been successfully established. This framing of progress is clearly fundamental to the leadership style deemed necessary for such progression. Meanwhile, the teleological view holds that science develops by the addition of new truths to the stock of old, or by the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, perhaps with the correction of odd errors, with progress made through the scientific method of prediction, description, explanation, and control. In reality,

Leadership in Science

the more prosaic demands of today’s challenging professional and economic environment in academia are centered upon research output. If our purpose is the activity of research, a more sophisticated blend of leadership approaches is required, challenging leaders to balance elements to achieve valuable and effective outcomes for all stakeholders as well as science. Achieving a Goal

Overall, a reduction in the effort devoted to novel exploratory work has occurred in favor of pursuing incremental science which advances established ideas, as a consequence of the dramatic changes to scientific incentive and reward structures observed in the last half of the 20th and the early 21st century. The rise in popularity of quantitative performance metrics together with increased competition for research funding are the likely contributors, since ideas develop slowly, with great effort, as they progress through the lifecycle from exploration to breakthrough, before incremental advance. The result has been a generally conservative research outlook consistent with Kuhnian normal science, and the acceptance of transactional leadership styles. Incentive Structures The “publish or perish” idiom, first articulated in the 1940s, describes the relationship between an individual’s output volume in terms of published papers and the associated rewards of promotion, tenure, awards, and funding. Scientific journals are ranked by impact factor, a function of the number of citations each published paper garners, as well as by popularity. Modern metrics such as the h-index developed by physicist Jorge Hirsh combine volume and popularity and are a part of the citation revolution, which has incentivized incremental “me-too” science. Here work in crowded areas harvest many citations at the expense of exploration and scientific “play” more likely to lay the necessary groundwork for breakthrough discoveries. Eugene Garfield was primarily responsible for the genesis of citation indices in 1950, with their initial construct and objective to assist scientists process a rapidly growing body of

577

scientific literature. These quantitative metrics are now used to assess and compare performance, the impact of which is their domination of decision making, leading to a scholar-centric reward of output. Funding incentives further contribute to this shift toward an abundance of Kuhnian normal science. A 2011 paper by Pierre Azoulay and colleagues found that funding mechanisms which tolerate early failure yield a 97% increase in breakthrough papers. Implications for Research and Thought Leadership Two important economic principles illuminate the challenges associated with the heavy reliance on quantitative performance metrics in science. Goodhart’s law states that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure, as effort is optimized to meet the target regardless of consequence. Second, Campbell’s law posits that the more a metric is used the more likely it will corrupt the process it is intended to monitor. Improper targets increase risks to scientific integrity, such as the practice of p-hacking to mine for statistically significant and thus publishable results, as well as erroneously incentivizing select aspects of work such as grouping data into least publishable units to maximize publication numbers. In 2012, Ferric C. Fang and colleagues found life science and biomedical research journal article retractions have increased 10-fold since 1975, 67% of which were due to misconduct. Although a full understanding of scientific retraction and irreproducibility is nuanced, checks and balances readily reveal problems in a system that emphasizes quality, whereas errors, falsification and fabrication are all incentivized in a system that emphasizes quantity. Thought leadership to promote practices that uphold scientific integrity is thus increasingly and immeasurably important. Building Teams

The culture of scientific endeavors refers to a set of collective beliefs, values, and attitudes of the wider scientific community, whereas a climate can describe the environment experienced in specific teams within that culture. A team climate is less

578

Leadership in Science

stable, can change relatively quickly, and is highly dependent on the context and people involved. Leaders play a critical role in setting the climate which can then collectively inform the wider culture. The Centrality of Trust Trust is an essential component of highperformance cultures, and effective leaders establish conditions for trust in their team. Conditions that foster an innovative scientific climate include viewing failure as an opportunity to learn; encouraging calculated risk taking where boldness and initiative are encouraged; and challenging followers to their perceived limits. Moreover, an innovative scientific climate is one in which leader integrity, professional competence, and emotional intelligence are demonstrated. These conditions combined with a challenge culture where opposition is viewed as a type of loyalty and the moral courage and careful thought required to question established ideology and practices are respected, create an environment for diversity of thought and innovation. The Contribution of Diversity to Integrity The responsibility of the research community is not always well defined in assuring individual or group compliance with scientific principles and codes of conduct. Yet the benefits that arise from normal and revolutionary science will only succeed in achieving scientific progress if there is a strong commitment by the scientific community to shared theoretical beliefs and values, described by Kuhn as a disciplinary matrix. A further troubling impact of emphasizing output versus outcomes is the risk of selecting for academics more comfortable with, and responsive to, productivity incentives. If to maintain an academic career an individual must conform to an existing culture of values and processes, they may become unethically complicit, per Mark Granovetter’s well-established 1978 threshold model of corrective behavior. This may be particularly problematic for attracting or retaining women and underrepresented minorities (WURM) in scientific research careers. WURM

students tend to be altruistically motivated seeking scientific avenues to serve society or community, counter to productivity incentives which align more so with individual achievement. Thus, climates to promote and encourage such individuals become more important in the face of individual value differences to the values of scientific culture. Effective leaders strike a balance between retaining antecedent strengths while evolving and nurturing a climate relevant to meet the challenges of today. An Observed Shift From Agentic to Communal Leadership Since the turn of the 21st century, scientific practice has undoubtedly evolved in the direction of more communal leadership styles. Previously dominant agentic approaches sought merely to leverage resources to achieve a goal. Traits such as assertiveness, self-sufficiency, independence, dominance, and aggression are most highly valued in such a model. Agentic leadership can perhaps be associated with male domination of the field prior to the 21st century. Communal approaches, by contrast, place a greater emphasis on interpersonal relationships, with value derived from collaboration, participation, and cooperation that is socially oriented, helpful, and expressive. It has been suggested that women exhibit more communal than agentic traits, and thus lean more toward those styles in their leadership. One postulation is that the increased presence of women in science has influenced this shift from agentic to communal leadership. There is however considerable evidence pointing to greater variation within the sexes than between them in terms of traits stereotypically considered to be masculine or feminine. It is difficult to separate out the social effects that set up conditions for gender-based generalizations. If women perceive themselves to have less independent economic or social power in STEM fields, it is possible that they regain agency and influence by less-contested means, which may contribute to them being considered inherently “communal.” The shift from agentic to communal leadership in scientific fields is offered as an observed reality that could be the result of a response to changes in incentives, economics, career and work patterns, or cultural norms—or

Leadership in Science

to all of the foregoing. Whatever the underlying cause or causes, it appears to be driving the development of more effective leaders in science who are better adapted to changing circumstances. Developing Individuals

The putative principles that guide scientists and scholars include respect for the integrity of knowledge, collegiality, honesty, objectivity, and openness. Fostering these personal principles is fundamental to sound practice of the six logical principles upon which scientific thinking is founded: ruling out rival hypotheses; correlation is not causation; falsifiability, replicability; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and Occam’s razor (the simplest of competing theories should be preferred to the more complex). Mentoring Is a Function of Resources These principles and traditions of science are conveyed to successive generations of scientists mostly through example, discussion, and informal education. That informal education frequently occurs through the immediate leadership of a principal investigator/mentor, as well as senior laboratory personnel. The number of graduate students a professor mentors and the number of student committees served has tended to increase, as head count has become another performance metric upon which scientific leaders are judged. The time committed to each individual’s development affects the quality of their education, however, in ways that are less easily measurable. Leadership as Facilitation Servant leadership contrasts with traditional power leadership models in recognizing the development of each individual as critical to organizational operations. Acknowledging and encouraging individual needs and aspirations regardless of position or stature can be unfamiliar and uncomfortable in deeply hierarchical organizational structures, but if achieved can promote a powerful climate of innovative productivity. In postgraduate studies, personal development exclusively focused on academic careers is slowly being supplanted by less insular considerations. A

579

reported year-over-year increase of 15% in PhDs earned from 2010 to 2021, with less than 3% of new PhDs acquiring permanent academic jobs, has led comprehensive institutions to increasingly offer career development support tailored to individual aspirations. Nevertheless, this mostly still includes limited opportunities for advanced training— especially for funded training—aimed at those openly pursuing a career trajectory outside of academia. Emotional Intelligence in Scientific Leadership Helping individuals successfully navigate challenges inherent in, but by no means unique to, scientific endeavors, such as criticism and failure, are necessary to confidently embrace the path of scientific inquiry. Criticism is an integral part of the scientific process from formal peer review evaluations in publishing to peer-to-peer interactions. Learned skills to respectfully receive and give criticism must be mastered in order for criticism not to become a barrier to making contributions and taking risks. Similarly, scientific progress is not made without risk of failure, the possibility of which must be accepted by those who would practice idea evolution and integration. Leaders who possess high emotional intelligence are able to demonstrate self-awareness, social awareness, and effective communication. Emotionally intelligent leadership models kindness, empathy, and self-compassion; values learning, rest, play, and recovery; celebrates milestones and diverse perspectives; and acknowledges and names our common fears and uncertainties. Leading individuals while acknowledging our humanity boosts team morale, increases engagement, promotes effective collaboration, and cultivates commitment and shared purpose. Lesley D. O’Brien See also Collective Leadership; Creativity and Innovation; Group Process; Higher Education; Innovation; Team Leadership

Further Readings Adair, J. (1979). Action centred leadership. Farnborough: Gower Publishing.

580

Leadership in Violence Prevention

Alberts, B. (2013). Impact factor distortions. Science, 340(6134), 787. Azoulay, P., Graff Zivin, J. S., & Manso, G. (2011). Incentives and creativity: evidence from the academic life sciences. RAND Journal of Economics, 42(3), 527–554. Bass, B. M. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18, 19–31. Benmira, S., & Agboola, M. (2021). Evolution of leadership theory. BMJ Leader, 5(1), 3–5. Bhattacharya, J., & Packalen, M. (2020). Stagnation and scientific incentives. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper No. 26752. Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead. London: Vermilion. Edwards, M. A., & Siddhartha, R. (2017). Academic research in the 21st century: Maintaining scientific integrity in a climate of perverse incentive and hypercompetition. Environmental Engineering Science, 34(1), 51–61. Fang, F. C., Steen, R. G., & Casadevall, A. (2012). Misconduct accounts for the majority of scientific publications. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(42), 17028–17033. Gartzia, L., & van Engen, M. (2012). Are (male) leaders “feminine” enough? Gendered traits of identity as mediators of sex differences in leadership styles. Gender in Management: An International Journal, 27(5), 296–314. Granovetter, M. (1978). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), 481–510. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

LEADERSHIP

IN

VIOLENCE PREVENTION

Leadership can be viewed as an active form of engagement where individuals in various roles or at different organizational levels embody or develop and utilize certain skills to encourage and inspire goal-oriented action in others. Effective leadership is essential to violence prevention efforts because leaders are often key stakeholders and professionals in agencies given the duty of addressing various forms of violence. Thus, how leaders approach violence prevention can significantly influence the nature and quality of the

responses of supporters and followers. The role of leadership in curtailing violence can be understood by first identifying the skills and characteristics of those who exemplify leadership in violence prevention, and then by examining the influence of leaders on the development and application of violence prevention programs. Violence prevention efforts are categorized in accordance with a social-ecological framework in order of the scope of human and communal interaction—family violence, community violence, and societal violence. The most effective violence prevention strategies are multi-faceted instead of a one-size-fits-all model and often involve the strategic collaboration of various social agencies. Impactful leaders appreciate that the perspectives and expertize of all entities involved should be considered and respected. Hence, democratic leadership, also known as participatory leadership, is visible in the most common types of violence prevention efforts. This leadership style seeks to involve all key agencies in the decision-making process by encouraging the exchange of ideas and empathetic communication through which the perspectives of each agency and team member are valued.

Leaders in Violence Prevention The characteristics of the most effective leaders naturally depend on the duties required by their roles and situational factors. For example, leaders in the role of trauma counselors and first responders are emmeshed in daily operations that require direct interaction with victims and perpetrators of violence. Others may be involved in administration or research dedicated to violence prevention programming in which dealing directly with survivors and perpetrators is not common. Some individuals and groups engage in leadership that embodies a blend of both worlds. There are several specific skills, characteristics, and traits that are important for violence prevention leaders to possess. Cooperation is a necessary skill, one that is tied to self-awareness, self-management, and accountability. Problems like violence are nuanced, so the solutions are often complex and require leaders to be open to solutions from others. Cooperation also allows a leader to be resourceful by working with others on their team.

Leadership in Violence Prevention

When cooperation is successful, an effective leader will have access to many more tools, skills, and avenues to solve a problem than they would have had on their own. Another vital skill effective leaders possess is strong communication. Communication strategies often play a significant role in determining the outcome of dangerous and potentially violent situations. For example, hostage negotiators must be skilled in both verbal and non-verbal communication to help de-escalate “life or death” situations. In addition to skills of cooperation and communication, traits like empathy and altruism are especially important for leaders to possess, most notably when helping victims of violence and establishing trust with communities. These traits allow an individual to think beyond themselves, resonate with the experiences and perspectives of others, and act for the greater good. Acting for the greater good is an important theme in the criminal justice field, where the rule of law depends on utilitarianism, and actions based solely on the leader’s perspective can undermine trust, legitimacy, and cooperation from the community in solving complexities of violence. It is also vital that leaders act with equity, inclusion, and fairness toward all and give marginalized communities a voice in addressing problems that affect them. Engagement with marginalized communities is essential to help decrease disparity and prevent hate and bias-based crimes. If communities most affected by violence do not perceive leaders as legitimate and trustworthy, then cooperation with criminal justice professionals will erode and violence prevention efforts may no longer be impactful. Finally, characteristics like resiliency and perseverance are instrumental for tackling the problem of violence. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back and adapt to stress and changing situations. Leaders who possess the mental strength to deal with unconscionable events will be more likely to persevere in attaining violence prevention goals, even when multiple barriers exist.

Leadership in Family Violence Prevention Programs Leaders in family violence prevention exist in both formal organizational settings, such as nonprofit

581

agencies providing shelter to victims, and in informal settings, such as survivors of intimate partner violence helping victims access services. Successful leadership appreciates the need to engage members from other agencies such as schools, mental health agencies, and police departments to target risk factors from a multi-systemic approach. In the organizational setting, effective leaders understand the importance of using empirically informed practices to reduce family violence. Consequently, they are also cognizant of the various processes involved in violence perpetration, such as trauma responses, social learning mechanisms, and cycles of violence. This knowledge, in conjunction with formal leadership roles, places them in a position to support practices that are proven to help prevent family violence. The two primary forms of family violence that are targeted in programs are intimate partner violence and child maltreatment. Most family violence prevention programs can be categorized according to the goals they achieve: addressing developmental pathways toward perpetrating child maltreatment and intimate partner violence, strengthening the family home environment by improving social support and stability, providing education to pertinent organizations on how to identify and prevent family violence, and providing support to survivors. These goals are accomplished through various approaches with the help of leaders in multiple community agencies such as schools and criminal justice organizations. For example, leaders in domestic-violence prevention coalitions engage with leaders in law enforcement to identify the most effective ways of responding to family violence incidents. Child development and trauma specialists provide teachers with training on identifying signs of trauma and the best ways to help affected children. While numerous violence reduction programs target one or more of the above stated goals, home-based visitation programs used by local and state agencies encompass multiple strategies to reach all of these goals. These programs typically consist of a mental health clinician or nurse providing services in the homes of families experiencing or at-risk of violence. Specifically, providers target family-level risk factors of child

582

Leadership in Violence Prevention

maltreatment such as parenting styles and poor communication and support, as well as individual-level risk factors within parents such as low self-control and mental health issues. Home visitation professionals and their respective organizational leaders are also trained to consider the role of unique family and cultural dynamics in developing appropriate plans of action. These providers also act as a liaison between the family and other involved organizations like schools and criminal justice agencies. Despite not occupying a formal leadership position, successful home visitation professionals embody the essence of leadership in violence prevention by being empathetic to the unique needs of each family, engaging in rational decision-making to ensure the best outcomes, and encouraging parents toward positive action even during challenging circumstances. Research consistently shows that when implemented properly, home visitation programs help reduce child maltreatment and some forms of intimate partner violence. State and national level leadership can help support home visitation programs and providers by advocating for additional research on the most effective components of intervention, strengthening avenues of crossprogram coordination, and supporting efforts to make visitation programs accessible to all families in need of services.

Leadership in Community Violence Prevention Programs Community violence, such as mass shootings, gang violence, and school violence, is often addressed through interventions with youth. Leaders recognize that a multi-agency holistic approach is needed to effectively address risk factors for such violence. For example, in their 2013 work on identifying what works in violence prevention, Abigail Fagan and Richard Catalano found that programs and interventions that focused on the individual, school, family, and community produced significant reductions in youth violence. School-based interventions are often based on building healthy relationships, bonds, and skills within peer groups. For example, programs that target bullying by promoting empathy can be quite

effective. One important program is LifeSkills training, which can help build positive social bonds and connections with school. Outcomes of life skills programs include increased academic achievement, lower disciplinary actions like suspensions, and higher levels of parental involvement, all of which are associated with lower likelihood of committing violence. Targeted interventions that include life skills training are found in wraparound programs for juveniles—these programs use holistic plans to address risk factors. The Handle with Care initiative is a wraparound program that positions different leaders in agencies (youth probation, schools, court system, law enforcement, mental health services) to collaborate with one another to ensure that youth are given proper care and guidance after a crisis situation. Community interventions like crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) address the role of physical environments. This is where community coalitions or workgroups can be especially helpful in tackling trauma and working to make the community more resilient. Community coalitions give community partners a voice and agency in tackling problems—each member is a stakeholder in the solution to problems in their community. Sectors often include the criminal justice system, youth organizations, religious organizations, educational outlets/schools, local government, and health care entities, to name a few. These approaches are consistent with trauma-informed care and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendations on tackling the problem of violence; a holistic, all-encompassing perspective can often be what is best to build resilience and address the problem of violence in communities.

Leadership in Societal Violence Prevention Programs Societal violence prevention programs aim to solve vast and complex problems. Therefore, leaders must consider both individual and social-level factors that contribute to the multitude of forms of global violence. Implementation of societal violence prevention programs and policies span a wide range of efforts from formal organizations, such as the WHO and the United Nations (UN), to

Leadership in Violence Prevention

grassroots organizations that involve collective social action from citizens to create change in their communities and beyond. Programs target violence risk factors such as social policies, cultural values and norms, and violence perpetrated by state actors. Initiatives include addressing gender-based values that contribute to violence, holding entities in power accountable for their decisions that contribute to violent crimes such as genocide, and informing policy to address other acts that harm vulnerable members of society. One of the primary genocide prevention efforts is facilitated by leaders of the United Nation’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (UNGPRP). UNGPRP’s representative special advisers are tasked with identifying countries that are at-risk of experiencing crimes against humanity, and raising global awareness on the dynamics of genocide and how leaders can prevent such atrocities. Specific goals include developing a plan of action for religious leaders and other state actors in positions of power and formal leadership roles to mitigate factors that lead to violence incitement and ultimately to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Special advisers often utilize participatory leadership strategies to ensure that country-specific needs such as cultural values and political conditions are considered when developing plans to disrupt pathways leading to genocide. The success of these interventions is often dependent upon the cooperation and effective communication between leaders from different cultural and political backgrounds. The European Link Coalition (ELC) is a unique grassroots attempt to reduce societal-level violence by addressing its correlation with childhood exposure to animal cruelty, trauma, and violence. ELC is comprised of a group of volunteers including researchers, practitioners, and advocates who strive to promote international policy change to improve both child and animal welfare. ELC builds upon the numerous research studies showing that children exposed to endemic violence against animals are more likely to experience a variety of maladaptive behaviors including self-harm and violence perpetration against humans. In 2019, ELC provided a comprehensive report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) detailing the link between childhood

583

animal cruelty exposure and perpetration of violence, and offered recommendations to prevent such violence. During the 87th Session of the UN in May 2021, the committee advised select countries about the effects on children exposed to societal violence against animals and discussed developing plans to address the problem. Such efforts are naturally reflective of leadership qualities demonstrated not just among formal leaders but also by informal leaders of the volunteer group ELC, including perseverance through numerous barriers, effective communication and collaboration with involved parties, and action-oriented empathetic concern for victims of violence. These characteristics are also reflective of the numerous individuals who exemplify leadership in family, community, and other societal violence prevention efforts. Roshni T. Ladny and Carrie Mier See also Crisis Leadership; Community Leadership; Political Leadership; Social Change; Trauma

Further Readings Fagan, A. A., & Catalano, R. F. (2013). What works in youth violence prevention: A review of the literature. Research on Social Work Practice, 23(2), 141–156. doi:10.1177/1049731512465899 Fortson, B. L., Klevens, J., Merrick, M. T., Gilbert, L. K., & Alexander, S. P. (2016). Preventing child abuse and neglect: A technical package for policy, norm, and programmatic activities. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control Division of Violence Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Leitch, L. (2017). Action steps using ACEs and trauma-informed care: A resilience model. Health & Justice, 5. doi:10.1186/s40352-017-0050-5 Niolon, P. H., Kearns, M., Dills, J., Rambo, K., Irving, S., Armstead, T., & Gilbert, L. (2017). Preventing intimate partner violence across the lifespan: A technical package of programs, policies, and practices. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control Division of Violence Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. (2014). Framework of analysis for atrocity crimes: A tool for prevention. Retrieved from www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/

584

Leading Diversity

documents/publications-and-resources/Genocide_ Framework%20of%20Analysis-English.pdf World Health Organization Violence Prevention Report. (2010). Violence prevention: The evidence. Retrieved from https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/ 77936/9789241500845_eng.pdf

LEADING DIVERSITY Much of the traditional leadership literature understandably focuses on the one-to-one leader-follower relationship. However, many of today’s leaders find themselves more engaged with leading groups of followers working in team contexts in which their collaboration with each other as well as with the leader is required for organizational success. In addition, as business becomes increasingly global, and workers more heterogeneous, leaders are increasingly faced with the need to work effectively with teams with diverse membership who nonetheless need to come together as integrated units in order to reach their performance goals. Thus, it becomes vitally important to understand how leaders can effectively work with diverse teams in order to achieve desired organizational success. This entry begins by defining team diversity and considering its benefits and drawbacks. Inclusive leadership is then explored, followed by an examination of cross-cultural issues that have become more prevalent in recent years or may arise in the years to come.

Team Diversity Team diversity encompasses many forms. When thinking of diverse teams, gender and racial or ethnic diversity often come to mind, and indeed there has been considerable research done on diversity based on those factors. However, team diversity involves many other forms of individual differences as well, including differences in age, sexual orientation, and national origin and culture. In addition, demographic diversity is just the superficial tip of the diversity iceberg, with the influences of personal attitudes, work styles, and beliefs representing a deeper level of diversity, and

the effects of these differences may be stronger and longer lasting than those based on demographic differences. In addition, as many of today’s teams deal with a broad range of complex problems, teams are increasingly multidisciplinary, with team members representing a variety of academic and professional backgrounds, each with their own specialized training and knowledge. Thus, team diversity often incorporates functional diversity, with members expected to share and combine unique knowledge from their differing professional and technical perspectives. All of these forms of diversity present their own challenges for leaders. The literature on team diversity indicates that team diversity is a “double-edged sword,” offering potential benefits as well as common liabilities. As previously noted, diversity in all forms should add resources to the team, with members bringing in different perspectives and experiences that can enhance creativity and expand the team’s knowledge in ways that are required for many organizational tasks. However, the literature also finds evidence of problems of coordination and conflict arising from these differences. Demographic differences between leaders and followers have been shown to affect satisfaction and performance. The quality of the leader-follower relationship has been found to be lower when the two are of different genders. Both in the United States and elsewhere, demographic leader–follower differences are associated with leaders giving demographically different followers lower ratings for effectiveness, being less attracted to them, and, correspondingly, followers report lower levels of satisfaction. At least initially, demographically diverse teams may exhibit less effective team processes and more conflict that can result in lower performance. However, as time passes diverse teams can begin to outperform homogeneous teams as surface-level differences based on demographic dissimilarity fade in importance in comparison to deeper-level psychological attributes. Recent meta-analytic work supports the idea that it is deep-level diversity that offers the greatest benefits to team creativity and innovation. With so much at stake, it becomes incumbent on the leader of a diverse group to find ways to harvest the benefits of diversity while limiting potential problems.

Leading Diversity

Studies examining the effects of many traditional leadership styles such as transformational, participative, or ethical leadership with diverse teams have produced mixed results. This suggests the importance of a variety of moderators, including attributes of the leader as well as organizational and team context. Thus, it is important to consider the nature of the team and its task, and the nature of its diversity, in understanding what leader behaviors might be most effective in enhancing group performance.

Inclusive Leadership One style of leadership garnering recent attention as particularly important for leaders of diverse teams is the concept of inclusive leadership. Although subject to differing definitions and methods of assessment, the construct typically advocates that effective leaders must find ways to allow team members to contribute their best efforts in ways that make them feel both included and valued. Thus, inclusive leadership may be broader than any particular leadership style, and in fact might incorporate behaviors recommended by a number of different leadership models based on the needs and challenges of a particular team. The goal of fostering both belongingness and uniqueness in diverse team members strikes at one of the most challenging aspects of any group work, that of allowing people to feel part of something bigger and greater than themselves while not being swallowed up in a way that they lose their individuality. It has been said that the goal of managing diversity is not to create a melting pot, integrating people into a homogenous mass of people who think alike, but rather to create a mosaic of people who contribute their individual, distinguishable talents in service of the creation of a beautiful whole. Inclusive leadership values individual uniqueness while finding ways to use that uniqueness in the service of a collective endeavor. Managing staff diversity and creating inclusive work climates has become one of the most important tasks of organizational leaders today. This work can be undertaken at multiple levels, with leaders setting up systems and practices that select and promote fairly based on merit, as well as

585

engaging in everyday interactive behaviors that convey respect and a valuing of the contributions of all team members. Work in the area of microaggressions has shown how people cue in on the subtle signals given by others to assess how welcome or unwelcome they feel in a given situation. Inclusion demands a parallel understanding of how inclusion may be demonstrated proactively. Leader behaviors proposed as related to inclusive leadership include most of those for effective leaders in any situation, such as listening, communicating regularly, becoming more socially aware, treating team members fairly, avoiding bias, being open to different ideas, and involving team members in decision-making in areas affecting them. The difference in inclusive leadership is that these behaviors are extended to those who are different from oneself as well as to those who are similar. One key task for the effective inclusive leader of diverse teams is to manage how the team acquires, stores, and uses information. With members coming from differing backgrounds, it is important that leaders help their teams come to share a common framework as to how to approach issues. With shared mental models, team members should have a common reservoir of information about the tasks they face, the processes used to address these tasks, the collective expertize of the team, and a set of shared attitudes and beliefs as to how to interpret tasks. Research evidence has shown shared mental models to be effective in increasing team cohesion and motivation, as well as sharing the work and helping each other. In diverse teams, a common understanding and mental framework cannot be assumed, but can be proactively developed by the leader. Evidence also suggests that perhaps even more important than shared mental models is the development of transactional memory systems, such that each team member understands who in the team knows what so that information can be effectively sought out as needed. Effective transactional memory systems allow for the acknowledgment of the value of diversity, in that individual expertize and experience is recognized and valued. Thus, leaders can ensure not only that team members work from a common base of task expectations and processes but also have the opportunity to make a unique

586

Leading Diversity

contribution to the team effort and are acknowledged for doing so.

Cross-Cultural Issues As organizations become more global and team members are drawn from a variety of cultures, the need for inclusive leaders to be aware of cultural issues becomes paramount for many leaders. Extensive work with international executives suggests behaviors that can help leaders establish more positive relationships with culturally different team members. Although this research has typically been developed with a focus on international diversity, the cultural heterogeneity inherent within many nations suggests that managing cultural diversity is an issue for domestic teams as well. Desirable leader behaviors for engaging culturally different team members encompass cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains. Important cognitive skills for leaders involve cognitive complexity, which is the ability to make finer interpersonal differentiations among people and understand how culture might affect behavior. Affective leader skills include tolerance for ambiguity, cultural empathy, and openness to dissimilarity. Behavioral skills include intercultural communication skills, the ability to identify and regulate one’s own and others’ emotions, and being able to successfully manage team conflict. Other skills suggested for culturally competent leadership include being sensitive to cultural differences, being able to bring out the best in people, having flexibility, and being open to criticism and feedback. The nature of teams and teamwork has changed over time, and many of these changes hold particular challenges for diverse teams. Much of the traditional research on teams assumed stable membership, with the same people laboring together for long periods. Yet modern organizational life sees far more turnover, with people moving in and out of teams and organizations more frequently, and the greater use of project teams that have shorter life spans. Creating a sense of belonging and uniqueness for all members needs to happen more quickly, and socializing new members into existing diverse teams is now and

will continue to be a recurrent leadership challenge. In addition, leaders and team members are increasingly being tasked with working together across time and space, as geographically dispersed teams have some or all members communicating electronically rather than face-to-face. Many of these teams bring together talent from around the world, offering incredible resources and opportunities along with increasing diversity. Inclusion can be much more difficult when some team members are in front of you and some are asleep, thousands of miles away. Leaders will need to learn new strategies to engage dispersed team members and ensure equity and involvement for those out of frequent sight. Given all of these challenges, the role of the leader becomes ever more important in diverse teams. In the years ahead, functioning as facilitator, honest broker, promoter, mentor, role model, and coach, leaders will find that a key component of their job is seeing that the talents of a highly diverse workforce are harnessed effectively. Lynn R. Offermann See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; E-Leadership; Leader-Follower Relationships; Team Leadership

Further Readings Ferdman, B. M., Prime, J., & Riggio, R. E. (2021). Inclusive leadership: Transforming diverse lives, workplaces, and societies. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429449673 Homan, A. C., Gὕndemir, S., Buengeler, C., & van Kleef, G. A. (2020). Leading diversity: Towards a theory of theory of functional leadership in diverse teams. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105, 1101–1128. doi: 10.1037/apl0000482 Jackson, S. E., & Joshi, A. (2011). Work team diversity. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 651–686). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/ 12169-020 ¨ Lloyd, S., & Hartel, C. (2010). Intercultural competencies for diverse work teams. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 25(8), 845–875. doi:10.1108/ 02683941011089125

Leading From Below Randel, A. E., Galvin, B. M., Shore, L. M., Ehrhart, K. H., Chung, B. G., Dean, M. A., & Kedharnath, U. (2018). Inclusive leadership: Realizing positive outcomes through belongingness and being valued for uniqueness. Human Resource Management Review, 28(2), 190–203. doi:10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.07.002 Srikanth, K., Harvey, S., & Peterson, R. (2016). A dynamic perspective on diverse teams: Moving from the dual-process model to a dynamic coordination-based model of diverse team performance. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 453–493. doi:10.1080/19416520.2016.1120973 Stahl, G. K., & Maznevski, M. L. (2021). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A retrospective of research on multicultural work groups and an agenda for future research. Journal of International Business Studies, 52(1), 4–22. doi:10.1057/s41267-020-00389-9

LEADING FROM BELOW This entry articulates the importance of leading from below, the characteristics of this kind of leadership, and the skills that are deemed necessary to be effective in this role. While leading from below may include lateral influence across the organization, this entry focuses on its more common meaning: leadership and influence up the organizational chart. Tradition suggests that leadership is a one-way, top-down process where elite members of a community or organization provide orders and direction to those who serve beneath them. This perspective on leadership has changed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it greatly narrows the number of people who can be regarded as engaging in leadership. Leadership is generally defined as moving others toward a common goal, and this activity occurs throughout an organization or system, not just at the very top level. Leaders can and do emerge from many places within a hierarchy. Such individuals have no formal authority over those they seek to influence; indeed, they may be seeking to lead people considered above them. Despite the lack of a high-powered title, they are nonetheless able to affect decision-making processes and outcomes.

587

Importance It has been said that leadership is too important to be left to the leaders. Ray Smith, former CEO of Bell Atlantic, has said that the responsibility of leadership in an organization falls to everyone. People lower on the organizational chain have critical information that those higher on the chain do not as a result of their direct experience with customers, fellow employees, and existing procedures. It takes people from lower levels of the organization who can see the opportunities and challenges from the ground level to promote solutions up the ranks. Further, while leadership is generally about a vision for change, people at the highest level with “leader” or “manager” in their title may be the very people inhibiting change. For an organization to grow and avoid costly mistakes, it takes people from below who are willing and able to articulate the need for innovation or adaptation. Many organizations realize the necessity for leadership at all levels and provide opportunities for leadership development outside of the execute suite. Some individual leaders also work to develop leadership among those who report to them, subscribing to the perspective that an aspect of effective leadership is creating more leaders. Of course, not all systems train or encourage leadership at all levels. Systems that rely on a predictable hierarchy or fortified silos may likely reject leadership advances if they do not come from an appropriately titled person. The concept of leading from below may have roots in M. Scott Myers’s seminal book from 1970, titled Every Employee a Manager. Myers researched the concept of “job enlargement,” a process whereby additional activities are added to an employee’s current role. Of particular relevance is vertical job enlargement, whereby employees are encouraged to communicate with those higher up the organizational chart to identify problems and improve processes. In the context of his studies, organizations that supported employees to take the lead found they reduced costs and cut absenteeism, while providing more meaningful work. For many people, doing one’s job effectively and achieving one’s professional goals cannot be achieved just by following the orders of a direct

588

Leading From Below

supervisor. Leading from below provides them with the opportunity to make a difference for both themselves and the organization.

Characteristics Leadership from below happens in nearly every context. Scholarship has focused on how teachers aim to lead administrators toward school improvements and how fundraisers persuade donors to join their cause. Many other examples are available, as court clerks persuade lawyers to follow correct procedures, nurses advocate for patient needs to physicians, and managers articulate new ideas to owners. Often, people in these positions don’t think of themselves as engaging in leadership. Lacking authoritative power, they may think of themselves as helpers, supporters, informers, facilitators, or consultants, even as they engage in behaviors described in the leadership literature. Leading from below can also be understood within the context of effective followership. Traditional models of leadership have characterized followers as passive conformists, but since the 1990s modern theory has recognized that followers play an integral and active role in organizational outcomes. Characteristics of effective followers, according to the most recognized framework for understanding followership, includes thinking for oneself, being committed to organizational goals, and displaying credibility and courage. These characteristics align with the tendencies of those who lead from below and will be discussed later in the entry. The followership style called the partner is particularly relevant. The partner offers strong support to the leader but is also willing to challenge them when necessary. They respect the leader’s position but see themselves as collaborators and not underlings. They perceive themselves and their supervisors as a “we” rather than taking an “us versus them” approach. While people are typically selected for formal leadership positions, it is uncommon for people to be asked to lead from below. Those at higher levels may not even be aware of the concerns and opportunities that are obvious to people at the ground level. Since individuals are unlikely to be called upon to lead from below, this behavior is best understood as a decision that happens when

individuals believe the system needs their ideas and they have the courage and skills to speak up. The skills and behaviors associated with leading from below are helpful to leaders at any level, but they are particularly important for people with lower power because these individuals cannot fall back on authoritative status to get things done. To influence, these leaders must have skills in networking, relationship building, and communication. It has been said there is power in numbers, and that is the case for lower-level leaders. Well networked individuals have the opportunity to learn what is valued and how things operate across the system. They are able to collaborate on ideas, increasing the likelihood that when those ideas are presented up the ladder, they will be stronger and seem more credible. It is also important to have a trusting relationship with one’s supervisor or other target of influence. Trust comes from sharing accurate information that helps the superior succeed in their role. It also comes from showing commitment to organizational goals and being skilled at one’s job. The more one can be seen as competent and as a trusted advisor, the easier it will be to influence decisions or policy. The key communication skills required to influence are empathy and framing. Empathy is the ability to understand the world from another person’s point of view. In the context of leading from below it means getting to know the concerns and desires of one’s supervisor or other relevant high-powered officer and being mindful of those interests when bringing forward problems and new ideas. Few higher ups are interested in backing an idea just because an employee likes it or will benefit from it. Having empathy allows one to effectively frame their communication; describing their ideas in a way that will be meaningful and relevant for the target. For example, if the idea is an energy-saving initiative, the leader-from-below might connect that idea to a supervisor’s expressed interest in going green, winning community awards, or becoming more efficient. Persuasion without authority is more likely to occur when a supervisor is attracted to the idea personally or can see its connection to the strategic goals and mission of the organization.

LGBTQ1 Social Movements

Related Concepts

589

LGBTQ1 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Managing Up

This concept refers to helping one’s manager be better at their job. Managing up consists of articulating the needs of subordinates or giving the manager feedback in a helpful and nonthreatening manner. It may also include adopting some of the manager’s responsibilities (e.g., holding fellow employees accountable) so the manager can be more successful in their position. Conceptually, if the supervisor is doing well, the organization benefits and so does the person who is managing up. Leading From the Middle

This concept refers to the position of middle management where both leading up and leading down are required. Middle managers, for example, lead their team to meet strategic goals, while also leading those above them to make decisions that benefit their unit or the organization. Heidi Reeder See also Distributed Leadership; Followership; Persuasion; Shared Leadership; Trust

Further Readings Chaleff, I. (1995). The courageous follower: Standing up to and for our leaders. San Francisco, CA: BerrettKoehler. Hyde, C. A. (2018). Leading from below: Low-power actors as organizational change agents. Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 42, 1, 53–67. doi:10.1080/23303131. 2017.1360229 Kelley, R. E. (1992). The power of followership: How to create leaders people want to follow, and followers who lead themselves. New York, NY: Doubleday. Myers, M. S. (1970). Every employee a manager. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Salacuse, J. W. (2006). Leading leaders: How to manage smart, talented, rich, and powerful people. New York, NY: AMACOM. Wagner, L. (2005). Leading up: Transformational leadership for fundraisers. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer1 (LGBTQ1) social movements grew in tandem with other leading social movements of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries to focus on the inherent equity and humanity of people inclusive of all sexualities deserved. As the Western women’s movements and abolitionist movements worked for equity based on race, gender, and bodily autonomy, LGBTQ1 populations rooted their work for equity based on sexuality. These movements are wide-ranging and contain a multitude of leaders, followers, and ideologies, most notably because of overlapping social identities such as race, gender, and class among their communities. These differences then affected how subgroups identified core issues relevant to their group, while also affecting the selection of leaders for each subgroup. As the following sections testify, queer organizers have led social change without acknowledgment of, or focus on, their sexuality; queer artists, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and politicians equally contribute to the fabric that composes our society.

Queer Leaders for Queer Activism The acronym LGBTQ1 refers to a wide variety of people organizing on issues that appeal to communities who often find themselves pushed outside of societal norms. These norms are created with, and often regulated by, people who fall within their boundaries. For example, marriage becomes codified in law as between one biologically assigned man and one biologically assigned woman because of a society’s predominant religious values (regardless of whether or not all of society’s members follow that religion). Once a norm has been established, it is often very difficult for a society to accept those whose practices might fall outside of the norm. In this context, the word queer will be used as an umbrella term to denote any individual or group that does not identify as sexually or romantically straight; or for whom the binary gender choices (male or female) presented in interpersonal relationships do not appeal.

590

LGBTQ1 Social Movements

It also is important to note that queer communities might fall under the LGBTQ1 rubric but might not be organized on causes related only to sexuality. For example, trans rights groups might also organize around gender while maintaining sexually straight relationships; nonbinary individuals might self-select into the queer community but not fully align themselves with lesbian (predominantly female communities) or gay (predominantly male communities) issues. It is from this political and personal attribution of “otherness” that queer leaders arose in social movements. Distinct activist movements lead by queer people for the benefit of queer people can be found across social institutions such as government (including the law and the military); sports; religion; media; family; and the economy. Social institutions have great influence upon each other, and access within one institution might rely heavily on social access within another institution. Policies that become law affect a community. For example, being open about an individual’s family status (trans) in the workplace (economy) might be linked to legal repercussions and loss of employment or housing (law). Legal criminalization of sexual and gender expression has been the dominant mode of enforcement when it comes to segregating queer people from larger communities. The existence of LGBTQ1, or “queer,” social movements in the modern era is largely due to relatively recent historical social repression across social institutions. Evidence and artistic artifacts from ancient civilizations through the European Renaissance indicate that same-sex relationships were part of daily life. Such repression was enacted when colonizing groups, such as the British, Spanish, and French armies, moved into and occupied the lands of indigenous groups in the Western and Southern hemispheres. Native groups once accustomed to diverse practices and acceptance of all genders and sexualities were forced into Judeo-Christian monotheistic religions that placed strict boundaries on acceptable sexual relationships and practices, and gender expression. The norms of acceptable sexual practices narrowed from a once diverse spectrum to a singular, straight binary (European, Christian). The straight binary relationship was codified by legal and dominant religious practices in colonized

countries. Judeo-Christian orthodoxy prevented any kinds of native practices that might include more diverse representations and acceptance of many kinds of gender and sexuality expressions. Modern queer activism stems directly from this history of colonization; this imposed social stricture caused the need for—and existence of—queer social movements lead by queer people.

Contextualizing LGBTQ1 Leadership: The Homophile Movement Leadership in LGBTQ1 social movements varies widely depending on the historical context of each group. Because of a shared inheritance of social oppression, many leaders for queer rights took their cues, both in style of leadership and in exposition of group tenets, from American abolitionist movements (1700s–1860s), and the British and American women’s movements (1900s– present). Arguments which declare that American history has long been shaped by queer leaders point to many prominent individuals who transgressed social boundaries of sexuality and gender. Being “out,” or openly transgressive of norms within society, was not necessarily treated as remarkable enough to be castigated by wealthy, prominent members of society or arrested by law enforcement if an individual was economically secure or white. Much historical guesswork on the sexuality of certain political figures such as American politician Daniel Webster and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, German legal scholar and judge Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and Zuni Nation’s We’wha have demonstrated that people have long lived their lives and expressed themselves along a spectrum of identities, provided they had an additional form of social capital. This capital often came in the form of heterosexual marriage; economic wealth; educational privilege; and, most notably, whiteness. If these conditions presented themselves in concert with an individual’s gender or sexuality boundary-pushing, institutional privilege often granted individual expression. Privilege in one aspect of an individual’s life enables them to move among social circles and social institutions that might otherwise be off-limits to them because of their sexuality. This can be seen in historic LGBTQ1 equality

LGBTQ1 Social Movements

movements. After enslavement was outlawed in the United States, White people and, more specifically, White men retained heightened social capital across all social institutions but became alarmed at the prospect of Black individuals occupying equal social space. This White supremacy–based fear caused gay men to heavily skew the early gay rights movement toward the perspectives of White male social access. This limited the issues around which leaders focused their organizing efforts. Major social events, such as wars or global pandemics, often disrupt social norms of gender, sexuality, and family. These events necessitate that people operate outside established ways of behavior and, once those former boundaries are enjoyably transgressed, expanded social roles become difficult to relinquish. At the turn of the 20th century and the close of the First World War, despite persistent racial prejudice, wealthier White bisexual people, gay men, and lesbian women demanded more public acceptance of their sexual expression. Facing ever-increasing police harassment and legal enforcement of postwar homophobic mores, LGBTQ1 groups began to focus their activism. The communications media became an avenue for both political and personal expression. Literary groups—such as the Modernist movement and the Beat Generation—used their art to comment upon repressed sexuality to the broader public, while smaller activist groups formed publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines. These media established safe places for individuals to meet in real time and, in addition, provided content geared toward their audience. Founded by Harry Hay, but with an overarching goal of community-based leadership for gay male rights, The Mattachine Society began publishing The Mattachine Review in 1950. Born of collective leadership, Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian rights group founded by Del Martin, Phyllis Lion, Rose Bamberger, and Rosemary Sliepen, published The Ladder. Pockets of regional queer publications, including college and university affiliated media, began to appear within the United States. The media was used to disseminate perspectives of gay people, but representation—and any subsequent rights received thereof—was limited to certain members of the community.

591

As this collective leadership fomented public conversations around gay relationships and gender expression, it took the concurrent civil rights movement and second-wave feminist movement to demand more visibility for all queer people. Groups led by White people neglected to address White supremacy within the queer community; groups led by men neglected to address sexism within the queer community. This resulted in transactional leadership styles that operated in traditional hierarchical approaches and echoed straight, male-dominated organizations.

Intersectional Approaches and LGBTQ1 Leadership in the 21st Century The civil rights movement, which advocated for legal rights for Black Americans, and early feminist movements, which advocated for legal rights for women, influenced queer activists. Of course not all queer people have the same experiences. It took social movement policy change for racial and gender equality to shape the modern LGBTQ1 movement. Intersectionality, a term defined and employed by Black feminist leaders, requires organizations to identify the ways in which personal identities such as gender, race, and class intersect with political access across social institutions. Although queer activism was still heavily community-based in structure, individual leaders began to emerge out of smaller sub-communities to form national organizations like Gay Activist Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front. These leaders were intersectional in their approach to sub-communities’ needs. Leaders such as Bayard Rustin straddled multiple personal identities as a gay, Black man and wielded considerable political clout. Marsha P. Johnson organized the Stonewall uprising, also known as the Stonewall riots and Stonewall rebellion, after a police assault; she further demanded Black trans rights be equally positioned within the gay rights movement. Sylvia Rivera provided accessible housing to trans youth by founding the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR); this shone a spotlight on the many ties between discrimination and child abuse, ´ homelessness, and transphobia. Jeanne Cordova integrated feminist activism with religious

592

The Liberal Tradition

affiliation into mainstream lesbian publishing and academia. Scholar and activist Barbara Smith founded the Combahee River Collective to combat systemic racism and heterosexism in the feminist movement; the collective’s manifesto remains the foundation for all intersectional feminist organizing. Collaborative leadership for specific subcommunities (trans; children/youth; people of color) continued well into the 1980s and 1990s. This collaboration birthed the first Pride parades in the 1970s and the first March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian, and Bi Rights in 1993. The AIDS pandemic intensified some social institutions responses toward inclusivity. Mistakes made by the medical establishment resulted in preventable deaths, as did many governments’ refusal to treat the disease as one that affects all people. It took highly visible demonstrations by many groups, most notably ACT UP, and globally coordinated, on-the-ground “death-in” protests at government institutions to provide equitable access to health care. As the government slowly began to control the AIDS pandemic by releasing funding and treatment to all populations, political pushback on queer people’s visibility resulted in sustained legal consequences for LGBTQ1 people in other ways. The consequences involved policies such as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) in the military, higher incarceration rates, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), bans on adoption, and removal of parental rights for non-straight individuals. The turn of the 21st century saw a global shift in queer visibility and access to equal protection under the law. As legal protections rose for LGBTQ1 populations outside of the United States, pressure mounted on the American justice system to remove discriminatory laws. Queer collaborative leadership exemplified by organizations like the Human Rights Campaign created successful challenges and repeals of DOMA and DADT. Between 2000 and 2016, social access for LGBTQ1 individuals grew across institutions to include employment discrimination protection, federal housing protection, visibility in the arts, and protections for youth in public educational systems. Protection fluctuates as political and religious influence waxes and wanes. Further avenues for queer organizing and collaborative leadership have grown to include protection

for LGBTQ1 immigrant rights, freedom for potentially lethal pseudo-medical treatments like conversion therapy, and antidiscrimination protections for trans athletes. Finally, whereas charismatic and transformational approaches to understanding the influence of queer leaders in the context of historic moments can be helpful, it is clear that communitybased groups have shifted the pendulum toward equality for all sexualities and gender expressions. Julianne Guillard See also Collective Leadership; Community Leadership; Feminism; Gender Stereotypes; Race and Ethnicity; Sexuality

Further Readings Bronski, M. (2011). A queer history of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Canady, M. (2009). The straight state: Sexuality and citizenship in 20th century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carter, D. (2010). Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Combahee River Collective. (1986). The Combahee River Collective statement: Black feminist organizing in the seventies and eighties. Albany, NY: Kitchen Table Press. Hanhardt, C. B. (2013). Safe space: Gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Serano, J. (2013). Excluded: Making feminist and queer movements more inclusive. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Signorile, M. (2015). It’s not over: Getting beyond tolerance, defeating homophobia, and winning true equality. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

THE LIBERAL TRADITION In the modern democratic context, leaders operate within an institutional structure and ethos both of which aspire to the ideal of liberalism—the view that individuals should be able to live their lives as they see fit, so long as they are not violating the rights of others. The liberal tradition evolved as a

The Liberal Tradition

way of accommodating the persistent reality that people disagree about what is good in life. The disagreement often cuts deep. The devout Mormon and the secular atheist can differ about the most fundamental matters about personal ethics, the afterlife, the meaning of existence, and the social arrangements that lead to human flourishing. What should the state do in light of such disagreement? One natural answer is that the state should determine which of the many available perspectives is correct, and then try to design legal, educational, and political institutions so they are in line with that correct perspective. According to the doctrine of liberalism, however, this is misguided. Instead, it holds, the state ought to be neutral with respect to the various conceptions of the good life that people might have. The liberal state does not take sides in such debates—rather, it aims to maintain institutions that allow a diverse range of individuals and communities to peacefully live under the same roof, so to speak. This entry outlines the basics of the liberal tradition and arguments supporting it.

Defenses of Liberalism There are two broad strands of argument in defense of liberalism. From a deontological viewpoint (the study of moral obligations), the state simply lacks the authority to impose a particular view of what constitutes a good life on individuals. Forcing people to live a certain way is not in line with respecting their autonomy and their equal moral standing as persons. So, even supposing that a particular view of the good life is uniquely correct, the state may not coercively impose that ideal on people who disagree. For, doing so amounts to treating people in an objectionable way, by not affording them the respect, in the Kantian sense, that they are owed as persons able to think for themselves and make their own choices. In the more utilitarian way of seeing things, liberalism can be defended by noting that giving states the power to impose particular ideas of the good life is more likely to do harm than good. After all, the state is not a perfectly benevolent, omniscient entity—rather, it is composed of ordinary people who are themselves fallible, corruptible, and prone to bias. Giving the state the power

593

to determine and impose the uniquely correct way of living, then, will make matters ripe for abuse.

John Stuart Mill and the Liberal Tradition Further utilitarian rationales can be given for why the state should seek to be non-paternalistic, avoiding the coercion of individuals for their own good. In the 19th century, philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill notably put forth several arguments to this effect. First, he argued, there are no one-size-fits-all rules for what choices and lifestyles are optimal for everyone. For example, whereas one person might be prone to alcohol addiction, and thus might be wise to avoid all alcohol, another person might feel an occasional drink or two in social situations enhances their quality of life. A blanket ban on alcohol, then, is likely to be counterproductive from the standpoint of many people’s well-being. Second, Mill thought that each individual was the expert on what made their life go best. Of course, Mill felt, anyone can make prudential mistakes, but in general, and in the long run, it’s best if people are allowed freedom to make their own decisions. In addition, if individuals are allowed to conduct their own “experiments in living,” the resulting lessons and perspectives are likely to be a boon to society at large. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, liberals of various stripes have, on anti-paternalistic grounds, advocated for the legalization of a range of behaviors that might be plausibly construed of as self-regarding and thus not within the proper purview of state prohibition. Though particular examples are bound to be controversial, some include: marijuana decriminalization, the legalization of sex work, and the abolition of prescription requirements for drugs. From the liberal standpoint, it is not just the state which can interfere with autonomy. Social pressures, customs, and sanctions can be just as—if not often more—inhibiting. The historical Chinese practice of foot-binding, for example, was not primarily enforced by state actors. Neither is the convention of female genital mutilation prevalent in parts of Africa. The social milieu can have a very powerful impact on the choices people are able to make. Indeed, part of the function of a

594

The Liberal Tradition

liberal state is plausibly to prevent society from interfering with individuals’ liberty. Provisions against discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation, for example, are enacted with this goal in view. The fact that social contexts exert tremendous force on individuals’ choices can raise a dilemma for the liberal state, however. From the liberal standpoint, individuals ought to be free to live as they please, so long as they are not interfering with the rights of others, regardless of their social characteristics such as gender or caste or religious affiliation. However, this stance threatens to impose a particular ideal of the good life on communities who by and large endorse social norms and practices that are sensitive to social characteristics. Thus, a religious community might believe that in order to flourish, men and women must have different rules applicable to them. There might be separate dress codes, norms of deference, or locations for praying based on gender. Furthermore, there might be high social costs imposed for leaving the religious community. How ought a liberal state accommodate such practices? If it seeks to ban or discourage such religious practices, it threatens to coercively impose a particular ideal of the good on its citizens. On the other hand, if it doesn’t interfere, then some individuals within its jurisdiction may seem to have their autonomy limited in ways at odds with the liberal ethos. Political theorist Chandran Kukathas has argued that one potential way out of this dilemma is to conceive of the liberal society as an archipelago. The idea is that the liberal state is obliged to allow illiberal communities to flourish within its borders. If individuals want to join, or remain in, such societies, they must have the liberty to do so. However, the state must ensure that there is a robust freedom to exit—once someone has decided that that life is not for them, they must be free to leave.

Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition In addition to the anti-paternalistic ideal, liberal philosophers have also emphasized the freedom to speak one’s mind. To the extent a state imposes content-based restrictions on what views can be expressed, it departs from the liberal ideal. In

modern liberal democracies, states typically do not impose punitive sanctions for expressing ideas. However, individuals can face great social and professional costs for expressing ideas that conflict with those of their milieu—to the extent this happens, society can depart from the liberal ideal even if the formal state apparatus does not. Liberal philosophers thus have stressed the importance of maintaining a cultural ethos of free expression, which promotes the minimization of social or professional sanctions imposed on individuals for merely expressing opinions. Of course, some speech acts can go beyond merely stating an opinion—for example, inciting violence by riling up a mob—and can be sanctioned for that reason. But Mill in particular emphasizes the need for society to tolerate, without qualification, a wide range of opinions, even those which the majority (or the influential minority) may deem offensive or harmful. Mill defended an absolute and unqualified right of free expression for the following reasons: Either the claim that is suppressed is true, in which case the censor is doing society a disservice by not allowing it to apprehend certain truths, or the claim suppressed is false; but even then, the censorship is counterproductive in the long run—for, Mill thought, having some people defend false opinions helps others better understand the reasons why their beliefs might be true. For people to be genuinely justified in believing any claim, there needs to be the robust possibility that people will challenge that claim. Mill thought that even if Newtonian physics, which in his time was well established, could not be challenged, then people could not be rationally confident in believing it. Indeed, as it turns out, Einstein later showed that Newtonian physics is only true in approximation in certain contexts. Typically, suppression of opinions via social and professional sanctions occurs when a dominant ideology, or comprehensive system of looking at the social world, is potentially threatened by some ideas. While it might be tempting to think this type of suppression is beneficial if the dominant ideology is true, Mill thought that any such comprehensive system could only contain, at best, part of the truth. If the ideology successfully isolates itself from criticism, the culture is then bound to have blind-spots, which might worsen over time.

Liberalism and Toleration

Thus, Mill thought, people should be very suspicious of attempts to suppress ideas for the supposed reason that they can only be harmful. Furthermore, the claim that certain ideas can only be harmful is itself an opinion one can only be justified in believing if it can be robustly challenged. An ethos of free speech, Mill thought, was best for society in the long run because only with it can the truth be reliably tracked. Some liberal philosophers such as Seana Shiffrin have also defended the ideal of free speech as a necessary precondition of people being able to develop as rational beings. Only if they are free to speak their minds can they fulfill their fundamental needs as individual thinkers. Liberalism is a particular response to the question of what to do when faced with a diverse array of perspectives—both about what the world is like, and what ought to be done within it. It seeks to be maximally tolerant of individuals’ choices so long as they do not interfere with the liberty of others. The other face of liberalism is a commitment to tolerating expressions of opinion even if the majority, or the powers that be, deem those opinions to be false, misguided, or even harmful. There remains disagreement, however, as to how society should interpret particular liberal ideals and what they might require in terms of particular policies. Hrishikesh Joshi See also Groupthink; Liberalism and Toleration; Moral Pluralism; Political Leadership; Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context

Further Readings Jacobson, D. (2021). A defense of Mill’s argument for the “practical inseparability” of the liberties of conscience (and the absolutism it entails). Social Philosophy and Policy, 37(2), 9–30. doi:10.1017/S0265052521000029 Kant, I. (1996). In Mary J. Gregor (Ed.), Practical philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kukathas, C. (2003). The liberal archipelago. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackie, G. (1996). Ending footbinding and infibulation: A convention account. American Sociological Review, 61(6), 999–1017. doi:10.2307/2096305 Mill, J. S. (2008). In John Gray (Ed.), On liberty and other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published 1859.

595

Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shiffrin, S. (2014). Speech matters: On lying, morality, and the law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

LIBERALISM

AND

TOLERATION

Liberalism can be defined as a tradition of philosophical thought about politics, law, and the economy. The origins of liberalism trace back to 17th-century Europe. The primary moral and political values in the liberal tradition are liberty and equality. Toleration can be defined as allowing someone to think, speak, or behave in ways that others oppose. Most liberals think that respect for liberty requires toleration of various beliefs, practices, religions, and cultures, even if people disapprove of them. The limits of toleration are also widely discussed in the liberal tradition. Liberals characterize someone who is unwilling to respect the liberty and equal status of other persons as intolerant. Liberalism is neither a left-wing nor a right-wing political identity. When people refer to someone as liberal as opposed to conservative, they are using the term liberal in a different sense than what is presented here. The idea of toleration that is central to liberalism is also neither a left-wing nor a right-wing political position. Rather, the idea of toleration is modeled to fit the idea of liberty and equality that is central to the liberal tradition. There are interpretations of liberal values that can be classified as left or right-wing, yet that is a separate topic. This entry discusses the concept of toleration in the liberal tradition. Contexts in which toleration is important include law, business, education, interpersonal, and international relations. Some examples illustrating why toleration is important to those in positions of authority will be presented.

Liberalism Prominent liberal thinkers include John Locke (1632–1704), Adam Smith (1723–1790), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), and John Rawls (1921–2002). Liberals advance a

596

Liberalism and Toleration

vision for society that emphasizes liberty and equality. According to liberals, individual rights, including liberty of conscience, freedom of association, and freedom of expression, are fundamental values that should be protected by law. Not surprisingly, there are points of agreement that unite liberals and also different interpretations of liberal principles and values. For example, liberals agree that some form of limited government is preferable, that societies should tolerate religious and cultural diversity, and that liberty is a fundamental value. Yet liberals are divided on whether economic liberty is a fundamental value, as well as on the degree to which liberal values should be modified to fit different cultural and political circumstances. They also disagree about the appropriate limits on markets and commerce.

Toleration The concept of toleration refers to an attitude or policy that allows people to think and act in ways that others may find objectionable. The concept of toleration consists of two parts. First, a belief or practice is thought to be objectionable. Second, despite being judged objectionable, a belief or practice is thought to be permissible in the sense that force or law should not be used to prevent someone from expressing the belief or engaging in the practice. Putting these two parts together, toleration applies when there is a right to express a belief or engage in a practice that others may find objectionable. Someone might tolerate smoking, for example, even if they believe smoking is wrong or objectionable. Another example is religious toleration. Someone tolerates another’s religion when they disagree with that person’s religious convictions yet affirm that person’s right to decide for themselves what to believe. The distinctive feature of liberal toleration consists of affirming others’ right to affirm a belief or engage in a practice that that the tolerant person opposes. The concept of toleration is often thought to rest on a kind of paradox. Often, people do not tolerate something they think is objectionable or wrong. The challenge of liberal toleration consists of figuring out where to draw the line between objectionable practices that are not permitted and those that are permitted. Liberals think respect for

liberty and the recognition of other persons as moral equals requires accepting certain kinds of diversity. Toleration requires a degree of restraint and humility. Moreover, when liberty is protected people will naturally arrive at different understandings about politics, religion, culture, science, and many other areas of life. The commitment to liberty entails acceptance of the fact that reasonable people often disagree. According to this view, one should tolerate some things they oppose because other persons should be free to believe and to do those things. Toleration is of fundamental importance because people disagree about beliefs, practices, and how to live a good life. Without toleration, these disagreements will likely result in significant hostilities and conflict. When a population accepts toleration as a moral and political value, it becomes easier for people who disagree to coexist in peace. In this respect toleration has both a practical and a moral dimension. The practical function is to reduce conflict between people who disagree about what to believe and how to live. When the choice is between accommodating diversity by tolerating people’s differences or intolerance, liberals oppose intolerance on the grounds that social hostilities will increase.

Applications of Main Ideas Liberals argue that the moral basis for toleration is liberty. The connection between liberty and toleration can be represented as follows. First, liberty is a basic right to which all persons are entitled. Second, the right to liberty includes freedom of belief, lifestyle, and cultural identity. Third, when members of a population exercise their liberty with respect to religion, politics, and culture, diversity is the inevitable outcome. Fourth, toleration facilitates the acceptance of this diversity. Liberals think freedom requires toleration and that toleration is a condition for peaceful coexistence in a diverse world. Different liberal governments adopt policies that reflect differing interpretations of liberal values. For example, France and the United States are both liberal nations. Both governments are committed to liberty and toleration. At the same time, France is more strictly secular than the United

Liberalism and Toleration

States. This difference is reflected in state religion policies that limit, in the case of France, and permit, in the case of the United States, religious dress in public schools and in public spaces. Different liberal states can also adopt different legal standards for speech that is protected by law, as opposed to legally restricted. In some European states forms of expression that denigrate an ethnic minority might be prohibited by law, whereas that same speech might be legally permissible in the United States. One feature that explains this variation is a different understanding of toleration and its limits. In the United States, toleration in law is linked to a more individualistic and civil libertarian understanding of freedom of expression. In some European states, the idea of a group harm, such as may be expressed by certain forms of hate speech, is more strictly regulated than in the United States. The concept of toleration can apply to persons or to institutions. A tolerant person will engage respectfully with those whose beliefs, practices, religion, or culture, differ from their own. A tolerant government will protect the liberty that permits citizens in a multicultural and multireligious society to pursue their own values. A tolerant business owner will treat employees respectfully by recognizing their individuality. An entrepreneur seeking business opportunities might exercise a policy of toleration for several reasons. First, they might recognize that respect for business partners, employees, and consumers requires tolerating various forms of diversity. Second, they might also recognize that success in commercial ventures is more likely when business culture is more tolerant. In other words, their commitment to toleration might be influenced by their occupational goals and not just their moral commitments. Third, they might aspire to be role models who put into practice the value of toleration in their public and private lives. The idea of liberal toleration can also influence relations between persons of different nationalities. For example, opportunity migrants seeking employment will often carry their languages, cultures, and religions across borders. Political leaders who affirm liberal toleration must navigate the social and political issues that arise when newcomers add diversity to their host society. Business leaders also need to navigate the social

597

and political issues that arise when they consider how to reconcile their economic objectives with liberal toleration. One perennial topic here is to what extent law and government should intervene on behalf of values central to liberal toleration. Some liberals will favor a more laissez faire approach that prioritizes economic liberty over regulatory intervention on behalf of liberal toleration. Other liberals will favor government oversight that promotes the ideals of a tolerant multicultural liberal society. Individuals in leadership positions will also reflect these and other different interpretations of liberal toleration. Sometimes individuals and institutions represent toleration in different ways. For example, university presidents may promote a university culture that is tolerant toward international students or LGBTQ students. In doing so, they represent the individual character trait of toleration while also promoting a tolerant educational and institutional culture. Toleration in this respect is an important feature of civil society. Tolerant leaders can play an important role in larger political discussions about the meaning of liberty and equality. Business leaders may promote a culture of toleration within their respective business cultures. Most liberal political philosophers will favor these efforts, and many will also claim there are practical benefits. For example, markets are more productive when no one is excluded from opportunities to participate, whether as producers, consumers, or business owners. On this view, an open society is both more tolerant and likely to be more prosperous. The traditional idea that careers and opportunities should be open to talent is better served by a commitment to liberal toleration. By contrast, intolerance creates barriers to opportunity and reflects a zero-sum outlook that is less likely to produce win-win outcomes. The economic argument for toleration is an additional consideration that many liberals stress in their defense of toleration as an important value. Liberals agree that toleration is a requirement of basic justice in many areas of life, including government, the workplace, and education. Yet different liberals will advance different positions on where to draw the line between economic liberty and toleration. For example, to what extent

598

Literature

should government require a business owner to tolerate workers and customers whose beliefs and practices the business owner finds objectionable? One influential proposal is that people should tolerate beliefs and practices unless doing so exposes others to a risk of harm. The relevant concept of harm might be specified in terms of protecting others from having their fundamental rights violated along with personal security. On this view, liberalism does not require us to tolerate smoking in certain spaces, such as a workplace. The liberal might say people can smoke on their own time and in places where they do not pose a risk of harm to others. By contrast, if someone seeks employment in a retail store and wears a Muslim headscarf—hijab—out of a sense of religious obligation, the liberal can say that the business owner or manager has an obligation to accommodate this request, even if the business has a “no headwear” policy. In that case, no one else is harmed by the fact that an employee is wearing a hijab, and the employee is able to fulfill a religious obligation.

LITERATURE “Literature” as a genre is broad in scope, encompassing a wide variety of subgenres, usually fictional or semi-fictional, including poetry, prose (novels, memoirs, short stories, etc.), and drama. The Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition: “The result or product of literary activity; written works considered collectively; a body of literary works produced in a particular country or period, or of a particular genre.” While colloquially, the term literature is often used to refer to a body of critical works within a specific discipline (e.g., the literature on the study of organizational leadership), as an overarching category, “Literature” as a field of study is more specifically geared toward the analysis of written creative works. This entry provides background on literature as storytelling, an introduction to language use, and an overview of how to understand “Literature” (methods of critical reading), followed by specific recommendations for its ties to leadership and leadership studies.

Jon Mahoney See also Cross Cultural Leadership; Democratic Leadership in Democracy; Ethical Leadership; Global Leadership; Moral Disagreement; Philosophy and Leadership; Social Justice; Virtues

Further Readings Forst, R. (2013). Toleration in conflict: Past and present. Trans. C. Cronin. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1996). Multicultural citizenship: A theory of minority rights. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (1689/1983). In J. Tully (Ed.), A letter concerning toleration. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Mill, J. S. (1859/1978). In E. Rappaport (Ed.), On liberty (8th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Patten, A. (2014). Equal recognition: The moral foundations of minority rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, I. (2011). Justice and the politics of difference. (Rev ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zagorin, P. (2003). How the idea of toleration came to the west. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Storytelling and Language The connection between leadership and “Literature” (hereafter, literature; no capital L, no quotation marks) is one made perhaps most clear in the notion that leadership is a function of storytelling, and storytelling is a function of leadership. Storytelling is the use of narrative to make an argument. For leaders, stories offer a means of connecting to followers, providing common ground, articulating values, and even modeling ideal behaviors. Storytelling can be employed in a fictional or non-fictional context as well as in an oral or written format. Stories which focus primarily on symbol and allegory most often are also considerably embellished from fact or are entirely imagined (referred to as “fiction”). The fictive type of storytelling forms the basis for literature, both in terms of contemporary forms and in historical terms, as oral fictive storytelling provided the blueprint for the development of written literary forms. Oral stories take several forms, including both rhetorical oratory and folklore, and each have their own conventions

Literature

and expectations. Written literature—regardless of time or nation of origin—may share some commonalities with these oral forms, but has developed its own subgenres with specific conventions, and should thus be approached differently. As a discipline that is specifically written, literature as a macro-genre focuses on written rather than spoken language. While there are languages that are more pictographic or logographic rather than alphabetical (for instance, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are pictographic, Japanese kanji are logographic, and English is alphabetical), the methodologies of language use are applicable across all languages. In order to understand the methods relevant to discussing a literary-centric approach to studying literature through a leadership lens, it is important to recognize the fundamental structures of language and linguistic meaning-making. Language provides the building-blocks for narrative in the form of linguistic units known in the study of semiotics as signs. A sign is the relationship between a word or phoneme and a concept, whether concrete (such as a tree or cat) or abstract (a feeling, idea, or theory). Signs are useful to understand how we make particular associations between words, ideas, and emotions. Literature makes use of signs in order to invoke emotions, patterns of understanding, and sets of values. Signs come together within the grammatical structure of language to communicate meaning and create the potential for symbolic or figurative language, which includes such terms as symbol, allegory, and other literary devices. Within an understanding of literature and storytelling, a symbol is defined as a word or phrase that represents or indicates something else, typically an abstract or larger concept. For example, a crown may be used as a symbol for royalty; a bird as a symbol of freedom; and a rose as a symbol for love or death. The term allegory should be understood as the use of symbols or symbolic characters within a story designed to represent a cohesive moral lesson. While such complex uses of language are not necessary for a work to be considered literary, their presence in literary writing is common and expected. These devices work together as figurative language, which is often used to obscure the main argument or lesson of the work of literature.

599

Understanding Literature The study of literature revolves around a practice known in the literary disciplines as close reading, which engages in in-depth analysis of the language used in a work of literature with the intention of coming to a better understanding of the work. Although simplified, this process can be broken into a series of discrete steps, which will be illustrated using a small section of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Basic Understanding

The first of these steps comes as the level of basic understanding and determines the overall narrative of the work or section of the work. The question “What is being said?” is useful as a frame for this initial step. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, alone on her balcony, wonders aloud why it is that her relationship with Romeo is unacceptable to the society around them. She says, O be some other name. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. (2.2.42–44)

These lines could be paraphrased as follows: Just call yourself something different. What is a name, anyway? A rose would still be a rose if we called it something different. As a part of understanding this, a reader must also consider the in-work context of the lines. In this case, one should consider the speaker— Juliet—and the plot surrounding the lines. In this case, she has recently met Romeo (the subject of her speech) and fallen in love with him but knows that her family and his are enemies and would not approve of their relationship. Linguistic Understanding

The second step looks specifically at the language choices made by the creator(s) of the work. The question that best frames this step is “How is it being said?” It is during this step that a reader may consider literary devices, but, more specifically, the

600

Literature

signs and symbols in the work. On its simplest level, this means paying attention to word choice, style, and syntax. The linguistic understanding of a work includes broader categories as well as narrow ones, including the conventions of genres and expectations about the style of a work, as well as the nuanced specifics of syntax, figurative language, and word choice. In the example, Romeo and Juliet is a five-act play, a tragedy, and mostly written in blank verse. This conveys expectations about how long the play will be, that it is likely to end with death, and that large portions of the play will be written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. (For reference, an iamb is a metric style: ba-DUM. Pentameter means that a line has five [pent] “baDUMs.” For instance: by AN-y OTH-er WORD would SMELL as SWEET). In these lines, Juliet uses several words that start with the same sound (alliteration): which we, word would, smell sweet. Alliteration brings a sense of unity and harmony. Many book titles, article titles, and even the names of companies employ alliteration: Song of Solomon, “Leadership and Literature,” and Kars for Kids, for example. It makes the lines easier to remember, which would have been beneficial for the actors in Shakespeare’s company (to tie word choice back to genre). However, it also makes the lines harder to say, as in a tongue-twister (such as She sells seashells by the seashore), which means that alliteration forces elocution and careful diction. It slows down the lines, letting the audience (or reader) know that they need to pay extra attention. In addition, these lines repeat the same idea; repetition is another clue that a concept is important. In this case, Juliet’s lines include a hypothetical question—What’s in a name?—and then a response—That which we call a rose/By any other word would smell as sweet. Question and response, which imitates a catechistic style, is a form a repetition that emphasizes the lesson Shakespeare wants his audience to learn. Finally, Juliet’s lines contain a reference to a symbol: an image that stands in for something else. In this particular case, the rose represents more than just a flower. The rose represents love (Juliet’s love for Romeo); death (Romeo and Juliet both die at the play’s end, and the flower serves as

foreshadowing of this); and, finally, the House of Tudor, although to understand why, readers need another step.

Contextual Understanding Context is critical to understanding the meaning of a work relative to when and where it was created. Works of literature are created within a particular sociopolitical context by one or more human beings who are providing commentary—making an argument—about their particular circumstances. The intention or argument of a work of literature cannot be fully perceived without understanding the context in which it was created and by whom. Context includes the era, location, author, and culture into which the work was originally created. For Romeo and Juliet, that is the early modern period (specifically, the year 1597) in London, England, written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men playing company. Shakespeare himself probably acted in the play and was writing for a specific group of men (all of his actors were men, even those who played female roles) whom he knew well. There is also the larger political context of late 16th century London, a period fraught by religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Adding to this tension, Shakespeare’s audience would have been concerned not only about the potential for foreign invasion (as was attempted by Spain in 1588), but also by the fact that their Queen, Elizabeth I, was rapidly aging and had no heir, a fact that pointed to the potential for open civil war upon her death. The play’s focus on the feud between “two households, both alike in dignity” (0.1.1) echoed the audience’s familiarity (from Shakespeare’s earlier plays) with the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) that ended with the rise of the Tudor dynasty (Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII). It also reminded those familiar with the court—like Shakespeare and his company—of the feud between the Cecils (William, Lord Burghley, and his son Robert) and the House of Essex (Robert Devereux and his retainers, Francis and Anthony Bacon) over power at court, Elizabeth’s favor, and the claims of potential successors to the throne.

Literature

This context—the potential for civil war, internal division between Catholics and Protestants—suggests that Juliet’s lines are about not simply the two households in the play (the Capulets and the Montagues), but also the houses that almost tore England apart in the Wars of the Roses (York and Lancaster), whose symbols (the white and red roses) were combined in the bi-colored Tudor rose still emblazoned on royal heraldry in 1597, which is the third meaning of Juliet’s “rose by any other word.” Juliet’s lines become more meaningful when viewed through the steps of basic understanding, language, and context: O be some other name. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.

So instead of this being simply a teenager’s lament that her parents don’t like her boyfriend (which it also is), these lines remind Shakespeare’s audience that perhaps they should let go of their religious and political factionalism in order to focus on what united them instead of what divided them, since petty division would only bring tragedy. Juliet’s lines present an opportunity to make choices that unify rather than divide—choices that the characters in the play do not make so that Shakespeare can remind his audience of the tragic consequences of polarization. With this understanding, readers can turn to the final step. Reframing (for Leadership)

This last step takes the lessons deduced from basic, linguistic, and contextual understanding and applies those lessons to a new framework. In the case of leadership studies or practice, to a leadership-specific framework. In the realm of literature, leadership can be considered in three ways: The leadership of the author. In creating their work, the author makes a specific set of observations and/ or arguments about their context. The leadership of the work in context. This is the interaction between the work itself and its

601

immediate audience. Typically, the work done by a work of literature parallels the intentions of its author (although not always). This may be to encourage an audience to behave in a particular way, to accept or reject a policy or set of behaviors, and so on. The leadership of the work in a new context. A work of literature can be reframed in a new time period, location, or culture, or it can be revised or rewritten. When this happens, the work takes on new meanings that may not have existed in its original context or were not imagined by the author(s).

This new context—the reframing of a work for a new audience—is most often where leadership can make use of already-extant works of literature, either by drawing on stories created by others or by recognizing in the lessons taught by those works potential parallels to a new set of circumstances. For example, Shakespeare’s lesson about internal division and toleration in Romeo and Juliet would also be applicable to a 21st-century American political context—if a reader imagined Romeo as a Republican, for instance, and Juliet as a Democrat. An example of reframing can be seen in the musical film West Side Story, which refigures the original Shakespearean story to reflect gang warfare between x and Puerto Rican communities in New York in the 20th century. Thus, the lessons of a work from the 16th century can be shown as applicable to leaders trying to negotiate the polarized atmosphere of the 2020s as it was to Elizabeth’s court in the 1590s.

Implications for Leadership If we wish to consider the value of literature to leadership, we should consider not simply how leaders might make use of literature as a means of demonstrating ideologies, but also how literature provides examples of and arguments for particular styles of leadership and followership. Within works of literature are models and exempla created by authors (in some cases drawn from history, and, in others, drawn from the imagination) that serve as commentaries on those authors’ larger contexts, but which can continue to provide commentary on contemporary society.

602

Literature

Literature is itself leadership of a cultural variety; works of literature and their authors simultaneously—and separately—engage in leadership analysis and critique of the societies and individual leaders around them. Followers and leaders alike are drawn far more to stories and to literature than they are to policies and straightforward arguments, and are—as some psychology studies demonstrate—more susceptible to the claims made in narratives than to those made more explicitly. It is therefore important to recognize the leadership potential of literature as not simply a set of models for leadership (positive or negative), but to recognize literature as leadership, both that of the author and that of the work itself, both within its own context and outside of it.

A Caution for Leadership Scholars and Practitioners It may be tempting for those untrained in literary criticism to ascribe intention and leadership to characters rather than to the author of a work. It is important to recognize that characters take actions and make speeches only as the avatars of their authors. Within works of literature, characters take actions that appear to be leadership—such as Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet, who fails to stop the feud in Verona. Escalus may serve as an example of a leader who is unsuccessful in convincing his people to cease their violence, but he does so because Shakespeare created him as such, not because of any psychological failings or incorrect choices on his own part. While one might wish to adopt some of the characteristics evinced by such fictional characters, it is important to recognize that they are fictional, and we cannot expect to find complete solutions in fictional figures. Finally, it is worth noting that the field of literary studies is extensive and dates back nearly as far as the creative discipline itself. For leaders and leadership scholars interested in making use of literature, this existing scholarship on specific works of literature can be deeply valuable, as it can aid with the challenges of linguistic and contextual understandings for those who are not

trained in literary and historical period scholarship, but who find value and meaning in the works themselves and wish to deepen their understanding. Kristen M. S. Bezio See also Creativity; History; Rhetoric; Visual Arts

Further Readings Abrams, M. H., & Harpham, G. (2014). A glossary of literary terms (11th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Bezio, K. M. S., & Yost, K. (Eds.). (2018). Leadership, popular culture and social change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Fish, S. (1970). Literature in the reader: Affective stylistics. New Literary History, 2(1), 123–162. Harvey, M. (2006). Leadership and the human condition. In G. R. Goethals & G. L. J. Sorenson (Eds.), The quest for a general theory of leadership (pp. 39–45). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Literature. (n.d.). In OED online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved May 10, 2021, from http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/109080 Marturano, A. (2014). Editorial: Leadership and the humanities: Un an apr`es. Leadership and the Humanities, 2(2), 87–93. Mohd, H. S., & Yakin, A. T. (2014). The semiotic perspectives of Peirce and Saussure: A brief comparative study. Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences, 155, 4–8. Saussure, F. de (2011). In P. Meisel & H. Saussy (Eds.), W. Baskin, Trans. Course in general linguistics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Schreiner, C., Appel, M., Isberner, M.-B., & Richter, T. (2018). Argument strength and the persuasiveness of stories. Discourse Processes, 55(4), 371–386. Shakespeare, W. (1994). Romeo and Juliet (B. Gibbons, ed.; Reprint [1980]). London: Routledge. Trilling, L. (2008). The liberal imagination: Essays on literature and society. (Introduction by Louis Menand.) New York, NY: Review Books. Warner, N. O. (2011). Leadership in literary perspective. In M. Harvey & R. E. Riggio (Eds.), Leadership studies: The dialogue of disciplines (pp. 171–183). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

M MAJORITY

AND

decisions and actions. “Majority” in this context refers to an opinion majority, not to demographic status within the team or within society. As the common expression “majority rules” indicates, a team will generally enact the will of the majority of its members. There are several reasons underlying majority influence. There are strong norms directing team members toward acceptance of a majority position. Expressing a minority opinion results in conflict within the team. To be viewed as a good team member, an individual may fail to express a minority position in the face of majority opposition. Even after expressing their opinion, minority opinion holders may assent to the majority position in the interest of smooth team operations. Majorities can establish dominance within the team. Majorities may direct resources unavailable to minority members to enforce majority-imposed rules and norms. Majorities can also use approval and status as rewards for compliance with the majority position. Individuals may comply publicly to attain the social rewards controlled by the majority. Further, the majority can punish dissenting opinions and behavior in both overt and subtle ways. At the extreme, the majority can ostracize an individual who persists in expressing a minority position. If the individual values team membership, then compliance with the majority position is quite likely. The majority can induce minority compliance even when the majority position is objectively incorrect. In his classic studies on influence in the

MINORITY INFLUENCE

As organizations have become more reliant upon teams to make decisions, it has become more important to understand the influences on team decision-making. One of those influences is found within the team itself in the form of majority and minority subgroups. This division represents an important influence on team performance and member satisfaction with the team. Investigation into majority and minority influence began with experiments demonstrating majority influence and then expanded to minority influence on the team. Minority status with respect to demographic variables adds further complexity. Managing majority and minority influence in teams is a challenge to team leaders. This entry begins by providing an overview of both majority and minority influence. It then offers insight into dual processing in relation to exerting influence, demographic effects on majority and minority influence, and how individuals in majority or minority groups may be influenced differently when members of a virtual team. The entry concludes by examining how team leaders can help establish a climate in which both demographic and opinion minorities are comfortable expressing disagreement within a learning goal orientation.

Majority Influence It is obvious that the majority within a team will have a great deal of influence on the team’s

603

604

Majority and Minority Influence

1950s, Solomon K. Asch assembled teams of five confederates and one experimental participant. The individuals provided assessments of the color of slides, with all of the confederates providing an incorrect response, with the experimental participant responding last. The experimental subject could succumb to majority influence and provide a response that was objectively inaccurate or offer the correct response. Approximately one-third of the experimental subjects complied with the majority response despite its objective inaccuracy. While Asch’s work has been interpreted to illustrate conformity to a majority, that assessment is not entirely appropriate. Two-thirds of the participants expressed a dissenting (and correct) response. While pressure to conform can increase over time, fully a quarter of the participants held firm to the minority position over a series of trials. Thus, there is evidence of minority dissent as well as conformity to the majority. The failure to conform to the majority opinion eventually led to the question of whether the minority could exert influence on team decisions and actions.

Minority Influence Beginning in about the 1970s, attention turned to the phenomenon of minority influence within the team. While it may seem counter-intuitive (contrary to the simple “majority rules” axiom), minorities may exert significant influence on teams, even extending to changing the team’s decision. As this research progressed, there was interest in determining the manner in which majority and minority influences were exercised. In the 1970s, Serge Moscovici proposed a dual processing theory to explain majority and minority influence. According to the theory, majority influence followed a straightforward comparison process: a team member engaged in a simple process of comparing his or her position to that of the team majority. In the event of a difference, the member brought his or her position into compliance with the majority position. The comparison required little to no in-depth cognitive processing, relying instead on the principle that “the majority is usually right.” The member avoided the social disapproval that might accompany dissent by adopting the majority position. Overt compliance was obtained, although private beliefs might be unaffected.

Moscovici suggested a more complex process for minority influence. A team member holding a position different from that of a minority of the team had no simple decision rule to rely upon. As a result, the member needed to engage in deep processing of the minority position to understand the reasons underlying its adoption. The probability of intense cognitive probing of the minority position taking place was enhanced through contextual factors such as consistency of minority advocacy of the position, confidence in the position, and previous negative team outcomes. Based on this cognitive processing, the team member came to understand the reasons for the minority’s position. Comprehension, however, does not automatically lead to public adoption of the minority position on the part of the majority. Individuals may accept the minority position privately but endorse the majority position publicly. This change is a conversion, because it involves private acceptance, rather than compliance, which requires only external assent. With consistent advocacy over time from the minority, private acceptance may transition into public acknowledgment, making the minority position the “new” majority position.

Evidence for Dual Processing Moscovici’s experimental work was predicated on that of Asch. He, too, utilized color slides and confederates along with one experimental participant. Within the group of five confederates, two provided an incorrect response for the color of the slides—green instead of blue. Minority influence was demonstrated by collecting data on private responses regarding after-images. Despite correctly identifying the color the slide itself, many of the experimental participants identified the afterimage as red or purple—the after-image color associated with a green slide—thus establishing the influence of the minority responses. Although interesting, these findings demonstrate minority influence only on private responses. To initiate a public conversion to the minority position, the minority must accomplish two tasks. First, the minority must give voice to the dissenting opinion, and then the majority must attend to the rationale underlying that position.

Majority and Minority Influence

605

Hidden profile studies are typical for investigating these two processes. In this type of study, four to five individuals are provided with information regarding a team decision situation. However, not all individuals receive the same information. A majority of the participants receive information that strongly suggests a particular decision. A minority of one or two participants receive additional unique information that suggests a different but superior decision. After making individual decisions, a team decision is required. Leader acceptance of dissent and team learning goal orientation encourage minority voice so that the team learns about the novel information. Cognitive processing that incorporates the novel information is more likely when the information is provided by a minority position holder rather than by someone initially in the majority. Team choice of the superior alternative provides evidence of minority influence. Advocacy of position is also important for influencing a team. Research has identified consistency in position presentation as an important variable for both majorities and minorities to exert influence. A consistent minority can more strongly influence a team position than an inconsistent majority. Even in the face of a consistent majority, a minority faction that presents a unified front and holds firmly to its position over time can win the majority over to its position. Time is a crucial element in the minority influence process. A team may not welcome a minority position early in its processing because a minority position engenders conflict. However, a minority that is consistent in its presentation will motivate greater cognitive processing on the part of the team. This elaboration process sometimes results in acceptance of the minority position. However, the extended discussion and processing may give rise to previously unrecognized alternative positions. Through the elaboration process, the team may identify a superior alternative through consideration of a greater range of options.

perspectives. Individuals who are demographically dissimilar from their team members may find themselves in the position of being a “double deviant”—that is, dissimilar both demographically and with respect to opinion or position. Combined demographic and positional dissimilarity has both negative and positive effects. Teams that are demographically diverse offer a less positive experience for team members than homogeneous teams. Members of diverse teams identify less with the team, communicate less with one another, and are less satisfied with the team experience. These negative responses may stem from concern about the potential for disloyalty to the team. Demographic majorities prefer for minority individuals to have a single identity corresponding with the dominant group, abandoning their minority identity. Demographic minorities often prefer a dual identity, such that they identify with both the majority group and with their demographic minority. Dual identification breeds concern about the potential for disloyalty among individuals in the demographic majority. If leaders emphasize the superordinate team identity, they risk of losing the unique contributions offered by demographic minorities. Individuals with dual identification may have to take actions that demonstrate loyalty to the majority group to stimulate acceptance and trust. A positive aspect of demographic diversity is the novel information and perspectives that demographic minorities bring to the team. Inclusion of demographic minorities on teams, including a top management team, may result in improved performance on complex decisions. Leader openness to demographic minorities is key to reaping the benefits of their fresh perspectives. Further, teams are more comfortable when congruence is maintained—that is, when dissenting opinions are voice by demographic minorities than when they come from demographic majority members. Thus, the inclusion of “double deviants” can lead to better team performance that may, over time, lead to a more satisfying team experience for all members.

Demographic Effects

Virtual Teams

Individuals who are demographically dissimilar to existing team members are often invited to join a team in order to introduce novel information and

The rapid growth in communication technology has facilitated a corresponding increase in virtual teams. At first blush, minority influence in virtual

606

Manhattan Project

teams should be enhanced because both demographic and hierarchical status cues may be concealed or completely unavailable in the electronic environment. Thus, individuals may be more willing to voice dissenting opinions in a virtual environment. Minority opinion holders may be more willing to voice their disagreement in a virtual environment, but it is easier for the majority to ignore that dissent. It is more difficult for minorities to demonstrate consistency and confidence in their position in a virtual than in a face-to-face environment. Further, geographically distributed virtual teams may have difficulty overcoming cultural differences. Individuals from collectivist cultures may be less willing to offer dissenting opinions. Members from individualist cultures, while willing to express differing opinions, may be more dismissive of dissent in an environment with low social presence.

The Role of Team Leaders There are two consistent messages in the literature on majority and minority influence. The first is that dissenting opinions are valuable for enhancing team performance. The second is that leaders need to encourage dissenting opinions and facilitate team attention to such dissent. The leader’s role is key in team performance. Leaders can support minority contributions by establishing a climate of openness and psychological safety, so both demographic and opinion minorities are comfortable expressing disagreement. Further, leaders can encourage a diversity of position through control of membership, especially temporary membership. Including temporary members who bring new perspectives also enhances the probability that the new perspectives will be heard and incorporated. Leaders can support a learning goal orientation within the team that will facilitate greater cognitive processing and discussion of dissenting positions. A learning goal orientation within the team may facilitate the emergence of a demographic minority as the team leader, thus sending a strong message about the value of “difference” within the team. A transformational leadership style focusing on vision and innovation may prove to be useful.

The team leader must determine when deep level cognitive processing is required and when such activity is unnecessary. While it may seem easy to distinguish between routine and complex decisions, appearances may be deceiving. Scratching the surface of a routine decision may reveal complexities that were not immediately obvious. Skilled leadership is essential to reaping the benefits of reliance on work teams. S. Gayle Baugh See also Conformity; Creativity and Innovation; Diversity; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70, 1–70. doi:10. 1037/h0093718 Levine, J. M., & Tindale, R. S. (2015). Social influence in groups. In M. Muklincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), APA handbook of personality and social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 3–54). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/14342-001 Martin, R., & Hewstone, M. (2008). Majority versus minority influence, message processing, and attitude change: The source-context-elaboration model. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 237–326. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(07)00005-6 Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London: Academic Press. Nemeth, C. J. (1986). Differential contributions of majority and minority influence. Psychological Review, 93, 23–32. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.93.1.23 Zhang, D., Lowry, P. B., Zhou, L., & Fu, X. (2007). The impact of individualism-collectivism, social presence, and group diversity on group decision-making under majority influence. Journal of Management Information Systems, 23, 53–80. doi:10.2753/ MIS0742-1222230404

MANHATTAN PROJECT The effort led by the United States to develop and use atomic bombs in World War II, known as the Manhattan Project, has come to be recognized as

Manhattan Project

one of the most impressive military–industrial– scientific–governmental collaborations of all time. It advanced what was essentially laboratory-scale and pilot-scale science and technology into a nation-spanning new industry in an extremely short amount of time—roughly three years. It did so through the coordinated labor of more than 500,000 people, including thousands of scientists and technicians, spread out at dozens of sites across the country. Organizing this effort, under conditions of strictest secrecy, required extraordinary leadership and management techniques. Its success in producing three useable nuclear weapons by the late summer of 1945 (one tested in New Mexico in July, two dropped on Japanese cities in early August), combined with the historical attribution of the end of World War II to their use (historians still debate the exact role of the atomic bombs versus other forces), have meant that the Manhattan Project has long been invoked as a model for desired large-scale scientificindustrial efforts for a large number of nonnuclear endeavors, including but not limited to climate change-related mitigation and vaccine development. This entry describes the decision to make, build, and use the atomic bomb, and examines the effects leadership styles had in each of those stages of the Manhattan Project.

Deciding to Make the Atomic Bomb The atomic bomb was based on a scientific discovery (nuclear fission) that had been made by German-Austrian scientists in late 1938. Over the course of 1939, news of this work spread rapidly across the globe, and scientists in numerous countries quickly realized that it might be possible to use it to produce nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons. Many of these scientists petitioned their governments for resources and coordination of effort on this topic as a consequence. In the United States, the brilliant but eccentric physicist Leo Szilard, a Hungarian e´ migr´e and refugee from the Nazis, feared that Nazi Germany may be pursuing such a weapon and would use it with impunity as part of their campaign of global conquest. Knowing that his own obscurity would likely hinder his attempts at getting aid, he enlisted his much more famous friend, Albert Einstein, to

607

write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, imploring the latter to take this matter seriously. Roosevelt, receiving the letter through an intermediary, authorized the creation of a modest Advisory Committee on Uranium, based in the National Bureau of Standards, to help coordinate the national effort to evaluate whether nuclear technology was a short-term threat. The Advisory Committee on Uranium, as this first organization was known, was not exceptionally effective. Among other issues it had, its director, Lyman Briggs, was viewed by many as ineffectual, unenergized, and overly preoccupied by secrecy. Little was done from its creation in 1939 until 1941. Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who had been the vice president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) prior to heading the Carnegie Institution, convinced President Roosevelt to create two new organizations in succession, each with increasing powers, to organize American scientific work for defensive purposes. The National Defense Research Committee (1940) and the Office for Scientific Research and Development (1941), both of which were run by Bush, were created by presidential executive orders according to Bush’s fear that the winner of World War II (which the United States was not yet formally involved in when they were created) would be the nation that could best exploit its scientific workforce. The work of the Uranium Committee had been absorbed as “Sections” of Bush’s organizations. Bush was himself initially quite lukewarm on the prospects of nuclear fission, seeing it, like several other scientist-administrators who were not directly connected to the research, as being an area filled with many uncertainties, risks, and, above all, room for maturation at a normal pace. There was no great reason, he judged in early 1941, to divert much-needed resources to something that would not likely become a major force for a decade or more. Stimulation from abroad changed the situation dramatically, however. A group of British scientists looking at the same problem had come to the conclusion that if a very purified form of the isotope uranium-235 could be isolated from natural uranium in modest quantities, then it would be very straightforward to turn that into a very

608

Manhattan Project

powerful explosive. The British scientists judged that the United States and Germany both had the industrial capacity to do the work of isotopic separation on a large scale within a few years’ time. This conclusion was sent to Briggs, the head of the Uranium Committee, with the intent on generating more American interest in the problem. Briggs apparently filed the report in a drawer and showed it to no one else. In mid-1941, after no response was evident, an emissary from the British group visited several major American scientists connected with the uranium work in the United States to inquire as to what had happened. Making an end-run around Briggs, he convinced Bush, as well as several other prominent national physicists, that nuclear weapons were much more feasible than they had realized, and that they may be in a race for an atomic bomb with Nazi Germany. Bush was sufficiently motivated by this to orchestrate what was in effect a coup, removing the work on fission from the control of the Uranium Committee and putting it into the hands of a new group, the S-1 Section, whose purpose was to build pilot-scale facilities that would test the feasibility of a crash program. This effort coincided with a greater scientific interest in the possibility of building nuclear reactors to produce another, different form of fuel for a weapon: plutonium-239. By mid-1942, Bush and his collaborators were convinced that with a large-but-not-exceptional expense ($400 million 1942 USD), the United States could have functional nuclear weapons in a matter of a few years. He was also convinced that the odds were high that the Germans were engaged in an effort of similar magnitude, and that if the United States failed to develop its own nuclear weapons, it would be put in an untenable position should the Germans succeed. Bush took this proposal to President Roosevelt and inquired whether it was time to engage the services of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct the massive industrial facilities that would be necessary to accomplish the creation of the weapons, and to essentially scale the work up to the level of a crash production project. Roosevelt approved the proposal, and allocated funds from a “black” (discretionary, secret) budget toward these ends. He also urged that “absolute secrecy” be

preserved, more so than on other secret wartime projects, and made clear that the circle of government officials who knew about the work would be kept deliberately small. Thus began the Manhattan Project, and the true decision to build useable atomic bombs during World War II had been made.

The Building of the Atomic Bomb The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was the branch of the U.S. military concerned with construction. As the atomic bomb project would be mostly concerned with building large industrial facilities for the production of fissile material, it was a natural choice to go with the Corps of Engineers to lead the project. The Office of Scientific Research and Development would serve as the primary civilian agency involved, facilitating the manpower requirements for scientists and technicians, as well as providing connections to dozens of universities across the country. Bush and the other principals understood that if this “crash” program was going to succeed, it would need decisive leadership at the very top. The initial head of the Manhattan Engineer District, the part of the Corps of Engineers created to run the project, was not attentive or aggressive enough by Bush’s judgment. He urged a search for a new leader, one who would pursue this with the same spirit that Bush and the other scientistadministrators who had lobbied for it believed it deserved. The person who ended up being tapped for the job in the fall of 1942 was Colonel Leslie R. Groves, a West Point-trained engineer who had previously overseen the construction of the new War Department headquarters, the Pentagon, which was then the largest office building under one roof in the entire world. Groves’s logistical capabilities were clearly evident, and he had a reputation for doggedly pursuing his desired outcomes. He was able to secure the highest priority rating for the project, so that he would be able to adequately requisition the resources, both human and material, necessary for success. Once in charge of the project, it became clear to all around him that Groves could live with nothing less than its total success. He utterly invested

Manhattan Project

himself in the work and made an enemy of anyone who he thought was standing in his way. His leadership style was that of the bully: he was blunt, angry, and badgering. His immediate military subordinate, Kenneth D. Nichols, famously described Groves’s management style in his memoirs in contradictory terms. Groves was, “the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for,” Nichols wrote. “He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. . . He is the most egotistical man I know.” Importantly, Nichols added: “He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make difficult, timely decisions. . . . He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision. He abounds with energy and expects everyone to work as hard or even harder than he does.” Nichols concluded by emphasizing that “if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss I would pick General Groves” (Nichols, 1987, p. 108). Groves met with several scientific principals involved in the work, in part to seek out an overall scientific leader of the endeavor. He met J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist then teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer had been pulled into the uranium work some time before it had become the Manhattan Project, helping with calculations relating to the theory of how a nuclear weapon would work. Oppenheimer was a popular teacher, and known to be an impressive mind, but he had essentially no formal leadership experience and no proven capability to manage large projects. Thus, it was considered quite surprising to others involved when, after Groves met him, he asked Oppenheimer to head the new secret laboratory that was being planned for centralizing the most sensitive aspects of weapons research. As the head of what would become Project Y, the Los Alamos laboratory, Oppenheimer would also be the scientific director of the overall Manhattan Project—a role of considerable responsibility and delegation. In choosing Oppenheimer, Groves deliberately avoided other potentially more attractive choices, such as Oppenheimer’s Berkeley colleague Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel Prize winner with extensive experience as the director of a large physics laboratory.

609

What made Groves make the choice of Oppenheimer? Historians have identified several factors, based partially on Groves’s own explanations, but also other aspects that might have played into the equation. Groves himself identified Oppenheimer’s obvious and wide-ranging intelligence as a primary factor: Oppenheimer was a polymathic genius, and he had the ability to hold the entirety of the Manhattan Project’s technical problems in his head. He also was a “scientist’s scientist”: his lack of management and administrative experience, and his research focus on abstract theoretical physics, gave him certain credentials with other scientists that “scientistadministrators” (like Bush or Lawrence) did not. For Groves, this kind of choice was a clever one, as Groves himself was aware that he would likely have an antagonistic relationship with academic scientists, regarding them as prima donnas. Oppenheimer seemed only interested in the ultimate success of the project. Despite their apparent differences in background and intellectual temperament, Oppenheimer and Groves proved to be a powerful pair. The work of the Manhattan Project proved to be much more difficult and challenging than had been initially appreciated in 1942, when it was authorized. The costs ballooned to $2 billion USD (1945) by the end of the project, and so did the size of the labor force. Los Alamos was planned to have a few thousand people at the site, but ended up with more than 10,000 employees. The work of building and debugging the production sites for fissile materials turned out to be much bigger than expected: the ultimate size of the active labor force on the project peaked in 1944 at more than 120,000 people, but because of high rates of turnover, the total number of people who worked on the project was more than 500,000. These high rates of turnover were caused in part by the unpleasant working conditions at the remote production sites, but also by the secrecy that was imposed upon them. Groves believed that the “heart of security” was the policy of compartmentalization, or the “need to know” approach to information: every worker was meant to know the minimum amount of information necessary to do their job, and no more. Most of the Manhattan Project labor force had no idea that

610

Manhattan Project

they were producing nuclear weapons. As Groves and his staff realized, this created serious morale problems during wartime, when workers who had agreed to contribute to the war effort were frustrated by their apparent lack of contribution. Technical difficulties were also discovered. Plutonium-239 was planned for use in the weapons prior to any actually been produced by nuclear reactors. The first samples of reactor-grade plutonium, procured in the summer of 1944, indicated that there were unavoidable impurities that would make their planned bomb design impossible for use with that element. This necessitated a massive re-organization of the Los Alamos laboratory by Oppenheimer in order to develop a far more complex bomb design (the implosion design) that could work with plutonium (the simpler, “gun type” design was still used for the uranium-235 fuel). Groves and Oppenheimer’s desires for success were enough that they met such setbacks with redoubled resolve. They had invested enough— materially and psychologically—that they were willing to press on, even if it meant that the project ballooned in size and cost. This required a near-total avoidance of democratic transparency with the President and Secretary of War colluding in helping Groves avoid audits from Congress and other government agencies who became increasingly suspicious and alarmed by the resources going into the mysterious “Manhattan” category. Secrecy may have harmed the efficiency of the Manhattan Project, as many project scientists would argue both during it and in the postwar (the scientists in particular resented limitations on what they could know and who they could talk to), but it was absolutely enabling from an organizational standpoint.

The Use of the Bombs In the popular imagination, the question of the use of the atomic bombs was one decided upon by the new president, Harry Truman, in July 1945. In reality, Truman was very peripheral to the process: he was not exceptionally informed about the work. He had only been briefed on it after Roosevelt’s death, and even then, his understanding was much more indirect than Roosevelt’s had

been. Truman was for the most part presented with decisions already made. He could have vetoed them, presumably, but his approval was not required or sought. The decisions about how to use the atomic bombs were made by other people, notably the Interim Committee of scientists, military officers, and statesmen created and chaired by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the Target Committee, a group made up of scientists and military officers. The Interim Committee made such high-level policy decisions as the choice that the first use of the atomic bombs would be against urban areas, and the Target Committee worked out both the technical issues of how they would be deployed (i.e., as high airbursts to maximize blast damage) and developed the criteria that would lead to the selection of the specific cities as targets (e.g., based on their size, location, and the fact that they had been relatively undamaged by previous attacks, so that they could showcase the effects of the bomb). There were members of the Manhattan Project who did not want to see the first use of the atomic bombs as attacks against primarily civilian cities. Leo Szilard was particularly adamant that there would be severe political and moral hazards involved. Szilard’s conception of the atomic bomb had been as a hedge against the acquisition of such weapons by the Nazis; by the spring of 1945, however, it was clear that the Nazis would soon be out of the picture (and it had been clear by November 1944 that the Germans had made no serious effort toward building an atomic bomb of their own), and what was being contemplated was a surprise attack against the Japanese. Szilard led an effort for a petition by scientists working on the project against such a use, at least without an actionable warning to Japan first. Many of the critics of the plans were located at the University of Chicago, a major site for reactor research early in the project, but whose jobs had essentially ended by 1945 as the fruits of their work had been transferred to other sites for production purposes. Groves also transferred people from Chicago to these other sites if he deemed them to be politically acceptable to him; “troublemakers,” like Szilard, were deliberately kept at Chicago in order to isolate them.

Manhattan Project

Contradictory views to those of Groves, Stimson, Bush, and the other high-ranking members of the Manhattan Project were discouraged by both chain of command and compartmentalization, but the specific objections of Szilard and others at the University of Chicago could not be totally ignored or suppressed. The solution was to have their recommendations evaluated by a small team of scientists already involved in the creation of the bomb and the planning for its use, headed by Oppenheimer, who concluded that the only way forward was the one that had already been agreed upon. In this way, Stimson and Groves gave the appearance of deliberation without much actually being done. Ultimately, many of the operational decisions about the bombing missions were made by people on the island of Tinian, where the bombing raids were deployed against Japan. The difficulty of cross-global communication probably made this inevitable, but it was also assumed by Groves that the details of a military operation, even one of this importance, would ultimately devolve to the forces in closest to the front. The exact timing of the attacks was decided as a result of the weather forecast, considerably shrinking the period of time between the two attacks. The first attack was pushed back several days, and the second was pushed up, so that instead of a week separating them, only three days did. Kokura was meant to be the primary target, but Nagasaki was pursued instead, and the exact aiming of the second bomb was significantly different than what had been planned ahead of time. Historians have cautioned against narratives of the bombings that focus too much on the idea that they were exclusively strategic decisions made from the seats of power as a result. The story of the Manhattan Project showcases many different complex styles of leadership. Not all of them are what we would in the abstract think of as positive patterns: Groves’s approach was extremely effective for his overriding goal, which was making atomic bombs for use in war and having them play a role in the war. It was not effective for other values, such as democratic deliberation and oversight. This complexity is part of the mixed legacy of the atomic bombings, and

611

one of the reasons they remain so controversial to this day. While Groves’s leadership style was immensely successful in the specific context of World War II, and was almost certainly necessary to achieve the successes that he did, his dictatorial style was incompatible with the postwar military and the new scrutiny he was faced with, having lost his cloak of secrecy. By 1948, he had been forced into retirement. Alex Wellerstein See also Crisis Leadership; Cuban Missile Crisis; Political Leadership; Presidential Leadership

Further Readings Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. (2005). American Prometheus: The triumph and the tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York, NY: Knopf. Groueff, S. (1967). Manhattan Project: The untold story of the making of the atomic bomb. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. doi:10.1063/1.3034436 Jones, V. C. (1985). Manhattan: The Army and the atomic bomb. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Lanouette, W. (2013). Genius in the shadows: A biography of Leo Szilard, the man behind the bomb. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing. McMillan, P. J. (2005). The ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the modern arms race. New York, NY: Viking. Nichols, K. D. (1987). The road to Trinity. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company. Norris, R. S. (2002). Racing for the bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s indispensable man. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press. Reed, B. C. (2014). The history and science of the Manhattan Project. New York, NY: Springer. doi:10. 1007/978-3-642-40297-5 Sherwin, M. J. (1987). A world destroyed: Hiroshima and the origins of the arms race. New York, NY: Vintage. Thorpe, C. (2006). Oppenheimer: The tragic intellect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/ chicago/9780226798486.001.0001 Wellerstein, A. (2021). Restricted data: The history of nuclear secrecy in the United States. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/ 9780226020419.001.0001

612

Marketing Leadership

MARKETING LEADERSHIP In contemporary society, consumers are increasingly partaking in coordinated social movements. Drawing on economic, environmental, and social issues, consumers mobilize against organizations to initiate change. Consumer movements, in conjunction with other factors, create a complex context in which marketing leaders operate and must navigate on behalf of their organizations. This context is characterized by unpredictability, competing ideologies, and requires innovative approaches. Marketing leaders must strive to be responsive to consumer demands, while continuing to create value for other stakeholders and remaining profitable. In response, marketing leaders have cultivated environments and experiments to analyze emerging patterns and increased their levels of interaction with consumers. Specific strategies include cocreation of value with consumers and alignment of brand positioning with compelling moral discourses through virtue signaling. While these strategies allow marketers to leverage consumer movements to create value, they also leave them open to criticism. This entry characterizes the complex context created by consumer movements, explores the strategies marketing leaders use to create value, and discusses the criticisms they face.

the broader public. Movements must translate their vision into a collective identity, allowing members to make movement affiliation a part of their individual identities. Due to their collective opposition of dominant market forces, logics, and cultures, movements often form a basis for countercultural communities, tribes, and subcultures.

Resistant vs. Activist Movements Consumer movements can be resistant or activist in nature. Resistance is a form of opposition to dominant market forces, which aims to passively influence consumer choices through introspection. Resistant consumers hinder the achievement of organizational objectives by rejecting products, avoiding consumption, and not participating in market exchange processes they deem to be unethical, hyper-hedonistic, or misaligned with their values. Behaviors range from using products in unintended ways, to more sustainable, reduced, and even alternative forms of consumption. In contrast, activism involves a more radical and confrontational movement. Activist movements aggressively challenge the meaning of advertising, marketing practices, brands, organizations, the market, and even consumption itself. Consumer activism is underpinned by desire for change, protection of consumer rights, ethical and moral values, and an interest in the public good.

Consumer Movements

Tactical Repertoire of Movements

Social movements involve conscious, resolute, and persistent action by organized groups of consumers that strive for societal change around issues of identity, social justice, quality of life, and consumption, outside of conventional means. A sub-category of social movements, consumer movements strive to transform various elements of social order regarding consumption and marketing, providing a counterforce to corporate greed, social injustice, misaligned corporate values, and other corporate misconduct. They focus media attention on unethical practices, shift political conversations, and force organizations to change. Effective mobilization of a consumer movement relies on its ability to collectively articulate grievances and a vision for change that resonates with

To be successful, consumer movements must develop a tactical repertoire, or a way of organizing dramatized public performances to draw attention to their cause, encourage others to participate, and force organizations to change. These tactics comprise three categories. Firstly, consumers engage in subversion of marketing messages by mocking, parodying, or changing their meaning. Examples include sharing memes or creating spoof advertising. Secondly, they engage in retaliatory behaviors such as expressing dissatisfaction, disrupting marketing activities, or spreading negative word of mouth. Examples include posting antagonistic messages on brand social media pages, writing spiteful reviews, or initiating boycotts. Finally, consumers attempt to

Marketing Leadership

sabotage, attack, or harm brands without seeking a resolution. Examples include crashing a brand website or submitting offensive content into online competitions.

Online Brand Scrutiny The internet and social media have made it easier to engage in consumer movements. Brands are more visible than ever on social media pages, company websites, and other channels. Consumers monitor how brands behave, how they interact with customers, and how they respond to movement tactics. The online environment allows consumers to engage in collective action on a global scale with minimal effort. By creating and sharing content, liking, commenting, or being involved in other forms of interaction, anyone can participate in a consumer movement. In addition, consumers have access to information about an organization’s past behavior, allowing them to scrutinize every action. The ability of consumer movements to mobilize online creates increasing pressure on marketing leaders to respond, neutralize threats, and find innovative ways of creating value for stakeholders. One of the most popular strategies is value cocreation. Value Cocreation

In 2004, Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch proposed that the dominant logic of marketing was shifting from a focus on goods, to a focus on services. Goods dominant logic (GDL) suggests the purpose of exchange is to make, distribute, and sell goods, whereby production processes embed value in goods, and price is determined by a consumer’s willingness to pay. In contrast, service dominant logic (SDL) argues exchange is based on services. Goods act as “service delivery vehicles,” and the application of knowledge and skill that creates value is the source of competitive advantage. As such, value is created through the combined efforts of organizations, employees, customers, and other stakeholders within a marketplace exchange, and decided by the customer during use. For example, a motor vehicle only has value through combining a manufacturer’s production processes with the driver’s private (driving skills) and public (roads)

613

resources, when driving. With “value in use” as the focal point of the value creation, knowledge and skill is contributed by all participants, including organizations, employees, and consumers. Therefore, the producer–consumer distinction vanishes, and all contributors cocreate value.

How Value Is Cocreated Marketing leaders cocreate value with consumers by engaging in dialogue at every stage of the customer journey. This helps marketers to understand the consumer’s point of view, needs, desires, and brand interactions, to cocreate offerings that provide value for consumers and the organization. Examples of how consumers contribute to value cocreation include submitting ideas for new products in online competitions, volunteering to test concepts or samples, participating in market research, or becoming part of a brand community that engages in discussion about the brand. Consumers also help to cocreate value in less visible ways, including being anonymously tracked online to improve website experiences, or subscribing to loyalty programs so their experiences can be personalized based on historical data, among other examples. Even consumer movements that challenge the organization in a conflictual manner can help to cocreate value. Resistant or activist consumer movements can send a powerful message to marketing leaders about how their brands are perceived by the broader public. Accordingly, marketing leaders can incorporate this feedback into their products, services, offerings, advertising, brand positioning, or corporate reputations to realign the values of the organization with its target audience. For example, if an organization endures a consumer boycott due to its impact on climate change, the pressure created by the movement may force the organization to re-evaluate and take steps to improve its corporate reputation. While cocreation generates value for consumers and organizations, it also attracts criticism.

Appropriation of Consumer Movements A critical stream of literature suggests marketers leverage value cocreation to turn consumer

614

Marketing Leadership

movements into increased competitive advantage and profit. This process is referred to as appropriation or co-optation. In essence, each time a new consumer movement or counterculture arises, attracting substantial participation, marketers identify these emerging consumer groups as new and profitable market segments. By understanding their values, ideologies, and needs, marketers create new products, services, brands, and advertising messages to appeal to them. Consumers taking part in the countercultural movements are drawn to the value provided by these new offerings as part of their countercultural identitybuilding projects. In turn, the countercultural movement, and those participating in it, are gradually appropriated back into the mainstream marketplace. Therefore, even though consumer movements intend to disrupt the power structures of advertising, brands, organizations, and the market, they are inadvertently co-opted by marketers through value cocreation, fueling capitalism, consumerism, and increased profit.

Exploitation of Consumer Labor Critical scholars have also highlighted how value cocreation can lead to exploitation of raw consumer labor for profit. To illustrate, we can look to brand communities and insider programs. It is commonplace for brands to invite both loyal brand supporters and critics to participate in brand communities. Members discuss different aspects of the brand, offering, advertising, and other facets in detail. They spend significant amounts of time interacting, typically on a volunteer basis, and without remuneration. They passionately debate their likes and dislikes, suggest ideas for change, and even develop their own versions of brand offerings. These tensions, discussions, new creative ideas, and suggestions for improvement are all captured by the brand on an ongoing basis. While this process creates value for consumers, it also ensures the organization has a constant stream of raw labor input, in the form of creative ideas, which it uses to refine its offerings and brand positioning. This allows the organization to improve its competitive advantage and drive profits. Therefore, while value cocreation has been a successful strategy for navigating the complexities

created by consumer movements, it has been criticized for its opportunistic and exploitative effects. Another strategy used by marketing leaders is virtue signaling. Virtue Signaling

Consumers are becoming increasingly cynical about how brands are contributing to overcoming the economic, environmental, and social challenges facing society. In response to shifting consumer attitudes, marketing leaders are building brand identities and communications campaigns that align the organization’s moral position with its customers. This strategy is referred to as virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is the articulation of an organization’s moral position, which implies its integrity and enhances its standing, without explicitly stating it is virtuous. Signaling virtue allows marketing leaders to align their brands with economic, environmental, and social causes, which are important to their target audience of consumers. It implies the brand has a purpose that goes beyond simply selling their market offerings for profit. Typically, virtue signaling garners publicity through mainstream media coverage and virality on social media. Brand virtue signaling is omnipresent. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many brands ran advertising campaigns containing virtue signaling messages. Some campaigns urged consumers to follow stay-at-home orders, employ hygiene practices, socially distance, wear masks, check-in to physical locations, and get vaccinated. Others contained messages of solidarity, camaraderie, information about the pandemic, and thanked consumers and employees for their efforts in overcoming the crisis. However, with consumers becoming increasingly cynical about brand motives, interpretations of brand virtue signaling attempts vary, from being perceived as authentic and truthful to allegations of insincerity and moral grandstanding.

Moral Grandstanding Though marketing leaders can create value by aligning their organizations with social causes,

Me Too Movement

ultimately, their role is to drive growth, revenue, and profit. As such, positioning an organization as virtuous is a challenging and paradoxical task, as these attempts could be met with accusations of duplicity and moral grandstanding. A pejorative term for virtue signaling, moral grandstanding is defined as engaging in discourse that aims to convince others one is morally respectable, with the goal of enhance one’s own social standing and reputation. Thus, aligning an organization with economic, environmental, and social causes could be seen as a superficial attempt to resonate with its target audience and sell more products and services. When an organization signals virtue, consumers can conduct research into its historical behavior and make judgments about whether its virtue signaling is sincere. For example, pharmaceutical companies who signal virtue by highlighting their role in developing COVID-19 vaccines could be accused of moral grandstanding if consumers discover they charge exorbitant prices for other medications. In summary, marketing leaders operate within complex contexts. On one hand, they are confronted with increasing participation in consumer movements based on economic, environmental, and social issues. On the other, they must continue to create value for consumers, their organization, and various stakeholders. While value cocreation and virtue signaling are two powerful response strategies, they face growing criticism for being opportunistic, exploitative, and superficial mechanisms for generating profit. Vlad Demsar See also Behavioral Economics; Communication; Corporate Social Responsibility; Ethical Consumerism; Social Media

Further Readings Demsar, V., Sands, S., Campbell, C., & Pitt, L. (2021). “Unprecedented,” “extraordinary,” and “we’re all in this together”: Does advertising really need to be so tedious in challenging times? Business Horizons, 64, 415–424. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2021.02.007 Heath, J., & Potter, A. (2006). The rebel sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture. Chichester: Capstone.

615

Gabriel, Y., & Lang, T. (2015). The unmanageable consumer. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. doi:10.4135/ 9781473922044 Goodwin, J., & Jasper, J. M. (2015). Rethinking social movements: Structure, meaning, and emotion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kozinets, R. V., & Handelman, J. M. (2004). Adversaries of consumption: Consumer movements, activism, and ideology. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(3), 691–704. doi:10.1086/425104 Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76. Vargo, S. L., Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1–17. doi:10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036 Wallace, E., Buil, I., & De Chernatony, L. (2020). ‘Consuming good’ on social media: What can conspicuous virtue signaling on Facebook tell us about prosocial and unethical intentions? Journal of Business Ethics, 162(3), 577–592. doi:10.1007/s10551-0183999-7 Zwick, D., Bonsu, S. K., & Darmody, A. (2008). Putting consumers to work: Co-creation and new marketing governmentality. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 163–196. doi:10.1177/1469540508090089

ME TOO MOVEMENT The hashtag #MeToo was created by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 as a way for victims of sexual assault or harassment to use social media to indicate the prevalence of sexual misconduct. Since then, #MeToo has brought attention to the predatory conduct of several high-profile men in positions of power and drawn attention to issues of sexual misconduct in the workplace. Leaders have an important role to play in addressing sexual harassment, including creating gender equity, communicating no-tolerance policies clearly, and handling complaints quickly and effectively. In 2017, the technology of social media and some courageous media expos´es, brought a few prominent sexual misconduct cases to light using the Me Too hashtag. This exposure was facilitated by actress Alyssa Milano, who, on October 15,

616

Me Too Movement

2017, suggested that people post “#MeToo” on the social media platform Twitter if they had ever been sexually harassed or assaulted, as a means of raising awareness of the problem. Within hours of her tweet, there were over 50,000 responses. By the end of 2017, there were five million #MeToo tweets in over 200 nations. Victims, who are often disconnected by the silence of their shame, or formally by nondisclosure agreements, finally felt safe enough and free enough to share their common experiences. Many respondents also shared details. Sharing through the Me Too hashtag sometimes occurred after the significant passage of time from the victimization. People who posted were emboldened by the knowledge that they were not alone and it was not their fault. As a result, people began to realize that the same bad actor(s) may have sexually harassed a number of women.

Power Dynamics That Lead to Sexual Misconduct Work dynamics present a context where a harasser’s power could be misused with indemnity to sexually objectify a subordinate, given the harasser’s success, prestige, and level of public admiration. Targets of harassment are often vulnerable, given their youth, inexperience, or dire need to retain their job or internship to support their career or their family. One way to silence accusers is to blame the victim, especially if they are of a lower socioeconomic status than their perpetrator, or a member of a racial or ethnic minority. Although in the greater majority of instances women are targets of harassment by men, in some cases men have also been victims of sexual harassment from women and from other men. Further, women have also sexually harassed men and women. These realities are also a part of Me Too awareness. The New York Times reported in 2018 that across the United States, in roughly the year following the start of the Me Too movement, about 200 high-profile men had been held accountable for inappropriate workplace conduct. They were terminated or otherwise removed from positions where the conduct would continue. Where there was evidence of sexual assault or rape, such as in the case of movie producer Harvey

Weinstein or actor Bill Cosby, offenders were criminally charged and convicted of crimes. There are several reasons why someone in a position of authority might engage in sexual harassment. One reason is a sense of entitlement. A second reason is a blindness to the substantial power differential involved between the harasser and harassed. Another possible explanation is that valorizing workplace relationships between supervisors and subordinates is a popular convention in television and film. The media is powerful in influencing how to characterize sexual exploitation, at times ignoring clear power dynamics. The news and entertainment media send mixed messages about what is acceptable in terms of sex and consent conduct. For example, when elementary school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau began the repeated statutory rape of 12-year-old Vili Fualaau, the media often characterized the matter as a teenage love affair or forbidden love; thus minimizing the rape of an ethnic minority male by a White female. The New York Times reported in 2018 that across the United States, in roughly the year following the start of the Me Too movement, about 200 high-profile men had been held accountable for inappropriate workplace conduct. They were terminated or otherwise removed from positions where the conduct would continue. Where there was evidence of sexual assault or rape, such as in the case of movie producer Harvey Weinstein or actor Bill Cosby, offenders were criminally charged and convicted of crimes.

Leader Responsibility in Handling Workplace Sexual Misconduct Meaningful change in settings where sexual misconduct can be pervasive tends to occur after survivors become aware of other survivors, and they seek legal redress. The catalyst for these developments is often an advocate or advocacy group working with the media to shame the organization into action. However, a good leader, especially in the era of the Me Too movement, can be effective in decreasing occurrences of misconduct in the first place, and in supporting victims by dealing with complaints effectively when they do occur.

Me Too Movement

Leaders can do a great deal to change what happens in the work context with regard to the potential for sexual harassment. One strategy is to take on the long-term task of shifting the cultural environment of the workplace through creating gender equity. To be effective from a leadership perspective, those in charge must act swiftly and unwaveringly to respond to sexual harassment partly because employees watch their leaders for cues of how they should respond to situations. Leaders are responsible for the well-being of their employees at work, and messages must be consistent and clear about what is and is not acceptable conduct. Employees must be able to see their leaders as people they can trust to hear them, maintain confidences, and protect them. Leaders cannot be passive and must monitor to see that their managers do not overemphasize collegiality above safety, which could contribute to the suppression of others’ exploitation. Sexual harassment awareness trainings alone are insufficient unless there is also a requirement to report misconduct with consequences for not doing so and strict no retaliation policies for those in positions of power. To be effective in reducing sexual harassment, leaders should not question allegations publicly but rather state clearly that addressing any sexual harassment or sexual inappropriateness is a priority and that harassment will not be tolerated. Leaders must consider their public response carefully to avoid being perceived as taking sides. A failure to make a public response runs the risk of being taken as implicit condemnation of the accuser. Any public statement should include a reassertion of the firm’s policy toward sexual misconduct. The institutional response should be empathic, consider the target’s safety, and offer some choice in how the complaint is handled, but also make sure that reporting policies are followed. Leaders must also have a greater awareness of the impact of their actions and learn to regulate their own behaviors. When leaders are self-aware about the impact of their actions on others, they are more likely to not overlook such behaviors from others. For example, with regard to workplace hugging in the legal profession, it should not be the role of employees to say that hugging makes

617

them uncomfortable. Leaders should be aware enough to know this. In personal relationships, individuals are advised to receive clear agreement or consent from the other for engagement as opposed to operating with ambiguity. The idea is to shift the burden to the person with more power, often a male, to prove the “yes” rather than having the other person prove the “no.” In California, this requirement exists as an Affirmative Consent law applicable in colleges and universities. The California response reflects an acknowledgment that contexts can have longstanding norms. For decades, many university police departments and university administrators have dissuaded female victims from reporting or seeking justice if sexually assaulted or raped by a male student who was wealthy, well connected, or a successful athlete. In the absence of clear messaging by leaders, a culture that facilitates sexual aggression can persist, given the ongoing male dominance and power imbalance in many work settings. Some men have erroneously claimed that a blameless female victim would fight back or not take years to go public with a complaint. This position ignores the fact that harassers and abusers tend to not prey on women whom they perceive will fight back, but harass those who are stuck and vulnerable, with few choices in resistance given their position in the work setting. After such experiences, it could take a survivor years to be in a strong-enough position to speak up. Some men in power will convince themselves that a powerless subordinate was exercising free will when pressured. While rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are prohibited by laws and policies, they are facilitated within a heritage of patriarchy and misogyny wherein perpetrators have traditionally not been held accountable given their power and prestige. In this context, victims are not readily believed but are shamed into silence or are re-traumatized by how the system handles their case (such as reluctance to prosecute rape and scouring the victim’s character to establish if the person is a worthy victim). Sexual harassment awareness trainings alone are insufficient unless there is also a requirement to report misconduct with consequences for not doing so and strict no retaliation policies for those in positions of power.

618

Me Too Movement

Legislative Solutions and Equitable Advancement Messages against sexual harassment should be consistent and come from different sectors of society. If corporate and other work context leaders move against sexual harassment, legislative leadership can assist by supporting these efforts in laws and policies. One legal strategy is to eliminate or curtail nondisclosure agreements that include silence about sexual misconduct as a condition for employment. In 2018, sixteen states proposed such laws, and six were successful by mid-year: New York, Washington, Vermont, Arizona, Maryland, and Tennessee. Other legislative efforts have included laws that remove legal barriers to sue in misconduct cases and prevent public funds from being used to defend someone against sexual misconduct claims involving the public sector. In addition, companies with greater female representation in top leadership positions seem to have less sexual harassment. One inadvertent negative effect of Me Too is that some male leaders have elected to mentor males instead of females to avoid the possibility of being accused of being inappropriate with a female employee. Given that men dominate key positions in most companies and active male mentorship and sponsorship are important to changing the gender distribution in corporate ranks, this preference will slow down women’s ability to advance in a company. States with a higher percent of females in management, however, have lower rates of harassment charges from any gender, according to a national study by Gardner and Juban in 2019. When women lead, the work environment can be more collaborative and respectful, reflecting greater equity for female advancement and compensation parity to men. The presence of women in top leadership positions reduces gender-based power differentials that facilitate harassment. An October 2018 report in The New York Times indicated that about a half of the high-profile men who were promptly replaced after being terminated for sexual harassment in the United States were replaced by women. Camille Gibson

See also Coercive Management, Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks, Patriarchy and its Origins, Power and Powerlessness, Sexual Harassment

Further Readings Alabi, O. A. (2019). Sexual violence laws defined in the “Me Too” era: Affirmative consent and statutes of limitations. Widener Law Review, 25(1), 69–90. Beaulieu, S. (2020, August 12). Four conversations leaders in the #MeToo era should be ready for. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2020/ 08/4-conversations-leaders-in-the-metoo-era-shouldbe-ready-for Beggan, J. K. (2019). Sexual harassment, the abuse of power and the crisis of leadership: “Superstar” harassers and how to stop them. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Carlsen, A., Salam, M. Cain Miller, C., Lu, D., Ngu, A., Patel, J. K., & Wichter, Z. (2018, October 29). #Me Too brought down 201 powerful men: Nearly half of their replacements are women. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html Durham, M. G. (2021). MeToo: The impact of rape culture in the media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gardner, L., & Juban, R. (2019). State economies and women’s economic parity: How are they related to states’ sexual harassment claims before and after #MeToo? Southern Business and Economic Journal, 42(1), 25–48. Hillstrom, L. C. (2019). The #MeToo movement. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Lee, J. (2018). Passive leadership and sexual harassment: Roles of observed hostility and workplace gender ratio. Personnel Review 47(3), 594–612. doi:10.1108/PR-072016-0169 Medeiros, K., & Griffith, J. (2019). #Ustoo: How I-O psychology can extend the conversation on sexual harassment and sexual assault through workplace training. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 12(1), 1–19. doi:10.1017/iop.2018.155 Ward, S. F. (2018, June 1). Times up: As the Me Too movement continues to shed light on sexual harassment and assault, sparking changes in various industries, the legal and judicial systems have been slow to adapt. ABA Journal. Retrieved from https://www.abajournal. com/magazine/article/timesup_legal_judicial_ harassment_assault#google_vignette

Men and Masculinities

MEN

AND

MASCULINITIES

Throughout human “his”tory, leadership has been male-dominated, assumed to be “men’s work” and conflated with qualities stereotypically associated with masculinity, such as being tough, aggressive, competitive, and decisive. Although in recent years women have become more visible in senior positions, men continue to dominate leadership, especially in large corporations and in national and international politics. When people “think leader,” they still often “think male.” Men’s dominance is also evident in the frequent associations of leadership and militarism. The revered leader in many societies is he, only occasionally she, who has led the nation, be it in war, as in the case of Winston Churchill, or in national struggle, as with Nelson Mandela and Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. Even in peace time, militarism often figures prominently in leadership talk, as in the “war on terrorism” or “the war on drugs.” Despite antidiscrimination legislation in Western societies, women continue to comprise a small fraction of those occupying senior leadership and boardroom roles. In leadership studies, gendered assumptions about what effectiveness means have been largely taken for granted. The 19th century emphasis on “great men” creating change and the 20th century focus on heroic, charismatic, and transformational leaders tend to conflate leadership with men and masculinity. Studies have frequently defined leadership effectiveness in terms of being dominant, assertive, independent, authoritative, strongminded, confident, task-oriented, courageous, and adversarial. Such behaviors are not only associated primarily with men but have also become the stereotypical norm against which leaders are typically compared and measured. Although masculine assumptions are deeply embedded in leadership theory and practice, men’s persistent colonization of senior positions has rarely been an explicit topic of concern in research, in media coverage, or in everyday talk about leadership. Men and masculinities are frequently central to the study and practice of leadership, yet rarely the focus of interrogation. They remain “an absent presence.” Much of men’s leadership

619

practices, in communicating, negotiating, motivating, persuading, networking, lobbying, presenting self, and so on is not seen or noticed as gendered. Men’s practices often coincide with what is considered and counts as the usual, even “normal” way of doing leadership. This extends not only to what is said and how it is communicated, but also to the way things are done and who is included in leadership roles. This entry examines emerging insights on men, masculinities, and leadership from social constructionist and more critical perspectives. It considers how men construct masculinity in organizations within effective leadership processes, the importance of gendered power in understanding men, masculinities and leadership, and the dysfunctional consequences that can occur when men leaders’ decision-making is informed by excessively masculine ways of thinking and acting.

Constructing Men’s Leadership Masculinities Drawing on detailed discursive analysis of spoken interaction in various New Zealand workplaces, Janet Holmes and colleagues document how men “do masculinity” in leadership roles. She shows how what it means to be a leader is often to perform leadership in conventionally masculine ways. While acknowledging that women leaders may also draw on similar styles, her research revealed that these discourses were mainly and more frequently enacted by men leaders. Holmes (2009) highlights three different leadership discourse styles through which masculinity in the workplace is constructed. The Authoritative Style: Leader as Hero

The hero leader adopts a powerful and controlling interactional style, for example, in tightly controlling the management of meetings with a structured agenda, the overt allocation of speaking turns, close control of topics by asking questions, and the avoidance of digressions. Hero leaders also adopt a tough approach to problem-solving and decision-making, explicitly criticizing others and disagreeing directly and publicly. Holmes argues that by controlling the topic and the way interactions develop, hero leaders construct

620

Men and Masculinities

powerful and authoritative masculine identities oriented to both transactional goals and more relational aims of enacting authority and establishing leadership status. The Paternalistic Style: Leader as Father

The fatherly leader attends to the emotional needs of subordinates, defending them from criticism, tolerating misbehavior, and generally adopting a paternalistic approach. Holmes highlights how in Maori culture family values are paramount and a paternalistic approach by male leaders is culturally appropriate. Protecting the welfare and interests of younger employees, Maori leaders in Maori companies provide employees under stress with support going well beyond what would be expected of a leader. Holmes found that this sympathetic and mentoring style was especially likely to be enacted by older men leaders in relation to younger women employees. The Egalitarian Style: Leader as Good Bloke or Mate

More commonly enacted in interactions between men at work, the “good bloke” identity emphasizes that leaders are mates and equals with employees. These leaders play down differences by dressing informally to work (e.g., shorts and sandals) and speaking in casual and informal ways (e.g., using culturally appropriate language and by swearing). Emphasizing solidarity with subordinates, they use humor in self-deprecating ways and demonstrate a willingness to be the butt of subordinates’ joking and teasing. Holmes notes that as a feature of the way that men frequently talk in informal and egalitarian settings, swearing is often used by men as a way of displaying toughness and manhood to other men. Through these three discourses, men in senior positions construct masculine identities in workplace interactions in ways that effectively combine transactional and relational demands of their leadership role. All the men selected in Holmes’s research were positively evaluated by colleagues as effective leaders. Holmes argues that the ways leaders do masculinity relate to this challenge of integrating transactional and relational aspects of performance.

However, by no means is all leadership effective, and not all masculinities are empowering. To examine the other side of this leadership coin— where leadership is less effective and masculinity more oppressive—the next sections consider critical perspectives on gender and leadership. This diverse and heterogenous field reveals how power in all its hierarchical and gendered forms may be exercised in dysfunctional and oppressive ways.

Deconstructing Men’s Leadership Masculinities Feminist studies constitute the major influence in developing critical analyses of gender and leadership. Challenging taken-for-granted views that White, middle-aged men are inevitably the people in charge who create visions and make decisions, feminist studies demonstrate that gender is an important source of power and influence typically embedded in organizational structures, cultures, and practices. They show how romanticized notions of the heroic, “tough,” “strong,” and “charismatic” leader are often saturated with images and assumptions of men and masculinity. Feminist research explores possible differences in styles between women and men leaders and the organizational barriers and intersectional disadvantages that women face in climbing maledominated hierarchies. Studies document how the comparatively few women who achieve hierarchical progress can be made to feel uncomfortable in male-dominated cultures, often having to cope with intense scrutiny (of their bodies, clothes, and physical appearance), sexual innuendo and sexist joking, and sexual harassment. Research has found that women leaders can feel isolated, excluded, and continuously tested on masculine criteria of success such as toughness, political skill, and total commitment. Others document how aspiring women’s strategies of either resisting or trying to blend into male-dominated leadership cultures were ineffective. Women leaders can feel compelled to “act like a man,” working long hours, being totally committed to the organization, and being “tough,” “hard,” and at times aggressive. While feminist research has tended to focus on women’s experience of male-dominated leadership

Men and Masculinities

cultures, critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM) more explicitly examine the gendered nature of men and masculinity—they “name men as men” (Collinson & Hearn, 1994). Informed by feminist scholarship, CSMM link the social construction of masculinity to questions of gendered power and identity. Studies recognize that masculinity is neither universal nor monolithic but can take multiple forms related to intersecting inequalities and may also vary across transnational organizations and societies. The term “multiple masculinities” denotes the diverse and intersecting character of men’s dominant power and status in organizations. CSMM reveal how the category “man” takes different forms and how “hegemonic” (e.g., White, heterosexual, affluent) and other “subordinate” masculinities—complicit, subordinated, marginalized, and resistant (e.g., Black, gay, working class)—typically inform gendered power relations, including leadership, management, and followership. Adopting a specific, rather than implicit or incidental, focus on men and masculinities, CSMM examine how men’s power and identity are produced through material and symbolic differences. For many men, work continues to be a primary site for identity construction and of “masculinity contests.” Seeking to prove they are powerful and tough, men often compete for dominance and status, particularly through strategies that seek to show no weakness, demonstrate strength and stamina, put work first, and engage in dog eat-dog hyper-competition. These gendered workplace contests are also very much about White masculinity: hegemonic masculinity is typically defined not only by male but also White supremacy. CSMM show how hegemonic masculinity can shape dominant leadership models, values, styles, language, cultures, relations, identities, and practices in ways that subordinate women and other men and masculinities. Leadership masculinities can be hegemonic within organizations in many different ways. Leaders enjoy comparatively high salaries and ancillary remuneration packages through share options, company cars, pensions, extensive holiday entitlements, as well as other material and symbolic benefits such as large offices and administrative support. Even when they are

621

dismissed, executives may receive substantial “golden handshakes,” and poor performance does not seem to prevent reemployment in other lucrative, senior positions. In organizations where the CEO is also the owner (and possibly the founder), gendered power relations can be especially asymmetrical and gendered. Associations between “self-made men” and entrepreneurial masculinities are particularly strong and frequent. Equally, the ownership of many businesses is still often passed from one generation to the next, with sons often inheriting firms from fathers. The social reproduction of patriarchal authority can thus perpetuate men’s dominance of leadership.

Exploring Masculinity in Leadership Decision-Making Decision-making is a key aspect of leadership. It is also an important way that leaders exercise power and influence, for good or ill. While leaders’ decisions are assumed to be rational and balanced, critical research on gender in organizations suggests that in practice this is by no means always the case. Critical studies reveal that, firstly, different masculine assumptions can shape leaders’ strategic thinking and, secondly, decisions can be so informed by excessive masculinities that judgments become dysfunctional. Research has shown that men leaders can make unlawful selection and promotion decisions that discriminate against highly qualified and experienced women candidates, while privileging male applicants. One study found that men in senior positions frequently selected in their own image (“homosocial reproduction”) in ways that excluded women and reproduced an all-male leadership elite. Men were appointed to senior positions because they were perceived to be more reliable, committed, and predictable, as well as free from conflicting loyalties between home and work. Another study describes how U.S. male corporate leaders expected pregnant women managers to organize Caesarean operations to fit in with the launch date of new products. Research in U.S. courts describes how legal decision-making is shaped by masculine assumptions and practices. The study outlines how male lawyers act as

622

Men and Masculinities

“Rambo litigators” seeking to dominate through intimidation within the adversarial culture of dispute resolution. Women litigators who adopted similar strategies were denigrated, whereas women who were more supportive were seen as “too soft” and compliant. Critical studies also reveal that men in senior positions can make particularly flawed decisions when cases of men’s sexuality emerge in organizations. Research has found that men’s (hetero) sexuality often remains dominant in organizations and is sometimes accepted and privileged in workplaces, for example on all-male shopfloors. Studies also show that in some cases, men leaders may use their position of authority to begin and maintain a sexual relationship with a woman employee (often, but not always in a subordinate position). In other cases, men may use their (hetero)sexuality to try to maintain control, particularly in situations where individual women enter male-dominated areas. Raising questions about how men in senior positions respond, research has found that men leaders may prefer to “turn a blind eye” and view men’s sexuality as “normal,” “natural,” and unproblematic. Relatedly, studies have shown that men in senior positions can misjudge and misunderstand not only what constitutes sexual harassment, but also the most effective ways to respond to specific claims. Research suggests that the initial response of men leaders can again be to try to defuse, rationalize, and normalize. Shared masculinities between leader and accused can result in the former seeking to protect the perpetrator and to blame the victim. Some men leaders try to control or limit claims of sexual harassment, particularly by instigating highly informal resolution processes, rather than deal with matters openly and formally. Women’s skepticism that their claims of harassment will be dealt with seriously, professionally, and sympathetically by men in authority remains a critically important barrier to disclosure. The global financial sector is heavily maledominated and men financiers’ risky behavior was highlighted by the global financial crash of 2007–08. Male executives’ hubristic masculinities resulted in a collective cultural failure to recognize that expanding credit to people who could not afford to repay, to aggregate their debts into

mortgage bonds, and then sell these sub-prime mortgages to other financial organizations was an extremely dangerous strategy. The result was huge corporate losses for some, the collapse of famous, longstanding financial organizations, while companies “too big to fail” had to be bailed out by governments. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) acquisition of the Dutch Bank ABN Amro exemplifies how hubristic masculinity and excessive risk-taking can characterize executive decisions. Although in 2007 this was the biggest banking takeover in history, this decision was made without undertaking normal procedures of due diligence. Occurring just as the global liquidity crisis began to bite, the deal fundamentally weakened the RBS balance sheet, not only because of the size of the acquisition, but also because of ABN’s significant exposure to the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. Consequently, RBS had to be bailed out by the U.K. government and in 2022 the bank was still owned by the state. Other research has found that men leaders’ masculine perceptions and preconceptions can legitimize high risk-taking and reckless decisionmaking, sometimes with lethal consequences. The tragically flawed decision-making by MortonThiokol executives that led to the Challenger disaster is a case in point. Research reveals that the all-male executive team overruled engineering advice about the threat to safety in launching the shuttle in very cold conditions, defining this as “an acceptable risk.” Executives used previously successful launches to rationalize high risk-taking while also suggesting they were in control by suppressing doubt, fear, and uncertainty. Focusing narrowly on the task—“to get Challenger up”—they suppressed any consideration that human beings were on the shuttle. Their high-risk decisions revealed a masculine indifference to its human consequences. The tragedy of the Challenger shuttle exemplifies the disastrous organizational and social consequences that can result from the continued male hegemony of leadership positions and the masculine tendency to underestimate risk in decision-making.

Future Directions This entry has addressed the significant but neglected inter-relationships between men,

Military Leadership

masculinities, and leadership. Having discussed the ways that men leaders construct masculinity, it considered more critical perspectives that explicitly question the gendered nature of power dynamics and revealed how men leaders’ judgment can be clouded by traditional masculine assumptions, leading to dysfunctional outcomes. Much of the critical literature explores the detrimental effects of masculine control and more research is needed, for example, on the connections between men’s hubris, the abuse of power (e.g., fraud and other forms of corruption), and leadership masculinities. While these are indeed significant themes for future research, it is equally important for critical studies to acknowledge and address the changing nature of men, masculinities, and leadership, including their “positive,” more caring and progressive potential. For example, it is possible that the “#metoo” movement could have transformative effects producing new forms of more gendersensitive and inclusive leadership, thus impacting positively on the ways that men do leadership. Having said that, global, transnational political regimes have in recent times seen a re-emergence of a new form of “strongman leadership.” This retrogressive reappearance of “the great man” theory of leadership in the new guise of global masculine authoritarianism makes the development of critical analyses of men, masculinities, and leadership an even more pressing concern. David L. Collinson See also Bad Leadership; CEO Hubris; Critical Leadership Studies; Diversity; Feminism; Gender Stereotypes; Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth; Implicit Leadership Theories; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020). Strongmen: How they rise, why they succeed, how they fall. London: Profile Books. Berdahl, J. L., Cooper, M., Glick, P., Livingston, R. W., & Williams, J. C. (2018). Work as masculinity contest. Journal of Social Issues, 74, 422–448. doi:10.1111/josi. 12289 Collinson, D. L., & Hearn, J. (1994). Naming men as men: Implications for work, organization and management. Gender, Work and Organization, 1(1), 2–22. doi:10. 1111/j.1468-0432.1994.tb00002.x

623

Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Hearn, J., & Collinson, D. L. (2018). Men, masculinities and gendered organizations. In R. Aldag & S. Nkomo (Eds.), Oxford research encyclopedia of business and management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://business.oxfordre.com/view/10. 1093/acrefore/9780190224851.001.0001/acrefore9780190224851-e-55 Holmes, J. (2009). Men, masculinities and leadership: Different discourse styles at work. In P. Pichler & E. Eppler (Eds.), Gender and spoken interaction (pp. 186–210). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10. 1057/9780230280748_9 Maier, M., & Messerschmidt, J. (1998). Commonalities, conflicts and contradictions in organizational masculinities: Exploring the gendered genesis of the Challenger disaster. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 35(3), 325–344. doi:10.1111/j.1755618X.1998.tb00726.x

MILITARY LEADERSHIP In Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, the United States Army defines military leadership as “the activity of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization” (U.S. Army, 2019, pp. 1–13). While this definition accurately locates influencing people at the center of modern military leadership, it is deceptively simplistic. As societies and the wars they wage have evolved over time, military leadership has become an increasingly complex endeavor that defies simple definitions. The skills and attributes needed for effective military leadership at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war are somewhat distinct and not necessarily complementary. Effective leadership at one level does not always translate to effective leadership at another level. Distinctions between leadership at the three levels of war appear at various points throughout this entry. The tactical level of war resides at the knife’s edge. It is the level at which commanders and soldiers fight battles and engagements. The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) is an

624

Military Leadership

example of the tactical level of war. The operational level of war is the level at which militaries arrange and wage a series of tactical movements and engagements logically connected in time and space in order to achieve a common unifying objective. The operational level of war deals with campaigns rather than battles. An example of the operational level of war is not just the D-Day invasion (June 6, 1944), but the entire Normandy Campaign (June 6, 1944–August 30, 1944) in the Second World War. The strategic level of war is the level at which political leaders and the highest echelons of militaries employ and arrange military ways and means to achieve political objectives. Looking again at the Second World War, the generals and admirals of the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff who apportioned forces between and approved campaign objectives for the European, Pacific, and China-Burma-India theaters of war operated at the strategic level of war. This entry considers military leadership in both its historical and modern contexts. It opens with a brief survey of military leadership in ancient, medieval, and early-modern periods, then discusses military leadership during the 19th and 20th centuries. During the historical discussion, “military leadership” refers nearly exclusively to leadership of forces meant to engage in ground combat, as both human flight and a commonly accepted absence of distinction between military and naval forces is a surprisingly recent development. The essay then turns to a brief discussion of modern military leadership and new pathways for military leadership given emerging trends in warfare and technology.

Historical Context The dynamics of military leadership are not constant. They have shifted over time according to political, social, cultural, and technological circumstances. Accordingly, this entry makes generalizations about military leadership during specified periods of time. These generalizations reflect prevailing trends in military leadership within the most powerful militaries within a given period of time but are not truths universally applicable to all militaries during that period of time.

The best military leaders in ancient times possessed political acumen and tactical prowess in equal measure. The relationship between military power and political power was often reciprocal, with advances in one leading to elevation in the other. Military leaders among the ancients were often political elites in their respective societies, or even kings and emperors. They were able to lead polities and armies simultaneously because ancient warfare usually was characterized by short, brutal engagements. A continuous, 10-year-long siege as described in the Iliad was an impossibility given the insurmountable logistical burden to sustain armies in the field for that long without centralized systems and infrastructure on par with the Roman Empire, and the political risks entailed in deploying armies away from one’s home territory for lengthy campaigns. Ancient commanders had every reason to seek decisive victories in short campaigns often limited to a single major engagement, or to die trying. In keeping with their status as elites in rigidly hierarchical societies, they led by compulsion rather than persuasion or negotiation. They also led by conspicuous example. Given comparatively small field armies in closed, tightly controlled formations armed with edged weapons, ancient battlefields were small enough that commanders could keep their entire armies within view and keep themselves in view of most of their armies. Ancient military leaders were therefore often personally engaged on the battlefield at enormous personal risk. Perhaps because of this, and also because natural limits on ancient logistical infrastructure produced comparatively small field armies by modern standards, ancient leaders were confident that they could regenerate forces in the event of catastrophic defeat, and often were perfectly willing to hazard the loss of entire armies in the pursuit of victory in a decisive battle. Apart from risk calculus, these dynamics remained in place for much of the medieval period. Although shifting political alliances and improvements in various technology and infrastructure needed to project power enabled more military actors to project power at greater distances and for longer durations, political acumen and military prowess continued to lie at the heart of effective military leadership. Kings and nobles routinely led

Military Leadership

military forces manned by compulsory service, deriving their authority from their royal or feudal mandates. Their armies fought primarily with edged weapons on relatively small battlefields, causing army commanders to accept similar levels of personal risk as their ancient forebears, generally for the same reasons. At the same time, this period saw the rise of a professional military class whose loyalty, proficiency, and readiness were expensive to maintain. As a result, commanders became more likely to give sufficient weight to assessments of risk to their forces to allow those assessments to shape battle and campaign plans. While they still sought decisive victories on the battlefield, medieval leaders were less willing to risk catastrophic defeat unless they faced a truly existential threat. Throughout the early-modern period and nearly the entire 18th century, the rise of the nation-state, continuing trends in military professionalization, evolving military technology, and the changing economics of warfare shifted the nature of military leadership. With the rise of the nation-state and increasingly robust government bureaucracies, military leaders came to be seen as a distinct professional class requiring a distinct body of knowledge. Status as a political or social elite did still shape the terms—and rank—by which an officer entered the profession, but thereafter the officer would rise or fall according to not only their political and social connections, but also their merits as tactical and operational commanders. Related to this, what we now refer to as the operational level of war—although the term itself did not emerge until the 20th century—began to emerge and became central to effective military leadership. With the emergence of firearms and artillery, the battlefield became larger and more difficult to manage. As a result, army commanders generally had to stay well behind the front lines in order to see, understand, and direct battles and campaigns. Generals in this period were more prone to direct their troops to go forward rather than beckon them to follow, relying upon a larger body of subordinate officers to manage formations and lead by personal example. Much like their predecessors, these officers came from middle and upper classes in highly stratified societies, felt little

625

personal connections to the lower-class soldiers in their charge, and led through compulsion rather than persuasion or negotiation. Generals similarly shed few tears for soldiers lost to enemy action, but at the same time they recognized that it took more time and expense to generate a force of soldiers well trained in musketry and artillery than it took the ancients to cobble together a force capable of wielding swords and spears, and were therefore far less willing to risk major losses in battle. By the 17th century, the imperative to ensure the survival of a field army meant that lengthy campaigns of maneuver for positional advantage had replaced short campaigns seeking a single decisive battle as the defining characteristic of warfare. Successful generalship had come to have more to do with preserving the strength of field armies and maneuvering them to positions of advantage from which they could achieve victories in limited tactical engagements than it was about tactical mastery in the classical sense. As warfare grew more complex in the late-18th and 19th centuries, so too did military leadership. The emergence of modern republics and democracies changed the dynamics of military leadership by forcing officers to lead by various combinations of compulsion, negotiation, and inspiration. Increasing egalitarianism—or at least relative degrees of it—meant that armies could and at times did dissolve of their own accord. A demonstrated commitment to soldier morale and welfare became as important to sustaining armies in the field as logistics and training. At the same time, the wars of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France introduced national mobilization of massive armies comprised of hundreds of thousands of conscripts. Exponential increases in the size of armies produced exponential increases in the scale of warfare. Field army commanders came to rely upon and employ distinct corps that could fight together or independently. And the new scale of warfare demanded army group commanders or supreme commanders to coordinate and direct the operations of multiple independent field armies. While generals still relied on their subordinate officers to lead subordinate echelons at the tactical edge personally and through conspicuous example, generalship was bifurcated and focused upon the operational and tactical levels

626

Military Leadership

simultaneously. Corps and division commanders existed for the sole purpose of fighting and winning individual battles. Army and army group or supreme commanders sustained and maneuvered multiple corps or field armies and coordinated multiple engagements in space and time to achieve larger objectives. And as the world and warfare became more industrialized throughout the century—bringing the telegraph, the railroad, high explosives, and rapid-fire technology onto the battlefield—the demands of warfare at the operational level became considerably more complex. In this bifurcation and increasing complexity, it became apparent that success in one level did not necessarily lead to success in the other. American generals George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant were far more adept at the operational and even strategic levels of war than they were at the tactical level, in large part because the organizational capabilities that allowed them to bring order to increasing chaos at the operational level did not have immediate relevance in the heat of battle. Political, social, and technological development in the 20th century exacerbated these trends. As weapons became more lethal, forces dispersed more and the actions of relatively junior officers became far more central in tactical engagements than they were before. A captain in the First World War managed a similar amount of combat power and could control a similar amount of terrain as a colonel or even a brigadier general in the American Civil War. And a captain in the Second World War could bring to bear combat power and control terrain on a level roughly equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the First World War. At the same time, increasingly democratized societies meant that the authority of those junior officers depended far more on persuasion, inspiration, and negotiation than ever before. Successful junior officers could not be martinets whose authority derived entirely from their relative station in life, nor even entirely from their competence as military officers. They had to earn the respect and trust of those they led. Similarly, generalship became much more focused upon the operational and strategic levels of war. The most successful generals of the 20th century found success because of their organizational abilities or their abilities to manage alliance

warfare rather than because of their tactical abilities. George W. Goethals organized the American construction effort at the Panama Canal from 1907 to 1914. French Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch figured out how to synchronize Belgian, British, French, and American operations to break German military resistance on the First World War’s (1914–18) Western Front in the late summer and fall of 1918. Similarly American General George C. Marshall served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army during World War II (1939–45), organizing and coordinating a two-front American war effort spanning much of the globe, and institutional activities within the United States to sustain that war effort.

Modern Military Leadership Military leadership in the 21st century has continued along the same trajectory it assumed in the 20th century. Although an unprecedented pace of technological change and evolving geopolitical and macroeconomic contexts have made militaries far smaller than they used to be and appear to have put an end to mass mobilization, an exponentially increased amounts of combat power are now in the hands of comparatively small units and junior officers. At the tactical level, the modern battlefield is far more expansive but simultaneously less crowded—at least in terms of combatants— than it used to be. And the authority of those junior officers is even more negotiated and dependent upon varying combinations of skill, demonstrated care, and concern for soldier welfare than before. And “skill” in this case depends more than ever on the ability to rapidly synthesize data and information, and mass effects from combat platforms operating in or emanating from any combination of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace in order to break the enemy’s ability to resist. Comparatively, junior officers therefore must now have the ability to transition smoothly between tactical and operational levels of war, while still inspiring and influencing those they lead. This isolates modern generalship to the operational and strategic levels of war. Arguably, the most important job of a modern general is no longer to lead in a direct and classical sense, but to manage systems and institutions so that they

Mindful Leadership

produce enough subordinate leaders of the right caliber, leading sufficiently manned, equipped, and trained units—and supported by sufficiently committed and interoperable allies—so that with proper purpose and direction they can achieve victory on a modern battlefield. This is a far leap from the demands levied upon an ancient king or noble standing in front of a phalanx, facing a similarly arrayed opponent with shield and sword in hand. Rory McGovern See also Institutional Culture versus Structure in the Army; Organizational Leadership

627

leadership or a theory of leadership, but rather a way of inhabiting and enacting the role of leader. A leader who embodies mindfulness shows up to the role of leader intentionally with high levels of attention and wisdom such that they exhibit deep presence and interact in a way that seeks to understand and integrate their own and others’ needs, desires, and perspectives. This entry begins by providing some background on early studies of mindfulness. The entry then offers an understanding of how mindfulness is established in the workplace, why it is beneficial, and the two broad approaches of studying it in the workplace. The entry concludes by examining how to cultivate high levels of mindfulness and the transformation power it offers to leaders who practice it.

Further Readings Gat, A. (2006). War in human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, W. E. (2016). Waging war: Conflict, culture, and innovation in world history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNeil, W. H. (1982). The pursuit of power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/ 9780226160191.001.0001 Paret, P. (Ed.). (1986). Makers of modern strategy from Machiavelli to the nuclear age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400835461 Parker, G. (Ed.). (2005). The Cambridge history of warfare (Revised and Updated edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United States Army. (2019). ADP 6-22: Army leadership and the profession. Headquarters, Department of the Army.

MINDFUL LEADERSHIP Mindful leadership refers to leadership that is characterized by high levels of attention, intention, and wisdom. Mindful leaders recognize that in any given moment or situation, what they pay attention to and how they pay attention matters a great deal when it comes to their own effectiveness and well-being as a leader, as well as the effectiveness and well-being of those with whom they interact. Mindful leadership is not so much a type of

Background on Mindfulness In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn established the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, largely bringing the concept of mindfulness to Western audiences from Eastern Buddhist contexts in the form of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). This program popularized the now commonly referenced definition of mindfulness as “present-moment awareness without judgment” and, as the name suggests, this program was established with the goal of helping participants reduce their stress and pain and increase well-being. In the last 40 years, mindfulness has grown in popularity largely due to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s pioneering work, and it is estimated that more than 25,000 individuals have gone through the eight-week intensive MBSR training as of 2021. Mindfulness was introduced to the organizational sciences by Ellen Langer in 1989 and by Karl Weick and Karlene Roberts in 1993, but their conceptualizations of mindfulness defined it somewhat narrowly as seeking novelty and being flexible with mental processes, which shared little in common with Buddhist conceptualizations of mindfulness, which focused on reducing human suffering. Since the 1990s, work on mindfulness in the organizational sciences has slowly accumulated, with the early 21st century seeing a large spike in both academic and practitioner work on the topic. More recently, scholarship has begun to re-infuse and integrate the Buddhist roots of

628

Mindful Leadership

mindfulness into its conceptualization and measurement within the organization sciences, recognizing that while attention has been the predominant focus of mindfulness, wisdom also is a vital component to understand mindfulness more fully.

Establishing a Core of Mindfulness As mindfulness has grown in popularity, the word itself has evolved to represent an umbrella term that, depending on the context in which it is used, can describe a characteristic of individuals (i.e., a trait), a state of mind that comes and goes, a series of practices an individual engages in such as a focusing on the breath, a training program one can take part in such as MBSR, Google’s Search Inside Yourself, or even be used colloquially to mean “be aware of.” Common to all of these uses is that mindfulness predominantly involves attention and intention. That an individual can in each moment allocate their attentional resources to any number of possible stimuli occurring internally (i.e., within their own mind and body) or externally (i.e., in their environment) represents a key value proposition of mindfulness. And consistent with this is that it is beneficial and skillful to be more in control of one’s attention rather than allowing it to drift mindlessly. Indeed, such mindlessness often leads to negative outcomes such as rumination, anxiety, and a fixation on negativity—all of which bring down the person experiencing them, as well as others they interact with on a daily basis. Beyond attention and intention, however, mindfulness also comprises another vital aspect that speaks to how one allocates their attention. This aspect has been referred to by many different labels such as nonjudgment, metacognition, curiosity, decentering, and decoupling. Common to all of these labels, however, is that mindfulness entails a recognition that one’s own experience represents just that—one’s own experience, and that without continually being aware of this truth, individuals tend to think, feel, and behave in ways that reinforce that their own needs, wants, and perspectives are the most important. This second core component of mindfulness serves to situate the individual as a noncentral node within the larger context of a vast and interconnected world, rather than in a

place where one’s needs and wants are central and more important than everyone else’s. The mindful quality that entails this recognition that each of us is not the center of the world and that intentionally living life with this in mind is both beneficial and skillful, is thus aptly referred to as decentering, and represents a second core aspect of mindfulness. Attention is vital for mindfulness, but the quality of this attention such that there is more spaciousness for others is also vital. And it is this decentering aspect of mindfulness combined with high levels of attention that contributes to increased wisdom and can powerfully transform interpersonal relationships, including relationships at work.

Frameworks for Studying Mindfulness at Work Two broad approaches to considering mindfulness at work have emerged and have largely developed separately. The first is at the individual level and this approach primarily considers the impact of mindfulness on the individual practicing it (i.e., well-being and stress reduction) as well as how this mindfulness may impact others (i.e., via empathy, leadership, etc.). Mindfulness has also been conceptualized at the collective level, where instead of a characteristic of an individual, mindfulness is instead considered a characteristic of a team or an organization. Much of this work at the collective level has been conducted in highreliability organizations (HROs) in which the goal is for teams to produce work that is virtually error-free. Such contexts include inside airplane cockpits, on board nuclear submarines, or in healthcare surgery teams. Mindfulness conceptualized at the collective level often is referred to as mindful organizing because it entails how individuals work together to organize in a way that gives rise to mindful team functioning.

Benefits of Mindfulness at Work The benefits of mindfulness at work are extensive. Research has shown that mindfulness is related to reduced levels of stress, higher levels of well-being, more compassion and empathy, better sleep quality and recovery from work, higher levels of job

Mindful Leadership

performance and job satisfaction, more self-awareness and self-regulation, better listening, and physical and psychological well-being. Mindfulness has been associated with better negotiation outcomes via integrative solutions, more extensive information processing, better team performance, higher levels of transformational leadership, lower levels of destructive leadership, higher levels of leadership self-efficacy and leadership capabilities, and even heightened levels of resilience and collaboration. When leaders demonstrate high levels of attention, they infuse their cognitive and emotional energy into interacting with another individual. They resist allowing the mind to wander to the future or the past, and thus reside in the moment with others. They also avoid getting distracted by the allure of technology, either actively or passively. They commit their attention to the task at hand, or the individual with whom they are engaged. Mindful leaders also continually engage in their tasks and relate with others in a decentered way such that they remain aware of their own biases and ways of seeing the world, and recognize that these biases influence the information they receive, how they process this information, and how they ultimately respond to this information. In other words, mindful leaders continually seek to acknowledge that without intentional effort committed to decentering, there is no room for others’ perspectives, ideas, and passions—and when this is the case, these individuals do not feel valued, empowered, or cared for, which holds them back from living their best selves.

Cultivating Higher Levels of Mindfulness In order to develop higher levels of leader mindfulness, two broad approaches exist and are often utilized together. Over time, and with practice, individuals can move toward more intentional and less habitual information processing, which reduces the rollercoaster of life experiences and helps individuals develop higher levels of equanimity, defined as mental and emotional stability/ balance. Formal mindfulness practices include setting time aside specifically to practice or engage in mindfulness activities—that is, predominantly

629

through an exercise such as a breath meditation in which an individual pays attention to the rate of breathing, how it feels to be breathing, or other sensations that arise. A second form of formal mindfulness is a body scan meditation in which the individual “scans” their body from head to toe by building up a mental picture of the body by checking in with each body part, giving it some attention, and allowing any sensations to just be without trying to change them. In these practices, the key is for individuals to focus on the meditation intention (i.e., the breath or the body), and to gently redirect attention back to this intention when the mind inevitably becomes distracted. In this way, formal mindfulness practices strengthen attentional control and attentional regulation. As a result of these attentional strengthening practices over time, one’s capacity to experience life as it occurs by focusing attention on the present moment increases and they spend less time dwelling on unhelpful (and often harmful) thoughts and emotions that contribute to stress and anxiety. Informal mindfulness practices involve going about one’s daily activities with higher levels of intention, presence, and wisdom. In other words, rather than setting time aside to specifically engage in a mindfulness activity such as a breath meditation or a body scan meditation, informal mindfulness practices involve weaving increased levels of attention and intention into the activities of everyday living, working, and leading. Examples include eating, walking, listening, cooking, coaching, and strategizing with high levels of attention and care rather than just engaging in these activities in a robotic or routine way. When engaging in such informal mindfulness practices, one fully allocates attention to the present activity and intentionally infuses this attention with high levels of decentering. By intentionally seeking to remain present and guard against getting lost in one’s own emotions or thoughts, informal mindfulness practices serve to infuse daily activities with higher levels of equanimity, presence, and concern for others, which reinforce leadership wisdom. In order to develop mindful leader capacity, formal and informal mindfulness practices can be utilized in tandem. Leaders can set aside time each day to engage in formal mindfulness practices

630

Monetary Policy

(e.g., before or after work), and throughout the day they can also engage in informal mindfulness practices as they infuse their leadership with intentional presence and wisdom. At the intersection of formal and informal mindfulness practices, leaders can create structures to remind them to be aware of and more in control of their attention. Such examples include setting reminders on one’s phone or calendar to remember to be more aware of one’s level of intentional presence and to mentally “reset” if needed. Hand washing, hourly breaks, lunch time walks, and deep breathing before having an important conversation with someone on the phone, via Zoom, or in person can further provide opportunities for practicing mindfulness throughout the workday. Together, formal and informal mindfulness practices build up one’s mindfulness capacity. This allows individuals to become more skilled over time at recognizing when their attention or decentering waivers such that they can more readily re-engage with mindfulness.

The Transformational Power of Mindfulness Although an abundance of the work to date on mindfulness has considered how mindfulness impacts the individual practicing it, a growing focus has recently been on understanding how mindfulness may impact others—that is, seeking to gain more understanding about the interpersonal outcomes of mindfulness. The relatively nascent work on mindful leadership has grown out of this need. Indeed, one of the important benefits of mindfulness is that it helps leaders understand and make sense of their thoughts and emotions in relation to others. Through the wisdom gained by mindfulness, individuals become better at understanding their own and others’ needs and ensuring that they can take better care of themselves and others in healthy ways. When leaders bring mindfulness to the role of leader, they have higher levels of empathy, compassion, connection, and can build and sustain high quality connections with others. As leaders and employees experience higher workloads and increasing levels of stress in an increasingly virtual world, leaders’ ability to be intentional with their attention in a way that serves the larger whole is vital for their own well-being

and flourishing, as well as the well-being and flourishing of the organizations they lead. Christopher S. Reina See also Emotional Intelligence; Ethical Leadership; Humility; Responsible Leadership

Further Readings Bunting, M. (2016). The mindful leader: 7 practices for transforming your leadership, your organisation and your life. Milton, QLD: Wiley. Dhiman, S. (Ed.). (2021). The Routledge companion to mindfulness at work. Abingdon: Routledge. doi:10. 4324/9780429244667 Good, D. J., Lyddy, C. J., Glomb, T. M., Bono, J. E., Brown, K. W., Duffy, M. K., . . . Lazar, S. W. (2016). Contemplating mindfulness at work: An integrative review. Journal of Management, 42(1), 114–142. doi: 10.1177/0149206315617003 Reina, C. S., Kreiner, G., Rheinhardt, A., & Mihelcic, C. (2022, April 29). Your presence is requested: Mindfulness infusion in workplace interactions and relationships. Organization Science. doi:10.1287/orsc. 2022.1596 Sutcliffe, K. M., Vogus, T. J., & Dane, E. (2016). Mindfulness in organizations: A cross-level review. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 55–81. doi:10.1146/ annurev-orgpsych-041015-062531

MONETARY POLICY Monetary policy in the United States is determined by the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve System (known as the Fed). Monetary policy decisions can influence the strength of the economy in the short run (thus affecting the unemployment rate and economic growth) and the rate of inflation (changes in prices of goods and services) in the long run. The Fed receives input from many sources, often with multiple voters on key policy issues. This entry reviews the challenges of leadership in such an institution, which include guiding multiple voters, communication, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Monetary Policy

Guiding Multiple Voters The Federal Reserve determines monetary policy within several groups. The most important is the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which consists of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (located in Washington, D.C.), along with the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and (on a rotating basis) four of the other 11 presidents of Federal Reserve Banks located around the country. The FOMC determines the Fed’s actions to buy and sell securities in financial markets, thus determining some short-term interest rates in the economy, most notably the federal funds interest rate. In addition to the FOMC, the seven members of the Board of Governors (BOG) also have some independent influence on monetary policy through their determination of one set of interest rates on short-term loans from the Fed to banks, the most important of which is the primary credit discount rate. Leading both the FOMC and the BOG is the chair of the Federal Reserve System, who is a member of both groups. Because there are two different groups voting on policy decisions, and the Fed chair has only one of 12 votes on the FOMC and one of seven on the BOG, the Fed chair must lead both groups to reach a consensus on the actions needed for implementing monetary policy. In the past 35 years, the different Fed chairs have accomplished this goal in very different ways. Paul Volcker was the Fed chair from 1979 to 1987, leading the Fed through the difficult period in which inflation was reduced substantially. He was appointed in 1979 under the premise that he would act boldly to reduce inflation and both the FOMC and BOG followed his leadership, as he reduced the growth rate of the money supply, which at the time was the variable most closely related to the inflation, causing interest rates to rise sharply at first. A severe recession followed, but Volcker convinced both the FOMC and BOG that it was necessary to reduce the inflation rate significantly. Alan Greenspan was appointed in 1987 to take over from Volcker. His leadership style differed from Volcker’s in that he focused in great detail on the nuts and bolts of how the economy worked,

631

understanding the data better than anyone else. Whereas Volcker reduced money growth sharply to reduce inflation, Greenspan preferred a more gradual approach, reducing the growth rate very slowly over time to reduce inflation. Greenspan had a very good sense of how to operate within the Fed’s voting environment, especially being sure that he had the support of the entire BOG prior to FOMC meetings. Greenspan served as Fed chair from 1987 to 2006. Under his leadership, the U.S. economy suffered only two very minor recessions in over 18 years, leading some to label him the most successful Fed chair of all time. However, his fascination with the subprime mortgage market led him to disregard warning signals about the coming housing crisis, which led to a financial crisis in 2008, tarnishing his reputation. Ben Bernanke replaced Greenspan in 2006 and changed the manner in which the Fed chair operated in many ways. Most importantly, he asked the members of the FOMC to have an open and honest discussion, whereas prior to that many of them were simply reading pre-prepared remarks into the official record. Under Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed became much more open and transparent, reporting in greater detail on what policymakers were thinking about the economy. Bernanke worked hard to convince the FOMC to reach a consensus. He and the FOMC faced a huge number of important issues because of the financial crisis that began in 2008 following the meltdown of the housing sector because of subprime mortgage lending. Notably, Bernanke led the Fed to engage in quantitative easing, in which the Fed purchased large quantities of financial assets with the goal of reducing interest rates in the markets to stimulate the economy. Janet Yellen was appointed Fed chair in 2014. She was an academic economist, like Bernanke, who had spent much of her career teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, but also had stints as a member of the Fed BOG, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and vice chair at the Fed. As Fed chair, Yellen oversaw the Fed’s gradual unwinding of the quantitative easing that it had undertaken in the financial crisis and its aftermath, gradually allowing the Fed’s assets to decline and slowly raising

632

Monetary Policy

interest rates. The debate about how fast to tighten monetary policy by raising interest rates was intense within the Fed, and Yellen was able to reach a consensus of the FOMC and BOG about that. Jay Powell was appointed chair in 2018. Unlike his predecessors, he was not an economist, but had worked in the financial sector, followed by serving in the Treasury Department and as a member of the Fed BOG. Not long into his term as Fed chair, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic occurred. Under Powell’s leadership, the Fed reduced interest rates sharply and engaged in significant quantitative easing to support the United States and world economies. Because he lacked the economic expertise of Yellen, Bernanke, Greenspan, and Volcker, he had to lead by working with the committees to build consensus, rather than leading with economic arguments.

Communication The fundamental difficulty faced by the Fed in communicating is that there are 19 potential policymakers in one institution. Clearly, the loudest and most powerful voice is that of the Fed chair, but others can speak and either confirm or possibly contradict the chair’s message. Because Volcker was making dramatic changes in Fed policy, he communicated periodically through speeches and congressional testimony. However, at the time, the Federal Reserve did not announce policy changes meeting-by-meeting and there was no announcement about what the FOMC decided at its meetings. Instead, the Fed’s actions were only discovered by market participants who tried to figure out what the Fed was doing based on its purchases and sales of government securities in the markets in the days following an FOMC meeting. The Fed usually stated the outcome of each FOMC meeting only in a memo that was issued six weeks or more after the meeting. Under Greenspan, the Fed’s communication changed over time. Initially, the Fed did not release a statement of its policy changes directly to the public after every FOMC meeting. Instead, the Fed would occasionally issue a statement after an FOMC meeting, mainly when the Fed wanted

people to know and understand a change in policy. One theory in economics was that a surprise change in policy would be more effective than one that was well anticipated. So, Greenspan was sometimes intentionally obfuscatory. In informal remarks before the Trilateral Commission, Greenspan noted, “. . . if you think what I said was clear and unmistakable, I can assure you you’ve probably misunderstood me” (Greenspan, 1988, p. 1). But he did give speeches and talk to the press (sometimes anonymously) when he wanted to send a message to the markets and the public about monetary policy. The Fed’s communication efforts began evolving toward more transparency after some misunderstandings in the market about FOMC policy changes. The FOMC began issuing a statement at the conclusion of every meeting, beginning in May 1999, a practice that continues to this day. Bernanke viewed communication quite differently from Greenspan. In his view, monetary policy worked better when it was not a surprise but rather when markets, firms, and households knew what the Fed was doing. Bernanke stated that “Central bank communication and transparency are important precisely because of the role of private-sector expectations in determining the effectiveness of monetary policy, a theme I have highlighted today” (Bernanke, 2004, p. 8). Bernanke persuaded the FOMC to set a target of 2% (in the Personal Consumption Expenditures [PCE] price index) for the inflation rate and to provide much more transparency about the factors the Fed was considering. The Fed began releasing many more details about what factors were important in the economy. Bernanke began holding regular press conferences after every other FOMC meeting to better communicate what was driving Fed policy. The increased openness about monetary policy may be Bernanke’s greatest legacy, which the Fed chairs who followed have continued to embrace. Yellen followed Bernanke’s lead of transparency. She noted, “A growing body of research and experience demonstrates that clear communication is itself a vital tool for increasing the efficacy and reliability of monetary policy” (Yellen, 2012, p. 2). When the Fed started to reverse course on the expansionary policy that had helped mitigate the financial crisis, Yellen laid out a blueprint for

Monetary Policy

how the Fed would reduce its portfolio of assets and slowly raise interest rates, helping financial markets and investors understand the process. Powell proved to be a well-spoken advocate for the Fed’s policy without using the economic jargon of his predecessors. His appearances at press conferences and interviews allowed him to showcase his skill at explaining economic ideas in straightforward language that was more easily understood by the public than was the case for any of the prior four Fed chairs.

Decision-Making Under Uncertainty The most difficult aspect of leadership in monetary policy is that decisions are made under uncertainty. First, lags in the impact of policy mean that today’s decision does not affect output for many months, with the maximum impact about one year after a change in policy. Changes in monetary policy do not affect inflation for close to a year, with the maximum impact about two years later. As a result, policymakers must use forecasts and base their decisions on their anticipation of the unknown future state of the economy. As a result of lags and uncertainty, many policymakers describe the policy-making process as one of risk management. This arena is where Greenspan was a master. As he noted, “Uncertainty is not just a pervasive feature of the monetary policy landscape; it is the defining characteristic of that landscape” (Greenspan, 2003, p. 1). Greenspan was able to convince his colleagues that he understood the future economic situation and thus could provide a convincing view about the appropriate setting for monetary policy. For example, in an FOMC meeting at which the Fed was worried about the possibility of a double-dip recession, Greenspan said, “This has to be one of the most difficult periods for policymaking that I remember. The reason essentially is that we’re dealing with an outlook that is far more difficult to fathom than I think any of us had really thought about” (Federal Open Market Committee, 1992, p. 41). Economic theory suggests that if the future state of the economy is not certain, then policy changes should be gradual. This was illustrated nicely by Yellen when she asked, “How should policy be formulated in the face of such significant uncertainties? In my view, it

633

strengthens the case for a gradual pace of adjustments” (Yellen, 2017, p. 16). Because of pervasive uncertainty, the leaders of the Fed must consider how to manage risks. As Greenspan noted, “In pursuing a risk-management approach to policy, we must confront the fact that only a limited number of risks can be quantified with any confidence” (Greenspan, 2003, p. 3). Powell stated the risk-management approach nicely, “As a way of heeding this advice, the Committee takes a risk management approach, which has three important parts: monitoring risks; balancing risks, both upside and downside; and contingency planning for surprises” (Powell, 2018, p. 9). Dean Croushore See also Behavioral Economics; Economic Recovery and Leadership; Organizational Leadership; Regulating Private Sector Leaders

Further Readings Bernanke, B. S. (2004, December 2). The logic of monetary policy. Washington, DC: National Economists Club. Bernanke, B. S. (2014, December 2). The logic of monetary policy. Federal Reserve Board. Retrieved from https:// www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/ 20041202/default.htm Bernanke, B. S. (2015). The courage to act: A memoir of a crisis and its aftermath. New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Federal Open Market Committee. (1992, October 6). Transcript of meeting of the federal open market committee. Federal Reserve Board. Retrieved from https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/ FOMC19921006meeting.pdf Greenspan, A. (1988, June 23). Informal remarks before a dinner meeting of the trilateral commission. Fraser, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Retrieved from https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/statements-speechesalan-greenspan-452/informal-remarks-a-dinnermeeting-trilateral-commission-washington-dc-8390 Greenspan, A. (2003, August 29). Monetary policy under uncertainty. Federal Reserve Board. Retrieved from https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/ 2003/20030829/default.htm Greenspan, A. (2007). The age of turbulence: Adventures in a new world. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Powell, J. (2018, October 2). Monetary policy and risk management at a time of low inflation and low unemployment. Federal Reserve Board. Retrieved from

634

Moral Character

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/ powell20181002a.htm Treaster, J. B. (2005). Paul Volcker: The making of a financial legend. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Volcker, P. A. with Harper, C. (2018). Keeping at it: The quest for sound money and good government. New York, NY: Public Affairs. Wessel, D. (2010). In Fed we trust: Ben Bernanke’s war on the great panic. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. Woodward, B. (2000). Maestro: Greenspan’s fed and the American boom. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Yellen, J. (2012, November 13). Revolution and evolution in Central Bank communications. Federal Reserve Board. Retrieved from https://www.federalreserve.gov/ newsevents/speech/yellen20121113a.htm Yellen, J. (2017, September 26). Inflation, uncertainty, and monetary policy. Federal Reserve Board. Retrieved from https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/ speech/yellen20170926a.htm

MORAL CHARACTER The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that leadership was about the character of the leader first and their choices second. By this line of thinking, ethical leadership is character driven. This entry examines the character approach to leadership and its use as a way to understand good and bad leadership both normatively and descriptively. Some leadership scholars and management gurus argue that leadership is about the leader’s choices and how they turn out. According to Aristotle and his heirs, virtue ethicists, leadership is only secondarily about the leader’s choices, because choices only matter as manifestations of the leader’s character. In other words, what makes the leader’s choice correct or incorrect according to the virtue approach is not a quality of the choice but rather the way that choice reflects virtuous or vicious character traits. Three conclusions follow. First, ethical leadership is defined by the leader’s good character traits. Second, leadership scholarship should be concerned with the study of character. Third, leadership education should start with paragons of virtue that leaders should imitate to develop leadership virtues.

Virtues and vices explain the leader’s choices because they are, among other things, dispositions to act in a certain way in a given situation. Shakespeare famously wrote in Julius Caesar: “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once” (Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 32-33). Leaders are people of action. They possess the virtue of courage. Cowards, in contrast, are more complex. They fear death and its stress many times before actually dying. In Shakespeare’s account, the virtue of courage and the vice of cowardice explain not only a leader’s choices but also their mental states. The character approach is committed to analyzing the leader and their choices.

Leadership and Virtue Leadership helps organize collective efforts and is a critical factor in organizational effectiveness. The leader represents the entire organization, and their character rubs off on their subordinates. Leaders exemplify virtues (and vices). Good leaders model good character. Great leaders are those whose actions and lives display the excellences of character we call the virtues. More importantly, a leader of good character is necessary for an organization of good character. The language of virtue has been confined to the domain of philosophy until recently, when social scientific approaches to management and leadership studies began to explore the dimension of character and personality to define good (and bad) leadership. Indeed, the question of what constitutes good leadership has attracted the attention of both ethicists and leadership scholars. Scholars Robert Hogan and Robert Kaiser draw the line between good and bad leadership in terms of performance. While good leadership promotes effective team performance, thereby enhancing the well-being of the incumbents, bad leadership degrades quality of life for followers and others. The authors also claim that character predicts leadership because one’s way of leading is also one’s way of being a person. Personality can and should be used to select future leaders or improve the performance of incumbents. Accordingly, the character-based approach to leadership is committed to the question of what

Moral Character

leaders are and who should lead. That is, what are the qualities or traits that make an overall good leader? Virtue ethicists argue that only the virtuous person can flourish. Does it follow that only a virtuous person can lead well? Can leaders flourish as human beings? Do a good leader’s character traits overlap with a good person’s traits? Are certain bad traits (vices) necessary for a leader to be a good and effective leader? It is impossible to do justice to all these questions here, but they illustrate two important points. First, the character approach to ethical leadership moves away from the evaluation of actions to a focus on the leader’s character and the cultivation of good traits to lead. Second, empirical and normative leadership studies converge on the centrality of character to understand good leadership.

The Good Leader: Normative Studies Normative research on leadership—research that explores the ethics of leadership—entertains the questions listed earlier. Several ethicists have identified the character traits necessary for someone to be a good leader. Philosopher Robert Solomon first proposed four essential business virtues in Ethics and Excellence, his seminal 1992 work on virtue ethics in business: honesty, fairness, trust, and toughness. He also added friendliness, honor, loyalty, sincerity, courage, reliability, benevolence, sensitivity, helpfulness, cooperativeness, civility, decency, modesty, openness, cheerfulness, amiability, tolerance, reasonableness, tactfulness, wittiness, gracefulness, liveliness, magnanimity, persistence, prudence, resourcefulness, coolheadedness, warmth, and hospitality. Later, he further listed pride, confidence, dependability, effectiveness, ambition, articulateness, competitiveness, contentment, creativeness, determination, entrepreneurship, generosity, graciousness, gratitude, heroism, humility, humor, independence, passion, saintliness, shame, tolerance, and zeal. The catalog of virtues postulated as necessary for good leadership depends primarily on the conceptualization of the practice. When it comes to business leadership, Solomon’s list of business virtues indicates a complete overlap between the character traits one needs to be a good person and the traits one needs to be a good business leader.

635

This reflects the optimistic view of scholars who have a positive (or at least a neutral) view on business, which leads to the overlap between business virtues and human virtues. Under the optimistic view, business is fundamentally a cooperative activity. As a result, the virtues a business leader needs to flourish as a businessperson are not different from those needed to flourish as a human being. In contrast, some authors hold a more pessimistic view about business activities. Even Aristotle criticized the business world of his day in his analysis of just exchange, just price, commerce, and lending money at interest. Those who think about business as a characteristically competitive activity tend to believe that business practices characteristically corrupt people’s minds and souls. Hence, it is unsurprising that they not only challenge the idea of an overlap between leadership virtues and ordinary virtues but also suggest that some vices are necessary for good leadership and that some ordinary virtues are useless or even unsuitable for the good leader. This applies to business, politics, and any other activity that can be described as adversarial.

The Good Leader: Empirical Studies The remainder of this entry connects previous normative work on the leader’s character with recent empirical findings that illuminate these questions. What are the character traits that distinguish good from bad leaders? Psychologists have used different measures of personality, which can be considered close to the virtue ethics notion of character. The most widely used measure of personality is the so-called Big Five, according to which all aspects of personality can be summarized into five broad dimensions: conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to experience, and emotional stability. More recent work on personality, published in 2014 by Michael Ashton and colleagues, suggests that there are indeed six major dimensions of personality in what is known as the HEXACO model of personality, which is the Big Five plus the dimension of honesty–humility. These measures of personality have been used in leadership studies. For example, conscientiousness, agreeableness,

636

Moral Character

emotional stability, and extraversion have been associated with higher levels of ethical leadership. But there are also specific measures of leadership virtues. Psychologist Ronald Riggio and colleagues developed a scale to measure cardinal virtues called the Leadership Virtues Questionnaire (LVQ) in order to develop a reliable measurement for ethical leadership. The four cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice are used as a theoretical framework to assess ethical leadership. In line with Aristotle’s unity of virtue thesis—according to which the virtues form a unified whole such that a person cannot have one without having them all (prudence guides one’s actions to be just, courageous, and temperate)—the LVQ correlates well with the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS) and the Authentic Leadership Scale (ALS). Studies by Riggio and collaborators using these measures show that these virtues have a positive effect on followers’ psychological empowerment and organizational identification. They also show that authentic leadership and the virtue of prudence both involve taking multiple perspectives into account on an issue and weighing that information before taking action. The authentic leadership factor of internalized moral perspective requires elements of self-regulation, which is consistent with the virtue of temperance. Ethical situations often make one or more virtues more salient at any given time. However, each virtue is considered necessary and jointly sufficient to define a virtue-based ethical leader. Now, if virtues are, among other things, dispositions to do virtuous actions, leadership ethics is not only about the study of character but also about the good leader’s actions. For example, Diane Bischak and Jaana Woiceshyn studied climbing activities to explore what constitutes ethical leadership in virtuous action. “Lead climbing” involves initiating the climb and guiding others to achieve a mutual goal: to reach the top and safely return. Bischak and Woiceshyn’s research found that key principles of ethical leadership in rock climbing parallel those found in business. Specifically, they identified six moral virtues exhibited by ethical rock-climbing leaders: rationality, honesty, independence, integrity, justice, and pride.

Rationality in rock climbing requires undivided attention to detail and being very precise and present in the situation. Honesty urges lead climbers not to fake it. It is disastrous to pretend, for example, that a piece of gear is properly placed to protect a fall when it is not. Independence highlights the handed nature of thinking and action in rock climbing. Integrity for climbing leaders means resisting the temptation of social and emotional pressures to compromise what one knows to be correct. Justice for climbing leaders entails evaluating and treating people fairly and rewarding virtuous agents and behaviors. Pride for climbing leaders is doing their absolute best, believing in themselves to do what is necessary, and successfully doing so, which is a motivational factor for constant improvement. In rock climbing, leaders need to walk the talk of doing their best for their followers to do the same. In the end, determining what constitutes ethical leadership involves not only the identification of excellent character traits but also the way they are manifested in action. The virtues that demonstrate strong leadership abilities in rock climbing empower leaders to lead effectively. Achievement of common values is possible by practicing the right character traits and setting the right example for followers and the whole organization.

Character and Leadership Education Identifying what character traits make someone a good leader is the first step in leadership education. Seeking to understand the character of leaders and their knowledge and pedagogical competencies, Elise Murray and colleagues identified six evidence-based principles of effective character education, namely prioritization (character development is an institutional priority), relationships (healthy relationships among all stakeholders), intrinsic motivation (internalization of targeted values and growth of intrinsic motivation for central virtues), modeling (leaders must model the character they want to see in others), empowerment (power and voice must be shared and respected), and developmental pedagogy (long-term formation of character must be the goal). To address the effectiveness of character education in the military, in 2019 Kristina Callina and

Moral Character

colleagues completed a longitudinal study at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, examining 15 character attributes: bravery, empathy, gratitude, grit, hardiness, honesty, integrity, intellectual humility, intentional self-regulation, leadership, optimism, purpose, relational humility, social intelligence, and teamwork. A four-factor structure of personality was found (relational, commitment, honor, and Machiavellian) that had important implications for the academy—character is a defining element of success for a leader in combat—and other institutions seeking to develop leaders of character.

Character, Reasons, and Actions One key feature of the character-based approach that is especially relevant for leadership studies is that the moral evaluation of a leader’s action is fundamentally connected to the assessment of their character. Thus, the character approach provides the resources to handle the case of effective but arguably unethical leadership, which can further organizational goals by resorting to immoral motivations and tactics; such questionable motivations and practices change the moral assessment not only of the leader but also of their decisions. Virtuous organizations aim to develop leaders to enhance their influence and effectiveness and to encourage and develop individuals to engage in ethical practices. Leadership involves a relational process of influence whereby people move toward shared goals. But influence is not enough for leadership development. The character approach is committed to connecting leaders to the best versions of themselves and enabling them to foster meaningful relationships with others while engaging effectively and ethically with their organization and its stakeholders. Good leadership implies that leaders are motivated by the right reasons and influence each other in ethical and effective ways. Thus, a character-based approach provides a comprehensive understanding of what good leadership entails. Toby Newstead and colleagues explain how the character-based approach to leadership development can be applied in organizations in three emerging areas: virtues language, pedagogical approaches, and the virtues project. First, the leader engages in continual communication processes: it is

637

through communication and language that leadership is talked into existence. Communication is also central for character development through socialization and enculturation, as it is through daily virtue talk that leaders influence the moral identity of their followers. Second, pedagogical approaches link virtues, values, and decision-making through specific courses and overall curriculum design. Newstead et al. advance this approach by adding the organizational context with a focus on the use of group discussions, counseling, chaplains, and reinforcing virtues through training and reflection. Third, the virtues project was originally developed as a parenting program and continues to be used in families and schools, indicating that strategies such as speaking the language of virtues, recognizing teachable moments, setting clear boundaries, honoring spirit, and offering companioning can become something leaders inculcate throughout their lives.

Good Character Means Good Leadership In sum, studying the moral character of the leader is the best way to learn ethical leadership because leadership is character driven. Good leaders exemplify a set of moral excellences that inspire followers (and other leaders) and set the tone and culture of the organization. Normative and empirical research on leadership studies converges in identifying the traits leaders need to flourish qua leaders and qua human beings, as the processes for becoming both, as leadership scholar Warren Bennis has asserted, are very much the same. Miguel Alzola See also Authentic Leadership, Big Five Personality Traits, Deontology and Rights, Effective Leadership, Ethical Leadership, Ethics and Effectiveness, Humility, Virtues

Further Readings Alzola, M. (2018). Character-based business ethics. In N. Snow (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of virtue (pp. 591–620). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & De Vries, R. E. (2014). The HEXACO honesty-humility, agreeableness, and emotionality factors: A review of research and theory. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18(2), 139–152. doi:10.1177/1088868314523838

638

Moral Imagination

Aristotle. (1953). Nicomachean ethics (J. A. K. Thomson, Trans.). London: Penguin. Bischak, D. P., & Woiceshyn, J. (2016). Leadership virtues exposed: Ethical leadership lessons from leading in rock climbing. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 23(3), 248–259. doi:10.1177/ 1548051815617629 Callina, K. S., Burkhard, B., Schaefer, H. S., Powers, J., Murray, E. D., Kobylski, G., . . . Lerner, R. M. (2019). Character in context: Character structure among United States Military Academy cadets. Journal of Moral Education, 48(4), 439–464. doi:10.1080/ 03057240.2018.1528442 Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2005). What we know about leadership. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 169–180. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.169 Murray, E. D., Berkowitz, M. W., & Lerner, R. M. (2019). Leading with and for character: The implications of character education practices for military leadership. The Journal of Character & Leadership Development, 6(1), 33–42. Newstead, T., Dawkins, S., Macklin, R., & Martin, A. (2021). We don’t need more leaders–We need more good leaders. Advancing a virtues-based approach to leader (ship) development. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(5), 101312. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.101312 O’Reilly, C. A., & Pfeffer, J. (2021). Why are grandiose narcissists more effective at organizational politics? Means, motive, and opportunity. Personality and Individual Differences, 172, 110557. doi:10.1016/j. paid.2020.110557 Riggio, R. E., Zhu, W., Reina, C., & Maroosis, J. A. (2010). Virtue-based measurement of ethical leadership: The leadership virtues questionnaire. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 62(4), 235. doi:10.1037/a0022286 Shakespeare, W. (1992). Julius Caesar. New York, NY: Washington Square Press. Solomon, R. (1992). Ethics and excellence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

MORAL IMAGINATION Moral imagination defines the human capability, in any particular situation, to step back from that context, and evaluate the circumstances, issues at stake, and the operative individual, cultural, and/

or organizational mindsets at play in this context. Moral imagination also entails the ability to discover new mindsets and new possibilities that enable individuals to reframe and refocus their decision-making and judgments. Moral imagination is a normative concept proposing a viable but previously unthought of decision model that is not merely framed by sets of rules. Moreover, moral imagination must include moral reasoning, or it becomes merely fantasy. This concept is important for practicing leaders as a means both to avoid unforeseen pitfalls and challenge what often becomes stale or obsolete organizational or political dominant logics.

Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator Although not termed as such, moral imagination has its roots in economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments in his 1759 book by that title. There, Smith argues that it is the imagination that helps people identify and sympathize (or not) with the plights and judgments of others. Human imaginations are also the ground for the human ability to step back from a particular situation or dilemma and judge oneself as well as others. Smith terms this ability the impartial spectator, a functioning element of the human mind and its capacity for choice, moral judgment, and reform. The impartial spectator is never perfectly impartial nor completely independent. Nevertheless, using imagination coupled with reasoning makes possible the identification, creation, and evaluation of moral rules as well as moral and immoral behavior.

Immanuel Kant and the Three Elements of Imagination Independently of Smith, philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his work The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), spells out the nature of imagination as having three elements. The first is the reproductive imagination that synthesizes each person’s everchanging experiences into representations, which, in turn, connect with other representations, forming memory and the subjects for reason and science. The productive imagination, in brief, actively structures and schematizes these representations through what

Moral Imagination

Kant calls categories of understanding. Each human being experiences the world differently, but the categories of the understanding that frame, order, and organize each person’s experiences are universally the same, allowing for the development of communication, language, and knowledge. This form of imagination is also the source of the synthesis of all individual experiences and the identification of them as one’s own: the I, or what Kant calls the transcendental unity of apperception. Kant develops a third form of the imagination later in his book Critique of Judgment (1790). In that text, Kant acknowledges that often imagination engages in free reflection apart from the categories and independently from what is constructed from those categories as laws of nature. Free reflection uses the data of experiences to go beyond reason and the categories of the understanding to create esthetic ideas, the source of the arts and literature.

Contemporary Moral Imagination and Decision-Making These analyses are useful in elaborating a contemporary idea of moral imagination. The idea of moral imagination, in practice, begins by considering a particular case, scenario, or dilemma to which one reacts, and which usually calls for a choice or decision and, in most instances, action. By laying out that scenario, one becomes engaged in a form of Kant’s reproductive imagination wherein awareness of the context, situation, or dilemma at issue and its moral challenges occurs. A careful application of reproductive imagination wherein one truly steps back from the situation at hand—a Smithian impartial perspective—enables one to grasp not just the moral issues but also the context and background mindsets that are operative in that scenario. This is particularly helpful for a leader in any organization or nation-state, to understand not merely what is at stake, but also the operative organizational dynamics that may contribute to this issue. The second step in developing a moral imagination is to challenge what may appear to be either-or choices of simple right vs. wrong decisions. That requires a productive imagination that can question the dominant dynamic of one’s own

639

or an organization’s culture and introduce new ways to conceive an acceptable decision. It is in this context that one can test one’s thinking against moral principles or moral minimums—those behaviors and actions that are unacceptable in any context, such as sexual abuse, enslavement, murder, torture, or other human rights violations. And it is in this step, in particular, that one engages in moral reasoning. Again, this is of critical importance for a strong ethical leader. The third stage, the creative imagination, akin to what Kant terms free reflection or free play, projects beyond the present scenario and mindsets to actualize novel decisions that are both morally acceptable and creative. Again, the evaluative process that accompanies consideration of novel decisions entails testing against moral minimums and other moral rules. This element is particularly appropriate for creative, forward-thinking leaders in almost any context. One example of such thinking is implicit in the 2014 decision by Mary Barra when she had just been appointed CEO of General Motors. She almost immediately discovered that their Chevrolet Cobalt automobiles had had ignition problems for more than ten years, problems that cost lives and had not been addressed by any division at GM. As Anton Valukas reports in his 2014 evaluation of this issue, within a month of her appointment, she went public with the situation, brought in consultants to get at the roots of the problem, recalled millions of Cobalts, and addressed what turned out to be a fairly simple mechanical issue, but one that was neglected at the cost of lives and property. Barra, like her predecessors, could have just ignored this messy problem, but did not. Moral imagination is not merely limited to individual moral choice and action. It translates to organizational behavior as well. It is a critical dimension of ethical leadership since it not only addresses ethical issues creatively but also opens pathways for organizations to think out of the box from the prevailing dominant logic operative in most organizations.

Immoral Imagination and Blind Spots Notice, again, that moral imagination is a normative concept. It recommends how one should and can approach individual and organizational issues

640

Moral Language

in any situation and, in particular, for good leadership. However, some philosophers have questioned whether one can engage in immoral imagination. It seems obvious that as a normative concept moral imagination must be able to be negated. Immoral imagination entails many of the same steps outlined earlier, but an immoral imagination would violate the moral minimums that are the part of foundation of any ethical theory and sound moral decision-making. There is one last element to be considered. Often alleged immoral behaviors and resulting untoward consequences are not a result of deliberate misbehavior, but, rather, as Max Bazerman and Ann Tenabrunsel have outlined in their 2012 book of the same name, blind spots—situations where one misses seeing the problem as a problem in the first place. This does not forgive such blind spots, but explains how often good people, seemingly conscientious leaders, or good organizations can make mistakes. The most serious problem in ethics, applied ethics, and leadership is not that perceptions, knowledge, or moral sentiments are incomplete, sometimes biased, and surely limited in scope. The larger problem is that most people, individually or in organizations, do not realize that they are mis-framing the situation, disregarding data, ignoring counterevidence, or not taking into account other points of view. Many writers in the leadership studies field claim that good leadership entails being aware of one’s shortcomings and organizational blind spots and being on the look-out for blind spots, as well as analyzing more obvious ethical issues. Moral imagination, then, becomes a deliberative means to perceive as well as address these scenarios. Patricia H. Werhane See also Ethical Leadership; Ethics and Effectiveness; Moral Pluralism; Moral Risk

Further Readings Bazerman, M., & Tenbrunsel, A. (2011). Blind spots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kant, I. (1781/1980). Critique of pure reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. Basingstoke: Macmillan. [Originally published 1781].

Kant, I. (1951). Critique of judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York, NY: Hafner. [Originally published 1790]. Seabright, M. A., & Schminke, M. (2002). Immoral imagination and revenge in organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 38, 19–31. doi:10.1023/A: 1015764811710 Smith, A. (1759; reprinted 1976). The theory of moral sentiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valukas, A. A. Report to the Board of Directors of General Motors Company Regarding Ignition Switch Recalls. Retrieved July 8, 2022, from https://www.aieg. com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Valukas-report-ongm-redacted2.pdf Werhane, P. H. (1999). Moral imagination and management decision-making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

MORAL LANGUAGE Moral language, the use of moral reasons to justify certain behaviors, can facilitate leadership by improving leaders’ effectiveness, allowing them to build connections with their subordinates, and positively influencing the social and moral norms that influence the behavior of folks in organizations and institutions. Leaders can use deontological language and judgments to build trust and interpersonal connections with their subordinates. Consequentialist language and judgments, especially for leaders at the top of organizations, can aid them in conveying competence and intelligence. In addition, leaders can use virtue signaling, even if only motivated by the desire to build or mend their reputations, to improve the social and moral norms that influence that behavior of individuals in the institutions and organizations they lead—virtue signaling, especially by high-status folks like leaders, conveys essential information about the social norms governing their institution or organization. Moral language can thus be an invaluable set of tools for leaders.

Deontology and Consequentialism Two major theories in the history of moral philosophy are deontology and consequentialism. It is

Moral Language

often easier to define one theory in opposition to the other. Consequentialism is a family of moral theories that holds roughly that an action is morally permissible to the extent it produces the best consequences when compared to the alternatives. Depending on the version of consequentialism, a good consequence is often cashed out in terms of happiness or pleasure; some versions of the view hold that good consequences are ones where desires are satisfied. In contrast, deontology holds that morally permissible actions are instead determined by factors like rights and duties. For example, one doesn’t have moral permission to frame an innocent person for a crime and punish them, even if that would quell violent protests, since this would violate the rights of the innocent. Unlike consequentialism, deontology holds that moral obligations and permissibility are not determined solely by the salient consequences; in deontology, some actions are wrong regardless of the consequences. One way to explain this difference is that various forms of consequentialism often determine the morally right course of action based on something like what the end state is to be achieved. If an action would produce the best end in terms of minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness compared to the alternative actions, then that action is morally permitted. By contrast, the deontologist holds that moral factors, like rights and duties, are constraints on the actions in which one can permissibly engage where morality is concerned. Keeping a promise to a friend isn’t about the consequences for the deontology—one has a duty, except in extreme cases, to keep promises made. Deontology holds that rights and duties constrain actions in which one is morally allowed to engage; consequentialism holds that one is morally permitted, and even required, to engage in actions solely on the basis of the consequences. Moral language can be an invaluable leadership tool. Moral psychologists have discovered that deontological and consequentialist language and moral judgments convey different signals to third parties—signals that reveal something about the character of the person making the judgment. Individuals who make deontological judgments tend to be preferred as cooperation partners

641

because they are viewed as warmer and more trustworthy than those who make consequentialist ones; however, individuals who make consequentialist moral judgments are seen as more competent and intelligent than those who make deontological ones—it is believed that these judgments require intelligence to compute the consequences of an action, as this is often a complicated task. Deontological judgments often follow a rule as to what is morally required—for example, don’t lie, and keep one’s promises—without calculating the costs and benefits of following that rule. And those who make those kinds of moral judgments are thought more trustworthy because they do what is morally required, not because they’ve calculated the benefits, but because it is what they think morality requires of them. If Riley only kept his promise to Quinn because he thinks the benefits exceed the costs, Quinn shouldn’t trust Riley—he can only be trusted to do what’s morally right when it benefits him. That being said, it is sometimes good for people to calculate the consequences of possible actions and choose actions that maximize good consequences. People don’t just want others to be trustworthy; people sometimes want and need them to be competent, too—especially if the decisions have long-term consequences for an institution. People tend not to like friends, neighbors, and family members to calculate the consequences of their actions, since this can come off as coldhearted—not something one often looks for in direct and interpersonal relationships. However, they do prefer this in political leaders: people want their political leaders to think about the consequences of policy for the nation in an impersonal way, as that often helps the citizenry. The job of a political leader is to make their constituents better off, and that requires thinking impersonally about the consequences of the decisions and policies political leaders implement. One doesn’t want them to favor their own interests or those of their family and friends. Because leaders must do things like reassure subordinates during a crisis, set the agenda for the future, and cultivate trust and relationships, the variety of moral language they use is crucial. And the empirical evidence surveyed hints at some ways

642

Moral Language

of doing that. For example, if leaders want to effectively build trust with their subordinates, the research suggests that they should use deontological language: relying on moral factors like rights and duties in decision-making, and respecting persons as individuals. However, if leaders need to reassure their subordinates that they are competent leaders, they should rely on consequentialist language. Sometimes the kind of moral judgments leaders use, to be effective, will depend on their place in the hierarchy of an organization. Supervisors with more of a face-to-face relationship with subordinates would be more effective using deontological language; trust and warmth are important, and deontological judgments convey that to others. Leaders who are atop an organizational or institutional hierarchy will have an easier time discharging their leadership duties using consequentialist language and judgments to convey confidence and competence to those below them in the organization; people prefer confidence and competent leaders at the top. However, it isn’t just the kind of moral judgments and language that leaders employ that can facilitate effective leadership. The social and moral norms operating within the organization matter, too, and leaders can use tools from psychology to shape them.

Virtue Signaling Virtue signaling is the practice of using moral talk to boost one’s reputation. An example of this would be calling for the termination of someone with offensive views or the use of a brand name to advance social justice. Virtue signaling isn’t constituted by content, but rather the intention of using of moral talk to improve or preserve one’s moral reputation—to say things that make one look good to others. The hope is that by condemning the actions of others one can improve their reputation in the eyes of one’s peers, neighbors, and so forth. Many people find virtue signaling disingenuous and annoying—some philosophers argue that virtue signaling is parasitic on the moral capital of a society, exploiting moral language and the generous nature of other folks merely to boost one’s reputation. Less recognized, though, are the potential benefits of virtue

signaling. Before one can appreciate those benefits, it is important to understand the nature of social norms and how they govern behavior. The social psychologist Cristina Bicchieri—in her book Norms in the Wild—defines a social norm as a rule of behavior that causes individuals to prefer to conform to certain behaviors because they believe that most people in their reference network—the people whose opinions and beliefs matter to them—conform to those behaviors as well, and that those same people think others ought to conform to them, too. For example, Juan would prefer to conform to the social norm of recycling to the extent that his family, friends, and neighbors recycle and expect everyone else in the neighborhood to recycle, too. This signals that those in Juan’s reference network conform to certain environmental norms and think their neighbors should do so as well. This social norm conformity rests on two specific kinds of beliefs: beliefs about whether others in the group conform to a social norm and whether they think it ought (prescriptively) to be followed. Virtue signaling enters the picture when viewed through social norms: when one signals virtue, especially if this is done by large groups or by high-status individuals such as leaders, it conveys information about the social norms governing the group. Often these are social norms that are morally praiseworthy. A tip-off that virtue signaling is partially about boosts to one’s reputation is that individuals do not virtue signal something that isn’t laudable—one wouldn’t expect, for example, someone to virtue signal by announcing that their activities produce a lot of greenhouse gases because of constant air travel when those in their reference network are environmentally conscious. This would only highlight their comparatively bad moral character. And if highly influential persons, such as leaders, virtue signal by criticizing meat-eating, they strongly convey a social norm in the organization against meat-eating. Virtue signaling, whatever the intention of the signaler, conveys essential information about the social norms of that group. An example will no doubt clarify. Suppose one lived in a world where people privately believed it would be morally better if people avoided air travel as much as possible because it is a form of

Moral Pluralism

travel that significantly contributes to climate change. It may be difficult for people to act on those moral beliefs if they don’t know whether or not everyone else agrees with them—perhaps the company that employs them expects their employees to take a lot of flights, even when not strictly needed for the job. They would feel organizational pressure to act against their privately held moral beliefs and fly more than they think appropriate; they’d want to look like a “team player.” Now suppose the new chief executive of the company wants to look good to the employees by signaling a deep commitment to the environment, solely motivated by status-seeking, and announces that the company would prefer employees to take commercial and private flights only if required for the job and if there are no reasonable alternatives available. In this new environment, ushered in by new social norms around flying and reinforced by the status-seeking behavior of the chief executive of the company, employees can then freely act on their moral beliefs—the leader, despite their selfish intent, removed the social barriers to moral action. High-status individuals, like leaders, have the ability, by virtue signaling, to improve the social and moral norms operating within an institution or organization, and potentially improve the environment for their subordinates. And lest one worry leaders will only virtue signal to boost their reputations without acting on the virtues they signal—criticizing others for eating meat, but sneaking a burger at lunch—one can be assured hypocrisy will be short-lived and unstable. First, people are generally pretty good at detecting hypocrisy. Second, one effective approach to damaging one’s reputation is to be credibly charged with hypocrisy. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, then California governor Gavin Newsom was caught at the French Laundry, an upscale restaurant in Northern California, flouting the public health guidelines from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and California health officials. Within a short time, his approval ratings took a significant dive. This is not to deny that leaders may sometimes abuse their status just to boost their reputations, but to highlight factors that tend to disincentivize this behavior. Thus, virtue signaling, contrary to

643

popular belief, can be a mechanism that leaders use, even selfishly, to produce social and moral improvements in the organizations and institutions they lead. Jimmy Alfonso Licon See also Bad Leadership; Communication; Deontology and Rights; Ethical Leadership; Language and Leadership; Prosocial Behavior

Further Readings Bicchieri, C. (2016). Norms in the wild: How to diagnose, measure, and change social norms. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Driver, J. (2011). Consequentialism. Abingdon: Routledge. Everett, J. A. C., Faber, N., Savulescu, J., & Crockett, M. J. (2018). The costs of being consequentialist: Social inference from instrumental harm and impartial beneficence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 79, 200–216. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2018.07.004 Jordan, J. J., Rosanna Sommers, R., Bloom, P., & Rand, D. G. (2017). Why do we hate hypocrites? Evidence for a theory of false signaling. Psychological Science, 28(3), 356–368. doi:10.1177/0956797616685771 Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. Chichester: Blackwell. Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2020). Grandstanding: The use and abuse of moral talk. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Westra, E. (2021). Virtue signaling and moral progress. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 49(2), 156–178. doi:10. 1111/papa.12187

MORAL PLURALISM Moral pluralism is based on the recognition that there are multiple irreducible moral values that can come into conflict between and within organizations and individuals. A moral value refers to important beliefs associated with maintaining the welfare of the self and others. Pluralist notions of morality often vary on the specific moral judgments and motives that they cover. However, many frameworks rely on similar ideas of care,

644

Moral Pluralism

fairness, and justice as well as abstraction at different levels, such as self, other, and community. Leadership studies can benefit from an understanding of moral pluralism. Because there is a wide diversity in moral thought, different moral values can come into conflict, which can make it difficult for leaders to find a clear solution. Leaders, group members, and other stakeholders may have different and sometimes conflicting moral values, which may create discord if mismanaged. Leaders must make choices that align with their own moral systems while also having respect for the moral systems of their subordinates.

Moral Foundations Theory Moral foundations theory (MFT) considers both the variety and universality of moral judgments. MFT asserts that the first draft of the moral mind, developed in terms of evolutionary advantage, has five psychological foundations of morality that are seen across cultures and throughout time and are likely to be a response to adaptive challenges that faced our ancestors. These five foundations are typically viewed as binding or individualizing. Cultures and individuals build on these intuitive moral foundations to create and live by moral norms and ethical systems. By early adulthood, moral judgments become intuitive rather than deliberative. The care/harm foundation comes from our innate need to care for our own and protect our tribe. This likely developed in response to the human challenge of having offspring that are dependent for a prolonged time, compared with those of other species. Our moral mind was primed to recognize suffering, distress, and pain, in our offspring and others, and to care about this pain. The fairness/cheating foundation includes ideas of equality, equity, and justice. The third foundation focuses on loyalty to the group. Because physical resources are limited, groups are incentivized to protect their coalition and maintain its wellbeing for survival. Group members who are seen to have undermined or disadvantaged the group are labeled as morally corrupt traitors, while those who have a strong obvious alignment with their group are extolled as patriots. The authority foundation refers to the way groups

naturally evolve hierarchies based on gaining respect, power, or status. Those who break the chain of authority through disrespect are often punished as a means to restore order. The fifth foundation, purity/degradation, can refer to physical purity, such as cleanliness or the avoidance of disease, and likely developed as a protection mechanism in early humans. The fear of social contamination may trigger protective purification instincts, such as discrimination against those who are viewed as unclean. Moral foundations theory describes cultural and political disagreements in terms of differing reliance on these foundations. One leadership tension that could arise within a moral foundation approach is the tension between wanting to care for a subordinate’s emotions but also needing to maintain honesty in feedback in order to promote organizational success. Honest feedback can be counterproductive from a care/ harm perspective if the employee feels threatened or is unreceptive to the feedback. Difficult feedback can damage the interpersonal relationships that leaders often wish to cultivate with their subordinates. However, leaders also need to provide honest feedback to underperforming employees so as to facilitate organizational success. Another common tension based on the moral foundation framework is the whistleblower’s dilemma. People may feel a moral obligation to report unethical and unfair practices within an organization so that these can be rectified. At the same time, organizational loyalty may discourage whistleblowers from reporting a severe moral dilemma.

Model of Moral Motives The model of moral motives (MMM) is social in nature, relying on two group-based moralities (protect and provide) that can operate at different levels of inclusion (self, other, and group). The motivation to protect is an inhibition motivation that typically involves some sort of restriction or avoidance. Alternatively, the motivation to provide is active, meaning that it requires prescriptive regulation. There is some degree of overlap between MMM and moral foundations theory. The other-protect motivation is linked to care, or avoidance of harming group members. The

Moral Pluralism

other-provide motivation is similar to the construct of fairness. Group-protect motives involve the binding foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity. The model of moral motives has implications for leadership in that for work to be motivating, employees must be industrious and be motivated by some degree of self-promotion, while also maintaining loyalty to the organization. The nature of work requires motivation to provide for oneself. There is a strong moral imperative for self-reliance to alleviate pressure on community resources and contribute to group success. MMM also allows for a strong communal attachment (group-protect) in terms of group cohesion, uniformity, and loyalty.

Relationship Regulation Theory Relationship regulation theory (RRT) specifically focuses on moral regulation in social relationships. These relationships can be as small as dyads (i.e., parent–child or spouse–spouse) or as large as nations. This framework relies on four motivating relationship models, which determine the frameworks of moral judgments likely to emerge in different social situations. Authority ranking structures inherently rely on a hierarchy that community members have a moral obligation to maintain. Group members who violate this hierarchy are seen as immoral. Equality matching relationships, however, are intuitively based on equality among group members, where the primary motivation is to maintain balance and equality. Equality matching relationships tend to be more individualistic and justice oriented rather than community based. Alternatively, communal sharing relationships tend to be motivated by group success. These types of relationships typically take a needs-based approach, where resources are given to those in need rather than based on a hierarchy or equality norm. Group members have a responsibility to care and provide for each other. Market pricing relationships are motivated by fair market value and typically reduce group members to a single factor that is usually related to money or performance. These structures can exist as nested models, for example,

645

a communal sharing relationship inside a larger, meta-relational, authority ranking structure. Leaders often feel that they have a right to assert their dominance—in fact, this may feel like a moral imperative. Social constructs require managers to maintain an air of authority. The role requires that leaders maintain a hierarchy with their subordinates. This may feel conflicting as leaders also often feel a friendly attachment to their subordinates or at the least a sense of care or responsibility for their well-being. Conflicting roles may make it difficult to maintain friendships as well as a sense of authority with subordinates. Authority ranking relationships require hierarchies, while communal sharing relationships prohibit them. Leaders may feel tension when their role requires them to judge employees based on their value to the organization, which is often purely monetary. Leaders often have a sense of pastoral care over their subordinates, but also must act within the confines of the business with a financial mindset. This may pit internal loyalty to employees against loyalty to organizational success, or to one’s role as a supervisor.

Loyalty Tensions in Moral Leadership Many of the tensions leaders may feel on the basis of pluralist moral systems can be summarized as “right versus right” moral dilemmas. Under a pluralistic worldview, there can be competing moral motivations, each of which is logically valid and worthy of respect. Leaders may need to negotiate right-versus-right dilemmas with their subordinates and within themselves. Loyalty may be split between self-promotion, role, and organizational membership. Leaders may feel obligated to maintain a hierarchy because of the social constraints of their roles but may also feel obligated to foster an inclusive and egalitarian community with their subordinates. Leaders may feel personal ethical motivations to report unfair or illegal business practices, but also feel that doing so would constitute a betrayal to their organization. Alexandra Figueroa Anderson and Jesse Graham

646

Moral Risk

See also Moral Character; Moral Language; Multiculturalism, Ethics of; Political Identities; Religious Disagreement; Social Identity Theory; Virtues

Further Readings Fehr, R., Yam, K. C., & Dang, C. (2015). Moralized leadership: The construction and consequences of ethical leader perceptions. Academy of Management Review, 40(2), 182–209. Fiske, A. P., & Rai, T. S. (2015). Virtuous violence: Hurting and killing to create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janoff-Bulman, R., & Carnes, N. C. (2013). Surveying the moral landscape: Moral motives and group-based moralities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(3), 219–236. Koleva, S., Beall, E., & Graham, J. (2017). Moral foundations theory: Building value through moral pluralism. In A. J. G. Sison (Ed.), The handbook of virtue ethics in business and management (pp. 521–530). New York, NY: Springer.

MORAL RISK An act is morally risky if there is some chance that it could be morally wrong. Leadership always involves moral risk because there is always a chance that a leader’s choices could be wrong. Even if a leader thinks that they are doing the right thing, they may still have moral reasons to avoid moral risks if they can, assuming that avoiding moral risk is not excessively burdensome or morally risky in other ways. This entry presents several examples of moral risk and discusses the relationship between moral risk and blame. It also discusses the significance of moral risk to the study of leadership ethics. Acts are morally risky because people are often uncertain about what the consequences of their actions will be, and because people are uncertain about morality. For example, an act is morally risky if it exposes people to a risk of wrongful harm, but the harm is not guaranteed. Cases like driving while intoxicated or recklessly polluting the environment fall into this category.

Alternatively, an act is morally risky if there is some chance that it is wrong, but people aren’t sure. Eating meat falls into this category because it could be the case that animals have moral status. In many cases, a person is not blameworthy if they didn’t know that they were doing something wrong. For example, if a diner who was allergic to shellfish was served a dish that contained shellfish, the server would not be blameworthy for unknowingly triggering the diner’s allergy assuming the server did not know that the diner was allergic and that the dish contained the relevant allergens. In this case, the server is not blameworthy because he acted from factual ignorance that he couldn’t have reasonably avoided. Yet in other cases, a person can be blameworthy even if they acted from ignorance. For example, if a person served a dish that he knew had some probability of being undercooked or expired, but declined to investigate further, then he would be responsible for any food poisoning that resulted even if he didn’t know for certain that the food was bad. In this case, the server acted recklessly, so he is still blameworthy for serving the bad food. Similarly, people can be responsible for acting recklessly in circumstances of moral ignorance. For example, assume that eating animals is morally wrong. If a person knows that there is some chance that eating animals is morally wrong but decides not to investigate the matter and to eat animals anyhow, then they are blameworthy for eating animals even if they did so only because they didn’t know that eating animals was wrong. In the aforementioned case, the decision to eat animals is especially morally reckless because it is not comparably morally risky to refrain from eating animals and because the knowledge of the moral risk is fairly accessible to most people. In other cases, it’s less clear whether people are blameworthy for their risky choices, either because moral ignorance was hard to avoid or because people face moral risks no matter what they do. To see how moral ignorance can be difficult to avoid, consider the behavior of people who lived in ancient civilizations during times when people enslaved other people and engaged in genocidal warfare and widespread violence against women. It is now clear that these practices were morally

Motional Intelligence and Leadership

wrong. Yet it’s also plausible that ancient people’s moral ignorance was nearly unavoidable, or that it was at least far less avoidable than the moral ignorance of someone who endorsed those practices today. Similarly, people today may be morally ignorant about a great many injustices that persist, which have not yet even been considered or acknowledged as unjust. In other cases, people who act from moral ignorance may not be blameworthy because they encounter moral risks no matter what they do. The decision to continue a pregnancy is sometimes characterized in this way. On one hand, abortion is morally risky in the way that vegetarianism is risky—it risks killing a being that has moral status. On the other hand, having a child may be risky in the same way, and some say that there are also environmental risks to having children. In these cases, ethical decision making involves weighing moral risks to determine which option is the least morally risky, not avoiding moral risk altogether. One might think that people who are deciding under conditions of moral uncertainty should just decide in the way that maximizes the expected utility or rightness of their action, but this seeming solution to moral risk cannot fully settle questions of moral uncertainty because they assume that morality requires maximizing some value or a particular conception of rightness. Deciding under conditions of moral uncertainty requires straightforward moral deliberation about one’s options. The philosopher Dan Moller proposes that people who face morally risky decisions consider how likely an act is to be wrong, the seriousness of wrongdoing if it is wrong, as well as the cost of avoiding a potentially wrongful act and whether avoiding one risk is risky in a different way. For leaders, the stakes of risky decisions are often even higher than the moral stakes for individuals who are deciding only for themselves, because leaders make decisions at a larger scale. If it’s morally risky to choose to eat meat, it’s far more morally risky to choose to sell hamburgers in a restaurant or to put chicken tenders on the menu for a national chain. Leadership is also distinctively morally risky because leaders make decisions for people who cannot consent, including future generations, constituents, and people who are exposed

647

to leaders’ influence more generally. This raises the stakes of decisions that expose lots of people to risks of harm because, in addition to the moral reasons against harming people, leaders must also consider the moral reasons against interfering with people in ways they did not consent to. Jessica Flanigan See also Leadership Ethics, Moral Psychology

Further Readings Guerrero, A. A. (2007). Don’t know, don’t kill: Moral ignorance, culpability, and caution. Philosophical Studies 136(1), 59–97. Moller, D. (2011). Abortion and moral risk. Philosophy 86(3), 425–443. Rosenthal, C. (2020). What decision theory can’t tell us about moral uncertainty. Philosophical Studies 178(10), 3085–3105. Williams, E. G. (2015). The possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18(5), 971–982.

MOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE LEADERSHIP

AND

Motional intelligence (MI) refers to an individual’s intelligent use of body movements to exert influence over others. It also refers to one’s ability to glean accurate information from the body movements of others. Leaders with a high MI move their bodies, including changes of facial expression and voice, to alter the cognitive and emotional states of followers. In turn, followers with high MI understand the meaning of these cues displayed by leaders. The phenomenon of MI was first described in by George Goethals and Scott Allison, who defined this intelligence as the ability to move one’s body for the purpose of moving people. This entry describes motional intelligence, its origins, and the role it plays in romantic attraction, leadership effectiveness, and followership effectiveness.

648

Motional Intelligence and Leadership

Origins of Motional Intelligence The idea of motional intelligence can be traced to two related phenomena. First, the term itself has its obvious derivation from the long-established concept of emotional intelligence (EI). Whereas EI refers to the ability of people to identify, understand, use, and manage emotions, MI involves the ability to identify, understand, use, and manage physical movements. Both EI and MI implicate the actor and the audience. That is, both intelligences involve demonstrating the skillset oneself and responding to that skillset in others. The second phenomenon that inspired the idea of MI is Howard Gardner’s concept of bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Bodily kinesthetic intelligence is one of seven types of intelligence in Gardner’s 1983 theory of multiple intelligences. An individual with high bodily intelligence has the ability to manipulate objects and use one’s body effectively. This intelligence involves a sense of movement, timing, and the perfection of skills through mind–body union. Athletes, dancers, actors, and artists display well-developed bodily kinesthetic intelligence. MI extends bodily kinesthetic intelligence to include the use of one’s body to lead others and to influence others’ emotions and attitudes. In addition, MI includes perceptions and interpretations of others’ bodily movements. Both MI and kinesthetic intelligence incorporate the idea of embodied cognition. Put simply, embodied cognition refers to the idea that processes of the body and mind are intertwined. The cerebral part of us is equally as necessary as the physical part, and the two are knitted together in complex ways. Because MI implicates both the actor and audience, the dynamics of impression management come into play. Sociologist Erving Goffman used the term facework to describe the interplay of the actor and her audience. The actor’s job is to act with the intention of creating a desired image, or “face,” and the audience’s job is to critically evaluate the actor’s “face” and judge its goals and veracity.

Actor–Audience Asymmetry in Motional Intelligence There is an important actor–audience asymmetry in MI that does not characterize EI. With regard to

EI, the intelligence of actors and observers parallel each other. That is, people with high EI are adept at identifying, understanding, using, and managing their own emotions as well as the emotions of others. In contrast, for MI, there is an actor– audience difference. Actors with high MI are skilled in identifying, understanding, using, and managing their own physical movements for the purpose of influencing others. As audience members, however, people only show high MI if they succeed in performing two activities. First, audiences must exercise discretion in their sensitivity and responses to the bodily movements of others. Audiences that exercise discretion show good emotional and behavioral self-regulation in response to others’ body motions. In this context, good self-regulation refers to the ability to manage disruptive and dysfunctional emotions and impulses that the actor’s body movements intend to produce. Audiences with high MI do not compromise their personal or societal values in response to an actor’s self-presentation. Political philosopher Jessica Flanigan has argued that charismatic leaders can undermine moral reasoning ability, and psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that extremist speakers can lower the IQ of audiences by 10 or 20 points. Audiences with high EI and MI do not allow bodily intelligent presentations to undermine their cognitive or moral thinking abilities. Second, and more importantly, audiences with high MI are adept at accurately perceiving the authenticity and true intentions of the actor’s performance. Goffman and Edward Jones have described the ways that audiences can “pierce” an actor’s presentation, looking for signs of insincerity or manipulation. Actors may be skillful in using their bodies in delivering a speech, but audiences with high MI have the ability to identify ulterior motives and tactics aimed at deception, ingratiation, or quackery. Goffman describes the constant back-and-forth between actor and audience where the audience seeks to pierce or penetrate the actor’s line, without necessarily challenging it. Audiences with high MI are skillful in piercing an actor’s facade and seeing the truth that lies beyond the actor’s performance claims. This actor–audience dynamic in MI can be illustrated by examining two prominent world

Motional Intelligence and Leadership

leaders of the 20th century: Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States in the 1960s. Both Hitler and King had high MI, demonstrating effectiveness in using their bodies, voices, and facial expressions to move their audiences. With his “final solution” aimed at genocide, Hitler’s MI was directed toward manipulating audiences toward harming others, specifically Jews, Catholics, gays, and Rom/Sinti (“gypsies”). In contrast, King’s MI goal was to lead audiences toward helping others—specifically Black Americans. Audiences with high MI show effective self-regulation and piercing ability in response to leaders’ MI goals. As such, German citizens whose attitudes and behaviors were swayed by Hitler’s body movements showed low MI because they allowed Hitler’s MI to degrade their ability to self-regulate. In short, they failed to recognize Hitler’s dangerous megalomania. Citizens who remained unswayed by Hitler’s body movements had high MI because they were able to focus on the message and not the charisma. Thus, they showed healthy self-regulation in correctly identifying Hitler as a genocidal menace. Conversely, King’s followers showed high MI because they demonstrated successful self-regulatory skills in being moved by King’s motional abilities directed toward establishing a social good—namely, racial equality. They also correctly viewed King as sincere in his desire for a racially egalitarian world. Those who resisted King’s motional skills showed low MI because of a blunted self-regulatory ability to respond appropriately to King’s positive social message. King’s low MI resistors also “mispierced” his presentation, falsely believing King to have evil or deceptive intentions.

Motional Intelligence in Romance Psychologists have long known that people’s use of their bodies, faces, and voices can exert a strong effect on romantic attraction. For example, the act of being touched causes attention and arousal, and studies have shown that restaurant servers receive larger tips if they briefly touch a customer’s hand or shoulder. Women and men use their bodies to flirt with others, and they often use them differently. Research has demonstrated that women

649

tend to signal interest by smiling, lifting their eyebrows, opening their eyes wide, tossing and tilting their heads, and briefly covering their face with their hands. When they walk, women sometimes attract partners with a provocative swivel of their hips. Men often flirt by maximizing the space that they occupy. Specifically, men tend to spread their arms, their legs, or both. Men lean back in their chairs, clasping their hands behind their heads with their elbows high. Studies show that men also arch their backs and thrust their upper body or chest toward the object of their romantic interest. The chest thrust, or its equivalent, is seen in other male animals who want to appear larger and stronger than they really are. Snakes, toads, and frogs enlarge their bodies in the presence of potential mates. Antelope stand sideways to show off their size and deer turn to advertise their antlers. Codfish puff up their bodies and thrust out their fins. Lobsters lift themselves onto their legs and extend their open claws. Gorillas beat their chests. Animals demonstrate high MI when their motions lead to successful procreation. Humans and other animals show sensitivity to the movements of potential mates. As George Harrison of the Beatles sang, there is “something in the way she [or he] moves.” Because women have wider hip bones than men, their pelvis must rotate while walking. Research has shown that women who show this wiggle in their hips when they walk are judged as more attractive compared to women who show little or no wiggle. Men who walk with a masculine swagger in their shoulders are rated as more attractive compared to men with little or no swagger. Voices are also important in attracting potential mates. Men with deeper voices tend to have more testosterone, and these deeper voices are rated as more attractive than higher-pitched male voices. Moreover, women with higher voices are rated as more attractive than women with deeper voices. There may be an important gender-based asymmetry in romantic versus leadership MI. Specifically, a man looking for either a romantic partner or a leadership position may benefit from the same movement—a shoulder swagger. The swagger signals power and status, attributes that potential partners and potential followers find

650

Motional Intelligence and Leadership

attractive in men. Women, in contrast, may find themselves in a double-bind dilemma. The body motions they need to attract mates are the same ones that may signal poor leadership skills. Specifically, a woman displaying traditionally feminine skills in flirtation may secure a romantic partner but not a leadership position, whereas a man can win in both romance and leadership by displaying the same traditionally male body movements.

Motional Intelligence in Leadership Many of the same body movements used to attract mates are also used to assert dominance and signal leadership ability. The act of touching others, mentioned previously, is a prominent example. Touching is a dominance display, with high status individuals more likely to initiate touch than those in low status, and men more likely to initiate touch than women. Leaders, however, need not physically touch followers to move them. Leaders with high MI have a kinesthetic charisma. Charisma involves communicating dynamically, using one’s body language to convey passion, enthusiasm, and commitment to a noble cause. Many U.S. presidents have had high MI, including Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. The most striking example of a president with high MI may be John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s gait, bearing, posture, and hand gestures communicated the attributes of wisdom, confidence, smoothness, power, and strength. Because motion is perceived on television and not on radio, most U.S. presidents known to have high MI hail from the era of television and video. John F. Kennedy was also a gifted speaker. The media embraced Kennedy and may have collaborated in creating the image of a dashing, charismatic hero with high MI. Sixty years after his assassination, Kennedy continues to earn high reputation rankings from presidential scholars. According to C-SPAN surveys of historians in 2000, 2009, 2017, and 2021, Kennedy ranked either 6th or 8th all-time among presidents. In 2021 his highest rating is in the category of Public

Persuasion (6th overall), followed by Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, Pursued Equal Justice for All, and Vision/Setting an Agenda (7th on all four). Kennedy’s leadership during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is almost legendary, and the 2000 film Thirteen Days reinforced that narrative. Moreover, other accomplishments of his brief administration, such as the Peace Corps and the space program, have cemented Kennedy’s image as an effective president. Despite this substantive evidence supporting Kennedy’s strong reputation, his looks, bearing, and eloquence—in short, his high MI—may lie at the heart of his popularity and high regard among scholars. It is important to note that MI is as common in villainous leaders as in heroic leaders. Some of the most ruthless leaders in human history have benefited from having a charismatic MI that attracts legions of misguided followers. These leaders include Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and Osama Bin Laden. Hollywood filmmakers have long known that one of the keys to box-office successful is the presence of villains with high MI. These villains include Hannibal Lecter (in Silence of the Lambs), the Joker (in Batman), Mildred Ratched (in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Hans Gruber (in Die Hard), Jane Hudson (in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane), Jules Winnfield (in Pulp Fiction), and Darth Vader (in Star Wars). Little is known about the source of MI—how nature and nurture combine to form individuals who possess the gift of moving their bodies to move people. In addition, not much is known about how biology and environment interact to produce individuals who are gifted in perceiving the body movements of others, and who possess the self-regulatory mechanisms needed to respond appropriately to the body movements of leaders directed toward great good or great evil. Future research will no doubt be directed toward untangling these complex processes. Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals See also Emotional Intelligence; Evolutionary Leadership Theory; Followership; Heroic Leadership; Intelligence; Romance of Heroism; Romance of Leadership

Multiculturalism, Ethics of

Further Readings Flanigan, J. (2013). Charisma and moral reasoning. Religions, 4, 216–229. Frimenko, R., Goodyear, C., & Bruening, D. (2015). Changes in spatiotemporal differences between the sexes due to paired walking. Air Force Research Labs Infoscitex Corporation. Available at 2016 AFRL-RHWP-TP-2016–0006. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York, NY: Basic Books. Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2022). The construction and presentation of heroes and heroines. In K. Lee (Ed.), A cultural history of fame in the modern age. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. Goffman, E. (1967). On face-work. In E. Goffman (Ed.), Interaction ritual. New York, NY: Pantheon. Jones, E. E. (1964). Ingratiation: A social psychological analysis. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Muller, C., Cienki, A., Fricke, E., Ladewig, S., McNeill, D., & Tessendorf S. (Eds.). (2014). Body, language, communication: An International handbook on multimodality in human interaction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Salovey, P., & Sluyter, D. (Eds.). (1997). Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Educational implications. New York, NY: Basic Books. Sorenson, T. (1965). Kennedy: The classic biography. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

MULTICULTURALISM, ETHICS

OF

This entry reviews four approaches to addressing the ethical challenges that arise in the context of leading a multicultural group. The norms, values, and traditions that characterize a culture not only structure the daily patterns of interactions between its members but also imbue their collective practices with meaning and help shape larger conceptions of purpose that they tap into as they develop their personal life plans. Given the increased mobility and opportunities for communication made possible by modern technology, it is increasingly common for groups to include members who hail from different cultural roots, and leaders who are charged with directing such multicultural groups face distinct ethical

651

challenges in negotiating between members’ disparate cultural expectations. A principal of a high school in the suburbs of Atlanta, for instance, may oversee some students who grew up in a traditional Baptist farming community and others whose parents are secular, cosmopolitan businesswomen from Tokyo. Such a leader will face difficult ethical questions as they negotiate between families’ competing expectations concerning (for instance) everyday gender norms, holiday celebrations, and education about family planning.

Separating State and Culture: Benign Neglect Because culture shapes individuals’ personal values and preferences in fundamental ways, some liberal political theorists argue that civic leaders should give citizens the widest possible freedom to engage in their own culturally specific practices and neither interfere with, nor support, the spread of any cultural practices within the state. Applying this idea of benign neglect to leadership contexts more broadly, some might conclude that a leader of a multicultural group should take a “hands off” approach to group culture. A principal overseeing a multicultural student body, for instance, should simply remain silent on cultural controversies regarding personal gender norms and forgo any school-wide celebration of cultural holidays. While this posture of benign neglect may help protect a leader from charges of cultural bias, it also gives rise to some distinct challenges. Shared cultural norms and values help support interpersonal understanding and empathy between group members, and the consequent creation of social capital—that is, of social relationships that facilitate cooperation—within a culturally homogenous group may make members more willing to work toward group goals and address group conflicts when they arise. If there is no unified culture within a group, a leader may thus have difficulty motivating members to work together effectively. A second concern is that institutional constraints sometimes seem to make it impossible for a leader to “neglect” taking a stance on a culturally divisive issue. A principal of a multicultural school, for example, may be forced to make

652

Multiculturalism, Ethics of

choices about what kind of bathroom and locker facilities to build, and it is difficult to see how they could justify those choices without making reference to some culturally controversial assumptions about gender.

any deeper cultural references to Christmas songs or Santa Claus—may do little to inspire enthusiasm from students who are attached to culturally specific holiday traditions.

The Millet Approach Neutral Nationalism and the Common Denominator Approach Prominent political theorist David Miller argues that civic leaders should address the problem of social capital by working to forge a shared national culture that is, as far as possible, neutral on citizens’ deepest cultural differences. Miller proposes that this national culture should center around historical figures, narratives, and events that citizens can all identify with, but leaders may also draw on other neutral, nonhistorical resources. They may, for instance, orient followers around a shared mission statement, mascot, or brand, or draw on some other “common denominator” that already exists among group members. An advocate of this common denominator approach to multiculturalism might argue that— rather than doing nothing to foster a shared culture among students—a principal overseeing a multicultural study body should plan a generic “winter” celebration that coincides with students’ shared experience of completing winter exams. While this common denominator approach may help build some social capital, it too has its limits. First, depending on how deep and pervasive the cultural differences are that a leader must be neutral between, there may be limited territory on which genuinely neutral cultural norms and practices can be constructed. In some cases, any feasible option may either reflect, or at least give the impression of reflecting, partiality to a particular cultural group. Thus, the timing of an apparently generic winter celebration may (intentionally or not) reflect implicit partiality for a calendar year that privileges Christian families’ celebrations of Christmas over Japanese families’ celebrations of Kyū Bon in late summer. Second, even in cases where genuinely neutral practices can be found, they may be too shallow to generate the social capital a leader needs. A generic winter celebration that limits itself to references to, say, snowflakes and scarves—and is stripped of

To try to overcome the limits of the common denominator approach to multiculturalism, a leader may consider an alternative approach that is (at least in its outlines) historically familiar from the Millet system used in the Ottoman Empire. Observing that their empire had come to incorporate a wide variety of different religious and cultural groups, Ottoman rulers empowered distinct communities to regulate some of their internal affairs in accordance with their own specific cultural commitments. Taking a cue from the Ottomans, leaders might opt to show individualized support for different cultural communities’ distinct norms and traditions, rather than (or in addition to) attempting to forge a new, unified group culture. Thus, for instance, the principal of the multicultural school might provide the Southern Baptist family with access to school grounds to hold a Christmas celebration for interested Christians and offer the secular businesswomen from Tokyo similar institutional resources to facilitate a separate commemoration of Kyū Bon to enjoy with other Japanese families. Because a leader who takes this “Millet” approach to multiculturalism does not need to create a single, unified set of cultural practices, they may be able to avoid some of the difficult choice-points that appear to force nonneutral decisions. However, problems of neutrality may still arise insofar as a leader must find a way to provide equitable and unbiased support to both smaller and larger constituencies of cultural groups. In particular, they will need to ask whether the smaller size of one cultural group means it deserves fewer institutional resources, or if the fact that members of that group will have greater per capita burdens in maintaining their cultural practices means they deserve additional support. Followers who are given an opportunity to connect with others who understand and appreciate their cultural practices may feel invigorated

Multiculturalism, Ethics of

by those experiences, and this enthusiasm may spill over to also enhance their contentedness within, and motivation to work toward the larger goals of, the group. However, the Millet approach to multiculturalism may also inadvertently undermine different cultural communities’ integration into the broader group. In the 1980s, the Netherlands pursued a high degree of institutional separation between different immigrant groups—providing separate schools, housing, and even sometimes different media outlets for minority communities—and many social scientists have suggested that this approach has contributed to the increased levels of inter-ethnic conflict that Dutch society has since experienced. By contrast, countries like Canada and Australia, which have combined the provision of culturally specific accommodations with incentives for cultural groups to also integrate into the larger society (by creating, for example, more streamlined pathways to citizenship) have done even better with respect to integrating immigrant communities than countries that have provided little or no culturally specific accommodations.

The Melting Pot and the Potluck Models The Netherlands example suggests that a pure Millet approach to multiculturalism may not serve the ends of leaders who depend on shared social capital within a group to support extensive cooperation between multicultural constituencies. As we have seen, drawing on a common denominator to generate a neutral, unified group culture may also fail to generate substantial social capital if cultural differences run so deep that neutral norms and practices must by necessity remain quite superficial. In circumstances where followers from distinct cultural groups must engage in extensive cooperation but they also harbor deep cultural differences, leaders might thus consider a melting pot approach to multiculturalism. Rather than reinforcing cultural differences or trying to find a “shallow” common denominator between groups that allows them to simply set aside those differences aside, a leader who employs this approach will try to transcend those differences by encouraging diverse groups to assimilate their distinctive norms and practices together into a new homogenous group culture.

653

Critics of this melting pot model of multiculturalism note that it may, in practice, easily be prone to be implemented in racist and ethnocentric ways. For example, 19th-century political theorist John Stuart Mill treated cultural assimilation as a way to civilize and “enlighten” peoples who he and his contemporaries regarded as “backward.” The resulting process of—as political scientist Walker Connor describes it—majority nation-building through minority nation-destroying unfortunately became common in the course of state development in the 20th century. Even if leaders do not impose assimilationist policies with explicitly prejudiced motives, insofar as they hail from positions of cultural dominance and power, they may well be imperceptive of the ways in which those policies harm marginalized groups. In part to express his resistance to the melting pot metaphor, prominent multicultural theorist Eboo Patel suggests the metaphor of a “potluck” as an alternative. Patel’s potluck approach to multiculturalism encourages leaders to preserve—rather than erase—cultural differences, and to integrate distinct practices into a new, internally varied cultural setting. Thus, for example, a melting pot approach to multiculturalism might be taken to imply that the principal of a school with a multicultural student body should, say, create a new syncretic celebration that combines elements of the Christian celebration of Christmas and the Buddhist-Confucist celebration of Kyū Bon. A potluck approach, however, would recommend that they facilitate public, school-wide celebrations of both holidays, and pro-actively solicit the engagement of all students in both celebrations. Because the potluck approach to multiculturalism encourages followers to share their culturally distinctive practices with others in the group, it may, in theory, have more power to bridge cultural divides than the benign neglect, common denominator, or Millet approaches. However, the potluck approach will only be successful at bridging cultural divides if followers are willing to invest the time and energy required to engage with relevant cross-cultural practices and ideas. Insofar as followers find that engagement challenging or uncomfortable, the potluck approach may require considerable social capital to sustain.

654

Multiple Roles of Leaders

The potluck approach to multiculturalism is also not immune to challenges concerning neutrality. Suppose for instance that the secular Japanese businesswomen support, and the Southern Baptist family opposes, using limited school funding to build new, gender-neutral bathroom facilities. Since these appear to be mutually exclusive cultural preferences, it is unclear how the principal could apply the potluck model of multiculturalism to such a case. Besides its being true that a leader may sometimes be practically unable to be neutral on a culturally divisive issue, feminist philosopher Susan Moller Okin argues that it may also be morally important for leaders not to be neutral on such issues when some followers’ cultural norms unduly undermine others’ rights and liberties. However, if a leader simply imposes their own view on those who disagree with without actively engaging them in dialogue, those people are apt to feel alienated and resentful toward the leader and the larger group. This may in turn undermine the leader’s ability to enforce their preferred policies and to work effectively toward group goals. For instance, if the principal uses limited school funding to build new, gender-neutral bathroom facilities, dissenting parents may stop contributing time and money to the school PTA, and this may undermine the principal’s ability to achieve desired educational outcomes for the broader student body. When no neutral, ethically acceptable options exist for addressing multicultural conflicts, leaders may thus need to take on the difficult task of persuading dissenting constituencies. Such persuasion is apt to require difficult and protracted processes of group deliberation, but may also be the only way that group cohesion can coexist with the fulfillment of relevant moral demands. Marilie Coetsee See also Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Diversity Ideologies; Inclusive Leadership; Liberalism and Toleration; Disagreement, Ethics of; Religious Disagreement

Further Readings Connor, W. (1999). National self-determination and tomorrow’s political map. In A. C. Cairns, J. C. Courtney, P. MacKinnon, H. J. Michelmann, &

D. E. Smith (Eds.), Citizenship, diversity, and pluralism: Canadian and comparative perspectives. Montr´eal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kesler, C., & Bloemraad, I. (2010). Does immigration erode social capital? The conditional effects of immigration-generated diversity on trust, membership, and participation across 19 countries, 1981-2000. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 43, 319–347. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship. New York, NY: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Multiculturalism. In Contemporary political philosophy: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. (2000). Citizenship and national identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murphy, M. (2012). Multiculturalism: A critical introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Okin, S. M. (1999). Is multiculturalism bad for women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Patel, E. (2019). Out of many faiths: Religious diversity and the American promise. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walzer, M. (1992). Comment. In C. Taylor, & A. Gutmann (Eds.), Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

MULTIPLE ROLES

OF

LEADERS

Most of what we know about leadership we have learned from great storytellers like Homer and Shakespeare, noted generals such as Sun Tzu and Thucydides, and ingenious writers like James Madison, Peter Drucker, and James MacGregor Burns. From them and others we have learned that leadership means different things to different people. For many of us, leadership is an evocative word rich in positive meaning: it refers to empowerment and liberation. It is about making good things happen and preventing bad things from happening. It is a process of getting people to work collaboratively to achieve common purposes. But not everyone understands leadership in a positive way. Some define leadership as manipulation, as wheeling and dealing—“the art of the deal,” as Donald J. Trump put it, referring to a practice involving deception and even coercion.

Multiple Roles of Leaders

Leaders, Followers, and the Uses of Power Leadership involves leaders, followers, context, and power. And power, temporarily loaned by followers to those in leadership positions, gets lodged in human hands—and this can be problematic. For strong and charismatic leaders can have conspicuous liabilities as well as organizational and rhetorical skills. We have seen prominent examples of charismatic leadership in the political sphere—power harnessed for noble ends is of tremendous value. But power can also be an aphrodisiac and a toxin. The best leaders understand the deepest yearnings and needs of their followers. At their most effective, leaders educate, inspire, and mobilize people to become the best they can be. Effective leaders unlock the talents and energies of good people, so they can create, innovate, and make desirable, even noble, things happen. Empowering leaders understand that trust is the coin of the realm. Good things happen in high-trust organizations. Most people want to be part of a meaningful and socially responsible enterprise where they can grow, learn, contribute, and develop to their full potential. Fair play, fair pay, and decency motivate everyone. When deceit, distrust and intimidation are involved, good things and innovation seldom happen. Ruling by fear can work in the short run, yet invariably fails. Rarely can one leader provide an organization’s entire range of leadership needs. Most organizations and societies have all kinds of leaders, and these diverse leaders, in turn, depend for their success on others. Some leaders excel at creating or inventing new structures. Other leaders are splendid task or managerial leaders, encouraging groups at problem solving. Others are social architects, enriching morale and renewing the spirit of an organization or a people. Still other leaders influence us because of their integrity, character, and moral authority. They compel us to ask: Is this right? Is this wise? Is this fair? They raise their voices on behalf of those who have been left behind. They rally us to protest when some of our sisters or brothers find their rights and liberties diminished. These leaders are consciousness-raisers, urging us toward social

655

responsibility—social and economic justice, individual freedoms and racial, religious, and gender tolerance. Spirited critical discussion about leadership and the moral uses of power is extremely important. Prescient observers remind us that power wielded justly today may be wielded corruptly tomorrow. Artists, poets, critics, scientists, writers, theologians, and scholars are often able to help us determine whether we are using power or instead abusing it. The most lasting and pervasive leadership is often intangible and may come from people who are not in formal institutional positions of authority. This is the leadership of ideas embodied in social, political, or artistic movements; the leadership expressed in speeches and writings; and in the memories of valiant lives, valiantly lived. The central job of a leader is less the challenge of producing followers than the challenge of producing community, meaning, and, in turn, more leaders. Leadership defies formulaic prescriptions. Harvard professor Joe Nye warns that holding a leadership position is like having a fishing license. A license alone is no guarantee of catching a fish. Similarly, a military proverb states that “If you think you are leading your troops up a mountain and midway up you turn around and there is no one behind you—you’re not leading, you’re merely taking a hike.” A leader’s legitimacy is fragile and must be regularly re-earned.

Engagement Between Partners and Collaborators Leadership needs in complex organizations and societies have to be viewed as an engagement between partners and collaborators. All of us are followers and at least in some ways, all of us can lead. Followers, much more than is commonly appreciated, often have considerable influence on their leaders. When leadership takes place, it involves a two-way communication and the mutual engagement of leaders and “led.” Hence, it is essentially a collective enterprise; an ongoing, if subtle, interplay between common wants and a leader’s capacity to understand and respond to these shared aspirations. Virtually every leader has to have ideas and must contribute to the substantive thinking

656

Multiple Roles of Leaders

necessary to move an organization beyond problems and toward achievements. Leaders define reality, clarify options, and help minimize the obstacles that make it difficult for members of an organization to succeed. Perhaps the essence of the leadership is consciousness-raising and unlocking the energies and talents of fellow associates. Leaders at their best are not involved in doing great deeds so much as getting their followers to believe they, the followers, can do great deeds and excel. Leaders define and defend and promote values. And they help redefine values, and understand when, in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, the dogmas of the part are inadequate for the stormy present. They understand when new circumstances call for new vision. Leaders are skilled listeners and learners, carefully consulting their own and their colleagues’ values, beliefs, and passions. What is more, a leader has to nurture trust and self-confidence. Associates and followers expect leaders to have bold visions and to pursue them with enthusiasm. People being led yearn for a mission or vision that is clearly stated. Yet they will not support and strive to achieve something if they do not understand it and if they don’t believe in it. And followers must fully believe as well that their leaders believe in it.

Creativity and Effectiveness in Leaders and Managers Although it is true that an effective manager is sometimes an effective leader and that leadership requires many of the skills of an effective manager, there are differences. Leaders infuse vision into an enterprise; they are preoccupied with purpose and the longer-range dreams and aspirations of a society. While a good manager is rightly concerned with efficiency, with routines and standard operating procedures, the creative leader acts as an inventor, risk-taker, and general entrepreneur, forever asking or searching for what is right, what is true, what is worth doing, and keenly sensing new directions, new possibilities, and welcoming change. Leaders can delegate efficiency, yet they own the responsibility for effectiveness. Leaders dwell on the why and the purpose, while managers dwell on the how, the process. An effective organization

needs plenty of managers as well as leaders, and ideally leaders with a good deal of managerial ability. But leadership and managerial outlooks are often different and sometimes clash. Leaders are typically optimistic. They believe in breakthroughs. They are alliance-builders who never give up. They often have a contagious self-confidence and steadfast idealism that attracts others to join them and persevere. They instill enthusiasm in an organization by convincing people about what is important, right, and true. They enhance the possibilities for freedom and for change. Leaders build on strengths: their own, their colleagues’, and the strengths and opportunities afforded by the situation. When considering the multiple roles of leaders, here are a few of the central leadership realities that leaders need to master. • •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Leaders define, defend, promote, and manage their organization’s vision and dreams. Leaders understand it is much easier to lead people to where they want to go than to where they ought or need to go. Leaders understand too the adage: Good judgment is usually the result of experience—and that experience invariably comes from lessons learned stemming from the previous exercise of poor judgment. Leaders risk failure if they ignore or try to delegate their organizational culture. Enriching organizational culture is paramount. Mistakes happen. Embrace them and keep learning from them. Understand what they are teaching. And like an agile skier or surfer, get up and navigate the next challenges. Flatten the pyramid when possible. Be allergic to unnecessary bureaucracy, layers, hierarchy, and “Dilbertisms.” Reward and thank people who are contributing and recruit the right people. Hiring the right people makes firing less necessary. But hiring and firing are even more important than most people appreciate. Effective organizations have fun, invent jobs that are opportunities—not obligations—and provide everyone an understanding of the importance of what they are all doing. Leaders are optimistic, yet theirs is an optimism that is tough-minded rather than na¨ıve. Leaders

Mutiny

understand how things may be, yet they keep searching for the possibilities. • Leaders understand that ambition and leadership are uneasy yet indispensable companions. Leaders need to have a strong dose of ambition, pride, and egotism—strong egos, not swollen ones, or what is called a narcissistic personality disorder. They understand too that ambition can be both a good servant and a dangerous master. • As psychologists and management scholars suggest, the effective leader must be an integrative thinker, able to knit together diverse information and competing ideas into a coherent strategy. • Leaders learn that their primary challenge is less to produce followers than to produce community, meaning, and more leaders.

Effective leaders understand these realities, and understand, too, that paradoxes, dilemmas, and quandaries are everywhere. Leaders embrace paradoxes and learn to reconcile them when they can, yet coexist with them when they cannot. The best leaders learn to exploit paradoxes, transcend either/or choices, and, where possible, unlock the power and advantages of paradox. Life would be easier if leadership was merely some type of equation or list of simple rules, but paradoxes are always present in politics and the business world. Paradoxes and dilemmas come with the territory. The best of leaders—and this is asking a lot—learn not only how to operate in this world of paradoxes and contradictions, but how to embrace or transcend paradoxes. Here are six of the paradoxes that must be navigated by leaders in the performing arts, and in other domains: 1. Need to be optimistic and to radiate confidence. . . yet need to be hard-headed realists and confront brutal realities. 2. Need to be humble, decent, empathetic, servantleaders. . . yet have ferocious resolve, heightened self-confidence, strong ego. 3. Need to be intuitive and risk-taking. . . yet not at the expense of the data. Obtain as much rigorous data as possible. 4. Need to be passionate, inspirational performers and actors. . . yet people hate phonies, fakers, and overpromising of any kind.

657

5. Need to be customer-driven. . . yet put your own people first. . . they need purpose, autonomy, space, and fun. A sense of drive and urgency is crucial, and the customers are not always right. 6. Vision is important. . . yet so also is execution and getting small things accomplished. Sometimes the best vision is supervision. “Yes, we need leadership,” says a fellow in an iconic Wall Street Journal cartoon, “but we also need somebody to tell us what to do.”

This lesson is clear. It is imperative for groups, organizations, and societies to recruit and promote people into leadership positions who can understand and who deal best with paradox and dialectics. Leaders are people who help create options and opportunities and help inspire people to imagine and see the possibilities of a better world. Leaders understand that leadership and responsibility go together—that’s the deal. Thomas E. Cronin Further Readings Bennis, W., & Nanus, B. (1985). Leaders: The strategies for taking charge. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Cronin, T. E., & Genovese, M. A. (2012). Leadership matters. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Daloz Parks, S. (2005). Leadership can be taught. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Fiedler, F. E. (1967). A theory of leader effectiveness. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Gardner, J. W. (1990). On leadership. New York, NY: Free Press. Rubenstein, D. M. (Ed.). (2020). How to lead. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

MUTINY Mutiny is defined as the refusal to obey a legitimate order by two or more individuals in a military organization. This entry reviews the origins of the phenomenon and explores its persistence and historical importance in relation to leadership.

658

Mutiny

Origins of the Word Mutiny The origin—as an English word—derives originally from the Latin movere (“to move”) via the Old French mutin, meaning “rebellious.” It first appeared in the English language in 1567, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who later refused to pay the sailors that had saved the country from the Spanish Armada in 1588 and subsequently hanged those who mutinied in protest. By 1579, mutiny was associated directly with sailors or soldiers rebelling against their commanders. Mutiny can also occur in merchant naval vessels (including ships carrying enslaved people) because the officers of such vessels are considered to embody sovereign power, that is, power which temporarily resides in the ship’s captain while the ship is at sea and is thus separate from another institution or state. Mutiny is not present when an individual refuses to obey a legitimate order or when civilian groups rebel against a legitimate state; that would be considered sedition—conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of the state or monarch.

Mutiny and Leadership Mutiny and leadership are opposite sides of the same coin; leadership generates its own resistance, and has always done so. For example, that “reversedominance-hierarchies”—attempts by subordinates to organize against the superordinate to either discipline or overthrow them—have always occurred. Generally speaking, where subordinates are unhappy, they will either remain passively unhappy or rationalize their unhappiness (“It could be worse, at least we are alive”), or do something about it. What they do about their unhappiness depends on a whole raft of issues, including the time and space for the resistance, the resources available to them, the legitimacy of their oppression and resistance, the presence of enough people willing and able to lead the resistance, and, of course, the equivalent resources available to the authorities. Since mutiny is, by definition, limited to social, rather than individual, dissent and to military or naval organizations rather than all organizations, the leaders of both sides in a mutiny are often

encased in a different mold than their equivalents elsewhere. Elsewhere, social dissent might take the form of a protest, working at a deliberately slow pace, a strike, a march, a sit-in, or any one of hundreds of other manifestations of dissent that are visible every day. But none of these are mutinies. In mutinies, any form of dissent can be interpreted by the authorities as an attempt to overthrow, by force, the status quo; in other words, not just a manifestation of unease among the subordinates, but some form of rebellion. And with rebellion comes extreme coercion, oftentimes ending in corporal or capital punishment. That unique context generates different forms of leadership which challenge the understanding of power, leadership, and legitimacy. For most people, deciding to dissent from the wishes of employers or the demands of the state might require the voluntary reduction of income or a few hours of marching in the rain; for mutineers and those against whom they mutiny, the decision to act, and the form of response taken, might very well lead to being shot by a firing squad, hung from a yardarm, or dumped into the ocean. Or it might just improve conditions, secure the back pay owed for months, get rid of despicable tyrants, or set the organization on a better path. In effect, leadership in mutinies, on both sides, is a precarious act where any false move—or even any move—might be one’s last. This is especially the case for the mutineers where leadership is not something honed to a professional skill over years of practice and supported by the majesty of the law, the fear of dismissal, and the terror of the lash and noose, but rather something that often emerges rather spontaneously and usually with little experience on the part of the leaders. Often, in military hierarchies, superordinates do not bark orders, and subordinates work without permanent intimidation. Of course, this may be because the subordinates accept the legitimacy of the hierarchy or because it is self-evident that any challenge will bring severe consequences, so what would be the point of dissenting? In itself, this is an important point: generally speaking, people who deem themselves to be in an unjust or unfortunate position will not do much about it if there is no obvious resolution of the problem available.

Mutiny

Recognizing that one is unjustly enslaved does not automatically result in revolt if a path to freedom is not visible. Moreover, dissent among those at the top of the hierarchy is also common, but that does not count as mutiny if it is limited to individuals. The absence of overt dissent does not equate with consent. Indeed, for long periods of time the coercive control of the state over its soldiers in particular would have been minimal outside of parades, marches, or battles. Few armies lived permanently in barracks, and on campaign many were traditionally assigned lodging among civilians, thus the overt military discipline and control would have been minimal for significant periods of time. It was for this reason that the wearing of the uniform and the regular rotation of guard duties was required: to remind soldiers that they were just that, soldiers who had signed a contract to comply. It is also for this reason that leadership within military hierarchies is suffused with supporting systems beyond the mores of legitimacy. A monopoly over the legitimate use of violence is, of course, the sine qua non (necessary condition) of the state, as German sociologist Max Weber insisted, but that usually pertains to the deployment of violence by agents of the state against an actor or movement which challenges the rule of that state. Mutiny itself involves the use of violence either against the authorities of the state or against those normally required to use violence against the state’s enemies or opponents. Since mutiny challenges the legitimate use of that violence against the internal agents usually required to deploy it, mutiny is often only seen when the mutineers perceive that there has been a severing in the moral economy, the agreed-upon “rules of the game” under which subordinates risk life and limb in exchange for some level of care on the part of the superordinates. But for those against whom the mutiny is organized, it is often regarded as posing an existential risk to the state. It is for this reason that military hierarchies reinforce their own legitimacy with symbols of power—not just the power of the law but the rituals associated with it: the uniforms, the flags, the medals, the drum beats, the deployment of marines, the ordering of the naval crews

659

and the army units to witness punishments, the physical separation of officers and others, the hovering, ever-present threat of “the enemy,” the media, religious rituals, appeals to loyalty to the head of state, and so on. All of these are arranged in a sequence of practices to deter dissent and encourage compliance, and the consequence is that leadership in mutinies, on both sides, is unusually difficult and frequently terminal. Naturally, many mutinies are not intended by the mutineers to be the first act of dissent in an eventual rebellion intended to replace the hierarchy or escape from it. Frequently, mutinies are the equivalent of industrial disputes—conflicts between management and workers over employment—at least in the eyes of the perpetrators, especially when external protests are commonplace and external comparisons become popular. Thus, the British army mutinied in 1919 over the slow speed of demobilization. But, since the legitimate monopoly of violence runs through the institutions of the state, any challenge to it is often construed by the superordinate agents of the state as a political rebellion, not an industrial dispute. Sometimes this is the first step in rebellions, as witnessed in Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1918. The consequence is that the forms of leadership within a mutiny, and the skills required to lead or suppress one, are not that necessary outside of military hierarchies.

Leadership Within Mutinies Leaders of mutinies need to be absolutely clear about the purpose, strategy, and tactics required to bring the mutiny to a successful conclusion. If the purpose is not the overthrow of the ship’s captain, for example, but rather the securing of back pay, then violence needs to be closely monitored and probably abstained from, but even this may be insufficient to prevent retribution, especially if the mutiny fails. This also means that the process of leading a mutiny is fraught with danger. Without the rituals and practices associated with the leadership of the formal hierarchy, or within industrial organizations, the leaders of mutinies have few of the traditional levers of power. They are unlikely to be able to ensure that those unwilling to join the mutiny can be punished in any conventional way, by permanent exclusion from the union or being

660

Mutiny

ejected from membership for example, and are left with merely ostracizing those refusing to rebel or engaging in violence or restraint against them. But these actions are, again, often signs of impending failure and expose the weakness of the mutineer’s main weapon: solidarity. Oftentimes, of course, given the speed with which mutinies develop and the importance of retaining secrecy in the early stages, it becomes an enormously complex task to lead a mutiny, and the serendipitous nature of events means that victory is never certain and possible defeat is a constant companion. Indeed, it may well be that some mutinies are not well planned or thought through, but spontaneous acts in the face of a particular event that is regarded by the mutineers as beyond unacceptable. If then, leadership is necessarily a relational activity in which the success or suppression of the mutiny is dependent upon the relationship between the leaders and followers, rather than the power of the leaders or followers in and of itself, then the cause of the mutiny is frequently the collapse of that relationship between the officers and their subordinates. Equally important, the explanation of the success or failure of the mutiny is usually a consequence of the relationship between the mutineers and their leaders. Often in mutinies, success is related not only to the solidarity of the mutineers but also their leadership. If the purpose of the mutiny is clear and generally accepted by those required to support it, the strategy is appropriate for the context, and the tactical skill of the leaders is better than that of their opponents, then a mutiny has a chance of not just succeeding, but of concluding without the scapegoating of the mutiny’s leadership. But if the purpose is confused or divisive, the strategy inappropriate, or the tactics insufficiently inflexible, then not only is the mutiny likely to fail but the leadership will almost certainly be disciplined at least and perish at worst. Leaders in a mutiny have to take the general disquiet of the group and turn that frequently formless anger into a coherent and disciplined response, designed to address the disquiet as quickly as possible. Making a mistake in life is often an opportunity for learning something about

oneself and the world; making a mistake in a mutiny is often a life-ending event. In some mutinies the world is changed for the better and for the many, but in some cases it is changed for the worse, and for the few, forever.

Mutinies in the Present Day Many contemporary countries have not seen a mutiny for many years. In some areas, this is often because war now plays a less important role. In others, the recognition of how important pay and conditions are has generated a more sustainable model for the relationship between civilian and military rulers. Moreover, many military organizations are composed of volunteers rather than those required to serve, so the relationship between superordinate and subordinate is different. But even those countries that rely on volunteer forces are not immune, and some countries do seem plagued by mutinies: According to an October 2021 News Directory 3 article, Sudan has suffered 15 military coups or mutinies since 1952, while the rest of Africa has experienced 206 coups or mutinies and the level has remained remarkably stable at about four a year on average. But a military coup is an attempt to replace the government of a country whereas a mutiny is a revolt against the military superordinates by the subordinates. And whatever the outcome of a mutiny, and whether it succeeds or not, the future will have been ineradicably changed, for good or ill. Keith Grint See also Collective Action; Followership; Military Leadership; Obedience; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Bell, C. M., & Elleman, B. A. (Eds.). (2003). Naval mutinies of the twentieth century. London: Frank Cass. Boehm, C. (2001). Hierarchy in the forest. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grint, K. (2021). Mutiny and leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guttridge, L. F. (2002). Mutiny: A history of naval insurrection. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.

Mutiny Hathaway, J. (Ed.). (2001). Rebellion, repression, reinvention: Mutiny in comparative perspective. Westport, CT: Praeger. Linebaugh, P., & Rediker, M. (2000). The many-headed hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso. News Directory 3. (2021, October 31). Sudan and military coups in Africa. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https:// www.newsdirectory3.com/sudan-and-military-coupsin-africa-mangalam/

661

Sale, M. M. (1997). The slumbering volcano: American slave ship revolts and the production of rebellious masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weber, M. (2015). Politics as a vocation. In T. Waters & D. Waters (Eds. and Trans.), Weber’s rationalism and modern society. New York, NY: Palgrave. Woodman, R. (2005). A brief history of mutiny. London: Robinson.

N of adults. It is possible, however, for individuals to have many signs of narcissism and not be officially diagnosed. Everyone has the potential to be a leader. Likewise, everyone has the potential to be a narcissist. The unpredictable combination of genetics and environment can either fertilize or hinder the expression of a specific trait. At its core, narcissism is a perfect storm of genetics and environmental factors.

NARCISSISTIC LEADERSHIP Leadership is an admirable trait found in many role models, innovators, and trailblazers. Public figures such as athletes, politicians, and celebrities as well as more local neighborhood professionals such as teachers are often cited as having leadership abilities. However, the positive attributes of leadership can coincide and coexist with negative traits of personality disorders, including narcissism. Leaders are good communications, sympathetic and empathetic, responsible, and confident. Narcissists, on the other hand, may present an exterior of capable and emotionally strong individuals, but they are deeply self-absorbed and suffer from low self-esteem. Narcissistic leadership consists of the positive attributes and traits of leaders tinged with the negativity and toxicity of a narcissist. To a narcissist, leadership is quickly devalued from guiding the greater good into simply benefitting the narcissist themselves. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a clinical, pathological mental disorder that can cause serious issues with personal and professional relationships. Narcissistic personality disorder is notoriously difficult to confirm, owing to the necessity of a clinical diagnosis. Because of their inflated ego, narcissists do not believe they need counseling or therapy; thus, clinical narcissism is only estimated to be present in a small percentage

Behind the Narcissistic Façade Outwardly, narcissists often appear to have unflappable confidence and self-esteem. They may seem to have perfect relationships, beautiful homes, great children, and the proverbial white picket fence. However, self-esteem is not the same thing as the superiority flaunted by narcissists. In fact, the two are unrelated; the narcissist has rock-bottom self-esteem but covers it with egotism and lies. The ego of a narcissist is akin to a fancy car with a fuel tank constantly on the verge of a red, glaring E but unable to be fully fueled. The fuel is provided by other people in their life: children, partners, family members, co-workers, customers, and so on. Narcissists are, by nature, braggarts who showcase their real or perceived talents obnoxiously in an effort to make other people feel envious. The drive for to attain superior status is what keeps a narcissist moving through life. The shaping and maintaining of social acceptance and

663

664

Narcissistic Leadership

the appearance of being better than the people around them are of paramount importance.

Leadership and Personality Even in the absence of a clinical diagnosis, traits of narcissism are still overwhelmingly damaging in all areas of life. A lack of empathy and an inflated ego can cause major problems, infiltrating all domains from personal relationships to the workplace. Narcissists are more likely to engage in cheating and cutting corners, experience unpredictable and frequent mood swings, and have difficulty getting along with others. No matter the cause or etiology of a trait, it is considered negative if it is inflexible and maladaptive. As humans are both product and process, personality is both physical and psychological in that it both is something and does something. Leaders do not fit neatly into any specific personality trait theory. Trait theories such as the Big Five rank individuals on according to the degree, high or low, to which a trait is expressed. The OCEAN acronym—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism—identifies individuals as having multiple traits that may often coexist. For example, someone may rank highly in openness but low in extraversion. This doesn’t mean that introvert cannot be a good leader. It does mean, however, that personality traits can overlap and have both positive and negative dimensions. Personality Traits of Positive Leaders

When looking at the OCEAN personality trait theory, it is easy to see how the traits overlap and interact. Leaders who are high in Openness are said to be willing to try new experiences, to be curious and creative, and possess a love of learning. Similarly, individuals who have high Conscientiousness have a high level of intellect, which increases with age, plan and organize well, value order and good performance, and are disciplined and consistent. Extraversion is strongly linked to leadership as well as social confidence and assertiveness. Those who rank low in extraversion can still be impactful leaders because they also are introspective. Their lack of boisterousness

can indicate a higher expression of another leadership trait, such as conscientiousness. Leaders must also get along with others, be respected, and sympathetic. These traits of agreeableness can help promote rapport in the workplace. Individuals with low neuroticism are confident and adventurous and have stable and predictable moods and emotions. On the surface, a narcissist appears to be made for leadership roles: they appear remarkably confident, outspoken, gregarious, and well liked. Unfortunately for a narcissist, leadership is much more than appearances and first impressions. Many studies have found negative correlations between leadership ability and narcissistic traits, indicating that one’s simply having the appearance and surface behaviors of a leader does not translate into a well-led workplace. Personality Traits of Narcissistic Leaders

Good leaders are consciously motivated and aware of what they are doing and why, which guides them in decision-making. In narcissists, this trait becomes dangerous. While they are consciously motivated in that they are aware of what they are doing, they are also aware that what they are doing is damaging to others. This is where narcissistic leadership overtakes, or supersedes, positive leadership: the perceived benefit to the self is far more important than the benefit to others. The narcissist will make the conscious choice to hurt or take advantage of others for their own personal good. In the context of the Big-Five OCEAN trait theory, a narcissist will most likely rank high in neuroticism and low in agreeableness. They are rigid, unmoving, and refuse to consider any opinion or anyone else’s comfort aside from their own. An individual high in neuroticism is jealous, moody, pessimistic, and insecure. This trait is linked to poor job performance and high anxiety, and it increases the likelihood of engaging in risky behaviors such as drug or alcohol abuse, shoplifting, and sexual affairs. An individual low in agreeableness will come across as blunt, rude, and callous. These two traits of neuroticism and low agreeableness shape the true identity of the narcissist beyond the extraverted façade. A true extrovert is comfortable with others, friendly and

Narcissistic Leadership

talkative, and possesses high social confidence. These aren’t mere surface traits. Instead of working for the greater good, a narcissist works for their own personal good. When one digs beneath the surface, there is little in common between narcissists and leaders beyond their confident appearances. Narcissists are deeply ashamed of themselves and have a very fragile, delicate self-image. They cannot tolerate blows to their image or self and therefore use a bombastic exterior as armor. A good leader, in contrast, can handle the lows that come with the highs of life and use them as occasions for personal growth. A narcissist has little notion of personal growth or motivation to practice positive behaviors with the aim to improve themselves. Work Environment

Sharing an environment with a narcissist is sure to produce conflict, anxiety, and negativity. If a narcissist is in a position of authority, the responsibilities and perks that come along with the position empower their insatiable egotism. Narcissists are generally identified as encompassing the traits of dominance, grandiosity, self-absorption, combativeness, and exploitative tendencies. Obviously, these traits do not translate well into the professional world. The workplace will become toxic and punctuated by frequent conflict and negativity. There will also be a consistent cycle of scandal and cover-ups, a high level of employee turnover, favoritism, and rampant harassment and discrimination. Workplace violence can be either threatened or actual, and the stress inflicted by threats of abuse can be detrimental to one’s health. Shortcomings and failures will always be recorded and tallied up while successes will be ignored or even passed off as the narcissist’s work. Individuals with high extraversion are also found in leadership roles or other self-bestowed places of power and direction. They may not have earned the position, but they strongly feel they deserve it no matter what. The overblown ego of a narcissist is often a cover for the crippling self-doubt and low confidence they secretly possess. However, this trait can overlap with that of high extraversion, which would allow the

665

narcissist to skillfully cover up his or her low self-esteem with the popular, bombastic exterior.

Working With a Narcissist Extraverts who also embody other narcissistic traits will most likely surround themselves with people who are easily influenced and bullied or are otherwise nonconfrontational. A narcissist typically cannot be treated with anything less than devotion and kid gloves and will not tolerate rebuttals or differing opinions. Combined with the traits of low agreeableness, neurotic narcissists also tend to lose their composure when angered or confronted. The need to defend themselves and come out on top as being right outranks the comfort of others or what the facts really indicate. To the narcissist, truth doesn’t matter as long as they are seen as right. A narcissist is unable to take the blame for a situation gone wrong, or to apologize. The blame will always be squarely placed on another individual. The narcissistic leader will be catered to by individuals who also have very low self-esteem and are too afraid to stand up for themselves. People who are agreeable and involved with a narcissist tend to try and avoid conflict and do whatever necessary to keep things calm and take the blame on behalf of the narcissist. However, a narcissist can never be truly pleased, and those working for the narcissist will never be granted rest. Empaths and honest individuals are easy targets for narcissists, who thrive on power and the ability to control others and can be exceptionally sneaky at succeeding. By linking themselves to a partner or coworker with high agreeableness, the narcissist leader is ensuring there is always an available punching bag. People with the prosocial behavior of agreeableness tend to be trusting and cooperative and look for the good in others no matter what. Therefore, agreeable people who find themselves entangled with a narcissistic individual will most likely follow instructions and cater to demands. Agreeable people are also more likely to accept and tolerate the various types of abuse from the narcissist to keep the peace and please their partner. In contrast, narcissists and those with low agreeableness have little or no concern for others

666

Networks and Networked Organizations

and lack the capacity to put the needs of others ahead of their own.

Manipulation and Control A narcissist is obsessed with maintaining control through manipulation. The narcissistic leader will resort to one of two methods of retention: benefit provisioning behaviors or cost-inflicting behaviors. Both are methods of control and are designed to keep the narcissist in charge. Benefit-provisioning actions consist of the narcissist covering up blunders or mistakes with the best possible excuses or sacrificing others to maintain their personal lead. Records will be adjusted or forged, or gifts will be bestowed to change the narrative. The second method of retention, cost-inflicting behaviors, is far darker, more intimidating, and just as abusive as the gift-giving method. Cost-inflicting narcissists rely on the use of bullying and threats to keep their subordinates in line. Violence can either be actual or insinuated against one person or a cohort. The narcissist can rearrange job placements, force a transfer, deny a promotion, or even recommend a demotion or pay reduction. The narcissist not only flaunts their power but also devalues and dehumanizes the worker. Kristy Lee Hochenberger See also Bad Leadership; Followership; Leader Emergence and Performance; Leader–Follower Relationship; Paradoxes of Leadership; Toxic Leadership; Trait Theories of Leadership

Further Readings American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text revision (DSM-5-TR)). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi. books.9780890425787 Blair, C. A., Palmieri, R. E., & Paz-Aparicio, C. (2018). Do Big 5 personality characteristics and narcissism predict engagement in leader development? Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018. 01817 Hochenberger, K. L. (2021). Love in the age of narcissism: Finding clarity in a world of ego and façade. Psychology Today. Retrieved June 10, 2022, from

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-in-theage-narcissism McGreal, S. A. (2015, November 29). Personality’s ‘big one’ and the enigma of narcissism. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/ blog/unique-everybody-else/201511/personalitys-bigone-and-the-enigma-narcissism Raypole, C. (2019, January 26). What the Big 5 personality traits can tell you. Healthline. Retrieved June 10, 2022, from https://www.healthline.com/ health/big-five-personality-traits

NETWORKS AND NETWORKED ORGANIZATIONS Networked organizations consist of connecting and interconnecting systems. Leadership in networked organizations sees and facilitates connections and interactions between people and processes to influence change. Organizations, as organized networks, comprise networks of people, tasks, ideas, programs, and products that are connected within and across other organizations and beyond. This entry considers how leadership in networks and networked organizations facilitates these connections and influences change. Networked organizations model the networks that can be seen throughout nature. It was the new science of ecology that observed how species were linked together through food chains. This food web is a network that connects all species together in an ecosystem. In neuroscience, the ubiquity of networks is realized in the 10 billion nerve cells which are interlinked in a network of one trillion connections. The world, both natural and manufactured, is organized on the principles of networks.

Understanding Organizations The industrial era, based on Newtonian principles such as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, had a strong influence on 20th-century science and business. At that time, organizations were built on the principles of mechanistic or machine-like functioning, compartmentalization of distinct

Networks and Networked Organizations

boundaries, and vertical top-down control. The industrial era saw the exponential growth in organizations that were hierarchical and which typically generated tangible commodities through assembly line productions. Metaphors used to describe this form of organization were mechanistic, such as when all is going well it is working as “a well-oiled machine.” If an organization faltered, it was often described as “broken,” and to fix it, a part was replaced. Employees were often seen as easily replaceable in an organization. In the 21st century, the traditional approach to organizational work has shifted. The knowledge era encompassed the development of the microchip, the computer, and the internet, resulting in the digital revolution. Emerging in the 21st century, we are witnessing the life-science revolution, where the digital is commingled with biology. In this global society, this generates new constructs for social structures and relationships across the human landscape. The networks of a living system more adeptly describe 21st-century organizations. This shift has implications for understanding the role and activities of leadership in organizations.

Science of Networks In 2020, the entire world experienced COVID-19. Once the virus took hold, it spread exponentially. Every contact and every connection became a potential source of contagion, impacting change. Some scientists believe human behaviors spread the same way as viruses. And, indeed, the viral metaphor is useful when talking about the dispersal of simple ideas or information, such as news of a tsunami in Japan or a royal wedding in Great Britain. They are easy to transmit and are categorized as simple contagions. On the other hand, to influence social change requires significant alterations in human belief systems and behaviors. It means engaging in more complex contagions. Contagion Typology

A simple contagion is a clear-cut idea that spreads quickly but lacks lasting impact on human behavior. It has linear causality, such as the spread of a single idea from one person to another.

667

A complex contagion refers to a multifaceted idea and the way change happens in social networks and shifts normative behaviors. It includes the channels of connections, the patterns of those connections, and the prisms through which the new idea is interpreted. Geometry of Networks

The spread of a complex contagion is contingent on the pattern of connections. The geometry of social networks comes in two basic forms, decentralized and distributed. Decentralized networks can be visualized by a fireworks display. Each person is at the epicenter of their “burst,” and their ties reach out randomly in every direction. There is minimal overlap or connection with one another’s contacts. Distributed networks look more like a fishing net or a spiderweb, with the appearance of interconnecting triangles and rectangles. People are connected to one another’s contacts. The pattern reflects a profusion of network clustering. The science of networks studies these patterns of connections, how information spreads in systems, and the implications for organizational networks and leadership.

The Dynamics of Networks in Organizations Networked organizations are organized differently than those designed as hierarchies. Characteristics of networked organizations are as follows. Networks Are Wholistic

Networked organizations are more than the sum of their parts. Rather than focusing on the components, it is important to focus on the whole and how the parts relate to fully understand the organization. For example, to fully understand the health of a human body, one must study the flow of nutrients throughout the body, just as one must analyze the entire flow of information across networks within an organization. Networks Blur Boundaries

Owing to their connectivity and interconnectivity, networks blur boundaries within and between

668

Networks and Networked Organizations

organizations, between people and their communities, and between where people work and where they live. Links and connections transcend traditional boundaries. In a globalizing economy, multilateral organizations transcend national boundaries. Social media also compresses time and blurs boundaries. Networks Are Nonlinear

Networks behave in nonlinear ways as the myriad connections create multiple opportunities for discontinuous change. The connectivity of the system makes it possible for many variables from near and far to create ripple effects that influence the whole system. This makes it difficult to assign causality; like the speed of information from synapse to synapse in the brain, information in organizations spreads at the speed of light throughout multiple modes of communication simultaneously. Networks Are in Constant Flux

When interconnected variables are at play, high speeds and movement are natural. Networks are, therefore, constantly in a dynamic flux, prompting organizations to experience accelerating speed and constant movement. The more accessible and instantaneous the reach, the greater the sense of urgency is created.

dynamic movement and connectivity, networks do not respond to force; instead, they naturally resist it. As the dynamics of networks has increasingly grown, it has led to increased rapidity of change and the lessening effectiveness of control. Global economic, political, and societal issues affect organizations and how people think and work within them. Effectiveness used to be measured in part by a person’s ability to work independent of others and maintain distinct boundaries. Now, effectiveness is measured by a person’s ability to develop and maintain cross-boundary relations and see patterns in the whole system. One’s success is determined by one’s connectedness.

Implications for Leadership The current literature on leadership contains a large array of frameworks that embrace the concept that everything is interconnected. The interactions among the parts of a system are critical to the organization’s success and ultimately its sustainability. Networks require a shift in the ways of thinking about organizational life and the phenomenon of leadership within the organization. Shifting the Leadership Mindset

The complexity of the network grows geometrically. A networked organization is never closed off from outside influencers; it is constantly shaped by variables that exist outside departmental and organizational boundaries. It is impossible to understand all the variables at play, thus it requires constant adaptation. It necessitates focusing on the relationships between variables and a view of the whole system. Leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz describes this as the view from the balcony above the dance floor watching the intricacies and the patterns of the dancers below.

The move from hierarchy to networks and from mechanistic to nature-based concepts of leadership shifts the focus from a top down, control orientation to one that emphasizes developing leadership throughout the organization. In the Industrial era organizational leaders tended to rely on vertical hierarchies and a fragmented-parts mindset, but this shift in focus means turning their attention to a wholistic, living-systems perspective. Thinking about organizations as living systems means viewing all elements as part of a broad system of intersections and relationships. The focus on the flow of information shifts from top down and bottom up, to seeing the flow of information and energy as between and across networks.

Networks Are Linked

Embracing the Whole

Networked organizations can be influenced but they cannot be controlled. Due to the high degree of

Understanding the critical vitality of linkages and intersections makes it clearer that at some

Networks Are Relational

Networks and Networked Organizations

level everything is interdependent. Moreover, this knowledge of the interconnections of everything necessitates looking differently at organizational and human interactions and behaviors. The study of organizational leadership and practice moves from being based on vertical, reductionist processes to studying the whole. Systems thinking replaces linear thinking. Organizational processes in living systems continually renew and reinvent themselves while maintaining their core identity. From the smallest structural element to the very complex patterns of behavior that exist throughout the organization, there are patterns that are played out. At every level of the organization there exists a self-organizing capacity. This makes it even more important for leaders to recognize that within the organization’s dynamic action, their actions have cascading and rippling implications throughout the organization. Valuing Connectivity

In a networked organization, connectivity is the condition that informs leadership work. The interactions between processes are the driving force for advancing the organization. Leaders need to be aware of the relatedness of processes, actions, behaviors, and functions. No act is independent, and no one act adds value independent of its relationship with other elements. Most of the work of leadership involves facilitating the interactions and connections between people and processes. Leaders need to keep in mind that action in one place ultimately has an impact on all other places, and fluctuations of mutuality means leadership roles move between organizational members. In a networked organization, one’s value is related to one’s connectedness across boundaries within an organization as well as between the organization and its community. It is the quality of those interconnections which ultimately determines value. What flows through the interconnectivity is where the often-unforeseen value lies. For example, trees develop intertwined root systems that relay information about water, stress, and support to the other trees in the area. It is the interrelated connections that cannot immediately be seen that require attention.

669

Linking Complex Networks

Linked networks create more complex networks. In organizations, there are formal networks and informal networks. Both are part of the dynamics of change. Networks in an organization continually interface, confront, intersect, and interact with each other. Simple networks interact with each other in a dance of self-organizing and joining with other networks. The linkage with other networks demonstrates a synergy when acting in relationship to each other, each doing its part in the “dance of change,” and it leads to shifting impact or transformation. The informal networks carry the information of sentiments—feelings, emotions, and beliefs— throughout the organization. Organizations have hundreds of informal networks that operate as peer groups, colleague networks, and other organizational structures. These are just as valid and vital as the formal networks where huge inflows and outflows of information and knowledge move dynamically through the systems. Central to the concept of networks is that all systems within the organization respond collectively to changes in the environment. There is a continual and dynamic interaction between all the persons and processes within the organization and the external environment. Leaders in the organization recognize this dynamic interaction and see it as central to adapting to and influencing change. Influencing Relevant Change

Change in networks requires the social proof that an idea or an innovation is useful to them. To attain relevance, a new concept must attain legitimacy, which requires acceptance and use by a diversity of sources. Influencers that conform to the status quo can block change. The potential for the greatest social change lies in the periphery of the networks or at the margins of the organization where critical information exists. Networks have always existed. They are ubiquitous in the natural world and in the organizations in which people live and work. In networks everything is interdependent; there is an ebb and flow, a dependence on all the elements. As the world continues to become more complex and

670

Neuroscience

interconnected, the work of leadership will increasingly involve facilitating the interactions and connections between people and processes. Cynthia Cherrey See also Actor Network Theory; Bureaucracy; Connective Leadership; Organizational Leadership; Systems Thinking

Further Readings Allen, K., & Cherrey, C. (2000). Systemic leadership: Enriching the meaning of our work. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Balkundi, P., & Kilduff, M. (2005). The ties that lead: A social network approach to leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(4), 419–439. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. leaqua.2006.01.001 Bolden, R. (2011). Distributive leadership in organizations: A review of theory and research. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13, 251–269. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2370.2011.00306.x Capra, F. (2002). The hidden connections: Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability. New York, NY: Doubleday. Heifetz, R. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Slaughter, A. (2017). The chessboard and the web: Strategies of connection in a networked world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Uhl-Bien, M., & Marion, R. (2008). Complexity leadership: Conceptual foundations. The Academy of Management Review, 33(4), 1013–1015.

NEUROSCIENCE Neuroscience can describe and explain why thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationships involved in leadership occur and why some are more effective than others. The field of neuroscience addresses a human’s complete nervous system, including brain activation and functioning and the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric nervous systems. Advances in neuroimaging have enabled research to move the field beyond simplistic schemata of left versus right brain, and

similar theoretical constructs often proven incorrect within a decade of further research. Although a discussion of all aspects of neuroscience applicable to leadership is beyond the scope of this entry, the following sections focus on a few major themes from research with the most relevant links to leadership studies.

Antagonistic Neural Networks: Task Versus Social Leadership A long and rich history of describing leadership styles and roles as task-focused or people-focused can be explained by the underlying neural networks each style/role employs. Analytic processes that focus on problem-solving, accounting, finance, engineering, information systems, and specific objectives rely upon activation of the task positive network (TPN) in the brain. In contrast, openness to new ideas, scanning the environment, openness to other people and emotions, as well as broad moral context, rely on the default mode network (DMN) in the brain. Professor Anthony Jack of Case Western Reserve University has relabeled these as analytic networks (AN) and empathic networks (EN) to ensure that the labels reflect the functioning of each network. While both networks are needed for leadership, they present a challenge because these neural networks suppress each other. This distinction helps to explain why so many approaches to leadership research frame their theories or models as dialectical opposites. Transactional leadership styles rely upon TPN/AN primarily. Meanwhile, transformational leadership styles rely upon DMN/EN primarily. Because the neural networks suppress each other, the resulting behavioral styles or roles repeatedly chosen by certain people will often present themselves as opposites. Without knowing the neuroscience underlying these styles and roles, consultants and professors have often tried to entice people into using both at the same time. The neuroscience shows us that at best a person can toggle or cycle between them but not truly activate them at the same time. Similarly, leader–member exchange theory (LMX) and research postulates a transaction, which is more likely to rely upon the TPN/AN and suppress openness to new ideas and people. Later

Neuroscience

developments of LMX theory incorporated exchange of emotions which provided a process for activation of the DMN/EN. Dual process theory proposed fast and slow neural systems. The fast system was more limbic and emotion driven and the slow system was more analytic and rational. While this was an advancement on underlying cognitive processes with which to understand leadership, the research since 2010 suggests that there are TPN/AN fast and slow processes, as well as DMN/EN fast and slow processes. Because both of these dominant neural networks are needed for leadership functioning and effective leadership, the dueling research agenda of showing one style, role, or mode of behavior as more effective becomes less productive. The neuroscience suggests a more fruitful pursuit of this question with a comment that the late Professor Richard Hackman of Harvard University asked in response to many research inquiries: “Under what conditions would each be effective?”

Leadership Is a Relationship Although researchers are often drawn to understanding the leader as a person, it is far more accurate to claim that leadership is a relationship. A person cannot be a leader without followers. An emerging stream of research on followership since the beginning of the 21st century has begun helping us to understand what truly transpires between the leader and the people around them. The LMX research has attempted to determine what goes back-and-forth between the leader and others. Richard Boyatzis and his colleagues conducted one such effort, characterizing the nature of the relationship as either resonant (i.e., in tune with each other) or dissonant. Initial neuroscience studies have shown that reflections and memories of interactions with resonant leaders with whom one has worked invoked the motor neuron network and many components of the DMN/EN. Meanwhile, reflections and memories of interactions with dissonant leaders suppressed these networks while activating networks that are associated with a more defensive response. Building and maintaining leadership relationships requires various degrees of understanding others—which is often called empathy. Scholars,

671

poets, and philosophers have long attempted to deconstruct empathy with dichotomies like head-versus-heart thinking about others. Neuroscientist Jean Decety of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have shown distinct neural processes for two forms of empathy. One type is understanding a person by building a model of how and why they think and feel, and therefore act as they do. The other type of empathy is feeling with another. Some have erroneously labeled these as cognitive versus affective empathy. The neuroscience has shown that both are cognitive (i.e., brain) functions and both have some emotions involved. This is an example where neuroscience research has provided more specific and refined concepts of empathy, as well as clarifying what labels seem more appropriate. In assessing what transpires between a leader and those around them, the topic of emotional contagion comes to the forefront. Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawai’i and John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago have been pioneers in studying and documenting the processes that would describe how a leader captures the hearts and minds of those around them. Continuing his neuroscience research, Cacioppo was aided by other neuroscientists, like Joseph LeDioux of New York University, in exploring the speed of arousal of various emotions in others. As he showed, if emotional activation in the brain can occur within thousandths of a second, leaders can use the power of emotional contagion to move crowds to become mobs, special interests to become social movements, and give expression to pent-up frustration in creating revolutions. It helps to explain how some leaders can influence or—some might claim—manipulate people, capture hearts and minds, or squelch action and instill fear. The leaders able to do these feats of creating collective emotion and then action are not always formal leaders but clearly people to whom others respond with a follower relationship.

Stress, Power Stress, and Sustainability of Leadership Through Renewal One of the most significant challenges of leadership is managing the balance of stress and renewal. People in leadership positions are subjected not

672

Neuroscience

only to all of the normal annoying forms of stress, as well as bouts of acute stress from environmental, industry, and specific organizational issues, but also, as the late Professor David McClelland of Harvard University called it, extra power stress. The latter comes from the responsibility for other people and their lives in an organization. Stress is the activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). It is a set of neural activations, often emanating from the amygdala, a structure of cells in the midbrain, when fear or defensiveness is aroused. The resulting secretion of endocrine hormones (which are also neurotransmitters), primarily epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol, can, with repeated arousal, impair a leader’s cognitive, emotional, and perceptual functions. They also compromise a person’s immune system and inhibit neurogenesis (i.e., conversion of neural stem cells in the adult human brain into new neurons). The only antidote to such repeatedly arousal of the SNS and the resulting damage to leadership performance is arousal of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The PNS secretes oxytocin and vasopressin into the bloodstream, thereby reversing the effects of the SNS endocrine secretions, resulting in a leader’s healthier immune system, wider perceptual scanning, higher cognitive functioning and creativity, and more openness to emotions and to others. Sustainability of an effective leader’s functioning is a direct result of how often and with what variety of experiences they engage the PNS daily. With emotional contagion, the leader’s stressed or renewed state infects others around them, which has the corresponding effects on their cognitive, perceptual, and emotional functioning. Professor Naomi Eisenberger of University of California, Los Angeles has reported numerous studies showing that renewal moments (which are not the same as resting or relaxation) activate the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which in turn stimulates the PNS. It is also a component of the DMN/EN described earlier.

Strategy In addition to the effects of the default mode network and analytic network (DMN/AN) and repeated arousal of the sympathetic nervous

system (SNS) discussed in the preceding sections, these neuroscience discoveries also help to explain mistakes or miscalculations of leaders in strategic management. David Waldman of Arizona State University, Suzanne Pederson of the Thunderbird School of Management, and Pierre Balthazard of Fairleigh Dickinson University conducted a series of studies showing how degrees of convergence of various neural pathways resulted in leaders having more impact on vision, efficacy, and effectiveness.

Future Prospects The use of neuroscience in the study of leadership will likely continue to advance through three main avenues. First, as more sophisticated neuroimaging methods are discovered that will allow live monitoring during interactions between leaders and followers, scholars will be able more precisely to assess mutual activation and other direct causal effects. Second, as leadership scholars base their work on a holistic model of the human and include various psycho-physiological variables in studies, neuroscience will add considerable depth to the inquiry. Third, as improved neuroimaging methods and better theories emerge, neuroscience can help scholars to explore and understand how leadership development can be more effective. Richard E. Boyatzis See also Dual Process Theory; Emotional Contagion; Empathy; Leader–Member Exchange; Resonant Relationships; Stress; Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Further Readings Boyatzis, R. E., Rochford, K., & Jack, A. I. (2014, March). Antagonistic neural networks underlying differentiated leadership roles. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00114 Cooper, C. L., & Quick, J. C. (Eds.). (2017). The handbook of stress and health: A guide to research and practice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell: doi:10.1002/ 9781118993811 Decety, J., & Michalska, K. J. (2010). Neurodevelopmental changes in the circuits underlying empathy and sympathy from childhood to adulthood. Developmental Science, 13(6), 886–899.

Nonprofit Leadership Eisenberger, N. I., & Cole, S. W. (2012). Social neuroscience and health: Neurophysiological mechanisms linking social ties with physical health. Nature Neuroscience, 15(5), 669–674. doi:10.1038/nn.3086 Jack, A. I., Dawson, A. J., Begany, K. L., Leckie, R. L., Barry, K. P., Ciccia, A. H., & Snyder, A. Z. (2012). fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. Neuroimage, 66C, 385–401. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061 Passarelli, A. (2015). The neuro-emotional basis of developing leaders through personal vision. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1335. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01335 Rochford, K. C., Jack, A. I., Boyatzis, R. E., & French, S. E. (2016). Ethical leadership as a balance between opposing neural networks. Journal of Business Ethics, 144(4), 1–16. Waldman, D. A., Balthazard, P. A., & Peterson, S. (2011). The neuroscience of leadership: Can we revolutionize the way that leaders are identified and developed? Academy of Management Perspectives, 25(1), 60–74.

NONPROFIT LEADERSHIP Nonprofit organizations are formalized corporations organized for charitable purposes. They promote civic engagement, allow for expression of values, and seek charitable ends through market strategies. Nonprofit leadership is unique, formed by the legal constraint of distributing profits to stakeholders, and that participation with them is voluntary.

Nonprofit Organizations and Leadership Nonprofits are organizations that facilitate private action intending to promote a public good. They exist to provide moral civic expressions, as well as an instrument to carry out those ideas. They are similar to businesses in their market-based approach to earning revenue, and similar to governments in their aim to provide good for many. However, nonprofits base their success on mission, not profit maximization, unlike business. And they cannot earn revenue from taxes, unlike governments. In order for nonprofits to be sustained, they depend on leadership and governance that will

673

make them effective in this unique organizational context. Leaders must perceive and renew strategies in pursuit of their mission, connections to those they serve and serve with, and the relevance of their mission to stakeholders. Nonprofit leaders gather diverse types of information to make decisions aimed at maximizing impact. And while they do share some characteristics, nonprofit leadership approaches can vary as widely as the organizations they represent. For example, leaders are employed and volunteer in organizations ranging from large hospitals and universities to small grassroots groups.

Historical Origins of U.S. Nonprofit Leadership From the early colonial period of the United States, families, communities, businesses, and governments formed the building blocks of what would become nonprofit organizations and a new approach to leadership. U.S. settlers were products of the Enlightenment, meaning that they relied on rational choice and saw themselves as individuals in charge of their own destiny, perceiving that they had the opportunity to start the world over. The new U.S. government inherited Western notions of philanthropy and adopted two main charitable laws from England, the Statute of Charitable Uses, and the Elizabethan Poor Law. The disestablishment clause in the Second Amendment, which separated church and state, coupled with Great Awakening of the 1730s, changed association patterns. In contrast to European counterparts, it forced Americans to consider their dealings with the public, whether in religion, business, or politics, as governed by individual convictions and choices. This fostered a complex network of churches and voluntary organizations. Alexis DeTocqueville arrived in the mid-1800s and wrote extensively on the power of U.S. associations. As industrialization flourished, wealth grew dramatically for some while others experienced crushing poverty in new American mega-cities. From the mid-1850s onward, families formed family foundations, essentially a formalized expression of individual giving at the time. Because they were fiercely excluded from some groups,

674

Nonprofit Leadership

immigrants and other marginalized families formed mutual benefit societies. Meanwhile, in the two generations following the Civil War, many people grew rich, skyrocketing from 100 millionaires in the 1870s to 40,000 millionaires by 1916. The wealthy of the Progressive era were a new force in civilization, capable of bringing about social change outside of the arena of the government. Philanthropic leaders like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford saw their work as national instead of provincial or local, further developing the sector. As the decades progressed, the U.S. government provided an increasingly favorable regulatory environment for charitable giving and nonprofit institutions, which helped prompt the formal emergence of the nonprofit sector. Also helpful, the federal system of government model helped both local and federal associations to flourish as the groups mimicked the government’s organizational style. These nonprofit organizations provided schools of citizenship that trained leaders for public service and vice versa. At the same time, government-endorsed inequality and injustice prompted marginalized groups to develop leadership through alternate power structures. Women established the modern welfare state through the economy of volunteer time. In the early to mid-19th century, groups of women formed charitable organizations, bought land, and enjoyed other freedoms that individual women could not. Women’s groups worked to address social welfare issues and advocate for their own rights on a national scale, culminating in winning the right to vote in 1920. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement is lauded as one of the shining accomplishments of voluntary associations in the United States, bringing together a broad cross-section of people to address institutionalized racism. Finally, the U.S. government promised vast social projects that leaders in the nonprofit sector helped fulfill, including both the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of 1964. After World War II, President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address launched the age of international development with his now famous “Point Four.” More recent government engagement with the sector included: privatization and severe reduction of government services in the 1980s with

President Ronald Reagan, the marked growth of the number of faith-based organizations with the George W. Bush administration, and the dramatic restructuring of health care services during Barack Obama’s presidency. President Donald Trump’s era saw the rise of polarized volunteer activism. Though they demanded rapid restructuring, most of these government actions resulted in the professionalization and proliferation of the sector.

Nonprofit Leadership in Theory and Practice Historic events shaped today’s nonprofit sector, which now accounts for 10% of both the U.S. economy and its workforce. The sector is led in its majority by women, though not at the sector’s largest organizations. Racial and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in leadership, though recent scholarship, advocacy, and creative organizational forms aim at fostering change. The roles and responsibilities of the sector’s leaders are formed ongoing by historical and current realities of the sector at large. Among the many leadership roles of nonprofit organizations, governing board members, executive leaders, and volunteer leaders are considered in the following sections. Governing Boards

In nonprofit organizations a governing board is an appointed group of individuals that assumes legal responsibility for an organization and provides strategic volunteer leadership. Effective governance is often linked to organizational effectiveness in nonprofit studies, as the board of directors gives key input to top-level decisions about the mission, vision, policies, and resource stewardship. Board members assume legal responsibilities according to nonprofit law, which includes the duty of care, duty of loyalty, and the duty of obedience. The duty of care requires that board members use reasonable and prudent judgment when making decisions on behalf of the organization. They must spend the effort, time, and action to make decisions that are aligned with what they perceive as the best interest of the organizations. This includes actively participating in meetings and being prepared to make informed decisions within them. The duty of

Nonprofit Leadership

loyalty means that board members will act in good faith to advance the interests of the organization. They will not engage in business dealings that will knowingly harm the organization. Practically speaking, board members will constrain a board member from participating in decisions when they have a conflict of interest (meaning their personal interests or those of another organization they serve conflict with the interests of the nonprofit in question). Finally, the duty of obedience demands that nonprofit board members will align with the organization’s mission, bylaws, and policies. They will honor the cultures and standards in place within the organizations they lead. Additionally, board members have a fiduciary responsibility to the organization. This means that board members will regard the resources of the organization as a community trust, and they will see to their use in legal and reasonable ways, appropriate for the mission of the organization. This applies to the financial resources of the organization primarily, but also encompasses stewardship of all aspects of the organization’s capital, be it material or human. Executive Leadership

As stated in the introduction, nonprofit leadership is unique in its harmonizing of mission, money, and management, all of which are interdependent. Executive leaders navigate these three areas in assistance to, and at the pleasure of, the governing board. Within a host of varieties, nonprofit organizational executive leadership today models Max Weber’s 1946 descriptions of bureaucracy, and subsequent theories of organizational structure. Organizations are directed at a goal, and leaders, arranged hierarchically, make rational decisions to pursue that goal. In practice, the relationships between boards and executive directors are more entangled than hierarchical, with board members being legally superior, and executive leaders usually having more information, more expertise, and more at stake in the organization’s success. Volunteer Leadership

Leaders of volunteers and leaders who volunteer are both very different than those who lead

675

paid workers and those who are paid. While some nonprofit organizations very much follow the structure of for-profit entities, groups such as associations and volunteer service programs exhibit more collective and egalitarian approaches to leadership structure. Volunteers are motivated and incentivized through participating successfully in a social system, in a dynamic and fluid environment. Nonprofit Leader Roles

In a 1997 study of the largest nonprofits in the United States, Burt Nanus and Stephen Dobbs found that in roles serving nonprofits, leaders often operated according to an internal and external—and present and futurist—orientation. This orientation describes what it is, on a practical level, that nonprofit leaders do in order to pursue the missions of their respective organizations. Future external leaders are visionaries and strategists, setting goals and implementing critical action steps to pursue them, and communicating both elements to audiences outside of the organization. Future internal leaders are change agents, communicating and applying those visions and strategies to implement change within the organization. Present internal leaders are also coaches. Here, nonprofit leaders monitor and assist other staff and volunteers to accomplish established goals well. Finally, present external nonprofit leaders act as politicians and fundraisers, working to garner and allocate resources for their current goals.

Nonprofit Leader Skills Effective executive leaders cross boundaries to seek and act on opportunities in their context to help shape the future health and direction of the organization. Scholars have identified specific skills that are common among many types of organization leaders, including responsiveness to stakeholders, obtaining necessary resources and support, and interpreting the meanings of events. In focusing on one of these skills, nonprofit leaders can interpret events using single or overlapping frames of interpretation. They can interpret structurally, with clear goals, and rational policies and processes. This provides a sense of

676

Nonprofit Leadership

order and steadiness within the organizational environment. Leaders can also interpret according to a human resource frame, wherein leaders will balance goals and structure alongside the hopes and talents of those most engaged in the organization, often key staff members. Seeing people as the most valuable asset, this leader may attend more to individual preferences, and will delegate often to decentralize control, empower others, and foster an individual’s growth. Invoking a political frame will see challenges within the organization as something to negotiate, with a focus on acquiring and allocating resources. This frame often prioritizes prominent people within a community who lead through influence and power. Finally, symbolic frames are used to create shared meanings within organizations, so ceremonies, rituals, and artifacts help support the organization’s ongoing advancement and further reach. In this frame, charismatic leaders shine as they call stakeholders to a shared vision.

Nonprofit Leader Ethics Because of their purpose to provide a public good, nonprofits are given special legal standing. To uphold this exceptional status, the organizations are expected to be motivated and act according to this desire to promote good. Though not stated explicitly, this is a social contract that provides for the possibility of organizations that are run privately but benefit the public. In order for nonprofits to be truly ethical, their claims to public good and core values must align and permeate both public declarations and private operations, their espoused and operative values. In order for nonprofits to be trusted, leaders must not act in a self-serving way, and structures and reward systems must marinate the desire for public benefit into the culture of an organization. Scholars outline five core ethics for leaders of nonprofit organizations: integrity, when leaders are what they claim to be; openness, conducting their activities in a nonsecretive way; accountability, being responsible for and able to explain their choices; service, devoting one’s work to benefiting the public; and charity, understood in antiquity to mean an ongoing love and commitment to one’s neighbor.

The Unique Role of the Nonprofit Leader Nonprofit leaders serve a unique role in society as they lead organizations that exist to promote a public good. Throughout the history of the United States, these leaders have shaped and been shaped by the culture at large, with the nonprofit sector professionalizing and proliferating over time. Nonprofit leaders can take on a variety of roles including board members, executive staff, and other volunteer leadership. Their roles, skills, and ethics are key in shaping both the success of their organizations and the future of the sector. Jamie L. Goodwin See also Board Leadership; Community Leadership; Moral Imagination; Organizational Leadership; Prosocial Behavior

Further Readings Friedman, L. J., & McGarvie, M. D. (2003). Charity, Philanthropy, and civility in American history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frumkin, P. (2002). On being nonprofit: A conceptual and policy primer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nanus, B., & Dobbs, S. M. (1999). Leaders who make a difference: Essential strategies for meeting the nonprofit challenge. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Powell, W. W., & Steinberg, R. (2006). The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Renz, D. O., & Herman, R. D. (2016). The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management. (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Salamon, L. M. (2014). New frontiers of philanthropy: A guide to the new tools and new actors reshaping global philanthropy and social investing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. P. (1999). Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Smith, D. H., Stebbins, R. A., & Grotz, J. (Eds.). (2016). The Palgrave handbook of volunteering, civic participation, and nonprofit associations (Vol. 2). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, M. (1946). VII: Bureaucracy. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology

Nostalgia and Leadership (pp. 196–244). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Zunz, O. (2014). Philanthropy in America: A history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

677

achievement, increasing feelings of connection to the organization and intrinsic motivation.

Nostalgia as a Resource for Leadership

NOSTALGIA

AND

LEADERSHIP

Nostalgia is a complex, bittersweet, and wistful emotion that focuses on personal events of the past, typically momentous and socially significant events. It also can be a useful leadership tool, promoting creativity, optimism, and productivity. Most relevant for leadership studies are the (somewhat surprising) motivational and future-oriented features of nostalgia, which may be triggered by sensory and mnemic inputs such as childhood tastes, smells, songs, photos, reunions, or by recalling personally meaningful memories. Despite the generally positive associations it holds today, this self-conscious emotion was for centuries considered dysfunctional or downright dangerous—a denial of the present and unhealthy longing for the past. Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, combined two Greek words (nostos, a longing for home, and algos, pain) and postulated that nostalgia was a brain disease. Some proposed that nostalgia had demonic origins; others asserted that constant clanging of cowbells in the Alps led to auditory and neurological damage. It wasn’t until the 21st century that rigorous, empirical research conclusively dispelled these notions. Today nostalgia is viewed as a largely (but not entirely) positive emotional experience that can enhance feelings of social connectedness, meaning in life, and self-continuity, among other psychological benefits. The self plays a central role in nostalgic experiences, and the narrative arc usually is one of redemption or self-growth. The self typically is embedded in a community: most nostalgic reverie involves close friends and family members; graduations, weddings, birthday parties, and vacations are among the most common wellsprings of nostalgia. When leveraged effectively by leaders, nostalgia supports teamwork and goal

Leadership necessarily is forward-looking. A group or organization without a future needs no leader. Yet leaders frequently hearken back to the past for inspiration, ideas, and motivation. Nostalgia, while drawing on the past, is in many respects a forwardlooking, motivating, and approach-oriented state. Thus, while there is currently almost no direct empirical work linking nostalgia with leadership, inferences can be made to suggest that nostalgia might be an untapped resource for leaders and organizations. Stated differently, researchers need to catch up with leader behavior by beginning to empirically assess how leaders have been utilizing nostalgia, and to what effect. Nostalgia can provide fuel for action by increasing several types of approach motivation. Studies consistently have found support for the motivational function of nostalgia. Nostalgia increases pursuit toward important goals and boosts intrinsic motivation. In particular, transformational leaders who wield nostalgia may see improved relations among followers, greater productivity due to enhanced intrinsic motivation, and reduced turnover. Nostalgia also increases prosocial behavior, which could be directed toward fellow group members as well as outsiders (e.g., potential clients). These benefits of experiencing nostalgia might be particularly crucial in organizations in which intrinsic motivation is lower or where prosocial actions are especially vital, such as when members work in teams. One potentially fruitful approach might be to examine the psychological profile of the highly nostalgic leader (i.e., someone high on nostalgia proneness): does nostalgia proneness correlate with other traits that are associated with leadership effectiveness? Research has found that most or all of the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability) are associated with leadership effectiveness, particularly openness and conscientiousness. Similarly, nostalgia proneness has been positively associated with all of the Big Five,

678

Nostalgia and Leadership

though the correlations typically are not large. In addition, highly nostalgic individuals are higher in empathy, even when controlling for other relevant variables such as the Big Five and gender. More broadly but as yet not empirically examined, nostalgia proneness might be related to emotional intelligence—how adept individuals are in employing higher-level processes regarding their own and others’ emotions—which has demonstrable links to leadership effectiveness. Emotional intelligence has been linked especially strongly with an effective transformational leadership style. Thus, we might infer that those high in dispositional nostalgia might be moderately more effective leaders by virtue of their higher conscientiousness, empathy, and so on. The interactionist (i.e., trait by situation, or “fit” approach) perspective is, of course, a broader and more empirically validated approach than a mere trait approach to leadership: identifying the organizations and situations that can most benefit from particular leadership traits could yield additional insights about potential benefits of a leader who enjoys waxing nostalgic.

Personal Versus Collective Nostalgia It is important to distinguish between nostalgia at the personal level, such as nostalgia proneness, and at the collective level, such as national or university nostalgia. Collective nostalgia is a group-level emotion, qualitatively distinct from nostalgia proneness, and dependent on social or group identification. Personal and collective nostalgia typically are only modestly correlated, and they have some divergent psychological and social outcomes. Collective nostalgia has received relatively little empirical attention, almost entirely in two realms: nostalgia for one’s university and nostalgia for one’s nation (the “good old days”). National nostalgia may confer some benefits for the ingroup (e.g., approach orientation, more positive attitudes, and prosociality toward the group and fellow ingroup members). However, national nostalgia also has been linked to endorsing populist policies hostile to some outgroups (e.g., anti-immigrant proposals). Fundraising or volunteering might be enhanced by the leader appealing to collective nostalgia; university presidents and heads of nonprofits, for

example, might try to activate collective nostalgia toward their school or organization, such as telling stories of an organization’s founding or notable early leaders, in order to motivate members to donate time or money. An important mechanism in collective nostalgia is the role of felt belonging to the ingroup, so leaders would do well to foster greater inclusiveness and stronger ingroup identity. If group identity is lacking, such as in a looser organization or after a merger of two groups, nostalgia may still be invoked by appealing to events, departed co-workers, or workplace norms and traditions from the past. These organizational nostalgic memories may lie at the intersection of personal and collective nostalgia. Inducing nostalgia might boost the productivity of a workplace and reduce burnout or turnover because members find more meaning and fulfillment in their work, particularly when employees experience greater burnout. Organizational nostalgia may enhance idealism and underscore values in the organization. Thus, utilizing organizational nostalgia is advantageous to leaders, particularly with transformational leadership approaches. Leaders who do not know their organizational history may not be able to take advantage of salient elements from the past. Perhaps even enormous international companies like Apple and Microsoft might be able to leverage organizational nostalgia in hiring, fomenting creativity, and reducing turnover by hearkening back to their humble beginnings and highlighting enduring organizational values or traditions that have continued through the considerable growth and evolution of the organization. Even the darker side of collective nostalgia—hostility toward an outgroup—might be harnessed by encouraging competition with a corporate or university rival (e.g., University of North Carolina vs. Duke University). Inducing nostalgia, whether personal, collective, or organizational, may have personal or organizational benefits during tough times for the organization or its members. Studies have consistently found that nostalgia has a restorative or psychological buffering function: nostalgia is triggered by several negative psychological states, such as loneliness, feelings of meaninglessness, stress, and boredom. These unpleasant states are then ameliorated by feelings of nostalgia. For centuries, this association helped contribute to the faulty

Nostalgia and Leadership

inference that nostalgia caused negative states, rather than being activated by these states. This repairing or homeostatic utility of nostalgia might be harnessed by leaders when an organization suffers a setback or undergoes rapid change. For example, organization members could be encouraged to nostalgize via listening to nostalgic music or putting pictures in their personal workspace.

Leadership-Related Nostalgic Benefits Regardless of their level of nostalgia proneness, leaders can induce nostalgia in their followers. This nostalgia could be at the personal, collective, or organizational level. Personal nostalgia has been shown to have many salubrious outcomes potentially relevant to effective performance. Experimental work has validated the finding that nostalgia can boost creativity (e.g., writing more original stories). Nostalgia can also spark greater optimism, which may in turn improve the performance and/or well-being of organization members as well as reduce turnover. Nostalgia also enhances inspiration; transformational and charismatic leaders might be most likely to harness this potential, though perhaps leaders who do not readily or easily inspire their followers could indirectly do so via encouraging nostalgia in their organizations. Researchers suspect that nostalgia is an untapped resource regarding boosting creativity, optimism, and inspiration because people may implicitly believe that looking back on the past would inhibit or constrain rather than augment these behaviors. Future research should investigate this potential as well as assess whether some types of nostalgia would be more effective than others. For example, organizations with a longer and more successful history might elicit group-level nostalgia, whereas newer organizations with more relationship-oriented leaders might attempt to induce personal nostalgia in order to spark creativity or optimism (e.g., have people reflect on creative episodes in their childhood). Important Mediators or Drivers of Nostalgia Benefits

There are three important mediators empirically identified by the nostalgia research: meaning in life, social connectedness, and self-continuity.

679

Stated differently, the most replicated and robust effects of nostalgia are feelings of connection to others, feelings of the self being continuous across different life eras, and feeling that one’s life has meaning. Moreover, these outcomes, in turn, have been shown empirically to mediate effects of nostalgia on other outcomes. For example, nostalgia increases feelings of social connectedness, which in turn increase optimism and inspiration. Thus, nostalgia may provide a social lubricant, binding organization members more closely together, and sharing nostalgic episodes more directly (e.g., listening to music from one’s youth, sharing childhood stories) might more directly increase member closeness. Organizational nostalgia increased work meaning in one set of studies, which in turn reduced turnover intentions, particularly for individuals relatively high in burnout. Nostalgia can also increase the sense of meaning in one’s life, which enhances individuals’ motivation to pursue their life goals. Consequently, nostalgia experienced organizationally might increase the meaning individuals derive from their work and impel them to pursue personal and organizational goals with greater zeal. Increased feelings of self-continuity from feeling nostalgic leads to greater happiness and well-being, reduced maladjustment, and prosocial engagement (e.g., toward one’s alma mater).

Nostalgia’s Utility in Leadership In conclusion, nostalgia may be a highly useful but heretofore unexamined tool for leaders to inspire their followers, spark their creativity, stoke optimism, and increase their feelings of social connection and meaning. The more tangible outcomes may extend to increased productivity, improved relationships vertically and horizontally, and reduced turnover. Nostalgia capitalizes on cherished past memories in the banks of memory (that have earned interest) in order to address problems of the future. Jeffrey D. Green, Margaret A. Kneuer, and Mattie V. Hedgebeth See also Group Satisfaction; Leader-Follower Relationships; Leaders’ Stories; Pride and the Psychology of Prestige; Romance of Heroism

680

Nostalgia and Leadership

Further Readings Allison, S. T., & Green, J. D. (2020). Nostalgia and heroism: Theoretical convergence of memory, motivation, and function. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 3682. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.577862 Green, J. D., Cairo, A. H., Sedikides, S., & Wildschut, T. (2021). The ties that bind: University nostalgia fosters relational and collective university engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 4083. doi:10.3389/fpsyg. 2020.580731 Hepper, E. G., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Ritchie, T. D., Yung, Y.-F., Hansen, N., et al. (2014). Pancultural nostalgia: Prototypical conceptions across cultures. Emotion, 14, 733–747. doi:10.1037/a0036790 Leunissen, J. M., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., & Cohen, T. R. (2018). Organizational nostalgia lowers turnover intentions by increasing work meaning: The moderating

role of burnout. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 23, 44–57. doi:10.1037/ocp0000059 Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2020). The motivational potency of nostalgia: the future is called yesterday. In A. J. Elliot (Ed.), Advances in motivation science: Vol. 7. San Diego, CA: Elsevier Academic Press. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To nostalgize: Mixing memory with affect and desire. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 51, 189–273. Wildschut, T., Bruder, M., Robertson, S., van Tilburg, W. A. P., & Sedikides, C. (2014). Collective nostalgia: A group-level emotion that confers unique benefits on the group. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, 844–863. doi:10.1037/ a0037760

O target change their behavior. This request may be overt, such as a person requesting donations, or covert, such as an ad touting a politician’s positive qualities. Regardless of whether a request is overt or covert, the target is aware of the request in a compliance interaction. Obedience is often defined as a specific variation of compliance in which the influencer primarily relies on their authority to elicit a compliant response. Other methods of influencing a target to comply with a request include manipulating the target’s emotional state (e.g., rapidly eliciting and then assuaging anxiety prior to a request), reframing a request as being beneficial to the target (e.g., using a “that’s-not-all” approach to sweeten a deal), or evoking social norms, such as the norm for reciprocity (e.g., by giving a free sample prior to a sales request). Conformity is a form of “indirect” influence, where a target modifies their behavior to align with perceived social norms. Norms can be either descriptive (e.g., a park visitor carries their trash to the trash can because they see others doing the same), or injunctive (e.g., a park visitor throws away their trash after glancing at a sign reminding them to please keep the park clean). Obedient behavior can be an outcome of conformity to social norms. For example, organizations can vary in the norm of power distance, the extent to which hierarchical relationships are expected and enforced. One way power distance manifests is in how leaders employ autocratic or

OBEDIENCE Obedience is an acquiescent response to a demand from an authority figure. Effective leadership often necessitates directing others to perform tasks they might not wish to do. At the same time, many of the most horrific acts in human history have been perpetrated by those who were “just following orders” from those in command. The study of obedience attempts to explain and reconcile these juxtaposed observations. An understanding of when, why, and how obedience occurs requires examining the authority figure, the target of influence, the demand, and the social setting in which a demand is made. The purpose of this entry is to review current research from social psychology and leadership studies on factors explaining obedience to authority.

Distinguishing Obedience From Other Social Influence Processes Obedience is one of many methods of social influence, defined as an attempt by one entity to change the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors of another entity. Researchers typically categorize social influence under three categories. They are compliance (which includes obedience), conformity, and persuasion. Compliance is a form of “direct” social influence in which the influencer directly requests that a

681

682

Obedience

consultative forms of authority. In organizations with a high power distance norm, subordinates are generally expected to obey leadership directives without question. In those with a low power distance norm, subordinate disagreement with leadership directives is expected. Persuasion is a form of social influence that attempts to change a target’s underlying attitudes toward an idea. Persuasion can lead to compliance, as one method an influencer might use to elicit a target’s compliance is to improve a target’s attitude toward the topic of compliance (e.g., reframing a sales request as a major bargain). Leaders can demonstrate authority in a number of ways. These approaches to power and authority are described in the following section.

Expert Power is derived from the extent to which the influencer is knowledgeable in an informational domain that has a potentially beneficial or detrimental effect on the target of influence. Importantly, the influence associated with expert power relies on the influence target believing in the expertise of the influencer. Informational Power is based on tangible information. For example, a new employee may find that their coworker is a subject matter expert in an unfamiliar system—the coworker can now wield influence through sharing information with the new employee. Informational power is the “concrete” version of expert power. Referent power is based on charisma. Targets of influence are more likely to comply with individuals with whom they identify or like.

Bases of Power and Authority Power is the extent to which a person or group can influence a target to change their attitudes or behaviors. Authority is a social norm that ascribes power to specific individuals or groups. Where does power come from, and how is it exerted to achieve influence? A prevailing theoretical model proposed by John French and Bertram Raven describes six domains from which a person can exert power: Legitimate power is upheld through shared belief systems regarding who should have authority over whom. Sociologist Max Weber described this power as legitimate authority. An authority holds legitimate power to the extent that a target of influence believes the authority has the right to dictate their behavior. For example, a soldier may obey a higher-ranking officer because obedience to superiors is a cardinal rule of the military system. If the soldier believed the commander no longer had legitimate authority, they might defy norms of obedience. Reward power is the ability for the authority figure to reward the target with some incentive (e.g., a bonus or promotion). In contrast, coercive power is the ability to punish a target with negative circumstances, (e.g., undesirable work tasks or termination). Both types of power result in obedience that is generally dependent on the authority figure’s ability to surveil the subordinate’s compliance and effectively impose a reward or punishment.

Empirical Studies of Obedience to Authority Perhaps the most well-known scientific studies of obedience are the obedience to authority (OTA) studies conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1962 and 1963. Milgram sought to examine “destructive obedience”—obedience to commands that conflict with social norms or strongly-held values—to better understand how seemingly ordinary individuals could carry out inhumane orders during the Holocaust of World War II. In the OTA studies, Milgram devised a detailed scenario to make participants believe they were truly being ordered to harm another person. Participants—adult men from New Haven, Connecticut—were told they were taking part in a study on memory and learning. Participants learned that their role in the study was to be the “teacher” and ask a second participant (the “learner”) questions testing verbal memory. Participants were ordered by a research assistant (“the experimenter”) to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to the learner each time an incorrect answer was given. The learner receiving the shocks was a confederate trained to react as if the shocks were painful. Participants administered shocks using a realistic generator with 30 voltage levers ranging from 15 (“Slight Shock”) to 450 volts (“XXX”). If participants said they wished to stop, the experimenter would prompt them with up to four statements that the participant must continue (increasing in demand from “Please continue” to “You have no other choice; you must go on”).

Obedience

Obedience was quantified as the number of shocks the participant administered. In the reported results, participants displayed overwhelming obedience. In the baseline version of the study, in which the learner received shocks in a separate room out of sight of the participant and the authority figure was in the room with the participant, 65% of participants (26 of 40) obeyed the experimenter’s commands all the way to the final voltage switch. All participants reportedly believed the shocks were real. Most participants also showed signs of extreme stress. Milgram concluded these results demonstrated the power of authoritative cues as well as the “banality of evil” that participants were likely willing to obey because the presence of the authority figure created a diffusion of responsibility. This explanation aligns with later work on bystander intervention, in which lack of clear responsibility for action has been shown to preclude intervention in emergency situations. However, other obedience scholars have disputed Milgram’s explanation and suggested several other potential reasons for the high rate of obedience alongside diffusion of responsibility. One competing theory is based on the foot-in-the-door persuasive effect. From this perspective, the gradually increasing severity of the shocks may have made participants more willing to continue at higher shock levels, having already committed a similar act in the past. Evidence for this hypothesis is mixed. A second competing theory is based on the principle of engaged followership. From the lens of social identity theory, participants may have identified with the experimenter and felt as if the two formed an ingroup, whereas the learner constituted an outgroup member. Additionally, participants may have felt a sense of purpose and engagement from the experiment, as the majority of participants continued in response to the prompt “the experiment requires you to continue.” Concerns With Milgram’s OTA Studies

Many scholars have published criticisms of the OTA studies’ ethics. These include issues of participants’ informed consent and debriefing (with several being debriefed weeks after their study

683

session) as well as the potential psychological harm that may have befallen participants. Additionally, several methodological concerns regarding the OTA studies came to light when Milgram’s notes in the Yale library were digitized. Some of these concerns include evidence that (1) the experimenter often went off script when providing prompts, such that the wording of prompts varied across experiments and participant sessions; (2) in several unpublished studies, participants were more likely to disobey when they thought the learner was actually being shocked; and (3) Milgram reported only a subset of studies that favored obedience over disobedience. These issues call into question validity of Milgram’s published OTA studies. A number of studies have been conducted to replicate and extend the OTA paradigm; however, a metaanalysis considering publication bias has yet to be conducted. Some highlights of these findings are summarized in the following sections. Does the OTA Effect Replicate?

Many replications of the OTA have been conducted. More than 10 published studies have replicated the OTA paradigm using American participants, and on average 60% of participants fully obeyed. Cross-cultural replications of the OTA have also been conducted in South Africa, Germany, Australia, Jordan, Spain, and India, with an average obedience rate of more than 65%. Outside the United States, the highest obedience occurred in Italy, South Africa, and Austria (.80%) and the lowest occurred in Australia (,30%). OTA replications have shown fairly consistent findings from 1967 to 2009. Research has identified cross-cultural differences in obedience norms, with norms of power distance (described previously) and individualism/ collectivism cultural dimensions having particular impact on social norms. Collectivist countries and countries with high power distance norms are more likely to have strong norms for obeying authority figures. However, studies testing the relationship between these cultural dimensions and destructive obedience have been mixed to date.

684

Obedience

Victim Factors

Physical and emotional closeness to the learner has been shown to decrease obedience to destructive commands. Four versions of Milgram’s OTA study found that when the learner was seated in a separate room, more than 60% of participants obeyed; when the learner was in the same room, obedience fell to 40%. In one unpublished Milgram OTA study, only 15% of participants obeyed when a friend, family member, or neighbor played the part of the learner. Authority Factors

Milgram reported that OTA study participants were more likely to obey the experimenter when authoritative cues were salient and when the experimenter was physically present. For example, participants were more likely to obey the experimenter when he wore a lab coat. When the experimenter wore “normal” clothing, obedience decreased. Authority cues can also come from the setting of a request. In one OTA iteration, the study was conducted in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Participant obedience in the Bridgeport version of the study declined by almost 20% compared to the baseline study at Yale. Target Factors

Several factors related to a target’s inner state, such as their personality, have been shown to influence the target’s obedience. In one OTA replication, participants who were higher in agreeableness and conscientiousness obeyed less. During the COVID-19 public health emergency, a worldwide survey suggested that individuals who were lower in openness to experience and higher in neuroticism were more likely to disobey government stay-at-home orders. The extent to which a participant feels that their individual identity is anonymous, known as deindividuation, also has implications for willingness to obey destructive commands. One 1969 study found that participant “teachers” in the OTA paradigm who wore full body uniforms and masks administered more painful shocks than participants who wore no masks and name tags. Social identity

theory suggests that deindividuated people identify more with the group than with their individual identity. In groups controlled by an autocratic leader, a deindividuated person may be more likely to obey due to the saliency of the group’s norms for obedience. Factors Related to the Obedience Prompt

Some scholars question whether obedience is the correct term for Milgram’s influence tactic given that three of the prompts the experimenter gave were actually requests (e.g., “Please continue”) rather than demands (“You must continue”). It may also be that a more demanding command elicits less obedience when an authority figure does not have reward or coercive power. In a 2014 replication of the OTA study, participants never complied when an experimenter prompt used demanding language, but were responsive to prompts appealing to a shared interest in advancing science.

Future Directions Research trends in obedience have turned from understanding individual and situational factors underlying obedience to understanding dissent, disobedience, as well as group and system-level factors in promoting compliance. One potentially fruitful future application of this research is toward developing more successful compliance messages in scenarios such as public health emergencies, in which social norms of individualism conflict with public health needs for behavior restrictions. Additionally, meta-analyses of the OTA paradigm considering recent methodological criticisms of Milgram’s work should be conducted. Athena Cairo See also Persuasion; Power and Culture; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Blass, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64, 1–11. doi: 10.1037/a0010932

Organizational Leadership Blass, T. (2012). A cross-cultural comparison of studies of obedience using the Milgram paradigm: A review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6, 196–205. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00417.x Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych. 55.090902.142015 French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 259–269). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Birney, M. E. (2016). Questioning authority: New perspectives on Milgram’s “obedience” research and its implications for intergroup relations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11, 6–9. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.03.007 Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York, NY: Harper. Perry, G. (2013). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments. New York, NY: The New Press. Rochat, F., & Blass, T. (2014). The “Bring a Friend” condition: A report and analysis of Milgram’s unpublished condition 24. Journal of Social Issues, 70, 456–472. doi:10.1111/josi.12071

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP Organizational leadership is distinguished by its context—formal organizations—which entails a legally designated structure with rules and responsibilities. Leadership in this setting encompasses a process in which leaders and members work to accomplish the mission of a company, nonprofit organization, or government agency. One approach to analyzing organizational leadership is in the context of its larger external environment over time, including the industrial era, the information technology era, and the global era. The influence of each of these eras and the organizational leadership and structures that accompany it overlaps and evolves into the next stage of change.

The Industrial Era Organizational leadership in the industrial era became formalized and structured as society

685

shifted from agrarian and crafts to manufacturing and mass production. The culture needed new ways of organizing for the industrial era. Sociologist Max Weber theorized that bureaucratic organizations would provide an efficient, impersonal, and effective structure for business and government agencies to organize for a market economy that delivered products and services to society. Weber envisioned bureaucracies as having four primary features: structure (a hierarchical chain of command); rules (written instructions and procedures to guide the work); specialization (clear division of labor based on specialized training and experience); and competence (hiring of administrators and employees based on technical capability). He further theorized that the best form of leadership for the bureaucratic organization was a sole, highly trained administrator or executive at the top of the organization. Executive leadership provides a system of communication, securing essential efforts, and forming and defining purpose. Executives achieved these functions through formal coordination of every facet of the organization and a system of communication conveyed through central positions. Highly trained and experienced executives should receive tangible incentives (a good salary) and intangible inducements (prestige, interest in the work, and pride in the organization). While bureaucratic organizations contributed to efficiency, productivity and competency, they had disadvantages that were inherent in the structure. The bureaucratic machine placed executives in hierarchical chains and limited human connection in the organization. Modifications in rules and regulations were often unable to keep up with the rapid pace of change and decisionmaking because they required inordinate time to move through the chain of command. The bureaucratic model was not designed to tackle complex problems that compel organization members to generate creative solutions and remain agile and adaptive. Executives in bureaucracies use several styles of leadership to direct their organizations. Transactional leadership, as conceived by James MacGregor Burns, involves an exchange of valued things between leaders and members. Leaders induce members to provide the desired work or performance outcomes in exchange for

686

Organizational Leadership

both tangible (salary) and intangible (status, pride, respect) incentives. Contingency leadership focuses on leader effectiveness and maintains that leaders are more effective when they correctly make their behaviors contingent on certain situational and follower characteristics. Theories of contingency leadership considers a number of variables, including the quality of leader-follower relations, the amount of structure involved in completing tasks, the relative power between leaders and followers, and the clarity of the path between a goal and rewards provided for achieving that goal. Transformational leadership motivates members of an organization to do more than they originally intended and often more than they thought possible. Transformational leaders influence and motivate others through idealized influence, which provides encouragement to look at problems from new perspectives by offering support, encouragement, and an appealing vision, as a means of arousing strong follower emotions and identification with the leader. Charismatic leadership describes individuals who by the power of their person have profound and extraordinary effects on their followers. Organizations often seek charismatic leaders because they are distinguished by their vision, their rhetorical skills, their ability to build a particular kind of image in the hearts and minds of their followers, and their personalized style of leadership. Servant leadership asserts that a great leader should be conceptualized as servant who provides followers with opportunities for nurturance and empowerment that help them grow as persons, become healthier, wiser and autonomous, and ultimately become servants themselves, who are subsequently able to benefit the least privileged in society.

The Information Technology Era The information technology era brought about major changes in society through computers, the Internet, and telecommunications. Organizations became inundated with massive amounts of data and material from multiple sources. Because no single executive could stay abreast of the quantity of information and technology, organizations

embraced various forms of shared leadership. Organizational leaders began to modify bureaucracies and their leadership styles to provide more collaborative expertise, flexibility, and creativity across organizational functions and departments. This period also produced rapid growth of multinational corporations. Shared leadership describes a process of interdependent and interactive influence and leadership whereby organizational members lead each other to achieve the organization’s purpose. Teams and team leadership became the predominate style in many organizations since teams provide greater use of the intellectual resources and expertise of their members. To generate the most effective performance and accrue collective benefits from members, team leadership must provide a compelling direction, enable a workable team structure, and develop a supportive organizational context that ultimately builds the team’s capacity to manage itself. Democratic leadership operates by distributing responsibility among the membership, empowering group members, and aiding the group’s decision-making process. Leaders operate by creating an environment in which the relationship between the organization and the individual is adult-to-adult, not superior-to-subordinate. Individuals are seen primarily as investors actively building and deploying their human capital in ways that allow them to develop their natures and express their diverse qualities. As a result, individuals have accountabilities and obligations both to themselves and the organization. Invisible leadership embodies situations in which dedication to a compelling and deeply held common purpose is the motivating force for leadership. This common purpose provides inspiration for participants to use their strengths willingly in leader or follower roles and cultivates a strong shared bond that connects participants to each other in pursuit of their purpose. In organizations where the common purpose leads, members have an enhanced collective capacity to work, learn, and achieve together. They develop an internalized purpose through strong personal commitment, can work in either visible or invisible roles, and are committed to purpose-inspired dedication and accountability.

Organizational Leadership

By challenging what people hold dear and orchestrating conflicts over their values, beliefs and behaviors, adaptive leadership encourages people to think and act in new ways. By shifting responsibility from authority figures and structures to organization stakeholders, adaptive leaders facilitate learning through innovation and discovering what works and what does not. One goal of adaptive leadership is to create a new context of cultural change and values clarification.

The Global Era The global era is a time of unparalleled change, pervasive uncertainty, radical technological advancements, and transnational challenges. Scholars characterize global leadership as distinctively more complex than domestic leadership. Global leadership encompasses issues involving cultural differences among people, styles, values, and beliefs. Several dimensions that contribute to global leadership challenges in organizations include the exponential increase in number and type of issues and difficulties that global leaders face, interdependent interrelationships with economies, alliances, teams, and joint ventures, and ambiguity created by uncertain information and a lack of definitive cause and effect relationships. Because work must be done by people in geographically different locations and in asynchronous time zones, much of global leadership takes place through virtual means. These dynamics change the way members of organizations interact within and across organizations. The concept of e-leadership refers to a social influence process embedded in both proximal (near) and distal (distant) contexts mediated by advanced information technology that can produce a change in attitudes, feelings, thinking, behavior and performance. Members of the organization have

687

considerable autonomy and involvement in the team and leadership process. To meet the challenges of global leadership, organizations and their stakeholders (especially leaders and members) need to break away from the confines of bureaucratic organizations, which default to order and control, and embrace the adaptive responses of complexity leadership. Complexity leadership consists of three functions. They are entrepreneurial leadership that generates innovation, learning, and growth in a system; operational leadership that transforms innovation into a new adaptive order for performance and results; and enabling leadership that creates the adaptive space for people to spawn, struggle with, and generate new ideas and innovation. Gill Robinson Hickman See also Adaptive Leadership; Bureaucracy; Contingency Theories; E-Leadership; Global Leadership, Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Further Readings Bass, B., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hackman, J. R., (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Hickman, G. R. (Ed.). (2015). Leading organizations: Perspectives for a new era (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Mendenhall, M. E., Osland, J. S., Bird, A., Oddou, G. R., Maznevski, M. L., Stahl, G. K., & Stevens, M. J. (2017). Global leadership: Research, practice, and development (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory & practice: (9th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

P the five nations between 1846 and 1980. All contributed to making possible the creation, completion, and operation of the waterway.

PANAMA CANAL TREATIES The term Panama canal treaties refers to the international agreements governing the construction, functioning, maintenance, and defense of a waterway through the isthmus of Panama. Leadership was instrumental in generating these arrangements, involving five countries—the United States, Great Britain, France, Colombia, and Panama—over almost 135 years. Although several Panamanians, U.S. Americans, and other nationals helped bring about these agreements, in the most recent stage, the leadership of U.S. President Jimmy Carter proved instrumental in securing passage of the 1977 treaties, which ended the controversies between Panama and the United States over control of the waterway. Carter had no qualms about negotiating with a military dictatorship but resorted to persuasion to create a coalition across the United States, including members of the Senate who ultimately approved the treaties, even though support reduced their electoral opportunities. This entry reviews some of the most important negotiations and treaties over this long period, especially those that eventually gave control of the waterway to Panama, thereby easing tensions between the United States and Panama, and arguably between the United States and Latin America more generally. Broadly speaking, there are at least 18 treaties or contracts referring to a canal in Panama negotiated among

Establishing U.S. Control Over Panama’s Transit Corridor Prior to 1878, there were three treaties or contracts involving the United States, Great Britain, and New Granada (now Colombia) that negotiated transit rights for the United States in the part of New Granada, which is now Panama. Then in 1878, a contract between Colombia and the French Canal Company (Wyse Concession) opened the way for France to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. However, engineering difficulties, disease, and mismanagement resulted in the downfall of the French company. Its successor, led by Philippe Bunau Varilla, formerly the canal’s chief engineer, held on to the Wyse Concession with the purpose of selling it, ideally to the U.S. government, given its interest in creating an interoceanic route through Central America. In 1902, the Spooner Act authorized U.S. acquisition of French canal property and building rights as well as negotiations with Colombia for ´ control of the adjoining area. The Hay-Herran Treaty, rubricated in 1903 by Secretary of State John Hay and Colombian charg´e d’affaires in ´ Herran, ´ contemplated a 99Washington, Tomas year lease over Panama’s transit zone in exchange for an annuity. However, it was rejected by the

689

690

Panama Canal Treaties

Colombian Senate in August 1903. To overcome Colombian opposition, the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt, in coordination with Bunau Varilla, agreed to support Panama’s secessionist movement. Secessionism had been brewing in Panama since the isthmus joined Colombia in 1821 and reached a boiling point after the demise ´ Treaty, which Panamanians of the Hay-Herran had idealized as an economic solution. On November 3, 1903, Panama separated from Colombia. U.S. support cost the new republic dearly. An Isthmian Canal Convention was signed on November 18. Known as the Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty, after Secretary Hay and Frenchman Bunau Varilla—who blackmailed the new republic into appointing him as Panama’s special envoy—the treaty was in force for 75 contentious years, from its entry into force on February 23, 1904 to September 30, 1979, when it finally expired pursuant to a new U.S.–Panamanian agreement (accorded in 1977). The Isthmian Canal Convention authorized the United States to build, operate, maintain, and defend the waterway, for which purposes Washington would administer the adjacent territory, named the Canal Zone, in perpetuity, “as if it were sovereign.” The United States assumed responsibility for guaranteeing Panama’s independence and maintaining public order in the cities of Pan´ located at each entrance to the ama and Colon, canal.

Preserving U.S. Control Over the Canal The 1903 treaty furnished a lopsided legal framework allowing the United States to finish the canal in 1914. Having obtained a concession in perpetuity, “as if it were sovereign,” for the next six decades (1904–1964) U.S. diplomacy focused on maintaining the status quo in the face of Panama’s objections. The onerous terms of the 1903 Convention aggravated Panamanians, who resented U.S. suzerainty. A treaty negotiated in 1914 between the United States and Colombia, with the purpose of removing “all the misunderstandings growing out of the political events in Panama,” further irritated the Isthmians. Ratified by both countries in 1921, the Thomson-Urrutia Convention—after U.S. minister in Bogota´ Thaddeus

Thomson and Colombian Foreign Secretary Francisco Urrutia—made a $25 million payment to Colombia and imposed an unfavorable territorial boundary upon Panama. The treaty proclaimed that the title to the “interoceanic Canal and the Panama Railway” was “vested entirely and absolutely in the United States of America” and granted the right to transport Colombian “troops, materials of war and ships of war” free of charge through the canal. Panamanian complaints of unfair treatment led to many requests over the years to modify the 1903 convention. A Panamanian commission headed by Ricardo J. Alfaro, the country’s minister in Washington, negotiated with a convention with the U.S. State Department in 1926. However, its terms sparked negative reactions in the Panamanian press. Criticism was especially focused on the clause creating an automatic alliance between both countries at wartime. In early 1927, the National Assembly resolved not to continue discussing the convention. Then in 1933, Panama President Harmodio Arias, who as an assemblyman had led opposition to the 1926 convention, met with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss a new treaty. Arias took advantage of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which had begun reducing tensions in U.S.-Latin American relations. On March 2, 1936, both countries agreed on a General Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, which abrogated the “public order” and “guarantee of independence” clauses of the 1903 convention and provided limited economic benefits, including an upward adjustment in Panama’s annuity. The United States recognized Panama’s sovereignty over its air space and radio communications and agreed to partly fund a highway across the isthmus. Signatories included Ricardo J. Alfaro, once again Panama’s minister in Washington, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The National Assembly approved the convention in December 1936, but the U.S. Senate did not follow suit until July 25, 1939. The General Treaty brought improvement to a disproportionate relationship but was far from satisfying Panama’s rising nationalist aspirations. In 1941, President Arnulfo Arias (Harmodio’s brother) was overthrown in a U.S.-supported coup

Panama Canal Treaties

after he refused to authorize a 999-year term lease of numerous defense sites throughout the republic, as requested by the State Department. He also rebuffed a request to arm U.S.-owned merchant vessels flying the Panamanian flag, arguing that Panama remained neutral during the Second World War. After his removal, in 1942 a nonelected successor permitted U.S. military forces to operate over 100 defense sites. When in 1947 the United States tried to renew the leases, Panamanians revolted, forcing the National Assembly to reject the proposal. This victory, however, did not placate the nationalists, who insisted on additional rectifica´ a tions. In 1953, Panama President Jos´e Remon, former police chief closely associated with the United States, initiated negotiations ending in the Treaty of Mutual Understanding and Cooperation ´ on January 25, 1955 (shortly after Remon’s assassination on January 2). U.S. Ambassador Selden Chapin and Foreign Minister Octavio ´ Fabrega signed this treaty, which increased Panama’s allowance, returned some U.S.-held real estate, ended commissary purchasing privileges for non-U.S. employees, and enabled the Panamanian Government to collect income taxes from its citizens and foreign nationals (except U.S. citizens) working in the Canal Zone. Wage discrimination supposedly ended, although through the 1970s U.S. nationals continued to enjoy “unfair advantages over non-citizen employees” (Conniff, 1985, p. 177). Economic enhancements secured in 1955 were insufficient for Panama’s nationalists, who demanded full recognition of Panamanian sovereignty in the Canal Zone, complete removal of U.S. military forces, transfer of the waterway’s administration to Panama, and neutralization of the canal. Nationalist protests escalated and, although in 1963 U.S. President John F. Kennedy authorized the display of Panama’s flag in the Canal Zone, on January 9, 1964, a group of Zonians prevented a delegation of Panamanian students from raising their national emblem. An uncontrolled riot erupted, leaving 23 Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers dead. When U.S. forces fired over the border, Panama President Roberto F. Chiari complained of aggression and broke

691

relations, which undermined the reputation of the “northern colossus.”

Overhauling the Relationship to Protect U.S. Interests The January 1964 incidents dawned upon Washington that maintaining its position “as if it were sovereign,” in perpetuity, in Panama’s transit corridor was untenable, as such insistence was a direct source of violence and instability on the isthmus affecting U.S. interests. A third stage in the history of the Panama Canal treaties began on April 3, 1964, after both countries resumed diplomatic relations and agreed to negotiate new conventions leading to the elimination of the causes of conflict. Negotiations in 1964–1967 resulted in draft treaties covering the canal, the defense sites, and construction of a sea-level waterway, which then seemed feasible. The drafts were initialed in mid-1967 by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s special representative, Robert B. Anderson, and Panamanian Foreign Minister Fernando Eleta. These proposals, especially the canal treaty, were complex. Still, they represented important achievements for Panama, including the abrogation of the 1903 canal convention, including its perpetuity clause; recognition of Panama’s sovereignty in the Canal Zone; an end to U.S. jurisdiction in the zone; an agreement to turn over the waterway to Panamanian administration by end-1999 or one year after the inauguration of a sea-level canal, whichever occurred first; and establishment of a binational commission to run the canal through 1999, together with an arrangement to share canal profits between both countries. The drafts proclaimed the waterway’s neutrality and authorized the operation of U.S. military bases in the Canal Zone up to five years after termination of the canal treaty—clearly, one of Washington’s main objectives during the Cold War. If built, the sea-level waterway would be placed under joint administration for a 60-year period, in no case extending beyond 2067. These drafts were unsatisfactory to Panama’s nationalists, who complained about a long, 32year transition period and legalization of U.S.

692

Panama Canal Treaties

military bases directed toward regional hegemonic pursuits beyond canal protection. Prompted by ´ ´ nationalist Deputy Carlos Ivan Zuñiga, in December 1967 the National Assembly urged the forthcoming administration to engage in negotiations agreeing with the “principles and aspirations of the people of Panama, expressed in January 1964.” The challenges of obtaining a new arrangement amenable to Washington if an environment allowing free debate prevailed on the isthmus now became clear to the Johnson Administration. Misgivings increased after former Panama president Arnulfo Arias won the May 1968 election. Although Arias assured U.S. officials that he would successfully finalize the treaties, Washington did not trust him. Thus, the Johnson Administration was relieved when a military coup, by Panama’s National Guard, overthrew Arias in October 1968. Panama’s National Guard had close connections with the U.S. Army, and Omar Torrijos, the officer who gained control of the military regime, was a paid informant of the 470th Counterinsurgency Brigade at least through 1970. To legitimize his rule, in 1971 Torrijos seized the nationalist cause, proclaiming the 1967 drafts “worthless.” Negotiations reinitiated in 1973 and continued for four years as a convenient distraction at a time when civil liberties were suppressed by a dictatorship that ensured that no threat against U.S. interests on the isthmus would take hold, while posing abroad as a nationalist vanguard. In 1977, Torrijos and President Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty and the Neutrality Treaty. The canal convention stipulated a firm transfer date on December 31, 1999, with no exceptions, and included increased economic and military assistance. Beyond these benefits, it did not contain substantial advantages for Panama over those achieved in 1967. The Neutrality Treaty provided a security structure for the waterway starting in 1999, in which the United States holds the upper hand. Washington finally obtained acceptable agreements thanks to a Panamanian dictatorship that orchestrated a 67% approval vote in a plebiscite held on October 23, 1977, labeled undemocratic and fraudulent by the opposition.

In early 1978, the U.S. Senate began debating the treaties in controversial sessions. Conservatives equated approval with giving away U.S. property to enemies. Liberals focused on notions of fairness deeply embedded in the tradition of the U.S. founding. In support of his initiative, President Carter succeeded in putting together a broad alliance of civic, religious, and business leaders and eventually obtained the support of 67 senators, the minimum required to pass the treaties—including minority leader Howard Baker (R-Tennessee), whose backing was instrumental and contributed to undermine his possibilities for obtaining a presidential or vice-presidential candidacy in 1980. Despite the administration’s efforts, treaty approval came only after the Senate added conditions, such as the DeConcini Reservation, after its proponent, Senator Dennis DeConcini (R-Arizona), which allowed U.S. intervention in Panama to confront threats to the waterway. These unilateral additions were not submitted to approval by the people of Panama. The military regime ratified them without debate, further corroborating its identification with Washington’s agenda. The canal treaty became effective on October 1, 1979, when both the Canal Zone and the Panama Canal Company ceased to exist. A binational commission organized as a U.S. federal agency took over the company’s functions. The Neutrality Treaty entered into force at the expiry of the canal treaty on December 31, 1999, after Washington withdrew all military forces from the isthmus. Also in 1979, Panama and Colombia signed the Treaty of Monter´ıa concerning concessions made in the 1914 Thomson-Urrutia Treaty. In yet ´ Torrianother bow to Washington (and Bogota), jos agreed to maintain Colombia’s privilege of transporting its troops, navy vessels, and war materials through the waterway without charge. After Panama’s armed forces occupied the premises of a reluctant National Assembly, the convention was approved on November 25, 1980. Carlos Guevara Mann See also Congressional Leadership; Political Leadership; Presidential Leadership

Paradoxes of Leadership

Further Readings Conniff, M. (1985). Black labor on a white canal: Panama, 1904-1981. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Guevara Mann, C. (1996). Panamanian militarism: A historical interpretation. Athens: Ohio University Press. Linares, J. E. (1983). Tratado concerniente a la neutralidad permanente y el funcionamiento del canal ´ [Treaty concerning the permanent de Panama. neutrality and operation of the Panama canal.] Panama: Litograf´ıa e Imprenta LIL. McCullough, D. (1977). The path between the seas: The creation of the Panama Canal: 1870–1914. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ´ P., & Arauz ´ Monfante, C. A. (1996). Pizzurno Gelos, Estudios sobre el Panama´ republicano. [Studies on the Panama´ republic. Colombia: Manfer. U.S. Department of State. (1922). “Treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of Colombia,” signed 6 April 1914. The American Journal of International Law, 16(3), 119–121. doi:10. 2307/2213235 U.S. Department of State. (1963, July 8). Memorandum. Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. Office of Central American and Panamanian Affairs. Retrieved September 10, 2021, from https://www.archives.gov/ files/research/foreign-policy/memoranda-1963.pdf U.S. National Security Council. (1977). Information Memorandum: Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera. ALC-96-158.

PARADOXES

OF

LEADERSHIP

Recognizing the tensions and contradictions within leadership theory and practice is an important starting point for developing more creative and constructive ways of working. The ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity that now permeate all areas of business and society drive an expectation for leaders to provide a clear and compelling sense of purpose and direction for staff and stakeholders. Like many aspects of leadership, however, this requires balancing competing demands and expectations that are not easily resolved. This entry outlines principles of a paradoxical approach to leadership, some of the key

693

paradoxes faced by leaders and organizations, and highlights implications for theory, practice and development.

Understanding the Link Between Paradox and Leadership A paradox is defined as something that incorporates contradictory elements that cannot be resolved or explained through logical reasoning alone. Understanding and exploring paradox has been a primary concern of authors and philosophers throughout the ages, with the logician Willard Quine outlining the following three types of paradox: •

Veridical paradoxes are statements that, while appearing nonsensical, are logically true. A ¨ common example is the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment (devised by the physicist ¨ Erwin Schrodinger in discussion with Albert Einstein), which says that in the absence of an opportunity to verify whether a cat enclosed in a sealed box is dead or alive, we must consider both to be simultaneously true. • Falsidical paradoxes are statements that, while appearing logically true, turn out to be false. An example here is that of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion (named after the Greek philosopher Zeno, who came up with them in 4th century BCE) which suggest, among other things, that an arrow will never reach its target and that motion is an illusion. • Antinomy paradoxes comprise two plausible yet contradictory statements that cannot be resolved by any amount of logical reasoning—an idea used by the philosopher Immanuel Kant to demonstrate the limits of philosophical and scientific enquiry.

Such examples are not purely intellectual curiosities but have practical implications for how we engage with the world and make sense of the information we are provided with. Veridical paradoxes, for example, highlight our ability to “think outside the box” and have an important role to play in fostering creativity and innovation. Falsidical paradoxes highlight our ability to distinguish sense from nonsense, something particularly pertinent in a world of populism and “fake news.” And antinomy paradoxes highlight

694

Paradoxes of Leadership

our capacity to make plans, actions, and decisions in the face of complex, ambiguous, and incomplete information. Paradoxes are characterized by a tension between two or more polarities that, at face-value, appear as discrete and in opposition to one another (e.g., the cat IS either dead or alive) yet, on closer inspection, turn out to be interdependent (e.g. the cat must be CONSIDERED both dead and alive until observed). In an extensive review of theory and research on paradox in management studies, Jonathan Schad and colleagues define paradox as “persistent contradiction between interdependent elements” (2016, p. 10). The persistent nature of paradox, they suggest, distinguishes it from similar notions, such as dialectics, which suggests the possibility of synthesis of polarities, and dualities, which focuses on the interdependent elements themselves rather than the tensions between them. They conclude by proposing that paradox is a promising meta-theoretical perspective and theorizing tool for exploring the complexities, tensions, and challenges of organizational life. The challenge and opportunity of paradoxes is that they require us to think and act differently. Whereas some leadership theory and practice might encourage leaders to be bold and decisive, a paradoxical perspective encourages us to consider the (unintended) consequences of such an approach and to (re)conceive an alternative approach. As Albert Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The implications of a problem-centered approach to leadership are illustrated by Keith Grint, who highlights the need to differentiate between different kinds of problems and the strategies that can be used to address them. Tame problems, he argues, are the kinds of issue that we have faced before and, although potentially quite complicated, can be addressed through a rational process of management. Wicked problems, on the other hand, are novel challenges comprising a series of complexities and interdependencies that no amount of analysis will resolve. Addressing such problems is fundamentally ideological, requiring a collaborative leadership response that helps makes sense of the issues and potential ways

forward. The third category discussed by Grint is critical problems. While crises, of course, may be the manifestation of underlying tame or wicked problems, the time-critical nature of the issue requires a decisive command intervention. Any one of these kinds of problem may contain paradoxical elements; however, they are most evident within wicked issues. Faced with complex, contested, and intractable challenges, leaders are often expected to deliver apparently contradictory outcomes, such as improving services while cutting costs. Responding to such demands requires inclusive and collaborative ways of working that may challenge established norms and assumptions about leadership. When faced with a wicked problem, the work of leadership is not to provide the “solution” but to convene a sufficiently diverse group of contributors to help frame the problem and to work collaboratively toward addressing it. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of leadership, and organizational life in general, is a central theme of complexity approaches to management and organizations, where contradictions emerge through the interface of individual and systemic factors. For complexity scholars, paradoxes are a ubiquitous characteristic of organizational life that can never be “resolved,” and which demand a shift in mindset—from either/or to both/and—in order to address them.

Common Paradoxes of Leadership There are multiple paradoxes that face leaders, as well as organizations and those researching leadership. In a book titled Leadership Paradoxes, edited by Richard Bolden, Morgen Witzel, and Nigel Linacre, contributors highlight issues including •

The ambivalent relationship between leaders and followers in respect to the perceived need and want for “leadership”; • The elusive nature of “leadership” and the challenges this poses for leadership research and development; • Tensions around leaders being a part of and apart from the “team” and addressing current versus future needs/challenges;

Paradoxes of Leadership •

Paradoxes around the nature of, and assumptions about, “heroic” leadership. • The conundrum whereby, in attempting to control events leaders may experience a loss of control; • The paradoxical nature of “authentic” leadership, particularly in relation to conceptual framing, context, identity and depth; • Moral dilemmas of leadership and the complexities of “right” and “wrong.”

Each of these points highlights fundamental contradictions and ambiguities in how leadership is understood and enacted. These are issues that extend beyond leaders themselves, with implications for organizations and societies more broadly. Like power, leadership has been described as an essentially contested concept in that what is seen, understood, and/or encouraged is dependent on the perspective of the observer. This incorporates a wide range of factors, including demographics, profession, personality, and political orientation. Such issues help explain the difficulties in agreeing on a universal definition of leadership and of putting in place appropriate reward and recognition systems. Some underlying polarities within leadership include individual–collective; leading–following; competition–collaboration; stability–change; autonomy–control; means–ends; planned– emergent; and short-term–long-term. Although a simple either/or solution is often proposed, it is argued that a both/and approach is more effective and less likely to produce unintended consequences.

695

to conform to concepts of professionalism promoted through much global management education. In volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments, leaders and organizations face a range of paradoxes, dilemmas, and tensions that are not easy to resolve. Leadership, management, and organization development, as well as performance review and appraisal processes, need to recognize this and support the development of individual and collective capacity to deal with paradox. Such processes may feel counter-cultural in contexts where rationality, planning and control are emphasized and rewarded. Working with paradox requires us to think differently about how we try to resolve problems. As Charles Handy argued in The Age of Paradox, rather than seeking control we need to generate a compelling narrative that creates a sense of continuity, connection, and direction around which people can mobilize. In order to embrace the opportunities offered by paradox, it is suggested that leaders and organizations need to enhance their capacity for identifying polarities, clarifying purpose and priorities, reframing issues from either/or to both/ and, connecting and working across boundaries, providing support and reassurance for people struggling with the anxiety caused by uncertainty, and building a learning culture that is able to adapt and respond to emerging scenarios. Ultimately, an ability to recognize and embrace paradox opens new opportunities for leaders and organizations to promote creativity and remove entrenched assumptions and ways of working. Richard Bolden

Implications of Paradox for Leadership Theory, Practice, and Development Despite the ubiquity of paradox in organizations, much management and leadership theory, practice, and development still promotes the idea that leaders and managers can exert direct control over organizational outcomes. Such concepts continue to influence leadership and management practice and development around the world and, while many non-Western countries have a tradition of recognizing and valuing paradox, it is not well documented how they achieve this in the face of pressure

See also Complexity Leadership Theory, Creativity, Systems Theory, Wicked Problems

Further Readings Bolden, R., Witzel, M., & Linacre, N. (Eds.). (2016). Leadership paradoxes: Rethinking leadership for an uncertain world. London: Routledge. Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of “leadership.” Human Relations, 58(11), 1467–1494. Handy, C. (1994). The age of paradox. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

696

Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context

Paternalistic leadership (PL), based in Confucianism, emphasizes the role of discipline and authority in combination with compassion and moral integrity so as to maintain role obligation and collective harmony among leaders and followers. More fundamentally, PL emphasizes a top-down hierarchical structure grounded in morality, kindness, care, and respect for authority. In PL, leaders demonstrate their role as a parent or head of a family who cares about followers’ well-being in professional and private life. In response, the followers feel obliged, indebted, and grateful to leaders to reciprocate in fulfilling various roles. PL is distinct from other leadership styles, such as transformational leadership, which provides individualized care limited to professional life, whereas PL provides holistic care. Also, transformational leadership transforms followers through communication, inspiration, and empowerment, while PL focuses on shared objectives through a cultural/contextual value system.

behaviors. Furthermore, authoritarianism highlights the importance of rewards and punishment as a means for leaders to shape and motivate followers. Thus, authoritarianism refers to a leader’s absolute authority, personal dominance, centralized decision-making, and discipline. In the context of PL, benevolence refers to a leader’s ability and capacity to express individualized concern and care for followers’ well-being in both professional and private lives. Benevolence also means that leaders treat their followers with kindness, and in return, expect respect from followers. Benevolent leaders create growth opportunities for their followers and seek to evoke positive emotions within them. Benevolence also involves creating growth opportunities, demonstrating care, and devoting energy to help restore followers’ comfort when they are having trouble. PL’s benevolent behaviors testify to genuine concern for followers, provide followers with opportunities to learn from their mistakes, and are positively associated with performance, trust in the leader, and organizational support. Thus, in benevolent leadership, a dyadic relationship is practiced with different subordinates within the same working group, thereby reflecting the notion of healthy professional leader–member relations. PL’s morality dimension involves expressing personal virtues, moral values, self-discipline, unselfishness, and respect for others. It is a normative phenomenon that focuses on high values and respect for followers in an ethical environment. Furthermore, leaders demonstrate moral behaviors through honesty, respect, truth, integrity, social justice, and maintenance of work values at an organizational level. When leaders demonstrate strong moral values, followers experience high-quality relationship exchanges and are likely to reciprocate in kind.

Dimensions of Paternalistic Leadership

Origins of Paternalistic Leadership

Authoritarianism is one dimension of PL. Under PL, a leader has absolute control over their followers through a centralized hierarchy system, similar to how a parental figure has authority over children. Authoritarianism exerts power over followers, demanding absolute obedience and focusing on discipline to shape followers’ favorable

Confucianism is a Chinese philosophy that plays a vital role in formulating individual’s behaviors in Chinese society. Further, Confucianism is not an organized religion nor missionary tradition; however, it shares human values such as respect, love, and care with other religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Daoism

Quine, W. V. (1966). The ways of paradox and other essays. New York, NY: Random House. Schad, J., Lewis, M., Raisch, S., & Smith, W. (2016). Paradox research in management science: Looking back to move forward, Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 5–64. Smith, W. K., Lewis, M. W., & Tushman, M. L. (2016, May). “Both/and” leadership (pp. 62–70). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https:// hbr.org/2016/05/both-and-leadership

PATERNALISM: ORIGINS THEORETICAL CONTEXT

AND

Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context

and exerts a strong influence on East Asian culture in family structures, education, society, and government. An important aspect of Confucian philosophy is leadership. Confucius’s leadership is located in the core PL concepts of ceremony or ritual, benevolence, and trustworthiness. Ceremony or ritual is an unwritten law, a collection of different social habits, norms, and rules that influence human behaviors to develop discipline and regulation in Chinese society. According to Confucianism, leaders act as paternal figures and patriarchs of a tribe. Leaders as patriarch and paternal figures demonstrate concerns for followers’ best interests and expect unquestioning compliance from followers. Aside from Chinese culture, the cultural traditions of surrounding countries contribute to PL’s contemporary face. Paternalistic culture exists in collectivist and high power-distance societies including many nations in South Asia, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America. In paternalistic cultures, individuals in positions of authority provide care and support of well-being to individuals (followers) under their supervision. In response, they expect faithfulness, devotion, and compliance from their followers. For instance, children in the Asian subcontinent are trained to submit their needs to the head of the family and are expected to obey the decisions of the head of the family.

Paradoxical Leadership in PL PL can be viewed through the lens of paradoxical leadership theory, whereby leaders manage contradictory and interrelated elements simultaneously. It is becoming popular in the current era when leaders must manage both contradictions and agreement, reflection and action, conflict and settlement. In contrast to contingency theory, where one chooses from existing alternatives, paradox theory focuses on both ends that link to integrating and accepting simultaneously. Leaders’ paradoxical behavior may posit long-lasting outcomes by adopting divergent and contradictory elements, such as organizations pursuing exploration and exploitation simultaneously instead of choosing one option or the other. Similarly, PL is a form of paradoxical leadership. Paternalistic leaders manage both authoritarianism and benevolence/

697

morality at the same time. Thus, in line with the paradoxical leadership theory, paternalistic leaders have strict control over subordinates and provide individualized care, respect, and benevolence in work-life and nonwork life.

Theoretical Support The effects of PL can be explained by social exchange theory (SET) and leader–member exchange (LMX) theory. SET seeks to explain the relationships between PL and concepts such as organizational justice, leadership, psychological contracts, and employee job-related behaviors. SET is based on reciprocity norms and negotiated relations to have win-win situations. SET exhibits three types of reciprocity, namely as a transactional pattern, as folk belief, and as a moral norm. In other words, SET distinguishes social exchanges from economic exchanges based on the fair equilibrium to develop benevolence and well-being for the team members. The benevolent behavior of leaders can trigger the social exchange process and induce constructive emotions. For instance, paternalistic leaders reflect individuals’ reciprocity regarding support, care, empathy, and value. In response, individuals tend to express gratitude, feel indebtedness, and may perform beyond their job duties. The effects of PL can be explained via LMX theory, generated initially from the vertical dyad linkage (VDL) approach. The VDL approach assumes an interaction between leader and subordinates and focuses on a dyad; that is, a group of two individuals. The central premise of VDL is that the leader establishes separate exchange interactions with each subordinate, and this phenomenon leads to the development of LMX theory. LMX examines the quality of exchange relationships between leader and followers and focuses on dyadic relationships. According to LMX theory, the relationship and work roles between leaders and followers are negotiated over time through various interactions. Furthermore, LMX relationships can be categorized into low-quality relations and high-quality relations. Low-quality LMX relations are based on economic exchanges such as financial rewards and employment contracts. By contrast, individuals in

698

Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks

high-quality LMX relations enjoy more exchanges than do individuals in low-quality LMX relations. They experience not only economic exchanges but also social exchanges such as respect, trust, and loyalty. Reciprocal relations can be strengthened through several activities during working hours, such as developing fair environments, inducements, and resources distribution. Thus, PL has three paradoxical (authoritarianism, benevolence, and morality) but interrelated dimensions, which can be explained from the respective standpoints of SET and LMX. Furthermore, followers reciprocally respond to the leader’s positive attitudes when social exchange relationships tend to develop obligation and reciprocity.

Linking paternalistic leadership to employee performance. Journal of Management, 40(3), 796–819. Cheng, B. S., Chou, L. F., Wu, T. Y., Huang, M. P., & Farh, J. L. (2004). Paternalistic leadership and subordinate responses: Establishing a leadership model in Chinese organizations. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 7(1), 89–117. Farh, J. L., & Cheng, B. S. (2000). A cultural analysis of paternalistic leadership in Chinese organizations. In J. T. Li, A. S. Tsui, & E. Weldon (Eds.), Management and organizations in the Chinese context (pp. 84–127). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10. 1057/9780230511590_5 Pellegrini, E. K., & Scandura, T. A. (2008). Paternalistic leadership: A review and agenda for future research. Journal of Management, 34(3), 566–593.

Antecedents and Consequences of PL Research has identified various antecedents and consequences related to PL, such as family-like organizational climate, fewer formal rules in organizations, more significant interaction with top management, and respect for social status. Trust is an essential factor in PL’s relationship and its various antecedents. Paternalism is provided where trust and mutual harmony between leaders and subordinates exist. Research suggests that a positive relationship exists between PL and work attitudes, organizational engagement, job satisfaction, and job performance. It has been determined that authoritarian behavior has a negative association with followers’ outcomes like organizational commitment, job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, and intention to leave the organization. However, benevolence and morality showed a positive correlation regarding performance, trust in leaders, job commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. Muzammil Hussain, Tuan Luu, and Timothy Marjoribanks See also Autocratic Leadership; Confucian Ethics, Contingency Theories; Empathic Leadership; Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Further Readings Chen, X. P., Eberly, M. B., Chiang, T. J., Farh, J. L., & Cheng, B. S. (2014). Affective trust in Chinese leaders:

PATERNALISTIC LEADERSHIP: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS Paternalistic leadership is generally defined as a style of leadership that combines authority, control, and discipline with a parental concern for subordinates’ well-being. It is a form of leadership that is common in several societies including Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Paternalistic leadership is of particular relevance to leadership scholars and practitioners who are interested in exploring whether or not leadership theories are applicable across cultures, or if there are specific leadership approaches, styles, and behaviors that work best in specific cultural contexts. This entry provides an overview of paternalistic leadership, the major frameworks of paternalistic leadership, the key antecedents and outcomes of this style of leadership, and recommendations for future research.

Overview Since the 1990s, research in leadership has increasingly demonstrated that cultural values and societal expectations play a major role in whether a certain leadership style will be prevalent and effective within a specific context. A major research consortium of leadership scholars called

Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks

Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) investigated the extent to which paternalistic leadership is accepted around the world. They found that more than one-third of societies endorsed some form of paternalism. The term paternalism is derived from the Latin paternus (fatherly). Paternalism as a social or political system is one wherein the persons of authority (i.e., the leaders) direct and supply the needs of those under them, and control a range of matters, including how subordinates relate with their leaders and with one another. Although paternalistic leaders may consult with their subordinates, they wield the ultimate decision power and serve as the moral authority of their social or organizational units. At the same time, because subordinates are considered like extended family members, paternalistic leaders prioritize their subordinates’ well-being, both at work and in personal spheres. Early mention of paternalism in relation to organizations was made by the pioneering sociologist Max Weber, who described paternalism as a traditional form of legitimate domination, in which subordinates owe personal obedience to their leaders by virtue of their status. Weber argued that paternalistic practices, which are based on patriarchal households, would eventually be supplanted by organizational bureaucracies that are characterized by formal rules intended to provide order and protect individual rights. Contrary to Weber’s prediction, paternalistic leadership is prevalent in many countries outside Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Paternalism has been widely researched in Chinese firms operating in various parts of Asia-Pacific, including China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia. This leadership style is congruent with Confucian philosophy, emphasizing leader authority, patriarchal tradition, and responsibility for subordinates, as well as the Chinese philosophy of guanxi (personal connections based on mutual interests and benefits). Research in the Middle East has been led by Turkish researchers, whose conceptualization of paternalism emerged from historical Ottoman Empire feudal structures and Islamic values emphasizing respect for authority, collectivism, and concern for others’ welfare. Still other research on paternalistic

699

leadership has been conducted in Mexico and other Latin American countries, where paternalism is viewed as an acceptable leadership style consistent with respect for family and personal ties, hierarchical relations, and the Catholic-based precepts that employers should take care of their “flock.” While paternalistic leadership has roots in the patriarchal concept (in which the father or eldest male is considered head of the family), some scholars have argued that the paternalistic style can be used by both male and female leaders since the construct emphasizes more the role of parent or guardian. In 2019, a meta-analysis of paternalistic leadership behaviors in 14 countries (including China, Taiwan, Turkey, the United States, Pakistan, and India) found no evidence that paternalistic leadership was more characteristic of males compared to females. However, it was found that older leaders tend to be more authoritarian than younger ones.

Frameworks of Paternalistic Leadership There are two major conceptualizations of paternalistic leadership: (1) the triad model by Chinese researchers Jiing-Lih Farh and Bor-Shiuan Cheng; and (2) a unitary measure by Turkish researcher Zeynep Aycan. Farh and Cheng proposed three distinct dimensions (subscales) of paternalistic leadership: authoritarianism, benevolence, and morality. Authoritarianism refers to leader behaviors that emphasize decision-making control, expectation of unquestioning obedience from subordinates, and the enforcement of strict discipline (e.g., scolding, punishment) when rules are not followed, or when performance goals are not met. Benevolence highlights the leader’s concern for subordinates’ daily life, including personal and family well-being. The leader builds a strong personal (almost familial) relationship with employees that goes beyond work and organizational matters. Morality covers leader behaviors that demonstrate personal virtues and integrity (e.g., not taking advantage of subordinates or using illicit practices for personal gain). Subsequent empirical research has demonstrated that authoritarianism is negatively related with benevolence and morality. Moreover, authoritarianism is

700

Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks

associated with lower subordinate commitment and satisfaction, while benevolence and morality have the opposite effect. In contrast, Aycan described paternalistic leadership in terms of five dimensions within a unitary measure: (1) employee commitment to the company; (2) superior’s involvement in employees’ personal life; (3) “father” role of the superior; (4) superior’s empowering behaviors; and 5) superior as the team integrator and harmonizer. This conceptualization emphasizes the leader’s nurturing and close family-life relationships with subordinates, with no mention about discipline and punishment. Findings using this unitary measure have often yielded positive relationships between paternalistic leadership and employee attitudes and performance. Aycan suggested that there are four paternalistic approaches on the basis of the leader’s behavior (care and control) and the underlying intent: benevolent paternalism, exploitative paternalism, authoritarian approach, and authoritative approach. Benevolent paternalistic leaders genuinely care for subordinates who show loyalty in return because they respect and appreciate their leaders. Exploitative paternalistic leaders also show care and support for subordinates; however, because their main intent is to gain compliance, the subordinates show deference not merely out of respect but because of their fear of being deprived of key resources. The authoritarian approach differs from the authoritative approach in that with the former, the leader controls employees through the use of rewards and punishment, while with the latter, the subordinates willingly comply with the rules because they know the rules are meant for their own welfare and they respect their leader. The differing paternalistic approaches discussed imply that paternalism is not a singular construct equivalent to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism as a form of leadership has generally been considered incompatible with the norms and expectations of employees in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries such as the United States. However, the existing literature shows that some forms of paternalistic leadership, notably benevolent paternalism, are associated with positive employee attitudes, and can thus be viewed to be effective

leadership strategies. This is because within collectivistic societies, employees wish and expect their leaders to be involved in their personal lives, not considering this an invasion of privacy as it would be within individualistic cultures. Moreover, within high-power distance societies where unequal power relationships between a leader and subordinate are accepted, employees tend to look up to their leader as a quasi-parental or elder sibling figure whose responsibility is to make the best decisions for the group, and thereby have the right to expect their loyalty. In comparing paternalistic leadership to other leadership constructs, some similarities can be observed, particularly with authoritarianism, leader-member exchange (LMX), and transformational leadership. Unlike authoritarianism, paternalistic leadership incorporates nurturing and genuine personal involvement with subordinates, in addition to strict control and authority. Moreover, the enactment of authority by paternalistic leaders need not always include abusive or demeaning behaviors (as illustrated by the Chinese triad model). Paternalistic leadership can be viewed as a high-quality social exchange relationship between leaders and followers. Much like transformational leaders, paternalistic leaders provide inspiration and individualized consideration to their followers. However, paternalistic leaders express care for their followers beyond the work domain (e.g., giving personal advice, participating in major life events). An analysis of more than 100 studies provided evidence that paternalistic leadership is conceptually and empirically distinct from LMX and transformational leadership, even though there are some common themes.

Antecedents and Outcomes of Paternalistic Leadership Various socio-cultural and contextual factors are associated with paternalistic leadership. Paternalistic leadership typically occurs in societies where people are collectivistic, desire close personal relations, value tradition and social rules, are loyal to their community, and respect the inequalities of status and power between leaders and followers. This style of leadership tends to emerge within

Paternalistic Leadership: Conceptual Frameworks

family-oriented work atmospheres that are often lacking in formal guidelines and procedures. Paternalistic leadership is often seen in contexts where employees are reactive (rather than proactive) and have a high uncertainty avoidance or discomfort with ambiguity. In these situations, paternalistic leaders exert influence by making firm decisions and responding to employees’ needs. Researchers have studied the differential effects of the two main dimensions of paternalistic leadership, authoritarian and benevolent leadership, and explored the interactive effects of these two ostensibly paradoxical components on various outcomes. Generally, findings show that benevolent paternalism is related to multiple outcomes, including higher job satisfaction, organizational commitment, citizenship behaviors, job performance, creativity, and positive subordinate attitudes and emotions toward the leader. Benevolent paternalistic behaviors are also associated with lower turnover intentions and counterproductive work behaviors. This is because benevolent paternalistic leaders build higher trust and forge a stronger bond with their followers, compared to authoritarian paternalistic leaders. Research in Chinese organizations has shown that when leaders exhibit high authoritarian and high benevolent paternalistic behaviors, the levels of employee trust, knowledge-sharing, and innovative behavior are significantly higher than when leaders exhibited high authoritarian but low benevolent paternalistic behaviors. The relationship between paternalistic leadership and employee outcomes is dependent on a number of factors such as subordinate traditionality, authority orientation, locus of control, and dependence on supervisors for work resources and approval. For example, more traditional and dependent followers react more favorably to paternalistic leaders while more autonomous or independent subordinates are likely to reject paternalistic leaders. This is because when leaders act according to an employee’s ideal leader prototype, they are likely to be experienced positively, thereby generating higher levels of commitment and satisfaction. On the other hand, when leaders violate the implicit expectations of their followers (e.g., too authoritarian for independent subordinates), they generate negative perceptions and

701

emotions, leading to lower employee commitment and satisfaction. This suggests that the effective use of paternalistic leadership is situational, depending on the context and type of subordinate.

Future Research Directions As research in paternalistic leadership continues, more work needs to be done to clarify the construct and improve existing measures. In particular, academicians have called for the development and validation of a measure that more appropriately reflects the positive intent underlying the dual dimensions of authority and care/concern. This could encourage more research, including greater attention from mainstream leadership researchers who often have considered paternalistic leadership as negative, harsh, manipulative, or atypical. There is still relatively little information on the prevalence and generalizability of paternalistic leadership in many parts of the world including Africa, North America, and Europe, and the conditions in which this leadership would be acceptable and effective. It would be useful to explore if there exists an ideal balance between authority and benevolence, or whether this balance depends on the context, type of organization (e.g., small family business, large multinational corporation), and the characteristics of the leaders and followers. Much of the research on paternalistic leadership has focused on employees’ perceptions of their leaders. Future studies could compare this with leaders’ perceptions of their own paternalistic style, and whether the congruence of perceptions matters. Additionally, it would be worthwhile to study paternalistic leadership across multiple levels of an organization, looking at the impact of organizational culture and structure. Finally, it must be noted that paternalistic leadership, by its very term and conceptualization, is a gendered construct. Thus, while some research has shown males and females do not differ according to existing paternalistic leadership scales, questions such as whether there are distinct forms of maternalistic leadership and what their unique impact might be on employee behaviors and organizational success would be important to explore. This is particularly relevant given the rise

702

Path-Goal Theory

of women in senior leadership ranks in social, political, and economic spheres and the increase of women-owned enterprises around the world.

Weber, M. (1946). Essays in sociology. In H. C. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds. & Trans.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Patricia Denise Lopez See also Autocratic Leadership; Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; Culturally Relevant Leadership in Education; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leader–Member Exchange (LMX); Paternalism: Origins and Theoretical Context

Further Readings Aycan, Z. (2006). Paternalism: Towards conceptual refinement and operationalization. In K. S. Yang, K. K. Hwang, & U. Kim (Eds.), Scientific advances in indigenous psychologies: Empirical, philosophical, and cultural contributions (pp. 445–466). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farh, J. L., & Cheng, B. S. (2000). A cultural analysis of paternalistic leadership in Chinese organizations. In J. Li, A. S. Tsui, & E. Weldon (Eds.), Management and organizations in the Chinese context (pp. 84–127). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hiller, N. J., Sin, H., Ponnapalli, A. R., & Ozgen, S. (2019). Benevolence and authority as WEIRDly unfamiliar: A multi-language meta-analysis of paternalistic leadership behaviors from 152 studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 30, 165–184. doi:10.1016/ j.leaqua.2018.11.003 Mansur, J., Sobral, F., & Goldszmidt, R. (2017). Shades of paternalistic leadership across cultures. Journal of World Business, 52(5), 702–713. Mart´ınez, P. G. (2003). Paternalism as a positive form of leader—subordinate exchange: Evidence from Mexico. Management Research: Journal of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management, 1(3), 227–242. Pelligrini, E. K., & Scandura, T. A. (2008). Paternalistic leadership: A review and agenda for future research. Journal of Management, 34, 566–589. doi:10.1177/ 0149206308316063 Tian, Q., & Sanchez, J. I. (2015). Does paternalistic leadership promote innovative behavior? The interaction between authoritarianism and benevolence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 47, 1–12. doi:10. 1111/jasp.12431 Unler, E., & Kilic, B. (2019, July/September). Paternalistic leadership and employee organizational attitudes: The role of positive/negative affectivity. SAGE Open, 1–14. doi:10.1177/2158244019862665

PATH-GOAL THEORY The path-goal theory of leadership was first articulated by Robert J. House in a now classic article published in a 1971 issue of the Administrative Science Quarterly. The most widely cited and used presentation of the theory, however, was published in 1974 by House and Terence R. Mitchell. The House and Mitchell formulation included four different types of leader behavior which, contingent upon employee characteristics and the situational context, were hypothesized to lead to a variety of positive organizational outcomes. Empirical support for the theory has been inconsistent over the past fifty years and, in fact, little research on it has been published during the decades encompassing 2000–2021. The complexity of the model, coupled with methodological issues associated with its testing, created problems in terms of replicating support for the theory. The model itself, however, has led to a number of developments within the leadership field, most notably, renewed interest in the behaviors associated with charismatic leadership. All in all, the model remains as one that does have useful implications for the practice of leadership.

History and Background While the path-goal theory of leadership is most often associated with Robert J. House and his 1971 publication in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the theory’s conceptualization, however, had its roots in three earlier works. Specifically, these are: Basil S. Georgopoulos and colleagues’ development of a path-goal hypothesis in 1957; Victor H. Vroom’s articulation of an expectancy theory of motivation in 1964; and Martin G. Evans’s 1970 article, which first tied the concept of effective leadership to expectancy theory propositions. This entry reviews the evolution

Path-Goal Theory

of the theory, briefly discusses empirical support, and notes the impact that the theory has had on the field of leadership—particularly with an eye toward generating more recent theories and approaches to leadership. House’s original 1971 elucidation of the path-goal theory was essentially put forward to explain contradictory findings with respect to the initiating structure and consideration perceived leader behavior dimensions discovered in the Ohio State leadership studies (initiating structure is essentially task-oriented leader behavior that is directive and provides structure and guidance to subordinates; consideration concerns interpersonally supportive leader behavior that shows concern for subordinate comfort and well-being). Some studies, for example, showed positive relationships between these two dimensions and a variety of outcome variables, while other studies found little to no such relationships. In fact, some research indicated a negative relationship between initiating structure and employee satisfaction. To reconcile these issues, in 1971 House developed a dyadicbased conceptualization utilizing expectancy theory of motivation and stressing that the primary motivational thrust of any leader entails (a) increasing the perceived incentives to employees for achieving work-related goals and ensuring that the path to these incentives is clear by eliminating or reducing barriers, and (b) attempting to increase the opportunities for satisfaction while performing the work. In other words, the utilization of directive (or path-goal clarifying) and supportive leader behaviors may have the potential to increase employee performance as well as other desirable outcomes.

The Theory The basic premise behind the path-goal theory of leadership is that leaders spark employee motivation by helping to clarify the paths that lead to employee-desired outcomes. In expectancy theory terminology, the leader’s first role is to strengthen the relationship between an employee’s effort and job performance by showing the employee how to achieve varying levels of performance or success. This may mean clarifying role responsibilities or, in some instances, removing barriers to performance

703

attainment. This behavior alone, however, will not lead to high levels of employee motivation. The leader must also understand the attractiveness of various outcomes to the employee and link the outcomes which are perceived as most attractive (or valent) to high levels of performance or task success. When leader behaviors successfully clarify key paths for subordinates, a variety of positive outcomes will ensue, including positive job satisfaction. In essence, employees will be motivated because they will understand how to obtain the types of valued outcomes they desire from their jobs. The model is dyadic in nature because it concentrates on the interaction between a manager and each individual subordinate (and not work groups). Path-goal theory was further developed by House and Mitchell in 1974 when they expanded the leader behaviors outlined in the first presentation of the theory to include four different leader behaviors. These four behaviors serve as independent variables in the model, and their effects are contingent upon organizational and contextual characteristics and the personal attributes of subordinates. The four leader behaviors included in the extended model are 1. Directive (path-goal clarifying) leader behavior—which entails behavior directed toward clarifying employee job expectations, giving specific job-related information concerning how to achieve performance goals and, in some cases, employee coaching, mentoring, and development. 2. Supportive leader behavior—used to assist employee goal attainment in situations of high stress or frustrating job contexts. 3. Achievement-oriented behavior —encouraging subordinates to strive to attain higher performance goals and showing confidence that employees are capable of reaching such goals (efficacy building). 4. Participative leader behavior—invites employee involvement in the making of decisions that are important to them and that affect their performance.

As of this writing, the House and Mitchell articulation of the theory is the one most typically associated with the path-goal theory of leadership,

704

Path-Goal Theory

and it can be found summarized in numerous organizational behavior textbooks as well as books published in the leadership area. The overall summary of the theory, which is considered a major contingency perspective on leadership, is that an effective leader utilizes four different styles of leader behaviors (depending on the attributes of an employee and the unique characteristics of the context) to strengthen the paths to high performance and valued rewards. When this is done effectively, desired organizational outcomes such as positive job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and improved performance are hypothesized to occur. Following the House and Mitchell extension of path-goal theory, House published a more comprehensive and updated “reformulation” of the theory in 1996. This new theory was advanced to reconcile some of the inconsistent empirical findings published in the prior 25 years, and to extend the theory to work unit performance (rather than applying only to dyadic leadersubordinate relationships). The essence of the revised theory is that for leaders to be effective, they must utilize behaviors that are consistent with an employee’s contextual environment (as well as their respective abilities) in such a way that they help compensate for employee deficiencies, thus creating a strong link to employee satisfaction and work unit performance. Ten different classes of leader behavior, individual employee differences, and contextual moderators were delineated in the revised theory’s formulation. These 10 classes were also hypothesized to be related to each other through 26 different theoretical propositions. Perhaps owing to its complexity, this reformulation did not spark a flurry of additional research, nor did it replace the more parsimonious and most commonly used and described 1974 model of House and Mitchell. Given this, following sections will focus on the 1974 articulation of the theory.

Concerns Raised Despite its continued popularity, there have been numerous concerns expressed about the veracity of the path-goal theory of leadership. Although hundreds of investigations dealing with various aspects of the theory have been published since the

mid-1970s, most scholars and scientists conclude that the model has not been adequately tested. Much of this is due to the complexity of the theory, in addition to methodological issues with respect to measurement of the various leadership behaviors. The later concern is especially problematic when measures developed and used in the Ohio State leadership studies have been employed, as they do not adequately measure the key leadership constructs of the theory. Moreover, there have been additional challenges in terms of selecting relevant moderator variables and the fact that many of the intervening variables proposed from expectancy theory (such as the attractiveness or valence of rewards to subordinates) have not been assessed in the vast majority of studies. Issues have also been raised about the viability of the theory from a cross-cultural perspective. In contexts where an external locus of control is more prevalent or where collectivistic values prevail, it is not clear that such an individualistic, dyadic model can assist the leader in effectively influencing others. Another criticism of the theory relates to the foundation of the model, based on expectancy theory of motivation, which is predicated upon the view that subordinates make rational choices in terms of their actions. In other words, it is assumed that if leaders show employees clear paths to high performance (by reducing barriers or ensuring that subordinates have the necessary skill sets to achieve goals) and if leaders clearly establish a linkage between high performance and desired outcomes, employees should be satisfied with their job, highly productive, and committed to the organization. It is widely known, however, that employees are not always rational in weighting the various outcomes associated with their behaviors and/or the expectation that their efforts or behaviors will lead to success.

Outgrowths From the Theory Despite mixed research support and the tenuous assumption of rationality in influencing employee behavior, House’s path-goal theory has led to a number of other theoretical developments in the leadership field. One of these is the notion of “substitutes for leadership,” developed by Steven Kerr and John M. Jermier in 1978, which proposes

Path-Goal Theory

that when the paths to various outcomes are clear to subordinates, the need for a leader is minimized and leadership may, in fact, be totally unnecessary. Among the numerous variables proposed to serve as substitutes for leadership behaviors are high subordinate ability, autonomous teams, and clear, unambiguous task contexts. Substitutes theory has been somewhat expanded and refined and is now commonly referred to as leadership replacements theory. Perhaps the most significant outgrowth of path-goal theory is recent renewed interest in understanding the behavioral elements of charismatic leadership. The tenets of path-goal leadership theory did not consider in depth the impact that a leader may have on subordinate self-confidence, beliefs, and value systems. Given this, House developed a renewed interest in charismatic leadership behaviors. House proposed that charismatic leaders may have a strong emotional impact on subordinates, as well as a heightened ability to clarify goals and stimulate or ignite increased confidence in employee abilities to achieve challenging goals. Moreover, owing to subordinates’ identification with a charismatic leader, the attractiveness of different outcomes to the subordinate and the leader is likely to be similar, along with attitudes toward workplace goals. The charismatic leader, essentially, was hypothesized to forge an emotional connection with subordinates that facilitates goal accomplishment and impacts desired outcomes through leader identification. Although there has been little empirical work on the path-goal theory of leadership over the past two decades, and while previous investigations have yielded mixed results, the model provides clear prescriptive ideas for practice. Use of the theory by managers requires knowledge of the theory, effective diagnostic skills (to determine the necessary leadership behaviors to be displayed), and behavioral flexibility (to actually tailor behavior to meet each subordinate’s needs).

Application of the Theory to Practice Pragmatically, and especially for new leaders in particular, the theory helps to elucidate some important ideas to consider in helping employees

705

attain key organizational outcomes. First, leaders should ensure that there are no barriers preventing employees from achieving performance targets. This may mean appropriately matching employee abilities and skills to jobs; coaching and/or training them when necessary; and clarifying performance expectations for those employees who need more guidance and structure. Second, effective leaders should interact with each subordinate to learn more about their particular aspirations, needs, and goals. Although the model was initially developed with a dyadic perspective, it has the potential to be applied in a more aggregate way to a work group, team, or unit. In the latter case, the effective leader will need to determine the types of outcomes desired by their teams, groups, or work units. The third key to successfully using the path-goal theory in practice entails ensuring that the outcomes desired by work groups and/or individuals are clearly linked to well defined performance metrics. In those instances where employees or teams clearly understand how to meet performance expectations, the leader might consider using more achievement-oriented behaviors to challenge subordinates to achieve more difficult goals or use empowerment techniques to spark their creativity in designing new methods for task achievement. The key to using the theory in practice centers around being able to employ different leadership behaviors depending on the needs of individuals and teams for their accomplishment of performance goals and achieving desired outcomes. Although the research validating the path-goal model of leadership is mixed and inconsistent, the pragmatic benefits associated with using the theory to assist with the practice of leadership are notable. Perhaps path-goal leadership theory should be thought of today as more of a prescriptive approach to leadership rather than a model with strong scientific support. Linda L. Neider and Chester A. Schriesheim See also Charismatic Leadership; Contingency Theory of Leadership; Leadership Applications; Leadership Training

706

Patriarchy and Its Origins

Further Readings House, R. J. (1971). A path goal theory of leader effectiveness. Administrative Science Quarterly, 16, 321–338. House, R. J., & Mitchell, T. R. (1974). Path-goal theory of leadership. Journal of Contemporary Business, 3, 81–97. Schriesheim, C. A. (1997). Substitutes-for-leadership theory: Development and basic concepts. Leadership Quarterly, 8, 103–108. Schriesheim, C. A., & Neider, L. L. (1996). Path goal leadership theory: The long and winding road. Leadership Quarterly, 7, 317–321. Vroom, V. (1964). Work and motivation. New York, NY: Wiley.

PATRIARCHY

AND ITS

ORIGINS

Most human societies, currently and over the course of history, can be characterized along a continuum from more to less patriarchal. Patriarchy is a form of social organization in which men maintain greater influence over political decisionmaking and greater control over resources, relative to women. Patriarchy may exist at the level of the family, local community, or society-at-large—typically all three levels simultaneously. While some more egalitarian hunter-gatherers were not clearly patriarchal, there is likewise no clear evidence that a human society has ever existed where women maintained greater influence than men (i.e., matriarchy), particularly in top tiers of leadership. The historical absence of matriarchy doesn’t mean human societies couldn’t be matriarchal in the future, nor diminishes women’s significant political influence in many societies, particularly societies in which inheritance passes from mother to daughter (i.e., matriliny). Much of the study of patriarchy focuses on its more proximate causes, including restrictive gender norms and institutionalized sexism. But where do restrictive gender norms and institutionalized sexism come from, and why are they so cross-culturally ubiquitous? We must also consider more ultimate causes of patriarchy, particularly

the evolution of average gender differences in physiology, in preferences, and in behavior. Evolved gender differences help explain but do not determine and certainly do not justify patriarchy. This entry considers how human evolution can help us understand the origin of patriarchy, as well as its variation across human societies. It concludes by looking at how patriarchy can be dismantled.

Comparing Humans With Other Species Across animal species, it is rare to find societies where males form coalitions, to control sexual access to females and to violently attack neighboring groups to expand territory. In primates, these characteristics are limited to humans and to one of our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees. In the large majority of group-living species, males emigrate from their groups at maturity while females remain (i.e., matrilocality), and thus adult females but not males have kin with which to build coalitions. A small minority of these species are matriarchal, like spotted hyenas and ring-tailed lemurs, where females are dominant to males. Thus, it seems, humans and chimpanzees experienced similar evolution of coalition-building among males, a fundamental building block of patriarchy. Indeed, much of human history has involved groups of men, organized by kinship or by affiliation with a shared ethnicity, engaging in coalitional violence within and between communities. Primary motivations, particularly in pre-state warfare, were competition for women or competition for resources to enhance status and mate value. Rarely have coalitions of women directly engaged in collective violence. Contrast humans and chimpanzees with bonobos, our other closest living relative. Bonobos are patrilocal like chimpanzees, but females nevertheless frequently form coalitions with nonkin to suppress male aggression. Bonobos have often been invoked to argue that humans’ evolutionary past was less characterized by violent male coalitions than comparisons with chimpanzees suggest. However, even in bonobos, females and males differ in their use of coalitions. Females are more likely to build coalitions to defend against male

Patriarchy and Its Origins

aggression, whereas males tend to build coalitions primarily to compete for high rank and the mating opportunity it affords. This sex difference has parallels across animal species, and can be explained by principles of sexual selection. To fully understand patriarchy in humans requires first understanding sexual selection.

Sexual Selection An influential theory of sexual selection goes as follows. Males in many, but not all, species have a higher potential reproductive rate than females, initially due to sex differences in pre-zygotic parental investment. Females produce fewer gametes and invest more in each of them. This initial sex difference often potentiates greater selection among females to maintain or increase total parental investment, including gestation and lactation in mammals. When females invest more in parental investment, female reproduction is generally more limited by access to resources than is male reproduction, whereas male reproduction is generally more limited by access to fertile females. Males are therefore expected to experience greater selection for direct competition for mates. While this sex difference in parental investment and in direct competition for mates receives general empirical support across animals, there is nevertheless much variation unaccounted for by the theory. Sex differences may attenuate or, less frequently, reverse in species in which offspring survival benefits from paternal investment, among other factors. Human males are unique among great apes in the amount of provisioning they provide to offspring. The transition to hunting and gathering over human evolution facilitated the growth of our large, expensive brains, but also resulted in offspring highly dependent on parents over their development. As a result, human males experienced selection for increased parental investment. Human females experienced selection to compete over males who can maximally complement the provisioning of offspring.

Gender Differences Human gender differences in reproduction, competition, and cooperation are broadly consistent with

707

the aforementioned sexual selection account. Men’s parental investment has tended to moderate but not eliminate these gender differences. In the large majority of human societies, including more egalitarian hunter-gatherers, men tend to experience greater skew in reproduction than women. Men are over-represented at both the low end and the high end of lifetime reproductive output. This gender difference may arise due to a greater fraction of men mating polygamously (within or outside of marriages) and/or men repartnering after divorce with greater probability than women. The result is often more men than women who do not reproduce at all. Genetic evidence points to fewer males than females reproducing since at least the late Pleistocene, with bursts in male reproductive skew coinciding with exceptional periods of population replacement (e.g., Mongol expansion across Eurasia). Thus, there has likely been much opportunity for sexual selection to act differently on men compared to women over human evolution. Effects of such sexual selection are evident in men’s greater proclivity for direct, often violent aggression, as well as the large sex difference in upper body strength. Observational and selfreport studies suggest women are more likely to prefer indirect aggression, such as gossip or social exclusion. The greater contribution to women’s reproductive success from parental investment, particularly gestation and lactation, may have made injury-causing activities riskier for women over human evolution. Cross-cultural experiments have also found that men tend to prefer even nonphysical competitive situations more than women do. However, such experiments also identify certain conditions that can make women as competitive as men, such as when competition directly benefits their children, when top performers are given the opportunity to share their winnings, or when performance rankings are inconspicuous. Sexual selection may also have contributed to gender differences in cooperation, sometimes as a means of facilitating competition. For example, men tend to be more tolerant of risk, particularly to showcase skill and generosity to sexual rivals and to potential mates. In addition, men can be more likely to build social networks with more

708

Patriarchy and Its Origins

acquaintances (i.e., “weak” ties), to prefer socializing in larger same-gender groups, to organize their groups hierarchically, and to revere other group members’ competitiveness. These preferences emerge early in development, are most pronounced in early adulthood, and may facilitate large-scale coalitional competition. In contrast, existing studies tend to find that girls and women are more likely to prefer socializing in smaller same-gender groups in which more egalitarian relationships are enforced. Average differences between women and men in preferred forms of competition and cooperation have consequence for gender inequality in political influence. Observations of task groups and work settings find that men are more likely to selfpromote and exaggerate competence in the pursuit of leadership, to treat acquaintances or colleagues instrumentally to gain information, favors, or opportunities, or to be willing to make unilateral decisions on behalf of their group. To the extent men more frequently socialize in large groups and build larger same-gender coalitions, men may be advantaged in influencing the design of political institutions and in enforcing their interests. To the extent men build larger social networks with more “weak” ties, men may gain advantage in accessing novel information or opportunities for ascending institutional hierarchies. Men’s larger body size can also advantage their emergence as leaders. Group members often show implicit preferences for leaders with greater physical formidability, particularly during crises. More physically formidable leaders may have advantages in negotiation, rapid coordination of group members, and sanctioning of free-riders, at least in the politics of small face-to-face groups. In the politics of large-scale societies, implicit preferences for physically formidable leaders may be much less functional. Importantly, gender differences in physiology, preferences, and behavior are only average differences. There is comparatively larger variation observed within than between genders, and the magnitude of gender differences varies with the trait in question, age of individuals, and the society. Furthermore, patriarchy isn’t simply an outcome of evolved gender differences. Nor are the

aforementioned gender differences purely a product of evolution. Rather, sexual selection generates initial gender differences, which then shape and are shaped by subsistence practices, socially transmitted norms, and institutions. For example, gender differences in preferences and in behavior can vary with inheritance norms. Recent studies of the matrilineal Mosuo of China find no evidence of a gender difference in social network size, and in certain contexts find that Mosuo girls are more risk-seeking than boys. As these and other results suggest, gender differences in preferences and in behavior are neither genetically determined nor pure cultural constructions. Rather, gender differences are the result of a dynamic interplay between genetic inheritance and local context, especially subsistence practices, socially transmitted norms, and institutions.

Gendered Division of Labor Gendered division of labor is a central pillar of patriarchy and an example of how evolved gender differences interact with subsistence practices, socially transmitted norms, and institutions. Historically, women were typically expected, if not legally compelled, to perform more labor within the house and men more labor outside of it. Though variable cross-culturally in its form and magnitude, gendered division of labor is relatively ubiquitous across human societies. Anthropologists have long tied gender inequality in political influence in both small- and large-scale societies to gendered divisions of labor, which may constrain women’s networking within and between communities and accord men more opportunity to amass and control wealth. For example, studies in small-scale societies (e.g., Amazonian horticulturalists) suggest that greater childcare burden contributes to, but doesn’t fully explain, smaller social networks and lower political influence of women relative to men. Why gendered divisions of labor exist at all owes to the effects of pregnancy and lactation on women’s and men’s marginal efficiency in different tasks, the benefits to childcare from task specialization within households, and also sexually selected gender differences in preferred forms of competition and cooperation. For example, men

Patriarchy and Its Origins

across societies are more likely than women to provision their families via hunting, as well to target larger, more riskily acquired game that can be widely shared outside the family. Gender differences in hunting in part reflect greater motivation among men to enhance status and mate value by engaging in high-variance but potentially high-return productive activities. However, gendered divisions of labor are rarely pure mutualisms between women and men. In general, men’s greater physical formidability and larger-scale coalition-building likely enabled men to normalize and institutionalize gendered divisions of labor that are closer to men’s interests than to women’s interests. For example, women are often criticized for assuming competitive roles in mixed-gender groups, and women are often expected to trade off their own human capital development to facilitate the productive opportunities of male spouses or kin. Cross-culturally, manhood more than womanhood is described as something to be earned, and which can be gained or lost depending on display of competitive ability, skill, generosity, and leadership. Norms and laws that limit women’s productive opportunities outside the home also benefits men’s desire to control women’s sexual relationships.

Variation in Patriarchy Cross-Culturally Cross-culturally, patriarchy weakens, or strengthens according to how subsistence practices affect wealth creation, inheritance, and residence patterns, intergroup conflict, and gendered divisions of labor. Humans have spent the vast majority of our existence subsisting as hunter-gatherers in smallscale societies. A minority of hunter-gatherers known to anthropologists were led by chiefs with some amount of coercive authority, but most hunter-gatherers were likely relatively egalitarian with high degrees of autonomy for individuals. In hunter-gatherers, tracking descent through both men and women is more common than patriliny or matriliny, and residential decisions are made more flexibly than under patrilocality or matrilocality. Women regularly influence group decisions in hunter-gatherer and other small-scale subsistence societies, particularly in domains such as marriage,

709

residential decision-making, and informal dispute resolution. Women in such societies are also often noted more than men for their criticism of nonnormative behavior. The latter can be a means for women to use men to advance their political goals, by turning private knowledge into common knowledge that forces the community or kin group to act. In some small-scale societies, women assumed political leadership within their own religious and political organizations. However, even in the most egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, women perform the bulk of intra-household labor, including childcare, and men are more frequently described as organizers and leaders of meetings to coordinate community-wide activities. Within the past few thousand years, male control of political decision-making became especially pronounced following agricultural intensification and the generation of large surpluses of livestock or cultivars. Monopolizable wealth in the form of land or surplus production likely increased men’s motivation and opportunity to form large alliances with other men to control, defend, and compete for resources, whether within or across communities. Threats and opportunities from warfare likely contributed to increased frequency of patrilocality and patriliny, which distanced women from their kin and entrenched male control over resources. Patriliny and patrilocality were also favored because of the relationship between polygyny and wealth and thus the increased value to men of investing in their sons. Investment of wealth in wives and offspring further heightened men’s regulation of women to safeguard paternity. Change in subsistence practices also affected gender norms and gendered division of labor. For example, societies where the plow was introduced earlier tend to have more restrictive gender norms today. Introduction of the plow was especially beneficial to patriarchy because it made agricultural labor more strength-intensive and less compatible with childcare, thereby decreasing women’s labor value outside of the home, their bargaining power, and their access to political leadership. In another example, individuals from societies that historically were dependent primarily on herding (i.e., pastoralism) are more likely to promote restrictive norms concerning women’s

710

Patriarchy and Its Origins

mobility. Analyses suggest that men’s fear of nonpaternity due to periodic absence from their communities for herding or war initially promoted these restrictive gender norms. A minority of agricultural societies are or were matrilineal, particularly those with minimal surplus production and/or where men’s labor is less valuable. Women most frequently acquired formal political leadership in those pre-industrial societies with matrilineal descent. In the Iroquois confederation, for example, senior Iroquois women appointed and removed male chiefs and could veto their decisions, and Iroquois women arranged marriages and were as likely as men to be religious leaders. Men in matrilineal societies wield authority in terms of their relationship to the matriline, so a mother’s brothers nominally have the most authority in group decisions. However, the nominal authority of men in matrilineal societies may often contrast with real authority wielded by women, particularly at the household level. In some contexts, norms and institutions that favor women’s inheritance can counter-intuitively augment patriarchy. For example, Islamic law has strict guidelines that allow for female inheritance, but women primarily transmit rather than control wealth. Furthermore, women’s inheritance in a strongly patriarchal society can foster cousin marriage (so that men can retain control of wealth within the extended family) and discourage women’s labor force participation.

Dismantling Patriarchy Men continue to hold more positions of formal political leadership in large-scale, industrialized societies. However, this gender gap has rapidly decreased over recent decades (at least in Western democracies) and has been accompanied by shifts in leadership stereotypes. For example, “appropriate” leader qualities have historically been tied to forms of cooperation and competition more often preferred by men. However, recent surveys in the United States find that leader stereotypes have become more androgynous, and the majority of people report no gender preference in leaders. These changes may owe in large part to changes in gendered division of labor. Many countries now

have gender parity in workforce participation. Furthermore, women now outpace men in educational attainment in many of the most economically developed societies. Increasing returns to education in a more globalized, service-oriented economy may be increasing (decreasing) the rewards to women’s (men’s) preferred forms of cooperation and competition, and favoring the production of more women leaders. Greater promotion of women to top leadership positions will also depend on making work more compatible with childcare and by adopting more charitable parental leave policies. Institutional requirements for gender equity can, by promoting more women to positions of leadership, further normalize women as leaders. Organizations can also scrutinize the extent to which they reward men’s more than women’s preferred forms of competition and cooperation. An equitable mix of women and men as leaders can be a boon to organizations and to society at large. For example, in certain contexts, leader effectiveness may hinge more on risk-seeking, overt competitiveness, and creation of rigid hierarchical coalitions, on average favoring male leaders. In other contexts—and, some argue, the majority of contexts—leader effectiveness may hinge more on less direct forms of competition, risk aversion, and more empathy-driven forms of relationship building, on average favoring women leaders. Women leaders can be more likely to prioritize issues like health care, welfare, and education that advantage the most disadvantaged in society. Moreover, women’s empowerment in general may be a key driver of transitions to greater democracy and transparency in government. Chris von Rueden See also Evolution of Inequality; Gender Stereotypes; Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth; Men and Masculinities; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Alesina, A., Giuliano, P., & Nunn, N. (2013). On the origins of gender roles: Women and the plough. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128, 469–530. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjt005

Pearl Harbor Speech Bahrami-Rad, D. (2021). Keeping it in the family: Female inheritance, inmarriage, and the status of women. Journal of Development Economics, 153, 102714. doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102714 Becker, A. (2019). On the economic origins of restrictions on women’s sexuality. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3432818. Social Science Research Network. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/ abstract53432818 Benenson, J., & Abadzi, H. (2019). Contest versus scramble competition: Sex differences in the quest for status. Current Opinion in Psychology, 33, 62–68. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.013 Cassar, A., & Rigdon, M. L. (2021). Option to cooperate increases women’s competitiveness and closes the gender gap. Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(6), 556–572. doi:10.1016/j. evolhumbehav.2021.06.001 Eagly, A. (2020). Once more: the rise of female leaders. APA Research Brief. Retrieved from https://www.apa. org/research/action/female-leaders Hessami, Z., & da Fonseca, M. (2020). Female political representation and substantive effects on policies: A literature review. European Journal of Political Economy, 63, 101896. doi:10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020. 101896 Konner, M. (2015). Women after all: Sex, evolution, and the end of male supremacy. New York, NY: Norton. Low, B. (1992). Sex, coalitions, and politics in pre-industrial societies. Politics and the Life Sciences, 11, 63–80. doi:10.1017/S0730938400017214 Smith, J., von Rueden, C., van Vugt, M., Fichtel, C., & Kappler, P. (2021, July 30). An evolutionary explanation for the female leadership paradox. Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution. doi:10.3389/fevo. 2021.676805 Smuts, B. (1995). The evolutionary origins of patriarchy. Human Nature, 6, 1–32. doi:10.1007/ BF02734133 von Rueden, C., Alami, S., Kaplan, H., & Gurven, M. (2018). Sex differences in political leadership in an egalitarian society. Evolution & Human Behavior, 39(4), 402–411. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.03. 005 Wilson, M., Miller, C., & Crouse, K. (2017, November 8). Humans as a model species for sexual selection research. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 284, 20171320. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017. 1320

711

PEARL HARBOR SPEECH Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Franklin D, Roosevelt

Across the span of 80-plus years, those words of Franklin Roosevelt continue to exert considerable rhetorical power. Delivered to a joint session of Congress with FDR situated behind a podium, long steel leg-braces enabling him to stand despite the debilitating impact of polio, the president made the case that a state of war already existed between the United States and Japan. The speech ran less than 8 minutes, including two minutes of spontaneous applause. The response was immediate and emphatic. With only one dissenting vote, Congress took less than an hour to declare war on Japan. Three days after that, Germany followed its alliance with Japan by declaring war on the United States. Congress returned the declaration with one of its own the same day. The United States was, as of December 11, 1941, an official participant in World War II. This entry goes beyond the historical significance of these momentous events to a consideration of how an analysis of Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speech yields insights into how leaders work to shape opinions and influence reactions.

The Dual Purposes of Rhetoric In analyzing FDR’s speech, it is important to keep in mind that leaders deploy rhetoric to serve two purposes simultaneously. First, the leader is seeking to convey information. What, precisely, happened that led to this declaration? And second, the leader is hoping to persuade others. To start with the conveying of information, FDR carefully enumerated the “facts of yesterday”: “The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces.” • “Very many American lives have been lost.” •

712

Pearl Harbor Speech

“In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.” • “Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Midway Island.” • “The facts of yesterday and today,” the president asserted, “speak for themselves.” •

We know, of course, that leaders may misrepresent the facts they marshal to make an argument, even in matters as critical as war. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson used the pretext of an attack by North Vietnam on an American destroyer to seek Congressional endorsement of his plan to escalate that war. Historians now assume that no such attack occurred, and, even at the time, Johnson harbored his own doubts. The descriptive facts included in a leader’s speech can and should be checked for accuracy. The facts enumerated in the Pearl Harbor speech were accurate. “Very many lives were lost,” Roosevelt asserted. And indeed, more than 3,500 Americans were killed or wounded on that Sunday morning. The Philippines were attacked, and so on. His characterization of the attacks as sudden and deliberate may have been stretching the point a bit. Tensions had been building between the U.S. and Japan for some time. As far back as 1937, Japanese fighter planes had attacked the USS Panay in Chinese waters, sinking the ship and killing four people on board. FDR’s choice of the words “suddenly and deliberately” (of course it was deliberate—aren’t all attacks?) served a different purpose than mere description of facts. FDR was trying to persuade. Leaders are always trying to persuade. FDR was not standing in front of Congress only to convey information. What he wanted from Congress was a declaration of war against Japan; a quick and, if at all possible, unanimous one. These were the days when the Constitutional authority of only Congress to declare war was recognized and (mostly) honored by both the

Executive and Legislative branches. So that approval was vital.

Scholarly Analyses of the Pearl Harbor Speech Scholars who have pored over early drafts of Roosevelt’s speech uncovered detailed evidence of the meticulous care the president took as he selected words and tinkered with the order and flow of his argument. Start with that famous opening sentence. Note the precise wording: the United States was attacked not by Japan but by “the Empire of Japan [emphasis added].” Why add that descriptor: empire? The United States is a country born out of rebellion against an empire; a colony demanding its independence. Imperial countries—countries with colonies, and especially colonies claimed through force—were taken to be the antithesis of what the American Republic seemed to represent. So, the juxtaposition of “the Empire of Japan” with the United States of America” served not just to separate the two antagonists but to identify the “good guys” and the “bad guys”: an evil empire versus a virtuous Republic. (It is worth noting that Ronald Reagan called explicitly on the “evil empire” trope in his denunciation of the Soviet Union. In that case, he was echoing the “evil empire” imagery of the popular Star Wars franchise.) Of course, the United States was an empire as well. Starting with the Indigenous Peoples on the North American continent and spreading through the Philippines and beyond, the United States might also have been characterized as a far-flung empire with lands and peoples often claimed by force. The attacks by the Empire of Japan had, in fact, targeted some of these very colonies: Hawaii, as well as the Philippines and Guam (attained via the Spanish–American War). Hong Kong and Malaya were colonies of the empire of Great Britain. Had Roosevelt said that the empire of Japan had attacked the empires of the United Stated and Great Britain, he would have been accurate. However, in addressing Congress, FDR was not simply seeking accuracy. He was attempting to persuade. So, he choose his images and words deliberately.

Pearl Harbor Speech

Roosevelt concluded the speech with the statement: “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.” In that plea, the president was not stating facts; he was, rather, adding his interpretation and virtually demanding that Congress agree with him. War already exists, he insisted. No real need to deliberate about whether to declare war. Just recognize reality. It was a legitimate interpretation of events. Congress agreed (with only one dissenting vote), as did most of the country. But consensus around an opinion, even one as clearly legitimate and widely embraced as this one was, does not alter the analytics. As a leader, Roosevelt was doing more than stating facts: he was giving his own opinion and using the speech to shape the opinion of listeners.

Nondeclarations of War in U.S. History It may be thought that any direct assault on American territory or any military action that deliberately killed American citizens would lead inevitably to a declaration that a state of war existed. That was precisely the reasoning that. George W. Bush used in declaring a “war on terrorism” in 2001 following the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. However, the idea that a counter-declaration of war would always follow a direct attack is simply wrong. American history is replete with examples of direct attacks that did not lead to a claim that a state of war existed. In the early days of the Republic, an official declaration of war by the Barbary state of Tripoli accompanied by the capture of an American frigate and a blackmail demand for money, did not lead to a reciprocal declaration by the United States. Rather, the president at the time, Thomas Jefferson, instructed his emissaries to engage in a negotiation to seek the return of the crew. In that case, although a state of war did literally exist, the president did not want war. He feared the impact a U.S. war would have on the size and scope of the federal government. Therefore, it did not happen. More recently, the first terrorist attack on the

713

World Trade Center in 1993 killed six people and injured numerous others. Then-president Bill Clinton did not declare a “war on terrorism” in response. Rather, he promised a police effort, along with a reward, to capture the attack’s planner, al-Qaeda’s Ramzi Yousef. Each of these presidential responses can be questioned and debated. Should Clinton have declared war on terrorism in 1993? Should Johnson have avoided a war in Vietnam? These are important questions. The point of this entry is different. Rather, it is to take any statement made by a leader, especially a leader in times of declared crisis, and evaluate those statements according to two criteria: Are the facts contained in the statement accurate? That is, do the descriptive statements in the rhetoric of the leader conform, as best as can be determined, to what is known to be true? To what purpose is the leader making that speech? What are they attempting to achieve and how have they constructed their statements to meet that goal?

Thomas Jefferson did not want war declared during his administration. FDR, however, wanted a declaration of war against Japan and was not unmindful that such an action would allow him, finally, to come to the full military aid of Great Britain in its battle with Germany. Both presidents followed a course of action—Jefferson avoiding war and FDR entering one—that adhered to their understanding of the best interests of the country at the time. To return to FDR’s insistence in the Pearl Harbor speech that the facts speak for themselves, it is important to understand that facts never speak for themselves. Roosevelt spoke eloquently and powerfully about what “the facts of yesterday” meant, and he was convincing. That is what leaders do. They take facts—accurate, we hope, although certainly this is not always the case—and provide them with meaning. In so doing, they hope to mobilize opinion and shape reactions. Bert A. Spector See also Political Leadership; Political Leadership and Historic Memory

714

Persuasion

Further Readings Beschloss, M. (2018). Presidents of war. New York, NY: Crown. Immerwahr, D. (2019). How to hide an empire: A history of the greater United States. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Peifer, D. C. (2016). Choosing war: Presidential decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay incidents. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Spector, B. (2019). Constructing crisis: Leaders, crisis, and claims of urgency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Various drafts of the Day of Infamy speech, along with Roosevelt’s hand written notes, can be viewed at the National Archives site https://www.archives.gov/ publications/prologue/2001/winter/crafting-day-ofinfamy-speech.html

PERSUASION As the COVID-19 pandemic began to wreak havoc and devastation around the world in 2020, the global community was faced with two equally urgent but very different challenges. One was the bio-medical challenge of developing effective treatments and vaccinations to protect people from the virus and its mutations. The other was the social psychological challenge of determining how to change people’s attitudes and behaviors regarding washing their hands, socially distancing, wearing masks, and, eventually, getting vaccinated. It may or may not be surprising that the social psychological challenge proved to be the more vexing. While many millions of people did indeed heed the advice to engage in behaviors to help protect themselves and others from the virus, many millions of others resisted, thereby rendering the challenge of ending the pandemic ever more difficult. This was, in essence, a problem of effective persuasion—that is, the processes by which attitudes (and, by some conceptualizations of the construct, beliefs and behaviors) are changed. The pandemic made the need to understand the psychology of persuasion and apply its lessons especially critical. Even in the absence of an acute

global crisis, of course, knowing how to change others’ attitudes and opinions is always one of the most fundamental tools of leadership. This entry presents examples of early research on persuasion and then provides a description of two influential theoretical models to understanding persuasion, focusing more specifically on the elaboration likelihood model. The entry concludes with a section on how bias affects processing of persuasive messaging.

Early Research on Persuasion The COVID-19 pandemic was not the first global crisis to trigger a heightened focus on persuasion. With the horrors of fascism and World War II came a tremendous surge of interest in relevant social psychological issues, including conformity, obedience, aggression, prejudice, and persuasion. Research on attitude change and persuasion in particular was in demand, as entities such as the U.S. government and military looked to researchers to help the war effort through mastering persuasion. It was important to understand how to create propaganda that would persuade citizens to support the decision to enter the war and to convince them to make huge sacrifices in their lives to support the war effort, such as by rationing meat, gas, and numerous other goods and resources, buying war bonds, donating scraps of metal, having women go to work in traditionally male jobs in factories and assembly lines (and having them leave those jobs once the men returned from the war). It was also critical to learn how to inoculate the nation’s own troops and citizens from the enemy’s propaganda. The interest in persuasion continued in the years immediately following the war. Most prominent was the research by the Yale Communication and Attitude Change Program, led by Carl Hovland and his colleagues. The Yale group, and the work it inspired, investigated what factors caused people to attend to, comprehend, accept, and retain in memory the contents of a persuasive message. Much of this early work focused on “the 3 Ws of persuasion”: who said what to whom. The who refers to the source of a persuasive message, including variables such as the credibility, likability,

Persuasion

and attractiveness of the source. The what refers to aspects of the message itself, such as the quality or number of arguments, whether the message is one-sided or two-sided (that is, does it argue exclusively for one side of an issue or does it offer at least some arguments for the other side), how extreme the arguments are in a particular direction, and how does the use of emotion in the message affect attitude change. The whom refers to the audience or recipient of the message, including variables such as the intelligence, mood, age, personality, or prior attitudes of the recipient. One key variable established in early research was source credibility. For example, research conducted in the 1950s during the Cold War found that American participants were more persuaded by a speech on the development of nuclear submarines if it was said to come from an eminent American physicist than if it was attributed to a Soviet government-controlled newspaper. Particularly to Americans, the former was seen as much more trustworthy. Along with trustworthiness another critical factor in source credibility is competence. It is a reasonable heuristic to rely on the wisdom of experts than nonexperts, and so a message carries much more persuasive weight if it is said to come from an expert or someone perceived to have a good deal of competence concerning the issue at hand. The logic is somewhat less compelling, however, for why the attractiveness and the likeability of a source should also be significant factors in the persuasiveness of a source, but much research has demonstrated their impact. An attractive model advocating for a particular beauty product may be perceived as having some credibility in that domain, but attractiveness can also be an effective source factor even for products or issues that are clearly not connected to physical appearance. Just as height or charisma can give leaders more power to influence their followers, the attractiveness and likeability of the source of a message can facilitate persuasion, whether or not the attitudes to be changed are directly relevant to these factors. Attractive and likable people capture others’ attention and may inspire others to want to be like them. The communicator matters, but of course so does the communication itself. All other things

715

being equal, messages are more effective when they contain arguments that are strong and clear and can be easily retained in memory. Arguments that present two sides of an issue while making the stronger case for one side tend to be more effective than purely one-sided messages, particularly if the audience is likely to be aware of the other side. A good deal of research also investigated the role that emotions aroused by a message play in persuasion. One early focus in this work was on the use of fear. Should one craft messages to scare people into, for example, quitting smoking or voting for one candidate over another, and how much fear should be aroused? Studies demonstrated that fear could be an effective tool in motivating attitude change, but it could also backfire, as when too much fear causes recipients to feel helpless or to panic and avoid thinking about the arguments in the message. In general, fear-arousing messages are more likely to be effective when the message also provides clear and reassuring strategies on how to cope with the threatened danger. Much of the early research on persuasion addressed what could be considered “main effects”—that is, the researchers would isolate one independent variable at a time and examine its impact on persuasion. Greater credibility or likeability of the source would lead to greater persuasion, for example, as would clearer and more compelling arguments. Over time it became clear that persuasion worked in more complex ways, with interactions among multiple independent variables. Two highly influential theoretical approaches emerged in the 1980s that would help make sense of the more complicated patterns of findings.

The ELM and the HSM These two theoretical models arrived almost simultaneously and both took a dual-route approach to understanding persuasion. Richard Petty and John Cacioppo offered the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), while Shelly Chaiken presented the heuristic-systematic model (HSM). Each of these models proposed multiple processes for how variables could affect persuasion, and they each identify two routes to persuasion, one of

716

Persuasion

which involves more thoughtful consideration of information and one of which typically engages less careful analysis and greater reliance on cognitive shortcuts. The ELM emphasizes that the processes by which a variable affects persuasion depend on the amount of thinking, or elaboration, in which the recipient is likely to engage. On the low end of this elaboration continuum, the processes of persuasion operate more on the peripheral route. On the high end of the elaboration continuum, the processes work on the central route. Loosely put, this distinction refers to how peripheral or central the thinking is to the message and its relevant issues. According to the ELM, when people are processing on the central route, they think carefully about and elaborate the arguments in a message. When processing on the peripheral route, in contrast, people are swayed by variables peripheral to the strength of the arguments themselves. Instead, they rely more on simple cues such as the credibility or attractiveness of the source, or the quantity of arguments made regardless of their quality. Parallel to the distinction between peripheral and central routes in the ELM is the HSM’s distinction between heuristic and systematic thinking. When people are unable or unmotivated to think carefully, they engage in heuristic processing, which is characterized by minimal thinking and the reliance on simple rules of thumb or decision rules, such as, “If a message is clearly expressed, or if it has a lot of arguments, it is probably correct,” regardless of the actual quality of the arguments. In contrast, when people are able and motivated to process information with more effort and care, they engage in systematic processing. That is, they think carefully about what the message says. There is much similarity between what the ELM calls the peripheral route and what the HSM calls heuristic thinking, as there is between the ELM’s central route and the HSM’s systematic thinking. The two models differ in more than just the language they use, but the differences between them are nuanced and are dwarfed by their similarities. This entry will focus on the ELM, simply because it is featured more prominently in the extant literature, but both approaches have for many decades now remained important in the field.

The ELM and Route Selection By distinguishing between central and peripheral routes to persuasion, the ELM could address important questions such as whether and when people are influenced more by the source or the message. The attractiveness or credibility of a source are variables that are peripheral to the persuasive arguments themselves, and therefore they carry relatively more weight when people are engaging in peripheral rather than central route processing. Two key factors in determining route selection are how able and how motivated people are to focus on the facts in a communication. When people are interested in the topic at hand and are able to process the information carefully (that is, the information presented is not too complex for them, it is not delivered in an unclear way, and they are not distracted or otherwise compromised), they are more likely to process on the central route and be influenced by variables associated with the message itself. When either ability or motivation is low, however, they are more likely to process on the peripheral route and be affected by more superficial factors. A 1981 study by Petty, Cacioppo, and a colleague illustrates these points. Undergraduate students heard a speaker propose that all seniors should be required to take comprehensive exams in order to graduate. One independent variable concerned the source of the communication: the speaker was apparently an education professor at Princeton University or a high school student. A second independent variable concerned the communication itself: it contained well-reasoned arguments and hard evidence or weak arguments based only on anecdotes and personal opinion. The third independent variable was the recipients’ degree of personal involvement: the participants were told either that the proposed exams might be used the following year (and therefore would affect them personally) or that they would not take effect for another 10 years. Consistent with the ELM, the results indicated that personal involvement determined the relative impact of the expertise of the source and the quality of speech. Among participants who would not be affected by the proposed change, attitudes were based largely on the speaker’s credibility,

Persuasion

reflecting the peripheral route: The professor was persuasive; the high school student was not. Among participants who thought that the proposed change would affect them directly, attitudes were based on the quality of the speaker’s proposal, reflecting the central route: Strong arguments were persuasive; weak arguments were not. Leaders who want to persuade people would be wise to attend to these variables. If they have strong, compelling arguments and a target audience that is able and motivated to focus and elaborate on the arguments, they should highlight the arguments and be sure not to distract the audience away from them. If the arguments are weak, however, leaders should draw the audience’s attention away from the arguments and toward the periphery, such as through the use of exciting music and attractive spokespeople. To choose the best persuasive approach, leaders must recognize whether the recipients have both the ability and the motivation to process the information in the message carefully. Ability and motivation can be affected by situational factors such as distraction or the issue’s personal relevance. They may also reflect more stable characteristics of the audience. For example, people who are high in need for cognition—that is, they enjoy effortful cognitive activities—are more likely to engage in the central route of persuasion than are people low in need for cognition. People who are high in self-monitoring—that is, they tend to regulate their behavior from one situation to another out of concern for public self-presentation—are more image conscious than low self-monitors and tend to be more influenced by high-status sources and image-oriented appeals. While it is clear that the amount of thinking in which people engage moderates the effects of source variables such as credibility, it is also the case that source variables can influence how much thinking people do. Recipients of a message may use the credibility of its source as a cue for how to approach the message. For example, they may think more about a message from a high-credibility source and merely skim a message from a low-credibility source. This can lead to an interesting twist on the more typical effects of source credibility. That is, if high credibility triggers greater thinking about the arguments in a message

717

but those arguments are in fact weak, then the higher credibility of the source could lead to less persuasion. More recent extensions of the ELM articulate the important role of second-order thinking, or metacognition—that is, thoughts about one’s thoughts or thought processes. One important dimension of metacognition is the degree of confidence people have in their thoughts. According to the self-validation hypothesis within the ELM, people not only elaborate on a persuasive communication with positive or negative attitude-relevant thoughts, they also assess the validity of these thoughts. Applying the self-validation hypothesis to research on the role of emotion in persuasion leads to more nuanced predictions. For example, in a 2003 study with Pablo Briñel, Petty had participants either nod or shake their head while thinking about a persuasive message on a topic important to them. Nodding their head was associated with greater confidence in their thoughts relative to shaking their head. Participants who nodded were more persuaded by the message if it had strong arguments than were participants who shook their head, as the former participants had greater confidence in their positive thoughts about the arguments. However, when the message contained weak arguments, participants nodding their head were less persuaded than participants shaking their heads, as the former participants were more confident in their unfavorable thoughts about the message.

Biased Processing and Partisanship The processes described thus far have been, for the most part, quite rational. It makes sense to be more persuaded by credible than noncredible sources, to think more carefully about the contents of a persuasive message when the issue is personally relevant and important, and to take into consideration one’s confidence in one’s thoughts. People are, however, notoriously prone to deviate from dispassionate, rational processing of information due to various biases, and these biases can play important roles in persuasion. People prefer to avoid exposure to information opposed to their attitudes and beliefs, such as by choosing to read articles and follow news sources that present

718

Persuasion

information heavily or exclusively tilted toward their existing attitudes. When confronted with a message or evidence that is incongruent with their attitudes, people may strongly counterargue and reject the information, whereas they are quick to accept attitude-congruent information at face value. This biased approach to processing information has been shown even when the issue at hand is highly relevant to individuals and assessing the truth should be particularly important, such as when the information is about their own health. In a provocative series of studies by Peter Ditto and colleagues in the 1990s and 2000s, participants took a (bogus) medical test that they were led to believe could reveal their chances of having a potentially serious health issue. Despite how personally important it would be to discern the truth, people’s preference for one type of conclusion over another (that is, good rather than bad news about their health risk) biased how they processed the information. When confronted with potentially unfavorable information, they generated more alternative explanations and required more data before accepting the validity of the information than if they were presented with the information they preferred. The medical test used in the research was bogus, but the information presented to people about the health benefits of masking and vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic has been real. The extraordinary degree to which political partisanship has moderated how persuaded people have been by this information illustrates the power of motivated reasoning. The abject rejection of a wealth of science-based evidence by many millions of people suggests the enormous role that social identity concerns play in persuasion today. Ordinarily, if the source of messages about dealing with a virus is the vast majority of medical scientists, the source credibility would be considered extremely strong. When Donald Trump and other leaders of the Republican Party in the United States publicly rejected much of this information as “fake” and politically motivated, however, a very large percentage of their followers followed suit. The social identity of the source of the conflicting messages about the pandemic—that is, whether the source is part of one’s (political) ingroup or outgroup— carried much more persuasive weight than any

other aspects of their credentials or than the evidence presented in the messages themselves. Over the long span of human development, humans have of course evolved to trust their ingroups more than outgroups, and this tendency is not specific to any one political party or ideology. The highly polarized access to information via the media and social media, however, is particularly extreme today, and this creates echo chambers that expose individuals to an absolute bombardment of persuasive messages on only one side of an issue. Moreover, research has shown that politically conservative individuals tend to value political-ingroup loyalty more highly than liberals do. Taken together, these forces may account for a dramatic shift in the weighting of variables in the processes of persuasion, with social-identity factors playing an especially heightened role for political conservatives. As such, attempts to persuade conservatives, for example, to take a vaccine to protect them against COVID-19 must take this into account. Consistent with this idea, a 2021 study from Sophia Pink and others found that unvaccinated Republicans were significantly more likely to report that they planned to get vaccinated after having been exposed to endorsements from elites in the Republican party than if the endorsements had come from Democratic elites. Research such as this highlights the role of leadership in influencing persuasion. Leaders not only have direct impact on persuasion through their role as powerful sources, but they also can moderate how individuals decide what other sources should and should not be trusted and what kinds of evidence should and should not be considered valid—and when. Steven Fein and Grace J. Kim See also Conformity; Democratic Leadership; Obedience; Rhetoric; Rhetoric and Persuasion

Further Readings Briñol, P., & Petty, R. E. (2003). Overt head movements and persuasion: A self-validation analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(6), 1123–1139. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1123 Chaiken, S. (1987). The heuristic model of persuasion. In M. P. Zanna, J. M. Olson, & C. P. Herman (Eds.),

Philosophy and Leadership Social influence: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 5, pp. 3–39). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Hovland, C. I., & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15, 635–650. doi:10.1086/ 266350 McGuire, W. J. (1996). The Yale communication and attitude-change program in the 1950s. In E. E. Dennis & E. Wartella (Eds.), American communication research—The remembered history (pp. 39–59). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Petty, R. E., & Briñol, P. (2008). Persuasion: From single to multiple to metacognitive processes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(2), 137–147. doi:10.1111/j. 1745-6916.2008.00071 Petty, R. E., & Briñol, P. (2012). The elaboration likelihood model. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 224–245). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. doi:10.4135/ 9781446249215.n12 Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 123–205). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. doi:10. 1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2 Petty, R. E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Goldman, R. (1981). Personal involvement as a determinant of argument-based persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(5), 847–855. doi:10.1037/00223514.41.5.847

PHILOSOPHY

AND

LEADERSHIP

Philosophy, which in Greek means “love of wisdom,” is the exploration of certain fundamental questions about reality, existence, and knowledge, such as “What makes actions right or wrong?” “How can we know that the external world is real?” “What is consciousness?” “Do humans have free will?” “and “Is morality objective?” and What makes a society just or unjust?” Philosophers aim to figure out which answers to these and other fundamental questions are most likely to be true. They do this through systematic, rational argumentation. This entry considers the importance of philosophy for the

719

study of leadership. It considers such questions as how leaders should act, how leaders and followers should relate to each other, and how we should structure leadership positions throughout society.

What Is Philosophy? Philosophers disagree about how to define philosophy. Instead of attempting to give a general definition, it may be more useful to consider some common topics that philosophers study. One such topic is metaphysics, which focuses on general questions about reality and what reality contains, such as the existence of God, the nature of causality, and whether we have free will. Another common topic is epistemology. Epistemologists examine the nature of knowledge and justification. They ask such questions as “What counts as knowledge?” or “What makes a belief justified?” Ethics, a major branch of philosophy, is the study of good and bad, right and wrong. Other branches of philosophy include philosophy of mind; the philosophy of science, math and logic; and esthetics, which deals with the nature of beauty and taste and the philosophy of art. At first glance, it may not be clear what unites subjects like epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Why does the study of these topics belong in the same discipline? One answer is that what it is not possible to investigate these subjects in a purely empirical way. Consider the methods of science. Science discovers what causes what and what things the world contains. Science has been remarkably successful at discovering these things. But science can’t tell us everything. It can’t tell us what’s good or bad, what justifies a belief, or whether humans have free will. Although science can inform our answers to such questions, science alone falls short of having the ability to settle them. Nonetheless, these questions seem amendable to rational inquiry. We can come up with better or worse answers to them and give better or worse reasons for our answers. This is where philosophy comes in. Philosophy is not primarily an empirical method of investigation. Yet it aims to rationally answer questions such as these. How does philosophy do this? Philosophers avoid appeals to authority. Instead, they aspire to create arguments

720

Philosophy and Leadership

that rest on widely acceptable premises and good inferences to defend their positions. Let’s consider a brief example of philosophers doing these things. Take the question of makes actions right or wrong? Many people throughout history have thought that what makes an action right or wrong is whether a divine being approves or disapproves of this action. On this view, stealing and murder are wrong because God (or the gods) disapproves of these actions, and charity and honesty are right because God approves of them. This view is called a divine command theory of ethics. But the ancient Greek philosopher Plato raised a problem with a divine command theory in his dialogue Euthyphro. In this dialogue, the character of Socrates asks: Are our actions right because the gods approve of them or do the gods approve of actions because they are right? Let’s consider both options, starting with the second one. Suppose that the deity approves of actions like charity or truth-telling because they are right. That means that there is a standard of assessment that’s external to the deity. Thus, charity isn’t right because God approves of it. Rather, God approves charity and honesty because they are right independently of what He thinks. On this option, God’s approval is irrelevant to determining whether something is right or not. An independent standard of assessment does all of the work. God’s approval merely mirrors that standard. Let’s now consider the first option, to claim that an action is right because God approves of it and an action is wrong because God disapproves of it. Suppose though that God approved of murder and theft. If actions are right because God approve of them, that murder and theft would be acceptable. You might object: “God would never approve of murder!” But why not? If morality depends on God’s will, then He can make murder right simply by approving of it. There’s no independent standard of assessment to say that this is a mistake. Most people think that this makes morality too arbitrary. We can restate this argument as follows: 1. Either an action is wrong because God disapproves of it or God disapproves of an action because it’s wrong. 2. If an action is wrong because God disapproves of it, then morality is arbitrary.

3. If God disapproves of an action because it is wrong, then God’s disapproval is irrelevant to determining what’s wrong. 4. So, either morality is arbitrary or God’s disapproval is irrelevant to determining what’s wrong.

If this argument is correct, then it shows that the view that morality depends on God, or the gods, is untenable. There is no need to assess this argument here. The point is only to illustrate how philosophers go about evaluating answers to the questions that interest them. Also, this example brings out several features of philosophy. In particular, philosophers answer foundational questions that cannot be settled through empirical investigation and they develop logical arguments to defend their answers to these questions.

Relevance to Leadership The branch of philosophy that’s most clearly relevant to leadership is ethics. Leaders often face ethical choices. For example, leaders may need to decide whether it’s necessary to harm some people in order to benefit others, or whether to lie in order to achieve some valuable aim. How should leaders behave in cases like this? For thousands of years, philosophers have analyzed the ethical choices that leaders must confront. In modern times, two rival traditions of moral philosophy have emerged: deontology and consequentialism. Consequentialism is the view that people should do whatever brings about the best consequences. Deontology is the rejection of consequentialism. Deontologists claim that people should sometimes respect rights or keep their promises even if this results in worse consequences overall. One example nicely illustrates the distinction between deontology and consequentialism: war. Suppose that a political leader faces the following choice. He can authorize a military strategy that deliberately targets noncombatants or one that avoids targeting noncombatants and instead focuses on the enemy’s military. Imagine that the first strategy would likely end the war more quickly and, as a result, fewer people will die. Thus we stipulate that the first strategy will bring about a

Philosophy and Leadership

better outcome overall. What should the leader do? If consequentialism is true, then the leader should authorize the strategy that targets civilians. If deontology is true, then the leader should probably select the second strategy, as this one refrains from violating the rights of noncombatants. I say “probably” because most deontologists believe that the consequences of an action matter morally, but they need to be balanced against other considerations such as respect for rights. So, the debate between deontology and consequentialism matters for deciding what leaders should do. And this doesn’t apply only to war. It also matters for almost all leadership decisions. Which view is correct, though: consequentialism or deontology? A full, detailed examination of the debate between consequentialism and deontology is beyond the scope of this entry. But philosophers have developed powerful arguments for both positions, and the debate is ongoing. Another area of philosophy that is relevant to leadership is political philosophy. Political philosophers study not only how individual leaders should behave but also how we should organize societies and governments. For instance, political philosophers examine how societies should select leaders in the first place. Consider the debate between defenders of elite rule and democrats. Proponents of elite rule argue that the wisest and smartest people should rule society, and we should select these rulers through a meritocratic system. Democrats contend that ordinary citizens should have political power because citizens collectively make better decisions than elites. Even within the democratic tradition people disagree about how to select leaders. Modern democracies use elections to pick representatives. But ancient democracies selected officials through random lotteries. So, ordinary citizens in ancient Athens would often serve as public officials and leaders. Which system is more democratic? Political philosophers continue to debate the comparative merits of representative government, rule by lottery, and other means of selecting leaders. Political philosophers also examine the justification of political authority. Questions about political authority ask why we should have states at all and why citizens should comply with the laws that political leaders authorize. For instance, the social contract tradition holds that states are

721

justified in part because citizens consent to form states. Thus, citizens should obey the law because they have voluntarily agreed to do so. Philosophers have also offered competing accounts of political authority that appeal to the value of fairness or democracy rather than consent, whereas philosophical anarchists reject all accounts of political authority and argue that states are illegitimate. The study of political authority is relevant to debates in leadership ethics on the justification of leaders’ authority over their followers and followers’ obligations to comply with the decisions of their leaders.

Other Areas of Philosophy Ethics and political philosophy matter for the study of leadership. But what about the rest of philosophy? Can a scholar of leadership safely ignore other subfields of philosophy such as metaphysics and epistemology? Most philosophers would say no, on the grounds that the various branches of philosophy are interconnected; issues in metaphysics and epistemology sometimes matter for ethics and political philosophy. So, we can’t ignore these other parts of philosophy. Consider these questions: Why should you be moral? Why should you ever do something that makes you worse off in order to benefit others? These are especially important questions for leaders. Leaders are in positions of power, and therefore they can often act in ways that benefit many other people. But they may also have the discretion to benefit themselves at the expense of their constituents. Why then should leaders act morally rather than selfishly? Let’s call the difficulty of finding a satisfactory answer to this question the immoralist challenge. Philosophers have tried to solve the immoralist challenge in various ways. One radical approach is found in the Buddhist philosophical tradition. When we act selfishly, we implicitly assume that we exist. Suppose that an individual decides to harm other people in order to benefit themselves. When they do this, they’re presupposing that there is an entity–the—self—that exists and that can be benefited. But Buddhist philosophers argue that this assumption is false. They contend that there is no self. Instead, what we call “the self” or

722

Plutarch

“a person” is merely a fleeting aggregate of mind and matter that is causally connected in various ways. Buddhists give various interesting arguments for this conclusion that are too complex to consider within the scope of this entry. The important point is that Buddhist philosophers use metaphysical arguments to deny that selves and persons are ultimately real. What’s does this stance imply? If the self is unreal, then selfishness is a rational mistake. When I act to benefit myself at the expense of others, I’m irrationally prioritizing the interest of a fictional entity— me—over the interests of others. Of course, other people don’t exist either. But pain and suffering are quite real. So, we should reduce pain and suffering wherever they occur, irrespective of whether they accrue to “me” or “others.” In this way, the rejection of the self leads to radical altruism. The Buddhist solution to the immoralist challenge may sound absurd to some readers. At any rate, the point is not to convince you, the reader, that the Buddhist solution to the immoralist challenge is the right one. The intention is to illustrate how one branch of philosophy (metaphysics) can have major implications for another branch of philosophy (ethics) that everyone agrees is relevant to leadership. In similar fashion, other seemingly unrelated areas of philosophy can be important to leadership ethics and the study of leadership more generally. Javier Hidalgo See also Deontology, Ethical Leadership, Ethics of Deception and Manipulation, Leader Exceptionalism; Political Leadership; Taoist Moral Obligations; Virtues

Further Readings Brennan, J. (2017). Against democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Huemer, M. (2012). The problem of political authority: An examination of the right to coerce and the duty to obey. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Parfit, D. (1986). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. (1997). In J. M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Eds.), Plato: Complete works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Rosen, G., Byrne, A., Cohen, J., Harman, E., & Shiffrin, S. V. (2018). The Norton introduction to philosophy. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Shafer-Landau, R. (2020). The fundamentals of ethics (5th ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Siderits, M. (2007). Buddhism as philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Zwolinski, M. (Ed.). Arguing about political philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.

PLUTARCH Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45–120 CE) is best known as the author of the Parallel Lives, one of the most influential studies of political leadership in the Western literary canon. Plutarch also wrote more than 70 speeches, dialogues, and other works that have been collected under the title Moralia. These works frequently touch on themes of interest to scholars of leadership studies. It is all the more remarkable, then, that Plutarch’s voluminous corpus does not include a work titled “On Leadership” or even (since his primary interest was leadership in politics) “On Statesmanship.” Plutarch studied leadership by studying leaders, not by attempting to formulate a theory of leadership. His approach suggests that leaders are best understood by means of literary forms that attend to their individuality and the historical particularities surrounding them, without losing sight of more universal themes. Biography was the literary form that best suited Plutarch’s approach to the study of leadership. As this entry explains, while his work in that genre has proven most influential, both his biographical and nonbiographical works constitute a reflection on the nature and dignity of political leadership.

Moralia Plutarch’s “Precepts of Statecraft” offers an example of his approach to leadership in his nonbiographical writings. In this work, Plutarch Author’s Note: Portions of this entry draw upon on my page “Plutarch” on the Great Thinkers website and from my 2016 book Plutarch’s Politics and appear here with kind permission of https://thegreatthinkers.org/plutarch/ and Cambridge University Press.

Plutarch

responds to a request for career advice from an ambitious young man, Menemachus, who aspires to lead the Greek cities at a time when they were under Roman rule. The young man should pay particular attention to how his political situation determines what sort of leadership will be most effective. Plutarch warns: . . . you must say to yourself: “You who rule are a subject, ruling a state controlled by proconsuls, the agents of Caesar; ‘these are not the spearmen of the plain,’ nor is this ancient Sardis, nor the famed Lydian power.” You should arrange your cloak more carefully and from the office of the generals keep your eyes upon the orators’ platform, and not have great pride or confidence in your crown, since you see the boots of the Roman soldiers just above your head.

Plutarch goes on to advise Menemachus to speak cautiously of the battles in which Greeks defended their freedom against the Persians, “and all the other examples which make the common folk vainly swell with pride and kick up their heels.” In short, Menemachus must attend carefully to the particular challenges and opportunities his situation presents. Nevertheless, Plutarch’s advice to this particular person in this particular situation reveals certain precepts of leadership that apply more universally. Leaders must always consider carefully the character of the people they intend to lead. Once in a position of power, they should lead by both example and speech. Leading by example requires improving one’s own character, according to a standard Plutarch considered timeless. For example, a good leader was always prudent, never foolish; always courageous, never cowardly. Also unvarying was the dignity and choice-worthiness of political leadership itself. Even with the goals of politics seemingly so diminished from Greece’s glory days, Plutarch did not recommend a life of pure contemplation to ambitious young people. Politics, no matter how paltry, remained the proper setting for virtuous action. The same praise of political leadership—and the contention that it requires excellence of character,

723

speech, and the capacity to judge particular circumstances well—runs throughout the Moralia. In an essay titled “Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Politics,” Plutarch argues that man is “intended by nature to live throughout his allotted time the life of a citizen,” never retiring into private life and never ceasing to love “his native land and fellow-citizens.” An essay titled “That a Philosopher Ought to Converse Especially with Men in Power” portrays philosophy, properly understood, as favorable to political action. The teacher of philosophy is not “a sculptor to carve statues doomed to stand idly on their pedestals and no more”; rather, he strives to make everything that he touches active and efficient and alive, it inspires men with impulses which urge to action, with judgements that lead them towards what is useful, with preferences for things that are honorable, with wisdom and greatness of mind joined to gentleness and conservatism.

In the same spirit, Plutarch contemns Epicurean sages for retreating to their private gardens and diminishing ambitious young men’s longing for “virtue and action.” The philosophers Plutarch most admires not only encourage virtuous action in their students but themselves engage in political life. Plutarch praises Plato for liberating Syracuse through Dion, Aristotle for freeing Stageira, and Theophrastus for overthrowing tyrants in his native Eresos.

Parallel Lives Plutarch’s most famous work, the Parallel Lives, consists of 46 short biographies arranged in pairs. (He is believed to have written several more Lives that have not come down to us.) In this work, Plutarch paired Lives of Greek statesmen with Lives of Roman statesmen, and he normally concluded the pair with a short “comparison” (synkrisis) of the two. Many authors had written biographies of leaders prior to Plutarch, but few took advantage of the literary form’s capacity for psychological depth to the same extent as Plutarch. None used the parallel form in the same way. It is worth considering how these aspects of the literary

724

Plutarch

form Plutarch pioneered relate to the study of leadership. First, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives are what we would call “biographies”—accounts of an individual’s character and accomplishments between birth and death. Plutarch focused his Lives on probing the character of leaders, not merely recording their actions and achievements. In a famous passage from his Life of Alexander, Plutarch distinguished the biographer from the historian: It is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities. Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.

Plutarch’s attention to “slight things” gives his readers a powerful sense of personal intimacy with famous leaders. Readers come to know legends as only their closest friends could have done; at one point in the Lives, Plutarch compares the subjects of his biographies to men he has invited over for a dinner party. Plutarch’s careful portraits allow his readers to reach well-informed judgments about a leader’s character and to recognize the motives behind their accomplishments. The point of studying men like Alexander at such close range, however, is not to record, much less admire, what is merely idiosyncratic to them as individuals; rather, the goal is to study their soul, their character, their virtues and vices. Plutarch wants his readers to be students of human nature, eager to improve themselves—including their ability to lead others—based on what they learn. The Lives, then, are simultaneously records of individuals’ actions from birth to death, like our biographies, and

“ways of life” to be studied, judged, and potentially imitated. Plutarch wrote biographies, so understood, in parallel, appending a short “comparison” to most pairs. Setting Greeks and Romans in parallel at a time when Romans dominated Greek cities politically (while largely admiring Greek culture) carried a certain political weight, although scholars have debated whether Plutarch’s intent was to syncretize, assert the superiority of Greece to Rome, or something else entirely. Clearer, however, is the pedagogical potential of Lives set in parallel. This form permitted Plutarch to study similar character types in distinct political settings. One could compare, for instance, how an ambitious Greek statesman conducted wars of conquest and how an ambitious Roman statesman pursued similar projects, thereby learning about universal elements of leadership (ambition, conflict) and developing one’s capacity to evaluate particular circumstances (Athens in the late 4th century, say, or Rome in the wake of Sulla). Plutarch facilitated and modeled such evaluations by composing “comparisons” that asked the reader to judge which leader in a given pair was superior to the other, and in what respects. Plutarch himself awards particular rounds to one statesman, then to another, without ever quite deciding who wins the bout. That decision is left for the reader; the responsibility for making it seems intended to motivate deliberation and a deeper inquiry into who these leaders were and what about them should be admired or criticized. Finally, it is worth noting how different the study of leadership through parallel biography is to more theoretical or philosophical approaches to the theme. Plutarch portrays leaders competing vigorously with one another for a reader’s approbation, rather than anesthetized and dissected by a theorist’s scalpel. He gives us leaders whole, in their native element, and suggests that this is the best way to study them. Not every sort of leader was admitted to these contests, however. Contemporary scholars of leadership studies write of leadership in business and culture, as well as politics. Plutarch’s abiding concern was the politkos, or statesman. He focused on this character type not to denigrate

Political Identities

other sorts of life; he admired poets and philosophers, Plato especially. Plutarch did, however, consider the statesman’s life a high, if not the highest, life for human beings. He seemed also to worry that the political circumstances he faced in his own time—an extensive empire that limited the autonomy of its cities—threatened the active more than the contemplative life. His Lives therefore focus on a particular chronological period, or perhaps it is better to say a particular phase of political development. Plutarch’s Greeks live in autonomous cities, with the “last of the Greeks,” Philopoemen, witnessing the fall of the cities to Rome. Plutarch’s Romans live prior to the Empire, with Antony (the last of them, chronologically) witnessing the rise of Octavian. The portraits Plutarch chose to include in his Lives suggest that he wanted his readers to contemplate the sort of political leadership that preceded the Empire. What did Plutarch intend his reader to learn? The lessons Plutarch offered were many and varied—as varied, perhaps, as political life itself. One sees in the souls of Plutarch’s statesman the immense power of political ambition, for good and ill. One learns to admire virtues like justice, while also witnessing its destructive excesses when not tempered by prudence and gentleness. One witnesses the excellence and hubris of the great, as well as the noble recalcitrance and persistent envy of the many. All of these were themes to which Plutarch returned as the individual Lives he composed required. Ultimately, he seems to have hoped to sustain, through a literary resurrection of the ancient cities and their greatest statesmen, the virtues required for an ennobling form of politics, even under the subjection of the Empire.

725

that still survives. These examples could be multiplied, for Plutarch has found enthusiastic readers in each generation that followed him, despite these readers’ widely varying political and cultural conditions. This lasting influence indicates the timelessness of the insights at the center of Plutarch’s study of leadership and the wide appeal of the literary forms, biography above all, in which he conducted that study. Hugh P. Liebert See also Heroic Leadership; Military Leadership; Political Leadership; Rhetoric

Further Readings Beck, M. (Ed.). (2014). A companion to Plutarch. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Beneker, J. (Ed. & Trans.). (2019). How to be a leader: An ancient guide to wise leadership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beneker, J. (2012). The passionate statesman: Eros and politics in Plutarch’s lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duff, T. E. (2000). Plutarch’s lives: Exploring virtue and vice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebert, H. (n.d.). Great thinkers: Plutarch. Retrieved from https://thegreatthinkers.org/plutarch/ Liebert, H. (2016). Plutarch’s politics: Between city and empire. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Pelling, C. B. R. (2002). Plutarch and history. Havertown, PA: The Classical Press of Wales. Plutarch. (2001). Plutarch’s lives. (Ed. A. H. Clough. Dryden translation). New York, NY: Modern Library. Stadter, P. (2014). Plutarch and his Roman readers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conclusion Plutarch’s posthumous influence on the study of leaders has been significant. Shakespeare took Plutarch as his guide to ancient statesmen in several plays. Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised Plutarch’s astute psychological judgments and recommended careful study of his works to young people. Alexander Hamilton studied the Lives while serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp during the American Revolution, recording his reflections in a notebook

POLITICAL IDENTITIES Pundits and the public alike have commented on the increasing degree of political polarization in the American politic body at large. This polarization appears evident well beyond the United States, as populist leaders take over numerous other countries, and democratic leaders warn of the creeping power of authoritarianism around the globe. In

726

Political Identities

many instances, the cause for such tensions is located in the nature of leaders who embrace especially belligerent leadership styles. In the United States, for example, some observers and commentators blamed Donald Trump for the exacerbation of the political divide that was noted around the time of his presidency. Of course a leader is only a leader if he or she has followers, and the nature of that followership helps shape and define the leader. In other words, leaders reflect their constituents and thus the leaders are symptoms as well as causes of wider societal antagonisms. The nature of the relationship between leaders and followers often revolves around the meaning and function of the various political identities that individual groups espouse. Leaders can create, manipulate, and use these identities to their advantage to overcome opposition and further their personal political ambitions, however self-serving. Most often, they succeed in this undertaking by invoking and channeling particular emotions, such as anger and fear, in their followers, and then using that energy and intention to their political advantage. In particular, by strategically manipulating identity and emotion, leaders can overcome internal divisions within groups that might otherwise divide them by pointing to a common enemy that everyone can unite against to try to defeat. This unified cohesion allows the leader to overcome challenges to collective action that might otherwise paralyze their leadership or thwart their ambitions. Equally important, the focus on an external enemy easily diverts followers’ attention from the nature of a leader’s real objectives, which are often more self-interested than they represent or than their followers might understand. This entry describes the link between political identities and political affiliations, providing a recent example of how political leaders can capitalize on social identity among their following. Leaders are able to strategically manipulate political identities in order to further their agendas and political careers, which in turn lead to enhancing their political leadership.

The Nature of Political Identification The term political identity is most often used to refer to demographic characteristics, such as age,

race, sex, or religion, as well as political party identification. In the United States, the links between specific demographic characteristics and certain political affiliations have been clear since the outset of systematic research into the nature of public opinion. For example, rich, white men lean Republican while poor, black women are assumed to prefer Democrats. These tendencies have only become more pronounced and predictable over time. Indeed, these cultural predispositions are so strong that advertisers use them to target marketing for certain kinds of products to particular groups of people on the basis of such markers. But there is another important meaning of the term identification that is equally significant, and that is the way in which followers identify, or sympathize, with leaders, and feel that certain leaders understand them and represent their interests. In many ways, this process does not follow the rational path of cost-benefit analysis advocated by economists because it proceeds on the basis of a more emotional connection. This is likely part of the reason why the more educated part of the population is often at a loss trying to understand why poor people might support a candidate whose policies so clearly work in opposition to their economic self-interests, as for example Trump’s tax reform harmed so many poor Americans who voted for him. Yet these people continued to admire and support him. The key to understanding this connection lies precisely in the way that his followers identified with him, and the way he used emotion to manipulate and consolidate those loyalties. Clearly, these leadership dynamics extend far beyond Trump, but he provides a useful illustration of these underlying psychological dynamics. The following section provides a discussion of the nature of this attachment before returning to the larger theoretical issue. Trump’s Devoted Base

The people who supported Trump were not necessarily the white working class that the media liked to portray. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton dominated Trump among households earning less than $50,000 a year. Trump’s supporters were, however, much more anxious over

Political Identities

their perceived relative loss of status in society than those who supported Clinton. Thus, Trump was appealing primarily to a group of people who felt threatened about their place in the social structure. Why was Trump so appealing to such individuals? Two very interesting studies, using different kinds of methodology, provide fascinating insight into the nature of his attraction. In 2016, Arlie Hochschild spent several years in the south in general, and Louisiana in particular, talking primarily to white evangelicals seeking to understand the source of their identification, political and social, with Trump. She noted that as a group, most of these people felt left behind by a system that they perceived placed them at a structural disadvantage to minority groups who they felt were harming them. This “deep story” narrative had a strong basis in feeling, if not in reality. But of course it is easier and simpler to blame immigrants rather than technology and globalization for the loss of one’s job, and thus one’s family. The emotional nature of the attachment to Trump proved central to his appeal with this group. White, educated liberals may have seen Trump as a pathological liar, but his supporters knew he never lied about what mattered to them: his hatred for those who hurt him, and, by inference, them. Trump’s anger and resentment at groups who did not support him was real, and his followers could see and sense this. More importantly, they shared this feeling of rage and the desire for vengeance. He hated the same groups that these individuals felt had “cut in line” ahead of them and harmed them. They shared his frustration and joined in his desire to “drain the swamp” and get rid of the liberal elitists they felt were supporting those who cheated the system in a way that made them bear the cost. In this way, Trump provided a target for all the anger and frustration they felt over their position in life. In addition, Trump exemplified the suffering they experienced in their own lives. He managed to transform every attack on him into an attack on his followers and their values, lifestyle, and way of life. In this way, his followers came to see him as suffering for them within a Christian narrative framework that proved quite resonant.

727

What did Trump’s followers get out of this aside from a strong sense of emotional validation, community, and satisfaction, forces that should never be underestimated? Here is where important 2019 research conducted by Jonas Kunst and his colleagues provides very important insight. Over the course of seven experiments, these investigators demonstrated that people who felt a sense of psychological “fusion,” or sense of oneness, with a political leader proved more likely to actively support political violence against opponents. Using identification with Trump as an example, these studies showed that those who identified most strongly were significantly more likely to persecute Muslims and other immigrants and, importantly, were more willing to violently challenge election results. The authors identified the source of this psychological sense of fusion with Trump around status anxiety as well. The logic is clear: Trump is a high-status individual; they identified with Trump; therefore, this sense of identification raised their sense of personal status as well. His gain directly benefited their sense of social status; his loss was indistinguishable from their loss. In addition, this identification with Trump also supplied people with an immediate and clear sense of community with many others who felt similarly left behind or betrayed by the social and economic structure. Thus, for those whose social fabric had frayed as a result of economic dislocation—who had lost their marriage, their church, their bowling league, or veteran’s hall— association with Trump alleviated their personal loneliness by providing a new sense of community with immediately shared and valued interests. Social Identity

The dynamics described in the aforementioned studies relate specifically to Trump, but apply much more broadly to the nature of political identification. Social identity theory, proposed by Henri Tajfel in the mid-1970s, offers insight into both of these elements. Specifically, social identity theory discusses how the most trivial of factors can establish a sense of connection within a group; past experiments have built such communities from things like shared eye color or art preference. Importantly, a person’s sense of social identity

728

Political Identities

serves at least two critical functions from within this theoretical perspective. First, social identity can provide a sense of belonging and community. In the aforementioned examples, Trump followers and others often derive a deep sense of meaning and solidarity from their common support for a given political leader. The second aspect of this model is even more critical for understanding how the enhanced sense of status and self-esteem that can derive from identification with a powerful leader can transform into violent action. Social identity not only offers the person an enhanced sense of self-esteem and community, but also produces out-group discrimination. In other words, feeling good about one’s group inevitably makes one experience prejudice toward the other group. In the Kunst studies, this led to discrimination against Muslims and other minorities such as Iranians as well as against immigrants. The problematic consequences of this conundrum are self-evident. This outgroup discrimination can quickly, easily, and effortlessly transform from dislike into hostile action toward other groups. Notably, this outgroup discrimination serves an important function for leaders. When groups are focused on how much they hate another group, they put less time and attention into internal divisions that might otherwise fracture the in-group membership. A shared enemy who poses a threat, either real or imagined, consolidates in-group cohesion and helps overcome any potential internal divisions. For example, poor white people may join in solidarity with rich white people although their economic interests might align more closely with poor blacks. Leaders are not ignorant to these dynamics. They can leverage such loyalties to recruit others in opposition to their adversaries, even if the real source of their hostility is more self-interested in origin. Their followers may not be aware of these more selfish motives, or may be impervious to them, assuming the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Strategic Manipulation Leaders confront specific challenges around recruiting and retaining followers. They have various ways they can seek to accomplish these goals, which often produce internal tensions. For

example, larger groups are more likely to win campaigns, but groups that are too large often fraction into competing coalitions that may lose against more coordinated opponents. For example, the women’s movement that came to the fore after the election of Trump fractured within a year over internal divisions of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. This made it more difficult to advance women’s rights through a legislative agenda since the constituency did not remain united in support of a single shared goal. Leaders employ a variety of different tools to cement cohesion. One of them involves the public performance of identity. Using coded language, dress, or other signifiers of in-group status, leaders can help followers to locate their allegiance and coordinate with others. Various symbols help signal particular values or goals; consider the role of the Confederate flag in the early 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Sophisticated leaders understand the role that this public performance of identity, whether social or political in nature, serves in transforming individual identity into group solidarity. They can traction such symbols, or language, to recruit new followers, or to cement loyalty among existing followers. In addition, these public performances can widen the potential base of support by capturing those on the edges of a particular identity to join with the larger group through a shared sense of interest or perception of threat. One of the tools leaders uses to encourage such adherence lies precisely in the strategic manipulation not only of identity but also of emotion. Charismatic leaders can capture the attention and devotion of followers by using outrage, real or manufactured, to motivate action against opponents. Such outrage moves those on the fence to join the group to defend their values. Effective leaders need not necessarily be self-aware of these processes in order to use them successfully. By creating or recognizing a perceived risk from another group that threatens core values or identities, leaders can make followers aware of seemingly existential issues at stake in any given fight. Followers are led to believe that their welfare has been disregarded and if they do not stand up and do something about it, worse will certainly follow. Emotional manipulation allows leaders to quickly and effectively mobilize and coordinate a

Political Identities

diverse group of followers toward a shared goal. Anger, for example, is easy to stoke and almost automatically engages followers in a viscous cycle of escalatory retaliation. Certainly, the plethora of misinformation and the extensive reach of social media only heighten and speed these effects. Astute leaders can both create and direct such effects in service of their own particular political interests.

Political Leadership All leaders confront some similar challenges. They need to recruit sufficient followers to win an election or sustain power in a more authoritarian regime. If the group is too small, they can easily lose power to a larger group. If the group is too large, they may fragment. Leaders need to find ways to overcome well-known challenges to coordination in order to produce effective collective action on their own behalf. They can do this through a kind of entrepreneurship in the realm of political identity by helping potential followers locate and understand the foundation of their loyalty. In this way, a leader can expand their base by offering a sense of status and a shared community. Followers come to identify with the leader and gain self-esteem from that identification. The leaders’ enemies become their enemies and they prove willing to go into political battle for the person they believe has suffered at the hands of their opponents for their sake. This systematic transformation of personal identity into group solidarity forms the foundation of the alliance between specific political leaders and their loyal followers. This does not happen through a rational alignment of personal preferences and policy interests, as economists might advocate and educated people might prefer. Rather, it happens through the automatic, effortless, strategic manipulation of emotion in followers by leaders. These processes work precisely because identity is socially constructed. Identity is often formulated in explicit contradistinction to some other reality: a teacher is only a teacher because she has students; a leader is only a leader because she has followers. Similarly, groups largely exist as a figment of collective imagination; they exist on the basis of individuals’ belief in them. Leaders can exploit both these characteristics not only to recruit and retain

729

followers, but also to divide and conquer the opposition by pointing out to those in the other group that some other aspect of their identity might be better suited to that group. In this way, because almost everyone embodies multiple identities, cross-cutting cleavages around different aspects of identity, such as race or gender, can be exploited by leaders to produce electoral realignments. In this way, political identity goes far beyond simple political party alignment or demographic characteristics. Rather, it includes the ways in which individuals identify with the values and goals that particular leaders present, espouse, and embody. This form of identification does not need a basis in reality but can rest solidly on authentic emotional attachment devoid of substantive content. Such attachments can securely rely on narratives that need not be objectively accurate. Even if they are not true, they feel right to enough people to ensure a loyal following. The objective facts may be incorrect, but the feeling remains authentic and powerful. And most people will privilege emotional attachment over obscure abstract information. That is why abortion gets a lot more public traction than tax policy, although arguably affecting fewer people. It is that feeling of emotional attachment that forms the basis of the political identity upon which skilled leaders depend for their effectiveness, whether for good cause or selfish action. Rose McDermott See also Coalitions; Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Followership; Intergroup Processes; Political Leadership

Further Readings Hochschild, A. R. (2018). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New York, NY: The New Press. Kunst, J. R., Dovidio, J. F., & Thomsen, L. (2019). Fusion with political leaders predicts willingness to persecute immigrants and political opponents. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(11), 1180–1189. doi:10.1038/s41562019-0708-1 Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1968). The people’s choice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/laza93930

730

Political Leadership

McDermott, R. (2020). Leadership and the strategic emotional manipulation of political identity: An evolutionary perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101275. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.11.005 Mutz, D. C. (2018). Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(19), E4330–E4339. doi:10.1073/pnas.1718155115 Tajfel, H. (Ed.). (2010). Social identity and intergroup relations (Vol. 7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP Political leadership is a subset of leadership more broadly defined. This entry explores both the unique and common elements of political leadership. Political leadership shares many characteristics, tasks, and roles of leadership in a family, religious organization, or corporation. And yet, political leadership represents a narrower, domain specific and discreet subset of leadership. Similar, yet different. For example, in the corporate world, the goal is clearly understood, and the organization is put to the employ of achieving that goal: profit. In politics, there is no corresponding agreement over ends or goals which are a point of contention, debate, and conflict. Should the “end zone” be the achievement of justice? Promotion of liberty? Equality? Safety and security? Laisse faire or state-controlled economy? These are the things over which we argue and debate. And the end zone can vary from election to election, leader to leader, season to season. The goal is thus dynamic, not static; changing and transitory.

The Role of Leadership in Politics Political leadership is vitally important to the polity. Where humans gather, where they form into communities, leaders emerge. And politics becomes the vehicle for collective decision making. Political leaders use the authority, resources, and power of the state to make choices that affect the community.

Leadership can help liberate or enslave, promote liberty or oppress, elevate or demean. By politics, we mean the process of public, collective decision making wherein the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and where rules are established regarding public interactions and the allocation of power. It is how “we” make decisions without resorting to violence. By leadership, we mean the process that organizes, mobilizes, and inspires a group to achieve a common goal. A leader influences the group and works to help the group achieve their goals. Leaders use different styles and approaches in their efforts to lead a community. Some exhibit more authoritarian inclinations, while others are more democratic. Some are collegial, where others more servant oriented. There is no “one size fits all” in political leadership. And institutional design and structure often limit the freedom of operation in which a leader might pursue their ends. Political leaders operate in two very different domains or environments: internal and external (domestic vs. foreign policy). Internally the state has set rules and punishment mechanisms in place. The creation of order is a function of making the laws work efficiently and fairly, something over which the leader has significant influence. Externally the international system is characterized not by order and set rules, but by a form of loose norms in an anarchistic world. Here power, interests, and alliances operate in ways over which the leader has only a marginal impact. An effective leader must master both domains. Who becomes a political leader? For the most part, political leaders self-select. They offer themselves (in an electoral system) and try to persuade the citizens to vote for them. In this sense, the leader is dependent on the approval or support of the people. Because of this, some leaders pander to the people: Let me give them what they want. Other, more courageous leaders (or statesmen) state their case, try to persuade, present the direction, and show how to get there and what will happen if/when we succeed. They tell the people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Such leaders are less vulnerable to the whim of the people.

Political Leadership

The Evolution of Political Leadership In the age of the Divine Right of Kings (before the Renaissance), a myth that the king was chosen by God to rule gave the king both legitimacy and authority. Standing on the shoulders of God meant that the will or whim of the king was widely accepted and little challenged. In this age, “leadership” was less important, and rule or command was the style practiced by most kings. But as the world became more secular, a new narrative, the Divine Right of the People, emerged. Now the ruler needed the consent of the governed. And the governed often had their own ideas about how things should be done. The people were less docile and more demanding, less willing to comply and more likely to resist. Leaders actually had to lead, persuade, and mobilize, always knowing that the warrant on their authority was on fragile ground. If power, influence, and office holding are so fragile in this age of the Divine Right of the People, why would anyone offer themselves up for such an uncertain position? Motivations for seeking public leadership vary, but a useful way to think about what motivates a person to seek out political leadership is to think of this as a continuum, with self at one end, and serve at the other. Those who seek political status and leadership for self, do so because they want power, control, status, honor, to be at the center of things, the one who can say up or down, who can dominate and lord over others. Such a person may enter the political arena for many of the wrong reasons (e.g., lack of self-esteem, insecurity, hunger to dominate). At the other end of the continuum, those who seek position in politics may do so because they want to serve and elevate their communities, right wrongs, and move in the direction of justice. Of course, most leaders reside somewhere between these two extremes but will exhibit tendencies in one direction or the other. Social evolution has brought about key changes in political leadership. The kinship clan required one structure and set of skills and attributes, but with the emergence of the state, a more hierarchical and centralized system of government emerged. Today, with rapid-fire change, governing systems are under tremendous pressure to change, respond, and lead. The local clan has given way to

731

the interdependent world, and political leadership has had to broaden to include not just a particular state but an international system that is interconnected. Personal leadership often gave way to institutional and systemic leadership. And leadership itself became more professionalized as power became more diffused.

The Great Thinkers on Political Leadership Because of the importance of political leadership, the great thinkers across the ages have spent much time and attention on what type of leader and what type of organization is best. In The Republic, Plato told us that the only viable leader was the “Philosopher King,” a man trained over an extended period in the art and science of leadership. Leadership of the polity was no job for amateurs, but a highly specialized task that required the development of skills and knowledge that would teach the aspiring leader to know justice and act justly. But Plato’s scheme would not be implemented, and over time, leaders were usually selected by accident of birth or force of arms. In the early 1500s, Florentine diplomat Niccolo` Machiavelli emerged as a rebel voice, challenging the accepted wisdom of the day, offering less of an ideal vision of what a leader “should be” and presenting the prince of Florence with a series of observations on what he needed to be. In his classic work, The Prince, dedicated to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (1492–1519), Machiavelli eschewed the teaching of virtue as a guide and taming force that would keep a leader under check. No, Machiavelli presented a treatise based in stark realism. He was pragmatic and empirical in his observations, relying on the lessons of history and what we might learn about governing from the great and good as well as the brutes and bullies of the past. Machiavelli has a very bad reputation. Some believe him to be the teacher of evil. His advice to the Prince can be painfully frank and even frightening. Is he really saying that the Prince should lie? Use violence creatively? Dissemble and manipulate? Yes, but. Machiavelli reveals; he does not create. He is not inventing hard-nosed politics, he is merely describing how politics works in the real and sometimes harsh world. What he is most keen

732

Political Leadership

on is advising the prince to act wisely and well. That means to keep your word and behave honorably if circumstances allow, yet be prepared to fight political fire with fire when necessary. The word necessary is a key here. Machiavelli does not advise the prince to do evil, he advises the prince to do what is necessary to protect and advance his power so as to best achieve good policies for his people. The ends do not justify the means; circumstances, however, may justify less than honorable means, but only when absolutely necessary. The prince is not evil for the sake of being evil; he may feel compelled to do some less than honorable things because it is necessary even if not desirable. He has not written a book on how the prince can achieve salvation in heaven; he is telling the prince how to rule. That he remains the world’s most read and followed writer on leadership, and that so many leaders either follow his advice or, more accurately, follow human nature, about which Machiavelli has written so powerfully, is testimony to his wisdom. Should the leader be feared or loved? Better to be feared. Can the leader do that which is “not good”? Only when necessary. Should the leader practice the ways of a Christian prince? Only if you wish to allow other less scrupulous leaders to defeat you and damage your people. What, to Machiavelli, makes the good leader great? He presents three key factors that determine outcome: Virtu, Occasione, and Fortuna. By virtu (virtue) he does not mean goodness but skill, broadly defined. This skill is the result of deep study and intense experience. Occassione, meaning context, situation, or circumstances, offer a range of what is possible. Sometimes call for boldness, other times for restraint. Some opportunities must be acted upon, and at other times one must diagnose the odds and pull back. Fortuna, or luck, is something over which the leader has no control. One could be well trained and have much experience and have good advice and a good plan, but if fortune does not smile on the leader, all can be lost. The plan might run afoul of sudden bad weather. A key player might come down ill on the eve of battle. Yes, leadership is about skill and timing, but if fortune frowns on you, you become its victim. Many promote a “great man” theory of history and change, where great and powerful leaders confront the challenges of the world, and by sheer

force of will, courage, and skill, make change happen. British historian Thomas Carlyle wrote the influential book On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), argued that “The history of the world is the biography of great men.” His view is contrasted with Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, whose 1869 book War and Peace presents a distinctly a-heroic model of human activity. Napoleon, he wrote, did not lead in the Battle of Borodino; in fact his orders were never conveyed to his troops. No, that battle occurred “independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will. . .” (Book 10, Chapter 28). Perhaps Alexander Hamilton best expressed the dilemma of political leadership in our age when he asked in Federalist Paper # 1 “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Political leadership is our test of this proposition. Laws, rules, and norms can help keep the guardrails in place, but it is political leaders who do the day-to-day work of making rules and laws come to life. Can leaders mobilize the people to pull their oars in the same direction for the good of the community at large, or will narrow self-interest guide the members of the polity? Is then, the primary role of leadership and government to manage conflict or develop community? And if political leaders must do both, are we asking too much of mere mortals?

Political Leadership Today Contemporary social scientists are especially suspicious of the claims that leaders are in command and make change (or history) happen. Many theoretically inclined political scientists express a great deal of skepticism regarding claims of agency where individual leaders are central to the change process. They tend to see structural or institutional, social forces or technology driving change as much as, or in some cases more than, leaders. They challenge leadership scholars to come up with clear, testable propositions or evidence that attribute agency to individual leaders.

Political Leadership and Historical Memory

Political scientist Thomas E. Cronin helps us better understand both the parameters of this debate and the multidimensional nature of political change by suggesting that political change is best understood as a three-act process. In Act I, policy ideas are formulated and discussed, usually at the local level or at universities and think tanks. Here, those we traditionally think of as “leaders” play virtually no role. In Act II the more promising of these ideas spread to the wider community and begin to be noticed by local and perhaps regional office holders. Local citizens become more organized and mobilize for change. By Act III, regional and national leaders begin to see the value of these proposals and begin to emerge as champions of change. In this model, “leaders” come in at the later stages of the process. In this process leaders are important, but only at a particular point. So rather than ask “Do leaders matter?” the real question is when and how do they matter. Leaders of course, need followers. In the modern era, followers often serve as leaders and agents of change, and at the point when they are asked to follow, may well say no. Thus, leaders must persuade and influence citizens to follow their lead. The old saying “strong leaders make for a weak people” rings true, and in democratic systems, followers have the power to limit or defeat as well as empower would-be leaders. Political leadership matters. And while we often look to our leaders to “save us” (especially in a crisis) thereby diminishing the role of citizens, in all forms and structures of government, leaders can work with and for the public good, or serve narrow and selfish interests of power and profit. That political leadership is so variable speaks to the role both of institutions and rules, as well as individual motivations and agency. Michael A. Genovese, Jr. See also Autocratic Leadership; Congressional Leadership; Democratic Leadership; Multiple Roles of Leaders; Presidential Leadership

733

Cronin, T. E., & Genovese, M. A. (2012). Leadership matters: Unleashing the power of paradox. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Genovese, M. A., & Han, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). Leadership at the crossroads: Political leadership (Vol. 2). Westport, CT: Praeger. Miroff, B. (2000). Icons of democracy: American leaders as heroes, aristocrats, dissenters, and democrats. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Skowronek, S., & Glassman, M. (Eds.). Formative acts: American politics in the making. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP HISTORICAL MEMORY

AND

History is to the nation, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once famously suggested, as memory is to the individual: As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. (2007, n.p.)

In the last century, especially, past political leaders have played a central role in Americans’ efforts to orient themselves by anchoring the present in a longer history. Knowledge of the leaders of the past has thus served as an essential resource for Americans—and citizens of other countries— as they have sought to meet the challenges of their own times and advance their contending visions for American democracy. Americans have evoked past leaders to make sense of their history, to understand their nation’s place in the world, to build solidarity amid crisis, and to call attention to both the possibilities and the injustices of American life. They have built statues and torn them down; they

Further Readings Caro, R. A. (1975). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. New York, NY: Vintage.

Author’s Note: Parts of this entry were adapted from “The Crumbling Monuments of the Age of Marble,” © 2015 by Mason Williams, as first published in The Atlantic.

734

Political Leadership and Historical Memory

have sought lessons in the lives of their “founding fathers” and identified those figures’ moral failures. They have summoned up historical leaders both to teach children and to make a quick buck. They have celebrated and castigated, exalted and laid low, revered, and ridiculed. In so doing, they have fought over core questions about the meanings of American history, the workings and capacities of American democracy, and who should be fully included in the American experiment. The history of commemoration therefore holds a mirror up to some of the most important developments in modern American history. This entry examines how and toward what ends Americans have evoked leaders over the last century, illustrating broader trends through the case study of Abraham Lincoln. Because Lincoln’s life and work touch on so many of the core themes of American history, his image, the historian Eric Foner writes, “has provided a lens through which we Americans examine ourselves. As an icon embodying the society’s core values and myths—self-made man, frontier hero, liberator of slaves—he exerts a unique hold on our historical imagination” (2011, p. xv). To “claim” Lincoln has therefore thus been a powerful way of asserting and legitimating broader political claims.

Great Leaders and the American Narrative Though collective memory has been a perennial feature of American public discourse, focused attention on individual leaders as the driving forces of American political history is a relatively recent phenomenon, a product of the era from the late 19th century to the interwar period. A host of factors came together to encourage a focus on leaders: the development of the modern presidency, America’s rise to the status of a world power, new forms of mass media and culture, and the lingering imperatives of national reconciliation in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In place of previous generations’ grand narratives—of the frontier; of a distinctive, liberty-loving republican people—Americans increasingly focused their attention on great leaders, depicted as the conduits who channeled timeless American virtues into national progress, greatness, and power. Great

men, the sociologist Barry Schwartz notes, served as subjects of reverence and symbols of unity, democratic progress, fair dealing, and justice. During the first half of the 20th century, idealized images of politicians served as focal points for a narrative of American national unity and progress. This era saw the creation of many of the most iconic images of American civic culture: the Lincoln Memorial (1922), Mount Rushmore (1941); the Jefferson Memorial (1943). These were also the years when American currency assumed its present form, when the concept of “the Founding Fathers” originated, and when historians devised the “presidential synthesis” of American history—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s landmark The Age of Jackson was published in 1945 and Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It in 1948. This heroic style of commemoration was sustained by a kind of national comity-throughexclusion, a vision of the nation that could only exist because northern and western Americans had acquiesced in the dismantling of the legacy of Reconstruction. The style reached its height during the period of American history—from Plessy v. Ferguson and the defeat of the Republican Party’s last attempts to enforce the 15th Amendment in the 1890s to the Second World War—in which “the race question” was largely off the table in national politics and everyday life in the name of intersectional reconciliation. As a consequence, an exclusionary vision of the nation is written into the national meanings encoded in the era’s iconography. Both the heroic style of commemoration and the exclusionary vision that guided it are visible in the Lincoln Memorial, the Greek revival temple on the west end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1922. The words engraved behind Daniel Chester French’s marble sculpture of Lincoln do not bear testament to a new birth of freedom; rather, they emphasize union and national reconciliation: “IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.” President Warren G. Harding made the point even more explicitly in his address at the dedication ceremony. “The supreme chapter in history is not emancipation,” he argued. Rather,

Political Leadership and Historical Memory

“Emancipation was a means to the great end—maintained union and nationality.”

Challenges to the Heroic Style of Commemoration Grounded in an exclusionary vision, this heroic style of commemoration naturally drew challenges. Black activists and intellectuals, in particular hit the style where it was weakest, forcing Americans to grapple with the cultural politics of racial exclusion and endowing them with a better sense of the role of radicals, social movements, and moral leadership in American history and life. Lincoln’s prestige had been in decline in African American intellectual circles since the 1930s: In a 1936 Lincoln Day column, the historian Carter Woodson called Lincoln “often overrated as the savior of the race.” At best, Woodson noted, Lincoln was “a gradual emancipationist and colonizationist” who “doubted that the two races could dwell together in peace.” Woodson called for greater attention to the abolitionists who had “made Lincoln possible” (New York Amsterdam News, February 3, 1936, p. 8). In the 1960s, this line of critique burst into public view as a new generation of intellectuals revisited the claim that Lincoln was, as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass had once put it, preeminently the white man’s president. As issues of racial and gender inequality and colonialism gained space in public conversations, reassessments of practically every “great” American political figure followed. These currents changed the meanings of some older icons: the Lincoln Memorial has not looked the same since Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. If King had attempted to displace the memorial’s original reconciliationist meaning with a liberationist one, others in the Black freedom struggle were eager to reject Lincoln altogether: In 1968, Ebony magazine ran a cover story by Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” which enlisted Lincoln’s memory as a warning against the limitations of white liberalism. Just as the style of commemoration that characterized the first half of the 20th century was the product of the conjuncture of several historical developments, so has been its unmaking. Stemming

735

from the desegregation of the academy, the public sphere, and the historical imagination itself, Americans have taken a newly critical, and newly inclusive, approach to American history. They have become more aware of the symbolic, the linguistic, and the personal as domains of power. The declining esteem for our governing officials which first registered in public opinion polls in the second half of the 1960s has lent popular traction to historians’ dismantling of the “presidential synthesis” in particular and a history driven by “great men” more generally. Cultural and spatial sorting by party, group, and ideology have led to issues of national identity and the commemorative practices associated with them being fought out, increasingly, in two separate national communities. The sociologist Barry Schwartz (2008) has termed the resulting style of commemoration “post-heroic,” “awash in obscene vulgarity,” and characterized by the deterioration of “traditional symbols and practices” and a diminishment of the very idea of greatness. At the same time, however, other scholars have identified a new “age of commemoration” and a “surfeit of memory,” born of a “strong desire,” writes the scholar of literature Andreas Huyssen, “to anchor ourselves in a world characterized by an increasing instability of time and the fracturing of living space.” (2000, p. 28). Amid the anxieties and everquickening tempo of contemporary life, Americans have sought out stability in the familiar figures of the past. This has been especially the case in political life: in an age in which contemporary American politics has been characterized by dysfunction and scandal, evocations ranging from door-stopper Father’s Day biographies to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenomenally popular musical Hamilton have suggested that the system could be made to work if we learn the lessons of the heroes of the past. Recent evocations of Lincoln have followed both the postheroic and the neo-heroic tracks. Lincoln has come in for more than his share of absurdist or vulgar treatment—witness the original dust jacket of Jon Stewart’s 1998 Naked Pictures of Famous People (featuring Abe in the buff) and the 2012 film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, among many others. At the same time, Lincoln has been one of the primary

736

Political Leadership and Historical Memory

neo-heroic figures. In 2005, newly elected U.S. Senator Barack Obama wrote in a short essay for Time magazine: In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles. He also reminded me of a larger, fundamental element of American life—the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams. [July 4, 2005]

Obama acknowledged what he called Lincoln’s “imperfections.” But “it is precisely those imperfections—and the painful self-awareness of those failings etched in every crease of his face and reflected in those haunted eyes—that make him so compelling,” he argued. Two years later, he would announce his bid for the presidency of the United States in Lincoln’s adopted hometown of Springfield, Illinois; he evoked Lincoln continuously throughout his presidency. If Obama gently chided Lincoln for not being “immune from political considerations,” two of the most widely recognized treatments of Lincoln in the early 21st century, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s 2012 film Lincoln, focused squarely on Lincoln’s genius as a pragmatic politician. If these works called attention to an aspect of Lincoln’s career that had often been overlooked, they also said something about the political anxieties many Americans felt in an era of polarization and gridlock: American democracy could be made to work, these depictions seemed to suggest, if its leaders possessed the right marriage of character, vision, and pragmatic political skill.

The Postheroic Style In more recent years, past political leaders have increasingly been depicted as emblems, not of the possibilities of American democracy but of its limitations. The advancing century has seen a critical reassessment of American history comparable in

many ways to that of the 1960s. Beginning in earnest in the fall of 2015, student movements on many college campuses demanded the renaming of dormitories and academic programs and the removal of statues of historical figures associated with white supremacy and violence against indigenous peoples as part of what was frequently described as a “reckoning” with the American past. Students at the University of Missouri petitioned (unsuccessfully) for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson; students at Princeton University campaigned, ultimately successfully, for the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In this context, Abraham Lincoln’s views on race and his treatment of indigenous people have received renewed attention. In 2019, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones emphasized Lincoln’s opposition to Black equality and support for colonization in the lead essay to the New York Times Magazine’s widely read and award-winning “1619 Project.” The following year, the city of Boston removed a copy of the Freedmen’s Memorial that had stood in a public park since 1879. And in early 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 6–1 to rename 44 public schools, including Abraham Lincoln High School. The tendency to evoke history through the figures of individual leaders has sometimes served Americans ill. By collapsing collective social and political processes into individual agency, it can obscure the actual workings of history; and with its tendency toward mythology it can even obscure how leadership actually works. Yet the persistence of this tendency lends credence to the value such evocations have in connecting past to present and individual to group. As the philosopher Michael Sandel observes, commemoration is a kind of common good, the impoverishment of which would represent a loss to public life. And so the quest to find a style of commemoration which serves valuable cultural and political ends without simplifying or distorting the past seems likely to continue. Mason B. Williams See also Black Lives Matter; Critical Leadership Studies; Political Identities; Political Leadership; Presidential Leadership; Romance of Leadership

Political Obligation

Further Readings Blight, D. (2001). Race and reunion: The Civil War in American memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foner, E. (2011). The fiery trial: Abraham Lincoln and American slavery. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Hannah-Jones, N., Roper, C., Silverman, I., & Silverstein, J. (Eds.). (2021). The 1619 project: A new origin story. New York, NY: One World. Holzer, H. (Ed.). (2009). The Lincoln anthology: Great writers on his life and legacy. New York, NY: Library of America. Huyssen, A. (2000). Present pasts: Media, politics, Amnesia, Public Culture, 12(1), 21–38. Maier, C. S. (1993). A surfeit of memory? Reflections on history, melancholy and desire. History & Memory, 5(2), 136–152. Peterson, M. D. (1994). Lincoln in American memory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Schlesinger, A. M. (2007, January 1). Folly’s antidote. New York Times, p. A19. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/01schlesinger.html Schwartz, B. (2008). Abraham Lincoln in the post-heroic era: History and memory in late twentieth-century America. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

POLITICAL OBLIGATION Political obligation is classically equated with the contention that citizens have a moral responsibility to obey the law. This has important implications for how leaders should behave. If citizens do have real political obligations, then good leaders should generally comply with the law and encourage their followers to do the same. This entry introduces the main moral grounds argued to underlie a duty to obey the law—consent, natural duties, association, and fair play—and considers some of the more prominent critiques advanced by philosophical anarchists who deny that laws create new moral obligations.

737

Sara his car, or agrees to give her a ride, he gives up the usual claims he might have over his possessions or time. He has no cause for complaint if she takes his keys or gets angry if he fails to show up. Similarly, consent theory suggests citizens who agree to abide by the laws are duty bound to do so. They have no right to complain when others demand that they comply. Yet few if any philosophers argue that actual citizens are bound in this way. Rather than formally consenting to the laws that govern them, most citizens are born into already-operative political communities whose dictates they are given little meaningful opportunity to reject. Modern advocates of political obligation thus tend to focus on tacit consent, the notion that even though citizens never formally agree to obey the law, some other actions that they take serve as binding agreement. The popular phrase, “America, love it or leave it,” for example, reflects the English philosopher John Locke’s notion that a person consents to complying with the law simply by virtue of territories of the government. The idea that mere presence constitutes agreement, however, bleeds consent theory of any moral weight it gains from reflecting subjects’ free exercise of will, since few people can leave the county in which they live, and those who do so must often pay a steep price. Rather than accepting mere presence as proof of agreement, contemporary defenders of consent theory emphasize citizens’ active engagement with the state, arguing that people agree to the laws when they do things such as vote, take advantage of public schooling, seek a state-funded scholarship, or think of themselves as acting in concert with their fellow citizens. Critics, however, argue that such actions are not properly read as expressing binding agreement. A person might, for example, vote because they disagree with the law. Moreover, such consent rarely occurs in a context with the kind of meaningful options that would seem to lend agreement to its binding force. Even naturalized citizens who do formally commit to the laws routinely do so without acceptable alternatives.

Consent Consent is often treated as making a moral difference to the power that parties can exercise over each other. If, for example, Jacob consents to lend

Natural Duties Natural duties arguments for political obligation contend that citizens have a moral obligation to

738

Political Obligation

comply that exists independently of prior actions they have taken or any special relationships they might have to others. This idea saw its most famous, if perhaps less developed, iteration in the work of John Rawls. More contemporary authors have sought to flesh out the moral reasons that might ground such a duty. Arthur Ripstein and Anna Stilz, for example, argue that subjection to democratic laws prevents individuals from unilaterally imposing their judgments on others and is thus the only way to avoid unjustified coercion and achieve freedom. Others hold that citizens ought to obey the law out of a concern for equality. Advocates of this approach fill in the relevant notion of equality in different ways. Jeremy Waldron, for example, contends that we must accept a singular institution as a legitimate source of authoritative commands to ensure an effective and fair scheme of coordination in the face of justifiable disagreement. Some philosophers argue that treating democratic laws as authoritative respects our fellow citizens’ status as equals by conferring equivalent standing on their judgments as a way of publicly recognizing the equal value of their interests, while others contend that granting laws (or at least those that are the product of egalitarian procedures) authority instantiates the value of relating as equals by ensuring that no citizen is subordinated to another since each has equal control over their shared relationship. Critics of a natural duties approach, however, point out that a duty to support and sustain just institutions does not give citizens a reason to obey the law when noncompliance does not threaten an institution, as is certainly the case in many instances of disobedience. For example, a citizen who runs a red light in the middle of nowhere does not obviously undermine the security of the welfare state or the fundamental structure of property laws. Others call into question whether a concern for equality gives citizens a reason to obey actual real-world laws, given the deep inequalities that are baked into existing political and legal structures.

Associational Obligations Associational obligations are said to arise from the roles that people occupy in others’ lives. For example, citizens are mothers, or colleagues, or

friends. That they have this status subjects them to certain moral responsibilities. A sister should (at least pro-tanto) call her brother on his birthday; a colleague should offer to help on a difficult work assignment. Such roles, advocates contend, are part of the fundamental architecture of moral life. Proponents of political obligation who take the associational approach hold that co-membership in a political community is the kind of role that gives rise to responsibilities. This, they suggest, explains why citizens are bound to comply with the law of their nation even though their status as members of particular political communities is largely nonvoluntary. A person owes her sister, and her coworkers, even though she typically cannot choose the family into which she was born or the colleagues her workplace hires. The status of a compatriot is no different. Critics raise several concerns. Strong accounts of associational duty, they worry, imply that people have obligations to deeply unjust communities. More tellingly, they contend that roles are either not at all, or not distinct sources of, moral obligation. The value of relationships that explain their purported capacity to create moral responsibilities reduces to other moral reasons like consent or natural duties. Even if interpersonal associations can give rise to real obligations, opponents argue that political associations are not the kind of relations to do so. While family and friends share intimate personal ties, compatriots are at best distantly connected. Citizens will never meet—much less share close interactions with— most of their fellow compatriots.

Fair Play Perhaps the most prominent defenses of political obligation in recent years ground their claims in a concern for fair play. The fact that fellow citizens comply with the law, proponents like George Klosko argue, provides benefits like physical security, public health, and a clean environment. These advantages come at a cost to those who obey—complying is burdensome. It is unfair to free-ride on this work by enjoying these benefits without conforming in turn. Those who do so act unfairly by giving themselves a privilege that they would deny to others. On these grounds, scholars like H. L. A. Hart contend that

Power and Culture

citizens who benefit from the law ought to obey, not because they owe their compliance to the state, but because they owe it to their fellow citizens who have themselves obeyed. Critics like Robert Nozick argue that the principle of fair play is implausible, or applies only to voluntarily accepted benefits, since the alternative would permit people to oblige others simply by conferring unrequested benefits. Others accept this possibility in theory, but contend that contemporary societies are too disaggregated and uncooperative to qualify as the kind of practices that generate such obligations. In response, advocates of fair play argue that many people do actively participate in the practices that generate public goods by doing things like seeking a legal marriage, calling the police, or bringing a case to court. Others reject the need for signs of active acceptance. Goods like health and security are, they suggest, so significant as to be presumptively valuable, even if individuals have not actively sought them out. More recent critics accept that duties of fair play create real obligations to those who obey the law but deny that satisfying the resulting duty requires compliance. Candice Delmas, for example, argues that a concern for fair play sometimes requires that citizens disobey unacceptable laws. Brookes Brown holds that citizens can discharge their duties of fair play without complying with the law by contributing to the common good in other ways (e.g., by donating their time or resources or avoiding legal but deleterious behaviors). Such critics of political obligation raise potent objections. If their concerns prove true, we are left with two choices. One option is to reshape our institutions so that the moral grounds of obligation are more applicable. States, for example, could structure themselves to make consent realistic, by easing the pathway to emigration and secession. The second option is to conclude that citizens are not morally obliged to follow the law. This is not the same thing as contending that they have no moral reason to do what the law says they should. Philosophical anarchists, such as A. John Simmons, Leslie Green, Robert Paul Wolff, Jessica Flanigan, and others, hold that citizens have no moral obligation to obey the law merely because it is the law. Doing so, they argue, either directly contravenes citizens’ freedom or sense of self, or is simply

739

unjustified by existing institutional structures. However, they hold that citizens quite often have good reason—indeed are sometimes morally obliged—to do what the content of the law demands. For example, philosophical anarchists might agree that a person should not drive the wrong way down a one-way street—but hold that the reason that she should avoid doing so is because such behavior unduly risks the lives of fellow citizens, not because the law commands her to do otherwise. Thus, the rejection of political obligation is far more compatible with ordinary intuitions about civic behavior than proponents of such duties might fear. Brookes Brown See also Conformity; Cooperation; Coordination; Ethical Leadership; Followership

Further Readings Brown, B. (2020). Reciprocity without compliance, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 48(4). doi:10.1111/papa. 12176 Christiano, T. (2003). The authority of democracy, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 11(2). Hart, H. L. A. (1955). Are there any natural rights? The Philosophical Review, 64(2). 187. doi:10.2307/ 2182586 Klosko, G. (2005). Political obligations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199256209.001.0001 Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York, NY: Basic Books. Simmons, A. J., & Wellman, C. (2012). Is there a moral duty to obey the law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, M. B. E. (1973, April). Is there a prima facie obligation to obey the law. The Yale Law Journal, 82(5), 950–976. doi:10.2307/795537 Trifan, I. (2020). What makes free-riding wrongful? The shared preference view of fair play, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 28(2). doi:10.1111/jopp.12201

POWER

AND

CULTURE

“Power” and “culture” are two central concepts in social science, but their meanings are sometimes

740

Power and Culture

contested or not well conceptualized. In the humanities, power and culture have long been important but without a clear conceptualization of what these are and how to measure their significance. Their use in social sciences is mixed: ignored or undervalued in economics and some political science; central (perhaps overemphasized) in parts of anthropology and sociology. This entry sets out to clarify ways to think about power and culture so that they can be used fruitfully, including within leadership studies.

Power A classic definition of power is from Robert Dahl, based on Max Weber’s formulation: “A has power over B to the extent that A can get B to do what B otherwise would not do.” This formulation gets at the essence of power: overcoming another’s resistance without convincing that other to change their mind (i.e., persuasion). However, this also hides complexities of power, because there are various ways to get B to do something against B’s interests. Perhaps the most useful way to think about power follows an adjusted version of Steven Lukes’s model, in which power has three facets or dimensions. The first facet is resource power. This involves an imbalance of resources and their use. One form of resource power is dependency, when B depends on A: for example, when employees rely on bosses for wages and thus for survival. (This form of power is collective as well as individual: employers as a class have power over employees as a class.) A second facet is discursive power. This involves controlling what is talked about and thus acted upon: agendas in politics (e.g., Congress), discussions about normal versus abnormal behavior (e.g., by doctors and criminologists), and ignoring issues (e.g., class in the United States). What is discussed can then be acted upon by the state (law) or professionals (e.g., doctors) to control others. The third facet is narrative power, which operates by controlling narratives of the natural world (social and material) and how history inevitably unfolds. In this way, the powerless think their position is natural and that they must accept it; elites can claim their status is deserved.

Social Darwinism is one expression of narrative power. Note that all three dimensions are analytically separate, but in reality they can feed off each other. Resource power most effectively compels obedience and helps elites construct other facets. Discursive power makes it easier to create narrative power, but if dependency and discursive power falter (as in economic depressions), narratives of natural hierarchy might make the powerless less likely to mobilize. As useful as these dimensions of power are, they presume one actor or set of actors deliberately trying to shape another actor’s or group’s behavior. Power might also work unintentionally or indirectly. One form of this is structural power: power compels because decisions and actions by one set of actors unintentionally shape and narrow available options for other actors. The classic case of this is high school textbooks in the United States. Publishers tend to orient their textbooks to school boards in big states (e.g., California and Texas) who purchase a large number of books and not invest in states with smaller populations (e.g., West Virginia). Thus, states with smaller populations have to accept the textbooks published for bigger states. School boards in Texas are not deliberately imposing particular textbooks on West Virginians, but the effect is the same. Power can work in subtle and unintended ways—and that those wielding power might not be aware they are doing so. Analyzing power requires methodological caution, as some ideological biases lead one to see “power” everywhere (or, in other cases, to see “consensus” when power is really at work). Sometimes two or more people share interests and norms or are persuaded to do something, or someone “powerless” by their own free will actually accepts the status quo. To simplify, a study of power should pinpoint whether people know they must act against their interests or whether they feel duped. Obvious cases are moments of clear repression, such as police cracking down on protests. In other cases, power might be asymmetrical so that open resistance does not occur and it seems consensus is the norm—here researchers have to use different research strategies.

Power and Culture

One approach can be an analysis (quantitative or qualitative) of people’s real actions versus those that would seem logical for their social positions. For example, do workers in a company town (one predominant company) vote in higher percentages for the company-backed candidate, than in locales where the company is less strong and faces competition? This might signal a power dynamic at work. Alternatively, sometimes people will openly say that this is the case, although they might do so only in private, in trusted company. This requires the researcher to gain trust and guarantee subjects’ anonymity. When access to people’s real thoughts is difficult—for closed groups or historical topics—researchers must find hints in private discourses (e.g., diaries, private conversations) or in how they use public performances strategically (e.g., proclaiming loyalty to elites but with a hint of cynicism).

Culture Scholars conceptualize culture and its significance in varying ways: as beliefs, norms, symbols, rituals, meaning systems, and even institutions. What all these concepts share is that culture is a manifestation of meanings that we, as individuals and collectives, give to real and virtual “things” that we perceive around us. Culture as beliefs and norms has been a mainstay definition in social science because this makes it easy to study: simply use closed-ended surveys (e.g., about views on abortion, political beliefs) to map out culture for a particular place and time. However, anthropologists, historians, and some sociologists have questioned whether this is too superficial: self-described anarchists and conservative capitalists in one country will still shop at stores in the same way and use money in the same way. In recent decades, cultural studies have focused on language that actors use in different places and times, and on symbols, expressions of meaning fixed in objects (e.g., paintings, money, diplomas). A fruitful approach has been to link language and symbols to institutions and trace how particular categories and symbols gain status, usually through the state: for example, how doctors gained status and authority because the state and insurance companies accepted that a medical

741

degree conferred on its holder the status of competency and objective understanding of normality (Doctors also wear professional garments such as lab coats and use medical and scientific jargon, which many ordinary people perceive as status symbols.). Scholarship on propaganda states and dehumanization (e.g., in Nazi Germany) are particularly powerful studies of how culture shapes inequality and even the application of violence: those dehumanized are easier targets for violence because, as subhuman and threatening, they do not deserve rights and compassion. This said, the real causal force of culture remains disputed. In anthropology and cultural studies, symbols and meanings have explanatory power, but other disciplines and scholars disagree. Some Marxist approaches reduce the importance of culture by claiming it is epiphenomenal: norms, tastes, and symbols reflect positions in class structure, and the dominant culture exists to defend the privileges of the ruling class. Scholars more inclined to economics and rational choice theory, or who use quantitative methods, tend to downplay culture’s significance. Instead, people make decisions based on objective costs and benefits of different decisions, and culture is either reduced to secondary status or safely ignored altogether. One retort to this is that “value” is symbolic, for example “prices” and “money.” Decision-making is grounded in heuristics. These are processes we use to solve problems, and cultural meaning systems inform us of what we should measure and how. For example, do we measure the effect of climate change in terms of dollars, justice, or the esthetics of a “clean” environment? Do we measure “health” care in terms of gross domestic product or human rights? This suggests that culture does not drive us, but it does shape how we interpret and respond to the world. Note that this does not mean we should assume people are cultural dupes who do what “culture” tells them to do. One early error in cultural studies was to presume that a society had a uniform code of norms and symbols. However, partly inspired by Marxist research, sociologists discovered that culture can be multivocal. First, different social groups or contexts might have different sets of norms and meanings—for example, differences in

742

Power and Culture

the meaning of “nation” across different countries (France vs. the United States) or of good food and art across different classes. Furthermore, the same symbols can have multiple meanings: one such case is money itself, whereby the simple dollar can be an unfettered means of exchange (the usual meaning in economics) in one context and a form of value limited to particular ends (e.g., “pin money” set aside for special uses in the home). Finally, culture can be contested, as different groups argue over cultural meanings and their appropriateness: for example, the nature of ` a woman’s body vis-a-vis a fetus. This is particularly true when power and culture become intertwined. One common way to study culture is to observe carefully what people do and say, and in what contexts—and also what people do not say or do in those contexts. Opinion surveys can get at general norms and beliefs, but whether these really matter—whether these meanings are embodied in decisions and practices—is not clear form survey data alone. An ethnographic or anthropological approach to culture focuses on how people respond to particular contexts: what are the goals and challenges that orient their actions, what kinds of responses do they take, and how do they explain or justify these actions? Historical scholarship also looks for the categories and arguments people use to describe, judge, or justify actions; language is then compared across contexts to see how specific cultures are operating. Taking context into account is crucial, as actors might be forced to take particular actions (which is power in action, not necessarily culture)—that is, power and culture might be intertwined.

Power and Culture, Together Some important scholarship sees power and culture as inextricably intertwined, as hinted at in the previous section. Culture shapes our conceptions of what is normal and legitimate, making power relations seem inevitable and natural. Power relations, in turn, shape what meanings are available. How power and culture interact is more complicated. In its simplest form, relations of power shape what makes it into public discourse. For

example, media outlets might produce a general line that their owners want, or media outlets relying on advertising income might be hesitant to criticize existing economic and power relations. Americans don’t speak much about “class” because political and economic elites have closed down discussion of class, sometimes violently (as in the first half of the 20th century). The example of dehumanization mentioned earlier is another form of the power–culture intersection: the use of categories of “unhuman” to justify the use of repression, which in turn reduces those targeted to states of powerless and poverty such that they might seem objectively inferior. Furthermore, culture can be used to legitimate relations of power and turn them into authority. An extreme version of this is propaganda, in which a regime propagates one interpretation of politics, history, and society to the exclusion of other interpretations; citizens either accept the propaganda as truth or have no readily available alternative categories and information to form a coherent competing worldview. More subtly, professionals have used the support of the state and other actors to appear to have the keys to truth for their particular field (e.g., medicine, law, dentistry), so average people either accept their authority (and then continue to accept their definitions of normality) or feel they are powerless to dispute professionals’ claims and judgments. In this way, authority and culture reproduce one another. This leads to an important conclusion from several decades of scholarship: culture can hide power through meanings of “normality.” For example, what it means to be a “healthy” man or woman or teenager is really a construction of power that makes alternative forms of “health” abnormal and thus subject to control and “cure.” Those wielding power might not think they are doing so: Doctors and dentists think they are keeping people healthy, but they are also imposing a view of “healthy.” This understanding of the power-culture relationship provides a critical lens that can hold professionals to account: For example, to make sure they do not repeat earlier medical claims about the natural inferiority of people of different “races,” which itself is a social construct.

Power and Powerlessness

Power, Culture, and Agency One danger is reducing actions and structures to power and culture, depriving people of decision-making agency (and making leadership studies useless). If power and culture are everywhere and shape all action, then do they explain anything? And what happens to people in the process? One way out of this conundrum is to understand that agency—the capacity to define our own personal values and interests and then to act on them—varies by social position, but that all people have some degree of agency. People with access to material and discursive resources—who are less dependent on others for money and information—have more capacity to develop and follow through on their own initiatives. Those with fewer resources have a greater struggle at least acting on their own ideas about a normal social world. This means that studies of power and culture should not assume people are powerless dupes. Instead, the focus should be on fields of power and culture by tracing out what people perceive, need, want, and believe, and then linking these to their social positions. Jeffrey K. Hass See also Effects of Power; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. New York, NY: Doubleday. Bourdieu, P. (1998). The state nobility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. Birth of the prison. New York, NY: Pantheon. Gaventa, J. (1982). Power and powerlessness. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hass, J. K. (2011). Power, culture, and economic change in Russia, 1988–2008. New York, NY: Routledge. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). London: Red Globe Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wuthnow, R. (1987). Meaning and moral order. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

POWER

AND

743

POWERLESSNESS

Concepts of power and powerlessness have long been contested, both in academic debates and in lived social and political experience. Although there is little agreement, the intersection of diverse perspectives from theory and practice provide essential insights for leadership. This entry first compares three broad views of power from recent Western social and political thought: power as agency, as structured, and as multidimensional. Examples are then given of related practical frameworks used for context analysis and strategy development by civic and political leaders and organizations. Finally, implications of these academic and applied perspectives for qualities and attributes of powersensitive leadership are explored.

What Is Power? Efforts to make sense of power in society, politics, and leadership have challenged philosophers worldwide for centuries, if not millennia. Today, western political science considers the concept of power “essentially contested” as it eludes any objective or agreed-upon definition. Yet interest in power and powerlessness is alive and well, not only across academic disciplines but in fields of practice from social activism to politics, public administration, management, and organizational development. The theoretical debates about power, together with lessons from practical experience of navigating and shifting power relations, offer vital insights for leadership studies. This brief review of evolving concepts of power and powerlessness, and their implications for leadership, provides an outline of this rich terrain and a starting point for further inquiry. Power as Agency

Power and the lack of it are often conceived, both in political thought and in everyday experience, as a matter of agency. Power is understood as the ability of individuals or groups to act of their own free will without being coerced or

744

Power and Powerlessness

dominated by others. The ability to coerce and dominate is also a kind of power as agency, and by corollary, to be coerced or subordinated is to be powerless. Domination is achieved through the exercise of persuasion, force or violence, or simply by the potential to exercise them: armies and security forces don’t always have to act to secure a population’s compliance. However, the use or threat of violence is not the only or even the principal form by which consent to be ruled is secured. People agree to be governed when they recognize the legitimacy of a leader or group and when they participate in the institutions by which leaders are selected or removed. Securing this consent is also a form of power but is defined more precisely as authority. Yet whether consent to be ruled is always an expression of free will—or has been obtained through the manipulation or socialization of beliefs—is a major point of disagreement in debates about power. Liberal democratic ideals, for example, pose citizens as individual agents who are free to inform themselves, create alliances, participate politically, express their opinions, elect and remove leaders, and hold government to account. Neoliberal thinkers go further to affirm a natural interdependence between political and economic markets, where pluralist democracy and laissez-faire capitalism are both optimized by rational choice. Political outcomes are pluralistic aggregations of individual self-interest. Power in this view is zero-sum, a finite resource divided among winners and losers. Political economy analysis (PEA) builds on these assumptions to identify and predict patterns of conflict and cooperation, as actors will create and disrupt alliances according to their interests, and the accepted norms of their institutions. Yet questions about how people come to perceive and articulate their interests in the first place, and how institutions and social norms are established or change over time, open the door to concepts of power that look beyond agency and rational choice. Power as Structured

Social theorists of power, such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, are concerned less with agency and more with the ways in which values, norms, beliefs, and behavior are socialized and

internalized, creating certain limits to what actors—whether they are dominant or subordinate—consider acceptable or possible. Advocates of power as structured (or poststructural) don’t discount the role of agency but consider agents as less than free to choose, and as constrained or enabled by pervasive social norms and beliefs. The scope for altering power relations hinges on longer-term processes of social change and, for agents of change, calls for strategies that can expose and transform normative social dispositions. Focusing on dominant values, discourses, and narratives, it is argued, will shift power relations more profoundly than episodic struggles of domination and resistance between agents. Hierarchies will otherwise tend naturally to reassert themselves, as illustrated famously in George Orwell’s 1945 parable/novel Animal Farm. Prominent examples of structured power are patriarchy, racism, homophobia, nationalism, ageism, and other identity-based constructs and hierarchies. Powerlessness, in this view, is experienced when people are socialized or habituated into accepting a subordinate status or illegitimate leadership—and even if they consciously reject this order, still being constrained by prevailing values, beliefs, and behavior. Power structures tend to be resilient and self-reproducing and are experienced and actively asserted as the natural order of things. This is not to suggest that all socialized structure is bad, or even that power itself is bad, as without either of them society would not function for lack of any collective institutional fabric or rules. An egalitarian society also requires normative structures. Yet structural power relations are not purely deterministic or void of any scope for agency: Values and beliefs are in constant flux and are ever contested or retrenched as societies change. Each moment offers agents possibilities to either reject normalized inequalities (albeit constrained by the threat of consequences) or to conform with discriminatory beliefs. Recognition of this interplay between agency and structure has generated interest in multidimensional concepts of power. Multidimensional Power

Fundamental, even ontological disagreements between those who understand power as agency

Power and Powerlessness

and those who understand it as structured have led to a somewhat binary scholarship divided along disciplinary lines. Nonetheless, theorists and practitioners alike have found it useful to bridge the two perspectives by recognizing agency and structure as iterative processes, and power as multidimensional. Steven Lukes, in his 1974 book, Power: A Radical View, distinguished between three “dimensions” of power: contests over who prevails in observable decision-making (the first dimension); power mobilized behind the scenes by interest groups (the second dimension); and the manipulation of perceived interests such that people willingly consent to domination (the third dimension). Resonating with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, in the third dimension some conflicts and decisions never need to arise. The assumptions that citizens willingly consent to authority, and that rational choice will yield pluralist outcomes, come into question. Following Lukes, much discussion has ensued among social and political theorists about to what extent beliefs are willfully manipulated by powerful interests, and to what extent they are socialized and embodied by all actors, for example through what Judith Butler calls performative processes of gender, and Clarissa Hayward calls networks of social boundaries. Mark Haugaard, building on Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, divides the third dimension in two: The active manipulation of beliefs and consent by powerful actors on the one hand (through education, the media, religion, propaganda, etc.) and life-long internalized processes of social conditioning and habituation on the other hand (suggested as a fourth dimension). In short, the multidimensional view recognizes the roles of both agency and structure, and their continuous interplay, where socialized norms are instilled through embodied and habituated behavior and beliefs, as well as through the willful propagation of dominant ideology and narratives. Beyond academia, the experiences of social and political practitioners, activists, and leaders have drawn from and contributed to multidimensional perspectives on power. Making sense of power as agency, structure, and their dynamic interaction opens up possibilities for the deployment of strategic and transformative interventions for change, even while recognizing the limitations of episodic

745

struggles and the resilience of structures. Practical power analysis frameworks have been developed by leaders and thinkers from feminist, racial justice, labor rights, sexual rights, environmental, and other movements to create power-aware approaches to social and political leadership. Conservative forces have also adopted change strategies that reflect a multidimensional grasp of power, for example, in mobilizing populist narratives, building identitarian followings and discrediting other values and worldviews.

Power and Leadership A purely agent-centric view suggests approaches to leadership based on mastering control through game theory and methods of coercion or domination. A structure-centric view implies either manipulating beliefs and manufacturing consent or surrendering to paralysis in the face of socialized norms. Multidimensional views of power, on the other hand, offer diverse frameworks and practices for understanding, navigating, and influencing a spectrum of power dynamics. Power-aware leadership shifts the focus from contestation between dominant and subordinate actors alone, or the power of deterministic structures alone, to processes of change that require shared leadership and collective strategies that respond to the dynamic interplay of agency and structure. A number of power frameworks have been developed for this purpose by practitioners, activists, and engaged academics, in dialogue with theory, to support multidimensional approaches to analysis and strategy in processes of social and political change.

Navigating and Transforming Power Lukes’s three dimensions of power has been widely applied and adapted by activists and academics, notably in John Gaventa’s 1982 study of Power and Powerlessness in Appalachian mining communities, further developed in his power cube framework for navigating power in citizen–state engagement, and by Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller in their 2001 citizen action guide A New Weave of Power. These frameworks distinguish three “faces” of power: visible (formal and

746

Power and Powerlessness

observable decision-making), hidden (setting the agenda behind the scenes), and invisible (shaping dominant norms and beliefs). The power cube offers two further dimensions: spaces (closed, invited and claimed); and levels (local, national, global) to identify power dynamics at the intersections of these various facets and to guide strategic responses. Applications of multidimensional power like these, and others, address agency by identifying actors and their interests—whether in formal, observable arenas (visible power) or in informal channels of influence (hidden power), or even through illegal and corrupt modes of coopting power (shadow power, sometimes distinguished as a more insidious version of hidden power). At the same time, the faces of power recognize and address structure by exposing the power of values and beliefs (invisible power)—whether unwittingly socialized and reproduced, or willfully manipulated through dominant narratives. The systemic relationships between these faces of power are also explored, such as how visible decision-making is shaped by less hidden and shadow power dynamics, and how all of these are shaped by norms and beliefs. From the perspective of civil society and social movement leadership, a further framework of transformative power is offered by feminist power analysts, expanding on notions of agency (e.g., power to and power over) found in political science. A recent iteration by the consulting firm Just Associates distinguishes four forms of agency that are involved in efforts to resist and transform power over. These are power to (the ability to act), power within (dignity and self-esteem), power with (collective understanding and action), and power for (the imagination and articulation of a social vision). In civic movement-building activities, these forms of power are proactively developed through popular education, organizing, and leadership and are exercised in direct relationship to the faces of power. For example, alternative values and narratives that contrast with dominant ideologies may be enacted through building power within and articulating power for as ways of contesting invisible power. The role of affirming multiple identities and their intersectionality as sources of power is often included in efforts to build transformative power and to counter identity-based discrimination and exclusion.

Power-Sensitive Leadership For leadership, whether in public service, politics, or civil society, these multidimensional lenses offer a nuanced approach to power that can be used for example to understand how the three faces are enabling or constraining democratic participation, and to identify what qualities of leadership may be called for to redress exclusionary or coercive power dynamics. To address both agency and structure, leaders need to balance agency-centered notions of political leadership with capacities to engage in structural transformation, both personal and societal. In the more visible domains of power, leaders need skills and awareness to engage in the politics of cooperation, opposition, alliancebuilding and agenda-setting. In the less visible domains, leaders need to be able to navigate and influence values and beliefs. Power-sensitive leadership implies the cultivation of various qualities and capacities. One is critical reflective practice, or the ability to understand how one’s personal experience, leadership, and institutional context are embedded in complex power dynamics, and to develop the awareness and capacity to shift one’s practice of leadership accordingly. Another is the ability to create shared leadership and to build collective understanding and agency around shared visions, objectives, and strategies. These two qualities in turn rely on fluency in the arena of shifting and generating social norms, ideas, beliefs, and narratives, both in order to understand how they are socialized and internalized and to be able to articulate, nurture and embody strategies of narrative change. Jethro Pettit See also Collective Action and Leadership; Collective Leadership, Empowerment, Feminism; Foucault and Postmodernism; Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Leadership; Power: Leaders’ Resources and Followers Reactions; Shared Leadership

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1980). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(1), 519–531.

Presidential Leadership Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and punish: The birth of a prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Gaventa, J. (1982). Power and powerlessness: Quiescence and rebellion in an Appalachian valley. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gramsci, A. (2011). The prison notebooks. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Haugaard, M. (2020). The four dimensions of power: Understanding domination, empowerment and democracy. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Hayward, C. R. (2000). De-facing power. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lukes, S. (1974, 2005). Power: A radical view. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Orwell, G. (1945). Animal farm. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. VeneKlasen, L., & Miller, V. (2002). A new weave of power, people and politics: The action guide for advocacy and citizen participation. Warwickshire: Practical Action.

PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP The president of the United States is one of the most powerful leaders on this planet. This entry considers both the qualities that are associated with ethical and effective presidential leadership and the way people judge past presidents. One datum suggests that judgments of “moral authority” are central to overall rankings of presidential greatness by both historians and the general public. The 2021 C-SPAN rankings of presidents showed that the presidents ranking highest of the moral authority received the top ratings overall. Those scoring highest on that dimension are Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, and Barack Obama, in that order. But his entry shows that many qualities are associated with good presidential leadership. Four very different approaches to this special species of leadership are considered here.

Barber’s Analysis of Presidential Character Political scientist James David Barber theorized that the key to successful presidential leadership

747

was the ability rooted in high self-esteem or self-confidence to make decisions that were not overly influenced by feelings, rational or irrational. Barber famously wrote that every story of presidential decision making is a story of an outer man thinking and an inner man feeling. He developed that idea by distinguishing four distinct categories of “character” depending on whether a president, or any leader for that matter, is Active or Passive in their approach to work, and also whether they are Positive or Negative in their feelings about themselves and their work. The Active Positive presidents work hard and enjoy what they are doing. They are flexible in their approaches to getting things done and do not become compulsively rigid in their endeavors, like Active Negatives, or too compliant in responding to advice from members of their administration or others, like Passive Positives. Unlike the PassiveNegatives, Active-Positives don’t resent the duties that they feel compelled to carry out. In Barber’s assessment, Franklin Roosevelt showed the best qualities of Active Positive presidential leadership. He worked actively, responded flexibly, engaged advisers almost joyfully, and gained the support of the Congress and the public in combating the Great Depression and guiding the nation into and through the Second World War. His manner of leading was rooted in his firmly grounded sense of self. Active Negative presidents such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump were consumed by anger and the compulsive pursuit of ultimately selfdestructive personal and political agenda. The passive presidents either give in too easily to please others, or simply avoid acting as much as possible.

Fred Greenstein’s Six Presidential Qualities Another political scientist, Fred Greenstein, developed an approach to presidential leadership that both critiques and builds on Barber’s work. Greenstein does not try to categorize presidents into one of four groups. Rather, he suggests that the presidents within any one of Barber’s groups are actually quite different, one from the other. His own approach is to consider how each president stands on each of six dimensions of leadership.

748

Presidential Leadership

The first quality is public communication. What are the various ways that presidents communicate to the public? He cites Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as the most effective communicators, FDR through radio and Kennedy and Reagan through television. Though he did not evaluate Barack Obama’s presidency in any detail, he also listed Obama as an exceptional orator. Greenstein also considered George Washington to be a very effective public communicator, but not through words so much as action, especially touring the country to be seen by the public. The show was impressive and won Washington political capital. Second, Greenstein considers organizational capacity. Did the president choose good advisers and department heads, and organize their input in a way that thoroughly vetted various decision alternatives? He cites Dwight Eisenhower as an exemplary leader in this respect. He selected talented advisers and used them effectively as a group to devise and implement policies. Next is political skill, the ability to work with members of Congress and also people in one’s own administration. Greenstein cites Lyndon Johnson as excelling on this dimension, while Jimmy Carter floundered. Fourth is vision. There are two aspects of this quality. One is the president’s overall vision for the nation. When Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861, his vision was the preservation of the Union. In little more than a year it was expanded to include the abolition of slavery. The other aspect of this dimension is policy vision, or the tactics required to achieve the strategic vision. For Lincoln, coming up with just the right policies to achieve his ends was more difficult than being firm about the final goal. The last two dimensions refer to elements of a president’s personality and abilities. The first of these is cognitive style. How do presidents obtain and process information? Do they fully understand the implications of what they are dealing with? John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama were exceptionally intelligent, well-informed presidents with the capacity to think clearly and thoroughly. It is apparent that both organizational capacity and cognitive style are important in effective decision making.

The final quality Greenstein considers is emotional intelligence, referring to a president’s ability to control and direct their emotions. This dimension overlaps with Barber’s emphasis on presidential character and whether presidents have enough self-confidence to think and plan without their emotional demons diverting them into selfdefeating policies and decisions. This quality is something of a cautionary one. Having emotional intelligence, at least as Greenstein defines it, may not make for effective leadership, but the lack of emotional intelligence can lead presidents to disaster. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump let their fears and resentments misdirect their presidencies. Students of the presidency have discussed the relative importance of these qualities. One published ranking by Meena Bose orders them this way: vision, political skill, organizational capacity, public communication, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Other studies put public communication much higher, pointing to the importance of the rhetoric and charisma of FDR, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan in rallying support for their actions and decisions. No matter the relative importance of these six qualities, it is clear that they interact and work together. Having a vision supports public communication, and good organization enhances political effectiveness. Furthermore, it seems essential to remember that lack of emotional control can lead to self-defeating pursuits.

Skowronek: The Politics Presidents Make Both Barber and Greenstein focus on presidents’ personal qualities and abilities. Barber gives some attention to external factors such as what he terms the “climate of expectations,” that is, whether people are looking for action, legitimacy and morality, or reassurance. An alternative approach by Stephen Skowronek explains presidential leadership almost entirely in terms of external factors, though presidents’ personalities and temperaments may matter as well (see the entry on Reconstructive Presidents, this encyclopedia). Skowronek classifies presidencies (not presidents) on two dimensions. One is whether the president is

Presidential Leadership

affiliated with or opposed to the dominant “political regime” of the day. For example, after Franklin Roosevelt established the liberal regime of the New Deal, the next several presidents were affiliated with or opposed to that prevailing approach to government. Harry Truman, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter were affiliated with FDR’s general approach, an approach that dominated politics until it was completely supplanted by Ronald Reagan’s conservative regime. On the other hand, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were opposed to New Deal policies. The other dimension of presidencies in this approach is whether the existing regime or way of doing things in government is resilient or vulnerable. Following Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the New Deal approach to government was resilient through much of Lyndon Johnson’s administration but it had exhausted its hold on American politics by the time Jimmy Carter took office. By then it was vulnerable. Crossing the two dimensions yields four different kinds of presidencies. First, there are those such FDR’s and Ronald Reagan’s, which were opposed to a vulnerable regime. Skowronek calls these administrations reconstructive. The new presidents’ opposition to an outmoded or discredited way of governing allows them to institute a completely different set of politics with entirely different assumptions about the proper role of government. Second, there are administrations opposed to a resilient regime. Skowronek calls these preemptive presidencies. They often incorporate elements of the resilient regime into their presidencies, though they are fundamentally opposed to that regime. Those include Eisenhower’s eight years in office and Bill Clinton’s as well. Third, some presidents, such as Harry Truman and JFK, are affiliated with a resilient regime. These presidents make the politics of articulation. They try to refine the basic political approach. Finally, there are presidents affiliated with a vulnerable regime, such as Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover. These presidents are said to make the politics of disjunction. It is difficult for them to accomplish much of anything by acting in accord with a way of doing political business which has lost its legitimacy.

749

The preemptive presidents, those who are opposed to a resilient regime, may be the most interesting. One might ask if the regime is resilient, how are they elected in the first place? Also, once elected, how do they fare in office? The examples of Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton help answer the first question. Both had unusual personal qualities, and arguably weak opponents in 1952 and 1992 respectively. Eisenhower (“I Like Ike” was a campaign slogan) was enormously popular as the leader of Allied forces in Europe during World War II. He also had a likable persona. He would have been tough to beat. Bill Clinton was an unusually gifted politician, especially in debates, and George H. W. Bush was attacked within his own Republican Party for departures from what was seen as Reagan orthodoxy. He was 68 years old in 1992 and ran a tired campaign compared to the one he ran in 1988. In short, personal qualities and circumstances can lead to preemptives being elected. However, their fate as presidents is often difficult. The preemptives tend to depart from their own parties’ traditional way of policy making and borrow from the resilient regime. This is often seen as treachery by the former and as unfair poaching by the latter. They end up without much political support anywhere. Preemptive presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton lost so much political support that they were impeached. Eisenhower’s historical popularity and his support for many popular New Deal–like policies, for example infrastructure in the case of the Interstate Highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway, kept him above the political fray more than other the three. The overall implication of Skowronek’s analysis is that situational contingencies and timing matter more than personal qualities in presidential effectiveness. This is a controversial stand, but it has been very helpful in understanding what works well or poorly over time.

Simonton: Leader Schemas and Ratings of Presidential Greatness Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has done dozens of studies on perceptions of presidential greatness. His work attempts to identify what

750

Pride and the Psychology of Prestige

elements lead scholars to rank presidents highly, particularly to see them as “great.” His research identifies only one personal quality consistently associated with perceptions of greatness, namely, intellectual brilliance. However, several nonpersonal factors contribute to such ratings. Presidents who held office for a long period of time, who were war heroes, and presidents who were assassinated are rated highly. Presidents who had a scandal on their watch tend to be rated negatively. Simonton’s overall analysis of the data from his research is that the raters themselves have an unconscious mental template or schema for a great leader and that small amounts of highly memorable, salient information lead them to see a president as fitting the overall schema more or less. People might think, for example, that a president who was in office for a long period (in the case of FDR) must have been good. Similarly, one who had scandal associated with his administration would be thought not to fit the leader template. More important, Simonton argues that our schema for a good leader is quite simple. We judge, again on the basis of small amounts of memorable information, whether a president is strong, active, and good. He further speculates that this image of the strong, active, and good leader is essentially an unconscious archetype that has been shared across human history and across cultures. A man who is a war hero, for example, is seen as having all three of those qualities. Since assassins are bad people, the presidents they murder must in contrast be good. These speculations have to be considered as possibilities rather than proven facts. But it is important to note that Simonton’s theory does account for the data obtained from his studies. People use schemas to think about people, groups, and events, and perceive them as fitting or not fitting—or various degrees, various schemas. Thinking about presidents might be no different.

Conclusion The accounts of presidential leadership presented here suggest that both personal and situational factors are important for success. This conclusion is entirely consistent with much of the theory and research on leadership in general. The specific

elements suggested by these analyses are useful in thinking about leadership at the more general level. George R. Goethals See also Congressional Leadership; Contingency Theories; Political Leadership; Reconstructive Presidents; Rhetoric and Persuasion

Further Readings Barber, J. D. (1992). The presidential character: Predicting performance in the White House. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bose, M. (2006). What makes a great president? Analysis of leadership qualities in Fred I. Greenstein’s the presidential difference. In L. Berman (Ed.), The art of political leadership (pp. 17–44). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Greenstein, F. I. (2009). The presidential difference: Leadership style from FDR to Barack Obama. (3rd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greenstein, F. I. (2009). Inventing the job of president: Leadership style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simonton, D. K. (1987). Why presidents succeed: A political psychology of leadership. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Skowronek, S. (1997). The politics presidents make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

PRIDE AND PRESTIGE

THE

PSYCHOLOGY

OF

Imagine the following scenarios: Olympic medalists with arms extended victoriously to the sky; a parent beaming as they watch their child flawlessly execute their first musical performance; an employee enthusiastically shaking hands with their peers after being elected to a leadership position. In the English lexicon, the word that could best describe the uniquely satisfying emotional experience likely shared by the individuals across these situations is probably pride. People experiencing this emotion can be expected to feel positively

Pride and the Psychology of Prestige

about the event and themselves in that moment, be motivated to continue behaviors that led to the situation, and even want others to know about the event. But why do experiences of pride tend to look and feel the way they do? Why do only certain events trigger this emotional experience? Why does the emotional experience exist at all? In what follows, we will address these questions using the theoretical framework of evolutionary psychology—leading to the conclusion that the emotional experience labeled “pride” is the product of a panhuman psychological adaptation that evolved to facilitate status-attainment within social hierarchies.

Evolutionary Psychology and Psychological Adaptations As the name implies, evolutionary psychology uses insights from the theory of evolution by natural selection to understand human psychology. Evolution by natural selection occurs in populations of self-replicating agents (e.g., organisms) if their phenotypic characteristics, such as taste preferences, body size, coloring, beak shape, or sexual inclinations, are: (1) variable, such that there are differences between individuals in the population; (2) heritable, such that the differences in the traits can be probabilistically passed down from parent to offspring; and (3) associated with differential reproductive success, such that some variants of traits contribute to greater numbers of reproducing offspring relative to others. Given these three ingredients, populations of self-replicators will change over generations such that the phenotypic characteristics that on average contribute to greater numbers of surviving offspring—and the genes associated with building them—will tend to become more common within the population. When iterated over long periods of time, the simple but powerful process of natural selection causes populations of organisms (e.g., species) to accrue inheritable traits that enhanced—and lose traits that impeded—survival and reproduction in the environments in which their ancestors lived. The majority of phenotypic traits possessed by organisms should therefore exist because they maximized survival and reproduction of previous

751

generations, relative to alternative variants. The phenotypic traits that become common within a population because they helped to solve problems and increase differential survival and reproductive success across previous generations are called adaptations. The suite of adaptations within a species will generally reflect the numerous and specific sets of subtasks that the prior generations had to carry out in order to survive and reproduce. Examples of these subtasks—which are often called adaptive problems—include extracting oxygen from the environment, defending territory, finding food, avoiding becoming food, avoiding toxins and environmental hazards, finding a mate and mating, raising offspring and many more. Evolutionary psychologists aim to use the understanding of natural selection and adaptation to discover and understand human psychological adaptations. The first step in doing so typically involves identifying an adaptative problem that our ancestors likely faced throughout our evolutionary history. Alternatively, researchers may start with a psychological phenomenon they want to study and then attempt to reverse engineer the phenomenon by developing hypotheses about potential adaptive problems to which it may be related. In either case, after identifying a potential adaptive problem, good evolutionary psychology involves performing a task analysis to decompose the problem into subtasks and identify what psychological machinery would be necessary to effectively solve them. Ideally, this process should generate novel predictions about the computational structure of our psychology that can be tested with new data to evaluate the likelihood of the hypothesized adaptive value of the psychological mechanism. An evolutionary psychological theory of emotions posits that emotions are adaptations that coordinate a range of cognitive and physiological processes within organisms in response to specific adaptive problems. Under this perspective, the features of many emotions are expected to have been designed through the iterative tinkering processes of natural selection so that their features would on average produce behavior that helps to solve adaptive problems, and ultimately, increase evolutionary fitness. Because fitness-enhancing

752

Pride and the Psychology of Prestige

behavior differs depending on the adaptive problem being faced, different emotions evolved in response to different adaptive challenges. One set of adaptive challenge that likely recurred throughout much of our evolutionary history includes navigating status hierarchies, attaining status, and leveraging that status to obtain fitness-linked benefits. Pride is a clear candidate for an emotion that evolved to solve such challenges. To understand why, it is helpful to first consider whether hierarchies impact organisms’ evolutionary fitness and the specific adaptive problems that hierarchies pose. Evolutionary Significance of Status

Status hierarchies have clear effects on organisms’ evolutionary fitness. Rank within a hierarchy strongly determines an organism’s access to fitness-relevant resources. Across species, higher rank within a hierarchy is associated with priority access to territory, shelter, food, water, and mates; low rank is associated with more restricted and contested access to such resources. As a result, higher rank individuals tend to be better able to survive and reproduce. In human groups, status hierarchies are typically less steep than in other primate social primates. But higher status men and women tend still tend to fare better on various indices of evolutionary fitness, such as mate quality, number of mates, number of offspring, and offspring health. Because hierarchies were likely a recurrent and pervasive feature of groups throughout human evolution and rank within the hierarchy impacted individuals’ evolutionary fitness, humans should possess psychological adaptations that facilitate navigating hierarchies and the problems they pose. In order to predict what these tools—the design features of emotions—might be, it is necessary to understand how humans tend to compete and strive for status. The Logic of Status Allocation in Human Groups

In many nonhuman social groups, hierarchical rank is largely determined by force. Individuals who are better able to obtain and defend resources tend to be deferred to by those less able to do so.

The result is a relatively stable hierarchical structure that reflects individual differences in dominance—the ability to inflict costs on others. Even low rank can ultimately be fitness-beneficial to individuals within the hierarchy because they generally gain the same access to resources that they would otherwise gain from repeated aggressive encounters, without the associated costs (e.g., injury, death). Status in human groups, however, is somewhat different. Although humans likely possess many psychological adaptations attuned to cost infliction potential, humans also possess many ancient psychological and cultural adaptations that make attaining and maintaining rank through dominance in human groups more challenging than it tends to be in nonhuman primates. For one, language allows individuals in human groups to coordinate their actions with relative ease to overpower overly aggressive and exploitative individuals. Additionally, humans developed many tools for hunting and warfare, such as spears and bows, that effectively shrink individual differences in the ability to inflict cost or damage. The result is that status based on a purely aggressive strategy is fraught with difficulties and dangers that make it a relatively unstable and generally less effective route to status. Within human hierarchies, a more stable method of obtaining higher social rank within one’s group is by generating benefits for others—obtaining prestige. Humans tend to willingly allocate status toward people who are willing and able to generate benefits. There are likely benefits to doing so—both for the group members conferring status and the individual receiving it. For example, if an individual has particular abilities that enable them to generate benefits for others in the community (e.g., leadership, tool making, hunting), allocating status toward them may incentivize their continued generation of the beneficial service. If so, ceding some resources or influence to the high-status person is a collectively borne cost that may be vastly outweighed by their group-beneficial contributions. Likewise, by allocating status to individuals who can effectively generate benefits for the group by inflicting costs on within-group cheaters or out-group threats, group members may increase the likelihood that

Pride and the Psychology of Prestige

such benefits will continue in the future. Status allocation within human groups appears to be largely mutually beneficial processes whereby individuals gain net benefits by allocating status to benefit-generating group members. Those who are allocated status receive benefits in the form of greater relative access to resources, influence over group outcomes, and boost in mate value, which can be translated into fitness.

Features of Pride and the Adaptive Problems of Status Pursuit There are several subtasks that individuals need to solve in order to pursue and attain status. First, individuals must identify the characteristics and skills that can increase one’s status—the characteristics that will increase others’ perceptions of their willingness or ability to generate benefits. Second, individuals must be motivated to acquire status-relevant skills that they do not already possess. Third, individuals must effectively broadcast the possession of skills and characteristics that are prestige-worthy so that others upregulate their perception of the individual’s social value and are therefore more likely to allocate status to them. Fourth, in order to fully reap the benefits of status gains, the individual must also recognize such gains and update their own estimates of the extent to which they are entitled to priority access to resources and influence within their community. An adaptation that evolved in response to these adaptive challenges should effectively facilitate solving them. Evidence suggests that the features of pride aid are well-designed to solve these problems. Pride tracks status. Several cross-cultural studies show that the amount of pride people around the world expect to feel if they were to possess different characteristics or have an event happen to them is very closely related to the impact that those same characteristics and events would have on their status and social value in the eyes of their peers. Thus, pride appears to be able to solve the problem of identifying acts, skills, and events that would increase one’s status. Exactly how internal estimates of potential status impacts become stored within the mind and referenced by pride remains an important avenue for future research.

753

Pride motivates status pursuit. The actual experience of pride, as well as the expectation of feeling pride in the future, is associated with the motivation to work toward the pride-inducing event or invest further in the skill, as well as pursuing new challenges. This suggests that the feelings associated with pride experiences could serve as an intrinsically rewarding motivational component of status pursuit and incentivize behaviors that are likely to increase one’s status, such as practicing a socially valued skill or accentuating a valued characteristic. Pride broadcasts status gains. When people feel pride, they often assume a specific postural display: standing straight with their chest out and chin tilted upwards, sometimes with their arms extended upwards in a “V” shape. This display, or minor variations of it, is made by cultures around the world, and even by congenially blind individuals, suggesting that is does not have to be socially learned. Additionally, the pride display is reliably recognized early in development and across cultures. People who witness others making the pride display tend to automatically and subconsciously infer that the person is high status, suggesting the pride display works as a signal of status that can recalibrate others’ perceptions. Moreover, feeling pride is associated with wanting to spread information about the pride-inducing event to others. Pride can upregulate self-perceptions of status. Experiences of pride are associated with increases in self-esteem, as well as greater likelihood of expecting better treatment from others. Thus, pride helps individuals manage their relative status in the social world within their own minds. The increased feelings of entitlement that can accompany pride may facilitate leveraging status gains to maximize resource acquisition. Taken together, the evidence to date demonstrates that the design features of pride appear well designed to solve adaptive problems related to status pursuit and attainment. This close functional fit between the adaptive problems of status pursuit and structure of pride suggests that this emotion is an evolved adaptation for navigating status hierarchies. Future research can provide further evidence to support the case that pride is an adaptation. For example, research may focus on establishing the existence of pride homologues

754

Procedural Justice

in nonhuman primates; mapping the genomic architecture behind the mechanisms that produce pride; identifying similarities and differences between the prospective and reactive aspects of pride experiences; and reverse-engineering the processes by which pride helps to tailor behavior to situational contexts. In conclusion, the adaptationist account of pride provides novel empirical predictions about the design features of pride and a compelling explanation why this powerful emotion evolved in the human lineage.

pp. 51–114). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. doi:10. 1016/bs.aesp.2020.04.002 von Rueden, C. R., & Jaeggi, A. V. (2016). Men’s status and reproductive success in 33 nonindustrial societies: Effects of subsistence, marriage system, and reproductive strategy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(39), 10824–10829. doi:10. 1073/pnas.1606800113 Wrangham, R. W. (2021). Targeted conspiratorial killing, human self-domestication and the evolution of groupishness. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 3. doi:10. 1017/ehs.2021.20

Patrick K. Durkee and Aaron L. Lukaszewski See also Collective Action; Dominance and Prestige; Evolution of Leadership; Followership; Power and Powerlessness

Further Readings Durkee, P. K., Lukaszewski, A. W., & Buss, D. M. (2019). Pride and shame: Key components of a culturally universal status management system. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(5), 470–478. doi:10.1016/j. evolhumbehav.2019.06.004 Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. doi: 10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4 Sznycer, D., Al-Shawaf, L., Bereby-Meyer, Y., Curry, O. S., De Smet, D., Ermer, E., . . . Tooby, J. (2017). Crosscultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(8), 1874–1879. doi:10.1073/pnas.1614389114 Sznycer, D., & Cohen, A. S. (2021). How pride works. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 3. doi:10.1017/ehs. 2021.6 Sznycer, D., Xygalatas, D., Alami, S., An, X. F., Ananyeva, K. I., Fukushima, S., . . . Tooby, J. (2018). Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), 8322–8327. doi:10.1073/pnas.1808418115 Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11(4–5), 375–424. doi:10.1016/0162-3095(90)90017-Z Tracy, J. L., Mercadante, E., Witkower, Z., & Cheng, J. T. (2020). The evolution of pride and social hierarchy. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 62,

PROCEDURAL JUSTICE In leadership settings, procedural justice refers to the perception that decision-making procedures and social processes are fair. Perceptions of fair process have been shown to enhance acceptance of authorities, increase obedience to rules, foster perceptions of leaders’ legitimacy, and promote cooperation with group efforts. In the early 1970s, a research group led by John Thibaut and Laurens Walker discovered that decision-making procedures that were seen as fair prompted greater acceptance of decisions even for those who received negative outcomes. Later work showed that perceptions of the fairness of process and procedure often exert an extraordinarily strong influence in determining whether decisions are accepted and obeyed and whether those who make the decisions are seen as trustworthy and legitimate. Procedural fairness in turn depends on such leader behaviors as granting those affected by decisions an opportunity to express their views (called “voice”), giving adequate explanations of procedures and decisions, treating people with dignity and respect, and avoiding the appearance of bias or favoritism. Perceptions of procedural fairness are key elements in a number of theoretical explanations of how leadership works. Allan Lind and Sim Sitkin in their six domains of leadership model include fairness as an important aspect of the leadership domain called “relational leadership.” Their research work

Procedural Justice

has demonstrated that the belief that a leader uses fair process can function as a “leadership heuristic,” a perception that moves potential followers rapidly to accept and obey new leaders in organizations. This occurs because fair treatment helps solve a follower’s dilemma about whether investing efforts and identity in a particular leader is safe for the follower’s long-term interests. Procedural justice is seen as an important antecedent of the trust, which leader–follower exchange (LMX) theory posits to be important for effective leader-follower relationships. Procedural justice is also often linked to transformational leadership theory (because procedural justice promotes trust in transformational leaders) and to ethical leadership models (because procedural justice leads to overall perceptions of justice and because it promotes a climate of fair treatment). Procedural justice also plays a role in identity models of leadership (because procedural justice influences whether followers identify with a potential leader and with the group to which the leader and follower belong). Early research on procedural justice was prompted by work in the 1960s on the perceived fairness of outcomes or payment schemes, exemplified by Stacey Adams’s work on equity and by sociological work on distributive justice. It has become apparent, however, that impact of the perceived fairness of procedures and social process is at least as powerful, and often more powerful, than is that of the perceived fairness of outcomes. The positive effect of perceptions of fair procedures on acceptance of outcomes, trust in authority, obedience to rules, and cooperation within the group is called the “fair process effect.”

Fair Process Effects The fair process effect was first seen in laboratory experiments, such as the findings mentioned earlier showing that in laboratory allocation procedures even those who lose are more likely to accept the outcome if they feel they have experienced fair procedures. Fair process effects have been observed also in a variety of real-world legal, organizational, and societal settings. Studies have shown that citizens are more likely to obey laws when they think governments use fair procedures, litigants are more likely to accept court judgments

755

when they think arbitrators and judges use fair process, and people in organizations are more likely to trust their leaders, identify with their team and company, and show organizational citizenship behavior when they feel procedures and processes are fair. For example, terminated employees, whether laid-off or fired, are less likely to initiate wrongful termination litigation when they feel they were treated with procedural fairness during the termination process. In contrast, the perception that one has been treated unfairly can have a number of quite negative effects. Thus, terminated employees who feel very unfairly treated are not just more likely to sue, they sometimes show a “vendetta effect” that results in litigation behavior that seems objectively unreasonable: People who feel they have experienced very unfair treatment sue even when they see little or no likelihood of winning. There is evidence that incidents of workplace violence are often tied to feelings of unfair process and disrespectful treatment. While fair process effects are common in most organizational settings, there appear to be at least two factors that modify the strength of the effect. Research by Joel Brockner and Batia Wiesenfeld shows that fair process effects are often stronger for those who ultimately receive negative outcomes than for those who ultimately receive positive outcomes. Research by Kees van den Bos and his colleagues shows that personal uncertainty can also prompt people to react more strongly to procedural fairness in their subsequent attitudes and behavior.

Theories of Procedural Justice Tom Tyler and Allan Lind advanced a relational model of authority to explain why the fairness of procedures and social process has such a strong influence on positive or negative reactions to leaders. Building on their earlier group value theory of procedural justice, the relational model suggests that the experience of fair procedures and process is seen as signaling that those involved have positive social standing—good status and inclusion—in the group, team, or society in question. For this reason, even unfavorable outcomes are acceptable if they come from procedures and processes that provide reassurance to the person

756

Procedural Justice

that they remain fully included in the group. Procedural injustice, on the other hand, raises serious questions about whether the person in question will face exclusion or exploitation in the future, and this can prompt disidentification with the team or group and negative behavior toward it. This line of theory links procedural justice phenomena to other social identity phenomena, including social identity theories of leadership, and it explains why so many of the attitudes and behaviors that show fair process effects are related to cooperation with the group and acceptance of its authority structure. The relational model of authority has received empirical support from research in many different national and organizational settings. Later theoretical work by Tyler and Steven Blader (the group engagement model) emphasizes the connections between perceptions of procedural justice, feelings of social identity, and cooperation with group efforts. Theoretical work by Lind and van den Bos (fairness heuristic theory and the uncertainty management model of fairness) has focused attention on the role of fairness judgments in helping people deal with uncertainty about their social and personal situation and in helping them assess the safety of new group relationships. Feelings of being fairly treated by leaders can calm people as they react to novel and unusual situations. All of these lines of theory emphasize the importance of perceptions of fair treatment in allowing people to make decisions about whether to invest their time, effort, and identity in the groups, teams, and organizations to which they belong. Some discussions of procedural justice divide feelings of fair treatment into various subcategories: “pure procedural fairness” (fairness that is built into rules and formal procedures for decision making), “processual fairness” or “interpersonal fairness” (fairness that is experienced in day-to-day interactions between a leader and followers), and “informational fairness” (fairness that results from explanations of how procedures work and how decisions are made). Research studies in organizations sometimes show stronger effects for one subcategory than another, but generally all of these “flavors” of procedural justice are highly correlated, and all have positive

impacts on general feelings of fair treatment. Most of the theorizing in the area focuses on overall perceptions of procedural fairness and views these different types of fairness as really just different antecedents of general perceptions of fair and unfair treatment. Fairness heuristic theory goes even farther, suggesting that people base their own fairness-prompted attitudes and behavior on their overall feelings of fair or unfair treatment. These overall justice judgments can be based on the distributive justice of outcomes as well as on procedural justice experiences.

Factors Promoting Procedural Justice There are at least four factors that promote feelings of fair treatment when they are enacted—and that cause feelings of unfair treatment when they are neglected. These four antecedents of procedural fairness judgments are voice, explanations, dignity and respect, and avoidance of bias. Leaders who give followers voice—who allow the people affected by a decision to express their views and concerns—are likely to be seen as fair and therefore are likely to reap the acceptance, loyalty, and cooperation benefits that go with perceptions of procedural fairness. Voice is the most common manipulation used in experimental studies of procedural justice and its effects, and the provision of voice is often seen as one of the most reliable ways to create feelings of fair process in real-world settings. Leaders who practice active listening (and who do so effectively) are likely instilling a perception of voice and therefore engendering feelings of procedural justice. The voice that is given must be real, however. The leader must really consider and show their consideration of the views expressed. Robert Folger and his colleagues have demonstrated that if voice is used deceitfully, if it is just a façade, followers sometimes show “frustration effects,” which can result in strong negative reactions. Treating followers with dignity and respect and being very careful to avoid any suggestion of bias are also important ways to promote feelings of procedural justice on an everyday basis. One key finding in research on procedural fairness and leadership is that it is the followers’ perception of fairness, not leaders’ own perceptions of how they

Procedural Justice

treat followers, that matters. There is often leader-follower disconnect in feelings of how fairly leaders are treating those they lead. It is not unusual to see small or zero correlations between leaders’ assessments of their own fairness and followers’ perceptions of their leaders’ fairness. This occurs because leaders intend to behave fairly and often base their assessments of their behavior on that intention. Followers often do not share these assessments because they can only see the leaders’ external behavior, not the leaders’ intentions. Attention to actively demonstrating respect and bias avoidance is especially important when there are racial, ethnic, gender, national, or professional divides within a team. In such situations concerns about exclusion and exploitation are sometimes present, and actions that the leader believes to be fair might receive a very different interpretation by followers who are on the other side of the divide. For example, leader behavior that is intended to show familiarity and inclusion can come across as patronizing and alienating because respect is not assumed by followers as it is by the leader. Similarly, decisions that in the leader’s mind have good objective reasons can be seen as biased if those favored by the decisions are more similar to the leader than to the follower making the fairness judgment. Giving adequate explanations about how procedures work and how and why specific decisions are made promote feelings of fair treatment by helping followers feel comfortable with their understanding of the process works and how their leaders think about important issues. Explanations of process and of the reasons for decisions can help avoid the perception of bias—if the explanation is accepted. This means that the leader has to be consistent and conscientious in following their own rules. On one hand, leaders who have been in a team or organization for a long time sometimes forget how confusing processes can be to those who are new, and the lack of explanations can lead to perceptions of unfair treatment that in turn result in disenchantment among new recruits to the team. On the other hand, as noted earlier, leaders who pay special attention to fairness in interactions with new followers can reap a substantial benefit in their influence via the leadership heuristic, the “quick leadership” dynamic,

757

mentioned earlier in the discussion of the six domains of leadership model.

Recent Applications of Procedural Justice Recent work in procedural justice has examined the influence of perceived fair or unfair process in important leadership and authority contexts inside and outside of organizations. Some of these studies look at the workings of procedural justice phenomena in extreme authority and cooperation/conflict situations and thus suggest how powerful procedural justice effects can be in more mundane organizational settings. Tyler and others have demonstrated that citizens’ perceptions of fair process can de-escalate potentially dangerous policecitizen interactions. When police officers deliberately act to provide voice, explanations, respect, and bias-avoidance, police-citizen violence is less likely and obedience is greater. Work on procedural fairness in policing has implications for how leaders should handle conflicts in organizations. Van den Bos has shown that when people feel unfairly treated by authorities, they are more likely to move to extremist views and even to lean toward terrorism. This phenomenon seems similar to the vendetta effect seen with terminated workers. Procedural justice interventions offer promise for lessening the likelihood that people will adopt extremist views and behaviors, suggesting that procedural justice can help people move away from extreme beliefs and behaviors. Similar approaches might work for leaders who need to overcome opposition within their teams. A recent working paper published by the regulatory arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international organization promoting democratic reforms and development, suggests that when governments use fair process to create and administer regulations, people are more likely to accept and obey the rules. An analysis of the effects or efforts to increase the perceived procedural justice of Dutch administrative law hearings showed support for this idea. The positive effect of procedural justice in rule-making and administration points out the importance of fair treatment in organizational change initiatives and in administering organizational policies.

758

Property-Owning Democracy

Finally, there is evidence that medical patients are more likely to follow the advice they receive if physicians and other health care providers make an effort to provide voice, give explanations, and demonstrate respect and bias-avoidance. For organizational leaders, this suggests that including procedural justice antecedents in interactions with followers can increase the leaders’ credibility, as well as enhancing their legitimacy and authority. E. Allan Lind See also Ethical Leadership; Leader-Member Exchange (LMX); Social Identities; Transformational and Transactional Leadership; Trust

Further Readings Brockner, J., & Wiesenfeld, B. M. (1996). An integrative framework for explaining reactions to decisions: Interactive effects of outcomes and procedures. Psychological Bulletin, 120(2), 189–208. doi:10.1037/ 0033-2909.120.2.189 Lind, E. A., & Arndt, C. (2016). Perceived fairness and regulatory policy: A behavioural science perspective on government-citizen interactions. OECD Regulatory Policy Working Papers, No. 6. Paris: OECD Publishing. Lind, E. A., & Sitkin, S. (2015). The six domains of leadership. Columbia, SC: Learning with Leaders. (Reprinted as Lind, E. A., and Sitkin, S. B. (2019). Learn to lead: Be an effective leader. Dubuque, IA: Great River Learning.) Lind, E. A., & Tyler, T. R. (1988). The social psychology of procedural justice. New York, NY: Plenum Press. Tyler, T. R. (2017). Procedural justice and policing: A rush to judgment. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 13, 29–53. doi:10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci110316-113318 Tyler, T. R., & Lind, E. A. (1992). A relational model of authority in groups. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 115–191). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Van den Bos, K. (2018). Why people radicalize: How unfairness judgments are used to fuel radical beliefs, extremist behaviors, and terrorism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Van den Bos, K., & Lind, E. A. (2002). Uncertainty management by means of fairness judgments. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 34, pp. 1–60). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

PROPERTY-OWNING DEMOCRACY “Property-owning democracy” refers to the ideal of an egalitarian market society in which private property is broadly dispersed, such that most if not all citizens have a tangible ownership stake, in the form of real property (housing and land), company stock holdings, or cash assets, and such that there is not a dominant class of property holders as found in capitalist societies. This entry focuses primary attention on John Rawls’s uses of the term in A Theory of Justice (1971) and subsequent work aimed at clarifying and extended his liberal egalitarian theory of justice. That discussion will help clarify the ways in which property-owning democracy is conceptualized as a distinct alternative to both welfare state capitalism and democratic socialism, and the possible advantages of property-owning democracy vis-a-vis these alternative systems. The final section will review recent proposals aimed at enacting a version of property-owning democracy in contemporary times. The term first came into usage among thinkers associated with the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party in the 20th century, before being appropriated by the left heterodox economist James Meade in the mid-20th century. In turn, Rawls, an American political philosopher, borrowed the term from Meade, naming “propertyowning democracy” as one of two candidate economic systems potentially compatible with his conception of social and economic justice. In more recent years, various political theorists and economists have called renewed attention to the concept in an effort to conceptualize possibilities for dramatic reform of capitalist societies and reverse long-term trends of growing inequality of wealth and income. Property-owning democracy is most typically juxtaposed to the welfare state and to state socialism, which accounts for its attractiveness to segments of both the political left and the political right. Whereas it is claimed that the welfare state creates or sustains a segment of the population permanently dependent on economic support from the government, property-owning democracy envisions most or all citizens enjoying the personal

Property-Owning Democracy

and political independence and security associated with property ownership. Likewise, whereas mid-20th-century versions of socialism (including in Western Europe and the United Kingdom) endorsed large-scale public ownership of key enterprises as well as public housing, propertyowning democracy appealed to the ideals of small-scale entrepreneurship and private homeownership.

Rawls and Economic Systems As discussed in this encyclopedia’s entry on Economic Justice, John Rawls argued that a just society would be one that worked to maximize the well-being of the least well-off group in society over the long run within a framework of fair equality of opportunity, equal civil and personal liberties, and political democracy. Rawls termed this ideal “difference principle,” or, more colloquially, “maximin” (maximize the minimum). Many commentators initially presumed that a robust welfare state could satisfactorily fulfill these conditions by instituting sufficient taxes to transfer income from the richest to the poorest citizens so as to satisfy the difference principle. Assuming the general efficiency in most circumstances of market allocations of resources, the argument goes, an efficient solution to the problem of distribution would be to allow market processes to run their course, then use the tax system to “correct” the levels of inequality generated by the market to an acceptable level. In this context, “acceptable” would likely mean assuring the least well-off group has sufficient income to live at a socially acceptable level, but not redistributing inequality away entirely (so as to preserve economic incentives thought to help grow the economic pie over time). In fact, however, Rawls in A Theory of Justice made reference to “property-owning democracy” as his preferred economic system, terming it a “regime in which land and capital are widely though presumably not equally held” (Rawls, 1971, p. 247). Rawls went on to argue that such a regime would prevent a relatively small group from controlling the “preponderance of productive resources” or from concentrating power in ways threatening to democracy itself. Rawls’s

759

broad-brushed picture of property-owning democracy was significantly informed by the work of Meade’s writings. Meade envisioned a society in which ownership of property was distributed widely and the mass of the population, not just a few, earned significant income year-byyear as returns on their capital holdings. In such a society, work (wage labor) itself would become, according to Meade, rather more a matter of personal choice rather than a compulsory activity. Extending this train of thought, in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls provides a brief analysis of five candidate political-economic systems that a society committed to the principles of liberty and equality might consider: command socialism, laissez-faire capitalism, welfare state capitalism, property-owning democracy, and democratic socialism. By command socialism, Rawls means a type of economy organized on the model of the pre-1980s Soviet Union, with a central state organizing and planning the lion’s share of the economy. Rawls argues that such an economy, coupled with a one-party political regime, would violate both liberty and equality systemically by the excessive concentration of political and economic power. Therefore, he rules out this form of socialism as a credible political-economic system for a just society. Conversely, laissez-faire capitalism would also violate the principles of justice according to Rawls. First, unrestricted capitalism tends to generate exceptionally high levels of economic inequality that cannot be plausibly said to realize fair equality of opportunity or to maximize the well-being of the least well off. Second, large concentrations of wealth typically convert into excessive political influence, thereby undermining democracy and the principle of equal liberty. These judgments are not surprising and would be widely (though not universally) shared by most academic political theorists. More startling is Rawls’s judgment that welfare state capitalism, though undoubtedly a significant improvement over laissezfaire capitalism, also systematically violates principles of justice, for the same kinds of reasons—excessive economic and political inequality. That judgment may seem counterintuitive given the commitment of welfare state capitalism to at

760

Property-Owning Democracy

least some measure of redistribution of resources and the provision of public education, public health, income support, and myriad other programs found across the range of welfare states. But Rawls argues that welfare state capitalism promises equality of opportunity but fails to deliver; insufficient redistribution takes place to actually even out life chances across income groups. Indeed, Rawls suggests that welfare state capitalism creates a toxic pattern in which some citizens are marked as “dependent” on others, rather than as genuine civic equals. Extending this analysis, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel note the widespread but mistaken view of many citizens that they have a moral claim to their pre-tax income, which feeds resentment against higher tax rates aimed at helping the least well-off (especially when the least well-off are labeled as undeserving, or racist narratives are in play). Murphy, Nagel, and Rawls all would agree that citizens only have a moral claim to their posttax income, but to the extent ordinary citizens do not fully agree and prefer to keep more of their paycheck, they will tax themselves at rates too low to adequately support the demands of the difference principle. This analysis suggests it would be vastly preferable to achieve rough economic parity across groups and to maximize the position of the least well-off through pre-distribution—that is, through directly providing citizens more equal shares of wealth (inclusive of both financial holdings and human capital) in expectation of generating more equitable outcomes in the market itself, rather than relying primarily on after-the-fact taxation of unequally distributed earned income to realize distributive justice. To use a familiar analogy, pre-distribution aims to assure that all players in a game of Monopoly hold tangible wealth and to prevent the formation of oppressive monopolies, so that all players can continue in the game indefinitely on an equitable footing, rather than allowing one or two players to hold key monopolies and expecting that taxing them more will produce fair and equitable outcomes. This analysis leads to the crucial point: in known forms of capitalism, including capitalist societies with generous welfare states and significant public regulation of economic activity, the ownership of wealth tends to be highly

concentrated. This is true in the United States, where the top 1% hold nearly 40% of all wealth, but it is also true in advanced welfare states like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. This concentration of wealth confers an unequal privilege among a small class of wealth-holders and also gives them disproportionate political voice and influence in ways inconsistent with equal political liberty. The result is that not only is the well-being of the least well-off good not maximized, there is not even a proper deliberative discussion about how best to do so. Instead, the substance of politics in these societies becomes a flawed compromise between the interests of the wealth-holding minority and the broader public interest. The full realization of liberal egalitarian justice, Rawls concluded, would require that the bulk of productive wealth be distributed on a relatively egalitarian basis. Logically, these can be achieved through two principal strategies: public or common ownership of the means of production (the traditional socialist strategy), or through dispersed private ownership in which many or even all citizens have meaningful assets and no group has a predominant share. In practice, both strategies can co-exist. Property-owning democracy is a regime in which the latter (dispersed ownership) strategy predominates; democratic socialism is a regime in which the public or common ownership strategy predominates. Rawls states that both property-owning democracy and democratic socialism could, if properly constructed, realize the two principles of justice. Hence, the decision between them is not to be made in the abstract thought experiment of Rawls’s “original position,” but by democratic legislatures who have fuller knowledge of the specific circumstances, including culture and history, of their respective societies. The choice between these systems should be made on the basis of these particular facts, according to Rawls. The clear implication is that in nations with a robust social democratic tradition, including high levels of unionization and labor organization, and generous welfare provisions, the logical step beyond the flawed compromises of welfare state capitalism would be a transition to democratic socialism proper, with the bulk of productive

Property-Owning Democracy

capital being brought under public control. Conversely, in nations with relatively weak labor traditions and a high emphasis on entrepreneurialism, the property-owning democracy strategy may make the most sense as a political-economic system. Rawls makes clear that this would likely be the cases for nations like the United Kingdom and especially the United States (the lone major industrial nation that historically has not had a socialist major political party).

Policy and Institutional Features of Property-Owning Democracy Clearly a functional property-owning democracy would have two primary features: a method for preventing massive accumulations of wealth in the hands of the very few, and a method for distributing (pre-distributing) meaningful shares of capital to the wider population so that ownership of meaningful property becomes widespread, if not universal. Numerous contemporary economists argue for a comprehensive wealth tax as the most effective means for achieving the former goal. Taxing large fortunes in real times as they accumulate is seen as preferable (and more effective) than relying on inheritance taxation, especially given the many available vehicles for avoiding inheritance taxes. A comprehensive wealth tax would apply annually to all assets of households above a given threshold (such as $50 million). To distribute wealth more broadly, a variety of tools have been proposed. One approach is to give all citizens a direct “capital stake,” so that citizens have significant funds useable for housing, education, or investments. Child trust funds (briefly implemented in the United Kingdom), which provide children a savings fund upon birth, are now widely supported by policy scholars and many political leaders in the United States. The aim of all these proposals is to assure that all citizens have a meaningful stake of capital over the course of their lives. Increased interest in the wealth tax and tools to distribute capital broadly are a promising sign. However, there is reason to doubt that these two strategies, taken alone, would suffice to achieve the egalitarian distribution of wealth envisioned by

761

property-owning democracy. Hence, some versions of property-owning democracy go yet further and argue that to assure ownership of corporate stock is egalitarian, stable, and balanced, socialization of large public companies and distribution of stock shares to citizens will be necessary, following a framework first developed by John Roemer. Alternatively, corporate law could require large public corporations to give majority ownership to employees through employee stock ownership plans (already widespread in the United States). Other scholars further argue that workplace democracy (democratic management of firms, possibly coupled with worker ownership of firms) must be an integral part of property-owning democracy. Respect for one another as equal citizens stands at odds with relationships of domination and exploitation in the workplace and, hence, a Rawlsian just society should seek to organize work in ways that promote equal respect as well as equal benefit from cooperative economic activity. Taken together, these four policy mechanisms— significant taxation of wealth, universal capital stakes, democratization of corporate stock ownership, and workplace democracy—would represent a significant shift away from current models of capitalism. To the extent that these mechanisms do not envision democratic planning of the entire economy or large-scale public ownership, the distinction between property-owning democracy and socialism remains useful and, to a degree, valid. In practice, however, a fully realized propertyowning democracy would almost certainly borrow elements from both democratic socialism and more familiar models of social democracy. Thad Williamson See also Community Wealth Building; Democratic Leadership; Economic Justice

Further Readings Krouse, R., & McPherson, M. (1986). A “mixedproperty” regime: Equality and liberty in a market economy. Ethics, 97(1), 119–138. doi:10.1086/292821 Meade, J. (1964). Efficiency, equality and the ownership of property. London: George Allen & Unwin.

762

Prosocial Behavior

O’Neill, M., & Williamson, T. (Eds.). (2012). Property-owning democracy: Rawls and beyond. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/ 9781444355192 Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/ 9780674245075 Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/ 9780674042605 Saez, E., & Zucman, G. (2019). The triumph of injustice: How the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Thomas, A. (2017). Republic of equals: Predistribution and property-owning democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780190602116.001.0001 Wolff, E. (2021). Household wealth trends in the United States, 1962 to 2019: Median wealth rebounds. . .but not enough. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper No. 28383. doi: 10.3386/w28383

PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR At the most basic level, prosocial behavior is any action that benefits another. Those behaviors come in various guises: helping an individual in need; sharing resources with another; volunteering one’s time and effort; or cooperating with group members or members of other groups to achieve common goals. While all these actions are examples of prosocial behavior, to fully appreciate the domain of prosociality, it is necessary to examine the underlying processes that serve as the bases of these behaviors and reflect upon the common features of prosocial acts. To facilitate this examination, a useful organizational framework takes a multilevel approach that considers prosocial behavior at three hierarchical levels of analysis. At the most basic level, the microlevel includes constitutional and dispositional characteristics of the individual that set the stage for prosocial actions. The meso level considers situational and motivational factors involved with overt dyadic helping. The macro

level of prosocial behavior captures prosociality at the group level, including volunteerism, intragroup cooperation, and intergroup cooperation. These three levels are closely interconnected and provide mutually supportive, coherent, and comprehensive explanations for prosocial actions. Microlevel processes offer basic explanations for meso-level helping, while processes operating at both the micro- and meso-levels serve to elucidate the underpinnings for macro-level prosocial behaviors. In this entry, each of the three levels of prosocial behavior will be considered in detail, and the links between the levels will be examined. Implications for leadership will also be explored.

The Micro-level of Prosocial Behavior The micro level is the foundational base that provides the tools that promote and support prosociality. At the most basic level, it includes the products of our evolutionary roots that have served our survival, specifically, kin selection (i.e., offering aid and resources to those with whom we share common genetic background) and reciprocal altruism (i.e., helping those who have helped us). Certain neurological structures (e.g., limbic system, prefrontal cortex) have emerged that are “tuned” to stimuli that call for some prosocial response. Developmental changes in cognitive capacities throughout childhood enable us to empathize with others in need and to respond to their plight by offering assistance. Personality traits (e.g., agreeableness, other-oriented empathy) affect an individual’s inclination to help others. Social relationships between helpers and victims play critical roles in decisions to give help; help is more likely to be provided to those with whom one shares close and positive connections—an extension of the kin selection effect. Note that these factors are not actual prosocial acts, but they provide the infrastructure upon which overt prosocial actions occur.

The Meso Level of Prosocial Behavior The meso level considers actual acts of dyadic helping and explores situational factors that facilitate or inhibit helping and the motivations that underlie those acts. The catalyst for much of

Prosocial Behavior

the research at this level of analysis was the murder of Kitty Genovese outside of her apartment in Queens, New York, in 1964. Initial reports suggested that numerous bystanders were aware of the attack but did nothing to intervene. The question “why did no one help?” was answered by bystander intervention research, showing that the decision to help in emergencies is not a simple one; multiple factors come into play. Potential helpers must first define a situation as one requiring intervention. If the need of help is clear, bystanders will recognize that some sort of intervention is needed. But in situations that are ambiguous (like many emergencies), potential helpers may refrain from getting involved because they misinterpret the circumstances. They may rely on the actions of others to define the situation, and if others are doing nothing because they are also trying to understand the situation, they may conclude that no help is required. This pluralistic ignorance precludes helping. Even if bystanders correctly recognize that the situation requires intervention, they may question whether they are personally responsible for helping. They may ask themselves why they must get involved if others could provide the assistance; diffusion of responsibility may allow a person to deny that they have an obligation to help. This impediment to helping is particularly strong as the number of others who might be able to help increases. However, this diffusion effect may be overridden if bystanders occupy roles that confer personal responsibility. For example, following the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon, most spectators rushed away from the explosion, while trained first responders rushed to the scene to give assistance. These responders demonstrated courageous prosocial leadership. Only by defining the situation as one requiring help and accepting personal responsibility may help be given. A final factor to be considered is the costs that helping would incur and the benefits that would likely be received. If potential benefits (e.g., monetary or social rewards, guilt avoidance) outweigh the expected costs (e.g., effort, time, resources), help is likely to be offered. If costs outweigh benefits, help is improbable. The cost–benefit analysis offers insights into why someone would give help in the first place:

763

What is the motivation for planned, nonemergency prosocial behavior? As a cost–benefit calculation suggests, egoistic considerations play a major role in decisions to help. Social and personal norms may prescribe how an individual should respond to a person in need; violations of norms may result in costly social sanctions. Grounded in the evolutionary roots of reciprocal altruism, the norm of reciprocity exerts social pressure to help those who have previously helped us. Adherence to this norm may promote stable and positive social relations: We are attracted to those who reciprocate the favors that we have done for them. Because of the strength and prevalence of the norm of reciprocity, it can be turned against targets to make them vulnerable to requests for help from those trying to take advantage. Charities may send small gifts in the hope that recipients will feel social pressure to reciprocate by making contributions. Other social norms may also impact prosociality, including the norm of social responsibility to give aid to those dependent upon us and the norm of fairness to divide shared resources in equitable ways. If prescriptions of general norms are internalized by individuals, they may become personal norms that are more directly tied to and predictive of a person’s prosociality in specific situations. Personal norms may be seen as one of the microlevel individual difference variables that influence overt actions at the meso level. Emotional factors also affect an individual’s propensity to help others. The arousal: cost– reward model argues that observing another in need vicariously leads to an aversive emotional arousal that the observer is motivated to eliminate. One way to eliminate that arousal is by helping the victim escape the adversity; help removes the source of the negative arousal and thereby terminates the aversive state. Direct help is but one course of action that might be taken to stop the arousal. Observers may recruit others to intervene (indirect help), leave the scene and allow the feelings of distress to dissipate over time, or distort and reinterpret the situation as one that is not actually serious. According to this formulation, observers will take the course of action that will most quickly and completely

764

Prosocial Behavior

remove the distress, while minimizing the net costs that must be borne. The negative state relief model considers helping to be an instrumental act that may be taken to eliminate a negative mood state, particularly sadness. According to this model, saddened individuals have learned that helping others is one way to boost one’s mood. If the opportunity to help presents itself when one is feeling bad, a person may take advantage of the situation. However, if other mood-bolstering events occur before an opportunity to help presents itself, no increase in the likelihood of a prosocial act would be found. Underlying both the negative state relief model and the arousal, the cost–reward model is the assumption that helping is an egoistic, selfserving act, with the goals of boosting one’s mood or relieving one’s distress, respectively. Helpers give their assistance to the extent that it makes themselves feel better. That is, the ultimate goal of helping is some self-benefit for the helper, and any benefit realized by the person in need should be seen as a secondary byproduct of the help. Although egoistic motivations for helping are the most widely accepted explanations, others have questioned if, in some limited cases, help might be given when the ultimate goal of the act is to benefit another person’s welfare—that is, for purely altruistic reasons. The empathy–altruism hypothesis advances this argument. According to this proposition, empathizing with a victim may elicit in an observer an other-oriented emotion that is congruent with the perceived welfare of the individual in need (empathic concern). Prosocial behavior elicited by such empathic concern is the result of an altruistic motivation, with the helper showing a willingness to incur significant personal costs that would not be accepted if motivated by egoistic concerns. An important point must be made. The term altruism may be a source of some confusion. In everyday parlance, altruism is often used as a synonym for helping, but, for prosocial researchers, a distinction should be made between the two. Helping is the act of benefiting another; altruism refers to the motivation of the act. The term altruism is reserved for cases in which empathic concern for the person in need

motivates the help—altruistic helping. If a helper’s primary motivation is to reduce distress, to improve a negative mood, or to fulfill other selfserving concerns, the help given is egoistically motivated—egoistic helping. If a man rushes into a burning building and saves a child, observers may praise him for his altruism. But if the helper reports that he would not have been able to live with himself had he not tried to rescue the child, an egoistic motive of guilt avoidance can be seen as having motivated the act. Therefore, while an act of helping was certainly performed, it was not a case of altruism. The inherent difficulty of determining the motivation for any act lies at the heart of the problem of labeling instances of altruism.

The Macrolevel of Prosocial Behavior Dyadic helping at the meso level is often thought to be the prototypical prosocial behavior. But important prosocial behaviors involving more than two people also occur, and the macrolevel of prosocial behavior captures prosociality at the group level, including volunteerism, intragroup cooperation, and intergroup cooperation. These macrolevel prosocial behaviors rely on the factors and processes operating at the micro- and meso levels, but other emergent processes also come into play. Volunteerism may be seen as a transitional prosocial behavior in terms of the multilevel perspective, straddling the boundary between the individualistic, meso level of the volunteer and macrolevel of the group of recipients. Volunteerism is a “non-obligated” action that involves some planned, sustained, and ongoing prosocial behavior that often takes place within an institutional context (e.g., Habitat for Humanity, American Diabetes Association). Volunteers contribute time, energy, resources, or expertise and are driven by many of the same egoistic meso-level motivations that influence a person’s decision in dyadic situations. The individuals receiving a volunteer’s assistance typically share some common need but are often unknown to the volunteer. Although meso-level helping may be influenced by personal relations and feelings between the parties involved, such personal

Prosocial Behavior

connections are not central considerations when volunteering. What motivates volunteers to serve? Six basic motives have been identified: expressions of humanitarian concerns, opportunities for new learning experiences, social interactions with friends, career-related benefits, protection from feelings of guilt, and enhancement of personal growth. Egoistic concerns lie at the center of each of these motives. These motives are critically important in terms of what make opportunities to volunteer differentially attractive, and volunteers report being more satisfied with their service and more likely to continue in their roles when their experiences are congruent with their primary motivations. While the principal beneficiaries of volunteerism are the recipients, long-term volunteers benefit by their actions in terms of more rewarding social relations, better physical health, and enhanced psychological well-being. The primary focus of prosocial behavior at the macro-level is on cooperation—prosociality of groups. The critical elements of cooperation are interdependent relations coordinated to promote mutually beneficial outcomes for the common good. There are two distinct classes of cooperation: intragroup cooperation and intergroup cooperation. Intragroup cooperation involves the dynamics of a group of independent individuals who have come together to achieve a common goal. Much of the work investigating intragroup cooperation has been conducted in the context of social dilemmas. Social dilemmas are ubiquitous situations characterized by the conflict between one’s own best interest and the interest of the group (e.g., climate change, resource management, charitable contributions). The dilemma is that individuals must choose between acting to maximize their individual interests versus acting (cooperating) to improve the common good (i.e., “tragedy of the commons”). If enough individuals are willing to make some short-term sacrifice (i.e., foregoing a personal gain, accepting some personal cost), the group as a whole will benefit in the long run (e.g., individual vaccinations will mitigate the long-term collective consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic).

765

How is it possible to suppress an individual’s egoistic tendencies and to promote cooperation for the greater good of the group? There are several ways by which cooperation can be encouraged. Selecting a group leader is often the preferred solution to promote cooperation. A successful leader can define the parameters of the situation, provide a focused vision of the direction for the group’s action, and present the problems in terms of collective goals rather than each individual’s personal payoff. Facilitating direct communication among the members of the group is one of the most effective tools available to the leader to increase cooperation. Communication allows group members to share information about their situation, develop strategies to address their problems, and coordinate their actions to reach their collective goal. They can publicly state their intentions to cooperate, and those making such commitments are very likely to follow through. Communicating with other group members about their plan also gives them a sense of having “voice” and provides a sense that any agreed-upon course of action has been fairly decided. For example, imposing behavioristic reinforcement contingencies can be effective for bringing about the desired cooperation; incentives can be offered to cooperating group members, and punishments can be imposed on those who defect from the group’s plan. A leader can ensure adherence to rules and regulations and administer the prescribed rewards and punishments as necessary. Finally, communication may promote trust among group members, giving greater confidence that others will follow through with their plan and not exploit others. Trust allows the group to appreciate the mutual benefits of cooperation for all. Intergroup cooperation considers the dynamics involved when two independent groups come together to merge their interests. Understanding intergroup cooperation is related to the study of a variety of real-world situations, including improving interracial relations, the dynamics of business mergers, and reducing international tensions. There are two related theories that elucidate the processes that promote intergroup cooperation and reduce “us versus them” thinking—the contact hypothesis and

766

Prosocial Behavior

the common ingroup identity theory. These theories begin with the premise that contact between the individual members of the two groups is the first necessary step in developing cooperative relations when the two groups come together. One-on-one interactions between the members from the two groups lead the members to stop seeing themselves strictly as members of their original groups and to begin to see each other as independent individuals. This decategorization process serves to eliminate stereotypic beliefs held about the other group and, with sufficient time to interact with one another, to recognize the degree to which individuals of each group actually share common attitudes. Group members get to know each other as individuals rather than as exemplars of the out-group and to have an appreciation for the goals of the other group. Members develop more positive attitudes and greater trust toward one another. Favoritism that had previously been shown only for fellow ingroup members fades, and more egalitarian behavior patterns toward all emerge. This process is facilitated if the two groups are of equal status at the start of process, although this condition is not always met. As interactions continue, new relationships may form and crystalize around shared themes and goals; this is recategorization. The nature of this new social arrangement may take one of several forms. A unified, superordinate group may evolve in which the previous ingroup/outgroup biases are suppressed or eliminated, and individuals identify themselves as members of a single group. After recategorization of this type, many intragroup cooperation processes may begin to operate, with strong leadership being an important piece to holding the new group together. Alternatively, the original interacting groups may retain their independent identities, but the decategorization process will blur the boundaries between the groups. This allows their representatives to trust one another and to negotiate new relations with less fear of exploitation. The mutual willingness to compromise will be the basis for the intergroup cooperation, with win-win being the outcome. In each of these cases, the result is greater cooperation, with members coming together to achieve goals that would not have been possible without the collective efforts of the two groups.

Final Remarks Humans are prosocial animals, and prosociality is an essential quality of the human condition. Prosocial behavior is the result of the multilevel interplay among the multiple factors that have been identified. Helping, volunteering, and cooperating serve to facilitate our social interactions and to promote the formation of bonds between benefactors and recipients. Understanding these processes may enable leaders to build cohesiveness in their groups to better accomplish their goals. Prosocial behavior is the glue that holds the social fabric of society together. Because of the mutual aid and support offered to one another, all are benefited. David A. Schroeder See also Altruism; Collective Action; Cooperation; Procedural Justice; Trust

Further Readings Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780195341065.001.0001 Dovidio, J. F., Piliavin, J. A., Schroeder, D. A., & Penner, L. A. (2006). The social psychology of prosocial behavior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., Piliavin, J. A., & Schroeder, D. A. (2005). Prosocial behavior: Multilevel perspectives. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365–392. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103. 070141 Schroeder, D. A., & Graziano, W. G. (2015). The field of prosocial behavior: An introduction and overview. In D. A. Schroeder & W. G. Graziano (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior (pp. 3–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780195399813.013.32 Schroeder, D. A., & Graziano, W. G. (2018). The human essence of prosocial behavior. In M. van Zomeren & J. F. Dovidio (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of human essence (pp. 109–121). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780190247577.013.9 Sturmer, S., & Snyder, M. (2010). The psychology of prosocial behavior: Group processes, intergroup relations, and helping. Chichester: Wiley. doi:10.1002/ 9781444307948

Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership Sullivan, B. A., Snyder, M., & Sullivan, J. L. (Eds.). (2008). Cooperation: The political psychology of effective human interaction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Van Lange, P. A. M., Balliet, D., Parks, C. D., & Van Vugt, M. (2014). Social dilemmas: The psychology of human cooperation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE EVOLUTIONARY APPROACHES LEADERSHIP

TO

Leadership can be conceptualized and systematically studied in a multitude of manners with a multiplicity of methods. This entry describes an evolutionary-informed perspective. Following from Nobel Prize winning biologist Niko Tinbergen in his cornerstone 1963 journal article “On Aims and Methods of Ethology,” this entry describes a broader biologically informed perspective taking into account “ultimate and proximate” issues that complement mainstream approaches to leadership. This entry recounts and explains “Tinbergen’s four questions” regarding the biological study of leadership behavior. To accomplish this, the entry discusses evolutionary leadership theory, considering the interaction between types of conflict and resolution styles; Tinbergen’s four questions, providing brief discussions of each question as they apply to leadership through examples of facial characteristics and behavior; and specific examples of ultimate and proximate approaches that may be used to ask questions regarding current leadership dilemmas.

Evolutionary Leadership Theory Leadership, and the followership it requires, occurs in response to recurrent evolutionary problems that rely upon coordination and cooperation among group members to survive and thrive. These problems include dealing with intergroup conflict, as occurs with resource exploitation and/or war, and with intragroup conflict, such as decisions to engage in exploration and/ or the coordination of activities to maintain peace. With these adaptive survival problems, Mark Van

767

Vugt and Chris von Rueden assert that the coordination and cooperation solutions a leader provides to followers may include such behavioral strategies as broadening-and-building coalition size, tending-andbefriending group members especially in the face of loss, and rallying-and-responding to external threats in an aggressive manner. However, because modern problems are often ambiguous or even “wicked problems” (e.g., impossible to solve) due to their having incomplete or contradictory information, multiple opinions, and interconnectedness with other problems, entrepreneurial individuals can sell themselves as leaders by asserting narratives about the ready-made, and often simplistic, solutions they alone possess. Brian Spisak and his colleagues have argued that there is often a mismatch between leader emergence and leader effectiveness owing to, for example, evolved preferences for physiological characteristics and behavioral traits, such as facial masculinity and dominance signaling, that do not address modern problems. Because of this worrying disjoint between leader selection and effectiveness related to human evolutionary predispositions, understanding the roots of leadership and followership from an evolutionary perspective is an important starting point (i.e., a well-crafted evolutionary framework—such as the one developed by Tinbergen— broadens and clarifies the nature of inquiry to provide a more comprehensive understanding of leadership). Specifically, Tinbergen’s four questions provide a structure to map what is known and at the same time illuminate what is not known. In the following section, each of these four questions is addressed by defining the question and method in further detail, especially as it relates to leadership and followership, before considering (as a working example) the role played by the human face in the selection of leaders and in their performance.

Leadership and Tinbergen’s Four Questions Tinbergen’s four questions assist the scientific understanding of behavior by considering ultimate and proximate approaches concerning both developmental processes resulting in a trait, and the product of that trait at one point in time. These questions are in turn based upon appreciation for the importance of evolutionary theory by using an

768

Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership

Table 1

Tinbergen’s Four Questions Developmental

Single Form

Proximate (the “How” questions)

How did it develop? Ontogeny/Development

How does it work? Mechanism/Causation

Ultimate (the “Why” questions)

Why did it historically evolve? Phylogeny/Evolution

Why is it currently functional? Adaptive value/Function

inter-disciplinary approach that draws extensively upon the natural sciences. As a result, the four questions may fruitfully be applied to understanding leadership and the followership upon which it is based. The four questions asked are separate, yet not mutually exclusive, and are complementary by looking at both individual- and population-level behavior (Table 1). The first two questions address proximal causes of individual behavior by considering what motivates an individual to behave in a particular manner at a specific moment in time. Specifically, the questions are: How did it develop? and How does it work? The last two questions address ultimate causal factors and can be seen as applied to populations. These questions ask: Why did it evolve from a historical, phylogenetic perspective? and Why is it functional in the current environment? Brief introductions to each of these questions with a cursory example of how the human face, in light of “Tinbergen’s four questions,” can affect leadership-followership dynamics are provided. Proximate-Single Form: How Does It Work?

Causation, also known perhaps more accurately as mechanisms of control, as suggested by Patrick Bateson and Kevin Laland, asks research questions concerning “How does it work?” It does so by ascertaining those mechanisms that produce different types of individual behavior in the immediate context. These mechanisms can range from the molecular to behavioral level. Much of the research addressing facial behavior, for example, focuses on considering three central questions to better understand social behavior. The first asks, does the actor displaying the emotion actually feel the emotion? Specifically, does a leader’s facial behavior reliably indicate

their intent? Second, how well do observers of facial behavior perceive and understand what the communicator intends to do? In other words, can followers effectively interpret and carry out a leader’s intent? Finally, do behaviors reliably elicit emotional response in observers, and if not, what factors play a role in how these facial behaviors are interpreted and how? Indeed, within the leadership literature there is a growing appreciation for understanding how individuals respond to the face. Individuals automatically infer leadership qualities from facial attributes and are predisposed to match the face with the type of problem being addressed. This not only affects leader selection in a competitive context, it also affects perceived appropriateness of facial behavior based upon the leadership strategy to be employed. Leaders not only must win support of followers, they must also respond to discrete types of challenges whereas they may need to broaden-and-build their coalition, rally-and-respond to threats from outside the group, or tend-and-befriend followers in times of loss. Leaders should be able to effectively communicate their behavioral intent through reliable signals, such as happiness/reassurance, anger/ threat, and— when appropriate—sadness/evasion, that are interpreted consistently by both followers, the opposition, and bystanders. As leader–follower interactions are an accentuated form of communication, future research might consider how specific leader facial behaviors are interpreted. Because facial behavior is not necessarily a direct readout of internal emotional and physiological states but involves the appraisal of multiple factors, including attributes of the sender, contextual elements, and the receiver’s own biases, understanding the influence of each can lead to a better appreciation for the process of leadership in multiple contexts.

Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership

Proximate Development: How Did It Develop?

The second individually focused question concerns the process of ontogenetic development; in other words, it asks “How did it develop?” This research question looks at the roots and development of behavior over an individual’s lifetime. Both environmental and internal factors play a role, albeit roles that are intertwined and difficult to separate. Here, the question concerns whether there are innate tendencies in upbringing or development of an individual over their lifespan that triggers particular behaviors. However, while ontogeny considers development over an individual’s lifespan, there is greater plasticity and development occurring earlier in life. Ontogenetic-based understanding of leadership and followership, thus, importantly involves ethological consideration of behavior among children as they form and navigate social relationships. Carol and Glenn Weisfeld consider play fighting, dominance interactions, and bullying, suggesting each constitutes distinctly different forms of interaction, and ones that change in both frequency and type over developmental stages. These interactions form the template for future leadership and followership behaviors, likely moving beyond gross motor movements to more finely honed nonverbal communication such as facial behaviors and perceptions. When it comes to leadership, children as young as 5 years of age can predict election outcomes based upon facial characteristics of political candidates. According to Alexander Todorov, this is not surprising, as newborns are attracted to faces; even with limited visual acuity, they are predisposed to looking at faces and the processing the information displayed. Facial behaviors seen during early childhood interactions are then evident in later leadership encounters. For example, this is the case with relaxed open-mouth displays signaling playful intent and silent bared-teeth submissive displays seen most often during early childhood developmental stages that are also witnessed among interactions between politicians to reduce conflict and yield to threatening leaders, respectively. Open research questions that come from an ontogenetic perspective may consider not only these more micro-level analyses of facial behaviors over a lifespan, but also how leaders change or maintain their public behavior.

769

Ultimate-Developmental: Why Did It Historically Evolve?

The third question considers why behavior develops in a species over its evolutionary history and analyzes its phylogenetic roots by considering similarities and differences in behavior among several closely related species. Homologies made by ascertaining a common biological heritage thus allow for (leadership) lessons to be learned and applied to social behavior across species. Following from the work of Signe Preushoft and Jan van Hooff, Bridget Waller and colleagues endorse four specific criteria for assessing homology in facial behavior related to social interactions such as leadership, asking: (a) is it stereotyped and identifiable in a manner that makes it recognizable by conspecifics? (b) are there similarities in multiple observable elements? (c) are there similarities with the underlying musculature and neural substrates? and (d) is it present in a large number of related species? Findings by Seth Dobson suggest that those species living in larger social groups have a tendency to produce more varied facial movements than would be expected from their body size. The greater variety of facial movements is seen as due to the role that facial behavior plays in conflict management and social boding to maintain group cohesion, with increased facial musculature mobility leading to larger behavioral repertoires, enhanced signal strength, and greater signal conspicuousness. In short, the evolution of social life and the associated traits of (facial) communication allows for increasingly complex patterns of leadership and followership. When considering the role of facial behavior in communicating leadership and followership, many of the initial insights regarding emotional state and behavioral intent used an ethological approach to consider homologies in social primate interactions. By considering happiness-reassurance, anger-threat, and fear-evasion, with sadness-appeasement being added later, the stage was set for a more coherent understanding of nonverbal leader behavior. Research concerning nonhuman primates has linked the elaboration on smile forms and functions with greater species egalitarianism—findings that have, in turn, been applied to human political behavior by Patrick A. Stewart and colleagues.

770

Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership

More precise measurement tools (e.g., the Facial Action Coding System [FACS]) have been developed and applied to multiple primate species to allow for research considering the rate of facial behavior, the size of the behavioral repertoire, and the diversity of these behaviors. The information provided by this method promises enhanced insights regarding face-to-face leadership interactions of these primate species in multiple contexts. Open research questions may consider how facial behaviors shared by different primate social groupings are used to communicate leadership to address recurrent evolutionary problems. Ultimate-Single Form: Why Is It Currently Functional?

Ultimate causation considers the current, functional cause of an evolved feature in terms of how it promotes the passing of an individual’s contributions (genetic and cultural) to future generations through enhanced reproductive fitness. To use Tinbergen’s terminology, it is a question concerning survival value, asking “What is it good for?” With leadership and followership, the functional-level perspective sees the adaptive significance of a trait as a means to group decision-making and action in which choice options and behavioral uncertainties abound, all the while maintaining group unity. This allows for economies of scale and specialization to develop, providing for even greater group success. At the same time, the leader might benefit directly through enhanced reproduction, alliances, and/or deference from others or indirectly by benefitting kin, offsetting energy and opportunity costs as well as risks to their health and/or reputation. However, it should be noted that there is not a one-to-one causal link between phylogeny and adaptive value; in other words, just because something has adaptive value currently, that does not mean it was selected for this purpose (e.g., see research on cultural exaptation). The leader’s face, keeping with our example, provides a focal point for social interactions and provides not only a short-hand heuristics through capacity cues, but also reliable signals of their intent. Because leaders can be defined by their visual dominance, especially in those animal species with hierarchical social structures, the information signaled is of great importance for group members.

Open research questions may concern not just the nature of signal quality based upon the physiognomic attributes of leader faces, but also how the faces and facial behavior of leaders are similar and differ from followers, in what manner, and how this affects leader choice and performance. Applications to Modern Issues

From Carlyle’s great man theory to the present, humans have sought to better understand and codify leadership in pursuit of ending the mismatch between leader emergence and leader effectiveness. Each approach has contributed to a fuller understanding, yet none has provided a complete answer. Societies, communities, and organizations all seek the “right” leader that meets their particular needs and aligns with their values and beliefs. In the case of organizations, significant investment is also made in developing individuals for leadership positions. The use of emerging facial recognition, facial expression analysis, and other analytical technologies are likely to play a role as this quest continues. Greater understanding of the evolutionary roots of human behaviors and responses, facial and otherwise, and the application of that knowledge can help ensure more carefully considered choices as well as the most productive and ethical use of those technological tools. For example, many areas of work have become more collaborative and team-based with the emergence of the knowledge economy. This calls for leaders who can foster the conditions of openness, sharing, cooperation, and psychological safety. Yet a legacy of implicit bias toward dominant leader faces in organizations may disadvantage candidates for leadership positions who possess precisely the most-needed skills and traits. That bias can only be overcome when recognized, explained, and appropriate adaptations are made to selection protocols. Similarly, could the difficulties of the U.S. federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic be explained, in part, through an evolutionary understanding of leaders? Politics aside, President Donald Trump was a classic dominant leader. His supporters gravitated to his combative style revealed as much through his facial and body

Proximate and Ultimate Evolutionary Approaches to Leadership

behaviors as much as his verbal language. The pandemic was a classic collective problem. It called for a leader who could bridge differences and bring people together to confront a common threat. In such a situation, the best (and most difficult) option for a dominant leader may be to step back while letting more collaborative leaders step forward. Couched in evolutionary terms, such a move becomes less personally threatening, a show of wisdom rather than weakness. Perhaps the most appropriate analogy for the potential of an evolutionary understanding of leadership is to emotional intelligence. While it is a relatively recent addition to the study and evaluation of leaders, the understanding of the importance of emotions to human social interactions as well as the value of being able to process and regulate one’s emotions is seen as relevant to leader and follower performance. Training the limbic system to respond rather than react, for example, allows one to modify one’s emotional responses to achieve pro-social outcomes. Cultivating awareness of other evolutionary tendencies, such as facial behaviors that transmit emotions and intent, can be similarly useful. Application of current and future research on faces and facial behavior of leaders also offers significant challenges. Culture, gender, and other factors may affect facial behavior. Implicit and explicit biases may affect how those behaviors are received and interpreted. Artificial intelligence and other technologies may embed and amplify those and other biases. Thus, the evolutionary perspective should be seen as another facet of understanding leaders and leadership, not one that should preclude other approaches, nor one to exclude diverse candidates for leadership positions. Formally understanding how and why potential leadership biases emerge and then working to bridge these gaps is an important start; fortunately, Tinbergen’s four questions to ultimate and proximate causation provide a robust foundation. Patrick A. Stewart, Brian R. Spisak, and Eric J. McNulty See also Appearance; Biology of Leadership; Charismatic Leadership; Emotion and Leadership; Heroic Leadership; Neuroscience

771

Further Readings Bateson, P., & Laland, K. N. (2013). Tinbergen’s four questions: An appreciation and an update. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(12), 712–718. doi:10.1016/j. tree.2013.09.013 Dobson, S. D. (2009). Socioecological correlates of facial mobility in nonhuman anthropoids. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139(3), 413–420. doi:10. 1002/ajpa.21007 Preuschoft, S., & Van Hooff, J. (1997). The social function of “smile” and “laughter”: Variations across primate species and societies. In Nonverbal communication: Where nature meets culture (pp. 171–190). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Spisak, B. R., Blaker, N. M., Lefevre, C. E., Moore, F. R., & Krebbers, K. F. B. (2014). A face for all seasons: Searching for context-specific leadership traits and discovering a general preference for perceived health. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 792. doi:10.3389/ fnhum.2014.00792 Spisak, B. R., Homan, A. C., Grabo, A., & Van Vugt, M. (2012). Facing the situation: Testing a biosocial contingency model of leadership in intergroup relations using masculine and feminine faces. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(2), 273–280. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.08.006 Spisak, B. R., O’Brien, M. J., Nicholson, N., & van Vugt, M. (2015). Niche construction and the evolution of leadership. Academy of Management Review, 40(2), 291–306. doi:10.5465/amr.2013.0157 Stewart, P. A., Bucy, E. P., & Mehu, M. (2015). Strengthening bonds and connecting with followers: A biobehavioral inventory of political smiles. Politics and the Life Sciences, 34(1), 73–92. doi:10.1017/pls.2015.5 Stewart, P. A., Salter, F. K., & Mehu, M. (2009). Taking leaders at face value: Ethology and the analysis of televised leader displays. Politics and the Life Sciences, 28(1), 48–74. doi:10.2990/28_1_48 Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. ¨ Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433. doi: Zeitschrift fur 10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x Todorov, A. (2017). Face value: The irresistible influence of first impressions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi: 10.1515/9781400885725 van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M., & Preushoft, S. (2003). Laughter and smiling: The intertwining of nature and culture. In F. B. De Waal & P. L. Tyack (Eds.), Animal social complexity: Intelligence, culture, and individualized societies (pp. 260–287). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/harvard. 9780674419131.c20

772

Prozac Leadership

Van Vugt, M., & von Rueden, C. R. (2020). From genes to minds to cultures: Evolutionary approaches to leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 31(2), 101404. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101404 Waller, B., Julle-Daniere, E., & Micheletta, J. (2020). Measuring the evolution of facial ‘expression’using multi-species FACS. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 113, 1–11. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.02.031 Weisfeld, C. C., & Weisfeld, G. (2013). Defining normal on the playground: What would Tinbergen do? Human Ethology Bulletin, 28(4), 12–22.

PROZAC LEADERSHIP Positivity is widely seen as an important quality of effective leadership. Leaders who are upbeat and optimistic, it is argued, create “feel-good” communities inspiring creativity, innovation, and loyalty. Being positive is widely seen as an attractive personal attribute, enabling leaders to exude an air of confidence and authority and to communicate strategic visions. Practitioner-oriented leadership books typically emphasize that effective leaders should display passionate commitment, infectious optimism and act as cheerleaders inspiring confidence and enthusiasm through positive intensity. To be sure, positive leaders who are authentic and sincere are more likely to motivate employees and create inclusive, high commitment cultures. Research reveals, however, that leaders’ positivity can also become excessive: when it is unrealistic and disconnected from reality problematic and dangerous consequences can result. Exaggerated positivity not only encourages leaders to believe their own narratives that everything is going well but also discourages followers from raising problems or admitting mistakes. Leaders’ excessive positivity is frequently characterized by a reluctance to consider alternative voices. This typically leads to important issues being ignored, leaving organizations and societies ill-prepared to deal with unexpected events and serious threats. This entry critically examines the tendency for leaders’ positivity to become excessive with reference to the metaphor of Prozac leadership.

Excessively Positive Leaders Prozac leaders seek to define reality and inspire others through excessively positive messages. Rather than concern themselves with the detailed challenges of policy construction and implementation, their overriding concern is to stay positive at all times. Prozac leaders are not only over-optimistic themselves, but also demand positivity from their subordinates: if employees are upbeat and bring with them a positive commitment to work, there is less need for costly supervision. Believing their own rhetoric that everything is going well, Prozac leaders discourage open debate. They also often refuse to heed cautionary voices and alternative views, effectively silencing criticism and in some cases punishing those who dissent. As a result, they misunderstand or ignore problems entirely, leaving organizations ill-prepared to deal with unforeseen events and setbacks. By insisting that subordinates’ upward communication is exclusively positive, Prozac leadership can result in overoptimistic planning projections, poor decisions, lack of timely responses to problems, and the increased potential for organizational collapse. In a literal sense, Prozac (generic: fluoxetine) refers to the widely available anti-depressant drug, but here the term is used strictly as a metaphor to denote and symbolize leaders’ preoccupation with excessive positivity. The concept of Prozac leadership builds on earlier research on toxic leadership to develop a more subtle analysis of how power and control can operate in leadership dynamics. Reinforcing the growing interest in critical leadership studies, it is also informed by poststructuralist ideas on the disciplinary effects of discourses and their emphasis on the positive nature of power. In contrast with other perspectives that tend to view power as an inherently negative mechanism of repression, poststructuralist approaches suggest that power can also be enabling and productive, especially in shaping subjectivities and constructing identities. The Prozac leadership metaphor was first used to examine the conditions that gave rise to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08. In the years preceding the crisis, excessively positive thinking informed a climate of reckless selling (of subprime

Prozac Leadership

mortgages) that openly discouraged critical thinking. In the early 2000s, it was widely assumed that the buoyant economy was now a permanent condition and that housing and stock market booms could be controlled by interest rates alone. This was compounded by the recklessly optimistic view that it was economically sustainable to expand credit to people who could not afford to repay, to aggregate their debts into mortgage bonds, and then sell this debt to other financial organizations. Discouraging critical analysis in favor of high risk-taking, organizational cultures of excessive positivity, and the Prozac leadership that was their condition and consequence were heavily implicated in the financial crisis that swept across Western economies. In 2007, The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was the largest bank in the world, having pursued a global growth strategy of aggressive expansion through acquisition. Its CEO, Fred Goodwin, was knighted in 2004 for services to banking. The RBS decision in 2007 to purchase the Dutch Bank ABN Amro exemplifies the kind of over-optimistic thinking that characterized leadership in Western economies at this time. Despite its being the biggest banking takeover in history, this purchase decision was informed by inadequate due diligence, too little risk analysis, and a reckless disregard of warnings. Occurring just as the global liquidity crisis began to bite, this acquisition at a vastly inflated price (£49b) fundamentally weakened RBS, particularly because of ABN’s significant exposure to the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. The takeover threatened RBS’s survival and the savings of millions. In 2009, RBS posted a loss of £24.1 billion, the biggest in UK corporate history. The bank had to be rescued by the UK government, effectively being nationalized, and still remains in state ownership. The UK government hopes to return RBS to the private sector in 2025. In a highly unusual move, Goodwin’s knighthood was canceled and annulled in 2012. This case illustrates how the vital strategic decisions of senior executives in major organizations can be largely informed by a kind of delusional optimism that disregards detailed due diligence. Prozac leadership is also common in political leadership, with equally dangerous effects. George

773

W. Bush defined the role of president as one of “cheerleader,” encouraging optimism, inspiring confidence, dispelling doubts, and pumping up the spirit of national selfcongratulation. In her memoirs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained that she did not express various concerns, because the president demanded optimism and strongly discouraged pessimism, hand-wringing, or doubt. Despite advance warnings about three major disasters during Bush’s period in office—the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina floods in New Orleans, and the 2007 financial meltdown—the Bush administration’s responses in each case were too slow and inadequate. The president’s preoccupation with positivity was a significant barrier to open communication, which in turn eroded his administration’s ability to anticipate major disasters and their consequences. Various authors have argued that optimistic bias can override warnings about potential disasters, hindering people’s ability to envisage worst-case scenarios, undermining preparedness, and inviting disaster. They have described how, in 2001, FBI leaders in Washington repeatedly disregarded warnings of possible terrorist attacks by air, including the significant alert in the “Phoenix memo” from FBI agents prior to September 11. Within the FBI, a predominantly top-down flow of information combined with the complacency of over-optimism was fundamental barriers to communication. By suffocating alternative perspectives, leaders make it more likely that organizations are less equipped to consider future risk or potential threats and dangers. Hence, Prozac leadership can result in over-optimistic predictions about possible future scenarios. Excessively positive thinking can also discourage followers from expressing critical comments or suggesting alternative courses of action. Employees learn that it may be advisable to comply with the typical mantras of Prozac leaders such as “I only want to hear positive news” and “Bring me answers, not problems.” Followers may engage in positive impression management by communicating the “good news” that Prozac leaders favor. They may censor their views as a way of protecting themselves and their career,

774

Prozac Leadership

salary, or job security. By insisting that subordinates’ upward communication is exclusively positive, Prozac leaders and the uncritical cultures they encourage can silence committed and concerned employees.

Resisting Prozac Leadership While Prozac leadership can have silencing effects, employees’ internalization of positivity should not be overstated. Firstly, follower silence may be a consequence of fear (rather than consent) or an act of resigned compliance and thus more oppositional than it initially appears. Moreover, subordinates do not always accept or internalize leaders’ upbeat messages. A recurring theme in this author’s research is that employees often detect inconsistencies between leaders’ (excessively) positive messages and their actual practices. This can lead to distancing, cynicism, indifference, and even more overt and explicit forms of resistance and dissent, rather than the empowered employee motivation envisaged. Research on two North Sea oil installations found that, despite senior management’s upbeat claims about the company’s safety systems and record, many offshore workers did not disclose accidents and near misses. Senior managers in London and Aberdeen were very confident that the accident-reporting system operated effectively and that all incidents were reported. It was company policy not to penalize employees for accidents or near misses, and to concentrate on learning from any incident. Proudly describing the company’s learning culture, they emphasized the total corporate commitment to safety, repeatedly stating this was their “number one concern.” Yet, on the platforms workers complained that those who reported safety-related information were penalized with poor assessments (which affected pay and employment security). Believing that offshore installation managers would prefer not to hear about difficulties related to safety, workers communicated overly positive messages back up the hierarchy. Wherever possible, they concealed or downplayed accidents and near misses. Responding to a report outlining these findings, corporate executives at the London Head Office expressed disbelief that employees were not disclosing accidents. Assuming

that concealment could not occur, since this contradicted the learning culture (and was also a firing offense), senior managers’ responses illustrated their excessive optimism and distance from offshore practices. This research highlighted the discrepancy between leaders’ excessively optimistic belief in a corporate learning culture, and workers’ lived experiences of a platform blame culture. Although many employees may feel they have no choice but to perpetuate the cycle of overly positive impressions by communicating good news and downplaying/concealing bad news, in some cases subordinates are more determined to speak up and question organizational cultures of “delusional optimism,” regardless of the personal costs of so doing. It is important to acknowledge that Prozac leadership can prompt overt resistance despite the severe consequences this can create. Studies of whistleblowing, for example, reveal that those who speak truth to power run significant risks. Particularly in the context of Prozac leadership, those who express more critical perspectives risk being labeled as “negative,” “troublemakers,” or “whingers.” Explicit dissent may have damaging effects on an individual’s career and might even result in dismissal. Yet despite these risks, employees do find ways to resist excessively positive leaders. In the United Kingdom, the head of group regulatory risk at Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) repeatedly warned senior directors that the bank was lending too much, too fast. Paul Moore argued that HBOS’s aggressive sales culture was out of balance with controls and that the organization was underestimating the risks of lending too much to borrowers who would have difficulty repaying. He was fired in 2004 by The HBOS CEO, Sir James Crosby, and replaced by a sales manager with no experience of risk management or regulation. Three years later Moore’s concerns were validated when HBOS went to the brink of collapse, financial reserves dried up, and the company had to be bailed out by the UK government before being sold to Lloyds Bank. Moore was subsequently awarded substantial damages for unfair dismissal. In 2009, Moore presented his evidence to a Treasury Select Committee, where he explained that he had previously raised these matters with the Financial Services Authority, but to no avail. As a result of Moore’s testimony,

Prozac Leadership

Crosby resigned from his new post as deputy chair of the Financial Services Authority. When other avenues of persuasion seem to be exhausted, employee resistance to Prozac leadership may be expressed through resignation. For example, in 2003 the International Development Secretary Clare Short resigned from the U.K. Cabinet during the Iraq War in protest at the allies’ failure to produce a postwar reconstruction plan for the country. At the Iraq War inquiry in 2010, Short highlighted the highly masculine culture of the male-dominated Blair Cabinet, which, she argued, forced through decisions and was hostile to alternative voices. Blair later conceded that he did not anticipate the nightmare that unfolded in Iraq in the aftermath of war, an acknowledgment which vindicates Short’s earlier criticisms. This case exemplifies how Prozac leadership frequently fails to anticipate difficult possibilities. It also highlights problems women can face within cultures dominated by excessively optimistic men. Resistance to Prozac leadership may also be expressed by customers. In 2008, musician Dave Carroll watched from his window seat as baggage workers at Chicago airport mishandled and damaged his expensive guitar as it was being loaded into the hold. After nine months of unsuccessful attempts to convince United Airlines of its responsibility, Carroll wrote and recorded a song, “United Breaks Guitars.” Posted on YouTube with accompanying spoof video, the song became a massive hit, the largest in Carroll’s career. Within 12 months the video had received approximately 9 million hits, and sales of his other recordings soared. Carroll appeared on nearly every major news outlet and chat show in the United States and Canada, in what had become a public relations disaster for United Airlines. On his website Carroll highlights the discrepancy between the airline’s highly positive commitment to quality customer service and its actual response to a specific customer problem. During the nine months of repeatedly contacting United Airlines, and despite the company’s upbeat messages about customer service, employees were unwilling to take Carroll’s problems seriously, simply redirecting him to other departments. Belatedly, the managing director of customer solutions at United Airlines telephoned Carroll to apologize. Still espousing a positive message, he

775

asked permission for the YouTube video to be used in internal training and assured Carroll that the organization intended to learn from the incident. Research reveals that shareholders, as well as customers and employees, may resist Prozac leadership. One study of litigation data in 165 lawsuits (2003–08) found that executives’ use of overly optimistic disclosures (especially about corporate earnings) increases the risk of firms being sued by shareholders. The researchers found that the disclosures of sued companies were consistently more optimistic than those of nonsued firms in similar circumstances. In 91% of cases, plaintiffs targeted optimistic language when bringing actions against a firm. Typically, investors alleged that their expectations about a company’s value were improperly raised by leaders’ upbeat messages. This study indicates that executives’ optimistic language can increase the risk of litigation. Together, the foregoing examples illustrate how leaders’ preoccupation with positivity may produce various forms of effective dissent from employees, customers, and shareholders. These cases provide illustrations of employee resistance, but they are by no means exhaustive of the ways that dissent can be expressed.

Concluding Remarks As discussed in the preceding sections, Prozac leaders are reluctant to address difficult problems. They tend to believe their own rhetoric that everything is going well and discourage subordinates from raising problems or admitting mistakes, preferring only positive upward communication. By silencing alternative voices and open debate, Prozac leaders leave societies and organizations ill-prepared to deal with unexpected events and threats. When their excessively positive narratives are disconnected from the economic and/or social realities of everyday life, followers are likely to become increasingly skeptical and/or suspicious. Far from being motivational, excessive optimism can damage trust, communication, learning, and preparedness, either silencing followers or provoking their resistance. As a result, mistakes will likely be repeated, lessons will not be learned, and vicious circles of excessive positivity will continue.

776

Purpose and Invisible Leadership

This is not, however, to dismiss the value of positive thinking. Being positive can be empowering and there are numerous therapies designed to overcome depression, self-doubt, and anxiety that emphasize the value of greater positivity. Popular writers such as Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale wrote best sellers extolling the merits of positive thinking. Similar perspectives are also influential in academic disciplines like cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology, which hold that optimism can facilitate health, confidence, and effectiveness. Equally, it is important to acknowledge that historical examples exist of leaders who do seem able to be both optimistic and realistic at the same time. Such leaders balance and combine optimism with critical thinking, positivity with a willingness to confront difficult realities, and upbeat visions with a capacity to listen to alternative voices. The Prozac leadership metaphor suggests it is when positivity is taken to excess that problematic organizational, societal, and personal consequences arise. Regardless of whether Prozac leaders are motivated by wishful thinking, naivety, hubris, or more deliberately manipulative motives, subordinates may dismiss their excessive optimism as insincere and instrumental. In such contexts, it is likely that alternative perspectives will be silenced, dissenting voices marginalized and/or upward messages disguised. The global pandemic that began in 2019 highlights the continued relevance of the Prozac metaphor for contemporary leadership theory and practice. Despite the financial crisis providing clear lessons for leaders about the dangers of excessive positivity, more than a decade later similar mistakes were made. Political leaders in major economies like the United Kingdom, United States, and Brazil adopted excessively optimistic approaches that underestimated COVID-9 and undervalued scientific advice. These three countries subsequently recorded some of the highest pandemic death rates in the world. The global pandemic is a salutary reminder of how Prozac leadership can cost many lives. David L. Collinson See also Critical Leadership Studies; Humor; Toxic Leadership; Trust

Further Readings Cerulo, K. (2006). Never saw it coming. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collinson, D. L. (2020, October 5). Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and the dangers of excessive positivity. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation. com/donald-trump-boris-johnson-and-the-dangers-ofexcessive-positivity-146356 Collinson, D. L. (2012). Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking. Leadership, 8(2), 87–107. Collinson, D. L. (1999). Surviving the rigs: Safety and surveillance on North Sea oil installations .Organization Studies, 20(4), 579–600. Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. Foucault, M. (1977). In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Random House. Fraser, I. (2015). “Shredded”: Inside RBS the bank that broke Britain. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Lewis, M. (2010). The big short. London: Allen Lane. Lovallo, D., & Kahneman, D. (2003, July). Delusions of success: How optimism undermines executives’ decisions. Harvard Business Review, 81, 56–63. Rogers, J., Van Buskirk, A., & Zechman, S. (2011). Disclosure tone and shareholder litigation. The Accounting Review, 86(6), 2155–2183.

PURPOSE

AND INVISIBLE

LEADERSHIP

Leadership often begins when one person or several people recognize a reason for action—for example, a need to create, change, or safeguard a right, opportunity, or asset—then communicate this insight to others. Those who concur with the need for action express their willingness to participate by joining the group’s effort to achieve a common purpose. A common purpose is more than a mission statement. It is a deeply held sense of common destiny, the substance that binds people together, and sometimes even a life course or calling. It is the reason people come together to lead an initiative or start an organization. Many definitions of leadership inadvertently trivialize the significance of purpose—the reason for leading—because these definitions focus

Purpose and Invisible Leadership

heavily on actions of the leader or the relationship between leaders and members or participants. Leaders and participants are absolutely essential to leadership; but the underlying question is why are they leading? The role of purpose in leadership is most apparent in social movements such as the women’s movement, civil rights movement, or environmental movement. Such movements coalesce around issues in society where groups who are adversely affected and their allies join together to bring about collective change.

The Common Purpose as Leader: Invisible Leadership The significance of purpose may be obvious in many social movements but less apparent in other contexts such as business, government entities, or some nonprofits. Management scholar Mary Parker Follet observed in the late 1920s that there were companies where people in both leader and participant roles were following the invisible leader, that is, the common purpose. Follett’s original concept, and contemporary leadership scholars Gill Hickman and Georgia Sorenson, reverse the emphasis on purpose in leadership by placing it in the forefront. They contend that invisible leadership embodies situations in which dedication to a compelling and deeply held common purpose is the motivating force for leadership. This common purpose provides inspiration for participants to use their strengths willingly in leader or follower roles and cultivates a strong shared bond that connects participants to each other in pursuit of their purpose. Hickman and Sorenson conducted research in 21 companies where the common purpose leads the work that leaders and participants undertake. They found that together the subscales of their survey instrument formed a highly reliable scale of invisible leadership. In these organizations members appeared to have—an enhanced collective capacity to work, learn, and achieve together; internalized the purpose through strong personal commitment; role flexibility to work in either visible or invisible roles; and purpose-inspired dedication and accountability. One comment from a respondent in the survey encapsulates the

777

essence of how an inspiring common purpose effects people in the organization. She expressed that the members of her company were very purpose driven; that purpose gives their relationships strength and holds them together. As a result, they are living their purpose daily. They constantly talk about their strengths and how they can build on them while developing themselves as leaders and contributors to their field. Essentials of Developing an Inspiring Common Purpose

Creating and sustaining an inspiring common purpose requires concerted effort. Together leaders and members determine the essence of the organization’s purpose that: •

gets to the heart of what they want to do and represent in the world; • inspires deep commitment or ownership by people in your organization; • inspires participants to use their strengths willingly in leader or follower roles; and • inspires a strong shared bond that connects participants to each other in pursuit of their purpose.

Embedding Common Purpose in the Culture

The essential function of positional leaders in high-purpose contexts is to facilitate (rather than control) the work of the group or organization. Facilitating the work requires leaders to embed several vital practices into the culture. Create a context where common purpose leads and people thrive. •

When leaders and participants follow the common purpose, Lao Tzu’s would counsel that the wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily. The leader’s presence is felt, but often the group runs itself. • Keep the common purpose at the forefront of all actions from hiring to finance to decision-making. • Embody the essence of the common purpose by modeling ethical, open, and caring behavior.

778

Purpose and Invisible Leadership

Cultivate purpose as lived experience.

Engaging Members in Meaningful Work

•

•

Engage with members in an on-going dialogue about the purpose to identify why the work of their company or nonprofit is important—conversations, forums, teams, and so on. • Allow members/teams to own and undertake the purpose so that the purpose infuses meaning into day-to-day work.

Generate and sustain a culture of invisible leadership. •

Develop work arrangements that facilitate a strong bond of relationship among employees—that is, teams, pairs, open-space. • Create role flexibility that allows members to serve the purpose in any needed capacity (leader, team member, or visible representative) • Develop and sustain an ethical culture of inclusion, participation, and transparency • Create an environment where leaders and members foster each other’s’ development and well-being.

There are five subcomponents of embedding common purpose into the culture. Facilitating Selection of New Members •

Focus on hiring members that embrace the organization’s purpose and simultaneously contribute their ideas and diverse perspectives.

Fostering Collective Capacity •

Enhance capacity of the group through: shared approaches to work, learning, and training; preparation for multiple jobs/roles; professional and personal development for teams and individuals. • Develop processes/programs for teams and leaders to recognize praiseworthy work toward the purpose. • Create opportunities for team members to understand the organization beyond their team or position. • Encourage use of selfagency by members to act on behalf of collective aims, or make use of opportunities, and obtain resources for the common purpose.

Meaningful work stems from a meaningful purpose. It is morally worthy work because it makes life better for the people who do it and the good that comes from it according to philosopher Joanne Ciulla. • Meaningful work calls for meaningful rewards systems, for example team-conferred rewards.

Facilitating a Strong Bond or Relationship • • • • • • •

Leaders play a support role to the group by: Keeping the common purpose in the forefront; Sustaining the link to meaningful work; Providing optimal work spaces and technology for maximum interaction and teamwork; Invigorating the culture with work and social rituals or celebrations Providing professional development; and Attending to the well-being of members.

Facilitating Change •

Remain true to the culture of inclusion, participation, transparency, trust, and care in bringing about organizational change; especially change that involves altering the purpose itself. • Assure that decision making is consistent with the culture of invisible leadership in their organization. • Involve members before choices must be made about organizational change.

In these organizational cultures, leaders and members know and embrace the purpose; they place it upfront; it drives their work; and it bonds them together.

Ethical Dimensions of the Common Purpose Developers of an ethical common purpose aspire to find a way to protect the rights and needs of others while pursuing their own common purpose. As philosopher Al Gini emphasizes, ethical behavior respects the rights of all affected, whereas unethical behavior deliberately or negligently tramples on the rights and interests of others. The common purpose of groups or organizations can range from enhancing the well-being of society to

Purpose and Invisible Leadership

779

causing harm to other individuals and groups, and any variation in between. For instance, social movements and nonprofit organizations that focus on the environment, human rights, or civil rights may generate environmental stewardship or enhance the well-being of marginalized groups. Their purpose can be considered ethical when it benefits society or groups without causing harm to others. Another group may organize for the purpose of benefiting its members (such as a university, a chamber orchestra, a sports team, or a business) without causing harm to others who are not members of their group. Still, a different group may develop a common purpose that gains or preserves privilege for their members (for example, supremicist groups, repressive regimes, or terrorist organizations) while causing harm or restricting and usurping the rights or well-being of other groups. According to Gini, ethics tries to find a way to protect one person’s individual rights and needs against and alongside the rights and needs of others. This criterion provides leaders, participants, and stakeholders a critical means of evaluating the ethics and implementation of a common purpose.

vaccine regardless of the countries’ ability to pay; among many other complex issues. Leaders and participants can create common purpose at community, organization, nation-state, and global levels, but the task becomes even more daunting based on the scope and number of entities involved, the type, level, and speed of change, and complexity of the challenge. The responsibility of leadership in these circumstances is to develop processes where participants can identify and create an ethical purpose while fostering a deeply held sense of genuine inclusion, trust, and respect for the rights of all stakeholders. Leadership scholars Kathleen Allen and colleagues, while participating in the Kellogg Leadership Scholars Project, proposed that the purpose of leadership in the 21st century is threefold:

The Complexity of Purpose

Several decades later, their declaration still conveys a profound purpose for the shared future of humanity.

Identifying a common purpose can be highly complex, especially when it is multifaceted, contested, or conflicted. For instance, global eradication of the COVID-19 virus seems to be a straightforward common purpose, but it is fraught with complexity and an array of underlying issues. Many people were filled with doubt and disagreement about whether the virus was real or a hoax; whether the virus came from nature or was developed in a laboratory; whether the motivation for pursuing a solution to the crisis was scientific or political; whether there was a trustworthy source of information about how the virus affects humans and what precautions individuals need to take; what treatments should be used for people stricken with the disease; whether a vaccine could be developed to treat the virus; whether the vaccine could be safe and reliable; and whether people in countries around the world would receive the

1. To create a supportive environment where people can thrive, grow and live in peace with one another; 2. To promote harmony with nature and thereby provide sustainability for future generations; 3. To create communities of reciprocal care and shared responsibility, where every person matters and each person’s welfare and dignity is respected and supported.

Gill Robinson Hickman See also Collective Responsibility; Ethical Leadership; Group Effectiveness

Further Readings Allen, K. E., Bordas, J., Hickman, G. R., Matusak, L. R., Sorenson, G. J., & Whitmire, K. J. (1998). Leadership in the 21st century. Empowerment for change: A conceptual working paper. In Rethinking leadership: Kellogg leadership studies project 1994–1997 (pp. 41–62). College Park, MD: The Burns Academy of Leadership. Ciulla, J. B. (2000). The working life: The promise and betrayal of modern work. New York, NY: Times Books.

780

Purpose and Invisible Leadership

Follett, M. P. (1949/1987). Freedom & co-ordination: Lectures in business organization. New York, NY: Garland. Gini, A. (2004). Moral leadership and business ethics. In J. B. Ciulla (Ed.), Ethics, the heart of leadership (pp. 25–43). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Heider, J. L., & Dao de Jing. (1985). The Tao of leadership: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching adapted for a new age. Atlanta, GA: Humanics New Age. Hickman, G. R., & Sorenson, G. L. (2013). The power of invisible leadership: How a compelling common purpose inspires exceptional leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

R RACE

AND

Connecting Race and Ethnicity to Leadership

ETHNICITY

To the extent that race and ethnicity are viewed as social constructions, they can be seen as categories arbitrarily chosen by people to categorize and divide people by groups. However, because they have become infused within the lexicon of so many and form the basis for understanding different groups of people, it is important to examine findings about leadership through the lens of race and ethnicity. In contemporary studies, leadership refers to the methods, styles, or processes that a person or group of people employ to influence others to achieve a common goal. Although, or perhaps because, race and ethnicity are socially constructed, it is important that a person’s race and ethnicity be included in a discussion of their history and leadership experience. This is because a denial of these constructs, and the impact they may have on leaders, may result in rendering their experiences and the context of their leadership invisible. Another reason to acknowledge race and ethnicity in leadership studies is that diversity is a benefit to organizations, particularly when members learn how to acknowledge, respect, and incorporate aspects of diversity into their decision-making. An understanding of race, ethnicity, and leadership broadens our understanding of what leadership is and the range of diversity among leadership styles. One critique of leadership studies has been that researchers often do not consider how race and ethnicity play a role in a leader’s

Race and ethnicity are terms that are in general use, but their meaning can be contested. This is because, despite most people’s use of the terms as real categories, they are in part social constructions. Race refers to physical characteristics such as skin color or hair texture and a broadly regional place of origin, such as a continent. Ethnicity refers to cultural traditions and customs, and ties to a physical place such as a country. The reason these definitions can be problematic is that the physical attributes used to categorize race are somewhat arbitrary, determined by people generations ago to categorize and divide groups of people. These separate categories have also contributed to the different treatment of groups according to which physical characteristics were deemed more or less valuable. Race and ethnicity are important in a discussion of leadership because historically, leadership has been discussed with regard to the dimensions of race and ethnicity. Research about leadership theory reveals that much of the research was historically based on Western traditions and case studies of White men, which limited understanding of how race and ethnicity played a role in diverse leaders’ experiences. Further, to exclude race and ethnicity from leadership studies would be to deny the reality of racial and ethnic oppression that leaders from diverse backgrounds confront.

781

782

Race and Ethnicity

experience. Taking into account that White is a racial category, this is true for White as well as non-White leaders. Therefore, the ways in which race influenced White leaders or shaped their experiences, as well as how the race of non-White leaders (e.g., Latinx, African American, Indigenous, or Asian) and ethnicities of global leaders (e.g., Irish, Indian, Chinese, or Kenyan) are often underexamined. It is common to think of leaders from a specific perspective, or view them through a particular lens. Leaders can hold official positions such as president. For example, Aung San Suu Kyi is a human rights leader, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and has held formal office in the Burmese government. Leaders can also lead organizations or social movements from informal positions. In these cases, it is common to read about such leaders in oral histories or publications that specifically focus on the experiences of people who are not typically covered in textbooks, popular media, or mainstream coverage. Whatever the context, those who study leadership are typically interested in the process and experience of leadership. As ways to investigate leaders’ strengths and weaknesses, biographers are often interested in the leaders’ backgrounds, motivations for leadership, and how they overcame challenges. Because social factors such as race and ethnicity often shape the lived experiences of those living in a society, a person’s identity, including their race and ethnicity, is important to consider and to inform a sound understanding of their leadership.

with community or relational conceptualizations of leadership and overlooks cultures and communities in which leadership is conceived as relational. Current studies of leadership, which focus on how leaders build relationships and work collectively with others, reject the notion that simply adding race or ethnicity to an examination of traditional leadership models will sufficiently explain the roles of race and ethnicity in leadership. This approach emphasizes and seeks to understand individuals’ background, context, and relation to others as part of their leadership. An emphasis on leadership as influence takes into account the ways in which a single person, such as the well-known civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr—or as another example, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African nation when she was elected in Liberia in 1972—leads people to ask questions about their personal leadership, their interaction and collective leadership with others, and how race and ethnicity impacted their leadership experience. Although the many biographies about Dr. King and other leaders attest to the reality that there is interest in studying individual leaders, viewing Dr. King as the sole leader for the African American civil rights movement of the mid-20th century ignores the leadership of other African American people who collectively sought to end various forms of oppression. Further, placing race and ethnicity at the center of leadership invites consideration of how different cultural groups may or may not adhere to individualistic notions of leadership, decentering Eurocentric understandings of leadership.

Challenging Traditional Notions of Leadership

Expanding Diversity and Leadership Studies

Traditional studies of leadership often center on the traits, behaviors, and outcomes of a singular, “heroic” individual who saves a community or group of people from some hardship. The traditional model of a single, often male, leader as a hero for an entire group of people is anachronistic. Therefore, simply including nonwhite leaders and examining their heroic leadership, while increasing exposure to racially diverse leaders, also reinforces the outdated “hero” version of leadership. This individualistic concept of leadership is at odds

Because the way leadership is written about influences our understanding of leaders, it is important to expand one’s understanding of leadership beyond formal positions such as those in politics, business, or the military. Traditional thought has either praised or critiqued singular leaders as heroes (or villains), which oversimplifies leadership studies. If asked to write down a list of leaders, the extent to which one’s list is racially and ethnically homogeneous may be an indication of how narrow is the scope of one’s exposure to diverse

Race and Ethnicity

leadership. Although socially constructed, an analysis of what is generally known about leaders of diverse racial and ethnic groups helps us to think about who else has contributed to social, political movements. This investigation can include the histories, documents, and stories of diverse leadership that sustained minoritized groups oppression. Understanding diverse leadership in these contexts can prevent an oversimplified understanding of resistance to oppression, or the quest for freedom. For example, during the antebellum period of chattel slavery in the United States, leaders such as Denmark Vesey led revolts of enslaved people Similarly, scholars Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and David Treuer document the leadership among Indigenous peoples in the United States to resist genocidal practices, survive, and preserve cultural traditions. These histories challenge oversimplified narratives.

Issues Regarding Race, Ethnicity, and Leadership Since the late decades of the 20th century, researchers have contributed to an understanding of the diverse range of leaders through a lens of race or ethnicity. Acknowledgment of the race and ethnicity of leaders when thinking about leadership styles aids in the understanding about types of leadership styles and experiences across different cultural groups. Often, experiences of racial oppression leaders faced in their formative years contribute to their desire to pursue leadership to end the types of oppression they faced. It is also important to consider how a leader’s understanding about race and ethnicity influences their leadership. Researchers indicate that nonWhite leaders openly acknowledge and embrace their racial identities more than White leaders do. Relatedly, leaders who embrace their race and ethnicity as a strength often form connections with others of the same group and find those connections helpful in navigating their contexts. Another issue to consider concerns the challenges and obstacles leaders face and overcome because of how others perceive them because of their race or ethnicity. It is also important to consider how leaders and the context in which they operate, whether in an organization or in terms of the wider society, influence each other.

783

More specifically, the challenges leaders face because of racism or prejudice often include the burden of having to navigate their own culture and the dominant, often White, culture.

The Intersectionality of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender When thinking about race, ethnicity, and leadership it is important to avoid overgeneralizing, which may lead to assumptions that all people within a particular race or ethnic group have the same experiences. This harmful tendency is referred to as essentialism or stereotyping. One reason why it’s important to avoid essentialist characterizations is that people within racial or ethnic groups have intersecting identities. For example, a Latinx man and Latinx woman may share similar experiences because of their race. However, the Latinx woman may experience different encounters because of her gender. Further, Latinx as a broad term does not take into account differences between specific ethnic populations. Other forms of socially constructed identities include but are not limited to religion, sexuality, and ability. Taking into account how the unique identities of leaders shape their leadership journey is important both for researchers and for others interested in learning about leaders. A major takeaway regarding race, ethnicity, and leadership is that the lived experiences of non-White and male leaders have historically been underexplored. Centering race and ethnicity in leadership studies is an invitation to expand traditional notions of leadership that gloss over important aspects of the lived experiences of racially and ethnically diverse leaders, while also expanding knowledge about how people enact leadership in different ways in diverse cultures. Leaders exist in local contexts who are likely not included in textbooks, movies, or websites, but whose stories can contribute to a deeper understanding of leadership in those contexts. The continued pursuit of knowledge regarding the experiences, leadership styles, and role of racial and ethnic identity and cultural norms on leadership of groups not largely represented in literature will further inform both conceptualizations of what leadership is and how it is enacted and

784

Racial Disparities

efforts to create more inclusive organizations and communities.

Racial/Ethnic Representations of Leadership in the Workplace

Kendra Lowery

Research has shown that when asked to mentally picture an image of a leader, the majority of people, especially in the United States, will produce the image of a White man. Explanations for this finding have focused on the many ways people have been primed to view leadership regardless of what our beliefs and convictions may be about equity in leadership. Specifically, the U.S. media culture offers little representation of leadership outside of stereotypical illustrations. This pattern is pervasive, with all the American presidents identifying as White men, except for former President Barack Obama. Moreover, no president to date has identified as a woman or sexual minority. Discussions about diversity in the workplace have been an ongoing topic for many years, especially in academia, information technology, healthcare, and psychology. Many of these fields display significant gaps in the racial diversity of their employees. Employees with racial and/or ethnically minoritized statuses in predominantly White institutions (PWIs) may be susceptible to negative stereotypes, biases, stricter criteria for evaluation of their work performance, and could experience a reduced sense of belonging. These barriers impede the career trajectory of employees of color, exacerbating racial/ethnic disparities in leadership. Furthermore, the prioritization of Eurocentric templates for leadership (e.g., work cultures that normalize stereotypically White and male values, for instance, rewarding competitiveness and dominance over other qualities such as compassion and collaboration), lack of appropriate training, the perpetuation of hostile work environments, and organizational hiring practices that systematically disenfranchise employees from racially/ethnically minoritized groups, even when there is a decent pool of diverse candidates for these positions, add to racial disparity in leadership roles. PWI colleges and universities are especially susceptible to inequities in leadership, such as the scarcity in administrators who identify as Black or African American in the majority of these institutions. This is concerning given that administrators possess the power and status to influence the

See also Diversity; Intersectionality: Multiculturalism Ethics; Race and Gender; Racism in the United States

Further Readings Chin, J. L. (2013). Diversity leadership: Influence of ethnicity, gender, and minority status. Open Journal of Leadership, 2(1), 1–10. Ospina, S., & Foldy, E. (2009). A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing context, power and the collective dimensions of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 20, 876–896. Ospina, S., & Su, C. (2009). Weaving color lines: Race, ethnicity, and the work of leadership in social change organizations. Leadership, 5(2), 131–170.

RACIAL DISPARITIES This entry focuses on a discussion of racial and ethnic racial inequities in leadership. It is important to distinguish between race and ethnicity. Race is defined as a political and social construct reflective of systems of oppression that disenfranchise certain groups to create and perpetuate inequities, rather than biological differences. Ethnicity, in contrast, denotes one’s affinity to a group as a result of shared characteristics such as values, culture, and customs. In using terms such as employees or faculty or color, this entry discusses the shared experiences of people from minoritized ethnic backgrounds such as those who identify as Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, or those from multiethnic backgrounds with a shared experience of some form of social disenfranchisement due to their phenotype, without any implication that their experiences are monolithic. This entry documents racial disparities in leadership in a variety of industries and then provides guidance on how to work toward equity in workforce leadership.

Racial Disparities

culture of an institution. Evidence suggests that administrators of African descent who occupy these positions may remain there for shorter periods of time due to prejudicial experiences related to their racial and ethnic identities as well as the intersections of other identities such as gender. Women of color may be particularly vulnerable to delays in their career trajectory because of experiences related to racism and sexism. Other administrators of color may be hired for specialized positions focused on diversity initiatives. Specific to tenure-stream positions, faculty of color on the tenure track are at increased risk for facing challenges on the road to tenure for multifaceted reasons. These include lack of mentoring or problematic mentoring, devaluation of their scholarly and pedagogical practices, bias in student evaluations (which continue to be used as a measure of teaching effectiveness in numerous institutions), being overburdened with service commitments due to racial/ethnic underrepresentation in PWIs, the psychological burden of having to prove oneself, and recurrent exposure to microaggressions. Thus, it is unsurprising that racial disparities in the faculty distribution of tenured professors mirrors other disparities in leadership in other industries. Recent data indicate that full professors in postsecondary institutions comprised 80% of faculty who identified as White males or females, 11% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% Black or African American, 3% Latinx, and people from indigenous groups or with multiracial heritage contributed to 1% or less of tenured full professors. These statistics are inconsistent with U.S. census data and expose an inequality in the academy as tenured faculty possess more authority relative to their untenured counterparts. This story of racial disparities in leadership can also be seen in the healthcare system, with Black and Latinx physicians being underrepresented in cancer centers, and Asian physicians occupying fewer leadership positions, although they are well represented in the field. Nurses who identify as Black or African American have also been found to encounter barriers to leadership positions as a result of discrimination, bias, and inadequate mentoring. The preponderance of White editors has also been documented in psychological research, with

785

editors-in-chief comprising approximately 93% of the leaders in the field who make decisions about the rigor of studies, to determine whether they are publishable and thus valuable contributions to the field. Editors-in-chief who identified as people of color were reported to be three times more likely to highlight the value of examining race and/or differences in racialized experiences in psychological research relative to their White counterparts. These data are concerning for a field that prides its dedication to diversity, cultural awareness, and equity. This begs the question, what do we lose when we do not prioritize equity in leadership? How can we make progress toward a world that facilitates one’s ability to reach their full potential regardless of their racial and/or ethnic identity?

Working Toward Equity in Leadership Perspectives matter, especially when they have the potential to create change for all regardless of one’s social group. A workforce that mirrors the demographics of the nation would be beneficial for epistemological innovation, technological advancement, creativity, improving health outcomes, enhanced and tailored mentorship, and increased revenue. We miss out on myriad benefits when we continue to exist in a world that does not value equity in leadership. The costs of the current structure of the majority of our work environments have resulted in psychological, social, and health inequities, consequently decreasing productivity— people cannot reach their complete potential and contribute to the advancement of humanity when they experience social disadvantages that negatively tax their emotional and physiological resources. Thus, targeted steps are needed to cultivate equitable access to leadership as well as to thrive in leadership. Organizations need to start demonstrating active antiracist actions toward reducing inequities in leadership rather than simply stating their dedication to diversity and inclusion initiatives. Much of the work in this area has been superficial and needs more directed efforts to ensure actual change. This change can occur over time by, for instance, increasing pipelines for recruiting and retaining employees of color. Recruitment focused on expanding the racial/ethnic demographics of

786

Racial Disparities

any company needs to incorporate a variety of methods that extend beyond placing job advertisements on a company’s website or on popular job sites. Recruiters can seek out diversity candidates by sending out personalized invitations, by targeting minority organizations (e.g., within the field of psychology, placing advertisements on the career site of associations such as the Association of Black Psychologists and National Latinx Psychological Association, recruiting graduates from historically black colleges), or by contacting supervisors who may be aware of mentees of color who would be a good fit for the company. Furthermore, companies can utilize hiring professionals who specialize in recruiting diversity candidates to increase the pool of employees. As the pipeline of employees of color increases to match the demographics of the country, it is vital that companies cultivate safe working environments for these personnel. It entails systematic training and mentoring, as well as creating culturally affirming environments that are not solely focused on Eurocentric and stereotypically male values. Effective antiracist work should be an integral part of organizational analyses of structural systems used for promotion and compensation. Methods of employee evaluation should be examined for bias as they reduce one’s leadership tragedy if these procedures are inherently biased toward certain demographics. Examples include definitions of professionalism, which are typically skewed toward whiteness such that a Black person’s curly hair or locks may be viewed as unprofessional, relative to a White person’s hair; and favoring certain accents over others, in which European accents or modes of communicating are deemed to be more favorable over non-European ones regardless of the perceived “thickness” of these accents. Our current systems reward extraversion and people who display initiative by voicing their opinions often, even though these opinions may not always be grounded in thoughtful information processing. Thus, using this as a barometer for assessing one’s potential for leadership could systemically exclude others with great potential for leadership. It has been widely reported that people of color often have to “code switch,” a term used to

describe processes such as changing the cadence of one’s voice or dialect and minimizing certain mannerisms, to increase White comfort in order to be more accepted in predominantly White spaces, and to reduce the confirmation of certain negative stereotypes. Work environments can be culturally affirming, allowing people to be authentic, which could, in turn, fuel their productivity and creativity. Many employees of color who exist in PWIs are often called upon to engage in diversity efforts without any compensation or the appropriate compensation, and more so without recognition of the potential psychological burden this could place on them due to the personal nature and relatability of these matters. Thus, organizations should be cautious about the impact of the additional burden and invisible labor of employees of color by promoting and compensating them accordingly when they engage in diversity initiatives on behalf of the larger organization. Moreover, these employees should not be expected to “represent” their race or ethnicity and should be supported when they choose to not engage in such initiatives, without fear of negative repercussions. Continuous bias training should be an essential part of any organization that seeks to create equitable experiences for all workers, particularly those in leadership. In academia, the extant literature has documented the effects of implicit bias in student evaluations of instruction of faculty of color, which is often compounded by intersecting identities such as age, gender, and nationality, yet many institutions continue to use this as a barometer for assessing teaching effectiveness, consequently impacting one’s tenure and promotion as well as compensation. Thus, it is unsurprising that Black women make up only 2% of the tenured professors in U.S. colleges and universities. Bias training could be a useful tool for buffering against the effects of implicit biases, which may hinder the promotion of employees of color into leadership positions. Finally, additional research is needed on racial inequities in leadership, including evidence-based research and practices that could be effective for reducing these inequities. Many of the suggestions made in this entry and by other scholars should be examined systematically. Admittedly, progress toward equity in leadership cannot be achieved without time-consuming

Reconstructive Presidents

and effortful work. The benefits clearly outweigh the costs from a financial and productivity standpoint to facilitate the needs of our increasingly growing ethnically diverse country. More importantly, our humanity continues to be at stake if we refuse to participate in the construction of a just world that allows everyone to live to their full potential, regardless of their phenotypes or other intersecting identities. This goal cannot be actualized without multicultural leadership. Camilla W. Nonterah See also Diversity; Leading Diversity; Race and Ethnicity; White Privilege

Further Readings Avakame, E. F., October, T. W., & Dixon, G. L. (2021). Antiracism in academic medicine: Fixing the leak in the pipeline of Black physicians. ATS Scholar, 2(2), 193–201. doi:10.34197/ats-scholar.2020-0133PS Buchanan, N. T., Perez, M., Prinstein, M. J., & Thurston, I. B. (2021). Upending racism in psychological science: Strategies to change how science is conducted, reported, reviewed & disseminated. American Psychologist. doi:10.1037/amp0000905. Epub ahead. Davis, T. M., Jones, M. K., Settles, I. H., & Russell, P. G. (2021, May 14). Barriers to the successful mentoring of faculty of color. Journal of Career Development, 1–19. doi:10.1177/08948453211013375 Iheduru-Anderson, K. (2020). Barriers to career advancement in the nursing profession: Perceptions of Black nurses in the United States. Nursing Forum, 55(4), 664–677. doi:10.1111/nuf.12483 Jeffries-EL, M. (2021, September 14). POV: Where are the tenured Black female professors? What we need to do to support Black women in academia? BU Today. Boston University. Retrieved from https://www.bu.edu/ articles/2021/pov-where-are-the-tenured-black-femaleprofessors/ Morgan, A., Shah, K., Tran, K., & Chino, F. (2021). Racial, ethnic, and gender representation in leadership positions at National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers. JAMA Network Open, 4(6), 6–13. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.12807 Richards, B. N. (2019). Faculty assessments as tools of oppression: A Black woman’s reflections on (colorblind) racism in the academy. In W. Caron Byrd, S. Ovink, & R. J. Brunn-Bevel (Eds.), Intersectionality and higher education: Identity and inequality on

787

college campuses. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Roberts, S. O., Bareket-Shavit, C., Dollins, F. A., Goldie, P. D., & Mortenson, E. (2020). Racial inequality in psychological research: Trends of the past and recommendations for the future. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1295–1309. doi:10.1177/ 1745691620927709 Sanchez-Hucles, J. V., & Davis, D. D. (2010). Women and women of color in leadership: Complexity, identity, and intersectionality. American Psychologist, 65(3), 171–181. doi:10.1037/a0017459 Yu, P. T., Parsa, P. V., Hassanein, O., Rogers, S. O., & Chang, D. C. (2013). Minorities struggle to advance in academic medicine: A 12-y review of diversity at the highest levels of America’s teaching institutions. Journal of Surgical Research, 182(2), 212–218. doi:10. 1016/j.jss.2012.06.049

RECONSTRUCTIVE PRESIDENTS The American Constitution is skittish about political leadership. Presidents appear in the document as solitary figures. Their job description includes command of the military and management of the government’s statutory commitments, but when it comes to providing political direction or galvanizing the government for concerted action, they are given direction. This entry explores how this Constitutional blind spot plays out in political time by looking specifically at reconstructive presidencies. The entry examines the history of presidents who broke from politics of the previous leadership regime, highlighting some specific reconstructions that had profound effects on American politics.

The President and the Constitution Presidents occupy one of three coordinate branches of the U.S. government, each separate and checked by the others. Basic features of presidential democracy—like candidates, parties, and campaigns—are conspicuous for their absence in the initial construction of the office. They came later as add-ons. The Constitution looks askance

788

Reconstructive Presidents

at political mobilization around the presidency, seeking instead to prioritize stability, continuity, and a steady administration of the laws. This is a compound curiosity. Although its provisions for political leadership are vague and attenuated, the Constitution also makes it all but certain that every president will try to provide it. Consider the presidential oath, wherein the incumbent swears to “execute the office.” Each president is authorized thereby to take charge of “the executive power” in their own right and to exercise it on their own terms. Each sets up a “new administration,” intervening in the established order of things and disrupting received political and institutional arrangements. If for no other reason than this, presidents all find themselves engaged from the beginning in an effort to reorder affairs. Each presidency is, almost by definition, an incipient new deal out to secure support for the changes it brings about. Because the office is so weakly endowed for political leadership, these reordering efforts are almost always frustrated. Persistent though they are, the disruptions that attend the transfer of power from one president to the next are seldom sufficient to overcome the system’s deep structural biases toward continuity. Presidents who come to office politically affiliated with previously established governmental commitments have been at a particular disadvantage. Starting out with strong expectations of collective control and responsibility, their political warrants for reordering are cloudy, and their disruptions tend to put them at odds with their own followers. By the same token, the critical stance of those who come to power from the opposition is an asset. Opposition leaders are better positioned to craft their own message, and they have more independence in political action. More often than not, however, residual support for the old order delimits their efforts to transform things.

Sequences of Affiliated and Opposition Leadership Extended sequences of affiliated and opposition leadership have driven this system, time and again, toward flashpoints of breakdown and reconstruction. The history of presidential leadership in

America is framed by this syndrome. Repeatedly, we find evidence of extreme dysfunction joined in the very next moment to rare demonstrations of political mastery: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Not coincidentally, each of these pairings also marks a pivot point in the development of American government and politics. The first president in each pair came to power affiliated with a set of commitments long established but increasingly out of step with changes in the nation at large. In situations like that, presidents are at pains to ease the strains on the system, but notwithstanding often desperate efforts to alleviate the stress, they seem only to divide their followers more severely and to deepen the crisis of legitimacy. The second president in each pair came to power from the opposition, and, with the old order imploding of its own accord, each found an extraordinary opportunity to confront it head on and repudiate it outright. These were reconstructive presidencies. Girded politically by the manifest failure and bankruptcy of the established order, these presidents broke decisively with the politics of the past, reordering things comprehensively and durably. The reconstructive presidents are widely considered paragons of political leadership, but note the irony: The presidents who most fully vindicated their constitutional charge to exercise the executive power in their own right and on their own terms upended the system root and branch. They broke through constitutional constraints, dislodged established commitments, and reconfigured government and politics holistically. Great leadership in the American system appears to hinge on an opportunity that the American Constitution was designed to foreclose. These wrenching changes appear to be the price paid for a governing frame that was overprotective of stability and wary of presidential democracy. They speak as well to a push toward holistic change inherent in the drive to secure “a new administration.” The reconstructive presidents stand out in retrospect as proud testimony to the regenerative capacities of constitutional government in the

Reconstructive Presidents

United States. Each redirected national affairs, moving the nation beyond seemingly intractable difficulties. But leadership of this sort is experienced in the moment as a time of extraordinary volatility, high anxiety, and extreme threat. It is perceived by many as a frontal assault on constitutional government and the rule of law.

The Political Architecture of Reconstructive Leadership Examples of reconstructive leadership are not limited to American government or, for that matter, to government per se. Something akin to it appears occasionally in other states (e.g., Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain), and parallels can be found in settings outside of national politics, like corporate organization and church organization. But reconstructive leadership has been an ingrained feature of American government and politics. It has been a vital and characteristic mode of adaptation, and it has followed a recurrent pattern. That affords an opportunity to generalize about its features. We can assay its preconditions, its political architecture, and its future prospects. Note first, that the distinguishing features of reconstructive leadership in the American system are not found in the personal attributes of the leaders themselves. Other presidents famous for their political skills, like Lyndon Johnson, saw the political foundations of their leadership unravel beneath their feet. Others were of equally sound character, and more to the point, the character traits of the reconstructive presidents themselves varied widely one to the next. Jackson was irascible and vindictive; Lincoln, steadfast and contemplative. FDR was pragmatic and hard to pin down; Reagan, programmatic and ideological. What these presidents shared was a context, a moment in a political sequence, a contingent political relationship to their predecessor. The tie to context rather than character cautions against an unbridled endorsement of leadership in this form, for there is no telling who will end up wielding its extraordinary authority. The circumstances in which these presidents came to power proved catalytic because they resolved a profound conundrum at the heart of political leadership in a constitutional system.

789

Though the presidency is an institution poised to disrupt and destabilize others, its incumbents are pledged to system maintenance. They are obligated “to preserve, protect and defend.” Reconstructive leaders come into office at moments when the order-shattering effects of presidential action in politics are most fully aligned with these order-affirming purposes. They take charge of a political system already in crisis and widely discredited. Drastic measures taken to dislodge what exists present themselves as necessary to save fundamentals. To affirm the system, the leaders in this situation reconstitute it; to save it, they create something new. Bidding to rescue the regime from itself, they leverage the authority to replace it. In this sense, reconstructive leaders recall the authority of Jesus at the Temple and Martin Luther at Wittenberg. They generate transformative energy by joining a forthright indictment of the received order of things with a determination to reclaim the true order of things. Reaching back to a mythic past, reconstructive leaders affirm values allegedly squandered and lost in the degeneracy of the received dispensation. Lincoln repudiated the alleged slave power conspiracy in just such terms: Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it and wash it white in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution [. . .] If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make it and keep it, forever worthy of the saving. (Bassler, 1953, p. 276)

FDR, taking charge in the depths of the Great Depression, put it this way: Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected in the hearts of minds of men [. . .] The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. (Rosenman, 1938, p. 12)

The political appeal and transformative energy of this stance is temporally structured to disassociate the leader from the immediate past and maximize independence in action. Repeatedly,

790

Reconstructive Presidents

reconstructive presidents have brought that stance to bear at three sites critical to maintenance of the old order: (1) Reconstructive leaders target received political coalitions. They do not simply bring an out-party to power. They are party builders. They use widespread disaffection from the received order of things to reconfigure political alliances, and they do so with an eye to broadening their base of support in a new coalition capable of dominating government long into the future. (2) Reconstructive leaders target the courts. Compelling deference from the judiciary is sine qua non in a reconstitution of government, and as protectors of precedent, monitors of consistency, and anchors of continuity, the courts invariably run up against ambitions of leaders who attempt it. Court battles are emblematic of the politics of reconstruction and indicative as well of the precarious relationship between the reconstructive stance and the rule of law. (3) Reconstructive leaders target key programmatic supports for the politics of the past. They seek to dismantle the residual institutional infrastructure of the old order, the linkages between the state and civil society that bound the prior regime together. Whatever else they might accomplish, reconstructive leaders are most distinctive for these negations and displacements. Jackson destroyed the National Back; Lincoln destroyed slavery. Just as presidential history reveals the structure of reconstructive leadership, it also alerts us to possible changes in its future character. Consider first how the prospects for sweeping away programmatic supports for the politics of the past have changed. Over time, ties between state and society have grown more elaborate and resilient. They have been anchored by a far-reaching and well-articulated administrative apparatus. As these bonds thicken, we might expect it to become harder to repudiate and dislodge them. This suggests that presidentially led political reconstructions of American government are likely to become shallower affairs.

Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as Reconstructive Leaders Something along these lines is hinted at by the 20th-century exemplars of the type, FDR and

Reagan. They produced nothing so categorical as Jackson’s destruction of the National Bank or Lincoln’s eradication of slavery. Roosevelt set himself against the “economic royalists,” but he could not dispense with them altogether. He led an interdependent industrial society. He needed to enlist his opponents in his program for economic recovery, and ultimately, during World War II, he worked to integrate their interests more fully into his new order. Reagan railed against the liberal’s welfare state. He even feigned an assault on its cornerstone, the Social Security program. But in the end, he failed to dismantle any program of vital significance to the old order. Reagan did much to discredit liberalism, and he reconfigured political alliances to press relentlessly against its institutional supports, but the rhetoric of “the Reagan Revolution” far outstripped its institutional accomplishments, and dislodging liberalism remained as an unrealized, seemingly inexhaustible, aspiration for his fellow partisans going forward. All told, secular thickening in the institutional universe of presidential action promises to dilute the transformative energy of reconstructive leadership, and while that might appeal to all those who value stability, it may also have profound implications for the regenerative capacities of the system at large. Another change that might affect future prospects for reconstructive leadership points in the opposite direction. The political foundations of presidential power have changed profoundly since the party reforms of the 1970s. The displacement of the convention system of nomination by the primary system has weakened the bonds of collective control and responsibility. Contenders for the presidency now build their own political following, and with the rise of candidate-centered campaigns, each victor transfers a political organization of personal loyalists into the White House. The general effect has been to loosen the constraints of political affiliation on presidential action and to cloud the differences between affiliated leaders and opposition leaders. Because all presidents are now more independent in political action, we might expect reconstructive action to become less distinctive and more widely available. These developments are likely to register their effects most dramatically on the late-regime

Regulating Private Sector Leadership

affiliates, presidents who have traditionally struggled haplessly at those vulnerable pivot points when the old order begins to implode. Consider Jimmy Carter. He was a political insurgent. He used the new primary system to take over the long-dominant Democratic party at a time when its liberal commitments were coming under severe stress. Before he was defeated in his bid for reelection, Carter was well along in his own attempt to upend liberal orthodoxy and invert its priorities. Acting under extraordinary economic pressures, he privileged the fight against inflation over the traditional liberal commitment to full employment, and he did so while beating back a direct challenge to his renomination from his party’s most formidable defender of liberal orthodoxy. The most recent rendition of leadership by a late-regime affiliate presents an even more striking variation. The Donald Trump presidency was the fourth incarnation of the conservative regime ushered in by the Reagan Revolution. But like Carter, Trump was an insurgent and a loner. His affiliation with his party was nominal at best. As if to demonstrate that the Republican establishment had lost control of its message and its following, Trump built a political movement all on his own and consummated a hostile takeover of the organization. His campaign message—“Make America Great Again”—was unabashedly reconstructive, and once in office, Trump followed through with a course of action that was unmistakable. He rebranded the Republican party and recast the coalition. He packed the courts and turned the Justice Department into a strong arm of his own personal party. He repudiated the “Deep State” and set out to gut the residual institutional infrastructure of the old order. But for his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump was poised to skip the disjunctive phase of the standard reconstruction sequence and recast the system categorically in his own image. These contrary trends suggest a politically volatile future. Reconstructive ambitions may become more common, but the reorderings themselves are likely to prove more superficial and less durable. Instead of resolving great disruptions periodically into agreeable settlements, presidential interventions may just whipsaw more fiercely back and

791

forth. If so, the core values sown into the original constitutional design—stability, continuity, and the steady administration of the laws—will be all but lost from view. Stephen Skowronek See also Congressional Leadership; Democratic Leadership; Leaders’ Stories; Presidential Leadership

Further Readings Lincoln, A. (1953). At Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854. In R. P. Bassler (Ed.), The collected works of Abraham Lincoln (Vol. 2, p. 276). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Roosevelt, F. D. (1938). Inaugural address, March 4, 1933 acceptance speech. In S. Rosenman (Ed.), The public papers and addresses of Franklin Roosevelt (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Random House. Skowronek, S. (1997). The politics presidents make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Skowronek, S. (2020). Presidential leadership in political time: Reprise and reappraisal (3rd ed.). Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

REGULATING PRIVATE SECTOR LEADERSHIP Regulation serves as a mechanism to establish limits or standards on private industry for the purpose of maintaining quality, safety, accessibility, and fairness. Regulation affects key attributes of leadership by providing a framework in which leaders must operate to meet goals and organize resources.

Regulations as a Framework Regulations provided by the government occur in many forms and affects everything from workers to firms, property, and environments. These rules and regulations provide a framework for leaders in making decisions about such matters as where resources can be used; who is qualified to work on

792

Regulating Private Sector Leadership

projects; and what situations, customer channels, products, and locations must be included within the decision-making process. Healthy leadership within a regulatory framework may occur at the expense of entrepreneurial leadership if innovation, ethics, and effective practices are not aligned with government, professional organization, or private association goals. Entrepreneurial leadership is a form of leadership marked by innovation and creativity in the organization, use, and distribution of resources. These resources include land, labor, capital, and management that must be organized by leaders to operate and be successful. These specific forms of leadership include when an individual or organization does not merely lead but creates new opportunities and navigates followers into new and uncharted territories. One way in which regulation encourages entrepreneurial leadership is through providing tools to act as a signal of quality and safety within producer–consumer or leader–follower relationships. Rules and regulations establish a level of trust for the actions and decisions of a leader because those decisions and actions are occurring within a framework built to ensure that the governmentestablished norms of quality and safety have been met and verified. The verification or adherence to regulations can be an unexpected or time-intensive requirement for leadership. These regulations may be detrimental to potential entrepreneurial leaders because they can drastically increase the cost of resources such as wages and salaries of workers; materials and manufacturing equipment; and physical space for conducting business activities. To certify that resources meet the expectations implicit in the rules takes time and labor power. Understanding the regulatory focus is an important explanatory factor in the influence of ethical leadership. In an effort to be a good steward of the profession, organize resources, and align commitments between the employer and employee, leaders may promote the mindset of development mechanisms that measure and coordinate skill level of employees such as occupational health and safety in the work setting.

Types of Private Sector Regulation Government-sponsored regulations can be implemented by national, state, local, or tribal departments and lawmakers. Some regulations, for example the requirements to be an airline pilot, are set to a national standard created by a department or bureau, in this case the Federal Aviation Administration. In other cases, private sector regulation must be determined by lawmakers through a voting process or by executive order, such as import tariff rates. The crucial components of private sector regulation can be divided into five main categories: occupational, firm or establishment behavior, property, environmental, and taxes. Occupational regulation is any form of regulation that affects the individual attributes of a job for a laborer. This includes different signals of quality, competence, or training such as licensing, certification, registration, as well as mandatory insurance and bonding. Licensure and certification determine who can be employed within a specific job and what job duties and tasks they are legally allowed to perform once employed. These regulations can be set either through the government or professional organizations with licensing representing a strict requirement and certification representing an optional but recommended requirement. Leaders benefit from occupational regulation because they can quickly assess the qualification, skills, and insights of employees and followers in order to maximize the returns from choosing the correct leadership strategy or assigning these individuals to tasks more suited for their interests. The forms of strict licensure, whereby an individual cannot perform a task at all without government permission, creates barriers to opportunity for entrepreneurial leadership in which there will be limitations to the available qualified individuals; furthermore, the cost of training and utilizing workers who have received and finished this training can be prohibitive for some projects. Firms or establishments have many regulations related to the behavior of the firm, the workers within the firm, and the management or leadership. These include quality and safety standards for goods and services, fair labor standard laws pertaining to items such as personnel leave and mandatory overtime, and business ethics that

Regulating Private Sector Leadership

prohibit unfair business practices by firm leadership such as insider trading. These categories include a majority of what is considered private sector regulation: what tasks a firm or individual can perform, how they can perform it, and what individuals can purchase or use. This form of regulation is crucial for all types of leadership. It can limit innovation through reducing available goods and services; the tasks an organizations can perform; and how leadership engages with the public, employees, and followers through tangent and virtual mediums such as advertising. The economic perspective of property and environmental center around the concept of property rights. The Coase theorem, a fundamental economics concept, holds that as long as property rights are well defined, there are a reasonable number of consumers within a transaction, and the transaction cost of negotiation is low enough that economically efficient outcomes can exist. Yet, these concepts can become more complicated at more centralized levels of government, such as the national level. These regulations seek to align the pricing and output decisions of firms by inducing additional benefits or costs that cause private sector behavior to align with socially optimal levels. The purpose of property and environmental regulations whereby leadership is coerced to focus on healthy leadership outcomes is to reduce unintended consequences for others. Regulations of the private sector involving taxes can more accurately be described as taxes and subsidies. Taxes are a compulsory contribution levied by a government on income, profits, or added costs to goods and services to increase local, state, or national revenue sufficiently to afford public projects. Subsides, in contrast, are government-sponsored payments to an individual or firm to incentivize continuing some sort of behavior—for example, tax deductions for making charitable donations. These programs affect leadership goals through adjusting the cost and benefits to encourage leadership in programs intended to increase social welfare for the common good while disincentivizing behavior that may be harmful to others. These monetary provisions affect how closely aligned entrepreneurs must be to healthy

793

leadership practices and can either (a) deter leadership that is causing social harm by increasing costs with taxes above a level in which the entrepreneur can operate or (b) encourage healthy leadership by reducing costs through integrating subsidies that allow a leader to receive monetary benefit from an action.

Leadership and Self-Regulation Regulation of the private sector arises not only from government but can be self-regulation through leaders’ own actions or the actions of a private professional organization or a private association in which leaders seek membership. Professional organizations are a collection of individuals within a particular profession who have a vested interest in improving their occupation for the public good, such as the American Medical Association for physicians. Yet, these organizations also come at the cost of ostracizing those who do not seek or agree to membership. Private associations are collections of individuals who self-regulate for a common cause, such as homeowners’ associations. Professional organization membership can have both benefits and costs for leaders. First, agreeing to the set of rules and regulations put forth by the professional organization can signal to customers and collaborators that this person is recognized favorably among their professional peers. These memberships can also help leaders to both develop a network for receiving and sending information, as well as provide a pool of potential employees, followers, or managers to improve or execute the goals of leadership. The subsequent costs of freely entering a professional organization or private association can be a limited set of choices and personal autonomy in the decision-making process. Leaders will also be perceived to have the ethics and effective leadership types that are commonly associated with the organization, which may not directly correlate with the leader’s personal mission, vision, and purpose. This form of private sector regulation standardizes leadership while also inhibiting potential entrants, which could inhibit new entrepreneurial leadership from forming.

794

Religion and Leadership

Healthy Leadership An important question of private sector regulation is whether it promotes healthy leadership, and whether this healthy leadership is at the expense of entrepreneurial leadership. The role of effective and healthy leadership in regulation depends on the stringency of the regulation and the ability of the leader to quickly respond to, and innovate on the basis of, changes in regulatory environment. Leadership may be supported through regulation by acting as a signal of good faith or quality and may ensure that actions taken by leadership are in the interest of the social good. Leadership or the interest of the social good promotes healthy actions, but this can be at the expense of entrepreneurial leadership when that entrepreneur is adversely affected by the rules and regulations and in turn unable to accomplish a desired goal or innovation. Entrepreneurial leadership can avoid some of the pitfalls of increased barriers to performance and action by exhibiting decisive, effective leadership and prioritizing business ethics that algin with the concerns of regulators—through government, professional organizations, and private association regulation. This may include reducing projects that cannot be accomplished with the additional costs of private sector regulation and instead restructuring goals and outcomes to align with social values and ethics early on within the process of leadership design. If the social value is targeted, then the addition of private sector regulation may entail unintended consequences for effective leadership behavior. Aligning with these potential regulations does reduce the autonomy of entrepreneurial action for leadership, in which healthy leadership arises through the reduction of entrepreneurial leadership. Alicia Plemmons See also Board Leadership; Effective Leadership; Ethics and Effectiveness, Political Leadership, Unintended Consequences of Leadership Theories

Further Readings Adams, Jr., J. E., & Copland, M. A. (2007). Principal licensing and leadership for learning: The need for

coherent policy. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 6(2), 153–195. Barling, J., Loughlin, C., & Kelloway, E. K. (2002). Development and test of a model linking safety-specific transformational leadership and occupational safety. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(3), 488–496. Cavanagh, G. F. (2004). Global business ethics: Regulation, code, or self-restraint. Business Ethics Quarterly, 14(4), 625–642. Kark, R., & Dijk, D. V. (2007). Motivation to lead, motivation to follow: The role of the self-regulatory focus in leadership processes, Academy of Management Review, 32(2), 500–528. Welsh, S., Keller, M., Wellman, B., & Boon, H. (2004). Moving forward? Complementary and alternative practitioners seeking self-regulation. Sociology of Health and Illness, 26(2), 216–241.

RELIGION

AND

LEADERSHIP

The relationship between religion and leadership is one that has received relatively little attention in the academic literature. A key concept in this area is that of servant leadership, which has become increasingly prominent in wider debates on leadership in recent years. Discussions surrounding servant leadership provide useful insight into the different ways in which an ethical, person-centered, and values-based approach to leadership might play out in faith-based settings and how the nuances of this leadership style may be appropriated in and through workplace practice in related organizations. The concept has also been developed within broader theological writings as a consequence of its perceived fit with religious models of leadership based on servanthood, most notable to date being those within the Christian tradition. This entry explores the relationship between religion and leadership by presenting an overview of the way in which servant leadership has been appropriated by theological scholars within this tradition.

What Is Servant Leadership? In his 1977 (reprinted 2002) book Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate

Religion and Leadership

Power and Greatness, Robert K. Greenleaf defines servant leadership as follows: The Servant-Leader is servant first . . . It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first . . . For such, it will be a latter choice to serve – after leadership is established . . . The leader-first and servant-first are two extreme types . . . The best test, and difficult one to administer is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely themselves to become servants? [original emphasis; p. 27]

Widely regarded as the seminal text on servant leadership, Greenleaf’s book has inspired a generation of leaders both in Christian and secular settings. In terms of religious association, Greenleaf explicitly states that he is not a theologian, but it is clear that his writings are based, at least in part, on the teachings and practices of Quakerism and, in this sense, his conceptualization of servant leadership can legitimately be seen a deriving from a Christian worldview. At a general level, there appears to be little, if any, formal connection between Greenleaf’s original work and wider theological thought, save for the fact that when discussing leadership issues theologians have often gravitated toward servant leadership as a natural starting point. The accepted logic here appears to suggest that because Greenleaf was influenced by faith-based teachings, his work on servant leadership must necessarily be underpinned by biblical notions of leadership. A connection to the “sacred” may be one of the reasons why servant leadership has historically been less prominent in secular discussions of leadership. However, this situation has changed markedly since the turn of the 21st century as corporate leaders and organizations have come to see the benefits of this particular model. During the same period, academic discussion around the topic has burgeoned.

Religion and Servant Leadership Religious undertones can certainly be seen in the practical outworking of the servant leadership

795

model. A number of writers have alluded to the fact that servant leaders often demonstrate a spiritual connection to their work, believing that it is their “vocation” or “calling” to lead—and to lead in a certain way. Central to the overall concept (and where servant leadership distinguishes itself from other leadership styles) is that the underlying motive for the leader to take on leadership responsibilities is based on the replacement of self-interest (i.e., the pursuit of one’s own ambitions) with an orientation toward the interests of others (both within the organization and the wider community). Armed with such an altruistic and moral mindset, servant leaders seek to engender notions of collegiality, trust, fairness, respect, humility, relationship, and an intentional interest in the well-being and potential of employees, believing that the needs of followers outweigh those of the organization itself. The central premise is that achievement of organizational goals is simply a by-product of employee investment (i.e., when workers/followers perceive that their growth and well-being is prioritized, they are likely to be more efficient and productive in their work). In turn, servant leaders seek to impact the lives of employees to the extent that they themselves become other-oriented and catalysts for organizational and social transformation. At one level, of course, such an approach may appear counter to the individualism of contemporary social life and the authoritarian and hierarchal regimes of more traditional organizations where profit is often prioritized over people. Despite the apparent paradox inherent in the term servant-leader, the overriding objective is for the two to become interchangeable.

Theology and Servant Leadership As a consequence of this values base, servant leadership has been enthusiastically embraced by Christian leaders (both inside and outside of faith contexts) whose calling (or vocation) to serve often represents a pivotal component of their religious identity. Indeed, it could be argued that the principles of service, other-personcenteredness, and a concern for the least privileged in society are entirely commensurate with (yet not exclusive to) Christian theology.

796

Religion and Leadership

Operating on the assumption that Greenleaf’s concept derives from a biblically based model (and, in this sense, is not original), theologians have been quick to adopt his thinking as a framework for analysis. This has taken place in line with various themes, two of which are: (1) the interrogation of Bible passages in relation to examples of servant leadership and (2) empirical research into the way in which Christian leaders might manifest (or not) the key characteristics of servant leadership.

Biblical Examples of Servant Leadership While the Bible contains a plethora of examples of servant leadership, the first of these themes is most aptly demonstrated in the New Testament gospels (the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) where the relationship between the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, and his 12 disciples is most accurately portrayed. In John 13: 1–17, for example, Jesus demonstrates a disruption of social norms by washing his disciples’ feet within the context of the Last Supper (the eve of his betrayal and crucifixion)—a cultural practice that would have been regarded at that time as an entirely menial and subservient task and one reserved only for “low-ranking” individuals. This event was not simply a statement of humility and service, but also an indication of how Jesus wanted his disciples to treat each other and how they, in turn, should lead more widely. That he washed their feet did not denigrate the sense that he was their leader, rather this was his way of demonstrating an altogether different kind of leadership constructed on the premise of sacrificial service. This notion is further portrayed in Mark 10: 35–45. Here, Jesus is again in conversation with his disciples, two of whom (James and John) are pursuing a line of inquiry as to who will sit at the right and left hand of Jesus in heaven. Dismissing his ability to make this decision, Jesus uses this opportunity to deliver another lesson in servant leadership by revealing the egotistical and selfserving nature of those concerned: whoever wishes to be first must be last (a slave) and whoever wishes to become great must become a servant. An account of the same incident in Matthew 20: 25–28 sees Jesus explicitly stressing the counter-cultural

nature of the servant leadership model: “You know that the rulers of this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant.” Perhaps not surprisingly, this instruction appears to both confuse and grieve the disciples simply because it defies the experiential logic of worldly leadership. Moreover, it is a political statement that bears testament to the way in which the principles, values, and behaviors underpinning servant leadership present as counter to the conventional (hierarchical) leadership styles of the time.

Biblical Characteristics of Servant Leadership Taking these examples one step further, what, we might ask, do they tell us about the biblical characteristics of servant leadership? First and foremost is the issue of followership. Jesus’s leadership style created a set of expectations for his disciples; they were not only expected to follow him in terms of his teachings but also in relation to the way that he led. The key principle here is that good leaders must not simply be good followers, they must serve their followers. Second is the connection between humility and authenticity. Service of this kind demands a heightened sense of humility. Here, security in one’s identity brings with it a measure of authenticity evident in part by Jesus’s ability to naturally share his vulnerabilities and to dismiss traditional notions of relational power in order to prioritize the interests of others. Such sacrificial investment has particular impact when applied to those who might be deemed to be of lower social standing than oneself. Third, the notion of disproportionate investment and multiplication is also evident in these examples. Jesus had a wide and varied ministry (not least to the marginalized) but a significant proportion of his time was spent investing in his 12 disciples who, in turn, were expected to invest in small number of others—thus mirroring the “community” element of Greenleaf’s concept. The key principle here is that servant leaders should be judged not only on the success of their own tenure but also on the generational legacy that they leave. The intentional

Religious Disagreement

nurturing of followers (disciples) can be found throughout these accounts and speaks readily to the servant leader as carer and mentor. It is widely accepted that the 12 disciples were from a range of social and occupational backgrounds and that their personal qualities and attributes were far from complementary. Yet Jesus appears to see the potential in each individual and in seeking to bring this to fruition once again demonstrates a servant leader mentality.

Concluding Thoughts Our aim here has been to provide a depiction of the way in which the relationship between religion and leadership plays out in everyday working life. We have done so by suggesting that Greenleaf’s widely accepted concept of servant leadership is loosely derived from a biblically based model and that, as a consequence, leaders who adopt a Christian worldview often deploy a servant leadership approach. Indeed, we would go as far as suggesting that such a position is often a default of practitioners in this sector (consciously or not) simply because of the values and principles that servant leadership promotes and the way in which these align with the central tenets of their faith. Of course, this does not limit the relevance of our discussion to faith-based organizations. On the contrary, such thinking also applies to Christian leaders in secular contexts and/or those of other faith traditions. Nor is this the only model of leadership adopted by this particular cohort. Operationally speaking, many modern-day, faith-based organizations mirror the everyday working practices of corporate (secular) life. Hence, literacy in a range of leadership frameworks and models is necessary both for Christian leaders and theologians. Andrew Parker and Don Vinson See also Authentic Leadership; Caring Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Servant Leadership

Further Readings Bell, R. M. (2019). What’s not Christian leadership? Learning from Jesus’ condemnation of toxic leader exemplars in the New Testament. Theology of Leadership Journal, 2(1), 56–72.

797

Broward, J. J. (2019). Follow the leader: An integrated theology of leader development. Theology of Leadership Journal, 2(1), 86–97. Gemechu, T. F. (2018). Description of discipleship life experience in a servant leadership context. Theology of Leadership Journal, 1(1), 37–48. Greenleaf, R. K. (1977/2002). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. New York, NY: Paulist Press. Hall, K. S. (2019). A biblical foundation of cross-cultural Christian leadership: An explication through Pauline leadership in acts. Theology of Leadership Journal, 2(1), 7–20. Halverson, J. (2018). The character development and spiritual disciplines required for Christian leaders of secular organizations to transform organizational culture. Theology of Leadership Journal, 1(2), 110–140. Hernandez, N. J. (2019). A double paradox: Servant leadership and gender scripts in the Latin American context. Theology of Leadership Journal, 2(1), 38–55. Thomas, D. (2018). Jesus’ cross-cultural model of ‘leaderservant’ in Luke 22:24-30. Theology of Leadership Journal, 1(1), 67–78.

RELIGIOUS DISAGREEMENT In the late 19th century, the pioneering German sociologist Max Weber argued that as scientific knowledge spread and social institutions became increasingly subject to rational scrutiny, modern citizens would abandon their old, traditional religious commitments and give allegiance to new, more secular norms of social interaction. This “secularization” hypothesis remained popular among European scholars of religion well into the 1970s and, if true, would make the problem of religious disagreement obsolete. However, scholars of religion widely agree that this hypothesis has been invalidated by the 20th-century resurgence of conservative religious movements in the United States and Europe, as well as by developments in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. In addition to the existence of important differences between those who are committed to distinct religious traditions, social and political oppositions between religious and nonreligious citizens started

798

Religious Disagreement

growing at an alarmingly fast rate in the late 20th century. These trends indicate the continued relevance of the problem of religious disagreement: individuals differ from one another either in belonging to distinct religious traditions or in belonging to no religious tradition at all, and these opposing attitudes regarding religion often produce diverging positions on what policies shared social institutions and groups should implement. Euro-American scholarship on the question of how leaders should respond to religious disagreement is perhaps most developed in the field of political philosophy, and in particular within the social contract tradition that dominates this field. This entry discusses the social contract tradition’s historical approach to religious disagreement, as well as arguments for and against the doctrine of religious restraint that figures at the center of contemporary social contract theorists’ debates about religious disagreement.

Social Contract Theory and Religious Neutrality Social contract theorists argue that a political leader’s authority to impose and enforce policies on their constituents is contingent on the latter giving the former consent to exercise their power in that way. Canonical social contract theorists like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes developed their arguments in part in response to the European religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, which provided to them particularly egregious examples of how disagreement between religious communities can contribute to destructive social conflict. Seeking a basis for political authority that would not be contingent on the religious sanctions of the church, Locke and Hobbes argued that a political leader may only justifiably exercise their power over a citizenry if individuals in a “state of nature” (where no such government authority was yet in place) would autonomously have endorsed that exercise of power. Social contract theorists’ emphasis on the importance of consent gained important moral motivation from the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant pointed out that, unlike (say) wrenches or toads, persons have a capacity for rational autonomy: they can

understand and appreciate moral and practical reasons, and govern their own conduct in accordance with those reasons. As a result, Kant argued, one ought not to simply compel persons to conform to one’s own ends in the way one may perhaps legitimately do with (say) a wrench or a toad. Instead, one ought (at least presumptively) to respect persons’ freedom to govern their own choices, and so ensure that they are able to consent to any imposition of power to which they are subject. Given this importance of consent to the justifiable exercise of power, social contract theorists since Locke, Hobbes, and Kant have suggested that in conditions of religious pluralism, governments should only impose secular policies that are neutral between those who disagree on religious grounds. Insofar as these lessons of social contract theory are correct, they apply in predictable ways to circumstances where leaders are, like political authorities, charged with settling on and administering policies by which religiously diverse groups are compelled to abide. Social contract theorists are likely to argue that leaders should determine what policies and collective goals to adopt by considering what religiously diverse followers would have been apt to autonomously endorse prior to their entry into the group, and that leaders should as a result only impose nonreligious, secular policies that are neutral between those who disagree.

The Doctrine of Religious Restraint Critics of the social contract tradition’s approach to religious disagreement often point out that secular policies are not, just by virtue of being secular, necessarily “neutral” with respect to religion. A secular policy requiring construction workers to wear hard hats, for instance, may effectively prevent Sikh believers (whose religious commitments compel them to wear alternative head coverings) from securing gainful employment in the industry. In response to this critique, defenders of the social contract tradition make a distinction between “neutrality of impact” and “neutrality of justification.” John Rawls, a prominent social contract theorist of the 20th century, suggests that

Religious Disagreement

whether or not a policy is “neutral” with respect to religion depends on the nature of the justifications that can be given for the policy, not (or at least not primarily) the impacts that the policy has on those who disagree. In particular, Rawls argues that the appropriate rules for social cooperation are rules that can be justified by reference to reasons that would be accepted by individuals behind a “veil of ignorance”—that is, by reference to reasons that individuals would accept if they did not know what social positions in society they occupied or (more specifically) to which religious doctrines they adhered. Suppose, for instance, that individuals behind a veil of ignorance took into consideration that they could turn out either to be Sikh believers—who could not get jobs as construction workers due to the hardhat policy—or construction managers—who would be subject to higher insurance premiums for some employees’ failure to wear hardhats. If, under these conditions, persons behind a veil of ignorance determined that the balance of reasons spoke in favor of a rule requiring hardhats, then (according to Rawls) this rule would be religiously “neutral” in the needed way—even despite its uneven impacts—because it could be justified in an appropriately impartial manner. While Rawls’s argument may help respond to the aforementioned objection about uneven impacts of “neutral” secular rules on religious believers, it also raises new concerns. Rawls’s argument seems to entail that in religiously diverse contexts, those involved in group decision-making processes should not rely on religious reasons as bases of justification for proposed policies—and this doctrine of religious restraint (DRR) has been subject to considerably controversy. A prominent objection to the DRR is that it places a disproportionate burden on religious citizens that similarly situated secular citizens are not also required to take on. Call this the disproportionate burden objection. One version of the disproportionate burden objection points out that citizens disagree not only on religious premises but also on secular, moral, and philosophical ones. Nonreligious ethical theories like utilitarianism and Kantianism, as well as other, broader secular conceptions of meaning and purpose—often collectively referred to in the literature, alongside religious doctrines, as comprehensive conceptions of the good—can reasonably be

799

subject to disagreement just like Christian or Buddhist doctrines. Applying this objection to a leadership context, some might conclude that leaders should not allow reasons grounded in controversial secular conceptions of the good to serve as justifications for group policies while also disallowing reasons grounded in controversial religious frameworks from doing the same. Rawls grants this version of the disproportionate burden objection and argues that citizens and civic leaders should not appeal to any comprehensive conceptions of the good to justify group policies. Instead, Rawls suggests, religious and secular citizens alike have a duty of civility to offer public reasons for policies that appeal to commonly shared political values (e.g., values of political liberty and equality that are familiar from liberal democratic constitutions). If correct, and if applied to a leadership setting, Rawls’s argument would suggest that in circumstances of religious and philosophical disagreement, leaders’ justifications for group policies should appeal only to organizational values that are familiar from whatever common mission statement or goals group members have all signed on to.

The Limits of Restraint and the Convergence Conception of Justification Though understanding the DRR as part of a more general “duty of civility” addresses one version of the disproportionate burden objection, it does not resolve all the salient concerns. Opponents of the doctrine argue that—even if there is some overlap in citizens’ endorsement of abstract political values like freedom and equality—the details of how citizens conceive of these “shared” values often differ, and so they often fail to provide a basis on which citizens can arrive at mutually acceptable policy conclusions. To take one example, consider the issue of abortion. Even if all parties agree on the political values of freedom and equality, it seems that to determine what these abstract values imply for concrete policies about abortion, one must be able to settle the question of whether and when a fetus becomes the sort of “person” who has a claim to be treated as free and equal; moreover, it seems that one cannot settle that question without appealing to some particular,

800

Religious Disagreement

contested comprehensive conception of the good. In cases like this one, it seems that any policy will depend for its justification on some controversial moral or religious framework, and so the disproportionate burden objection can once again gain traction. If any justification for a decision will require appeal to some or other comprehensive conception of the good, opponents of the DRR may (once again) insist that it is unfair to ask religious believers, but not others, to restrain from appealing to reasons that find home in their controversial comprehensive commitments. If and insofar as the arguments reviewed thus far are correct, they would seem to imply that neither leaders nor followers should in general appeal to religious reasons—or any other controversial “comprehensive” values—to justify group policies, but that such appeal may be permissible in cases where shared values (centered on, for example, the mission statement of the group) cannot provide detailed enough guidance on how to achieve mutually acceptable policy outcomes. However, defenders of the DRR might worry that this conclusion leaves too much leeway for religious reasons to serve as justifications for group policies. Suppose, for instance, that a private school includes in its mission statement the charge to give students comprehensive, practical tools for leading a flourishing life, but that some families in the school hold to a controversial religious conception of “flourishing” that entails that students should receive abstinence-only sex education. Even if any decision about how to teach sex education would require appeal to some controversial “comprehensive” moral framework to precisify what it is to lead a “flourishing” life, proponents of the DRR might object that the solution is not to simply allow religious families to impose their conception of flourishing on others. Instead, they might argue, a leader should (first) ascertain whether group members’ diverse, unshared values can still lead them to converge on a similar policy outcome and (second), if and when such convergence is not forthcoming, default to a policy of liberty. Thus, they might argue, the principal or the school board should seek to ascertain whether there are alternative, secular reasons that can persuade secular families to agree to abstinence-only education and,

if there are not sufficient such reasons, default to a policy of liberty in which no student is required to take a comprehensive sex education course that conflicts with their religious or secular values. One drawback of this convergence model of justification is that it does not settle what conception of liberty a leader should default to when convergence fails. If there is no convergence on a policy about abortion, for instance, does “defaulting” to liberty mean protecting women’s liberty to choose to get an abortion, or protecting a fetus’s liberty not to be aborted? In difficult cases like these, the creation of common ground may require leaders and followers to reexamine and reconsider even their most deeply held, controversial commitments. Marilie Coetsee See also Democratic Leadership; Liberalism and Toleration; Multiculturalism, Ethics of; Disagreement, Ethics of; Moral Pluralism; Religion and Leadership

Further Readings Audi, R., & Wolterstorff, N. (1997). Religion in the public square: The place of religious convictions in political debate. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Casanova, J. (2008). Public religions revisited. In H. de Vries (Ed.), Religion: Beyond the concept. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Eberle, C. J. (2002). Religious conviction in liberal politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi:10. 1017/CBO9780511613562 Freeman, S. (2012). Social contract approaches. In D. Estlund (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of political philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376692.013.0007 Gaus, G. F., & Vallier, K. (2009). The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity: The implications of convergence, asymmetry and political institutions. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 35(1-2), 51–76. doi:10.1177/0191453708098754 Hartley, C., & Watson, L. (2018). Equal citizenship and public reason: A feminist political liberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/ 9780190683023.001.0001 Neufeld, B. (2021). Public reason and political autonomy: A critical introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315185316

Resilient Leadership Putnam, R. D., & Campbell, D. E. (2012). American grace: How religion divides and unites us. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Weber, M. (1980). Religious rejections of the world and their directions. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds., Transl.). Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

RESILIENT LEADERSHIP Resilient people can be defined as exhibiting a certain ease with life despite adverse circumstances, perhaps most notably in their ability to bounce back after disappointment, rejection, or failure. Not all resilient people are leaders, but all authentic leaders are resilient: exhibiting grace under pressure; resolute in purpose and positive outlook; and leveraging strengths and weaknesses by knowing when to ask for help and when to go it alone. Resilient people present themselves to others as being in charge of themselves and their lives, fundamentally positive in their outlook on life, and keenly aware of their abilities as well as their shortcomings. Being flexible and adaptable, resilient people tend to see stressful situations and crises as opportunities to pivot and grow in a new direction. Rather than shutting down in highpressure situations, they flourish. Looking to the natural world, we see examples of resilience in desert plants thriving in the harshest dry heat, and viruses and bacteria persisting and evolving through millennia of changing environments. Humankind too evolved in the natural world, and our resilience in the human realm mirrors this natural ability to thrive amidst the harsh environments of stress, loss, disappointment, and failure. Resilient people tend to exhibit two fundamental characteristics: (1) they tend to have a strong internal locus of control; in other words, an inherent sense that they are in control of themselves and their lives. These people happen to the world rather than the world happening to them—they go knocking on opportunity’s door and (2) they have strong self-awareness of their strengths and abilities as well as their weaknesses which, crucially, are

801

seen less as a deficit and more as a useful compass for what to pursue in life and what to bypass. Getting good at anything takes resilience, since no one is the best at something the first time around (practice makes perfect) and excelling at what you’re good at while recognizing what you’re not good at is, effectively, a recipe for success in life. Whereas resilient people are flexible and adaptable in life, “brittle” people, by contrast, are more likely to crack or break under pressure and have less facility at pulling themselves back together after disappointment, rejection, or failure. This brittleness in personality might manifest, for example, in someone who blames her failure at work on a boss or coworkers who are “impossible” (external locus of control), while a resilient person might recognize she’s not thriving in this work environment and start looking around for something better (internal locus of control). A “brittle” teenager might apply to five top universities and decide to forgo college altogether if five rejection letters come back (external locus of control), while a resilient teenager might apply to a range of colleges and universities and, upon receiving all rejections, pivot to plans of traveling with a friend for a year instead (internal locus of control).

Theory and Research Publications on the subject of resilience have exploded since 2010. At that time, there were only about half a million publications on the subject; now there are well over five million. Most of these publications reside in the fields of psychology, education, and business. Resilience has taken center stage and become a high-profile buzz word in the culture at large because it seems to be the key to success in life. People who emerge as leaders, whether on the playground, in the workplace, or as cultural thought leaders, typically are resilient because they almost inevitably overcame disappointment and failure many times over en route to becoming leaders.

Resilience Versus Pollyanna Prescriptions of “Put a Smile on Your Face” A sizeable portion of the contemporary literature on resilience falls within the genre of self-help, such as books about moving on after tragic loss

802

Resilient Leadership

like the death of a spouse or child. These handbooks help to guide people through difficult times and toward hope, acceptance, and recovery. There is some resistance to this literature, however, from those who interpret (or misinterpret) the overall message of this subgenre as “be strong and move on” because they see this message as potentially damaging to those who need a different kind of help. For example, victims of partner abuse will not benefit from trying to be “resilient” to the abuse. In fact, this misunderstanding of the message doubles down on the abuse. As with any psychological literature, it is prudent to understand its potential uses and misuses.

Is Resilience Innate or Learned? This question invites further research. The answer from contemporary neuroscience seems to be “a little of both”; the degree to which a person is resilient is likely a combination of inborn traits, such as how we’re wired to handle stress, plus the quality of early childhood relationships with caregivers, current environmental conditions, opportunities for self-awareness and self-care, and other factors. But perhaps the most fundamental feature of resilience is how one handles stress. To use a concrete example, a resilient person might dread an upcoming public speaking event and feel nervous about it, but ultimately see it as a learning opportunity to grow, knowing that it will make all future public speaking that much easier. A more brittle person, by contrast, might decide that public speaking is off the table and find an excuse to bow out, fearing they would faint or suffer a heart attack at the podium. In an elevator stuck between the 34th and 35th floor of a high-rise, the brittle person might become catatonic with anxiety, unable to function, while the resilient person will be more able to stay calm and start exploring possible solutions to get everybody out safely. It is easy to see how the more resilient among us naturally emerge as leaders.

Resilience (or Lack Thereof) in Younger Generations The COVID-19 pandemic has given the whole world a reason to feel panicked and fatalistic. The

development of the vaccine has allayed some fears in some of us, and we know much more about the virus than when it first emerged, but we’re still living with uncertainty about the health of ourselves and our loved ones, the future of our jobs, and future pandemics and how they’ll affect us. The resilience of humanity as a whole has been tested since early 2020. But even before the pandemic struck, high schools and colleges were struggling with an epidemic of psychological problems and diagnoses (e.g., anxiety, depression, ADHD, victimhood) and wondering what was causing it. It seems the younger generations in the developed world feel that the world is a scarier place to be than ever before, yet they are, historically speaking, arguably living in the safest and most privileged era on planet Earth. Colleges and universities are encountering a surge in brittle students plagued by central nervous system (CNS)–related syndromes who sadly cannot function adequately in the college environment and either fail or drop out. These young people are not the resilient, adaptable, optimistic future leaders society needs them to be.

How the Self-Esteem Movement Produced the Resilience Movement Much has been written about the hands-off, distant, and even neglectful parenting with which many members of the postwar Baby Boom generation were raised. Baby Boomers themselves were considerably more involved raising Gen X’ers. Boomers’ kids played outside, neighborhoods felt safe, schools, churches, and clubs were assumed to be safe, and kids had considerable independence when not in school or at the dinner table. Many Gen X parents doubled down on being more involved, engaged, and hands-on parents— sometimes to a fault. The “helicopter” (hovering over kids) and “bulldozer” (get out of my way or else) parenting styles were dominant, and many parents felt like failures if they weren’t micromanaging every detail of their kids’ lives from homework to sports, friends, social life, and future. A crucial element of the micromanaging parenting style was to spare kids any disappointment and hurt feelings at all costs, thus short-circuiting self-esteem instead of letting it develop organically.

Resonant Leadership

Micromanaging children’s lives, argues Julie Lythcott-Haims in her book, How to Raise an Adult, is the best way to ensure that kids grow up feeling helpless when faced with even minor life challenges. Such children may become ineffectual adults, overwhelmed by life and thus more likely to fail. In a nutshell, the message is this: If parents don’t let their kids learn how to handle small disappointments and failures when they’re growing up, how will these children ever handle big disappointments and failures as adults? Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, has written extensively about the riddle of Millennials who are plagued by anxiety and depression and overwhelmed by everyday life, yet rank themselves unrealistically high on self-esteem assessments. Essentially, they think very highly of themselves but don’t really have a good reason for doing so. Self-esteem (“I am good enough”) and self-efficacy (“I can do this”) are not characteristics that are given to someone; they must be earned through hard work, perseverance, and overcoming failure. Although good grades are desirable, being able to move on after a poor grade is ultimately much more useful in the long run. Educators, psychologists, school administrators, counselors, and parents alike are now collectively realizing that society is on an unsustainable path, with overlapping generations of brittle people who are chronically stressed out, have no coping skills, and suffer from every CNS-related syndrome in the book, yet are the champions of the future. As a result, educators are shifting away from praising the high grades to praising the effort, no matter the grade.

Can Resilience Be Taught? Resilience can be thought of as a set of behaviors, skills, and thought patterns, and the good news is that these can be honed with practice. An individual’s locus of control probably runs pretty deep in their nature (whether inborn or developed in childhood) but with mindfulness, therapy, or any activity that makes the individual more self-aware, it’s possible to change the mental habit of “things happen to me” to “I make things happen.” A positive outlook also seems to be endemic to someone’s nature, but with mindfulness practices that teach the individual to notice the distinction

803

between event and reaction, it’s possible to learn that a failure at one thing can double as an invitation to another thing. Resilient people also tend to be comfortable asking for help when they need it and knowing how to effectively rely on their network for social support. Resilience might also entail being more adept at knowing when to rest, reflect, withdraw, and recharge, essentially a recipe for self-care. Resilient people can bend and stretch like a rubber band but at some point, they must recoil so they don’t lose that flexibility and become brittle. Learning how to become more resilient may prove to be hard work, but the alternative of being brittle and more prone to break down under stress is ultimately much, much harder to live with. Liz Stillwaggon Swan See also Effective Leadership; Health and Well-Being; Leader Self-Efficacy; Self-Leadership; Wellness

Further Readings Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribners. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House. Lythcott-Haims, J. (2015). How to raise an adult: Break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co. Marano, H. E. (2008). A nation of wimps: The high cost of invasive parenting. New York, NY: Broadway Books. Swan, L. S. (2021, August 3). Narcissism and the gift of resilience. Psychology Today. Swan, L. S. (2021, July 12). What is resilience? Psychology Today. Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen: why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy—and completely unprepared for adulthood (and what this means for the rest of us). New York, NY: Atria Books.

RESONANT LEADERSHIP Resonant leadership is a relationship-based form of leadership, grounded in emotional intelligence. Creating “resonance” requires that one is tune

804

Resonant Leadership

with others’ emotions and develops an environment where those emotions can be moved in a positive direction for the benefit of individuals and the organization. The concept was introduced in 2002 and is a developing construct in leadership literature. This entry investigates the origin and development of resonant leadership, including the types of resonant leadership and their connection to emotional intelligence; its theoretical foundation in social cognition and neuroscience; and the outcomes for followers such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and teamwork.

Origin The term resonant leadership (RL) emerged from the experience and research of Daniel Goleman and colleagues. The term was meant to capture the positive energy an emotionally intelligent supervisor or boss creates between themselves and their employees; an energy that allows members to meet their objectives while feeling supported and understood. Grounded in a musical metaphor, to resonate means to be “in sync” with others’ emotions so one can create a positive emotional tone, which will collectively reverberate throughout the team. Musical metaphors aside, RL is about empathizing with the concerns of others, both those expressed and those that are intuited, and articulating a believable and hopeful future that helps people achieve their shared goals. There are both resonant and dissonant (i.e., nonresonant) styles of leadership. The four types of RL styles identified are visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic. They are considered resonant styles because each one depends on a high level of emotional intelligence. Visionary leadership, for example, is described as prioritizing empathetic relationships with others, empowering them to innovate, and moving them toward a shared purpose. Coaching is an RL style, as it entails understanding individual employees and supporting their growth. Affiliative leadership is considered resonant because it offers a genuine connection between the leader and followers through self-disclosure and valuing others’ emotional experiences. Democratic leadership is resonant because people are consulted for their concerns and advice as big decisions are made.

Dissonant leadership is understood to be more common in organizations than RL. There are many ways to be dissonant as a leader, from being ruthless to manipulative to plainly unaware. The commonality is that the leader is not connected to the emotional reality faced by followers and thus cannot address their concerns and build a positive working climate. The two common types of dissonant leadership are pacesetting and commanding. Pacesetting leadership consists of a high concern for standards and a low concern for employee emotional welfare. This form of leadership is uninterested in relationships or collaborative teamwork. Commanding leaders issue orders and expect immediate compliance, with no questions asked. Coercion, threats, and bullying are exercised as deemed necessary.

Theoretical Foundations RL is a relationship-based style of leadership that has foundations in social cognition and neuroscience. These three elements—relationship-based style, social cognition, and neuroscience—can be described as follows. A Relationship-Based Style

RL is part of a movement that has continued to emerge since its origins in the 1990s and which has fostered the understanding of leadership as a relational process. Other relationship-oriented models of leadership include transformational leadership, leader–member exchange, and authentic leadership. Relational styles are a shift from forms of leadership that focus on task completion, such as transactional leadership. As some observers have noted, the problem with the latter is that although focusing solely on the task may be effective in the short run, over the long term individuals and teams are likely to feel disconnected and devalued, and thus have poorer performance. Theoretically, resonance does not occur within a leader; rather, it is a quality that occurs between leaders and followers—that is, within relationships. When a sequence of verbal and nonverbal behaviors between two or more people is genuine and uplifting, it can be considered a resonant interaction. A pattern of such interactions over time can be considered

Resonant Leadership

resonant leadership. This focus on interaction, rather than on the characteristics of a leader, is common among relationship-based models. However, some of the literature on RL does attend to the qualities of the leader, placing individual strengths and weaknesses at the forefront of analysis. Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee’s book Resonant Leadership, for example, focuses on the difficulty of remaining a resonant leader given the many pressures and demands of a leadership position. The authors suggest it is essential for emotionally intelligent leaders to devote time to renewal so they can continue bringing resonance to the workplace and not devolve into dissonance. Similarly, one of the most prolific researchers on RL, Greta Cummings describes the high degree of relational energy that is needed from a resonant leader. When there is difficulty at work, the relational energy brought by leadership allows the team to persist and find meaning despite the challenges they experience. In contrast, dissonant leaders do not create this relational energy, so when things go wrong there is no supportive or meaningful net to hold the team together. The scholarly research on RL has a similar pattern; in some studies participants report on the quality of their interactions with leadership, and in other studies participants reflect on the qualities of the leader.

(limbic system) and a cognitive center (prefrontal cortex) that communicate with one another. In keeping with the evolutionary development of the brain, the emotional center is typically the first to respond when there is risk, like encountering a demanding or uncaring boss. Because the emotional center of the brain is quick and powerful, dissonant styles of leadership tend to create negative emotional impulses that disrupt the workplace. A study by Richard Boyatzis and associates investigated whether interactions with resonant leaders impacted different areas of the brain than do interactions with dissonant leaders, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. Recollections of exchanges with resonant leaders activated areas of the brain associated with the mirror neuron system and positive affect, whereas recollections of exchanges and experiences with dissonant leaders activated areas of the brain associated with the mirror neuron system and negative affect, along with regions associated with avoidance and decreased compassion. The neurology behind leader–follower interactions suggests there are physiological reasons, in addition to social psychological ones, why resonant leadership creates better, more productive working environments than dissonant leadership.

Social Cognition

Theories from social psychology have been used to explain how a leader’s resonant behavior leads to positive emotions and outcomes for the group. One commonly used theory is social cognitive theory, a wide spanning theory about learned behavior. Of relevance to RL, the theory emphasizes that people learn to behave by observing and modeling others in their environment. When leadership is caring and responsive, followers learn to mirror the pattern, creating resonance. Neuroscience

In addition to social psychology, neuroscience has been used to understand the impact of emotionally intelligent leadership generally, and RL specifically. The brain has an emotional center

805

Outcomes The scholarship on RL in the 2000s has been primarily conducted in the field of health care. Through statistical analysis, numerous benefits to this leadership approach have been found. When leadership displays resonant behaviors rather than dissonant behaviors, employees and organizations enjoy the following outcomes: •

Reduced employee-to-employee incivility; Increased organizational commitment, both directly and indirectly by increasing compassion in the workplace; • Increased job satisfaction, both directly and indirectly by reducing emotional exhaustion; • Fewer negative effects on employee health after a work transition; • Fewer unmet patient care needs; •

806

Responsible Leadership

•

Increased perception by employees of having resources, support, self-determination, engaging work, and spiritual connection; • More workgroup collaboration; and • Better employee emotional health.

Heidi Reeder See also Emotional Intelligence; Transformational Leadership; Leader–Member Exchange (LMX); Authentic Leadership; Empowerment; Health and Well-Being

Further Readings Boyatzis, R. E., & McKee, A. (2005). Resonant leadership: Renewing yourself and connecting with others through mindfulness, hope, and compassion. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Boyatzis, R. E., Passarelli, A. M., Koenig, K., Lowe, M., Mathew, B., Stoller, J. K., & Phillips, M. (2012). Examination of the neural substrates activated in memories of experiences with resonant and dissonant leaders. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(2), 259–272. Cummings, G. (2004). Investing relational energy: The hallmark of resonant leadership. Nursing Leadership, 17(4), 76–87. Cummings, G., Hayduk, L., & Estabrooks, C. (2005). Mitigating the impact of hospital restructuring on nurses. Nursing Research, 54(1), 2–12. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. E., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP Responsible leadership is a normative theory that focuses on leader accountability for the needs of an array of stakeholders. This entry will introduce and provide examples of what responsible leadership entails, and the application of responsible leadership theory in business and other settings.

Stakeholders and the Relational Perspective Responsible leadership theory emerged from the growing interest in the fields of corporate social

responsibility and sustainability and is rooted in ethical and social-relational theory. Responsible leaders are accountable to multiple stakeholders, in other words different individuals and groups who are impacted by a leader’s decisions and actions. Stakeholders may include employees, customers, shareholders, the local community, and even the environment. Responsible leadership, therefore, requires that leaders behave responsibly not only to satisfy the needs of shareholders by maximizing profits. Instead, responsibility extends to all people who have a stake in the leader’s organization or organizational issues and processes. The focus of responsible leadership theory is improving social and environmental outcomes and creating global sustainable and positive change. To illustrate with an example, a responsible business leader is one who facilitates an organizational culture of healthy work–life balance for employees; who sources ethical and sustainable resources in production, including considerations for safe work environments for their laborers both locally and globally; and who contributes to the local community through corporate social responsibility initiatives or by providing opportunities for the employment of less advantaged community members—all while delivering profits to shareholders. Although related, responsible leadership theory is distinct from other leadership theories, such as those of ethical, servant, or transformational leadership. For instance, Robert Wood and Melissa Wheeler define an ethical leader as one who recognizes ethical issues and acts ethically both when alone and when others are present, who serves as a role model of ethical behavior, who effectively communicates the need for ethical action and persuades others to follow the path of moral rightness, and who holds difficult conversations when standards lapse. Responsible leadership theory acknowledges the importance of ethical principles and the role modeling of good behavior and extends on these by adopting a relational point of view, going beyond the dyad of leader–follower to encompass a wide range of leader–stakeholder relationships, as outlined in the work of Nicola Pless and Thomas Maak. Responsible leadership theory is best understood in terms of a relational perspective, via interactions with others. While traditional

Responsible Leadership

leadership theories, and those of leader–member exchange, tend to explore relationships between leaders and followers, usually conceptualizing followers as subordinates in organizational settings, responsible business leadership broadens the definition of followers to include stakeholders both outside and within corporations.

Stakeholder Complexity Globalization and technological advances have increased stakeholder complexity, and thus the challenges that responsible business owners face as they consider the needs of different stakeholders and stakeholder groups. The complexity is further augmented because diverse stakeholders have different expectations about the kinds of behaviors and actions a business leader should embody. Interacting with a multitude of stakeholders, inside and outside a corporation and at local and global levels, presents a number of challenges for a responsible business leader to address. According to Maak and Pless, challenges include ethics (e.g., dealing with competing stakeholder interests, different worldviews, and resolving ethical dilemmas); diversity (i.e., how to lead diverse people and business from different countries and cultures, all while creating an inclusive environment where followers feel valued, respected, and fulfilled); a business-in-society challenge (which involves earning a social license to operate, making the business case for leading responsibly, and acting as a good corporate citizen); and, finally, a stakeholder challenge, which involves creating, building, maintaining, and—if lost—restoring trust with different stakeholders.

Roles Model Approach To fulfill one’s responsibilities to followers in a stakeholder society, a leader needs to adopt different roles to lead various stakeholders. The roles model approach of responsible leadership theory introduces a number of roles leaders can step into so as to respond to various challenges and in interactions with different stakeholders. The roles are intended to be used flexibly, and to reflect not different personas but instead a leader who is an integrative being.

807

The eight roles include •

•

•

•

•

• •

•

leader as steward, the role of a guardian or custodian of values who leads responsibly even throughout times of trouble; leader as citizen, the role of a reflective and active citizen who encourages reflective citizenship inside the organization and beyond; leader as visionary, the role of envisioning a desirable future that is appealing to followers and gives followers direction; leader as servant, a role requiring humility, modesty, and a desire to support and care for others; leader as coach, a role to adopt with interacting with immediate followers, one that provides development, learning, and support to aid followers to achieve their objectives; leader as architect, the role of creating inclusive environments and facilitating meaningful work; leader as storyteller and meaning enabler, the role of communicating responsibility and morality to engender a shared sense of meaning and encouraging stakeholders, both internally and externally, to strive for business success and for the public good, also referred to as the greater good; and leader as change agent, a role based on transformational leadership that requires leaders to initiate and support ethical and sustainable change.

The roles model approach highlights the complexity of leading diverse followers, or stakeholders, and defines the leader not as one person at the top of the hierarchy but as a human being, equal to stakeholders, who needs to rise to challenges and to earn the respect and the social license to operate by weaving all stakeholders together to share in the leader’s vision for leading responsible and sustainable organizations. Christian Voegtlin and colleagues distilled the roles of responsible leaders down to three: the expert, the facilitator, and the citizen. The expert leader is task-oriented and facilitates follower success in achieving performance goals and planning future goals. The facilitator motivates and cares for the needs of employees. To address the needs of society, the citizen engages in reflection

808

Responsible Leadership

and considers the consequences of their behavior for society and the environment. They transcend short-termism and instead have a future-oriented outlook, aiming to create value for society. In a set of empirical studies conducted by the same authors, the three roles-model was tested to identify the predictors (antecedents) and consequences (outcomes) associated with responsible leadership theory. Results revealed empathy, positive affect, but not holistic thinking, as antecedents, with partial support found for self-transcendence values as antecedents. Leader effectiveness, employees’ affective organizational commitment, employees’ community citizenship behavior, stakeholders’ perceptions of leader as an attractive role model and of the company the leader works for as attractive, but not employees’ duty toward colleagues were discovered as outcomes. In other words, leaders who are empathic, who experience positive emotions, and who have a benevolent value orientation are more likely to display responsible leadership behaviors. Regarding outcomes, responsible leadership is associated with greater perceptions of the effectiveness of one’s leader, and to employees feeling greater emotional attachment to the organization and engaging in more community citizen behaviors at work. External stakeholders (e.g., job seekers) found responsible leaders to be positive role models and to work for attractive companies.

Organizational Outcomes Responsible leaders can impact organizational outcomes through their effective engagement with and influence over multiple stakeholders via two pathways: psychological and knowledge-based, according to Jonathan Doh and Narda Quigley. The psychological path includes building trust, ownership, and commitment from followers, while the knowledge-based path focuses on maximizing options through creativity and knowledge sharing. Leaders who employ these two pathways trigger organizational outcomes at four levels. At the micro or individual level, responsible leaders treat their followers as important stakeholders, considering their unique perspectives and fostering follower motivation and creativity. At the level of the team, the meso level, a responsible leader encourages teams to utilize the diverse perspectives of its

members, increasing psychological safety, or the sense that one will be heard and not penalized for voicing ideas, and learning—two factors that have been linked to team performance and improved decision-making. At the organizational level, being accountable to multiple stakeholders improves organizational culture and through the sharing of knowledge with external stakeholders, potential outcomes include business growth, increased innovation, and improved performance. At the broadest level, the societal level, responsible leaders are likely to better manage cultural boundaries and apply a forward-looking approach to anticipate and respond to upcoming economic and societal issues.

Application of Responsible Leadership In the early 1990s, a multinational corporation specializing in metal refinery acquired land and received approval from the Indian government to begin work on a greenfield project in rural India. However, the multinational corporation faced criticism, resistance, and protests from both nonprofit groups and from the indigenous people who resided in the affected area, leading to massive delays and a decade-long conflict situation. A new CEO was appointed to resolve the conflict and to drive the project ahead. The new CEO was faced with a dilemma: to call a stop or to press on with the industrialization project. A recent paper by Nicola Pless and colleagues proposed a technique to respond to and resolve this real-life crisis situation. The technique requires ethical reflection and moral imagination and involves asking not what should be done, but instead what could a responsible leader do in such a situation. Responsible leadership is about contributing to solutions that benefit all stakeholders, not just for shareholders or customers but also to the community involved and even to society more broadly. Behaving responsibly means not only avoiding harm but also doing good and being virtuous. This is particularly challenging in complex multinational settings when seemingly intractable conflicts arise, as in the case just described. Leaders who intend to develop responsible solutions need moral imagination; that is, a

Rhetoric

morally creative way of approaching a problem that may not have a clear solution—with one option that is morally right and an alternative option that is clearly morally wrong. Complex stakeholder settings cause dilemmas which are dynamic and messy. Often these dilemmas are grounded in values—not right versus wrong, but right versus right. In these scenarios, moral imagination allows individuals to gain some distance and perspective and to come up with what philosopher Rushworth Kidder refers to as a third way—a middle ground between two extremes. Returning to the case study, the new CEO could discover what is important for the local villagers and determine how to make a substantial contribution to local development as a basis for long-term engagement and the building of public trust. In the short term, however, this would mean that the CEO would have to justify the associated financial investment by focusing on the future benefits and the acknowledgment of the moral imperative to act responsibly toward all stakeholders. In conclusion, as seen in the foregoing applied example, responsible leadership requires future thinking, moral imagination, and a commitment and demonstration of strong values in order to consider and address the needs of various stakeholders. Melissa A. Wheeler See also Ethical Leadership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Leadership for the Common Good; Servant Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Doh, J. P., & Quigley, N. R. (2014). Responsible leadership and stakeholder management: Influence pathways and organizational outcomes. Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(3), 255–274. Kidder, R. M. (1995). How good people make tough choices. New York, NY: Morrow. Maak, T., & Pless, N. M. (2006). Responsible leadership in a stakeholder society–a relational perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 66(1), 99–115. Miska, C., & Mendenhall, M. E. (2018). Responsible leadership: A mapping of extant research and future directions. Journal of Business Ethics, 148(1), 117–134.

809

Pless, N. M., & Maak, T. (2011). Responsible leadership: Pathways to the future. In Responsible leadership (pp. 3–13). Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-0073995-6_2 Pless, N. M., Sengupta, A., Wheeler, M. A., & Maak, T. (2021). Responsible leadership and the reflective CEO: Resolving stakeholder conflict by imagining what could be done. Journal of Business Ethics, 1–25. Voegtlin, C., Frisch, C., Walther, A., & Schwab, P. (2020). Theoretical development and empirical examination of a three-roles model of responsible leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 167(3), 411–431. Wood, R. E., & Wheeler, M. A. (2017). Ethical leadership in D. Pitch, & A. Messenger (Eds.), Leadership matters: Seven skills of very successful leaders. Highett, VIC: Major Street Publishing. Zhang, T., Gino, F., & Margolis, J. D. (2018). Does “could” lead to good? On the road to moral insight. Academy of Management Journal, 61(3), 857–895.

RHETORIC It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Rhetoric is the art and science of effective, persuasive speaking. It is often thought to operate when things are contingent. But rhetoric also offers the appearance of certainty to things that may be contingent. Rhetoric enables deliberation and decision-making and it naturalizes elements of communities; it enables the exercise of power and masks its operations. Rhetorical leadership is the exercise of influence through discursive means; it is thus performative as well as textual and visual. Rhetorical leaders are most often studied in terms of institutional position, but they can also exercise influence as citizens or as leaders of social movements, in public forums or in business contexts. The focus of this entry is on these situations understood as communities. Communities are rhetorical constructions. Rhetorical leadership, above all, influences the kinds of communities we inhabit. Because all

810

Rhetoric

efforts of defining community necessarily entail both inclusion and exclusion, political leaders help determine those boundaries, which are always fluid and subject to change over time. Whether we are talking about nation-states, local governments, social movements, businesses, or other kinds of communities, the rhetoric of those in leadership positions helps to define the nature of those communities and how they will operate as communities. Different kinds of communities offer different kinds of opportunities for the exercise of such leadership, and they attend to different kinds of audiences, but they all involve legitimating institutions or failing to do so. Leaders must determine which issues are on the shared agenda, and they must frame the ways those issues will be understood. In doing so, the rhetoric of leaders shapes the nature of their communities.

Rhetorical Opportunities Every time a leader speaks, there is an opportunity to shape community. U.S. presidents, for instance, have institutionally routinized moments dedicated to the definition of the U.S. polity, such as inaugural addresses and state of the union speeches. Other global leaders, especially those in democracies, encounter similar occasions. National leaders speak in international as well as national forums; chief executive officers speak to international meetings of stockholders; local leaders may give addresses on important holidays or other ceremonial occasions. These moments, whether given over to deliberation over policy or to the ritualistic expression of patriotism or company team building, all produce rhetorical leadership. The use of such occasions allows leaders to engage in constitutive rhetoric, which creates audiences for specific appeals. That is, when a U.S. president declares that “all Americans believe in equality,” or the prime minister of New Zealand avers that “all citizens believe in diversity,” these appeals call upon the citizens of these communities to enact their national values. By announcing national values, these leaders provide justifications for action based on those values. In doing so, they must use values that the community understands themselves as sharing and must apply those values to policies in ways that the community can

tolerate. Leaders can move communities in certain directions, but community members must want to be led in there. Audiences have something great to say about whether rhetorical leadership will be effective.

Audiences and Rhetorical Leadership Increasingly, even the most local and parochial of events have global reach. Certainly this is true for national leaders, whose words, once intended primarily if not exclusively for a national audience, are now circulated around the world. Several things are important here. First, the form and content of such communication has changed. No longer do speeches last for hours, as they did in the early 19th century. They are now tailored for international audiences, and even when they are directed primarily at domestic audiences, they are written in ways that accommodate themselves to sound bites and memes. The linguistic economy of such rhetoric has changed. The rhetoric has become shallow, more dependent on banal nationalism, and more characterized by verbal and visual shortcuts. Second, there is the reach of such circulation. A leader might once have been able to offer appeals that satisfied one constituency, secure in the knowledge that another would remain ignorant of those appeals. This is no longer the case. A politician speaking in London will be heard in Singapore. This difference matters because leaders can no longer design appeals solely for niche audiences but must accommodate themselves to larger, more diverse audiences. As leaders seek to create communities, especially in democracies, they cannot content themselves with obviously exclusionary definitions of their communities. The third element is the increased speed of this circulation. Speakers now have information about the reception of their words practically before the echo of those words has died away. Responses—both positive and negative—to their appeals begin instantaneously, and the time allowed for reflection is reduced. Moreover, the noise created by the rapid circulation of messages means that no one message has significant staying power; the larger the community in question, the more difficult it is for a leader’s messages to break through the noise to be heard, and there are many

Rhetoric

811

competing voices. Institutionally based leaders have an advantage when it comes to having their messages circulated, but new media platforms allow for and even encourage the circulation of competing messages. So the fourth element is the competition that rhetorical leaders face. The fifth element involves the interpretation of this rhetoric once it has been circulated. No speaker can ever precisely control the interpretation of their speech. But in times and in nations where the audiences of such speech are homogeneous, such as when political agency in the United States was restricted to property-holding adult White males, there is a likely correspondence between the speakers’ intentions and the audiences’ understanding of those intentions. In a globally networked world, however, not only is that correspondence lacking, but the words themselves can be subject to repurposing by others to completely different ends. In sum, audiences are not the captives of rhetorical leaders, but participate in the creation and circulation of meaning. Rhetorical leadership is transactional and, to be effective, must be grounded in values and beliefs to which the audience already adheres. When leaders speak from an institutional position, among the most important of these values and beliefs pertain to that position.

One of the prerogatives of leadership is the ability to influence the issues that a given community find important. Whether it is a new technology for a business, or the question of how best to manage a budget, leaders can use occasions like a State of the Union address or a speech to stockholders to tell community members what matters most to them. By choosing to talk about one thing and not another, to visit one place and not another, to respond to one event and not another, leaders send powerful messages about what and who matters. The theory of agenda setting pertains to the media’s power to influence the views of its audience about the relative importance of various issues; but as in the case of the United States at least, the media agenda is related to the agenda coming from the White House. This doesn’t have to be a formal process. There is, for example, evidence that as president, Donald Trump’s tweets influenced both the media and public perceptions of politics. Rhetorical leadership influences what people think about; it can also influence how they think about issues. That is the power of framing.

Legitimating Institutions

Framing Political Issues

When leaders speak, whether they are doing so before a corporate board, a parliament, or the mass public, they inevitably support—or fail to support—the institutions that undergird their leadership. The president of a local parent–teacher association may praise or criticize the local school board; an American president may attack Congress; a dictator may condemn the actions of peaceful protestors. Other leaders, on other kinds of occasions, by enacting rituals such as the observance of important anniversaries or holidays, by passing a gavel to their successor, by appearing before certain groups or refusing to do so, legitimate or delegitimate political processes and institutional forms. These actions help members of communities see those institutions as important or not, as functioning well or poorly, as authoritative or not. The more powerful and authoritative a

Rhetorical frames, what literary theorist Kenneth Burke called terministic screens, are the lenses through which members of a community view and issue, event, or person. Communities can understand welfare policies as “a safety net” or as aid to the “undeserving poor.” Wars can be fought in defense of democratic values or as an exchange of “blood for oil.” Social movements can be understood as acting for “social justice” or against “law and order.” An individual can be a hero to some and a villain to others. By setting a frame through rhetorical means, leaders can wield a great deal of influence over how a public views certain things and therefore also over what course of action a community decides to take. Frames can unite or divide communities; most frames will do both at once because communities are never as united as leaders depict them.

leader’s position is thought to be, the greater influence they have over a community’s agenda.

Influencing Political Agendas

812

Rhetoric and Persuasion

Uniting the Polity This brings us back to the notion of constitutive rhetoric. By dealing with a variety of audiences, legitimating (or refusing to legitimate) political institutions, by influencing which issues are considered important and the terms through which those issues are defined and understood, leaders help followers understand that they are members of a given community, and what it means to be part of that community. Rhetorical leadership influences community membership, values, and actions. It does this by making arguments overtly, by masking hierarchies and exclusions, and by rendering some things invisible while highlighting others. Leaders often make explicit arguments about belonging, especially on occasions that call for statements of shared purpose. By offering a toast at a holiday party, celebrating a retirement, giving a eulogy, or delivering an inaugural address, leaders announce the terms of belonging to a particular community. When a national leader offers a eulogy, for example, they highlight an individual’s claim to community attention, and do so in ways that underline that person’s values and behavior as somehow contributing to the polity. This tells the audience what it means to be a community member. But doing so may also mask hierarchies and exclusions. By claiming that a given individual made specific contributions to a community, the speaker may elide the fact that only men were able to enjoy the opportunities to make that contribution. Moreover, the speaker may ignore the influences of socioeconomic class, or race, or the combination of these things. A leader offering such speech perhaps promotes an overt claim to democracy while ignoring the ways in which their community may not be democratic. Finally, a leader offering this eulogy may value, for example, the military service of the individual and may well do so without also noting that this service may have been in the interest of a nation that claims to be democratic but may have been extending colonialism. Rhetorical leadership in this case supports the institutional forms that provide the leader with their power. The rhetoric influences citizens what to think about and how to think about it, and it preserves and protects the

national community’s view of itself. Some citizens will see themselves in this vision of community and others will not. Thus, rhetoric responds to contingencies and elides others; its power and effectiveness depend both upon the speaker and the audience, who stand in relationship to one another as they together define the nature of their communities. Mary E. Stuckey See also Authentic Leadership; Autocratic Leadership; Bad Leadership; Community Leadership; Democratic Leadership in Democracy; Political Leadership

Further Readings Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso books. Campbell, K. K., & Jamieson, K. H. (2008). Presidents creating the presidency: Deeds done in words. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Charland, M. (1987). Constitutive rhetoric: The case of the peuple Quebecois. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73(2), 133–150. Dorsey, L. G. (Ed.). (2002). The presidency and rhetorical leadership. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Entman, R. M. (2003). Cascading activation: Contesting the White House’s frame after 9/11. Political Communication, 20(4), 415–432. Hart, R. P. (1987). The sound of leadership: Presidential communication in the modern age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scacco, J. M., & Coe, K. (2016). The ubiquitous presidency: Toward a new paradigm for studying presidential communication. International Journal of Communication, 10, 24. Zarefsky, D. (2004). Presidential rhetoric and the power of definition. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34(3), 607–619.

RHETORIC

AND

PERSUASION

Rhetoric is an artistic process where symbols (both verbal and visual) are created or appropriated in

Rhetoric and Persuasion

order to advance arguments and ideas, and are adapted to audiences for influencing, changing, or intervening in public life. Persuasion more specifically refers to the strategic dimensions of rhetoric, where rhetors marshal language and other forms of communication to deliberately achieve assent, belief, or action. Leadership is constituted by both rhetoric and persuasion. To situate rhetoric as a process is important—as it encompasses everything from the “invention” of rhetorical appeals, through their arrangement and styling, right to the delivery of such appeals. The rhetorical process does not end there; it is not a one-way directional transmission of persuasive arguments, but rather a negotiation between the intent of the rhetor and the expectations of the audience. The whole process is also bound by dynamics of power and always dependent on history, context, and situation. Arguably, our very experience of society is almost always mediated by some kind of rhetoric, making it an essential feature of human communication. This entry elaborates on these definitions by situating rhetoric within its historical development and detailing the parameters of what can be called “rhetorical leadership.”

History of Rhetoric and Leadership The relationship between rhetoric, persuasion, and leadership is part of a contentious history. Such history points back most often to ancient Greece, although this is not the only tradition where a philosophy of rhetoric was articulated and practiced. But that era provides a useful example of how rhetoric has often been seen and constructed. Three basic foundations formed out of the classical tradition, foundations that would often clash with one another: the sophistic, the philosophical, and the technical. While the complex histories of each—and their interrelationships with another— are not to be relayed in one encyclopedia entry, it is important to point out that one key binary that has accompanied these strands of rhetorical thought over centuries is the tension between extremes of what one would call “mere rhetoric” (the idea that rhetoric is about inessential stylistic frills and techniques added to argumentation) and “sophistic danger” (the idea that rhetoric is a harmful

813

perversion of truth through manipulative arguments). The problem of “mere rhetoric” developed through a long tradition of handbooks and how-to style manuals where persuasion was reduced to tropes and figures that rhetors could apply to style their arguments. The problem of “sophistic danger” is often associated with Plato’s withering criticism of the moral relativism and argumentative tricks (he likened it to “cookery”). The growth of the mass media in the 20th century and governments’ increasing use of propaganda solidified this distrust of rhetoric, even as it was employed on a scale that Plato and his contemporaries could never have imagined. What emerges in these long-standing rhetorical frames is the fraught notion of “effect.” Debates about whether rhetoric has any discernible effect for leaders in trying to change policies and minds are age-old, where rhetoric was often situated as a smokescreen for the “real” business of leading and as a negative force that obfuscated deliberation and rational argument. Coupled with the inability to fully measure its empirical impacts, the frequency and constancy of these debates over a long period of time are signs that rhetoric is most surely an art of contingency and context, dependent on situational constraints (both historical and contemporary). Scholars of rhetoric today are less interested in determining precise effects of rhetoric, as if it were a science, and more interested in understanding how rhetoric intersects with everyday life and such issues as identity and ideology. A driving assumption here is that rhetoric is part of a recursive process where rhetoric both shapes and is shaped by leaders and their various communities. The works by such towering figures in the field like Aristotle, Isocrates, and Cicero distinguished themselves by conceiving of rhetoric not simply as an instrument of persuasion but also as a way of being in the world—to see the world through a rhetorical lens is to weigh the complex and contingent forces of public life and to adapt, articulate, and sometimes challenge those forces, whether those be personalities, values, ideologies, histories, public memory, and more. Much more than a mere theory to be applied, rhetoric has become embedded into the material practices of public affairs and practiced by a diversity of leaders, broadly defined.

814

Rhetoric and Persuasion

Current Perspectives on Rhetoric and Leadership The study of “rhetorical leadership” has centered around these forces. Rhetorical leadership connotes a marriage between the classical ideals of wisdom and eloquence, and in more modern terms, invokes symbols to reach particular goals with intended and sometimes unintended audiences. One powerful trope of the Western classical tradition is that of the single unitary rhetor, where one central leader is in the position to change the beliefs and values of a larger audience through strategic appeals based on credibility, emotion, and logic/argument. In some cases, leaders vie to maintain power and control over the meaning and interpretation of events, while in other cases, leaders reinterpret shared values in novel ways to make successful arguments. These definitions of rhetorical leadership remain important. But complicating the unitary image is the not-insignificant issue of how collective action takes place in communities and how power dynamics affect the exercise of rhetorical leadership. One of rhetoric’s greatest powers is that it can call attention to powerful inequities around class, gender, and race. The main challenge is that, in today’s world where power is often shared and there is no singular source of authority, leaders have to use rhetoric to help communities make good choices and act on shared problems. These additions to the study of rhetorical leadership are important not just because of the reminder of inequalities and power but because they usefully decenter leadership away from one agent and instead show the fluidity of leadership between rhetors not just above communities but within them. Some scholars have found that decentralization of the traditional leader in particular rhetorical situations has been a productive way to emphasize that collaborative advocates must distribute the burdens of leadership among diverse coalitions. Rather than employ a more instrumental form of persuasion, some leaders construct the members of their audiences as having a responsibility to determine the best course of action. Rather than tell them what they should do, these leaders instead empower their audiences to believe they can affect change.

Gender also plays an important role in challenges to the classic unitary leader. So often the unitary actor of rhetorical leadership is supported by a rhetoric of “hegemonic masculinity” that maintains a vertical patriarchy. Such masculinity has had a Machiavellian effect on global communication, where national leaders vie for power based on “realist” appeals to fear of the “other” and through a persuasive frame of perpetual insecurity. For example, in modern diplomacy, foreign policy, and war-making, phrases like “saving face,” “not giving in,” and “standing strong” remain prominent—leaders often even substitute another leader’s name for an entire nation (e.g., Iraq becomes synonymous with Saddam Hussein; Russia is equated with Vladimir Putin). In such competitive rhetoric, patriarchal rhetorical practices often close out the possibility of open dialogue and meaningful, shared communication. To mitigate this kind of power, rhetors from marginalized groups have adopted meaningful alternative frames. The rhetorical power of “narrative” is one integral method for empowering such groups on local, national, and global levels. Certainly, the use of narratives can be appropriated by powerful institutional leaders within patriarchal hierarchies, but it also has subversive potential for other rhetors critiquing that power. One example is the rhetoric of Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Her Nobel address lecture takes up an approach that blends Western narratives with the narrative of African oral tradition. Rather than prescribe a problem and solution, she doesn’t define the exact lesson or correct answer for her audience, but instead invites participation to actively debate and generate discussion through her use of “dilemma tales” and through creating models that suggest (but not dictate) future possibilities. There are also similarities between these African dilemma tales and “Native American lesson stories.” A premium is placed on rhetorical narratives that guide listeners toward shared values and cocreate knowledge between speaker and audience. Native peoples benefited from millennia of living with the land, and thus valued teachings that emphasized balance. And not just anyone in the

Rhetoric and Persuasion

community could offer these stories—the tellers of the lessons had to have proven themselves personally ready to impart such messages. In these contexts, rhetoric had a high bar of responsibility and accountability for those in the community and was built on a carefully maintained sense of balance and equilibrium. In general, the rhetoric of social movements has emphasized the power of identity (whether race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality, among others) to facilitate questions, critiques, and changes to traditional (most often White) institutions. The Chicano movement in the 1960s and 1970s is one important example. Chicano leaders like the poet “Corky” Gonzales used rhetoric to teach movement members about the hegemony of Anglo political and social institutions and the ways they constrain and oppress. In addition, Gonzales created a kind of rhetorical nationalism which stipulates that Chicanos should embrace self-determination from an almost spiritual perspective and use that to establish their own leadership and reclaim their own communities. Rhetors like Gonzales adopted the aforementioned notion of rhetoric as a way of being, as his critiquing and teaching about the systems of oppression became a lifestyle dedicated to the unity and self-identification of Chicanos. Gonzales’s example of rhetorical leadership is also a reminder that one has to consider scale when discussing the power of rhetoric and persuasion. The complex interplay between the local, national, and transnational is both an important constraint on rhetoric and a genuine opportunity to better understand its power. For example, the relationship between the Black Church and Black identities and communities affirms the importance of the local in considering rhetoric’s power. One influential Baptist minister (Miles Mark Fisher), in a 1946 speech to other ministers, showed how local rhetoric was an indispensable source for mobilizing the masses who may not pay attention to the media or presidential rhetoric, but do listen intently to their pastors every Sunday. For many, that shared experience of engaging with the rhetoric of a religious community is where social change starts. On the other side of the scale, the more recent developments of transnational rhetorics are

815

shifting our understandings of rhetoric’s scope. The powerful discourse of cosmopolitanism, a kind of inverse of the local rhetoric mastered by Fisher, has been influential in defining citizenship in a globalizing world. For example, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of postconflict Liberia, is a rhetor who foregrounded economic empowerment, the value of education, and access to leaders, particularly for previously marginalized citizens newly enfranchised after the experience of trauma and war. To do this, Sirleaf had to invent an ideal of the cosmopolitan citizen and emphasize the porousness and fluidity of borders in Africa to empower citizens in connecting the local and national to the global. Here, rhetoric was activated to create responsible and engaged world citizens. In these brief examples, rhetoric transcends its history of both being a “mere” collection of tropes or a dangerous, manipulative practice. While certainly susceptible to such labels in certain cases, rhetoric is more profitably seen as a world-shaping force that is embedded into every aspect of public life. It does reinforce hierarchies and patriarchies, but it also emancipates and challenges audiences to change, adapt, and transform. The classical prescriptions of rhetoric remain influential, but rhetors across the sociopolitical scale and with a host of identities have appropriated them and revised them to operate in an impossibly complex and globalized world. Timothy Barney See also Charismatic Theory; Communication; Discourse Ethics; Language and Leadership; Leaders’ Stories; Persuasion; Rhetoric

Further Readings Aristotle. (1991). On rhetoric. (Trans. G. A. Kennedy). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Cicero. (1949). De inventione. (Trans. H. M. Hubbell). London: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/DLCL. marcus_tullius_cicero-de_inventione.1949 Clark, M. E. (2004). Rhetoric, patriarchy, and war. Women and Language, 27(2), 21–28. Dorsey, L. G. (2002). Afterword: Rhetorical leadership and presidential performance. In L. G. Dorsey (Ed.), The presidency and rhetorical leadership (pp. 252–256). College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.

816

Romance of Heroism

Hargrove, E. C. (1998). The president as leader: Appealing to the better angels of our nature. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Jensen, R. J., & Hammerback, J. C. (1982). No revolution without poets: The rhetoric of Rodolfo “corky” Gonzales. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 46, 72–91. doi:10.1080/10570318209374066 Kirkscey, R. (2007). Accommodating traditional African values and globalization: Narrative as argument in Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Prize lecture. Women and Language, 30(2), 12–17. Medhurst, M. J. (2007). Rhetorical leadership and the presidency: A situational taxonomy. In T. L. Price and J. T. Wren (Eds.), The values of presidential leadership (pp. 59–84). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1057/9780230609334_4 Miller, J. H. (2016). Empowering communities: Ella Baker’s decentralized leadership style and conversational eloquence. Southern Communication Journal, 81, 156–167. doi:10.1080/1041794X.2016. 1149613 Olson, K. M. (2008). The practical importance of inherency analysis for public advocates: Rhetorical leadership in framing a supportive social climate for education reforms. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 36, 219–241. doi:10.1080/ 00909880802010691 Riley, C. L. (2016). Rhetorical leadership and the Black church: Revisiting 1940s Durham. Howard Journal of Communications, 27, 291–310. doi:10.1080/ 10646175.2016.1194788 Sunwolf. (1999). The pedagogical and persuasive effects of Native American lesson stories, Sufi wisdom tales, and African dilemma tales. Howard Journal of Communications, 10, 47–71. doi:10.1080/ 106461799246898 Zarefsky, D. (2000). Lincoln’s 1862 annual message: A paradigm of rhetorical leadership. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 3, 5–14. doi:10.1353/rap.2010.0112

they are like, and when they should emerge. The romance of heroism leads to exaggerated perceptions of the heroic qualities in selected others, especially under conditions of stress and uncertainty. Romanticized desires to designate people as heroes is subject to distortions and can induce people to choose false heroes and poor leaders. The romance of heroism has its inverse; under certain conditions, people may be motivated to see villainy and malevolent qualities in others. This entry describes the development of this concept. The phrase “romance of heroism” was first coined by George Goethals and Scott Allison, but the phenomena it describes can be linked to the theoretical work of Ernest Becker in 1973, and Elaine Kinsella, Eric Igou, and Tim Ritchie in 2017. These scholars argued that the human desire for heroes stems from people’s need to find meaning in life. Becker’s thesis focused on people’s existential need for heroic immortality. Kinsella and her colleagues argued that events threatening a person’s sense of meaning tend to activate psychological processes that serve the goals of meaning reestablishment and meaning maintenance. One specific state that triggers a search for meaning is a situation with high ambiguity or uncertainty. Uncertainty motivates members of groups and organizations to seek and manufacture heroic leaders who will provide or retain such meaning. The romance of heroism differs from a related concept, the romance of leadership. The latter phenomenon refers to the tendency of people to assign too much credit to the leader for group successes and give too much blame to the leader for group failures. The romance of heroism does not involve calculating how much leaders are responsible for group outcomes. Rather, it focuses on the motivational, perceptual, and cognitive consequences of people’s thirst for heroes.

Romance Resulting From Motivational Drives

ROMANCE

OF

HEROISM

The romance of heroism refers to people’s idealistic and quixotic notions of heroes and heroic leadership. These beliefs derive from the human longing for heroes, a longing that engenders romanticized ideas about who heroes are, what

In his book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that people harbor a deep need to live meaningful and impactful lives. Becker called it the universal urge to heroism, which he believed stemmed from “the ache of cosmic specialness” (p. 204). Because so few of us can achieve actual heroism, we are highly motivated to gravitate

Romance of Heroism

toward exceptional others whom we believe are living a heroic life. Self-identifying with these heroes can, in part, satisfy the universal urge to achieve heroism for oneself. The motivation to see heroic greatness in others can skew people’s perceptions of leaders and celebrities who may be able to meet this need. This tendency to distort information about others is an example of motivated cognition, defined by social psychologists as the human propensity to see the world in a way that confirms preferred desires. Guided by motivated cognition, people are driven to think in a preferred way that supersedes accuracy motives. For example, an American watching an American athlete performing a gymnastics routine in the Olympic games will be motivated to evaluate the athlete’s performance more favorably than when witnessing a non-American gymnast. Motivated cognition can lead a person to selectively attend to information that confirms their prior beliefs, or to information that cast them or their group in a positive light. To the extent that we harbor a romantic longing for heroes, we may be quick to attribute heroic qualities to others. A leader’s good looks, charisma, self-confidence, rosy promises, and appeals to lower tribalism needs can all lead us to conclude that the leader is heroic. Ari Decter-Frain, Ruth Vanstone, and Jeremy Frimer have argued that groups and nations have such a strong need for heroes that they manufacture heroes from ordinary people. Frain and his colleagues give the example of the Dalai Lama. Whenever a Dalai Lama dies, his Tibetan followers choose an ordinary small child or toddler from an ordinary village and, through social processes, cultivate a great moral leader. The motivational component of the romance of heroism can also be demonstrated in voters’ preferences for Donald Trump for U.S. president in the 2016 and 2020 elections. White Christian evangelical voters desired a candidate who endorsed their religious views and who made promises, expressed as “Make America Great Again,” to return the country to a time when White Christians dominated U.S. politics. Evangelicals labeled Trump as “the chosen one,” a moniker that he gladly embraced to appeal to the psychological needs of his evangelical followers. Many followers of Trump held romanticized views of him, even

817

deifying him as God’s symbol of American exceptionalism. The romance of heroism is most likely to be activated under conditions of mystery and ambiguity. In March of 1983, U.S. president Ronald Reagan used mystery to manipulate television news to broadcast his speech announcing his Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan administration officials hinted that something big would be announced. However, the networks were hesitant to broadcast the speech unless they could be assured that the new was indeed “big.” The Reagan administration had to “show a little ankle” by giving a few clues about what was entailed. They piqued interest by creating mystery, with a hint of something good at the end, and the media’s strong motivation to unravel the mystery led them to comply with Reagan’s request. The phrase “show a little ankle” underscores the important role of mystery in romance as well as in leadership. Sigmund Freud highlighted the similarity between libidinal attachments to leaders and lovers, and the way our romantic fantasies tend to overvalue both. This overvaluation is most pronounced when leaders, like lovers, create a little mystery, especially mystery suggesting desired outcomes, such as group success in the case of leaders and increased intimacy in the case of lovers. Research on romantic attraction has shown that uncertainty and mystery about a potential lover can increase attraction to that individual. Mystery allows us to satisfy our motivations by fueling our imagination, thereby enabling us to see what we prefer to see in others.

Romance Resulting From Perception and Cognition In its verb form, the word romance means to exaggerate or to invent detail. This exaggeration component results in distorted and fanciful social perceptions. The human tendency to engage in romantic exaggerations about heroes is consistent with research in social and cognitive psychology showing that people actively construct their social reality from incomplete information. Researchers have found that people are active perceivers of their social world. When we meet strangers, perceptual and cognitive processes are activated to

818

Romance of Heroism

help us understand these new encounters. The mystery resolution process involves principles of visual organization that allow us to fill in gaps using preexisting impressions, prototypes, archetypes, and implicit theories of leadership. Thus, romanticizing about heroes results not only from motivations but also from basic cognitive functioning. In the realm of visual perception, Gestalt psychologists have emphasized that the whole is different from the sum of the parts. Gestalt means “unified whole,” and Gestalt theorists describe how our visual processing system helps us convert disparate fragments into groups or meaningful wholes. The Gestalt principle of closure states that when visual information is incomplete, people fill in the blanks (or connect the dots) to construct a whole or complete image. The way people fill them in is often determined by context. Perceivers quickly “complete” an ambiguous visual stimulus, rendering it whole to give it meaning. Mental schemas in conjunction with the representativeness heuristic also help people to “fill in the blanks.” A schema is a mental representation of a person, group, place, or thing, and it contains information and expectations about the entity being perceived. People notice information that is consistent with their schemas, and often ignore or distort information that is inconsistent. They will perceive attributes consistent with their schemas even when there is no such information presented. The representativeness heuristic is a rule of thumb that people use in assuming that an entity is a member of a category to the extent that the entity resembles the prototypical features of the category. Thus, when we perceive an individual possessing some, but not all, of the attributes of a heroic leader, we may fill in the gaps and judge the individual to be more of a good fit than they actually are. Research on implicit leadership theories has shown that leadership schemas contain three components: beliefs about the characteristics or traits of leaders, beliefs about what leaders do, and beliefs about what leaders cause to happen. These preconceived expectations of leadership can color people’s judgments of who is most fit to lead. An example is found in Malcolm Gladwell’s (2005) book Blink in his discussion of the Warren

Harding error. Warren Harding is believed by presidential leadership experts to be one of worst presidents in U.S. history, yet he was nominated and elected in 1920 partly because he looked the part. His physique, bronzed complexion, deep voice, and smooth motions activated the heroic leader schema. In short, voters filled in the gaps and viewed him as kind, intelligent, honest, and effective. Our romantic exaggerations of leadership ability are not always wrong. An example of an effective U.S. president with a high reputational score is John F. Kennedy, a man who shared Warren Harding’s good looks, charisma, and motional intelligence. A motionally intelligent leader possesses the ability to move their body in a way that commands attention and suggests competence and effectiveness. A leader’s speech-making ability can also lead to romanticized judgments of leadership. William Shakespeare demonstrated this idea in Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar, and it has also been illustrated in people’s judgments of great leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and in evil leaders such as Adolf Hitler. Romanticized ideas of heroism also seem to be enhanced upon the death of an effective leader. Researchers have called this phenomenon the death positivity bias. Several U.S. presidents with the highest reputations are also ones who perished while in office—Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy are examples. Leaders who die when they are still relatively young seem to benefit from a stronger death positivity bias. Notable examples include Princess Diana of Wales, John Lennon, Tupac Shakur, Elvis Presley, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The reputations of these leaders all benefited from their premature deaths. People appear to romanticize villains as much as they romanticize heroes. Because psychologists have shown that negative information carries more weight in our impressions of others compared to positive information, individuals who are suspected of being villainous may be prone to more elaborate romanticization compared with individuals who resemble heroes. Under conditions of uncertainty, people may be quicker to vilify others than to heroize them. Research also shows that the

Romance of Leadership

tendency to romanticize fictional leaders is stronger than the tendency to romanticize real-world leaders. That is, fictional heroes are rated more favorably than nonfictional heroes, and fictional villains are rated less favorably than nonfictional villains. An explanation for this finding is that authors of fictional accounts of heroes and villains may be constructing more exaggerated and romanticized accounts of those characters than are found in real-life heroes and villains. In conclusion, several key motivational forces and cognitive factors steer people toward exaggerated heroic or villainous conclusions about mysterious others. The motivations include our need to achieve closure in our perceptions, our drive for accuracy and efficiency in our thinking, and our romantic ideas about how leaders should look, behave, and shape group outcomes. The cognitive factors include Gestalt organizational tendencies and mental representations that steer people toward conclusions that match those mental images of heroes—or of villains. Scott T. Allison See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Heroic Leadership; Implicit Leadership Theories; Leaders’ Stories; Persuasion; Romance of Leadership

Further Readings Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York, NY: Free Press. Decter-Frain, A., Vanstone, R., & Frimer, J. (2017). Why and how groups create moral heroes. In S. T. Allison, G. R. Goethals, & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), Handbook of heroism and heroic leadership. New York, NY: Routledge. Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2017). Social cognition: From brains to culture. London: SAGE. Freud, S. (1920). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 28: Beyond the pleasure principle, group psychology and other works. London: Hogarth Press. Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Company. Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2019). The romance of heroism and heroic leadership: Ambiguity, attribution, and apotheosis. West Yorkshire: Emerald.

819

Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2022). The construction and presentation of heroes and heroines. In K. Lee (Ed.), A cultural history of fame in the modern age. Camden: Bloomsbury Press. Kinsella, E. L., Igou, E. R., & Ritchie, T. D. (2017). Heroism and the pursuit of a meaningful life. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 59(4), 474–498. doi:10.1177/ 0022167817701002

ROMANCE

OF

LEADERSHIP

The romance of leadership (RoL) approach challenges traditional notions of leadership as both effectual and positive. First introduced in the 1980s by James Meindl, the RoL encourages followers to question their individual and collective fascination with leadership and pushes them to consider how and why they can definitively establish that leaders create or even contribute to performance outcomes. This entry presents the RoL perspective and examines the ways in which followers’ beliefs about leaders and leadership contribute to the romanticization of the leader role, and the contribution of societal anxiety during uncertain times to the tendency to glorify the personal attributes of leaders and view them as heroic figures, whether or not their qualities and behavior truly merit such praise. Dating back at least to the time of the ancient Greeks, human beings have been enamored with the “larger than life” stories and parables of mythical gods that can definitively control the uncontrollable, predict the future, and ensure the success of the group. Empirical research with followers has shown that when given the choice of external circumstances (economic, temporal, or shifting competitive landscapes), followers prefer leadership as the favored explanation for both positive and negative outcomes. In addition, followers are drawn to winning teams and successful organizations more acutely when those results are attributed to leadership, a phenomenon that leaders and organizations perpetuate. Success is celebrated and failure is demonized, as leaders become heroes or villains, gods or devils.

820

Romance of Leadership

Leadership and Followership—An Unbalanced Equation The RoL is an alternative to conventional wisdom that leadership always matters and an attempt to highlight the unbalanced equation between leadership and followership. While the RoL does not reject the importance of leaders, it challenges followers to question what leaders can accomplish and under what limitations and constraints. Furthermore, it suggests that it is wise to be wary of the collective fascination—even obsession— with leaders and recognize that leadership is a complex interplay of leaders, followers, and the situation. Whether leadership ultimately succeeds or fails, followers have played a vital role in helping to shape the outcome. The RoL perspective highlights a collective and ongoing love affair with the idea of leadership, both as individual followers and as societies. Specifically, followers glamorize those in leadership positions, both those who they voted for and those who are anointed with leadership positions through inheritance, genetics, luck, or fate. Similarly, disproportionate amounts of power, status, money, fame, and celebrity are associated with leadership positions, whether they be coaches of youth soccer or football teams, CEOs, or politicians. As groups and societies, followers place excessive weight on the causal role of leaders in influencing and changing institutions and single-handedly creating successes and failures, and lavish top leaders with riches, status, and tolerate increasing economic and social differences between CEOs and front-line workers. Ultimately, when organizations return high-performance outcomes, or in contrast perform more poorly than expected, followers prefer to identify leadership as the most salient explanation for that performance, in contrast to situational, systemic, team, and follower-related inputs. While performance is more accurately a complex interplay of factors with both short-term and long-term impacts, successes and failures are most readily attributed to the all-powerful and almighty leader. In addition, the role of cyclical effects with complex and dynamic feedback mechanisms are poorly understood and underutilized as explanatory mechanisms. Meindl was not “antileadership,” nor did he dispute that leaders can and do have influence.

However, he argued that the amount and extent of this influence should be treated as an empirical question rather than an undisputed fact. Whatever the true impact of leaders and leadership in organizations and societies, it is always easier to believe in the efficacy of leadership than to prove it. As a result, the concept of leadership garners an immense—and therefore overweighted and unbalanced— influence in understanding the world. Dating back to the early writings of Max Weber in the first half of the 20th century, Meindl highlighted that despite centuries of discussion and over a century of formal research and writing, the concept of leadership is still somewhat “magical.” It may be precisely due to this magical quality that followers find it so compelling. However, the RoL ensures that the true nature and impact of leadership will remain largely elusive: as individuals and as societies, followers continue to faithfully believe that leadership is important in its own right, even in situations where there is no direct evidence to sustain this belief.

Follower Dynamics: Social Contagion The RoL perspective was one of the first followercentric approaches to leadership, providing a counterpoint or unique perspective to the predominant emphasis on leaders in the leadership process. Rather than continuing to highlight leadership behaviors, styles, and personality characteristics, Meindl questioned what happens when the lens is reversed. More specifically, he asked what it is about followers that sustains their need to believe in a heroic leader, and why is it that followers are so quick to believe in the efficacy of leadership in the absence of supporting evidence. In addition, he emphasized interfollower processes, also known as social contagion processes, in understanding the influence of leaders. Empirical research in this area has shown that leadership influence is transmitted rapidly from follower to follower, often independently from any direct interactions between the leader and his or her followers. These processes help to explain why the same speech or leadership behavior can result in radically different perceptions of the leader’s charisma or effectiveness. In sensemaking organizational, team, or societal outcomes, leadership is only one of many critical

Romance of Leadership

factors that ultimately influences success and failure. However, it is the most salient and readily accessible factor, which leads to its overuse. In addition, over time the underlying assumption that leaders can and do create causal outcomes is increasingly taken for granted to the point that it is no longer questioned to what extent leadership matters. In addition, the influence of these successes and failures creates a “halo or horns effect”: if the coach is winning or the manager is a “winner,” fans and followers are more likely to overlook ethical failures, short-term mistakes, and even bullying, harassment, and extreme levels of misconduct. Not all followers or situations are equally susceptible to this tendency to romanticize leaders. At its root, the RoL approach is grounded in attribution theory, or the implicit biases and schemas that we use to understand why things happen and what caused them. Research explores which followers are more susceptible to falling victim to this attributional error than others, and when and why some followers are more susceptible. Previous research indicates that followers who are higher in emotional intensity and agreeableness are more likely to gravitate to leaders with a dramatic and dominant message. In addition, followers who have more central and dense connections to others in their social networks can more readily influence others to support or undermine the leader. In times of crisis or external threats to the group, these followers become even more critical in spreading the leader’s charismatic appeal. Furthermore, followers are more likely to turn to strong, directive, and charismatic leaders to resolve the ambiguity of stressful situations. This also corresponds to the time when followers are most susceptible to authoritarian leadership and dictatorships. When threatened, followers look to leaders to provide direction, clarity, and mitigate uncertainty when the situation is anything but certain. The RoL also suggests that followers’ perceptions of leaders are themselves a worthwhile object of study, independently of the leader. The ways and channels through which followers communicate about the leader’s behaviors and what they mean for followers and the organization can enhance or mitigate a leader’s reach and are the

821

essence of the social construction of leadership. The ways in which followers construct images of leaders become equally or even more important than the leader’s actions or style in influencing perceptions of effective leadership. Tracking the spread of a leader’s influence within and across groups becomes critical, as do issues such as the leader’s representativeness and prototypicality of the group. In cases of large social distance between leaders and followers, followers’ decisions to back or fight for a leader are shaped by interfollower communications, in which they compare notes, gossip, and share informal musings about the leader. Followers are therefore complicit cocreators of leadership, not simply passive recipients of a leader’s influence. In addition, the emotional state of followers and their beliefs, needs, and attributions become critical components in the leadership process. The rise of the celebrity CEO, in which dominant and dramatic leaders are highlighted in the media as capable of single-handedly turning around companies and industries, further highlights the need to explicitly question and empirically examine the significance of leadership in modern organizations. The RoL theory proposes that when leadership is discussed, it is most frequently in terms of efficacy and romanticized positive qualities such as status, esteem, prestige, charisma, and heroism. In contrast, when followership is discussed, it is most frequently in terms of conformity, passivity, subservience, and even stupidity—the stereotypical view of followers as sheep who are unquestioningly willing to blindly obey and follow a leader’s directives. In addition, majority of research and media attention in the popular press treats leadership as a positive force on followers and society. As a result, the so-called “dark side” of leadership is ignored, and authoritarian, toxic, and more destructive forms of leadership are downplayed. The RoL suggests that our popular discourse and writings about leadership are important to study in their own right. Images of leaders are produced in the media for mass consumption in the form of idealized portraits of success and recipes that sell the critical ingredients for effective leadership. Idealized images of leadership satisfy a collective need and appetite for leadership

822

Rosy Halo and Power

products and behaviors that promise to enhance lives and solve critical societal problems. Through appealing to a collective fascination with the power and status of leaders, their personalities, styles, and characteristics, attention is directed away from solving problems through alternate avenues. Leadership is a commodity to be bought and sold, providing an important window into collective beliefs about what constitutes ethical or effective leadership and why it is important.

Meindl, J. R. (1995). The romance of leadership as a follower-centric theory: A social constructionist approach. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(3), 329–341. Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30, 78–102. Shamir, B., Pillai, R., Bligh, M. C., & Uhl-Bien, M. (Eds.). (2007). Follower-centered perspectives on leadership: A tribute to the memory of James R. Meindl. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Concluding Remarks In sum, the RoL perspective questions our collective fascination with leadership and our emphasis on heroism, charisma, and the glorification of leadership in the face of any tangible evidence that a given leader is worthy of such praise. It questions the underlying assumption that leadership is inherently important in its own right, or always a positive force in our teams and organizations. In contrast, we would do well to enhance our appreciation of external factors and the complexity of ambiguous and uncertain circumstances in which organizations operate. It also suggests that we need to approach leaders with a healthy dose of skepticism that they always act for the benefit of their followers and for the collective good. Ultimately, followers play a critical role in defining what good and bad leadership look like, and how we decide if and when leadership matters. Michelle C. Bligh Further Readings Bligh, M. C., & Meindl, J. R. (2004). The cultural ecology of leadership: An analysis of popular leadership books. In D. M. Messick & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), The psychology of leadership: New perspectives and research (pp. 11–52). Mahwah, NJ: LEA Press. Bligh, M. C., Kohles, J. C., & Pillai, R. (2011). Romancing leadership: Past, present, and future. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(6), 1058–1077. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua. 2011.09.003 Meindl, J. R. (1990). On leadership: An alternative to the conventional wisdom. In B. M. Staw & L. L. Cummings (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 12, pp. 159–203). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

ROSY HALO

AND

POWER

The phrase rosy halo refers to highly positive views of powerful leaders, particularly with regard to their moral character. The concept stands in contrast to the notion that power corrupts, so common as to have become a clich´e; both popular culture and academic research tend to highlight examples of powerful, corrupt leaders. However, research has been inconsistent in demonstrating links between power, leadership, and corruption. Where such links are observed, they often reflect the influence of moderator variables; for example, narcissists may behave more corruptly, and narcissists are often found to be overrepresented among corporate and political leaders. The rosy halo thus offers a surprising counterpoint to traditional beliefs about power. This entry outlines the evidence for objective associations between power and corruption or ethicality, then presents key reasons for perceived associations. Taken together, this material suggests that powerful leaders do often behave corruptly; however, it is not clear that power itself causes corruption. Further, regardless of their overall beliefs about power, individuals seem predisposed to be credulous and trusting toward the powerful.

Power: Corrupting or Ennobling? Popular culture provides many examples of corrupt leaders; indeed, many prototypical examples of powerful leaders also bring corruption in mind. Consider figures such as Jeffrey Epstein (financier and sex trafficker), Kenneth Lay (CEO

Rosy Halo and Power

of Enron upon its demise), or any number of self-dealing heads of state. Research has shown that power makes people more self-focused: Powerful people tend to believe that others agree with them, want what they want, and feel what they feel. They are more likely to act in line with their dispositions, even if that means ignoring norms and situational demands. They tend to be instrumentalists and to see others in objectified terms—as means to achieve their own goals—as well as to dismiss the value or agency of subordinates. For these reasons, it is easy to see why “power corrupts” is an appealing aphorism. However, the rosy halo concept highlights three important problems with how the relationship between power and corruption has been interpreted, which are discussed below. First, the impression that power corrupts may reflect an error in perception by observers. Second, to the extent that power and corruption are related, the causal direction of the relationship may be reversed. Third, and most fundamental, perhaps power is not related to corruption, but rather seen to elevate those who have it. Flawed Perception That Power Corrupts

Leaders—those in power—are less numerous than those out of power. As tournament models of leadership suggest, ascending in a hierarchy means participating in a contest over multiple levels; some members are pushed out at each round. Typically, only a single individual survives all rounds of competition to achieve the pinnacle of power (a presidency; a CEO role). Even without a tournament or strongly vertical hierarchy, organizations almost always have fewer leaders than followers. The aphorism “too many cooks spoil the broth” captures the widespread view that effective direction and coordination require concentrating power in a small group, so that the larger collective follows and implements that direction. This universal creates two consequences. First, those in power are focal. They are seen to represent their groups, they are often the first to speak or act on behalf of the group, and the impact of their actions means that observers are vigilant about even their subtle or private behavior. Being

823

more visible and more monitored means that actions by the powerful are imbued with more significance than actions by the less powerful. Many subordinates apply a sinister attribution bias to organizational edicts and decisions; this bias stems from so-called paranoid cognitions that occur when individuals feel self-conscious and vulnerable to evaluation pressures. Because power differentials are associated with vulnerability as well as the entitlement to evaluate, feeling low in power may trigger sinister attribution of decisions made atop the organization. Further, a key difference between those with high and low power lies in their primary mode of cognitive processing. Leaders tend to engage in more abstract processing, focusing on the “whys” of a situation. Low power fosters more concrete thinking, focusing on “how” and “what.” Because leaders focus—as a function of role demands but also due to basic cognitive processing—on different concerns from those with less power, the latter may interpret decisions as corrupt even though they are based in sound instrumental and even ethical reasoning. In short, differences in perspective and feelings of vulnerability may cause those low in power to react with distrust and moral condemnation to actions by the powerful. Second, the relative rarity of powerful individuals, paired with the relative rarity of corrupt behavior, can lead to an illusory correlation between power and corruption. When two kinds of attentional objects are both rare, perceivers tend to overestimate the degree of correlation between them. For example, members of minority ethnic groups in a society are rare by definition. In most societies, crime is also rare. Perceivers often form the belief that minority group members commit more crimes. Although this can be true, often it reflects a mistaken perception of a relationship, driven by the vividness of each rare component. In short, to some degree the perceived relationship between power and corruption may be less common than is typically believed. Reversed Causality Between Power and Corruption

However, research and anecdote have—as described earlier—established that some relationship

824

Rosy Halo and Power

between power and corrupt behavior does exist. The direction of that relationship nonetheless remains unclear: Perhaps it is not that power (a cause) corrupts (an effect). Instead, some evidence suggests that more corrupt people (the cause) are more likely to seek positions of power (the effect). People enter power out of some combination of their own efforts to seek power and others’ decisions to grant it to them. Both sides of this equation are vulnerable to admitting more corrupt individuals to power. Among power seekers, evidence increasingly suggests that narcissists, Machiavellian thinkers, and even sociopaths are overrepresented among those in power. Such individuals are less concerned for others, less willing to be constrained by consideration of others’ interests, and more likely to show confidence, authority, and charisma that actually win them powerful roles. We have no evidence that being in power induces psychopathology. As a result, when observing the higher representation of, for example, psychopaths among CEOs than in the general population, we can infer that individuals with such pathologies may be more likely to pursue these positions. As for those who grant power, they tend to respond positively to cues of competence and charisma—even when these cues are faulty. For example, experimental research has demonstrated that a group member who is loud and confident about their performance will more likely be nominated to lead the group. Crucially, this is true even when their performance is observably wrong; the confidence cue overcomes the more diagnostic signal of quality. Likewise, extraverts tend to win status early, largely because they are dynamic and appealing. Over time, however, they often prove to be poor leaders, more interested in socializing than performing. In contrast, highly neurotic group members—who are very concerned with living up to others’ standards and performing well—come across in an unappealing way and are passed over when the group’s hierarchy is initially established, even though they are more likely to perform well over time. These dynamics suggest that decisions about granting power are likely to reflect biases that privilege flashy and seductive candidates over the quiet and conscientious—another pattern that could produce a true relationship between power and corruption.

Impressions of the Powerful As More Ethical

Whether power is related to corruption in reality or only in the realm of clich´e, emerging evidence suggests that the belief that power corrupts is not as universal as one might think. When forming impressions of the powerful around them, perceivers do not operate in a vacuum; their views reflect motivated processing, not simply dispassionate interpretation. People are motivated to perceive the world as just, so that outcomes reflect what is deserved. A just-world view would infer that someone with power must have reached their position out of merit and deservingness. Likewise, system justification theory proposes that existing power orders are seen as just and legitimate—preferable to alternatives. Coupled with the fact that someone with low power in the system is vulnerable to and dependent on leaders for their own outcomes and well-being, system justification dynamics lead low-power perceivers to trust in the benevolence of the powerful. Beyond motivation, perceivers may form rosy views of leaders’ moral character based on reasoning about the constraints of power. CEOs are constrained by boards and regulators; presidents and prime ministers are constrained by other branches of government, by the media, and by the voting public. The same focal nature of power that can produce perceived corruption, as discussed earlier, might persuade observers that corruption was unlikely—that is, everyone is watching. Ethical transgression would be far more difficult to commit for those in such a spotlight. Whatever the reason, work by Overbeck and colleagues suggests that, when employees across numerous industries rate their own leaders, their estimation of the leaders’ ethical character increases as leaders’ power increases. Likewise, these authors’ experimental studies manipulating leaders’ power showed that higher power leaders were seen as having greater ethical character. Such results contradict not only the notion that power corrupts but also the notion that people believe it does. However, conflicting beliefs can coexist. Further, power may be yet another domain (alongside stereotyping, cooperation, and competition, among others) in which discontinuities exist between groups (impressions of “the powerful”)

Rosy Halo and Power

and individuals (impressions of “my boss”). It seems likely that perceivers hold a negative stereotype about the state of holding power, yet nonetheless see individual leaders in loftier terms.

Implications If people indeed tend to perceive their leaders as having greater, not lesser, ethical character, then a number of challenges arise for leaders and organizations. On the positive side, leaders may be able to rely on greater trust and support than anticipated. Though some low-power organization members may be predisposed to be skeptical and even see leaders in sinister terms, generally their own sense of vulnerability is likely to induce a self-protective feeling of credulity toward those leaders. On the negative side, the boost in trust and credulity is not clearly driven by leaders’ actual behaviors, and, as noted earlier, untrustworthy individuals are disproportionately likely to seek power. As a result, organizations must be especially careful not to assume more ethicality than is warranted. Some unpublished evidence suggests a tendency to release powerful people from monitoring that is intended to prevent ethical lapses. For example, before the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, credit rating agencies seem to have given excessive deference to the most powerful firms and their leaders, while applying stricter scrutiny to those less powerful. Frontline workers from Amazon to department stores are subjected to invasive monitoring, including being observed by video and having to carry belongings in clear plastic containers, to prevent theft. The rosy halo effect suggests that the relative weight of monitoring may be reversed, if the powerful are regarded more credulously—and the powerless less credulously—than they deserve. Jennifer R. Overbeck See also Cognitive Biases in Leadership; Leader Exceptionalism; Leaders’ Power Resources and Followers’ Reactions; Moral Character; Power and Powerlessness

825

Further Readings Boddy, C. R. (2014). Corporate psychopaths, conflict, employee affective well-being and counterproductive work behaviour. Journal of Business Ethics, 121(1), 107–121. DeCelles, K. A., DeRue, D. S., Margolis, J. D., & Ceranic, T. L. (2012). Does power corrupt or enable? When and why power facilitates self-interested behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97, 681–689. Hamilton, D. L., & Gifford, R. K. (1976). Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12(4), 392–407. Insko, C. A., Schopler, J., Hoyle, R. H., Dardis, G. J., & Graetz, K. A. (1990). Individual-group discontinuity as a function of fear and greed. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(1), 68. Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Peach, J. M., Laurin, K., Friesen, J., Zanna, M. P., & Spencer, S. J. (2009). Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 421–434. Kramer, R. M. (1994). The sinister attribution error: Paranoid cognition and collective distrust in organizations. Motivation and Emotion, 18(2), 199–230. O’Reilly, C. A., & Pfeffer, J. (2021). Organizational power and politics: The narcissist’s advantage? Personality and Individual Differences, 182, 111061. Overbeck, J. R., Tost, L. P., & Wazlawek, A. (2013, August). With great power comes great. . .morality? [Paper presentation]. Academy of management annual conference 2013: Lake Buena Vista, FL, United States. Smith, P. K., & Overbeck, J. R. (2014). The leaders’ rosy halo: Why do we give powerholders the benefit of the doubt. Power, politics, and paranoia: Why people are suspicious of their leaders. In J. W. Van Prooijen & P. A. Van Lange (Eds.), Power, politics, and paranoia: Why people are suspicious of their leaders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, P. K., & Trope, Y. (2006). You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: Power priming and abstract information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 578–579.

S SCHEMAS, SCRIPTS, MODELS

AND

Schemas facilitate the categorization of objects, events, and concepts based on shared elements and characteristics. As suggested by cognitive theories, memories containing both common and unique information about concepts, objects, and causality are organized around schemas. Schemas benefit human information processing by providing useful inductive inferences, they facilitate the computation of fit to the prototypes that characterize mental structures, and they help us integrate simple ideas into complex concepts. While there are numerous sorts of schemas, four of them are particularly important: person schemas, self-schema, scripts, and mental models. Person schemas are comprised of traits, ideas, and feelings concerning a specific type of individual (such as a leader). A particular type of schema, self-schemas, organizes self-relevant information, and is central to the burgeoning research on self-identities. Script schemas contain sequences of actions related to a particular goal, and they help us generate instrumental actions and understand the actions of others. Mental models are organized structures related to a particular aspect of the external world. These internal symbolic representations can reflect abstract constructs (e.g., ethics) and more concrete information such as images of situations or objects.

MENTAL

Learning is an important process for knowledge accumulation. Our brains autonomously learn to recognize, categorize, and predict objects and events that allow us to rapidly learn about new environments without forgetting what we already knew. Individuals can develop their skills and crystallize their identities around leadership through learning from related experiences. These experiences are often events encountered that are stored in the episodic memory as small chunks of information. From these chunks, we can construct mental representations such as schemas, scripts, and mental models, providing the basis for constructing domain-specific contextual knowledge structures. These three types of representations reflect various approaches in understanding human cognition and, therefore, have different implications for leadership literature. This entry describes each of these types and how they help us understand leadership.

Schemas The term schema is often used to represent mental structures we hold that affect the way information is encoded into and retrieved from memory. Schemas contain an active organization of knowledge about the past, and they are often used to guide cognitive processes and behaviors.

Person Schemas

Person schemas include both exemplar information describing a specific person and prototypes

827

828

Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models

that are abstractions that define cognitive categories. People use the information embedded in categorical schemas as a standard that guides judgments of others such as potential leaders and as a guide for their own leadership behavior. For example, when one believes that intelligence is an important characteristic leaders should possess, then one would expect this trait from a leader. Leadership categories are also used to facilitate encoding and retrieval of information that later is used to complete behavioral measures of leadership. Leadership categorization theory posits that people develop hierarchical structures that vary in inclusiveness (superordinate, basic, and subordinate leadership categories). Basic-level leadership categories are the most useful level and are often specific to a particular context (e.g., business leader, political leader, military leader). Individuals compare potential leaders to the leadership prototype they hold, and these potential leaders are considered to be leaders if their behaviors and characteristics “match” the prototype or if they perform exceptionally well. The more similar one’s behavior is with the leadership prototype, the more likely this person will be classified as a leader. Empirical evidence also suggests that the way individuals consider themselves to be a leader affects the way they think about leadership and view others as a leader. Moreover, individuals’ leadership self-schemas relate to their person schema of others as a leader. Leadership categories are only one of many person categories that could be used to guide information processing regarding a leader. Incorporating Stephen Grossberg’s adaptive resonance theory, which explains how we search memory for cognitive categories, Megan Medvedeff and Robert Lord addressed the dynamics of accessing and using various categories. In general, observed or recalled information about a leader guides a search through memory for a relevant category. If this active information matches a memory structure sufficiently well, a resonance occurs between the category and the memory structure, and that structure becomes active in consciousness to guide further information processing. Thus, a leader’s characteristics or behaviors could be encoded in various person categories (e.g., gender, race, leadership, trait, or affective categories), and any

of these categories could be used to guide perceptions, depending on which had higher resonance with the information guiding category search. Later, when we evaluate leadership for any purpose, we can rely on any of these categories, not just the category that was used to encode behavior, and thus accuracy in retrieving and using information about leaders can vary. In addition, individuals constantly refine schemas rather than merely recalling past schemas and information from memory. In this way, leadership categories are adjusted on the fly to fit particular contexts. This happens as part of a person perception process that dynamically integrates person categories at multiple hierarchical levels. Hence, both behaviors of leaders and perceptions of others are grounded in dynamically created, context-specific schemas. Similarly, followers also interpret behaviors differently based on their follower schema that is activated by a certain context as it is adjusted to that context. Self-Schemas

Self-schemas are cognitive-affective structures that organize information processing pertaining to the self in a specific domain or role. Like person schemas, a self-schema is used dynamically both in retrieving a schema that is appropriate to a given context (i.e., a working self-concept) and is adjusted to context (e.g., a leadership self-schema when one works as a manager in an organization). Marilynn Brewer and Wendi Gardner propose that the self can be represented at different levels (individual, relational, or collective), and activation of these alternative levels also activates associated values and motivational orientations. For example, when individual level of self is activated, one’s value of being an honest person gets activated. When collective level of self is activated in the context of organizations, one’s leadership self-schema may be activated. Further, Karoline Strauss, Mark Griffin, and Sharon Parker point out that self-schemas also include desired future selves, and their elaboration in the present creates a motivational force for related proactive career behavior. Encoding information using reference to the self provides a vivid and often emotionally based representation, which facilitates later use.

Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models

Leadership self-schemas guide both one’s self-evaluation and the evaluation of others, providing a basis for leadership development. Recent research links self-schema to personal semantics, which are self-descriptive cognitive structures that reflect the junction of episodic (mentally re-experienced episodes of the past) and semantic (recollection of general knowledge) memory. Louis Renoult and colleagues consider personal semantics as knowledge of one’s past that is personal and often reflects vivid recollections of specific events with emotional significance. Personal semantics vary from personal facts to personally significant concepts that can involve interactions with others, and different types of personal semantics are encoded in memory using specific neurological structures. Research on personal semantics support the distinction between episodic and semantic memories and offer clues as to how self-relevant, personally significant events are remembered. For example, personally significant concepts often trigger specific episodic memories that are vivid and emotional, whereas personal facts involve general information in semantic memory.

Scripts Scripts are goal-related mental structures that describe behaviors that typically lead to goal attainment. They are often organized in terms of means-end chains and are comprised of several different paths to goals that are arranged in a hierarchical means-end structure. Thus, they provide a temporal structure to events and help one select appropriate behaviors. For example, when leaders make decisions, they first need to gather information, assess the situation, weight gains and losses, then set out the most appropriate plan of actions. This process often occurs automatically as accepting a goal makes associated scripts highly active in memory, eliminating the need to search for or construct appropriate behaviors. Through their relations to goals, scripts are often linked to self-schema, thus activating a particular self-schema helps activate relevant motivational structures. Because organizational activities and leadership tasks are often repetitive, they are easily organized into generic script-based structures.

829

Similar to scripts, case-based knowledge also follows a story structure that represents case experience containing event-related information from past experience, making it more salient in memory and easier to access than conceptual knowledge. Events are connected episodes of scenes that are most likely encoded in the episodic memory. Ernest Hoffman and Robert Lord introduced a taxonomy of leadership events in 2013, and Frederick Morgeson, Terence Mitchell, and Dong Liu’s event system theory offers an alternative to explaining leadership behaviors in terms of personal traits. Events contain ebbs and flows of episodes that entail causality and specify antecedents and consequences. Leaders can extract information regarding causes and goals from these events and bind together contexts, actions, goals, and outcome relations to build domain-specific leadership skills. Scripts and case-based knowledge interact over time; for example, cognitive skills needed to complete leadership tasks such as problem definition, planning, goal analysis, and constraint analysis involve the use of case-based knowledge. Case-based knowledge constructed based on experience allows leaders to have a fine-grained understanding of the event as a part of their experience at a with-in person level.

Mental Models A mental model is an underlying cognitive framework that is used to evaluate events. Thus, it has similarities to scripts, which are also event-based. Mental models are used to create internal representations of the external world, but rather than being dimensional structures, like implicit leadership theories, they contain rules for producing behaviors or mental operations. They are used to help people understand situations and make decisions. Mental models are often used in the educational setting to evaluate learning, and a common finding is the correspondence of a student’s mental model to those of the instructor’s explain learning. Similarly, convergence in team mental models has been used to predict team processes like planning behavior and resulting performance. Often, fast-paced situations such as medical responses to cardiac arrest require shared mental models for teams to be effective. However,

830

Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models

the accuracy of team mental models may be more important in predicting performance than the similarity in mental models. How team mental models are measured can also be important, with measures that emphasized structure rather than content showing higher relations to team processes, although all types of measures of shared mental models predicted team performance. Early work on mental models represented operationalized structures in terms of networks of concepts. Extending this idea, Dorothy Carter and colleagues maintain that leadership can be viewed as networks of related individuals. We would expect that experienced leaders would hold internal mental models of such networks that represent organizational learning and facilitate the practice of leadership. Mental models represent abstractions of experience that differ among leaders. For example, charismatic leaders identify people as key causes, ideological leaders believe that situational attributes are the key causes, and pragmatic leaders recognize both people and situational attributes to be key causes. Moreover, as leaders store different content in their mental models, they also behave distinctly in activities such as problem-solving, task performance, and the use of tactics. Leaders’ mental models are likely to be strengthened and become more accurate with training and educational interventions based on cases. Leaders can create mental models by reflecting on their experience embedded in case-based knowledge. Michael Mumford and colleagues further suggest that the effectiveness of these mental models depends on the availability of relevant event knowledge containing abstractions of multiple event-specific key attributes. As attributes are linked to goals, experience is elaborated into means-end chains that integrate event-related information for memory encoding. Such structure supports goal pursuit by enabling the execution of temporally ordered productions (e.g., if A then B).

Future Directions Theories of cognitive structures such as person and self-schemas, scripts, and mental models played a significant role in the psychological literature for the second half of the 20th century. Research on

events that emphasize the importance of self-relevant experiences also gained increased popularity. With the use of cognitive representations generated from event experience, we build domain-specific (e.g., leadership) contextual knowledge structures that help us better perform in leadership roles. With extensive mental models constructed based on schemas and scripts that order events causally across time, one can understand and effectively respond to contexts. More extensive leadership knowledge structures also allow individuals to become more selective (effective) in their execution of actions as knowledge becomes increasingly specialized in one domain (i.e., expert-level skill). Looking toward the future, a potential advancement in theories that integrate the understanding of various cognitive structures may involve the use of computational models. Computational models help define many cognitive functionalities and provide a basis for explaining human cognitive information-processing. Neurological studies may also provide insights into how human brains encode and retrieve relevant information stored in various brain regions that can be integrated to help us solve problems. Diary studies that track individuals’ daily experience may help to categorize the types of events and behaviors that leadership experiences produce. Robert G. Lord and Angelique Fu See also Implicit Leadership Theories; Leadership Development

Further Readings Brewer, M. B., & Gardner, W. (1996). Who is this ‘We’? Levels of collective identity and self representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(1), 83–93. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.71.1.83 Carter, D. R., DeChurch, L. A., Braun, M. T., & Contractor, N. S. (2015). Social network approaches to leadership: An integrative conceptual review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(3), 597–622. doi:10.1037/ a0038922 Grossberg, S. (2013). Adaptive resonance theory: How a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world. Neural Networks, 37, 1–47. doi:10. 1016/j.neunet.2012.09.017

Self-Leadership Hoffman, E. L., & Lord, R. G. (2013). A taxonomy of event-level dimensions: Implications for understanding leadership processes, behavior, and performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(4), 558–571. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2013.03.009 Lord, R. G., Epitropaki, O., Foti, R. J., & Hansbrough, T. K. (2020). Implicit leadership theories, implicit followership theories, and dynamic processing of leadership information. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 7(1), 49–74. doi:10.1146/annurev-orgpsych012119-045434 Medvedeff, M. E., & Lord, R. G. (2007). Implicit leadership theories as dynamic processing structures. In B. Shamir, R. Pallai, M. C. Bligh, & M. Uhl-Bien (Eds.), Follower-centered perspectives on leadership: A tribute to the memory of James R. Meindl (pp. 19–50). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Morgeson, F. P., Mitchell, T. R., & Liu, D. (2015). Event system theory: An event-oriented approach to the organizational sciences. Academy of Management Review, 40(4), 515–537. doi:10.5465/amr.2012. 0099 Mumford, M. D., Todd, E. M., Higgs, C., & McIntosh, T. (2017). Cognitive skills and leadership performance: The nine critical skills. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), 24–39. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2016.10.012 Renoult, L., Davidson, P. S., Palombo, D. J., Moscovitch, M., & Levine, B. (2012). Personal semantics: At the crossroads of semantic and episodic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(11), 550–558. doi:10.1016/j. tics.2012.09.003 Strauss, K., Griffin, M. A., & Parker, S. K. (2012). Future work selves: How salient hoped-for identities motivate proactive career behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(3), 580–598. doi:10.1037/ a0026423

SELF-LEADERSHIP Self-leadership can be defined as a process of self-influence through which people proactively shape their own behaviors and cognitions to accomplish meaningful outcomes. Influence is a central idea in most conceptualizations of leadership. However, in many organizations, however,

831

conventional, top-down leadership influence is being de-emphasized while individual autonomy and initiative are being encouraged. Self-leadership relaxes traditional notions that leadership influence must be directed from one person to another and suggests that individuals are capable of influencing, and thus leading, themselves. To fully understand self-leadership, it is important to examine its conceptual development, measurement, research history, and current challenges and future directions.

Conceptual Development In 1983, Charles C. Manz published an influential paper, “Improving Performance through Self-Leadership,” introducing the concept of self-leadership for the first time. The concept’s development was motivated by a disconnect between organizational leadership and staff, in which leaders attempt to maximize productivity by imposing micromanagement practices with unrealistic expectations and punishment practices for suboptimal performance. Inspired by Steven Kerr and John M. Jermier’s idea of substitutes for leadership, Manz and others speculated whether it was possible to lead staff in a way that they learned to set their own target performances and were driven to accomplish them. Grounded in Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier’s control theory, self-leadership was advanced as an extension of basic self-management processes, including both behavioral and cognitive strategies and processes. Later, empowering leadership (also referred to as super-leadership) came to be viewed as a salient type of leadership behavior involving the process of leading others to lead themselves. Over the years, the concept of self-leadership was further refined and predominantly understood as the skill to motivate oneself for the completion of work tasks or the achievement of goals more generally via three distinct types of strategies: behavior-focused, natural reward, and constructive thought strategies. Behavior-focused strategies entail initiating actions enabling the completion of tasks, especially those that are unpleasant. This includes selfobservation, self-goal setting, self-reward, selfcorrecting feedback, and self-cueing. Natural

832

Self-Leadership

reward strategies involve maximizing intrinsically motivating behaviors and minimizing attention toward unpleasant task aspects in order to accomplish goals. Constructive thought strategies are a means of cultivating constructive and goal-directed thought patterns and habits. This includes identifying and challenging limiting beliefs, practicing mental rehearsal of goal-directed behavior, and fostering positive self-talk. As some research has shown, self-leadership is a skill that can be cultivated through training.

Measurement As the concept of self-leadership evolved, so did its measurement tools. The first attempt to psychometrically test self-leadership was with a prototype developed in 1987. Across 21 questions, behavioral, cognitive, and natural reward strategies were assessed. Later, the prototype was elaborated into two distinct self-leadership scales: a 34-item questionnaire containing eight self-leadership factors, and a 50-item questionnaire with 10 factors. The latter was also the first self-leadership scale ever published, comprising a key foundation for future self-leadership scales. Eventually, Jeffery D. Houghton and colleagues combined these scales into two of the more frequently used and psychometrically sound self-leadership assessment tool: the Revised Self-Leadership Questionnaire (RSLQ) and the Abbreviated Self-Leadership Questionnaire (ASLQ). The RSLQ

The RSLQ contains 34 items (statements about work habits) across the three strategy types and nine distinct dimensions: Self-goal setting, selfreward, self-correcting feedback, self-observation, and self-cueing represent behavioral strategies; visualizing successful performance, self-talk, and evaluating beliefs and assumptions represent cognitive strategies; and, focusing thoughts on natural rewards represents motivational strategies. Participants are presented with the items and asked to describe how true each statement is in describing them on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (not at all accurate) to 5 (completely accurate). Several studies

examining the RSLQ have shown good psychometric properties. The ASLQ

The ASLQ is a condensed version of the RSLQ. It was developed by taking the highest-loading items from the nine dimensions of the RSLQ. Whereas the self-punishment dimension was dismissed entirely owing to a lack of empirical support, two self-goal-setting items were selected instead. The ASLQ is administered and evaluated in the same way as the RSLQ. Several studies have shown satisfactory reliability and validity of the ASLQ.

An Overview of Self-Leadership Impacts Publication of the RSLQ in 2002 enabled self-leadership measurement, and subsequently self-leadership-focused empirical research has grown exponentially. A topic search of “selfleadership” in Web of Science yields 43 publications from inception until 2005. For the years between 2006 and 2020, the same search produces 1,161 publications. Throughout this time, most research has focused on the impact of selfleadership on work-related outcomes in relation to individual and team outcomes. At the individual level, research has consistently shown multiple benefits of self-leadership, with positive links to productivity (both in quality and quantity), self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and career success owing to better adjustment and higher levels of confidence. Furthermore, it has been linked to lower levels of absenteeism, stress, and anxiety. At the team level, self-leadership research has predominantly compared self-managing teams with traditional teams. Here, the benefits of self-leadership are slightly more ambiguous. Studies have shown that self-managing teams are typically more productive, creative and self-efficacious, and have higher levels of psychological empowerment. Mixed impacts have been found on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, absenteeism, staff turnover, and stress and anxiety. Regarding job satisfaction, self-leadership tends to be associated with higher satisfaction in

Self-Leadership

team members, while lower levels have been observed in supervisors. More recently, the broader applicability and relevance of self-leadership has been recognized. Research has investigated the impact of selfleadership on health behaviors, resilience, nursing, entrepreneurship, social work, and innovation among other areas.

Current Challenges Whereas a strong theoretical foundation was laid and considerable progress made in the examination and further refinement of the self-leadership construct over several decades, the construct has also encountered challenges, including the observation of paradoxes, conceptual overlap, and issues stemming from a narrow focus on strategies. Self-Leadership Paradoxes

Several paradoxes have been highlighted that have yet to be fully explained. These include the phenomenon that self-leadership seems to be a finite resource that can be depleted when heavily relied upon over short-term periods. However, self-leadership skills are cultivated when continuously applied over long periods. The paradox of self-leadership through collaboration points to the fact that despite its being a somewhat solitary process by definition, self-leadership skills involve the harnessing of available resources to accomplish goals, including the mobilization of social support. As such, self-leadership often leads to increased collaboration and team coherence. Other paradoxes include the observation that leaders of organizations, while desiring to practice selfleadership themselves, often restrict the ability of their staff to practice self-leadership equally strongly. Finally, the paradox and tautological nature of needing self-leadership to improve self-leadership have been highlighted. Conceptual Overlap

At times during its development, self-leadership has been criticized for being indistinct from other related theoretical concepts, including selfregulation theory and self-determination theory,

833

as well as overlap with the conscientiousness dimension of the big five personality theory. Subsequently, a substantial amount of conceptual and empirical research has been performed to distinguish self-leadership and establish construct validity. Notably, empirical studies have shown self-leadership to have discriminant and incremental validity relative to classic motivation constructs, including the need for achievement, self-regulation, and self-efficacy. Overreliance on Strategies

Another major challenge is the conceptualization of self-leadership into specific and relatively narrow sets of individual strategies, potentially neglecting other possibly beneficial self-leading behaviors, processes, and techniques. For example, selfleadership scholars focused on the importance of authenticity and meaningfulness in shaping higher-order or superordinate goals that help shape the why and what of the self-influence process. Moreover, as research around habit formation (behavior-focused strategies), motivation (natural reward strategies), and cognitive performance (constructive thought strategies) has developed considerably since the inception of self-leadership, inclusion of the vast number of self-leadershiprelevant strategies has become unmanageable, or impractical at best.

Future Opportunities The following opportunities are currently being explored to overcome the challenges highlighted in the preceding section, and to advance the concept in a meaningful way while building on the existing evidence base. Broader Conceptualization

Over many years of self-leadership theorizing and research, a relatively narrow, strategies-based conceptualization has emerged. Consequently, an opportunity exists to redefine self-leadership as an individual-level equivalent of population-based behavior change models. Among other suggestions, it has been proposed to explicitly include self-knowledge and authenticity, in addition to

834

September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership

basic self-goal setting and self-regulatory processes to emphasize its relevance for meaningful goal-setting and accomplishment through insight into personal values and strengths.

Stewart, G. L., Courtright, S. H., & Manz, C. C. (2019). Self-leadership: A paradoxical core of organizational behavior. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 6(1), 47–67.

Cross-Disciplinary Input

While self-leadership research to date has remained predominantly in the business management and leadership literature, the opportunity to redefine and advance the concept through crossdisciplinary input is clear. In particular, input from research on human flourishing focusing on strengths-based behavior change and values-based living, such as explored by positive psychology studies, seems to be of particular relevance. Focus on Constructs

As the inclusion of relevant strategies has become increasingly unfeasible, a focus on secondand third-level constructs has been suggested. Relevant second-level constructs include selfknowledge, self-goal setting, and self-regulation, each of which further distinguishes a number of relevant third-level constructs. Maike Neuhaus and Jeffery D. Houghton See also Authentic Leadership; Emotional Intelligence; Empowerment; Organizational Leadership; Team Leadership; Transforming Leadership

Further Readings Houghton, J. D., Dawley, D., & Diliello, T. C. (2012). The abbreviated self-leadership questionnaire (ASLQ): A more concise measure of self-leadership. International Journal of Leadership Studies 7(2), 216–232. Houghton, J. D., & Neck, C. P. (2002). The revised selfleadership questionnaire: Testing a hierarchical factor structure for self-leadership. Journal of Managerial Psychology 17(8), 672–691. Manz, C. C. (1983). Improving performance through selfleadership. National Productivity Review, 2(3), 288–297. Manz, C. C. (1986). Self-leadership: Toward an expanded theory of self-influence processes in organizations. The Academy of Management Review 11(3), 589. Stewart, G. L., Courtright, S. H., & Manz, C. C. (2010). Self-leadership: A multilevel review. Journal of Management 37(1), 185–222.

SEPTEMBER 11 TERRORIST ATTACKS AND LEADERSHIP The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the homeland of the United States, at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have led to profound changes in American society and the international order. Decisions and actions in the administration of President George W. Bush before, during, and after the 9/11 attacks have important implications for both leadership and followership. This entry explores failures to take seriously warnings before 9/11 of an attack, the president’s rallying leadership in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and the leadership and followership that led to the invasion of Iraq a year and a half later.

Intelligence Regarding Al Qaeda Important insights into the handling of intelligence related to the militant jihadist organization Al Qaeda before September 11 are detailed in the 2004 book Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, by Richard Clarke. Shortly after the transition from the presidency of Bill Clinton to that of George W. Bush, Clarke, and others tried to impress upon members of the new administration the mounting dangers from Al Qaeda. Some of the new president’s advisers, however, notably Paul Wolfowitz, could not believe that Osama bin Laden and his followers were genuine threats to the United States. In meetings, they reportedly belittled national security experts and others who tried to shift the focus of the new administration from Iraq to Al Qaeda. Up to a week before the attacks, intelligence experts, including CIA director George Tenet, tried to get senior members of the Bush team to focus on Al Qaeda. But advisers such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply argued that

September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership

there were other threats of terrorism that warranted greater scrutiny, including the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. And then the attacks came. The dismissals by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney represent classic cases of ignoring information inconsistent with one’s worldviews and foreign policy ideals. Their self-assuredness and refusal to change their minds despite new, conflicting information, combined negatively with some of President Bush’s personal qualities, as explored by psychologists Dean Keith Simonton and Dan McAdams. Simonton explores Bush’s very low standing on the Big Five personality trait Openness. McAdams also explores the former president’s very high standing on Extraversion. The combination of these two traits can lead to highly risky, almost impulsive behavior in pursuit of important goals. For Bush, McAdams argued, an important personal goal was to bring down Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the man who had threatened his father’s presidency. For whatever reason of personality and staff, the Bush administration lacked the degree of vigilance and openness to the unfamiliar that might have led to taking Al Qaeda more seriously before the September 11 attacks.

President Bush as Mobilizing Leader Shortly after the United States was attacked on September 11, George W. Bush’s resounding calls for resilience and revenge became a rallying point for the American public. Within weeks after the attack, his approval ratings shot up to 90%, the highest ever in U.S. history. The country craved strong leadership such that almost any leadership would reassure and attract support. While the president may have seemed uncomfortable in his speech from the White House to the nation on the night of the attack, he quickly found his footing and cemented a bond with his followers during a speech at Ground Zero in New York, a mere three days after the World Trade Center towers had collapsed into rubble. Bush held a bullhorn in one hand and had his other arm around a New York City fire fighter. His words didn’t seem to make much headway until a person in the crowd shouted “We can’t hear you.” At that point Bush pivoted seamlessly and proclaimed, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the

835

people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The crowd began a victorious chant. With one rousing statement, entirely in sync with his audience’s needs and expectations, Bush built his image as a strong and charismatic leader. Although the president met the heightened demand for what noted leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz has called needs for direction, protection, and order it has been said that the bar was relatively low. The need was intense and any response that went halfway to meet that need would likely have engendered strong support. Whether the president was charismatic is still debated. But clearly there was an emotional connection between Bush and his audience that is a central feature of charismatic leadership. Offering a clear new vision of protecting the United States and fighting terrorism abroad offered reassurance to a nation desperately in need of answers and direction. After the first post-9/11 months, however, Bush’s support slowly ebbed. Still, it was strong enough to avoid the typical losses for the incumbent president’s party in the midterm congressional elections. With the political winds at his back, Bush began to lead his nation into a war with Iraq. It is also important to recognize another leader who stepped up to boost both local and national morale in the hours the attacks. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani walked amidst the smoking debris where the twin towers had stood. He was among the few visible political leaders offering comfort and assurance that life would go on. He spoke eloquently about the collective pain of the entire nation. Asked how many had perished in the attacks, Giuliani said, “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear.” As befitting a good leader, he pleaded with New Yorkers to remain optimistic. “Tomorrow, New York is going to be here,” he said. Giuliani became “America’s Mayor,” revered as the leader of 9/11. Time magazine named him “Person of the Year,” and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth awarded him an honorary knighthood.

Leadership and Followership on the Road to War in Iraq Books by Richard Clarke and Dan McAdams testify to George W. Bush’s focus on Iraq both

836

September 11 Terrorist Attacks and Leadership

before and after 9/11. And his close advisers Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz offered a steady supply of justification and prior planning for such a course. All of them were convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and promoted the idea that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. There was clear evidence that it was Al Qaeda and not Iraq that was responsible, but a mindset of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein grew stronger. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, four months after the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, Bush identified Iran, North Korea, and Iraq as an “axis of evil” that posed a “grave and gathering danger.” Advice countering the implications of that narrative, in terms of fighting Al Qaeda versus Iraq, or otherwise preparing the country to combat terrorism, was ignored or sidelined. As the administration continued to build its case for war against Iraq to eliminate WMDs—which, it turned out, did not exist—a key figure was U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, an African American soldier who had served President Reagan as national security advisor and the first President Bush and President Bill Clinton as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had become one of the most admired men in America, and one with more credibility than almost any other individual in government. Powell died in 2021, and his legacy is largely defined, perhaps unfairly, by what he referred to as “one of [his] most momentous failures,” the speech he addressed to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. In that speech Powell eloquently and persuasively made the case that Iraq surely had WMDs, and that it was poised to use them or ready to share them with terrorist organizations. As Jeffrey Matthews’s biography of Powell reports, the secretary proclaimed that the administration “will not shirk” doing what was necessary to defeat the Iraqi menace (2019, p. 4). Powell had substantial information that the intelligence supposedly proving that Iraq actually did have WMDs was suspect. But, he wrote in 2012, his instincts failed him. He spoke with confidence to the United Nations and tied his well-earned credibility to the faulty intelligence and justification for invasion.

And that speech was critical in gaining support for the war both in the United States and in the international community. It’s important to understand how it happened that Powell let himself down. Matthews argues that Powell’s actions with respect to the UN speech represent bad followership, defined as effective and ethical followership. Recent analyses of followership focus on the difficulties for followers to challenge ineffective or unethical leadership. In many situations followers have neither the will nor the wit, that is the motivation or ability, to challenge bad leadership, or for that matter, any other kind of leadership. Powell’s background and his position at the time in the Bush administration may have made going against the grain of the administration, and sustaining that opposition, exceptionally difficult. Powell had been a military man for most of his life. In the army, he had been both a leader and a follower. He knew how to lead by leaning against the grain, by opposing the prevailing wisdom. But there was a deep tradition of following orders, especially from his commander-in-chief, the U.S. president. In the end, as he wrote, he acquiesced against his better judgment. In addition, most of the other senior advisers to Bush were all in on going to war with Iraq. They repeatedly ignored Powell’s warning along the lines of “you break it, you own it,” referring to Powell’s experience in Vietnam, where he felt the U.S. government did not invest in the war effort resources commensurate with the challenge it encountered, a mistake Powell vowed never to make again. He didn’t share his colleagues’, and his boss’s, optimism that a flourishing and peaceful democracy would happen in Iraq, at least not through military intervention alone. He understood Clarke’s point of view that invading Iraq would be a gift to Osama bin Laden because it would increase the radicalization of young Muslims. The advisers who pushed aside Powell’s reservations included the bureaucratically savvy Cheney and Rumsfeld and the highly ideological Wolfowitz, along with George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. That Powell gave in to them and made an eloquent speech supporting invasion is no surprise, given the number and strength of those disagreeing with

Servant Leadership

him. Even though he was a very powerful and persuasive individual himself, going against his superior and the nearly unanimous views of those senior advisers surrounding that superior, was understandably difficult. He faced the stark choice of resigning on principle or assuming the role of loyal follower. Aides close to Powell speculated that he believed the United States was headed to war with Iraq whether he gave the speech or not, and he believed he could best serve his country by staying in the arena as secretary of state to deal with the consequences and attempt to rally international support. In acquiescing, however, he failed the highest standard of being a good follower. Powell made a mistake and acknowledged it in later years. But the United States, Iraq, and the world are still dealing the consequences of the Bush administration’s decision. George R. Goethals See also Big Five Personality Traits; Charismatic Theory; Cuban Missile Crisis; Institutional Structure versus Culture in the Army; Military Leadership; Political Leadership

Further Readings Clarke, R. A. (2004). Against all enemies: Inside America’s war on terror. New York, NY: Free Press. Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goethals, G. R. (2021). Bad followers create bad leaders. In A. Ortenblad (Ed.), Debating bad leadership: Reasons and remedies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McAdams, D. P. (2011). George W. Bush and the redemptive dream: A psychological portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthews, J. J. (2019). Colin Powell: Imperfect patriot. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

SERVANT LEADERSHIP Servant leadership is a follower-focused approach to leadership developed by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s. Servant-leaders focus on others (i.e., followers, teams, organizations, communities)

837

through the one-on-one prioritization of their followers’ personal and professional needs and interests. In that way, the servant-leader is the steward of their employees and entrusted with their ongoing growth and development. Servant leadership research demonstrates that when leaders put their followers’ needs first, the leader does not sacrifice organizational performance. Rather, by focusing on the followers’ needs, servant-leaders empower followers to handle tough decisions, complete their tasks independently, and encourage followers to embrace a service culture. This leads to higher organizational performance and shareholder value increase. Hence, servant leadership has an indirect impact on performance. Thus, it is not surprising that world-learning organizations such as The Home Depot, Starbucks, and Marriott International are integrating servant leadership within their management practices. For example, The Home Depot uses an inverted pyramid approach where the CEO serves the senior leaders, who then serve the middle managers, through to the associates who serve their customers. Analytics company SAS implements servant leadership slightly differently, with employees receiving unprecedented levels of autonomy in their work schedules, methods, and career paths. The company’s leaders help employees understand how they can contribute to the bigger picture at SAS and support them to achieve their goals. This entry provides an overview of servant leadership, focusing on the components of servant leadership, how it is distinguished from other forms of leadership, an outline of core research findings, and criticisms of servant leadership.

What Is Servant Leadership? Servant leadership was developed in 1970 by Greenleaf, the director of management research at AT&T. His short essay, “The Servant as Leader,” argued that the most effective leaders prioritized their followers’ needs while guiding an organization to build value for their communities. Greenleaf argued that while the servant as a leader is an inherent contradiction, this juxtaposition is required to maximize sustainability and high levels of organizational performance.

838

Servant Leadership

Although the practice of servant leadership continued to grow among organizations, it was not until Jill Graham in the early 1990s that academic interest in servant leadership research began. The late 2000s saw the popularization of servant leadership and the development of three different perspectives. Three separate research teams, led respectively by Bob Liden, Dirk van Dierendonck, and Sen Sendjaya, developed their own conceptualizations and measurements of servant leadership. Each approach emphasizes a different element of servant leadership and is all readily used within both research and practice. Liden and colleagues argued that servant-leaders demonstrate the behaviors of emotional healing, conceptual skills, creating value for the community, helping subordinates grow and succeed, putting subordinates first, and behaving ethically. Their unique contribution focused on the broader community, not just the organization, and they were the only team to address the development in followers’ conceptual skills under a servant-leader. Van Dierendonck contended that servant leadership consisted of stewardship, empowerment, accountability, standing back, humility, authenticity, courage, and interpersonal acceptance. van Dierendonck’s model reflects Greenleaf’s assertion that there is a leader-side and a servant-side to a manager, and these two must work together (i.e., the juxtaposition). Sendjaya and his team identified six behaviors of servant-leaders—voluntary subordination, authentic self, responsible morality, covenantal relationship, transcendental spirituality, and transforming influence. Sendjaya and his team contributed a holistic approach to servant leadership by including spirituality, meaning, and purpose within the model. In summary, the commonalities between the three servant leadership models are the leader’s primary focus on their followers, the leader’s ability to empower and grow the capacity of employees, an ethical mindset, and that the leader is authentic in their behaviors.

How Does Servant Leadership Differ From Other Leadership Theories? Servant leadership is one of a number of positive and moral leadership theories examined in the

leadership literature, such as transformational, authentic, and ethical leadership. Although there are similarities in behaviors between these theories, such as setting a compelling vision, ethical decision-making, and being authentic, there are significant theoretical and empirical differences. Servant-leaders differ from transformational leaders through how they see their responsibility to followers. It has been argued that transformational leaders put the goals of the organization first, and the individualized consideration transformational leaders show followers is in pursuit of organizational goals (i.e., treating employees as a means to an ends). In contrast, servant-leaders see followers as the ends in themselves. A servant-leader’s primary focus is the holistic development of their followers, and through investing in their followers, organizational goals can be achieved. In short, the servant-leader puts the needs of their followers first, their organization second, and themselves last. Ethical leadership puts a greater focus on rewarding and punishing (un)ethical behaviors of their employees. While servant-leaders demonstrate moral and ethical behaviors, they distinguish themselves from ethical leaders by focusing on serving wider stakeholder groups. Both authentic leadership and servant leadership highlight the importance of the leader acting authentically in their behaviors. Where servant-leaders differ is that their inner calling (desire to serve) is matched with their outer behaviors (acting in service). Research demonstrates the benefits of servant leadership in comparison to these other three approaches. In comparative studies, servant leadership predicted an additional 5%–10% in key organizational outcomes such as follower, team, and organizational performance; organizational commitment; and helping behaviors. Although this research is ongoing, there is enough evidence to suggest that servant leadership offers a unique and important approach to studying and practicing leadership.

Research on Servant Leadership Servant-Leader Characteristics

Individuals who are more agreeable, have a strong self-belief, are mindful, identify strongly

Servant Leadership

with their organization, and are pro-socially motivated are more likely to be servant-leaders. Conversely, individuals who demonstrate high levels of narcissism, psychopathy, and extraversion are less likely to be servant-leaders. Gender differences also exist within servant leadership. Women are more likely to display servant leadership than men due to a tendency for women to display more stewardship and emotional healing behaviors and hold altruistic values. When women display servant leadership, they are more likely to influence follower servant leadership behaviors than their male servantleader colleagues. However, there is also a greater expectation for women to display servant leadership behaviors than men. The Impact of Servant-Leaders

Research shows that servant leadership influences more than 100 different attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcomes in their followers, teams, and organizations. Servant leadership positively impacts followers’ attitudes toward their work. These include feelings of thriving at work, finding meaning in their job, organizational commitment, engagement, and well-being. Followers of servant-leaders are also more likely to identify with the organization, feel that they fit with their job, and are less likely to be emotionally exhausted and bored in their job. Servant-leaders also assist followers with gaining work-life balance to reduce work-family conflict. Lastly, by engaging in servant leadership, managers improve the relationship between them and their followers, which increases perceptions of trust and leader effectiveness. One of the most commonly researched areas of servant leadership is follower behaviors. This stream of research draws on Greenleaf’s test of a servant-leader that they create followers who are more likely to serve others as well. Thus, there is a strong link between servant leadership and followers’ helping behaviors toward their co-workers, customers, and community. In addition, followers are more likely to engage in corporate social responsibility programs, collaborate with colleagues, and take on additional responsibilities to assist the organization.

839

Performance outcomes of servant leadership have been wide-ranging, including increasing individual, team, and organizational performance. Servant-leaders also encourage employees to be more creative and innovate in their roles by providing psychologically safe environments to experiment and invent. For customer service firms, servant leadership can be used to deliver increased customer service quality, performance, value, and satisfaction. How Servant-Leaders Influence Followers

Servant-leaders influence their followers’ attitudes, behaviors, and performance through two main ways—through followers observing and subsequently emulating their servant-leader (social learning theory) and by followers reciprocating the positive behaviors of the servant-leader (social exchange theory). One of Greenleaf’s key tenets of servant leadership was that servant-leaders create more servant-leaders by being role models for their followers to emulate. Through the social learning process, followers observe and emulate the nature of servant leadership and perform positive behaviors because they are pro-socially motivated to do so. Thus, research has argued that followers help co-workers and deliver exceptional performance because their servant-leader influences individual attitudes such as heightening their core selfevaluation and public service motivation and influencing the team by creating climates characterized by service, socio-moral, and knowledge-sharing. The other dominant way servant-leaders influence followers is through a reciprocal exchange, where followers engage in positive behaviors because of the positive behaviors displayed by the servant-leader. It is important to note that the servant-leader does not serve the follower with the expectation that the follower does something positive in return. Instead, social exchange theory argues that followers feel a sense of obligation to reciprocate the service behaviors shown to them by their leader. Research shows that followers demonstrate helping and innovative behaviors due to feelings of trust and commitment toward the leader and organization and a sense of duty to uphold their end of the psychological contract.

840

Servant Leadership

Criticisms of Servant Leadership One of the most significant criticisms of servant leadership is its theoretical and empirical overlap with other positive and moral leadership theories, such as transformational, ethical, and authentic leadership. Although servant leadership scholars have attempted to distinguish unique elements of servant leadership, the argument remains that there are more similarities between the leadership theories than there are unique differences. This overlap is partly due to the poor conceptualization of what servant leadership actually was and how it differed from existing leadership theories in early empirical research. Perhaps this is why empirically, servant leadership is highly correlated with the other positive leadership theories. An emerging criticism of servant leadership theory is that it fails to consider how individual identities (e.g., race, gender, class) influence who is perceived as a servant-leader. For example, in Helena Liu’s study of servant leadership in an Australian multicultural workplace context, she argued that while the servant leadership literature claims to be power-neutral and rejects traditional heroic leadership prototypes, in practice, this is not the case. Rather, for individuals who do not conform to the prototypical White male leader, they are seen by their employees as simply “servants” and do not have the innate qualities that make them a “leader.” Practically, due to the follower-first notion of servant leadership, conflicting interests are likely to emerge. First, if a servant-leader is meant to serve all stakeholders (e.g., followers, shareholders, community, organization), there is an inevitable situation of conflicting interests between stakeholders. For example, encouraging an employee to seek opportunities outside of the organization for their continued professional growth may not be in the organization’s best interests to keep their best and brightest employees. Second, conflicts could occur between what is morally right and what serves the needs of followers. For example, fossil fuel organizations may be caught between transitioning to renewable energy, which causes some followers to lose their jobs, and continuing business as usual to ensure their followers have employment. Thus, the criticism of servant leadership becomes, is

it practical to serve everyone or do servant-leaders need to pick and choose when, where, how, and whom to serve. While servant leadership might seem to some as idealistic or unrealistic, especially in today’s profit-driven culture, organizations and managers have embraced this unique approach to leadership to deliver superior organizational performance without sacrificing the needs of their employees. Servant leadership appears to be more appropriate for managers willing to invest in the long-term growth of their organization, seek to share these benefits with all stakeholders, and have the character to put their personal needs aside for the needs of their followers and the greater society. Nathan Eva and Karryna Madison See also Authentic Leadership; Community Leadership; Ethical Leadership; Humility; Inclusive Leadership; Transformational and Transactional Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111–132. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018. 07.004 Greenleaf, R. (1970). The servant as leader. The Robert K. Greenleaf Centre. Retrieved from https://www. greenleaf.org/products-page/the-servant-as-leader/ Hoch, J. E., Bommer, W. H., Dulebohn, J. H., & Wu, D. (2018). Do ethical, authentic, and servant leadership explain variance above and beyond transformational leadership? A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), 501–529. doi:10.1177/0149206316665461 Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly, 19(2), 161–177. doi:10. 1016/j.leaqua.2008.01.006 Lemoine, G. J., Hartnell, C. A., & Leroy, H. (2019). Taking stock of moral approaches to leadership: An integrative review of ethical, authentic, and servant leadership. Academy of Management Annals, 13(1), 148–187. doi:10.5465/annals.2016.0121 Liu, H. (2019). Just the servant: An intersectional critique of servant leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 156(4), 1099–1112. doi:10.1007/s10551-017-3633-0

Service Innovation

841

With the proliferation of technology, the service landscape has changed dramatically since the turn of the millennium. Along with technology comes innovation. An innovation is something new that creates value. Service innovation involves new value created within a service, from a haircut to the Uber app. Services are intangible experiences between a customer and a firm, from simple interactions like a fast-food drive-thru to more complex, ongoing relationships such as those that exist between firms (e.g., technology service partner). Generating and executing novel innovations is key to successful leadership in business. This entry begins by further defining service innovations, then explains how they can disrupt entire industries, and concludes by exploring automation and personalization of service innovation, providing several examples of industry service innovation throughout the entry.

we purchase books. The innovation may involve a change to a process, such as Patagonia creating a new program that allows customers to trade in used products for store credit instead of disposing of them, or a wholly innovative offering, such as the convenient entertainment experience provided by Netflix that revolutionized the movie rental industry and pioneered online streaming. Such disruptive innovations can change the way consumers behave in dramatic ways. Additionally, an innovation may be planned to create efficiencies for the firm or a better service experience for the customer, or it may be unplanned, such as enhanced virtual collaboration among employees during the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of Zoom meetings. Service innovation has an impact on firms, employees, and customers. Service innovation provides a way for firms to differentiate from one another. For example, a prospective employee may be more likely to work for an innovative firm or an innovative leader. A customer may reward an innovative firm with continued business. Managers can foster a culture of innovation where new ideas are rewarded and risks are revered. Such perspectives within an organization’s culture are more difficult for competitors to imitate than technological know-how, giving innovative leaders an edge in the marketplace. While innovations to services can occur in the absence of technology, this entry will focus on service innovations that have been spurred by recent advances in technology and the digital landscape.

What Is Service Innovation?

Disrupting Digitally

We often think of innovation related to products, such as the Apple iPhone or Amazon’s Alexa smart home device. Indeed, product innovation is well-studied in the marketing and management fields. A less studied but growing field of research is service innovation. In the realm of services, which are intangible, interactive, and typically labor intensive, innovations can also occur. A service innovation may be incremental, such as redesigning the customer’s route through a retail store, or disruptive, such as the way Airbnb changed the entire hotel service industry or the way Amazon transformed the way

Just like Henry Ford disrupted the horse-and-buggy business, new business models that are based in service innovation have disrupted entire industries and, in some cases, made business models obsolete. Service innovations often create a new way for the consumer to experience the core benefit of the service. Uber and Airbnb are just two examples of companies that created entire businesses from a service innovation, altering the taxi and hotel industries in significant ways. As neither provides the “product” offering (i.e., transportation or accommodations), the core business is a service. Uber and Airbnb each offer a technology platform

Sendjaya, S., Sarros, J. C., & Santora, J. C. (2008). Defining and measuring servant leadership behaviour in organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 45(2), 402–424. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2007. 00761.x van Dierendonck, D. (2011). Servant leadership: A review and synthesis. Journal of Management, 37(4), 1228–1261. doi:10.1177/0149206310380462

SERVICE INNOVATION

842

Service Innovation

that provides services to customers. In the case of Uber, the platform connects people in need of transportation with drivers. In the case of Airbnb, the platform connects people in need of accommodations with rentals and other lodging options. Similarly, Google did not create the idea of providing information. Rather, the disruptive service innovation was a new delivery system for providing information. Google’s innovative algorithm offers relevant search results to virtually any query faster than ever before. A long-standing characteristic of services is that they are typically inseparable. This means that, due to the interactive nature of services, the benefit offered is inseparable from the service provider (e.g., I can’t experience food from a restaurant without being there). However, with digital service innovations, many service benefits can now be consumed separately from the service provider. Consider Khan Academy, an organization that offers online courses on a wide variety of topics. In the past, learning about computer programming or how to paint required visiting a physical space where an expert on the topic shared their knowledge. Khan Academy disrupted the realm of education by providing high-quality lessons online. While this may now seem commonplace, Khan Academy was one of the first companies to create a new delivery system for education, changing the way services are defined. Similarly, when medical offices adopt telemedicine visits, this is yet another example of a service that has enhanced the customer experience through innovation and used technology to provide value virtually. Digital disruption and service innovation is also happening in the realm of service recovery. Service recovery involves the actions a firm takes to solve a customer’s problem. For example, if a Starbucks employee makes a coffee incorrectly, the manager’s service recovery may involve a coupon for a free drink and an apology. In the online space, many firms have digitized their service recovery efforts, such that employees are given the authority to solve customers’ problems online. This digital recovery effort may occur within a chat window or in an online forum or community. A unique innovation in service recovery is the use of a firm’s customers to solve their peers’ problems online. For example, an Apple iPhone user that is having

trouble with syncing contacts can post a request for help in Apple’s online forum and fellow customers will respond with solutions. While this certainty creates efficiencies for Apple, it also helps customers feel like they are participating alongside the firm, creating community with others, and co-producing value.

Simplifying via Automation The automatic teller machine (ATM) is a common example of a service innovation that simplified monetary transactions via automation. While commonplace now, the ATM offered a streamlined process that reduced labor needs and provided the customer with the independence to complete the banking transaction at their own pace and at the time they desired. Self-service gas stations similarly represent a service innovation through automation. More recently, many grocery stores have adopted self-checkout technology that similarly allows the customers to complete a grocery store purchase without the need to interact with a cashier. This innovation benefits the customer by providing autonomy and privacy; it also benefits the firm by reducing labor costs and creating efficiencies, especially during peak times. It should be noted that many service innovations, such as incorporating automation, can have a negative impact on employees. As service tasks are automated, the need for the employee to facilitate a one-on-one, face-toface interaction is often reduced. Therefore, firm leaders must be careful to both innovate and consider the welfare of employee stakeholders. Another area of innovative service automation is in electronic point-of-sale (ePOS) systems in businesses such as caf´es, hair salons, food trucks, and coffee shops. Rather than using a traditional register, small and large businesses alike utilize a platform such as the Square or Clover ePOS system to manage transactions, fill orders, facilitate contactless payments, and request tips, all electronically. The platform may be included on a card reader or as an app on an iPad or tablet that faces the customer. Such systems collect a vast amount of data that businesses can also use to innovate, improve processes, and tailor offerings. The platform business such as Square is itself a service innovation. Square disrupted the electronic

Service Innovation

point-of-sale software industry, innovating the way payments are collected and orders are taken, therefore providing an innovative solution to the business. The adoption of ePOS systems also represents an innovation that impacts consumers directly, changing the way they must behave in the store. For example, whereas the purchase experience in a caf´e previously included a tip jar at the register, new ePOS systems have tip options automatically populated. The prior tip script, or the actions we expect to perform in a specific service situation, was flipped. Previously, we may have dropped a dollar bill into a tip jar. Now, we are asked by the user interface on the ePOS system, “How much would you like to tip? 15%? 20% 25%.” Clearly, this service innovation involving tipping benefits the business by allowing them to collect more tips. However, as such service innovations simplify the purchase process via automation, consumers are uncertain how to act, particularly in service situations where tips historically have not been collected. Service innovations may change norms, or the way we typically behave, which can result in both positive and negative outcomes.

Personalizing the Service Experience Service innovation may also involve personalizing the service experience to the consumers’ needs and preferences. For example, Disney Resorts provide guests with MagicBands, radio frequency-enabled wristbands that open hotel rooms and allow guests to pay for food and drink. More importantly, park employees can offer surprises and personalize the experience for the guest through the MagicBand. This service innovation creates efficiencies for the customer (e.g., cashless payments) and the business (e.g., tracking the number and location of guests in the park), while also creating a unique service experience that is scalable for Disney. Another example of a highly personalized service innovation is the private classes offered by virtual makeup and skin consultants at Sephora. Customers are paired in a one-on-one Zoom session with a beauty expert who provides personalized advice. These online services also help Sephora generate income when in-store visits are down as they embrace new modes of doing business.

843

Many businesses are also embracing new modes of order delivery that allow the consumer to select the service experience that is best suited to them. Grocery stores now offer online scheduling for order pickup and delivery. Likewise, when making a purchase from Amazon.com, consumers have the option of a traditional delivery or to pick up the order from a locker at a Whole Foods grocery store. Amazon also provides a long list of options for customers who intend to return a product, from a Kohl’s department store drop-off, to a UPS driver pick-up, to a UPS store experience that involves the consumer simply showing up with the product, no need to pack it or label it. These hybrid offerings, where both products and services are intermixed, use service innovations as a way to satisfy the customer postpurchase and build long-term loyalty. It is important for the personalized service to be adaptable to customer needs, but also standardized enough to create economies of scale for the business (e.g., a fast-food assembly line). While the discussion thus far has intentionally focused on service innovation driven by new technology, service innovation also occurs in response to consumer needs that are not associated with technology. For example, Starbucks recently opened a store in Washington, DC that focuses on employing and serving deaf and hard-of-hearing customers. In sum, service innovation involves responding to opportunities in the marketplace. Leaders should be equipped to respond strategically with planned service innovation as well as unplanned service innovation that results from uncertainty (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Sara Hanson See also Behavioral Economics; Change and Leadership; Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership; Entrepreneurship; Marketing Leadership

Further Readings Berry, L. L., Shankar, V., Parish, J. T., Cadwallader, S., & Dotzel, T. (2006). Creating new markets through service innovation. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(2), 56–63. D’Emidio, T., Dorton, D., & Duncan, E. (2015). Service innovation in a digital world. McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-

844

Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership

functions/operations/our-insights/service-innovationin-a-digital-world Gustafsson, A., Snyder, H., & Witell, L. (2020). Service innovation: A new conceptualization and path forward. Journal of Service Research, 23(2), 111–115. doi:10.1177/1094670520908929 Heinonen, K. (2017, October 9). Positive and negative valence influencing consumer engagement. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 28(2), 147. Heinonen, K., & Strandvik, T. (2022, April 19). Viewpoint: Applying pragmatism to stimulate service research and practice—A European perspective. Journal of Services Marketing, 36, 4, 467. Heinonen, K., & Strandvik, T. (2021, January 2). Reframing service innovation: COVID-19 as a catalyst for imposed service innovation. Journal of Service Management, 32(1), 101–112. doi:10.1108/JOSM-05-2020-0161

SERVICE-FOR-PRESTIGE THEORY LEADERSHIP

OF

Service-for-prestige is an evolutionary theory of leader-follower relations, proposed by psychologists Michael E. Price and Mark Van Vugt, that has two main goals. First, the theory explains how and why these relations can range from being voluntary and “good” (i.e., based on a leader’s ability to benefit followers) to coercive and “bad” (i.e., based on a leader’s ability to harm followers). Second, the theory establishes that leader-follower relations are universally considered “good” when they represent a mutually beneficial reciprocal exchange: leaders produce public goods for followers, and followers deliver elevated social prestige (and associated fitness-relevant benefits) to leaders. This entry gives a brief presentation of how service-for-prestige attempts to achieve these goals. It is important to first consider several fundamental questions about leader-follower relations that service-for-prestige is intended to address.

Human Leader-Follower Relations: How Universal and How Unique Are They? Leadership and followership are such ubiquitous and familiar aspects of our own societies that it’s

easy to take them for granted. It just seems normal for human groups to have leaders, and leaders can’t exist without followers, so followership seems equally ordinary. This characterization is to some extent fair: leadership and followership do indeed appear to be deeply normal aspects not just of our own cultures, but of human societies in general. And not only are these behaviors cross-culturally universal, they are observed in many other species as well, from bees to ravens to nonhuman primates. So on the surface, leadership and followership may not seem so exotic. But once we start examining this apparent ordinariness more closely, some fundamentally important questions begin to emerge. Why, in an ultimate sense, are these behaviors so cross-culturally universal? What is it about human nature that generates this universality? If biological evolution selects for behaviors that are adaptive at the individual level, why did these particular behaviors evolve? That is, how did leadership benefit the fitness of leaders, and followership benefit the fitness of followers, in ancestral human environments? To what extent are these behaviors truly universal—is there universal agreement, for example, about what constitutes “good” versus “bad” leadership cross-culturally? And finally, even if these behaviors are observed in other species, is there anything unique or extraordinary about how they play out in human societies? These are the kinds of ultimate questions about leadership and followership that service-forprestige has been designed to address. Service-for-prestige aims to understand leadership and followership behavior in terms of human nature: as the products, that is, of psychological adaptations that evolved to benefit the genetic fitness of ancestral individuals. The vast majority of this evolution occurred in hunter-gatherer environments, so a good starting point for understanding service-for-prestige is to consider leader-follower relations in such environments.

Leadership and Followership Among Hunter-Gatherers The hunter-gatherer societies that anthropologists have studied most closely have usually taken the form of relatively small bands of nomadic

Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership

foragers. A typical band consists of 25–50 members, and these members tend to express fairly unambiguous preferences about what constitutes “good” versus “bad” leadership. If a member is recognized as having special abilities that produce benefits for other members, then that member will tend to be voluntarily respected, followed, and regarded as a good leader. A bad leader, on the other hand, is one who attempts to control other members through coercion and their ability to impose harm. It’s difficult, however, for a bad leader to maintain power for long in these environments. Nomadic foragers exist in “fissionfusion” societies: bands often fracture in response to social conflict, and members have considerable ability to leave one band and join another. If a leader attempts to maintain power via an ability to impose harm on followers, the followers will be both eager and relatively able to vote with their feet. Further, because these groups are so small, members generally have little incentive to tolerate overbearing leaders. Whereas larger groups often require strong leadership in order to cooperate successfully—to solve collective action problems related to group coordination and free rider punishment, for instance—this is less true in smaller groups. Collective action is a simpler undertaking, and strong leaders are therefore less necessary, in groups with fewer members. In nomadic foraging societies, then, two factors conspire to reduce the power of would-be coercive leaders: members are relatively able to escape the presence of such leaders, and are less dependent on leadership in general, due to the simplicity of cooperation when groups are small. Although a coercive leadership style is difficult to get away with in such fission-fusion societies, it becomes more tenable in other kinds of hunter-gatherer societies. To illustrate this point, consider leadership among the indigenous peoples of the North American Northwest coast. These communities lacked agriculture, but by establishing their villages close to salmon-rich rivers, they were able to form communities of hundreds of members, much larger than the bands of nomadic foragers. As these villages grew larger, they became increasingly dependent on strong leadership in order to cooperate successfully, for the

845

production of group defense and other crucial shared resources. Further, compared to members of fission-fusion nomadic societies, residents of these sedentary villages found it more difficult to simply pack up and leave if a leader became overly dominant and coercive. Due to followers’ increased dependence on leaders and decreased exit options, the leadership style that emerged in these communities was notably more coercive than that seen among nomadic foragers. Slavery, for instance, was a common practice among powerful members of Northwest coast communities, but is unknown among nomadic foragers.

The Universality of “Good” Leadership: Dominance Versus Prestige The aforementioned anthropological examples suggest that when hunter-gatherers are free to choose the kind of leader they want, they express a clear preference for someone who would make a beneficial cooperative partner, as opposed to someone motivated by narrow self-interest. This preference is not limited to just hunter-gatherers, however, and is likely to be cross-culturally universal. In a landmark study of leadership preferences across 61 cultures known as the GLOBE survey, Den Hartog and colleagues found that people consistently preferred leaders who displayed traits associated with prosociality (e.g., trustworthiness, fairness) and high ability (e.g., intelligence, competence). The GLOBE survey, and subsequent studies that have replicated its findings, suggest a strong human preference for leaders who are willing and able to engage in mutually beneficial exchange. That is, followers trust leaders who possess some ability to benefit followers, and who can be trusted to deliver this benefit when expected to do so. These studies also suggest a complementary universal aversion to leaderships traits associated with exploitative behavior, such as deceitfulness and coerciveness. In other words, the traits that make people wary of potential leaders are the same ones that make them wary of potential exchange partners. This spectrum of leadership styles, from good (trustworthy and productive of follower benefits) to bad (self-serving and exploitative), accords well with the two kinds of social status that have come

846

Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership

to be commonly distinguished in evolutionary behavioral science: prestige and dominance. The high status of good leaders, which followers freely confer in exchange for leader-provided benefits, is considered prestige. Dominance, in contrast, describes the high status of bad leaders, extracted coercively from followers via an ability to inflict harm. Both prestige-based and dominance-based leadership are commonly observed in modern industrialized environments, and people clearly possess the psychological equipment necessary for engaging in either kind of interaction. The two contrasting types of hunter-gatherer societies describe the range of ancestral environments that could have plausibly selected for this full spectrum of mental adaptation. According to service-forprestige, either of these leadership styles may emerge in a contemporary social environment, as long as that environment sufficiently resembles those that previously selected that leadership style. In environments more similar to the Northwest coast—those in which followers have lower ability to reject or escape leaders, or larger organizations in which strong leadership is more essential for collective action—dominance-based leadership will more likely emerge. Prestige-based leadership, in contrast, should prevail in environments more similar to those of nomadic foragers, in which followers have greater freedom to desert or depose leaders, and in smaller organizations in which group cooperation is a less complex undertaking.

Service-for-Prestige as a Form of Reciprocal Altruism As previously noted, people exhibit a universal preference for leaders who would make good exchange partners. But why? What kinds of resources do leaders and followers actually exchange, and what would this exchange process have looked like in the evolutionary past? To answer these questions, we must look again at leader-follower relations in hunter-gatherer societies, as these are the closest examples we have to the environments of our evolutionary past. Identifying the resources that leaders provide followers in hunter-gatherer societies is a relatively straightforward task. These leaders benefit follower

fitness by facilitating group success in crucial activities such as warfare, hunting, and other forms of foraging, band migrations, and the maintenance of within-group harmony. But what’s in it for the leaders, evolutionarily speaking? Leadership behavior often involves substantial costs, including heavy investments of time and energy, physical risk-taking, and stressful decision-making. For these costs to pay off, leaders must be compensated with some sort of fitness-enhancing return benefits. As the “service-for-prestige” title indicates in a not-so-subtle way, prestige appears to be the most important kind of fitness reward that leaders receive, in exchange for their service to followers. More specifically, by achieving elevated prestige in the minds of followers, leaders gain increased access to a diverse array of fitness enhancing resources. Their prestige makes them popular as friends, allies, and mates, and thus all sorts of resources tend to flow their way. In huntergatherer and similar kinds of small-scale societies, respected leaders are rewarded over the long-term with social, political, and material support. But the fitness benefits of leadership become especially apparent when considering leaders’ access to sexual resources. The high status of male leaders makes them attractive to female sexual partners, and also to parents who wish to betroth their daughter to a powerful ally. Accordingly, higher status men in small-scale societies tend to have relatively large numbers of wives and other sexual partners, higher-fertility partners, and more surviving offspring. Service-for prestige regards leader-follower relations as a form of exchange that is individually adaptive and mutually beneficial for leaders and followers alike. It thus represents an extension of Robert Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism, one of the most important theories of cooperation in behavioral biology. According to this theory, it can be adaptive to behave altruistically—that is, to intentionally incur a fitness cost, in order to deliver a fitness benefit to a nongenetic-relative—as long as the recipient reciprocates in a manner that more than compensates the altruist. Over a repeated series of resource exchanges, reciprocal altruism benefits both partners: each must pay a cost (e.g., one fitness unit) to benefit the other, but each also receives a return benefit worth more than that cost

Service-for-Prestige Theory of Leadership

(e.g., two fitness units), so the exchange is mutually adaptive. We’ve already discussed how leaders incur costs to provide benefits for followers and are rewarded with prestige. But for this interaction to be a true case of reciprocal altruism, followers must incur some cost in order to deliver this prestige to the leader. And service-for-prestige does propose that just as leaders pay costs to provide services for followers, followers incur costs to “pay respect” to leaders. Because prestigious leaders are so capable of benefitting followers, followers will willingly invest the time and resources that are required to remain in their favor. These follower investments may include, for instance, providing leaders with resources, deferring to their interests, cooperating with their instructions, and effortfully avoiding causing harm to them, their families, and their allies.

Service-for-Prestige as a Form of Collective Action As just discussed, service-for-prestige regards leader-follower relations as a kind of reciprocal altruism. But it also sees these relations as potentially constituting a form of collective action, that is, as a group cooperative interaction for the production of a public good (or more accurately, a “second-order” public good). Consider a leader who is providing two or more followers with a leadership service of equal value to all followers, and who is incentivized to provide this service by the promise of follower-generated prestige. The leadership service would qualify as a public good for followers, and the follower-generated prestige, as the leader’s main incentive, would be essential to the production of this public good. This prestige would thus represent a “second-order” public good, jointly produced by the followers to sustain production of the first-order public good (i.e., the leadership service). The joint effort of followers to produce this prestige, like all collective actions, would thus entail a potential free rider problem: a follower who had equal access to the leadership service, but who contributed relatively little to producing the prestige that was necessary for maintaining this service, could gain a free rider’s advantage. Service-for-prestige thus predicts that in such a scenario, followers who fail to pay their

847

fair share of respect to leaders will potentially be targets of anti-free-rider punitive sentiment from relatively respectful followers.

Conclusion Leadership is not unique to humans; leaderfollower interactions enable many species to solve coordination problems and share information. Only among humans, however, do these interactions clearly take the form of reciprocal interactions, in which followers actively compensate and incentivize leaders with allocations of prestige. Our species may therefore be capable of eliciting forms of leadership that, compared to those seen in other species, seem extraordinarily motivated, committed, and mutually beneficial for both leaders and followers. On the other hand, if social conditions are not conducive to reciprocal leadership—if groups are very large, for instance, and exit options are poor—a much more noxious form of leadership may emerge that can, if left unchecked, become a nightmare for followers. The more we understand about the environmental conditions conducive to each of these strikingly divergent leadership styles, the more we can promote leadership that proves to be a blessing for followers, rather than a curse. Michael E. Price See also Followership; Leader–Follower Relationships

Further Readings Den Hartog, D. N., House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., RuizQuintanilla, S. A., Dorfman, P. W., & GLOBE Associates. (1999). Culture specific and cross-culturally generalizable implicit leadership theories: Are attributes of charismatic/transformational leadership universally endorsed? Leadership Quarterly, 10, 219–256. doi:10. 1037/t15043-000 Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 165–196. doi:10. 1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4 Kelly, R. L. (1995). The foraging spectrum: Diversity in hunter-gatherer lifeways. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

848

Sexual Harassment

King, A., Johnson, D. D. P., & Van Vugt, M. (2009). The origins and evolution of leadership. Current Biology, 19, R911–R916. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.027 Price, M. E., & Van Vugt, M. (2014). The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: The theory of service-forprestige. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 363. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00363 Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., & Price, M. E. (2006). Cognitive adaptations for n-person exchange: The evolutionary roots of organizational behavior. Managerial and Decision Economics, 27, 103–129. doi:10.1002/mde.1287 Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57. doi:10.1086/ 406755

SEXUAL HARASSMENT Sexual harassment refers to a wide variety of possible behaviors related to sexuality. Sexual harassment is an important issue for leaders for two distinct, but related, reasons. First, leaders possess attributes, such as formal and informal sources of power, which increase the likelihood that they will engage in sexual harassment. Second, the duties of leaders include preventing their employees from engaging in behaviors that qualify as sexual harassment. Unwanted sexual attention involves behaviors that are offensive, not desired, and not reciprocated. These unwanted behaviors can involve actual sexual activity, or traits and characteristics associated with sexual identity or sexual orientation. Although men are more likely than women to initiate sexual harassment, and women are more likely than men to be the recipients of sexual harassment, men and women can occupy both roles. Gender harassment refers to unwanted and offensive conduct unrelated to sexual interest or desire. Instead, it is based on the actual or perceived biological sex, gender, sexual orientation, or sexual identity of the target. Gender harassment is often motivated by a desire to insult or degrade someone rather than to express sexual interest or achieve sexual gratification.

Sexual coercion involves the use of power to obtain a sexual opportunity with someone. Using deception to facilitate sexual activity is also a form of sexual coercion. The degree of coercion can range from subtle or minor, such as repeatedly expressing an interest in someone who does not reciprocate, to more severe, such as threatening someone’s job. Making employment conditional on providing sexual favors is known as a quid pro quo relationship. Less direct forms of sexual harassment can be termed creating a hostile work environment. A hostile work environment can be created through unwanted sexual attention or gender harassment. An extreme level of coercion can be defined as sexual assault, which refers to touching another person’s body in a sexual way, without their consent, even through clothes. Sexual assault refers to actions such as rape or attempted rape, child sexual relations, groping, or sexual relations that are facilitated by the use of drugs or alcohol, especially if covertly. The subjective experience of the target is relevant to determining whether sexual harassment has taken place. In other words, it is possible for someone for someone to sexually harass another person even if the initiator does not have that intention in mind. It is possible to distinguish a workplace romance from a workplace affair. Sexual gratification is the main goal of a workplace affair. In contrast, workplace romances involve a relationship between two people who are employed in the same institution. Both workplace romances and workplace affairs vary in the degree to which the parties involved perceive them as consensual. One problem for leaders is the difficulty in determining whether a relationship—regardless of its form—is completely consensual. It is possible that any form of power imbalance creates a workplace environment where what appears to be a consensual relationship is not. Forms of social influence that appear mild to one person may be encoded as forceful by another. Another problem is that a relationship that starts out fully consensual may shift in tone as the relationship develops. Leaders may have to deal with the fallout of a broken workplace romance on top of ordinary interpersonal conflict.

Sexual Harassment

Someone accused of sexual harassment will often deny the allegation. Outrage management refers to strategies people use to ameliorate the negative consequences of an accusation. Preventive strategies of outrage management involve stopping the release of damaging information. For example, a perpetrator may cover up evidence of wrongdoing or intimidate the target of sexual harassment through threats of punishment or promises of rewards. Once damaging information has been revealed, a harasser may attempt to devalue the target by questioning his or her credibility as a witness. Another strategy is to reinterpret a controversial comment or action in a more benign manner, for example, as a misunderstanding or poor attempt at humor. Finally, a harasser may use official channels, such as a formal grievance procedure, to slow down the process of an accusation. Responsible leaders must maintain a balance between the concerns of the accuser and the rights of the accused. They must often do so under stressful circumstances and worry that their actions may create second-order distress among the parties involved.

Sexual Harassment in Historical Context Before the 1970s, behaviors that would be classified today as sexual harassment were viewed as individual problems; that is, as a dilemma faced by a specific woman with regard to the behaviors of a specific man or men. The idea that sexual harassment was a social problem began in the 1970s when Cornell University employee Lin Farley realized that most women reported instances where they were made to feel uncomfortable based on interactions that involved sexuality. In 1975, another Cornell University employee—Carmita Wood—resigned because of persistent and unwanted sexual advances from her supervisor, noted nuclear physicist Boyce McDaniel. She testified in front of the New York City Human Rights Commission Hearings on Women and Work and explicitly used the term sexual harassment. Law professor Catharine MacKinnon’s 1979 book Sexual Harassment of Working Women argued that because women were victims of most instances of sexual harassment, it represented sex

849

discrimination and was therefore a violation of federal law based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1991 Senate confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice gave sexual harassment a high profile when Anita Hill testified about allegations that he had sexually harassed her by talking about pornography and his own sexual experiences while she was an employee of the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Another high-profile individual involved in sexual harassment accusations, which surfaced in 1998, was President Bill Clinton, with regard to his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Although there was never a suggestion that the relationship was nonconsensual, the extreme power differential between the president of the United States and a White House intern drew attention to the relationship between implicit and explicit power and someone’s ability to truly give consent. When Donald Trump ran for president, crude comments he made on an Access Hollywood tape (circa 2005) about the way in which his fame allowed him to sexually harass—or even sexually assault—women with impunity became public. Although prominent Republicans tried to distance themselves from the comments, and pundits predicted his comments would ruin his chances of winning an election, he remained a viable candidate and won the 2016 election. More recently, in October 2017, accusations leveled against Hollywood filmmaker Harvey Weinstein by a large number of women, as detailed by The New York Times and The New Yorker, inspired the MeToo movement, an instance of hashtag activism. Initially started by Tarana Burke as a way to help victims of sexual assault realize they are not alone, the movement was popularized by television actress Alyssa Milano as a means of making people aware of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment.

Explanations for Sexual Harassment Sexual harassment can be explained in terms of two distinct approaches. An evolutionary approach,

850

Sexual Harassment

called sexual strategies theory, suggests that men and women have different optimal strategies with regard to reproduction. Men have an incentive to approach as many women as possible in the search for possible mating opportunities. In contrast, women have an incentive to be more selective. The factor driving the tendency to adopt different strategies is the reality that the cost of reproduction is much greater for women than men. As a result, women are more selective and discriminating when they evaluate potential mates. Natural selection refers to the idea that traits that provide a survival advantage are selected for and, over time, become more prominent in the population. Sexual selection is a different process, which depends on the preferences of the person choosing a potential mate. With sexual selection, a preferred trait will become more prevalent if the opposite sex finds it more appealing. Women’s preferences tend to revolve around male accomplishment and are associated with a man’s ability to provide resources, such as food and security, as a means of insuring the welfare of the woman’s offspring. Thus, both natural selection and sexual selection encourage men to obtain resources and advertise them to potential mates. From an evolutionary perspective, some of the normal processes associated with mate selection will be viewed as forms of sexual or gender harassment when manifested in the workplace. As such, characteristics of leaders such as the accrual of resources and status cues, will make them more attractive as potential mates. However, drawing attention to these attributes could be viewed as unwanted displays of sexual or romantic interest. In contrast to evolutionary approaches, which are often criticized for being essentialist, sociological approaches focus on norms and institutions that maintain a patriarchal system that rewards men and as a result gives them an entitled attitude. From this perspective, sexual opportunities with women can be conceptualized as rewards available to men who conduct themselves in a manner consistent with the norms and role associated with hegemonic masculinity. The desire for these opportunities also motivates men to acquire resources. However, success at collecting these resources should not be used in the workplace to

justify trying to attract the attention of potential romantic and sexual partners in the workplace.

Optimizing Choice Although both men and women attempt to maximize reproductive success, they do so using different strategies. Error management theory focuses on two different types of errors that men and women can make with regard to mate selection. Men can make two types of correct decisions and two types of errors. The two correct decisions are to approach women that want to be approached and to avoid women who do not want to be approached. The two errors are to approach women who want to be avoided and to avoid women who want to be approached. For women, the two correct decisions would be to select as mates men who are willing to invest resources and to avoid men who are unwilling to provide resources. The two errors are to select men unwilling or unable to provide resources and to avoid men who would be willing to provide resources. For men the worst outcome is to avoid a woman who wants to be approached because a potentially successful opportunity for reproduction has been lost. For women the worst outcome is to select a man who is unwilling to provide resources because raising a child without assistance is costly. However, the magnitude of these errors is much greater for women than for men because the consequences of a women’s error could be her own death and the death of her child. For men, the lost opportunity could be replaced by another opportunity. The best way for men to minimize error is to cast a wide net in terms of reproductive opportunities by pursuing even low-probability events. In other words, men should be persistent and take risks. In contrast, the best way for women to prevent error is to be selective and require a high bar of accomplishment from a potential partner. Persistence and a willingness to take on risk are both traits that can be beneficial to men, both directly in their ability to acquire resources, and indirectly with regard to using those resources to attract women as potential mates. The mismatch

Sexual Harassment

hypothesis argues that the environment in which certain psychological mechanisms evolved differed dramatically from modern contexts. As a result, there can be a mismatch, or lack of congruence, between a behavior that was advantageous in the past and its current usefulness. Persistence and risk tolerance can help men achieve status and increase their reproductive potential. These same attributes also make men more successful as leaders. However, these same traits can work against men with regard to their behavior in the workplace. Cultural beliefs about appropriate behavior in the workplace have shifted faster than evolutionary adaptation. Several social variables are associated with an increased production of testosterone in men. The challenge hypothesis, originally developed with animals but more recently extended to human beings, refers to the positive relationship between testosterone and aggressive (or more generally competitive or dominance) behavior. Two forms of status that leaders possess are eminence and dominance. Eminence is a form of status that derives from the respect of others and their wiliness to be voluntarily deferent. Dominance can be defined as the ability to defeat others in a competitive interaction. Other research indicates that sexual activity or even the possibility of sexual interaction can lead to an increase in testosterone production. Being in a long-term relationship and having parental obligations are associated with a decrease in testosterone production. Risk tolerance increases with increased levels of testosterone. The positive relationship among testosterone, risk tolerance, sexual interest, and competitive success can create a positive feedback loop, which can increase the likelihood that an individual with the status of a leader may engage in sexual harassment.

The Superstar Sexual Harasser A superstar is a well-compensated, highly valued employee. Superstars often are valued because of the revenues they create; however, value can be defined in other ways, such as in terms of prestige. Because of their influence, superstars are often given a greater deal of latitude, and when this freedom is abused, they may break rules or flout conventions with impunity.

851

Leaders and superstars are distinct categories though in practice, their roles and identities can overlap. Although both types of employees wield authority in an organization, much of a superstar’s status may stem for the prestige or income they bring to their firm. Leaders, in contrast, possess power based on their role. Leaders tend to put the needs of the organization ahead of their own personal outcomes. Superstars may lack a strong loyalty to the organization as a whole because they are more concerned with maximizing their own benefits. Both leaders and superstars have authority within an organization. This authority may make them more attractive as dating partners. As such, potential partners may be drawn to them. Further, their own success may create a sense of entitlement that may encourage them to make romantic and sexual advances, which, even if they are desired and reciprocated, can represent problems for leaders. As a type of employee, the superstar is a relatively recent invention and can develop for several reasons. One reason involves a winner-take-all mentality, in which a person who comes in first receives a large reward but others receive nothing. In business, a winner-take-all mentality exists with sales contests. Even if the person who came in second place sold almost as much as the winner did, he or she might receive little in the way of formal or informal recognition. Economies of scale can create superstars. It may cost as much money to make a movie that sells a thousand tickets as to make one that sells a million tickets. Specialized knowledge can make someone a superstar. Being able to transfer knowledge from one domain to another is also a way to achieve superstar status. A college professor who writes a bestselling textbook may be seen as much more of a superstar than a similar professor who lacks a textbook credential. A superstar sexual harasser can be defined as someone who is notable in his or her achievements and engages in behavior that can be defined as sexual harassment in spite of—or perhaps because of—achievements in other domains. Although superstars are influential, they are not necessarily leaders. Even if they do not possess leadership power—what can be termed hard power—they often have informal, soft, power. Individuals can use both hard and soft power as a means of influencing potential targets of sexual harassment.

852

Sexual Harassment

Solutions to Sexual Harassment Leaders are often required to create policies to address and minimize the potential for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace. Even well-meaning leaders may face problems instituting these policies. Training programs geared toward preventing sexual harassment in the workplace are often based on fear appeals that highlight the threat of fines, lawsuits, or termination of employment. Fear appeals can backfire for at least three reasons. First, the threat of negative consequences for sexual harassment can be viewed as a restriction in freedom, which may encourage people to reassert their freedom by engaging in the restricted behavior. Second, once banned, behavior that could be construed as sexual harassment might be viewed as transgressive and, as a result, more appealing. Finally, engaging in risky behavior—actions that could be seen as sexual harassment—might appeal to men who are willing to take risks. Companies can use an affirmative defense strategy to protect themselves from lawsuits over sexual harassment if they make a reasonable effort to prevent and promptly address sexual harassing behavior. An affirmative defense is more likely to be successful if the target of sexual harassment does not report harassment or take advantage of institutional measures in place to deal with sexual harassment. Leaders may be placed in a difficult position of negotiating what is best for employees on different sides of the sexual harassment accusation. This difficulty may be intensified if the well-being of the firm requires a leader to more strongly advocate for one side than the other. One seemingly effective strategy against sexual harassment is a zero-tolerance policy. In this extreme instance, institutions can ban all behavior related to sexuality regardless of whether it meets the definition of sexual harassment. Further, it can respond immediately and severely to accusations of sexual harassment regardless of the details or the potential role of mediating variables. Such a policy is easy for leaders to institute. One problem with zero-tolerance programs is that more severe penalties can actually inhibit a target’s willingness to step forward with a complaint. A woman may be less likely to step

forward to report a minor infringement out of concern that the harasser may face a severe punishment, which, in turn, can actually encourage harassers to become bolder in the directness of their harassment. Another problem is that zero-tolerance policies do not allow institutions to develop workable systems to respond to different degrees of harassment. Instead, regardless of the degree of harassment, an employee would be punished and perhaps terminated. As such, leaders may inadvertently harm employees and themselves and the organization as a result of implementing harsh policies. Hashtag activism refers to using social media, especially Twitter, as a means of sharing information about, or showing support for, a cause. There have been at least four different hashtag responses to sexual harassment. The first, NotOkay, was specifically directed at Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood comments about grabbing women. The MeToo movement gained power against accusations directed at former film producer Harvey Weinstein. The WhyIDidntReport hashtag was popularized in response to the accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh made by Christine Blasey Ford, which addressed the overly simple assertion that if Kavanaugh had actually behaved in an inappropriate way, the she would have reported it immediately. The TimesUp movement was a way to give voice to women who were not celebrities or notable public figures.

Critiquing the Solutions One criticism of sexual harassment training programs is that they are often geared toward protecting the institution from legal liability rather than actually addressing workplace problems of sexual harassment. Zero-tolerance policies and certain training programs contradict the reality that many people successfully find romantic partners at work. Research suggests that about 40% of people have had at least one workplace romance. Further, over half of these romances led to marriage or long-term relationships. About a third resulted in a short-term relationship with few negative consequences. Less than 1%—perhaps

Sexual Harassment

only one-tenth of 1%—actually resulted in sexual harassment. Although workplace relationships are frowned upon, it is a popular convention in films and television. Positive media portrayals of workplace romances include classic television shows like The Office, Scrubs, and Grey’s Anatomy, as well as recent entries like Superstore and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Even The X-Files, a show about FBI agents investigating paranormal phenomena, featured a workplace romance between the two lead characters. The concept of reactance refers to the idea that people respond to a restriction of their freedom by making an effort to reassert it. The act of forbidding workplace romances may encourage people to seek them out as a means of asserting their independence. Similarly, a policy to discourage workplace romance may encourage people to carry on relationships in a clandestine fashion, which may make them seem more exciting and lead to more negative consequences should the relationship be discovered or end poorly. Victims of sexual harassment often seek out restitution in the form of financial settlements. These settlements, which may be quite lucrative for the victim, are usually conditional on agreeing to a nondisclosure agreement, which forbids the victim from discussing details of the case. Consequently, the apparent frequency of more extreme cases of sexual harassment may be underestimated. Further, the harasser escapes public attention to any misdeeds. Although court settlements may benefit one victim and punish one particular offender, in the long run they may do a disservice to efforts to stop sexual harassment. At least five schools of thought have a shared interest in restricting romantic and sexual behavior in the workplace. The first is the legal position that sexual harassment represents a form of sex discrimination and is therefore protected against. The second is organizational theory, which views sex and romance as potential threats to organizational efficiency. This framework is most likely the one most consistent with the goals and previous training of those in leadership positions in an organization. The third perspective, feminist theory, frames sexual harassment as examples and extensions of a patriarchy, which has traditionally oppressed and taken advantage of women. The

853

fourth perspective is motivated by the interests of attorneys and human resource departments who saw their value increase in direct proportion to the degree that sexual harassment was viewed as a serious threat to organizational success. Finally, the news media play a role in creating fear among employers regarding lawsuits, bad publicity, and huge legal settlements. Although it is unlikely that anyone would seriously speak out against sexual harassment laws, some critics have argued that the current corporate and government regulations regarding sexual harassment represent an instance of overreach. Specifically, people have argued that institutions use the fear of sexual harassment accusations to prohibit behaviors that would not meet the standard of sexual harassment of discrimination based on sex. Although laws and regulations that prohibit sexual harassment are intended to protect individuals, especially women, given that women are more likely than men to be targets of sexual harassment, they can also be conceptualized as a form of paternalistic control over women’s sexuality. The importance and pervasiveness of sexuality as part of the human condition make it difficult for leaders to guard against the intrusion of sexual and romantic issues in the workplace. James K. Beggan See also Executive Compensation; Gender and Leadership; Me Too Movement; Sexual Identity; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Beggan, J. K. (2019). Sexual harassment, the abuse of power and the crisis of leadership: “Superstar” harassers and how to stop them. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100(2), 204–232. Diehl, C., Rees, J., & Bohner, G. (2018). Predicting sexual harassment from hostile sexism and short-term mating orientation: Relative strength of predictors depends on situational priming of power versus sex. Violence Against Women, 24(2), 123–143.

854

Sexual Identity

Gersen, J., & Suk, J. (2016). The sex bureaucracy. California Law Review, 104(4), 881–948. McKinnon, C. A. (1979). Sexual harassment of working women: A case of sex discrimination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Perilloux, C., & Kurzban, R. (2015). Do men overperceive women’s sexual interest? Psychological Science, 26(1), 70–77. Rosen, S. (1981). The economics of superstars. The American Economic Review, 71(5), 845–858.

SEXUAL IDENTITY Sexual identity refers to an individual’s sexual orientation or sexuality, which can represent a wide variety of identities related to sexual behavior and attraction. Sexual identity and leadership represent a complicated history of how a leader’s social identities may inform and inspire their leadership decisions. Historically, Western leaders’ social identities are predominantly understood through gender or race. The social identities a leader holds have long influenced their standing in society and informed their leadership decisions. Sexual identity and leadership are commonly understood from the perspective of sexual minorities, particularly among the LGBTQ1 (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) civil rights movement. Sexuality has become an important consideration for how leadership is understood and enacted toward achieving outcomes benefiting sexual minorities in society. This entry offers a review of the history of sexual identity, from its grassroots activism to its growing mainstream acceptance in the corporate, education, and political sectors. The entry also theorizes how sexual identity may influence the role of leadership. Traditional notions of leadership expect leaders to fit a particular mold and espouse a level of character, charisma, morals, and, indirectly, a sexual identity that demonstrates masculinity or heterosexuality. These “great-man” assumptions of leadership have long since been dispelled, yet the characteristics of these types of leaders persist. One way to understand how sexual identity and leadership connect is to explore the application of

heteronormativity through a leadership lens. Heteronormativity is the consistent assumption of heterosexuality in society. At its foundation, heteronormativity posits heterosexuality as the “normal” and assumed sexuality for all people in society. Through the lens of leadership, a prototypical leader would historically be assumed, although not always explicitly stated, to be an educated, heterosexual, white, man. The assumption of heterosexuality is a cornerstone to heteronormativity, thus anything or anyone falling outside of that assumption is deviant. The emergence of the LGBTQ1 civil rights movement added an important element to the way identity and leadership manifest.

History of Sexual Identity In the United States, documentation of sexual minorities dates back to the colonial period. However, it was not until the 19th century when laws surfaced that criminalized cross-dressing and other behaviors, often targeting sexual and gender minorities. The term homosexual was created in the mid-19th century and, at the time, was synonymous with “gender inversion.” Today, the experiences and identities of sexual minorities (gay, lesbian, or bisexual people) are understood to be separate and distinct from those of transgender or gender minority individuals. Germany’s penal code Paragraph 175 criminalized same-sex relations beginning in 1871. Petitions for the repeal of Paragraph 175 point to early examples of social movement toward addressing sexual minorities’ persecution. Hitler’s rise to power reinforced Paragraph 175, resulting in the continued persecution and murder of homosexuals throughout Nazi Germany. Post-World War II witnessed the increased interest of the United States federal government to identify and remove homosexuals from military and other government services. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare tactics of identifying communist sympathizers also had a particular interest in identifying homosexuals, targeted with the assumption of being culpable toward the Communist agenda. Often referred to as the Lavender Scare, McCarthy infamously led government pursuits of homosexual government employees

Sexual Identity

during the height of the Cold War, backed by President Dwight Eisenhower’s anti-homosexual law, viewing sexual minorities as traitors to the United States. During this time, an era of formalized organizing among gay men and lesbians emerged in the United States. In 1950, Harry Hay of Los Angeles formed the Mattachine Society, the first documented gay men’s association. Shortly after in 1955, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin of San Francisco established the Daughters of Bilitis. These early organizations frequently served as points of social organization and created hidden networks for men and women who could not be open about their sexuality. These organizations also represent early examples of sexuality informing strategies for leadership and community organizing. State-sanctioned persecution of sexual minorities in the United States persisted in the 1960s and 1970s. Police raids of bars and nightclubs were common, and the continued U.S. government interest in identifying gays and lesbians in public service remained. Activists such as Frank Kameny pursued legal challenges to sodomy laws and the federal government’s unjustified purge of gay men and lesbians from public service. Kameny was an astrophysicist who began government work with the NASA program, only to be discharged due to homosexual behavior. Kameny is just one prominent figure who helped lead protests in Washington, D.C., and advocated for equal treatment for sexual minorities. The Stonewall Riots, which began on June 28, 1969, in Greenwich Village, New York City, are often credited with starting the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement. The riots were the result of patrons taking action against the continued police harassment and brutality of LGBTQ1 establishments at the time. The Stonewall Riots also represented the diversity of leadership among those who fought back against the state—including gender and sexual minorities, People of Color, street kids, and drag queens. The 1970s witnessed continued growth in leadership for sexual minorities in the United States but also continued social resistance behind the auspices of morality and the danger of sexual minorities to children. National organizations began emerging, including the National Gay

855

Taskforce (now known as the National LGBTQ Taskforce) and the Human Rights Campaign, and advocated for political rights of sexual minorities and for the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder classification in 1973. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization notable for addressing the ways multiple identities intersect through systems of oppression. The AIDS epidemic took a toll on the lives of sexual minorities and shifted the political engagement of activists. First identified in 1981, what became known as HIV/AIDS had killed nearly 5,600 Americans before President Ronald Reagan mentioned the word AIDS in 1985. Reagan’s lack of action in responding to the AIDS epidemic was representative of the moral objections of evangelical Christians who considered HIV/AIDS to be the repercussion of immoral sexual behavior. A convergence of activism related to social, political, and health causes eventually made way for leaders that were more visible from the LGBTQ1 community.

From Activism to Mainstream Sexuality and leadership have been important factors to the success of LGBTQ1 activism, resulting in successful shifts toward human rights for sexual and gender minorities. Contemporary activist efforts frequently emphasize greater intersecting needs, especially continued advocacy for transgender rights, racial justice, disability justice, and income disparities. The turn of the 21st century witnessed the shift of sexual minorities into mainstream leadership roles and positions across sectors. Much of the activism for sexual minorities has been grounded in grassroots, nonestablishment efforts where activists relied on “taking to the streets” and adhered to disruptive efforts. These were most evident by boycotts and street protests common in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking during the AIDS crisis through the 1990s. The turn of the 21st century saw the increased acceptance of LGBTQ1 rights, with the repeal on Sept. 20, 2011, of the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on LGBTQ1 service members serving openly and later full marriage equality achieved on June 26, 2015, through the Obergefell v. Hodges

856

Sexual Identity

U.S. Supreme Court Case. Corporate America became a strong ally for LGBTQ1 rights in the 21st century as many leading companies advanced policies to offer protections and partner benefits, expanding rights and advocacy to a national level. Organizations

A number of national organizations have placed themselves as leaders for sexual minorities in the United States. The Human Rights Campaign serves as one of the most prominent political organizations in the United States. Although their work has been criticized over the years, particularly due to their lack of support for and representation of transgender leaders and leaders of color, they have also been instrumental in electing LGBTQ1 officials to public office. Further, beyond political engagement, their work has evaluated municipalities and large corporations for their policies of inclusion, providing numeric rankings and information about what local municipalities and large companies provide affirming policies and practices for their LGBTQ1 employees. The National LGBTQ Taskforce (The Taskforce) is one of the longest concurrent running organizations dedicated to social justice and advocacy, offering a progressive agenda for the liberation of LGBTQ1 peoples. The Taskforce has taken an active lead for the larger community since, advocating for HIV/AIDS research, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, violence against gender and sexual minorities, and advocacy and education efforts. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD), organized in 1985, has served as a national source for improving the media representation of LGBTQ1 communities across print, news, television, film, and advertising industries. Their influence initially emphasized print media, particularly the representation of sexual minorities during the HIV/AIDS crisis, and eventually turned the focus to representation in film and television. The representation of sexual minorities through television and film has not always been positive, yet the increased visibility witnessed at the turn of the 21st century accounted for considerable shifts in public attitudes toward the LGBTQ1 community. These organizations serve as one example of how sexual identity

and leadership informed initiatives of change across the greater American culture through politics, science, and the greater public sphere. Education

Sexuality and leadership have been explored across academic disciplines, pushing beyond social movements for personal and political rights. Sexual minorities in education have often had to hide their identities in the workplace. Infamous cases involved state laws seeking to ban homosexuals from teaching children, a push to limit inclusive sex-education programs, policies preventing LGBTQ1 student organizations in schools, and more contemporary policies banning transgender students playing sports. The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a leading organization dedicated to addressing bullying and discrimination of LGBTQ1 youth in schools, assesses the educational experience for LGBTQ1 students across secondary education in all 50 states. Higher education institutions have faced similar challenges to PK-12 schools, but colleges and universities also opened up opportunities for student activists to organize and create community. Student activism in the 1960s led to the creation of the first student political organization dedicated to sexual minority organizing. The Student Homophile League at Columbia University, formed in 1967, was soon followed by similar organizations across the country. Even at the turn of the 21st century, faculty, staff, and students were common leaders advocating for institutional policies to support sexual and gender diverse communities through institutional policies and practice. Politics

The representation of sexual minorities in political leadership has become more common, and in recent years, their leadership represents a recognition that sexual identity is not intrinsically tied to their leadership. In 2021, the 117th United States Congress had the greatest number of elected LGBTQ1 officials in its history. In the earlier days of the LGBTQ1 rights movement, leaders sought to have a presence within local, state, and federal politics. In 1972, Jim Foster became the first openly

Sexual Identity

gay person to speak at the Democratic National Convention where he unsuccessfully advocated for gay rights to be a part of the party platform. Within this era, Kathy Kozachenko became the first openly lesbian politician elected to public office in 1974, followed by the more publicized election of Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Milk’s charismatic speeches and open sexuality created a symbol of hope for sexual minorities in politics, and he is frequently recognized for his work inspiring activists and other gay and lesbian leaders to enter politics, be open about their identity, and advocate for the larger LGBTQ1 community. Although sexual minorities elected to state and national offices would eventually follow, a number of political figures’ sexual identity was outed either while in office or after their service, many belonging to the Republican Party. Democratic Congressman Barney Frank was one of the earliest members to come out on his own accord while in office in 1987 and was the first member of Congress to be in a same-sex marriage in 2012. Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin, was the first nonincumbent lesbian elected to Congress in 1999. A number of political figures have since emerged, ranging from mayors of major American cities, to state governors, state legislatures, the military, and the federal executive branch. In the 2020 Presidential election, Pete Buttigieg became the first viable gay candidate to launch a major presidential campaign for one of the leading political parties. He was eventually appointed as the first openly gay cabinet secretary in President Joe Biden’s administration’s Department of Transportation. Although these more contemporary political leaders were open about their sexual identity, their politics were not necessarily driven by a need to change policy for the betterment of LGBTQ1 people. How sexuality informed their leadership has become less apparent as acceptance of sexual minorities has increased.

Theorizing Sexuality and Leadership The historical and contemporary context for sexual minorities and leadership reveals how central sexuality has been to the success of LGBTQ1 equity in social, political, and private realms. The concept of heteronormativity helps understand how

857

identity may shape the role of leadership, particularly by placing an emphasis on furthering policy and expanding rights to sexual minorities. Heteronormativity helps clarify how dominant heterosexual culture is within traditional notions of leadership. The sexual identity of leaders remains assumed until there is some cue or assumption about a leader and their sexual orientation. Most leadership studies fail to discuss leaders’ social identities in-depth. When considered through the lens of social movements (e.g., Black civil rights; LGBTQ1 civil rights), identity-based leadership is frequently associated with transformative, grassroots, or authentic approaches to leadership. Sexual identity and leadership are intertwined with multiple leadership approaches, not connecting to one singular approach or definition. Consistent across the few defining characteristics of theorizing sexuality and leadership is an emphasis on creating change for the betterment of sexual minorities in society. Thus, the tenets of transformative and grassroots leadership approaches strongly align with movements advancing LGBTQ1 equity. Sexual identity and leadership studies also span academic disciplines, social movements, and organizational and political spheres. Early examples of sexuality-informed leadership were the result of overcoming institutionalization and persecution of sexual minorities in society. Systemic discrimination carried out by governments and institutions continues to stigmatize sexual minorities. Setbacks caused by government actors, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and religious organizations continued to illustrate how sexual minority leaders sought to shift societal acceptance of the broader LGBTQ1 community. Leaders’ progress toward social equality, particularly through policy change within organizations and local, state, and federal politics, speaks to one of the more contemporary approaches to sexual identity and leadership. The deep entanglement of identity and political and social freedom remains a central tenet to sexuality and leadership. Jonathan T. Pryor See also Ableism; Glass Ceiling and the Labyrinth; Gender Stereotypes; LGBTQ1 Social Movements; Sexual Harassment; Sexuality

858

Sexuality

Further Readings Ball, C. A. (2019). The queering of corporate America: How big business went from LGBTQ adversary to ally. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Blount, J. M., & Guanci, S. (2020). Convergence of gender and sexuality in the history of educational leadership. In Handbook on promoting social justice in education (pp. 1729–1758). Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3030-14625-2_88 Cervini, E. (2020). The deviant’s war: The homosexual vs. the United States of America. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. D’Emilio, J. (2002). The world turned: Essays on gay history, politics, and culture. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.1515/9780822383925 Devor, A., & Haefele-Thomas, A. (2019). Transgender: A reference handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Johnson, D. K. (2009). The lavender scare: The cold war persecution of gays and lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pichler, S. (2018). Heterosexism in organizations: The importance of transformational and heroic leadership. In J. K. Beggan & S. T. Allison (Eds.), Leadership and sexuality (pp. 106–126). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. doi:10.4337/9781786438652.00013 Pryor, J. T. (2020). Queer activist leadership: An exploration of queer leadership in higher education. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. doi:10.1037/ dhe0000160 Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on. New York, NY: Viking. Sinclair, A. (1998). Doing leadership differently: Gender, power, and sexuality in a changing business culture. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Taylor, K. Y. (Ed.). (2017). How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

SEXUALITY Sexuality encompasses a variety of aspects related to the experience and expression of feelings, behaviors, and beliefs about sex. It also pertains to topics related to sex, such as marriage, romance, and dating. Sex refers to attributes of people as well as a broadly defined set of activities in which

people engage. Sexual identity refers to the way that an individual thinks about themself with regard to sexuality. Sexual identity takes into account biological sex, gender identity, sex roles, and sexual orientation. Issues related to sexuality create a number of problems for people who are trying to function effectively as leaders. Problems stem from leaders’ own sexuality as well as the sexuality of their constituents. This entry defines the many nuances of sexuality and then examines how it specifically affects leaders.

Defining Sexuality Sexual Identity

In terms of sexual identity, biological sex and gender are distinct concepts. Biological and genetic markers of sex refer to the presence of external (penis) or internal (vagina) sex organs and a chromosome pattern of XY or XX, for males and females, respectively. Gender refers to the socially constructed aspect of biological sex and is characterized by the degree to which people express traits and behaviors that are viewed as masculine or feminine. The social construction of gender examines the way in which certain traits are stereotypically associated with men or women. Gender Identity

Gender identity refers to the degree to which a person sees themself as possessing a gender. Gender identity may or may not correspond to biological sex. Whereas sex is often dichotomized as male versus female, gender—although conceptualized as masculine versus feminine—is viewed on a wider spectrum and as more fluid and variable from person to person, or even with the same person at different times. Sexual Orientation

Sexual orientation is defined in terms of the sexual characteristics of the person to whom one is sexually attracted. Sexual orientation is a multidimensional construct composed of sexual identity, sexual attraction, and sexual behaviors. Heterosexuality refers to sexual attraction to the

Sexuality

opposite sex; homosexuality refers to the sexual attraction to the same sex. Bisexuality means there is an attraction to both the same and opposite sex. Although the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality implies that sexual orientation exists as a binary, in reality, it is possible to express sexual orientation, like gender identity, on a continuum. The abbreviation LGBTQIA illustrates the complexity of the relationships between biological sex, gender, gender identity, sexual identity, and sexual orientation, and sexuality, as discussed by the Associated Press stylebook with regard to the meaning and potential sensitivities associated with terms related to sexuality. Lesbian refers to women who are sexually attracted to other women. Gay refers to men who are attracted to men but can also more generally refer to people who are attracted to the same sex as themselves. Bisexual refers to a sexual attraction to both men and women. Transgender refers to people whose gender identity does not match their biological sex. Queer has a history of being used as a pejorative term but activists have reclaimed its use. In some instances, the Q can also refer to questioning. Intersex refers to people whose genitalia or reproductive organs do not match standard definitions for male and female at birth. The A can be associated with allies, those who are not LGBTQ1 but who support their goals, or asexual, a person who does not experience sexual attraction. Leaders need to be aware of the nuanced meanings of these terms and concepts, and in some instances, how their meaning may change or evolve, or trigger strong reactions in some but not all people. One problem faced by leaders with regard to gender identity is that the person who possesses it is the one who experiences it. As such, there can be a discrepancy between how people perceive themselves in contrast to how others perceive them. This discrepancy can be a conscious or unconscious factor involved in personnel problems between employees or between employees and management. Another problem stems from the relative value society places on people as a function of their biological sex and gender identity. Discrepancies in apparent value can lead to both real and felt inequality. Relative to men, women are underrepresented in high levels

859

of corporations and the government. People who present a gender at odds with their biological sex or expectations about gendered behavior often have trouble on the job. Trans people are especially likely to face discrimination in the workplace. One controversy associated with sexuality identity and sexual orientation concerns the degree to which differences in identity reflect inherent differences between men and women or are the result of deeply rooted socialization practices that govern expectancies about and behaviors toward children, and then adults, based on their biological sex or manifested gender identity. Perspectives that draw attention to the differences between groups of people must be careful to recognize that a difference in the average between two groups may fail to take into account the variability of members of those groups. Sexual Behavior

Sexuality also refers to behaviors associated with sex. Although a narrow definition of sexual behavior might be limited to the actual act of having sex, sexual behaviors include actions related to finding, retaining, and separating from a sexual or romantic partner. As such, areas of human behavior involving dating, marriage, having and raising children, divorce, and infidelity relate to sexuality. Further, these areas may all become relevant problems for leaders trying to direct their followers. Evolutionary psychology, also termed sociobiology, focuses on the way that two selection processes have shaped the social behavior of human beings. The first is natural selection, commonly referred to as “survival of the fittest,” which states that traits that increase an individual’s likelihood of survival will subsequently increase their likelihood of reproducing. Over the long period of evolution, because a trait provides an advantage, it will appear in a greater number of individuals. An alternative process, sexual selection, is driven by the preferences of an individual’s potential mates. If a certain trait is preferred, then individuals who possess it will be more often sought as sexual partners and the trait will spread within the population.

860

Sexuality

An alternative approach to human sexual behavior focuses on the way human beings create meaning for sexual behavior. The most prominent approach to understanding sex as a socially constructed phenomenon is sexual scripting theory. Sexual scripts operate at three levels. Intrapersonal sexual scripts refer to an individual’s desires or preferences. Interpersonal scripts refer to how people negotiate sexual interactions among themselves. Cultural scripts refer to widely held beliefs about sexuality. Inconsistencies that operate at different levels of sexual scripts or between different people who possess different sexual scripts is one way to frame conflicts that result from sexuality, which leaders must address. Although evolutionary and social explanations are conceptually very different, they both propose that current behavior is at least partially a function of experience, either in the distal or proximal past. As a result, relatively rapid changes in expectations for employee behavior may require changes in employee behavior that is resistant to change.

Leaders and Sexuality Almost every leader has to deal with sexuality as part of their duties as a leader. Leaders need to act as both exemplars of appropriate behavior and guardians against inappropriate behavior by others. Leaders have an obligation to prevent prejudice and discrimination that occurs because of people’s sexuality. This would apply to identityrelated definitions of sexuality, such as sexual orientation and gender. It would also apply to sex as a behavior. One dilemma faced by leaders is that they may have to mediate between people both above and below them in a hierarchically structured organization. One difficulty that leaders face with regard to sexuality defined as romantic and sexual behavior is its pervasiveness in society. At the same time, because some people view sex as a taboo topic, it may be difficult to talk openly about. Because of this sensitivity, misunderstandings may arise more easily. A significant number of people meet each other at work. Most of them successfully navigate role conflicts related to professional and personal lives. As such, they may resent organizational policies

that try to control their personal lives. On the other hand, a small number of these relationships may cause distress and hardship for those involved. It may be the case that many minor problems go unreported, so estimates of sexually related conflicts may be underreported. Paradoxically, stricter policies against relationships among coworkers may actually exacerbate possible negative consequences. One problem is that the threat of punishment may cause people to keep their relationship secret, which is the exact opposite of the intended goal. A stricter policy against a behavior may increase the perceived desirability of the behavior, a process known as reactance. One problem with romantic or sexual relationships between leaders and subordinates is the inherent power difference between the two parties. This difference in power can make it difficult to determine the extent to which the subordinate is genuinely consenting to be in the relationship. Another element of the power difference involves the supervisory capacity a leader may possess for the subordinate. A personal relationship can affect a leader’s ability to evaluate a subordinate. While it is possible that a personal connection will influence a leader to evaluate a subordinate in too favorable a manner, given the difficulty people have in accessing their decision-making processes, a well-intentioned leader can err in the other direction and behave in an overly strict manner. Even if a leader were able to act in a fair manner, such as by having third parties rate the subordinate, other people may perceive unfairness on the part of the leader. This perception can have a negative effect on the reputation for the subordinate. It can also harm morale for other employees who feel that what they perceive as an unfair advantage for one employee harms their own chances of succeeding. One pragmatic concern for leaders who become involved in the lives of their employees is the possibility for a backlash if the relationship ends unpleasantly. Leaders open themselves and the companies they represent to legal consequences. Even if accusations of impropriety are unfounded, the leader and the leader’s company can suffer reputational damage merely from the accusation. One solution is to establish formal policies that

Shared Leadership

limit or forbid personal relationships between employees. Another strategy is to mandate education on topics related to sexuality in the workplace, such as sexual harassment training. A problem with institutional solutions to sexuality in the workplace is that they are often motivated by an organization’s desire to protect itself from legal liability rather than to address and resolve difficult issues related to sexuality. One dilemma related to sexuality that leaders face is that their role as leader may make them more desirable as a sexual or romantic partner. Being in a leadership role can paradoxically increase the likelihood that someone will engage in problematic behavior in a sexual domain. One reason for this is the relationship between testosterone, competitive success, and sexual desire can operate in a positive feedback loop. Whereas most leaders have to deal with sexuality in their role as leaders, some individuals are sexual leaders whose influence operates in domains related to sexuality. Sexual leaders can act on their own and model a different attitude, belief, or behavior about some aspect of human sexuality. Sexual leaders can also organize groups of others to work toward changing beliefs or behaviors in a sexual domain. Sexual leaders can appear on any location in a political spectrum between liberal and conservative. They can act as a social force to move in a more liberal or conservative direction. James K. Beggan See also Gender Stereotypes; LGBTQ1 Social Movements; Me Too Movement; Power and Culture; Sexual Harassment; Sexual Identity

Further Readings Beggan, J. K., & Allison, S. T. (Eds.). (2018). Leadership and sexuality: Power, principles and processes. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. doi:10. 4337/9781786438652 Buss, D. M. (Ed.). (2005). The handbook of evolutionary psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Fu, T. C., Herbenick, D., Dodge, B., Owens, C., Sanders, S. A., Reece, M., & Fortenberry, J. D. (2019). Relationships among sexual identity, sexual attraction, and sexual behavior: Results from a nationally

861

representative probability sample of adults in the United States. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48(5), 1483–1493. doi:10.1007/s10508-018-1319-z Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973/2005). Sexual conduct: The social sources of human sexuality (2nd ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Shively, M. G., & De Cecco, J. P. (1977). Components of sexual identity. Journal of Homosexuality, 3(1), 41–48. doi:10.1300/J082v03n01_04 Wingfield, J. C. (2017). The challenge hypothesis: Where it began and relevance to humans. Hormones and Behavior, 92, 9–12. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016. 11.008

SHARED LEADERSHIP Shared leadership is a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in teams in which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of team goals. Shared leadership encompasses peer-based, or lateral, influence processes while also integrating upward or downward hierarchically based influence. The fundamental distinction between shared leadership and traditional, top-down models of leadership is that influence does not merely move downward from leaders to subordinates or followers. On the contrary, with shared leadership, influence is broadly distributed and exchanged among the members of the team. Historically, theories of leadership have focused on a single individual and the relationship of that individual to his or her subordinates or followers. However, that conceptualization of leadership has been challenged in recent years, most notably by the publication in 2003 of a number of theoretical essays on shared leadership by Craig L. Pearce and Jay Conger. Now, many scholars find that leadership involves behaviors, roles, and activities that can be distributed among members of a team in both intentional and “accidental” shared leadership processes. According to this alternative conceptualization of leadership, individuals who are not formally designated leaders can rise to the occasion to exhibit leadership and then step back at other times to allow others to lead.

862

Shared Leadership

A Growing Interest in Shared Leadership Globalization of markets, hypercompetition, intense communication patterns driven by shifts in technology, and shortened product life cycles as well as a global pandemic are but a few of the forces driving organizations toward new modes of organizing. At present, the fastest-growing type of organizational unit is the team, specifically the cross-functional team, which is valued for its flexibility and its ability to generate solutions to problems faster than traditional organizational units—flexibility and speed being of the essence in a hypercompetitive globalized market. What distinguishes a team of this type from traditional organizational units is the absence of formal hierarchical authority. Whereas a cross-functional team may have an appointed team leader, this individual is quite commonly a peer, and is treated as such. Outside of the team, the team leader often does not possess hierarchical authority over other members of the team. Moreover, because cross-functional teams bring people with diverse backgrounds and types of expertise together for a common purpose, the leader is often at a knowledge disadvantage—that is, his or her expertise normally represents only one of the numerous functional specialties brought to the task at hand. Thus, the team leader is highly dependent upon the expertise of the other team members. Leadership in these types of settings is therefore determined by an individual’s capacity to influence peers and by the often diverse needs of the team in any given situation. Because the team members bring unique perspectives, knowledge, and capabilities to the team, at various crossroads in the team’s life, there are moments when each may be called upon to provide leadership. Shared leadership is also common in virtual teams, another form of team that has grown in importance and sheer numbers. Virtual teams consist of individuals collaborating and working from geographically dispersed locations. Members may occasionally meet in person, but normally they rely on modern communication technology (e-mail, conferences in chat rooms, and so forth) for interaction. Importantly, research has shown that technology-mediated communication differs from face-to-face communication: Communication becomes depersonalized and more task-focused in technology-mediated team

environments. When communication is more focused on the task and less preoccupied with authority relationships, leadership can be shared by several team members, with each providing leadership for different components of the team’s tasks. There are four fundamental types of leadership that team members might share—directive, transactional, transformational, and empowering. For example, shared directive leadership might be expressed as peers test one another with a directive “give-and-take” about how to resolve conflicting points of view, approach specific tasks, or assign accountability. Similarly, shared transactional leadership might be expressed through collegial recognition of efforts and contributions or through awarding valued rewards based on key performance metrics. Additionally, teams might engage in shared transformational leadership through peer inspiration and shared vision creation. Finally, shared empowering leadership might be expressed in a team through peer-based encouragement and support of self-goal-setting, self-evaluation, self-reward, and self-development. Ironically, while the need and appreciation for shared leadership has been steadily growing, an organized agenda for the scientific examination of shared leadership lags seriously behind. In large part, this is due to widely held romantic notions about leadership: many people—journalists, reporters, historians, the public at large, and even leadership scholars—focus on the individual “heroic” leader, disregarding shared forms of leadership, even as they call for more leadership to be shared.

Scientific Evidence of Shared Leadership Since the last decade of the 20th century, there has been an acceleration in the study of shared leadership across many disciplines, mainly focused on the outcomes of shared leadership, at the organizational, team and individual levels. Some of these outcomes are team performance, financial outcomes, and creative results. Importantly, there has also been some preliminary investigation of contextual factors related to shared leadership (e.g., task interdependence) and the antecedents of shared leadership (e.g., vertical, hierarchical leader behavior). Even so, the initial evidence suggests that shared leadership can have a powerful effect

Shared Leadership

on team behavior, attitudes, cognition, and performance, as outlined below. While the majority of work on shared leadership has been quantitative, there have also been a number of qualitative studies of shared leadership that provide a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon.

Quantitative Studies of Shared Leadership The first quantitative study linking shared leadership to important team outcomes was reported by Craig L. Pearce in 1997. Since that initial study, there have been scores of additional quantitative studies added to the literature. In fact, there have been four meta-analyses of shared leadership reported to date. The results consistently document the strong relationship between shared leadership and a number of team outcomes, including performance, and that shared leadership is moderated by certain environmental conditions (e.g., task interdependence). The upshot is that shared leadership is a robust predictor of team outcomes across a wide variety of types of teams and in a wide variety of contextual conditions, including organizational culture, team diversity, organizational processes, time horizons, as well as the cultural origin and values of the group members. Finally, there are the antecedents of shared leadership—an area of fertile future study. For example, Christina Wassenaar found that empowering leadership, leader integrity, perceived fairness of the leader, and leader diversity orientation are antecedents of shared leadership— these are just a few of the many potential antecedents that can foster the development of shared leadership. Given the previous facets for shared leadership study, and the integrative nature of the shared leadership experience, there has been a nascent push to study shared leadership using a meta-theoretical lens. This new method for modeling shared leadership endeavors to investigate shared leadership in a more holistic way, by integrating concepts across typical boundaries of study, from various theoretical backgrounds, time horizons, and disciplines.

Qualitative Studies of Shared Leadership In addition to the more traditional quantitative studies of shared leadership, many qualitative studies have also been reported. Two notable

863

qualitative studies include those published by Katherine Klein and her colleagues in 2006, and Craig Pearce and his colleagues in 2019. The first identified the importance of both vertical, hierarchical leadership and shared leadership, in an emergency room setting. The second went further in exploring the meta-paradoxical nature of the relationship between vertical leadership and shared leadership, tracing the rise of a multibillion-dollar company, from a small entrepreneurial firm, where two of the co-authors were participant-observers. Interestingly, both of the qualitative studies mentioned here demonstrate what Pearce theorized in 2004 as the importance of combining vertical, hierarchical leadership, and shared leadership.

The Future of Leadership in Organizations As many leaders are well aware, true teamwork poses many challenges, yet it is also a dominant source of competitive advantage in many organizations, regardless of type. In many cases it is difficult—even painful—to implement shared leadership as either/or team experience. Lately it has also become clear that shared leadership occurs along a continuum, rather than either existing completely, or not at all. This lens allows for organizational leaders and teams to identify opportunities to foster shared leadership movement on the continuum through the teams’ context, leadership development, social structure, and other forms of supportive activities. Clearly, shared leadership is not a panacea for all organizational woes: It is appropriate only for certain team-based tasks. Moreover, if team members, particularly the team leader, are resistant to the notion of shared leadership, it will not be carried out effectively. Resistance to shared leadership is likely a cultural phenomenon, and cultural norms can be observed at the national, industrial, or even organizational level. As an example, the cultural attribute of power distance represents the degree to which members of a culture accept and expect that power will be distributed unequally. Clearly, people in cultures high in power distance are less likely to embrace the concept of shared leadership. Similarly, shared leadership will not work if the team members lack the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities for

864

Situational Leadership

their task. Another potential complicating factor is that a team may successfully employ shared leadership yet work at odds with the overarching organizational mission. These are but a few of the potential limitations of shared leadership, but they make clear that shared leadership is not a simple plug-and-play technology. There continues to be a role for vertical leadership. Shared leadership and vertical leadership are inextricably linked and quite often, when people report experiencing shared leadership, they also note that they are more “led” from the top as well—resulting in the increase in positive outcomes previously mentioned here—reinforcing the fact that vertical and shared leadership can coexist and thrive. In fact, it is the dynamic combination of vertical, hierarchical leadership and shared leadership that appears to be the true secret to organizational success. Christina L. Wassenaar and Craig L. Pearce See also Group Decision Rules; Group Norms; Group Process; Groupthink; Leaderless Groups; Networks and Networked Organizations; Team Leadership; Teamwork

Further Readings D’Innocenzo, L., Mathieu, J. E., & Kukenberger, M. R. (2016). A meta-analysis of different forms of shared leadership–team performance relations. Journal of Management, 42(7), 1964–1991. Fausing, M. S., Joensson, T. S., Lewandowski, J., & Bligh, M. (2015). Antecedents of shared leadership: Empowering leadership and interdependence. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 36(3), 271–291. Klein, K. J., Ziegert, J. C., Knight, A. P., & Xiao, Y. (2006). Dynamic delegation: Shared, hierarchical, and deindividualized leadership in extreme action teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 51(4), 590–621. Nicolaides, V. C., LaPort, K. A., Chen, T. R., Tomassetti, A. J., Weis, E. J., Zaccaro, S. J., & Cortina, J. M. (2014). The shared leadership of teams: A meta-analysis of proximal, distal, and moderating relationships. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(5), 923–942.

Pearce, C. L. (1997). The determinants of change management team (CMT) effectiveness: A longitudinal investigation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. College Park, MD: University of Maryland. Pearce, C. L. (2004). The future of leadership: Combining vertical and shared leadership to transform knowledge work. Academy of Management Perspectives, 18(1), 47–57. Pearce, C. L., & Conger, J. A. (Eds.). (2003). Shared leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Pearce, C. L., Wassenaar, C. L., Berson, Y., & TuvalMashiach, R. (2019). Toward a theory of meta-paradoxical leadership. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 155, 31–41. Wassenaar, C. L. (2017). What makes leadership shared? A test of a mediational model (Publication No: 10619438). Claremont Graduate University. Wu, Q., Cormican, K., & Chen, G. (2020). A meta-analysis of shared leadership: Antecedents, consequences, and moderators. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 27(1), 49–64.

SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP A student in an organizational leadership program commented that when they were in the military, their leadership was fairly rigid given the hierarchal nature of the military. After transitioning from the military to a civilian leadership role, they attended a corporate-sponsored training session on the Situational Leadership II approach where they learned they could be flexible in their leadership approach—a revelation to the student. Situational leadership does just that—allows leaders to flex their leadership to the context. Rather than have a “one size fits all” approach to the leadership process, situational leadership allows leaders to stay true to their overall leadership style while stressing the need to accommodate those they are leading by providing the necessary direction and support for the given context. This entry reviews the origin of situational leadership theory, its four cycles and challenges associated with situational leadership.

Situational Leadership

865

Origin of Situational Leadership Theory

Situational Leadership Cycle

Situational leadership theory is about leaders providing the direction and support needed for followers to succeed and accomplish goals. The basis for this situational theory traces its roots to research conducted initially by W. J. Reddin in 1967 that has been further researched and developed by many others and is now used throughout organizations worldwide. As a testimony to the popularity and effectiveness of this theory, the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies use the situational leadership theory to some degree in their training programs. Historically, in regard to the evolution of the formal study of leadership, the situational leadership theory first researched in the mid-1960s is one of the first leadership theories or approaches that considered the follower and not just the leader in the leadership process. Up to this point in time, leadership research had primarily focused only on the leader and their behaviors or traits. This focus on factors other than the leader was important, as those developing and researching leadership pedagogy realized that other variables contributed to the leadership process. Situational leadership theory also was one of the first approaches to consider the context that the leadership process occurred. Leaders need to understand the environment where they were leading and the nature of the tasks to accomplish or goals to achieve in order to provide what followers needed from them to ensure follower success. The basic concept of situational leadership theory focuses on the direction and support from the leader and development level of those they are leading. Leaders provide varying degrees of both direction and support depending on what followers need given the context to accomplish the task or goal. The amount of direction or support is also dependent on the development level of the followers. Followers typically need more direction than support when starting a task or goal that is unfamiliar to them. After time and experience, followers progress to needing less direction and more support. With further time and experience, followers need less direction and support until leaders can confidently empower followers to accomplish the task or goal with minimal supervision.

A typical lifecycle of situational leadership theory starts with the leader being very directive while not offering much support to the follower. This phase of the situational leadership theory is characterized by one-way communication from the leader to the follower and not much interaction as the follower needs to be told what to do due to the follower’s inexperience with the task or goal and the context. As the follower becomes more familiar with the task or goal, the leader provides less direction and more support, allowing more interaction between leader and follower and greater two-way communication. Additional time and experience permit the leader to interact more with the follower to develop a sense of ownership by the follower for the task or goal. Finally, after much interaction, the leader can empower the follower and provide minimal supervision and direction as the follower has the confidence and knowledge to accomplish the task or achieve the goal. Ken Blanchard and his colleagues in 2013 described the four phases of this cycle as directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. This cycle of situational leadership theory can be repeated due to new or changing tasks or goals. For example, if in a manufacturing environment where trained, experienced employees are able and empowered to perform their assigned tasks and achieve production goals, the organization purchases a new line of equipment replacing old equipment. The employees who were functioning in an empowered, mature development level (delegating phase) with little supervision are now back to needing more direction and less support (directing or coaching phase). After initial training on the new equipment (directing/coaching style of leader behavior) the employees then progress to needing less direction but more support as they need support to grow their confidence with the new equipment. After additional experience with the new equipment, the employees’ confidence rise and eventually they are back to an empowered, mature level that requires little supervision from the leader (delegating phase). The directive behavior of leaders tends to be easily understood as leaders must provide the

866

Situational Leadership

needed guidance and training to ensure followers can achieve tasks or accomplish goals. Directive behavior is also better defined for leaders than supportive behavior. Supportive behavior is a broad term that encompasses many leader actions and behaviors and is less defined than directive behavior. A focus on organizational values can assist leaders when providing supportive behavior in the situational leadership theory, as the influence of values affects the leadership process. Values that are clearly identified and defined are important for the leadership process, as they can guide the actions of leaders and have a significant effect on organizational culture. Values often provide the why for followers if effectively communicated and mentored by leaders. Values play an important role in how visions—both on a personal as well as organizational level—are achieved. Supportive behavior that includes communication from leaders to followers regarding values provides the needed guidance and can create the intrinsic motivation followers need to develop a sense of ownership for the task assigned or the goal to achieve. A sense of ownership of the task or goal is needed for leaders to reduce the directive behavior and supervision, allowing followers the ability to act on their own and achieve the final delegating phase of the situational leadership theory.

Military Example of Situational Leadership Theory The United States Army provides a great example of the situational leadership theory. People voluntarily join the U.S. Army for many reasons and have a wide range of skills and competencies, although few translate to the skills and competencies needed in the Army. They are also entering a very unique environment where rules and regulations provide a rigid framework for actions and behaviors. The first phase of situational leadership theory occurs when new recruits attend basic training. Basic training is the first stage (directing) of the situational leadership theory, as those joining the Army are told what to do—without asking questions. The tasks new recruits must perform are completely new to almost all new soldiers and done so in a new context, requiring

one-direction communication from drill sergeant to new recruit with little support. Although this is the first phase of situational leadership and little support exists, support is being introduced as new recruits learn and begin to inculcate the seven Army values. These seven Army values include Loyalty: bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, the Army, your unit, and other soldiers Duty: fulfill your obligations Respect: treat people as they should be treated Selfless service: put the welfare of the nation, the Army, and your subordinates before your own Honor: live up to the Army Values Integrity: do what is right, legally and morally Personal courage: face fear, danger, or adversity

After basic training, new recruits then go to specialty training in the military occupational specialty they chose when they enlisted into the Army. During this training, soldiers are allowed to interact more with instructors as they gain the knowledge they need to perform the tasks needed in their chosen specialty. The direction from instructors (leaders) is less, and more two-way communication occurs as more complex tasks are learned (coaching). Support is beginning to increase as soldiers better understand the seven Army values, and more discussion occurs regarding their new context. After completing specialty training, soldiers are assigned to their first unit. At their first unit, they revert back to a more directing or coaching phase of the situational leadership theory as they must now learn the organizational culture of their new unit. This phase is usually not long and soldiers integrate into their respective small units and teams performing the tasks taught in basic and specialty training. Direction becomes less and support is greater as senior soldiers mentor new soldiers on the traditions and histories of the units of which they are now members (supporting). A common theme that runs throughout this integration phase is the seven Army values. As soldiers are promoted due to their increased experiences, skills, and competencies, the more senior leaders in the organization provide less direction and focus more on helping them understand the bigger picture or vision of the Army.

Skills

867

Those soldiers who continue in the Army and are promoted to the most senior leadership roles are entrusted or empowered with running organizations within the Army and illustrate the final phase of the situational leadership theory (delegating).

support to their followers. By understanding this relatively simple theory, leaders can better create effective leadership to accomplish tasks and achieve goals.

Challenges

See also Leader–Follower Relationships; Leadership and Management; Military Leadership

The situational leadership theory is simplistic in concept and design but does pose several challenges for leaders. First, leaders must have an awareness of their leadership approach, their overall style, strengths, and weaknesses. An awareness of their leadership approach allows leaders to better understand what they must focus on so as to providing direction or support. If the leader is very directive, they may need to focus more on how they provide support to ensure that their directive style does not hinder the support followers need. Second, leaders must also know those they are leading. The situational leadership theory hinges on leaders knowing those they lead, and they must have an effective relationship with them to better understand the needed direction or support for a given context. What followers need and how they respond to both direction and support are critical to the success of this leadership theory. A third challenge is for leaders to clearly understand the context in which the leadership process occurs. The environment along with the time needed to accomplish tasks or achieve goals affects the amount of direction and support leaders must provide followers. A time-constrained, tense environment may not allow for a nurturing, time-consuming supportive behavior from a leader. The situational leadership theory will not work without leaders knowing themselves, those they lead, and the context. In conclusion, situational leadership theory is a valuable asset and tool if leaders understand the basic components of this theory. First, leaders must understand that leadership is a relationship between leaders and followers. The situational leadership theory requires leaders to know their own leadership approach or style as well as understand the importance of creating effective relationships with those they lead. Knowing those they lead and what they respond to allows leaders to provide the needed direction and

John P. Baker

Further Readings Blanchard, K. H. (1985). SLII: A situational approach to managing people. Escondido, CA: Blanchard Training and Development. Blanchard, K. Zigarmi, P., & Zigarmi, D. (2013). Leadership and the one minute manager: Increasing effectiveness through situational leadership II. New York, NY: William Marrow. Bunkowski, L., & Shelton, K. (2019). Mission, vision, and core values through online education: A case study on tribal college leadership. Quarterly Review of Distance Education. 20(4), 1–22. Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training and Development Journal, 23, 26–34. Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1993). Management of organizational behavior: Utilizing human resources (6th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Reddin, W. J. (1967). The 3-D management style leadership theory. Training and Development Journal, 21, 8–17. Rhoades, A. (2011). Built on values: Creating an enviable culture that outperforms, the competition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. United States Army. (2019). ADP 6-22 army leadership and the profession. Army Publishing Directorate.

SKILLS When someone acquires a leadership role, both their followers and, more broadly, the firm as a whole expect the leader to perform. This rather straightforward observation brings to the fore a Author’s Note: We would like to thank Cory Higgs, Colleen Standish, Tanner Newbold, and Mark Fichtel for their contributions to the present effort.

868

Skills

new question: What is the basic nature of performance in leadership roles? One answer to this question has been provided by leadership researchers. These researchers argued that the performance of people in leadership roles depends on their ability to solve the problems—either social or technical problems—brought to them by others. Problem-solving performance, including the problem-solving performance of leaders, is influenced by many factors. It is clear that several factors are of some importance—such as intelligence, experience and expertise, and motivation to address the problem. However, the socio-cognitive skills leaders possess appear of special importance in accounting for performance in leadership roles. This entry examines the specific nature of the skills people need to perform effectively in leadership roles.

Skills and Leader Performance Before turning to the skills needed in leadership roles, we should briefly consider what we know about skills in general. A skill is a developed capacity that contributes to effective performance on a certain class of tasks. Thus, we may speak of psychomotor skills or critical thinking skills. Skills, however, display generality across a class of tasks, and, thus, are often critical to performance when new tasks or new problems are presented to people—as is the case for those who occupy leadership roles. Skills, moreover, develop over time as a function of experience, knowledge, and expertise. Thus, skills can be developed reasonably expeditiously, if not always quickly. The rate at which people acquire skills, however, depends on a number of considerations. For example, intelligence influences the rate of skill acquisition. Deliberative practice and self-reflection influence the rate of skill acquisition. Furthermore, appropriate exposure to critical, prototypic, experiential cases also appears to influence the rate of skill acquisition. Skills are of interest, in part, because they can be developed in people. And, skills are of interest because assessment of a person’s manifest skills can be used to predict performance. In fact, the value of skills in predicting leader performance has been demonstrated in a study that asked 1,800

Army officers to complete a battery of cognitive skill measures, where skilled performance was assessed with respect to military leadership tasks. The outcome measures examined in this study included leader problem-solving performance, critical incident performance, and citations/medals awarded. Skills such as problem definition, information analysis, and creative thinking were strongly, very strongly, positively, related (r  .55) to leader performance. Moreover, these skills were found to account for performance variance above and beyond more basic variables such as intelligence, expertise, and personality. And, these skills were found to develop, typically improving, as leaders moved through their careers. Accordingly, it seems clear skills are a powerful predictor of performance in leadership roles. The questions that come to fore at this juncture, however, is what are the key skills likely to influence leader performance across a variety of roles? And why would we expect each skill to be especially important to leader performance? Although many skills might be proposed as potential determinants of performance in leadership roles (e.g., communication skills, performance monitoring skills, decision-making skills), the authors believe seven skills are especially important factors in shaping leader performance: (1) cause/goal analysis, (2) forecasting, (3) constraint analysis, (4) creative thinking, (5) planning, (6) wisdom, and (7) sensemaking.

Cause/Goal Analysis Leaders cannot act effectively unless they understand the causes of the problem that has been brought to them. And, even if they understand the causes of the problem, they can only act effectively if they know what goals should shape their actions in trying to address the problem. In one initial study, Michael Mumford and colleagues asked people to formulate plans for leading an experimental secondary school and formulate a vision statement, described in a speech to be given to key stakeholders. Plans and vision statements were appraised quality and perceived impact. Prior to starting work on this task, participants were primed to think about either key causes, key goals, both, or neither. It was found thinking about

Skills

either causes or goals, depending on task conditions, contributed to leader performance. In a series of follow-up studies, it has been shown that individual differences in peoples’ skill in analyzing causes and goals contribute to leader performance. For example, one study asked people to work on an executive-level simulation exercise. Prior to working on this exercise, they were trained in causal analysis skills (e.g., think about causes that have big effects, think about causes you can control). It was found training in causal analysis skills resulted in more adaptive performance. In another study, it was shown that skill in analysis of goals also contributed to peoples’ performance when acting in leadership roles.

869

skill in identifying relevant constraints. Evidence for the value of constraint analysis skill has been provided in a study where participants were asked to assume the role of an entrepreneurial leader envisioning a potential new restaurant chain. Participants were, or were not, asked to consider either the type, timing, or number of constraints on potential actions. It was found that the viability of the plans people produced in this leadership role were strongly positively related to attention given to relevant constraints. Indeed, leader skill in identifying and prioritizing constraints on potential action may be as important to leader performance as cause/goal analysis or forecasting.

Creative Thinking Forecasting A leader’s identification of causes, and the goals that might be pursued, in addressing a problem provides the basis for forecasting the impact of a leader’s actions over time. And, because the effects of a leader’s actions unfold over time—often rather long periods in the case of top management—there is reason to suspect forecasting would represent another key skill. Some rather compelling support for this observation has been provided in a research study. In this study, participants were asked to assume the role of a leader working in an experimental secondary school. Prior to preparing vision statements, they were asked to forecast the downstream implications of implementing this vision. Forecasts were content coded and it was found that the extensiveness of forecasting activities and forecasting over a longer time frame were strongly (r  .40) positively related to leader performance. Given that these findings have been replicated in multiple other studies, using a variety of leadership tasks, it does appear forecasting skill is critical to leader performance.

Constraint Analysis Leaders forecasting activities, however, are not open ended, they are necessarily bounded by multiple constraints—constraints ranging from firm policy to follower affective reactions to a leader’s actions. Thus, leaders must have some

Skill in identifying constraints is noteworthy for another reason. Leaders often must find ways to work around, or work within, identified constraints. As research has pointed out, working within, and working around, constraints often provides a stimulus for creative thinking. Furthermore, there is strong evidence to suggest that creative thinking skills are critical to leader performance. Creative thinking skills are typically assessed through measures of divergent thinking, the capacity to generate multiple ideas that might be used to solve a problem. In one study, it was found that individual differences in the divergent thinking of military officers was strongly positively (r  .40) related to the leadership performance of Army officers—indeed, such creative thinking was important to leadership across career level (e.g., captains vs. colonels). In a later longitudinal study, moreover, the rank obtained by these officers 20 years later—a measure of leader performance in an up-or-out system—was again found to be a powerful predictor of leader performance.

Planning Case/goal analysis, forecasting, constraint analysis, and creative thinking skills all provide the basis for leaders to formulate the plans that they will use in acting to solve a problem. Planning is a complex activity and leader planning may prove especially complex as leaders draw information from many sources. As might be expected based

870

Skills

on these observations, planning sills also appear critical to performance in leadership roles. One study asked teams to formulate plans for turning around a failing automotive firm. Prior to starting work on these plans, all team members were asked to complete a measure of planning skills. And, after completing their plans, they were asked to nominate their team leader. It was found that the planning skills of team leaders were strongly, positively related to team performance. This study is, however, notable for two other reasons. First, it demonstrated that followers may not be able to observe, or report, leader skill levels. Second, it demonstrated the behaviors evidenced by leaders were dependent on, or caused by, the skills these leaders possessed.

Wisdom The plans developed by leaders are not simply an abstract set of thoughts. Plans are something that must be acted on in context. In addition, plans must work in this context. Thus, leaders must be able to appraise plans and plan “workability” in context. The appraisal of action workability in context is held to depend on a person’s wisdom. In fact, research has also shown that wisdom contributed to performance in military leadership roles, proving especially important to the performance of those occupying senior leadership roles. In a more recent study, researchers developed a measure of wisdom. On this measure, people were asked to identify the “moral of the story” in Aesop’s Fables. Identifying the moral of the story in Aesop’s Fables has long been considered the embodiment of wisdom. After completing this skill measure, participants were asked to assume the role of the leader of an experimental secondary school and articulate their plan and vision for leading the school. Wisdom was found to be positively related (r  .35) to performance in this leadership role. Moreover, as was the case for other skills such as forecasting, creative thinking, and casual analysis, wisdom was found to account for variance in leader performance above and beyond other individual characteristics such as intelligence or openness.

Sensemaking Leader plans, even wise plans, do not provide a fully adequate basis for addressing a problem. Typically, leader plans require the involvement of multiple followers and multiple other stakeholders. And, if these constituencies do not understand the leaders plan, and the intent of this plan, the plan is likely to fail. Thus, yet another skill is required—sensemaking and sensegiving. Leaders must not only understand cases, goals, and constraints in formulating plans, they must help others make sense of their plans. Sensemaking is commonly held to depend on the formation, and articulation, of a viable framework or image that will help others understand a plan and how that plan is to be executed. The construction of a viable framework for understanding and articulating plans, however, is dependent on the mental model leaders construct and articulate. One study investigating this relationship asked people to work on the secondary school leadership problem where judges appraised the viability of plans. Prior to working on the problem, participants were asked to illustrate their mental models for understanding the problem—making sense of the problem. It was found those who evidenced higher-quality mental models produced stronger leadership plans. Thus, sensemaking, and articulation of this understanding through sensegiving, appears to be a final key leadership skill.

Final Remarks Case/goal analysis, forecasting, constraint analysis, creative thinking, planning, wisdom, and sensemaking all appear to represent critical skills shaping leader performance. Moreover, these skills appear relevant to leader performance on multiple, different leadership tasks drawn from different domains. Furthermore, these skills are powerful predictors of leader performance shaping leader behavior and adding to the prediction obtained from more basic individual differences variables. Given these observations, and the powerful prediction obtained from these skill measures, it seems clear that skill measures provide a useful tool for assessing leadership potential.

Social Change

The findings obtained in these studies, however, also indicate that these leadership skills can be developed through viable training and experiential interventions. For example, research has shown that training in causal analysis strategies contributes to leader performance. Other studies have shown appropriate, well-timed assignments presenting problems and providing experience in skill application also contribute to stronger leader performance. As a result, the identification of key leader thinking skills might also provide a viable framework for the systematic development of leadership potential. Michael D. Mumford and Samantha E. England See also Creativity; Intelligences; Leadership Development; Military Leadership

871

Leadership Quarterly, 11, 11–35. doi:10.1016/S10489843(99)00041-7 Shipman, A. S., Byrne, C. L., & Mumford, M. D. (2010). Leader vision formation and forecasting: The effects of forecasting extent, resources, and timeframe. The Leadership Quarterly, 21, 439–456. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2010.03.008 Standish, C., Cho, J., Dai, Q., S., Ramasubramanian, M., & Mumford, M. D. (2021). Item analysis and development of a brief wisdom scale. Poster presented at 36th annual society for industrial and organizational psychology Conference, New Orleans, LA. Zaccaro, S. J., Connelly, S., Repchick, K. M., Daza, A. I., Young, M. C., Kilcullen, R. N., . . . Bartholomew, L. N. (2015). The influence of higher order cognitive capacities on leader organizational continuance and retention: The mediating role of developmental experiences. The Leadership Quarterly, 26, 342–358. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.03.007

Further Readings Connelly, M. S., Gilbert, J. A., Zaccaro, S. J., Threlfall, K. V., Marks, M. A., & Mumford, M. D. (2000). Exploring the relationship of leadership skills and knowledge to leader performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 11, 65–86. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(99) 00043-0 Marcy, R. T., & Mumford, M. D. (2010). Leader cognition: Improving leader performance through causal analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 21, 1–19. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.10.001 Marta, S., Leritz, L. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2005). Leadership skills and the group performance: Situational demands, behavioral requirements, and planning. The Leadership Quarterly, 16, 97–120. doi: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2004.04.004 Medeiros, K. E., Steele, L. M., Watts, L. L., & Mumford, M. D. (2018). Timing is everything: Examining the role of constraints throughout the creative process. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12, 471. doi:10.1037/aca0000148 Mumford, M. D., Hester, K. S., Robledo, I. C., Peterson, D. R., Day, E. A., Hougen, D. F., & Barrett, J. D. (2012). Mental models and creative problem-solving: The relationship of objective and subjective model attributes. Creativity Research Journal, 24, 311–330. doi:10.1080/10400419.2012.730008 Mumford, M. D., Zaccaro, S. J., Harding, F. D., Jacobs, T. O., & Fleishman, E. A. (2000). Leadership skills for a changing world: Solving complex social problems. The

SOCIAL CHANGE Social change is a complex phenomenon. It can be evolutionary versus revolutionary, and it has different dimensions (economic, political, societal). Social change can involve shifts in norms, structures, and institutions. The roots of social change are a combination of conscious acts (protests, reform legislation) and accidental conjunctures of structural and institutional dynamics outside any individual’s or group’s direct control. This entry examines dimensions of social change, in particular economic, political, and societal change. The entry also contrasts evolutionary and revolutionary social change, as well as describes differences in local, national, and global levels of social change. The entry concludes by examining how social changes occur.

How Societies Change Understanding how societies change may be the fundamental mission of the social sciences. Since the late 19th century, scholars have generated an incredible quantity of data, analyses, and theories. While some trends and explanations are increasingly

872

Social Change

taken as truth, there remain many debates about how societies change. Marxist accounts stress economic and class structures driving change; accounts inspired by Max Weber focus on some combination of institutions, elites, and norms; while other historical accounts focus on elite alliances and decisions. In the early 21st century, the Weberian framework appears to have the upper hand, as it can best explain variation in change across space and time, draws attention not only to structures but to individual and group decisions, and takes history seriously. Even then, there remains much work to do.

Dimensions of Social Change Social change has many dimensions, and the dimensions can be interconnected. The usual division is economic, political, and societal change; this mirrors the division of the social sciences into economics, political science, and sociology. This division is artificial: changes in political and economic institutions can influence each other, and these, in turn, can influence social norms and structures (e.g., inequality, families), which then can affect politics and economics. However, parsing social change into economic, political, and societal provides some structure for making sense of how societies and human interaction change over time. The first, most recognizable form of social change is economic change. Over the last several centuries, societies have moved from agricultural to industrial economies, and then in leading countries from industrial to service-based economies. Technological innovation is part of the story: the steam engine, the factory, and the microchip, for example, have been key technological innovations that have driven economic restructuring and development. However, technological change does not occur by itself: it requires social conditions, such as regimes amenable to innovation and science (made easier after the Reformation in the West), and an elite able to accumulate wealth, defend that wealth, and then have opportunities to invest in economic innovations. For example, in one account, capitalism emerged when the English agrarian elite was able to gain control of expansive tracks of land from peasants, to guard that property and wealth that agriculture generated against

peasants and the monarchy, and then to invest (eventually) in fledgling textile production. Concerns for economic development and relations between political and economic elites led American states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) to facilitate the coming of the modern corporation, which, in turn, made possible accumulation of yet more capital and technological development. It is also important to recognize that economic change has external dynamics as well. While modern capitalism developed in Europe, European countries then exported or imposed capitalism on the rest of the world, either through empire (e.g., Africa) or dependent relations (e.g., Latin America). In turn, economic change generates changes in class structures and institutions. A second dimension of social change is in a society’s politics. One of the more celebrated forms of political change is the expansion of pluralist democracies, and history does suggest that societies are becoming more open. Premodern political systems usually involved a form of hereditary monarchy, with sovereignty located in a royal family and the nobility whose status emanated from relations to the monarchy. This gave way to bureaucratic states and representative politics: elites (e.g., landed aristocracy) were initially given more say over political decisions, with middle-class men and then workers and women gaining the chance to participate in politics. In Great Britain, the Magna Carta gave knights and nobles the right to hold monarchs accountable for taxation and use of funds (the beginnings of Parliament); the English Civil War moved yet more authority to Parliament; in the 19th and 20th centuries, the middle class, working class, and women gained the right to vote. A similarly gradual expansion of political rights took place in many European countries and the United States. However, we should be careful of embracing such a linear and progressive view of political change. First, expansion of rights was not automatic; workers, women, and minorities in particular had to force elites to grant them rights. Second, many countries oscillate between democracy and authoritarianism. The United States gave political rights to Black males after the Civil War, but legislation in Southern states severely restricted those rights. In the 20th century, Russia moved

Social Change

from an absolute tsarist monarchy, to a limited constitutional monarchy, to a one-party communist dictatorship, to a fledgling democracy in the 1990s, and (in the 21st century) to an authoritarian regime cloaked in the façade of democratic procedures. In the 20th century, countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America experienced “waves” of democracy and dictatorship. An additional form of political change has been the rise of nations. With the growth of bureaucratic states, print capitalism, and middle classes, some segments of European societies began to imagine that they were a community sharing a political identity (English and British, French, German, etc.). National identity provided legitimacy to new states and democratic politics, because sovereignty came from the “nation.” This also altered the nature of politics, as elites now had to ` position themselves vis-a-vis the nation to advance their own interests (e.g., defining who has membership in the nation and how best to defend its well-being). National identity motives have contributed to authoritarianism (e.g., in Nazi Germany and contemporary Russia) and to progressive politics (e.g., welfare states in Europe and the United States in the mid-20th century). A third dimension is changes in societal change, that is, change in social structures and norms. The most visible changes are in social classes and groups, and here politics and economics play a role. Industrialization led to the rise of a blue-collar urban working class; the shift in major economies from industrial production to services hurt working classes and expanded the service class, which is bifurcated between lesser-skilled and lower-earning employees (e.g., telemarketers) and higher-skilled and better-paid professionals (e.g., computer programmers). Immigration and demographics can also change the class and ethnic structure of a society. In the United States, changes in immigration laws led to changes in the quantity and source of immigration (from Europe, East Asia, and Latin America). Another society change is shifts in social norms, in particular the increasing acceptance of diversity, in regards to race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the like. As political change has expanded rights, various

873

communities and classes have mobilized to gain acceptance both in law and in everyday norms; for example, gay marriage in the United States gained legal and social legitimacy over a few decades as social movements pressured legislatures and convinced much of the public at large that gay people deserved the same legal and social respect as others.

Revolutionary Versus Evolutionary Social Change Another dimension to “social change” is degree and time span. Much fundamental social change occurs rapidly; this is “revolutionary” change. This involves fundamental changes in structures, institutions, and classes and can take place over a few years or a few decades. The French and Russian revolutions essentially remade the class structures and institutions of those societies, and they were so radical that they inspired reformers and revolutionaries elsewhere. The Industrial Revolution was just as fundamental but took several decades to unfold; the rise of science and new technology (e.g., the steam engine) in 18th-century Britain made it easier to construct factories and use new technology, and once Britain demonstrated economic advantages of industrialization, other countries quickly followed suit. Factories were followed by canals and railways that joined local markets and integrated national economies. Increasing investment contributed to the rise of the modern corporation, which in turn helped create more integrated national elites and facilitated yet more investment in industry. Between 1780 and 1880 (with the bulk of change between 1780 and 1840), European and American societies had changed fundamentally, and via their empires they spread those changes across the globe. Not all change is rapid or fundamental; change can be more gradual yet still have a significant impact on societies. Evolutionary change has dynamics that are not immediately noticeable and cannot be reduced to visible institutions, ideologies, or interests. One such deeper evolutionary force is demography. Demographic growth can contribute to social change in different and sometimes contradictory ways. On the one hand,

874

Social Change

population growth means potentially larger pools of labor and consumers, which can fuel economic growth and changes that might come with this. At the same time, population growth can also create possible crises if institutions do not meet the needs of a growing population. One example is when families of elites and near-elites grow faster than economies and opportunities. Elite or middle-class children who do not find meaningful labor might turn to contentious politics and occasionally become leaders of reform or revolutionary movements, because they had little stake in the existing system. Another more gradual force for change is literacy and communication. The printing press and the spread of literacy had a profound impact on the modern world, yet this was not always clear initially. The printing press made possible the Bible in vernacular (local language, not Latin), which contributed to the rise of local identities. Bibles, newspapers, and fiction printed in local languages contributed to growing literacy, and this, in turn, led people sharing one printed language to believe that they were part of a broader cultural community—the nation. Literacy made it possible for social movements to reach a broader audience and helped average people educate themselves about politics and ideologies, which contributed to mass politics and social protest.

Levels of Social Change: Local, National, and Global Much work on social changes focuses on nation-states and their societies, but this might unnecessarily narrow one’s vision. In fact, it may be necessary to look “up” one level, to the global level, and “down” to the local level. When doing so, it becomes clear that social change is uneven and can move in different directions. This entry has focused primarily on changes of entire national societies, but changes within a society can be uneven. This can lead to imbalances of power and contentious politics; at times this can lead to revolution, as in the case of peasant revolts contributing to revolutions in Russia, France, and China. At the other end is social change driven by forces outside a country. Today’s world demonstrates the importance of connecting domestic

social change with broader changes at the global level. “Globalization” is a word used often but usually with little clarity. This said, investment can move across borders more freely and more quickly, which means that changes in one part of the world can affect others. The rise of new technologies (e.g., the internet) or new elites (e.g., the financial elite) provoke changes across borders: the movement of capital (investment and capital flight) becomes dependent on financial elites’ decision in New York and London, and these can promote growth and collapse. But transnational structures are not unique to the present. The slave trade of centuries ago provoked fundamental changes: the destruction of African communities (the source of slaves), the rise of new business elites (slave trade, cotton, tobacco, sugar), and capital for investment in other projects (e.g., sugar or cotton profits, grounded in slavery, being invested in industrialization). In the 19th and 20th centuries in particular, leading countries imposed economic and political changes on less powerful countries: one means was direct control (using empires or invasions to reshape societies) or by using resources to demand change (such as the United States and International Monetary Fund demanding significant economic and political reforms in exchange for massive funds to cover debts). Sometimes societies change even though their members do not want to.

Structures Versus Strategies in Changing Societies Finally, how all these changes occur has fueled debates for at least two centuries. Some scholars see demography as the ultimate motor of change, others see economic forces as drivers of change, while others focus on political institutions. An important distinction is to what extent social change depends on individual volition—conscious decisions and actions by individuals (e.g., elites) or groups (e.g., movements)—versus a conjuncture of various structures (e.g., classes, geopolitics, political institutions). The former is the lay understanding of change linked to democratic politics; the second is similar to plate tectonics, according to which earthquakes occur when plates move in a particular way against each other. Social change

Social Identities

can be a result of elites and social movements mobilizing resources to promote their interests. In these cases, each side used money and people to pressure political elites and institutions to adopt legislative changes; for example, the Civil Rights movement and expansion of voting and other civil rights, or consistent elite pressure in the United Kingdom and United States after 1980 to reduce the power of unions and movements. However, elites and social movements can arise from deeper structural causes. Industrialization created a working class that grew in numbers and whose members worked and lived in proximity to each other; this facilitated the rise of labor unions that could use strikes to gain concessions from business owners and from governments (e.g., better wages and working conditions, welfare policies). Deindustrialization in the United States and United Kingdom, for example (when owners moved industries from to Asia and Latin America), reduced the size and security of the working class; coupled with anti-union policies under U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, this reduced the capacity of workers to organize and to defend their interests. This is not the only such case. Revolutions—the most dramatic form of social change—occur because of a conjuncture of structural forces that include a weakening of the capacity of the state to repress (usually following wars or financial shocks that hurt state budgets), increasing conflict between state and economic elites (e.g., landlords vs. monarchies in France and Russia), and a large mass of peasants or others who gain the ability to mobilize and can use moments of state weakness to act, sometimes violently. This is an important point: revolutionaries have been plotting everywhere and all the time, but the only times they are successful is when institutions and structures collapse because contradictions and stresses weaken them. Much the same is true for social movements: reforms are everywhere, but those who succeed usually have the good luck to live at a time when structures weaken and states and elites cannot continue to repress. Jeffrey K. Hass

875

See also Civil Rights Movement; Globalism, Nationalism, and Leadership; Political Leadership

Further Readings Goldstone, J. (2008). Why Europe? The rise of the West in world history 1500–1850. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Lachmann, R. (2000). Capitalists in spite of themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Markoff, J. (2015). Waves of democracy: Social movements and political change (2nd ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315631202 Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. (1979). Poor people’s movements: How they succeed, why they fail. New York, NY: Vintage. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European states A.D. 990-1992. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

SOCIAL IDENTITIES Social identity is that part of an individual’s self-image that reflects their perceived membership in a relevant social group. People who have marginalized social identities, such as women and minorities, often experience greater difficulty attaining elite leadership positions than those who belong to dominant social groups, such as males and white individuals. Increasing parity in the representation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, people from low-socioeconomic-status backgrounds, and other nontraditional groups is not only a matter of justice and equity; individuals from these groups can bring to their leadership positions important perspectives and priorities that may otherwise be underrepresented. There are many factors that limit marginalized individuals’ access to power, ranging from barriers that hinder access to educational, social, and cultural opportunities, to individuals from dominant social identity groups working actively to maintain their privileged status. One important way social identities work to disadvantage some and advantage others in leadership is by shaping expectations and beliefs. Identities shape not only the way we as observers perceive and respond toward

876

Social Identities

others, but also the way we as actors think about ourselves and behave.

How Social Identities Shape Social Expectations Leadership in the Eye of the Beholder

To the extent that being perceived by others as a leader is critical to the leadership process, people with marginalized social identities can be at a distinct disadvantage. People evaluate their leaders and potential leaders in reference to their preconceived, lay conceptions of what it means to be a leader, referred to as implicit leadership theories. These implicit leadership theories often reflect more privileged social identities and can result in negative perceptions and evaluations of people who do not fit the image of a leader. Ample research shows that social identities influence the degree to which we see someone fitting our intuitive notions of an ideal leader. When asked to draw what an effective leader looks like, men and women almost always draw men, who are often white. Biased notions of a leader are often not driven by antipathy, but rather are a result of subtle, implicit thoughts that occur outside of conscious awareness. Unconscious biases stem from humans using two processing systems. The reflective system is used for controlled processing involving intentional and conscious consideration of evidence. However, human thinking can also be on “autopilot” and automatically processing information. This reflexive thinking relies on implicit associations, which are learned from observing covariation in the world, and can be both functional and innocuous. For example, many implicit associations humans develop, such as learning to associate dark clouds with rain, are helpful as people navigate their social world. Other implicit associations can be less useful, however, and can shape thoughts and perceptions in unintended ways. Achieving Access and Legitimacy

Achieving legitimacy in leadership can be challenging for those who do not fit preconceived

notions of leaders that often revolve around masculinity and being white. Negative expectations can result in denied access at different points of entry to leadership, in both formal and informal ways, from educational opportunities, to hiring situations, to important reviews and promotions. At these important entry points, disparities in leadership can be perpetuated by biased, identity-based expectations. Gender is one of the most studied social identities. Extensive social science research demonstrates that achieving legitimacy can be difficult for women. Gender stereotypes both describe beliefs about the attributes of women and men and prescribe how they ought to be. The deeply ingrained stereotypic beliefs that women take care and men take charge give rise to biases against female leaders that stems from the mismatch between gender-based expectations and expectations regarding the leadership role results. The discrimination that women face in leadership can be subtle; however, experimental paradigms, such as presenting people with identical resumes except for the ostensible gender of the applicant, can highlight a preference for selecting men over women for leadership positions. Identity-based biases can put women in a double bind in leadership positions. Women who are highly communal, expressing more of the “taking care” characteristics, may be criticized for being deficient leaders, whereas highly agentic women, who express more “taking charge” traits, may engender hostility for not being feminine enough. Other important identities that influence who people see as “fitting” the preconceived notion of a leader include race and ethnicity, social class, sexual identity, and being differentially abled. Though much research examines social identities in isolation, in actuality people have various and interrelated social identities that that can have implications for leadership expectations. An intersectionality perspective considers the intersection of multiple categories of social group membership. For example, from an intersectionality approach, some researchers have shown that Black women confront “double jeopardy,” experiencing both gender and racial bias. Others have found evidence of a distinctive form of oppression known as intersectional invisibility. Here, Black

Social Identities

women are marginalized because they are not seen as the typical members of either their racial group, where Black men are seen as typical, or their gender group, where white women are deemed typical. The social identity–based bias that emerges at the intersection of various identities will likely depend on factors including situational contexts and attributes of the perceivers. Followers and Legitimacy

Some people are more or less likely to accord individuals with marginalized social identities, such as women and minorities, legitimacy in leadership than other people. Certain ideologies and belief systems can bolster or undermine the experience or expression of bias in judgments about leadership. For example, in terms of gender bias, people with traditional expectations about the roles of women and men in society and those with negative attitudes toward women in authority show greater gender-biased leader evaluations than those with more progressive attitudes toward women in authority. Another important factor that predicts social identity bias in leadership is the extent to which people endorse hierarchical group relationships. People with a high level of social dominance orientation—that is, they endorse ideologies, policies, and practices that maintain group dominance rather than those that ease inequality— evaluate racial minorities and women leaders more negatively than those with lower levels of social dominance orientation. One important belief system that influences the extent to which people judge leaders from stereotypical standards is their mindsets of human attributes. These beliefs range from fixed mindsets, assuming human qualities remain stable over time and situations, to growth mindsets, predicated on the assumption that human attributes change as a result of experience, education, and maturation. Mindsets influence social perception largely by shifting what people focus on when trying to make sense of social situations. People with growth mindsets rely less on preexisting attitudes to gain an understanding of leaders and to make evaluations. Because fixed mindsets can lead people to focus on and cling to group labels, growth

877

mindsets can play an important role in mitigating social identity bias.

How Social Identities Shape Our Behaviors and Beliefs The expectations associated with social categories can also shape our own behaviors and the way we think about ourselves. Culturally dominant stereotypes can be powerful, even when they are not endorsed. People with marginalized social identities are keenly aware of the widespread stereotypes surrounding their social group and understand that others may treat them according to these stereotyped expectations. Marginalized individuals can experience identity threat in leadership situations particularly when attempting to lead in contexts where there are only a few others who share their social identity and where stereotypes are made particularly salient. Identity threats can be psychologically burdensome for leaders and can lead to decreases in performance, a reduced sense of belonging, and diminished well-being. Other responses to negative stereotypes revolve around making the stereotype less self-relevant. For example, leaders might disengage and disidentify from the leadership domain or the devalued social group, or they might react against the stereotype by actively engaging in counter-stereotypical behavior. Certain factors, ranging from the individual, to the interpersonal, to organizational/situational levels, can help reduce negative responses to threat or reduce the potential for making threat appraisals in the first place. How leaders respond to potential threats to their identity depends, in part, upon a host of factors related to the extent to which they see themselves as having, or being able to develop, leadership abilities. These factors include having high confidence in one’s leadership ability, or leadership self-efficacy, and holding a growth mindset that leadership abilities can be cultivated. Interpersonal relations can help buffer marginalized leaders from potential threats. Humans are, largely, socially constructed beings. Important others, including friends, family members, and mentors, play a critical role in the pursuit and

878

Social Identity Theory

attainment of goals. In particular, role models can play an important role in protecting people from threats to their identity in leadership roles. Although comparing oneself to a successful other has the potential of being self-deflating by highlighting deficiencies, role models can inspire and demonstrate that success is attainable. Role models can increase social belonging and inoculate people’s sense of self against identity threats. In addition, situational and contextual factors can help reduce threat appraisals. One potent approach is by creating identity-safe environments and organizational cultures that challenge the acceptance of negative expectations associated with stigmatized social identities. Associations linked to social identities are culturally specific; thus, the implications of identities for leadership will vary across cultural contexts. Much of the research on social identities and leadership has been undertaken in Western contexts, often the United States. It is unclear whether the processes identified by existing research will operate in other cultures. Crystal L. Hoyt See also Gender Stereotypes; Intersectionality: Race, Gender, and Leadership; Race, Ethnicity, and Leadership; Stereotype Threat

Further Readings Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Forsyth, D. R., & Nye, J. L. (2008). Seeing and being a leader: The perceptual, cognitive, and interpersonal roots of conferred influence. In C. L. Hoyt, G. R. Goethals, & D. R. Forsyth (Eds.), Leadership at the crossroads: Leadership and psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 116–131). Westport, CT: Praeger. Hoyt, C. (2015). Social identities and leadership: The case of gender. In G. R. Goethals, S. T. Allison, R. M. Kramer, & D. M. Messick (Eds.), Conceptions of leadership: Enduring ideas and emerging insights (pp. 71–91). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoyt, C. L., & Burnette, J. L. (2019). Efficacy and growth mindsets buffer against identity threat for women in leadership positions. In S. J. Tan & L. DeFrank-Cole (Eds.), Women’s leadership journeys: Stories, research,

and novel perspectives (pp. 178–191). New York, NY: Routledge. Hoyt, C. L., & Murphy, S. (2016). Managing to clear the air: Stereotype threat, women, and leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(3), 387–399. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2015.11.002

SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY Social identity theory is a social psychological theory of the role of self and identity in group and intergroup phenomena. The social identity perspective was initially developed by Henri Tajfel in the late 1960s and with later collaboration from John Turner in the 1970s. In the early stages of development, the theory largely focused on intergroup issues such as conflict and discrimination. Over time, the social identity approach was developed to encompass the entire range of group and intergroup phenomena, securing its place as a dominant theoretical perspective on groups in social psychology. Later, the social identity approach was extended to study the nature of leadership in groups, resulting in a social identity theory of leadership. This social identity theory of leadership has reinvigorated interest in leadership research among social psychologists and reformulated leadership as a fundamentally group process, arising from self and social categorization processes. This theoretical framework provided the foundation for an entirely new model of leadership by addressing the important identity function that leaders provide for their members. This entry takes an in-depth look at the social identity approach and then examines how it relates to leadership and in group roles. The entry concludes by highlighting some newer developments in the social identity approach as well as some future directions of research.

The Social Identity Approach Types of Self and Identity

Identity can be defined in many different ways. The social identity approach has primarily distinguished between one’s personal identity and one’s social

Social Identity Theory

identity. Personal identity is the portion of the self-concept that is based in idiosyncratic personal attributes (e.g., honest, intelligent) and/or personal relationships with specific other people (e.g., X’s husband, Y’s friend). In contrast, social identity is the portion of the self-concept that is derived from group memberships. Social identity is a definition and evaluation of the self in terms of specific groups to which one belongs (e.g., being a woman, an academic, Canadian, Muslim). Social identity is associated with group and intergroup behaviors (e.g., conformity, intergroup discrimination) that are different from the personal and interpersonal behaviors associated with personal identity. Salience

The extent to which one’s social identity influences behavior depends on the salience of the identity—the more salient a particular social identity, the more it will influence behavior. Social identity salience is based on the interaction between accessibility and fit. Cognitive accessibility is greater if an identity is used frequently (chronic accessibility) or is especially relevant in a given situation (situational accessibility). A particular identity or categorization has high fit if it accounts for relevant similarities and differences between people (comparative fit) and can explain their behavior (normative fit). When a social identity is psychologically salient, it shapes the way one sees oneself and others, and therefore the way one perceives, thinks, feels, and behaves.

879

outgroup is salient, prototypes are context-specific rather than fixed. Self-Categorization

Categorizing oneself and others into groups allows people to understand themselves and others as relative approximations of their group’s prototype. When social categorization occurs, group members are perceptually depersonalized, or viewed in terms of their similarity to the group prototype rather than as unique, idiosyncratic individuals. Perceptual depersonalization of outgroup members is more commonly called stereotyping, as one views outgroup members as being very similar to one another and possessing prototypical attributes of the group. Depersonalization is not unique to outgroup members, but rather applies to oneself and ingroup members in the same way. When a person self-categorizes, they view the self in terms of the attributes of the ingroup prototype (self-stereotyping). Since prototypes describe and prescribe how group members should think, feel, and behave, self-stereotyping leads one to think, feel, and behave in line with the group prototype. As a result, self-categorization not only transforms perceptions of self and others but also produces normative behavior among group members. Ultimately, group-oriented behavior, such as commitment to a group and adherence to group norms, depends on shared self-categorization and depersonalization. Motivation

Prototypes

People cognitively represent groups in terms of prototypes, or the fuzzy set of attributes (e.g., attitudes, values, and behaviors) that best define the group in a social context. Prototypes are derived by maximizing metacontrast—the ratio of perceived intergroup differences to intragroup differences—and therefore accentuate similarities within groups and differences between groups. Further, ingroup prototypes are polarized away from relevant outgroups, and thus tend to capture ideal rather than actual group attributes. Because prototypes can change as a function of which

Social identity and self-categorization processes are psychologically motivated by a desire for self-enhancement, optimal distinctiveness, and uncertainty reduction. In the early stages of development, social identity theory emphasized an underlying self-enhancement motive. This desire for self-enhancement, or self-esteem, motivates groups to protect and promote evaluatively positive distinctiveness for their group and its social identity, and therefore their members. More recently, optimal distinctiveness theory has emerged as a model of social identity motivation. According to optimal distinctiveness theory,

880

Social Identity Theory

people strive to balance two conflicting motives, one for inclusion/sameness (which is satisfied through group membership), and one for distinctiveness/uniqueness (which is satisfied through individuality). When people feel too distinctive, they strive for greater inclusion, and when people feel too subsumed by their group, they strive for greater distinctiveness. According to optimal distinctiveness theory, social identity and group phenomena are shaped by the need to balance these conflicting motives. Another motive that plays a key role in social identity and self-categorization processes is the desire to reduce feelings of uncertainty. According to uncertainty-identity theory, feelings of uncertainty, especially uncertainty relating to one’s self and identity, are aversive. Self-uncertainty can be highly anxiety-provoking and stressful—it makes it difficult to predict or control our world and what will happen to us in it. As such, humans are motivated to reduce this uncertainty. Self-categorization and group identification can reduce uncertainty because group prototypes describe and prescribe one’s identity, attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors, therefore making one’s own and other’s behavior more predictable. Because the group prototype is shared, self-categorization also provides consensual validation of one’s worldview and self-concept by fellow group members. Empirical tests of uncertainty-identity theory have shown that people identify more strongly with groups when they are uncertain, especially when the uncertainty is relevant to the self.

Social Identity Theory of Leadership The social identity approach conceptualizes leadership as a fundamentally group process, arising from self and social categorization processes. Prototypicality and Influence

Within groups, members vary in the extent to which they match the group’s prototype. Group prototypical members are those who best represent the group’s prototype, as they embody the attitudes, values, and beliefs that define the group. Because

groups are a key source of identity and self in society, members seek accurate information about their group’s prototype. Group prototypical members are trusted as the most reliable source of this information, and therefore people tend to pay close attention to the most prototypical members. Because other group members use them as a reference for how they themselves should act, think, and feel, highly prototypical members have disproportionate influence over the rest of the group and are best positioned to attain leadership. This process of group-based influence is strongest when the group is salient and central to members’ self-concepts and when members identify strongly with the group. As one’s group membership becomes increasingly salient, evaluations of leaders increasingly depend on the extent to which the leader embodies the group prototype. As a result, when the group is salient and important to one’s identity, group prototypical leaders are perceived as more effective, more influential, and receive greater support and trust than nonprototypical leaders. Social Attraction and Popularity

Within salient groups, liking for other group members becomes a process of depersonalized social attraction. That is, liking for other group members hinges on the extent to which members match the group prototype, rather than more personal attributes, friendships, or animosities. Group members tend to feel more positively about prototypical members and like them more than less prototypical members. Because there is usually significant agreement on the prototype, these positive feelings toward prototypical members are shared by the group as a whole. Thus, prototypical group members are popular—they are consensually liked by all. This social attraction toward prototypical group members has clear implications for leadership. Being liked makes it easier to influence people, as liking increases compliance with suggestions and requests. Prototypical members, who are consensually liked and popular, are more likely than less prototypical members to be able to persuade the group and have the group support their ideas.

Social Identity Theory

Social Construction of Charisma

Research in social psychology has shown that people seek to understand the causes of events around them, including the causes of other people’s behavior. In the process of causal attribution, it is common to overlook situational factors that might explain a person’s behavior and instead attribute behavior to invariant properties of the person, such as their personality. This fundamental attribution error is accentuated when the person is distinctive and stands out against the background. Highly prototypical group members are the focus of attention and distinctively figural against the background of the group. Because of this, observers are even more likely to attribute their behavior to an underlying disposition or personality rather than situational factors. For prototypical group members, the class of behaviors attributed to personality often includes influencing others, being persuasive, innovative, and being favorably evaluated by others—all components of charisma. Because these behaviors are attributed to personality, group members often construct a charismatic leadership personality for highly prototypical members. In this way, the social identity approach considers charisma to be an emergent property of social identity processes in salient groups, rather than a static personality attribute.

Leader Behavior

Generally speaking, the more prototypical a group member is, the more strongly they identify with the group and the more central the group is to self-definition. This enhanced identification among prototypical members is associated with greater investment in the group, greater embodiment of norms, stronger ingroup favoritism, fairer treatment of fellow ingroup members, and stronger promotion of the group’s goals and welfare. Thus, prototypical members are actually more likely to behave in group-serving ways that promote the ingroup. These behaviors reinforce their prototypicality and lead other group members to trust them to act in the best interest of the group, even when it appears they do not. Prototypical leaders are furnished with legitimacy and followers invest

881

their trust in them, allowing them greater leeway in their behavior. This stands in contrast to nonprototypical leaders, who need to use their behavior to establish follower trust in their group-serving intentions. Paradoxically, this greater behavioral leeway allows prototypical leaders to diverge from group norms and behave in ways that do not conform tightly to the group prototype. Thus, prototypical leaders can be more innovative and transformational, experimenting with new directions for the group and serving as effective change agents. Entrepreneurs of Identity

Highly prototypical leaders are well-positioned to guide the future of the group and to maintain their leadership position. Because they are trusted, given leeway to be innovative, and invested with charisma, prototypical leaders often serve as “entrepreneurs of identity” who can actively construct or shift perceptions of the group prototype and thus the group’s identity. Prototypical leaders have a unique ability to define who the group is and what it stands for. With this ability, prototypical leaders can also actively manage their own prototypicality. Prototypical leaders may redefine the group or modify the group’s prototype in order to make themselves appear more prototypical than they really are. There are many strategies, both rhetorical and behavioral, that prototypical leaders may use to shape the group’s identity and manage their own prototypicality. These strategies may include emphasizing their own prototypicality and/or de-emphasizing aspects of themselves that are nonprototypical, identifying and marginalizing ingroup deviants, casting opposing leader candidates as nonprototypical, or selectively invoking outgroup comparison groups that best enhance their own prototypicality. Leaders may also raise or lower the salience of the group. As group membership becomes increasingly salient, leader evaluations increasingly depend on prototypicality. However, when salience is low, prototypicality is a less important consideration and other factors will be more impactful. For prototypical leaders, raising the

882

Social Identity Theory

group’s salience or increasing members’ identification with the group enhances the leadership benefits of prototypicality, whereas for nonprototypical leaders, lowering group salience and weakening group identification can protect against the leadership pitfalls of being nonprototypical.

Social Identity Research and New Developments The social identity theory of leadership was originally developed in the late 1990s and first formally published in 2001. Since its inception, the theory has been extensively tested, conceptually extended, and has motivated novel areas of research. Twenty years of empirical research has supported the key premise of the social identity theory of leadership, that as group membership becomes salient and an important basis of self-conception, group prototypical leaders are evaluated more favorably than nonprototypical leaders. Early tests of the theory, in both controlled laboratory experiments and naturalistic field studies, demonstrated that as leadership evaluations more strongly hinged on group prototypicality, they were less dependent on the extent to which the leader possessed stereotypical properties of the “leader” category in general. Subsequent research added further support for the theory, demonstrating that as members identify more strongly with the group, prototypical leaders receive greater support and are perceived as more effective than less prototypical leaders or outgroup leaders. Additional research has shown that nonprototypical leaders receive more support and trust when they behave in ways that are group-oriented and demonstrate their commitment to the group. However, prototypical leaders are generally trusted to be acting in the group’s best interest, and so—unlike nonprototypical leaders— do not need to behave in overtly group-oriented ways to confirm their commitment and receive follower support. Uncertainty and Leadership

One recent development of the social identity theory of leadership is rooted in uncertainty-identity theory. In times of uncertainty, leadership becomes increasingly important, and group members often

look to leaders to provide a clear direction and reduce their uncertainty. There is a growing literature demonstrating the impact of uncertainty on leadership preference. For example, recent research has shown that uncertainty may moderate the relationship between leader prototypicality and perceived effectiveness, as well as the relationship between certain leadership styles and perceived effectiveness. Uncertainty-identity theory argues that feelings of uncertainty, especially uncertainty relevant to the self, motivate identification with social groups, and in particular, groups that are highly entitative. Highly entitative groups are especially “groupy”: they have clear boundaries, high internal homogeneity, frequent interaction, clear internal structure, common goals, and common fate. As such, entitative groups provide a clear and distinct prototype, and are especially well suited to reduce uncertainty. Research confirms that people experiencing self-uncertainty identify more strongly with highly entitative groups, and also prefer more rigidly and hierarchically structured groups. Hierarchical group structures are often associated with more directive, even autocratic, leadership, and recent research has shown that selfuncertainty can elevate support for an autocratic style of leadership. Intergroup Leadership

Intergroup relations are a topic that has long been a focus of social psychology and social identity theory, but has largely been missing from leadership research. In many cases, leaders are tasked with leading not just a single, unified group, but rather two or more subgroups with distinct and self-contained identities. In some cases, the relationship between subgroups is characterized by conflict, distrust, or discrimination, and leaders are tasked with improving intergroup relations and promoting cooperation. One intuitively appealing way to approach intergroup leadership is by crafting a superordinate or common ingroup identity. However, focusing on a common ingroup identity can blur and ignore important boundaries between identity-defining subgroups. Because groups strive to be distinct from one another, this can create an

Social Media

identity distinctiveness threat, prompting backlash such as increased intergroup hostility. Intergroup leadership theory argues that in the face of identity threat, intergroup leaders can improve subgroup relations by promoting an intergroup relational identity. An intergroup relational identity defines the self in terms of the ingroup’s relationship with one or more relevant outgroups. For example, to improve the divide between French Canadians and European Canadians, leaders could define these subgroups in terms of their essential interdependence rather than ignoring subgroup boundaries and exclusively defining everyone in terms of their shared attributes as Canadians. This strategy preserves the distinctiveness of subgroup identities and provides a sense of identity that includes the collaborative, interdependent relationship between the ingroup and outgroup. Recent research has shown that when a subgroup identity threat is present, leaders promoting an intergroup relational identity are evaluated more favorably and are better able to improve intergroup attitudes.

The Future The social identity approach has reinvigorated interest in leadership research among social psychologists, reconceptualized leadership as a fundamentally group process, and elucidated the important identity function that leaders serve for their followers. Today, the theory has been extended to consider important topics such as gender, race, and ethnicity, the dark side of leadership, social identity change and continuity, leadership under uncertainty, and intergroup leadership. The social identity theory of leadership remains an active and vibrant area of research in social psychology. Kathryn Kincaid and David E. Rast, III

883

Barreto, N. B., & Hogg, M. A. (2017). Evaluation of and support for group prototypical leaders: A metaanalysis of twenty years of empirical research. Social Influence, 12(1), 41–55. doi:10.1080/15534510.2017. 1316771 Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Platow, M. J. (2010). The new psychology of leadership: Identity, influence and power. New York, NY: Psychology Press. doi:10.4324/ 9780203833896 Hogg, M. A. (2001). A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 184–200. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0503_1 Hogg, M. A. (2007). Uncertainty-identity theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 69–126. doi:10. 1016/S0065-2601(06)39002-8 Hogg, M. A., van Knippenberg, D., & Rast III, D. E. (2012). The social identity theory of leadership: Theoretical origins, research findings, and conceptual developments. European Review of Social Psychology, 23(1), 258–304. doi:10.1080/10463283. 2012.741134 Rast, D. E. III (2015). Leadership in times of uncertainty: Recent findings, debates, and potential future research directions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9, 133–145. doi:10.1111/spc3.12163 Rast, D. E., Hogg, M. A., & van Knippenberg, D. (2018). Intergroup leadership across distinct subgroups and identities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(7), 1090–1103. doi:10.1177/ 0146167218757466 Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford: Blackwell. van Knippenberg, D. (2011). Embodying who we are: Leader group prototypicality and leadership effectiveness. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(6), 1078–1091. doi:10. 1016/j.leaqua.2011.09.004

See also Charismatic Leadership; Group Processes; Intergroup Processes; Social Identities

Further Readings

SOCIAL MEDIA

Abrams, D., Randsley de Moura, G., Marques, J. M., & Hutchison, P. (2008). Innovation credit: When can leaders oppose their group’s norms? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 662–678. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.95.3.662

Technological advances have transformed the ways in which leaders communicate, and social media is a major part of the technology landscape. Leaders must navigate social media in order to

884

Social Media

stay relevant and strengthen relationships with consumers, customers, and employees. Studies have demonstrated that leaders’ use of social media can help them to engender trust, build brand engagement, foster employee commitment, and safeguard reputation management. The potential impact that leaders possess through social media platforms given their position as well as global reach has redefined leadership in the 21st century. Social media is a collection of software-based digital technologies, typically in the form of applications (apps) and websites, that enable users to share content or information over some type of online social network. Users engage in asynchronous and synchronous forms of information transmission and communication predominantly through images, videos, and texts. Major platforms and apps include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. Social media enables quick and effective communication and information exchange. Approximately seven in 10 Americans report using some kind of social media site, though specific type of platform and app usage differs with age. Most users report visiting social media sites daily or multiple times a day. According to Statista 2021 statistics, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook have anywhere from 730 to 2,900 million active global users. Social media and related technologies have been adopted by businesses widely, including manufacturing, education, healthcare, and government. The majority of CEOs are present on social media and leaders are increasingly dependent on social media to convey their messages, attract consumers, market products, and manage their own reputations as well as their business. According to the social media platform Eclincher, all of the world’s major brands are now active on social media, with GoPro, Nike, and Spotify as some of the leaders. These brands had followers ranging from 7 to 95 million in 2021, depending on the particular platform or app. Leaders’ strategic use of social media is key to affecting the perceived credibility and authenticity of them as well as the companies they represent. Successful companies constantly create and distribute new information and quickly apply it to

new technologies. Knowing which apps and platforms to engage in, types of content creations (e.g., posts, status updates, videos, blogs) to utilize, frequency of engagement, and ultimate goals for social media are important considerations. This entry describes different ways in which corporate leaders can utilize social media, provides some pitfalls to avoid, explains how to manage generational gaps caused by social media understanding and usage, and provides future implications of leaders’ social media usage.

Who Is a Leader? The notion of who is considered a leader has expanded with technological advances and social media in particular. Conceptualizations of who is a leader are no longer confined to an individual with topic-related credentials, a particular position, or specific location. Communication networks have become democratized, enabling anyone with a cell phone or internet connection to express their opinions or ideas. In today’s social media landscape, influence is often defined by views, likes, comments, follows, and shares, and some researchers have defined leaders as those with high PageRank values. In this case, leaders can be individual users, groups, or organizations (e.g., World Health Organization).

Differences in Social Media Use Leaders differ in their use of social media. For example, some use it as a way of information processing and others to exert social influence, or both. Some leaders engage in reciprocal exchanges and others in nonreciprocal exchanges. While many people view social media as a necessary aspect of leading, leaders differ in their perspective with regard to purpose and the most effective ways to utilize social media platforms and apps. Leaders’ style, personality, culture, and generational status influence their view and use of social media. Different engagement patterns have been identified as it relates to a leader’s social media use. These include the use of social media for one-way spread of information to stakeholders; rallying stakeholders around a common vision, set of

Social Media

values, strategy, or frame of reference; exerting influence and promoting change in perceptions, attributions, or behaviors; engaging in interactive communications with stakeholders; mobilizing stakeholders toward a common goal or theme; confusing stakeholders by under- or overinforming them, and/or providing misinformation or disinformation; and working to gain attention for the company or organization. Social Media Use and Brand Identity

The number and breadth of regular social media users makes it ripe for customer engagement and brand identity. Social media facilitates communication and exchange with customers, fundamental to building trust, reputation, and loyalty. In fact, people are more likely to trust a company whose leadership team engages with social media. Relatedly, CEOs who engage with social media are perceived as better equipped to lead companies compared with their peers who don’t utilize social media. Successful leaders must be attentive to differences in consumers’ social media usage-related needs in order to build high-quality customer relationships. Consumers have transformed from passive bystanders whereby traditional media is controlled by an advertiser to active participants in the media process, whereby they actively participate in creating, consuming, and sharing information. For example, approximately 500 million tweets are created on Twitter alone every day. Brand communities or virtual customer environments (VCEs), where online communities of interest form around specific firms, brands, or products, have been established on social media platforms. These communities result in positive effects on the customer’s relationship with the product, company, and with other consumers/clients. Businesses and marketers have come to rely on VCEs as well as celebrity influencers and “microinfluencers,” that is lesser-known opinion leaders, to advertise their brands and attract consumers. Instagram celebrities, for example, post a wide variety of photos including selfies, portraits taken by others, and group photos featuring themselves in a wide array of product-related activities, such as wearing name brand clothing or dining at a

885

restaurant. In addition to helping generate brand recognition for a company, top influencers on platforms such as Instagram can make millions of dollars in income annually. Microinfluencers are often viewed as particularly credible and trustworthy relative to celebrities, as consumers view them as authentic. Social Media Use to Engage Employees

Leaders’ social media accounts are an extension of the organization and communicate an organization’s relevance to employees. Most employees report that they prefer to work for CEOs who have a media presence. Several studies have found that the use of social media significantly influenced the impact of leadership on innovation behavior by using effective learning opportunities and knowledge sharing. Performance is increased when employees share their knowledge, skills, and expertise, and social media is an effective tool to do that. In fact, social media can be used for leaders to engage in transformational leadership. Transformational leadership involves serving as a role model by gaining the trust and confidence of followers. Transformational leaders empower and motivate others through interpersonal and relational dimensions of leadership focused on consensus-building and teamwork. The challenge of the 21st century is to translate interpersonal and relational behaviors online in ways that demonstrate care and concern, inspire employees to see beyond their own self-interests for the good of the group, and encourage intellectual stimulation. Examples of ways leaders can communicate these principles online is to regularly engage with employees through posts and updates, publicly announce the professional achievements of employees, and/or send inspirational and motivational messages to colleagues in the workplace. Social Media Use and Crisis Management

Social media can be used effectively during times of reputation crisis such as a product recall or negative publicity. Leaders can use social media to rebrand their image or that of the organization. It is also an effective tool for

886

Social Media

demonstrating transparency during a difficult time by explaining a controversial decision or situation. In times of low morale or fear and confusion, such as in the case of a public health crisis or civil unrest, leaders can use social media to transmit messages that are clear, fact-based, uplifting, and forward moving. The immediacy of social media allows leaders to “get ahead” of a crisis by issuing apologies, communicating their side of the story, and moving the dialogue in a more positive direction. Social Media Use for Collective Action

Leaders have also used social media platforms to mobilize people to take action, known as digital activism. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been highly effective in facilitating social movements such as protesting against social injustice to overthrowing autocratic regimes. Other uses include mobilizing action for individuals and communities in need of social, physical, or financial assistance, or creating electronic petitions that can garner global support in a relatively limited period of time. Leaders may transform people from passive to active movement participants in part by creating a shared identity among potential sympathizers and help societies envision alternatives to the status quo. In this way, leaders use social media to unite people to work toward social change.

Leaders’ Misuse of Social Media Unfortunately, leaders can encounter pitfalls or misuse social media in a number of ways. For example, leaders may appear insensitive to particular issues or outdated in their communications. Leaders may also be too slow to respond publicly to a crisis, or engage in public arguments with followers. The use of social media by leaders to promote misinformation or disinformation has significant implications for major events and societal climate such as in the case of elections, pandemic control, and maintaining civil discourse. Posts may include distorted, exaggerated, or decontextualized information leading to mistaken conclusions and/or manipulated content (e.g., deep fakes). Social media can also be used as a platform for propaganda warfare. While integrity

and trustworthiness are qualities that have always been expected of leaders; the ethical use of apps and platforms has taken on increased significance given their global reach and transmission immediacy.

Managing Generational Differences While effective leaders have always needed skills in managing employees, online or virtual workplaces may have exacerbated intergenerational tensions. Perceived differences in the use of technology between generational groups have resulted in strains in the workplace. For example, oldergeneration workers relative to younger-generation workers are perceived to be less comfortable leveraging technology to communicate and conduct work tasks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, age-based stereotypes increased, leading to negative organizational outcomes. Leaders must understand intergenerational differences in perceptions of appropriate content and communication patterns such as the use of abbreviations, memes, and emojis/bitmojis, and help employees representing diverse age groups understand these differences at work. Leaders’ related awareness and skills may minimize workplace strife and facilitate organizational productivity.

Future Implications A number of important leadership concerns will continue to take on significance with continued technological advancements. They include the ethical use of social media, the prominence of virtual influencers, and the need for education and training around advances in digital communications. Issues of privacy, security, and trustworthiness are crucial to garnering and maintaining employee and consumer trust. Attention to accessibility in social media platforms and apps is critical to ensuring fairness and responsiveness. The ability of social media to transcend geographical barriers and limitations raises the importance of attending to cultural differences in consumers’ social media use, the ways in which messages are received and understood, as well as how trust and privacy concerns manifest given variations in regulatory policies (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union).

Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics

The use of virtual influencers, or computergenerated characters (CGIs), which can interact and engage with audiences at any time, will grow with developments in artificial intelligence. Finally, keeping up with the pace of change in digital communications will continue to be a challenge. Social media competency will require ongoing education. Competency will include understanding which platforms should be used and how to best use them, assigning responsibility for governance, and identifying metrics to measure value and potential risks. Julie R. Ancis See also Change and Leadership; Communication; Cultural Differences in Leadership Styles; E-Leadership; Virtual Leadership

Further Readings Ancis, J. R. (2017). Women and leadership. In K. Nadal (Ed.), Encyclopedia of gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Ancis, J. R. (2020). The age of cyberpsychology: An overview. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 1(1). doi:10.1037/tmb0000009 Carvill, M. (2018). Get social: Social media strategy and tactics for leaders. London: Kogan Page. Hameleers, M., & Minihold, S. (2020). Constructing discourses on (un)truthfulness: Attributions of reality, misinformation, and disinformation by politicians in a comparative social media setting. Communication Research. 009365022098276. doi:10.1177/ 0093650220982762

SPECIAL OBLIGATIONS LEADERSHIP ETHICS

AND

Most people believe that they have special moral reasons to care about their friends, family members, and the members of their communities. That is, people think that they have distinctive reasons to promote the interests of their associates and that they lack the same reasons to care about the interests of strangers. Call these distinctive reasons

887

special obligations. There are many different kinds of special obligations, such as associative duties, duties of reciprocity, and promissory obligations. This entry explores how special obligations are relevant to leadership ethics, with particular importance because they can impose moral requirements on leaders and generate new moral permissions. Yet special obligations also have limits. In particular, special obligations may fail to justify leadership behavior that harms or coerces others. As a result, special obligations have limited relevance in contexts where coercion is ubiquitous, such as politics.

A Taxonomy of Special Obligations Philosophers draw a distinction between two kinds of moral reasons. One kind of reason is agent-neutral. An agent-neutral reason is a reason that obtains for everyone. Take the reason to refrain from causing suffering. It’s plausible that everyone has reason to avoid causing suffering, although this reason can be overridden or undercut by other considerations. If so, then the reason to refrain from causing suffering is an agent-neutral one. But there is another kind of moral reason: agent-relative reasons. Agent-relative reasons are reasons that only obtain for certain agents. Suppose that Sam has promised to meet his friend Marco for lunch. Thus, Sam has a reason to meet Marco for lunch. But this reason only applies to Sam. Other people lack a reason to meet Marco for lunch in this particular instance. That means that Sam’s reason to meet Marco is an agent-relative reason. The distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons is relevant because special obligations are most naturally interpreted as agent-relative reasons, as illustrated by the lunch example. According to common sense, promises generate obligations. What Sam promises Marco to meet him for lunch, Sam acquires an obligation to meet Marco and this obligation is agentrelative. It binds only Sam. The same holds for other special obligations. Consider the special obligations that parents have to care for their children. It would normally be bizarre if a complete stranger thought that she had an obligation

888

Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics

to raise another person’s child. Instead, only certain people have this obligation, such as the child’s parents, whether biological or adoptive. But there are many different kinds of special obligations. One important kind of special obligation are associative duties. These are duties that people have to others by virtue of having a valuable relationship. One example is friendship. People have associative duties to their friends when their relationships with them have valuable properties, such as intimacy and mutual affection. Relationships between spouses or parents and children are usually understood to generate associative duties as well. Another kind of special obligation is duties of reciprocity. Roughly speaking, reciprocity is the obligation to return good for good. For example, suppose that Lisa can only attend college because a wealthy philanthropist pays for her tuition. Lisa owes this philanthropist gratitude because this person acted in a way that benefited her and Lisa accepted these benefits. Another closely related kind of special obligation is reparative duties. If a person wrongly harms someone, this person acquires a reparative duty to compensate the aggrieved party for the harm and to apologize for wrongdoing. A third kind of special obligation is what might be called voluntaristic obligations. This category includes the special obligations generated by promises and agreements. When a person agrees to perform some service for another, this person has a special obligation to perform this service because of having voluntarily agreed to do so. Let us now begin to explore how special obligations matter for leadership ethics.

Relevance and Limits of Special Obligations for Leadership Ethics Leaders and followers can have special obligations to each other. An example will illustrate this point. Suppose that Caroline is the president of a small liberal arts college. Because the college is small, Caroline is friends with many of the faculty and staff. Moreover, she works hard to benefit the college and her efforts pay off: the college’s enrollment expands and the size of the endowment increases, which allows the president to pursue

better compensation and working conditions for the faculty and staff. Also imagine that the faculty and staff have a strong sense of mission and work hard to promote the aims of the college. Finally, Caroline promises to continue to serve the college as president for at least several more years. It’s plausible that Caroline has special obligations to the members of the college, and they have special obligations to her. Caroline has valuable relationships with members of her college that are characterized by trust and respect. These valuable special relationships may generate associative duties. Caroline also benefits for college in various ways and the faculty and staff benefit her by helping to promote Caroline’s vision for the college. This pattern of mutual advantage justifies obligations of reciprocity. Furthermore, Caroline’s promise to keep serving the college community entails a promissory obligation. So, there’s nothing surprising about the claim that leaders and followers can have special obligations to one another. Moreover, these special obligations can be morally transformative: special obligations can generate new moral permissions and requirements. For instance, Caroline is morally required to act in ways that benefit her college because she has special obligations to do so. Special obligations may even override other moral obligations. Suppose that Caroline can do more good overall if she quits her job as president and becomes the director of a charity. Imagine that, if Caroline did this, she would benefit more people in need than if she continued to serve as a college president. Nonetheless, it’s plausible that her special obligations to her college community can take precedence over the moral reasons to promote a better outcome overall. Or consider a more dramatic example. Suppose that Lisa faces a terrible choice: she can either act in a way that will save the life of her own child, or the lives of two children who are strangers to her. Most people would probably say that Lisa should save the life of her own child. Normally, it’s wrong for a person to save one life when this person could have saved two lives instead. But Lisa’s special obligation to her child makes a difference. Whereas it would normally be wrong to fail to save the two strangers, Lisa’s special obligation

Special Obligations and Leadership Ethics

makes this permissible. In this sense, special obligations can create new moral permissions. And this point generalizes to the special obligations of leaders, too. Their special obligations can transform an impermissible action into a permissible one in certain cases. However, the moral importance of special obligations has limits. Most people accept that special obligations can override positive duties, duties to assist other people and provide them with resources. Lisa’s forced choice between saving her own child and saving two strangers illustrates this point. But there are other kinds of moral obligations besides positive ones. In particular, there are negative duties, duties to refrain from harming or coercing others. Many philosophers argue that the special obligations of leaders cannot override negative duties. Consider again the college president, Caroline. Perhaps her special obligations can outweigh her positive duties to, say, benefit strangers in need. But it’s much harder to believe that Caroline could permissibly harm or coerce strangers to benefit her college. Imagine that Caroline embezzled funds from strangers in order to boost her college’s endowment. Or image, even more fantastically, that Caroline hired thugs to mug people and forcibly take their money. Almost everyone would consider this behavior to be unacceptable. This suggests that special obligations are less likely to override negative duties to refrain from harming or coercing others. According to some philosophers, the claim that negative duties generally take precedence over special obligations has important implications for the ethics of political leadership. Political leaders often wield coercive power. They can authorize coercion and force against citizens or foreigners. And, at first glance, the application of coercion violates negative duties. If political leaders use coercion to exert influence and coercion violates negative duties, then political leaders are unable to appeal to special obligations to justify state action. This doesn’t mean that it is always wrong for states to use coercion. It just means that special obligations fail to justify the application of political power. To illustrate, consider immigration restrictions. Almost all states attempt to limit the number of

889

foreigners who can immigrate and reside in their territories. Proponents of immigration restrictions argue that these laws are justified because political leaders have special obligations to protect the interests of their citizens and that they have no such duties to foreigners. Furthermore, it is argued, immigration threatens the interest of citizens because immigration lowers wages, increases unemployment, and has other negative effects on citizens. So, according to this argument, political leaders should restrict immigration. Critics of immigration restrictions point out, however, that these restrictions are coercive. States restrict immigration by authorizing immigration agents to use coercion against foreigners. In other words, when states restrict immigration, immigration agents deploy credible threats of force to deter foreigners from immigrating and to deport them. Thus, if negative duties defeat special obligations, then the special obligations of political leaders to their citizens are unable to justify immigration restrictions. Here is an analogy that the philosopher Michael Huemer gives. Suppose that Sam’s daughter needs a job. It so happens that she’s a finalist for a job that she very much wants. But there is one other candidate for the position. On the day of the interview, Sam physically restrains the other candidate and prevents him from reaching the interview. Consequently, Sam’s daughter gets the job instead. Although Sam may have a special obligation to his daughter, his actions are seriously wrong. But the same principle applies to immigration. If it is wrong to use coercion to satisfy a special obligation to one’s daughter in this case, it is unclear why it would be permissible for political leaders to use coercion to satisfy their special obligations to citizens. This conclusion can be generalized to other areas of state activity, such as trade, war, and perhaps public policy in general.

Conclusion Special obligations are an important element of moral and ethical behavior and have significant implications for leadership. Leaders can have special obligations, and these obligations can be morally transformative. But the relevance of special obligations depends on in part on the nature of

890

Sports

the organization in question. The special obligations of leaders can create new moral requirements and permissions in voluntary organizations (as in the college example). Matters are more complex in the case of coercive organizations such as a nation-state. When an organization is coercive, the special obligations of leaders may have limited moral and ethical importance. Javier S. Hidalgo See also Accountability; Altruism; Collective Responsibility; Ethical Leadership; Moral Character; Virtues

Further Readings Becker, L. C. (1990). Reciprocity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huemer, M. (2010). Is there a right to immigrate? Social Theory and Practice, 36(3), 429–461. Keller, S. (2013). Partiality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lazar, S. (2009). Debate: Do associative duties really not matter? Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(1), 90–101. Macedo, S. (2007). The moral dilemma of U.S. Immigration policy: Open borders versus social justice? In C. Swain (Ed.), Debating immigration (pp. 63–81). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. (2016). Strangers in our midst: The political philosophy of immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheffler, S. (2003). Boundaries and allegiances: Problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SPORTS Leadership in athletics, specifically intercollegiate athletics, has evolved significantly over the past several decades. Grounded in amateur athletic competition, sport within higher education has both cultivated and extolled leadership skills among its participants and coaches. But sport within this setting also expanded recklessly during the late 19th century, giving rise to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1906 to

manage competitiveness and protect the collegiate athlete from undue harm and injury. In combination with the NCAA, institutions of higher education increasingly embraced intercollegiate athletics throughout the 20th century and implemented athletic organizations to administer their sport programs. Leading and managing an intercollegiate athletics enterprise has become increasingly more complex over time. As a result, the relevant skills and competencies required to exercise leadership in athletics have expanded. Additional changes within intercollegiate athletics also emerged from modifications to the NCAA’s regulatory framework. These changes have often reflected broader societal trends that have also affected higher education as a whole. Desegregation, Title IX, social justice movements, financial sustainability, enhanced regulatory requirements, and increased media interest and scrutiny of collegiate sports have served as catalysts for change. This entry considers the key competencies required for effective leadership of a modern intercollegiate athletics department. These leadership competencies include fostering competitive excellence, providing a first-class student-athlete experience, resource generation, and adherence to principles of integrity, equity, and inclusivity.

Competitive Excellence The tradition of competitive excellence on college campuses has deep roots. An enterprise that began as somewhat informal contests between elite institutions of higher learning has evolved and developed into spectacles of high-level competitions that attract nationwide television coverage and pack stadiums with thousands of fans. Today’s version of intercollegiate athletics is a broad departure from the Harvard-Yale Regatta on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire in 1852 or the muddy pitch in New Jersey, where Princeton and Rutgers held the first intercollegiate football contest in 1869. However, the ultimate goal of competition has not changed since those days—it remains to defeat your opponent. Expectations of competitive success have become a driving force within collegiate athletics. An athletics department must have the critical elements in

Sports

place that position each of its athletic programs or teams for success against other competing institutions. This pursuit of competitive success also stands as a primary force behind a leader’s decision-making process, a process that ultimately shapes an organization’s daily operations as well as its visionary aspirations. That pursuit begins with hiring talented coaches and outstanding staff members, who must execute a program’s vision for success. Leaders within individual teams then recruit high-level athletes capable of competing successfully in their sport. Success generally results from the leadership of an effective coach with the appropriate values and techniques that fit within an institution’s mission.

Student-Athlete Experience From its inception through the current day, the NCAA has evolved reactively to external demands concerning student-athlete health and well-being, academic integrity, and competitive equity. In time, these concepts became commonly referred to as the student-athlete experience. This term has come to embrace multiple meanings for varied constituencies. These meanings coalesce around three broad categories: academics, health and personal development, and leadership. Anyone exercising leadership within contemporary collegiate sports must consider how these issues will shape the student-athlete experience and how they might align with each institution’s unique mission and governance structure. Although education has always been at the forefront of the student-athlete experience, academic standards have changed dramatically since the 1980s. Academic eligibility standards legislated by the NCAA have affected the recruitment of prospective student-athletes and their continuing eligibility after enrollment. Athletic leadership finds itself seeking a delicate balance between academics and competitiveness. Leaders are evaluated based on athletic and academic outcomes. On the fields and courts of competition, the focus is on wins and losses. In the classroom, competitive success is measured by metrics such as the Federal Graduation Rate, NCAA Academic Progress Rate, and the Graduation Success Rate.

891

The student-athlete experience also encompassed a parallel expansion concerning health and personal development. Finding its origins in the NCAA’s CHAMPS Life Skills program, this expansion aimed to prepare student-athletes for life after college, offering them educational programs from career development to leading healthy lifestyles. More recent outgrowths from this renewed emphasis upon student-athlete health have centered on well-being and mental health. The most recent growth area within the student-athlete experience concerns leadership development. Initial emphasis in this arena involved the development of impactful team captains and positive peer-to-peer interactions among teammates. However, the concept of leadership has more recently expanded to offer studentathletes a collective voice and personal agency. In a sense, student-athletes are emerging as grassroots leaders, especially with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusivity. Student-athlete advisory councils and team councils have emerged as critical infrastructure within athletic departments that provide input and ongoing communication with departmental leaders about matters that affect the student-athlete experience.

Integrity, Equity, and Inclusivity Integrity, equity, and inclusivity stand at the forefront of a leader’s decision-making process. Media scrutiny and public narrative about the failings of intercollegiate athletics programs and high-profile athletes have increased in recent years. Promoting an ethic of personal and professional integrity has become a critical cultural component for any successful athletics department. Sport can be transformative and transcendent for all individuals involved. This impact creates an obligation for leaders to guard the characterbuilding aspects of sport against the corruptive influences that sometimes permeate athletics at the highest levels. The NCAA, conferences, and universities have implemented programming to support character development and promote positive decision-making. Examples include enhanced compliance education as well as programming surrounding personal development, life skills, and leadership development.

892

Sports

The NCAA instituted sweeping changes in these three areas by implementing a national governance structure, promulgating an expansive set of regulations with attendant enforcement procedures that levy enhanced sanctions for noncompliant individuals and institutions. This structure provides an engaged national enforcement program charged with protecting the integrity of intercollegiate athletics. Athletics compliance offices now exist in athletics departments on every college campus throughout the country. Their staffing levels continue to increase to meet the growing demands to provide rules education resources while proactively working to help ensure institutional compliance with applicable rules and regulations. Intercollegiate athletics is now one of the more highly regulated areas of higher education, which is likely to continue in the coming years as institutions realize the full impact of litigation as well as state and federal legislation concerning college sports. Many institutions and the NCAA governance structure have increased opportunities aimed to promote and enhance gender equity and inclusion initiatives. These enhancements include new committees, educational opportunities, and personnel designations. The women in sports movement has also grown in recent decades. Central to this growth was the passing and enforcement of federal legislation in the form of Title IX as well as the subsequent 1989 directive that required every NCAA campus to designate a senior women’s administrator. More recently, national support for the designation of chief diversity officer positions in athletics departments are starting to appear in institutions across the country. In addition, the push for more programming in the space of equity and inclusion has placed these initiatives at the forefront of a leader’s work. These developments and attendant mechanisms are critical and designed to consider equity for all involved within intercollegiate athletics, especially those groups who have been historically under-represented within leadership positions. The model mission for sport leaders has become the creation of an inclusive intercollegiate culture in which all voices receive respect and equitable access to all opportunities. These critical values are easily expressed, but more difficult to implement

consistently. Recent emphasis on social justice and gender equity initiatives calls upon the leaders of athletics departments to advance a culture that supports a diverse student-athlete body, coaching staffs, as well as an athletic experience that reflects both tradition and emerging demographic changes. At the end of the day, a leader’s job is to ensure that winning is done the right way and to build success at the highest level. This vision is accomplished by developing a culture that supports integrity, equity, and integrity. When this is done successfully, the leader demonstrates why sport matters in our society and creates a championship way of life that transcends sport. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it is also critical for success.

Resource/Revenue Development Achieving competitive success, promoting a top student-athlete experience, and developing the infrastructure to promote equity, integrity, and fairness requires resources. At its core, it is the exercise of managing institutional resources, such as budgets, facilities, and scholarships. However, in today’s world, it is more complex and nuanced than simple financial management. Athletics leadership must execute the business functions of developing comprehensive marketing plans, securing corporate partners, and negotiating media rights and corporate sponsorships agreements. Further, revenue generation must also include broad-based philanthropic support to meet the resource needs of the department. The cultivation and support of donors, both large and small, is critical to providing the resources necessary to provide a top-level student-athlete experience, to promote student-athlete well-being, and to compete for championships. Television and media rights deals continue to have a significant impact on athletics departments. At the highest levels of the autonomy conferences, media rights agreements generate more than a billion dollars in value each year. Media rights have been the driving force behind conference realignment over the past decade and continue to drive additional changes in the years ahead, as evidenced by the impending departures of the

State Aggression

University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma from the Big 12 Conference to join the Southeastern Athletics Conference. Realignment combined with the financial disparities between institutions and conferences are pushing intercollegiate athletics in new and challenging directions. Successful leaders must have the aptitude to navigate this changing landscape and the new business considerations that arise.

Looking Ahead

893

Further Readings Burton, L. J., Kane, G. M., & Borlund, J. F. (2019). Sport leadership in the 21st century (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Hoffman, J. L. (2020). College sports and institutional values in competition: Leadership challenges. New York, NY: Routledge.

STATE AGGRESSION

Today’s version of college athletics is far more complex than it was decades ago. Regulatory and governance processes are evolving. Ongoing societal changes have resulted in more focus on the individualism of the student-athlete and social justice issues. These are all matters that would not be in the purview of the leader of an athletics department several years ago. Today, these considerations impact the management and leadership of athletics departments on a daily basis. Despite the constant change, the ultimate goal remains the same. The core purpose of intercollegiate athletics continues to be to provide a positive and robust athletic experience that supplements and supports the studentathletes’ education and personal development while providing opportunities for the student-athletes to learn key life lessons while participating in the crucible of championship competition. As we look to the years and decades ahead, we will continue to see more change in this space. Important issues such as the evolving definition of amateurism, data analytics and sports science, media consumption, litigation, and other considerations will impact the trajectory and direction of intercollegiate athletics. In order to fulfill the student-athlete centered mission and achieve their goals, leaders must have an in-depth understanding of how these issues impact their student-athletes, coaches, staff members, institutions, and the greater community. As with all competitive endeavors, the great ones will adjust, and such will continue to be the case with leadership and athletics. John P. Hardt See also Educational Leadership; Higher Education; Student Development

State aggression refers to the actions of political entities to use or authorize the use of physical force against other political entities. There is tremendous variation in state aggression throughout the international system. A relatively small number of states account for a wildly disproportionate share of global and local violence. If we assume that there is a direct causal link between aggression and violence, then the question shifts toward the causes of interstate violence, or what is more commonly referred to as war. Among the possible causes, what is the role of political leaders and leadership? This entry explores that question by identifying factors that lead to state aggression, then focuses specifically on scholars’ analyses of the causes of World War II, especially the role of aggressive leadership. Next, a discussion of the postwar turn among academics toward social rather than diplomatic and military history during the cold war period is followed by an explanation of the renewed focus in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and on the roles leaders and leadership styles s play in international relations. The entry concludes with an extended discussion of contemporary theories concerning leader attributes and the factors that shape humans’ attitudes toward conflicts and aggression.

Factors That Lead to State Aggression In part, the likelihood of interstate and civil war is shaped profoundly by the circumstances in which states or intra-state groups find themselves. Research into the fundamental causes of organized state aggression found in the rational choice

894

State Aggression

literature focuses on three core factors: (1), leaders’ disagreement about the nature of what some future war might look like; (2), the ability or inability of one or both sides and their leaders to credibly commit to some sort of negotiated agreement; and (3), whether the issues or stakes being negotiated over are at their core, sufficiently divisible to allow sincere negotiation to occur. In the war as “caused” approach, there have been as many explanations for aggression and violence as there are systematically occurring circumstances that might incentivize or discourage fighting between states. These include the balance of power between states, the level of democracy between the two or more states considered at risk of war, power concentration in the international system, arms races, and the permissive effects of gently rolling terrain consisting of solid ground.

World War II and State Aggression In the intellectual periods leading up to World War II, social scientists and, in particular, historians looked to individual state leaders when they were trying to explain a significant event or series of events or the state of the world. Among the first factors these scholars and journalists would typically turn to was the character of national, local, and state leaders—and in turn the attributes that shaped leaders’ preferences and in turn their choices. After World War II, that emphasis on leaders shifted profoundly in political science, economics, sociology, and history. The events and costs associated with World War II played a huge role in driving this shift in scholarly and analytic emphasis. In the post–war period, there emerged a view that leaders’ aggression was a key precipitating factor in the war. From this perspective, World War II was a huge, cataclysmic event that led to the deaths of more than 100 million people, and it was caused by leaders and the dangerously aggressive choices they made. Much of the analytic and normative work after the war focused on the ways or factors that would serve to constrain the seemingly aggressive tendencies of at least some states’ leaders. After World War II, with the development of nuclear weapons, unconstrained individual human aggression could either culminate the world’s

destruction or could be corralled through mutual deterrence or other institutional checks. Either way, individual leadership did not seem to matter much in a world of mutually assured destruction or one of powerful international institutions. States either had a secure second-strike capacity or they did not. States could either destroy their neighbors or not. Deterrence would succeed or fail. In the emerging world of data-driven social science, nuanced, complex notions of leadership and human aggression did not resonate as much as institutional and power-based descriptions of state behavior.

A Turn Toward Social History In another intellectual turn from the focus on the aggressive character of state leaders, historians in the post–World War II period became more interested in social history, rather than diplomatic and military history. In both Europe and the United States, in the social movements of the 1960s—the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement—sociologists saw these as the factors that mattered most in understanding as well as shaping historical arcs. These scholars chose to emphasize the power of class, mass movements, and social structures over the role those individual leaders and, in turn, individual human aggression played in those movements. Economists almost always focused on markets, not people. Political scientists show the biggest shift after World War II. Before World War II, political scientists, focusing on international relations and on the national balance of power, looked to explanations of state aggression grounded in leadership, morality, and governance. As game theory and aggregate data analysis made inroads into academia as well as government, the role of individual leaders and their personal tendencies declined in prominence and focus. With the end of the cold war and post 9/11 came a renewed focus on the role those individual leaders play in shaping the features of the international system, leaders such as the terrorist Osama Bin Laden or the U.S. President George W. Bush were seen as playing key roles in determining the apparently aggressive nature of the organizations and states they led.

State Aggression

Policymakers and much of the electorate take as a given that the life experiences of presidents, prime ministers, and other executives profoundly affect the way they will behave once in office. In the 2008 presidential election in the United States, for example, many Americans compared John McCain’s background as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war in the Vietnam War to Barack Obama’s experiences as a community organizer and law school professor to try to anticipate how those experiences would shape their behavior once in office. Somewhat surprisingly to nonacademics, most international conflict research focuses primarily on system- and state-level variables. In addition to theoretical reasons why scholars have preferred studying system- and state-level variables, those are also the variables for which the most easily available data exist.

Leader Attributes and State Aggression Regardless of academia’s evolving research focus, state leaders make their choices within a context of predictable and systematic motivations, incentives, goals, and desires—both personal and professional. A growing literature within comparative politics and international relations spotlights the attributes of national leaders and the way that variations in leadership style and ability may affect international politics. This renewed focus on leaders is precipitating a renaissance of leadership studies that seeks to incorporate more effectively the “first image” into studies of international politics. Much recent work demonstrates that the aggressive behavior of leaders varies in decisive ways precisely because of their backgrounds as well as preparatory, and psychological differences between them. Individual differences in background affect relative aggression, risk taking, and competence in situations involving interstate conflict. The factors that predict leaders’ willingness to entertain high levels of policy risk, which in turn shapes states’ aggression toward their neighbors and other states, include prior military service, leader age, education, and family structure, among a host of individual factors. Some of the life experiences seem to reduce leaders’ aggression, while others enhance or exacerbate it.

895

Recently, systematic tests of “first image” variables by scholars of international relations challenges prior research that excluded consideration of leader attributes and provides a theoretical and empirical backbone for future research on leaders. Recent work in political science, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, and economics highlights the role those individual leaders play in shaping the aggressive tendencies of states and their governments.

Investigating What Affects Adult Human Behavior At the core of much of this research lies the question, what shapes adult human behavior? There is close to universal agreement among psychologists and sociologists that a combination of situational incentives, life experiences, and individuals’ genes acting alone and interactively determine the actions and choices we observe humans make. Much of human behavior results from the incentives that proximate settings provide as well as the emotional reactions these settings provoke. But as we all know, not everyone behaves the same way when put in the same situation. Differences in preferences as well as differences in individuals’ willingness to perceive and accept risk affect the aggressive or passive nature of the choices and reactions that different humans make and have in any given setting. What, then, shapes our preferences and attitudes toward risk and aggression? Again, the best research in psychology suggests that a complex interplay of genes and environment determine our individual behavior and attitudes, or what some psychologists refer to as one’s personality. For each of us, “environment” is again a complicated thing. A person’s environment means, in part, the situation at hand, but factors such as parenting, schooling, training, and other prior experiences also shape our preferences and attitudes. Research indicates that particularly intense experiences, both for younger people as well as for adults, play an important role in shaping our preferences and risk attitudes, both in periods close to these intense events, but also throughout the rest of our lives. Recent and original research in behavioral genetics shows how military

896

State Aggression

experience and combat trauma, for example, shape individuals’ behaviors later in life—and individuals’ willingness to countenance risk and violence. Early life experiences as well as inherent individual attributes powerfully affect individuals’ preferences toward the use of force against other human beings. Data on American citizens’ attitudes toward the torture of others reveals patterns in the attitudes on the use of violence among followers and citizens that parallels the views of leaders who shape their state’s policies. Most political science research on international conflict has focused on system-level variables such as the level of material power a country possesses or unit-level variables such as whether a country is a democracy and autocracy. This recent scholarship takes a different approach by drawing on psychological research as well as the civil-military relations literature to explain how the military backgrounds of leaders influence the aggressive nature of state leaders’ behavior once they enter office. By placing explanatory power at the level of leaders, this revitalized research program represents a powerful challenge to alternative models of international relations, such as the neo-realist paradigm of international politics. Prominent recent work in this area includes studies of the way the tenure of leaders influences decisions about the use of force, including the initiation and escalation of international conflict. Other recent research on the importance of leaders includes studies of the impact of leader age on international conflict, the significance of individual leaders for national growth rates, the link between leader beliefs and intervention decisions, and political assassination. This work follows on the recent calls to focus more on the relevance of leaders when studying international conflict. There are two main reasons political science scholars have tended to ignore the study of leaders: one theoretical and one practical. One reason focuses on the division of international relations theory into three segments: first, image theories focused on individual actors; second, image theories concentrated on the nation-state and domestic politics; and, third, image variables emphasized the international system. Both quantitative and qualitative scholars have generally paid greater attention to third, and more recently, second image research,

leaving first image theories of the importance of leaders uniquely under-studied. Yet this was always an assumption, not something scholars had demonstrated through in-depth analysis. The practical reason most international conflict research traditionally ignored the leader is that scholars lacked sufficient data to systematically test theories about leaders. This encouraged researchers to focus mostly on system-level or unit-level variables. With the creation of new data sets of leaders and their terms in office, scholars now have systematic data on which leaders were in office at what times. The recent turn to include individual human agency once again into systematic explanations of state aggression is not just a return to the “great man” era of historical study. Instead, this new research is building bridges between traditional international conflict research and political psychology research that suggests the theoretical argument for ignoring leaders—their assumed irrelevance—is mistaken. Some scholars have argued consistently that international relations theory generally understates the importance of leadership style in determining foreign policy goals and strategies, and, in turn, state aggression or passivism. This tendency no doubt reflects a reaction against the earlier trend in leadership studies to incorporate psychodynamic models and theories into explanations of individual behavior. While political psychologists have produced numerous studies of leaders’ aggressive tendencies, it has not been until recently that these innovations have begun to appear through the literature on state aggression. New studies linking state aggression to the leaders whose choices shape those policies rediscovers a long-ignored factor that influences international politics. This renewed focus on leaders helps explain systematic variance in state aggression variance that had been for far too long relegated to the error term. This work provides a more powerful explanation than traditional variables. Understanding leader aggressive tendencies, their willingness to accept high levels of risk, and the implications of their choices is a vital task for international relations research. Allan C. Stam

Stereotype Threat See also Leader Manipulation in Warfare; Leadership and U.S. International Relations; Political Leadership

Further Readings Best, G. (2020). How right is might? International debate about how to fight wars and how to win them, 1870–1918. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9781003105855-8 Chinkin, C., & Kaldor, M. (2017). International law and new wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316759868 Reiter, D., & Stam, A. C. (2002). Democracies at war. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/ 9781400824458 Stam, A. C. (1996). Win, lose, or draw: Domestic politics and the crucible of war. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/mpub.14373 Suganami, H. (1996). On the causes of war. Oxford. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780198273387.001.0001 Waltz, K. N. (1959). Man, the state, and war. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. N. (2010). Theory of international politics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

STEREOTYPE THREAT Individuals in leadership positions, especially those new to leadership roles, can be burdened by self-doubts about their skills, decisions, or general competence from time to time. Imagine adding to normal, albeit intermittent, self-doubt the worry for some leaders that they will fulfill a negative stereotype related to their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, age, or other social identity group. These negative stereotypes can call into question who is “qualified” to serve as a leader. Individuals who find their social category underrepresented in an organization, for instance, can experience self-doubts and feelings of inadequacy and anxiety that not only influence their effectiveness but also determine their career aspirations. Stereotype threat is defined as a threat to one’s self-concept felt when worried or anxious about fulfilling a negative stereotype about a salient social identity. Social identity refers to a

897

person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s). The concept of stereotype threat has been studied across a wide range of social identity categories and in various performance situations, including within work organizations. As applied to leadership, stereotype threat has been used to understand the experiences of underrepresented groups of leaders. Succeeding as a leader requires a unique set of skills and, equally important, confidence in those leader abilities (leadership self-efficacy), a strong identification with leadership as part of their self-identity (leader identity), and the motivation to take on the leadership position (motivation to lead). Capable leaders from underrepresented groups may not exhibit the confidence or hold the strong leader identity of the dominant groups, and therefore, miss opportunities for career advancement. This entry reviews the causes of stereotype threat for those in leadership positions, the consequences of that perceived threat, and the ameliorating factors that help reduce both causes and consequences. Stereotypes describe the widely held and often oversimplified images or ideas of a particular type of person. These are often used as cognitive shortcuts to judge or anticipate how others might behave. Although many are familiar with the limitations of evaluating an individual based on their social category, stereotyped thinking can lead to prejudicial judgments of an individual with a particular focus on the negative characteristics of their group. Negative stereotypes about one’s social category are well known and weigh heavily on people’s mind when entering a situation such as school or work where their social category is not equally represented. For example, women who were the first in many professions experienced intense feelings of stereotype threat. As Ruth Bader Ginsberg noted on her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court: It’s almost like being back in law school in 1956, when there were nine of us in a class of over 500, so that meant most sections had just two women, and you felt that every eye was on you. Every time you went to answer a question, you were answering for your entire sex. It may not have

898

Stereotype Threat

been true, but certainly you felt that way. You were different and the object of curiosity. (Quoted in Bazelon, 2009, n.p.)

The original research on stereotype threat found that the mere reminder of Black students’ social identity by the request for race/ethnicity category during standardized testing caused reductions in test performance compared to those students not reminded of their social identity. For individuals from minority groups in leadership positions, stakes are also high. In addition to negative stereotypes that are applied to their expected behavior, those individuals may have to be constantly vigilant to ensure that they do not fulfill negative stereotypes about their social identity.

Antecedents of Stereotype Threat for Underrepresented Leaders Although research on stereotype threat for leaders has focused primarily on women in leadership roles, some research has focused on other social groups having negative stereotypes about their leadership abilities. Across these different groups, there are common sources of stereotype threat and common reactions resulting from the fear of being judged according to a negative stereotype. For leaders with intersectional social identities, stereotype threat can come from more than one direction. The source of the threat (self or others) and target of the threat (self or group) combine to create specific forms of threat. A minority may interpret their lack of representation in leadership roles across a profession, organization, or workgroup as based on a feature of their social identity group that actually makes them unsuitable for leadership. Alternatively, being in the numerical minority often strengthens the salience of stereotypes and results in increased, even harmful, self-focus. Perceived token status can actively cause a minority group member to question whether they have been hired or promoted to a leadership role based on their capabilities or to give the appearance of fairness in an organization. Research on diversity hires has shown that this designation, whether true or perceived, can

negatively affect individuals’ confidence. In addition, leaders representing numerical minorities often face unrealistic expectations to serve as role models and mentors for others. Although minority group role models can help lessen the adverse effects of numerical minority status, the role models are often asked to spend relatively more time mentoring others and carry the additional burden of representing the entirety of their social identity group. Organizational culture can also serve as an ongoing source of threat. Exclusion by the dominant groups of those in the minority can become embedded in an organization’s operations. Cultural patterns are often driven by an implicit fixed—as opposed to growth—mindset. A fixed mindset as opposed to a growth mindset suggests that hiring and promotions must put the “right people” in jobs, which is defined by their innate talent rather than develop their ability to acquire skills through training or experience. The assumption that someone is born with talent rather than assuming people can develop relevant skills may suggest that women and minority group members lack competency based on stereotypes that favor the incumbent majority. Organizational cultures can also drive toxic workplaces. Although currently women in the United States and China account for approximately 45% of gamers, the video gaming industry hires very few women. Women who do join these companies leave because of cultures that perpetuate negative gendered stereotypes of women. These “bro” cultures have faced recent lawsuits for excluding and harassing women, minorities, and LGBTQIA1 employees. Leaders of some of these organizations adopt a hyper-masculine leadership style that promotes high levels of competition with a focus on sexual conquests. Again, for those in the minority, they will find the lack of fit salient and will lower their leadership aspirations. Research on stereotype threat has investigated situations where gendered leadership stereotypes were made salient. Cues that highlighted the incongruity between “women” and “leadership” determined the extent to which a female leader might react to stereotype threat and perhaps decrease their leadership self-efficacy, that is, their

Stereotype Threat

belief in their ability to perform as a leader. The same issue arises for age or ethnic groups. In the United States, there are distinct stereotypes for ethnic/racial minority groups that determine their level of leader prototypicality. In a study of East Asian (e.g., Chinese) and South Asian (e.g., Indian) leaders it appeared that current leader behavior expectations more closely fit South Asian stereotypes and provided one explanation for different representation in leadership roles. The media can strengthen these stereotypes of leaders in general and leaders by industry. Research on women leaders who were shown gendered television commercials or print advertisements showed stereotype threat reactions. Although stereotype threat cues can be blatant, sometimes they are more subtle. For example, leadership stereotype threat can arise from repeated microaggressions in the workplace. Microaggressions are small but clear verbal, behavioral, and environmental insults to social identity groups that can remind of a negative stereotype attached to their group. For example, an often-repeated microaggression heard by Black employees and leaders is, “You are so articulate.” This statement is rarely used to refer to members of other groups. Over time, hearing this statement often reminds the individual of a strong negative stereotype of their social identity group, as it suggests it is surprising to the majority to find an articulate Black leader. Other microaggressions may remind the individual of their group’s status as a newcomer to the workplace or suggest their accomplishments seem unusual for their social identity group. Repeated phrases like, “We’ve never had a woman on the executive team previously” reminds them of their minority status and perhaps unsuitability, while someone saying, “I’m all for hiring women and minority leaders as long as they are qualified” suggests it might be rare to find qualified leaders in these underrepresented groups.

Mitigating Factors and the Experienced Consequences of Stereotype Threat Stereotype threats leave leaders vulnerable to many negative consequences such as increased anxiety, self-doubt, low leadership self-efficacy, and decreased aspirations for leadership.

899

However, several factors can mitigate stereotype threat responses at the individual, group, and organizational levels. There are different methods for managing stereotype threat at the individual level. While one may increase task effort to disconfirm the threat, these actions can tax working memory and interfere with regulation and control of behavior and emotions. Furthermore, whether the individual response improves performance depends on the task and the individual’s personal resources. When a task is well learned or simple, stereotype threat might work to facilitate performance, but in situations where a task is more complex or novel, performance can decline. Research studies on women leaders showed that those with high leadership efficacy performed better under threat conditions (either as a numerical minority or after being exposed to gender-leader incongruity stereotypes). In this situation, effective leadership performance for high-efficacy individuals is a dominant response. For those new to leadership, and most likely low in efficacy, the threat decreases performance. Stereotype threat strongly influences those who identify with the domain of leadership, that is, those who see themselves as a leader (e.g., strong leader identity). Therefore, high identification can increase the risk of negative stereotype threat reactions, especially when combined with low leadership self-efficacy. An ongoing stereotype threat could cause someone to disidentify with the leadership role, especially if they feared a negative evaluation of their leadership capabilities. In one study, women low in leadership efficacy had lowered leader identity strength when they were told leadership required masculine traits. In another study, Black managers within an organization with low minority representation sought out indirect feedback or feedback that relied on ambiguous cues as a reaction to stereotype threat rather than seeking and utilizing direct feedback, which is essential for improving work performance. The fear of evaluation that might confirm a negative stereotype can drive vulnerable reactions. Many organizations have taken the lead on promoting identity safety by designing initiatives that show the value of diverse individuals to their organizational missions. Organizations may be expected to play a role in helping develop leaders

900

Strategic Leadership

who potentially may face stereotype threat in traditional organizations. Unconscious bias training focuses on the ability to recognize when we engage in stereotyped thinking. Putting in mechanisms to slow down thinking can reduce the overreliance on stereotypes. Leader development programs that alert individuals to ways to mitigate perceptions of stereotype threat will benefit individuals across social identity groups. The benefits of role models argues for increased representation for nondominant groups that can help numerical minorities succeed and reduce negative stereotypes and the associated stereotype threat. Not all stereotypes, however, are negative. Stereotype lift is the idea that certain social identities carry a positive aspect of the stereotyped group. Research has shown that there are positive outcomes when these positive aspects of a social identity are made salient. Although there is no research yet that has looked at how this might work to mitigate negative stereotypes for leaders, one encouraging note is the current focus on inclusion within organizations that underscores uniqueness and belongingness as hallmarks of high levels of inclusion. Also, in many organizations, there is an increased focus on empowered, team-based leadership across a diverse workforce. Therefore, many employees experience leadership that is less prototypically masculine. Members of underrepresented groups will gain experience that may be able to help them curate strengths to help lead diverse work teams adding to the evolving and inclusive conceptualizations of leadership.

Casad, B. J., & Bryant, W. J. (2016). Addressing stereotype threat is critical to diversity and Inclusion in Organizational Psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00008 Davies, P. G., Spencer, S. J., & Steele, C. M. (2005). Clearing the air: Identity safety moderates the effects of stereotype threat on women’s leadership aspirations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(2), 276–287. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.88.2.276 Hoyt, C. L. (2005). The role of leadership efficacy and stereotype activation in women’s identification with leadership. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 11(4), 2–14. doi:10.1177/1071791905 01100401 Inzlicht, M., & Kang, S. K. (2010). Stereotype threat spillover: How coping with threats to social identity affects aggression, eating, decision making, and attention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(3), 467–481. doi:10.1037/a0018951 Kray, L. J., & Shirako, A. (2012). Stereotype threat in organizations: An examination of its scope, triggers, and possible interventions. In M. Inzlicht, & T. Schmader (Eds.), Stereotype threat: Theory, process, and application (pp. 173–187). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780199732449.003.0011 Pennington, C. R., Heim, D. Levy, A. R., Larkin, D. T. (2016). Twenty years of stereotype threat research: A review of psychological mediators. PLoS One, 11(1). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146487 Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52(6), 613–629. doi:10.1037/0003066X.52.6.613

Susan E. Murphy See also Inclusive Leadership; Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Leadership; Leader Self-Efficacy; Leading Diversity; Women and Men as Leaders

Further Readings Armenta, B. E. (2010). Stereotype boost and stereotype threat effects: The moderating role of ethnic identification. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 16(1), 94–98. doi:10.1037/a0017564 Bazelon, E. (2009, July 7). The place of women on the Court. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/ 12ginsburg-t.html

STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP Leadership has been a concern for sages since the era of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates elevated the importance of practical wisdom or prudence as the most important virtue of a leader. For Plato, leadership was the duty of philosopher kings. Aristotle emphasized that leaders needed to possess the greatest knowledge, abilities, and virtue, as well as a deep knowledge of themselves. Strategic leadership has largely been absent from the academic literature, as has been a focus

Strategic Leadership

on leadership “of” organizations, as opposed to leadership “in” organizations. Thus, while many theories of leadership are about leadership “in” organizations, strategic leadership theories are concerned with leadership “of” organizations. As this entry explains, strategic leadership focuses on the people who have overall responsibility for the organization and includes not only the titular head of the organization but members of what is referred to as the top management team, dominant coalition, or upper echelon.

Definition of Strategic Leadership Activities often associated with strategic leadership include a wide array of functions. The creation of meaning and purpose for the organization, creation of an ethical culture, reaffirming core values and identity, making strategic decisions, and creating and communicating a vision of the future are all a part of strategic leadership. Other functions associated with strategic leadership include developing key competencies and capabilities; developing organizational structures, processes, and controls; managing multiple constituencies; and selecting and developing the next generation of leaders, all shrouded in an environment of ambiguity, complexity, and information overload. Thus, strategic leadership effectiveness is based on the leader’s capacity to learn and adapt, coupled with managerial wisdom. Based upon a review of the literature, Kimberly Boal offered the following description of strategic leadership: Strategic leadership is a series of decisions and activities, both process-oriented and substantive in nature, through which, over time, the past, the present, and the future of the organization coalesce. Strategic leadership forges a bridge between the past, the present, and the future, by reaffirming core values and identity to ensure continuity and integrity as the organization struggles with known and unknown realities and possibilities. Strategic leadership develops, focuses, and enables an organization’s structural, human, and social capital and capabilities to meet real-time opportunities and threats. Finally, strategic leadership makes sense

901

of and gives meaning to environmental turbulence and ambiguity and provides a vision and road map that allows an organization to evolve and innovate.” This definition implies that Strategic Leaders actions must take into account not only the real time issues confronting the organization but must do it in a way that preserves the organization’s identity and paves a way for future growth and success. (Boal, 2004, p. 1503)

In 2020, Medhi Samimi and colleagues conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on strategic leadership. In their review, they ask three essential questions regarding strategic leaders. What do they do? Why do they do it? How do they do it? This entry will address each of these questions as well as the question of who is the strategic leader? When do strategic leaders act? and the context in which strategic leadership takes place, all informed by the definition of strategic leadership. This entry discusses the who, what, when, where, how, and why of strategic leadership. Finally, the entry discusses the effects of strategic leadership on performance.

Who Strategic leaders are the upper echelon of managers who are responsible for the overall success and direction of the organization. The amount of discretion they enjoy will moderate the relationship between their choices and organizational outcomes, constraints, organizational factors, as well as individual differences, as reflected by demographic and personality characteristics. However, to the extent that the leader possesses discretion but does not perceive it, then the leader is likely to fail to take action. On the other hand, if leaders mistakenly believe they have discretion when they do not, then actions are likely to be met with resistance and failure. Only where there is congruence between objective and perceived discretion is success likely.

What Samimi and colleagues suggested that strategic leaders are involved in the following eight activities.

902

Strategic Leadership

Making Strategic Decisions

Motivating and Influencing

This includes innovation, acquisitions, strategic change, and diversification. However, they suggest that researchers have given little attention to indecision (lack of decision-making). Recently, Mark Meckler and Boal have addressed the consequences of failing to act, when action is called for, or solving the wrong problem. They discuss how either can lead to iatrogenic outcomes in which more harm, than good, is created.

Being a role model, establishing trust, shaping an organization’s culture, and communicating a vision of the future are all ways strategic leaders can motivate and influence organizational members. Founders of an organization typically define and shape an organization’s culture. Organizations reinforce this culture by selecting, retaining, and promoting individuals who subscribe to this culture. An example of culture influencing decision-making can be seen in a typical question employees at Disney often ask, “What would Walt do?”

Engaging With External (and Internal) Stakeholders

Strategic leaders build and manage relationship outside the firm. Strategic leaders do this to maintain organizational legitimacy and survival. Interacting with a wide range of networks, inside and outside the boundaries of the firm, the strategic leader encourages new ideas/schema to old problems as well as discovers new problems to which known or knowable shared schema can be applied. Strategic leaders are involved in maintaining survival of the firm. The activities of the strategic leader range from vision setting, storytelling, and network brokering to defending the practices of their organization. One way in which strategic leaders do this is by the elaboration of socially integrating myths. These myths infuse day-to-day behavior with long-term meaning and purpose. By understanding the stories of organizations, we can claim partial understanding of the reasons behind visible behavior. It is in the creating, telling, and retelling of key stories by strategic leaders that the past, present, and future of the organization are connected. Performing Human Resource Management Activities

Whereas strategic leaders are involved with the compensation, evaluation, and development of organization members, no activity is more important than the selection of their successor. In his book The Hero’s Farewell, Jeffrey Sonnefeld depicts various scenarios in which the way the old strategic leader chooses their successor and departs greatly influences whether the new strategic leader will, or will not, be successful.

Managing Information

Strategic leadership acts through the tagging process to influence the context and structure of agent activity. Tagging is a mechanism that facilitates the creation of aggregates by permitting agents to distinguish among each other. Tags signal to agents when interactions are possible, resulting in patterns of interactions that define boundaries among a collection of agents. Tags serve as markers (e.g., brands, symbols, protocols, etc.) that identify different agents and control the types of transactions/ interactions that are permissible. Tags shape agents into organizational structures like “departments,” “functions,” and “teams.” Overseeing Operations and Administration

Establishing the organization’s structure, putting in place procedures for monitoring organizational members performance, and ensuring organizational learning and change to adapt to a changing environment are all roles for the strategic leader. Learning and change are based upon either exploitation of core competencies or exploration for new opportunities. It is in the exploitation of core competencies that firms maintain their trajectory and identity, thus achieving stability in the mists of change. It is in the exploration for new opportunities that firms overcome the related problems of competency traps, core rigidities, or the Icarus paradox. Managing Social and Ethical Issues

Strategic leaders are involved in a variety of ethical and social issues ranging from tax avoidance

Strategic Leadership

to fraud and corporate social responsibility. To set a tone for ethical behavior, strategic leaders must be clear about their ethical expectations, putting formal and informal systems in place, making sure that the formal and informal cultures align, and ensuring that executive behavior aligns with the organization’s values and vision. Managing Conflicting Demands

Strategic leaders are also involved in reconciling conflicting goals and directions for the firm, both with respect to short-term versus long-term goals, and exploration versus exploitation. Beyond simply processing different forms of information, the dissemination of that information flow is also critically important since knowledge and learning are distributed throughout the organization. Learning in the organization is influenced by its absorptive capacity and the level of procedural and transactive memory (the mastery of organizational routines and an awareness of the range of knowledge available, its location, and who possesses it) among members.

When Strategic leadership is most needed among those organizations, and in those periods of organizational life, where there is most freedom from the determination of decisions by technical goals and methods. In other words, timing matters. When a leader makes a decision or takes an action is as important as what decision is made or action taken. This contention is reflected in the notion of Kairos time, which involves making a crucial decision at the right time. Wisdom is the key to obtaining competitive advantage from organizational learning and knowledge, and that wisdom is therefore a key strategic resource. Developing the organization’s capacity to learn from its past, adapt to its present, and envision and create the future is a key undertaking of strategic leadership. This requires a capacity for strategic recognition on the part of leaders at the strategic apex. Strategic leaders in their roles as designers, stewards, and teachers must value learning and become experts at learning in the context of their organization. This requires

903

openness, lack of bias, and the ability to reflect on experiences from multiple perspectives.

How Strategic leaders can also carry their own tags that reform the interactions among other agents and transform the activity of the entire organization (acting as a sort of “traffic cop”), disseminating information, spreading new tags, and potentially recreating the entire organizational architecture. These new interaction patterns and activity flows leverage existing agent capabilities into new organizational properties, such as novel behaviors directed at finding new resources. Strategic leader agents may cause further differentiation among groups of agents resulting in new capabilities, or they may modify previous boundary definitions.

Why Research on why strategic leaders do what they do tend to focus on individual characteristics or group characteristics. In a sense, they focused on why strategic leader do, not from an organizational sense, but from a personal sense. They found that research suggests that personality characteristics (e.g., narcissism. hubris, risk-taking propensity, as well as personality attributes as measured by the Big Five personality traits), managerial cognition, charisma, power and motivation, and managerial knowledge, skills, and abilities have been all been used as explanations of strategic leadership behavior at the individual level. At the group level, they find the diversity of the top management team (e.g., heterogeneity, educational background, functional background, nationality differences) has been used to help fill in the missing processual holes in strategic leadership theory in general, and establishing clear links to absorptive capacity, capacity to change, and managerial wisdom in particular.

The Role of Context The world of strategic leadership, in particular, is dramatically changing. A new context is emerging, and this emerging context influences the why of strategic leadership. This world is characterized in

904

Student Development

a high-velocity environment where globalization and constant changes in technology are the rule, such that the strategic leader is motivated to adapt or die. Thus, this world is often described as a complex adaptive system. In complex adaptive systems, what challenges do strategic leaders face? First, they face stimulating and then channeling emergence, where emergence is some activity occurring that is not induced by the environment, but instead results from the interdependence of system components. Dealing with these challenges is enabled by linking the past (who we are), present (what we do), and future (where do we want to go). In a sea of turbulence, leaders need to provide meaning in a conventional way by interpretations of the past, which articulate the values, beliefs, and identity of the organizational subunit consistent with the organization’s values, beliefs, and identity. In the present, they need to strike a balance among the sub-units’ core competencies to exploit the present while also encouraging learning and innovation in the face of competition and unknown possibilities. At the same time, by framing current actions and linkages with desired futures, they need to choose among competing alternatives, presented to them by middle-level management, to foster, develop, and enable growth and evolution. They need to lead both directly via interpersonal influence and indirectly via alterations of systemic components, such as formal programs, management systems, or aspects of formal structure.

Performance Finally, it is important to ask what are the relevant outcomes of strategic leadership? There seems to be no agreement on this issue. Initially, upper-echelon theory suggested that organizational performance, defined in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and stakeholder’s needs, were the proper dependent variables. At the organizational level of analysis, this is operationalized as return on equity (ROE), return on investment (ROI), return on assets (ROA), sales, etc. More recently, researchers have focused on the ideas emerging from The balanced scorecard, emphasizing issues pertaining to creating wealth and ensuring core competencies but considering both shareholders and customers view,

and the triple bottom line putting emphasis on people (both inside and outside the organization), and planet (the ecological impact of the organization) as well as profits. Kimberly B. Boal See also Big Five Personality Traits; Organizational Leadership

Further Readings Boal, K. B. (2004). Strategic leadership. In G. R. Goethals, G. J. Sorenson, & J. M. Burns (Eds.), Encyclopedia of leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap ... and others don’t. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Meckler, M., & Boal, K. (2020). Decision errors, organizational latrogenesis and error of the 7th kind. Academy of Management Perspectives. doi:10.5465/ amp.2017.0144 Samimi, M., Corrtes, A. F., Anderson, M., & Herrmann, P. (2020, January 17). What is strategic leadership? Developing a framework for future research. Business Leadership Quarterly. Sonnennfeld, J. (1991). The hero’s farewell? What happens when CEOs retire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

STUDENT DEVELOPMENT Student development is a commonly used term to refer to the degree to which traditionally aged college students grow, change, and become more complex during their undergraduate years. Student development is relevant to leadership in that students grow and change throughout their college students in ways that enhance their ability to perform and understand leadership principles and actions. This entry focuses on describing how student development can be fostered, using the ideas of the field’s most prominent student developmental theorist, Nevitt Sanford. Although Sanford formulated his ideas in the 20th century, his theories and principles of student development remain relevant today.

Student Development

Nevitt Sanford’s Life Influences To best understand Sanford’s perspectives on student development, it is important to consider the details of his upbringing, his professional life, and the zeitgeist of his era. He was born in 1909 and died in 1995. His father and grandfather were both Baptist ministers. He attended college at the University of Richmond, received his master’s degree from Columbia University, and earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. Sanford’s early career was spent as a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1940. In 1943, he was offered a $500 grant to study anti-Semitism at Berkeley, an opportunity he relished, viewing it as a chance to help undermine the fascism he saw developing in Germany at the time. With the grant, he developed a scale for measuring anti-Semitism. He saw his work as being inspired by trying to understand the hatred that caused the Holocaust. His ideas led to the later research on prejudice and helped establish the emerging field of social psychology. The Authoritarian Personality

Sanford published nearly 200 scholarly articles and more than a dozen books in his career. He first gained prominence as a co-author of The Authoritarian Personality, which was a study of anti-Semitism published in 1950. His co-authors included two refugees from Nazi persecution. In The Authoritarian Personality, Sanford traced the links between children’s upbringing and their prejudice in adulthood. He showed the people who were prejudiced against one ethnic, racial, or religious group tended to be prejudiced against others as well. He wrote about how social conditions could encourage people with dogmatic biases to persecute groups they were prejudiced against. Sanford was a brave scholar who was highly principled. These attributes proved to be important in his later theorizing about student development. In 1950, he was asked to sign a loyalty oath at Berkeley to swear his allegiance to the United States and swear off any ties to communism. Though by all accounts he was not a communist, he was fired from Berkeley as one of five professors

905

who refused to sign the loyalty oath. When asked why he went to such lengths to stand on principle, Sanford noted that political tests should have no role in deciding who teaches at a university. He also noted that if professors signed loyalty oaths for unpopular opinions, this could lead down a slippery slope of forcing them to sign similar oaths for less unpopular opinions. After being fired from Berkeley, Sanford left the country and worked at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London for a year. He next joined the faculty of Vassar College, a women’s college in upstate New York. Later, in 1995, he was reinstated to Berkeley with back pay by the California Supreme Court. Sanford had left Berkeley in 1960 to become a professor at Stanford University, where he stayed for eight years. At the conclusion of those eight years, he and his wife (who missed the Berkeley area) returned to Berkeley to found The Wright Institute, which was essentially a research and think tank where Sanford could be left to his own devices. It was at The Wright Institute that Sanford transformed his thinking on authoritarian personality into his seminal work on student development in university settings.

Major Books on College Student Development Sanford wrote two major books about college student development. The first was The American College. It was based on data gathered from women at Vassar in 1962. He refined his theory in this book on the basis of his study of students at Stanford and Berkeley. His second major book was Where Colleges Fail, published in 1967. This book consisted of speeches from his book tour promoting The American College. Sanford wrote that he believed the colleges should teach and emphasize social responsibility. He argued that education should help students integrate their personality, sifting the parts of it into a coherent and more complex whole. Sanford also believed that one of the outcomes of education should be an understanding among students that they are global citizens and should take leadership roles to promote the greater good. He stressed the power of faculty–student relationships

906

Student Development

and particularly focused on the influence that a good mentor can have on a student. The focus of Sanford’s writing was on individual student development throughout the college experience. He defined development as the organization of increasing complexity in one’s personality. Such development enhances student leadership skills. Sanford was an early critic of IQ tests, arguing that they were biased in favor of a white middle class. He was also a champion of making a college education more accessible to nontraditional students and minority students. Sanford’s focus on the developmental challenges of minority students helped inform his theory of student development in general.

Sanford’s Student Development Theory Nevitt Sanford is known as the first college student development theorist. He postulated several concepts that were in accordance with his many studies of college student development that he conducted at Vassar, Berkeley, and Stanford. Six of his concepts are especially noteworthy in producing student development and promoting student leadership skills: the concepts of readiness, challenge, retreat, support, balance, and optimal mismatch. Readiness

Among the first concepts that Sanford postulated is that of readiness. That is, an individual cannot respond to certain situations in their environment until something in their body or mind reaches a tipping point, or threshold. He noted that personality development can happen when some stimulus, whether internal or environmental, acts on the person in such a way as to demand a response. Sanford noted that readiness is a necessary condition for further development but is not sufficient in and of itself.

person’s usual ways of dealing with events are inadequate to handle, thus requiring that the person try something new, thereby expanding their personality traits. Challenge itself is something that upsets the individual’s normal ways of functioning and requires a new response to the world around them. It pushes students to reach beyond their customary habits and pushes them beyond their comfort zone. Retreat

If a student faces a challenge for which they are not ready, they can respond by retreating from that challenge. Retreat happens when the challenge becomes overwhelming, the student withdraws, and ceases to develop in that context. Retreat does not necessarily signify failure, as it can be overcome with the help of significant social resources. Support

The key factor that can help students negotiate challenges and avoid retreating is that of support. Support variables uphold or sustain the student while new behaviors or attitudes are initiated. In other words, support is the stabilizing force that helps make challenge manageable. Some may be tempted to think that support should be maximized to promote as much development as possible. Not so, according to Sanford. He maintained that if the support offered is too great, it will impede challenge, resulting in stagnation, a condition in which development does not occur. In contrast, he emphasized the importance of a supportive peer group in the college student experience, noting that students are likely to leave their current institution if they don’t find a peer group that supports them. Thus, many student development professionals place a strong focus on helping students find their niche socially as a way of retaining the student at their current institution.

Challenge

Development unfolds, according to Sanford, when a person is challenged by an internal or external event in such a way that their equilibrium is upset. This challenge creates a state that the

Balancing Challenge and Support

According to Sanford, challenge and support need to be in the proper balance in order to promote development. This does not mean, however,

Sustainability

that challenge and support should be at the same level. For first-year students, an environment with more support than challenge is generally seen as favorable to development. For seniors, an environment with more challenge than support is seen as developmental. Thus, the optimal balance will vary according to each person’s developmental stage. Optimal Mismatch

In describing the proper developmental relationship between challenge and support, Sanford recommended an optimal mismatch. That is, the amount of challenge a person can handle is based on the amount and quality of support present. Generally, given the presence of adequate support, more challenge can be tolerated and be developmentally beneficial. For any particular student the optimal mismatch will vary, depending on the quality of the challenge, the extent of support provided by the environment, as well as the student’s habits and character traits. John D. Foubert Further Readings Canon, H. J. (1988). Nevitt Sanford: Gentle prophet, Jeffersonian rebel. Journal of Counseling and Development, 66(10), 451–457. Sanford, N. (1962). The American college: A psychological and social interpretation of higher learning. New York, NY: Wiley. Sanford, N. (1967). Self and society: Social change and individual development. New York, NY: Atherton Press. Sanford, N. (1968). Where colleges fail: A study of the student as a person. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

907

basic understanding of sustainability is indispensable for leaders and citizens of the world. This entry is organized into six sections: (a) origins of sustainable development in the 1987 UN Brundtland Commission Report, (b) definition of environmental, economic, and social components of sustainable development, (c) UN Sustainable Development Goals, (d) environmental sustainability from an ecological economics perspective, (e) human behavioral aspects of environmental sustainability and implications for effective management of common-pool resources, and (f) analysis of how business can meet the challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability in the 21st century.

The UN Brundtland Commission Report Since the late 1980s, sustainability has been closely aligned with the term sustainable development (SD). The origins of sustainable development can be traced to the 1987 UN Brundtland Commission Report, titled “Our Common Future.” This report stated: “. . . the ‘environment’ is where we all live; and ‘development’ is what we all do when attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable.[. . .] Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable: to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN WCED Report, 1987, p. xi). The fundamental tension in the Brundtland Commission definition stems from balancing the needs of environmental protection with the goal of advancing human welfare in current and future generations (intergenerational equity).

The Three Dimensions of Sustainability

SUSTAINABILITY The concept of sustainability can be understood in terms of three areas: environmental, economic, and social. Sustainability gained much attention following the 2015 United Nations announcement of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and the implementation of these SDGs means that a

The current understanding of SD is based on three primary dimensions: environmental, economic, and social. While the theoretical origins of this definition are unclear, some have linked this three-part model to John Elkington’s Triple Bottom Line (planet, profits, people) from the field of management, originally proposed to operationally define corporate social responsibility. These three components (environmental, economic, social) are sometimes displayed graphically as overlapping circles, with sustainability represented at the

908

Sustainability

intersection, or alternatively, as a building with three pillars as its foundation.

and norms of civility. This aspect of social sustainability is captured by the concept of social capital, introduced by sociologist James Coleman.

Environmental Sustainability

Following Robert Goodland’s 1995 analysis, environmental sustainability means that natural capital (e.g., virgin forests, clean air, fresh water) must be maintained, both in terms of providing sources (e.g., raw materials) and as sinks for waste (e.g., CO2 absorption by forests, coastal wetlands). Environmental sustainability requires that the size of the human economic system be held within the biological and physical limits of its supporting ecosystem. In terms of sources, environmental sustainability requires that renewable resources (e.g., fisheries, timber) are harvested at levels within their natural regeneration rates. For nonrenewable resources such as fossil fuels, environmental sustainability means that extraction rates must be adjusted to the rates by which renewable resource substitutes can be identified. Economic Sustainability

Goodland states that economic sustainability requires that economic capital be maintained at a stable level, according to the principle that economic activity consumes only the amount during a time period that permits capital to remain intact. An assumption of the economic pillar of SD is that the path to economic sustainability requires robust and consistent economic growth. In the international development context, the economic aspect of sustainability is often represented by a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is one operational measure of its economic welfare. Social Sustainability

Social sustainability is often defined as maintaining and improving human well-being, while taking into account societal indicators such as health, equity, inclusion, and human conflict. Additional social integration metrics can be incorporated as well. Goodland defines social sustainability as the “moral capital” of society, created and maintained by strong community participation, social institutions, shared values,

UN Sustainable Development Goals The assumption underlying this model is that SD can be achieved only by careful balancing of the needs required by the three pillars. This multidimensional view emerged gradually, beginning with the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio. The three-pillar definition is now firmly embedded in the ambitious United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which established the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. These SDGs direct UN member states to move toward sustainability in multiple domains, such as agriculture, water management/sanitation, energy, economic growth, consumption/production, ocean/marine resources, and climate change adaptation/ mitigation. The SDGs are designed to motivate action toward a sustainable future for the world. Despite the apparent consensus implied by the UN SDGs, there has been much debate among sustainability scientists and practitioners over the conceptual clarity and operational implications of the three-pillar SD model. One practical question concerns how the balancing process is to be performed to deal with potential trade-offs between the three dimensions and their relative importance weights. The three-pillar SD model provides less guidance for resolving these key implementation questions. Moreover, concern has been expressed about the conceptual separation of the closely linked economic and social dimensions. Some sustainability scholars have recommended reducing the prevailing three-part SD definition to two basic dimensions: human well-being (combining economic and social pillars) and sustainability (environmental). It has been argued that this dual-component view is more consistent with the original formulation of the Brundtland Commission Report.

Three Questions About Environmental Sustainability Since the early 1990s, scientific research on sustainability has grown dramatically, represented by the specialized fields of ecological economics and

Sustainability

sustainability science. Robert Costanza and Bernard Patten suggest there are three fundamental questions about environmental sustainability. The first question, deciding which system should be sustained, requires social and political consensus regarding the relative valuation of economic growth, the preservation of natural capital, and intergenerational fairness. A sustainable system may be defined simply as one that survives or persists. Sustainability always involves a time dimension. Thus, the second question asks how long a system can be maintained. This issue is crucial because a system cannot be sustained indefinitely. Evolutionary adaptation to changing conditions requires that nested subsystems have a proper balance of finite life spans to allow for natural selection of new alternative subsystems. The third question asks: when do we decide whether a system has actually persisted? Costanza and Patten argue that any definition of sustainability is actually only a prediction about which human actions performed today will lead to sustainability in the future. For example, the well-known practice in fisheries and forest management of determining maximum sustainable yield (MSY)—the highest amount of resources (e.g., fish catch) that can be extracted from a population over an indefinite period—is used as one definition of environmental sustainability. However, high uncertainty in the complex dynamics of an ecosystem means that we can only know whether a system is sustainable after the fact, once enough time has passed to tell if the prediction from MSY-theory has been confirmed. This reality provides the rational basis for the precautionary principle in ecosystem management: policies should not be implemented that risk unnecessary, and possibly irreversible, negative consequences for the ecosystem in the future.

Challenges in Managing Common-Pool Resources Common-pool resources (e.g., ocean fisheries, national forests) represent one of the world’s most profound challenges for sustainability. The social sciences were galvanized to study the human behavioral aspects of sustainability by Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in the journal Science.

909

Hardin illustrates his thesis with a parable about a group of herdsmen grazing their flocks of animals on a shared, open access pasture. His analysis explores a scenario where the carrying capacity of the commons—the shared resource of the pasture– is reached, dictating the maximum number of animals a defined habitat can support indefinitely (given seasonal and random variations) without degrading the environment and reducing future carrying capacity. Hardin reasons that simple cost-benefit economic analysis would lead each herdsman to add an additional animal to his private herd because the financial reward would be greater than the costs of the action, which are shared equally by all herdsmen in the form of ecological destruction of the commons from overgrazing. Thus, the collective outcome of individually rational choices by the group of herdsmen is tragedy, as the commons becomes unusable to all. Hardin was pessimistic about the world’s capacity for sustainable use of open access commons without dramatic action to control population growth and government intervention to regulate and manage access to common-pool resources. He suggested that in certain cases (e.g., national parks), government-enforced privatization may be a desirable alternative to the tragedy of the commons. Hardin described his solution as “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected” (p. 1247). Hardin’s essay raised thorny questions about the prospects for sustainable use of common-pool resources. His dire prediction was investigated systematically over the next forty years by Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her research on commons governance. Ostrom’s conclusion was that Hardin’s pessimistic prediction was wrong: Local commons can be preserved through sustainable management, at least under certain conditions. Some examples of commons studied in her field research around the world include water irrigation systems, in-shore fisheries, and groundwater aquifers. Ostrom identified a set of design principles that describe successful local governance systems for managing common-pool resources. For example, long-term sustainability is more likely in

910

Sustainability

self-organized local groups that establish clear boundary rules about who is allowed to use resources from the commons and who is excluded, assign costs to users proportional to their benefits from resource use, and participate actively in designing and enforcing their own access and use rules, including sanctions for rule violations. Such design principles demand active and frequent communication among users within the local governance system. It should be noted that there is compelling evidence for Hardin’s tragedy of the commons in one special case: numerous species have been extinguished from overfishing in large, unregulated, open access ocean fisheries with heterogeneous user groups.

Sustainability in Business While Ostrom’s research provides cause for optimism regarding local governance solutions, there is the unresolved question of whether business can successfully transform itself to meet the sustainability challenges of the 21st century. A prescient 1993 book by Paul Hawken, titled The Ecology of Commerce, presented a clear vision of why and how this transition can happen. His provocative thesis was that business organizations must reinvent themselves to a create a restorative, circular economy. Using an analogy from ecology, Hawken described the state of business as an immature system, by which too many raw materials are consumed from the environment and transformed into goods and products that create excess (and toxic) waste exported back into the natural environment. Instead, commercial succession to a mature, restorative economy must occur, where incentives motivate businesses to use fewer resources and create more innovative and efficient products with waste materials that can be recycled into new sources, creating a circular system that emulates nature. Hawken suggested that one effective incentive involves using cost/price integration via the introduction of taxes on energy (e.g., carbon tax). Cost/ price integration, however, has historically been vigorously opposed by the business community. The basic problem is that while the free-market system is highly efficient in setting prices, it is not designed to detect costs. The true external costs of

products and services associated with their actual environmental impacts (e.g., CO2 emissions) are often not captured in the prices that consumers pay. For example, gasoline prices in the United States have been substantially lower than in Europe and Asian countries. Cost/price integration has been used in a growing number of countries (e.g., Denmark, Germany, Japan) for several decades.

Climate Change Changes envisioned by Hawken have gradually taken place in business over the intervening decades, but much remains to be done. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore, in his simultaneously released 2006 book and film documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, drew worldwide attention to the urgency of addressing the global warming of the earth’s climate. There is little doubt that his call to action on climate change mitigation provided further impetus for the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is a promising sign that the nations of the world have committed to the 17 UN SDGs. However, as Goodland concludes, the world will ultimately reach a level of sustainability, by one means or the other. The critical question is what will remain of the earth’s natural resources and biodiversity for current and future generations to sustain if inaction over climate change persists. Charles D. Samuelson See also Corporate Social Responsibility; Systems Theory

Further Readings Costanza, R., & Patten, B. C. (1995). Defining and predicting sustainability. Ecological Economics, 15, 193–196. Goodland, R. (1995). The concept of environmental sustainability. Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 26, 1–24. Gore, A. (2006). An inconvenient truth. New York, NY: Rodale. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–1248. Hawken, P. (1993). The ecology of commerce: A declaration of sustainability. New York, NY: Harper Business.

Systems Thinking Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purvis, B., Mao, Y., & Robinson, D. (2019). Three pillars of sustainability: In search of conceptual origins. Sustainability Science, 14, 681–695. United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development Report. (1987). Our common future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

911

complained as recently as 2016 that, generally speaking, the field has still failed to appreciate the fact that leadership is a system. At its most basic, a system is a set of relationships with a shared function or purpose, so that one could examine the organization of both the whole and its parts as they seek some combination of preservation of the whole or “pattern integrity,” adaptation, and transcendence.

How Systems Operate

SYSTEMS THINKING A powerful framework for studying and practicing leadership goes by the name of systems thinking. After a brief history of systems thinking, this entry goes on to explain its most basic features and apply them to complex social systems, thereby indicating ways for leaders to operate more successfully and ultimately design better systems. Doing so also suggests an emerging type of research.

Origins of Systems Theory The idea of systems theory coalesced around the time of the Second World War (1939–1945), when scholars from different academic disciplines responded to the reductionist practices of the time and the misguided notion that one could optimize the parts and then, upon reassembly, the whole would perform optimally. Even among social scientists, systems thinking emerged as a way of conceptualizing these dynamics, where events fall into patterns that systems thinking could help to explain and predict. The breadth of its applicability suggests that perhaps at a fundamental level, everything is a system that participates in larger systems and also is composed of subsystems. In the 21st century, systems thinking continue to change and expand across the disciplines, becoming increasingly sophisticated. By 1992, Peter Senge, in organizational management, and Margaret Wheatley, coming from the natural sciences, both urged scholars in Leadership Studies to adopt systems thinking. A few, such as Mary Uhl-Bien, accepted the challenge with considerable success, but Barbara Kellerman

Every system operates within a context that serves as its environment, which in turn is itself a comprehensive system of greater magnitude, so that one can say that systems are nested in one another, comprising a hierarchy from the very small to the very large. The individual person participates in relationships that form an organization within an industry that contributes to the encompassing market, with global implications. Each individual system to be studied goes by the name of a holon, so that the person of the leader is a holon participating in a relationship with the follower, which in its turn is a holon, participating in a group or organization, which is also a holon. A holon that interacts with its environment is known as an open system. Across time then participants interact, resulting in patterns of behavior. Out of these behaviors, an order of some sort emerges, frequently resulting in properties none of the participants intended. These emergent properties can be good or bad, helpful or harmful, a fact which lays primary responsibility on leaders to recognize, assess, and respond to these patterns, encouraging some and discouraging others. An example of an emergent property of particular importance to leadership is organizational culture, which can be either additive or subtractive to system performance and integrity. To see the impact of such dynamics requires a holistic orientation, seeing the system as an interconnected whole and recognizing the implications of simple behaviors today on the larger system tomorrow. An open system can be depicted in stock-andflow diagrams showing what it is that enters into and then leaves the system, whether comprised of money, widgets, or fluids. The rise and fall of the stock depends on a mechanism known as feedback

912

Systems Thinking

loops, some of which stabilize the flow (negative or balancing feedback loops) and some of which amplify the flow (positive or reinforcing feedback loops). As one variable goes up or down, this influences how the system responds, with more or with less input. A simple analogy from the operation of an automobile is that balancing feedback loops is like applying the brakes, whereas reinforcing feedback loops is like pressing the accelerator. At any point in time, of course, a system will be doing both simultaneously. The question for leaders is the relative strength of each feedback loop. In most cases, the ultimate goal is to sustain a dynamic equilibrium, a steady rate of flow. Its relative success at doing so in response to change is known as a system’s resilience. Stock and flow dynamics can also be applied to what people think or feel. For example, consider the stock of good will that followers feel toward leaders. This reservoir of good will can go up or down. A leader’s misguided action, for example, can reverse the flow and drain the stock. Knowledge and ideas and emotions can be said to accumulate or dissipate over time. Leadership would appear to have some responsibility for these intangible flows. It is for this reason that one can speak of leaders as cultural engineers, managing the common symbols that give to participants a constellation of meaning. Systems thinking considers the time dimension, so that as a stock rises and falls, there will be delays before feedback loops even respond. In human systems, there will be (a) perceptual delays regarding the time it takes to notice and make sense of the situation, (b) response delays regarding the time it takes to act, and (c) delivery delays regarding the time it takes for the response to have any measurable impact. Often, leaders make decisions before delays in the system have been resolved, so that they are responding to a reality that is already changing by the time their decision takes effect. Leadership often entails shortening or lengthening these delays. The most important facets of a system’s dynamics are input, throughput, output, and feedback. Input describes the antecedent conditions at any given moment in time. Throughput describes the action that takes place. Output describes the future results of those actions.

Finally, feedback returns information back to the system about its performance. By this means, the system regulates itself.

Systems and Leadership For leadership specifically, input would be the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individual participants, the nature of their relationships with other people, the purpose they share, and the surrounding context. Throughput would be the interaction among the participants, primarily their communication and the actions they take in response to that communication. The resulting output would be observed and measured as feedback, helping to create the conditions for further leadership. This new information becomes part of the input for future behavior. It is precisely because these facets are all interacting that leaders must view the system holistically and not elementally. Systems thinking suggest a multitude of ways that a leader can influence these dynamics. Donella Meadows refers to them as leverage points of varying utility, ranging from installing buffers in order to slow things down, as one example, to reconsidering the entire purpose of the system afresh. The most basic leverage point, and often the hardest to accomplish, is transcending the mental models by which participants operate. Systems thinking is a holistic paradigm that promises to alter the way that people interact. Fortunately, a system can reach its desired outcomes in several different ways. This principle is known as equifinality, and the realization of this potential gives to leaders a variety of methods by which to achieve the system’s purpose. Two different behaviors can reach the same end. However, the principle of multifinality provides that the same behavior in two different contexts can lead to very different outcomes. The realization of this potential cautions leaders to pay close attention to initial conditions. Causation in systems is rarely as linear as stating a general precept that X results in Y. Too many other things are going on. Human systems are highly complex, open to their environment, yet bounded in part by the capacities of their participants to absorb, process, and imagine responses to a changing context. Human beings are limited by what they can

Systems Thinking

recognize, understand, and remember. This idea of bounded rationality does not prevent systems from functioning, but it does limit what they can do. Accordingly, systems that persist will learn how to work within these limits, occupying a space between (a) complete deference to external forces, such that the system has no integrity of its own, and (b) complete resistance to external forces, such that the system becomes increasingly isolated. In its management of these boundaries, a system will be called autopoietic to the extent that it is able to organize and re-organize itself across time in response to signals. Many machines cannot do this; they work or they do not work. Organisms can learn and eventually become something else. Senge recommended that social systems improve their capacity to do this by becoming learning organizations. In this way, a complex system continuously adapts. Before intervening, therefore, leaders would be advised to do two things. First, leaders must locate responsibility for taking action. Too often, leaders seek someone to blame when a majority of problems are caused by the system as a whole and not by individual participants. W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993), an important advocate for systems theory in management education, once estimated that 94% of the problems management encounters turn out to be problems with the system and not with individual participants. One must ask, therefore, where exactly is the optimal point of leverage? Second, leaders must scrutinize their mental models or implicit schemas, becoming increasingly capable of reimagining the situation and alternative responses. This includes helping others in the system to do the same. In some cases, the leader must reassert or revise the very purpose of the system itself, for in the absence of clarity about purpose, individual participants will devise their own. Consequently, the system will gradually drift. To rethink one’s purpose, however, a leader must occupy a place conceptually outside of a system in order to see it whole and also see beyond its present boundaries.

Leadership and Systems Research Research into leadership could examine the participants, their interrelationships, and their

913

organizational contexts in multilevel analysis, using archetypes of common structures for each, including stock-and-flow diagrams, with accompanying feedback loops and delays, to explain recurring patterns of behavior. Leadership is nothing if not dynamic and purposeful. Thus, students of leadership would be advised to scrutinize their own mental models, as well as identify points of leverage. At one remove, of course, they might become more intentional about studying the leadership that fosters systems thinking in other people to begin with. Using systems thinking, scholars avoid the classic agent–structure problem, which obscures the extent to which they are reciprocal. Agents influence structures and structures influence agents; they can be said to constitute one another. Research must accordingly rely on the hermeneutic circle, considering any system from alternating points of view between the parts and the whole. That means studying leadership from the perspective of each participant separately, in addition to the perspective of the relationship itself, not to mention from the encompassing perspective of its context. As a result, leadership will be treated less as an array of things or people or even discrete actions and instead as a process or flow. Here is the same difference between studying a car (a static entity) and studying traffic (an ongoing dynamic). Another result of using systems thinking is the recognition that leadership is a domain of polarities or tensions; the most adroit practitioners avoid either extreme. For example, a system must enjoy sufficient control to achieve coordination, while at the same time allowing sufficient autonomy in its subsystems. That is, from a systems point of view leadership tends toward two seemingly incompatible ideals of order and freedom. Of increasing interest for purposes of leadership research would be the point of contact between systems, the places where information flows from one system to another, not unlike port cities in geography, as well as nodes, links, and hubs in network thinking. These membranes improve learning and help systems adapt more readily in what are known as meshworks. A meshwork is a self-organizing structure that integrates diverse elements from across systems, like caravanserai in the desert, a place where systems intersect.

914

Systems Thinking

Attention to meshworks limits the risk of insular leadership in closed systems. During an era of globalization, exemplified by the internet and pandemics, these meshworks become critical to the resilience of the systems on which humanity and its civilization depend Nathan W. Harter and William Donaldson See also Actor–Network Theory; Change; Distributive Leadership; Networks and Networked Organizations

Further Readings Cabrera, D., & Cabrera, L. (2015). Systems thinking made simple: New hope for solving wicked problems. Ithaca, NY: Odyssean Press.

Deming, W. E. (2000). The new economics (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Donaldson, W. (2017). Simple complexity: A management book for the rest of us. Newburyport, MA: Morgan James Publishing. Kellerman, B. (2016). Leadership—It’s a system, not a person! Dædalus 145(3), 83–94. Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York, NY: Currency Doubleday. Uhl-Bien, M., & Marion, R. (Eds.). (2008). Complexity leadership: Conceptual foundations. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Wheatley, M. (1992). Leadership and the new science. San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler.

T Typically, the individuals don’t know each other. Each person is given a five-page account of a human relations case study that poses a problem for the group to consider and offer solutions. Each person gets the same information, but they don’t know that for sure. Thus, the first problem they face is to figure out all the data that the group as a whole actually has. Importantly, there is no group structure. They have to interact and offer a group recommendation for the organization facing the problem. The group of five knows that it is being monitored and recorded through a one-way mirror. Trained observers code actions and statements into 12 different categories continuously, approximately 15–20 times per minute. The coding categories include actions such as “Expresses Tension Release,” “Gives Information,” and “Asks for Opinion.” At the end of 45 minutes, the group dictates its recommendation into a tape recorder. The key data include not only the coded statements and behaviors of each participant, but also several questionnaire measures. The two of greatest interest are each participant’s ratings of who had the best ideas and who was best liked. In the course of several studies using this paradigm or variations, a number of hypotheses were considered and modified.

TASK AND SOCIO-EMOTIONAL LEADERSHIP Starting in the 1940s, Harvard social psychologist R. F. Bales began groundbreaking studies of interaction in small groups. His research produced influential findings on the leadership roles that emerge in unstructured problem-solving groups. One of Bales’s experimental paradigms revealed what has been called the bifurcation of leadership, whereby groups have two different kinds of leaders. One is the task leader, who makes suggestions, answers questions, expresses their opinions, and more generally urges (one might say, prods) the group to focus on its work and figure out the answers to puzzles that they are charged with solving. The other is the socio-emotional leader, who soothes rather than pushes, who jokes rather than focuses, and who reduces tension and makes peace when feelings get hurt. This entry begins by taking an in-depth look at Bales’s study. It then explores how task and socio-emotional leaderships complement each other in U.S. presidential administrations. The entry concludes by highlighting Bales’s research that, while rare, it is possible for effective leaders to utilize a combination of both approaches.

Bales’s Groundbreaking Studies on Small Groups

Explanations From the Findings

The first hypothesis was that there would be a single-status order, a variation of the Great Man

A typical Bales study involves five student participants. The students are first-year men at Harvard.

915

916

Task and Socio-Emotional Leadership

theory. That is, one person would be seen as the obvious leader and would be objectively scored as the most active and would be rated by their peers as being best liked and having the best ideas. However, the data were more complicated than that. In general, activity level and best idea ratings were highly correlated. However, the best idea person was not always best liked. Often another person, somewhat less active, who expressed agreement and reduced tension, was best liked. In one series of studies that took place over five sessions, the data showed that best idea person was also best liked less and less often, from 57% of the time at first to 9% of the time in the last session. There seemed to be something unusually difficult about taking the lead on getting the job done, that is, being the task leader, while also being wellliked, and becoming the “socio-emotional leader.” Importantly, these groups do finds ways to get their work done but also take care of people’s feelings. It’s just that the same person doesn’t always take the lead in both areas. Why not? One possibility is that the two roles—leading the group to do its work and making people feel respected and liked—are incompatible behaviors. One involves pushing, prodding, and giving orders. The other is about soothing and dealing with feelings. Perhaps it’s difficult to do both, or both at the same time, for anybody. Another related possibility is that although it is possible to both move and sooth at the same time, few people have the ability to pull off that difficult challenge. From these data the researchers developed their second hypothesis, that groups evolve a structure of two complementary leaders, who work together to accomplish the group’s goals while maintaining group cohesiveness. Outside the laboratory, there are many examples of such groups. One offered by Bales in a 1958 article reflected the dominant traditional family structure of the era. There would be a task-oriented father and a socioemotionally oriented mother, right out of the period TV series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Surveys of college students show that while that traditional division is true in some households there are many variations. Sometimes the mother rather than the father is the pushier, more task-oriented, while the dad is the soother.

Sometimes one parent is the more socio-emotional in some situations, but the roles reverse in others. It depends on the domain. One thing that often characterizes these bifurcations of leadership, just as the original research by Bales suggested, is that there is true complementarity between the two leaders, whether they be parents or leaders in other domains. They understand the division of leader labor and use it to both produce results and maintain morale. This dual leadership template can be seen in many other domains. In surveys, college students often indicate that on a team, one co-captain may be the hard-edged task leader, while the other addresses people’s anxieties and disappointments. Other data indicate that a school principal may be the gentler, emotionally oriented leader while the assistant principle is the enforcer disciplinarian, focused on getting work done. In other schools the roles may be just reverse.

Complementary Task and Socio-Emotional Leadership in U.S. Presidencies It is also easy to see this kind of bifurcation of leadership in the distinctive political structure of the United States. The United States has a president and a vice president. In recent decades the vice president has played a considerably more visible role, starting with Walter Mondale, under President Jimmy Carter, Al Gore under Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney under George W. Bush. In several administrations there seems to be a coordinated, complementary leadership structure. For example, Cheney wore the perpetual scowl and took a cold-eyed view of what America had to do to protect itself after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. President Bush was folksier, the one many people said they’d like to have a beer with. They were in essence a fairly effective good cop/bad cop duo. Roles switched in the administration that followed. President Barack Obama was a cerebral, focused task leader while Vice President Joe Biden was the president’s warmer, more empathic socioemotional complement. Time will tell whether there is a similar bifurcation in the Biden-Kamala Harris administration. The aforementioned examples raise the important question of how much the way any individual,

Task and Socio-Emotional Leadership

leader or not, behaves in a group is a reflection of role requirements on the one hand or of their personalities on the other. For example, was Biden’s manner of interacting and leading during his time as vice president more a function of the role of that office, his particular relationship with Obama, or his own personality and interpersonal style? Clearly, all of these elements are influential. The original Bales research shows, for example, that how relatively active any individual in a small group is depends on the behavior of others. A person who is naturally reticent may be looked to for more agency and leadership if others in the group are also hesitant to step forward. Or, an individual may be nudged into an unfamiliar caring role while collaborating with an assertive, focused task master. In the case of Biden, his warm, sympathetic, empathetic persona is clearly who he is, as a result of many lifetime experiences. It could be assumed that he would act similarly in his role as U.S. President.

Combining Both Types of Leadership While the intriguing hypothesis of complementary leaders seems to account for the ways leadership evolves in many situations, Bales’s later research suggests that task and emotion-oriented leadership can sometimes—rarely, perhaps—be combined. Studies in the interpersonal behavior and small group tradition suggest three independent dimensions of behavior. One Bales calls Upward versus Downward; that is, to what extent a person’s behavior is dominant and assertive versus passive. A second is Positive versus Negative; that is, is the individual agreeable and friendly, or the opposite? The third is labeled Forward versus Backward. This dimension is somewhat more complicated. Forward means that the actor is both task-oriented and is one who adheres to group norms rather than rebels or escapes from the job at hand. Backward is the opposite. Any individual person can be high, medium, or low on each of the three dimensions. They are orthogonal, meaning statistically independent. An ideal leader is likely to be Upward, Positive, and Forward, or UPF in the Bales typology. Such a person is somewhat rare. By chance, only one in 27 individuals would be high, rather than medium or

917

low, on all three dimensions. They must be capable of both focusing on the work facing the group and treating people in an agreeable and respectful way. This can be difficult, but some people manage to do it. One thinks of the best presidents in U.S. history, such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In different ways, both could be warm and even charming, but they could also push, prod, direct, and even manipulate. So, there is hope for us to combine effective task and socio-emotionally oriented leadership, but it’s not easy, and it is actually rare. Some of the research Bales reported from his early studies points the way toward such an effective if elusive combination. Those early studies considered the ratio of how much task-oriented leaders talked to how much they listened. They found that when leaders listened more, they were also better liked than when they dominated airtime and spoke more than they listened. In the groundbreaking musical Hamilton, the character Aaron Burr wisely, if cynically, in song advises Alexander Hamilton to “talk less, smile more.” That can be good advice for leaders who aspire to combine taskand socio-emotionally oriented leadership most effectively. Other research supports the idea that listening or otherwise showing respect for followers is an important element of leadership. Research by Tom Tyler and E. Allan Lind on procedural justice shows that people respect the decisions of authority more on the basis of whether the decision was made using a fair procedure than whether the decision itself benefitted them, or even seemed fair to them. There are several possible reasons for this, most important may be that if the decision is made using a fair procedure, that’s a good signal that the decision itself actually yielded a fair outcome. Also, people realize that the same authorities are likely to be handing down other judgments in the future, and it is therefore important to know whether they are making them fairly. Given that perceptions of procedural fairness are important in followers’ willingness to go along with the leader, what are the signals that people use to judge whether decision-making procedures are in fact fair? Studies show it is important for leaders to show that they respect the right of

918

Teacher Leadership

followers to express their views by being polite and showing that they consider what those followers say. Together, these various lines of research suggest how task-oriented leaders can also engender mutual respect and mutual liking, and thereby include some relationship-oriented elements to their leadership. The best leaders are those who can point the way to the successful achievement of goals while at the same time address people’s emotions and sensibilities by engaging in the behaviors noted long ago by Bales and his colleagues that socio-emotional leaders exhibit. Listening leads the list of such behaviors. George R. Goethals Further Readings Bales, R. F. (1958). Task roles and social roles in problem-solving groups. In Maccoby, E. E., Newcomb, T. M., & Hartley, E. L. (Eds.), Readings in social psychology (pp. 437–447). New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Bales, R. F. (1970). Personality and interpersonal behavior. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Messick, D. M. (2005). On the psychological exchange between leaders and followers. In D. M. Messick & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), The psychology of leadership (pp. 81–96). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tyler, T. R., & Lind, E. A. (1992). A relational model of authority in groups. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 115–191. doi:10.1016/S00652601(08)60283-X

TEACHER LEADERSHIP Larger school sizes and the increasingly more complex needs of schools and students have created the need for an enhanced American public school teacher role—the teacher-leader. In addition to regular classroom instruction, teachers find themselves fulfilling roles that might traditionally have been held by specialists or administrators. This entry explores how and why the teacher leadership role evolved and discusses the responsibilities

teacher-leaders may be expected to fill in areas such as data analysis and testing, community outreach, the learning of new technologies and curricular initiatives, and mentorship and training of other teachers. The growing complexity of the roles of today’s teachers is further complicated by the diverse demands on schools from state to state regarding varying standards, governmental oversight, and legal obligations.

The Development of the Teacher-Leader Role The concept of teacher leadership is not necessarily new in American education. It can be traced back to the earliest publicly funded schools where the title of “principal” was a shortened version of the title “principal teacher” and reserved for the most skilled veteran teacher. Since then, American public schools have grown in size and complexity, and the roles of the teacher and the school leader have increasingly diverged. As of 2022, with just under 100,000 public schools in the United States according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the diverse profiles and needs of schools necessitate diverse roles for teachers. These roles often fill needs that fall between the traditional role of the classroom teacher and that of the school administrator. Although they are typically instructional in nature, these roles require a distinct set of skills and knowledge apart from classroom instruction. Across the country, a variety of new job titles have proliferated in P–12 settings since 2000, including academic coach, instructional coach, lead teacher, department chair, reading or mathematics specialist, academic interventionist, and so on. These emerging roles required expertise that combined some elements of both traditional teachers and traditional administrator roles, but also included supervising teachers, leading colleagues in collaborative curricular efforts, developing benchmarking assessments beyond their individual classroom, and analyzing standardized test data for grade-levels, subject-specific departments and even for entire schools and school districts. Although these new roles have acted as a natural progression to traditional leadership and administrative jobs in an educator’s career

Teacher Leadership

trajectory, a growing number of teachers have found a fulfilling niche in the emerging teacher leadership job.

Data Analysis Alongside the increased emphasis on standardized testing in America, today’s teacher is increasingly expected to have data analysis skills. The growing emphasis on the data-related instructional needs of a school, including analyzing student assessment data across a school, subject area, or grade level, has created the need for distinct expertise that goes beyond the individual classroom. Another need arising out of the standardized testing era is the need for schools to develop their own school-wide benchmark tests, and re-align their curricula for teachers to accommodate ongoing changes from state and federal education authorities. Teacherleaders often take on these roles to guide the other teachers in their school in collaborative efforts to develop assessments and use assessment data to make curricular decisions.

Instructional Initiatives, Professional Training, and Community Engagement Although it is commonly understood that school principals are also instructional leaders within their schools, years may have lapsed since a school administrator has been a classroom teacher. Teacher-leaders, however, are typically active teachers who may combine classroom teaching, supporting other teachers, and working on other instructional issues as part of their daily responsibilities. School leaders may task a teacher-leader to guide a number of initiatives, particularly those related to instruction, classroom culture, the curriculum, student and parent engagement, new technology, or new pedagogical strategies. For instance, a teacher-leader may develop a curriculum event at the school for students’ families. Teacher-leaders may collect data from students and their families through surveys, analyze the data, and develop an initiative to address the issue uncovered in the survey. Because new educational technologies are emerging continuously, schools may send teacher-leaders to become trained on a new technological platform and then return to

919

their school to train the other teachers in their subject area or grade level. Schools may also purchase new curricular materials and resources and designate the teacher-leader to be trained and deliver the training to their colleagues. Public schools in the United States differ dramatically in size, but it is common for schools to range from several hundred to several thousand students. With large schools, administrators—who we often think of as the traditional leaders of the school—are charged with tasks that have morphed toward more managerial and business-oriented roles. These leadership roles involve overseeing monetary aspects of running a school, federal guidelines, accreditation, grant funding, and other higher-level elements of school operations. Over time, this shift has created a need for teachers to take on roles outside their classroom in ways that may have been considered the purview of principals and assistant principals previously. For instance, teacher-leaders may be tasked with leading Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) with groups of teachers to focus on specific issues (i.e., low test scores in a particular area school-wide). These PLCs may collaboratively analyze school data and develop and implement a plan to address the issue. Research also consistently shows the importance of school–community connection in the academic achievement of students. Teacher-leaders may lead community engagement initiatives, whether on school grounds or in the community, in order to build community buy-in, establish local sponsorships of particular initiatives, increase parental involvement, address identified family needs, or even develop school partnerships with local businesses. Although these efforts may vary dramatically across communities, they typically require the local community knowledge that a teacher can provide, and teacher-leaders may develop and implement these initiatives due to their own desire to improve community relations for the school.

Mentorship The job of today’s teacher is multifaceted and requires a unique combination of knowledge, skills, experience, dispositions, and personal

920

Team Leadership

commitment. Research has shown that teachers need mentorship, particularly in their first several years on the job, in order to successfully navigate the complexities of the profession. Schools and systems with established and comprehensive mentorship programs typically have higher retention rates of new teachers along with higher indicators of retention such as teacher satisfaction and student achievement. Teacher-leaders are tasked with mentoring new teachers and developing more robust mentorship programs schoolwide.

Compensation Teacher compensation varies dramatically across and within states. Public school teacher compensation is typically established on a pay scale that only allows for increases in pay for years of experience and advanced degrees, and teachers may have to move into an administrative role to see a substantial increase in their pay. A sizable portion of the teacher population is not interested in school administration, and some states have even found that teachers have completed traditional leadership graduate programs in order to increase their pay even when they did not desire an administrative position. The development of these teacher-leadership roles has been an effective measure to retain highly experienced and skilled educators in the school setting while also compensating them accordingly for their expertise. In some states, formal licensure pay-scale steps have been developed through the state educational agencies, yet this formal acknowledgment remains inconsistent across the country.

Geographical Differences The role of the teacher-leader is not without its challenges. Because this role is relatively new and inconsistently implemented across geographic regions of the United States, the job can look dramatically different from school to school and from state to state. Some state education systems have more effectively formalized the teacher-leader role, including formal graduate programs and statewide assessments required for concrete licensure category. Others remain unclear as to the specifics of the role and, like many other aspects of

public education in the United States, vary greatly from state to state (curriculum, testing, licensure). As acknowledgment of the importance of the teacher-leader role in contemporary schools continues, there will likely be increased acceptance of the formal aspects of the duties, responsibilities, and areas of expertise of the teacher-leader, as well as increased standardization of the compensation and licensure of the teacher-leader within the broader education profession. Bob Spires See also Bureaucracy, Educational Attainment, Educational leadership, Multiple Roles of Leaders, Servant Leadership

Further Readings Berry, B. (2019, March 25). Teacher leadership: Prospects and promises. Phi Delta Kappan. Retrieved from https://kappanonline.org/teacher-leadership-prospectspromises-berry/ Danielson, C. (2006). Teacher leadership that strengthens professional practice. ACSD. Levin, B., & Schrum, L. (2016). Every teacher a leader: Developing the needed dispositions, knowledge and skills for teacher leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Teaching Essentials. Schott, C., van Roekel, H., & Tummers, L. G. (2020). Teacher leadership: A systematic review, methodological quality assessment and conceptual framework. Educational Research Review, 31. doi:10. 1016/j.edurev.2020.100352 Stein, L. (2020). Teacher leadership: The missing factor in America’s classrooms. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 93(2), 78–84. doi:10.1080/00098655.2020.1716671

TEAM LEADERSHIP Team leadership is a critical driver of team effectiveness. Such leadership is defined as processes by single or multiple team members that provide direction and foster the collective action of two or more individuals. This form of leadership is distinguished from other leadership perspectives

Team Leadership

by its focus on facilitating the work and goals of multiple individuals working interdependently toward team goals. The team leader’s key role is to establish the conditions for effective coordination, collaboration, and synergy among members of a team. Thus, the antecedents and outcomes of team leadership are determined by their consequences for an interdependent collective rather than for individual followers or organizations as a whole. This entry first describes the two most prominent perspectives of team leadership, hierarchical team leadership and collective or shared leadership. It then defines the functions and processes utilized by effective team leaders, and their effects on emergent team states. Next, the entry explains team and task properties that influence how leaders need to lead their teams. Finally, it discusses the different forms of collective leadership and the conditions that enable its effectiveness. Research on team leadership has proceeded from two perspectives. The first reflects the traditional hierarchical arrangement of an individual team member leading and managing a team of followers. This person can hold a position of formal authority within the team or emerge as an informal leader through team members’ support. This perspective focuses on the processes and functions that team leaders employ to develop and support effective teams. A second perspective refers to shared or collective leadership, where multiple team members serve as leaders. This approach describes how different team members collectively or separately enact different leadership functions. Collective leadership is defined as an emergent property of the team, whereby, through team interactions, members develop expectations and processes for how they will enact leadership together.

The Processes and Functions of Team Leadership Research on team leadership has mainly reflected the functional leadership perspective described by Richard Hackman. This perspective argues that the team leader’s role is to perform any functional processes necessary to help the team accomplish its mission or purpose. These processes can be broadly arranged in four sets: (1) those that help the team define its direction and assess emerging

921

obstacles, (2) those that help the team execute plans and solve problems, (3) those that help the team manage its interpersonal processes, and (4) those that help team members become more skilled at collective leadership. Team direction-setting needs to align with emerging external challenges and demands. Leadership processes that facilitate such direction setting, therefore, begin with scanning the team’s environment, detecting emerging demands, and interpreting their meaning (sensemaking). Team leaders then communicate their understanding of these issues to the team (sense-giving) and facilitate a specification of what the team needs to do to accomplish its general purpose. Leaders also determine who will execute plans, including who will be involved in such actions, and how different team members will coordinate their actions. Thus, team leaders prepare the team for effective action. During the execution phase, team leaders facilitate the development of team communication protocols and foster collaborative problem-solving processes. They provide communication and feedback to the team on its operations. They also monitor team processes and outcomes to ensure the team is on the correct path. These processes reflect adaptive team leadership, where team leaders assess the actions of the team against dynamic environmental contingencies to determine if the current team path is still the best one to meet these contingencies. If teams are not making sufficient progress, they facilitate corrective adjustments and realignments. Finally, in the execution phase, team leaders ensure that team members are exerting appropriate levels of effort relative to one another on behalf of the team. Team leaders enforce performance norms that minimize social loafing and free riding in the team. These planning and action phase processes are influenced greatly by team leaders’ attention to interpersonal dynamics within the team. Team interactions are rarely without conflict. Team conflict can be constructive when it entails a strong and healthy debate about different ideas. However, more often than not, members engage in more personal disagreements that can damage the climate of the team. Another function of team leaders is to foster the enactment of more constructive (idea-focused) forms of conflict that

922

Team Leadership

can produce creative outputs for the team, while at the same time preventing factual disagreements from producing negative affect within the team. Such affect management also entails monitoring the mood of the team and intervening when team affect turns negative. A final key function of team leaders is to help team members learn and engage in collective leadership. The processes associated with this function include staffing the team with members who have leadership potential and helping these members gain leadership expertise. Team leaders do this by coaching team members to engage in situation awareness, planning, problem solving, and action monitoring as noted previously. Such coaching not only builds leadership skills for all team members but also can increase the team’s leadership efficacy, in other words, the sense that members can successfully enact leadership as a team. This points to an important emergent state within the team that can foster its long-term success.

Team Leaders and Team Emergent States So far, this entry has examined the processes that team leaders enact to facilitate team effectiveness. The effects of these processes on team outcomes are mediated or explained by their influences on various team emergent states. Emergent states refer to properties of the team that occur as a result of team interactions over time. These include shared cognitive, motivational, and affective states. Cognitive emergent states comprise shared knowledge and understanding about the team and its context. Members can develop a shared situation awareness and collective understanding of the team’s problem space. Team leaders facilitate this development by providing information about the team’s context and helping members make sense of their situational observations. Members also form a shared awareness of each other’s skills and capabilities, known as transactive memory. Such awareness can become critical in many team situations where members need to know who can address an emerging issue most effectively. Leaders can foster the formation of transactive memory by engaging the team in forms of cross-training, by directing members to communicate their expertise

to one another or directing members to shadow or observe the actions of other members. Another cognitive emergent state important for team effectiveness is a shared team interaction mental model. This refers to a shared awareness of what each member will do and in what order during a team’s execution of its action plan. Team leaders can foster shared interaction mental models by clearly communicating team action plans to members and assigning the right team members to specific roles. Practicing or simulating team action execution also builds stronger shared interaction mental models. When communicating action plans, team leaders need to include their intent (what they want team action to accomplish). The combination of a clear statement of the leader’s intent along with a strong team interaction mental model facilitates team adaptation. In such instances, when teams need to change how they are interacting because of shifting events, members can do so by realigning their actions with such events but in ways that correspond to the leader’s mission intent. Leadership processes also influence team outcomes though their effects on such emergent states as team cohesion, collective efficacy, and team trust. Cohesion refers to the strength of the commitment members have toward the team as a whole. Higher cohesion means that members are more willing to exert maximum effort on behalf of the team and its mission. When team leaders enforce performance norms to prevent social loafing or free riding by individual team members, they help increase team cohesion. Team leader behaviors that empower team members and encourage task engagement can also lead to greater team cohesion. Team leaders foster collective efficacy when they provide clear action plans to the team, coupled with empowerment strategies that encourage the team to perform well. Collective efficacy refers to the team’s confidence that, as a whole, they can accomplish their tasks and mission. Teams with higher collective efficacy will set higher performance goals, accept more difficult challenges, and persist longer in the face of such challenges. Team trust is a vital element that can facilitate the flow of team member actions and decisions, particularly in novel and extreme contexts. Team

Team Leadership

leaders can foster team trust, particularly in newly formed teams, by promoting early team communication focused on identifying the task competencies of team members and forming relationships among members. Leaders also need to set and model clear norms about members keeping their word, communicating transparently, and looking out for each other. Team leaders use these norms to establish a psychologically safe space in the team for members to offer new ideas and constructively critique existing ones.

Team Properties That Alter Required Leadership Processes Functional team leadership perspectives emphasize the importance of team leaders identifying what the team needs to accomplish its goals and removing obstacles to such accomplishment. Attributes of the team, its primary task, and its context will influence the specific functions leaders need to enact to help the team succeed. Thus, effective team leaders need to be flexible in how they lead when faced with different team challenges. Such flexibility is evident when teams are tasked with generating and implementing an innovative idea or product. Team innovation involves three distinct phases. The first is the idea generation phase in which team members offer novel ideas for possible implementation. In this phase, team leaders need to enact leadership processes that encourage idea exploration and discovery. These include empowering team members to offer new ideas, take risks, use errors as learning tools, and developing a psychologically safe space for such exploration. The second phase entails evaluation of generated ideas. Here, team members engage in dialogue and collaboration to critique emergent ideas and gain shared acceptance of the best ones. In this phase, team leaders need to use conflict management strategies to ensure that the team engages in constructive and healthy debate rather than destructive arguments when evaluating ideas. The third phase of innovation is idea implementation, in which team members execute action plans to bring ideas to fruition. In this phase, team leaders need to be more directive in their actions, ensuring the team sticks to the implementation

923

plan and monitoring how the team is completing the tasks in this plan. Leaders also regulate team progress and implement corrective actions when the team veers off expected implementation pathways. In essence, the core functions of team leaders move flexibly from openness and empowerment in the idea generation phase to more directive, structuring, and regulating in the implementation phase. The dispersion of team members can also influence the functionality of different team leadership processes. Such teams, called “virtual teams,” are those in which members do not work together in the same physical/geographical space or time frame. Interactions in such teams occur through electronic or technological channels. Team member dispersion can present a number of challenges for team interaction processes and the development of key emergent states. Accordingly, leaders of virtual teams need to expend more effort on communicating both with the team as a whole and one-on-one with team members. This can help provide more clarity in terms of team direction and planning. Frequent communication can also help develop and maintain social ties and group cohesion. Leaders of such teams also need to set clear communication protocols for the team as dispersion can reduce the quality of member interactions. During virtual team meetings, leaders need to focus on including all members to ensure engagement. Leaders also need to engage in more frequent monitoring behaviors to keep the team on task. Thus, team dispersion calls for increased leadership activities of communication, monitoring, and building cohesion and team trust. Teams that operate in extreme environments (such as in military combat, space, underwater, or in subzero temperatures) also require greater frequencies of particular functional leadership behaviors. Such environments have higher personal and collective consequences for failures and greater levels of uncertainty and complexity. Teams in extreme contexts are often at greater risk of disruption and dissolution, as members begin to focus more on personal concerns and less on teamwork. Accordingly, team leaders in such contexts need to spend more time on training such teams to endure in difficult contexts. They also need to spend more time monitoring the

924

Team Leadership

environment and communicating information about sudden shifts and emerging events. To help the team prepare for difficult contexts, team leaders need to focus more strongly on building social cohesion and trust, and closely monitoring the team for any fraying of these emergent states. Finally, in instances of shock and team trauma, functional team leadership behaviors include helping the team with emotional coping and recovery. Team tasks, member dispersion, and extreme environments are just some of the team features that can alter the functionality of particular team processes. Effective team leaders can discern these features and know how to change their leadership approaches accordingly. This reflects the core element of functional leadership theory, that leaders’ primary purpose is to facilitate the group’s achievement of its goals. Team features that pose different obstacles to team progress can require very different leadership responses, along with leadership skill in flexibly shifting across such responses.

Collective Leadership Collective leadership refers to a phenomenon in which, during a team performance episode, more than one member of a team engages in the range of leadership functions associated with setting team direction and managing collective action. This collective enactment can take several forms. First, the leadership role can rotate from one team member to another within and across team performance episodes. While in the role, that person enacts the full range of leadership functions. A second form is distributed leadership, where different team members carry out different leadership functions. For example, one member may be responsible for situation scanning and sensemaking, while another coordinates team planning. A third might represent the team to external stakeholders, while still another member may focus on motivating the team. A high degree of coordination is necessary for such distribution to be effective. A third form of collective leadership occurs when members work together to enact all of the leadership functions. Thus, through team interactions,

members collectively make sense of the team’s context, determine how the team should respond, plan accordingly, and monitor the execution of team actions. Variations of this form can include semi-hierarchical team structures where a core group of members engage in shared leadership, while the rest of the team is subordinate to the leadership team. The engagement of collective leadership in the team is an emergent property in which the capacity to do so develops from team members’ interactions with one another. Other team emergent states support the emergence of collective leadership. For example, the team needs to have a shared sense of psychological safety so the members can feel permitted to offer leadership suggestions. A sense of social support or cohesion is also needed to facilitate team members working together as leaders. Finally, members need to have the collective competence to engage in leadership and a shared sense of leadership efficacy, or the confidence that together they can successfully enact leadership. Leaders who are external to the team, or formal leaders within the team, foster the emergence of shared leadership within the team in several ways. First, they need to be comfortable with the “power sharing” that shared leadership affords. Such humility can encourage others to step forth as leaders. Second, they can coach team members on how to enact leadership functions. Such coaching can foster greater self and collective leadership efficacy. Third, they can help facilitate the team emergent states that support shared leadership. Such facilitation can help the team develop shared trust, social support, and psychological safety. Thus, shared leadership often occurs effectively within the context of supportive formal leaders. Stephen J. Zaccaro and Jessie A. Cannon See also Collective Leadership; Distributed Leadership; Group Process; Shared Leadership

Further Readings Burke, C. S., Shuffler, M. L., & Weise, C. W. (2018). Examining the behavioral and structural characteristics of team leadership in extreme environments. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39, 716–730. doi:10.1002/ job.2290

Terror Management Theory Burke, S., Stagl, K. C., Klein, C., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Halpin, S. M. (2006). What type of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 288–307. doi:10.1016/ j.leaqua.2006.02.007 Carson, J. B., Tesluk, P. E., & Marrone, J. A. (2007). Shared leadership in teams: An investigation of antecedent conditions and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1217–1234. doi:10.5465/ amj.2007.20159921 Contractor, N. S., DeChurch, L. A., Carson, J., Carter, D., & Keegan, B. (2012). The topology of collective leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 23, 994–1011. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.10.010 Day, D., Gronn, P., & Salas, E. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. The Leadership Quarterly, 15, 857–880. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2004.09.001 Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Creating conditions for great performances. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A theory of team coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30, 269–287. doi:10.5465/amr.2005.16387885 Hackman, J. R., & Walton, R. E. (1986). Leading groups in organizations. In P. S. Goodman (Ed.), Designing effective work groups (pp. 72–119). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Larson, L., & DeChurch, L. A. (2020). Leading teams in the digital age: Four perspectives on technology and what they mean for leading teams. The Leadership Quarterly, 31, 1–19. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2019. 101377 Morgeson, F. P., DeRue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2010). Leadership in teams: A functional approach to understanding leadership structures and processes. Journal of Management, 36, 5–39. doi:10.1177/ 0149206309347376 Zaccaro, S. J., Rittman, A. L., & Marks, M. A. (2002). Team leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 12(4), 451–483. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(01)00093-5

TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY According to terror management theory (TMT), the uniquely human awareness of death gives rise to potentially debilitating existential terror that is “managed” by embracing cultural worldviews that

925

confer a sense that one is a person of value in a world of meaning. People are consequently highly motivated to maintain faith in their cherished beliefs and confidence in their self-worth. In times of historical upheaval, when existential anxieties are heightened, people are more inclined to support charismatic/populist leaders who provide a psychological bulwark against existential dread. Although such leaders can be noble and elicit heroic life-enhancing behaviors by their followers, they are more likely to be despotic demagogues with malevolent intent who exploit their followers’ fears for ideological, political, and material gain. This is the psychodynamic underpinning mindless passionate devotion to leaders characteristic of fascist and totalitarian regimes that are inimical to democracy, personal growth, and social progress. This entry explores the origins of TMT and its implications for leadership.

Terror Management Theory: The Basics TMT is based on cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s interdisciplinary efforts in The Birth and Death of Meaning and The Denial of Death to delineate the motivational underpinnings of human behavior. The theory starts with the Darwinian assumption that while humans share with all forms of life a basic biological predisposition toward survival in the service of reproduction, we are unique in our sophisticated cognitive capacities: abstract symbolic thought, including language; mental “time-travel,” reflecting on the past and contemplating the future; mental simulations and prospective imagination; self-awareness; and theory of mind, the awareness of others’ internal mental states. These attributes enable us to imagine things that do not yet exist, and the audacity to transform figments of our imagination into reality. Surely such mental agility underlies humankind’s proliferation in a wide range of diverse and rapidly changing environments. Moreover, self-awareness has propitious emotional ramifications, in that knowing one is alive is often a great source of joy and spontaneous exuberance. Self-awareness in a time-traveling creature is also, however, poignantly problematic in that we recognize that, like all animate entities, our lives are of finite duration and that we can die at any

926

Terror Management Theory

moment for reasons that cannot always be anticipated or controlled, that we will die at some point, and that we are embodied animals who are no more significant or enduring than fruit flies or ferrets. Ongoing awareness of our perpetual vulnerability to, as well as the inevitability of, death engenders potentially debilitating existential terror that humans “manage” by embracing cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about reality shared by individuals in a group to acquire and maintain a sense that one is a valuable member of a meaningful universe and is thus eligible for literal and/or symbolic immortality. Literal immortality includes the heavens, souls, afterlives, and reincarnations central to many of the world’s great religions. Symbolic immortality consists of the belief that a remnant of one’s existence persists in perpetuity by, for example, having children, amassing huge fortunes, being part of a great and enduring tribe or nation, producing great works of science or art, or performing noble acts of public service. People are consequently fundamentally motivated to maintain faith in their culturally acquired belief systems and confidence in their self-worth in the service of managing existential terror and will respond defensively when their cherished cultural worldviews or self-esteem are undermined. In accord with TMT, a considerable body of research has demonstrated that making one’s mortality momentarily salient increases the need for the protection afforded by cultural worldviews and self-esteem, resulting in vigorous agreement with and affection for those who share our cherished beliefs, and equally vigorous hostility and disdain for those who are opposed to our beliefs or merely different from us, as well as efforts to bolster self-esteem. Researchers typically induce mortality salience by having people respond to two open-ended questions: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; and, “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die.” Other mortality salience manipulations include viewing graphic depictions of death; being interviewed in front of a funeral parlor; or subliminal exposure to the word “dead” or “death”; control groups are asked parallel questions about neutral or aversive but not fatal

matters such as listening to music or being in intense pain. In response to mortality salience, for example, Christian participants had more favorable reactions to fellow Christians and less favorable reactions to Jewish targets; and soldiers who derive self-esteem from their driving skills drove faster and more recklessly in a driving simulator.

Leadership and Charisma At the outset of the 20th century, sociologist Max Weber viewed leadership as a dynamic interaction between leaders and their followers, and proposed that leaders derive their authority through a combination of legal statutes, cultural traditions, and charisma. Moreover, in times of historical uncertainty, such as wars, economic instability, natural disasters, when faith in cultural traditions and legal institutions is threatened, Weber contended that people are especially prone to devotion to charismatic leaders: seemingly larger-than-life individuals who are imbued with supernatural powers and believe they are singularly capable of “saving” their followers by ridding the world of evil. Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom, subsequently described the relationship between charismatic leaders and their followers as sadomasochistic authoritarianism: submissive followers fuse their identities with a domineering leader to procure psychological security at the expense of their individuality and autonomy. Such leaders and their followers are thereafter psychologically fused and hobbled by morbid codependency. Followers are totally dependent on the whims of the leader to determine what to think and how they feel, whereas leaders are equally dependent on the constant outbursts of effusive adulation they receive, and indeed, demand, from their followers. Eric Hoffer extended this analysis in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, arguing that populist movements are generally initiated when a critical mass of economically and psychologically insecure individuals become ardently devoted to a charismatic/populist leader who infuses their lives with meaning and value by making them feel like they are valued parts of something great. Such leaders, Hoffer observed, need not be intelligent or original; rather, they can

Terror Management Theory

be characterized in terms of their audacity, fanatical conviction in their own beliefs, passionate hatred and contempt for disbelievers, arrogance, defiance, disregard for others’ opinions, and deliberate obfuscation of facts, or what Hitler famously referred to as “the big lie.” Toxic leaders’ relentless insistence on “the big lie,” Hannah Arendt emphasized in The Origins of Totalitarianism, serves to metaphorically lobotomize followers to the point where they are impervious to facts and lack the cognitive capacity to reason that would otherwise undermine confidence in such leaders, who are generally corrupt, incompetent, and unconcerned about the well-being of their constituents, and would be easily recognized as such by a dispassionate observer. Charismatic leaders, Becker added, are deft psychological alchemists who transform their followers’ death fears into rage and righteous indignation and direct it toward people designated as all-encompassing-repositories of evil who, once subdued or eradicated, will restore life to a glorious, albeit generally fictitious, golden era when life on earth was supposedly as it is purported to be in heaven.

Studies of Mortality Salience and Charismatic Leadership There is now a robust literature based on TMT research corroborating this existential account of the allure of charismatic leaders. In one study, after a mortality salience or aversive control induction, participants read campaign statements by three hypothetical gubernatorial candidates who varied in leadership style. The charismatic candidate’s statement asserted each person’s importance in a great nation, avowing that “you are not just an ordinary citizen, you are part of a special state and a special nation, and if we work together we can make a difference.” The other candidates’ statements emphasized completing tasks effectively or the need for leaders and followers to work together and accept mutual responsibility. In the control condition, the task-oriented candidate was preferred by the majority of participants, with just 4% of the respondents voting for the charismatic candidate; however, 31% of the people who were reminded of death before voting chose the charismatic candidate.

927

This general effect was subsequently replicated in a more historically-relevant fashion in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in New York City, when President George W. Bush’s popularity skyrocketed after he declared that the United States would rid the world of the “evildoers” and that he believed God had chosen him to lead the country during this perilous time. From a TMT perspective, Bush’s increased popularity resulted from the pervasive literal and symbolic reminders of death—bodies tumbling from the World Trade Center and attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center as symbols of American military and economic might, respectively— engendered by the events of 9/11. Consistent with this view, participants reminded of their mortality reported substantially greater support for the president and his Iraq policies. In a follow up study, participants were exposed to subliminal terrorism primes (the numbers 911 or the letters WTC) or subliminal control primes (numbers and letters of equivalent familiarity), followed by a word-stem completion task to assess the accessibility of nonconscious death-related thoughts; for example, COFF__ could be “coffee” or “coffin.” Results indicated greater levels of death-related thoughts for participants in the subliminal terrorism prime conditions. For Americans then, even subliminal reminders of the events of 9/11 aroused concerns about mortality. Accordingly, in a third study participants were randomly assigned to think about death, the events of 9/11, or an aversive control topic before rating President Bush and his policies in Iraq; both mortality and terrorism salience produced substantial increases in support for President Bush and his policies in Iraq. In a final study conducted five weeks before the 2004 presidential election, although control participants reported they would be voting for Senator John Kerry by a 4:1 margin, President Bush was favored by a 2.5:1 margin after a mortality salience induction. Comparable findings were obtained in 2016 when then candidate Donald Trump declared that only he could keep Americans safe from hordes of Hispanic immigrants storming the southern border, Islamic terrorists and Muslims in general, and China’s aggressive efforts to undermine the

928

Terror Management Theory

U.S. economy. Specifically, while Americans were more supportive of Hillary Clinton than of Donald Trump in a control condition, their support for Trump increased in response to a death reminder. Additional studies demonstrated that Americans asked to think about a terrorist attack, or a mosque being built in their town, or immigrants moving into their neighborhood had increased levels of non-conscious death thoughts; and, that this in turn increased their support for Trump. Similar effects demonstrating the existential underpinnings of support for toxic leaders have also been obtained in field surveys. For example, when economic uncertainty is high, increased support for overbearing and aggressive populist authoritarian leaders of dubious moral character over leaders respected and admired for their abilities and virtuous character was found in three studies with 140,000 participants in 69 countries. Additionally, in a 2017 national sample of Americans, support for then President Trump was positively correlated with authoritarian dispositions; and support for Trump was also high independent of authoritarian dispositions in local areas with elevated levels of existential threat assessed by age-adjusted county mortality rates.

TMT and the Future of Democracy The fact that arousing existential anxieties, in the laboratory and in life, makes people prone to embrace charismatic leaders with facsist inclinations has portentous implications for democracy, regardless of one’s personal political predilections. This is why the proverbial Founding Fathers of the United States were leery of political parties and apprehensive about direct elections. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned against “factions” (i.e., parties) that could foster partisan allegiances that threaten to trump the common identity necessary for maintaining social cohesion and collaboration at the national level. Political parties were also prone to being co-opted by ruthless ideological demagogues who preyed on their followers’ fear and rage to win elections in which they would not fare well if judged by rational standards by an informed electorate. The antidote to death-anxiety-driven, morbidly co-dependent sado-masochistic devotion to toxic

leaders, and a prerequisite to a functional democracy, is an educated and existentially mature public. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to advance knowledge with the explicit goal of educating leaders and cultivating informed citizens. Educated leaders with integrity would ideally distance themselves from dangerous demagogues and have the capacity for self-reflection to eschew such tendencies on their part when they arise. Citizens in a civil democratic society, informed by their education, and encouraged— that is, infused with courage—to strive for moral virtue, would ideally easily recognize and swiftly repudiate toxic leaders and have the capacity for self-reflection to eschew polarizing political partisanship when such tendencies arise. Only then can a genuine democracy emerge, where educated and informed citizens engage in spirited and civil disagreement united by an overarching commitment to a common cause and devoted to outcomes that are ideally ultimately maximally beneficial to all. Sheldon Solomon See also Charisma; Dominance and Prestige; Followership; Leader–Follower Relationships; Toxic Leadership; Weber on Charisma

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1951). The origin of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Schocken. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York, NY: Free Press. Becker, E. (1971). The birth and death of meaning; an interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Free Press. Cohen, F., Solomon, S., & Kaplin, D. (2017). You’re hired! Mortality salience increases Americans’ support for Donald Trump. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 17(1), 339–357. doi:10.1111/asap.12143 Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart. Hinckley, R. A. (2021). Local existential threat, authoritarianism, and support for right-wing populism. The Social Science Journal. doi:10.1080/03623319. 2020.1859816 Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Theater and Leadership Kakkar, H., & Sivanathan, N. (2017). When the appeal of a dominant leader is greater than a prestige leader. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(26), 6734–6739. doi:10. 1073/pnas.1617711114 Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. New York, NY: Random House. Weber, M. (1922/1947). In A. M. Henderson & Talcott Parsons (Trans.), Max Weber: The theory of social and economic organization. New York, NY: The Free Press.

THEATER

AND

LEADERSHIP

Theater is a multidisciplinary artform that is performed live in the physical presence of its audience. The theater director guides the process and is the indisputable leader of the production team. How directors lead, whether as autocrat or collaborator, and how their leadership is received depends on many factors, one of which is gender. This entry offers an overview of research on the intersection of leadership and gender in theater. For example, a written play script is often an essential component, but a script alone is not theater. Theater requires many creative components, including acting, scenic design, lighting, sound, costumes, props, movement, space, tempo, story, and the actor-audience relationship. The person on the creative team who is responsible for coordinating all of these disparate elements is the director: the director interprets the play, chooses the actors, often chooses the designers, has final approval of all design elements, shapes the physical life onstage, and serves as a surrogate audience to guide the production to opening night.

The Birth of the Director Western theater dates back nearly 3,000 years, but the theater director only emerged about 120 years ago. Prior to that, the work of staging a play was handled by the playwright in ancient Greece, the pageant master in the Middle Ages, and then by actor-managers who staged plays, based largely on

929

routine blocking patterns and stock acting conventions. The role of theater director, as we know it today, emerged in the late 19th century with George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Andr´e Antoine, among others. The impetus for this development was the seismic socio-political shifting at the time: urbanization, a rising working class, and the impact of writings by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. As long-held beliefs were overturned, new ways of understanding the world gave rise to a cascade of artistic movements (realism, naturalism, symbolism, expressionism, theatricalism), as well as the call for a poet-artist, a singular visionary whose artistic vision would unify all the disparate elements of a theater production into a cohesive whole: a total theater that would reveal the world anew and unify audiences in a transcendent communal experience. In keeping with the ideology of separate spheres, a theater director was initially designated as male. Women could act, but not direct. In response, early female pioneers resorted to creating their own theater companies in order to have opportunities to direct, as Eva Le Gallienne did with the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York in 1926. Margo Jones, Nina Vance, and Zelda Fichandler are credited with launching what would eventually become the regional theater movement after they created their respective companies: Theatre ’47 in Dallas (1947); Alley Theatre in Houston (1947); and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. (1950).

Leadership Style Given the mandate for a singular artist-visionary with total control, the leadership style employed by early directors was decidedly autocratic. Accounts describe Saxe-Meiningen as a relentless dictator controlling every detail on the stage. Edward Gordon Craig, the first person to use the term theater director, famously regarded actors as puppets. This model served as a prototype throughout much of the twentieth century, until more collaborative models started to gain prominence in the 1960s and 1970s following anti-authoritarian social protest movements, including second-wave feminism. Since the 1980s, leadership styles have varied, ranging

930

Theater and Leadership

from the auteur director on one end of the spectrum (as exemplified by director-designer Robert Wilson, who determines all aspects of a production including the actors’ every move, gesture, and utterance in strict detail by counts), to the shared leadership model employed by theater collectives ˆ like Th´eatre du Soleil in Paris and Mabou Mines in New York. Most contemporary theater directors operate somewhere in between.

Areas of Leadership Responsibility The theater director is responsible for developing the artistic vision for a production, as well as overseeing the day-to-day processes for bringing that vision to life onstage. Leadership falls into three distinct areas: work done alone in preparation, work done with the designers in advance of rehearsals, and casting the play and working with actors in rehearsal. Throughout, the director’s role is to be at the forefront of creative engagement, decision-making, facilitation, and problem-solving. The preparatory work alone requires extensive text analysis, imagining the potential meanings and resonances of the play for contemporary audiences, and developing an interpretation and artistic vision for the production. Whether for a reimagined classic, new play, devised theater piece, or musical spectacle, the director as artistic leader is expected to offer a personally meaningful interpretation of the play and articulate an original and compelling vision for its production. The work with the design team is a creative partnership where communication is paramount. Designers need to know the specifics of the director’s personal interest, passion, and vision for the play in terms that evoke striking imagery or metaphor. The director often leads through inspiration, getting the designers excited about the ideas in the play and the possibilities for performance, and by listening carefully to what each designer brings to the table. Throughout their ongoing communications, the director’s responsibility is to pay close attention to detail while simultaneously seeing the big picture, which is the total performance experience for the audience. Leadership in the rehearsal room with the actors constitutes the core of the work, and it is there that a director’s leadership style is most fully

revealed. One example would be a director who arrives at rehearsal with a predetermined plan for the scene to be worked on that day, including all the moves sketched out and notes as to how the lines should be delivered. Then, working from that plan, the director tells the actors what to do. This director tends to have all of the answers and is firmly in charge throughout the process; their authority operates in a vertical mode. Another example would be a director who comes into rehearsal fully prepared with a thorough understanding of the scene, and then collaborates with the actors in a process of mutual exploration and discovery as to how the scene might come to life. Rather than answers, this director tends to offer questions, and invites dialogue; their authority operates in a horizontal mode. Historically, women theater directors have tended toward the latter model.

Impacts on Gender Research on the impacts of gender on female directors’ methods and leadership styles indicates that, while there is a wide range of individual practices, there is also an affinity among female directors for a collaborative approach. Directors identify the benefits of this approach as offering (1) more creative results; (2) the advantage of shared ownership, which enriches the actors’ performances; and (3) the benefit of relationship-building, wherein the collective experience of the process itself is as important as the end result. Findings suggest that the ways women are socialized—to be sensitive to other people’s feelings, to care for others and be nurturing—may foster particularly useful skills for collaboration. Applied in the rehearsal room, an awareness of and openness to feelings, as well as attention paid to nurturing artists, can help to establish intimacy and trust, which empowers actors, as it mediates fear and helps create an environment where everyone feels safe to explore freely. Studies in the 1980s and 1990s noted that the most challenging impact of gender on women directors was how their leadership was received by others. Women often encountered resistance, which necessitated their having to continually prove themselves. They also had to be careful

Theater and Leadership

about their behavior; while male directors were expected to wield power in certain ways, there was no tolerance for female directors expressing anger, or being demanding or aggressive. At the same time, female directors were aware that their collaborative approach might be read as a sign of weakness in situations where the expectation was for a strong leader who would give orders. As female directors were faced with limited employment opportunities, career advancement was also a concern. The League of Professional Theater Women report (1984) found that out of the 261 Broadway shows produced between 1977 and 1982, women directed only nine of them. The following decade showed an increase in the number of women directing off-Broadway; this offered some encouragement, as did the breakthrough in 1998 when a woman won Broadway’s coveted Tony Award for direction for the first time in history. In fact, two women won that year: one for Best Direction of a Play and another for Best Direction of a Musical. This raised hopes that resistance to women’s leadership would fade as more women directors were working in the field. Despite the breakthrough moment in 1998, later studies have confirmed the persistence of the gender imbalance. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) report in 2020 revealed that of the total Broadway directing contracts issued in the 2013–2014 season, male directors held 81% and female directors held 19%. Five years later, in the 2018–2019 season, men directed 89% of Broadway shows and women only 11%. Although female directors did better in the non-profit jurisdictions of regional theater, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, male directors still had a significant majority of directing contracts, and they were consistently paid higher fees than female directors. Studies in the early 2000s addressing the specific challenges faced by women directors working in the historically male-dominated field of theater identify several recurrent themes: unequal opportunities for employment, hiring decisions made in networks to which women directors have little access, and differences in standards, where male directors are hired for potential while female directors are hired only after proven success.

931

Female directors are expected to serve as assistant directors for a much longer period of time than their male counterparts, who are encouraged to spend very little time assisting and are advised to go out on their own to develop their individual artistic esthetic. These practices mean that professional advancement takes longer for women. In addition, there is an added pressure on women that they must not fail—first, for fear that they will not be offered another opportunity, and second, because one woman’s failure reflects on all other women directors in ways that it does not for male directors. This pressure adversely affects female directors’ ability to take risks. Finally, one roadblock appears in every study: the closer one gets to the money, the fewer women directors there are. While the number of women directors has increased in the small and mid-sized not-for-profit theaters, there has been persistent resistance to hiring women directors in the prestigious, high profile, commercial and regional theaters with the largest budgets and largest financial rewards. For female directors of color, the situation is even more challenging. An indication of the scope of the disparity can be found in the 2016 Wellesley Centers for Women report on women’s leadership in resident theaters. The demographic breakdown for artistic directors throughout the regional theater network was as follows: 73% white men, 19% white women, 7% men of color, and 1% women of color.

Calls for Racial Justice The first two decades of the 21st century witnessed recurring waves of social justice protests: the Occupy movement; the Dreamers movement; the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) rights movements; the Indigenous peoples movement; the women’s march; #MeToo; and Black Lives Matter, among others. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, and the racial justice protests that erupted throughout the United States and around the world, the American theater experienced its own protest movement. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) theater artists published an open letter calling for changes that would readdress the inequities that

932

Toxic Leadership

pervade the field. The response to the We See You White American Theatre collective was swift, as theater unions, service organizations, and theaters across the country began to share public statements of support for and commitments to change. Since 2020, research reflects several themes: how to create structural pathways that will open up equitable access, how to establish shared networks for mentoring early and mid-career directors and playwrights, how to develop new economic models for equitable funding across the field, and, how to expand the reporting and analysis of leadership and employment data. The question at the heart of these research efforts concerns how theater can serve 21st-century audiences, and asks whose stories are told and who gets to tells them. Dorothy J. Holland See also Autocratic Leadership; Racial Disparities; Shared Leadership; Transformational Leadership; Women and Men as Leaders.

Further Readings Carney, K., & Boyd, J. (1984). Directors and designers report on sex discrimination in the theatre. Women and Performance, 1(2), 46–54. doi:10.1080/07407708408 571064 Cole, T., & Chinoy, H. (Eds.). (1963). Directors on directing: A sourcebook of the modern theatre. Berlin: Allegro Editions. Daniels, R. (1996). Women stage directors speak: Exploring the influence of gender on their work. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Erkut, S., & Ceder, I. (2016, August). Women’s leadership in resident theatres: Final report. Wellesley Center for Women. Retrieved from https://www. wcwonline.org/ Marty, P. (2019). Contemporary women stage directors: Conversations on craft. London: Bloomsbury. Sidiropoulou, A. (2019). Directions for directing: Theatre and method. New York, NY: Routledge. Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. (2020). On the edge: The lives and livelihoods of stage directors and choreographers. Retrieved from https://sdcweb. org/next-stage-report/ We See You White American Theatre. (2020, June). Retrieved from https://www.weseeyouwat.com/about

TOXIC LEADERSHIP Toxic leadership is a term coined by Marcia Lynn Whicker in Toxic Leaders (1996) and further defined and expanded upon by Jean Lipman-Blumen’s definition in The Allure of Toxic Leaders (2005). The term describes leaders whose deliberate or unintentional behaviors, psychological qualities, as well as their resulting policies, inflict serious and often enduring or fatal harm on their followers and organizations. Even others less closely aligned with toxic leaders can be seriously affected. This entry explicates the meaning of toxic leadership, the dysfunctional psychological traits and destructive behaviors of these leaders, as well as the key contexts in which toxic leadership have been studied. Given that leadership requires followers, the role that followers play in supporting toxic leaders is also discussed.

Historical Arc of Toxic Leadership From the earliest days of the Roman Empire to the current 21st century, toxic leaders have destroyed their enemies, their competitors, and even their own blood kin in their pursuit of power and pelf. Their engagement in genocide and other acts of violence, thievery, dishonesty, and incompetence has been documented by scholars throughout the ages. Toxic leaders stand in stark relief to more admirable leaders, whose examples of integrity, courage, competence, caring, strength, dedication, and self-sacrifice also populate the pages of history. Unfortunately, toxic leadership—both intentional and unintentional—is a phenomenon that appears to have no end date. The consistent and damaging appearance of toxic leaders, particularly in times of crisis, has led to the efforts of numerous modern scholars to untangle the toxic leadership puzzle.

Behaviors and Psychological Qualities of Toxic Leaders Toxic leaders’ destructive behaviors, frequently promulgated in injurious policies, are manifestations of their dysfunctional personality traits. From a behavioral perspective, toxic leaders often

Toxic Leadership

initially charm or intimidate followers, but eventually mistreat, manipulate, and undermine, if not totally destroy, them. Playing to their followers’ basest needs and fears, toxic leaders demand unquestioning compliance with their decisions, stifle even constructive critiques, and/or mislead their followers by deliberately or ineptly misdiagnosing issues. In addition, toxic leaders engage in unethical, often criminal, behavior, undermining both structures and processes intended to promote justice, truth, and excellence. Their destructive behaviors range from pitting constituents against one another, to instilling fear in constituents, to identifying scapegoats, and failing to recognize incompetence or toxicity in followers or other members of their retinue. Their criminal behavior may include fraud, theft, or even murder and genocide. To ensure their continuing power, toxic leaders may make the costs of their own removal too great for their constituents to consider, including total destruction of the system. From a personal qualities perspective, toxic leaders feed their own insatiable ambition and outsized egos by prioritizing their personal needs for power, acclamation, and wealth above all else. Their arrogance blinds them to their own errors, and their amorality prevents them from distinguishing between right and wrong. They recklessly disregard the costs of their actions to others and frequently even underestimate the impact of their choices on themselves. In addition, cowardice often prevents toxic leaders from making difficult, but necessary, choices. In 2002, three personality traits (referred to as the “dark triad”) emerged in the toxic leadership literature, and all share common malevolent features (e.g., a tendency to be selfish, heartless, and manipulative). Narcissism (a sense of selfimportance and grandiosity), Machiavellianism (exploiting others through wickedness and deceit to accrue or retain power), and psychopathy (callousness, lack of empathy or remorse) make up the dark triad. Leaders who possess high levels of each of the three characteristics are likely to be destructive to those within their sphere of influence, as they are likely to use power for personal, rather than social, benefit. Moreover, their inability to empathize or show remorse for their actions can

933

lead toxic leaders to inflict serious harm, including death, on their constituents. In empirical studies, researchers have found these traits to be linked to an extensive range of destructive outcomes.

Contexts of Toxic Leadership Research Toxic leaders permeate all sectors of society, with the majority of studies published in areas such as the military, business, healthcare industry, higher education, and politics. Research conducted by George Reed on the military from 2004 to 2010 revealed that the destructive behaviors of leaders negatively influenced the culture and led to decreases in morale of those serving. Characteristics of toxic military leaders included disregard for the welfare of their subordinates, lack of empathy, and overriding self-interest motivations. In the corporate sector, additional empirical support has been found for the destructive behaviors associated with toxic leadership. In 2010, Kathie Pelletier identified eight behavioral dimensions associated with toxic leaders from the perspective of their followers: attacks on followers’ self-esteem, lack of integrity, abusiveness, social exclusion, sowing divisions, threatening followers’ physical and psychological safety, promoting inequity, as well as laissez-faire behaviors, whereby leaders are passive or absent when the situation demands a hands-on approach. Since the early 2000s, studies of toxic leadership in the healthcare system have proliferated. The results of these studies have provided further affirmation of the effects of toxic leaders’ dysfunctional traits and abusive behaviors, including increases in stress among nursing professionals. Not surprisingly, these destructive behaviors have resulted in higher levels of turnover in the nursing profession. Academia has not been immune to the deleterious consequences of leader toxicity. Case studies at the university level depict callous and narcissistic administrators, who are low in emotional intelligence and lack empathy for faculty and staff. Furthermore, toxic university administrators commonly fail to engage in meaningful shared governance with the faculty. These characteristics, in turn, prompt toxic university leaders to make decisions that work counter to the educational

934

Toxic Leadership

mission of the academy, including the welfare of students—their primary constituents.

The Role of Followers Although researchers have traditionally focused on toxic leaders, followers play a critical role in aiding and abetting them. As Lipman-Blumen described in 2005, followers do so, initially by rationalizing their behavior as conduct that they should adopt. Eventually, however, these rationalizations harden into “control myths,” behaviors that followers believe they must demonstrate rigorously. This results in followers basically controlling themselves, without any substantial assistance from the toxic leader. Consequently, followers actively participate in the leader’s destructive behaviors or, through their passivity and/or complacency, enable leaders to go unchecked. Scholars have suggested that followers acquiesce to toxic leaders to satisfy their own pragmatic needs. These needs include safety and security, as well as belonging, certainty, and orderliness in an indeterminate, disorderly world. As Robert Kelley postulated in his 1988 writing, followers differ in their levels of critical thinking and engagement with their leaders. Kelley noted that some followers are independent critical thinkers, while others are more authoritarian. Additionally, some followers are actively engaged with their leader or organization, while others tend to be more passive. The three subcategories most aligned with conformers are (1) sheep (followers who are passive and prefer the leader to do the thinking for them), (2) yes-people (followers who tend to be on the leader’s side and also lean toward authoritarianism), and (3) pragmatics (followers who prefer to take a wait-and-see approach, and/ or are preservers of the status quo). Conformers and Colluders

Since Kelley’s work, scholars have offered additional, yet related, follower classifications: conformers and colluders. Conformers follow destructive leaders out of fear, trying to minimize the consequences of non-compliance with toxic leaders. Colluders, on the other hand, go along with or actively participate in the agenda of toxic

leaders for personal gain. Colluders often benefit materially (e.g., have greater access to resources and information, receive raises and promotions) from destructive leaders, especially if they are in the leader’s entourage. In 2012, Christian Thoroughgood and colleagues proposed the notion of a susceptible circle of followers, expanding and denoting the characteristics of conformers and colluders. Conformers include three sub-types: “lost souls,” who harbor unmet belongingness needs, “authoritarians,” who accept unquestioningly the power and legitimacy of the leader, and “bystanders,” who simply wait for the leader to leave or change. Colluders include “acolytes” and “opportunists.” Acolytes share the leader’s values and needs, and may view the leader as acting in the best interest of the organization, despite serious contradictory evidence. The opportunist’s intention is to capitalize on the situation, with the objective of gaining professional, political, or financial advantages.

Environments Conducive to Leader Toxicity In 2007, Art Padilla and colleagues introduced the “toxic triangle.” They posited that destructive, dysfunctional leaders are aided by susceptible followers within a conducive environment. Conducive environmental factors include instability, perceived threats, unhealthy culture/poor cultural values, and a lack of checks and balances. Instability refers to the organization’s lack of certainty and predictability. Perceived threats readily follow instability and frequently lead to acceptance of charismatic leadership and a greater willingness to acquiesce to centralized authority. From the perspective of the toxic triangle, symptoms of a “bad” culture include high rates of turnover, strong centralized power, punitive policies, secrecy, and fear of retaliation for challenging the leader or the upper echelon. A lack of checks and balances aids corruption because regulations and policies are not enforced, the toxic leader is not monitored, and no systems are in place to detect or expose corruption or toxicity. Crisis—a serious perceived threat—creates an extreme environmental condition that often promotes and sustains toxic leadership. In times of

Trait Theories of Leadership

crisis, toxic leaders commonly insist that following their directives is the only sure path to safety. Because this behavior on the part of toxic leaders evokes long-submerged reactions to authoritative parents’ admonitions to young children in times of danger, followers—without conscious recognition of this subconscious prompt—tend to acquiesce.

Future Directions Toxic leaders are not a new phenomenon. They have existed since the dawn of humankind. Their followers have a variety of justifications for supporting them, explicitly or implicitly. Environments that nurture these leaders are also conducive to the damage these destructive leaders leave in their wake. Although the increasing number of studies on leader toxicity and followership has enabled us to gain a better understanding of these phenomena, more research is needed to explore the characteristics of those individuals who make a conscious and courageous decision to challenge toxic leaders. In many cases, followers do not recognize the leader as toxic until the toxic arrow pierces their skin. Because of the continuing rise of toxic leaders, additional research on toxic leadership, courageous followers, and strategies for confronting or ousting toxic leaders remains imperative. Jean Lipman-Blumen and Kathie L. Pelletier See also Autocratic Leadership; Bad Leadership; Big Five Personality Traits; Dark Triad; Narcissistic Leadership

Further Readings Kelley, R. E. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66, 142–148. Lipman-Blumen, J. (2005). The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians—and how we can survive them. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176–194. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001 Pelletier, K. L. (2010). Leader toxicity: An empirical investigation of toxic behavior and rhetoric. Leadership, 6(4), 373–389. doi:10.1177/174271501 0379308

935

Reed, G. E. (2004). Toxic leadership. Military Review, 84(4), 67–71. Schyns, B., & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(1), 138–158. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2012. 09.001 Thoroughgood, C. N., Padilla, A., Hunter, S. T., & Tate, B. W. (2012). The susceptible circle: A taxonomy of followers associated with destructive leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(5), 897–917. doi:10.1016/j. leaqua.2012.05.007 Whicker, M. L. (1996). Toxic leaders: When organizations go bad. Westport, CT; London: Quorum Books.

TRAIT THEORIES

OF

LEADERSHIP

The trait approach to leadership is one of the earliest leadership theories. Previous attempts at examining leadership had involved the inspection of the lives of exceptional historical figures (i.e., the great man approach to leadership) to determine the qualities that made one a great leader. Beginning in the mid-20th century, researchers began to theorize that specific traits could distinguish leaders from other individuals. In an effort to make the study of leadership more scientific, researchers of the trait approach to leadership started focusing on the personal attributes (or traits) of leaders, including physical and personality characteristics, intelligence, competencies, motivations, and values. These traits were thought of as being relatively enduring (i.e., dispositional) characteristics of leaders that elicited consistent patterns of behaviors across different leadership contexts. The traits, however, were not considered to be causes of these behaviors, but rather as descriptive of the characteristics of an effective leader. Frequently these traits included relatively superficial characteristics such as height, weight, and appearance. Although the trait approach defined most of the early leadership research, it is not a fully articulated theory with well-developed hypotheses. During the 1940s, researchers began investigating possible traits that defined effective leaders; however, the findings of their research were often

936

Trait Theories of Leadership

unclear and contradictory. Reviews of the literature conducted during this period failed to find convincing evidence for the efficacy of the trait approach. Many leadership researchers of the time began to realize that the search for universal leadership traits was not a fruitful endeavor. One reason for this was the large number of leadership traits that were being considered in this research. For example, some studies claimed that more than 40 traits were important for effective leadership. The failure to develop an organizing framework for these traits, however, made it difficult to compare results across studies. As indicated earlier, another problem was that there was little existing theory available at the time to guide the search for important leadership traits. In the end, the presence of these traits in leaders was not found to ensure their effectiveness. The following section offers a review of the early research of the trait approach to leadership, including the attributes believed to be characteristic of successful leaders as well as some limitations to that early research. More recent studies on the subject are then featured. The entry concludes by examining how the five-factor model of personality was an important advancement in the study of trait theories of leadership.

Early Research on the Trait Approach Early trait researchers focused on the personal attributes that they believed were related to leadership effectiveness. Many early researchers viewed leadership as a unidimensional trait that could be reliably measured and was normally distributed throughout the population (i.e., an individual difference variable). Most of the early empirical work using the trait approach focused on the systematic investigation of the differences between leaders and followers. It was reasonable to assume that individuals in leadership positions would possess higher levels of leadership traits than those in non-leadership positions. Concurrently, a large number of studies were conducted in an attempt to develop reliable and valid measures of leadership traits. Researchers discovered, however, that only a few traits appeared to successfully distinguish between leaders and followers. Leaders tended to be slightly higher on attributes such as

height, intelligence, extroversion, adjustment, dominance, and self-confidence as compared to non-leaders. These unexpected findings of only small differences between leaders and non-leaders in these studies were attributed to methodological shortcomings (e.g., measurement error in leadership traits), errors in leader selection, and the failure to assess critical leadership attributes. Many early trait researchers had assumed that, no matter what the situation, there was a set of characteristics that made a leader successful. These researchers believed that the same leadership traits would be effective, for example, both in the boardroom and on the battlefield. However, the differences between leaders and followers on these traits were found to vary widely across different situations—researchers had underestimated the impact of situational variables on leadership effectiveness.

Leadership Traits Trait researchers often developed lists of characteristics that they believed were related to successful leadership. In creating such lists, researchers often combined very different characteristics. For example, these lists included leadership attributes that were aspects of behaviors and skills in addition to traits that were related to temperament and intellectual ability. The lists of traits typically included characteristics such as self-confidence, intelligence, ambition, perseverance, assertiveness, emotional stability, creativity, and motivation. These lists, however, were not exhaustive and predictably omitted some critical leadership attributes. The basic notion remained that if an individual possessed such traits, they would be a successful leader in any situation. In 1990, John W. Gardner published a study of a large number of leaders and concluded there were some attributes that appeared to make a leader successful in any situation. These traits included the following: •

Physical vitality and stamina Intelligence and action-oriented judgment • Eagerness to accept responsibility • Task competence • Understanding of followers and their needs •

Trait Theories of Leadership • • • • • • • • •

Skill in dealing with people Need for achievement Capacity to motivate people Courage and resolution Trustworthiness Decisiveness Self-confidence Assertiveness Adaptability/flexibility

Even today in the popular press, many writers on leadership continue the tradition of proposing lists of traits that are thought to be central to effective leadership. One of the concerns with such lists is that the attributes typically associated with successful leaders are often perceived as “male” traits. Reportedly, when men and women are asked about the other gender’s characteristics and leadership qualities, significant patterns emerged, with both men and women tending to see successful leaders as male.

Problems and Limitations of the Trait Approach As discussed previously, many early researchers found no differences between leaders and followers with respect to their leadership characteristics—some even found that individuals who possessed such traits were less likely to become leaders. Researchers also found very small relationships between these traits and leadership effectiveness. Because so few of the traits clearly differentiated between effective and ineffective leaders, their efficacy in selecting individuals for leadership positions was severely limited. There were too many leadership measures with low reliabilities and there was no rationale for selecting specific variables to include in a study. This approach has been called “dust-bowl empiricism” at its worst. Additionally, there has been little systematic research on the processes by which individuals acquire the capacity for leadership. If leadership is indeed an individual difference variable, then very little is known about the origin of these differences. Another issue with the trait approach is that it views leadership solely from the perspective of the individual leader. Implicit in this approach is the

937

assumption that traits produce patterns of behavior that are consistent across situations. That is, leadership traits are considered to be enduring characteristics that people are born with and that remain relatively stable over time. Recently, there has been some innovative thinking about the nature of leadership. This thinking posits that leadership is not a characteristic of an individual but is rather distributed among the members of the work group. The quality of the leadership in the group is based on factors such as the direction, alignment, and commitment of the group.

Recent Research on the Trait Approach As the trait approach fell out of favor in industrial and organizational psychology, researchers began to develop new situational approaches to leadership. They also started to focus their attention on leader behaviors, which led to the emergence of behavioral theories of leadership. Many modern researchers adopted a contingency approach to leadership, which posits that leaders who possess certain traits will be more effective in some situations than in others. Moreover, recent studies have attempted to correct some of the methodological shortcomings of the earlier research on leadership traits. For example, researchers have developed conceptual models linking leadership attributes to organizational performance. Additionally, they have begun to highlight consistent patterns of relationships between traits and performance measures. Rather than simply studying what combinations of traits would be successful in a particular situation, researchers are now linking clusters of personality traits to success in different situations. Recently, with the rise of the five-factor model of personality, there has been somewhat of a resurgence in research on the trait approach to leadership.

The Trait Approach and the Five-Factor Model of Personality The emergence of the five-factor model of personality was an important advance in the creation of an organizing framework for the traits thought to be important for effective leadership. Through the factor analysis of personality assessments,

938

Trait Theories of Leadership

researchers found that personality traits can be grouped into five factors: Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Research has found that four of these factors individually (i.e., Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness) are positively related to leadership. The five factors in combination have been found to be predictors of leadership emergence and effectiveness. Because correlations between the five personality factors and leadership are typically found to be low to moderate, however, there are still questions about the true effects of personality on leadership. There are several hypotheses as to why the relationship between the personality factors and leadership is a modest one. A reasonable explanation for these modest relationships is that most personality assessments are self-report measures and the results are adversely affected by self-enhanced responding (i.e., faking) by the test-takers. There is some evidence that observer ratings of personality are better predictors of leadership effectiveness than are self-ratings. The use of multi-source personality measures in leadership trait research may result in more robust associations with leader effectiveness.

to improve their performance. The entire field of leadership development is based on the premise that the qualities of a successful leader can be developed through well-designed programs and experiences. Even traits that are dispositional in nature (e.g., introversion) can be mitigated by increasing the self-awareness of leaders that they may lack some traits (e.g., extroversion) that are thought to be important for effective leadership. In general, however, trait and situational approaches have resulted in only limited advances in our understanding of leadership. Although early studies highlighted the importance of situational considerations in leadership, no situational theory of leadership currently exists. Most leadership researchers, therefore, have abandoned the purely situational approach. Many researchers have concluded that successful leadership is the result of the interaction between the traits of the leader and the situation itself (i.e., the contingency approach to leadership). They have realized that the interaction between the leader and the situation is central to understanding leadership, in addition to the specification of important trait and situational variables. John W. Fleenor

Final Remarks From an historical perspective, the trait approach represents an important advance in the study of leadership. It was one of the first efforts to apply rigorous research methods to the study of leadership. The trait approach was also an early attempt to answer the question of whether leaders are born or made. Based on their studies, trait researchers began to understand that even if dispositional characteristics exist that can make one an effective leader, there are many important leadership attributes that can be developed. For example, selfconfidence may have some dispositional aspects, but it can be increased through developmental activities and experiences. For practicing leaders, the trait approach provided a means for evaluating their own strengths and development needs. Through the assessment of these traits, leaders were able to increase their self-awareness of the level of their leadership effectiveness and pursue developmental activities

See also Behavioral Theories of Leadership; Big Five Personality Traits; Situational Leadership

Further Readings Colbert, A. E., Judge, T. A., Choi, D., & Wang, G. (2012). Assessing the trait theory of leadership using self and observer ratings of personality: The mediating role of contributions to group success. The Leadership Quarterly, 23, 670–685. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2012. 03.004 Gardner, J. W. (1990). On leadership. New York, NY: Free Press. Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 765–780. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765 Muchinsky, P. M. (2012). Psychology applied to work: An introduction to industrial and organizational psychology (10th ed.). Northfield, MN: Hypergraphic Press. Porter, L. W., Lawler, E. E., & Hackman, J. R. (1975). Behavior in organizations. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

Transactional and Transformational Synergies Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology, 25, 35–71. doi:10.1080/00223980.1948. 9917362 Vroom, V. H. (1976). Leadership. In M. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 1527–1551). New York, NY: Wiley. Zaccaro, S. J., & Klimoski, R. J. (Eds.). (2001). The nature of organizational leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

TRANSACTIONAL AND TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNERGIES Converging research streams provide clear evidence that leaders who engage in high levels of both transactional and transformational behavior are uniquely effective. This may come as no surprise— hundreds of studies illuminate the positive outcomes flowing from these two leader behaviors, and many would frame them as cardinal elements of the leadership studies canon. The path toward additional insight involves understanding how this synergy occurs in practice. This entry explores that question from two perspectives, first by reviewing the small set of studies adopting a pattern approach to investigate the interplay among transactional and transformational behaviors. Next, the focus shifts to an illustration of the ways Lyndon Johnson’s transactional and transformational leadership contributed to one of the most productive periods in U.S. Senate history. The essay closes with a reflection on how the synergies revealed here could be viewed as a specific case of leading in a versatile and beautiful way.

939

own needs, effective leaders also help followers enlarge and transform their motives to include others, such as an organization or society, typically by offering a compelling vision of the future and stimulating followers’ emotions and intellect. In line with the active, engaged nature of transformational and transactional behaviors, effective leaders also avoid passively waiting to act until problems arise, often referred to as managing by exception. Thus, work exploring leadership from a pattern approach generally defines “optimal leaders” or “super leaders” through a pattern of high transformational, high transactional, and low management-by-exception behaviors. Along with demonstrating the optimal pattern’s effectiveness—such leaders tend to generate uniquely high levels of commitment, collaboration, trust, and performance—this work has revealed several intriguing findings. First, rather than deploying transformational and transactional behaviors in a compensatory fashion, optimal leaders appear to engage in higher levels of both, as compared with leaders who rely primarily on one of the two styles. Second, when leaders add more passive behaviors to a profile already containing high levels of transformational and transactional behaviors, they often experience more role-based demands and higher levels of burnout. Third, despite the ubiquity of the label “transformational leader,” very few leaders engage solely in transformational behaviors. Each of these findings highlights the value in studying leadership from a pattern-oriented perspective. Robert Caro’s book about Lyndon Johnson’s U.S. senatorial leadership, Master of the Senate, offers a compelling lens through which to explore how these dynamics can play out in practice.

Senatorial Leadership Patterns of Leader Behavior What might a uniquely effective pattern of leader behavior look like? To start, one would include transactional behaviors known as contingent reward, where leaders and followers share tangible and intangible things that each party to the exchange values (e.g., follower effort in exchange for leader mentoring). To complement and yet also move beyond this transactional focus on one’s

The Senate, together with the House of Representatives, comprises the U.S. Congress. The House was designed to directly capture the will of the American people—all 435 representatives face the voters every two years, so at least in theory, the electorate can profoundly change the entire makeup of the House in one election cycle. Senators, in contrast, are elected to six-year terms, with only about a third up for election during a given

940

Transactional and Transformational Synergies

cycle. Consequently, it takes a long time to change the makeup of the Senate. The teacup saucer analogy of the Senate is an apt one, where the boiling passions of the House go to cool. Individual senators have considerable power, able to halt legislative action with unlimited debate and discussion through the filibuster, which at present can only be ended by having at least 60 of the 100 senators vote to close debate. When Lyndon Johnson was elected to the Senate, he looked around the chamber and remarked quietly that it was the right size. No one can be sure what he meant, but he likely saw it as perfectly suited to his one-on-one, close in, cajoling, horse-trading, manifestly physical leadership style. Stories about “the Johnson treatment” were legendary in 1950s and 1960s Washington, with all reflecting his claim that if he knew one thing, it was where to look for and how to use power. He knew each senator’s weaknesses— their vanities, insecurities, constituent pressures, as well as their aspirations, values, and ideals—and used that knowledge to form unlikely coalitions that “broke the dam” and got legislation moving in a flurry of finger-pointing and lapel grabbing.

Transactions and Power Leadership scholars have noted that the recent enthusiasm for transformational and charismatic theories has unnecessarily downplayed more mundane yet still very effective transactional behaviors. A caveat to that claim is required in Johnson’s case: In his hands, there was nothing mundane about transactional leadership. Within the vivid tapestry that was his leadership repertoire, the transactional colors shone the brightest. First, he saw the potential for power and exchange—two raw ingredients of transactional leadership—where others did not. In fact, he created that potential. Creating Power Resources

Within the Senate, committee leaders have tremendous power to impact the content of bills as well as to decide if and when they receive a vote. Prior to Johnson’s becoming Minority Leader in 1953, seniority was the sole criterion determining committee membership and chairmanship, with ranking Democratic senators very happy with this

arrangement. Johnson, however, saw many of these senators as ill-suited to lead the charge against Republican senators who would be trying to undo the Roosevelt–Truman legacy, especially in the foreign policy arena. He argued that to counter the influence of Ohio’s powerful Senator Robert Taft, who was assuming the chair of the Foreign Relations committee, Democratic committee seats needed to be assigned to members like Hubert Humphrey, a foreign policy expert who could hold his own against anyone in a debate. Johnson prevailed, opening the door for many talented young Democratic senators, including John F. Kennedy, to receive committee memberships based on merit or strategic concerns rather than seniority. With this change, membership on a prized committee became a bargaining chip that Johnson could use to gain the support he needed from individual senators. Building Bridges

Johnson also saw potential bridges and alliances where others did not. Few would dispute the claim that his greatest achievement as Majority Leader, a role he assumed in 1955 when the Democrats regained control of the Senate by a razor-thin, one-vote margin, was shepherding the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Discord within the majority party (at that time, Northern liberal Democrats who passionately supported a civil rights bill vs. conservative Southern Democrats who clearly did not) presented a seemingly insurmountable challenge to passing a bill. Johnson argued to the Southerners that the national tide was turning on civil rights, and that they needed to pass legislation or risk ceding the issue to Republicans, many of whom, with Vice President Richard Nixon’s leadership, were eager to pass a civil rights bill. His argument to the Southerners was pragmatic— Democrats need to pass something on civil rights, or we’ll get clobbered at the ballot box. He knew, though, that the Southern Democratic senators would never support anything beyond a very weak bill—and so he worked to make the bill as weak as possible, focusing it primarily on voting rights rather than also including housing and school desegregation. And, to keep the bill as weak as possible, he found the Southern

Transactional and Transformational Synergies

Democratic senators allies. For years, Western Democratic senators in Oregon and Idaho had been fighting to ensure that any dam built on the Snake River at Hells Canyon would be owned by the federal government, not private corporations. Behind the scenes, Johnson arranged for the Southern Democrats who wanted no more than a weak civil rights bill to side with the Western Democrats when the Hells Canyon dam came to a vote. In return, those Western Democrats—some of them who were ardent civil rights supporters—agreed to side with the South to keep the civil rights bill as weak as possible. And with that support, the Southern Democrats allowed a civil rights bill to be placed on the calendar, a key step toward its receiving a vote.

Transformation Through Shared Leadership The transformational elements of Johnson’s senatorial leadership tended to emerge through neither charismatic appeals nor lofty rhetoric. His brand of transformational leadership was often as calculating and pragmatic as the other elements of his leadership style, as was clear in the way he persuaded Northern liberal senators to support the 1957 civil rights bill. His framing of the issue to them was a constant tamping down of expectations. Liberals wanted the bill to be as far-reaching as possible, saying that they would never support watered-down legislation focusing only on voting rights. Johnson rallied them instead under the cry that the most important goal was simply to pass a bill—any bill, as he used to implore—to break the dam that had held back civil rights legislation from passing the Senate for a century. He also argued that voting was the foundational civil right from which all others flowed. If Blacks could vote, they could have a voice in our nation’s civic life, and if they had a voice, they could demand justice in housing, education, criminal justice, and employment. He was also transformational from a shared leadership perspective. One of the chapters in Master of the Senate is titled “YOU do it,” which reflects Johnson’s understanding that he was not always the best vehicle to drive the change he sought in the Senate. Still, it was not that he never engaged in transformational appeals. During the

941

civil rights fight, he often told a moving story about how his cook, driving his government-issued Cadillac limousine from Washington to Texas while Johnson traveled by airplane, was forced to relieve herself outside because she could not find a restroom that would serve her. Rather, it was that he knew which senators were the best at making charismatic, eloquent appeals, and he often relied on them to do so. Finally, as Joseph Nye notes, leaders can be transformational by achieving transformational outcomes as well as engaging in transformational behaviors, and few would argue that the civil rights bill was not a transformational outcome, setting the stage as it did for the more comprehensive civil rights reforms that would follow when Johnson was president. Considering the synergy between transformational and transactional leadership, it is likely that one style remains dominant and colors the expression of the other in the actions of individual leaders. In Johnson’s hands, transformational leadership—articulating group values, framing an issue in a compelling way—always seemed to have a utilitarian goal, as if it were just one more commodity that could be used to stimulate transactions with his fellow senators. Transactional behaviors also help bridge the distance between followers and transformational leadership, bringing lofty inspirational appeals “back down to earth” and connecting leaders to the immediate wants and needs of others.

Coda: Leadership Versatility and Beauty Efforts to identify optimal or best leaders often evoke arguments that they generate an impoverished, paint-by-numbers picture of leadership. Of course, no one behavioral style works well all the time given the vagaries of timing, context, and even luck. The world is just not that simple. Even so, pattern-oriented research illustrates that there appears to be something uniquely effective about leaders who engage in both transactional and transformational behaviors. This understanding dovetails with studies highlighting how leadership success often hinges on versatility—finding a balance among contrasting behaviors such as support and direction. Even more broadly, evocations of beautiful leadership center on the importance of moderation, where leaders know how much of a

942

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

certain act is just right for a given moment, as opposed to being deficient or excessive. Indeed, the work Johnson undertook to move civil rights legislation forward in the Senate was strikingly creative and versatile, and even beautiful. Patrick Gavan O’Shea See also Congressional Leadership; Full-Range Leadership Theory; Political Leadership; Power and Powerlessness; Transformational and Transactional Leadership, Transformational Leadership; Transforming Leadership.

Further Readings Arnold, K. A., Connelly, C. E., Gellatly, I. R., Walsh, M. M., & Withey, M. J. (2017). Using a pattern-oriented approach to study leaders: Implications for burnout and perceived role demand. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38, 1038–1056. Caro, R. A. (2002). The years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the senate. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Doucet, O., Fredette, M., Simard, G., & Tremblay, M. (2015). Leader profiles and their effectiveness on employees’ outcomes. Human Performance, 28, 244–264. Gustafson, S. B., & Mumford, M. D. (1995). Personal style and person-environment fit: A pattern approach. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 46, 163–188. Kaplan, B., & Kaiser, B. (2006). The versatile leader: Make the most of your strengths—without overdoing it. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Ladkin, D. (2008). Leading beautifully: How mastery, congruence, and purpose create the aesthetic of embodied leadership practice. Leadership Quarterly, 19, 31–41. Nye, J. S., Jr. (2014). Transformational and transactional presidents. Leadership, 10, 118–124. O’Shea, P. G., Foti, R. J., Hauenstein, N. M. A., & Bycio, P. (2009). Are the best leaders both transformational and transactional? A pattern-oriented analysis. Leadership, 5, 237–259.

TRANSFORMATIONAL AND TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP After being introduced into leadership discourse in the late 1970s, the concept of transformational

leadership quickly received widespread attention, soon coming to dominate leadership research. Academic and popular writers alike heralded this “new” and “radical” approach with enthusiastic titles, including 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership: Create a Mindset of Passion, Transformation and Growth; Radical Transformational Leadership: Strategic Action for Change Agents; and Transformational Leadership: A Blueprint for Real Organizational Change. Articles and books examining transformational leadership soon came to outnumber all leadership articles using other theories combined (e.g., trait theory, path–goal theory, leader–member exchange theory). In addition, transformational leadership dominated the pedagogy offered in leading MBA programs, helping to set the agenda for educating future corporate executives. Company-sponsored internal leadership development courses insisted that the route to career success would be to move beyond “mere” management and embrace this notion of transformation—for one’s self, for subordinates, and for the sponsoring organization. Enthusiasm for transformational leadership waned significantly by 2020. No academic book featuring the topic had appeared over the previous five years. Now, “authentic leadership,” a variant of transformation that emphasized positive trustworthiness and heightened self-awareness, asserted its dominance. There was also an ongoing critical re-examination reflected in a new set of titles: “Transformational Leadership: Flawed from the Get-Go,” Is Transformational Leadership Theory Pass´e?, and The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership. This entry will both present the theory and the more recent critical analysis. It concludes with some future directions of research.

A Theory Emerges Political scientist James MacGregor Burns is typically credited with being the originator of transformational leadership and its contrasting construct, transactional leadership. Those two modes of leading—transforming and transacting—were put forth in his seminal 1978 book, Leadership. Five years earlier, however, sociologist James V. Downton offered his conceptualization of transactional leadership in Rebel Leadership:

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Commitment and Charisma in the Revolutionary Process. In Downton’s view, a transactional exchangebenefit relationship among leaders and followers lay at the heart of effective leadership. Transactions involved a recognition that each party to the exchange could have its own legitimate interests, both economic and psychological. Those interests were not assumed to be entirely congruent. But once a positive leader-follower bond was forged, participants were situated to make the kinds of adaptations and changes required in a dynamic environment. With the inherent reciprocity of benefits and obligations, transacting parties—leaders and followers—recognized both their mutual autonomy and their interdependence. For Downton, the notion of transformative change—he was studying leadership in radical social movements, after all—was an element of transactional leadership because followers willingly adopted the leader’s new model of behavior for themselves. Thus, Downton’s transactional leadership could achieve transformational ends. That last conclusion—the inherent synergy between transaction and transformation—would be rejected by Burns and the cohort of transformational leadership scholars that followed. Burns’s book was pivotal in the evolution of leadership discourse. Prior to its publication, attention focused mainly on the behaviors of individuals within small groups and actions taken by supervisors of shop floor workers. Burns examined statesmen, presidents, and leaders of large social movements: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. most prominently. In Burns’s construct, transforming leaders and transformed followers would bend the arc of history toward an enlightened, rational, and just society. Transactional leadership, conversely, consisted of “horse trading” and a reliance on “naked power” to achieve the leader’s goals. All leaders, Burns conceded, did some of this. Still, in sharp contrast to Downton’s view, Burns ascribed an aura of shadiness if not outright mendacity to the transactional exchange. Transformational leadership provided moral elevation; transactional

943

leadership functioned at a considerably lower level. It was Burns’s construct rather than Downton’s that moved into the mainstream of leadership when a small group of scholars situated in schools of management—Noel Tichy, Bernard Bass, and Warren Bennis prominently among them—adopted transformational leadership as a kind of cure-all for American business organizations.

Early Stage Theory Development In the early stage of theory development, the definition of transformational leadership was vague and impressionistic, relying far more on unsupported assertions than on data. Scholars pointed to specific CEOs—and they named names, including Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca, General Motors’ Roger Smith, and General Electric’s Jack Welch— who were said to have instilled high levels of employee morale and had helped employees generate a sense of meaning in their work. Such attributions were assertions unsupported by systematic studies. These leaders motivated, it was claimed, largely through the power of their vision, thus inviting employees to put aside self-interest on behalf of the overall objectives of the corporation. Appealing to what was “right, good, important, and beautiful”—as per Bass and Paul Steidlmeier—transformational leaders mobilized employees to join them in creating something new out of the old. Organizations would be transformed, as would employees who worked in those organizations. Transactional leadership, with its embrace of reward and punishment as the core approach to motivation, produced markedly inferior results. Transactional leaders sought to maintain the status quo by embracing rules and procedures rather than flexibility and change. They sought simply to avoid rocking the boat or shaking things up. Transactional leadership was said to be a prescription for ongoing mediocracy. Transformational leaders based their approach on four overarching principles: •

Idealized influence in which leaders exerted sway over followers not through control of contingent rewards (transactions regarding raises, promotions, etc.) but by displaying

944

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

exemplary behavior and making emotional appeals. • Inspirational motivation suggested that the articulation of an appealing and inspiring vision of a desired future state to followers would provide motivation to followers. • Intellectual stimulation saw transformational leaders challenging status quo assumptions, seeking a wide variety of input from others, and encouraging creativity. • Individualized consideration suggested leader concern for the needs of followers.

Transformational leadership scholars believed the combination of those four elements amounted to a new approach to leadership. The result of transformational leadership would be positive for the organization and its members alike. These same scholars warned against the abuse of transformational means on behalf of nontransformational ends. Pseudo-transformational leaders positioned themselves as visionaries while directing their own actions and shaping the actions of others on behalf of their own self-serving interests. These leaders professed support for, say, intellectual stimulation and candid exchanges but always with the underlying goal of co-opting the independence of others while demanding adherence to their own ideas and plans. The notion of pseudotransformational leadership echoed an earlier theory, developed by Chris Argyris, that individuals often manifest a gap between what they claimed as their values, their espoused values, and the values that were demonstrated through their behaviors, their enacted values. The result would be a deeply felt cynicism on the part of followers. A more nuanced view of the relationship between transformation and transaction emerged over the subsequent decade. Bruce Avolio and Bass suggested an augmentation effect rather than a dichotomous tension. Transactions would always be part of organizational life. On their own, however, transactions were not up to the task of transformation if and when fundamental change was required (and transformational leadership scholars assumed that such fundamental change was always called for). In these situations, transactions were necessary but not sufficient. Transformational leadership could augment transactions.

The augmentation view still departed ways with Downton’s assessment that transactions and transformations were synergistically linked. However, augmentation at least accepted transactions as potentially useful. Over time, even Burns walked back the rigid separation he had proposed in his 1978 book. By the turn of the 21st century, the study of transformational and the intertwined field of charismatic leadership—the power of a leader’s vision was said to be enhanced through the force of charisma—had fundamentally altered and unquestionably enlivened the field of leadership studies. Some scholars insisted that transformational and charismatic leadership were interchangeable concepts: different names for the same model. According to this argument, idealized influence and inspirational motivation served as proxies for charismatic leadership. Now, empirical research attempted to add substance to the assertion that transformational leadership contributed to organizational effectiveness. This new stream of research focused not on media-star CEOs but unnamed direct supervisors. Transformational leadership characteristics were found to be causal of a number of desired organizational outcomes that would lead to improved performance. Table 1 summarizes the evolving theory of transformational leadership, focused on the interactions between the independent variables of overarching principles, the mediating variables of behavioral response, and the dependent variables of performance outcomes. The outcomes of transformational leadership were entirely positive. Scholars, it seems, had come across the ideal approach to leadership. Critical leadership scholars, however, were unconvinced, finding flaws in both the formulation and the application of the theory.

A Critical Appraisal One problem raised by critical leadership scholars was the conflation and thus confusion of independent and dependent variables. Transformational leadership researchers selected CEOs who they believed to be highly successful (e.g., Chrysler’s Iacocca) and then attributed to that leader the qualities that they labeled as transformational. That approach guaranteed a conclusion that

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Table 1

Constructing a Transformational Leadership Theory

Foundation (Independent Variables)

Behavioral Response (Mediating Variables)

Overarching Principles

Actualized Through Leadership Behaviors

Leading to Positive Follower Offering Performance Responses Benefits



•

•

  

945

Idealized influence Inspirational motivation Intellectual simulation Individualized consideration

• • • •

•

Offer a vision of a desired, enlightened future state Seek agreement while respecting differences Develop and value independent thought among followers Motivate through vision and values Make individual sacrifices on behalf of organizational effectiveness Be trustworthy

transformational leadership created high performance. But with no conceptual independence of input and outcome, any statement of the impact of inputs on the outcome lacked rigor and validity. Critics also noted that transformational leadership studies fell in the trap known variously as the “halo effect” (Phil Rosenzweig) or the “romance of leadership” (James Meindl). The reference is to the tendency of observers of social units to over-attribute the performance of those units to the actions of the leader, a bias manifest in evaluating both success and failure. When sports teams underperform, the coach or manager is fired; when organizations perform above expectations, the CEO is lauded and rewarded. However, performance of social units is the result of many factors, both internal and external to the unit. Pinpointing a single factor, let alone an individual, to explain performance was criticized as being simplistic and misleading. There is an additional question of evaluating unit performance under transformational leaders. A truly transformed organization should demonstrate its capacity to sustain excellent performance. Yet evaluations of organizational performance privileged short-term turnaround over long-term sustained competitive advantage. Iacocca’s Chrysler

• •

•

•

Enhanced commitment and loyalty to the organization Higher level of job satisfaction Higher level of satisfaction with supervisors and leaders Enhanced willingness to collaborate and work in teams Greater tolerance of diversity among coworkers

Outcomes (Dependent Variables)

•

Enhanced individual and organization creativity • Improved adaptability • Readiness to change and adapt • Improved bottom-line performance

and Smith’s GM sunk into near bankruptcy in the 1990s, just years after being heralded for their transformational successes. Smith even earned a position in CNBC’s list of “Worst American CEOs of All Time.” GE, under Welch, enjoyed a much hardier run throughout his two-decade tenure. Yet, even this transformational favorite crumbled immediately after Welch’s retirement. If none of the model transformational CEOs built a corporate culture capable of sustained excellent performance, then the underlying notion of transformation seemed at best dubious. Critical leadership scholars raised ethical concerns regarding the application of Burns’s model to business organizations. Burns, remember, focused on elected leaders of democracies (Roosevelt, Kennedy) and mobilizers of social movements (Gandhi, King). Corporate CEOs are neither elected by their employees like presidents nor followed voluntarily like social movement leaders. They are hired, evaluated, and perhaps fired by their corporate boards who are representative of the interests of shareholders (and who are voted into their position as board directors by shareholders). From the employee perspective, there is no pretense of democratic or informed choice. Your boss is your boss by virtue of being appointed by

946

Transformational and Transactional Leadership

someone higher in the hierarchy. Yet, transformational leadership theory endorsed the right, even the obligation, of hierarchical bosses to impose a set of values on those employees. Downton’s original concept of transactional leadership recognized the potential for differences of interests. A common set of values and goals would not be imposed by one side on the other but instead negotiated through a transactional process. Transformational leadership envisioned a single set of values imposed by CEOs on subordinates. Employees would be transformed into what the CEO believed to be “right, good, important, and beautiful.” CEO values would be related not to some notion of enlightenment. Their value creation focused on bottom-line performance as measured by Wall Street and rewarded by their corporate boards. That is what is in the CEO job description. That incompatibility between Burns’s examples and the world of corporations was simply ignored by scholars who assumed employees were entering willingly and voluntarily into a process of personal transformation. Once the power of leaders to expect and reinforce compliance is recognized as an inherent and inevitable component of hierarchical organizations, the imposition of a particular set of values can be seen as coercive rather than uplifting.

Future Directions There can be no question that Burns’s 1978 book and the subsequent stream of transformational leadership research helped raise and focus important debates on the importance and impact of organizational leaders. It also had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing a heightened, even exaggerated, attribution of outcomes to a single leader. The issues raised through a critique of transformational leadership, summarized in Table 2, implicitly or explicitly ask what the future of transformational leadership as a research model may hold. It may be time to move on from the construct. Bert A. Spector See also Authentic Leadership; Charismatic Theory; Critical Leadership Studies; Transformational Leadership; Transforming Leadership

Table 2

Critique of Transformational Leadership

Ethics

Granting hierarchical bosses the right, even the obligation, to alter the values of subordinates beyond those relating to specific performance requirements raised ethical questions regarding top-down imposition and coercion.

Research Methodology

Starts with transformational outcomes, then works backward to apply to leaders who are then said to be transformational.

Role of Power

By relying on notions of idealized influence and inspirational motivation, transformational leadership ignores the reality of hierarchical power capable of demanding compliance in corporations.

Performance Measures

Measures for assessing transformational performance are impressionistic, pay inadequate attention to sustained, long-term performance, and concentrate excessively on role of individual leaders.

Performance Attribution

Over-attributes the performance of a unit to the behaviors of that unit’s leader while under-valuing the complexity of forces, internal and external, that impact performance.

Performance Sustainability

A focus on short-term performance improvements often obscures a failure to create a sustained, high-performance corporation.

Further Readings Bass, B. M. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19–31. doi: 10.1016/0090-2616(90)90061-S Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper. Downton, J. V., Jr. (1973). Rebel leadership: Commitment and charisma in the revolutionary process. New York, NY: Free Press. Spector, B. A. (2014). Flawed from the get-go: Lee Iacocca and the foundations of transformational leadership. Leadership, 10(3), 361–379. doi:10.1177/17427 15013514881

Transformational Leadership Tourish, D. (2013). The dark side of transformational leadership: A critical perspective. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203558119 Van Knippenberg, D., & Sitkin, S. B. (2013). A critical assessment of charismatic-transformational leadership research: Back to the drawing board? Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 1–60. doi:10.5465/ 19416520.2013.759433 Wilson, S. E. (2016). Thinking differently about leadership: A critical history of leadership studies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. doi:10.4337/ 9781784716790

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP Transformational leadership is fundamental to achieving societal and organizational change. Rather than making small, incremental steps, the process produces quantum leaps forward. As a consequence, it transforms not only the organization or society but also the followers and the leaders themselves. This type of leadership can be distinguished from transactional and other forms of leadership by two attributes. The first is the magnitude of change that the leader seeks to achieve. It is always disruptive and transformative (hence the term) rather than incremental. For this reason, transformational leadership is commonly seen during inflection points, moments in time when the solutions of the past no longer provide sufficient improvements for continued success. Crises or the emergence of disruptive opportunities such as the advent of new technologies serve as triggers. The second attribute that distinguishes transformational leadership is the depth and intensity of the relationship between the leader and the followers. Transformational leaders elevate their followers’ sense of identity and purpose. Simultaneously, the followers’ commitment increases the leader’s dedication to the mission and their competence as an agent of change. Given the magnitude of the change and the intensity of emotions, the attributes required for transformational leadership are complex, highly sophisticated, broad in scope, and difficult to acquire and cultivate.

947

This entry begins by pointing out the difference between transformational and transactional leadership. Qualities of transformational leaders, and how those leaders view threats and opportunities, are then described. The entry then cautions about some liabilities that can be associated with transformational leadership. The entry concludes by pondering whether anyone can become a transformational leader.

Transformational Versus Transactional Leadership The term transformational leadership has its roots in the writings of the political scientist James McGregor Burns, who first used the term transforming leadership. His model deploys a simple topology to contrast two forms of leadership—transforming and transactional. He points out that transforming leaders focus on far-reaching and transcendent goals whereas transactional leaders choose more incremental and mundane objectives. Transforming leaders raise the consciousness of their followers to transcend their self-interests for the greater good, while transactional leaders focus on self-interests rather than a collective higher purpose. While an over-simplification of a complex phenomenon, Burn’s polar model of leadership was popularized in the literature especially by the field of organizational behavior. Bernard Bass and Philip Podsakoff were among the first scholars to examine the attributes of organizational transformational leaders, and they developed measurement tools for both transformational and transactional leaders. This work would spawn several decades of research on their models. At the same time, research conducted on charismatic leaders and organizational change leaders produced frameworks that had overlapping dimensions with transformational leadership. Since they share numerous attributes, the terms “transformational,” “charismatic,” and “change leadership” are often used interchangeably. In reality, however, transformational leaders are not necessarily charismatic, and change leaders don’t necessarily seek transformational ends. Given its defining character of higher order change, transformational leadership blossoms in

948

Transformational Leadership

certain contexts and tends to falter in others. Rarely is transformational leadership successful in stable, highly regulated contexts. Here transactional leaders tend to fare well. In contrast, environments supportive of transformational leadership are those where new technologies, demographic changes, or societal crises demand a rejiggering of the social order or the competitive advantages and competences of organizations. In response to these external forces, individuals come onto the scene with new strategic visions for what is possible while possessing the leadership and organizational capabilities to transform such visions into realities.

Attributes of Transformational Leaders Transformational leaders are entrepreneurial change agents. They possess a broad set of skills that can be captured along three dimensions. First, they have the ability to see a radically different future before others. Second, they are able to communicate a compelling vision of this future and elucidate the pathways to its achievement in highly motivational ways. Third, they are remarkably adept at aligning their followers’ actions and energies. Specifically, the transformational leader’s abilities at inspiring, promoting innovation, setting high standards, instilling a collective mindset, and personally modeling a higher purpose make this one of the most influential forms of leadership. In terms of the first dimension, the leader’s ability to see opportunities in societal or marketplace events requires a wide field of vision and dispositional preference for change. While they may draw upon or accentuate existing cultural attributes or current competencies of a society or organization, they feel in no way bound by them. They are relatively unafraid of failure, perceiving little opportunity in maintaining the status quo. Rather than being internally focused, they are highly attuned to the external forces of change. As a result, they tend to be comfortable moving ahead quickly with a great sense of urgency to capture emerging opportunities and repel threats. What aids the transformational leader’s skill at envisioning is the capacity to understand their organization’s landscape from a broad perspective. They take an enterprise or market or societal view.

For example, a transformational healthcare leader would draw not only upon their medical training but also upon a deep understanding of the broader economic, regulatory, technological, and demographic trends at play across society. In contrast, other forms of leadership would tend to operate from a narrow and more vertical perspective grounded in healthcare alone and the leader’s functional expertise as a medical specialist. Seeing opportunity or identifying threats, however, is only the initial step for the transformational leader. They also have to articulate and communicate the vision in ways that build support and commitment from followers. Invariably, people in organizations fear change. They worry that too much will be asked of them, that leadership can’t be trusted, and that the status quo is superior to the unknown. Transformational leaders personally engage with individuals rather than trying to lead change through one-way communications and company policies. They describe the changes in the world and competitive environment, as well as the specific actions that need to be taken in response. They acknowledge the difficulties of change. They promise and provide the training and resources needed for success. They paint a picture that all can see of the two roads that lie ahead, and why the recommended one is better both from a mission-driven perspective. Beyond communicating a compelling vision, transformational leaders require a deep understanding of the complexities of how organizations or societies change. This is foundational to the successful implementation of their vision. To achieve the magnitude of the change required, they must transform an entire system versus a singular process or function. Simultaneously, they must possess a deep appreciation for the importance of the levers of transformational change—deploying the appropriate organizational structures, processes, metrics, skill sets, and leadership talent to drive and support the vision’s tangible outcomes. Finally, they need to leverage their follower relationships using their engagement skills. One of the challenges facing transformational leaders is that the visionary aspirations often are ambiguous early in the change process. They come into focus only as specific goals are neared. This requires that leaders and their followers possess an entrepreneurial mindset and the willingness to take

Transformational Leadership

risks. In organizational actions, this mindset translates into the ability and confidence to quickly pivot and shift directions. Success is therefore dependent on interdepartmental comradery, comfort with uncertainty, intrinsic motivation, and a deep sense of mission and purpose. For these reasons, transformational leaders build a collective culture. Incentives tend to be awarded at the group level with the leader’s vision being seen as more important than the metrics governing the status quo. The organizational structures created are by necessity more informal and agile. Ultimately, the glue that holds the transformational change process together is the leader’s ability to engage with people and intervene as doubts and concerns arise. And for that reason, visibility of the leader is vital. In contrast, transactional leaders focus on clear and incremental goals. They rely on the advantages of “compound interest.” For example, if an organization’s sales can grow by 5% each year, then in 14 years the organization will have doubled its revenues and profits. Rewards, therefore, depend on quid pro quo incentives—reaching a sales target results in greater compensation. Transactional leaders also tend to employ the skills and approaches that made them and their organization successful in the past. Rather than viewing the entire organization or evolving societal issues as the greatest opportunity, they maximize the function of each vertical component. Rigid metrics are the “coin of the kingdom.” Marketing has sales targets, manufacturing cost targets, and human resource employee satisfaction targets. The transactional leader’s strength comes from attributes such as consistency, predictability, and simplicity of communication. Sales teams can quickly measure their success and calculate the increased income they earn each month. Manufacturing can implement across-the-board budget reductions and tie them to diminishing over time or supply chain expenses. Human resources can focus its efforts on annual surveys or other specific tools used for measurement.

How Transformational Leaders Perceive Threats and Opportunities Transformational leaders view threats as opportunities to introduce radical solutions, distinguish

949

themselves from their peer organizations, or maximize their organization’s unique competitive advantages. Confidence is both their friend and foe. They see their role as changing the world, and risk as an essential element of that goal. Recklessness is the greatest danger under transformational leadership. Transactional leaders, on the other hand, perceive threats as reasons to cut back on investments and to drive toward greater efficiencies deploying cost-cutting. Similarly, they approach new opportunities cautiously, preferring incremental investments and detailed analysis to minimize risks. Caution is both their friend and foe. They see their role as protecting the status quo. Inertia is the greatest danger under transactional leadership. Transformational leaders often have dabbled in a variety of operational areas earlier in their lives and can call on a broad array of inputs, experiences, and cross-industry tools to create solutions that no one else had previously considered. They recognize “similarities in seemingly different situations” and often apply what others have developed in new and innovative ways. For them, “good is never good enough,” but sometimes “failure is the result of reaching for greatness.” For transactional leaders, the risks and intrinsic tradeoffs of jettisoning what’s made them successful in the past seems too dangerous to pursue. For transformational leaders, anything less than radical change feels unacceptable and even foolish.

Liabilities of Transformational Leadership The mantra of transformational leadership is “go big or go home.” This form of leadership places followers in a state of continual change that invariably generates high levels of anxiety and stress. They require periods of calm and recuperation to integrate changes and to re-energize. For this reason, it is not unusual for the transformational leader to outpace their followers, pressing them to implement changes in rapid succession one after another. This may produce dissatisfaction with the leader and ultimately break the bonds that tie followers to the leader. In addition, when the journey to achieving the visionary goals encounters the inevitable roadblocks and setbacks, the followers can become

950

Transformational Leadership

disillusioned and disheartened, leading to further failure. Transformational leadership is risky. Various implementation hurdles to the vision may simply be too great to overcome. The vision itself can be a flawed one, incapable of being achieved. Sometimes the vision itself is premature given the state of evolution of an industry, technology, or society. For example, it often takes 20 years for a new technology to reach a maturity capable of disrupting markets and societies. The liabilities can also be inside the leaders themselves. Transformational leaders tend to be bored by small steps in change and by administrative demands. Unless they surround themselves with complementary talent to address these shortcomings, they may foster unintentional missteps, derailing their missions by having overlooked critical investments in managerial talent and procedures. Finally, they may become impatient when others have difficulty seeing their vision, recognizing its value or being willing to take the risks involved to fulfill it. As a result, they may damage follower relations or prematurely end their leadership role. Organizations and societal groups need to match the right leader with the right time. Transformational leadership is disruptive and can lead successful companies into failure and oblivion when overused. But transactional leaders in times of external disruption invariably fail. In retrospect, identifying one circumstance from the other is obvious. But by the time that happens, it is too late. For that reason, determining the type of leadership needed and the right time for change are the most important roles a society or organization and its board can play.

Can Anyone Become a Transformational Leader? As is often the case, leadership ability is a combination of nature and nurture. There is no simple answer to why some individuals are capable of envisioning a future that no one else can see or why certain individuals possess the temperament to accept risk and failure with seemingly little anxiety or hesitancy. For that matter, it is not completely clear why some individuals are

remarkably skillful at follower engagement. Almost everyone who has the opportunity to become a transformational leader has a proven track record and extensive experience in their field or they would not be in their current role. What is usually missing in individuals who fail to step forward and provide transformation leadership when it is most essential is the horizontal breath of knowledge needed, the personal temperament required, or the capacity for follower engagement—or all three. The truth is that some individuals are intrinsically more skilled at providing transformational leadership than others. The best of them are capable of seeing opportunities when no one else is able and translating their visions into operational change. For most people, becoming a transformational leader is a matter of choice, dependent on their willingness to go beyond their comfort zone without turning back. But even when transformational leadership comes naturally, success isn’t guaranteed. Invariably, even the best transformational leaders experience failure at times in their career. Jay A. Conger and Robert M. Pearl See also Adaptive Leadership; Change and Leadership; Heroic Leadership; Transforming Leadership; Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Further Readings Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York, NY: Free Press. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1998). Charismatic leadership in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Moorman, R. H., & Fetter, R. (1990). Transformational leader behaviors and their effects on follower’s trust in leader, satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors. The Leadership Quarterly, 1(2), 107–142. doi:10. 1016/1048-9843(90)90009-7

Transforming Leadership

TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP The concept of transformational leadership has generated a great deal of research and controversy since it found its way into the mainstream of leadership studies literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This encyclopedia has three entries addressing it directly, and others that touch on it. Though the term transformational leadership first appeared in a 1973 book by James Downton, it is generally credited to James MacGregor Burns. Burns made much of the distinction between transactional leadership and what has come to be called transformational leadership in his important 1978 book, Leadership. To the extent that “leadership studies” is truly an academic discipline and not simply a varied set of explorations into leadership and followership, it can be traced to Burns’s important book. And to the extent that the concept of transformational leadership has become a major influence in the study of leadership, Burns’s book can also be regarded as its source. However, this entry discusses an irony, and aims to clarify what Burns actually said about transformational leadership. The irony is that Burns said little if anything about transformational leadership. But as explained in what follows, he did write in considerable detail about a similar but distinct idea: transforming leadership.

Transforming Leadership in 1978s Leadership Although the 1978 book is routinely cited as the source of the concept of transformational leadership, as well as the distinction between transactional and transformational leadership, to the best of this author’s knowledge the phrase transformational leadership does not appear in that book. It is not listed in the index. Nor does it appear in Burns’s 2003 book Transforming Leadership. In fact, in a conversation in 2012, not long before his death, Burns told this author that he never used the term “transformational leadership.” He consistently spoke of transforming leadership. In fact, it is the idea of transforming leadership that he contrasted with transactional leadership in Leadership. It is important to be clear about the difference between transactional and

951

transforming leadership as discussed in that volume and the difference between transforming leadership and transformational leadership as developed empirically by Bernard Bass and his colleagues. Transactional leadership, in Burns’s view, was deal making. There was no genuine personal relationship between leader and follower. Leaders provide services of various kinds for followers, who in return give the leader some degree of support. In short, they follow to the extent that they could exchange their allegiance for some kind of good or service. Transforming leadership was quite different. In that case, leader and follower engage one another in ways that raise both to higher levels of motivation and morality, such that their purposes become fused. It is the moral component of transforming leadership that was central in all of Burns’s writing about leadership. The idea of leaders and followers elevating each other in both motives and morals grows out of the influence of psychologist Abraham Maslow on Burns’s thinking about leadership. As Burns wrote in 2003’s Transforming Leadership, his study of leadership as a process, in contrast to the study of individual leaders, required that he learn more about the psychology of human motivation. His explorations in that domain took him to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Although there have been refinements and variations of the need hierarchy, fundamentally it consists of five levels of motivation: physiological needs, such as for food, water and air; safety needs; belongingness needs; esteem needs; and finally, the need for self-actualization. The fundamental idea is that once lower-level needs are satisfied, people become concerned with needs or motives that are higher in the hierarchy. For example, one does not worry about belonging or self-esteem until basic needs for food, water, shelter, and safety are met. Burns was intrigued by the idea that potential leaders could work to satisfy followers’ lower-level needs and then transform them or elevate them to higher levels. Although motives and morality are different, Burns felt that in helping followers satisfy basic needs, leaders could guide them toward self-actualization through moral pursuits. Thus, elevation of motives and morality happened simultaneously.

952

Trauma

Transforming and Transformational Leadership in Dead Center Although Burns did not use the term transformational leadership in most of his work, and recalled never having used it, in fact that phrase is used in his 1999 book, written with Georgia Sorenson, called Dead Center. That work is an indictment of the administrations of Bill Clinton and Al Gore as too moderate and too transactional. They claimed it lacked moral focus. The book concludes, however, with a discussion of Hillary Rodham Clinton and the hope that she was a “potential transforming leader.” In the same paragraph they ask “What would transformational leadership mean in the twenty-first century?” (p. 344). Thus, the two terms transforming leadership and transformational leadership were used interchangeably, perhaps reflecting Sorenson’s preferred usage. In any case, the book concludes with a particularly clear definition of transforming/ transformational leadership: Transformational leadership, with its emphasis on the highest public values, is the most moral form of leadership. It is also the most practical, because at a time when the biggest changes are flowing from private leaders in business and technology, only strong public leadership can hold antidemocratic forces in check. (1999, p. 345)

Burns’s Transforming and Bass’s Transformational Leadership Bernard Bass and his colleagues developed the conception of transformational leadership that is generally used in the field today. Though Bass cites Burns, as explained earlier, Burns almost never used the term, and he did not do so in this seminal 1978 Leadership. Bass’s transformational leadership does not have an explicit moral component. Rather, as outlined in other entries in these volumes, transformational leadership combines the four measurable leader behaviors of Idealized Influence (or Charisma), Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation, and Individualized Consideration. These four elements all correlate with each other, while Idealized Influence/Charisma correlates more

highly with the other three than those other three do. Thus, transformational leadership shares a great deal with charismatic leadership, as explained elsewhere. In contrast, in Transforming Leadership, Burns expresses doubt that charisma generally leads to moral leadership, and equally important, empowers followers with purposes that are fused with those of the leader. Ironically then, transformational and transforming leadership, while sometimes regarded as twins, are quite different in their fundamental emphases. George R. Goethals See also Ethical Leadership; Heroic Leadership; Transactional and Transformational Synergies; Transactional and Transformational Leadership; Transformational Leadership

Further Readings Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1993). Transformational leadership: A response to critiques. In M. M. Chemers & R. Ayman (Eds.), Leadership theory and research. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Burns, J. M. (2003). Transforming leadership: A new pursuit of happiness. New York, NY: Grove Atlantic. Burns, J. M., & Sorenson, G. J. (1999). Dead center: Clinton–Gore leadership and the perils of moderation. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Downton, J. V. (1973). Rebel leadership: Commitment and charisma in the revolutionary process. London: Macmillan.

TRAUMA The concept of trauma is ancient, originating from the Greek word for wound. Psychological trauma is defined by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA) based on three Es: event, experience, and effects. The event describes what happened, including extreme threats of harm. Traumatic events can be a single event or repeated incidents. In order for an event to be considered traumatic, it must be experienced

Trauma

as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening. The experience of an event is a subjective and internal state. It will vary between individuals, meaning that what is experienced by one individual as traumatic may not be experienced as traumatic by others. Finally, in order to be considered trauma, there must be lasting negative effects on functioning and health. Good leadership in the treatment of trauma must recognize both the origins and consequences of the experience of trauma. This entry lists the various types of trauma before offering an in-depth examination of the reactions to and effects of trauma on individuals. The entry concludes by providing an overview of the leading organizational approach to addressing the effects of trauma.

Types of Trauma Trauma is frequently characterized as a single event, but there are different types of trauma with distinct effects. Early adversity and trauma, including childhood maltreatment, are associated with alterations to stress-responsive biological systems and disrupted development. Chronic or complex trauma is associated with alterations to affect regulation, attachment, and relationships. Racial trauma describes the emotional injury caused by chronic exposure to race-based bias, discrimination, and racism. Collective trauma describes a traumatic event experienced by a group of people such as the September 11th terrorist attack. Massive collective trauma forms the basis for historical trauma, which reflects the cumulative psychological and health effects across generations. Examples of historical trauma include genocide and slavery. Intergenerational trauma describes how events that were experienced by an earlier generation are passed down to subsequent generations.

Effects of Trauma Direct experience of trauma is not always required for the development of traumatic stress reactions. Individuals exposed to trauma narratives through work may develop vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, or compassion fatigue. Vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress reactions

953

reflect the negative changes in physical, emotional, and spiritual health that occur as a result of listening to and empathizing with traumatic stories while having to control your reaction. The symptoms of vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic response are similar to the traumatic stress reactions associated with directly experiencing trauma but may also include continuously thinking about the trauma of others, feeling disconnected from clients and work, and feelings of hopelessness. People respond to traumatic events in different ways. The most common traumatic stress reactions fall into five domains and make up the diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Hyperarousal and reactivity is one of the core reactions to trauma. Individuals may be quick to startle, alert, and hypervigilant. Hyperarousal symptoms are related to the fight, flight, and freeze response and are associated with changes in stress hormones. The constant state of readiness for danger can lead to disturbances of sleep and concentration, irritability, and anxiety. At the other end of the spectrum are responses related to hypoarousal such as avoidance and numbing. Individuals may feel withdrawn and numb. They may avoid situations that remind them of the event or distressing memories or thoughts related to the event. Intrusive symptoms such as re-experiencing and re-enactment are some of the oldest documented responses to trauma, first appearing in ancient Greek historical literature. Intrusive symptoms include nightmares and flashbacks. Flashbacks and intrusive thoughts or feelings related to the traumatic event may occur in response to a reminder such as a sound, smell, or image. Another common response to trauma is negative changes in beliefs and feelings. Following trauma, people may feel that the world is unsafe or that no one can be trusted. They may struggle to feel positive emotions. Individuals may avoid talking about what happened to them, may be unable to speak about the event, or may try to forget it. Some individuals experience a mental separation from experience called dissociation. They may feel as though they are in a dreamlike state or watching themselves in a movie. They may feel detached and lose touch with parts of themselves. Disassociation can occur in response to stress or may be a more constant way

954

Trauma

of engaging with the world. Individuals may experience some of these reactions following a traumatic event without meeting criteria for PTSD. Importantly, many of the risk factors for developing PTSD following trauma are outside of an individual’s control. Risk factors for PTSD before the trauma include: age; being female; history of childhood trauma, adversity, or prior trauma; genetics; mental health history; temperament; and experiencing multiple traumas. Risk factors during the trauma associated with the development of PTSD include level of exposure, intensity of experience/severity of trauma, perception of event, and whether it is interpersonal, intentional trauma. Finally, risk factors following trauma include little or no social support, limited access to resources, ongoing stress, and limited coping skills. Similarly, the protective factors that reduce the likelihood of developing PTSD following a traumatic event are also largely outside of an individual’s control. Protective factors identified in the literature include being male, age at which the trauma occurs, higher education level, support from friends and family, access to resources and services, the response of others to the traumatic event (which is especially important for children), adaptive coping skills, being able to act and respond despite fear, biology/genetics, and having a strong system of support. Trauma is associated with long-lasting effects to physical and psychological health likely due to a combination of trauma-related alterations to neurobiology, stress physiology, immunity, development, and interpersonal functioning. Trauma underlies a number of psychiatric disorders such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, and substance use. It is also associated with suicidality and impulse control. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study demonstrated a dose-response relationship between greater adversity and negative health outcomes. The lasting effects of traumatic events on health are often overlooked because of clinician discomfort around asking about trauma history. Importantly, healthy relationships and support have been shown to buffer the effects of adversity and trauma, and reduce the likelihood of later development of PTSD. Research suggests that the timing of trauma matters. Children may have less resources to cope

with a traumatic event and less control over their environment. There are also sensitive periods of brain development in which trauma leads to increased neurobiological effects, generally in childhood and adolescence. Interpersonal and intention trauma perpetuated by a caregiver is especially damaging. Trauma during development may interfere with the accomplishment of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral tasks. The earlier that steps are missed during child development, the greater the potential effects. Individuals experiencing chronic trauma during childhood may have multiple gaps in development. In terms of emotional development, children experiencing trauma may have difficulty with self-regulation, naming feeling and internal states, and communicating wants and needs. The inability to communication internal states may lead to increased anger and irritability, since individuals are unable to describe the emotions behind anger such as shame or sadness. Children who have experienced trauma may also have difficulty recognizing the emotional states of others. There is also evidence that children who experience maltreatment are more attuned to anger in vocal tone and facial expressions, in some cases perceiving anger in images of faces demonstrating fear. While anticipating or perceiving anger can be protective in a dangerous environment, misperception of emotions such as fear and anger may lead to misunderstanding and difficulty with relationships. The effects of trauma on cognitive development include difficulties regulating attention and executive functioning, memory impairments such as working memory deficits and disrupted recall of learned information, and a sense of a foreshortened future. It is also associated with reduced cognitive processing speed, inhibitory difficulties, and learning disabilities. Neglect has been further associated with suppressed intellectual and language development. Behaviorally, individuals who have experienced trauma may have difficulty appraising danger and safety. Children may act out in school or appear inattentive or irritable. They may have difficulty controlling their behavior to meet long-term goals. They may also engage in reckless, risk-taking, or reward-seeking behavior; or they may be risk-avoidant.

Trauma

These disruptions to emotional, behavioral, and cognitive development ultimately effect functioning. Individuals may have decreased academic or career achievement, impaired social and peer relationships, and greater occupational difficulties. A history of trauma places an individual at greater risk of re-victimization. Traumatic experiences are also associated with disruptions in trust and attachment. Individuals may feel ill-prepared to handle the future because they have missed key developmental steps or skills. These missed developmental steps during childhood may continue to influence the level of functioning and accomplishment of tasks into adulthood.

The Organizational Leadership of Trauma A leading organizational approach to addressing the effects of trauma is trauma-informed care (TIC). SAMHSA defines TIC as a “strengths-based service delivery approach that is grounded in an understanding of and responsiveness to the impact of trauma, that emphasizes physical, psychological, and emotional safety for both providers and survivors, and that creates opportunities for survivors to rebuild a sense of control and empowerment” (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2014, p. 8). SAMHSA also refers to TIC as “a program, organization, system that is trauma-informed: Realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential pathways for recovery; Recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, staff, and others involved with the system; Responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; Seeks to actively resist re-traumatization” (Ibid., p. 9). The idea of TIC is to move systems from asking, What is wrong with you? to asking, What happened to you? This shift in perspective means transitioning from a framework based in hierarchy and control to one based in partnership and collaboration. This approach incorporates an understanding of the fact that trauma affects how people approach systems as well as how those systems respond. Organizations and programs can perpetuate trauma and must be thoughtful in creating systems that establish and maintain psychological safety for everyone.

955

TIC has been integrated across healthcare, educational, service, and other settings. The core principles of TIC, as defined by SAMHSA, include safety; trustworthiness and transparency; peer support/mutual self-help; collaboration and mutuality; empowerment, voice, and choice; and cultural, historical, and gender responsiveness. There are multiple guidelines and approaches to becoming trauma-informed. These generally include staff training on the lasting effects of trauma on health and development, communication of sensitivity to trauma, creation of a physically and psychologically safe and comfortable environment, and the provision of services in a trauma-informed way. The experience and conceptualization of trauma is likely as old as humanity itself. As society has become increasingly aware of the effects of trauma, the definition has been refined to incorporate individual experiences of traumatic events. There is growing evidence supporting the intergenerational transmission of trauma and recognizing the lasting effects of historical trauma. Trauma can lead to alterations in emotional and behavioral responses as well as cognition and have lasting and dose-dependent effects on functioning and health. Missed developmental steps due to trauma exposure may limit the ability of an individual to functional at an expected level for their age or stage. Trauma-informed care is an organizational approach to address the experience of trauma at a systems-level and provide support for all members within the organization. It addresses the fact that systems play a role in the perpetuation of trauma and that individuals with a history of trauma may engage with systems in different ways based on past experiences. Importantly, TIC reframes the approach to trauma, shifting from a model of blame to one of curiosity. The implementation of TIC and the acknowledgment of trauma and its long-lasting effects is an important step in supporting individuals with a history of trauma across systems. Mollie C. Marr See also Crisis Leadership; Power and Powerlessness; Racism in the United States; Resilient Leadership; September 11th Terrorist Attacks

956

Trolley Problem

Further Readings Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. New York, NY: Basic Books. Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, NY: Penguin Books. US Department of Health and Human Services. (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

TROLLEY PROBLEM The trolley problem epitomizes a tradeoff that is particularly vexing for ethical leaders: whether decision makers may harm some people to save or benefit a greater number of other people. It consists in a series of thought experiments. The first, sometimes known as the “Driver” scenario, poses the question of whether a trolley driver should turn a trolley whose brakes have failed from a track where five track workers are trapped to a turnoff where one track worker is trapped. This decision represents a tradeoff to the extent that there is no perfect solution: if the driver does not turn the trolley, five people will die; if the driver does turn the trolley, one person will die. The second thought experiment, sometimes known as the “Bystander” scenario, asks whether a bystander on the trolley tracks is permitted to make the turn, killing one to save five, if the trolley driver suddenly perishes. The third, sometimes known as the “Footbridge” scenario, inquires whether a pedestrian on a footbridge over the trolley tracks may push another pedestrian onto the trolley tracks to stop the trolley (where the latter pedestrian happens to be large enough for this purpose), again killing one to save five. Theorists have argued that in the Driver and Bystander scenarios, the participants may turn the trolley, but the pedestrian in the Footbridge scenario may not stop the trolley. The “problem” of the trolley problem, then, is that no single ethical theory supports people’s intuitions that it is ethical

for Driver and Bystander to turn the trolley but unethical for a pedestrian to push another pedestrian onto the tracks in Footbridge. Utilitarianism, for example, holds that people should do whatever creates the most overall utility. It thus supports people’s intuitions in Driver and Bystander but not in Footbridge. Deontology, by contrast, holds that it is wrong to kill people deliberately. As such, it supports people’s intuitions in Footbridge but not Driver and Bystander. In this sense, the trolley problem presents a key challenge for ethical leaders concerning the use of ethical theories to guide decision-making about difficult questions, such as those involving tradeoffs. This entry describes several solutions that have been proposed to the problem, applications of the trolley problem, and criticisms of the trolley problem.

Proposed Solutions to the Trolley Problem To explain why Driver and Bystander may kill one to save five, but the pedestrian in Footbridge may not, theorists have introduced several concepts, including “killing,” “letting die,” “risk redirection,” and “mere means.” These concepts are meant to provide guidance where utilitarianism and deontology seem less helpful. While offering insights into the problem of the trolley problem, however, these concepts bring difficulties of their own. Killing and Letting Die

Killing is actively causing a person’s death. Letting die, by contrast, is failing to intervene in the case of a person who would die without that intervention but whom the intervention would save. Theorists have argued that killing is morally worse than letting die because the person who kills directly causes the death of the person who dies. In letting die, by contrast, the person who lets die does not directly cause the death of the person who dies. Theorists have used these concepts to transform the three scenarios, making the intuitions associated with them seem less conflicted. If Driver allows the trolley to continue on its track, Driver kills five people in the sense that Driver controls the blunt object that directly causes their deaths. In

Trolley Problem

intervening to save the five by turning the trolley, Driver kills one. Killing five seems intuitively worse than killing one; thus, Driver may divert the trolley to avoid killing five. Through the lens of killing and letting die, the Bystander scenario looks incongruous—ethically speaking—with the Driver scenario and congruous with the Footbridge scenario. If Bystander does nothing, Bystander lets five die; in intervening to save the five people, Bystander kills one. Similarly, in the Footbridge scenario, the pedestrian faces a choice between killing one (the other pedestrian) and letting five die (the five track workers). Although this reshuffling is potentially useful in developing theory to explain people’s various intuitions about the three scenarios in the trolley problem, it also reveals a serious weakness in the concepts of killing and letting die. The weakness is that the sense in which killing is morally worse than letting die is vague: these concepts do not explain how much worse it is to kill than to let die. In particular, it is obscure whether killing is less than five times worse than letting die. If killing is more than five times as bad as letting die, Bystander may not divert the trolley and the pedestrian may not push the larger pedestrian off Footbridge. If killing is less than five times as bad as letting die, though—say, four times as bad as letting die—then diverting the trolley and pushing the large pedestrian are ethical. While intriguing, then, the concepts of killing and letting die appear not to solve the trolley problem. Risk Redirection

To address differing intuitions between the first two scenarios and the Footbridge scenario, theorists have also developed the concept of “risk redirection.” Risk redirection refers to a decision maker’s choice to redirect a pre-existing risk, or probability that harm will occur, so that it harms different people from those it would harm if it were not redirected. Risk redirection is permitted (a) because it does not create a new risk and (b) if it reduces the risk of harm posed by the un-redirected risk. Consider the application of risk redirection to the Driver and Bystander scenarios. In those scenarios, the decision maker redirects the risk so that

957

one person, instead of five people, is harmed (i.e., killed). Using the concept of risk redirection, killing one to save five in these two cases is permitted because no new risk is created and the risk of harm posed by the un-redirected risk is reduced. In Footbridge, by contrast, no risk is redirected; rather, the pedestrian who pushes the other, larger pedestrian creates a new risk to the large pedestrian by pushing that person onto the trolley track. Thus, the concept of risk redirection does not permit the first pedestrian to kill the larger pedestrian to save the five people trapped on the trolley track. As such, it explains why people intuit that decision makers are permitted to kill one person to save five people in the Driver and Bystander scenarios while being prohibited to kill one person to save five people in the Footbridge scenario. The concept of risk redirection thus appears promising as a solution to the trolley problem. Its narrow scope, pertaining only to decisions involving redirecting or not redirecting risks, potentially limits its usefulness to ethical leaders. Mere Means

Pauline Kleingeld has offered an alternative concept to address people’s different intuitions about the Driver, Bystander, and Footbridge scenarios. Drawing upon Kantian ethics, a form of deontology, she argues that the discrepancy can be explained by the fact that the decision maker in Driver and Bystander does not use the one person as a “mere means” to save the five people, but in the Footbridge case, the decision maker does use the one person as a “mere means” to save the five people. Kantian ethics prohibits using people as a “mere means” to secure an “end,” or goal, that benefits someone else to the extent that Kantian ethics requires decision makers to respect people as “ends in themselves,” or to acknowledge that people are capable of setting their own ends and deserve respect in virtue of this capability. This basic requirement of ethics entails that a decision maker may never treat a human being as though they are less than human, such as by enslaving or otherwise exploiting them, to secure an end for someone else.

958

Trolley Problem

In the context of the Driver and Bystander scenarios, then, the decision maker does not use the one person as a mere means to save the lives of the five people. The one person does serve as a means to this end (in the sense that the one person is killed as a direct effect of the decision to diver the trolley to save the five people) but not as a mere means. The one person does not serve as a mere means to the extent that it would be consistent with the decision maker’s end of saving the five people if the one person were somehow to escape, such as being unexpectedly scooped up by a passing, large drone. In the Footbridge scenario, by contrast, it would directly thwart the decision maker’s goal of saving the five people if the large pedestrian were somehow saved, such as by falling to the side of the trolley track rather than directly on it. In this sense, Footbridge, but not Driver and Bystander, uses the one person as a mere means to save the five people. Thus, the decision to save the five in Footbridge, but not the decision to save the five in Driver and Bystander, is prohibited.

Applications of the Trolley Problem The trolley problem has been widely applied to practical conflicts, such as those concerning autonomous vehicles. Theorists have argued that the algorithms powering driverless vehicles need to have ways of making ethical decisions, including whether they may harm some people to save or benefit a greater number of other people in unavoidable crashes. The trolley problem is useful in this regard to the extent that it offers dilemmas, upon which decision makers may reflect before they determine how algorithms will react. Other theorists have argued that the trolley problem does not provide a good model for ethical questions about autonomous vehicles. Consider two disanalogies, for example, between the trolley problem and autonomous vehicles. Whereas the trolley problem is conceived as an in-the-heat-ofthe-moment decision in which a pedestrian must react quickly to unfolding events, designing the algorithms of autonomous vehicles is a reflective process in which many people play a role. Secondly, whereas the outcomes of the trolley problem are stipulated to be certain (100% probability

of either killing five people or killing one person), autonomous vehicles’ algorithms will be probabilistic. The trolley problem, though, does not engage decision makers’ moral reason about probabilities of harm.

Criticisms of the Trolley Problem As its popularity and influence has grown, the trolley problem has been subject to criticisms, many of which are directly relevant to its role in leadership ethics. Theorists have objected, for example, that the trolley problem leaves out too much information, including the role of private companies and the government in regulating trolleys and trolley tracks. Such organizations carefully monitor under what conditions workers may perform work on them (e.g., typically not when workers are unable to escape from the tracks when needed) and who may interfere with the trolley (e.g., bystanders are typically prohibited from operating the trolley). Others have criticized educators’ use of the trolley problem in ethics education. The sensationalistic nature of the trolley problem, combined with its removal from the kinds of ethical questions decision makers are likely to confront in their daily lives, may make it poorly suited to train ethical leaders. In light of such criticisms, ethical leaders may opt to discount the trolley problem. Still, the thought experiment’s articulation of a compelling ethical quandary—may decision makers harm some people to benefit a greater number of other people—provides a valuable opportunity for ethical leaders to work out both their thoughts on this matter and their ethical reasoning capabilities, more broadly. Tobey Scharding See also Accountability; Decision-Making Theory; Dirty Hands; Moral Character; Special Obligations

Further Readings Kleingeld, P. (2020). A Kantian solution to the trolley problem. In M. Timmons (Ed.), Oxford studies in normative ethics (Vol. 10, pp. 204–228). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/ 9780198867944.003.0010

Trust Lin, P. (2016). Why ethics matters for autonomous cars. In M. Maurer, J. Christian Gerdes, B. Lenz, & Hermann W. (Eds.), Autonomous driving: Technical, legal, and social aspects (pp. 69–75). Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-48847-8_4 Thomson, J. J. (1976). Killing, letting die, and the trolley problem. The Monist, 59(2), 204–217. doi:10.5840/ monist197659224 Tuana, N. (2014). An ethical leadership developmental framework. In C. M. Branson & S. J. Gross (Eds.), Handbook of ethical educational leadership (pp. 153–175). New York, NY; London: Routledge. Wood, A. (2011). Humanity as an end in itself. In D. Parfit & S. Scheffler (Eds.), On what matters: Volume two (pp. 58–82). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10. 1093/acprof:osobl/9780199572816.003.0003

TRUST Trust is an essential component of leadership. This entry explains the concern over declining trust in contemporary society, how trust in political life illustrates the dynamics of trust more generally, the factors that determine trust in leaders, the importance of social capital or general trust, and the benefit of a healthy degree of mistrust.

Declining Trust One of the most widely accepted findings of recent social science research is that trust in society is declining—trust among individuals in their communities, trust in institutions, and trust in political leaders. The Pew Research Center’s long-term polling reveals, for example, that the percentage of Americans with a great deal of trust in government has steadily declined from a peak of nearly 75% in 1958 to less than 30% in 2019. That frequently cited number is simply the tip of an iceberg, consistent with similar findings from Gallup, the Edelman Trust Barometer, and several other polling firms and researchers. The decline is as wide as it is deep. It cuts across generations, income groups, racial and ethnic categories, political affiliation, and democracies throughout the world. And people are less trusting

959

in nearly every kind of institution: government, business, the media, science, religion, and even the military and law enforcement. The trend is not inconsequential. Trust is essential to living cooperatively in complex economic and political systems and diverse societies. It is a kind of social lubricant, lessening the need for the legal and bureaucratic regulations and other highly formal constraints in our political or economic lives. In simple terms, the greater the trust within a community, the easier it is to cooperate to pursue a common good. There is also a related concern: social scientists generally believe that diminished trust becomes a self-reinforcing downward spiral that is extremely difficult to reverse. Once lost, trust is nearly impossible to recover. Apart from the data and the patterns, however, there is also an intuitive sense that people simply prefer to live in a society where they trust their neighbors, the institutions that serve them, and the leaders they choose. Trust makes life easier. It also makes life better.

Trust in Political Life Understanding trust in political life, especially in democracies, is a good starting point for understanding why trust matters and what it depends upon. The Federalist Papers is a collection of essays by U.S. Founding Fathers John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, written to explain the proposed Constitution and argue for its ratification. In the often-overlooked contribution Number 64, John Jay makes a case for trusting executive officers, but only under certain conditions. The essay is about the treaty-making responsibilities of the executive and the legislature. As perhaps the most seasoned diplomat among the Founders, Jay knew something about negotiating with foreign entities. The process required secrecy and a fair amount of discretion to bargain and make promises. Executives and those operating on their behalf needed room to maneuver. They had to be trusted to pursue the nation’s best interests. Jay’s argument cuts against the grain of a constitution that was otherwise designed to constrain public officials through an elaborate

960

Trust

system of checks and balances and a division of powers among three separate branches. The drafters of the Constitution assumed those with power often had the temptation—and always the opportunity—to abuse it. Leaders were, after all, human, and were therefore driven by self-interest. Jay is being practical, however, writing that leaders needed to be given some discretion, which they would deserve if they had the right experience, skills, and motivations to act wisely and judiciously. On the other hand, they might not act wisely and judiciously. How, then, to find the right balance between trust and mistrust? The Constitution, Jay explains, solved the dilemma by granting officials power but also putting a safeguard in place, and that is the fear of impeachment, which he believed would provide a strong incentive for good behavior. Trust was conditional. It could be withdrawn if it was violated. The treaty-making example is specific, but the principle is a general one. Even John Locke, the 17th-century British philosopher who shaped contemporary understanding of liberal democracies and provided the rationale for why leaders must be constrained and held accountable, believed “prerogative” powers were necessary. Although leaders always had to act in accordance with the laws, he wrote, and although their authority depended on the consent of the governed, sometimes they would find themselves in situations where the laws offered little guidance or where circumstances required stretching the bounds of their formal authority. Inaction in times of crisis, for example, was not an option. In those cases, trusted leaders needed room to maneuver. Leaders without trust would have far less discretion.

Why Leaders Are Trusted? How do leaders gain and keep trust? It depends on three factors: their competence, their honesty, and their commitment to the interests of others. Competence is not simply a matter of managerial skills, nor does it apply only to those in administrative or executive positions. It is also a matter of how well individuals align with the distinctive responsibilities of the office they hold. The abilities required of a jurist are different than those needed to serve competently as a legislator.

And skills that serve leaders well in business or a university may differ from those needed in politics. A leader must have the hard skills to do the job, but also the softer skills of judgment, insight, and an understanding of the role the institution has in society as well the particular office the individual holds. As a leader produces results and acts appropriately in fulfillment of the assigned responsibilities, the perception of competence grows, and trust grows along with it. Another factor is honesty and integrity. Telling the truth earns trust. But honesty is about more than just conveying facts. It is also the ability to persuade and explain effectively, to communicate with followers in terms they understand, and, occasionally, to convey the inconvenient truth about problems and the sacrifices needed to solve them. “God told me so” may be a sufficient rationale for decisions in a theocracy. “Because I said so” may be sufficient in an autocracy. But in settings where leaders must earn trust, higher levels of public explanation and reasoning are necessary. Public justification entails explaining clearly what is to be done but also why it must happen. Telling the truth is a sign of respect for others. Honesty therefore expands into a larger embrace of integrity and other virtues, such as humility and the willingness to acknowledge and learn from mistakes. Famously, John Kennedy seriously blundered early in his presidency when he authorized a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) scheme to launch an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles for the purposes of overthrowing the regime of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The plan failed miserably, and in the aftermath Kennedy honestly and publicly admitted his mistake and took full responsibility. The trust he earned served him well later during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he acted with considerable discretion and judgment to avoid a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. A final determinant of trust is whether followers perceive that a leader has their interests in mind. This is not as simple as it first appears. In a democracy, leaders seek approval by, for example, seeking re-election. An alignment between an official’s self-interest in retaining their job and the voters’ desire for the candidate to act on their behalf is a desirable situation. In his landmark essay “Politics as a Vocation,” the pioneering

Trust

sociologist Max Weber explains the intricate relationship of a leader’s self-interest to the interests of their followers this way: Leaders need conviction and commitment to a purpose (or what Weber calls a “passion”) but also an awareness of the consequences of pursuing those commitments (which he calls an “ethic of responsibility”). When leaders pursue their own interests irresponsibly, without concern for the consequences on others, they will lose the public’s trust. Leaders also threaten their standing when they act in ways inconsistent with their publicly stated beliefs and principles—that is, when they hypocritically demand standards for others that they disregard for themselves. Preaching one thing and doing another conveys a sense of privilege and is surely a path to mistrust. Each of these factors—competence, honesty, and acting in the interests of others—is a necessary but not sufficient element of trust. Taken together, they comprise a constellation of personal qualities that foster trust.

961

with Shaylyn Romney Garrett produced Upswing (2020), an analysis of how increasing trust in America in the early and mid-20th century coincided with very high levels of shared commitments and evenly distributed growth and prosperity. Decreasing trust in the later part of the century coincided with stalled economic growth and greater inequality. The depletion of social capital was bad for society. There are at least two important leadership implications in social capital theory. First, as general levels of trust in society decline, leaders find it more difficult to gain the trust of followers. Second, as trust declines, leaders struggle to restore social capital through their own actions or policies. Polarization in democracies, the resulting paralysis in government, and the pitting of some groups against others to gain political or electoral advantages are trends associated with depleted social capital and lack of trust.

The Benefits of Mistrust Social Capital In his classic work Democracy in America, the French diplomat, political scientist, and historian Alexis de Tocqueville marvels at how Americans in the early 19th century had come together to advance the general well-being of their communities. They were “joiners,” he writes, who created civic associations to pursue common interests. This led them to the realization that their own self-interest was intricately connected to the common interest. De Tocqueville calls this “enlightened self-interest” or “self-interest well understood.” Among social scientists this is now considered “social capital.” It is the stock of trust that can be called upon for cooperative action. Robert Putnam is the scholar best known for analyzing why societies with high degrees of social capital are also the most prosperous and most effective. His initial study contrasted the societies of northern and southern Italy and found higher levels of civic engagement in the north along with higher levels of prosperity and trust. Later, in his book Bowling Alone, he documented the decline of associations in America and how this coincided with lower degrees of trust. More recently, his collaboration

Citizens prosper when living in societies with high degrees of trust. But mistrust has its place. It can be empowering for individuals to grant authority to trusted leaders, but only if they do so conditionally. As active citizens, not passive inhabitants, engaged in shaping the fate of their communities, they have their own obligations to participate in civic life, to provide leaders with direction, and to hold them accountable. A pathology of democratic life occurs when trust shades too far into unquestioned acceptance of a leader’s dictates. Despotism and authoritarianism can be seductive; they ask little of citizens other than to grant a leader passive, unquestioning obedience. But there is a pathology in the other direction when mistrust and healthy skepticism shade into cynicism, resulting in a reflexive disbelief in any and all leaders and institutions. The challenge for modern societies is finding that equilibrium point between the fatalism of cynical mistrust in any leaders and blind trust in just one trusted savior. Kenneth P. Ruscio See also Idiosyncrasy Credit; Leader Exceptionalism; Leader Follower Relationships; Procedural Justice

962

Trust

Further Readings de Tocqueville, A. (2002). Democracy in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, A., James Madison, J., & Jay, J. (1961). The federalist papers. New York, NY: Penguin Group. Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PEW Research Center. (2021, May 17). Public trust in government: 1958–2021. Retrieved from https://www.

pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust-ingovernment-1958-2021/ Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R. D., & Garrett, S. R. (2020). The upswing. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

U UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES LEADERSHIP THEORIES

argumentation, formulation, and empirical evidence in how they are developed, articulated and tested, rooted within a positivist social science paradigm. Broadly speaking, positivist research in the social sciences aims to model itself on how the physical sciences undertake research and seeks to establish truth. While highly influential, it is also enduringly controversial; one core objection is that human beings are not objects and therefore—on ethical and/or practical grounds—cannot be researched as if they were. Putting that debate to one side, formal theories constitute the “gold standard” in a positivist paradigm as to what is seen as desirable, reliable knowledge, due to both the rigorous processes through which they are developed and because such theories aim to offer generalizable knowledge and good predictive validity. According to a positivist perspective, good theories comprise a series of precisely articulated assumptions, definitions, constructs/concepts, and proven hypotheses, packaged into a coherent and cohesive model that explains some social phenomena. They develop through repeated efforts to test and refine the credibility of what the theory posits and, thus, are the subject of much scholarly scrutiny. Empirical evidence, often in the form of survey data or laboratory experiments, is subjected to complex statistical modeling, with a deductive logic of inquiry being used to test the validity of hypotheses. A “good” theory in this paradigm is one which provides a scientifically credible explanation of the phenomenon it pertains to and can predict with a good degree of reliability that the

OF

This entry discusses research and debates that address why and how, despite best endeavors, leadership theories can generate unintended adverse consequences, as well as what those consequences are said to entail. Scholars who critique dominant approaches to theory-building and hold a skeptical view toward leadership itself have been at the forefront of advancing such concerns. They challenge how leadership theories are typically formed and tested, question the core assumptions often made about leadership, and identify unintended effects arising from what theories recommend. A particular focus of such critique has been influential theories of leadership centered on notions of transformation, charisma, and authenticity. This entry first explains the dominant approach to theory-building in leadership studies and then considers what critics say about how this fosters the risk of unintended consequences. It then canvasses research and arguments that highlight unintended consequences which have been linked to transformational, charismatic, and authentic approaches to leadership.

How Leadership Theories Are Typically Developed What I will refer to here as “formal” theories strive to meet certain norms and standards of logical

963

964

Unintended Consequences of Leadership Theories

presence of a given construct or set of constructs, posited to be independent variables, are antecedent to the presence of a given dependent variable or set of variables. As a theory is further developed and tested, moderating and mediating variables will also be identified. A “successful” formal theory is one many scholars come to use in their own research and strive to build its explanatory power by testing it in multiple settings; identifying ever more moderating, mediating, or dependent variables; or establishing links between it and other theories. Having established a theory’s credibility via these processes of development enables a theorist to make authoritative prescriptive recommendations that people should adopt in practice what the theory proposes—and such theories play a significant role in the field of leadership studies. Formal theory development within the positivist paradigm is a laborious, difficult process. Enormous care and effort goes into developing a formal theory, and it is not easy for a theory to gain influence within a field. Scholars also typically aspire to have a constructive impact on the world through their efforts. Therefore, for all these reasons, a critique that a theory creates problematic unintended consequences is not normally framed as resulting from failures of individual theorists but, rather, as rooted in the nature of positivist theory-making along with the implicit assumptions shared by a given scholarly community and which shape its theory-making efforts. It is to those arguments that we now turn. Critiques of Positivist Theory-Building

One fundamental challenge to positivist theory development rests on what critics see as being the unavoidable indeterminacy of language and its usage, the notion that human communication is inevitably ambiguous and open to varying interpretations and an insight that is core to poststructuralist thought. This means, for instance, poststructuralists Mats Alvesson and Kaj Skoldberg argue the survey questions that so often form the fundamental building blocks for gathering the empirical evidence needed to test a theory are far more ambiguous than is acknowledged by positivists. The concern is that not only are survey questions open to varying

interpretations but, also, one cannot discern the intentions of respondents in selecting a given answer, nor is there any certainty their answer is merely a reflection of their current state of mind or indicative of a more stable, enduring attitude, belief, or perception. Accordingly, poststructuralists hold that the empirical bedrock upon which positivist theories are built fundamentally lacks the stability and certainty which positivists assume or assert is the case and consequently, that any conclusions drawn from such foundations should be regarded as far more tenuous and provisional than positivists allow for. Poststructuralists thus contend that in failing to grasp the indeterminate nature of language and its usage, positivist theory-making over-reaches what it can credibly say in terms of truth claims. In doing so, it fosters the risk of unintended consequences arising. A second core critique of positivist theorymaking pertains to concerns about what is placed in and out of scope and the effects that arise from this. A particular feature of positivist theory-making is the principle of parsimony. This holds that a theory should comprise as few terms, premises, and scoping conditions as possible and that each element in a theory must play a distinctive role that does not overlap with any other element. As a consequence of this, however, critics argue that theories developed via positivist methods exclude a multitude of social and structural factors from consideration and analysis, instead mostly focusing narrowly on prescribing leader behavior and measuring follower effects. Critics such as David Collinson say it is highly problematic that these theories leave out meaningful consideration of economic, institutional, social, cultural, political, and legal factors that influence the scope for leaders to act, and which shape priorities and the potential for action that extend beyond the leader’s will and skill. They also argue that the credibility of such parsimonious approaches to theorizing in fact depends in no small part on a culturally rooted bias of particular prominence in Western societies, namely attributing individual human agency as the motive force behind events and thereby ignoring or understating the influence of nonhuman, systemic forces. Critics contend this creates the problematic unintended consequence of having theories which prescribe actions said to be of

Unintended Consequences of Leadership Theories

universal applicability, but which actually reflect the cultural beliefs of a limited proportion of the human population. This, critics such as Helena Liu argue, constitutes a form of epistemic violence, a mechani