PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

1998, 51

PATTERNS OF LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR RELATED TO

EMPLOYEE GRIEVANCES AND TURNOVER: SOME
POST HOC REFLECTIONS

EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN
George Mason University

The Most Frequently Cited Article of the 1960s

Patterns of Leadership Behavior Related to Employee
Grievances and lUrnover
EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN AND EDWIN F HARRIS

This study investigates some relationships between the leader behavior

of industrial supervisors and the behavior of their group members. It
represents an extension of earlier studies carried out at the Interna-
tional Harvester Company, while the authors were with the Ohio State
University Leadership Studies.

It is hard to believe that 36 years have passed since the original pub-
lication of our article "Patterns of Leadership Behavior Related to Em-
ployee Grievances and Turnover." I still get requests for reprints (yes, I
still have some) or for permission from authors to reproduce the original
figures in their textbooks. That it was the most cited article published in
Personnel Psychology in the 1960s was a surprise to us. Of course, much
has happened in the field of leadership research since publication of this
article in 1962. Yet, it is somehow comforting to know that some con-
structs and findings are still useful and that the work of colleagues has
been influenced by them.
I appreciate the invitation by the editor of this journal to discuss what
led us to the publication of this article and to reflect on what followed.
First, I would like to provide some of the research that led to this partic-
ular study. Some of this may add some historical documentation about
some of the "earlier days" of the field of leadership research. Next, I
will summarize what I see as the major findings and implications. It is
interesting to me that some of the results I found most interesting are not
necessarily those that are quoted in the literature. Finally, I will provide
a brief epilogue on the status of this work in relation to the current status
of this field.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Edwin A. Fleishman,

11304 Spur Wheel Lane, Potomac, MD 20854.
COPYRIGHT © 1998 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, INC.

825
826 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

Historical Context

I was a research assistant at the Ohio State University Leadership

Studies working with Carroll Shartle, Ralph Stogdill, and John Hemphill,
who were among the major figures in this program. I was subsequently
awarded the first International Harvester Company Fellowship to pur-
sue my interests in leadership research, using their truck manufacturing
company as the organizational base.
This project, which subsequently became known as the "Interna-
tional Harvester Study," had three primary phases. The first phase in-
volved development of the instruments to measure leader behavior and
attitudes in industry and resulted in the confirmation and definition of
the constructs "consideration" and "initiating structure." This develop-
ment included the item analysis and factor analysis work that produced
the Supervisory Behavior Description (SBD) and Leadership Opinion
Questionnaire (LOQ), described in several early articles (e.g., Fleish-
man, 1953b, 1953c, 1957).
Earlier, I had been influenced by the studies of Lewin, Lippitt, and
White (1939), who introduced the concept of "social climate" into their
studies of leadership of boys in recreational groups. I hypothesized that
this concept could be examined in relation to leadership in complex
organizations. Today, the study of culture and climate in organizations
is a thriving research area (e.g., Schein, 1992; Schneider, 1990). The
International Harvester Studies may have been the first to examine the
potency of this construct, at least in some primitive form, as a moderator
of leader behavior and the results of leadership training in organizations.
The second phase of the original Harvester research utilized mea-
sures of leader Consideration and Structure to evaluate changes in fore-
man leadership attitudes and behavior resultingfi-oma centralized man-
agement training program for company supervisors. The amount of
change was evaluated at three different times—once while the foremen
were still in the training setting, again after they had returned from train-
ing to the plant environment (evaluated at three intervals up to 3 years),
and still later after a "refi-esher" training course. The results showed
that immediately after training, while in the training situation, there was
a distinct increase in Consideration and an unexpected decrease in Struc-
ture attitudes. Another finding, hardly ever cited, is that leadership at-
titudes among the trainees became more dissimilar rather than more
similar, despite the fact that all foremen had received the same training.
Thisfindingalone should have alerted us to the complexity of train-
ing effects, which depended at least in part on what the supervisor
brought to training in terms of his predispositions and experiences. When
the supervisor's behavior and attitudes were evaluated back in the plant.
 EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN 827

the effects of the training largely disappeared over time. This pointed
to the main finding, which was the overriding importance of the inter-
action of the training effects with certain aspects of the social setting in
which the foremen had to operate in the plant. Most critical was the
"leadership climate" supplied by the leadership behavior and attitudes
of the foreman's own boss in the plant. This was found to be more re-
lated to the foreman's own Consideration and Structure behavior than
was the fact that he had or had not received the leadership training.
The results of this work were first published in this journal (Fleishman,
1953a), although there was an earlier, more detailed, Ohio State leader-
ship project report (Fleishman, 1951).
Subsequent to this work, Edwin F. Harris received the second In-
ternational Harvester Fellowship at Ohio State and carried out a third
major phase which could be termed the "criterion phase." In this phase,
the relationships between Consideration and Structure and different in-
dices of foremen proficiency were examined. In my view, these con-
tributions to the area of criterion development and leadership have not
received the attention they deserved. This work was an early demonstra-
tion of the need for a multidimensional view of work group performance
and leader effectiveness. Also demonstrated was the effort required to
"decontaminate" criterion measures and to identify the sources of crite-
rion contamination in order to purify them for use in subsequent validity
studies. This phase demonstrated the fruitfulness of such a multidimen-
sional approach in providing a better understanding of the phenomena
of leadership in terms of its influence on a variefy of individual, group,
and organizational indices of performance.
An important finding was that production supervisors rated high in
"proficiency" by plant management turned out to have leadership pat-
terns high in Structure and low in Consideration. (This relationship
was accentuated in departments scoring high on a third variable, "per-
ceived pressure of deadlines"). On the other hand, this same pattern
of high Structure and low Consideration was found to be related to
high labor turnover, union grievances, worker absences and accidents,
and low worker satisfaction. There was some indication that these re-
lationships differed in "nonproduction" department. Another seldom
quoted finding was that foremen with low Consideration and low Struc-
ture were more often bypassed by subordinates in the informal organi-
zational structure. In any case, it was evident that "what is an effective
supervisor" was a complex question, depending on the proficiency cri-
terion emphasized, management values, type of work, and other situa-
tional variables. The most comprehensive treatment of the three phase
International Harvester Study was published in our book "Leadership
and Supervision in Industry" (Fleishman, Harris, & Burtt, 1955).
 828 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

This gives me an opportunity to call attention to another seldom cited

study that followed my original leadership training evaluation work. This
was the study that showed the importance of evaluating the effects of
leadership at the individual as well as the group level. I have indicated
that exposure to leadership training did not make participants more like
one another on either Consideration or Structure. In our follow-up
study (Harris & Fleishman, 1955) correlations were determined between
scores obtained before and after leadership training courses for fore-
men, compared with test-retest correlations for control groups receiving
no training over the same time intervals. A major finding was the stabil-
ity of leadership patterns (for both Consideration and Structure) across
time, for control groups that did not have intervening training. How-
ever, there was a significant shrinkage in the correlations when there
was intervening training. These findings were replicated in a study of
the effects of "refresher training" on the stabilify of leadership attitudes
and behavior across time. Again it was shown that a comparison of mean
differences between control and trained group could be misleading. The
finding of insignificant mean differences due to training did not tell the
whole story; again there was significant shrinkage in pre-post training
correlations, relative to the test-retest correlations for a control group.
This meant that the training affected different managers differently, on
both Consideration and Structure. It appeared that the effects of the
training depended on factors within the individual (e.g., personality) and
in his situation (e.g., climate in the plant).

The 1962 Study

In the years following the publication of the Harvester studies, I

turned to some broader interests in performance measurement (e.g.,
Fleishman, 1972,1982; Fleishman & Quaintance, 1984) and Ed Harris
eventually began his long career in Executive Development at Chrysler
Motors. The LOQ and SBD were published, used widely, and are still
available (Fleishman, 1960, 1989a, 1989b). As these measures of Con-
sideration and Structure continued to be used in a variety of settings by
me and by others, a number of questions came to mind. First, what is the
form of the relationship between leader behavior and indices of group
behavior? Is it linear or curvilinear? As far as we knew, no one had re-
ally examined this question. Rephrased, this question asks if there are
critical levels of Consideration and/or Structure beyond which it does or
does not make a difference in work group behavior? Is an "average"
amount of Structure better than a great deal or no Structure at all? In
a similar manner, is there an optimum level of Consideration above or
below which worker grievances and/or turnover rise sharply?
 EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN 829

A second set of questions concerned the possible interaction effects

of different combinations of Consideration and Structure. In our stud-
ies, and others after the Harvester Studies, significant correlations have
been found between each of these patterns and such indices as rated
proficiency, grievances, turnover, departmental reputation, subordinate
satisfactions, and so forth (for reviews see Bass, 1990; Fleishman, 1973b,
1989a, 1989b). These studies present some evidence that scoring low on
both dimensions is not desirable. They also indicate that some balance
of Consideration and Structure may be optimal for satisfying both pro-
ficiency and morale criteria. We feit that a more intensive examination
of possible optimum combinations of Consideration and Structure was
needed and that some post-hoc analyses of our data from the Harvester
project would provide some insights into these questions.
Space allotted here does not allow comments on all our results.
The original article provides the data and graphic representations. To
summarize briefly, work group grievance rates as well as work group
turnover rates were found to be quite reliable over the 11-month period.
Thefindingsof stable work group grievance and turnover rates over time
were important results. Next, the study indicated that there were several
significant relationships between the leader behavior of foremen and the
labor grievances and employee turnover in their work groups. In gen-
eral, low Consideration and high Structure were accompanied by high
grievances and turnover in the work groups. However, there appeared
to be certain critical levels beyond which increased Consideration or de-
creased Structure had no effect on grievance or turnover rates. Sim-
ilarly, grievances and turnover were shown to increase most markedly
at the extreme ehds of the Consideration (low end) and Structure (high
end) scales. However, the relationships were clearly curvilinear, not lin-
ear, and hyperbolic, not parabolic.
The critical points at which increased Structure and decreased Con-
sideration begin to relate to group behavior were not the same for griev-
ances and turnover. Increases in turnover did not occur until lower on
the Consideration scale and higher on the Structure scale, as compared
with increases in grievances. For example, if Consideration is steadily
reduced, higher grievances appear before increased turnover occurs. It
appears that there may be different "threshold levels" of Consideration
and Structure related to effects on grievances and turnover.
Other principal findings concerned the interaction effects found be-
tween different combinations of Consideration and Structure. Taken in
combination. Consideration was shown to be the dominant factor. For
example, both grievances and turnover were highest in groups having
low Consideration foremen, regardless of the degree of Structuring be-
havior shown by these same foremen. Grievances and turnover were
830 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

lowest for groups with foremen showing medium to high Consideration

together with low Structure. However, one of the most important results
was the finding that high Consideration foremen could increase Struc-
ture with very little increase in grievances and no increase in turnover in
their work groups, regardless of the amount of Structuring engaged in.
In other words, higher Consideration moderated the negative effects of
Structure.
Thus, with regard to grievances and turnover, leader behavior char-
acterized by low Consideration is more critical than behavior character-
ized by high Structure. Apparently, supervisors can compensate for high
Structure by increased consideration, but low Consideration supervisors
cannot compensate by decreasing their Structuring behavior.
Our interpretation was that workers under foremen who establish
a climate of mutual trust, rapport, and tolerance for two-way commu-
nication with their work groups are more likely to accept higher levels
of Structure. This might be because they perceive this Structure dif-
ferently from employees in "low Consideration" climates. Thus, under
"low Consideration" climates, high Structure (e.g., instruction) is seen
as threatening and restrictive, but under "high Consideration" climates
this same Structure is seen as supportive and helpful. A related interpre-
tation is that foremen who establish such an atmosphere can more easily
solve the problems resulting from high Structure. Thus, grievances may
be solved at this level before they get into the official records. Similarly,
turnover may reflect escape from a problem situation which cannot be
resolved in the absence of mutual trust and two-way communication. In
support of this interpretation, I had other evidence that leaders high in
Consideration are also better at predicting subordinates' responses to
problems (Fleishman & Salter, 1963).
The nonlinear relations between leader behavior and the criteria of
effectiveness provided a number of implications for leadership research.
For one thing, they pointed up the need for a more careful examination
of the form of such relationships before computing correlation coeffi-
cients. At least some obtained correlations with leadership variables
may be underestimates because of linearity assumptions. In a similar
fashion, negative or contradictory results may be "explained" by the fact
that (a) inappropriate coefficients were used or (b) these studies were
dealing with only the flat portions of these curves. If, for example, all the
foremen in our study had scored over 76 on Consideration and under 36
on Structure, we would have concluded that there was no relation be-
tween these leadership patterns and grievances and turnover. Perhaps,
in comparing one study with another, we need to specify the range of
leader behavior involved in each study.
 EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN 831

Epilogue

In this brief review, I have tried to place our 1962 article in the con-
text of the research that preceded this study. I have also tried to highlight
some neglected aspects of our findings, some research questions raised,
and I have made some effort to show what has and has not been followed
up. I will conclude with a few additional reflections.
There have been at least some partial replications of our results with
respect to these interactions of Consideration and Structure (e.g.. Cum-
mins, 1971; Matsui, Osawa, & Terai, 1975; Skinner, 1969). However, it
is difficult to find other work stimulated by ourfindingsof curvilinearify
in leadership-workgroup performance relationships. The importance of
organizational climate was certainly foreshadowed by this series of stud-
ies. The criterion phase underscored our earlier results on leadership
climate as critical to the leadership behavior and attitudes of first line
management and to the effects of leadership training. These findings
required further exploration and explanation. In the last phase we saw
that upper management actually rated as more proficient those foremen
who were high in Structure and low in Consideration. This, they did,
in the face of objective data that this was detrimental in terms of other
long-term criteria of work group performance such as grievances and
turnover. We also discovered the importance of an important modera-
tor variable, "pressure for production," in producing this effect.
Although the leadership training produced changes in attitudes and
behavior in the short run, it became clear why these effects did not last
very long in the plant environment. These results did influence corpo-
rate management to shift the emphasis in training to higher levels of
plant management. Such matters are, of course, taken for granted in
much of today's organizational development milieu. Perhaps the Inter-
national Harvester studies made an early contribution to those develop-
ments.
One reason the 1962 article is so frequently cited may be due, at least
in part, to the comprehensive definitions of Consideration and Structure
provided there. These constructs have been remarkably robust, perhaps
due to their parsimony and heuristic value. The availabilify of quantita-
tive measures of them allows for the possibilities of comparative studies,
as well as studies like our 1962 research, which allow statements about
threshold values and the form of the relationship between leadership
patterns and criteria of performance. Of course, many other leader di-
mensions have since been identified (for a review see Fleishman, Mum-
ford, Zaccaro, Levin, Korokin, & Hein, 1991). However, after all the
conceptualizations, factor analyses, and theorizing are done, some form
832 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

of Consideration and Structure generally emerge among the overarch-

ing constructs or as a significant part of the mix. I am grateful to have
been associated with colleagues John Hemphill, Ralph Stogdill, and B.
J. Winer as part of the original team which first identified them.
Since the days of these early studies, developments in the area of
leadership training have been diverse and extensive. However, to this
day, our earlier evaluations have been cited as one of the few attempts
to do a controlled leadership training evaluation. The difficulties of do-
ing this have been daunting, but the need for such evaluations is still a
responsibility of our discipline (Goldstein, 1993). The disappointments
of so many leadership training fads and programs provide ample testi-
mony for this need.
Since these ealier studies, our conceptions of leadership and our re-
search interests have broadened and encompassed so much more. In
those "early days" the focus was more on the interpersonal influence
aspects of leadership. The program I described led me to view lead-
ership as a process of interpersonal influence aimed at "optimizing" a
complex set of possibly contradictory individual, group, and organiza-
tional goals (Fleishman, 1973). For a number of years, my colleagues
and I, as well as many others, continued to relate Consideration and
Structure to different criteria of individual, group, and organizational
performance in a wide variety of contexts (for reviews see Fleishman,
1973a, 1973b, 1989a, 1989b). Later I updated my views on the status of
some of this work (Fleishman, 1998). However, with the stimulation and
collaboration of colleagues at George Mason University, my interests
have shifted to the identification of cognitive skills related to leadership
at higher levels of management (e.g., Fleishman et al., 1991; Fleishman,
Zaccaro, & Mumford, 1991; Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, Fleishman,
& Reiter-Palmon, 1993) including the management and leadership of
creative work teams (Fleishman and Friedman, 1990; Friedman, Fleish-
man, & Fletcher, 1992). I have been encouraged that we have been
able to identift such skills and to develop computer-interactive measures
that predict leadership performance involving such activities as problem
identification, planning, solution evaluation, and social problem solv-
ing (Marshall-Meis, Fleishman, Martin, Zaccaro, Baughman, & McGee,
1998).
With regard to the 1962 study, I still recall the elation of discovering
that our hypotheses about curvilinear relations and interactions among
leadership dimensions were confirmed by our additional analyses. I have
experienced a number of such moments during my research career. I
am very pleased that this earlier work has been recognized as a useful
contribution in the still fascinating field of leadership research.
 EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN 833

REFERENCES
Bass BM. (1990). Handbook of leadership. New York: Free Press.
Cummins RC. (1971). Relationship of initiating structure and job performance as moder-
ated by consideration. Journal ofApplied Psychology, 27,245-261.
Fleishman EA. (1951). Leadership climate and supervisory behavior. Columbus, OH: Per-
sonnel Research Board, Ohio State University.
Fleishman EA. (1953a). Leadership climate, human relations training, and supervisory
behavior, PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, 6,205-222.
Fleishman EA. (1953b). The description of supervisory behavior. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 37,1-6.
Fleishman EA. (1953c). The measurement of leadership attitudes in industry. Journal of
AppUed Psychology, 37,153-158.
Fleishman EA. (1957). A leader behavior description for industry. In Stodgill RM, Coons
AE (Eds.), Leader behavior: Its description and measurement. Columbus, OH:
Bureau of Business Research.
Fleishman EA. (1960). Leadership Opinion Questionnaire. Chicago: Science Research
Associates.
Fleishman EA. (1972). On the relation between abilities, learning, and human perfor-
mance. American Psychologist, 27,1017-1032.
Fleishman EA. (1973a). Overview. In Fleishman EA, Hunt JG. (Eds.), Current develop-
ments in the study of leadership. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Fleishman EA. (1973b). Twenty years of consideration and structure. In Fleishman EA,
Hunt JG (Eds.), Current developments in the study of leadership. Carbonale and
Edwardsville, IL: Southern lllinios University Press.
Fleishman EA. (1982). Systems for describing human tasks. American Psychologist, 37,
821-834.
Fleishman EA. (1989a). Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (revised manual). Chicago:
London House.
Fleishman EA. (1989b). Supervisory Behavior Description (revised manual). Chicago:
London House.
Fleishman EA. (1998). Consideration and structure: Another look at their role in leader-
ship research. In Dansereau F, Yammarino FJ (Eds.), Leadership: The multi-level
approaches. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Fleishman EA, Friedman L. (1990). Cognitive competencies related to management perfor-
mance requirements in R&D organizations. Fairfax, VA: Center for Behavioral and
Cognitive Studies, George Mason University.
Fleishman EA, Harris EF, Burtt HE. (1955). Leadership and supervision in industry.
Columbus, OH: Bureau of Business Research, Ohio State University.
Fleishman EA, Mumford MD, Zaccaro SJ, Uvin KY, Korokin AL, Hein M. (1991). Tix-
onomic effects in the description of leadership behavior: A synthesis and cognitive
interpretation. Leadership Quarterly, 2,245-287.
Fleishman EA, Quaintance MK. (1984). Taxonomies of human performance: The descrip-
tion of human tasks. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Fleishman EA, Salter JA. (1963). The relation between the leader's behavior and his
empathy toward subordinates. Journal of Industrial Psychology, 1,79-84.
Fleishman EA, Zaccaro SJ, Mumford MD. (1991). Individual differences and leadership:
An overview. Leadership Quarterly,2,237-243.
Friedman L. Fleishman EA, Fletcher JM. (1992). Cognitive and interpersonal abilities
related to the primary activities of R & D managers. Journal of Engineering and
Technology Management, 9,211-242.
834 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY

Goldstein IL. (1993). Training in organizations {3id edition). Pacific Grove CA Brooks-
Cole.
Harris EF, Fleishman EA. (1955). Human relations training and the stability of leadership
patterns. Journal of Applied Psychology, 39,20-25.
Levin K, Lippitt R, White RK. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally
created "social dimatcs." Journal of Social Psychology, 10, 271-299.
Marshall-Meis JC, Fleishman EA, Martin JA, Zaccaro SJ, Baughman WA, McGee ML.
(1998). Development and evaluation of cognitive and metacognitive measures for
predicting leadership potential. Leadership Quarterly.
Matsui T, Osawa T, Terai T (1975). Relations between supervisory motivation and the
consideration and structural aspects of supervisory behavior. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 60,451-454.
Mumford MD, Zaccaro SJ, Harding FD, Fleishman EA, Reiter-Palmon R. (1993). Cogni-
tive and temperment predictors of executive ability: Principles for developing leadership
capcity. Bethesda, MD: Management Research Institute, Inc.
Schein EH. (1992). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Schneider B. (1990). Organizational climate and culture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Skinner EW. (1969). Relations between leadership behavior patterns and organizational-
situational variables, PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY 22,489-494.