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The most Effective Leadership across functioning Organizations and Workplaces

Grayson S. Phillips

James Madison University

SCOM 280: Introduction to Communication Research

Dr. Tobias Reynolds-Tylus

December 14, 2020

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Introduction

Everyday people are placed in positions of leadership or followership in organizations

and workplaces. The question that needs to be asked, is what does the word ‘leadership’ really

means to us as humans? Assuming most people have never thought too deeply on this subject,

could it be used to describe someone, a trait people can obtain, or a process people partake in?

Well depending on who you ask, you could get a different answer to each one question. The

word leadership can entail so many other characteristics such as being skilled, respectful,

experienced, and confident. To reach my point, leadership is a process and a leader is a person. It

takes both the process and someone who can be put into the process to combine them, reaching

the ultimate goal of leadership. For this research paper, we will be researching what makes an

effective leader, and which leadership styles become most effective across all scenarios.

Leadership is tricky because there is no specific answer that is correct when trying to find the

“perfect” combination. Leadership is special because there can be many situations different from

each other that will work because of the leader and the followers in position. We can measure

and look at leadership many different ways. Specifically, in this paper, we are going to look at

effective leadership through genders style/characteristics, our “new” pandemic world view, the

leader themselves, and last but not least the followers. These ‘followers’ are employees in which

they affect how leaders respond and act in organizations. These subdivisions will help look into

the different facets of effective leadership and answer the question of what exactly it takes to

become effective across all levels. It’s also important to point out this is being looked at from an

organizational standpoint.

Organizations are places ranging from massive multi-million dollar corporations, all the

way small businesses in rural towns. Organizations will help find the research being looked for
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to help answer the question of what it really takes to be an effective leader. An organization is a

company but if you take the walls and technology away it’s a group of people. If that group does

not have a leader then there is no order in the company, leaving it to be studied by people who

want to understand how organizations work from a people point of view.

Gender and Characteristics

The conversation of men and women in the workplace has always carried controversy as

women tend to have more difficulty ranking up in organizations compared to men; while also

facing more barriers throughout their careers as a whole. According to Toossi and Morisi (2017),

between the 1960’s and the 1990’s women were entering the workforce in larger numbers than

ever seen before. There is no question about the inequalities women face when trying to enter the

workforce, but the goal here is to figure out which gender has the most overall positive effect on

leadership in organizations.

According to Eagly and Schmidt (2002), men and women have very different ways of

reaching leadership, such as looking at their different characteristics. These characteristics, or

tactics, are described as agentic or communal. Agentic behaviors are seen as an assertive and

even sometimes aggressive approach to organizations situations. Communal is more looking at

the office as a whole and making sure each employee is cared for and that the organization is

transparent with company information. This is probably not a surprise to most, but we tend to see

agentic behavior more aligned with men and communal more aligned with women. However,

this is where everyone has stopped the train. If one leader is able to obtain both of these

characteristic traits, then there could be a midpoint of both groups, which hopefully will help a

leader connect with each person no matter their gender. If we can teach a mixture on both these

approaches then it would make sense a leader could appeal to both ends of the spectrums. Let’s
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not talk about which characteristics align with which gender, but how each gender can learn both

parties of communal and agentic behaviors. Why would someone need both? Well a leader needs

to be assertive and efficient, while also being able to make his employees feel cared for and

appreciated for their work.

How can one even measure levels of leadership and effectiveness? Well a field study was

conducted by Moskowitz, Suh, and Desaulniers (1994). They particularly looked at the,

“simultaneous influence of gender roles and organization roles” (2001). For the study, they used

the experience-sampling method. This was used to look at their participants in their interpersonal

behavior in an array of work experiences for exactly twenty days. The experiment was accurate

with the definitions of agentic and communal characteristics. Agentic was more seen between the

interactions of employee/boss or a supervisor. On the other hand, the communal was seen and

influenced by the sex of the individuals. Women on women interactions saw more communal

than agentic behaviors.

According to Shen and Joseph (2011), both decided they were going to take a new

approach to see just how effective leaders can be in organizations. The new method decided not

to look at the leaders, but explore employees job performances. They created a new ‘lens’ to look

through that had nothing to do with the leader directly, but would give them information on just

exactly how effective their leaders tactics were being used. Shen and Joseph gave a new

perspective that included how we can look at different genders in job performance situations all

under one microscope. It now allows us to see which leaders are actually effective once in an

organization. The correlation between employee job performance and a leader’s effectiveness

create the outcome of research we need to find the ‘perfect fit’.

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The reason for combining characteristics and gender together resides in the fact that there

are many connections and correlations between the two groups. Whichever gender we are

following usually has a set of characteristics that conspire with the gender in position. According

to Breevaart (2013), they researched the two, transactional and transformational, styles and what

went on between the leaders and followers in the different traits held by the leader. Breevaart and

colleagues were the first to ever study the differences between transactional and transformational

leadership. We see that transformational leaders provide vision and a sense of mission for the

followers. This type of leader has high expectations and can express important objectives in

simple terms for the organization. A transformational leader is someone who can inspire their

followers to care about what they do for work in the organization, and help them grow and

develop. We see that women tend to be seen in leadership positions holding these characteristics

true, which means if you have a women leader you can expect these attributes.

On the opposite side, we can now predict that men must go with transactional leadership,

and they do. Transactional leaders are more prevalent to stay task oriented and really only care if

the work is done or not. They care about their employees, but when it comes down to completing

the job or make sure employees are feeling cared about, they chose the work. If employees are

good they are rewarded, if they step out of line or do not complete tasks on time they will be

punished. This doesn’t stand for every case, however it’s the general stigma around transactional

leaders. This also doesn’t mean that men and women can only possess one or the other trait.

What would actually be the best outcome is if leaders, men and women, could learn both of these

mind sets and be able to implement them into their organization. If we can make employees

complete tasks onetime while also making sure the feel valued and are progressing in the

company then the efficiency of organizations could be at an all-time high. It’s also important to
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point out that a leader can do everything correct but still have toxic employees which can be

removed, same goes for leaders.

Leadership in our New World: Post pandemic

We have all certainly experienced a lot since March of this year. It has been a crazy roller

coaster, but as our country and the rest of the world begin opening back up we have to

acknowledge how our world has changed. This is a whole new world we are all navigating

through and especially organizations and businesses. Most of the instore, in person work has

disappeared and moved completely virtual, however there still are in person workers such as

healthcare, education, retail, etc. Companies are cutting back office space which reduces the

chemistry of organizations, dwindling the leader-follower interactions we are eager to learn more

about. So how can we still make sure leaders and followers are working well together and still

producing for their organization. According to Kroning (2020), she was a leader at a hospital

when the pandemic reached skyrocketing levels. She explains how it was a fearing time when

everything hit and hospitals in general were not well prepared. While we do not have a guide to

tell us how to work through a pandemic world, we can collect stories from all around to complete

a guide for how businesses can continue even after a dramatic shift in the world. Kronings

number one statement was that all the healthcare workers were looking to their healthcare leaders

and that she didn’t realize until then how important great leadership was (2020). This already

shows how important communication still is and will continue to be as we are moving away from

in person and on to virtual offices.

We can connect this scenario with already researched methods such as transformational

leadership. “Having a clear, concise message was vital when communicating with staff”

(Kronings 2020). Kroning explains how her transparent communication was so important during
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this time of chaos. We can see that transformational and transactional leadership can in fact work

hand in hand here too. Nurses have no option but to complete the task as efficiently as they can,

transactional, but while doing that in a calm and reassuring manner to keep patients collected in

situations where it’s very stressful, transformational. This gives us a great understanding of how

these effective leadership styles can be used in our new pandemic type world. With things

always changing, we can still use methods today from the past to help us figure out our next

steps of leadership.

Leaders and Followers

It is important to know the characteristics each leader and follower possesses when in an

organization. Knowing what each position calls for and is expected, is very important when

entering an organization. In an article by Khan (2012), she looks into factors that could

potentially raise performance levels in organizations. What we want to see is what makes an

organization the most successful while also looking at employee’s through their commitment and

productivity for the organization. Trying to see what exactly a manager or leader can do to make

his/her organization and employees more satisfied and committed. There are many different

categories leaders could fall into, which can then place them in the best setting to produce for an

organization. It is important to point out that leaders do not only influence by personality, but by

influencing their ‘organization performance’. Khan (2012) highlighted the relationship between

leadership style and employee’s commitment.

Khan’s experiment took place in Islamabad, focusing in on a telecom sector. “Data was

collected using the stratified random sampling as there are 7 customer care centers of telecom

sector” (Khan 2012). They sent out 280 questionnaires and of those, 254 were received back and

filled out. In the questionnaire, the first part focused on demographics which included all the
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basics, such as, “age, gender, time spent on the current position and the total tenure” (Khan

2012). The second part looked at the independent variables and dependent variables which

correlate to the organization performance, and organization commitment and leadership styles.

To give an idea of exactly what their questionnaire was looking to discover; we can take traits

that each individual has and put them into either a leader or a follower role. Neither is better or

worse than the other, it just helps place you into a position that you can thrive the most you are

able too. Being able to place people in situations where they fit best allows them to give their full

potential to the organization which hopefully leads to employee commitment and organizational

performance.

In Khans conclusion of her study their first hypothesis discussed how transformational

leadership had ‘significant impacts’. Transformational leadership was found to be more flexible

while also increasing employee creativity. This ultimately leads to an increase of employee

performance in the company, and secondly helps us answer our question of which methods are

the best for leadership.

To reaffirm how transformational leadership seems to be the heavy favorite when

conducting leadership, we did research on an article that shows impacts of leadership style and

emotions on subordinates. Again, the goal of this paper is to research which methods seem to

work the best across all scenarios. Exploring how leadership impacts emotions and employee

output in the organization is very important. We want to see actual leadership styles affect the

performance of the surrounding subordinates. However, it’s not just the leaders who are

responsible, the employees also come into play when figuring out perfect placement. How

workers view and perceive their boss is important. If the employee is comfortable and knows the

boss well, then that employee will most likely do well for the company. On the other hand, if one
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employee does not like his/her boss’s style of management, it could be potentially bad for the

future of the company’s production.

In this particular experiment, they started off with four different propositions they wanted

to look at: Proposition 1: A perceived strong level of transformational leadership style has a

direct positive influence on experienced optimism. Proposition 2: A perceived strong level of

transformational leadership style has a direct negative influence on experienced frustration.

Proposition 3: Experienced optimism has a direct positive influence on performance. Proposition

4: Experienced frustration has a direct negative influence on performance. The four propositions

specify a model structure where the emotions of optimism and frustration mediate between

leadership and performance.

According to McColl-Kennedy (2002) she used sales representatives from a group in

global pharmaceutical firm based in Australia. She found that from this experiment, which has

been constant throughout this literary analysis, was that transformational leadership style

positively rubs off on subordinates. Their enthusiasm, intelligence, and a sense of mission were

all positive. This eventually leads to directly increasing optimism and performance. So, we can

take this and make the assumption that if we have low levels of transformational leadership then

employees will tend to become frustrated and have low levels of commitment to the organization

and their boss. As long as we have optimism it can counter balance with frustration. To conclude

this study, if we attract transformational leaders into our organization you will most likely see the

leader encourage and reduce frustration around the office, while also keeping everyone

optimizing for the future.

Method
The ultimate goal is to be able to score personality traits and behaviors of people in

organizations, which then place them in either a leadership or follower position. Each
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organization out there must find a way to have all employees work under one roof and have a

culture everyone is apart of in some way. To be specific, if there is a way to find out if people

will be better leaders or better followers, then it could potentially make organizations better than

they have ever been. The reason for this motive is toxic leadership and followership. When

companies have big changes, or do not keep up to date with their employees on how they are

doing, this can lead to toxicity. When a company’s starts forming toxicity, it can be very

dangerous internally. However, if there is a way to find what each individual possesses trait and

attitude wise then people can specifically place them into an organization in which they can

thrive in. A better community in organizations can hopefully transition to better efficiency and

overall boost the morale of the company.

Data Collection

There can be multiple ways to use different methods for conducting experiments, but for

this specific design, using humans as the main focus point is the best option. Through human

subject research it will be the most effective way to find the answer to the question, what it takes

to be an effective leader. Instead of using surveys or interviews the participants in the study will

be put through scenarios based on certain theory’s that can be used to collect data, such as

situational leadership and others which will be covered later.

The first step is collecting a pool of participants in the field in which can help look into

an organization and see what exactly is going on. The most effective way is to find an

organization that has toxic leader or followers. There needs to be an organization with at least 6-

9 people involved on the everyday schedule. Having too few participants could potentially skew

what is trying to be found. Once an organization is found with at least one leader and 6-9

followers, the study can proceed. Recruiting people from all over different organizations would
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seem helpful, but really each organization is its own working machine that is specifically tailored

to those employees. Vice versa the employees are tailored for that specific job. The most

efficient way is by looking at one individual organization at a time and not chewing more than

one can swallow. The age of participants is not really a factor just as long as the company is

legitimate.

Since the main focus of this research deals with leadership, that seems like the best place

to start. In order to collect data, there will be multiple situations and contingency models that can

scale what needs to be found. Situational leadership can help look at leadership styles and ways

leaders influence followers based on the perception of followers.

The first trial to begin the research will look at how a participant does, in the leadership

role, with 4 stages of followers. According to Schermerhorn (1997) they are split up by sections,

D1, D2, D3, D4. D1 deals with an enthusiastic beginner with low competence and high

commitment. D2 is a delusional learner with some competence and low commitment. D3 is a

reluctant contributor with high competence and variable commitment. D4 is a peak performer

with high competence and high commitment. This can be recorded by asking the participant how

they would handle each situation and what they’d specifically do with each worker in that

section. For example, ask the participant which employee he/she should be paying the closest

attention too. In this case only one would need to check in on D4 here and there, whereas the D2

and D3 need more face to face time with their leader to hopefully improve their commitment as

they already have high competence. D1 is being taught the ropes, but with their high

commitment levels it’s easy to let them take the reins.

In correlation to the leadership simulation with D1, D2, D3, and D4 there is also a

‘follower’ guide in which can find exactly what the follower needs in a leader. In this section
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S1, S2, S3, and S4 are the categories in which participants will be simulated. S1 is high directive

and low supportive behavior. If the follower lands in this category they need someone who will

direct them at work and pretty much tell them exactly what to do. S1 and D1 correlate. S2 deals

with followers who have high directive and high supportive behavior. A S2 follower will be

needing someone who will coach them through. S2 and D2 correlate. S3 is a follower with low

directive and high supportive behavior. S3 is looking for a leader to support them with their work

in the organization. S3 and D3 correlate. Lastly category S4. S4 consists of followers that are

low directive and low supportive behavior. S4 is your prime-time employee who is peaking, but

still needs a leader to delegate and talk things over with. S4 and D4 correlate.

Data Analysis

To summarize what findings are needed from S and D will be simple. It is a mixture of

quantitative and qualitative data. Score the participants with a D 1-4, or an S 1-4, quantitative,

but then there needs to be communication on what those numbers mean, qualitative data. The

D’s deal with followers and what they are currently in at their job. D1 workers are usually new

and not very good at their job. This leads to needing an S1 leader. S1 leaders are leaders who do

well with directing but not much else. D2 employees think they know what they’re doing and

will not ask for help, even though they could really use it. This calls for an S2 leader who will let

them be free, but knows when to step in and coach them up at the correct time. D3 employees

are informed about their job and do it well, but they just might not be the motivated member of

your team. This calls for the S3 leader who does well with supporting his employees to keep up

their good work. Finally, the D4 employee. This is your best and most trusty employee. An S4

leader needs to understand this is their most important employee so they must be careful and just

delegate with them office. What to gain from this is how certain followers in certain situations
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need a specific leader. With these tools and procedures, one can actually start to place workers

and leaders in positions they would excel so much more in because the job and position,

compliments their strengths. While these are specific guidelines to follow when placing people,

the best type of leader is someone who can work in all of those situations. An actual leader is

someone who can go into their office and take those D1 workers and direct them to simpler stuff,

while also working with possible D3, and D4 employees. A leader that can be versatile and move

across those four sections of employees then that is the ultimate goal.

Conclusion on Methods

Through these two specific procedures, it gives the opportunity to see which people

understand the leader or follower position the best. From there, participants can get feedback as

to whether they fit a specific role better than the other. Just between these two simulations it gets

closer to answering how exactly one can start finding which positions work best for individuals

within an organization. Remember that if individuals know how to place incoming employees

then our levels of toxicity and friction with in an organization could potentially decrease. If it can

decrease those frictions within organizations levels of efficiency and productivity and overall

moral can hopefully excel.

Conclusion

The objective of this study was to find connections and common themes between

research articles about effective leadership and which types work best. Specifically, with gender

and how there are different traits connected to men and women, but if we are able to take both

sides and combine them then we have a leader who can appeal to all. However, transformational

leadership was found to be the best type of leadership used in most scenarios. To remind

everyone, the nurses stories and the company based out of Australia both profited greatly from
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transformational leadership. This study needs to be put to the test across all working

organizations to be fine-tuned so when entering the workforce, one can see where they fit best.

Next time you find yourself in a leadership position, think of how you can inspire others to work

and see if you can find a new way to lead people whether it’s by action or communication.
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References

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05). Daily transactional and transformational leadership and daily employee engagement.

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Eagly, A., & Johannesen‐Schmidt, M. (2002, December 17). SPSSI Journals. Retrieved

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Elwell, S. M., & Elikofer, A. N. (2015, November/December). Defining Leadership in a

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Khan, V., Hafeez, M. H., Rizvi, S. H., Hasnain, A., & Mariam, A. (2012). Relationship of

Leadership Styles, Employees Commitment and Organization Performance. Retrieved

September 17, 2020.

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Kroning, M. (2020, November/December). The need for effective leadership. Retrieved

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McColl-Kennedy, J. R., & Anderson, R. D. (2002). Impact of Leadership Style and Emotions on

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Appendix

*This is not a survey or interview, but rather a guide for how to score the participants in

the test scenarios.

- D1= Low competence, High commitment

- S1= High directive, low supportive behavior

- D2=Low-Some competence, low commitment

- S2= High directive, high supportive.

- D3= Moderate-High competence, variable commitment

- S3= Low directive, high supportive

- D4= High competence, high commitment

- S4= Low directive, low supportive