Leadership

BS VII
Social Psychology
• Why do some people become leaders, but not others? Are
some people simply born to lead?
Leadership and Personality
• Leaders tend to reflect dominant majorities in their societies (Chin, 2010).
• Early researchers formulated the great person theory of leadership—the view
that great leaders possess certain traits that set them apart from other human
beings—traits that differentiate them from those who are merely followers.
• there can be no leadership without followers.
• leaders tend to be only slightly more intelligent, extraverted, charismatic, open to
new experiences, confident, and assertive (Ames & Flynn, 2007; Judge et al.,
2002; Van Vugt, 2006).
• Dean Simonton (1987, 2001) gathered information about 100 personal attributes
of all U.S. presidents, such as their family backgrounds, educational experiences,
occupations, and personalities.
Leadership Styles
• Transactional leaders set clear, short-term goals and reward people who meet
them.
• Transformational leaders, on the other hand, inspire followers to focus on
common, long-term goals.
• Transformational leaders think outside the box and inspire their followers to exert
themselves to meet big-picture goals.
Contingency Theory of Leadership
• The idea that the effectiveness of a leader depends both on how task or
relationship-oriented the leader is and on the amount of control the leader has
over the group.
• A comprehensive theory of leadership thus needs to focus on the characteristics
of the leader, the followers, and the situation.
• Task-oriented leaders, who are concerned more with getting the job done than
with workers’ feelings and relationships,
• Task-oriented leaders do well in high-control work situations, when the leader’s
position in the company is clearly perceived as powerful and the work needing to
be done by the group is structured and well defined (e.g., a corporate manager
with control over each worker’s performance review and merit raise). They also
do well in low-control work situations, when the leader is not perceived as
powerful and the work needing to be done is not clearly defined (e.g., the
supervisor of a newly formed group of volunteers).
• Relationship-oriented leaders, who are concerned more with workers’ feelings
and relationships.
• most effective in moderate-control work situations. Under these conditions, the
wheels are turning fairly smoothly, but important work still needs to be done; the
leader who can promote strong relations between individual employees will be
the most successful.
Kurt Lewin’s Leadership Styles
• In 1939, a group of researchers led by psychologist Kurt Lewin set out
to identify different styles of leadership.
• Authoritarian Leadership (Autocratic): provide clear expectations for what needs
to be done, when it should be done, and how it should be done.
• Participative Leadership (Democratic): Democratic leaders offer guidance to
group members, but they also participate in the group and allow input from other
group members.
• Delegative Leadership (Laissez-Faire): Delegative leaders offer little or no
guidance to group members and leave the decision-making up to group
members.
• School children were assigned to one of three groups with an
authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire leader. The children were
then led in an arts and crafts project while researchers observed the
behavior of children in response to the different styles of leadership.
The researchers found that democratic leadership tended to be the
most effective at inspiring followers to perform well.
Gender and Leadership
• In a study of appointments of women to CEO positions, Haslam, Ryan,
Kulich, Trojanowski, and Atkins (2010) found that women were
appointed to these positions when the organization was in crisis and
there was a high risk of failure, whereas men were more likely to be
appointed when the organization was doing well and the likelihood of
failure was low.
• a glass cliff exists—that is, when the leadership position can be
considered precarious or relatively risky because the organization is in
crisis.
• many people believe that good leaders have agentic traits (e.g., assertive,
controlling, dominant, independent), which are traditionally associated with men.
• If women seeking leadership roles conform to society’s expectations about how
they ought to behave, by being warm and communal, they are often perceived as
having low leadership potential. If they become leaders and act in ways that
leaders are expected to act—namely, in agentic, forceful ways—they are often
perceived negatively.