Chapter 1
Cynthia D. McCauley
In This Chapter
- The common elements in current conceptualizations of leadership.
- Some pitfalls to avoid in your conceptualization of leadership.
- Emerging concepts of leadership.
Given the attention that people give to the topic of leadership, the multiple disciplines that contribute to the understanding of leadership, and the plethora of models put forth to improve the practice of leadership, you might expect the field to be fragmented and full of disparate ideas. On the surface, you can find plenty of evidence to support this view: multiple competing leadership models, research studies that use different criteria to identify effective leaders, and no widely accepted general theory of leadership. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find some common elements: the conceptualization of leadership as an influence process, a focus on the characteristics of individuals identified as leaders, and a recognition that the context or setting affects how leadership is enacted.
This introductory chapter primarily seeks to highlight the common elements found in current conceptualizations of leadership. Armed with these elements, you’ll be better able to compare, contrast, and integrate the various topics, models, and frameworks offered in this handbook (and elsewhere). The chapter also points out several potential pitfalls associated with these common elements—difficulties associated with the concept of leadership that you’ll need to decide how to navigate. Finally, the chapter explains how the concept of leadership is continuing to evolve—that there are emerging conceptualizations worth exploring.
Common Elements in Concepts of Leadership
Think about leadership as a social tool—a device, so to speak—that humans have crafted, refined, and learned to use over time. Leadership is a tool designed to help with a particular human dilemma: how to get individuals to work together effectively to produce collective outcomes. Whether it’s a team working to produce a new product, a community working to keep neighborhoods safe, or a large organization working to increase shareholder value, success is more likely if everyone is headed in the same direction, coordinating work, and motivated to put the group above self. Leadership is a means for generating the shared direction, alignment, and commitment these groups need.
Exactly what this tool looks like in action varies somewhat, depending on what leadership model you consider or what stream of research you follow. However, these various conceptualizations of leadership do have three common elements:
- influence as the primary social process used in leadership
- characteristics of the leader as the main leverage point for enhancing leadership
- context as an important caveat for leadership.
Let’s briefly consider each element.
Influence as the Primary Social Process Used in Leadership
Most leadership theories take for granted that leadership is an influence process (Antonakis, Cianciolo, and Sternberg 2004; Chemers 1997). Those individuals who exert more influence in a group are identified as the leaders. Those being influenced are the followers. This is not to say that followers don’t also have influence. It’s just that leaders influence more than followers—and this asymmetrical influence process is often considered the defining feature of leadership. After reviewing the many definitions and models of leadership that have been offered in the literature, Bass (1990, 14) concluded that “defining effective leadership as successful influence by the leader that results in the attainment of goals by the influenced followers . . . is particularly useful.”
One can see why influence is at the core of many current definitions of leadership. Deciding on a shared direction and coordinating work so that people are aligned is facilitated by an influence process—in which people are willing to exert influence and be influenced by others. At the same time, there are many forms of influence—such as rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, and mutual exchange—which is one reason why particular leadership models can vary from one another, because they may make different assumptions about which forms of influence are best.
Characteristics of the Leader as the Main Leverage Point for Enhancing Leadership
Perhaps the most frequently examined question in leadership research is “What are the characteristics of effective leaders?” With knowledge about what distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective ones, you can more readily identify potential leaders and will know what characteristics to develop and encourage in individuals so they are better equipped to lead.
The characteristics that researchers have examined in trying to understand what differentiates effective and ineffective leaders cover a broad range of human capabilities, including personal attributes, actions or behaviors, competencies, expertise, and experience. Let’s briefly consider each one.
Personal Attributes
Personal attributes include stable dispositional traits (for example, extroversion) and abilities (for example, cognitive ability), as well as personal qualities that can change over time, such as motivation and integrity. Personal attributes are constructs that explain consistent patterns of behavior across situations. Cognitive ability and personality are two of the most frequently studied types of leader attributes (Zaccaro, Kemp, and Bader 2004). More recently, scholars have encouraged more research on the motivation to lead (Chan and Drasgow 2001) and the leader’s maturity level or developmental stage (McCauley and others 2006).
Actions or Behaviors
Rather than examining underlying personal attributes, other researchers have examined the observable actions or behaviors of leaders. A wide variety of methodologies have been used, including observations, diaries, interviews, behavior description questionnaires, and laboratory and field experiments. This approach yields taxonomies of behaviors used by leaders. Many of these taxonomies can be organized around three major concerns of leaders: task efficiency (for example, accomplishing tasks and maintaining orderly operations), human relations (building relationships and enhancing teamwork), and adaptive change (recognizing and supporting innovation and improving processes and systems).
Competencies
Describing effective leadership in terms of competencies is a more recent approach, but one that organizations have quickly adopted—many organizations now have developed their own leadership competency models. A competency is an interrelated set of knowledge, skills, and perspectives that can manifest itself in many forms of behavior or a wide variety of actions. For example, a leader with a high “developing others” competency would know strategies for developing others, would be skilled at coaching and mentoring, and would believe that developing others is an important aspect of his or her role.
Expertise
The knowledge or expertise that leaders possess is another potential differentiator of more and less effective leaders. Leadership scholars (Lord and Hall 2005; McCall and Hollenbeck 2008) have drawn from research and theories about the development of expertise in other domains to describe the process of moving from a novice to an intermediate to a master leader. An important concept here is leaders’ tacit knowledge—experienced-based knowledge that increases leaders’ sensitivity to important information in a given situation and their understanding of what action to take in response to that information (Cianciolo, Antonakis, and Sternberg 2004).
Experience
Finally, leaders can be characterized in terms of their leadership experiences. One can argue that these experiences enable leaders to learn the behaviors, competencies, and expertise needed to be effective; thus, experience is the key leverage point in enhancing leadership (McCall 2010). From this perspective, understanding the key experiences that differentiate more and less effective leaders (for example, boundary-spanning roles and leading change assignments) is as important as understanding leadership attributes or competencies.
Context as an Important Caveat for Leadership
Leadership happens in many different settings, and the leadership field recognizes that the context makes a difference when it comes to effective leadership. Influencing individual followers is different from building commitment on a team or galvanizing people in support of a vision for a social movement. And the characteristics admired in leaders vary from country to country around the globe.
One important distinction is between formal and informal leaders. Formal leaders have positional power (for example, a manager or an elected official), and informal leaders take on leadership roles without any formal authority. Leaders in positions of authority have access to different resources and use different influence strategies than those who lead without being in positions of authority (Heifetz 1994). Thus, effective leadership can be understood quite differently in settings where leadership is shaped by formal leaders as compared with those where it is shaped by informal leaders.
Within formal organizations, leader effectiveness is studied at every organizational level from first-line supervisory and project team leaders to chief executive officers and governing boards. Clearly, the demands of leadership vary by organizational level. For example, leaders at higher organizational levels tend to create rather than carry out organizational strategies and must integrate work across multiple groups and functions. At lower levels, leaders tend to emphasize motivating employees and building effective teams. These differences in demands on leaders across organizational levels call for different leadership practices.
Globalization has increased interactions among leaders from various parts of the world and the likelihood of individuals from one country leading others from different countries, making societal culture another important contextual feature of the leadership process. Although there are similarities across countries in what is expected of leaders, societies also differ in their expectations. For example, in some cultures being a risk taker is highly valued in leaders but in other cultures being cautious is highly valued; this difference is likely tied to whether a society tends to embrace or avoid uncertainty (Den Hartog and Dickson 2004).
Summing Up
These common elements in conceptualizations of leadership provide a shared foundation for understanding it as a phenomenon. They also provide a means for making sense of the wide range of leadership literature. When evaluating the value of any leadership model or theory for your own purposes, it is useful to ask these questions:
- What assumptions about social influence processes is the model built upon? Will these assumptions make sense to the people who will be using the model?
- What kinds of leader characteristics does the model focus on? Are these the kinds of characteristics you want to focus on to enhance leader effectiveness?
- For what contexts is the model most relevant? Are these contexts similar to the ones in which you’ll be using the model?
Potential Pitfalls in Concepts of Leadership
Current conceptualizations of leadership aren’t without their difficulties. Here are four of the most common ones:
- Assuming a leader is a leader is a leader. n Confusing authority and influence.
- Expecting too much of leaders.
- Overemphasizing individual leaders.
Let’s briefly examine each one.
Assuming a Leader Is a Leader Is a Leader
Despite recognition that context plays a role in leadership effectiveness, focusing primarily on the characteristics of effective leaders can bolster the notion that someone who is an effective leader in one context will be effective in other contexts. This assumption is particularly problematic when promoting individuals who have been successful leaders at lower organizational levels. Thus, individuals who continue to rely on the more tactical methods and behaviors that served them well as team or frontline leaders at a lower level can be derailed at higher levels of leadership responsibility where they are expected to be more strategic, build coalitions with diverse groups, and lead from a distance. Effectively taking on more complex leadership challenges requires continuous learning, growth, and change.
Taken to an extreme, the “once a leader, always a leader” perspective supports a view of the world as simply made up of leaders and nonleaders. In reality, individuals possess an array of characteristics that make them more and less effective in different leadership situations. Categorizing people as either “leaders” or “nonleaders” can create a static view of a dynamic social process and lead to the underutilization of leadership talent.
Confusing Authority and Influence
Management hierarchies are authority structures, not leadership structures. Just because someone is authorized to make certain decisions in an organization and others with less authority willingly carry out those decisions doesn’t mean that the less powerful have been influenced. They may simply be complying with authority or concerned about fitting into the organizational system—with no sense of shared direction or commitment to the organization.
Certainly managers in today’s organizations are expected to be more than wielders of authority; they also are expected to lead—which is why they are increasingly rewarded for engaging and developing employees and collaborating with peers. However, the practice of referring to those in the management hierarchy as “organizational leaders” simply because of the positions they occupy muddies the concept of leadership. Managers may not be generating direction, alignment, and commitment in the organization—and thus not be leading—not to mention that others outside the management ranks may be doing as much or more to generate leadership.
Strangely enough, those who often refer to managers as organizational leaders are often the same people who go out of their way to make a big distinction between management and leadership. They either describe management in more task-oriented terms (for example, planning and monitoring) and leadership in more people-oriented terms (motivating others and charismatic), or they describe managers as maintaining the status quo and leaders as creating change. Those who work in organizations know that such distinctions break down in real life. For example, the right strategic planning process can generate shared enthusiasm for the organization’s goals, and the manager who supports meaningful organizational traditions is often enhancing employee commitment.
One solution to this confusion is to recognize that a manager is identified by his or her position and responsibilities in an organization and a leader is identified by his or her role in producing the direction, alignment, and commitment needed in collective work.
Expecting Too Much of Leaders
Look at any organization’s leadership competency model, and you’ll see that leaders are expected to display a wide range of competencies, from strategic thinking and developing employees to learning agility and fostering innovation. What these competency models often do not point out is that every leader has a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, and that there are many routes to effective leadership. Although expecting individuals to continue improving and broadening their leadership skills is certainly realistic, it is unrealistic to expect them to be high performers in all dimensions of leadership. Such expectations can lead to the underutilization of other strategies for effective leadership, such as matching leaders with tasks at which they are particularly good, putting together teams with complementary skills, and shared or co-leadership arrangements.
Those who write about and teach leadership also can create high expectations when many of their examples come from the ranks of extraordinary or heroic leaders. Certainly, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eleanor Roosevelt are inspirational examples, but effective leadership rarely requires incredible self-sacrifice, charismatic oratory, or even a sense of duty. If we want the vast majority of people taking on leadership roles to enhance their “everyday” leadership, we must share stories of how “ordinary” people like them can become influential and encourage people to work together to achieve collective goals.
Overemphasizing Individual Leaders
Perhaps the biggest criticism of current concepts of leadership is their failure to fully depict leadership as a social process happening in a social system. Because of their focus on the individual leader, they tend to oversimplify the leadership process. One might assume in examining popular models of leadership that followers play a more passive role, waiting to be influenced or motivated. Practicing leaders know that this is far from reality. Even in theories where followers are more explicitly a part of the equation (for example, leader-member exchange), the dynamic interplay between leaders and followers is rarely closely examined.
In practice, leadership is also rarely an individual activity. Many leaders in organizations are influencing their coworkers in many different directions. In conceiving leadership as an influence process in which leaders are the individuals exerting more influence, figuring out who should be labeled leaders becomes quite difficult in many modern organizations. At any point in time, many people are both leading and following. The danger of only paying attention to people who are labeled “leaders” in the system (particularly when this label is primarily associated with certain management positions) is that it will lead to a failure to leverage other systemic aspects to enhance leadership, such as relationships and networks or the members’ collective beliefs and values (that is, the organization’s culture).
Emerging Conceptualizations of Leadership
The limitations of existing conceptualizations of leadership and the increased prevalence of particularly challenging leadership settings (for example, leading in a globally competitive marketplace, leading across cultural boundaries, and leading a partnership among multiple organizations) are pushing concepts of leadership in new directions. These emerging conceptualizations do not negate but rather broaden the perspectives typically used to understand leadership and improve its practice.
One developing aspect of leadership theory in recent years is the conceptualization of shared or distributed leadership (Pearce and Conger 2003). The concept of shared leadership has deepened the understanding of how teams are able to lead themselves—not by relying on a formal team leader but through a collaborative, emergent process of group interaction. Shared leadership is not conceived as the parsing out or alternation of leader-based influence, where the leader role passes from one individual to another, but as a qualitatively different social process of group interaction and negotiation of shared understanding. This is a social process that requires its own competencies, such as accepting responsibility for providing and responding to lateral influence and developing skills as both leader and follower (Pearce and Sims 2000).
Another emerging approach is the application of complexity science to leadership theory (Schneider and Somers 2006; Uhl-Bien, Marion, and McKelvey 2007). From the holistic perspective of complexity science, leaders and followers do not add up to leadership; that is, the behavior of leaders and the response of followers to that behavior do not predict with any certainty the collective outputs of a leadership system. A complexity leadership framework focuses not just on leaders and followers but also on the whole system of interacting “agents” and the top-down and bottom-up leadership processes these interactions produce.
At one leading organization in the field, the Center for Creative Leadership, the understanding of leadership has broadened from a strong focus on individual leaders as the target for leadership development efforts to seeing an organization’s collective leadership beliefs and practices (that is, its leadership culture) as the target (Drath and others 2008; McCauley, Van Velsor, and Ruderman 2010; McGuire and Rhodes 2009). From this perspective, leadership development includes individual development, relationship development, team development, organization development, changes in patterns of behavior in the organization, and changes in organizational processes. Leadership development has thus become much more of a process in which the whole organization engages.
Conclusion
Leadership is a broad and evolving concept. At its most basic, leadership can be understood as a social process for generating the direction, alignment, and commitment needed for individuals to work together productively toward collective outcomes. Researchers and theorists have examined leadership through different lenses in a wide variety of settings, resulting in numerous models and theories of leadership.
These models and theories have common elements that represent areas of deep knowledge in the field: leadership as an influence process, the characteristics of effective leaders, and how context affects leadership practices. At the same time, these concepts can be relied on too much, leading to oversimplification of and confusion about leadership. To address these limitations and the increased complexity of leadership in practice, emerging leadership concepts balance the current intense focus on the individual leader with a broader exploration of how leadership is produced in social systems.
Further Reading
American Psychologist, “Special Issue: Leadership,” vol. 62, no. 1, January 2007.
John Antonakis, Anna T. Cianciolo, and Robert J. Sternberg, The Nature of Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Wilfred Drath, The Deep Blue Sea: Rethinking the Source of Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.
Ellen Van Velsor, Cynthia D. McCauley, and Marian N. Ruderman, eds., The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.
Gary Yukl, Leadership in Organizations, 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009.
References
Antonakis, J., A. T. Cianciolo, and R. J. Sternberg. 2004. Leadership: Past, Present, and Future. In The Nature of Leadership, ed. J. Antonakis, A. T. Cianciolo, and R. J. Sternberg. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bass, B. M. 1990. Bass and Stodgill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications. New York: Free Press.
Chan, K., and F. Drasgow. 2001. Toward a Theory of Individual Differences and Leadership: Understanding the Motivation to Lead. Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 3: 481–498.
Chemers, M. M. 1997. An Integrative Theory of Leadership. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Cianciolo, A. T., J. Antonakis, and R. J. Sternberg. 2004. Practical Intelligence and Leadership: Using Experience as a “Mentor.” In Leadership Development for Transforming Organizations: Growing Leaders for Tomorrow, ed. D. V. Day, S. J. Zaccaro, and S. M. Halpin. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Den Hartog, D. N., and M. W. Dickson. Leadership and Culture. 2004. In The Nature of Leadership, ed. J. Antonakis, A. T. Cianciolo, and R. J. Sternberg. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Drath, W. H., C. D. McCauley, C. J. Palus, E. Van Velsor, P. M. G. O’Connor, and J. B. McGuire. 2008. Direction, Alignment, Commitment: Toward a More Integrative Ontology of Leadership. Leadership Quarterly 19, no. 6: 635–653.
Heifetz, R. A. 1994. Leadership Without Easy Answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lord, R. G., and R. J. Hall. 2005. Identity, Deep Structure, and the Development of Leadership Skills. Leadership Quarterly 16, no. 4: 591–615.
McCall, M. W. 2010. Recasting Leadership Development. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice 3, no. 1: 3–19.
McCall, M. W., and G. P. Hollenbeck. 2008. Developing the Expert Leader. People & Strategy 31, no. 1: 20–28.
McCauley, C. D., W. H. Drath, C. J. Palus, P. M. G. O’Connor, and R. Baker. 2006. The Use of Constructive-Developmental Theory to Advance the Understanding of Leadership. Leadership Quarterly 17, no. 6: 634–653.
McCauley, C. D., E. Van Velsor, and M. N. Ruderman. 2010. Our View of Leadership Development. In The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development, 3rd edition, ed.
E. Van Velsor, C. D. McCauley, and M. N. Ruderman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. McGuire, J. B., and G. B. Rhodes. 2009. Transforming Your Leadership Culture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pearce, C. L., and J. A. Conger. 2003. Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Pearce, C. L., and H. P. Sims. 2000. Shared Leadership: Toward a Multi-Level Theory of Leadership. In Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams, ed. M. M. Beyerlei, D. A. Johnson, and S. T. Beyerlein. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Schneider, M., and M. Somers. 2006. Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems: Implications of Complexity Theory for Leadership Research. Leadership Quarterly 17, no. 4: 351–365. Uhl-Bien, M., R. Marion, and B. McKelvey. 2007. Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting Leadership from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age. Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 4: 298–318.
Zaccaro, S. J., C. Kemp, and P. Bader. 2004. Leader Traits and Attributes. In The Nature of Leadership, ed. J. Antonakis, A. T. Cianciolo, and R. J. Sternberg. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
About the Author
Cynthia D. McCauley is a senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership, where she has been involved in research, product development, program evaluation, coaching, and management. Her work has focused on methods of leadership development, including 360-degree feedback, job assignments, developmental relationships, formal programs, and action learning. She has written extensively for both scholarly and practitioner readerships and is coeditor of The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development (2010).