The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications

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Contents

Foreword

In Memory of Bernard M. Bass

Acknowledgments

Preface

PART I

Introduction

1. Concepts of Leadership

Myths, Legends, and Religious Texts

The Modern Study of Leadership

Universality of Leadership

Defining Leadership

Leadership, Headship, and Management

An Evolving, Expanding Conceptualization of Leadership

Summary and Conclusions

2. Types and Taxonomies

Types of Leadership in Small Groups

Types of Leadership in Organizations and Institutions

Taxonomies of Leaders According to Their Functions, Roles, Perceptions, and Behaviors

Taxonomies of Leaders According to Their Styles and Patterns of Behavior

Commonalities in Types and Taxonomies

Summary and Conclusions

3. Models and Theories of Leadership

Good and Bad Theories

Sources of Current Models and Theories

Methods and Measurements

Summary and Conclusions

PART II

Personal Attributes of Leaders

4. Traits of Leadership (1904–1970)

1904–1908

Conclusions as of 1948

Traits of Leadership (1948–1970)

Factor Analyses of the Traits of Leadership

Conclusions by 1970

5. Traits of Leadership (1970–2006)

Situationalism

Heritability, Genes, and Biological Bases of Leadership in Behavior

Personality Traits Correlated with Emergent and Effective Leadership

Task Competence

Socioeconomic and Interpersonal Competence

Summary and Conclusions

6. Activity Level

Antecedents of Active Leadership

Effects of Active Leadership on Followers

The Motivation to Manage

Inactive or Laissez-Faire Leadership

Summary and Conclusions

7. Authoritarianism, Power Orientation, Machiavellianism, and Leadership

The Authoritarian Personality

Authoritarianism and Leadership

Power Motivation

Machiavellianism

Political Psychology and Leadership in Organizations

Summary and Conclusions

8. Values, Self-Esteem, Well-Being, and Leadership

Values

Motives

Concepts of the Self

Satisfaction with the Leadership Role

Health, Well-Being, and Leadership

Summary and Conclusions

9. Ethics and Leadership

Philosophies of Ethical Leadership

Ethical Leader Behavior

Ethics and Effectiveness

Spiritual Leadership

Moral Reasoning

Character

Vices of Leadership

Dealing with Ethical and Unethical Practices

Impact of the Internet

Summary and Conclusions

PART III

Personal Attributes of Leadership

10. Leadership and Accorded Status, Esteem, and Trust

Status

Esteem

Trust

Summary and Conclusions

11. Power and Leadership

Definitions of Social Power

Personal versus Positional Power

Varied Uses of Power

Power and Emergence as a Leader

The Bases of Power

Antecedents and Consequences of the Bases of Power

Summary and Conclusions

12. Leadership and the Distribution of Power

Importances of Differences in Power

Distribution of Power in Communities and Organizations

The Power of the Group

Power, Leadership, and Structure

Empowerment

Industrial Democracy

Power Sharing in Planning Change

Summary and Conclusions

13. Resolution of Conflict

Sources of Conflict

Conditions That Resolve or Reduce Conflicts

Managing Conflict

Legitimatization and Conflict

Constructive Conflict

Summary and Conclusions

14. Authority, Responsibility, Accountability, and Leadership

Authority

Responsibility

Accountability

Delegation

Summary and Conclusions

15. Reinforcement and Instrumental Leadership

Leadership as a Social Exchange

Reinforcement (Instrumental) Leadership and Followership

Applying Contingent Reinforcement

Reinforcement and the Emergence of Leaders

The Dynamics of the Exchange Relationship

Limits to Contingent Reinforcement

Constraints on the Use and Impact of Feedback

Constraints on the Performance-Appraisal Interview

Implicit Theories of Leadership as Moderators of LMX

Summary and Conclusions

16. Followers and Mutual Influence on Leadership

The Leader’s Influence

Followers’ Impact on Leaders

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)

The Reciprocal Relationship

Summary and Conclusions

PART IV

Styles of Leadership

17. Autocratic versus Democratic Leadership

The Two Opposing Approaches

Authoritarian and Democratic Leadership

Effects of Autocratic and Democratic Leadership

Antecedent Conditions That Moderate the Effects of Autocratic and Democratic Leadership

Large-Scale, Long-Term Comparisons of Autocratic and Democratic Systems

Summary and Conclusions

18. Directive versus Participative Leadership

Making Decisions

The Continuum

Aspects of Direction and Participation

Antecedents of Direction and Participation

General Effects on Benefits and Costs of Directive and Participative Leadership

Additional Contingent Effects of Directive and Participative Leadership

Deduced Models for Achieving Decision Quality or Subordinate Acceptance

Summary and Conclusions

19. Task versus Relations Orientation

Task, Relations, and Change Orientation

Antecedents of Task-, Relations-, and Change- Oriented Leadership

General Consequences of Relations-Oriented, Task-Oriented, and Change-Oriented Leadership

Blake and Mouton’s Grid Theory

Situational Contingencies Affecting Outcomes

The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory (SLT)

Fiedler’s Contingency Model of Leadership

Summary and Conclusions

20. Initiation versus Consideration

Descriptive Factors

Psychometric Properties

Alternative and Additional Scales

Behavioral Descriptions of the Ideal Leader

Antecedents and Correlates of Consideration and Initiation of Structure

General Effects on Productivity, Satisfaction, and Other Criteria

Contingencies in the Effects of Consideration and Initiation

Causal Effects

Summary and Conclusions

PART V

The New Leadership: Charismatic and Transformational Leadership

21. Charismatic Leadership

Concepts of Charismatic Leadership

The Charismatic Relationship Theories

Characteristics of Charismatic Leaders

Characteristics of Followers

The Emergence of Charisma

The Charismatic Leader in Complex Organizations: A Conceptual Examination

Empirical Studies of Charismatic Leadership

A Dynamic Model of the Charismatic Process of the Leader, the Followers, and Their Social Interaction

Inspirational Leadership

Summary and Conclusions

22. Transformational Leadership

Components of Transformational Leadership

Components of Transactional Leadership

The Model of the Full Range of Leadership

Other Concepts and Methods Relevant to Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Antecedents of Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Effects of Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Other Related Concepts and Propositions

Criticisms and Problems

Summary and Conclusions

PART VI

Management and Organizations

23. Managerial Work

Functions of Management and Leadership in Formal Organizations

What Leaders and Managers Do

Methods and Dimensions for Studying What Managers Do

Time Spent and Work Done by Managers

Mintzberg’s Managerial Roles

Managerial Activities

Moderators of the Manager’s Work, Functions, and Roles

Summary and Conclusions

24. Strategic and Executive Leadership

Upper-Level Management Theory

Agency Theory

Interplay between Strategy and Executive Leadership

Executive Leadership

Setting Policies and Strategies

Political Leadership

American Presidents as Leaders

Prime Ministers and Chancellors as Leaders

Summary and Conclusions

25. Environment and Organizational Effects

Trait Approach versus Situation

Theories, Models, and Prescriptions

Leadership, Organization, and the External Environment

Organizations and Leadership

Leadership and the Organization’s Internal Environment

Leadership and Organizational Culture

Summary and Conclusions

26. Leadership in Groups and Teams

Roles of the Leader

Functions of the Leader

Teams versus Groups

Effects of Groups and Teams on Their Leaders

The Effects of Leaders on the Group or Team

Summary and Conclusions

27. Effects of Task and Technology

Leadership in a Technology-Enabled Working Environment

The Leader’s Competence and the Requirements of Tasks

Important Dimensions of Tasks

Sociotechnical Systems

Leadership and Phases in Group Problem Solving

Effects of Type of Task

Path-Goal Theory: The Explanation of Task Effects on Leadership

Summary and Conclusions

28. Stress Effects

The Nature of Stress

A Model of Group Responses to Stress

Leadership under Stress

Successful but Not Necessarily Effective Leadership

Stress and Effective Leaders

Summary and Conclusions

29. Effects of Space, Virtuality, and Substitutes for Leadership

Interaction Potential

Leadership and Physical Space

Leadership and Psychosocial Space

Networks

Electronic Communication Networking

E-Leadership

Leadership in Experimental Communication Networks

Statistical Proxies

Self-Management

Summary and Conclusions

30. Transfer and Succession

Persistence

Transfer of Leadership

Succession

Summary and Conclusions

PART VII

Diversity and Cultural Effects

31. Women as Leaders and Followers

Two Examples

Interest in Women Leaders

Then and Now

Increase in Management and Administration

Increase in MBAs

Society in Transition

Constraints on Opportunities for Leadership

Conflicting Stereotypes of Women and Managers

Differences in the Leadership Potential of Women and Men

Differences in Leadership Style between Women and Men

Moderating Effects

Career Advancement of Women Leaders and Managers

Summary and Conclusions

32. Minorities as Leaders and Followers

The Challenge of Diversity

African Americans and Leadership

Performance of Blacks and Whites as Leaders

Hispanics

Other Ethnic Minorities

Other Minorities

Summary and Conclusions

33. Globalization and Cross-National Effects

Issues of Consequence

Culture, Country, and Attributes of Leadership

Universality

Origins of Leaders

Cultural and Institutional Changes

Personal Values, Motives, and Goals

Differences in Leadership Across Cultures

Styles of Leadership

Leadership in the Multinational Firm

Summary and Conclusions

PART VIII

Development and Identification of Leaders and Leadership

34. Training and Development

Development of Leadership

Developmental Issues in Leadership

Educational Institutions

Career Issues

Value of Training and Development in Leadership

Assessing Organizational and Individual Needs

Off-the-Job Leadership Training and Development

On-the-Job Leadership Training and Development

Giving and Receiving Feedback

Expected Effects of Leadership Training and Education

Training and Education in Leadership Styles

Motivation to Learn Leadership

Programmatic Applications

Evaluation of Leadership Training and Education

Factors That Affect Training Outcomes

Summary and Conclusions

35. Assessment, Appraisal, and Selection

Purposes of Assessment

Varieties of Available Assessment Information

Importance of Effective Assessment and Appraisal

Importance of Acceptability of Appraisals and Feedback for Development

CEO Performance Evaluation

Judgmental Approaches

Multiple Ratings Sources

Moderators of Judgments and Their Predictive Validity

Assessment Centers

Summary and Conclusions

PART IX

The Future

36. Looking Ahead

Expected Developments in Leadership Research

Considerations in Looking Ahead

Methodological Issues

A Future of Variety

Substantive Issues

Summary and Conclusions

About the Author

Glossary

References

Subject Index

Author Index

Foreword to the Fourth Edition

Without a doubt, Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership has been the most widely used and cited reference book in the study of leadership. Even though there has been a dramatic increase in leadership books of all kinds, including reviews of research and other handbooks, I am quite certain that the impact of this, the fourth edition of the Handbook, will be equal to or greater than the last edition. Why?

For leadership scholars, the Handbook, in its three earlier editions, has been the primary reference book—our bible for all things leadership. I consult the Handbook on a nearly daily basis, so much so that it is the only book that has a permanent place on my work desk. I will retire my third edition to a shelf and replace it with this fourth edition.

The Handbook, thanks to the exacting detail of Bernie Bass, is a thoroughly comprehensive and well-organized review of the voluminous (and growing) leadership literature. To grasp the enormity of this task, two-thirds of all psychological and management research on leadership has been published since the last edition of the Handbook. The comprehensive nature of the Handbook means that scholars can find reviewed here research on nearly every leadership topic imaginable.

The longevity of Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership, third edition, provided a bridge between the earliest research on leadership and the research that was being conducted at the time it was published. All too often, researchers are unable (or unwilling) to search the archives for elusive copies of early leadership research. This fourth edition of the Handbook covers the research history and brings it up to date. The fact that Bernie Bass has lived (and published in) the past seven decades means that scholars can use the Handbook as a tool to trace modern research from the present back to its earliest roots.

Finally, the Handbook is well written and arranged and provides a coherent structure to leadership. Leadership is a topic that has been studied from many perspectives by scholars from a myriad of disciplines. While the greatest contribution of the Handbook has been the sheer volume of information packed between its covers, it is Bass’s thoughtful organization and structure that help organize and define what is known about leaders and leadership.

Bernard M. Bass, one of the founders of the social scientific investigation of leaders and leadership, left us in 2007. Although he made enormous contributions to the field, this edition of the Handbook is Bernie’s most impressive gift to the leadership community.

As someone who has followed Bernie around at conferences, as he scurried from one leadership session to another, collecting copies of presentations and making connections with leadership scholars, I know firsthand that Bernie Bass’s heart and soul are in this handbook. His home office was crammed with copies of leadership books, journals, and papers, with his wife Ruth providing good organization to what otherwise would have been a mountainous clutter. It is very fitting that Ruth Bass, who contributed so much to Bernie’s life and his work, be a recognized co-author on this edition.

Bernie’s knowledge of leadership and related topics were truly encyclopedic. The knowledge of leadership research and theory that was inside Bernie Bass’s head could fill a dozen or more volumes the size of this Handbook. He had a very difficult time deciding what should be included, and he regretted greatly all that had to be left out. There are, after all, only so many pages that fit between a single cover.

Although I have consulted the Handbook countless times in my work, I also have had the good fortune of being able to consult Bernie directly on particular leadership topics, and he always had the answer. Those of us who study leadership and the many more who are deeply concerned about the practice of leadership in the world owe an incalculable debt to Bernie Bass.

As you get to know this edition of the Handbook, I am sure you will appreciate Bernie Bass’s legacy, and this final gift, as much as I do.

Ronald E. Riggio

Kravis Leadership Institute

Claremont McKenna College

In Memory of Bernard M. Bass

On October 11, 2007, during the final stages of the production of the fourth edition of the Handbook of Leadership, Bernard M. Bass passed away. Bernie, who was 82 years old, was distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Management at Binghamton University (State University of New York) and a member of the academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College in Florida. He was also the founding director of the Center for Leadership Studies at Binghamton and founding editor of The Leadership Quarterly journal. In the seven decades after 1946, he published over 400 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports; plus 21 books and another ten books that he edited.

He was a consultant involved in executive development for many of the Fortune 500 companies and delivered lectures and workshops in over 40 countries. He also lectured and conducted workshops pro bono for wide variety of not-for-profit organizations, including religious organizations, hospitals, government agencies, and universities. His work has been cited thousands of times and he received millions of dollars in research grants. Translations of his work have appeared in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese.

In addition to authoring the Handbook of Leadership, Bernie focused for 25 years on research and applications to management development of transformational leadership. Bernie was honored with many awards for lifetime achievement by several professional organizations, including the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Eminent Leadership Scholar Award from the Leadership Network of the Academy of Management. A Festschrift in his honor was held in 2001.

He is survived by his wife, Ruth, who was instrumental in the completion of the Handbook of Leadership; his daughter Audie; his daughter Laurie and her husband, Steve; his son Robert and Robert’s wife Maryanne and their three daughters, Rebecca, Megan, and Lauren; his son Jonathan and Jonathan’s wife Patricia, with their three sons Joshua, Jeremy, and Jonathan Jr., and Jonathan Jr’s. wife Christie and their two children.

Bernie was first and foremost a great scholar, scientist, and researcher—the greatest leadership scholar of the last 50 years—but he was also a generous, kind, and humorous human being. The field has lost a great scholar; I have lost a friend, colleague, and mentor.

Francis J. Yammarino, Ph.D.

SUNY Distinguished Professor of Management

Director, Center for Leadership Studies

School of Management

State University of New York at Binghamton

"Bernie was a giant in advancing the field of leadership for over seven decades. He was also a close friend to many colleagues around the globe, a mentor of the highest caliber, and an extraordinary thinker. The field of leadership would not be as advanced as it is today without his enormous contributions to theory, research, and of course the Handbook of Leadership."

Bruce Avolio, Ph.D.

Clifton Chair in Leadership

Director, Gallup Leadership Institute

Department of Management

College of Business

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

For me, leadership is social influence, and therefore Bernie Bass was my leader. Without knowing it, he played a major role in my becoming a leadership scholar 20 years ago, the most significant and fruitful move in my professional life. In the 1980s, the field of leadership studies was half dead and badly needed invigoration. We were lucky that a scholar of Bernie’s caliber was around to provide the needed invigoration. He is perhaps the person most responsible for the thriving of the field in the last 25 years. He was truly a luminary.

Boas Shamir, Ph.D.

Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences

The Hebrew University

Mount Scopus

Jerusalem, Israel

Bernie was a fabulous mentor. The opportunity to work with him shaped my career in many positive ways. I continue 25 years later to pursue leadership research. This interest started with Bernie’s passion for transformational leadership.

Leanne Atwater, Ph.D.

Chair, Department of Management

School of Global Management and Leadership

Arizona State University

I harbor most pleasant and appreciative memories of Bernie. His intellectual depth, the broadness of his interest in organizational issues, the strict scientific approach to the study and analysis of these problems have always struck me. Also, his organizational and editorial energy and care were conspicuous.

Pieter J.D. Drenth, Ph.D.

Emeritus Professor, Work and Organizational Psychology

Vrije Universiteit

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"Long before I met Bernie Bass, I was very aware of the fact that he had an enormous impact on my discipline of industrial/organizational psychology and on the particular area of leadership. His Handbook was really the bible for leadership scholars. It was the source for all things leadership, and it has always had a very special place on my bookshelf."

Ronald Riggio, Ph.D.

Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology

Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute

Claremont McKenna College

"I currently teach a history of management thought class and we have people we study whom we call ‘giants.’ Bernie was certainly one of these and has served as a giant role model for my students and for me. His work on transformational leadership has transformed the field, and, I feel confident, has brought many young scholars into it. His work on the various Handbook revisions is the gold standard of the field . . . I have also been impressed with the many other innovative contributions he made to the leadership, management, and psychology fields. He was always ahead of the curve. Along with these accomplishments, he has mentored a number of doctoral students and young professors who have gone on to make major contributions in their own right."

Jerry Hunt, Ph.D.

Horn Professor of Management

Founding Director, Institute for Leadership Research

Texas Tech University

To me, Bernie represents the model of a true scholar: interested in the content, thorough, clear. I’ve seen people attack relentlessly if their work is at all questioned—not Bernie. True scholar that he was, he was always more interested in furthering the development of the field than ‘defending his personal glory,’ if I can put it that way. He really has made a tremendous impact on our field.

Deanne N. Den Hartog, Ph.D.

Professor of Organizational Behavior

University of Amsterdam Business School

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

He opened a new and truly scientific way to look at what I was doing that has served me very well in my 40–year career in my field. To my way of thinking, that is the role of true scientist, scholar, and leader.

Fred Dansereau, Ph.D.

Professor of Organization and Human Resources and Associate Dean for Research

School of Management

State University of New York at Buffalo

Of course the pinnacle of his career was the development of Transformational Leadership, including the articulation of the conceptual space and the development of measures to tap these concepts.

Martin G. Evans, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Rotman School of Management

University of Toronto

Acknowledgments

Many fellow scholars, colleagues, staff, and students helped in the planning of and data collection for this fourth edition of the Handbook of Leadership, beginning in 1989 at the Center for Leadership Studies (CLS), School of Management at Binghamton University (State University of New York). Leading scholars of leadership research such as Chet Schriesheim and Fred Fiedler, as well as Robert Wallace, former senior editor of Free Press, reviewed Bass and Stogdill’s third edition to suggest ways of improving the fourth edition, along with updating the literature. My faculty colleagues at CLS—Bruce Avolio, Fran Yammarino, David Waldman, and Leanne Atwater—also made useful suggestions and helped frame the decision to maintain and expand the single reference list. Over the 18 years during which the fourth edition was in preparation, I received useful feedback from readers. One example stands out: Native American readers pointed out that in the third edition, Native Americans were seen as a severely impoverished group, when in fact by the 1990s, they had overcome much adversity and were making important economic, educational, and cultural strides. The opening of gambling casinos on Native American lands became a major source of revenue and enabled extensive investments. Much had changed for the good in their lives. Google was another source of unpublished ethnic information.

Secretarial staff and students helped greatly in locating and copying articles and technical reports. Particularly important was CLS secretary Wendy Kramer.

When it came time to finish the final draft of the manuscript of the fourth edition. I was aided immensely by two CLS professors at Binghamton University, Kim Jaussi and Shelly Dionne and their Ph.D. students, Becky Jestice, Jung Hwan Kim, Betsy Carroll, and Mike Palanski, as well as my wife, who all put a great deal of energy into locating and completing fully and partly missing references. They were an important source of support in preparation of the final reference list.

Writing was expedited by my ability to work directly on the computer. It was a new experience trying to get the results to the publisher using the exacting format and instructions I was required to supply. But thanks to Ruth Bass, my wife of 61 years and a self-taught computer buff, it was possible to do this. I remain deeply grateful for her efforts in this regard as well as for her editorial suggestions for the text and her encouragement as the final manuscript unfolded. Without her assistance, the task would never have been completed.

Bernard M. Bass

St. Petersburg, Florida

Preface to the Fourth Edition

What’s new in the fourth edition? Much has happened on the world scene over the past 18 years in international relations, politics, psychology, science, and technology, which is reflected in the leadership and leadership research that have appeared during these years. Increasingly, imaginative leadership is required. Globalization, climate change, and a single superpower, the United States, have become salient issues, along with the expansion and consolidation of the European Union. China and India have joined Japan as major economic powers and contributors to science and technology. The Arab world and the Middle East are now major players in international political life. Militant Islamists have spawned terrorism, civil wars, and massacres like the World Trade Center catastrophe of September 11, 2001, as well as overreaction by governments, particularly that of the United States. In reaction, national security has been strengthened with some loss to individual freedom. But a successful war on Al-Qaeda, the largest and best-organized network of terrorism, has been fought, reducing the network to small splinter groups still pursuing a philosophy of terrorism but lacking a central base and stripped of the means to easily communicate or coordinate their efforts.

In the 18 years since the publication of the third edition, the study, application, and practice of leadership have burgeoned. Business, government, and nonprofit agencies, plus community, education, military, and health organizations have increasingly made leadership a core concept in meeting the challenges of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the new millenium. There was a 100% increase in leadership research and applications in the United States and a 300% increase in management consultants during this period. Academic courses and curricula on leadership proliferated. In 1990, the same year that the third edition of the Handbook of Leadership appeared, the Leadership Quarterly was first published, followed over the next 10 years by almost 200 new articles. Also new during the 1990s were the Journal of Leadership Studies and other new sources on leadership research, applications, and practice. The domination in leadership research and theory by the United States and Britain has changed, spawned by a growing diversity of publications from Holland, Sweden, Spain, and Russia. Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, and India have become other rich sources, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

The subject index of the fourth edition reflects the emergence of new terms and concepts, some likely to be fads but others likely to survive as important innovations. Cognitive models of leadership have become as important as behavioral ones. Personal traits of leadership are back in vogue, bolstered by innovations in genetics. Leaders are both born and made. But situational differences remain of consequence. The new leadership of vision and transformation has become as important to leadership as the conception of leadership as an exchange of reward for following the leader. Also new are concentrations on strategic and virtual leadership.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century we saw a rise of interest in the charisma of those in everyday affairs and leadership positions join the interest in world-class figures, politicians, and CEOs. There was a spin-off and application to transformational, visionary, and valuebased leadership. Empirical work was greatly expanded as a consequence of Robert House’s 1976 theory of charisma and James Burns’s 1978 exposition on transformational leadership.

Ralph Stogdill conceived the Handbook of Leadership and published its first edition in 1978. Soon after, he asked me to collaborate on the second edition but died before the work could begin. I carried on alone with the second edition, published in 1981 as the Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership and the third edition in 1990, published as the Bass & Stogdill Handbook of Leadership. This fourth edition still includes some of Ralph’s work in two of its 36 chapters. In the final preparation, my wife, Ruth Bass, assisted editorially and applied her skills at research and use of the computer.

Illustrating the new developments are three new chapters added to the Handbook. Chapter 9 is dedicated to the ethics of leadership. Chapter 22 deals with transformational leadership. Chapter 24 focuses on strategic and executive leadership. In the same way, in addition to the updated chapters, many new sections address topics like heritability, accountability, authenticity, and virtual leadership. At the same time, space limitations required some reduction in pre-1990 content and details, but generally theories, conclusions, comments, and citations from the earlier literature have been maintained in the text and endnotes. Reflecting the changes in leadership research over the years, the fourth edition proportionally involves fewer short-term studies of leaders and follower relations at the micro level. More is presented at the macro level, of leaders as senior executives and heads of organizations, and the meta level of leaders of societies. Here, more effort has been made to include findings from political science, sociology, and history. As in the third edition, I have included content from prepublished and unpublished manuscripts and an increased number of paper presentations, especially from the annual meetings of the Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Books used tend to be limited to those that have some research base and are not just anecdotal accounts.

Most compendiums on leadership like the Encyclopedia of Leadership (2004) are collections of essays from many authors selected by the editors. These have the advantage of having been prepared and published quickly; they present many different points of view. They are disadvantaged, however, by duplication and a lack of integration. The Handbook of Leadership has a single author, who hopefully has avoided duplication, included a sufficient number of alternative points of view, and provided a continuing integration of the literature. Unfortunately, much more time has been required for data collection, review, and writing.

The third edition, published in 1990, was handwritten, then typed and printed as galley pages and eventually page proofs. This fourth edition was written more efficiently on a personal computer. The file was sent to the publisher on CDs to provide the page proofs for publication.

Plan of the Fourth Edition

The fourth edition of 36 chapters is in nine parts. In Part I, the Handbook expands the beginning chapters from the previous editions, addressing the history, definitions, and concepts of leadership. These are followed by taxonomies, theories, models, and methods of leadership research. In Part II, the Handbook takes up the personal traits of consequence to leadership, including activity level, authoritarianism, orientation to power, and Machiavellianism. Part II concludes with an examination of the values and ethics of leaders along with their feelings of self-esteem and well-being.

Part III deals with the externalities that affect the personal performance of a leader. These involve the leader’s accorded status and power. How the power is distributed, how conflicts are resolved, and the leader’s authority, accountability, and responsibility are considered. The leader’s use of reinforcement in the instrumental exchange with followers and the follower’s impact on the exchange conclude Part III.

Part IV reviews the alternative styles of leadership and their effects on individual, team, organizational, and societal performance.

Part V is about the new leadership of charisma and transformational leadership. Managerial work and executive and strategic leadership begin Part VI. Situational conditions that affect the manager and leader follow. They include the impact of the environment and organization, the immediate team, the task and technology, stress, physical distance and closeness, virtuality, substitutes for leadership, and the transfer of leadership and executive succession.

Part VII concentrates on women and minorities as leaders, as well as leadership across countries and cultures. Previous editions concentrated on African Americans, but the fourth edition has expanded to examine leadership among many other minorities, ranging from what has become the largest group, Hispanics, to another large group, Italian Americans, for whom less leadership literature exists.

Part VIII is concerned with development, training, and education of leaders and their assessment, appraisal, and selection.

Part IX concludes the Handbook, with extrapolation from the previous chapters of trends, likely environmental changes, and speculation about the future of leadership and leadership research.

I have used many secondary sources in my research. These include books, reviews, commentaries, technical reports, unpublished manuscripts, and theoretical papers. I also benefited from early drafts of prepublication manuscripts sent to me before a lot of the good ideas they contained were edited out in the publication process. I indicate in the references both the secondary sources and original publications from which the secondary sources are derived. Many of these references are presented in the footnotes, though they are by no means exhaustive. By 2008, there could be as many as 100 different citations of a popular research replication. I have tried to credit all the primary and secondary sources and have also included in the references some works which were not cited directly in the Handbook. The earlier seminal studies of 1950 to 1980 were not followed by numerous replication. Rather, I have tried to cover many of the meta-analyses of these replications, which continue to appear into the twentieth century.

I began collecting and reading for the fourth edition in 1989 and worked fairly steadily on the project. I never expected that it would take almost 20 years to complete. The first draft of the third edition was handwritten and took nine years to reach publication in 1990. It provided a substantial background and history of leadership research and practice, particularly from the 1940s onward; much of it is included in the fourth edition, along with additional work I found for the era. This material should help to defray the opinion that the only good leadership research is that which recently appeared. I have been privileged to contribute to the leadership literature dating back to 1946, and some of my early work is as valid and applicable today as it was then.

Bernard M. Bass

PART

I

Introduction

CHAPTER

1

Concepts of Leadership

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

RÉMY DE GOURMONT (1858–1915)

The evidence is all around us. It is in our daily lives—in our schools, businesses, social groups, religious organizations, and public agencies. It is in our local community, in our more distant state government and national government, and on the international scene. Leadership makes the difference. Leadership can be good, as when your sales manager calls his department together to point out that last month’s quotas have been met but that a new competitor is starting to make inroads. It can be better, as when a political party leader sums up what she and her team feel will be needed to win an election. It can be best, as when a community activist senses and articulates the community’s pressing needs and mobilizes the community into effective action.

Leadership has been built into the human psyche because of the long period we need to be nurtured by parents for our survival. Early on, we learned to follow the leadership of parents and their proxies for satisfaction of our needs for food and comforting. Our mothers or their surrogates became our leaders in early childhood. They still are. Fathers came next when they were recognized. With socialization, as we grew, peers and other significant people gradually took the place of parental leadership. How we think and behave as leaders and followers when we reach adulthood is still likely to be affected by our earlier relations with our parents, as well as by our genetic makeup. So it is not surprising that leadership is a universal phenomenon. The importance of parenting for human development and survival makes leadership the world’s oldest vocation. Parenthood makes for readymade patterns of leadership.

During the period of hunting and gathering, leaders had to be independent and strong to defend the sovereignty of their group of followers against marauders and natural disasters (Lipman-Blumen, 1996). The study of leaders advanced with the rise of civilization. All societies have created myths to provide plausible and acceptable explanations for the dominance of leaders and the submission of subordinates (Paige, 1977). The greater the socioeconomic injustice in a society, the more distorted the realities of leadership—its powers, morality, and effectiveness—in the mythology.

The patterns of behavior that are regarded as acceptable in leaders differ from time to time and from one culture to another, although we will find some surprising commonalities. Citing various anthropological reports on primitive groups in Australia, Fiji, New Guinea, the Congo, and elsewhere, H. L. Smith and Krueger (1933) concluded that leadership occurs among all people, regardless of culture, be they isolated Indian villagers, nomads of the Eurasian steppes, or Polynesian fisherfolk. Lewis (1974) determined, from an anthropological review, that even when a society does not have institutionalized chiefs, rulers, or elected officials, there are always leaders who initiate action and play central roles in the group’s decision making. No societies are known that do not have leadership in some aspects of their social life, although many may lack a single overall leader to make and enforce decisions. Such shared leadership is now representative of many scholarly and practical ideas about organizational life in the twenty-first century, the age of information, when no one member of a group has all the expertise and experience to help the group to reach its goals.

Myths, Legends, and Religious Texts

Myths and legends about great leaders were important in the development of civilized societies. According to Joseph Campbell, early myths about heroic leadership had much in common. The hero went forth and brought back something of great value. Prometheus brought back fire. Moses went up Mount Sinai and brought back God’s Ten Commandments. Myths mature into legends. Legendary heroes figure prominently in the Hindu Upanishads and in the Greek and Latin classics. In the Iliad, higher transcendental goals were emphasized: He serves me most, who serves his country best (Book 10, line 201). The Odyssey advised leaders to maintain their social distance: The leader, mingling with the vulgar host, is in the common mass of matter lost (Book 3, line 297). Plato’s ideal leader was the philosopher-king. Exploits of individual heroes were central to the Babylonian Gilgamesh and the Hindu Ramayana. Leadership was of much interest to Aśoka, Confucius, and Lao-tzu. Leadership was the focus of certain medieval classics of western literature such as Beowulf, the Song of Roland, and the Icelandic sagas. According to Gemmill and Oakley (1992), the social concept of leadership is a myth that maintains a belief in the need for hierarchies and organizational leaders in society. This myth results in alienated, intellectually and emotionally deskilled employees and the magical desire for an omnipotent leader.

Religions offer many accounts of leaders as prophets, priests, chiefs, and kings. Such leaders served as initiators, symbols, representatives, and examples to be followed. In the Old Testament, Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and Joshua led them to the promised land. Leaders such as Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and the Macabees were singled out in the Old Testament for detailed expositions of their behavior and relations with God and their people. God was the supreme leader of his chosen people; he clarified, instructed, and directed what was to be done through the words of his prophets and arranged for rewards for compliance with and punishment for disobedience to the laws and rules he had handed down to Moses. The gospels of the New Testament are filled with stories about how Jesus led his small group of disciples as well as large audiences. Saint Paul was the initiator of a multinational organization of churches. To the leadership of Saint Peter is attributed the founding of the Roman Catholic Church. In Islam, religious law provided the basis for the leadership of the ideal caliphate (Rabi, 1967). The Koran still undergirds the legal systems of Islamic republics. Gautama Buddha led his movement by his precepts and example.

From Myths and Legends to Early Histories of Leaders

From its infancy, much of the study of history has been the study of leaders—what they did and why they did it. What would the first histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Xenophon, written before 400 B.C.E., have been like without discourses about leaders, leadership, and followers? Over the centuries, the effort to formulate principles of leadership spread from the study of history and philosophy to all the developing social sciences. In modern psychohistory, there is still a search for psychoanalytical generalizations about leadership, built on the in-depth analysis of the development, motivation, and competencies of prominent leaders, living and dead.

Early Principles of Leadership

Written principles of leadership go back nearly as far as the emergence of civilization, which shaped its leaders as much as it was shaped by them. Written principles of leadership can be found in Egypt in the Instruction of Ptahhotep (2300 B.C.E.). Confucius and Lao-tzu of the sixth century B.C.E. discussed the responsibilities of leaders and how leaders should conduct themselves. Like J. M. Burns (1978), Confucius said that leaders must set a moral example. Like Argyris (1983), Lao-tzu declared that leaders must participate in and share ownership of developments. In developing their ideas about imperialism and public service, leaders of the British Empire turned for inspiration to the classics, such as the works of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. Roman and Greek authors such as Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, to name just a few, wrote extensively on the subject of leadership and administration. For instance, in his Parallel Lives of around 100 C.E., Plutarch (1932) tried to show the moral similarities between 50 Greek and Roman leaders: for each Greek leader there was a Roman counterpart. The mythical founder of Athens, Theseus, was matched with the mythical founder of Rome, Romulus. The lawgiver of Sparta, Lycurgus, was matched with the lawgiver of Rome, Numa Pompilius. Alexander the Great was matched with Julius Caesar.

The classical Greek and Roman writers had considerable influence during the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods, when many people looked back to the classics for guidance. The Greeks and Romans influenced Machiavelli in The Prince (1513), for instance, and Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws (1748). In his Two Treatises on Government (1690), John Locke wrote that what we would now call leadership had to reach beyond institutional authority to create and maintain a liberal society (Weaver, 1991).

America’s founding fathers were well versed in all these texts and were aware of how autocratic and democratic leadership had succeeded or failed in the Roman, Venetian, Dutch, and Swiss republics. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics figured strongly in their deliberations at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The constitutional checks and balances among executive, legislative, and judicial powers owe much to these writings.

Written Concepts and Principles of Leadership

Written concepts and principles of leadership emerged early. Figure 1.1 shows the Egyptian hieroglyphs for leadership (seshemet), leader (seshemu), and follower (shemsu), which were being written 5,000 years ago. In 2300 B.C.E., in the Instruction of Ptahhotep, three qualities were attributed to the pharaoh: Authoritative utterance is in thy mouth, perception is in thy heart, and thy tongue is the shrine of justice (Lichtheim, 1973).

Chinese classics written as early as the sixth century B.C.E. are filled with hortatory advice to leaders about their responsibilities to the people. Confucius urged leaders to set a moral example and to manipulate rewards and punishments for teaching what was right and good. Lao-tzu emphasized the need for a leader to work himself out of his job by making the people believe that success was due to their own efforts.

The Greeks’ concepts of leadership were exemplified by the heroes in Homer’s Iliad. Ajax symbolized inspirational leadership and law and order; Agamemnon, justice and judgment; Nestor, wisdom and counsel; Odysseus, shrewdness and cunning: and Achilles, valor and activism (Sarachek, 1968). Later, Greek philosophers, such as Plato, in the Republic, looked at the requirements for the ideal leader of the ideal state. Plato’s philosopher-king was to be the most important element of good government, educated to rule with order and reason. In Politics, Aristotle was disturbed by a lack of virtue among those who wanted to be leaders. He emphasized the need to educate youths for such leadership. Plutarch, concerned with prosocial ideals about leadership, compared the traits and behavior of actual Greek and Roman leaders to support his point of view in Parallel Lives (Kellerman, 1987).

Figure 1.1 Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Leadership, Leader, and Follower

SOURCE: Author

A famous Renaissance work was Machiavelli’s (1513/1962) The Prince. Machiavelli’s thesis that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things is still a germane description of the risks of, and resistance to, leadership. Machiavelli was the ultimate pragmatist. He believed that leaders needed steadiness, firmness, and concern for the maintenance of authority, power, and order in government. It was best if these objectives could be accomplished by gaining the esteem of the populace; but if they could not, then craft, deceit, threats, treachery, and violence were required (Kellerman, 1987). Machiavelli is still widely quoted as a guide to an effective leadership of sorts, and he was the basis for a modern line of investigation using a Mach scale (Christie & Geis, 1970). In 1987, a survey of college presidents reported that they still found The Prince highly relevant.

Other famous works of the Renaissance include Shakespeare’s plays, such as Richard II. As king of England, Richard made many mistakes in judgment, especially in his judgments of people, which alienated his nobles and ultimately led to his forced abdication and imprisonment (Payne, 2000).

Philosophy continued to contribute to principles of leadership. Thus a fundamental principle of leadership at West Point today can be traced back to Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Hegel, 1830/1971), which argued that by first serving as a follower, a leader subsequently can best understand his followers. Hegel thought that this understanding was a paramount requirement for effective leadership.

The Modern Study of Leadership

Among the landmarks in the modern study of leadership are Terman’s (1904) investigation of the psychology and development of leadership, Kohs and Irle’s (1920) predictions of the promotion of U.S. Army officers, Freud’s (1922) work dealing with group psychology, Weber’s (1927/1947) introduction of charismatic leadership, Cox’s (1926) analysis of the biographies of leaders, Moreno’s (1934/1953) invention of sociometry, and Benne and Sheat’s (1948) classification of roles in small groups. Leadership assessment centers began in 1923 in Germany (Ansbacher, 1951); they were initiated in Britain during World War II (Garforth, 1945) and by the Office of Strategic Services (1948) in the United States. By 1948, Stogdill (1948) was able to locate 128 studies of leadership, which he classified according to the traits of importance to leadership: capacity, achievement, responsibility, participation, and status. There were 124 articles, books, and abstracts on leadership published in English and four in German up to 1947 in the half-century preceding Stogdill’s (1948) review of the literature (see chapter 4). In contrast, 188 articles on leadership appeared in just one journal, Leadership Quarterly, between 1990 and 1999.

In determining the leadership that emerged, Stogdill also found it necessary to consider the situation and the nature of the followers—their objectives and their need for leadership. After Stogdill, there was a paradigm shift away from research on the traits and personalities of leaders to an emphasis on the situation and context in which the leadership occurred. Stogdill himself maintained that the personal traits associated with leadership were still important, though their effects were modified by the needs of the situation. But most empirical researchers up to 1975 abandoned the search for traits and turned their attention to the situation. Another paradigm shift occurred in the late 1970s, with a rising interest in charismatic, visionary, and transformational leadership (Hunt, 1999) and a perspective that both personal traits and situations (including followers) were important in determining the emergence, success, and effectiveness of leadership. By the 1980s, traits had again become important for research, along with context.

Influence of Leadership Research on Popular Books and Management Techniques

Leadership is a widely discussed and popular topic. In mid-1999, 55,172 publications on leadership could be found in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). As of April 14, 2005, Amazon.com listed 18,299 books for sale on leadership in English, French, and Spanish. Google Scholar listed 16,800 books on leadership, 95,500 publications on leadership, and 386,000 citations related to leadership.

In the past, popular books on leadership consisted of hortatory advice to leaders based on a mixture of armchair analysis and unproven generalizations. The best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1937) is illustrative, and is still used for confidence building, especially in workshops for public speaking and salesmanship. Dickson, BeShears, Borys, et al. (2003) selected 30 popular books on business leadership mainly written in the past 30 years such as The One Minute Manager, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and First, Break All the Rules. Two reviewers prepared a summary of key points in each book. Much in common was found with the academic research literature on leadership. (This was confounded to some extent because some of the authors of the popular books were primarily academics.) Staw and Epstein (2000) looked at the effects during five annual periods on the largest 100 U.S. firms (in sales) of introducing three popular management programs: Teamwork, Total Quality Management (TQM), and Employee Empowerment. The firms’ reputations were enhanced in news reports of the programs by the business press. The CEOs’ salaries and bonuses also reflected the use of the three programs, but the firms’ profitability remained unaffected.

Universality of Leadership

Leadership is a universal phenomenon in humans and is also observed in many species of animals, such as matriarchal elephants and patriarchal gorillas. Allee (1951) maintained that all vertebrates living in groups exhibit social organization and leadership. Koford (1963) observed that the relative dominance of two bands of monkeys encountering each other at an eating place was usually determined by the relative dominance of the leaders of the bands. Zajonc (1969) suggested that primate groups learn norms for the different status of members and their leadership. The norms are learned by group members, are stable but can be changed, and are complied with by the majority of members. Experimentation and observation in natural settings suggest that many groups of mammals learn strongly differentiated status hierarchies, which their members recognize and comply with. In primate groups, leaders obtain privileges that tend to bolster their dominance. Their presence is an advantage to the group in gaining possession of a desired territory and in expanding the area of free movement for the group. Whether these findings and similar results reported for packs of wolves and hyenas, elephant matriarchies, bands of gorillas, and pods of whales are relevant to understanding the human condition remains controversial.

Theory versus Problem Orientation

The earliest social science literature on leadership was concerned predominately with theoretical issues. Theorists sought to identify different types of leadership and to relate them to the functional demands of society. In addition, they sought to account for the emergence of leadership by examining either the qualities of the leader or the elements of the situation. Earlier theorists can be distinguished from more recent ones in that the former did not consider interactions between individual and situational variables. Also, earlier theorists tended to develop more comprehensive theories than do their more recent counterparts. Between 1945 and 1960, students of leadership devoted more of their efforts to empirical research and, as a consequence, ignored various issues that earlier theorists regarded as important. But research on leadership became theory driven again from the 1970s on, although the theories involved tended to focus on a few phenomena and were less ambitious than those of the past. Empirical research increasingly tested hypotheses derived from a theoretical model. By the 1990s, advances in statistical analysis had made possible testing of multivariate models of leadership involving interactions contingent on leaders’ and followers’ traits and situational variables.

Empirical research on leadership in some segments of the population (students, military personnel, and business managers) was heavy, but sparse in other segments such as leaders of volunteer agencies, police officers, and health administrators. Because of growing employment in health, social services, and protection, there was an upsurge in studies of leadership among nurses, social workers, and the police. In the same way, the increase and upgrading of minorities in the U.S. labor force has resulted in an examination of leadership among women and minorities. Cross-cultural studies of leadership have burgeoned as well.

The emerging propositions about leadership maintain their validity over time in strong cultures. Nonetheless, they also are subject to change because of cultural changes. Thus, over 50% of more than 1,000 students from eight U.S. universities who were surveyed about their attraction to the television series, MASH, dealing with a medical unit in the Korean War, indicated that watching the program had modified their attitudes or behavior about organizational life. All but 5% considered MASH a realistic portrayal of organizational values and processes. The respondents felt an increased desire to work with superiors who treat subordinates with understanding and respect (Dyer & Dyer, 1984). Most of the coercive, tough, autocratic, bullying leaders in organizations of 1905 had been replaced by 2005 with leaders who may still be as highly concerned about getting the work done but also have concern for their followers. Much of the work itself has changed from unskilled labor to the application of knowledge, from repetitive tasks to more meaningful work, from individual work to teamwork, from functional to project-based work, from single-skill to multiskill work. Coordination from above has decreased while coordination among peers has increased (Stein & Pinchot, 1995).

The Need for Leadership

Napoleon expressed his feeling about the importance of leadership in his quip that he would rather have an army of rabbits led by a lion than an army of lions led by a rabbit. Surveys of job satisfaction from the 1920s on illustrated the importance of leadership.1 They uniformly reported that employees’ favorable attitudes toward their supervisors contributed to the employees’ satisfaction. In turn, employees’ favorable attitudes toward their supervisors were usually found to be related to the productivity of the work group (see, for example, Lawshe & Nagle, 1953). Since then, countless surveys can be cited to support the contention that leaders make a difference in their subordinates’ satisfaction and performance. For example, Becker (1992) found that compared with their commitment to the organization, employees’ commitment to their supervisors and to top management was more highly related to their job satisfaction, their intention not to quit, and their prosocial behavior. Again, Becker, Billings, et al. (1996) showed that commitment by employees to their supervisors was more strongly associated with the employees’ performance than was their commitment to the organization. Leaders also can make the difference in whether organizations succeed or fail. In the public sector, local government managers must be able to lead when angry, single-issue, negative minorities wish to take over public policy making about issues ranging from abortion rights to protective services (Abels, 1996).

Typically, efforts to estimate the number of leaders in the United States use census data on proprietors and officials. But Gardner (1986) noted that although owners, managers, and officials are in a position to do so, they do not necessarily act as leaders. Cleveland (1985) estimated the number of opinion leaders in the United States and how this number grew between 1955 and 1985. In 1955, he estimated that there were 555,000 opinion leaders; in 1971, he guessed that at least one million Americans could be classified as opinion leaders. He considered 7 out of 10 public executives to be opinion leaders—policy makers in public, philanthropic, voluntary, and large-scale private enterprises. By 1985, he estimated the number to have multiplied to one out of every 200 Americans. In the age of information—with the ever-present need for change to stay ahead of the competition, for learning from timely feedback, for teamwork, and for the introduction of new technology—the need for leadership at all organizational levels is apparent. On the basis of a field study of 12 large organizational reengineering attempts. Jaffe and Scott (1998) pointed out that without engaging the firm’s leadership, efforts to reengineer, the operations will fail. Large-scale redesign requires leaders’ and employees’ commitment.

Need and Importance. It was the leadership of Robert E. Lee that enabled the Confederate forces to defeat the larger, better-equipped Union forces in many of the battles of the Civil War. It was the leadership of Henry V and longbow technology that produced the victory at Agincourt of 15,000 Englishmen over the 45,000 more heavily armored Frenchmen (Fiedler & Garcia, 1987). De Vries, Roe, et al. (1998) developed and validated a scale of need for supervision that can differentiate between conditions when employees need to be supervised and conditions when they do not. However, the effect of the need for leadership on the outcomes of leadership, though positive, is small (De Vries, Roe, and Taillieu, 2002). Supervisors do make a difference in employees’ sense of equity in the workplace and are more important than issues of pay and long working hours (Porter, 1997). Leaders’ vision, empowerment, and enabling of subordinates makes possible a highly adaptive, learning organization (Johnson, 1998). The Gallup Organization Workplace Audit, administered to 2 million employees in 61 countries, and supported by focus groups, identified five statistical factors associated with high-quality work environments. Two of these factors were one’s immediate supervisor and the overall leadership in the firm (Gallup, 1995, 1998). Leadership was central to the success of Total Quality Management (TQM), which requires the support and commitment of top management (Shea and Howell, 1998). Some of the performance of football teams is beyond the control and ability of the coach’s leadership, but the coach can turn a consistently losing team into a consistently winning team—as Vince Lombardi did with the Green Bay Packers. Around the globe, leadership is widely required because of two antithetical forces: interdependence and diversity (economic, political, and social). But despite the importance of leadership, Conger (1999, p. 145) lamented, A more competitive world forced many firms to reinvent themselves . . . (but) rarely did companies possess the courage to change management skills needed to orchestrate large-scale transformations. . . . The leadership talent necessary for such undertakings was . . . in short supply. Lipman-Blumen (1996) conceived a need for connective leaders who can bring divisive parties together by developing a sense of self-sacrifice, community, and common causes. Leadership is needed to change organizations. However, when De Vries, Roe, and Taillieu (2002) questioned 958 Dutch employees about how much they individually needed their supervisor to set goals, to decide what work should be done, etc., they found only modest effects on the relationship between the need for leadership and job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, stress of work, role conflict, and self-rated performance.

Caveat—Leadership is a Figment of the Imagination. Agency theorists (Meckling & Jensen, 1976) argued that an organization is a legal fiction that serves as the connection for contracts among parties. An organization is simply a network of individuals who exchange according to market conditions, rewards, resources, time, and skills. There is no distinction between leaders and followers. If there are no followers, there is no need for leadership (Arnott, 1995). Some critics have argued that all the effects of leadership are a romantic fiction, existing only in the eye of the beholder. Followers attribute to leadership effects that in fact are due to historical, economic, or social forces. Meindl, Ehrlich, and Dukerich (1985) presented five empirical studies of their concept of the romance of leadership. In the first study, they demonstrated that among a total of 33,248 titles of articles in The Wall Street Journal between 1972 and 1982, 34 business firms in various industries, leadership was more likely to be emphasized in those years when the firms did well but not when they did poorly. Leadership also appeared much more often in the titles in the years that industries performed well rather than poorly. A second study showed that the percentage of leadership topics between 1929 and 1983 in social science doctoral dissertations was greater after poor rather than good economic times. A third study found that the number of articles about leadership in business periodicals was also affected, but in the opposite way. The fourth and fifth studies demonstrated that students given various business scenarios were more likely to attribute large changes, up or down, to leadership rather than to alternative reasons for company success. Middling changes generated the least effect.

Other critics, such as Pandey (1976), have regarded the concept of leadership as useless for understanding social influence. Calder (1977) argued that the objective contributions of the leader to outcomes were possibly more interesting than true. Some critics attributed organizational outcomes primarily to other factors, but held that after the fact, leaders were credited with what happened. Organizational leaders who were perceived to be exerting leadership on organizational performance were merely the subjects of misperceptions. That is, organizational outcomes were objectively determined by environmental and organizational factors in which leadership, at best, could play only a minor role. For instance, M. C. Brown (1982, p. 1) concluded that once other factors influencing effectiveness are accounted for, it is likely that leadership will have little bearing on organizational performance. Pfeffer (1977) took a similar but less extreme position: leadership is a sense-making heuristic to account for organizational performance and is important primarily for its symbolic role in organizations. Leaders are selected or self-selected to fulfill the fate of the organization and are highly constrained by organizational and external factors.