Leadership Theories. A LiteratureReview.

Introduction

There are distinct epistemological lineages to the way academics conceptualise and define Leadership. Some schools of thought view leadership as a trait in a person, whereas some view it as a process between the practitioner and the subjects, and there are still others who view leadership as the coming together of the person and the practice. There are also varied views on what branch of knowledge does leadership belong to, there are voices that claim that leadership is a subject of psychology and others who claim that it is a discipline within management. This paper attempts to review available literature on three of the many frameworks or epistemological lineages in leadership, i.e., The Trait Approach, Leader-Member Exchange Theory and Transformational Leadership. As a beginning, a brief review of leading views on the definition of leadership could be helpful. Peter Drucker who is regarded as the father of modern management (Flaherty, 1999) suggests that traditionally, leadership has been viewed as a process in which a superior person included a group to pursue the goals established by him. Drucker further suggests that the ethos of such traditional and somewhat Palaeolithic view on leadership has been preserved and passed on through the generations even to this day when people see a leader as the indispensable man (Flaherty, 1999) (Smith, 2006), (Rothschild, 2008). Kruger (1995) sees leadership as the human factor that leads an institution towards realising goals through the voluntary co-operation of all people in the business, and Kotter (1990) suggests that the purpose of leadership is to produce change and movement in peoples conduct.

Reams of academic work is available on just the way how academics define leadership, but it emerges that there are two distinct views where one represents leadership as a phenomenon in social life in general and the other as a skill or process in the management of an organisation. Whereas both these views have been argued, what further emerges after a process of distillation is that leadership or leaders deal with people and their conduct, which then naturally progresses us in to the investigation of what makes some people leaders, and others followers, as also, if what does it take to lead. The Trait Approach was one of the first systematic attempt to study leadership (Northouse, 2007) with an intent to answer some of these questions. Within the Traits framework, leadership is seen as an outcome of the amalgamation of valued characteristics of peoples personalities. It rests on the basic premise that with the presence of some important charecteristics, like intelligence, insight, sociability, integrity, charisma et.al., in a person, they could become a leader, as represented in the works of Stogdill (1948), Mann (1959), Lord, DeVader, &

Alliger (1986), Kirkpatrick & Locke (1991), and others. In contrast to this personal charateristics based view, the Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theroy or approach sees leadership as a process. Where people in leadership positions interact with other people in the group based on their mutual roles, influences, exchanges and interests, and harness the strengths and weakenesses of group dynamics and individual motivational factors to realise their objectives (Dansereau, Graen, & Haga, 1975), (Graen & Scandura, 1987), (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). Transformational Leadership interestingly appears to bring the traits and LMX approaches together, since it defines leadership as an engagement with people to intrinsically motivate them to come together and join the leader, and where in the process, the overall level of motivation in both the followers, as well as interestingly, the leader rises. (Downtown, 1973), (Bass, 1985), (Avolio & Gibbons, 1988), (Jung, Chow, & Wu, 2003).

The three frameworks.

The Traits approach is built upon the premise that certain characteristics in people make them leaders, where merely the presence of these characterises puts people who possess them in a position to lead others. Some such, most important and written about traits (as mentioned earlier) are Intelligence, Self Confidence, Determination, Integrity and sociability. Further research and refinement in the theory during the last 30 years or so have consolidated these characteristics in to what are called the Big Five Personality Factors represented in the works of McCrae & Costa (1987) and Goldberg (1990). These Big Five factors are: Neuroticism, (the presence of the emotions of anxiety, vulnerability and hostility), Extraversion (the ability to be sociable enough to strike conversations, communicate freely without inhibitions, assertiveness and over all spread of positive vibes), Openness (the ability to lend a listening ear and be considerate to new ideas, to be well informed and versed with new developments, and a sense of general curiosity that leads to investigation and theorising), Agreeableness (the ability to accept others views and opinions, garner trust, evolve consensus), and finally Conscientiousness (the ability to make fair judgements, be thorough, dependable and firmly decisive). In subsequent research by Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt (2002) on the relationship of the big five factors and the practice of leadership, it was concluded that having these personality traits was positively correlated to being an effective leader. The Traits approach creates a divorce between leadershipand circumstances, it tries to circumvent the idea that a person with some or many or even all of these characteristics could be an effective leader because of the presence of congenial circumstances and supporting followers, and that if such circumstances were altered, then the effectiveness of such a leader could be jeopardised (as suggested in situational leadership). Based on the strong presence of the Leader as the centrepiece of any situation or circumstance, it is applied by many organisations to the extent that during their recruitment process for leadership positions, some organisations use personality assessment tests to gauge the presence of these characteristics in their potential leaders.

The LMX approach on the other hand could be considered as a more action-centric premise. Dansereau, Graen, & Haga (1975) , and Graen & Cashman (1975) suggested the presence of two types of relational dyads between leading managers and their teams based on expanded and negotiated responsibilities, and, contractual responsibilities. Where those individauls in the group who were more favourably disposed to exhibiting their calibur or were more relatively more motivated by their leaders interactions with them, took on extra responsibilities beyond the scope of what they were expected to do as part of their job, and the other group was represented by those who remained contended with doing as much they originally agreed to. Later Graen & Uhl-Bien (1995), upon further research suggested that instead of the presence of characteristics (as in the Traits approach), the LMX framework was related to the overall effectiveness of the organisation based on exchangesbetween the leader and the group. They suggested that the effective leader develops relationships with each or select members in the group to tap in to those individuals. With the successful establishment of such relationships comes commitment, meritocracy, better attitude of the employees towards the job, and increased level of trust of the leader towards their teams, which further leads to coaching, more attention and more personal support from the leader. The relationship building process and the contents and stages of development of these relationships have also been defined by Graen & Uhl-Bien (1995) within the hypothesis of the LMX theory (please see table 1.0 below),

Hypothesis: Leader-Member Exchange Theory of Leadership

where in three intangible stages of familiarity, namely, Stranger, Acquaintance and Partner, the interactions of the leader develop from interrogative overtures to strategic partnerships and where the leader and the group through the process of development of the relationship influence one another in reciprocity, and where the process may begin with the leaders self interest as the goal in mind, but through process, turns in to the groups enlightened interest.

The Transformational Leadership model, as the name suggests has a premise of leadership through the transformation of the subjects, and in the process, the transformation of the leader also (Northouse, 2007). It suggests engagement with the followers to create a connection that raises their motivation and morality. The theory first christened so by Downtown (1973), was further developed by Burns (1978) where he explained transformation by means of comparing it to transactional leadership where leadership occurs in the expectation of a reward, or outcome, whereas, the Transformational Theory framework capitalises on peoples intrinsic motivation and their desire to do what is perceived correct and conscientious. The transformational school saw further explanative work when House (1976) elaborated transformation through charisma, where charisma is taken as the idealized influence to translate the leaders persona in to a role model figure, at times to the extent that the role model figure takes the extreme form of being a cult. Later, Bass (1985) provided an even more detailed version of the transformational leadership model, by concentrating on the followers disposition. Where he seems to have attempted to explain that the transformed follower can separate and act on the importance of the principle of subordination of individual interests to the larger cause, and where because of the transformation, the followers could deliver even more than what was expected of them. More recently within the transformational school, Bass (1998) suggested the idea of pseudo-transformational leadership which deals with the negative side of transformation exercised by the likes of Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and others, suggesting that although these individuals did transform a large number of people, however, give the extremely negative and destructive connotations of their ideologies, such transformation was only a farce, hence the word pseudo.

Strengths & Criticisms

The Traits approach has over a 100 years of research to back it up, which becomes its first and foremost strength. Whereas all other schools of thought in leadership are relatively more recent and do not have as much depth of data points and varied range of research populations, the Traits approach is backed by the test of time. It also is in agreement with the common belief that leaders are born, and in the absence of any credible data that could disprove the belief, it is still accepted as relatively true even when it is a somewhat clichd expression. History stands witness to many personalities who did not go to prestigious universities, Indira Gandhi, Bill Gates, or,Hu Jintao, Abraham Lincoln, and many others whocame from humble backgrounds, but still turned out to be great leaders. The fact that Traits are identifiable and visible strengths, also proves to be a favourable argument to the Traits approach. It is clearly identifiable if a person has self-confidence, is high on integrity, is sociable etc., if compared to the LMX theory of networks and quality of interactions. On the other hand, as criticisms, the Traits approach fails to exhaustively list out the traits. Many researchers have drawn out lists of the traits that make an effective leader and whereas there are some common characteristics in every list, however, there are always some additions and exclusions in comparison to others. This makes the idea of leadership traits to appear as ever evolving. An even more serious and credible criticism of the traits approach is that it disregards circumstance and situations. As mentioned earlier, it attempts to divorce leadership from circumstances, and the popular belief that most success comes because people are present at the right place at the right time which in turn makes it an isolatist and exclusionist theory based on the un-tested assumption that all leaders will be effective in all situations. This suggestion of pervasiveness and omnipresence of effective leadership by the mere presence of certain personality traits makes it weigh much less in comparison to other schools that base their conclusions on circumstantial evidence. For example, a business leader who has an engineering background is more likely to effectively lead technology based organisations, the same person if tries to lead a law firm is likely to do comparatively worse if not completely fail. If the same example is kept in consideration for the purpose of perspective, another strong criticism of the Traits approach is that it does not evaluate the effect of the so called effective leadership on the subjects, i.e., the followers. If this leader with an engineering background was to start leading a law firm, in his zeal to acquire knowledge and brig himself up the curve he may exert undue pressure on his team to bring him abreast with operational situations that another leader who is

well versed with the operation of a law firm will just know as a matter of obvious fact. Hence, this leader will do very good for himself and will learn the new game to be an effective leader, however, in the process of doing so, his team will be affected adversely. The Traits approach does not consider such shortcomings of the person with the required characteristics to be a leader.

The Leader Member Exchange (LMX) theory by the propagation of distinction between high performing and not so high performing members in the group clearly establishes potential areas for the person in the leadership position to work on, which is seen as a strength. Since the LMX framework recognises that effective leadership is contingent on the quality of leader member exchanges, therefore it brings in the desired level of pragmatism to the hypothesis that does not claim an omnipresent effect regardless of the circumstances (unlike the Traits approach), which is seen as another definite strength of this framework. It is interesting to see that whereas, the Traits model suggests sociability as one of the characteristics of an effective leader, the LMX framework, highlights the importance of communication. It clearly suggests that in the absence of communication, the exchange networks breakdown, and hence leadership as a process of facilitating people to perform better ceases. This can be explained with an example of organisations that have a blind top-down approach to operating processes and procedures. In such organisations, since there is lack of high quality exchanges, either directly or through channels, therefore, the leadership operates in a cocoon where they keep designing processes and procedures that do not consider the requirements and realities of the people who have to enact them. This can potentially cause a loss of operational efficiency, and hence losses, along with definite loss of employee morale and job satisfaction. Apart from the strengths of the LMX framework summarised above, the hypothesis also alerts practitioners to be conscious of subjective influences when creating LMX networks, these could be based on prior familiarity with individuals, conforming personality type, religion, race, ethnicity, gender and so on, and hence takes in to account the potential human weaknesses (in the leader) that are very possible to jeopardise the idea. As in most cases, the criticisms of the LMX framework also stem as corollaries to its strength, where the most credible criticism is seen as the leaders inability to be objective when developing the Leader Member exchange networks. Such lack of objectivity leads to the second criticism of the LMX theory, where even if the leader is consciously objective, some team members may feel left out and hence discriminated towards. This occurrence of perceived unfair behaviour seems to be the beyond the zone of influence of the practitioner after a certain extent.

The framework therefore seems to need further research to be able to suggest strategies and means to help curtail the chances of such error and reducing such perception biases.

The Transformational Leadership Approach is also widely researched from different perspectives which includes qualitative investigations with business leaders in prominent organisations, with 34% of all the articles published in a respected journal like Leadership Quarterly in the last 10 years being on topics related to Transformational Leadership (Lowe & Gardner, 2001). The Transformational Approach possesses a widely intuitive appeal when it propagates the leader to assume the role of a model who showcases not just a way of life but provides motivational and moral direction to the followers. Another strength of the transformational model is that it treats leadership as a continuous process of evolution between the leader and the follower, and hence creates an impression and environment of empowerment and responsibility amongst the followers. From this stems what appears to be the most credible strength of the transformational model, which is that it augments and brings together other models in leadership like for example, the transformational leader to be able to lead people is supposed to have characteristics and skills like oratory, charisma, intelligence et.al., but these are combined with dialogue and participation of the leader with the followers. Having said that, the criticisms of the Transformational Model also stem from its strengths like in the case of the other models. Firstly, since the transformational model makes mention of concepts such as motivation, morality, hard work, etc., all these concepts sound and are accepted to be desired and noble, however, they bring extreme subjectivity to the model. Especially with the talk of morality, because different people in different circumstances within different societies have varying moral standards. Similarly, Because the leader is seen to be a role model in this school of thought, therefore, some critics may view the model as elitist, and leading to cult like situation. Hence there seems to be a need for further research to investigate the psychological effects of transformational leadership on the followers.

In conclusion, it can be inferred that leadership remains an issue of constant and on going investigation among the academia and intelligentsia. Whereas a lot of research has been conducted in the areas of developing leadership skills and traits and of practicing leadership by the use of methods like LMX, from the above criticisms, it appears that the present body of knowledge regardless ofthe framework, is somewhat deficient, so far as investigating the effects of leadership are concerned.

List of works cited

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