Leadership: Emerging Concepts for Modern Times
Leaders in today’s organizations have been confronting many situations rarely encountered by organizational leaders of the past.49 Never before have managers faced such tremendous aftershocks of economic hard times as well as ethical meltdowns of companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia. Today’s leaders are often called upon to make unprecedented, massive personnel cuts in order to eliminate unnecessary levels of organizations and thereby lower labor expenses, to create work teams to enhance organizational decision making and workflow, to reengineer work so that organization members will be more efficient and effective, and to initiate programs designed to improve the overall quality of organizational functioning.
Naturally, leadership approaches are emerging to handle these new, nontraditional situations. Overall, these emerging approaches emphasize leaders concentrating on getting employees involved in the organization and giving them the freedom to use their abilities as they think best. This emerging leadership approaches depend, to a great degree, on a great amount of trust between managers and employees.50 Figure 13.8 contrasts the “soul” of emerging leadership approaches with the “mind” of the manager. The following sections discuss servant leadership, Level 5 leadership, and authentic leadership as examples of leadership approaches that focus on more modern problems and the situations facing managers today.
Figure 13.8 Characteristics of the emerging leader versus characteristics of the manager
San Antonio Spurs’ coach, Gregg Popovich, demonstrates some of his effective coaching skills by his patience and appropriate behavior on the basketball court sidelines.
EPA European Pressphoto Agency b.v./Alamy
Servant Leadership
Servant leadership is an approach to leading in which leaders view their primary role as helping followers in their quests to satisfy personal needs, aspirations, and interests.51 Servant leaders see pursuit of their own personal needs, aspirations, and interests as secondary to their followers’ pursuits of these factors.52 Overall, servant leaders place high value on service to others over their own self-interests53 and see their main responsibility as caring for the human resources of the organizations.54 Servant leaders maintain that human resources are the most valuable resources in organizations and constantly strive to transform their followers into wiser and more autonomous individuals. Logically, the result of wiser and more autonomous followers is more successful organizations.
Some industry observers would characterize Tony Hsieh as a servant leader because his focus on building organizations emphasizes helping followers to be more effective in fulfilling their personal needs, aspirations, and interests. Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, a leading online retailer, believes a healthy work environment is the most important attribute of a successful business. Early in his career, Hsieh built a successful company, but as it grew, he found it increasingly difficult to enjoy his work. The problem, he determined, was that employees were not engaged or truly interested in their work. As a result, Hsieh became progressively more dissatisfied with his own company. In his next company, Zappos.com, Hsieh focused on building a work environment that made employees feel so good about their careers and their daily contributions that they were delighted to come to work.55
Servant leaders possess several distinctive characteristics that, when taken together, better enable servant leaders to help followers pursue their needs, aspirations, and interests.56 As a few of the more notable of these characteristics, servant leaders are:57
. . . good listeners. Listening is a critical characteristic of servant leaders. The ability to listen carefully to follower comments, for example, helps the servant leader more accurately define the critical factors of follower needs, aspirations, and interests and thereby more effectively assist followers in their quests to achieve these factors. Without such an accurate definition, the servant leader’s task of helping followers achieve these factors would be virtually hopeless. Overall, listening provides servant leaders with the feedback they can use to better serve their followers.
. . . persuasive. Seldom do servant leaders use their authority to mandate that their followers take certain actions. Instead, servant leaders focus on convincing followers of activity that should be performed. Such persuasive ability enables servant leaders to ensure that followers act appropriately but without creating the resentment between leader and followers that typically develops when a leader mandates activity without accepting follower input.
. . . aware of their surroundings. Servant leaders are keenly aware of organizational surroundings. As such, servant leaders know what factors might create barriers in followers’ quests to pursue their needs, interests, and aspirations and take action to eliminate those barriers. Servant leaders help followers deal with such barriers by furnishing critical ideas and information regarding formidable organizational challenges.58
. . . empathetic. Empathy is the intellectual identification with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. Being empathetic helps servant leaders to better relate to followers when helping them solve problems. Servant leaders understand the situations in which followers find themselves and are thereby better equipped to assist them in their pursuit of interests, aspirations, and needs.
. . . stewards. A steward is defined as an individual who is entrusted with managing the affairs of another. Overall, servant leaders see themselves as being entrusted with managing the human assets of an organization and with the responsibility to help organization members maximize their potentials. Servant leaders are committed to developing the human assets that are instrumental in achieving organizational success.
Undeniably, servant leadership has gained increasing and significant popularity in recent decades. The notion of servant leadership, however, is not new. Servant leadership was first introduced by Christianity’s founder, Jesus Christ, and has been practiced by monarchs for more than 1,000 years.59 Some of the growing popularity of the servant leadership concept can probably be attributed to the intuitive attractiveness of the concept.60 For example, some management theorists believe that servant leadership’s focus on empowerment, sense of community, and sharing of authority suggests that servant leadership is likely a theory with significant potential for enhancing organizational success.61
Recent research has analyzed the relationship between servant leadership and personality characteristics.62 For example, one study assessed whether a relationship between one’s ability to be a servant leader and personality traits such as agreeableness could be identified.63 Agreeableness has been defined in this context as someone who is altruistic, generous, and eager to help others. The results of this study indicated that the managers who were rated by their employees as servant leaders were also highly agreeable people. In addition, servant leaders demonstrated admirable values such as empathy, integrity, and competence. Although some research has been done in this area, additional research aimed at more precisely defining the worth of servant leadership theory to practicing managers is advisable.
Level 5 Leadership
In 2001, Jim Collins wrote a book called Good to Great. The book quickly gained both attention and notoriety.64 The purpose of the book was to report the results of a five-year study conducted by Collins in which he studied 1,435 Fortune 500 companies. The study focused on answering two questions: Can an organization become great, and if so how? Greatness was defined as a company being able to average a cumulative stock return that was 6.9 times higher than that of the general stock market for 15 years.66 Of all the companies studied, only 11 were able to achieve greatness.
So, how did these companies achieve greatness? Collins concluded that the one thing all 11 companies had in common was Level 5 leaders. Level 5 leadership is an approach to leadership that blends personal humility with an intense will to build long-range organizational success.
Basically, personal humility means being modest or unassuming when it comes to citing personal accomplishments. Such leaders do not seek public praise and never boast. Instead, Level 5 leaders have a tendency to give credit to others when things go right and to blame themselves when things go wrong. These leaders are not egocentric and are even seen as shy at times. Such leaders do not try to gain the personal notoriety or celebrity that might accrue to them because of the positions they hold. In short, these leaders are ambitious about achieving company success, not individual success.
Professional will is a strong and unwavering commitment to do whatever is necessary to build long-term company success. Level 5 leaders set the standards for maintaining long-term company success. They know what is necessary to meet such standards and are resolute in doing what is necessary, no matter how difficult.67
According to Collins’s research, Level 5 leaders are catalysts for spurring organizations toward achieving greatness. As Figure 13.9 shows, there are four other levels of leadership pinpointed by the research. Although Level 5 is the most effective level in spurring an organization from good to great performance, leaders at the other four levels can produce high levels of success, but not high enough to achieve greatness as defined by the study.
Authentic Leadership
Authentic leadership is leadership that entails leaders who are deeply aware of their own and others’ moral perspectives and who are confident, hopeful, optimistic, resilient, and of high moral character.68 Authentic leaders are clear on their personal moral beliefs and values, make them known to others, and use them as the basis for action.69
Figure 13.9 Level 5 Hierarchy
Authentic leaders also have moral courage. Moral courage is the strength to take actions that are consistent with moral beliefs despite pressures, either inside or outside of the organization, to do otherwise. Much has been written about leaders bowing to pressures to make profits in the short run and taking action that is inconsistent with their moral beliefs. Moral courage enables leaders to stand up for their moral beliefs, disregard pressures to do otherwise, and take actions consistent with those beliefs.70
It is reasonable to question the validity of the authentic leadership concept simply because it is relatively new and, as a result, does not have a large body of research exploring its merits. However, do not overlook the potentially positive impact of authentic leadership on organizational success. For example, one report indicates that authentic leadership is a worthwhile vehicle for creating healthy work environments for practicing nurses as well as other groups throughout the health-care industry.71