Cronin, 30, notes that while Franklin Roosevelt`s biographers emphasize his compassion for the average American, they also agree that he was conceited, devious, manipulative and had a passion for secrecy. These are often the standard weaknesses of large executives. Significant progress is made by those with dynamism, ambition and a certain level of impudent and irrational self-confidence. At the same time, potential leaders must earn their trust by demonstrating integrity while possessing the calculation, determination and pragmatism of a jungle fighter. While the public wants a leader who is somewhat religious, the public is wary of the one who is too much. Political leaders often go out of their way to be photographed when they go to church or in the presence of well-known religious leaders. The second strand of leadership research, which was prevalent in the fifties and sixties, focused on leadership behaviour. When asked what a manager should do, she generally assumed that he or she would be involved, take care of people, and structure tasks. Again, the behaviours studied were very socially acceptable.
The experience of World War II made it hard to believe that the rulers never listened to any of their people, were indifferent to the needs of others, and could not organize themselves to get out of a hayloft. Again, hundreds of studies have found very little. The only consistent outcome was a strong correlation between employee-centered behaviour (participation and consideration) and satisfaction. However, satisfaction has not been shown to increase performance. They explicitly suggest that something more than normal management or leadership, usually skills or abilities such as vision and building a corporate culture, is needed for effective performance. Some scholars have argued that this preoccupation with charismatic leadership reflects deep-rooted values and desires rather than reality. For example, Meindl recently speculated that this was part of the romance of leadership. A number of studies reported by Meindl, Ehrlich and Dukerich (1) have found that interest in leadership becomes stronger as organizational performance reaches extremes, whether good or bad. A number of scholars of civilization, including Arnold J.
Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber and Carroll Quigley, identified and analyzed “Western civilization” as one of the civilizations that have existed historically and still exist today. Toynbee has entered a rather expansive mode, including as candidates countries or cultures that have been so heavily influenced by the West that they have adopted these borrowings into their personal identity. Pushed to its limits, in practice, this would include almost everyone in the West in one way or another. In particular, Toynbee refers to the intelligentsia that formed among the educated elite of countries affected by European expansion in past centuries. Although these cultural and political leaders have often been demonstratively nationalistic, they have interacted within the West to such an extent that they have changed themselves and the West. [40] In a world where most companies operate globally, it is no longer enough to understand and rely on traditional Western leadership models. Progressive organizations need to consider cultural differences and leadership approaches. It is crucial that their managers learn to understand and adapt to this and work hard to acquire the skills needed to succeed. In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by the Turkish-Persian Muslims of medieval Asia, resulting in the loss of most of Asia Minor.
The situation was a serious threat to the future of the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire. The emperor sent a request to the pope in Rome to send military aid to bring the lost territories back under Christian rule. The result was a series of military campaigns from Western Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean, known as the Crusades. Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the Crusaders (who were members of the nobility of France, the German territories, the Netherlands, England, Italy and Hungary) had no loyalty to the Byzantine emperor and established their own states in the conquered territories, including the heart of the Byzantine Empire. Since the early 1900s, there have been more than 5,000 studies on leadership. If some of our simple ideas about leadership were true, they would come out like a sore thumb in the research results. As the review presented here shows, this is not the case. The likelihood that all these studies missed something, let alone something very simple and obvious, is extremely low. If leadership could be easily understood and recognized, the selection of leaders would be easy and selection mistakes would rarely be made.
There would be few failures. It is this failure of the rich and famous to explain how they made a fortune that moves our tongues. We become suspicious and even resentful when the recipes of our best performers do not advance us one iota. For this reason, over the years, the company has had mixed feelings towards top performers who don`t convincingly report how successful they have been. Some reputations, possessions or lives have been lost primarily because serial artists in the community eclipse us, mere mortals, with superior commercial or commercial results, artistic products or productions, livestock or products from their fields. In practice, our ambivalence moves us from admiration to envy, jealousy, expulsion of the offending artist from the underperforming community, and lackluster leadership. For the same reason, high-performing community members were also blamed for the natural disasters that hit the communities in which they lived. As the expression suggests, effective individuals have discovered, much to their regret, that the “hero to zero” journey depends on the speed of rumors spread by rivals who have failed in the game of life and work. Thus, this section of the Interim Report on African Leadership summarizes the findings of leadership research to date. It presents the most important clusters of leadership research outcomes and identifies important issues and controversies that remain unresolved in each area.
While there is a general lack of general theories incorporating ideas from different approaches, our knowledge of leadership has evolved over the past century. Most research since World War I has divided into four large groups, followed more or less sequentially, each of which has not provided consistent information, and researchers have moved on to a new direction, hoping it might be more fruitful. In a recent book examining six major executive education programs in the United States, Conger (11) argues that leadership training programs have four goals: to develop and refine certain teachable skills; improve managers` conceptual skills; tap into the person`s personal needs and self-esteem; and help managers see and overcome their interpersonal blockages. Research on the model has generally supported this, although some limiting conditions have been found. The fact that some decision rules were better supported than others suggests that the model is the best situational theory because it focuses on specific aspects of behaviour rather than general behaviours, because it contains significant intermediate variables, and because it identifies important moderating variables. However, it deals with only a small part of leadership. In fact, in some ways, it`s less a leadership theory than a problem-solving theory. It also presupposes that managers have the necessary skills to use any decision-making process. While Vroom & Jago have proposed a revised version of the model, many find the added complexity difficult to understand and use, especially since the original model was considered in some circles to be unnecessarily complex for everyday use.
Fiedler`s LPC model (1) deals with the effect of three situational factors, namely leader-member relationships, task structure and management power, on the relationship between a leadership characteristic called LPC and leader effectiveness. LPC measures the extent to which executives describe favourably or unfavourably the person with whom they could work the least, their least preferred employee (LPC). The model states that LPC executives perform best in some situations and low CAP executives perform best in others. Fiedler treats CAP as an indicator of whether a manager is primarily concerned with belonging (high CAP) or task completion (low CAP). Therefore, it is a trait contingency model that initially focuses on selecting managers based on the situation, followed by some situational engineering and training of managers to correct deviations. Paradox #2: The audience aspires to the “ordinary person” and also to the unusual, charismatic, heroic and visionary performance. The public wants its leaders to be like them, but better than them, i.e. King and commoner. The public aspires to both and demands both. The human heart secretly and endlessly reinvents royalty and seeks the heroic. At the same time, the audience is told that the hero is the one from whom individual society must protect itself. “Pity the nation that needs heroes,” goes an old saying.
It is believed that strong leaders can aspire, diminish and perhaps even destroy the sources of self-government.