SO YOU WANT
TO BE THE BOSS?
Many people aspire to be the boss; that is, the person
who runs everything. I suspect, but do
not know, that power is the greatest aphrodisiac of all. So why does it seem that the Peter Principle
is correct; that is,
“Each person rises to his or her level of incompetence.”
There is an excellent article concerning leadership
that this short discussion summarizes, with some observations of my own.
The article is, "What We Know About Leadership,
Effectiveness and Personality," by Robert Hogan, Gordon J. Curphy, and Joyce Hogon, American
Psychologist, June 1994, volume 49, number 6, pages 493 - 504. The American Psychologist is among the
leading psychological journals in the world.
You may consider the article a little old, but this is
not high tech. It is something we have
been doing throughout the history of man.
Choosing a leader (the boss) is expensive and is
fraught with risk. And, according to
this article, more than half the time the person selected fails. Leadership is
not an unknown entity in psychology.
Unfortunately, what is known is mostly ignored. In particular:
"Although psychologists know a great deal about
leadership, persons who make decisions about real leaders seem largely to
ignore their accumulated wisdom."
Hopefully, some of this accumulated wisdom can be
used.
The first real question to be answered is, "What
is leadership?" Without an answer,
"Who should lead?," is a very difficult
question indeed. According to the
authors,
"Leadership is persuasion, not domination;
persons who can require others to do their bidding because of their power are
not leaders. Leadership only occurs when others willingly adopt, for a period
of time, the goals of a group as their own."
Does leadership even matter? You better believe it does! Quoting again:
"In 1910, the Norwegians and the English engaged
in a dramatic and highly publicized race to the South Pole. It was an epic
contest, and the contrast between the performance of the Norwegian team led by
Ronald Amundsen and the English team led by Robert
Falcon Scott provided a real-life study in leadership and team performance.
Scott's incompetence cost him the race, his life, and the lives of three team
members, although, as often happens when high-level leadership fails, the
details were covered up for years..."
In this case, there was a difference between not only
success and failure but also between life and death.
Ask anyone who has to report to someone else whether
leadership matters or not. To quote our authors
again,
"[The way to understand that] ... leadership matters is to ask the consumers of leadership
(i.e., a manager's direct reports). .... Conversely, reactions to inept
leadership include turnover, insubordination, industrial sabotage, and malingering.
[It was] ... noted that organizational climate studies from the mid-1950s to
the present routinely show that 60% to 75% of the employees in any
organization--no matter when or where the survey was completed and no matter
what occupational group was involved--report that the worst or most stressful
aspect of their job is their immediate supervisor. Good leaders may put
pressure on their people, but abusive and incompetent management create
billions of dollars of lost productivity each year...."
Even in organizations where life and death is not a
question it still turns out to be a question of life and death. At least some postal workers think so:
"Reactions to inept leadership can be extreme. In
the spring of 1993 articles in several major newspapers (e.g., the New York
Times, the
Give your life so that junk mail can be delivered on
time? Incredible, but
true.
Can psychology help in choosing leaders? Certainly:
"Psychologists have known for some time that
measures of cognitive ability and normal personality, structured interviews,
simulations, and assessment centers predict leadership success reasonably
well..."
How can leaders be evaluated?
"Because subordinates are in a unique position to
judge leadership effectiveness, what leadership characteristics do they feel
are most important? Research ... indicates that a leader's credibility or
trustworthiness may be the single most important factor in subordinates'
judgments of his or her effectiveness."
Is this surprising when the subordinate's very
livelihood depends on a superior? The
administrator who lies to or about a faculty member, who takes advantage of the
position to force joint authorship or joint grant application, or performs any
kind of academic fraud or blackmail, or condones these activities between
faculty members and/or students, simply cannot lead. He or she may drive, given sufficient power, but
leadership is out of the question.
Integrity is the theme.
What is bad management?
"[R]esearch reveals
managerial incompetence to be associated with untrustworthiness, over control,
exploitation, micromanagement, irritability, unwillingness to use discipline,
and an inability to make good staffing or business decisions (or both)."
A lack of integrity is the first item in the list,
Why do we choose so many flawed leaders? The answer to that seems to be quite
complicated.
"[T]he answer may be that search committees
choose candidates not on the basis of established principles of personnel
selection but on the basis of the principles that guide leadership
emergence--namely, those candidates who seem most leader like are most likely
to be anointed. The problem is that persons who seem leader like may not have
the skills required to build and guide an effective team. The result is a
leadership failure rate in the range of 50% to 60%."
I guess the results could be worse, but how?
Can we forecast leadership, other than with tea
leaves? The authors think so.
"[T]he best way to forecast leadership is to use
a combination of cognitive ability, personality, simulation, role play, and multirater assessment instruments and techniques. ....
"
Some more evidence that we can forecast leadership and
that it is important that we do so.
"Research [pertaining to flight crews] is
important because breakdowns in team performance are the primary cause of air
transport accidents ... [They] showed that flight crew performance--defined in
terms of the number and severity of the errors made by the crew--is
significantly correlated with the personality of the captain. Crews with
captains who were warm, friendly, self-confident, and able to stand up to
pressure (i.e., agreeableness and emotional stability) made the fewest errors.
Conversely, crews with captains who were arrogant, hostile, boastful,
egotistical, passive aggressive or dictatorial made the most errors. Despite
these results, [it was] pointed out that personality is not taken into account
in the process of airline pilot selection."
My confidence in the quality of Delta's flight crews
is based somewhat on knowing the quality of the company. In fact, Delta's employees think so well of
Delta that they purchased an air liner for their company. Enough said.
Given a choice, I fly Delta.
Can things get worse?
Of course.
Managers fail according to the studies reported in part, because,
"[They] are perceived as arrogant, vindictive,
untrustworthy, selfish, emotional, compulsive, over controlling, insensitive,
abrasive, aloof, too ambitious, or unable to delegate or make decisions
..."
What is associated with successful leadership?
"The big-five model [Surgency,
Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Intellectance] reflects the 'bright side' of
personality. Effectiveness requires both the presence of these positive
characteristics and the absence of what we call 'dark side'
characteristics--irritating tendencies that alienate subordinates and interfere
with a person's ability to form a team. Research shows that these dark side
characteristics are negatively related to ratings of team performance and that
subordinates are almost always aware of them.... Nonetheless, they are hard to
detect using interviews, assessment centers, or inventories of normal
personality because they coexist with high levels of self-esteem and good
social skills.... Because managers with dark side tendencies often do well in
procedures that evaluate the leadership potential of strangers, their
counterproductive tendencies will be apparent only after they have been on the
job for some time."
How do leaders build teams? With some difficulty.
"The key to a leader's effectiveness is his or
her ability to build a team. .... [Research]
identifies eight problems for leadership that affect team performance; Six problems are task related and two involve team
maintenance. On the task side, successful leaders communicate a clear mission
or sense of purpose, identify available resources and talent, develop the
talent, plan and organize, coordinate work activities, and acquire needed
resources. On the maintenance side, they minimize and resolve conflicts among
group members and they ensure that team members understand the team's goals, constraints,
resources, and problems."
Does a leader's personality has
a direct bearing on team performance?
Wouldn't it be astonishing if it didn't?
"[A] leader's personality has predictable effects
on team performance. For example, leaders with higher surgency
scores communicate more with their teams, which increases the possibility that
the team understands its goal and the performance standards required to achieve
it. Moreover, these leaders are better able to build alliances with people
outside of the team, which allows them to secure necessary equipment and
resources. Conscientiousness is related to being perceived as trustworthy, planful, and organized. Agreeableness is related to
communication, trust, and morale. Emotional stability is associated with
seeming steady under pressure, able to resolve conflicts, and to handle
negative feedback, all of which promote team effectiveness. ...."
Were do we go from here? We just don't know very much about managing
people whose basic business is creativity and problem solving.
"[T]here is one aspect of leadership about which
we know very little: how to manage creative talent. There is good reason to
believe that successful organizations will increasingly rely on innovation and
the development of new products and services--meaning, on the performance of
their investigative and artistic teams. We understand something about the
characteristics of individual creativity..., but we know little about how to
manage teams whose primary tasks are problem solving and the development of new
knowledge, methods, and products .... How to manage
creativity is one of the most important problems of the future, and it is a
problem to whose solution psychology can make an important contribution."
I believe the one most significant characteristic
required in academic leadership is integrity.
Without that, nothing else is going to matter. The crimes for which there is no forgiveness
in the academic world include falsification of data (academic fraud), academic
blackmail, intellectual theft, and abuse of power.
A person who has integrity, upon realizing he or she
cannot do the job, will step aside.
A person, who has integrity, will not take advantage
of the position.
A person who has integrity, will not abuse his or her
power.
A person who does not have integrity will never be
able to lead. Nor do I think a person
can acquire integrity late in life. At
least I do not know of any studies indicating that it is possible.
Most of the people in positions of power that I have
seen fail, have failed because of a lack of integrity.