Research

COLE Convenes Leadership Research Conference

 

A principal activity of Duke University's Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics (COLE) is encouraging and supporting the exploration of leadership issues and ethical behavior, as well as bridging the gap between theory and practice, by engaging leading scholars in rigorous research and drawing on the rich experience of the business community.

Consistent with this research-based approach to leadership, COLE hosted its inaugural New Directions in Leadership Research Conference on May 31-June 1, 2008. The conference convened more than 40 scholars from six countries and included research presentations on leadership topics including: inspirational leadership, diversity, trust, leader responsibility, global leadership, and sources of leader effectiveness and ineffectiveness.

Each session generated a number of interesting insights with theoretical and practical implications; some of the highlights included the following findings.

• While many have talked about the importance of inspirational leadership, the specific mechanisms by which leaders generate improved performance in followers have not been clearly understood. In a series of studies, researchers demonstrated that leaders can affect performance by inspiring followers to raise their goal aspirations.
• Rather than being bound to a single leadership style, a study showed that leaders adapt their approach to building trust with followers based on the control system used by the organization.
• What can leaders do to enhance followers' felt responsibility for ethical behavior in organizations? To promote greater responsibility towards the institution over self-interest, one study demonstrated the importance of leaders providing clear and consistent role expectations for followers.
• Leader behaviors or traits typically considered positive (e.g., threat-reducing behaviors, conscientiousness) appear to have a curvilinear relationships with desired outcomes (e.g., performance), or as one scholar put it “too much of a good thing is not a good thing”.
• The timing of leader developmental experiences may be very important! For example, developing the flexibility for effective global leadership appears to be heavily influenced by early exposure to other cultures.
• Leader expressed emotion may have a greater effect on followers than previously thought – to explore these complex relationships, more elaborate models are emerging.

Group discussion also identified other emerging directions for leadership research, including:

• Updating theories and research methods to more effectively incorporate the role of time;
• Continuing to increase research on followers (e.g., elaborating the specific mechanisms by which leader behaviors and displayed emotions affect followers' intentions and behaviors);
• Connecting leadership research to fundamental cognitive and behavioral development processes (e.g., dual information processing systems, approach-avoidance motivational models, cognitive neuroscience and brain-mapping); and
• Increasing attention to the contextual effects of organizational “boundaries” (e.g., inter-group boundaries within organizations, inter-organizational boundaries, and organizational-societal boundaries across cultures).

For more information on any of these topics or to learn more about COLE's research conference and other research-related activities, please contact the COLE Research Director, James Emery, at james.emery@duke.edu .