Presenters | Paper Abstracts & Presentations |Conference Program| Past Years' Conference
Distributed Leadership: Practices, Structures, and Cultures
Deborah Ancona, MIT Sloan School of Management
Over the past two decades many organizations have become flatter, more geographically dispersed, more networked, and more structurally flexible than the bureaucracies of the past. Within many of these organizations, there has also been a parallel shift in leadership practices, away from the traditional hierarchical model of one leader at each level or unit within an organization, to networks of leaders operating at all levels who cross boundaries to spur innovation and solve complex problems. Researchers and practitioners have noted the shift from concentrated to more distributed leadership patterns, but there is little conceptual clarity about, or rigorous investigation of, this shift. I will be reporting on the start of a 5-year research program exploring the practices, structures, and cultures of distributed leadership.
Restoring Trust: Challenges and Possibilities
Kurt Dirks, Washington University in St. Louis
Few things are be more detrimental to leaders than having their trustworthiness called into question. Unfortunately, this occurrence is not uncommon. How might trust perceptions be repaired, once they have been damaged? I will describe a framework that outlines two different logics for the repair of trust, including why they might work and the challenges that they face. I will report the results from an initial empirical investigation of these ideas.
Implicit voice theories: A new perspective on leadership and employee self-censorship
Jim Detert, Cornell University
In burgeoning research on speaking up to authorities at work, leadership has been frequently portrayed as an important cause of subordinates' voice or silence. This “leader-centric” model links leader behaviors to employee behaviors through mediating cognitions (e.g., beliefs that it is unsafe or futile to speak up). In this research, we present a “follower-centric” approach to the study of leadership and voice that we developed from a series of studies investigating how people working in organizational hierarchies wrestle with the challenge of upward voice. Our results suggest that individuals bring to the workplace specific, measurable beliefs about speaking up to authorities – which we call “implicit voice theories” – and that these implicit theories lead to employee silence independent of current leader behaviors and influences. Thus, a follower-centric approach suggests that rather than being conceptualized primarily as a cause of subordinate beliefs about speaking up, leadership should also be theorized and studied as a moderator of the impact on voice of subordinates' long-standing implicit theories about the appropriateness and risks of speaking up to authorities. We present initial evidence for this moderating effect, showing, for example, how implicit voice theories are less related to silence propensity for subordinates whose bosses exhibit high levels of intellectual stimulation. Overall, this research provides support for a novel theoretical explanation for workplace silence based on implicit theories of voice and significantly broadens understanding of the relationship between leadership and subordinates' willingness to ‘speak truth to power.' We discuss both the research implications of this expanded view, as well as the practical implications for managers. In particular, we note (and illustrate with data) how a follower-centric approach indicates the need for leaders who want to stimulate organizational learning to trade positive but passive leadership styles (e.g., “consideration,” “openness”) for active, input-eliciting styles that overcome inherent tendencies toward silence.
Outsourcing Inspiration: The Motivational Effects of Inspirational Appeals from Leaders vs. Beneficiaries
Adam Grant, University of North Carolina
Scholars have defined inspiring employees as a central task for leaders. We challenge this view by proposing that inspirational appeals are more effective when delivered not by leaders, but rather when they are outsourced to firsthand beneficiaries of employees' work. Two field experiments with fundraisers support our hypotheses that inspirational appeals from beneficiaries increase performance by strengthening employees' sense of purpose, motivating them to work hard and smart. We discuss implications for theory and practice on leadership, influence, and motivation.
Empirical Test of the Six-Domains Leadership Theory
E. Allan Lind, Catherine T. Shea, and Sim B. Sitkin, Duke University
We present a new theory of leadership and an empirical test of the theory. We draw heavily on the social psychology literature, especially the social identity theory of leadership (Hogg, 2001; van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003) which views leadership as a group identity process facilitated by the leader over time. Leadership functions in six domains: personal, relational, contextual, inspirational, supportive, and responsible; and each domain has an effect on the leader's effectiveness: credibility, trust, stronger sense of community, raised aspiration, initiative, and stewardship, respectively. Within each domain, three theoretical constructs are discussed as independent contributors to overall leadership and the domain effect. In an empirical test of the theory, each domain of leadership produced an independent effect on overall leadership in direct report and peer samples. Viewing leadership in a more psychologically-grounded manner provides a more compelling picture of the complex process and interdependencies of leadership behaviors.
Leadership Measurement and Performance: What Do We Know and Why Don't We Know More?
Robert Lord, University of Akron
This paper maintains that the relation between leadership and performance has been understudied and has been addressed with overly restrictive conceptual and measurement approaches. Specifically, it maintains that there has been an overemphasis on specific leaders who are thought to directly cause performance. These “common sense” ideas need to be complemented with research on specific events (a within-person level), as well as group and organizational levels. In addition, research should examine indirect effects of leadership that occur through others as well as leadership effects that occur through implicit rather than explicit processes. Finally, it is argued that measurement techniques that emphasize episodic rather than semantic memory, implicit rather than explicit memory, and embodied-embedded as well as symbolic views of knowledge should be given more emphasis.
How Power Both Makes and Breaks Leaders:The Importance of Goals
Joe C. Magee, New York University
In this talk, I will use a social-cognitive lens to look at the role of power in leaders' thinking and behavior. My colleagues and I argue that anticipating the precise changes that power causes in leaders depends on identifying the leaders' goals because power makes their goals more central in how they interpret and approach the world. As a result, power has two overarching effects: one increases leaders' effectiveness, and the other can break them. First, a number of the psychological properties of power—action orientation, optimism, and abstract thinking—appear to be due to greater coherence between goals and behavior for power-holders and are also related to effective leadership. Second, possessing power causes individuals to anchor too heavily on their own egocentric desires and inhibits perspective-taking. The more power that leaders have, the more difficult it is for them to grasp what the world looks like to the people under them. I will also discuss some recent studies showing that when power is combined with perspective-taking, it tends to yield the types of just and productive decisions that organizations hope for in their leaders.
A Virtue-Based Approach to Ethical Leadership
Ronald E. Riggio, Claremont McKenna College
Quite often research on ethics in business leadership takes an atheoretical, commonsense approach that focuses on ethical or unethical leader behaviors. We instead draw upon Aristotle's virtue-based ethics as a theoretical model to better understand ethical leadership. Aristotle's cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice were used to create a measure of ethical leadership, the Ethical Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ). The ELQ is used to obtain follower and/or 360-degree assessments of a target leader's possession of the cardinal virtues believed to underlie ethical leadership. Research on scale construction, validation, and preliminary testing of the model will be presented, as well as the relationship of the model to theories of transformational and authentic leadership. Practical implications will be discussed.
The Invisible Work of Managing Visibility for Social Change: Insights From the Leadership of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Laura Morgan Roberts Harvard University(Presenter)
Darryl D. Roberts Emory University
Regina M. O'Neill, Suffolk University
Stacy D. Blake-Beard Simmons College
In this article, we introduce the concept of tempered visibility as a lens through which to view Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights leadership. First, we review the academic literature on visibility and its implications for leadership. Second, we outline key moral and sociopolitical factors that enabled King to become visible. Third, we provide examples of how King intentionally increased and decreased his exposure while leading key events in the Civil Rights Movement. From King's example, the process by which leaders gain visibility and the positive and negative outcomes of visibility for leaders and their change efforts is learned. This analysis extends the understanding of the strategic management of visibility as a tool that is motivated by personal goals, social pressures, and moral concerns and that is critical for managing impressions and leading social change.
Stereotyping and the "Dumb Jock" Effect: The Paradox of Leadership and Race in College Football
Andrew M. Carton, Duke University
Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, Duke University(Presenter)
An archival study on quarterbacks--one of the most important leadership positions in sports--was employed to investigate how perceivers maintain the cultural stereotype of the "dumb jock" when Black college quarterbacks are successful. Consistent with our predictions, results showed that perceivers selectively activated stereotypes that were congruent with performance outcomes. When successful, Black quarterbacks were perceived to have more athleticism than White quarterbacks. When unsuccessful, Black quarterbacks were perceived to be less intelligent than White quarterbacks. Implications for leadership, sports organizations, and motivated stereotype activation are discussed.
Leading Social Change: A Multi-Level Meaning-Making Perspective
Scott Sonenshein, Rice University
Both micro oriented perspectives such as issue selling and macro oriented perspectives such as institutional theory offer insights for explaining social change undertaken by business organizations. While very different in their level of theorizing and analyses, these perspectives share a common foundation in meaning-making. Drawing from both micro- and macro-oriented theories, I develop a multi-level model to explain how individuals inside business organizations lead social change initiatives in their organizations. I describe the influence of both external and organizational contexts, and explain how leaders of social change initiatives act agentically to use various levels of meanings from these contexts to persuade others to adopt social issues. I describe a set of meaning-making tools to explain how leaders of social change respond to different degrees of alignment in meanings among self, organization, and environment to lead social change initiatives.
Moral Openness and Leadership: Reducing Normative Equivocality through Discourse
Jason Stansbury, Calvin College
History and the business press remember Howard Lutnick for paying health insurance and profit sharing to the families of 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed in the World Trade Center , and M. Douglas Ivester for failing to appreciate the problem of contaminated Coca-Cola in Belgium . These examples illustrate a special problem of leadership: reducing the normative equivocality of a novel moral problem. While some leaders reduce that equivocality in Gordian fashion with a swift decision, the risk of substantially misunderstanding the problem . . . cutting the tree rather than the knot . . . is high. Another option that better facilitates moral imagination is to create moral openness, so that other people with alternative understandings of the normative issues and pragmatic constraints at stake can contribute to a practical moral discourse that informs the decision. Moral openness not only draws on the philosophical foundations of discourse ethics to describe the norms of discussion that facilitate reaching valid moral conclusions, it also highlights the role of a leader in eliciting constructive participation and taking the decision. It therefore contributes to models of transformational and authentic leadership by providing a normatively-grounded framework for perspective-taking and follower engagement, and to the model of ethical leadership by providing for the ongoing definition of normatively appropriate conduct.