markelltransition

A recent survey of theory and research on leadership lists 5,000 references in nearly 900 pages. For all of that, editor Bernard M. Bass concludes, “It would be instructive to gather behavioral data on an identified current group of charismatic business, military, church, and government leaders nominated by their subordinates because of the strong emotional bonding that has been established between the leaders and their subordinates and because the subordinates credit the leader for their transformed need structure and goal attainments.”10 We report on just such a group.
In 1979 we began to study the behavior of six chief executive officers (CEOs) of major American corporations—General Electric Company, Citicorp, AMAX Inc., Monsanto Company, International Business Machines Corporation, and New York Times Company—to learn how such a leader accomplished his mission. How did he get done what he got done? How did he move a large established bureaucratic organization to sustain its adaptive mode?
We are a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist who have been teachers, consultants, and students of organizations and leadership problems .—Levinson for thirty years, Rosenthal for thirteen; we are also involved in executive roles. We undertook this study for a number of reasons. Primary among them was our wish to keep learning about a field that is central to our work as professional consultants, teachers in schools of management and executive seminars, and writers about various executive and managerial problems. Although leaders operate in a multitude of ways, our hope was that we might elaborate certain common elements in practice, orientation, perception, and attitude that would help us understand more about organizational, particularly business, leadership. From extensive clinical and consulting experience we have long recognized the difficulties of changing organizations for even the most capable of executives. Therefore we also hoped to uncover those inhibiting factors that keep a leader from achieving what he has set out to achieve and how those limiting factors operate. Further, we were particularly interested in examining the degree of pressure that is created for people in these roles and how they handle that strain.