markelltransition

If we are to try to understand leadership style, we have several options. One is to classify it, as do most research studies on leadership. We can do that by using labels: autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire.2 Or characterizations: the craftsman, the jungle fighter, the company man, the games man.3 Or by placing the leadership style on axes: person- oriented versus production-oriented.4 Or by differentiating the achievement-oriented from the power-oriented or the affiliation-oriented. 5 Or we can characterize their temperaments: intuitive versus analytical. Another way is to try to measure leadership style after defining the traits, qualities, skills, or behaviors that characterize it. We might speak of Theory X and Theory y,8 System 47 or Model II. Finally, we can assess outcome: what did the leader achieve—in dollars, growth of organization, profitability, return on investment, innovation—the end rather than the means.
Characterizations of this kind are descriptive generalizations about modal behavior. The rubrics are drawn from group averages. We may recognize the broad outlines of specific people, or even their reflections or shadows, but never the people themselves. The generalization, by definition, is never detailed enough to fully describe how an individual actually behaved over time. In effect, it is a gross slice of a group. It cannot tell us much about the how or the why of leadership, nor about the application of a given style, by a given person, to a given situation. Only now and then, through an occasional paragraph, do we get a glimpse of a person acting, a view of the how, of the means rather than the end.

Contemporary management literature argues that a fundamental function of a leader is to create meaning for his followers that will facilitate their commitment and identification. As sociologists Trudy Heller and Jon Van Til put it, “Certain individuals emerge as leaders because of their role in framing experience in a way that provides a viable basis for action, e. g., by mobilizing meaning, articulating and defining what has previously remained implicit or unsaid, by inventing images and meanings that provide a focus for new attention, and by consolidating, confronting or changing prevailing wisdom.”9
Such works offer us anecdotal data, abstractions from those data, and theory built on abstractions. It is our contention that if we are to learn about leadership from leaders, we must examine a specific person in a specific context. Therefore, our crucial concern is with what the leader actually does, day by day, to build followers and knit them into an organization that can sustain them. The empirical research literature on leadership does not touch significant leaders. While there is much data on the behavior of managers, we have few concrete behavioral specifics about those leaders in top management responsible for building organizations. This is a very serious deficiency. For we have learned that when people are promoted on the basis of having achieved certain objectives, what they bring to their new roles is the continuity of their behavior rather than any particular past attainments. And the behavior that enabled them to achieve results in their earlier roles may or may not enable them to continue to achieve results in their new roles.
For all these reasons we felt it important to document actual business leadership behavior. This book is about the how of leadership. It speaks to how the chief executive of an established organization interacts with others, how he projects what kind of an image, how he uses others, and what he does through people to create a different social system with a structure, values, and a behavioral style that give rise to a modified organizational personality. To move toward that end, leaders evolve staffing patterns and modes of developing succession. They breathe new life into their organizations and give them new vision. We are therefore concerned with how they communicate their own personal views of what the organization should be and how they inculcate these personal views into those who follow and who become major components of their organizations. We are interested in how they communicate “who we are” as an organization and “what we are” as a cohesive, functional organizational system. We are interested in the interplay between the person as leader and the interactive organization that follows.