Caleb Love's List: Leadership Articles

• This paper reviews two major ethical theories and the manner in which the values they espouse are associated with the directive, transactional, and transformational leadership styles. A model of ethical leadership is proposed which relates the dimensions of these styles to the level of the leader's moral development. Transformational leadership appears to be most closely connected to deontology, while transactional leadership would seem to be related more to teleological ethics, and directive leadership to ethical egoism, a category of teleology. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research.

• Warren Bennis: "Leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential."
• John C. Maxwell, who simply stated, "Leadership is influence -- nothing more, nothing less."
• Bennis' definition of leadership encompasses traits such as "vision, communication, trust and effective action."
  
• These traits could be further defined to include practicality, realism, creativity, innovation, technical competence, human compassion and understanding, integrity, faith, intelligence, etc. Therefore, leadership is multidimensional -- it requires several traits rolled into one individual.
• to quote Bennis again, "Managers are people who do the things right and leaders are people who do the right thing."
• But leaders challenge the status quo through innovation and energize people looking out to the future. Leaders see opportunities that can make an organization perform better rather than making an organization meet stated metrics. Most importantly, leaders can get a reticent organization to adopt a new direction or change how it does business to achieve better performance and even change the culture of an organization.
• All leaders at their level or organizational sphere need to understand the environment (internal and external) in order to exert influence and change the organizational behavior to a desired outcome. This is where it all comes together, where leadership success or failure occurs.
• The official definition is "the process and conduct of decision-making for groups."

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• Conversations lie at the heart of managerial work. Managers talk. It is through talk that they teach and inspire, motivate and provide feedback, plan and take decisions. Conversations lie at the heart of how companies develop new ideas, share knowledge and experience, and enhance individual and collective learning.
• What does it take to build a context in which exciting conversations can occur, so that people can learn something new about themselves or others, discover new insights, hear and make counter-intuitive arguments, and come to creative and novel solutions to problems? How can companies improve the quality of conversations in their organisations?

• The first element they demonstrate is essentially personal. It encompasses their personal beliefs, and standards of behaviour. At the core are the leaders' values and the way in which they live these values on a day to day basis. While the first element is value-based, the second element is on the opposite dimension, and is fact-based. It is here that the tension lies. This encompasses hard-nosed performance-setting, the creation and articulation of a long-term vision, and the establishment of a "point of view" about the business direction of the company.
• Managing the tension between values and facts is becoming ever more important for HR leaders. This is why. A decade ago it was possible for fact-based HR leadership to deliver results. A leader could set the HR community clear goals, get the practices and procedures in place; create and communicate the rules governing the practices and procedures, establish and maintain monitoring and reporting standards. This may not have created stellar performance but was certainly good enough.
• When people trust each other they don't need to be burdened by a mire of rules and procedures. They trust each other to do the right thing. When people respect each other they engage in conversations and relationships which are authentic and caring. I believe that at the heart of great companies are high-quality relationships, and at the heart of high-quality relationships are trust and respect.

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• Third, two aspects of the leadership phenomenon can be studied: contents (behaviours representing leadership roles and other attributes of leaders, followers and situational contexts) and processes (the social influence processes and underlying psychological dynamics). Thus, leadership implies exercising influence over others by utilizing various bases of social power, reinforcers, tacts, etc. in order to elicit compliance and commitment of followers to achieve organizational objectives. Leadership also involves role behaviours of leaders and properties of followers and situations (task and environment) that facilitate or hinder the manifestation of the leadership phenomenon.
• Fourth, in order to understand leadership phenomenon, one must analyze properties of the three basic elements -- the leader, the followers, and the situational context -- and the three major relational processes the leader-follower influence process, the leader-context, and the context-follower relational processes (see Conger & Kanungo, 1988d, for this type of analysis of charismatic leadership).
• Finally, the role behaviours of a leader are intended to directly influence followers' attitudes and behaviour within the group or organizational context. Thus the direct measures of effectiveness should be based on the degree to which a leader promotes (a) instrumental attitudes and behaviours for the achievement of group objectives, (b) followers' satisfaction with the task and context within which they operate, and (c) acceptance of the leader's influence which is often manifested through the followers' emotional bond with the leader, attributions of favorable qualities to the leader, and compliance behaviour. Instead, more often leadership effectiveness is measured in terms of aggregate group or organizational productivity, such as sales increase, profit margin, cost per unit, overall group performance, etc. Such group or organizational productivity measures can truly reflect a leader's effectiveness only when followers' instrumental attitudes and behaviours have a one-to-one relationship with the aggregate productivity measures. But this is hardly the case in most organizations, Very often, indices of group or organization level productivity depend not only on followers' instrumental attitudes, values and behaviour, but also on available environmental resources, technology, market condition, etc. over which a leader has little control. Therefore, aggregate productivity indices are not always appropriate measures of a leader's influence.

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• We developed a model in which transformational leadership mediated between emotional intelligence and workplace performance. This paper states the effect of emotional intelligence on transformational leadership style in the 21st century. It is proposed that the emotional intelligence concepts of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management contribute to enhance a leader's sense of self and others in order to accomplish organization's goals
• Leaders with high EI help organizations create and maintain competitive advantage through increased performance, enhanced innovation, effective use of time and resources, restored trust, teamwork, and motivation (Goleman, 2000)