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Literature Review on Leadership
(Annex D of "Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector" by the PIU (March 2001) - Performance and Innovation Unit - part of the Cabinet Office

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Introduction
D1
For practical people concerned about leadership, the theoretical literature can often be frustrating, obscure and contradictory. Over 25 years ago Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership6 exposed a problem that has, if anything, grown worse over the years: there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people attempting to define it. Over ten years ago Yukl's7 wide-ranging review of the literature on leadership effectiveness came to an equally perplexing conclusion: "Most of the theories are beset with conceptual weaknesses and lack strong empirical support. Several thousand empirical studies have been conducted but most of the results are contradictory and inconclusive."8 Against this background of confusion and uncertainty within the literature on leadership, the following review establishes the two most common and traditional approaches (trait and contingency theories) before engaging in the more contemporary debates that support the general perspectives taken in the main report.

Traditional models of leadership
D2 Trait approaches to leadership have been popular since Hippocrates's construction of personality types derived from "body humour", but contemporary forms are rooted in psychological assessments of personality and a consequent taxonomy of consistent behaviour: leaders behave in certain ways because of their traits. These traits, or "unseen dispositions", vary in number from the 18,000 established in one early review9 to the more contemporary five: Self-Confidence, Empathy, Ambition, Self-Control, and Curiosity, and form the bedrock for the myriad numbers of personality tests. Supporters of trait approaches place more emphasis on the selection rather than the development of leaders.10 The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator remains a significant leader in this field,11 though the various competency models have also become standard, for instance in the Management Charter Initiative.12 However, the utility of these approaches often depends upon the background of the reader: psychologists tend to be generally supportive but others are critical of the assumptions that personality is stable: they suggest that the tests construct rather than discover such traits, they are doubtful whether successful leaders can be predicted by the possession of such traits, and they involve a surreptitious subordination of the individual to the alleged needs of the organisation.13 Even supporters accept that the Fundamental Attribution Error - the assumption that behaviour, especially first impressions, reflects core characteristics or traits - leads us to pick or reject potential candidates instantly.

D3 The most significant trait of all remains charisma, and the search for charismatic leaders to resolve apparently irresolvable problems continues to be the goal of many recruiters.14 It should be noted, though, that two significant aspects of charisma remain unresolved. First, it is probably best perceived as a social relationship rather than an individual trait - since charisma appears to lie in the eye of the beholder not in the mind of the possessor. Second, the reliance on charismatic leadership tends to undermine the ability of followers to participate in - and thus achieve - the resolution of their collective problems.15 And unless individual leaders are indeed endowed with superhuman qualities they will have to recognise that leadership is essentially a collective process not an individual position.

D4 Contingency and Situational approaches are grounded in the philosophy that leaders should act as the situation demands. The situational variant suggests that leaders should develop a repertoire of skills and styles that can be deployed to suit the particular situation. Its origins derive from the original Ohio State and Michigan University studies which popularised the distinction between task-centred and relationship-centred leaders.16 These studies, in turn, led to the "people or production" Leadership Grid work of Blake and Mouton which suggested that it was possible to have high concern for both people and production.17 Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory18 added a third dimension to the calculation - the maturity of the followers. This was itself divided into the job and psychological aspects and the most appropriate style for the leader to adopt could be triangulated against the measures for the task and relationship. Thus, for example, a low skilled and uncommitted workforce would need to be "told" precisely what to do, whereas the task could be safely "delegated" to an experienced and committed group of followers. Unfortunately, the intuitive pragmatism of this approach remains unsupported by the empirical reviews.

D5 The role of the followers is also highlighted in Vroom and Yetton's Normative Decision Model19 which suggests that the two critical elements of a leader's decision, its quality and the degree of subordinate acceptance, are more defined by the situation and the followers than by the characteristics of the leader. Thus what a leader should do depends upon the time available, the quality of the information, the likelihood of follower resistance and so on, and these feed through into a decision process that varies from autocratic to democratic. It must be said, though, that there is little evidence that using this approach makes for better leaders, even if they do make better decisions.

D6 The contingent variant, traditionally associated with the work of Fiedler,20 is sceptical that the same leader can operate successfully in radically different situations. He therefore suggests that either the leadership changes when the context changes or the leader acts to change the context such that her or his style becomes appropriate. Fiedler's basic conclusion, premised on the combination of leader-member relations, the structure of the task and the power of the leader, is that where the situation is "highly unfavourable" - that is, a crisis - and where the situation is "highly favourable" - that is everything is going well - a task-oriented leader is preferable. When the situation is "moderate" then a people-oriented leader is better. Aside from relegating the utility of people-oriented leaders to a minimal role, there is increasing doubt as to the empirical rigour of this approach.

D7 The final contingency model of note is the Path-Goal model of Evans,21 revamped by House and Dessler.22 Grounded in expectancy theory, this suggests that people operate on the basis of a rational calculation of effort to performance to outcome, and that leaders should trace and support this same approach with their followers. In this model leaders can vary their style in space and time to maximise the chances of success in conjunction with the followers' level of satisfaction and perception of their own abilities, and in line with the three critical situational variables: the task, the authority system and the work group. But as with all of these models their supporting empirical evidence remains, at best, ambiguous. In particular three criticisms predominate: first, the selection of critical variables is open to dispute; second, the interpretation of these variables is contested; third, the attempt to evaluate or replicate the studies tends to produce marginal results.23 This does not mean that the context and culture are unimportant; on the contrary, the evidence suggests that they are crucial. However, the problem remains in establishing precisely what the context and culture are.

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Contemporary challenges

From self-isolating individual leaders to self-supporting leadership teams
D8
Heifetz24 combines a relatively novel theme - about forcing subordinates to reflect upon their influence in the achievement of goals - and a relatively old theme - about the difference between situations that require mechanistic responses - which he calls "technical" issues (often called "management" elsewhere to distinguish it from "leadership") - and those that require "adaptive" responses (often called "leadership" elsewhere). In so far as Heifetz also distinguishes between the exercise of "authority" and the exercise of "leadership" - sometimes labelled power derived from formal role and power derived from informal role - Heifetz also hinges his ideas on a distinction familiar to Weber and many others since. Hence, for Heifetz, the critical issue is whether people have the ability and motivation to intervene in situations that are not routine, in which the answer cannot be derived from previous experience, and where part of the role of the leader is to reflect the problem-solving back into the followers. In sum, the leader must not take on the mantle of magician him or herself but persuade followers that they - and only they - can resolve the problems they face.25

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From individual leaders to leadership institutions
D9
Elgie26 suggests that although the traits and style of leaders makes some difference, nevertheless these differences are limited by, and exercised through, the institutional structure within which they operate. Thus American Presidents have more room to manoeuvre in foreign policy than in domestic affairs, and Italian and Japanese government leaders tend to be reactive rather than proactive because of the nature of their political systems. Moreover, while the US Congress can support or inhibit presidential leadership, it is institutionally incapable of providing leadership itself.27 Partly these constraints derive from historical developments, partly from the electoral methods, and partly from the power of various institutions to constrain the powers of the formal leadership. The implication for leadership in the public sector is that we need to take careful cognisance of the precise environment within which leadership is constructed and deployed: the appointment, monitoring, reward and accountability structures and processes will all play some part in inhibiting and/or encouraging certain forms of leadership. It is also likely that the multiple and often conflicting accountabilities that prevail upon public sector leaders necessitate greater training, support and skill than those required in most private sector positions.
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From cult control to cultural coherence
D10
The search for charismatic or "superleaders" often generates a form of leadership that is unable or unwilling to recognise when change is required, despite evidence to the contrary (for example, the corporate leaders of IBM in the late 1970s). Much of the debate around the "cult of leadership" is captured in the charismatic approaches but the difference between transactional and transformational leadership also generates cult followers. Transactional Leadership is premised upon motivating followers by some form of instrumental exchange, either a monetary or symbolic reward system. Transformational Leadership28 on the other hand, asserts that leaders can transform followers by persuading them to subordinate their individual wants to the needs of the collective. A recent example of this approach can be found in Jackson's approach to leadership in the American professional basketball league, the NBA.29 Jackson's retelling of the Chinese fable of the Emperor Liu Bang is instructive: it likens leadership to a wheel. The strength of the wheel does not lie in the spokes - the material that "leads" the wheel (China) - but in the spaces between the spokes - the "invisible" masses - for if the balance between spoke and space is wrong, the wheel will not work properly.

D11 The significance of the spaces throws a different light on the apparent poverty of leadership generally: it is not that there is a dearth of leaders because there are leaders in every walk of life and at every level in organisations. Indeed, most people, at some point in their lives, will lead others, be it their family, their friends, their local gardening club, or for just a few, their country. In effect, the talent necessary for organisations to be well led already exists within them - but it is not confined to the formal leadership. The problem, then, is as much to do with the poverty of followership as the dearth of, and problems with, existing leaders. By this I mean that the most successful organisations appear to be those where the errors which the leaders inevitably make are compensated for by their followers: responsible followers prevent irresponsible leaders. But where followers are unable or unwilling to constrain their leaders the organisation itself may well suffer. This "compensatory followership" operates right across the organisational and political spectrum such that, for example, the obsequient behaviour of most of Hitler's entourage (fortunately) failed to prevent him from making catastrophic strategic errors in the latter half of the Second World War. In a more contemporary vein we might consider a related failure of leadership and followership in the form of Rodney Ledward, the gynaecologist from William Harvey hospital in Ashford, Kent, who was "able to severely maim hundreds of women patients because of a hospital culture in which consultants were treated as 'gods' and junior staff were afraid of 'telling tales' ".30 Apart from protecting whistle-blowers - which necessarily occurs after the damage has been done by errant leaders - one method of deterring leaders from making mistakes in the first place is by institutionalising the role of devil's advocate, in which members of an organisation take it in turn to dissent from the group's decisions so as to force it, and its leader, to take cognisance of potential problems that would otherwise be obscured.31

D12 The dangers and inefficiencies of over-relying on leaders and of disabling "constructive dissent"32 are themselves mirrored by the potential benefits of incorporating followers and informal leaders into the decision-making process, for as Joynson and Forrester suggest, the solutions to most organisational problems are already known to the workers - but their formal leaders prevent them from implementing the solutions.33 One example where such an approach has already begun to bear fruit in the public sector is the new nurse-led injury clinics in the NHS. Here a solution to excessive waiting times and chronic staff shortages is to allow the "subordinate" nurses the freedom to solve the problems that they could have solved years ago - if only someone had thought to ask them and to implement their suggestions.

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From rules to principles
D13
The conventional explanation for the existence of rule-based organisations involves the need to inhibit followers from exercising their initiative and undermining conformance to requirements. The positive aspect of this, for example, is a bureaucratic support for equality in service provision. The negative aspect is a fundamental discouragement of subordinate initiative and risk-taking. Since it is impossible to construct an organisation that is run entirely along a system of rules (for that would require a hierarchy of rules surmounted by the "golden rule" that established which of the subordinate rules should be followed), some degree of subordinate initiative - or even leadership - is critical for organisational performance. Indeed, some organisations have pursued this route to the point where the corporate rulebook has been displaced by a few corporate principles. Risk-taking, however, remains anathema to many organisations and to many individuals, for despite claims to the contrary, there are few organisations that try to learn from, rather than eliminate, mistakes, and taking risks inevitably generates mistakes.34

D14 The inherent limitations of controlling organisations through rules, beyond the obvious example that "working to rule" usually equates with the absence of any productive output, are especially visible when operating at the level of inter-organisational collaborations, for example, the federations of organisations and institutions involved in regenerating deprived urban areas. Here, a rule-based approach inevitably appears doomed to failure - but so does one where the goals are as obscure as the lines of accountability and even the membership.35 The necessarily negotiated goals and means are easily undermined by inappropriate acts and resemble the actions of a rock-climber: it is extraordinarily difficult and slow to make progress up the rock-face, but falling off is both easy and quick. The presence of a clearly identifiable ultimate goal (the summit), and measurable points of progress along the route (base camp, camps 1 and 2 and so on), can help keep the climber motivated, but the "glue" that keeps him or her attached to the rock is based on a small number of climbing principles, not a climbers' rule book that needs to be examined for each precipice. Or, in terms of explaining how a shoal of fish or a flock of birds move in perfect symmetry without an apparent leader or complex book of rules, it is simply a question of following a basic principle: maintain the distance between yourself and your neighbours and move in the same direction and velocity unless you personally need to move in a different direction for ulterior reasons (defence against predators, etc) - in which case all your neighbours will move with you.36

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From naivety to complexity
D15
The role of context is critical to leadership. Contingency models operate on the basis of objectively analysing the context and generating the appropriate leadership response, either in leadership style (situational approaches) or the person of the leader (contingency approaches). A parallel debate in leadership surrounds the nature of the response, rather than the nature of the context. Drawn in particular from discussions of military leadership, the basic assumption is that the context is literally chaotic, and therefore the question is whether leaders should try to impose order upon the chaos or try to exploit the chaos by working within its confines.

D16 Over the last 50 years the developments in complexity theory provide a robust defence of the self-organising approach to leadership. Chaos or Complexity Theory implies six critical points:37

  • Organisational life is systemic without being systematic. It is both predictable and unpredictable: we know that the weather will be warmer in the summer than in the winter (a "strange attractor" limits its variance), but we cannot predict whether it will rain a week today (at least not in the UK).
  • Causal analysis is virtually impossible - because the inordinate number of variables that contribute to any event undermine our ability to explain its causal root.
  • Diversity rather than homogeneity is a more productive base given the difficulty of predicting change in the environment.
  • Self-organising principles reduce the concern that anarchy may prevail over disorder, and this supports the emphasis on distributed or deep leadership. (Perhaps the growth and persistence of the Internet is a good example here - it has no formal leader but multiple nodes of leadership ensure its survival.) In more conventional organisations the self-organising principles become manifest when order is built from relationships rather than enforced by structures.38
  • Individual action, in conjunction with the multiplier effect, concentrates responsibility at the lowest point: individuals operate on the basis on "min specs", that is the minimum specifications to get the job done.39
  • Scale-invariant properties and irreversibility are components of all complex organisations.

D17 The consequence of understanding organisations as complex adaptive systems is that they ought to be structured along "the edge of chaos", that is the point between over-structured inertia and under-structured confusion ("chaos" in the pejorative sense of the word).40 Or in Hampden-Turner's41 metaphor, it is sailing the line between the rock of excessive control and the whirlpool of disorder. And, following a neo-Darwinian trait that resembles some of the Population Ecology models of organisational survival,42 whether any complex adaptive system survives depends upon the niche it occupies in the "fitness landscape".43 Finally, it should be noted that the systemic element of complex systems implies that attending to one element of the system - in this case the leadership - is an inadequate base from which to construct a radical alternative future.44 Joined-upness is not merely a political goal; it is an inescapable element of organisational life.

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From similarity to diversity
D18
It follows from the prior discussion, concerning the importance of supportive but critical followers, that conventional patterns of leader recruitment tend to generate reflective but not reflexive leadership groups. In other words, leaders recruit in their own image45 which may make them feel more comfortable but it can also undermine the self-analytic and critical skills available to the organisation. It is not just, then, that diversity is important because it is morally appropriate or politically correct, nor is it that diversity is a pragmatic response to a severe recruitment problem, a political expedient.46 Instead the crucial argument for diversity lies in itself, as a creative alternative to, and active inhibitor of, the torpitude and complacency that may result from similarity and what Janis called "groupthink".47

D19 However, empirical research into the implications of diversity on performance suggests, first, that there are no consistent effects on organisational performance, and second, and ironically, a rather diverse series of issues need addressing.48 First, it may be that a successful team or organisation generates sufficient levels of satisfaction that transcend any notion of diversity. Success, then, is the independent not the dependent variable, and diversity is a secondary element in the calculation, such that successful teams regard diversity as a cause of their success while unsuccessful teams can regard an identically diverse composition as the cause of their failure.

D20 That said, it would seem more likely that some forms of diversity are more important than others. Thus, diverse values embody a primary inhibitor of organisational performance, while social diversity (ethnicity, class, gender and age) and informational diversity (knowledge, education and experience) generate higher levels of performance and satisfaction, especially when the task is non-routine. In short, simply constructing a diverse group is insufficient for enhanced performance - diversity can provide the framework for success but the group needs to have - or come to accept - similar values.49

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From private interest to public service
D21
Much of the debate around the difference between private interest and public service, and the relative differences in leadership required by the two forms, has been reconstructed recently through the development of Stakeholder Theory. Freeman's original construction expanded the focus of leaders in the private sector from a narrow concern about profitability to a wider acceptance of the legitimate interests of stakeholders beyond stock holders, notably workers, consumers, suppliers, creditors, the government and the local community.50 Indeed, the expansion in leader focus from the bottom line has been replicated elsewhere, and most notably in the development of the Balanced Score Card in which financial results are just an element of collective and individual appraisals and a means to connect the abstract world of organisational strategy to the detailed practicalities of employees' working practices.51

D22 Nonetheless, the enormous changes that the public sector has undergone since 1980,52 the relative novelty of such change,53 and the consequential convergence between private and public sectors in some areas has often generated disproportionate costs on the latter. Worall and Cooper,54 for instance, suggest that although changes in accountability, speed of decision-making and flexibility have been similar across the public-private divide, the public sector has faced a far higher collapse in morale, motivation, sense of job security and loyalty. In effect, the very aspects of public service that attracted particular people to work there in the first place are under dire threat without any compensatory balancing of the rewards which private sector employees (and leaders) have traditionally received. The direct effect of this on public sector leaders is clear: they are increasingly dissatisfied with an increasingly difficult job and an increasingly demoralised workforce.

D23 But although private and public sector leaders remain accountable to their respective governing bodies, perhaps where the difference remains most transparent is in the problems of accountability in the public service. For example, this problem goes beyond the unaccountability of individual consultants in the NHS to a systemic lack of accountability in the NHS as a whole. There can never be a health system that provides unlimited provision on demand but the best way to assure the public that its decisions on resource allocation are fair and efficient is a transparent system of accountability, in which leaders are both accountable for their decisions and removable by those to whom they are accountable.55

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From inherited trait to acquired skill to deployed will
D24
The most recent developments in the specification of particular characteristics for leaders have been twofold. First, the continuing pursuit of psychometric data to establish which people have the requisite traits or skills and so on. The most extreme versions of this have been the search for the "leadership gene" - which has proved (un)surprisingly elusive to those born with the "sceptical gene" - and the developments in evolutionary psychology. In the latter genre one of the most influential works has been Sulloway's neo-Darwinian account of the significance of birth order and family dynamics in the creation, or subversion, of leadership tendencies.56

D25 The second development has been the work of Goleman in the pursuit of "Emotional Intelligence" - the ability to manage oneself and one's relationships effectively - through four empathic capabilities: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social skill.57 In short, emotional maturity is a crucial ingredient of good leadership. The good news for leaders is that, in theory, these capabilities can be learnt and they are capabilities that are often important in inhibiting instinctive responses to perceived threats. The bad news is that they are little different from some of the ideals of the Human Relations school of the 1930s and in that guise they were only marginally successful in developing or distinguishing leaders.58

D26 However, a crucial element that neither of these approaches embodies is the difference between skill and will. Leaders may have all the capabilities and competencies that they need, and their followers may have all the skills and attributes necessary for the organisational tasks, but if the will of the leader or the followers is missing then the likelihood of achieving much is minimal. Both are crucial.

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From win/lose arguments to win/win negotiations
D27
The assumption that leadership derives from superior intelligence, aligned with superordinate logic and uncompromising reason, is deeply entrenched within western culture, at least from the era of Enlightenment. And it has an even longer gestation with the teachings of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, and even though the latter regarded rhetoric as a sleight of hand and a poor handmaiden to logic, the former's treatise on rhetoric served as the foundation of leadership training for many years.59 In some ways Habermas's "discourse ethics" provide the nearest inheritor of these models: providing the procedural rules for discussion can be mutually agreed through equal participation, a consensus can emerge. Indeed, this is precisely how most higher educational systems operate - they train students to engage in logical debate so that the most cogent and persuasive argument will prevail. Yet, ironically, we also know that research into change management and negotiation clearly concludes that logic and rationality are seldom the root cause of persuasion. If, as complexity theorists insist, autopoiesis (self-regarding and self-making) is a characteristic of both organisms and organisations, then change must begin with establishing and appealing to the self-interests of the organisation.

D28 This problem is manifest across all organisations of all sizes: it is very seldom that anyone admits to "losing" an argument and changes their mind on the basis of a superior appeal to logic. Instead people may do what you want, not because they think you are right, but because their self-interest persuades them to comply. Leadership, then, is not usually achieved through superior rhetoric or appeal to logic or reason, but by establishing what followers want and satisfying that through some process of exchange in which both sides can win. Of course, if leaders can construe these wants in a way that perfectly aligns followers and leaders then no simple "exchange" is required. However, the exchange is still present but it is now manifest in persuading individuals to exchange their self-interest for the good of the collective.

D29 But in the absence of this alignment leaders need to polish their negotiating skills rather than their debating skills. This not to imply that rhetoric is irrelevant because language is crucial to the construction of, rather than the reflection of, reality but it is to suggest that logic and reason are inadequate bases for leadership.

D30 A further element of negotiating skill that may prove critical for public sector leaders is the ability to negotiate their way through multiple accountabilities and responsibilities. For example, a headteacher required to minimise staff costs, maximise students' exam results and enhance the role of the local community should have the requisite skills to negotiate a working compromise between the internal and external stakeholders and not force the teaching staff, nor him or herself, into unacceptably high levels of stress.

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6 Stogdill, R.M. (1974), Handbook of Leadership (New York: Free Press).
7 Yukl, G. (1989), 'Managerial Leadership: A Review of Theory and Research' Journal of Management 15 (2), pp. 251-89.
8 Yukl, G. (1989), 'Managerial Leadership: A Review of Theory and Research' Journal of Management 15 (2), p. 253.
9 Allport, G.W. and Odbert, H.S. (1936), 'Trait-names: A Psycho-Lexical Study' Psychological Monographs 47, pp 171-220.
10 See, for example, Hogan, R.T., Curphy, G.J., and Hogan, J. (1994), 'What Do We Know About Leadership?' American Psychologist 49 pp. 493-504.
11 Myers, I.B. and McCaulley, B.H. (1985), Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Palo Alto, CA.: Consulting Psychologists Press).
12 MCI (Management Charter Initiative) (1997), Management Standards (London: MCI).
13 See, for example, Burr, V. (1995), An Introduction to Social Constructionism (London: Routledge); Du Gay, P., Salaman, G. and Rees, B. (1996), 'The Conduct of Management and the Management of Conduct' Journal of Management Studies 33 (3), pp. 263-82; Grint, K. (1995), Management: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press).
14 Bryman's (1992), Charisma and Leadership of Organizations (London: Sage) is a good introduction to charisma. More recent developments and disputes are covered in the special issue of The Leadership Quarterly (10 (4)) 1999.
15 See Heifetz, R.A. (1994), Leadership Without Easy Answers, (Cambridge: Belknap Press).
16 Hempill, J.K. (1949), 'The Leader and his Group' Journal of Educational Research 28, pp. 225-229, 245-46.
17 Blake, R.R. and Mouton, J.S. (1964), The Managerial Grid (Houston: Gulf).
18 Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K. (1982), Management of Organizational Behaviour: Utilizing Human Resources (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall).
19 Vroom, V.H. and Yetton, P.W. (1973), Leadership and Decision-Making (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).
20 Fiedler, F.E. (1967), A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness (New York: McGraw-Hill).
21 Evans, M.G. (1970), 'The Effects of Supervisory Behaviour on the Path-Goal Relationship' Organizational behaviour and Human Performance 5 pp. 277-98.
22 House, R.J. and Dressler, G. (1974), 'The Path-Goal Theory of Leadership' in Hunt, J.G. and Larson, L.L. (eds.) Contingency Approaches to Leadership (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press).
23 The most comprehensive reviews of traditional approaches to leadership are: Bass, B.M. (1990), Bass and Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research and Managerial Applications (New York: Free Press); Hughes, R.L., Ginnett, R.C., and Curphy, G.J. (1999), Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience (Boston: McGraw-Hill); Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (1987), The Leadership Challenge (London: Jossey-Bass); Northouse, P.G. (1997), Leadership: Theory and Practice (London: Sage); Wright, P. (1996), Managerial Leadership, (London: Routledge); Yukl, G. (1998), Leadership in Organization (Prentice Hall).
24 Heifetz, R.A. (1994), Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge: Belknap Press).
25 For example, Mary Keyes, vice-president of patient care in a New Jersey hospital relates how the average time taken to administer the first dose of antibiotics for patients with pneumonia reduced from 15 hours to 1.75 hours. The task was achieved by asking volunteers (not heads of departments) to set up their own group to solve the problem, and through a process of self-organized learning the target was achieved. See Zimmerman, B. (1999), 'Complexity Science: A route through Hard Times and Uncertainty' Health Forum Journal, Vol. 42 (4), pp. 42-47.
26 Elgie, R. (1995), Political Leadership in Liberal Democracies (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
27 Lindsay, J.M. (2000), 'Looking for Leadership: Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy' The Brookings Review, Winter, pp. 40-43.
28 Bass, B.M. (1985), Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations (New York: Free Press); Burns, J.M. (1978), Leadership (New York: Harper & Row).
29 Jackson, P. and Delehanty, H. (1995), Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior (New York: Hyperion).
30 Hartley-Brewer, J. (2000), 'Hospital Culture Left Doctor to Maim Women' The Guardian 2 June.
31 Chaleff, I. (1995), The Courageous Follower (San Francisco: Berret-Koehler); Kelley, R. (1992), The Power of Followership (New York: Doubleday Currency).
32 See, for example, the example of Motorola discussed in Baatz, E.B. (1993), 'Motorola's Secret Weapon' Electronic Business April, pp. 51-53, and Dess, G.G. and Picken, J.C. (2000), 'Changing Roles: Leadership in the 21st Century', Organizational Dynamics Winter, pp. 18-34.
33 Joynson, S. and Forrester, A. (1995), Sid's Heroes (London: BBC Books).
34 See Grint, K. (1997), Fuzzy Management (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 85-114; and Holt, J. (1996), Celebrate Your Mistakes (New York: McGraw-Hill).
35 Huxham, C. and Vangen, S. (2000), 'Ambiguity, Complexity and Dynamics in the Membership of Collaboration' Human Relations Vol. 53 (6) pp. 771-91.
36 Wood, R. (2000), Managing Complexity (London: Profile Books), pp. 244-5.
37 Battram, A. (1998), Navigating Complexity (London: The Industrial Society); Gleik, J. (1987), Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Cardinal); Ditto, W. and Munakata, T. (1995), 'Principles and Applications of Chaotic Systems' Communications of the ACM Vol. 38 (11), pp. 96-102; Thiétart, A. and Forgues, B. (1995), 'Chaos Theory and Organization', Organization Science Vol. 6, (1), pp. 19-31; Wood, R. (2000), Managing Complexity (London: Profile Book).
38 Wheatley, M. (1994), Leadership and the New Science (San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publications).
39 See Zimmerman, B. (1999), 'Complexity Science: A route through Hard Times and Uncertainty' Health Forum Journal, Vol. 42 (4), pp. 42-47; Morgan, G. (1997), Images of Organization (London: Sage).
40 Connor, D. (1998), Leading at the Edge of Chaos (London: Wiley); Eisenhardt, K. and Brown, S. (1998), Competing on the Edge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press).
41 Hampden-Turner, C. (1994), Charting the Corporate Mind (Oxford: Blackwell).
42 See Hannan, M.T. and Freeman, J.H. (1977), 'The Population Ecology of Organizations' American Journal of Sociology Vol. 82, pp. 929-64, and Aldrich, H.E. (1975), Organizations and Environments (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall).
43 See Frederick, W.C. (1998), 'Creatures, Corporations, Communities, Chaos and Complexity' Business and Society Vol. 37 (4), pp. 358-89.
44 Collier, J. and Esteban, R. (1999), 'Governance in the Participative Organization', Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 21 (2/3), pp. 173-88.
45 Byrne, D. (1971), The Attraction Paradigm (New York: Academic Press); Chatman, J.A. (1991), 'Matching People and Organizations' Administrative Science Quarterly 36 pp. 459-84; Van Maanen, J. and Schein, E. (1979), 'Towards a Theory of Organizational Socialization' in Cummings and Staw, B.M. (eds.), Research in Organizational Behaviour 1, pp. 209-264.
46 HR Focus (2000), 'Diversity: A 'new' tool for retention.' Vol. 77 (6) pp. 14-17.
47 Janis, I.L. (1982), Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
48 Williams, K. Y. and O'Reilly, C.A. (1998), 'Demography and Diversity in Organizations' in Staw, B.M. and Sutton, R.M. (eds.) Research in Organizational Behaviour (20), pp. 77-140 (Stamford, CT.: JAI Press).
49 Jehn, K.A., Northcraft, G.B. and Neale, M.A. (1999), 'Why Differences Make a Difference' Administrative Science Quarterly (44) pp. 741-63.
50 Freeman, R.E., Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Marshfield, MA.: Pitman Publishing).
51 Norton and Kaplan, 'The Balanced Scorecard'.
52 Ferlie, E., Pettigrew, A., Ashburner, L., and Fitzgerald, L. (1997), The New Public Management in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
53 Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997), The Managerial State (London: Sage).
54 Worrall, L. and Cooper, C.L. (1998), 'Fear that Haunts the Public Sector' The Guardian 26 September.
55 See Hutton, W. (2000), New Health for Life (London: Vintage).
56 Sulloway, F.J. (1996), Born to Rebel (London: Little, Brown & Co.).
57 See Goleman, D. (2000), 'Leadership that Gets Results', Harvard Business Review March-April, pp. 78-90.
58 See Grint, K. (1998), The Sociology of Work (Cambridge: Polity Press).
59 See Aristotle (1991), The Art of Rhetoric (Harmondsworth: Penguin), Grint, K. (2000), The Arts of Leadership (Oxford: Oxford University Press), and Wardy, R. (1996), The Birth of Rhetoric: Georgias, Plato and their Successors (London: Routledge).


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