Exploring the attributes, skills, behaviours, and decision
making styles of organizational leaders working at Karachi
and Islamabad: A Comparative Analysis
By
XYZ
Introduction and Literature Review:
We are living in an increasingly interconnected world. To be successful in dealing with
people from other regional cultures, organizational leaders need knowledge about cultural
differences and similarities among these regions. They also need to understand the
implications of the differences and the skills required to act and decide appropriately and
in a culturally sensitive way. This trend is forcing the organizations to hire the managers
who are well versed in leadership styles for multi-cultural environments. The proposed
research project will explore the qualities, attributes, skills, and styles of organizational
leaders across two major cities of Pakistan i.e., Lahore and Islamabad.
At the top of the agenda of AMA (American Management Association, the top
management forum) was leadership – what does it mean and what can it contribute to the
work place? One of the major conclusions was that leadership would retain its
importance as a subject as organizations continue to define and redefine themselves.
A number of studies have indicated that effective leadership can make a difference in
organisational performance (e.g. Mindle et al., 1985; Miller et al., 1986; Thomas, 1988;
Sarros et al., 1993). A review of the relevant literature reflects our everyday suspicion
that effective corporate leaders are crucial for any country. “The managers of enterprises,
public and private, and their technical and professional associates are part of every
industrialising elite. They are crucial to the success of any industrialisation effort. Their
policies and practices have far-flung influence in shaping the labour problems which
emerge in industrialising societies” (Kerr, 1962, p. ).
The proposed research will be the first of its kind in the field of leadership in any
Pakistani university. This way, we will be able to become a part of research community
researching one of the hottest research topics in the management sciences i.e.
“Leadership”.
Leadership has been an important topic in the social sciences for decades. A main
problem may be that researchers have studied leadership in a very atomistic way. Trait
theories studied what characteristics leaders possessed, what traits distinguish good
leaders from bad leaders and what traits leaders possessed that followers did not. Many
researchers, including Stogdill (1948) and Mann (1959), felt that effective leaders were
not distinguishable by using traits. The conclusion was that selecting and predicting
leadership by means of traits simply did not work (Bass, 1990). Since traits were not
believed to differentiate effective from non-effective leaders, some felt that perhaps
characteristic patterns of behaviour could, hence a behavioural approach followed the
trait era. Behaviourists only study what they can observe (Mazur, 1990), thus the question
the behaviourists addressed was: what do leaders do? Rather than inferring the "best"
personality characteristics of leaders and their relation to group performance, behavioural
research required subordinates to describe how their manager behaved, and then studied
the subordinate’s descriptions with measures of group satisfaction and effectiveness.
Many researchers hoped that the creation of a taxonomy of behaviours, though not as
effective for selection, would still contribute much to the training and development of
managers and, in general, the leadership of others (Vroom, 1976). Notice that the focus
of the behavioural approach in studying leadership is still on the qualities of the leader
and not the process of leadership. Nevertheless, behaviours are closer to the leadership
process than traits; a process is a systematic series of actions directed to some end, and
behaviour is certainly more action oriented than traits. Behavioural research, in a fashion
similar to trait research, was designed to be more explorative than confirmative. But
unlike the trait approach, advanced statistical techniques and more methodical research
designs were characteristic of the behaviour approach in studying leadership. Though
behavioural approach was also marked with criticism. The main criticism was it got
stuck in two factors approach i.e. task-based behaviours vs. consideration behaviours.
Many researchers felt that two factors were not enough, and too abstract to provide a
basis for how leaders handle specific role requirements (Yukl & Van Fleet, 1992). Even
Stogdill (1948) acknowledged that additional factors relevant to leadership might not be
measured by the LBDQ, which led him to create the LBDQ XH (Bass, 1990). The
popularity of the big two however dominated research in leadership for nearly two
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decades (Yukl & Van Fleet, 1992). Researchers looked at each behaviour independently,
as if each were mutually exclusive. Yet many situations require the use of both
behaviours to be successful. Seldom were patterns of each behaviour studied. The notion
that there is one best way to lead, regardless of the situation was a criticism of the trait
approach as well as the behavioural approach. The relationship between consideration,
initiating structure, and leader effectiveness tended to be positive but varied widely with
the population (Vroom, 1974). Few consistent results were found that were both situation
and population independent. Features of the situation, such as the complexity of the task,
the competence of subordinates, or the organization’s culture may influence the degree to
which task or people oriented behaviours are required. Although recent meta-analyses
have proven the big two to be more strongly correlated with various leadership criteria
than previously thought (e.g. Fisher & Edwards, 1988), this method was not as
well-known twenty years ago. Thus many researchers moved onward to measure the
situational constraints that leaders work in, with the hope that a better understanding of
the contingencies leaders face would steer towards a more complete picture of the
leadership phenomenon.
A wide variety of contingency theories (reference) exist which take into account many
different variables, such as the nature of the task, the amount of involvement needed from
subordinates, the amount of positional power held by the leader, the nature of leader
member relations, and the maturity of subordinates. All of the contingency theories
emphasize the importance of contextual factors or the nature of the environment in which
leadership takes place. Contingency theories (reference) have brought the discipline of
leadership one step closer to its conception as a process. The theories are an admission by
scholars that leadership does not exist in a vacuum but is instead a system of processes
that involves traits, behaviours and elements of the situation. Contingency theories are an
addition to already existing approaches to understanding leadership. None of the past
theories of leadership was necessarily "bad", but rather, incomplete (reference). A large
amount of variance remained unexplained by trait and behavioural approaches, and
contingency theories attempt to address this weakness by introducing moderators into the
leader-performance equation (reference).
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These theories still perpetuate the notion that leadership can best be determined by
understanding the attributes of leaders. When a manager discovers that employees do not
understand what is expected of them and subsequently clarifies their role, chances are
that the employee’s performance will improve. Can we then say that those employees
were led? Did leadership occur here? Is the relationship really between leadership and
subordinate performance, or training and performance? How do we really know when
leadership is occurring? What is there to point your finger at and say "that is leadership"?
All three approaches presented so far say a lot more about effective managerial practices
than they do about leadership (reference). Without a doubt, effective managerial practices
and leadership are strongly related, but to say that effective managerial practices is the
same as leadership is like saying anything that the manager does which makes employees
happy and productive is leadership (c.f. Zaleznik 1977). Is paying employees a huge
salary leadership? Can leadership be counterproductive and unsatisfying to others
especially if the effect is intended?
What the leadership research needed was an approach, which treats leadership as process,
a process of influence. An approach, which followed the contingency approach, was
charismatic and transformational leadership. Leadership is a process of influence and the
charismatic and transformational theories shed light, much needed, on how this influence
occurs. If employees are being influenced, and that influence stems from an individual,
then perhaps we are one step closer to identifying leadership as a process (reference).
Scholars and practitioners alike realized that there existed still more to the process of
leading others than was portrayed in trait, behavioural and situational theories.
Charismatic and transformational theories of leadership are the dominant focus of many
leadership researchers today, but by no means are trait, behaviour and contingency
theories dormant. All of these theories still make an important contribution to the
understanding of leadership. In fact, what is particularly special about charismatic and
transformational theories is their recognition that all of the aforementioned conceptions
of leaders and leadership are still important and relevant. More than any other conception
of leadership, charismatic and transformational theories claim to incorporate and build
upon the past to offer a more complete and holistic picture of how leadership occurs.
Traits, behaviours, and contingencies are all incorporated into charismatic and
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transformational theories, but new ideas are present as well, which makes these theories
both more useful and promising than any other models of the past.
This leadership theory integrate trait, style and contingency approaches of the leadership
and also incorporates and builds on work of sociologists such as Weber (1947) and
political scientists such as Burns (1978). In all of the new developments and theories the
theory, which has generated the most interest by practitioners and academia alike, is
"Transformational Leadership". As Meindle (1990) has noted "This recent resurgence of
interest in studying the topic of leadership appears to be accompanied by an acceptance
of the distinction between transactional and transformational leadership, with an
emphasis on the latter". Bass (1990b) claims that the transactional and transformational
leadership model is a new paradigm, neither replacing nor explained by other models
such as the relations oriented - task oriented leadership. Even though Bass (1985) claimed
that his model of leadership incorporates ideas from trait, behavioural, and contingency
approaches the four components or sub factors seem essentially behavioural. Contextual
variables or differences remain largely overlooked. It is interesting to note, however, that
in Bass's earliest work (1985) he speculated that the appearance of transformational
leadership might be contingent upon certain organizational contexts.
Clearly, what is expected of leaders, what leaders may and may not do, and the influence
that leaders have varied considerably as a result of cultural forces in the country or
regions in which the leaders function.
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