Integrative Theory

The theoretical literature on leadership effectiveness is often described as fractured and contradictory. However, that description is misleading. When viewed from a broad perspective that emphasizes the functions of leadership, the body of empirical findings provides many consistent themes that can be integrated into a comprehensive theory of leadership effectiveness. Psychologist Martin Chemers' integrative theory of leadership presented here brings together the disparate themes in the leadership literature to provide a comprehensive overview of small group leadership.

Organizations are human constructions designed to overcome the limitations of individuals working alone. Organizations benefit from the collective knowledge, skills, and effort of numerous individuals but suffer the costs of coordinating the individual contributions. A successful organization must attend to two central functions that determine its viability.

The first function of a successful organization is internal maintenance, which addresses the essential need of organizations to create reliable systems for dealing with routine events. Highly efficient, predictable, and reliable systems can be developed to address well-known and well-understood organizational demands. Standard operating procedures, rules and policies, and norms and expectations help to create internal stabilizing mechanisms.

Although internal stability and predictability are fundamental for organizational viability, not all of the demands on organizations are predictable and clear. Dynamic environments confront organizations with ambiguous, changing, and sometimes poorly understood exigencies (circumstances that make urgent demands).

The second function of a successful organization is external adaptability, which is the organization's ability to sense and react to changing conditions. Flexibility and responsiveness depend on being open to new information that can be integrated into decision making as a basis for reacting to change. It is not always clear when an organization must emphasize one or the other of these two functions, and it is not always easy to accommodate their sometimes contradictory patterns. Factors that increase reliability and predictability may limit flexibility and responsiveness and vice versa.

Organizational-level functions of internal maintenance and external adaptability have parallels at the group level or team level within the organization. Effective leaders must create cohesive and smoothly interrelated teams that give members of sense of stability and order but must also encourage those teams to be sensitive to changes in tasks or environments that call for adaptation.

In a sense, the effects of leadership on the performance of a small group can be compared to the role of intelligence in individual human functioning. [Page 719]Psychologist Robert Sternberg has described intelligence as the process by which individuals test their knowledge and skills against situational demands. When a good match between demands and cognitive resources exists, reactions become routinized and highly efficient. When changing situations create new demands, intelligence is the process by which the gap between current knowledge and needed knowledge is recognized, leading to the acquisition of new knowledge until responses can again be made on a routine basis. Similarly, effective leaders direct the capabilities of group members for the performance of assigned tasks, utilizing standard procedures and routine processes, until changing demands are detected and call for flexible reanalysis and the development and deployment of new knowledge and skills.

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