Leadership in Organizations

Leadership in Organizations

Leadership has long been a major area of interest among social scientists and in particular organizational and political psychologists. The notion of leadership is one that continues to attract generations of writers, in large part because we tend to view leadership as an important feature of everyday and organizational affairs.

Leadership is still not an easy concept to define. Its widespread currency and use in everyday life as an explanation affects the way it is defined and indeed probably makes it more difficult to define than a concept that is invented as an abstraction ab initio. Most definitions of leadership have tended to coalesce around a number of elements which can be discerned in the following definition by a researcher whose work had a profound impact on one of the stages of theory and research to be encountered below:

Three elements can be discerned in this definition that are common to many definitions: influence, group and goal. First, leadership is viewed as a process of influence whereby the leader has an impact on others by inducing them to behave in a certain way. Second, that influence process is conceptualized as taking place in a group context. Group members are invariably taken to be the leader's subordinates, although that is by no means obligatory. This focus on the leader in relation to a definable group is invariably translated into research in which supervisors and their work groups constitute the focus of analysis. However, leadership need not come from the person in charge. Leadership, being a process of influence, can come from anyone in the group. Third, a leader influences the behaviour of group members in the direction of goals with which the group is faced. Effective leadership - the holy grail of leadership theory and research - will be that which accomplishes the group's goal(s).

This definition applies best to theory and research that was conducted up to the mid-1980s. While it by no means fell into disuse, later definitions, insofar as they were specifically articulated, tended to dwell on the leader as a manager of meaning - a term employed by Smircich and Morgan (1982). In a similar fashion, Pfeffer (1981) and Weick (1995) write about leadership as symbolic action, by which they mean that leaders engage in ‘sense-making’ on behalf of others and develop a social consensus around the resulting meanings. In both cases, leadership is seen as a process whereby the leader identifies for subordinates a sense of what is important - defining organizational reality for others. The leader gives a sense of direction and of purpose through the articulation of a compelling worldview. The phrase ‘manager of meaning’ (and the complementary notion of ‘symbolic leadership’) is meant to draw attention to the defining characteristic of true leadership as the active promotion of values, which provide shared meanings about the nature of the organization. The years either side of the turn of the century saw the process of leadership become more of a social as well as a psychological process of influence. In effect, more effort was put into determining the nature of the leadership processes that were manifest in organizational settings.

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