LEADERSHIP STYLE

Leadership style

Leadership style

Introduction

Management theorists and researchers claim that certain leader attributes may be used to distinguish high from low performance organizations (e.g. Gupta and Govindarajan, 1984). Similarly, Hambrick and Mason (1984) called upon strategic management researchers to start focusing on the importance of the top management team to the performance of organizations. They suggested that the psychological profile of leaders could be reflected in the performance of their organizations.

One of the leader attributes that has often been used in the management literature for developing this profile is leadership style, a variable that is worthy of further investigation in the present study because of the conflicting and sometimes confusing research findings pertaining to the effectiveness implications of this attribute.

Leadership style is defined in this study as the extent to which a leader is people-oriented or task-oriented. Task-oriented leaders are those with strong concerns about a group's goals and the means to achieve them (Bass, 1981). These leaders are similarly referred to as production-oriented, production-emphasizing, goal-achieving, work-facilitative or goal emphasizing (Blake and Mouton, 1964; Bass, 1981). Task-oriented leaders also tend to be: high in need for achievement; and psychologically distant from their followers (e.g. Wofford, 1970).

Leaders who have strong concerns about their group members' relations with them and each other and express these concerns by creating a friendly and supportive atmosphere are said to be people-oriented (e.g. Beatty, 1988; Katz et al., 1950). Such leaders are also commonly referred to as interaction-oriented, interaction-facilitative and supportive, concerned for people, people-centered, and concerned for group maintenance (Anderson, 1974; Bass, 1967; Blake and Mouton, 1964).

The dichotomy between task and people orientation has been the focus of many research studies (e.g. Bryman et al., 1987; Klebanoff, 1976; Life, 1986; Likert, 1955; Roberts et al., 1968). Originally, the focus of some of these research studies was to determine if one orientation was always “better” than the other. Some researchers concluded that people-orientation led to higher levels of performance (e.g. Bryman et al., 1987; Roberts et al., 1968). Conversely, other researchers found that it was task-orientation that led to superior levels of performance (e.g. Dunteman and Bass, 1963; Mann et al., 1963). More recently, it has been suggested that there are contingencies that determine if one orientation or the other, or both will be the most effective for different individual, contextual, and organizational variables (e.g. Bass, 1981; Jensen et al., 1990). Leadership style in general therefore is an attribute that has received substantial attention in the management literature (e.g. Chorn, 1991; Life, 1986).

Most of the research to date on leadership style has focused on effective leadership style in for-profit organizations. Very little has been done to investigate effective leadership styles in not-for-profit organizations. Traditionally, researchers investigate the impact of a leader's task or people-orientation on organizational effectiveness. In the earliest stages of research in this area, the misconception was that one orientation - often in exclusion of the other - would be effective.

More recent research studies have indicated, however, that effective leadership style depends ...