The General Theory of Leadership - Defining Leadership, Understanding How It Emerges in Individuals, Learning

Chapter 1

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

Developing the General Definition of Leadership

Today there is a need to develop new models of leadership grounded in the understanding that humans, organizations, and organizational environments are all involved in the definition, emergence, and practice of leadership in organizations. It has been argued that the current models of leadership were designed for the industrial age1 and do not, therefore, align with the needed leadership for today’s organization. The development of the new models must be informed by a deep understanding of the organization and the environment in which it operates and must, in the end, take into account and address threats against the organization and the opportunities for the organization, both emergent in the environment of the organization.

Because of the biopsychological complexity of the individuals in organizations, as well as the complexity of the organization and the complexity of the biology, physics, chemistry, politics, psychology, and sociology of supplier and consumer environments of the organization, the leadership models must of necessity be interdisciplinary.

Interdisciplinary modeling for the leadership definition and theory developed in this book, for example, includes such fields as psychology, biology, physics, sociology, and mathematics. This interdisciplinarity provided a better understanding of organizational systems and could inform appropriate choices of leadership practices in organizations. But before we can begin to develop our general definition and general theory of leadership, we must first define “organization” as used in this book.

An organization is an aggregation of coordinated actions and activities centered by an emergent idea intended to generate economic or social value for its promoters and to satisfy expectations of stakeholders. Successful organizations are usually found in areas or regions that support their development and growth by providing raw material inputs, processing capabilities, and markets for their products and services.

As it turns out, the question “What is leadership?” is not as simple as it appears. Many people, if asked, could not define leadership, and those who tried could not give an adequate, acceptable, and useful definition for research, teaching, and practice. But without a general definition and a general theory, the teaching, research, and practice of leadership are not well served because they all depend to a large extent on robust, sound, and researched knowledge (data and information) about leadership. This book is the result of the long quest to answer the question and to develop a robust definition of leadership that would be useful in practice and in teaching and research across academic disciplines. The development of the general theory of leadership followed closely thereafter. The significance of the general theory lies in the fact that it provides practitioners, scholars, and students a framework or model through which to look at and analyze leadership and its aspects and also for testing other theories on leadership for alignment with the overall framework of leadership. It thus introduces consistency in teaching, practice, and theory development in leadership.

An examination of the most popular definitions and theories of leadership would reveal that they are narrowly focused on the leader-follower dynamic. They ignore the fact that leaders deal not only with followers, but must also be concerned with nonfollowers, if not more often than he or she deals with employees who are followers.

Theories such as transformational leadership theory and transactional leadership theory are focused on employee-follower motivation. Ethical leadership theories (such as servant leadership, spiritual leadership, and authentic leadership) are about disseminating ethical guidelines and modeling ethical behaviors for members of the organization.

Contingency theories of leadership (path-goal theory, situational leadership theory, leadership substitute theory, least-preferred coworker (LPC) model, normative decision model, cognitive resource model, and multiple-linkage model) “describe how aspects of the leadership situation alter a leader’s influence on an individual subordinate or a work group.”2 It is this narrow focus on the leader-follower relationship that makes any of them inadequate as general theory.

Defining Leadership

The quest to answer the question “What is leadership?” took an interdisciplinary odyssey through theoretical biology, complex theory, physics, psychology, management, and organization theory. The conclusion was that leadership is interdisciplinary and complex because the individuals practicing leadership, as well as the organization and the environment, are all complex, and their interaction is complex, too. At the end of the quest, leadership was defined as follows:

It follows then that a leader is an individual who practices leadership as defined above. The elements used to construct the definition of leadership are discussed in detail in Chapter 5 of this book.

The Dynamic Intersectionality of Leadership: Individual, Organization, and Environment

The working definition of an organization, for this book, is that it is an aggregation of coordinated actions and activities centered by an emergent idea intended to generate economic or social value for its promoters and to satisfy expectations of stakeholders. Therefore, there are individuals who, at necessary moments, practice leadership in and over the organization that itself exists in its specific environment that supplies it with resources and consumes its products.

The individuals are complex in their biopsychology, which dictates how they respond to other people and emergent phenomena (challenges and opportunities) in and outside the organization. The environment is also very complex in every aspect, whether it be weather systems and how they affect availability of resources and distribution of products for the organization, or disruptive events in political, economic, and social systems that could generate mortal threats for the organization. As we shall see, the organization itself spawns its own complexity through organizational systems based on its structure and systems.

All three, the individuals, the organization, and the environment, while constantly dynamic in themselves, are in constant dynamic interaction among themselves. The most serious threat or most rewarding opportunity emerging out of the complex dynamic environment of the organization, or out of the complex individuals in the organization, or out of the organization, is in most cases, complex and dynamic.

In general, dynamic threats and opportunities internal to the organization generate intra-organizational leadership practices along the input-process-output structure of the organization, while those between the organization and its environment generate leadership practices focused on suppliers (and as such deal with legal compliance and resource dependency power plays) and consumers (and therefore deal with competitive forces of the product or service marketplace).

It is important to reiterate here that each of the three factors of leadership, namely the individual, the organization, and the environment, has a role to play in the emergence and practice of leadership.

The environment supplies resources to the organization. The organization processes the resources into finished goods and services for sale. The environment then consumes the products and services. The individuals bring their knowledge about the organization and the environment to this dynamic interaction, their analytical intelligence to link pieces of organizational and environmental data into useful information, and the wisdom to use this information to make decisions that will both harvest the benefits of opportunities and thwart threats to the organization. At the core of both the general definition and general theory of leadership is this dynamic interaction of people, organization, and the environment, all dynamic and complex on their own.

What Is Complexity?

A nontechnical definition of complexity is that it is “the existence of many interdependent variables in a system. The more variables and the greater their interdependence, the greater that system’s complexity.”3 For example, a human body is a complex system because each of the systems that makes up the body is complex in itself and dependent on all the other systems. Similarly, an organization is complex because each department is not only complex but also dependent on all other departments. A more technical definition is that a system is complex if it has the following characteristics: nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and evolution.4

■ Nonlinear dynamics: Nature is nonlinear and nonlinear phenomena are an essential aspect of living systems.5 The general definition is that nonlinear systems are systems in which the output does not relate linearly to the input, as opposed to linear systems in which variations in the independent variable, x, will produce a predictable quantity, y (called the...