Effective Leadership Attributes: Evidences from Indian Power Sector.
| Author | Maheshwari, Sunil |
Introduction
Leadership has been the core of several behavioral researches for more than ten decades. A lot of research on leadership is obvious as "no member of a social group--be it a work team, organization, nation, or other social grouping--is better positioned to impact the functioning of the group than a leader" (Knippenberg, 2011: 1078). Scholars are continuously exploring the style and behavior for optimal leadership. It is observed that followers' commitment, satisfaction and performance are the major criteria for assessing the optimal style or behavior of leadership. In line with such observations, this study agrees with assertion of Dabke (2016 : 30) that "leaders are not just what they think they are. They are also what their followers perceive them as. Perceived leadership effectiveness is a phenomenon that lies more in the eyes of the significant stakeholder rather than objective job outcomes". Earlier, leaders were assumed to have the responsibility of overall functioning of the group/organization including evaluating, controlling, planning of related aspects. But, in today's era leaders are supposed to play motivational and inspirational roles and to create cohesive work environment through engendering belongingness among workforce. Such transitions in leaders' role make followers a focal point of complete leadership functioning. Following such assertions, this study assumes followers' perception as crucial for assessing the effective leadership.
This study deals with the key research question: "What attributes of leaders are related to overall effectiveness of leadership"? Mainly, this research intends to find different factors that could be the determinants of leadership effectiveness. At first, this research question appears to be well researched with significant number of empirical evidences. However, it is found that only a few scholars have addressed this subject in detail and surprisingly not much deliberation is done to explore what facets of leadership lead to overall effective leadership from followers' perspective. Following such research gap, this study explores the attributes of effective leadership from followers' perspective in the context of Indian power sector.
This study may add significantly to the literature as it deals with the above identified research question. First, it tries to find the range of attributes causing effective leadership from the followers' perspective. Such exploration will reveal knowledge on what makes a subordinate to feel their leader effective. Another contribution of this research is the context of the research, i.e., Indian power sector. It seems from review of literature that no studies have substantiated their research on effective leadership from the responses of Indian power sector employees. It is also observed that the previous studies exploring the attributes of leadership effectiveness have mainly focused on personality-based traits of leaders. This study might be additive to the literature by corroborating a wide range antecedents of effective leadership from followers' perspective.
Literature Review
The literature review helped us to find the number and pattern of research in leadership effectiveness in last decade. The research articles were searched through online database including EBSCO business source premier, Emerald full text, PsycINFO, and ABI/INFORM. The database was searched with keywords of [leader*AND effective*]. The studies were reviewed to find the evidences of the relationship between different attributes of leadership and overall leadership effectiveness.
On the basis of review of literature and semi-structured interview of the experienced personnel involved in academics, research and power industry of India, vision; strategic orientation; inspiring, developing and empowering employees; external customer focus; internal customer orientation; integrity; community orientation; communications; creativity; performance orientation; initiative; decision making; receptivity to change; identification with the company; self-concept, concern for quality, safety and profit were taken as attributes of effective leadership. The construct of the study was clubbed under three dimensions of leadership suggested by Higgs and Dulewicz (2014). These authors have suggested three dimensions of leadership: Intellectual dimensions; Managerial dimension; Emotional and Social dimension. The intellectual dimension includes aspects like critical analysis and judgment, vision and imagination, strategic perspective. The managerial dimension involves resource management, engaging communication, empowering, developing and achieving activities. Further, emotional and social dimension covers self-awareness, emotional resilience, intuitiveness, interpersonal sensitivity, influence, motivation and conscientiousness.
This study has divided the present identified leadership constructs into these three wide domains. Vision, strategic orientation, external customer focus, internal customer orientation, community orientation and creativity were considered as intellectual dimension. Further, communication, developing and empowering, decision making and performance orientation were understood as managerial dimension. Finally, self-concept, integrity, inspiring, concern for quality, safety and profit, identify with company, initiative and receptive to change were taken as emotional and social dimension of leadership.
Framing of Hypotheses
Literature has substance of the relationship between various constructs of intellectual dimension and overall leadership performance. Literature suggests that vision is the core competency of leaders (e.g., McDermott et al., 2011); yet, articulation may depend upon many factors including personal style, culture, context and sector. Next, "a strategic orientation has been associated with anticipating environmental influences, and coping with environmental agents through persuasion, cooperation and negotiation" (Srivastava & Nachman, 1989 : 54). Accordingly, strategic leadership literature accentuated the significance of the leaders' strategic orientation (Boal & Hooijberg, 2000). The leadership literature has also outlined the importance of leaders' orientation towards various stakeholders such as internal and external customers, and community overall. The emerging literature on 'responsible leadership' has majorly covered leaders' orientation towards stakeholders. The responsible leadership literature emphasizes leaders' stakeholder orientation through arguing that "winning the mandate to lead requires a relational leadership approach based on inclusion, collaboration and co-operation with different stakeholder groups" (Wicks et al., 1994). Leadership takes place in interaction with a multitude of followers as stakeholders inside and outside the corporation. Here, the leader becomes a coordinator and a cultivator of relationships towards different stakeholder groups. (Maak & Pless, 2006 : 99-100). Creative leaders are assumed to be instrumental to promote innovation at organization, e.g., Ellen Mathisen et al. (2012) as well as creativity among followers (Gamze et al, 2017).
H1: Intellectual Dimension (i.e., vision, strategic orientation, external customer focus, internal customer orientation, community orientation and creativity) will be positively related to leadership effectiveness
In the seminal work on communicative leadership, Johansson et al. (2014) have emphasized the role of leaders' communication competence through proposing a communicative behavior profile as act of initiating structure (e.g., setting goals, task allocation), work facilitation (coaching and training, feedback), relational dynamics (e.g., openness, supportiveness, conflict management), represent and outcomes. "Leadership essentially means identifying what is possible to do and develop, identifying the people who can do it and empowering them to do it" (McDermott et al., 2011: 370). Thus, developing and empowering people is one of the essential skills of a leader, hence play a major role in determining leaders' effectiveness. The importance of leaders' data driven decision making has been widely recognized in the context of schools (Sergis & Sampson, 2016).); thus, it is assumed that the construct might be useful in another context also. Regarding leaders' performance orientation, Hendricks and Payne (2007: 321) mentioned that "no studies have examined leader goal orientation as an antecedent of leadership effectiveness"; hence initiated to establish leaders' goal orientation as antecedent of leaders' effectiveness. In order to fill the gap as well as to support the findings of Hendricks and Payne (2007), the study has taken to examine the relationship between leaders' performance orientation and leadership effectiveness. In the line of above given discussion, the four constructs namely communication, developing and empowering, data driven decision-making and performance orientation have been taken as managerial dimension and accordingly the effect of these dimensions on leadership effectiveness have been assessed.
H2: Managerial Dimension (i.e., communication, developing and empowering, data driven decision making and performance orientation) will be positively related to leadership effectiveness.
The propositions in literature suggest hypothesizing the relation between leaders' self-concept and their effectiveness. For instance, Lapierre et al. (2012:766) have found that "leaders with a stronger relational self-concept provided more career support to followers who displayed higher (vs. lower) task performance". Another study of Goldsmith et al. (1996) also explored the leaders' self-concept for identifying fashion leaders. However, it is observed that the effect of leaders' self-concept on leadership effectiveness is rarely investigated, hence needs to be studied. Exploring the effect of leaders' integrity may bring another interesting...
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