Chapter 8: Relational and Distributed Theories of Leadership

Question 1

self-concept

Answer 1

how we perceive ourselves through attitudes, values, perceptions, emotion

Question 2

Follower-centric approaches cultivate the opinion that followers’ self-concept

Answer 2

directly influences the leader–follower relationship and effectiveness, which has given rise to relational and distributed leadership theories.

Question 3

Studying micro aspects of human interaction is rooted in work on the sociology of mind first enunciated by

Answer 3

the German sociologist Georg Simmel and developed by the American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead

Question 4

For Simmel, society is

Answer 4

constituted of a web of interactional forces between individuals and groups, and his focus on the concept of reciprocity emphasized that every single social phenomenon has meaning only through its relationships with others.

Question 5

Dyad

Answer 5

Group of 2 people

Question 6

Triad

Answer 6

Group of three members, more stable then a diad

Question 7

In general, the larger the size of the group,

Answer 7

the more its members can become dissimilar to each other, and the more independence and intellectual development can take place. This phenomenon has obvious implications for leading work teams.

Question 8

human intersubjectivity

Answer 8

a myriad of human interactions, individual self-reflection and meaning that is modified through social interaction

Question 9

symbolic interactionism

Answer 9

After his death, Mead’s work became known as this

Question 10

The premise of relational leadership is that

Answer 10

leadership is a two-way influence relationship between a leader and a follower, and the quality of the relationship affects attitudes and behaviours

Question 11

The relational leadership theory argues that leadership effectiveness hinges on the

Answer 11

ability of a leader to create high-quality relationships with others in the organization.

Question 12

Relational leadership defintion

Answer 12

A social influence process through which emergent coordination … and change … are constructed and produced

Question 13

ontology debates

Answer 13

which is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of social reality

Question 14

Two ontological debates are of particular relevance to organizational researchers, and these revolve around two questions:

Answer 14

‘Does social reality exist independent of our perceptions?’ and ‘Is what passes for reality merely a set of mental constructions?’

Question 15

The more we affirm ‘yes’ to the first question,

Answer 15

the more we move towards the positivist position

Scholars holding this view maintain that there is such a thing as social reality, and the job of the researcher is to discover what that reality is

Question 16

The more we affirm ‘yes’ to the second question,

Answer 16

the more we move towards the social constructionist position.

Scholars holding this view empathize with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) famous adage that there are no facts, only interpretations.

Question 17

Ontological debates also revolve around two other questions:

Answer 17

‘Is social reality largely fixed, something that individuals and groups have to confront but over which they have little or no control, akin to the weather?’

and

‘Is social reality not necessarily pre-existing but fluid, and open to be shaped by individuals and groups through their social interactions and agency?’.

Question 18

Leadership theorists looking at relationships through a positivist prism treat leaders and followers as

Answer 18

stable entities who have different roles in the organizational context.

Question 19

Leader–member exchange (LMX) theory

Answer 19

focuses on the quality of the dyadic relationship between a leader and an individual

It argues that because followers are uniquely different, leaders should establish a special relationship with each of his or her followers, rather than treating followers as a homogeneous group.

Question 20

The quality of LMX can be affected by

Answer 20

leader attributes, such as emotional intelligence, the personality trait agreeableness, ethical behaviour, and support for HRM policies

Question 21

LMX is both a dyadic and dialectical process,

Answer 21

and therefore in order to understand it consideration must be given to the interactional variables between leader and follower

Perception is an example of an interactional variable

Question 22

Perceived high LMX quality is

Answer 22

positively related to feelings of energy in followers, which, in turn, are related to greater involvement in creative work

Question 23

psychological contract

Answer 23

the informal set of expectations and understandings between leader and follower

Question 24

Early LMX research of dyads found two broad types of relationships:

Answer 24

1) those that were based on expanded role responsibilities, which were labelled the in-group
2) a second type of relationships that was based on restricted role responsibilities, which were labelled the out-group

Question 25

Just how a leader chooses who falls into an ‘in’ or ‘out’ group is ambiguous,

Answer 25

but there is evidence that in-group members have attitudes, personality and demographic characteristics that are similar to their leader

Question 26

Members of the in-group

Answer 26

receive more information, support and attention from their leader than do out-group members.

Question 27

Whereas in-group followers

Answer 27

go ‘beyond the contract’ and do extra tasks for the leader, members of the out-group usually work to contract and leave work at the designated time

Question 28

A number of prescriptions stem from this analysis:

Answer 28

a leader may offer certain followers increased involvement in decision making and/or creative work. In turn, these followers may reciprocate by expending even more energy on and having a greater commitment to their work goals. If this happens, such followers become members of the in-group.

Question 29

Less privileged employees who are not offered such a special relationship become members of an _____

Answer 29

out-group

Question 30

Leadership theorists, adopting a positivist perspective, have produced three distinct streams of work:

Answer 30

(1) perceived LMX differentiation (Hooper and Martin, 2008);
(2) relative LMX (Hu and Liden, 2013);
(3) group-level LMX differentiation

Question 31

In contrast, scholars adopting a constructionist position view relationships through a socio-cultural prism

Answer 31

Here self-concept is important

Question 32

The constructionist approach to understanding the nature of relationships draws heavily from

Answer 32

classical social theorists

In particular, Mead’s analysis of the social self is predicated on the belief that ‘individuals’, through language, social interaction and processes of socialization, learn to develop ‘selves’ within society

Question 33

From a constructionist perspective, leadership does not exist as an entity

Answer 33

rather it emerges through processes of interaction and co-construction.

Question 34

There are core orienting principles that seem to be embedded in current conceptualizations of relational leadership:

Answer 34

intersubjectivity,
dialogue,
reflectiveness and
sensemaking

Question 35

Lev Vygotsky’s (1978) cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)

Answer 35

examines the relationship between the human mind (what individuals think and feel) and activity (what individuals do).

It rests on the assumption that consciousness is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual’s social and cultural experience

Question 36

Sensemaking

Answer 36

shapes human relationships, with the premise that social reality is an ongoing achievement that arises from efforts to establish order and understand the events that occur

Question 37

The crux of distributed theories of leadership is that

Answer 37

the role of the leader as a ‘sense giver’ is not determined by the leader’s position in the organizational hierarchy, but by the two-way relationship between leader and follower.

The theory conceptualizes relational leadership as emergent, negotiated and co-constructed through ongoing interaction – a sensemaking process

Question 38

Distributed leadership theories shifts the focus from

Answer 38

hierarchy to heterarchy; from heroic to ‘post heroic’ leadership

Question 39

Heterarchy

Answer 39

The idea is that leadership resides not solely in senior individuals at the top of the organization, but in every person who, in one way or another, takes on the role of leader in a group or team

Question 40

The notion of distributed leadership is not a new concept, although it is called different things in the literature, including

Answer 40

‘dispersed’ (Gordon, 2010), ‘co-leadership’ (Vine et al., 2008), ‘shared’ (Conger and Pearce, 2009) and ‘rotated’ or ‘team’ leadership.

Question 41

Distributed theories of leadership do not disavow vertical leadership, but propose that gifted leaders

Answer 41

‘lead from behind’ by empowering their subordinates

Question 42

Distributed leadership

Answer 42

Researchers have conceptualized distributed leadership as an interactive process disassociated from the organizational hierarchy

the idea of ‘levels’ of leadership linked to different levels of strategic decision making

distributed leadership involves people with less power engaged in operational activities, which, it is argued, can help the development of employee cohesion and vision building

distributed leadership has a positive relationship with performance outcomes

Question 43

Teams and team leadership

Answer 43

employment relationship is characterized by teamworking, flexibility and employee ‘voice’ mechanisms.

Question 44

self-management work teams (SMWT) movement

Answer 44

proclaimed the need for redesigning organizations to allow members to undertake a wider range of tasks, including self-inspection, decision making and leadership responsibilities

Question 45

High-performance team working is generally enacted through mutual leader–follower reciprocation:

Answer 45

leaders develop high-commitment and trust-building work practices, and, in return, subordinates experience higher levels of job autonomy, involvement and leadership engagement

Question 46

Job design

Answer 46

process of assigning tasks to a job, including the interdependency of those tasks to other jobs.

Question 47

In its current phase of development, research on relational and distributed leadership has made several positive contributions to our understanding of leadership

Answer 47

First, LMX theory has significantly increased our understanding of leadership processes through its focus on dyadic and group relationships

Second, the relational constructionist lens offers new insights into relationships beyond the dyad to multi-member networks of relationships, which increase in complexity as the group or team increases in numbers.

Third, a strength of distributed/shared leadership is that it appears to be an important predictor of positive performance outcomes at individual, group or team, and organizational levels of analysis

Question 48

However, scholars have identified a number of conceptual and methodological weaknesses of relational and distributed leadership

Answer 48

First, LMX theory still remains ambiguous in its explanation of how the dyadic relationship develops.

Second, it is unclear how single dyads affect each other and how, for example, income inequality in dyadic relationships affects overall group outcomes. Income inequality is high in the UK: FTSE CEOs earn on average 386 times more than workers on the national living wage

Third, research has shown that workforce diversity and diversity-related policies and practices contribute to organization performance (Ng and Stephenson, 2017), but there is a paucity of empirical research on how diversity affects dyadic and group relationships.

Question 49

Turning to the limits of distributed and shared leadership theories, there are several issues to consider.

Answer 49

First, there is debate among critical workplace scholars regarding the tendency of leadership researchers not to give sufficient consideration to economic (i.e. profit or cost-reduction targets) imperatives and asymetrical power relations

Second, while Wassenaar and Pearce (2018) conclude that there are many precursors that are likely to develop team leadership, there appears to be a marked insufficiency of research evidence about the extent of change in the practices, particularly outside the domain of education, which give expression to the central concepts of shared leadership

Finally, while evidence mounts that high-quality LMX relationships (e.g. Martin et al., 2016) and team leadership (e.g. Pearce et al., 2014) can have positive effects on performance outcomes, numerous observers recognize significant methodological challenges.