Lecture 2: Leadership Overview & Keohane Flashcards
what are the challenges of leadership?
- Representing everyone’s wishes as much as you can
- Jurisdiction
- Knowing when to step down
- Compromise
- Stereotypes
- Keeping your weaknesses in check
- Motivating others
we take leadership for granted until there is:
- Failure of leadership
- Absence of leadership
- Lack of leadership
Nannerl Keohane
- A leading political theorist, the first woman president of Duke University, and former president of Wellesley College
- Examines what leaders do, how and why they do it, and the challenges they face
- Provides a useful set of considerations for understanding and assessing leadership
Keohane argues that leadership:
- Occurs in many contexts
- Has some relationship with power, but not a synonym for holding power
- Involves exercising authority, but not necessarily formal authority
- Can be performed in a variety of ways, from the admirable to the deplorable
- Central to almost all collective social activity
Joseph Rost
argues that leadership as we know it is a 20th-century concept as the word itself did not appear in dictionaries until the 19th-century
counterarguments to Rost’s notion of leadership
many ancient and modern languages have words that can easily be translated as leadership or some synonym
leadership and context
the character of leadership can vary significantly with context
family resemblances and leadership
- Keohane employs Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances when discussing leadership in a different context
- It allows for “meaningful general statements about leadership as an aspect of human social life”
Kehone’s two parts of leadership
- Putting forward ideas for accomplishing group goals
- Bringing together members of the group to act on these suggestions
Leaders must:
- Make decisions
- Devise and implement strategies
- Compromise to achieve goals
- Listen to proposals or petitions from others
- Adjudicate conflict
- Assemble resources and deploy incentives
- Give voice to vision
- Seek counsel and issue statements
- Take stands
- Persuade, require, or force
Max Weber
- Famous 19th-century German sociologist
- Argued for the distinction between power, authority, leadership, and legitimacy
Weber on leadership
Leadership requires the use of power but is also limited by existing power structure and relations (the institutional context)
Weber on power
the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be able to carry out his actions without resistance
Weber on authority
the probability that a command given within a specific context will be obeyed by a given group of people
examples of contextual factors
culture, geography, history, etc.
three leadership styles
- founders
- fixers
- sustainers
founders
establish new organizations
fixers
repair or radically transform existing institutions
sustainers
develop or sustain existing institutions
public vs. private leadership
Private leadership is more concerned with making a profit
James MacGregor Burns’ evaluation of leadership
- Leaders vs. power wielders
- Bad leadership implies no leadership
Joseph Nye’s evaluation of leadership
- Good = effective or morally admirable
- Bad= incompetent or evil
Barbara Kellerman and Jean Lipman-Blumen’s evaluation of leadership
argue for complexity
James MacGregor Burns on transforming leadership
- transforming leadership involves values
- Leadership that provides higher levels of motivation and morality
Sidney Hook on transforming leadership
- Event-making = transformative without the moral uplift
- Juxtaposes event-making with eventful leadership
Keohane on the relationship between leaders and followers
- Followers define what is possible for a leader
- They provide opportunity by silence or acquiescence and set limits to what is feasible by strong negative reactions
- They may also become resisters, withdrawing their support
Barbara Kellerman on the relationship between leaders and followers
followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than their superiors and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line
The spectrum of followership (Kellerman)
the isolate, bystander, participant, activist, and diehard
followers and the complexity of organizations
Typologies of followers differ according to their place in complex organizations
Burns’ concentric rings model
- Secondary, tertiary, and even “lower” leadership at most levels
- Leaders often oversee leaders of smaller units
- Leadership is thus multilayered
leadership across situations
- One can be a follower and a leader
- Furthermore, the difference between leaders and followers can be especially hard to define in a democracy
- Few of us are leaders or followers in every situation
what distinguishes leadership from followership? (Keohane)
A persistent asymmetry of influence between leaders and their followers, so that leaders affect or shape the behaviour of followers to a greater degree than followers affect or shape the behaviour of their leaders
Kenneth Janda on how leaders get accepted by followers
group members identify a leader’s behaviour with the group goal and thus have the right to prescribe behaviour patterns for them concerning their activities as group members
informal leadership
personality, abilities, resources, special knowledge, etc.
formal leadership
- A position in a formal structure or formal status by a legitimizing agent
- This is often understood in terms of authority
coercion and leadership
Neither coercion nor persuasion is needed when one has authority
three types of legitimate authority (Weber)
rational, traditional, and charisma
rational authority
rests on the belief in the legality of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands
traditional authority
ancient recognition, traditional dominance, or habitual orientation
charismatic authority
a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from followers as endowed with supernatural superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities
leadership as a figurative pyramid
below a top leader are other leaders, responsible to the top leader but also charged with leading others
leadership as a flotilla
leadership is needed on each ship and an overall leader whose job it is to make sure everyone stays on course
two key elements to leadership
- reciprocity
- selection of subordinates
leadership as relational
The actions and decisions of leaders are shaped by the actual and anticipated reactions and preferences of followers
relational leadership in a democracy
This is particularly true in a democracy, where leaders are chosen by the followers and charged with carrying out their will
following
joining with the leader, whether through offering energy or ideas or by simply going along
resisting
resisting the course determined by the leader
government
leaders who are in power at any particular time
state
the formal constitutional regime that provides the framework for the leadership
resistance activities across situations
There is a spectrum of resistance activities
