Leadership Without Easy Answers

"... Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Monroe, Benjamin Franklin - is attributed not to a demographic fluke but to the extraordinary times in which these men lived.  Instead of asserting that all of them shared a common set of traits, situationalists suggest that the times called forth an assortment of men with various talents and leadership styles.  Indeed, many of them performed marvelously in some jobs but quite poorly in others."  (17)

Leadership Without Easy Answers

"The jockey of the lead horse is leading nobody, except perhaps unintentionally to the extent that other jockeys set strategy and strive harder to overtake him."  (16)

Leadership Without Easy Answers

Heifetz, R.  (1994).  Leadership without easy answers.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"...one should always remember that not all dimensions are equally salient or important in a given culture."  (155)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"There is probably no more important category for cultural analysis than the study of how time is conceived and used in a group or organization.  Time management imposes a social order and conveys status and intention."  (134)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"There must evolve some consensus on what symbolically and actually is defined as a reward or punishment and on the manner in which it is to be administered."  (107)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"As Freud pointed out long ago, one of the models we bring to any new group situation is our own family model, the group in which we spent most of our early life."  (105)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"Thus, for example, the mission of a university must balance the learning needs of the students (which includes housing, feeding, and often acting as in loco parentis), the needs of the faculty to do research and further knowledge, the needs of the community to have a repository for knowledge and skill, and the needs of the financial investors to have a viable institution, and, ultimately even the needs of society to have an institution to facilitate the transition of late adolescents into the labor market and to sort them into skill groups."  (75)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"In fact, if a basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members will find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable."  (28)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

"For academic knowledge to be useful, it must illuminate experience and provide explanations for what we observe that puzzles or excites us."  (2)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

Macrocultures - "Nations, ethnic and religious groups, occupations that exist globally"

Organizational cultures - "Private, public, nonprofit, government organizations"

Subcultures - "Occupational groups within organizations"

Microcultures - "Microsystems within or outside organizations"

(2)

Organizational Culture and Leadership

Schein, E.H.  (2010).  Organizational culture and leadership.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The Nature of Leadership

"They forget that the most talented people chafe at bureaucracy and hierarchy.  They forget that intrinsic rewards are the best motivators.  They refuse to believe that work should feel like fun, or better than fun."  (341)

The Nature of Leadership

"What impact does the public's knowledge that reality is being manipulated have on its trust in its leaders?  And how does the Internet affect modern leadership, given its ability to create buzz about an individual or vilify him or her with a keystroke?  These are things we need to know in an age where television cameras can create seeming character and instant polling allows leaders to change their positions in midspeech."  (341)

The Nature of Leadership

"To an outsider, it is almost impossible to imagine that any organization would prefer silence to honest criticism that saves lives.  But such deadly organizational quietism happens all the time."  (338)

The Nature of Leadership

"As Harvard Business School scholar Lynn Sharp Paine says of morality and business, ethics does not always pay, but it always counts."  (337)

The Nature of Leadership

"Whereas virtues come naturally to those who practice them, they are not mindless habits.  People must practice them fully conscious of knowing that what they are doing is morally right."  (325)

The Nature of Leadership

"Power comes with a temptation to do evil and an obligation to do good."  (322)

The Nature of Leadership

"Achieving their objectives for social justice while empowering and disciplining followers to use nonviolent resistance is morally good leadership."  (315)

The Nature of Leadership

"Locke argued that if altruism is about self-sacrifice, then leaders who want to be truly altruistic will pick a job that they do not like or value, expect no rewards or pleasure from their job or achievements, and give themselves over totally to serving the wants of others.  He then asked, 'Would anyone want to be a leader under such circumstances?'  (Avolio & Locke, 2002, pp. 169-171).  One might also ask, Would we even want such a person as a leader?"  (314)

The Nature of Leadership

"...Immanuel Kant (1993) argued that because we cannot always know the results of our actions, moral judgments should be based on the right moral principles and not contingent on outcomes."  (309)

The Nature of Leadership

"...scholars in history, biology, and other subjects do not all agree on the definition of their subject, and, even if they did, it would not help them to understand it better.  Futhermore, scholars do not determine the meaning of a word for the general public."  (305)

The Nature of Leadership

"Culture can thus spring from three sources: (a) the beliefs, values, and assumptions of founders of organizations; (b) the learning experiences of group members as their organization evolves, and (c) new beliefs, values, and assumptions brought by new members and leaders (Schein, 1992)."  (275)

The Nature of Leadership

"An immediate implication of Wofford's model is that the likelihood that a leader will utilize a particular behavioral style is contingent on that leader first establishing appropriate scheme in memory.  Sensibly, individuals cannot act in a transformational manner unless they possess the appropriate schemata and scripts, nor can they regulate their behavior around a transformational identity unless they fully understand what it means to be transformational."  (128)

The Nature of Leadership

"Likewise, some individuals can be successful as leaders in some situations but not in others.  We would argue, however, that such success is a function of narrowly prescriptive leadership contexts that respond to a specific set of leader competencies, such as lower-level or direct line supervision (Jacobs & Jaques, 1987b; Zaccaro, 2001).  As leadership situations become more complex and varied, we suspect that personal attributes play a more substantial role in predicting success."  (104)

The Nature of Leadership

"The wise leader, according to Lao-tzu, was to be selfless, hardworking, honest, able to time the appropriateness of actions, fair in handling conflict, and able to 'empower' others (to use a more current vernacular).  Early and medieval mythology (e.g. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King) focused on the attributes of heroes, whereas biblical writing emphasized wisdom and service to others as leadership qualities.  Plato's Republic (1960) emphasized that in the ideal nation-state, effective leaders used reasoning capacities and wisdom to lead others....  His student Aristotle argued in Politics (1900) that leaders were to help others seek virtue; they would do so by themselves being virtuous."  (101)

The Nature of Leadership

"... leadership is not merely an academic interest; practical research arguably should offer insights into application and development of leadership within real-world settings, something qualitative methodologies have yet to demonstrate."  (82)

The Nature of Leadershipt

"However, a basic assumption is that individuals have the capacity to learn how to engage in various 'styles,' thus implying that leadership is not merely behavioral, as mentioned above, but that it may also be learned, much like any other competency."  (80)

The Nature of Leadership

"The practice of acknowledging study shortcomings is also congruent with the philosophy of science position that all research is flawed in one way or another and that knowledge can be built only through multiple investigations of the same phenomena, using different samples, methods, analytic practices, and so forth."  (70)

The Nature of Leadership

"Most self-managing teams have highly interdependent activities and are responsible for producing a distinct product or service.  Usually, the members have similar functional backgrounds, and they often take turns performing the various tasks for which the team is responsible."  (37)

The Nature of Leadership

"The person designated to perform the specialized leadership role is considered to be 'the leader.'  Others are considered to be 'followers' even though they themselves may help the leader in performing leadership functions.  Furthermore, it is possible for a person to be a leader and a follower at the same time..."  (25)

The Nature of Leadership

"To start, it is important to realize that there are many definitions of leadership - not just one - and, of course, a leadership scholar or practitioner's purpose will have a strong impact on the definition selected."  (25)

The Nature of Leadership

"There paradigmatic antecedents are concerned with the ontology and epistemology of leadership.  In other words, what is the nature of reality and how can we know what we know?"  (23)

The Nature of Leadership

"...we use the term 'paradigm' to reflect the commonly held perspectives of leadership academicians and practitioners concerning their ontological, epistemological, and methodological beliefs."  (23)

The Nature of Leadership

"It is only through efforts to consolidate findings that leadership research will go to the next level - where we may finally be able to construct and test a general theory of leadership.  Previous research has laid the foundations for such a theory."  (11)

The Nature of Leadership

"These contextual factors can include leader hierarchical level, national culture, leader-follower gender, organizational characteristics, among others."  (10)

The Nature of Leadership

"This position would suggest that what leaders do is largely irrelevant and that leader ratings may reflect simply the implicit leadership theories that individuals carry 'in their heads.'"  (8)

The Nature of Leadership

"LMX theory [relational] describes the nature of the relations between the leaders and their followers."  (8)

The Nature of Leadership

Antonakis, J., Cianciolo, A.T., & Sternberg, R.J.  (2004).  The nature of leadership.  Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.