Friday, September 28, 2007

Links to 3 great academic articles on leadership

Defining Leadership: A Review of Past, Present, and Future Ideas, by Matthew R. Fairholm - this is a 49 page document that surveys leadership theory - it is cheaper and easier to digest that buying a text book for an MBA course

Defining leadership is a recent pursuit. And many researchers lament the progress (or lack of progress) made in understanding and defining leadership. Bennis and Nanus conclude that “[n]ever have so many labored so long to say so little.” Rost is even more indicting when he comments that “these attempts to define leadership have been confusing, varied, disorganized, idiosyncratic, muddled, and, according to conventional wisdom, quite unrewarding.”

Many people are satisfied with the well known definitional concept of “I know it when I see it.”

This 49 page summary first provides a review of four historical threads of leadership thought and discusses the debate about the relationships between management and leadership. It then turns to a discussion of broader philosophical trends of leadership theory, such as values based transformational leadership, leader/follower interactions and followership, and sense-making conceptions of leadership.

Four V’s of Leadership, by Matt Fairholm -

According to Fairholm the Four V’s of Leadership are: Values, Vision, Vector, and Voice.
  • Values trigger behavior and reflect meaning, purpose, and commitment;
  • Vision operationalizes values;
  • Vectors operationalize vision and add direction;
  • Voice cements the leadership relationship.
In today’s organizations it makes sense to focus on what is meant by leadership and management. “Leader" is a title an individual may have. It may connote someone who practices leadership or it may merely connote the head person of a group, regardless of the functions and role he or she performs. Thus, leader and leadership do not necessarily reflect the same thing.

Leader is a title, while leadership is an action, a phenomenon, a relationship, that is not necessarily related to position. Manager is perhaps more straightforward.

A manager holds a position of authority and because of that hierarchical status can do some things in an organization that others cannot. Doing the stuff of management is the qualifier for who may be a manager, but merely being a manager, however, is not ipso facto leadership.

Regardless of the perspective of leadership and management one holds, using the concepts of the Four Vs discussed in this paper provides a useful framework to understand and apply both tools to the organizations in which we function.

Themes and Theory of Leadership: James MacGregor Burns and the Philosophy of Leadership, by Matt Fairholm -

A professor of management once told a friend, that if he comes upon an article on leadership and notices the bibliography does not include Leadership by James MacGregor Burns (1978), he dismisses it as unthoughtful and incomplete. That is quite a litmus test. Nevertheless, many share the view that anyone who claims to have thought seriously about the concept of leadership, must wrestle with the ideas in Burns' book. It is a seminal work; perhaps it is the one book that secured leadership theory and practice as a legitimate field of study.

This article reviews the major themes of Burns’ book, discuss the two concepts that are most often debated and studied (i.e. transactional and transforming leadership), and suggest that these two concepts are important mainly as they help to elucidate the real focus of the book -- a general theory of leadership that is inherently based on interpersonal relationships, motives, and values. Doing this will help explain why some who focus on the checklists and measurements of organizational effectiveness often confuse the distinctions between the concepts and functions of leadership and management.

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