“Our first experience with leadership occurs the day we are born,” is a statement made by Peter Northouse as he tries to explain the premise behind the psychodynamic approach to leadership. (Northouse, pg.320) I began to think about this idea of leadership and how it is presumably initiated at such an early age in one’s life and what I inevitably came up with instead pointed me to another entirely different approach towards leadership…the style approach. This approach follows the premise that leadership is ultimately tied to behaviors. Northouse explains this very notion, “The style approach emphasizes the behavior of the leader. The style approach focuses exclusively on what leaders do and how they act.” (Northouse, pg.75) Said a different way by Paul Muchinsky, a well-known student of organizational psychology, “The behavioral approach to leadership shifts the focus from traits that leaders possess to specific behaviors or actions in which leaders engage. The behavioral approach thus tries to understand leadership more in terms of “doing” than “having.” (Muchinsky, pg.400)
So let’s consider the stated hypothesis that to be an effective leader, one must act in a certain way. There are supposedly two main leadership behaviors that are indicative of the style approach: initiating structure and consideration. Initiating structure ultimately refers to the methods by which supposed leaders get work done. Initiating structure is related to the concept of task behaviors since these actions are primarily concerned with one aspect, task accomplishment. Leaders, who exhibit this behavior place major emphasis on completing the task at hand and subsequently, place very little importance on building lasting relationships with their subordinates. Consideration, on the other hand, refers to the means with which a supposed leader creates and sustains interpersonal relationships with his workers. Consideration is also related to a concept termed relationship behaviors as they are concerned with ensuring that your followers are invariably comfortable working for you. Leaders, who exhibit this behavior place a great deal of importance on building and maintaining satisfactory relationships with their workers at the possible expense of task completion.
I played around with these concepts and different leadership approaches and then tested both to see if the stated hypothesis was, in fact, correct. (Does either/both behavior(s) ultimately correlate with effective leadership?)
I chose an interesting method as a means of testing the theory. I looked back to my childhood, you know, “my first experience with leadership”. I thought of the ways in which my mother, a single parent, raised me and my sister. I thought of the methods that she used and then tried to correlate them to one of the critical behaviors associated with the style approach to leadership. What I inevitably found was that my mother was very high in initiating structure and only moderate in consideration behaviors. I can remember her saying, “I am not your friend and, no I am not trying to be your friend. My job is to make sure you do something meaningful with your life” She was primarily focused on task accomplishment, to a fault, which was ultimately her way of ensuring that I would eventually make something of myself. I wonder if that parenting philosophy has changed and if so, what effect that has had on the present state of the family dynamic in this country. I know how I turned out and with that being said, what method/behavior that was used to ensure I would turn out this way.
Some supposed experts claim that these two type of behaviors I discussed are independent of each other, which means supposed leaders can exhibit both, neither or some variation in between. Highly exhibiting one does not necessarily mean that you will be deficient in the other. There have been arguments claiming effective leadership was related to high consideration behaviors, while at other times there are claims that it is related to high initiation of structure behaviors.
Based on what was evident in my childhood and what is now evident in my adult life, I tend to agree with the results of the following study conducted in 2004 by three researchers, Judge, Piccolo and Ilies. The study tested the validity of both behavior models that are the basis for the style approach to leadership. The results indicated that, “Initiation of structure was highly correlated with leader effectiveness, while consideration was predictive of workers being satisfied with their leader.” (Muchinksy, pg.401)
References
Northouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and Practice. (2013) SAGE Publications. Thousand Oaks, CA.
Muchinsky, Paul M. Psychology Applied to Work. (2012) Hypergraphic Press. Summerfield, NC.