Should you take charge? Should you work to build consensus? Victor Vroom argues that effective leaders are sensitive to the nuances of their organizations, cultural environments, and short- and long-term objectives
Q: Do people tend to overlook the importance of situations in understanding leadership?
I think they do. People are looking for universals. They want the one “best” leadership style. Each pundit has his or her own “10 Principles of Leadership”—truisms about leadership that are not phrased in situational terms. They’re presented as always correct. A few of us have been doing research on contingency or situational theories of leadership, which emphasize the fact that different kinds of organizations, different kinds of challenges, and different kinds of decisions require different leadership styles.
A lot of leaders go about things that way, not developing the potential talents of the people they are working with. They don’t develop teams of people who can work closely together. And they don’t develop what some people call “goal alignment,” in which people are willing to sacrifice their own personal motives for the goals of the organization. That level of commitment comes when you feel as though you’ve got a voice in decision making and care not just about what you get out of it but how well the organization functions.
Q: How does gender play into the leadership approach?
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Qn, a publication of the Yale School of Management http://qn.som.yale.edu]