Leadership and the fate of organizations.

Abstract

This article concerns the real-world importance of leadership for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leadership and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible. The authors next offer a taxonomy of the dependent variables used as criteria in leadership studies. A review of research using this taxonomy suggests that the vast empirical literature on leadership may tell us more about the success of individual managerial careers than the success of these people in leading groups, teams, and organizations. The authors then summarize the evidence showing that leaders do indeed affect the performance of organizations--for better or for worse--and conclude by describing the mechanisms through which they do so.

Where Have All the “Workers” Gone? A Critical Analysis of the Unrepresentativeness of Our Samples Relative to the Labor Market in the Industrial–Organizational Psychology Literature

“…First, leadership theories often focus on alignment, strategy, and communication of goals from the strategic apex through management to the frontline workers (e.g., Bass & Avolio, 1994;Kaiser, Hogan, & Craig, 2008). This creates an assumptionstated or unstated-that fixing management will fix organizational problems, so studying management and managers is a good idea.…”

When overconfidence is revealed to others: Testing the status-enhancement theory of overconfidence

“…Our research contributes knowledge of an additional factor, overconfidence, which biases the allocation of status. Individuals may be promoted for exhibiting overconfidence, just as they are often promoted for skill at managing impressions rather than their actual leadership skills (for a review, see Kaiser, Hogan, & Craig, 2008).…”

Does talking the talk help walking the walk? An examination of the effect of vocal attractiveness in leader effectiveness

“…The rich literature on leader emergence and links to follower perceptions of the leader shows that when a leader induces positive perceptions from followers, those people work harder for the leader and make him or her more successful as a result (e.g., Johnson 2008). To be sure, perceptions of leader effectiveness influence the organizational success factors suggested by Kaiser et al (2008). Thus, the study of what drives these perceptions is much more important than the outcomes themselves since we want to learn how leaders are perceived as effective in addition to whether or not they are effective.…”

“…Second, it allows us to extend the goals of our paper by considering mediation mechanisms. Finally, the approach in Study 2 allows us to test the suggestion in the literature that leadership effectiveness outcomes differ in important ways from perceptions of leadership effectiveness (Kaiser et al 2008). …”

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, no research has investigated the effects of vocal attractiveness on perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Kaiser, Hogan, and Craig (2008) state that "much leadership research concerns how leaders are perceived and therefore provides limited insight into leadership effectiveness" (p. 107). Their argument is that the focus should be on outcomes, especially outcomes at the group or organizational level.…”