Lecture Leadership: Enhancing the lessons of experience (4/e) – Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - Assessing leadership and measuring its effects. Although this chapter focused on leadership research, there are several reasons it is relevant for leadership practitioners even though they are unlikely to actually conduct leadership research themselves. First, organizations can and do use a number of techniques to assess the values, personality, intelligence, and behaviors for any applicant pool.

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CHAPTER  FOUR

Assessing Leadership and 

Measuring Its Effects

Conventional Wisdom About 

Leadership

better leaders.

are more effective.

Research Findings About Leadership

necessarily make better leaders. 

consistently performed less well than those  who were less smart (Fiedler et al.) 

bases of power to meet situational  demands

Model 

The set of skills, knowledge, abilities, or  other attributes that are relevant to 

successful performance in a particular job. 

Multiple Hurdles Approach

Paper­and­pencil 

measures Interviews

Assessment centers

The Relevance and Legality Of  Unstructured Interview Questions 

would you be and why?

anyone, who would it be and why?

children?

leadership positions? 

Measures Of Successful and  Unsuccessful Leadership

performance ratings

• Subordinates’ ratings of satisfaction, 

organizational climate, morale,  motivation, and leadership 

effectiveness

Drawbacks Of Using Superiors’ 

Ratings

of performance because supervisors: 

– May not take the time.

– May be unaware or unfamiliar with a leader’s 

performance.

– May have difficulty dealing with conflict.

• Ratings can also be biased by friendships, 

perceptual sets, and attribution errors. 

Drawbacks Of Using Subordinate 

Ratings

unmotivated toward work no matter what  the leader does

guarantee effective performance

effective because he or she does not make  them work very hard and vise­versa. 

Variations of Leadership studies

Research method Surveys Experiments

Time frame Static Longitudinal

Research objective Replication Explore new issues

Locus of 

leadership

Heroic individual Shared/distributed

Causality Unidirectional Reciprocal

Data sources Single Multiple

Level of leader Supervisor Executive

Feature       Common       Uncommon

Source: G. Yukl, Reflections and Directions in Leadership Research

Critical Thinking Questions  Practitioners Should Ask

or behaviors are being assessed?

determined?

assessment to success?