In their article “What Have We Learned That Is Critical in Understanding Leadership Perceptions and Leader-Performance Relations?”, Robert G. Lord and Jessica E. Dinh review research on leadership perceptions and performance, and provide research-based principles that can provide new directions for future leadership theory and research.
What is leadership?
Leadership is tricky to define. The authors state: “Leadership is an art that has significant impact on individuals, groups, organizations, and societies”.
It is not just about one person telling everyone else what to do. Leadership happens in the connections between people – it is something that grows between a leader and followers, almost like a partnership. And it usually does not involve just one leader either. There can be leadership shared across a whole team or organization.
The big question is: how does all this connecting and partnering actually get a team to perform well? That is what researchers are still trying to understand.
What we do know about leadership
Researchers have learned a lot about what makes a leader “seem” effective to the people around them. Certain personality traits, behaviors, speaking styles and even body language can make people think “oh, that person is a good leader.”
But figuring out how those leaders actually influence performance over months and years is tougher. It is hard for scientists to measure stuff that happens slowly over time. More research is still needed to connect the dots between leaders’ actions today and results years later.
How people think about leadership matters
Learning science shows that how people process information shapes their perceptions, emotions and behaviors. So to understand leadership, researchers are now looking into things like:
- How do the automatic, gut-level parts of people’s brains affect leadership moments? (This means how emotions and instincts influence leadership)
- How do leaders’ and followers’ thinking interact?
- How do emotions and body language play a role?
This research might help explain why leadership works or does not work in real teams.
Some pitfalls to avoid
There are a few assumptions that could mislead leadership research:
- Surveys might not catch real leadership behavior, because people’s memories are messy. Their responses involve lots of other stuff beyond just the facts.
- What worked well for leaders in the past might not keep working in a fast-changing world. They cannot just keep doing the same thing.
- Leaders actually have less control than we think. Their organization’s success depends on unpredictable factors way beyond what they do.
The future of leadership research has to focus more on the complex thinking and system-wide stuff that is hard to see but really important. The human brain and human groups are just too complicated for simple explanations.
Reference: Lord, R.G., Dinh, J.E., 2014. What Have We Learned That Is Critical in Understanding Leadership Perceptions and Leader-Performance Relations? Industrial and Organizational Psychology 7, 158–177.