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2021 | Book

The History of Thinking About Leadership Read chapter Read first chapter

Leadership

No More Heroes

Authors: Dr. David Pendleton, Ph.D. Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

Leadership is most needed in times of change, uncertainty and crisis. We are living through those times.

To support leaders in all spheres, this book provides a guide to the territory of leadership and its three domains: the strategic (head), the operational (hands) and the interpersonal (heart). It describes the tasks leaders have to achieve and explains the psychology of leadership based in personality. It argues strongly that complete leadership is the province of diverse teams of leaders made up of complementary differences.

And now the best has just got better. The new edition shows how leadership has to change over time, describes how the most highly rated leaders achieve their goals and also elucidates the neuroscience of leadership to enhance understanding of leadership’s foundations.

Pendleton, Furnham and Cowell’s work is a powerful combination of the best research on the psychology of leadership and years of iteration and practical implementation in the field – working with thousands of leaders from all walks of life and learning from their successes and challenges.

There is no one secret recipe for success as a leader.

What this book provides is a framework to enable you to achieve success in your own way.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
1. The History of Thinking About Leadership
Abstract
The topic of leadership is controversial. There are those who argue that leadership is greatly overvalued: that the success of organisations derives at least as much from serendipity as from strategy, vision or leadership. They argue that attempts to identify the characteristics of great leaders have proven to be inconsequential or contradictory and that generaliseable lessons about leadership are elusive. We believe that these arguments may have some validity but that they do not represent the overwhelming weight of research evidence; evidence that has become more convincing since the first edition of this volume.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
2. Leadership’s Impact on the Performance of Organisations
Abstract
In the previous chapter, we argued that leadership has a pervasive effect on organisations. Yet, this is far from universally accepted. There are still those who take the view that leadership is vastly over-emphasised when explaining the performance of organisations. In this chapter, we will consider these arguments.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
3. The Primary Colours of Leadership
Abstract
In the previous chapter, the part played by culture and climate in the success of an organisation and the impact of the leader on these and other organisational features were explored and supported from research. This chapter switches from an emphasis on previous research and thinking and starts to outline more of our own ideas and propositions.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
4. What Do Highly Rated Leaders Do?
Abstract
By defining the tasks of leadership in Chap. 3, we have left it to leaders to find their own, unique approaches to achieving each task. In this chapter, however, we offer the tactics deployed by those leaders who have been highly rated by business psychologists in leadership assessments conducted by the Edgecumbe Consulting Group and which have been peer reviewed for consistency. In so doing, we do not suggest that other leaders need to address the tasks in these ways, but rather that these tactics work particularly well according to the research conducted on the assessment database of several thousand executives. In addition, in the following sections, we offer our judgement of tactics which may be the most powerful differentiators between the best and the rest.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
5. Five Enablers of Leading
Abstract
In the previous two chapters, we described and defined the Primary Colours Model of leadership and what highly rated leaders do to achieve its tasks. The model describes the three domains of leadership—the strategic, the operational and the interpersonal. We also looked briefly at five enablers of leadership that lie at the centre of the model: the area we have called leading. These are each described by a single verb—inspire, focus, enable, reinforce and learn. This chapter explores in more detail how the enablers are translated into leadership behaviours.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
6. The Improbability of Being a Complete Leader
Abstract
This chapter is in two parts. The first part describes three arguments why logically, empirically and psychologically it is improbable that an individual leader will be extremely good at all aspects of leadership. Not only does common sense suggest the improbability of this, awareness of the facets that make up personality and the evidence from many thousands of interviews we have conducted with top executives support this view. The second part describes three different types of jobs and three journeys that lead people to them. It provides further support for the contention that the various elements of leadership require different skills and are likely to appeal to different sorts of people. If we are right, the implications are profound.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
7. Building a Leadership Team
Abstract
We saw in Chap. 2 how the impact of the leader is key to creating the culture of an organisation: the common practices and beliefs its members share. Leaders also have a disproportionate effect on the climate, or how it feels for those working there. The culture and climate affect the degree of employee engagement, and thereby both the amount of discretionary effort they put in, and their intention to stay. Climate and culture have an impact on the bottom line: on the results of the organisation in terms of productivity, creativity and profits, and on levels of employee retention.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
8. Do You have to be Smart to be a Leader?
Abstract
In the last few chapters, we have described the various elements of leadership. We now turn to three related questions. In this chapter, we consider the question of intelligence: do you have to be smart to be a leader, and, if so, in what way? In the following chapter, we examine the evidence on personality and ask what are the characteristics most associated with effective leadership? In Chap. 10, we consider what happens when it all goes wrong: when leaders fail and derail.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
9. The Impact of Personality on Leadership
Abstract
Chapter 8 has demonstrated that the relationship between intelligence and leadership is not as strong as we might expect. Because leaders have to gather, interpret and integrate vast amounts of information in their work, and develop strategies and solve problems, it would seem reasonable to expect intelligence to play a major role in leadership effectiveness. Yet, the effect, as we have seen, is moderately small and accounts for no more than 7.5% of the variance in leadership effectiveness, and only when leaders are ‘directive’ (Judge et al. 2004). This is partly due to the fact that to get to a position of leadership you have to be (or at least, seem) pretty bright and therefore there is not as much variance in the abilities of people near the top as there is in the population at large.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
10. When It All Goes Wrong: Leaders Who Fail and Derail
Abstract
In the previous chapters, we have focused on leadership success: how it is to be defined, explained and encouraged. Here, we turn to the opposite: leadership failure. How and why does it go wrong and what might be done to prevent it?
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
11. A Programme of Action
Abstract
In the preceding chapters, we have set out four propositions. First, we have argued that leadership has to deal with the demands of three domains: strategic, operational and interpersonal. We have described these domains as overlapping and comprising seven tasks as described by the Primary Colours Model.
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
Correction to: Leadership: No More Heroes
David Pendleton, Adrian F. Furnham, Jonathan Cowell
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Leadership
Authors
Dr. David Pendleton
Ph.D. Adrian F. Furnham
Jonathan Cowell
Copyright Year
2021
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-60437-0
Print ISBN
978-3-030-60436-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60437-0