9789144127026

The LEadership model The Art of Matching Individual and Organizational Characteristics

Gerry Larsson Josi Lundin Ann Zander

Original title: Ledarskapsmodellen © Studentlitteratur, Lund, Sweden, 2017

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Art. No 39974 ISBN 978-91-44-12702-6 First edition 1:1 © The authors and Studentlitteratur 2018 studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Translation: Rikard Ehnsiö Cover design: Jens Martin/Signalera Cover illustration: yod67/Shutterstock Printed by Dimograf, Poland 2018

CONTENTS

Author presentation 5 Introduction 7

1 Introduction 9 Definitions of leadership 10 The historical background of the Leadership Model 11 Idea, target group and outline 14 2 The Leadership Model 15 Leader characteristics 17 Contextual characteristics 17 Leadership styles 17 Practical application 18 3 Leader characteristics 19 Basic prerequisites 20 Desirable competencies 29 4 Contextual characteristics 41 Group 42 Organization 55 External environment 61 The influence of context on leadership 63 T H E AU T H O R S A N D S T U D E N T L I T T E R AT U R

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Contents

5 Leadership styles 69 Developmental leadership 71 Conventional leadership 79 Destructive leadership 82 Relationships between leadership styles 85 6 Combinations of leadership behaviors 91 Social smoothness 92 Boundary spanners 95 Decision-making under stress 96 7 Indirect leadership 99 Studies on indirect leadership 102 The Indirect Leadership model 104 Final reflections 115 8 Development of leaders 117 Early factors of influence 117 Development of leaders in the workplace 118 Leadership training 120

Appendices

Appendix 1 Measuring contextual characteristics – The Contextual Leadership Profile (CLP) 134 Appendix 2 Measuring destructive leadership – Destrudo-L 136 References 139 Index 149

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

There are many views on leadership. What about these two: “When it comes to leadership, it all comes down to the individual!”

“When it comes to leadership, it all comes down to the social context!”

Who is right? Our hypothesis is that they are both wrong! We believe that the best way of explaining and approaching leadership is to see it as an interaction between the leader as an individual and the external context.

Hence, our leadership model is based on the interactional individualsituation paradigm, perhaps the most accepted of them all in behavioral sciences (Endler & Magnusson 1976).

Before discussing attempts to define leadership, we first discuss the term “leader.” In popular science, writers sometimes make a point of distinguishing between “manager” and “leader.” The notion here is that manager is the formal designation for someone who has been appointed to serve as a manager. Leader, on the other hand, is something you become as a result of the way you are, regardless of whether or not you are formally appointed to be one. In this book, we do not strictly distinguish between the terms manager and leader, but use them more or less synonymously, except in contexts directly related to informal leadership. Furthermore, there is no support in academic literature for this distinction, probably due to terms such as leadership and management having been assigned multiple and largely overlapping meanings.

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Definitions of leadership There are many definitions of leadership. In his classic work Leadership, Burns (1978) noted that there were more than 130 definitions. The currently most comprehensive inventory has been performed by Bass and Bass (2008).

They sort various definitions according to the three following headings: • leader-centered definitions • leadership defined as the interaction between the leader and those

being led

• leadership as an effect, an instrument for achieving objectives

Bass and Bass (2008) conclude that there is no point trying to find the one and only true definition. It is better to choose your definition on the basis of which methodological and contextual aspects of leadership you are interested in.

Nevertheless, we believe that there is a point to defining the term leadership. In the context of a major research project under the name of GLOBE, involving 84 researchers from 56 countries, the following definition was introduced: [Leadership is] the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.

House et al. 1999, p. 13

This definition emphasizes the importance of the leader as a person.

Another definition, which places more emphasis on leadership as a process, is presented by Yukl (2002, p. 7): Leadership is the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how it can be done effectively, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish the shared objectives.

Both of these definitions provide a good framework for the leadership model we present below. First, however, we take a look at the past and discuss the historical background of the model.

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The historical background of the Leadership Model In 1997, a research group was spontaneously formed at the Swedish Defence University, which was referred to as the Military Leadership Group (MLG).

After a couple of years, this group came to include seven individuals.1 The aim was to develop Swedish military leadership on the basis of scientific research. We had two key points of departure. One concerned our own studies on leadership in stressful conditions, particularly in connection with the wars in former Yugoslavia during the first half of the 1990s (Andersson 2001, Johansson 2001, Larsson 2002, Michel 2005).

The second point of departure was a traditional review of academic literature on leadership. What inspired us the most was the American model Transformational Leadership (Bass), which then, and still today, was the dominant leadership model in terms of number of articles published in high-ranking international journals. With some skill and a little bit of luck, we fairly quickly became acquainted with the main representatives of the model, professors Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio. We learned the American model and brought it back home to Sweden. It soon became clear, however, that it partially needed to be “Scandinaviazed” to fit our context. This should not be seen as a critique of the United States and American culture, just that there are some differences in relation to our own culture. Through our continued research and some test training sessions, we were ready to present the Swedish model Developmental Leadership at the beginning of the 2000s.

DL and IL In 2003, the first academic publication on Developmental Leadership (DL) was published in an international academic journal (Larsson et al. 2003).

This was an important milestone, as several years of work had borne fruit and the model had now received recognition in the academic community.

That same year, the supreme commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, General Johan Hederstedt, declared that Developmental Leadership was to be the leadership model of the Swedish Armed Forces, which it still is. The

1 Lars Andersson, Erna Danielsson, Ann Johansson (now Zander), Eva Johansson, Gerry Larsson, Per-Olof Michel and Ingemar Robertson.

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1 Introduction

same year, a pre-release edition of the Swedish Armed Forces’ leadership book, Direkt ledarskap [Direct Leadership], which is entirely based on the model Developmental Leadership, was also released.

Three years later, an academic study was published internationally, where the development and testing of the Developmental Leadership Questionnaire (DLQ) was presented (Larsson 2006a). This was another important milestone confirming that both the theoretical model as well as its accompanying measurement tool were recognized in the academic community. 2006 also saw the final edition of Direkt ledarskap [Direct Leadership] (Larsson & Kallenberg 2006), which is still the textbook of the Swedish Armed Forces in leadership and is used for leadership training at both the Swedish Defence University and the Swedish Armed Forces.

In 2005, the first international publication on the model Indirect Leadership (IL) (Larsson et al. 2005) was published. Subsequently, this model was also “approved.” Both Developmental Leadership (DL) and Indirect Leadership have subsequently been studied in a number of academic works.

Some of these studies have been carried out by ourselves at the Swedish Defence University, while others have been carried out by scholars at both Swedish and other universities. Studies in relation to DL and IL have also been included in both PhD dissertations as well as BA and MA theses.

The work on developing the theoretical model has been carried out hand in hand with the development of a DL training program (Johansson et al.

2000). The same has also taken place with regard to IL (Nilsson et al. 2007).

In addition to this, we also developed instructor training programs in DL and IL, launched a register of instructors and initiated regular meetings with instructors. The original “pen and paper” version of DLQ has now been replaced by an online version. A data bank has been created, which now (2017) contains more than 100,000 responses, the majority of which come from a civilian context, and the DLQ form has been translated into eleven languages, including Mandarin.

UGL Understanding Group and Leader (UGL) is the third and final training concept forming the basis of this book. UGL was originally produced by the Swedish Armed Forces as a leadership training program for future and 12

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1 Introduction

present officers. The aim was to provide knowledge and insights with regard to groups and the development of groups, how groups and learning relate to one another and how leadership affects both individuals and groups.

Social developments in the 1970s resulted in substantial changes in terms of the perception of people and the workplace. The new approach of the Swedish Armed Forces was to foster an understanding of the importance of leadership with regard to interpersonal relations as well as the ability of groups to achieve their objectives.

At the same time, the United States Armed Forces trained officers who were intended to act as internal consultants in their units and tasked with developing leadership. Swedish officer and psychologist Anders Risling was invited to the course Organization and Effectiveness, which contained a module using experience-based learning in order to show the development of a group and what influences this process. Risling came to realize that this could form the basis of leadership training in the Swedish Armed Forces. The name of the course became UGL, Understanding Group and Leader, and the first version was completed in 1981. The next step in the development of the course took place in 1984 when a major revision of the original course was completed.

In 2000, the Swedish Defence University took over the responsibility for the training concept UGL from the Swedish Armed Forces. At the same time, a new version (UGL 2000) was released, where exercises and theoretical material were added. However, UGL 1984 still constituted the point of departure.

In the fall of 2007, and following extensive development work, the Swedish Defence University released the program UGL 2008. All elements of the training program not supported by psychological theory and based on empirical studies were removed. Elements perceived as ethically questionable were also removed. The idea was that by means of experience-based learning, each component of the training program should illustrate the different theoretical aspects comprising the training program and that these should be complemented by theoretical material based on academic research.

UGL 2008 covered modern research on group development, leadership and personal development, and it was now placed in relation to the Leadership Model. The Swedish Defence University upgrades UGL on a continuous basis, where the most recent version was released in 2016. You may read more about this concept in Chapter 8.

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Idea, target group and outline DL and UGL are among the most common leadership programs in Sweden – well, perhaps even the most popular among the ones based on academic research. IL is also based on science and is aimed at managers at the organizational, executive and higher medium levels.

Developmental Leadership is included in something we already from the outset referred to as the Leadership Model. In the developed form of this model, based on current research, it may also be seen as a theoretical foundation for IL and UGL. That is why we simply decided to call this book The Leadership Model.

The target group for this book is made up of current and future managers, instructors and participants in leadership courses, HR departments and leadership consultants, as well as university students (both civilian and military). The book is intended to reflect scientific literature mediated in a popular scientific form. Throughout the book, references are provided to the sources discussed. The text also contains a number of accounts of practical leadership situations as well as illustrative quotations. The latter have been collected from the authors’ own qualitative studies as well as from stories we have heard during leadership courses.

The outline of the book is as follows. Our point of departure is the development of the Leadership Model on the basis of recent research (Chapter 2). This is the “map” guiding the remainder of the text. In Chapters 3–6, we go through the different parts of the model one by one.

Indirect Leadership involves a number of aspects that go beyond leadership in a direct form, which is why the entire model of Indirect Leadership is discussed in Chapter 7. In the final chapter of the book, we discuss some implications of the development of new theory with regard to the training programs DL, IL and UGL. We also present the results of a couple of longitudinal studies on the effects of the training programs DL and UGL. Finally, we should mention that a number of topics for reflection are found at the end of each chapter.

Happy reading!

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Gerry Larsson is a psychologist and professor of leadership psychology at the Swedish Defence University. He also serves as an adjunct professor in stress psychology at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Josi Lundin serves as a lecturer in psychology at the Swedish Defence University. She is responsible for the concept of UGL (Understanding Group and Leader), which means developing the concept and training UGL instructors.

Ann Zander holds an MSc in psychology and serves as a lecturer at the Swedish Defence University. She is responsible for the concept of Developmental Leadership, which means offering basic courses, training instructors and further developing the concept.

The LEadership model The Art of Matching Individual and Organizational Characteristics The central hypothesis of the Leadership Model is that leadership is shaped through an interplay between the characteristics of the leader and the external social and cultural context. The Model consists of three main components: leader characteristics, contextual characteristics and leadership styles. The complex interplay between these components is described in detail and illustrated using a large number of examples. The Model also serves as the basis for three of the most widespread leadership programs in Sweden based on academic research: Developmental Leadership (DL), Understanding Group and Leader (UGL) and Indirect Leadership (IL).

Art.nr 39974

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