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

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C

 

HAPTER

F

OUR

Assessing Leadership and 
Measuring Its Effects


Conventional Wisdom About 
Leadership
• People who are tall and athletic make 
better leaders.
• Smarter people make better leaders.
• Leaders who are stable and predictable 
are more effective.

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Research Findings About Leadership
• People who are tall and athletic do not 
necessarily make better leaders. 
• In some situations, smarter leaders 
consistently performed less well than those 
who were less smart (Fiedler et al.) 
• The most effective leaders use different 
bases of power to meet situational 
demands.
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Competency 
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

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The Relevance and Legality Of 
Unstructured Interview Questions 
1. If you were any part of a car, what part 
would you be and why?
2. If you could go out to dinner with 
anyone, who would it be and why?
3. Do you plan on having any more 
children?
4. How do you feel about women in 
leadership positions? 
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Measures Of Successful and 
Unsuccessful Leadership
• Superiors’ effectiveness and 
performance ratings
• Subordinates’ ratings of satisfaction, 
organizational climate, morale, 
motivation, and leadership 
effectiveness
• Unit performance indices
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Drawbacks Of Using Superiors’ 
Ratings

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• Ratings may not be an accurate reflection 
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. 

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Drawbacks Of Using Subordinate 
Ratings
• Subordinates may be relatively 
unmotivated toward work no matter what 
the leader does.
• Motivation and cohesiveness does not 
guarantee effective performance.
• Subordinates may rate the leader as 
effective because he or she does not make 
them work very hard and vise­versa. 
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Variations of Leadership studies
Feature                     Common                   Uncommon
Research method

Surveys

Experiments

Time frame

Static

Longitudinal

Research objective Replication

Explore new issues

Locus of 
leadership
Causality

Heroic individual

Shared/distributed

Unidirectional

Reciprocal

Data sources

Single

Multiple

Level of leader

Supervisor

Executive

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

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Critical Thinking Questions 
Practitioners Should Ask
1. Who is the sample?
2. What is the situation?
3. What leadership qualities, characteristics, 
or behaviors are being assessed?
4. How is leadership success being 
determined?
5. How do the writers link leadership 
assessment to success? 
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