Whether those who lead us are practicing good or bad leadership, or anything in between, is a matter of ongoing controversy that can be viewed from multiple perspectives. Even if such controversy is inherently unresolvable, there is still good reason to keep on asking ourselves whether providing leadership education or development programmes actually has any positive effects. Are such programmes worth the effort? Should they be redesigned to better foster critical thinking? Should they be replaced by arrangements that emphasize leadership practice in ‘natural’ or ‘field’ settings, where people are encouraged to find their own ways to develop into good leaders? Should we abandon efforts to provide for the development of leadership attributes and instead focus on identifying ‘naturally born good leaders’ and empowering these outstanding people? Or should we rethink and reframe our conceptions of the role/position of leadership as something special, and transform leadership into more accessible and less challenging forms that more people can handle?
In this special issue, we do not seek to solve these issues once-and-for-all. Instead, we aim to broaden the debates by offering some less common perspectives on how bad leadership might be averted and how good leadership might be fostered or enabled. The five articles in this special issue are the main inputs. In this introduction to the special issue, our aim to provide a conceptual map and place the contributions made by the five articles onto this map.
Before doing that, we shall define what we mean by ‘good leadership’. The latter of these two words – leadership – is in itself not easily defined, and putting ‘good’ as a prefix does not make our task any easier. Several scholars have claimed that good leadership is multi-dimensional and thus is not readily defined (Bass et al., 2005; Blakeley & Higgs, Citation2015; Carden & Callahan, Citation2007; Yukl et al., Citation2002), and we tend to agree. The converse approach, seeking to define ‘bad leadership’, is also very difficult. For example, Kellerman (Citation2004) shows that there are also many dimensions of bad leadership. And so, at the risk of being perceived as taking an easy way out, we shall approach the conundrum of what good leadership is by identifying some situations where we believe adverse consequences have arisen because of the absence of good leadership. Thus some leaders have, for example, neglected the following:
Adverse impacts on customers, the environment and society at large. Examples include the Lehman Brothers scandal (Stein, Citation2013), BP’s oil leak in the Mexican Gulf (Marques et al, Citation2011), and VW’s use of defeat devices to subvert anti-pollution controls (Jennings, Citation2015).
Adverse impacts of high-intensity work arrangements on employees. One of the most obvious examples was the Foxconn scandal (e.g. Hsu, Farquharson & Örtenblad, Citation2013). Another China-based example involved Gucci (Wang & Snell, Citation2013)
Adverse impact on the safety and well-being of customers or end-users, as in cases of willfully poisoned milk (Song, Citation2009) and of substandard health care arrangements and conditions (Healthcare Commission, Citation2009).
Adverse impacts on minority shareholders of financial ‘tunneling’ between majority shareholders and related external entities (Zhang et al, Citation2014).
Although the above examples may be considered somewhat extreme, we believe that there are countless and pervasive milder examples where leadership has negative consequences arising from the neglect of legitimate stakeholder needs and concerns, thus reflecting indifferent leadership. In the following section, we suggest five possible approaches for averting bad or indifferent leadership and for nurturing good leadership or creating conditions that may be conducive to its emergence.
Approaches to engendering better leadership
In this section we shall introduce five approaches in order of their popular prevalence, as we see this, starting with the most common approach. We shall derive the first four approaches from a typology offered by Yukl (Citation2002), who distinguished between leadership theories that focus on traits, on knowledge, or on behavior. While we believe that all five approaches are worthy of careful consideration, we shall evaluate each one as a potential means of addressing the leadership challenges that we have sketched out above. In conjunction with our evaluations, we shall also locate the five articles in the special issue on the ‘map’ of five approaches to leadership. We shall also reflect that some of the articles connect to more than one approach.
Education and development
This approach sees education and/or development as a matter of salvation and appears to underpin a great many leadership development programs. While it is not narrowly or exclusively aligned to any particular theory of learning, a core assumption is that actual or potential leaders can learn to recognize and adopt good leadership through their involvement in a series of formal and contrived learning activities, all or most of which are undertaken ‘off-the-job’, and which in that sense are ‘extraordinary’. Implicit assumptions associated with this approach are that good leadership can be learnt by anyone who undertakes the right education or development activities, and that providing more high-quality education and development opportunities and experiences will, in time, give rise to improvements in leader behaviours.
Those, who advocate that leadership should be turned into a profession in its own right can be said to take support from the education and development approach, in that if leadership were to be turned into a true profession, everyone seeking to become a certified leader would likely be required to undertake a substantial programme of higher education in the field of leadership.
Two articles in this special issue address the education and development approach. In their paper, ‘Can good leadership be learned through business games?’, Thomas Duus Henriksen and Kenneth Børgesen argue, on basis of comparative case study research into leadership learning processes on two leadership programmes, that the learning arising for participants from direct engagement with a business game interface is, in isolation, of limited value. Nonetheless, the game-based learning becomes potentially beneficial in combination with formal theoretical inputs, with informal discussions based on shared workplace experiences, and with shared motivation and reflective space for participants to form their own meanings and draw their own implications, some of which may be unanticipated. Henriksen and Børgesen’s analysis suggests that it is important to recognize that a business game serves as a trigger for such informal discussions. Informal discussions allow participants to capitalize on the implicit knowledge that they bring to a formal educational event, provide forums for their own thought leadership, and carry the prospect of engendering better leadership.
The second article that connects to the education and development approach is “Learning good leadership: a matter of assessment?” authored by Kasper Elmholdt, Claus Elmholdt, Lene Tanggaard and Lars Mersh. They investigate the use, and degree of usefulness of an elaborate, computer-based assessment tool in representing the effectiveness or otherwise of a company-based leadership programme. It transpired that both the assessment tool and a body of survey-based impact evidence indicated that the programme had largely failed to instill the model of leadership that had shaped the intended learning outcomes of the programme. A major reason for this apparent failure may have been that the programme had wrongly assumed that participants would be able to adopt a ‘pure’ approach to leadership. Participants reported, instead, that the daily realities of their work were continuing to cast them as player-managers, functional specialists, administrators, and project doers, and not as the ‘pure’ leaders represented by the assessment tool. Resonating with Henriksen and Børgesen, some interviewees indicated that the programme had been valuable to them in other, unanticipated ways that matched their ‘everyday’ leadership practices. Perhaps then, the programme might have been more effective if it had paid closer attention to the ‘pull’ of situational realities.
Practice
The practice approach shares a common assumption with the education and development approach, in that it too holds that given the right conditions, anybody would be able to learn to become a good leader. The key difference between the two approaches is that whereas the education and development approach focuses on extra-ordinary activities, the practice approach places learning-by-doing centre stage, and thus suggests that good leadership is best developed through practicing this.
Thus, this approach suggests that that good leadership can best be learnt-by-doing by those who happen to take on leadership roles. How, then, does the practice approach avoid the slippery slope of neglecting the needs of other stakeholders, manifest in the adverse impacts that we sketched out earlier in this paper? The key is to recognize that although those who practice leadership have a wealth of first-hand experience to reflect on, such experience has no value in itself, and may even be harmful, unless it is adequately reflected upon and used as a springboard for experimentation and self-improvement.
The literature on Action Learning can be said to rest on this approach. It sees leadership as involving ‘the connected individual creating a better world in good company’ (Pedler et al., Citation2010: x). Action Learning cautions against relying on the words of experts who supposedly know all the answers and rather emphasizing the importance of being thrown fresh questions and being confronted with fresh insights arising from frank commentary by fellow practitioners or ‘comrades in adversity’ (Revans, Citation1998). Action Learning as an exemplar of the practice approach also recognizes that leadership has a moral dimension and involves facilitating others rather than ‘bossing’ them. The facilitative leader seeks to ‘give everyone a voice, make consensus decisions and give the work back to the people’ (Pedler et al., Citation2010: 241).
While the education and development approach can to some extent be said to underpin the argument that leadership should be turned into a true profession, the practice approach, in assuming that good leadership is sensitive to and is shaped by the context, suggests that this should be performed by people from within the same profession as those who are going to be led, or at least by those with a similar background to that of the followers.
Lars Brinck and Lene Tanggaard argue, in their article entitled ‘Embracing the unpredictable: leadership, learning, changing practice’, that practice is important in leading the way to new paths for leadership development. They document and reflect upon their own separate experiences of leading communities of practice in relation to curriculum reform and research collaboration, respectively. As with Action Learning, they emphasize that leaders serve as facilitators, and that the leaders’ practices co-evolve with those of the communities that that they serve.
Heritage
The core assumption of the heritage approach stands in stark opposition to those of the preceding approaches. It holds that good leadership practices cannot be learned by most people but instead reflect special aptitudes that only a small number of people are born with. In the paper mentioned above on the practice approach Lene Tanggaard also mentions ‘heritage’, but in the different sense that emerging leaders can re-discover and re-invoke aspects of themselves that can be brought to bear on leadership, to good effect.
The heritage approach pre-supposes that only those with innate talent for leadership possess the prerequisites that form the basis for subsequent development. It would follow that resources for educating and developing people to become good leaders should target such special individuals and should not be wasted on others. Thus, one way for an organization to secure its need for good leadership would not only involve identifying these talented people as early as possible and grooming their skills, but also cultivating their loyalty, so that rival organizations are less likely to head-hunt them away. The problem of poor or indifferent leadership may, according to this approach, be solved through better instruments for detecting the few talented people who have what it takes to become good leaders.
This approach may seem outdated. For example, few nowadays would agree with older leadership literature (Stogdill, Citation1948) that indicates that good leaders are to be found among tall men (Bellingrath, Citation1930; Garrison Citation1933; Hensley and Cooper, Citation1987). Nonetheless, searching for ‘hidden’ leadership talent is in no way unfashionable (Neffinger and Kohut, Citation2014). Furthermore, identifying a person’s character strengths and virtues (Peterson and Seligman, Citation2004) rather than his or her ‘compellingness’ offers a somewhat more attractive and reassuring direction for the heritage approach to leadership.
Role expectations
The role expectations approach argues that the main reason for widespread leadership indifference and incompetence is that the expected role of leadership, in its current orthodox mold, has become a monstrosity. According to this approach, the burning issue is not how to select (heritage), prepare (education and development) or simply allow people to adopt leadership roles (practice), but rather the key task is to dispel the common myths and misconceptions of what leadership is. Thus the leader’s role might be changed into something more humane, accessible, and collaborative, so that more people would be invited in to the role, warm to it, and get a fair chance to perform it well. Changing role expectations could, for example, embrace the ideals of servant leadership (Chiniara and Bentein, Citation2016; Grant, Citation2013; Greenleaf et al., Citation2003), where leaders focus on supporting followers’ growth and well-being, and offer them empathy and emotional support, rather than issuing threats and commands.
There are several arguments that invoke the role expectations approach to leadership. For example, some scholars argue that orthodox models of leadership inappropriately reflect the legacies of plantation and factory management (Rosenthal, Citation2013) and that, not least because our economies have become oriented to service provision, leadership responsibilities should be re-conceptualized and shared-out on a more flexible basis rather than being concentrated in the hands of an elite minority (Shek & Chung, Citation2015).
Another argument for changing the leadership role is that dominant conceptions of leadership place unrealistically heavy demands on leaders, who find that this burdensome role requires them to work far too many hours, with negative consequences for their own health and that of their followers (Worrall et al., Citation2016). Where, then, do the unrealistic demands come from? Ironically, they seem to come from those very stakeholders (customers, subordinates, citizens, and shareholders) who are let-down by leaders’ actual role performance, as well as from the leaders themselves.
Two articles in this special issue connect to the role expectations approach. Mark Hughes argues, in an article entitled ‘The possibilities of leadership: revisiting J.C. Rost’s leadership writings’, that there is good reason to remodel the leadership role to avoid coercion and emphasize mutual purpose, influencing skills, and reciprocal relationships between leaders, who are also followers, and followers, who are also leaders. Hughes sows the idea that perhaps it is the purveyors of leadership myths who are resisting change, rather than those who refuse to obey prescriptions that cast people as instruments.
Alex Tymon and Margaret Mackay, in their article entitled ‘Developing business buccaneers: employer expectations of emergent leaders’, report on their study of employers’ perceptions of requisite leadership attributes for graduating students, based on interviews, focus groups and an on-line survey, involving a total of 146 managers. They note, with apparent disquiet, that there is a dissonance between employers’ expectations on graduates – which rather is to be buccaneers – and the academic aim of educating them to become morally and socially responsible leaders. It is quite likely, given the power of corporate socialization, that in the event of such dissident views about responsible leadership, employers’ norms would prevail over those of the educators and their graduating students, when it comes to how leaders think and act (Gioa, Citation1992). Graduates would likely unlearn the more humanistic conceptions acquired during their studies. Let there be no mistake about this: even if employers lose the academic arguments, they are likely to prevail because they provide the careers. It follows, therefore, that there is a need for closer dialogue between educators and employers about our respective conceptions and expectations about what good leadership might be. Educators might need to regard such dialogue as a process of mutual learning rather than as merely scoring debating points; and no doubt there are interesting leadership lessons to learn from the likes of Robin Hood and Blackbeard!
Appropriate compensation
As foreshadowed in our discussion of role expectations, the appropriate compensation approach considers that a major source of leadership malaise stems from its association with celebrity status, career glory and generous material compensation through golden parachutes, unwarranted bonuses, and absurdly high salaries. Such inducements may have over-sold leadership to those who may not actually be suitable to fill the available positions. The assumption here is not that extrinsic rewards per se impede intrinsic motivation and performance quality ― the evidence suggests otherwise (Shaw & Gupta, Citation2015) ― but that in the special case of leadership there has been a failure of corporate governance.
If some of the benefits that leadership positions often come with were to be reduced to more equitable levels, and were to recognize and reward leaders’ due attention to the justified needs of multiple stakeholders, then those people who have chosen to become leaders just because of the material and status-related benefits might no longer be so motivated to take on such positions. We would then expect those people, who have an intrinsic interest in leadership and in the people they would lead, to prevail. Such less-greedy leaders might be more inclined to adopt good leadership practices.
The appropriate-compensation approach is probably the least common approach within leadership literature, but it can be found in the philosophical writings of Alasdair MacIntyre (Citation2007), as well as in some of the literature advocating that leadership should become a profession in its own right (e.g., Vergon, Citation2013). We can also find complementary arguments in literature on dual career paths (Hill, Citation1992), which offer rewards to those who prefer to focus on enhancing their technical or other specialist skills rather than their leadership skills.
Where do we go from here?
We suggest that there is a need for further research on three levels. First, there is a need for further research and review studies that refine and bring out the best in each of the five approaches distinguished above.
Regarding the education and development approach – what should leadership education and development programmes contain and which pedagogies should be used, in order to best engender good leadership? There still appears to be much to do in terms of refining existing education and development supply so that it better engages good leadership. Contributions such as Henriksen and Børgesen’s article are useful in casting light on how particular educational methods such as business games can have potentially beneficial impacts, through informal and non-formal dynamics that may not have been anticipated by the designers. Discoveries of this kind can lead to improvements in the design and organization of leadership education programmes.
Regarding other approaches, in relation to the practice approach, the paper by Brinck and Tanggaard complements the Action Learning literature, which emphasizes interpersonal and organizational dynamics, by bringing out that openness to experience, reflexivity and flexibility are essential intra-personal foundations from which better leadership practices can emerge. The heritage approach may need to be directed away from the possibly futile quest to identify a few super-star leaders, and could be reframed as an endeavour that open to everyone to engage in as a means to identify and capitalize on our own unique leadership potentials, grounded in whatever character virtues and other benign assets we happen to possess. The role expectations approach could seek out successful organizations as exemplars of how more dispersed and employee-engaged modes of leadership and organization can be adopted to good effect, as in the case of DHL (Chung, Citation2012).
Second, the map of approaches regarding how indifferent or poor leadership can be avoided and good leadership can be fostered may need to be extended or refined. To take one example, appropriate compensation is only one aspect of leadership accountability, and this approach could be expanded to embrace just provisions for the sanctioning or even removal of under-performing leaders.
Third, there is a need for critical comparisons between the various approaches with a view to identifying and understanding which of the approaches are more promising than others in particular contexts and circumstances.
Finally, we think that every good academic text – or, at least, special issue – should include a ‘counter-argument’, or ‘counterimage’ as Ohlsson and Rombach (Citation2015) call it, and preferably this should appear in the same editorial text. We therefore counter-propose that the premise upon which we launched our special issue is incorrect. That is, there may actually be no point in setting out to facilitate, engender, teach, or whatever, good leadership. This counter-point is indicated in the contribution by Tymon and Mackay, and we have already touched on this in our discussion of role expectations: employers may have expectations about graduates that exclude the responsible leadership that they learn during their education. Game over?
Acknowledgements
We, the guest editors of this special issue, would like to express our appreciation to the authors of the five articles in the special issue, the authors of all other contributions that there unfortunately was not space for in this special issue, the editorial team of HRDI that has let us compile this special issue and for their help in making it come true, and – last but not the least – all the scholars who have helped us by reviewing the manuscripts. We present their names below, in alphabetical order:
Nelson Antonio, ISCTE Business School, Portugal
Joanne Chan, University of Macau, Macau
Anna Cregård, Halmstad University College, Sweden
S.H. Kong, University of Macau, Macau
Kuok Kei Law, Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Mark Loon, University of Worcester, UK
Thang Nguyen, National Economics University, Asia Institute of Management, Viet Nam
James Pounder, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Hans Petter Saxi, Nord University, Norway
Paul Tosey, University of Surrey, UK
Tracy X.P. Zou, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
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