Leadership behaviour in successful organisations: Universal or situation-dependent?

Abstract

Leadership behaviour has a critical role in the creation of successful organisations. This article reviews dimensions of leadership behaviour theory and their relationship to effectiveness, productivity, quality, health and job satisfaction in organisations. The article has two purposes: (1) to identify and summarise leadership behaviours common among successful organisations; and (2) to use these common elements to discuss those theoretical implications which concern situational aspects of successful leadership behaviour. The successful organisations studied for this work were two manufacturing companies, one hospital and one retail operation. The case studies were performed in connection with two leadership research projects. They focused on quality work, effectiveness, working environment, subordinate health and perceptions of the leadership. The common leadership behaviours were explored using a comparative qualitative method. The identified common leadership behaviours were then analysed in relation to the three-dimensional leadership behaviour theory (change-, structure- and relation-orientation) to explore distributions between dimensions. Nine common groups of behaviours were identified and described. The qualitative analyses showed that the identified behaviours were in all three behaviour dimensions. Also evident was that relation-oriented leadership behaviour was by far the strongest of the three. The conclusion is that a successful leader uses high relation-orientation as a base. At the same time, this successful leader uses all three behaviour dimensions. The two additional dimensions of structure- and change-orientation can be altered by leaders according to situational factors. This conclusion implies that successful leadership behaviour includes both universal and contingency elements.

Keywords:

• leadership
• leadership behaviour
• quality
• quality management
• health
• job satisfaction
• productivity
• effectiveness

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to VINNOVA (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovations Systems), AFA Insurance, Swedish National Institute of Public Health and the Division of Ecotechnology and Environmental Science at Mid Sweden University for their funding of this research.

Notes

In this paper leadership is defined as ‘… the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared goals’ (Yukl, 2006, p. 21).

In this paper organisational effectiveness is defined as ‘… grade of fulfilment of objectives’ and can be viewed as the benefit of the performed achievement. Both internal (fulfilment of internally determined objectives) and external (fulfilment of the market valuation of an organisation's achievement using market expectations, demands or objectives as the criteria) effectiveness are usually needed for survival of an organisation (Andersen, 1995, p. 29).

Skill Mix, System IV, Fire-Factor and Three Patterns.

The multiple linkage model (Yukl, 1994).

In this paper productivity is defined as ‘… the quota between two quantities, the production result (output) and some production resource (input)’; this can be seen as a simple form of effectiveness (Andersen, 1995, p. 28). The same meaning for productivity and effectiveness is used many times (Andersen, 1995; Arwidi & Samuelson, 1991; Frenckner, 1983; Nationalencyklopedin, 1991).

In this paper quality is defined as ‘…its ability to satisfy, or preferably exceed, the needs and expectations of the customers’ (Bergman & Klefsjö, 2003 p. 24).

In this paper job satisfaction is defined as a person's ‘… valuation of work or a work environment’ (see e.g. Hollingworth et al., 1988 or Månsson, 2006).

In this paper health is defined as a person's ‘… individually perceived feeling of well being’ (Larsson, 2004; Larsson, 2007, p. 43) and health and sickness are viewed as two-dimensional as in the health cross (Eriksson, 1984).

Within the discipline of quality studies the term ‘methodologies’ is often used to describe how a work activity or chain of activities is performed (Bergman & Klefsjö, 2003). Leadership methodologies are the activities and behaviours that a leader uses to lead subordinates (Larsson, 2007).