Leadership Research Summary:
• Cumulative research pertaining to the Vroom-Yetton and Vroom-Jago models suggests that multiple levels of analysis are needed to understand a leader’s choice of autocratic versus participative behaviors. Leadership scales that simply aggregate behavior across situations are incapable of detecting situational and persons by situation effects that do, in fact, exist. Research designs that capture these effects and that test specific prescriptive models are described.
Leadership Research Findings:
• Fifteen years ago, Locke and Schweiger (1979) reviewed 46 studies of the effects of
leader participation and found the overall results equivocal. There were as many studies
supportive of autocratic styles as there were studies supportive of democratic styles.
Obviously, the effects of participation are contingent upon the situation. The research echoes and amplifies that theme.
• Participation cannot be studied without explicit attention to the context in which it is displayed. Leadership measures that try to capture a leader’s style by asking a few questions about typical or average behavior are simply of little value. Certainly, there are those of us who are predisposed to be more autocratic or participative than another. However, the circumstances a person faces often dictate behavior other than that to which he or she is predisposed. And those situational forces have the larger effect when pitted against the person’s inclinations or desires.
• Clearly, much more work needs to be done if we are to understand the roles that autocratic and participative behavior play in leader effectiveness. At a prescriptive level, more evidence is required regarding the validity of the normative model and its specific components. At a descriptive level, researchers need to know more about the choices leaders make, the determinants of those choices, and how they differ from effective practice. This future work must recognize all the factors governing leadership style and employ research designs that reflect the multiple levels of analysis that are possible: person effects, situational effects, person by situation effects, group by situation effects.
• Collectively, theory has matured to a point where it makes little sense to advance hypotheses that suggest “participative leadership is effective” (or, for that matter, the reverse). However,
we must also avoid stopping at the simple truism so often heard: “effective leadership depends on the situation.” The study specifies what those precise contingencies are and design creative and innovative research studies that will advance our understanding of the complex phenomena of interest. Anything less provides little incremental value.