2.2 Entrepreneurial leadership for technology: an opposable mind  (Page 4/11)

In the early 1800s, leadership characteristics or “traits” were studied to determine what made certain people great leaders. For example, if we could identify the traits possessed by Abraham Lincoln, we could perhaps duplicate them in others. The “trait approach” was based on the belief that leaders were born with certain characteristics that made them great leaders and were different than others who were more passive followers. Examples of some of these traits included intelligence, self-confidence, self-determination, integrity, and sociability.

In the middle of the 20 ^th century, many researchers (e.g., Stogdill, 1948) argued that no identifiable set of traits separated effective leaders from ineffective leaders. Leadership began to emerge as a relationship between people and situations. This was actually the conceptual beginning of the theory we now call situational leadership.

Behavioral leadership (behaviors based on structure and consideration)

Researchers, after realizing that trying to identify leadership traits or characteristics was not dependable, began to study leadership behavior. In other words, they wanted to observe individuals as they were actually leading an organization or group of people.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, two major research studies looked at the behavior of leaders: the Ohio State studies and the University of Michigan studies. The first study focused on asking employees to report the number of times their leaders displayed certain kinds of behavior. Two specific types of leadership behavior surfaced: (a) behavior centered on structure and (b) behavior based on consideration. In other words, leaders provide structure for employees and leaders consider and care about the people under them. The University of Michigan studies revealed similar results, identifying two specific types of leadership behavior: (a) production oriented and (b) employee oriented. Production orientation involved completion of tasks, paralleling the structure behavior found in the Ohio study. Employee orientation involved the consideration behavior of the Ohio study.

In essence, these two studies indicated that effective leaders had to concern themselves with both task orientation and relationship orientation. The studies also found that some organizations might need leaders more focused on tasks while others might benefit from leadership with strong human-relations skills.

Situational leadership

Hersey and Blanchard (1993) are credited with the development of the theory of situational leadership. In essence, situation leadership theory involves a different form of leadership for each different situation. The contention is that an effective leader must adapt his or her style to the requirements of different situations. The two components of situational leadership (directive and supportive behavior) again parallel the structure and consideration constructs of the Ohio study and the production orientation and employee orientation of the Michigan study. Figure 1 shows such an alignment.