Cognitive skills and leadership performance: The nine critical skills

Over the years, a growing body of evidence indicates that certain cognitive skills are a critical determinant of leader performance. In the present effort we show that application of these skills is typically founded in case-based knowledge. Subsequently, we identify nine key skills people in leadership positions employ when working with case-based knowledge to address leadership problems: 1) problem definition, 2) cause/goal analysis, 3) constraint analysis, 4) planning, 5) forecasting, 6) creative thinking, 7) idea evaluation, 8) wisdom, and 9) sensemaking/visioning. Individual and situational contingencies shaping effective application of these thinking skills is discussed. In addition, the implications of findings bearing on leader thinking skills for leader assessment and leader development are considered.     

Leader vision formation and forecasting: The effects of forecasting extent,resources, and timeframe

Vision formation, and vision articulation, is held to be a central component of leader performance. Less is known, however, about the variables giving rise to viable visions. In the present effort, the impact of forecasting on vision formation was examined. Study participants were asked to write a speech describing their vision for a new school. Prior to writing this speech, participants were asked to forecast the outcomes of vision implementation. It was found that the extent of forecasting, along with forecasting of temporal and resources considerations, influenced the quality of vision statements. Forecasting was improved when people thought about causes, as opposed to goals, and implications, as opposed to facts. The implications of these findings for understanding leader performance in vision formation are discussed.     

Embedded leadership: How do a leader's superiors impact middle-management performance?

This study uses a low-fidelity simulation to test the effect superiors can have on the leadership style and cognition of their subordinates who also are leaders. These leaders within the organization, often referred to as middle managers, occupy an important, albeit overlooked position within an organization. In order to emphasize the leadership that occurs at the middle levels of management the term ‘embedded leader’ is used. Using a sample of 224 undergraduates, three variables were manipulated to examine their effects on participant sensemaking, confidence, and participative leadership. The variables manipulated were the severity of individual level consequences (high vs. low), the severity of organizational consequences (high vs. low), and the superior's motivational strategy (coercive vs. supportive vs. passive style). It was found that a leader's superior can influence their leadership behaviors in a complex manner. Participant sensemaking was higher when their superior emphasized low levels of individual (or personal) consequences. Participative leadership was higher when the supervisor framed organizational level consequences as being high. Findings for participant confidence were complex, but generally suggest that one's superiors can promote or hinder confidence in a variety of situations.     

How outstanding leaders lead with affect: An examination of charismatic,ideological, and pragmatic leaders

Frameworks for understanding outstanding leadership have flourished in the past decade. Research into the charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic (CIP) model of leadership in particular has examined how leaders develop mental models, frame visions, communicate goals, and utilize political tactics to form relationships with followers and impact society in meaningful ways. However, a discussion of how these types of leaders use emotions and influence tactics to influence followers and affect society is notably absent in the literature. To fill this gap, the current effort focuses on how charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders differ in their use of emotional displays and influence tactics. Results suggest that the emotional displays and influence tactics that leaders use successfully discriminate between CIP leader types and create expected leader styles. Implications of these findings are also discussed.     

Leadership of socio-political vanguards: A review and future directions

With the influential rise of the Alt-Right throughout the West in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the leadership of these forms of fringe political groups. While some work on the leadership of these types of groups was done in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, less work has been done since then. Given the important role of these groups in today's political environment, a review and theoretical integration of this past leadership work, along with suggestions for future research directions, is overdue.This paper begins by reviewing what literature exists regarding the leadership of socio-political vanguards, as well as what additional literature exists that may also be relevant to better understanding the phenomenon of vanguard leadership. Vanguard leadership is then placed within the historical context and goals of past vanguard groups. This analysis then leads to further defining some of the components of vanguard leadership along with a review of typically associated leadership traits, skills and behaviours.While few theories directly address the way in which vanguard leadership operates, this paper reviews related leadership theories that might offer meaningful contributions to our understanding of socio-political vanguard leadership. Some theories, such as those related to social movements (particularly burgeoning), minor but influential mainstream political groups, and advocacy/activist collectives are particularly relevant here and are reviewed along with more general leadership theories that might also hold applicability, such as those related to leader and follower (and public) information processing and sensemaking under crises. The paper then concludes with some suggestions for future research directions.     

Collectivistic leadership and George C. Marshall: A historiometric analysis of career events

Many of the prevailing approaches to understanding leadership assume that leadership operates as an individual-level phenomenon, in which one person takes on the role of a leader. However, a number of recently developed leadership models now describe leadership as a shared process. These collectivistic theories present leadership as a dynamic process in which a leader may selectively utilize the skills of followers and distribute elements of the leadership role among these followers as the situation demands. In this study, we conduct an investigation into the viability of core elements of the collectivistic theories through a historiometric analysis of events from the career of a notable leader, George C. Marshall. One hundred and two events from Marshall's career were identified from historical biographies and were then content coded and analyzed with regard to the components of a collectivistic leadership model. The results of this historiometric analysis indicated that there are key antecedents to collectivistic leadership and that the use of this form of leadership can result in positive team outcomes.     

Strategies for leader cognition: Viewing the glass “half full” and “half empty”

Leader cognition proves to be central to organizational functioning as leaders generate solutions and provide direction when organizations encounter problems. This study examined the effects of utilizing different general thinking strategies for thinking through organizational problems on the formation of problem solutions and statements articulating a future vision. Specifically, the effects of focusing on the positive, the negative, or balancing positivity and negativity were examined regarding their influence on the quality, originality, and elegance of solutions and the viability of vision statements. Participants were asked to assume the role of a leader in an educational technology firm and provide a solution and vision statement to address the firm's challenges. The results revealed that a positivity strategy – thinking about positive outcomes and means for attaining success – resulted in lower quality solutions and less viable visions than a balanced positive–negative strategy—either thinking about negative outcomes and means for attaining success or positive outcomes and means for avoiding failure. Solution originality, however, was moderated by attribution of responsibility such that thinking about negative outcomes and avoiding failure resulted in more original solutions when responsibility for the conditions confronting the firm could be attributed externally rather than internally. The implications of these findings for understanding leader cognition and performance are discussed.     

The WICS approach to leadership: Stories of leadership and the structures and processes that support them

This article presents the WICS approach to leadership and relates it to other approaches. Effective leadership is viewed as a synthesis of wisdom, creativity, and intelligence (WICS). It is in large part a decision about how to marshal and deploy these resources. One needs creativity to generate ideas, academic intelligence to evaluate whether the idea are good, practical intelligence to implement the ideas and persuade others of their worth, and wisdom to balance the interests of all stakeholders and to ensure that the actions of the leader seek a common good. The structures and processes underlying WICS work in concert to produce and maintain stories of leadership. These stories in turn enable leaders to fulfill their mission in leading followers.     

Development of outstanding leadership: A life narrative approach

Developmental events of a sample of outstanding leaders experienced in early life were examined. Relevant sections of 120 biographies of outstanding leaders in the 20th Century were content coded using a life narrative framework. The results indicated that individuals evidencing a particular leadership type (charismatic, ideological, or pragmatic) and orientation (socialized or personalized) were linked to certain types of developmental events. Similarly, event content was found to vary between the leader styles. Specific kinds of experiences were also related to various indices of leader performance. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Leader cognition in vision formation: Simplicity and negativity

Models describing how leaders think point to a complex set of cognitive processes. To execute these processes it may be necessary for leaders to simplify the problem at hand with respect to critical contingencies. In the present effort, undergraduates were asked to work on a vision formation task with the resulting vision statements being appraised for quality, originality, elegance, perceived utility, and affective reaction. Manipulations were made to encourage application of more or less complex mental models, a larger, or smaller, number of relevant concepts and cases, and forecasting of positive or negative outcomes. It was found that the strongest visions were produced when people used relatively simple mental models, few schema and cases, and they focused on forecasting negative outcomes. Thus leader performance appears to reflect simplification and an attempt to minimize negative outcomes. The implications of these observations for understanding leader cognition and leader performance are discussed.     

Learning from stories of leadership: How reading about personalized and socialized politicians impacts performance on an ethical decision-making simulation

Stories about notable, 20th-century politicians were investigated as a means by which reading stories of leadership influences subsequent ethical decision-making performance. Undergraduates read four short stories in which charismatic politicians exhibited a personalized, socialized, or neutral power orientation, followed by responding to four ethical dilemmas in the marketing domain—a distant transfer task. Results indicated that reading stories featuring personalized protagonists inhibited subsequent ethical decision-making processes. However, intensity of narrative processing, personal identification with the protagonist, and presence or absence of an ethical salience probe moderated these effects. Implications are discussed regarding the use of stories as a tool for ethical development and the importance of managing stories of leadership circulated throughout organizations and society.     

Thinking outside the box by looking inside the box: Extending the cognitive revolution in leadership research

Follower and leader cognitions play critical roles in many organizational phenomena. In this review, we report and reflect on a decade of cognitive leadership research. Following a brief introduction, the review is divided into two sections—one devoted to individual and dyadic cognition, and the other to collective cognition. We identified three central themes for each section. For individual and dyadic cognition, we identified metacognitive processes and leadership, implicit leadership theories (ILTs), and network based models of ILTs as central themes. For collective cognition, we identified charisma, organizational performance and sensemaking, and transformation and change as central themes. Our goal in this review was to uncover important underlying assumptions of selected studies to illuminate more clearly the path of cognitive leadership research over the past 10 years and its potential paths over the next ten years.     

The impact of leader communication on free-riding: An incentivized experiment with empowering and directive styles

Organizations often appoint leaders to foster cooperation. This paper studies the effect of leader communication on free-riding behavior using controlled and incentivized experiments. Leaders are asked to choose public messages from a set that induces a particular leadership style and to send them to subjects matched in groups to play a repeated, finite-horizon public good game. Using a between-subjects design, empowering and directive message sets are studied. Treatments are implemented with and without opportunities for two-way leader follower communication to study the impact of free-form communication. In the absence of opportunities for two-way leader follower communication, leaders assigned to the empowering messages treatment are more effective in mitigating free-riding than leaders assigned to the directive messages treatment. In its presence, contributions in both treatments are higher. The design allows for the study of a more interactive form of directive leadership by combining directive public messages with two-way leader follower communication.     

社会化经历与本土文化对领导特质形成的影响研究

在研究范式上过于依赖基于问卷测量的统计分析验证,在研究内容上忽视个人社会化经历和文化因素对于领导的影响,是造成现有领导特质理论"片段化"特征明显、特质形成过程不明的主要原因。采用案例分析的方法,通过对组织关键事件中领导与客体互动行为的分析来呈现领导者的特质,并从个体社会化经历和本土文化2个视角阐释了领导特质的形成过程;发现个体社会化经历和本土文化是领导特质来源的2个主要路径,弥补了领导特质理论在此方面的不足,为中国本土化领导研究提供了一个新的视角。     

Emergency risk communication and sensemaking during smoke events: A survey of practitioners

Emergency risk communication (ERC) for smoke emitted from major fires continues to challenge governments. During these events, practitioners (including scientific, communication, and emergency response government staff) are tasked with quickly making sense of the public health risks and the communication options available. Practitioners’ sensemaking—the process of creating meaning from information about an unfolding emergency—is key to effective ERC. This article identifies the factors that ERC practitioners consider the most important to their sensemaking for smoke events. A survey of practitioners (n = 86) was conducted to elicit their views on the level of importance of 22 different factors (individual, organizational, and contextual) on their sensemaking. The results indicate that the majority of the factors tested are very important to practitioners. This finding likely reflects the multidimensional nature of emergency smoke events and provides evidence as to why practitioners are challenged when trying to make sense of emergency situations. Despite multiple factors being considered very important to practitioners, the time-limited nature of emergencies means that practitioners will inevitability be forced to prioritize in their sensemaking efforts. Our results also provide insight into practitioners’ prioritization of different information sources. Specifically, practitioners prioritize their own knowledge and the knowledge of other practitioners. The two most important factors were information from other incident management stakeholders and the practitioners’ past experience. Other information, including community-based and academic knowledge, appear to be of lower priority for practitioners. Based on the study results, recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.     

Exploring the relationship of leadership skills and knowledge to leader performance

The criterion-related validity of constructed response measures of complex problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and leader knowledge is examined with respect to two criteria of leader effectiveness: leader achievement and quality of solutions to ill-defined leadership problems. Core aspects of the leader capabilities model are tested using these measures in a series of hierarchical regression analyses. Results indicate that constructed response measures of key leader capabilities account for variance in leader effectiveness and provide initial validation evidence for a central part of the theoretical model. The problem-solving, social judgment and knowledge measures account for significant variance in leadership criteria beyond that accounted for by cognitive abilities, motivations, and personality. Initial evidence also suggests that complex problem-solving skills, social judgment and leader knowledge partially mediate the relationship of cognitive abilities, motivation and personality to leader effectiveness. Implications and generalizability of the results are discussed in light of a related civilian leadership study conducted within the U.S. Department of Defense.     

Leadership and Affect: Moving the Hearts and Minds of Followers

We provide an integrative review of the empirical literature on leadership and affect (emotion, mood, and affective dispositions), which is first and foremost a literature on leader displays of affect. We conclude that the influence of leader affective displays can be understood through the mediation paths of emotional contagion and cognitive interpretation of affect in combination with the first- and second-stage moderators of these paths. We also conclude that the common yet overly simplistic notion that leader displays of positive affect are more effective than leader displays of negative affect can in important part be attributed to an overreliance on subjective ratings as indicators of leadership effectiveness, whereas behavioral indicators of leadership effectiveness suggest a more contingent view of the effectiveness of positive and negative affective displays. We propose that to bolster and further develop these conclusions, we need (a) more research focusing on moderation in dual-path mediation; (b) development of theory about cognitive interpretations following leader affective displays; and (c) more sophisticated models of the difference amongst different affective states to better capture the complexity of their effects. We also outline how evidence regarding the role of follower affect in response to leadership more generally points to the potential for integration of affective and non-affective models of leadership.     

A taxonomy of event-level dimensions: Implications for understanding leadership processes,behavior, and performance

Leader actions and their impact on follower, group, and organizational outcomes tend to be investigated at the aggregate person level, which may result in confusion between perception and performance-based evaluations of effectiveness. We advocate an alternative approach: assessing the link of leader behaviors to outcomes at the lower level of events, where adaptive leader responses and their variable influence on subsequent outcomes can be better assessed. To illustrate the potential benefits of an event-level approach, we first define events and how they differ by developing a taxonomy consisting of seven event dimensions. Important leadership implications of each event dimension are briefly discussed. We then apply our taxonomy to three existing theories of leadership to highlight its value in understanding performance. Strategies for measuring and researching leadership performance with our taxonomy are then introduced and discussed. Finally, event dimensions are used to address questions of critical significance to future leadership theory, such as determining what type of leadership is needed and ascertaining the leadership skills that are most likely to result in effective performance.     

Is a happy leader a good leader? A meta-analytic investigation of leader trait affect and leadership

Organizational scholars have long been concerned with identifying traits that differentiate effective leaders from ineffective leaders. Although there has been renewed interest in the role of emotions in leadership, there is currently no quantitative summary of leader trait affectivity and leadership. Thus, the current paper meta-analyzed the relationship between leader trait affectivity and several leadership criteria, including transformational leadership, transactional leadership, leadership emergence, and leadership effectiveness. Results show that leader positive affect is positively related to leadership criteria, whereas leader negative affect is negatively related to leadership criteria, and regression analyses indicate that leader trait affect predicts leadership criteria above and beyond leader extraversion and neuroticism. Additionally, mediational analyses reveal that the relationship between leader trait affect and leadership effectiveness operates through transformational leadership. Taken together, these results contribute to the literature on emotions and leadership by highlighting the role of leader affect as a meaningful predictor of leadership.