A New View on Leadership

09/24/2007

Don't look back. You're not going that way.
Mary Engelbreit

Organizational experts are continually analyzing what makes an effective leader. In an article, “The New Psychology of Leadership,” in Scientific American Mind (August 2007; www.sciammind.com), Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam propose a new explanation of leadership effectiveness. Their approach involves “the ability to shape what followers actually want to do, not the act of enforcing compliance using rewards and punishments.” They summarize this view…

Effective leaders must understand the values and opinions of their followers – rather than assuming absolute power -- to enable a productive dialogue with team members about what the group stands for and thus how it should act.
According to this new approach, no fixed set of personality traits can assure good leadership because the most desirable traits depend on the nature of the group being led.
Leaders who adopt this strategy must try not only to fit in with their group but also to shape the group’s identity in a way that make their own agenda and policies appear to be an expression of that identity.

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