Category: Leadership

Research into 63 companies and their CEOs reveals unexpected leadership factor.

Great leaders should be bombastic, omniscient, controlling and possessed of the easy confidence that their decisions are right.

People want certainty, they need authority.

Or do they?

One of the most surprising factors repeatedly found in great leaders has nothing to do with bombast, certainty or authority.

New research published in Administrative Science Quarterly once again finds that it’s humility which can produce the best performance from an organisation.

The finding comes from interviews with CEOs of 63 Chinese companies and around 1,000 of their employees (Ou et al., 2014).

They found that CEOs who were humble were more likely to empower the top management team, which in turn enabled the management team to be better integrated.

The empowering organisational climate then trickled down through the middle managers which increased their job performance, commitment and engagement with work.

The study’s authors describe the essential attributes of the humble leader:

“Overall, humble individuals accept that something is greater than the self. Humility is manifested in self-awareness, openness to feedback, appreciation of others, low self-focus, and pursuit of self-transcendence.

Humble people willingly seek accurate self-knowledge and accept their imperfections while remaining fully aware of their talents and abilities.

They appreciate others’ positive worth, strengths, and contributions and thus have no need for entitlement or dominance over others.” (Ou et al., 2014).

This is not the first study to pick up on this unexpected leadership factor.

One US study looked at Fortune 1000 companies that had been turned around by their CEOs (Collins, 2001).

That research found that one important factor which lifted leaders from ‘good to great’ was modesty.

The most effective leaders weren’t grand-standing show-offs; they were incredibly modest and humble.

It probably doesn’t hurt that humble leaders are also much more universally liked than their authoritarian counterparts.

The authors of the Chinese study conclude:

“Our findings alter the common misunderstanding that humble CEOs lack confidence or may be unable to motivate others.

We suggest that influential leaders need not be masculine, dominant, or authoritarian.

Instead they can be humble and form shared meaning across hierarchical levels, which in turn affects employee attitudes and behaviors at lower levels.

Humble CEOs have strategic value in building competitive advantage through cultivating shared perceptions across hierarchical levels.” (Ou et al., 2014).

Image credit: Atos

What’s the difference between how women see themselves and how they are seen by others?

Women are rated by others as being just as effective leaders as men, and sometimes they are rated more highly, according to a new review of the research.

The conclusions are based on data from tens of thousands of leaders in studies that have been conducted over almost fifty years (Paustian-Underdahl et al., 2014).

However, when men and women each rated their own leadership, men consistently rated themselves more highly than women rated themselves.

However, when other people’s ratings were taken into account, this difference disappeared.

The study’s lead researcher, Samantha C. Paustian-Underdahl, explained:

“When all leadership contexts are considered, men and women do not differ in perceived leadership effectiveness.

As more women have entered into and succeeded in leadership positions, it is likely that people’s stereotypes associating leadership with masculinity have been dissolving slowly over time.”

In the past women were not seen as having the right qualities for leadership:

“Women are typically described and expected to be more communal, relations-oriented and nurturing than men, whereas men are believed and expected to be more agentic, assertive and independent than women.

As organizations have become fast-paced, globalized environments, some organizational scholars have proposed that a more feminine style of leadership is needed to emphasize the participative and open communication needed for success.” (Paustian-Underdahl et al., 2014).

In certain types of positions women were rated by others as more effective leaders than men:

• Business and educational organizations.
• Middle management.
• Senior-level management positions.

This might be due to a “double standard of competence,” in that women have to be twice as good as men to get the top position.

Paustian-Underdahl continued:

“These findings are surprising given that men on average continue to be paid more and advance into higher managerial levels than women.”

Image credit: The picture is of Chantelle Buffie who was chosen as the 2013 HSBC Woman Leader of Tomorrow (Simon Fraser University).