Behavioural Theories
World War II provided a huge stimulus for studies into leadership, particularly in the United States. Experience with a large number of people in leadership roles in the armed forces showed that some of them were highly effective and some were ineffective. Given that most of these people had undergone a relatively similar selection process, the question was what made some of them better leaders than others. One example was bomber commanders, some of whom managed to fly hundreds of sorties, drop their bombs on target and on time and return to base on schedule, while others got lost, got shot down, dropped their bombs on the wrong target and failed to get home. Why were some commanders better at the job than others?
About $500,000 was spent in the early 1950s by the US Department of Defence to investigate this phenomenon. The result was what are known as the Ohio State Studies. Vast amounts of data were collected, analysed and subjected to various statistical techniques. The resulting conclusion was that two variables accounted for about two thirds of what leaders did. The Ohio State researchers called these two things initiating structure (essentially a focus on task, organising things and getting them completed) and consideration (essentially a focus on people and relationships).
Out of this came the first big commercial leadership style model, the Managerial Grid (Blake and Mouton.) Blake talked about styles in terms of numbers on the grid – i.e. where a person’s behaviour fitted on the two scales: their degree of concern for people and their degree of concern for production. Essentially he was saying that these two scales are independent of one another. That is, your score on one does not affect your score on the other.
The model generates four main styles of management:
- 9,1 Task Management – focus on organising and driving tasks to completion
- 1,9 Country Club Management – focus on people’s needs, with little concern for achievement of outputs
- 1,1 Impoverished Management – doing pretty well nothing at all other than ducking and diving and pretending to be busy with a low concern for getting results and a low concern for people.
- 9,9 Team Management - a focus on both achieving outputs and ensuring people’s concerns and needs are being attended to.
Thousands of week-long Managerial Grid workshops were run around the world in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Unfortunately, people who went on the Managerial Grid workshop came under quite a lot of pressure because they felt they had to get to 9,9 (Team Management) or they hadn’t made it as effective leaders. The weakness of the Managerial Grid centres around the fact that (remember Mr. Stogdill?) there is no ideal style of management or leadership. In some cases 9,9 works best and in others it doesn’t.
The good thing about the Managerial Grid was that it got lots of people thinking about leadership in a structured and easily understandable way. And it was confirmation that leadership behaviour could be learned.
Comments