Asking the Right Questions About Leadership: Discussion and Conclusions

By J. Hackman, Ruth Wageman. 2007

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Five questions prompted by the articles in the American Psychologist special issue on leadership (January 2007, Vol. 62, No. 1) suggest some new directions for leadership research: (1) Not do leaders make a difference, but under what conditions does leadership matter? (2) Not what are the traits of leaders, but how do leaders’ personal attributes interact with situational properties to shape out-comes? (3) Not do there exist common dimensions on which all leaders can be arrayed, but are good and poor leadership qualitatively different phenomena? (4) Not how do leaders and followers differ, but how can leadership models be reformulated so they treat all system members as both leaders and followers? (5) Not what should be taught in leadership courses, but how can leaders be helped to learn?

Subfields: Education, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/923758fedc17a3f405c97740010919ba9d32880a

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Citations in the corpus

Perceived leadership style and employee participation in a manufacturing company in the democratic republic of Congo (2012, background): “Many authors have studied this topic, but there is no generally accepted definition of what leadership is, no dominant paradigm for studying it, and little agreement regarding the best strategies for developing and exercising it (Bennis, 2007; Hackman and Wageman, 2007; Vroom and Jago, 2007).”
The effects of school culture and climate on student achievement (2009, background): “Hackman and Wageman (2007) suggested that different leaders can behave in their own unique manner and still achieve effective leadership results.”
The evolutionary psychology of leadership (2014, background): “Making trait inferences about leaders is called the ‘‘leader attribution error’’ (Hackman & Wageman, 2007) and it might well be another aspect of our evolved leadership psychology, resembling a possible mismatch.”
An Identity Perspective on Ethical Leadership to Explain Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Interplay of Follower Moral Identity and Leader Group Prototypicality (2019, methodology): “As a field, leadership research has been called ‘‘curiously unformed’’ (Hackman and Wageman 2007, p. 43), and research on ethical leadership is no exception.”
The Unwanted Self: Projective Identification in Leaders’ Identity Work (2012, background): “…(Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007), that those in formal leadership roles are not always followed while people without such roles can and do lead (Hackman & Wageman, 2007), and that the same people can be leaders or followers in different settings and/or at different times (DeRue & Ashford,…”
The Bright Side of Being Prosocial at Work, and the Dark Side, Too: A Review and Agenda for Research on Other-Oriented Motives, Behavior, and Impact in Organizations (2016, background): “…in a range of settings, from retail stores (George & Bettenhausen, 1990) to paper mills (Podsakoff, Ahearne, & MacKenzie, 1997), intelligence teams (Hackman & Wageman, 2007) to military units (Ehrhart, Bliese, & Thomas, 2006), and pharmaceutical sales teams (Podsakoff et al., 2000) to restaurants…”
Respectful leadership and followers’ knowledge sharing: A social mindfulness lens (2020, background): “As a consequence of their generic application, the leadership field has become “curiously unformed” (Hackman and Wageman, 2007: 43).”
Linking leader inclusiveness to work unit performance: The importance of psychological safety and learning from failures (2012, methodology): “Thus our study uses an interactionist perspectivewherein group performance shapes leader behavior (Farris & Lim, 1969), as well as constraining the effect of leadership behavior on group outcomes (Hackman & Wageman, 2007; Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006; Smircich & Morgan, 1982).”
The role of the situation in leadership. (2007, background): “A far more sensible approach is to regard the potency of leadership to be a matter of degree and to attempt to discover the kinds of situations that determine when leadership makes a difference (see Hackman & Wageman, 2007).”
Conceptualising followership – a review of the literature (2011, background): “Few individuals are actually absolute leaders (Hackman and Wageman, 2007) with most spending the majority of their working lives in following rather than leading roles (Ciulla, 2003; Gronn, 1998; Rost, 1993).”
The Role of Psychological and Developmental Science in Efforts to Improve Teacher Quality (2010, background): “Both principles derived from general systems theory in biology (von Bertalanffy, 1968) and have since been applied to developmental and psychological research ranging from developmental psychopathology (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996) to the study of leadership (Hackman & Wageman, 2007).”
Supervisor Prosocial Motivation, Employee Thriving, and Helping Behavior: A Trickle-Down Model of Psychological Safety (2018, background): “Indeed, helping behavior has been shown to have a positive relationship with performance (e.g., Ehrhart, Bliese, & Thomas, 2006; Hackman & Wageman, 2007; Podsakoff, Ahearne, & MacKenzie, 1997).”