The Last Lecture

3 SKILLS APPROACH

DESCRIPTION Like the trait approach discussed in Chapter 2, the skills approach takes a leader-centered perspective on leadership. However, in the skills approach we shift our thinking from focusing exclusively on traits to an emphasis on skills and abilities that can be learned and developed. Although personality and behavior certainly play a role in leadership, the skills approach emphasizes the capabilities, knowledge, and skills that are needed for effective leadership.

Researchers have studied leadership skills directly or indirectly for a number of years (see Bass, 2008, pp. 97–109). However, the impetus for research on skills was a classic article published by Katz in the Harvard Business Review in 1955, titled “Skills of an Effective Administrator.” Katz’s article appeared at a time when researchers were trying to identify a definitive set of leadership traits. Katz’s approach was an attempt to transcend the trait problem by addressing leadership as a set of developable skills. More recently, a revitalized interest in the skills approach has emerged. Beginning in the early 1990s, a multitude of studies have been published that contend that a leader’s effectiveness depends on the leader’s ability to solve complex organizational problems. This research has resulted in a comprehensive skill-based model of leadership that was advanced by M. Mumford and his colleagues (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, Jacobs, & Fleishman, 2000; Yammarino, 2000).

In this chapter, our discussion of the skills approach is divided into two parts. First, we discuss the general ideas set forth by Katz regarding three basic administrative skills: technical, human, and conceptual. Second, we discuss the recent work of Mumford and colleagues that has resulted in a skills-based model of organizational leadership.

Three-Skill Approach

Based on field research in administration and his own firsthand observations of executives in the workplace, Katz (1955, p. 34) suggested that effective administration (i.e., leadership) depends on three basic personal skills: technical, human, and conceptual. Katz argued that these skills are quite different from traits or qualities of leaders. Skills are what leaders can accomplish, whereas traits are who leaders are (i.e., their innate characteristics). Leadership skills are defined in this chapter as the ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to accomplish a set of goals or objectives. This chapter shows that these leadership skills can be acquired and leaders can be trained to develop them.

Technical Skills

Technical skills are knowledge about and proficiency in a specific type of work or activity. They include competencies in a specialized area, analytical ability, and the ability to use appropriate tools and techniques (Katz, 1955). For example, in a computer software company, technical skills might include knowing software language and programming, the company’s software products, and how to make these products function for clients. Similarly, in an accounting firm, technical skills might include understanding and having the ability to apply generally accepted accounting principles to a client’s audit. In both of these examples, technical skills involve a hands-on activity with a basic product or process within an organization. Technical skills play an essential role in producing the actual products a company is designed to produce.

As illustrated in Figure 3.1, technical skills are most important at lower and middle levels of management and less important in upper management. For leaders at the highest level, such as CEOs, presidents, and senior officers, technical competencies are not as essential. Individuals at the top level depend on skilled followers to handle technical issues of the physical operation.

Description

Figure 3.1 Management Skills Necessary at Various Levels of an Organization

Source: Adapted from “Skills of an Effective Administrator,” by R. L. Katz, 1955, Harvard Business Review, 33(1), pp. 33–42.

Human Skills

Human skills are knowledge about and ability to work with people. They are quite different from technical skills, which have to do with working with things (Katz, 1955). Human skills are “people skills.” They are the abilities that help a leader to work effectively with followers, peers, and superiors to accomplish the organization’s goals. Human skills allow a leader to assist group members in working cooperatively as a group to achieve common goals. For Katz, it means being aware of one’s own perspective on issues and, at the same time, being aware of the perspective of others. Leaders with human skills adapt their own ideas to those of others. Furthermore, they create an atmosphere of trust where followers can feel comfortable and secure and where they can feel encouraged to become involved in the planning of things that will affect them. Being a leader with human skills means being sensitive to the needs and motivations of others and considering others’ needs in one’s decision making. In short, human skills are the capacity to get along with others as you go about your work.

Figure 3.1 shows that human skills are important in all three levels of management. Although managers at lower levels may communicate with a far greater number of followers, human skills are equally important at middle and upper levels.

Conceptual Skills

Broadly speaking, conceptual skills are the ability to work with ideas and concepts. Whereas technical skills deal with things and human skills deal with people, conceptual skills involve the ability to work with ideas. A leader with conceptual skills is comfortable talking about the ideas that shape an organization and the intricacies involved. They are good at putting the organization’s goals into words and can understand and express the economic principles that affect the organization. A leader with conceptual skills works easily with abstractions and hypothetical notions.

Conceptual skills are central to creating a vision and strategic plan for an organization. For example, it would take conceptual skills for a CEO in a struggling manufacturing company to articulate a vision for a line of new products that would steer the company into profitability. Similarly, it would take conceptual skills for the director of a nonprofit health organization to create a strategic plan to compete successfully with for-profit health organizations in a market with scarce resources. The point of these examples is that conceptual skills have to do with the mental work of shaping the meaning of organizational or policy issues—understanding what an organization stands for and where it is or should be going.

As shown in Figure 3.1, conceptual skills are most important at the top management levels. In fact, when upper-level managers do not have strong conceptual skills, they can jeopardize the whole organization. Conceptual skills are also important in middle management; as we move down to lower management levels, conceptual skills become less important.

Summary of the Three-Skill Approach

To summarize, the three-skill approach includes technical, human, and conceptual skills. It is important for leaders to have all three skills; depending on where they are in the management structure, however, some skills are more important than others.

Katz’s work in the mid-1950s set the stage for conceptualizing leadership in terms of skills, but it was not until the mid-1990s that an empirically based skills approach received recognition in leadership research. In the next section, the comprehensive

skill-based model of leadership is presented.

Skills Model

Beginning in the early 1990s, a group of researchers, with funding from the U.S. Army and Department of Defense, set out to test and develop a comprehensive theory of leadership based on problem-solving skills in organizations. The studies were conducted over a number of years using a sample of more than 1,800 Army officers, representing six grade levels, from second lieutenant to colonel. The project used a variety of new measures and tools to assess the skills of these officers, their experiences, and the situations in which they worked.

The researchers’ main goal was to explain the underlying elements of effective performance. They addressed questions such as these: What accounts for why some leaders are good problem solvers and others are not? What specific skills do high- performing leaders exhibit? How do leaders’ individual characteristics, career experiences, and environmental influences affect their job performance? As a whole, researchers wanted to identify the leadership factors that create exemplary job performance in an actual organization.

Based on the extensive findings from the project, M. Mumford and colleagues formulated a skill-based model of leadership (Figure 3.2). The model is characterized as a capability model because it examines the relationship between a leader’s knowledge and skills (i.e., capabilities) and the leader’s performance (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000, p. 12). Leadership capabilities can be developed over time through education and experience. Unlike the “great man” approach (discussed in Chapter 2 of this text), which implies that leadership is reserved for only the gifted few, the skills approach suggests that many people have the potential for leadership. If people are capable of learning from their experiences, they can acquire leadership skills. The skills approach can also be distinguished from the leadership approaches, discussed in subsequent chapters, that focus on behavioral patterns of leaders (e.g., the style approach, leader–member exchange theory, and transformational leadership). Rather than emphasizing what leaders do, the skills approach frames leadership as the capabilities (knowledge and skills) that make effective leadership possible (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000, p. 12).

Description

Figure 3.2 Influence of Leader Characteristics on Leader Performance

Source: Adapted from “Leadership Skills for a Changing World: Solving Complex Social Problems,” by M. D. Mumford, S. J. Zaccaro,

F. D. Harding, T. O. Jacobs, and E. A. Fleishman, The Leadership Quarterly, 11(1), p. 23. Copyright 2000 by Elsevier.

The skill-based model of M. Mumford’s group has five components: competencies, individual attributes, career experiences, environmental influences, and leadership outcomes (performance and problem solving) (Figure 3.2).

Individual Attributes

The leftmost box in Figure 3.2 identifies four individual attributes that have an impact on leadership skills and knowledge: general cognitive ability, crystallized cognitive ability, motivation, and personality. These attributes play important roles in the skills model. Complex problem solving is a very difficult process and becomes more difficult as people move up in an organization. These attributes support people as they apply their leadership competencies.

General Cognitive Ability.

General cognitive ability can be thought of as a person’s intelligence. It includes perceptual processing, information processing, general reasoning skills, creative and divergent thinking capacities, and memory skills. General cognitive ability is linked to biology, not to experience.

General cognitive ability is sometimes described as fluid intelligence, a type of intelligence that usually grows and expands up through early adulthood and then declines with age. In the skills model, intelligence is described as having a positive impact on the leader’s acquisition of complex problem-solving skills and the leader’s knowledge.

Crystallized Cognitive Ability.

Crystallized cognitive ability is intellectual ability that is learned or acquired over time. It is the store of knowledge we acquire through experience. We learn and increase our capacities over a lifetime, increasing our leadership potential (e.g., problem- solving skills, conceptual ability, and social judgment skills). In normally functioning adults, this type of cognitive ability grows continuously and typically does not fall off in adulthood. It includes being able to comprehend complex information and learn new skills and information, as well as being able to communicate to others in oral and written forms (Connelly et al., 2000, p. 71). Stated another way, crystallized cognitive ability is acquired intelligence: the ideas and mental abilities people learn through experience. Because it stays fairly stable over time, this type of intelligence is not diminished as people get older (Rose & Gordon, 2015).

Motivation.

Motivation is listed as the third attribute in the model. While Kerns (2015) identified three categories of motivations (self- interest, career considerations, and higher purposes) that propel leaders, the skills model takes a different approach, instead suggesting there are three aspects of motivation—willingness, dominance, and social good—that are essential to developing leadership skills (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000, p. 22).

First, leaders must be willing to tackle complex organizational problems. This first step is critical. For leadership to occur, a person must want to lead. Second, leaders must be willing to express dominance—to exert their influence, as we discussed in Chapter 2. In influencing others, the leader must take on the responsibility of dominance because the influence component of leadership is inextricably bound to dominance. Third, leaders must be committed to the social good of the organization. Social good is a broad term that can refer to a host of outcomes. However, in the skills model it refers to the leader’s willingness to take on the responsibility of trying to advance the overall human good and value of the organization. Taken together, these three aspects of motivation (willingness, dominance, and social good) prepare people to become leaders.

Personality.

Personality is the fourth individual attribute in the skills model. Placed where it is in the model, this attribute reminds us that our personality has an impact on the development of our leadership skills. For example, openness, tolerance for ambiguity, and curiosity may affect a leader’s motivation to try to solve some organizational problems. Or, in conflict situations, traits such as confidence and adaptability may be beneficial to a leader’s performance. The skills model hypothesizes that any personality characteristic that helps people to cope with complex organizational situations probably is related to leader performance (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000).

Competencies

As can be observed in Figure 3.2, problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge are at the heart of the skills model. These three competencies are the key factors that account for effective performance (M. Mumford et al., 2012).

Problem-Solving Skills.

What are problem-solving skills? According to M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, and colleagues (2000), problem-solving skills are a leader’s creative ability to solve new and unusual, ill-defined organizational problems. The skills include being able to define significant problems, gather problem information, formulate new understandings about the problem, and generate prototype plans for problem solutions. M. Mumford, Todd, Higgs, and McIntosh (2017, p. 28) identified nine key problem- solving skills leaders employ to address problems:

1. Problem definition, the ability to define noteworthy issues or significant problems affecting the organization 2. Cause/goal analysis, the ability to analyze the causes and goals relevant to addressing problems 3. Constraint analysis, the ability to identify the constraints, or limiting factors, influencing any problem solution 4. Planning, the ability to formulate plans, mental simulations, and actions arising from cause/goal and constraint analysis 5. Forecasting, the ability to anticipate the implications of executing the plans 6. Creative thinking, the ability to develop alternative approaches and new ideas for addressing potential pitfalls of a plan

identified in forecasting 7. Idea evaluation, the ability to evaluate these alternative approaches’ viability in executing the plan 8. Wisdom, the ability to evaluate the appropriateness of these alternative approaches within the context, or setting, in

which the leader acts 9. Sensemaking/visioning, the ability to articulate a vision that will help followers understand, make sense of, and act on

the problem

Figure 3.3 shows the relationship between these different skills as a developing process, where employment of one skill can lead to development of the next.

Description

Figure 3.3 Hypothetical Relationships Between Problem-Solving Skills

Source: Reprinted from “Cognitive Skills and Leadership Performance: The Nine Critical Skills,” by M. D. Mumford, E. M. Todd, C.

Higgs, and T. McIntosh, The Leadership Quarterly, 28(1), p. 28. Copyright 2017 by Elsevier.

To clarify how these problem-solving skills work in conjunction with one another, consider the following hypothetical situation. Imagine that you are the director of human resources for a medium-sized company and you have been informed by the president that you must develop a plan to reduce the company’s health care costs. In deciding what you will do, you demonstrate problem-solving skills in the following ways. First, you identify the full ramifications for employees of changing their health insurance coverage (problem definition; forecasting). What is the impact going to be (cause/goal analysis)? Second, you gather information about how benefits can be scaled back (constraint analysis). What other companies have attempted a similar change, and what were their results (forecasting)? Third, you find a way to teach and inform the employees about the needed change (planning; creative thinking). How can you frame the change in such a way that it is clearly understood (planning; creative thinking; wisdom)? Fourth, you create possible scenarios for how the changes will be instituted (forecasting; idea evaluation). How will the plan be described? Fifth, you look closely at the solution itself (idea evaluation). How will implementing this change affect the company’s mission and your own career (sensemaking; visioning)? Last, are there issues in the organization (e.g., union rules) that may affect the implementation of these changes (constraint analysis; forecasting)?

Problem-solving skills also demand that leaders understand their own leadership capacities as they apply possible solutions to the unique problems in their organization (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Connelly, & Marks, 2000).

Being able to construct solutions plays a special role in problem solving. In considering solutions to organizational problems, skilled leaders need to attend to the time frame for constructing and implementing a solution, short-term and long-term goals, career goals and organizational goals, and external issues, all of which could influence the solution (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000, p. 15).

The process of dealing with novel, ill-defined organizational problems is complex and demanding for leaders. In many ways, it is like a puzzle to be solved. For leaders to solve such puzzles, the skill-based model suggests that problem-solving skills are essential.

Social Judgment and Social Skills.

In addition to problem-solving skills, effective leadership performance requires social judgment skills (Figure 3.2). Social judgment skills are the capacity to understand people and social systems (Zaccaro, Mumford, Connelly, Marks, & Gilbert, 2000, p. 46). They enable leaders to work with others to solve problems and to marshal support to implement change within an organization. Social judgment skills are the people skills that are necessary to solve unique organizational problems.

Conceptually, social judgment skills are like Katz’s (1955) early work on the role of human skills in management. In contrast to Katz’s work, Mumford and colleagues have delineated social judgment skills into the following: perspective taking, social perceptiveness, behavioral flexibility, and social performance.

Perspective taking means understanding the attitudes that others have toward a particular problem or solution. It is empathy applied to problem solving. Perspective taking means being sensitive to other people’s perspectives and goals—being able to understand their point of view on different issues. Included in perspective taking is knowing how different constituencies in an

organization view a problem and possible solutions (Gasiorek & Ebesu Hubbard, 2017). According to Zaccaro, Gilbert, Thor, and Mumford (1991), perspective-taking skills can be likened to social intelligence. These skills are concerned with knowledge about people, the social fabric of organizations, and the interrelatedness of each of them.

Social perceptiveness is insight and awareness into how others in the organization function. What is important to others? What motivates them? What problems do they face, and how do they react to change? Social perceptiveness means understanding the unique needs, goals, and demands of different organizational constituencies (Zaccaro et al., 1991). A leader with social perceptiveness has a keen sense of how followers will respond to any proposed change in the organization. In a sense, you could say it allows the leader to know the pulse of followers on any issue at any time.

In addition to understanding others accurately, social judgment skills involve reacting to others with flexibility. Behavioral flexibility is the capacity to change and adapt one’s behavior in light of understanding others’ perspectives in the organization. Being flexible means one is not locked into a singular approach to a problem. One is not dogmatic but rather maintains an openness and willingness to change. As the circumstances of a situation change, a flexible leader changes to meet the new demands.

Social performance includes a wide range of leadership competencies. Based on an understanding of followers’ perspectives, leaders need to be able to communicate their own vision to others. Skill in persuasion and communicating change is essential to do this. When there is resistance to change or interpersonal conflict about change, leaders need to function as mediators. To this end, skill in conflict resolution is an important aspect of social performance competency. In addition, social performance sometimes requires that leaders coach followers, giving them direction and support as they move toward selected organizational goals. In all, social performance includes many related skills that may come under the umbrella of communication.

To review, social judgment skills are about being sensitive to how your ideas fit in with others. Can you understand others’ perspectives and their unique needs and motivations? Are you flexible, and can you adapt your own ideas to those of others? Can you work with others even when there is resistance and conflict? Social judgment skills are the people skills needed to advance change in an organization.

Knowledge.

As shown in the model (Figure 3.2), the third aspect of competencies is knowledge. Knowledge is inextricably related to the application and implementation of problem-solving skills in organizations. It directly influences a leader’s capacity to define complex organizational problems and to attempt to solve them (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000). Knowledge is the accumulation of information and the mental structures used to organize that information. Such a mental structure is called a schema (a summary, a diagrammatic representation, or an outline). Knowledge results from having developed an assortment of complex schemata for learning and organizing data.

For example, all of us take various kinds of facts and information into our minds. As we organize that information into categories or schemata, the information becomes more meaningful. Knowledge emerges from the facts and the organizational structures we apply to them. People with a lot of knowledge have more complex organizing structures than those with less knowledge. These knowledgeable people are called experts.

Consider the following baseball example. A baseball expert knows a lot of facts about the game; the expert knows the rules, strategies, equipment, players, and much, much more. The expert’s knowledge about baseball includes the facts, but it also includes the complex mental structures used in organizing and structuring those facts. This person knows not only the season and lifetime statistics for each player, but also each player’s quirks and injuries, the personality of the manager, the strengths and weaknesses of available substitutes, and so on. The expert comprehends the complexities and nuances of baseball, and thus knows the game. The same is true for leadership in organizations. Leaders with knowledge know much about the products, the tasks, the people, the organization, and all the different ways these elements are related to each other. A knowledgeable leader has many mental structures with which to organize the facts of organizational life.

Knowledge has a positive impact on how leaders engage in problem solving. It is knowledge and expertise that make it possible for people to think about complex system issues and identify possible strategies for appropriate change. Furthermore, this capacity allows people to use prior cases and incidents to plan for needed change. It is knowledge that allows people to use the past to constructively confront the future.

To summarize, the skills model consists of three competencies: problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge. Collectively, these three components are positively related to effective leadership performance (Figure 3.2).

Influences on Skills Development

As you can see in Figure 3.2, the skills model identifies two influences that are related to the leader’s attributes and competencies and leadership outcomes: career experiences and environmental influences.

Career Experiences.

The skills model suggests that the career experiences (represented in Figure 3.2 as the topmost box) acquired in the course of leaders’ careers influence their development of knowledge and skills for solving complex problems. M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, and colleagues (2000, p. 24) pointed out that leaders can be helped through challenging job assignments, mentoring, appropriate training, and hands-on experience in solving new and unusual problems. In addition, the authors think that career experiences can positively affect the individual attributes of leaders. For example, certain on-the-job assignments could enhance a leader’s motivation or intellectual ability.

In the first section of this chapter, we discussed Katz’s (1955) work, which notes that conceptual skills are essential for upper- level administrators. This is consistent with M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, and colleagues’ (2000) skills model, which contends that leaders develop competencies over time. Career experiences help leaders to improve their skills and knowledge over time. Leaders learn and develop higher levels of conceptual capacity if, as they ascend the organizational hierarchy, the kinds of problems they confront are progressively more complex and longer term (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Connelly, et al., 2000). Similarly, upper-level leaders, as opposed to first-line supervisors, develop new competencies because they are required to address problems that are more novel, are more poorly defined, and demand more human interaction. As these people move through their careers, higher levels of problem-solving and social judgment skills become increasingly important (M. Mumford & Connelly, 1991).

So the skills and knowledge of leaders are shaped by their career experiences as they address increasingly complex problems in the organization. This notion of developing leadership skills is unique and quite different from other leadership perspectives. If we say, “Leaders are shaped by their experiences,” then it means leaders are not born to be leaders (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000). Leaders can develop their abilities through experience, according to the skills model.

Environmental Influences.

Another important component of the skills model is environmental influences, which is illustrated at the bottom of Figure 3.2. Environmental influences represent factors that lie outside the leader’s competencies, characteristics, and experiences. These environmental influences can be internal and external.

Internal environmental influences include such factors as technology, facilities, expertise of followers, and communication. For example, an aging factory lacking in high-speed technology could have a major impact on the nature of problem-solving activities. Another example might be the skill levels of followers: If a leader’s followers are highly competent, they will definitely improve the group’s problem solving and performance. Similarly, if a task is particularly complex or a group’s communication poor, the leader’s performance will be affected.

External environmental influences, including economic, political, and social issues, as well as natural disasters, can provide unique challenges to leaders. How U.S. public schools responded to the COVID-19 pandemic is a good recent example of this. As stay-at-home restrictions were enacted, most public schools closed months before the school year would have ended. A majority of these schools were unprepared to switch to online learning. Many districts faced an additional barrier in delivery of online learning due to access: 17% of U.S. students did not have computers in the home, and 18% of students lacked access to high-speed internet (Melia, Amy, & Fenn, 2019).

School leaders across the country scrambled to come up with solutions, including working with local governments and nonprofits to find ways to establish internet hotspots in neighborhoods and to secure and distribute devices to students so they could access online learning. In addition, because most teachers had never actually engaged in online teaching, they were untrained and struggled and underperformed. Others, however, found that having to teach online serendipitously improved their teaching performance. School leaders nationwide had to respond to the very unique challenges posed by an external force completely beyond their control and did so with varying degrees of success.

The skills model does not provide an inventory of specific environmental influences. Instead, it acknowledges the existence of these factors and recognizes that they are indeed influences that can affect a leader’s performance, but not usually under the control of the leader.

Leadership Outcomes

In the right-hand boxes in Figure 3.2, effective problem solving and performance are the outcomes of leadership. These outcomes are strongly influenced by the leader’s competencies (i.e., problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge). When leaders exhibit these competencies, they increase their chances of problem solving and overall performance.

Effective Problem Solving.

As we discussed earlier, the skills model is a capability model, designed to explain why some leaders are good problem solvers and others are not. Problem solving is the keystone in the skills approach. In the model (Figure 3.2), problem-solving skills, as competencies, lead to effective problem solving as a leadership outcome. The criteria for good problem solving are determined by the originality and the quality of expressed solutions to problems. Good problem solving involves creating solutions that are logical, effective, and unique, and that go beyond given information (Zaccaro et al., 2000).

Performance.

In the model, performance outcomes reflect how well individual leaders have done their job. To measure performance, standard external criteria are used. If a leader has done well and been successful, the leader’s evaluations will be positive. Leaders who are effective receive good annual performance reviews, get merit raises, and are recognized by superiors and followers as competent leaders. In the end, performance is the degree to which a leader has successfully performed the assigned duties.

Taken together, effective problem solving and performance are the outcomes used to assess leadership effectiveness in the skills model. Furthermore, good problem solving and good performance go hand in hand.

Summary of the Skills Model

In summary, the skills model frames leadership by describing five components of leader performance. At the heart of the model are three competencies: problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge. These three competencies are the central determinants of effective problem solving and performance, although individual attributes, career experiences, and environmental influences all have impacts on leader competencies. Through job experience and training, leaders can become better problem solvers and more effective leaders.

HOW DOES THE SKILLS APPROACH WORK? The skills approach is primarily descriptive: It describes leadership from a skills perspective. Rather than providing prescriptions for success in leadership, the skills approach provides a structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership. In the previous sections, we discussed the skills perspective based on the work of Katz (1955) and M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, and colleagues (2000). What does each of these bodies of work suggest about the structure and functions of leadership?

The three-skill approach of Katz suggests that the importance of certain leadership skills varies depending on where leaders are in a management hierarchy. For leaders operating at lower levels of management, technical and human skills are most important. When leaders move into middle management, it becomes important that they have all three skills: technical, human, and conceptual. At the upper management levels, it is paramount for leaders to exhibit conceptual and human skills.

This approach was reinforced in a 2007 study that examined the skills needed by executives at different levels of management. The researchers used a four-skill model, similar to Katz’s approach, to assess cognitive skills, interpersonal skills, business skills, and strategic skills of 1,000 managers at the junior, middle, and senior levels of an organization. The results showed that interpersonal and cognitive skills were required more than business and strategic skills for those on the lower levels of management. As one climbed the career ladder, however, the execution of higher levels of all four of these leadership skills became necessary (T. Mumford, Campion, & Morgeson, 2007).

In their skills model, M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, and colleagues (2000) provided a more complex picture of how skills relate to the manifestation of effective leadership. Their skills model contends that leadership outcomes are the direct result of a leader’s competencies in problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge. Each of these competencies includes a large repertoire of abilities, and each can be learned and developed. In addition, the model illustrates how individual attributes such as general cognitive ability, crystallized cognitive ability, motivation, and personality influence the leader’s competencies. And finally, the model describes how career experiences and environmental influences play a direct or indirect role in leadership performance.

The skills approach works by providing a map for how to reach effective leadership in an organization: Leaders need to have problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge. Workers can improve their capabilities in these areas through training and experience. Although individual leaders’ personal attributes affect their skills, it is a leader’s skills themselves that are most important in addressing organizational problems.

STRENGTHS In several ways, the skills approach contributes positively to our understanding about leadership. First, it is a leader-centered model that stresses the importance of developing particular leadership skills. It is the first approach to conceptualize and create a structure of the process of leadership around skills. Whereas the early research on skills highlighted the importance of skills and the value of skills across different management levels, the later work placed learned skills at the center of effective leadership performance at all management levels. The skills approach also supports succession planning in organizations by ensuring that there is a pool of potential managers ready to assume leadership at the next level (Griffith, Baur, & Buckley, 2019).

Second, the skills approach is intuitively appealing. To describe leadership in terms of skills makes leadership available to everyone. Unlike personality traits, skills are competencies that people can learn or develop. It is like playing a sport such as tennis or golf. Even without natural ability in these sports, people can improve their games with practice and instruction. The same is true with leadership. When leadership is framed as a set of skills, it becomes a process that people can study and practice to become better at performing their jobs.

An example of how individuals can improve their leadership skills is evident in game-based learning (GBL), which has been applied to developing leadership skills in recent years. Through GBL, individuals work toward a goal, choosing actions and experiencing the consequences of those actions in a risk-free setting. Through experimentation, participants learn and practice the right way to do things. In one study, a leadership game was found to improve motivation, facilitation, coaching, mindset changing, and communication (Sousa & Rocha, 2019) in participants. GBL also gives individuals at all levels in an organization access to training for leadership positions.

Third, the skills approach provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates a wide variety of components, including problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, knowledge, individual attributes, career experiences, and environmental influences. Each of these components can further be subdivided into several subcomponents. The result is a picture of leadership that encompasses a multitude of factors. Because it includes so many variables, the skills approach captures many of the intricacies and complexities of leadership not found in other models.

Last, the skills approach provides a structure that is very consistent with the curricula of most leadership education programs. Leadership development was estimated to be a $14 billion industry in the United States (Gurdjian, Halbeisen, & Lane, 2014), and leadership education programs throughout the country have traditionally taught classes in creative problem solving, conflict resolution, listening, and teamwork, to name a few. The content of these classes closely mirrors many of the

components in the skills model. Clearly, the skills approach provides a structure that helps to frame the curricula of leadership education and development programs.

CRITICISMS Like all other approaches to leadership, the skills approach has certain weaknesses. First, the breadth of the skills approach seems to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership. For example, by including motivation, critical thinking, personality, and conflict resolution, the skills approach addresses more than just leadership. Another example of the model’s breadth is its inclusion of two types of intelligence (i.e., general cognitive ability and crystallized cognitive ability). Although both areas are studied widely in the field of cognitive psychology, they are seldom addressed in leadership research. By including so many components, the skills model of M. Mumford and others becomes more general and less precise in explaining leadership performance.

Second, related to the first criticism, the skills model is weak in predictive value. It does not explain specifically how variations in social judgment skills and problem-solving skills affect performance. The model suggests that these components are related, but it does not describe with any precision just how that works. In short, the model can be faulted because it does not explain how skills lead to effective leadership performance. Despite the billions of dollars spent on leadership training, the overall effectiveness of these programs has not been clearly substantiated (Kellerman, 2012). In addition, the ability of leaders to transfer skills training to the job may be limited by the followers, the situation, or the organizational culture.

The final criticism of the skills approach is that it may not be suitably or appropriately applied to other contexts of leadership. The skills model was constructed by using a large sample of military personnel and observing their performance in the armed services. This represents a highly structured, hierarchical organizational culture where the variance in leader behavior is restricted. This raises an obvious question: Can the results be generalized to other populations or organizational settings? Although some research suggests that these military findings can be generalized to other groups (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Connelly, et al., 2000), more research is needed to address this criticism.

APPLICATION Despite its appeal to theorists and academics, the skills approach has not been widely used in applied leadership settings. For example, there are no training packages designed specifically to teach people leadership skills from this approach. Although many programs have been designed to teach leadership skills from a general self-help orientation, few of these programs are based on the conceptual frameworks set forth in this chapter.

Despite the lack of formal training programs, the skills approach offers valuable information about leadership. The approach provides a way to delineate the skills of the leader, and leaders at all levels in an organization can use it. In addition, this approach helps us to identify our strengths and weaknesses in regard to these technical, human, and conceptual skills. By taking a skills inventory such as the one provided at the end of this chapter, people can gain further insight into their own leadership competencies. Their scores allow them to learn about areas in which they may want to seek further training to enhance their overall contributions to their organization.

From a wider perspective, the skills approach may be used in the future as a template for the design of extensive leadership development programs. This approach provides the evidence for teaching leaders the important aspects of listening, creative problem solving, conflict resolution skills, and much more.

CASE STUDIES The following three case studies (Cases 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3) describe leadership situations that can be analyzed and evaluated from the skills perspective. The first case involves the principal investigator of a federally funded research grant. In the second case, we learn about how the owner of an Italian restaurant has created his own recipe for success. The third case profiles Kenyan teacher Peter Tabichi and his work to improve not only his students’ lives, but their community as well.

As you read each case, try to apply the principles of the skills approach to the leaders and their situations. At the end of each case are questions that will assist you in analyzing the case.

Case 3.1

A Strained Research Team

Dr. Adam Wood is the principal investigator on a three-year, $1 million federally funded research grant to study health education programs for older populations, called the Elder Care Project. Unlike previous projects, in which Dr. Wood worked alone or with one or two other investigators, on this project Dr. Wood has 11 colleagues. His project team is made up of two co-investigators (with PhDs), four intervention staff (with MAs), and five general staff members (with BAs). One year into the project, it has become apparent to Dr. Wood and the team that the project is underbudgeted and has too few resources. Team members are spending 20%–30% more time on the project than has been budgeted to pay them. Regardless of the resource strain, all team members are committed to the project; they believe in its goals and the importance of its outcomes. Dr. Wood is known throughout the country as the foremost scholar in this area of health education research. He is often asked to serve on national review and advisory boards. His publication record is second to none. In addition, his colleagues in the university know Dr. Wood as a very competent researcher. People come to Dr. Wood for advice on research design and methodology questions. They also come to him for

questions about theoretical formulations. He has a reputation as someone who can see the big picture on research projects.

Despite his research competence, there are problems on Dr. Wood’s research team. Dr. Wood worries there is a great deal of work to be done but that the members of the team are not devoting sufficient time to the Elder Care Project. He is frustrated because many of the day-to-day research tasks of the project are falling into his lap. He enters a research meeting, throws his notebook down on the table, and says, “I wish I’d never taken this project on. It’s taking way too much of my time. The rest of you aren’t pulling your fair share.” Team members feel exasperated at Dr. Wood’s comments. Although they respect his competence, they find his leadership style frustrating. His negative comments at staff meetings are having a demoralizing effect on the research team. Despite their hard work and devotion to the project, Dr. Wood seldom compliments or praises their efforts. Team members believe that they have spent more time than anticipated on the project and have received less pay or credit than expected. The project is sucking away a lot of staff energy, yet Dr. Wood does not seem to understand the pressures confronting his staff.

The research staff is starting to feel burned out, but members realize they need to keep trying because they are under time constraints from the federal government to do the work promised. The team needs to develop a pamphlet for the participants in the Elder Care Project, but the pamphlet costs are significantly more than budgeted in the grant. Dr. Wood has been very adept at finding out where they might find small pockets of money to help cover those costs.

Although team members are pleased that he is able to obtain the money, they are sure he will use this as just another example of how he was the one doing most of the work on the project.

Questions

1. Based on the skills approach, how would you assess Dr. Wood’s leadership and his relationship to the members of the Elder Care Project team? Will the project be successful?

2. Does Dr. Wood have the skills necessary to be an effective leader of this research team? 3. The skills model describes three important competencies for leaders: problem-solving skills, social judgment

skills, and knowledge. If you were to coach Dr. Wood using this model, what competencies would you address with him? What changes would you suggest that he make in his leadership?

Case 3.2

Andy’s Recipe

Andy Garafallo owns an Italian restaurant that sits in the middle of a cornfield near a large midwestern city. On the restaurant’s far wall is an elaborate mural of the canals of Venice. A gondola hangs on the opposite wall, up by the ceiling. Along another wall is a row of real potted lemon trees. “My ancestors are from Sicily,” says Andy. “In fact, I can remember seeing my grandfather take a bite out of a lemon, just like the ones hanging on those trees.”

Andy is very confident about his approach to this restaurant, and he should be, because the restaurant is celebrating its 25th anniversary. “I’m darned sure of what I want to do. I’m not trying different fads to get people to come here. People come here because they know they will get great food. They also want to support someone with whom they can connect. This is my approach. Nothing more, nothing less.” Although other restaurants have folded, Andy seems to have found a recipe for success.

Since opening his restaurant, Andy has had a number of managers. Currently, he has three: Kelly, Danielle, and Patrick. Kelly is a kitchen (food prep) manager who is known as very honest and dependable. She loves her work, and is efficient, good with ordering, and good with preparation. Andy really likes Kelly but is frustrated with her because she has such difficulty getting along with the salespeople, delivery people, and waitstaff.

Danielle, who works out front in the restaurant, has been with Andy the longest, six years. Danielle likes working at Garafallo’s—she lives and breathes the place. She fully buys into Andy’s approach of putting customers first. In fact, Andy says she has a knack for knowing what customers need even before they ask. Although she is very hospitable, Andy says she is lousy with numbers. She just doesn’t seem to catch on to that side of the business.

Patrick, who has been with Andy for four years, usually works out front but can work in the kitchen as well. Although Patrick has a strong work ethic and is great with numbers, he is weak on the people side. For some reason, Patrick treats customers as if they are faceless, coming across as very unemotional. In addition, Patrick tends to approach problems with an either–or perspective. This has gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion. Andy wishes that Patrick would learn to lighten up. “He’s a good manager, but he needs to recognize that some things just aren’t that important,” says Andy.

Andy’s approach to his managers is that of a teacher and coach. He is always trying to help them improve. He sees part of his responsibility as teaching them every aspect of the restaurant business. Andy’s stated goal is that he wants his managers to be “A” players when they leave his business to take on jobs elsewhere. Helping people to become the best they can be is Andy’s goal for his restaurant employees.

Although Andy works 12 hours a day, he spends little time analyzing the numbers. He does not think about ways to improve his profit margin by cutting corners, raising an item price here, or cutting quality there. Andy says, “It’s like this: The other night I got a call from someone who said they wanted to come in with a group and wondered if they could bring along a cake. I said ‘yes’ with one stipulation. . . . I get a piece! Well, the people came and spent a lot of money. Then they told me that they had actually wanted to go to another restaurant, but the other place would not

allow them to bring in their own cake.” Andy believes very strongly in his approach. “You get business by being what you should be.” Compared with other restaurants, his restaurant is doing quite well. Although many places are happy to net 5%–7% profit, Andy’s Italian restaurant nets 30% profit, year in and year out.

Questions

1. What accounts for Andy’s success in the restaurant business? 2. From a skills perspective, how would you describe the three managers, Kelly, Danielle, and Patrick? What does

each of them need to do to improve their skills? 3. How would you describe Andy’s competencies? Does Andy’s leadership suggest that one does not need all

three skills to be effective?

Case 3.3

2019 Global Teacher of the Year: Peter Tabichi

How does one take nearly 500 secondary math and science students at a school in an impoverished, remote part of Kenya with only one computer, a poor internet connection, and a student–teacher ratio of 58:1 and turn them into motivated, successful students and award-winning scientists?

That’s the question many have been asking Peter Tabichi, a math and science teacher at Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School in Pwani village, who was named the Varkey Foundation’s 2019 Global Teacher of the Year after being chosen from more than 10,000 nominations from 179 countries.

For Peter, who is a friar in the Franciscan Brotherhood, teaching starts with understanding his students, their cultures, and the challenges they face. Keriko is a government-run school in a part of Kenya frequently stricken with drought and famine, and Peter’s students come from poor families who barely eke out a living farming the land. A third of the school’s students are orphans or have only one parent and have lives marked by drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, early school dropout, young marriages, and suicide.

The fifth of eight children, Peter understands his students’ hardships. Peter’s father was a teacher and his mother a farmer. “We lived in a mud house, and we ate maize and vegetables grown in the garden,” he says. His mother died when he was 11, and his youngest sibling just 1. “After that, I had to go to the school where my father taught, and that was a 7-kilometer walk each way,” he says. “It was hard, but I knew I was lucky to be getting an education. My father took out loan after loan to put us through school” (Moorhead, 2019).

Peter went on to university to become a teacher and began his teaching career in a private school, and while he felt he was making a difference for his students, he wanted to do more. “I felt that the surrounding communities, they also needed my help. I said, ‘Let me stretch and extend the same love to the surrounding community’” (Talking Education, 2019).

“I felt increasingly inspired by the life of St. Francis of Assisi. His humility and simplicity appealed to me,” he says. Peter took his vows to become a Franciscan in 2018. “It’s a challenging life, but I knew it was the right path for me. There are big commitments to make, but this life brings me much happiness” (Moorhead, 2019).

Coming to Keriko, Peter began by giving away 80% of his income every year to provide the school’s students with books and uniforms because many of the students’ families could not afford to do so. Peter also saw that his students were “not able to concentrate mainly because they are not able to get enough meals at home” (Talking Education, 2019). To battle this food insecurity, he used his knowledge of science and farming to teach members of the community sustainable agriculture including ways of growing vegetables that use a very small portion of land and water. “Teaching the members of the community new ways of farming is a matter of life and death,” he says (Talking Education, 2019).

Part of his efforts in the community also involved convincing families and community members of the value of education. He would personally visit families whose children were at risk of dropping out of school and try to change the minds of those who expected their daughters to get married at an early age, encouraging the families to instead keep their girls in school (Zaki, 2019).

In the classroom, Peter saw that he needed to do more for his students than impart the basics of math and science. For many of his students, success in school was about instilling them with confidence. “It is all about having confidence in the student. Every child has potential, a gift or a talent. I try to engage students in various activities and mentor them. It is not a matter of telling them ‘do this’ and then walking away. You need to work with them closely” (Wodon, 2019).

To help build his students’ self-esteem, Peter started a series of school societies, notably the Talent Nurturing Club. “Everyone had something they were good at, and then they started to believe in themselves, and they started to do better at everything” (Moorhead, 2019).

Another pivotal group Peter formed was the Peace Club. Because the school’s students are a mix of genders and come from several different tribes and villages, there was the potential for students to form groups and for conflict to occur between the groups. Members of the Peace Club engage in activities like debating, tree planting, and sports where they have to work together. “They see that they can achieve as a group, not only as individuals. They see

themselves as people who are united. This also helps them do well in the classroom because they are able to work as a team,” Peter explains (Wodon, 2019).

Peter also expanded the school’s Science Club, an effort that has been so successful that 60% of the club’s research projects qualify for national competitions. At the 2018 Kenya Science and Engineering Fair, Keriko students showcased a device they invented to help people with vision and hearing impairments to measure objects. The club’s math and science team qualified to participate at the Intel-sponsored International Science and Engineering Fair in 2019. Another group of students was recognized by the Royal Society of Chemistry for their work in harnessing local plant life to generate electricity.

Despite the school only having one computer, limited internet access, and no library or labs, Peter has been able to incorporate information technology into 80% of his lessons. He visits internet cafés to download online content to be used offline in class, which he pays for out of his own pocket. He and his colleagues also visit struggling students’ homes on the weekends to provide one-on-one tutoring and meet their families to identify the challenges they face.

In just three years, Peter has dramatically improved his pupils’ achievement and self-esteem. The school’s enrollment has doubled, girls’ achievement has been boosted, and discipline cases have fallen from 30 per week to 3. In 2017, only 16 out of Keriko’s 59 graduating students went on to college; in 2018, 26 did (Wodon, 2019).

A colleague describes Peter as dedicated, passionate, and humble. “Bro Tabichi’s belief in his students has made our poorly equipped school perform well in national science competitions. . . . He became our role model” (Matara & Njeru, 2019).

“The fact that many students have varying needs, has taught me to be creative in using the best approaches while teaching them. They want to feel recognized, loved, appreciated and respected. They have taught me that for them to realize their dreams, you need to work with them closely with a lot of resilience, patience and dedication” (Koigi, 2019).

Questions

1. Applying the Katz three-skills approach, describe Peter Tabichi’s technical, human, and conceptual skills. Which of these three skills is most important to Tabichi’s success as a leader?

2. How would you describe Peter’s competencies? 3. Describe how you believe Peter’s career experiences and environmental influences have shaped his leadership

skills. 4. Describe some of the problem-solving skills Peter has exhibited. How have his competencies and individual

attributes contributed to his problem solving?

Leadership Instrument

Many questionnaires assess an individual’s skills for leadership. A quick search of the internet provides a host of these questionnaires. Almost all of them are designed to be used in training and development to give people a feel for their leadership abilities. Surveys have been used for years to help people understand and improve their leadership style, but most questionnaires are not used in research because they have not been tested for reliability and validity. Nevertheless, they are useful as self-help instruments because they provide specific information to people about their leadership skills.

In this chapter, we present a comprehensive skills model that is based on many empirical studies of leaders’ skills. Although the questionnaires used in these studies are highly reliable and are valid instruments, they are not suitable for our more pragmatic discussion of leadership in this text. In essence, they are too complex and involved. For example, M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, and colleagues (2000) used measures that included open-ended responses and very sophisticated scoring procedures. Though critically important for validating the model, these complicated measures are less valuable as self- instruction questionnaires.

A skills inventory is provided in the next section to assist you in understanding how leadership skills are measured and what your own skills might be. Your scores on the inventory will give you a sense of your own leadership competencies. You may be strong in all three skills, or you may be stronger in some skills than in others. The questionnaire will give you a sense of your own skills profile. If you are stronger in one skill and weaker in another, this may help you determine where you want to improve in the future.

Skills Inventory

Purpose: The purpose of this questionnaire is to determine your leadership strengths and weaknesses.

Instructions: Read each item carefully and decide whether the item describes you as a person. Indicate your response to each item by selecting one of the five options to the right of each item.

Key: 1 = Not true 2 = Seldom true 3 = Occasionally true 4 = Somewhat true 5 = Very true

1. I enjoy getting into the details of how things work. 1 2 3 4 5

2. As a rule, adapting ideas to people’s needs is easy for me. 1 2 3 4 5

3. I enjoy working with abstract ideas. 1 2 3 4 5

4. Technical things fascinate me. 1 2 3 4 5

5. Being able to understand others is the most important part of my work. 1 2 3 4 5

6. Seeing the big picture comes easy for me. 1 2 3 4 5

7. One of my skills is being good at making things work. 1 2 3 4 5

8. My main concern is to have a supportive communication climate. 1 2 3 4 5

9. I am intrigued by complex organizational problems. 1 2 3 4 5

10. Following directions and filling out forms comes easily for me. 1 2 3 4 5

11. Understanding the social fabric of the organization is important to me. 1 2 3 4 5

12. I would enjoy working out strategies for my organization’s growth. 1 2 3 4 5

13. I am good at completing the things I’ve been assigned to do. 1 2 3 4 5

14. Getting all parties to work together is a challenge I enjoy. 1 2 3 4 5

15. Creating a mission statement is rewarding work. 1 2 3 4 5

16. I understand how to do the basic things required of me. 1 2 3 4 5

17. I am concerned with how my decisions affect the lives of others. 1 2 3 4 5

18. Thinking about organizational values and philosophy appeals to me. 1 2 3 4 5

Scoring

The skills inventory is designed to measure three broad types of leadership skills: technical, human, and conceptual. Score the questionnaire by doing the following. First, sum the responses on items 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, and 16. This is your technical skill score. Second, sum the responses on items 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, and 17. This is your human skill score. Third, sum the responses on items 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18. This is your conceptual skill score.

Total scores: Technical skill _____ Human skill _____ Conceptual skill _____

Scoring Interpretation

For each category:

23–30 High Range

14–22 Moderate Range

6–13 Low Range

The scores you received on the skills inventory provide information about your leadership skills in three areas. By comparing the differences between your scores, you can determine where you have leadership strengths and where you have leadership weaknesses. Your scores also point toward the level of management for which you might be most suited.

Summary

The skills approach is a leader-centered perspective that emphasizes the competencies of leaders. It is best represented in the early work of Katz (1955) on the three-skill approach and the more recent work of M. Mumford and his colleagues (M. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al., 2000), who initiated the development of a comprehensive skills model of leadership.

In the three-skill approach, effective leadership depends on three basic personal skills: technical, human, and conceptual. Although all three skills are important for leaders, the importance of each skill varies between management levels. At lower management levels, technical and human skills are most important. For middle managers, the three different skills are equally important. At upper management levels, conceptual and human skills are most important, and technical skills become less important. Leaders are more effective when their skills match their management level.

In the 1990s, the skills model was developed to explain the capabilities (knowledge and skills) that make effective leadership possible. Far more complex than Katz’s paradigm, this model delineated five components of effective leader performance: competencies, individual attributes, career experiences, environmental influences, and leadership outcomes. The leader competencies at the heart of the model are problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge. These competencies are directly affected by the leader’s individual attributes, which include general cognitive ability, crystallized cognitive ability, motivation, and personality. Individual leaders’ competencies are also affected by their career experiences and the environment. The model postulates that effective problem solving and performance can be explained by a leader’s basic competencies and that these competencies are in turn affected by the leader’s attributes, experience, and environment.

There are several strengths in conceptualizing leadership from a skills perspective. First, it is a leader-centered model that stresses the importance of the leader’s abilities, and it places learned skills at the center of effective leadership performance. Second, the skills approach describes leadership in such a way that makes it available to everyone. Skills are competencies that we all can learn to develop and improve. Third, the skills approach provides a sophisticated map that explains how effective leadership performance can be achieved. Based on the model, researchers can develop complex plans for studying the leadership process. Last, this approach provides a structure for leadership education and development programs that include creative problem solving, conflict resolution, listening, and teamwork.

In addition to the positive features, there are some negative aspects to the skills approach. First, the breadth of the model seems to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership, including, for example, conflict management, critical thinking, motivation theory, and personality theory. Second, the skills model is weak in predictive value. It does not explain how a person’s competencies lead to effective leadership performance.

Third, the skills model is weak in general application because it was constructed using data only from military personnel. Until the model has been tested with other populations, such as small and large organizations and businesses, its basic tenets must still be questioned.

Descriptions of Images and Figures Back to Figure

The skills needed at each level of management are as follows.

Top management: Equal amount of human and conceptual skills, and a lesser amount of technical skills.

Middle management: Equal amount of technical, human, and conceptual skills.

Supervisory management: Equal amount of technical and human skills, and a lesser amount of conceptual skills.

Back to Figure

Individual attributes are general cognitive ability, crystallized cognitive ability, motivation, and personality. Competencies are problem-solving skills, social judgement and social skills, and knowledge. Individual attributes influence competencies, which influence problem solving, which in turn influence performance. Career experiences influence individual attributes and competencies. Environmental influences affect individual attributes, competencies, problem-solving, and performance. Leadership outcomes are problem-solving and performance.

Back to Figure

The steps are as follows:

Problem definition

Cause or goal analysis and constraint analysis

Planning

Forecasting

Creative thinking

Idea evaluation and wisdom, which influence each other

Sensemaking and visioning

4 BEHAVIORAL APPROACH

DESCRIPTION The behavioral approach emphasizes the behavior of the leader. This distinguishes it from the trait approach (Chapter 2), which emphasizes the personality characteristics of the leader, and the skills approach (Chapter 3), which emphasizes the leader’s capabilities. The behavioral approach focuses exclusively on what leaders do and how they act. In shifting the study of leadership to leader behaviors, the behavioral approach expanded the research of leadership to include the actions of leaders toward followers in various contexts.

Researchers studying the behavioral approach determined that leadership is composed of two general kinds of behaviors: task behaviors and relationship behaviors. Task behaviors facilitate goal accomplishment: They help group members to achieve their objectives. Relationship behaviors help followers feel comfortable with themselves, with each other, and with the situation in which they find themselves. The central purpose of the behavioral approach is to explain how leaders combine these two kinds of behaviors to influence followers in their efforts to reach a goal.

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the behavioral approach. Some of the first studies to be done were conducted at The Ohio State University in the late 1940s, based on the findings of Stogdill’s (1948) work, which pointed to the importance of considering more than leaders’ traits in leadership research. At about the same time, another group of researchers at the University of Michigan was conducting a series of studies that explored how leadership functioned in small groups. A third line of research was begun by Blake and Mouton in the early 1960s; it explored how managers used task and relationship behaviors in the organizational setting.

Although many research studies could be categorized under the heading of the behavioral approach, the Ohio State studies, the Michigan studies, and the studies by Blake and Mouton (1964, 1978, 1985) are strongly representative of the ideas