We’ve all been told about the power of positive leadership, servant leadership etc. But what if much of what we believe about these styles is more of an illusion?
Today, we’re diving into research that suggests the evidence for positive leadership styles might be more steeped in how leaders are judged, not just what they do, leading to a re-evaluation of how we understand leadership effectiveness.
Today’s study is: Fischer, T., Dietz, J., & Antonakis, J. (2024). A fatal flaw: Positive leadership style research creates causal illusions. The Leadership Quarterly, 35(3), 101771.
Make sure to subscribe to Safe As on Spotify/Apple, and if you find it useful then please help share the news, and leave a rating and review on your podcast app.
I also have a Safe As LinkedIn group if you want to stay up to date on releases: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14717868/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3Bhdg8uJYYT%2BmsMqZvpHBmdQ%3D%3D
Shout me a coffee (one-off or monthly recurring)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4BRXMeHeYBgjA4sCTepQnK?si=_sqB2a9_Tre99PU34XtaaQ
Transcript:
So we’ve all been told about the power of positive leadership, authentic, ethical, servant leadership. But one of much of what we believe about these styles is more of an illusion. Today, we’re diving into research that suggests the evidence for positive leadership styles might be more steeped in how leaders are judged, not just what they do, leading to a re-evaluation of how we understand leadership effectiveness.
Hello everyone, I’m Ben Hutchinson, and this is SAFE AS, a podcast dedicated to the thrifty analysis of safety, risk, and performance research. Visit safetyinsights.org for more research.
Today’s study is from Fisher et al. (2024), titled “A Fatal Floor: Positive Leadership Style Research Creates Causal Illusions,” published in The Leadership Quarterly. They tested the idea that leadership styles are more a product of subjective follower evaluations than being some sort of concrete, stable class of leadership behaviors or actions. Let me emphasize, they’re focusing on leadership styles, not the importance of leadership per se.
Providing background, while valid constructs are necessary in science, they need to be defined, measurable, and causally linked to other constructs. However, many behavioral constructs don’t meet these criteria. One systematic review of leadership and organizational behavior research found that just 3% of the variables in these supposedly behavioral sciences capture the observable behaviors of individuals or groups; rather, they tend to capture perceptions and evaluations. They argue that, or in the paper, ironically then, behavioral scientists rarely study behaviors, which is due to both improper conceptualization and incorrect measurement.
A problem of this popular stream of behavioral research is that they conflate leadership behavior with evaluations of the behavior and hence lead to causal illusions. Further, they argue that the positive benefits that come from leadership styles might be more of an artifact of conflation rather than a reflection of reality. What they mean is these validated constructs don’t actually validate the effects of leaders’ behaviors, but rather they support or validate a construct that conflates leader behaviors and evaluations of those behaviors.
Leadership styles are defined as patterns, characteristics, and modes of behavior, etc., like authentic, ethical, or servant leadership, but the pattern of behaviors isn’t the same as the behaviors themselves, but a characteristic of a set of behaviors with a common theme. As such, leadership styles then are more of a characterization or judgment—an evaluative component—so different. Behaviors are objective, whereas evaluations are subjective. So evaluations rest not just on observed behaviors but on other unobservable leader factors. So for instance, some research shows that a leader’s facial appearance affects the observer’s evaluations of that leader. A knowledge about a leader’s previous performance also shapes evaluations of leadership style. And hence, according to the paper, evaluations of leader behaviors are not merely judgments about these observed behaviors, but holistic assessments of the leader as a person.
Anyways, what did they find in the study? Well, some key findings were that positive leadership styles are outcomes that depend on non-behavioral evaluative factors, such as information about a leader’s previous success or value alignment between leaders and followers. Measures of leadership styles create causal illusions or various predictions of objective outcomes, even when leader behaviors and other leader-specific factors are kept constant. The findings, according to the paper, cast serious doubts on previous research claiming that positive leadership styles cause positive outcomes. Furthermore, “positive leadership style research is not only wrong” (their words), “but also practically futile because its constructs and measures are amalgams that do not isolate concrete and learnable behaviors.”
So unpacking the findings, they highlight that positive leadership styles are conflated to constructs that might be partially behavioral but in large part represent positive summary evaluations of leader behaviors and of other leader properties. As I said differently, leadership styles are likely affected by the leader’s behaviors, as you’d expect, but whether leaders have an ethical or servant sort of style is not in itself an objective leader property, but a subjective evaluation through the eye of the beholder.
Next, they argue that if “leadership is in the eye of the beholder,” then evaluating observer ratings is simply the correct measured choice. But they actually disagree with this premise because subjective evaluations of leadership styles are outcomes themselves and, according to the paper, using these styles as independent variables to predict other outcomes is a futile exercise that can only produce further causal illusions. The causal illusions are said to stem from misinterpreting leadership styles as purely behavioral constructs. Ignoring other variables, for instance, information about a leader’s past performance or the leader-follower value alignment, they argue that their findings are somewhat sobering, pointing to fundamental conceptual and methodological weaknesses in past research, thus knocking “past wisdom about positive leadership styles off its foundation” (their words).
Some conclusions from the paper: Positive leadership styles really lack a solid empirical foundation, rendering these claims speculative. Leadership styles are not leader behaviors per se, but rather a mix of what leaders do and how leaders evaluate leadership. These findings warn practitioners that lots of evidence on the effectiveness of positive leadership styles—again, not necessarily leadership actions and behaviors and goal setting—is likely driven by causal illusions and thus unwarranted.
So the big question, what can we make of these findings? This was another challenging paper for simple, practical, silver bullets. But maybe, shift leadership development to focus more on specific, measurable behaviors, more than vague, positive styles perhaps. Remember, behavior in this sense isn’t just a sort of “behavioralism” approach, but it’s the routines, the things that we do, and the logics of why we do them. Clearly distinguish objective leader actions from subjective follower evaluations. Of course, subjective evaluations by followers are in and of themselves critical. The authors are more critical around the concept or the construct of a style, perhaps critically evaluating research that has been undertaken on positive leadership styles. For limitations, again as you’d expect there was a few, but they say that there was limited predictive power between actual behaviors versus the subjective evaluations. Also, the causal illusion was only confirmed for three specific leadership styles that I mentioned earlier, but they expect these findings to apply more broadly.
SafetyInsights.org 