BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE THESIS
Effective leadership can be defined as the ‘ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members’. (Simonton, 1994) The two core dimensions of leadership effectiveness that consistently appear across most of the studies (Derue, Nahrgang, Wellman, & Humphrey, 2011) are – the leader’s ability to drive task performance (whether or not the group meets its objectives) and the leader’s ability to develop positive, enabling relationships with the team members (whether or not the team members are engaged and satisfied with the leader).
As a practitioner and a student of Human Resource Management, throughout my career across one and half decades, I have been acutely aware of the significant gap that exists between idealized descriptions of effective leadership in theory versus the actual reality of leadership that can be seen on the ground. It also appears that in spite of significant investment of time and money and range of approaches and tools being used, it’s not clear whether we have discovered ways of ways of systematically improving leadership effectiveness. (Ready & Conger, 2003). On this background, ‘Why ‘effective leadership’ is so rare in real life and why is it so difficult to develop?’ become very important questions.
I have always had some sense that at least part of the answer to this question is likely to be about elements of human nature that we don’t fully understand and that are not very easy to change at will. This was due to extensive evidence around us that indicates that failure to be an effective leader is rarely due to lack of knowledge of what an effective leader should do, because that knowledge is abundantly available – it is almost always due to failure in internalizing and practicing that knowledge.
While thinking about this question, I came across the model of fundamental polarity of human nature (Blatt, 2008) which proposes that personality development from infancy to adulthood is driven by two fundamental dimensions – self-definition and relatedness. Self-definition dimension is about drive to assert individuality and obtain mastery over the environment – the relatedness dimension is about connecting, relating with others by building empathetic bonds. While recognizing the fact that often these dimensions can pull an individual in opposite directions, the model states that development of mature and integrated personality is fundamentally dependent on the individual growing on both these dimensions. The vast body of research based on this model indicates these two dimensions can be seen playing a foundational role in personality development as well as psychopathology. Studying this fundamental polarity and importance of balance between two counteracting dimensions made me think about its potential implication for leadership. There is a large body of literature on leadership effectiveness (Bass, 1990; Kaiser & Overfield, 2010; Sloan, 1994; Yukl & Mahsud, 2010) which indicates that leadership is essentially about managing multiple counteracting forces and having capacity to adopt to suit requirements of changing environment. This body of research demonstrates that flexibility, adaptability and versatility are defining ingredients of effective leadership.
Juxtaposing these two strands – the first about the model of fundamental human polarity and the second about the definitive importance of adaptability for leadership effectiveness gave rise to an interesting question. This question – ‘Are there fundamental aspects of human nature which make development of flexibility and adaptability so rare and difficult?’ is the central line of enquiry for this thesis.
I found out that there are three other conceptually interlinked psychodynamic models that build on the model of fundamental polarity and throw great amount of light on human proclivity for inflexibility. Hence at the core of this thesis is the attempt to build an integrated framework that brings together four key psychodynamic models – fundamental polarity of human nature (Blatt, 2008), adult attachment theory (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007), ‘Three Neurotic Styles’ (Horney, 2013) and dark side personality traits (R. Hogan et al., 2007). The ‘adult attachment theory’ helps us understand how mental representations formed in early childhood about ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ have the potential of bringing in certain inflexibility in patterns of interpersonal relationships. The ‘‘Three Neurotic Styles’’ model throws light on evolution of three types of neurotic trends that result in excessive reliance on few types of behaviours, which leads to lack of adaptability. The ‘dark side personality traits’ model describes eleven dimensions that have the potential to create performance risks at workplace.
For each of the models, its interlinkages with the other model and insights that can be drawn form it about leadership adaptability have been described. The thesis ends with holistic application of the integrated framework to four important areas of practice – leadership development, executive coaching, selection and promotion for leadership roles and gender issues in leadership development.
I have chosen to focus in great depth on a synthesis of these four models, and therefore my contribution with this thesis will be of a theoretical nature. I will conclude with suggestions for future research that indicate ways in which this integrated framework might be tested.
While many earlier studies have captured interlinkages between some pairs of models covered in this thesis, I hope that the integrated framework which conceptually combines all of these four key psychodynamic models will be an original contribution of this thesis. It will not be an exaggeration to say that the foundation of the integrated framework – the model of fundamental polarity of human nature is one of the most important principles to understand human proclivity for rigidity and imbalance. It’s my sincere hope that the integrated framework presented in this thesis will serve as a useful lens for scholars as well as practitioners of leadership and human development.
