Active leaders and managers take the major responsibility for decision making when they are directive and consultative, whereas leaders and managers take little or no responsibility when they are inactive and laissez-faire. Various active leadership styles correlate between 2.30 to 2.60 with inactive, laissez-faire leadership (Bass & Avolio, 1997). The generally positive correlations between factorially and conceptually distinct styles of leadership will be detailed in chapters 17 through 22. That is, leaders who score high in direction, task orientation, change behavior, and initiation of structure also tend to score high in participation, relations orientation, and consideration. Thus for 112 managers, Jones, James, and Bruni (1975) found that the leaders’ supportiveness correlated .64 with an emphasis on goals and .74 with facilitation of work. Likewise, facilitation of interaction correlated .58 with the emphasis on goals and .70 with facilitation of work. Schriesheim, House, and Kerr (1976) found a median correlation for 10 studies of .52 between “consideration” and “initiation of structure” on the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire Form XII. Farrow, Valenzi, and Bass (1980) reported that the frequency of the leaders’ direction, as described by over 1,200 subordinates, correlated .26 with the leaders’ consultation and .13 with the leaders’ participation.1 Errors of leniency and halo effects may be involved in these descriptions. Even so, there is a tendency to describe leaders as being more active or less active on several conceptually distinct dimensions concurrently. This tendency may be due to the real behavior of leaders, as well as to subordinates’ perceptual biases.
Leadership infused by a motivation to lead and to manage is opposite to that due to a leader’s inclination to use the laissez-faire style. Active leadership is seen in much of McClelland’s (1975) Leadership Motive Pattern, discussed in Chapter 7; and in Miner’s “motivation to manage,” detailed later in the present chapter. Miner (1982) theorized that managers actively engage in maintaining good relations with superiors, competing for advancement and recognition, acting as assertive father figures, exercising power over subordinates, being visibly different from subordinates, and accepting responsibility for administrative details.2
As will be detailed in Chapter 7, McClelland found active leadership to be undergirded by a need for power and an absence of need for affiliation, coupled with an ability to inhibit the need for power. Miner and Smith (1982) inferred that a desire for control and power lay behind the motivation to manage. For Chan and Drasgow (2001), the motivation to lead involved cognitive abilities, values, personality, and attitudes that are augmented by social considerations such as affective identity and norms. According to Locke, one should lead actively for rational and selfish interests; according to Avolio, one should be motivated to lead actively for altruistic reasons (Avolio & Locke, 2002).
Jongbloed and Frost (1985) attributed the differential budgetary growth and success of two Canadian hospital laboratories to the motivation and activity of their directors. The desire of the director of the more success-ful laboratory “to achieve international recognition for outstanding research was apparent in the energy he devoted to lobbying hospital administrators and Ministry of Health Canada” (p. 102). The other laboratory director was not similarly motivated and did not engage in lobbying.
More activity by leaders, except when it is coercive, is usually associated with greater satisfaction and effectiveness among their followers. Conversely, more often than not, less activity in any of these active styles is negatively related to the performance and satisfaction of the followers. Thus, for instance, the structuring of expectations contributes positively to the productivity, cohesiveness, and satisfaction of the group. This pattern of behavior is the central factor in leadership when leadership is measured by initiation of structure, detailed in Chapter 20. The leader can accomplish these initiatives through direction or participation, inspiration or consultation, negotiation or delegation. Whatever the style, as long as it is not coercive and autocratic, it must involve the leader taking action. It is doubtful that leaders in most situations can be of positive value to the group’s performance, satisfaction, and cohesiveness without this kind of active structuring unless all such structure has already been provided by other means such as self-management, culture, or organization.
Being active in direction, consultation, or both was better than being inactive in both. When data collected by Farrow, Valenzi, and Bass (1980) from 1,300 subordinates and their 340 managers describing the pooled frequency of the direction and consultation of the managers were correlated with the effectiveness of the groups, as seen by both the managers and the subordinates, the correlation with effectiveness (.41) was higher than that obtained for direction (.28) or consultation (.37) alone. Even more extreme, the combined direction-consultation index correlated .61 with satisfaction; consultation alone correlated .52. Bass, Valenzi, Farrow, and Solomon (1975) found overall correlations ranging from .30 to .60 between the behavior of leaders, as seen by their subordinates, and the judged effectiveness of the leaders’ work units, regardless of whether the leaders were directive or participative. When direction, consultation, participation, and delegation were combined, their composite correlated .36 and .61 with effectiveness and satisfaction, respectively. Similarly, to predict increased effectiveness, System 4 participative management was combined with “high performance, no-nonsense goals, orderly systematic goal setting processes, and rigorous assessment of progress in achieving those goals” (R. Likert & J. Likert, 1976). Path analyses reported by R. Likert (1973) demonstrated that managerial leadership, whether task-or relations-oriented, contributed both directly and indirectly to the subordinates’ satisfaction and productive efficiency. For large samples, the direct correlations between total leadership, subordinates’ satisfaction, and total productive efficiency were .49 and .42, respectively. In addition, total managerial leadership correlated .42 with a good organizational climate, .23 with peer leadership, .27 with a good group process, and directly between .25 and .67 with subordinates’ satisfaction and total productive efficiency.
Stogdill (1974) reviewed an array of surveys and experiments, mostly containing concurrent analyses of leader behavior and outcomes, more often than not in temporary, short-term groups and without reference to possible contingent conditions. He concluded that both the democratic leadership cluster (participation, relations orientation, and consideration) and the work-related cluster (direction, task orientation, structuring but not autocratic) were more likely to be positively than negatively related to the productivity, satisfaction, and cohesiveness of the group. Participative leadership behavior, as well as leadership behavior that structured followers’ expectations, was consistently related to the group’s cohesiveness.
As will be seen in Chapter 19, Blake and Mouton (1964) argued that the best leadership is achieved with a 9,9 style concerned both with production and with people. Hall and Donnell (1979) confirmed this contention, showing that the 190 out of 1,878 managers who were the fastest in their career advancement were likely to be high in both task orientation and relations orientation, according to their subordinates. And the 445 managers who advanced most slowly were clearly 1,1 and laissez-faire in style—that is, low in both task orientation and relations orientation. In an experiment with 80 undergraduates, Medcof and Evans (1986) demonstrated that plodders are the least desirable leaders in business—a finding that agreed with Blake and Mouton’s argument. Misumi (1985) reported PM leadership, combining above-median performance in both performance and maintenance, was most efficacious in a wide variety of settings compared with below-median PM leadership.
Fleishman and Simmons (1970) concluded that leadership combining the factors of strong consideration and initiation of structure is most likely to optimize a number of criteria of effectiveness for a variety of supervisory jobs. In agreement, Karmel (1978) concluded that the combination of initiation and consideration—the total activity of leaders in contrast to their inactivity—may be the most important dimensions to investigate. A powerful general factor can be produced, if one so decides, by the selection of appropriate factor-analytical routines. It may be that pooling a diversity of decision-making styles for a new measure of generalized leadership activity will be useful.
Caveat: There are some obvious examples in which a group may do better with a less active leader. Leadership activity, as such, does not always guarantee the performance, satisfaction, or cohesion of a group. Highly active but coercive, monopolistic, autocratic leadership will contribute more to a group’s dissatisfaction and lack of cohesiveness than to productivity. The qualities of the leadership activity must be taken into account. For the leader, doing something is usually, but not always, better than doing nothing. A calm, steady hand at the tiller may be required rather than an impulsive change of course. Moreover, as will be noted in Chapter 20, activity in two styles may add little more than activity in one style alone.3
Not all activity in interpersonal and organizational settings is conducive to successful leadership; nor is successful leadership associated with the generation of any and all activity in oneself and others. For instance, as will be noted in Chapter 7, McClelland’s (1985) Leadership Motive Pattern (LMP) includes the tendency of individuals to tell stories about inhibiting activity on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The more relevant question is whether activity will be influential and whether it will necessarily result in the increased performance, satisfaction, and cohesiveness of a group. The answer to this question appears to depend on whether the work-related leadership behavior is autocratic, directive, task oriented, or structuring and whether the person-related leadership behavior is democratic, participative, relations oriented, or considerate. These determinants are in addition to the contingencies that also may have to be taken into account. The activist admonition—“Lead, follow, or get out of the way”—has to be qualified by adding “with fore-thought, responsibility, and care.” The pressure for action may need to be inhibited. Many a general has been victorious by waiting patiently to be attacked by a more impulsive enemy.
McClelland’s (1975) Leadership Motive Pattern (LMP) is high for individuals who score high on the projective Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) in their need for power but who score low in their need for affiliation and, as was just noted, who exhibit impulse control in their projected inhibition of the expression of power. (They are actually less active than they really are driven to be.) A high LMP index was seen to forecast success in management. Thus McClelland and Burnham (1976) scored the TAT responses of managers’ needs for power, achievement, and affiliation. They found that successful managers (managers whose subordinates were higher in morale and productivity) wrote TAT stories with “need for power” scores that were above average and with “need for achievement” scores that were higher than the need for affiliation. The stories contained at least moderate levels of activity inhibition. In a follow-up study of 237 AT&T managers, McClelland and Boyatzis (1982) found that although a high need for achievement predicted the success of lower-level managers, the moderate to high need for power, the low need for affiliation, and high scores in activity inhibition predicted the success of most other managers. Progress over 16 years at AT&T correlated an estimated .33 with LMP (McClelland, 1980).
Cornelius and Lane (1984) collected LMP data for managers in a profit-making professionally oriented service organization. The service organization provided instruction in a second language to full-time students. The investigators failed to obtain positive correlations of McClelland’s LMP profile of a high need for power and a low need for affiliation with measures of the performance of an administrative job or the subordinates’ morale. In fact, they obtained a negative correlation of 2.42 of LMP scores against an administrative efficiency index for the lower level of supervisors. Their analyses were weakened by their failure to include an expression for the activity inhibition of power in their measurement of LMR. Also, the service organization was a hierarchically arranged group of professionals. However, Cornelius and Lane did find that LMP scores predicted the assignment of managers to more prestigious work centers.
According to Miner (1965), people differ in their moti-vation to carry out the roles required of a manager and their success in doing so in a hierarchical organization. Miner used a projective approach—the Miner Sentence Completion Scale (MSCS), a sentence-completion test—in which examinees, without awareness, project their desires by completing incomplete sentences such as “Giving orders …”; “Athletic contests …”; and “My father …” He originated a theory of managerial role motivation, built on role theory, psychoanalytic theory, and the empirical results of Kahn (1956b) and Fleishman, Harris, and Burtt (1955). His theory was directed specifically toward role-taking propensities within the ideal large organization, formalized and rationalized to function bureaucratically. Miner argued that people who “repeatedly associate positive rather than negative emotion” with various managerial role prescriptions are more likely to meet the existing requirements for effectiveness.
Six managerial role prescriptions were presented by Miner, along with the required motivation for success as a manager in a hierarchical organization: (1) Managers must behave in ways that do not provoke negative reactions from their superiors. To represent their group upward in the organization and to obtain support for their actions, managers should maintain good relationships with those above them. A generally positive attitude toward those holding positions of authority is required; (2) Since a strong competitive element is built into managerial work, managers must compete for the available rewards, both for themselves and for their groups. If they do not, they may lose ground as functions are relegated to lower their status. Without a willingness to complete, promotion is improbable. To meet this role requirement, managers should be favorably disposed toward engaging in competition; (3) There is a parallel between managerial role requirements and the assertiveness that is traditionally demanded of the masculine role. Both a manager and a father are supposed to take charge, to make decisions, to take such disciplinary action as may be necessary, and to protect others. Even women managers will be expected to follow the essentially masculine pattern of behavior as traditionally defined.4 A desire to meet the requirements of assertive masculinity will generally lead to success in meeting certain role prescriptions of the managerial job; (4) Managers must exercise power over subordinates and direct their behavior in a manner that is consistent with organizational and personal objectives. Managers must tell others what to do, when necessary, and enforce their words through the appropriate use of positive and negative sanctions. The person who finds such directive behavior difficult and emotionally disturbing will have difficulty meeting this managerial role prescription; (5) Managers must stand out from their groups and assume positions of high visibility. They cannot use the actions of their subordinates as a guide for their own behavior as managers. Rather, they must deviate from their immediate groups and do things that will inevitably invite attention, discussion, and perhaps criticism from those who report to them. When the idea of standing out from the group, of behaving in a different manner, and of being highly visible elicits unpleasant feelings, then behavior appropriate to the role will occur less often than is needed; (6) Managers must “get the work out” and keep on top of routine demands. Administrative requirements of this kind are found in all managerial work, although specific activities will vary somewhat from one situation to another. To meet these prescriptions, a manager must at least be willing to deal with routines and ideally gain some satisfaction from doing so.
Contradictions. As can be seen, Miner did not mince words. He argued that in a typical bureaucratic hierarchy, what is needed for leadership is an authority-accepting, upward-oriented, competitive, assertive, masculine, power-wielding, tough-minded person who will attend to details. In preparing his role prescriptions, he was selective about which facts about leadership he incorporated and which facts he ignored. A positive attitude toward authority may characterize authoritarian-submissive behavior. An organization of submissive managers would not seem to promise innovation and effectiveness. Competitive behavior presents many problems for an organization. Managers who are in competition with their peers hide necessary information from each other. They fail to consider the goals of subordinates. Competition means that managers negotiate with their peers instead of solving problems with them. Decisions are based on power, rather than on merit—again, a consequence that is not calculated to add to organizational effectiveness. It is true that visibility may help one’s own advancement. However, the concern for such visibility may conflict with good team support from subordinates, who may feel exploited. The stern father image and the willingness and need to use sanctions seem to contradict most of the evidence about the costs of coercion and autocratic leadership. If attention to details means the inclusion of sanctions, and if the manager lacks a sense of priorities, this prescription can easily be overdone.
Despite these contradictions, considerable support for Miner’s theory has been amassed for predicting the success of managers in a hierarchical organization. But, as shall be seen, the contradictions are stronger in a professional organization of colleagues in which innovation and creativity are priorities, and where cooperation, open communication, expert power, and helping relationships are paramount. For the professional type of organization, Miner laid out a different set of role prescriptions for leadership, accompanied by a different sentence-completion test (MSCS-Form P) than the one created for assess-ing managers in a hierarchical bureaucracy (MSCS-Form H).
MSCS-Form H was used to measure managerial role motivation in bureaucratic organizations (Miner, 1965). It contains 40 items, 35 of which are scored. As was just mentioned, the scale is a projective measure in which examinees complete a list of incomplete sentences such as “Sitting behind a desk, I …” A majority of the incomplete sentences refer to situations that either are outside the work environment or are not specifically related to the managerial job. Ordinarily, examinees are unaware of what is being measured, so they are unlikely to distort their responses to present themselves in a good light as managers. Subscales for the motivation to take each of the prescribed managerial roles can be obtained. For instance, completing the incomplete sentence “When playing cards …” with the response, “I always try to win” would contribute to one’s score on the competitive games scale. The response “I usually become bored” would do the reverse. A multiple-choice version was developed by Steger, Kelley, Chouiniere, and Goldenbaum (1977), whose total score correlated .68, .38, .56, and .68 with the original MSCS-Form H in different samples. However, a considerable inflation of scores occurred when the multiple-choice format was used. Respondents did not choose the socially undesirable negative alternatives of the kind they ordinarily might produce in response to the open-ended incomplete sentences of the original projective test (Miner, 1977b).
Concurrent Validities. Berman and Miner (1985) obtained results indicating that 75 chief executive and operating officers, executive vice presidents, and group vice presidents who had worked their way upward most successfully through a bureaucratic hierarchy earned significantly higher MSCS scores than 65 lower-level managers of nearly the same age who had not risen as high in the hierarchy and 26 others, including the founder-entrepreneur and his relatives. Earlier, Miner (1965) found that the higher the total scores on MSCS-Form H, the higher the hierarchical level, the performance ratings, and the rated potentials of 81 to 100 managers of research and development (R & D) in a petrochemical firm. Furthermore, the total MSCS scores of 70 department store managers related significantly to the managers’ grade levels and potential but not to their rated performance. Likewise, Gantz, Erickson, and Stephenson (1977a) reported that the total MSCS scores of 117 scientists and engineers in a government R & D laboratory related significantly to their peers’ ratings of their supervisory potential. For 101 personnel and industrial managers, Miner and Miner (1977) established a significant relation between total MSCS scores and a composite measure of their success, compensation, and positional level. Miner (1977) obtained correlations of .20, .57, and .39, respectively, of MSCS with the performance ratings of 81 R & D managers, 61 oil company managers, and 81 administrators in a large school district. Similar correlations of MSCS scores with levels of position were found by Miner (1977a) for 142 personnel and industrial re-lation managers and for 395 managers from a variety of firms.
With 82 school administrators in a large city, Miner (1967) found that total MSCS scores were related significantly to their compensation, rated performance, and potential, but not to their hierarchical level. However, hierarchical level in the organization was significantly related to the total MSCS scores of 44 women department store managers (Miner, 1977a) and 50 and 37 textile managers, respectively (Southern, 1976). Two additional analyses reported by Miner (1982a) showed that MSCS scores were higher for those who were at a higher organizational level. The mean score for 22 personnel managers who were vice presidents was 5.7, but the mean score was only 2.4 for 79 personnel managers who were below the vice presidential level. The mean was 6.8 for 49 CEOs, presidents, and group vice presidents, but it was 0.9 for 49 matched managers at lower levels. Other concurrent significant differences that were in line with expectations for the scores on MSCS-Form H and the organizational level of managers were reported for hospital officers (Black, 1981). With samples of students, Miner and Crane (1977) obtained positive findings that related MSCS scores to the promotion of 47 MBA students to management, to the selection of a fraternity president from among 40 candidates (Steger, Kelley, Chouiniere, & Goldenbaum, 1977), and to the choice among 190 candidates for student offices. Miner, Rizzo, Harlow, and Hill (1974/1977) also reported positive findings for undergraduate students in a simulated bureaucratic organization. Finally, Miner and Crane (1981) found a correlation of .48 between the MSCS scores of 56 graduate students in management and the students’ tendency to describe their present and planned work as more managerial in nature.
Predictive Validities. Total MSCS scores forecast the rise in organizational level and subsequent performance ratings of 49 to 81 R & D and marketing managers in a petrochemical firm (Miner, 1965). Lacey (1977) found that total MSCS scores were significantly able to predict the promotion to management of 95 scientists and engineers. Lardent (1977) likewise found that the total MSCS scores of 251 candidates successfully forecast graduation from the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning. Butler, Lardent, and Miner (1983) were able to do the same for 502 West Point cadets. But Bartol, Anderson, and Schneier (1980) failed to find concurrent differences in motivation to manage among classes of sophomores, juniors, and seniors in business schools; and Bartol and Martin (1982) were unable to find significant changes in the same MBA students in a longitudinal study in which the 232 students were assessed with the multiple-choice form of the MSCS at the beginning of their program and again after graduation. Moreover, unlike the military findings, no relation was found between the students’ completion of the MBA program and their MSCS scores, although Bartol and Martin did report that the MSCS scores of 97 of the graduates were a significant predictor of these persons’ salaries after graduation. Support for the construct validity of the MSCS as a motivational measure was also obtained, in that Bartol and Martin found correlations with MSCS scores of .26 and .34 respectively, with the students’ desired managerial level and the level the students thought it was possible for them to attain.
Validity Contingent on Bureaucratic Hierarchy. Since the role prescriptions were applicable only to traditional bureaucratic hierarchies, Miner (1965) proposed and found that the total scores on MSCS-Form H were unrelated to the success of professionals outside such highly structured organizations. Miner (1977a) failed to find any significant relations between the scores on MSCS-Form H and various criteria of success of 24 to 51 managerial consultants, 49 faculty members at business schools, 36 to 57 school administrators in small and medium-size cities and consolidated districts, and 65 salesmen at an oil dealership (Miner, 1962a, 1962b). More convincing support for this argument was obtained by Miner, Rizzo, Harlow, and Hill (1977), who showed that in simulated low-structure situations, in which 89 students worked on various case projects in small teams of four to seven, scores on MSCS-Form H were unrelated to the students’ emergence as leaders. However, in line with Miner’s theory, in a high-structure situation in which students chose to work on current problems in assigned positions in a simulated organization with six divisional levels, the total scores on MSCS-Form H of higher-level leaders were highest and the scores of non-leaders and of those who opted to work outside the organization were lowest.
Oliver (1982) created an inventory to discriminate reliably between hierarchical and professional organizations; and Miner (1982a) developed MSCS-Form P, another sentence-completion test, to measure professional motivation to deal with success in a professional, in contrast to a hierarchical, organization. The subscales of Form P concern the motivation to acquire knowledge, to act independently, to accept status, to provide help, and to be professionally committed. Motivation on Form P is more likely to correlate with the level and performance of professional leaders than hierarchical leaders. Miner reported correlations of .51, .55, .42, and .53, respectively, with the professional rank, professional compensation, number of journal articles published, and number of books published of 112 members of the Academy of Management. The correlations of such criteria of professional success with the corresponding scores for the motivation to manage on Form H were, respectively, .02, .08, .01, and .09.
The motivation to manage on MSCS-Form H failed to relate to the desire of 38 entrepreneurs in Oregon to expand. Consequently, Form T was constructed to assess the motivation for entrepreneurial leadership: the motivation to achieve, to take risks, to seek the results of performance, to innovate, to plan, and to set goals. On Form T, the mean for 23 entrepreneurs with faster-growing firms was 11.9; the mean was 0.5 for 28 entrepreneurs with slow-growth firms and 2.0 for nonentrepreneurs (Smith & Miner, 1984).
Critique. A number of difficulties emerge from Miner’s work. Even restricting Miner’s motivation to manage to traditional hierarchies fails to account for the contrast between his prescriptions for the managerial role and those, say, of most behavioral scientists who favor democratic, participative, relations-oriented, considerate leadership. Indeed, conspicuously absent from Miner’s results are criteria for subordinates’ satisfaction, productivity, cohesiveness, and growth. As was noted earlier, the satisfaction of subordinates may be strongly associated with considerate and relations-oriented leadership behavior, but the leaders’ superiors may evaluate the leaders more favorably for their emphasis on production and their task orientation. As will be seen in Chapter 18, one leadership style—negotiation or manipulation—was related to the salary levels attained by managers (usually determined by their superiors) adjusted for age, seniority, education, function, and so on. Yet negotiative or ma-nipulative behavior was the one leadership style that was likely to be negatively related to subordinates’ satisfaction and subordinates’ ratings of the effectiveness of work groups.
Thus individual managers may be most successful in hierarchical organizations if they pursue the role prescriptions set forth by Miner. However, in the absence of evidence, one can only guess, given R. Likert’s (1977b) long-range studies (see Chapter 17), that their organizations are likely to suffer from the consequences of subordinates’ grievances, absences, turnover, and dissatisfaction, as well as from vertical and lateral blockages and filtering of communication. Nevertheless, Miner may be performing an extremely important service in pointing out the fundamental conflict, noted by Argyris (1964a) and Cul-bert and McDonough (1980), among others, between the integration of the long-term objectives of the individual manager and those of the organization.
In the twenty-first century, to survive and prosper, even the largest of hierarchical organizations require flexibility in meeting the challenges of rapidly changing technologies and markets. Professional-like concerns for commitment, loyalty, and involvement have become increasingly important. Entrepreneurial (or intrapreneurial) attitudes and behavior are also important for the organization’s members. It would seem that some complex combination of what is being measured by MSCS Forms H, P, and T would become increasingly relevant in the healthiest of organizations.
Bradford and Lippitt (1945) conceived of laissez-faire leadership as descriptive of leaders who avoid attempting to influence their subordinates and who shirk their supervisory duties. Such leaders are inactive and have no confidence in their ability to supervise. They bury themselves in paperwork and stay away from their subordinates. They may condone “license.” They leave too much responsibility with subordinates, set no clear goals, and do not help the group to make decisions. They let things drift. Laissez-faire leaders are indifferent to what is happening. They avoid getting involved in making decisions and taking stands on issues. They divert attention from hard choices and abdicate responsibility. They “refuse to take sides in a dispute, are disorganized in dealing with priorities and talk about getting down to work, but never really do” (Bass, 1998). Fortunately, only a minority of elected or appointed leaders consistently abdicate their responsibilities. Although this inactivity is the least frequently observed by colleagues and subordinates (Bass & Avolio, 1989), many leaders still reveal it in varying amounts. Followers may replace such leaders in influence.
To some degree, the perception of leaders’ passivity may be due to the motivation of their subordinates. For instance, Niebuhr, Bedeian, and Armenakis (1980) found that among 202 nursing personnel at a Veterans Administration hospital, those subordinates who were motivated toward self-goals of achievement, power, and independence perceived their leaders to be less active. Those with strong other-directed goals, such as a need for affiliation, saw their leaders as more active.
Presidential Examples. Ronald Reagan was one of the highest presidents and Lyndon Johnson was one of the lowest presidents in respect to inactivity. Jimmy Carter displayed such leadership only for some issues. Johnson and Carter immersed themselves in the details of what their administrations had to do. Yet although Carter ordinarily was greatly involved in detail, particularly in the creation of his programs, he was much less active in implementing voluntary wage and price guidelines, a macroeconomic strategy that a president can initiate by himself. Carter’s lack of much leadership in this regard contrasted with Johnson’s style: Johnson was much more willing to use his presidential powers of persuasion and bargaining with business and labor. Carter was more restricted in his efforts. Johnson would have earned a low rating as a laissez-faire leader on this issue, whereas Carter would have earned a higher one. On many matters, Ronald Reagan was much more inactive as president than either Carter or Johnson. Reagan’s subordinates usually had free rein to proceed as they thought best. The many scandals that surfaced during and after his administration could be attributed in part to his hands-off style and to poor choices by his subordinates. Still, in some matters he was highly active. He promoted activist interventions in economic policy such as cutting taxes and greatly increasing military spending. He strongly espoused less government intervention in domestic affairs. To take another example, whereas Theodore Roosevelt was a bundle of energetic activity, Calvin Coolidge slept 11 hours a day (Barber, 1985).
Inactive leadership should not be confused with empowering, delegation, management by exception, or granting autonomy to subordinates. Unlike a laissez-faire leader, an empowering leader sets boundaries within which subordinates are given discretion to act as they think best. The empowering leader follows up with resources, support, and caring. Delegation implies a leader’s active direction of a subordinate to take responsibility for some role or task. The active delegative leader remains concerned and will follow up to see if the role has been enacted or the task has been successfully completed. The leader who practices active management by exception al-lows the subordinate to continue on paths that the subordinate and the leader have agreed on—until problems arise or standards are not met, at which time the leader intervenes to make corrections. In passive management by exception, the leader intervenes only if agreements are not kept or subordinates’ performance falls below standards. This is less active leadership but still not laissez-faire.5 More active leaders monitor their subordinates’ performance, searching for discrepancies relative to accepted standards; more passive leaders wait for the discrepancies to be called to their attention (Hater & Bass, 1988). When autonomy is granted by a leader, subordinates are free to make many of the decisions affecting themselves and their assignments, but they work within constraints set by the leader, the organization, and the environment.
The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ 5X; Bass & Avolio, 1997)—one of several such instruments—contains a 10-item scale that directly assesses laissez-faire leadership. Examples of items on the laissez-faire scale include “Only tells me what I have to know to do my job”; “Avoids making decisions”; and “If we don’t bother him/her, he/she doesn’t bother us.” Respondents indicate from 0 5 “never” to 4 5 “frequently, if not always” how often the focal leader displays each behavioral item. The scale total correlates .88 with a higher-order factor of passive leadership and 2.11 with a higher-order factor of active leadership. A factor analysis of the 10 MLQ items disclosed that two factors rather than one factor were needed to account for the 10 items. Six of the items were laissez-faire, as expected, such as “Absent when needed.” But the emergent second factor of three items dealt with empowering, e.g, “Avoids telling me how to perform my job.” In a follow-up Italian sample of 1,053 MLQ managers rating their immediate superiors, the second empowering factor could again be extracted (Bass, 1998).
As expected, laissez-faire scores correlated negatively with various measures of transformational leadership. For 1,006 respondents’ descriptions of their leaders on scales of transformational leadership, correlations were as follows: charisma, 2.56; individualized consideration, 2.55; intellectual stimulation, 2.47; and inspirational leadership, 2.49. Correlations are similarly negative with contingent reward and with active (but not passive) management by exception. Van Loan (1994) obtained similar findings from 585 MLQ ratings by the subordinates of 83 supervisors, managers, and executives in a large public telecommunications utility.
Personal Predispositions. The tendency to be an inactive, absent, or avoidant leader was predictable from several personality traits. Makiney, Marchioro, and Hall (1999) found for 69 undergraduates in 20 groups that MLQ laissez-faire scores were negatively correlated with “Big Five” agreeableness (2.25) and extroversion (2.31) as well as with self-schemata of dedication (2.31) and social influence (2.24). McCroskey (1977) conceived the notion of communication apprehension (CA) as a personality trait of fear and anxiety to describe stage fright, shyness, and reticence. CA inhibited verbal communication with others even when such communication was needed in responsible positions of authority. Verbal output was low (McCroskey & Richmond, 1979). A 20-item instrument was provided to assess CA by Scott, McCroskey, and Sheehan (1978). It was expected that some laissez-faire leaders would suffer from CA. In the same vein, Hogan and Hogan (2002) postulated an avoidant personality who fears failure and being criticized. The avoidant personality is cautious, detached, introverted, indecisive, conforming, and irrational. I would expect that an avoidant personality in a leadership role would be an inactive leader.
Situational Circumstances. A previously highly active manager can become inactive, avoiding taking any new initiatives, after learning that he or she is going to be transferred to another division or relocated in another country. Such leadership inactivity can be endemic in an organization with rigid boundaries between departments and individuals. Interdepartmental communications may be limited to infrequent e-mail and memos. Contacts may remain superficial and unimportant (Heuerman, 1999). Among 6,359 Roman Catholic priests, sisters, and brothers who responded to an MLQ survey, those in contemplative orders rated themselves highest (2.42) in laissez-faire leadership. Next highest (2.21) were those in mendicant orders. Lowest (2.08) were those in apostolic orders (Nygren & Ukeritus, 1993). Conversely, less inactivity would be expected among American managers compared with nationals from many other countries, because of the American cultural bias for action (Peters & Waterman, 1982). Van Loan (1994) found significant negative correlations in a public telecommunications utility company between MLQ (5X) laissez-faire scores of 83 executives, middle managers, and supervisors and organizational culture. The cultural variables had to do with humanism, achievement, affiliation, and self-actualizing. They were measured by Cooke and Lafferty’s Organizational Culture Inventory. Passive management by exception and laissez-faire leadership correlated positively with more dismissals of employees.
Research Beginnings. Democratic and autocratic leadership6 were compared with the laissez-faire leadership of adults who were instructed how to lead boys’ clubs (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939; Lippitt, 1940a). Laissez-faire leaders gave group members complete freedom of action, provided them with materials, refrained from participating except to answer questions when asked, and did not make evaluative remarks. This behavior was in contrast to that of autocratic leaders, who displayed a much greater frequency of order giving, disrupting commands, praise and approval, and nonconstructive criticism. It also contrasted with the behavior of democratic leaders, who gave suggestions and stimulated the boys to guide each other. The groups were less well organized, less efficient, and less satisfying to the boys under laissez-faire conditions than under democratic conditions. The work was of poorer quality, less work was done, and there was more play, frustration, disorganization, discouragement, and aggression under laissez-faire leadership than under democratic leadership. When groups of boys were required to carry out various projects under highly laissez-faire leadership, they felt a lack of organization to get things done and did not know where they stood. When an autocratic leader was followed by a laissez-faire leader, the group exhibited an initial outburst of aggressive, uncontrolled behavior. This form of behavior subsided during the second and third meetings. Similar outbursts were not observed after the transition from laissez-faire to other forms of leadership. Although it did not stimulate as much aggression as the autocratic condition did, laissez-faire leadership was disliked because it was accompanied by less sense of accomplishment, less clarity about what to do, and less sense of group unity. The investigators (Lippitt & White, 1943; White & Lippitt, 1960) concluded that laissez-faire leadership resulted in less concentration on work and a poorer quality of work than did democratic and autocratic leadership. There was less general satisfaction with laissez-faire leadership than with the democratic style, but somewhat more satisfaction with laissez-faire than with the autocratic style that was employed in this study. Subsequent research suggested that the satisfaction of followers will be lower under laissez-faire leadership than under autocratic leadership if the latter is nonpunitive, is appropriate for the followers’ levels of competence, or is in keeping with the requirements of the situation.
Effects on Productivity, Satisfaction, and Effectiveness. Laissez-faire leadership has been consistently found to be the least satisfying and least effective management style. The original observations of Lewin, Lippitt, and White have been supported in a variety of survey and experimental investigations of the impact of laissez-faire leadership on subordinates’ productivity and attitudes. Pelz (1956) reported that the laissez-faire pattern of leadership was negatively related to productivity in a research organization. In a study of railroad-section groups, Katz, Maccoby, Gurin, and Floor (1951) found that the work groups were unproductive if their super visors avoided exercising the leadership role and re linquished it to members of the work group. These supervisors also did not differentiate their role from the role of worker. Like their subordinates, they engaged in production work rather than spend their time in supervisory functions. Berrien (1961) studied groups that differed in their adaptation to changes in work. Poorly adapted groups felt little pressure from their leaders and appeared to attribute their poor performance to lax discipline.
In an experiment by Murnighan and Leung (1976), undergraduate participants who were led by uninvolved leaders were less productive, in terms of the quality and quantity of the problems they solved, and less satisfied in comparison with participants who were led by involved leaders. Argyris (1954) conducted a case study in a bank in which the management recruited supervisors who were interested in security and predictability, disliked hostility and aggression, and wanted to be left alone. The bank’s recruitment policy fostered in employees a norm of low work standards and unexpressed dissatisfaction.
Watson (1993) collected 47 evaluations of 10 radio stations and the MLQ laissez-faire scores of the station managers. The mean laissez-faire scores of the managers was 2.45 at the five poorer stations but 1.88 at the five better stations. The expected negative correlations of laissez-faire leadership with the effectiveness of outcomes and subordinates’ satisfaction with the leadership generalized across different kinds of leaders, across different kinds of situations, and for outcomes with both soft and hard data. Thus correlations ranging from 2.29 to 2.60 were reported by their subordinates for 49 division heads, 58 production managers, 75 project leaders, 28 religious ministers, 9 vice presidents, 38 midlevel managers, 186 junior naval officers, and 318 senior naval officers between the laissez-faire leadership of their leaders and the leaders’ contribution to the effectiveness of their organizations (Bass & Avolio, 1989). Comparable negative correlations were found between laissez-faire leadership and superiors’ appraisals of the performance and promotability of business managers (Hater & Bass, 1988) and naval officers (Yammarino & Bass, 1990), and with financial outcomes of simulated businesses (Avolio, Waldman, & Einstein, 1988). In the same way, Arvonnen (1995) established for Swedish workers in two plants that job satisfaction and sense of well-being were lower if their supervisors were rated by the workers as laissez-faire leaders. In the same way, Antonakis (2000) obtained the comparable negative correlations of the MLQ laissez-faire scores of 19 faculty members in 36 classrooms from ratings of 584 students at an international center in Switzerland, as follows: course evaluation, 2.22 faculty member’s skills, 2.30, and faculty member’s patience and accessibility, 2.31.
Military Example. The negative effects of laissez-faire leadership are most pronounced in military commands. The Crimean War has been regarded as the most ill-managed in British history. The commander in chief, Lord Raglan, had no previous experience of command. Five of the seven members of his staff, known as the “nest of noodles,” were his blood relatives. Raglan’s incompetence was matched his by inactivity as a leader. His staff avoided troubling him with details and made light of possible difficulties. He was aloof and an extreme introvert who avoided direct contact with his men. (He must have had a bad case of oral communication apprehension.) “He could hardly bear to issue an order” (Dixon, 1976, p. 39). His one order before the successful battle of Alma was of little consequence, and the disaster of the charge of the Light Brigade into the Russian cannon batteries at Balaklava was partly due to his ambiguous order. He permitted his commander of cavalry, Lord Cardigan, to live separated from his troops every night on a private yacht and take up valuable Balaklava harbor space. Raglan was so confident that Sebastopol would be captured before the winter of 1854 that he made no plans to house and maintain his troops on high ground above the city. There was no issue of fuel or stores, and 35% of his army strength was lost over the winter due to exposure, malnutrition, and cholera. Raglan took no steps to ease the hardship of his troops, which he could have done if he had been concerned about their welfare and morale. After the first defeat in 1855 in the effort to scale the walls of the fortress at Redan, “Raglan’s army had no illusions as to the incompetence of their general and his staff. … The plans … turned out to be so execrably bad that failure was inevitable. Others described the battle as mismanaged, botched, bungled and a disgracefully childish failure” (Dixon, 1976, pp. 48–49).
Other Effects. Before self-management (with shared leadership) was conceived in the 1970s, Arensberg and McGregor (1942) wrote a case study of an engineering department without supervisors. A management committee approved the department’s plans and checked its progress. The management considered this arrangement to be ideal for creative work. The employees, however, felt insecure and constrained in this overly permissive environment. Farris (1972) demonstrated that the less-innovative of 21 scientific groups at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had less peer and managerial leadership. In addition, the leadership of these less-innovative groups was less task or relations oriented and less consultative or participative. Baumgartel (1957) studied directive, laissez-faire, and participative patterns of leadership behavior. Group members under laissez-faire leadership reported more isolation from the leader and less participation in decision making than those under directive leadership. These results suggested that laissez-faire leadership lessened the cohesiveness of the group members. Makiney, Marchioro, and Hall (1999) noted that in 20 student task groups, less task-facilitation was reported if the leadership was rated laissez-faire. Without “leadership engagement”—that is, if the leader’s involvement was limited and the leader lacked commitment—Jaffe and Scott (1998) felt that re-engineering programs were doomed to failure.
Kidd and Christy (1961) studied three patterns of behavior: laissez-faire, active monitoring, and participative leadership. They found that although the speed of processing work was greatest under laissez-faire leadership, there was much less avoidance of errors, particularly in comparison with active-monitoring leadership. Aspegren (1963) compared laissez-faire, directive, and participative patterns of leadership and found that laissez-faire leadership was associated with lower task motivation and lower satisfaction with superiors. Similarly, W. S. MacDonald’s (1967a, 1967b) study of three styles of leadership (laissez-faire, dominant, and democratic) in the Job Corps found that laissez-faire leadership was associated with the highest rates of truancy and delinquency and with the slowest modifications in performance. Wehman, Goldstein, and Williams (1977) reported results from an experiment in which four leadership styles were varied to study their effects on 80 undergraduates’ individual risk-taking behavior in group settings and the shift in risk-taking behavior when the responsibility for making decisions moved from the individuals to groups. They found that the shift in such behavior was more likely to occur in “laissez-faire-led” groups and “no-designated-leader” groups than in groups led by a democratic or autocratic leader.
Boss (1978) studied seven top-level administrative staffs from selected public agencies who engaged in a confrontation team-building program for six days. The only group that showed growth, according to subjective pre-post measures, was the group in which the chief executive officer (CEO) was present. The other six groups, in which no CEO was present, either retrogressed or did not change. This finding was consistent with the failures reported in organizational development efforts elsewhere, which were attributable to the lack of support from the CEO (Boss & McConkie, 1976) or the inability of the CEO to understand the objectives and processes of organizational development (Derr, 1972). This was consistent with 360 degree findings by Tsui, Ashford, St. Clair, et al. (1995) that ineffectiveness resulted when 410 managers failed to exert extra effort, failed to explain decisions, and avoided responsibilities.
Misumi (1985) provided a great deal of indirect evidence that a leader’s lack of active concern for subordinates’ performance and for the maintenance of relations (combined pm leadership) was consistently worse for organizational outcomes than active PM leadership (that is,(P) (P)erformance-oriented or (M) (M)aintenance-oriented leadership, where p and m signify below median rating and P and M signify above median rating). For example, Misumi reported that the annual accident rate per 100 of Nishitetsu bus drivers for a three year period was 79.1 if the bus drivers were supervised by pm dispatchers; it was 44 to 52 per 100 if the dispatchers were P, M, or PM. Similarly, Misumi found that the job satisfaction of 2,257 employees in 186 Mitsubishi work groups was above average in 28% of the pm-led groups but above average in 37 to 73 percent of the P-, M-, or PM-led groups. A similar pattern emerged for the employees’ satisfaction with the company.
Furthermore, the adequacy of communication was 14.7 under pm leadership and 16.0 to 17.5 under P, M, and PM leadership, respectively. The rated performance was high in only three of 92 squads in a bearing manufacturing firm led by pm supervision, but it was high in 10, 11, and 16 of P, M, and PM squads. Similar results with regard to productivity were obtained in surveys in other industrial companies (coal mining, shipbuilding, tire manufacturing, and automobile manufacturing). These surveys also found that regardless of the industry, pm leadership ranked last in relation to the productivity of groups, in comparison with P, M, and PM leadership. Only 6% of 883 pm engineering project managers were found to be successful, in contrast to 25, 16, and 52 percent of P, M, and PM project managers, respectively. Among 967 governmental employees, the measures of morale were uniformly lowest under the pm leadership of section chiefs than under the P, M, and PM leader-ship of such chiefs. The same pattern held for the leadership of Japanese schoolteachers, according to their pupils, and for children’s reports about the consequences of their parents’ pm, in contrast to P, M, and PM leadership for the children’s understanding, compliance, pride, intimacy, and respect. Misumi (1985, pp. 251–259) also reported the results of a Japanese experiment in which for groups that were high in motivation to achieve, the highest productivity occurred with PM supervisors. When the motivation to achieve was low, P-type leadership alone generated the most productivity. But regardless of the group’s motivation to achieve, productivity was lowest with PM supervisors.
Subordinates favor autonomy. Laissez-faire leadership provides autonomy. Laissez-faire leadership is dissatisfying to subordinates. Is this a contradiction? Freedom is a mixed blessing. If it means anarchy—an absence of control of oneself or others; an absence of needed organizational sanctions; the concentration of organizational control at the bottom so that individual goals take precedence over organizational goals; and an unregulated, leaderless, competitive marketplace for resources within the organization in which all the members are trying to maximize their own self-interests—it is likely to generate organizational ineffectiveness (Miner, 1973; Price, 1968; Tannenbaum, 1968).
If freedom implies the lack of systematic processes in problem solving, it will also result in ineffectiveness of outcomes. Thus when Maier and Maier (1957) experimented with discussions under free and more systematic styles of leadership, they found that free discussion produced decisions of lower quality than systematic, controlled, step-by-step discussion. They also noted that freer approaches to problem solving were less effective and less satisfying and yielded less commitment from participants than did systematic problem solving. Thus, when Maier and Solem (1962) compared 50 free-discussion groups with 96 groups of four participants each who used problem solving in systematic steps, the quality of the solutions was likely to be lower in the free-discussion groups than in the systematic groups. Only 12% of the free-discussion groups created integrated solutions that met the criteria of success, whereas almost half the systematic groups did. Maier and Thurber (1969) reported similar results.
Nonetheless, evidence can be mustered to support the contention that employees who feel a great deal of freedom to do their work as they like tend to be more satisfied and productive. When Morse and Reimer (1956) arranged for the authority of operative employees in two departments to be increased to strengthen the employees’ autonomy, they found that both satisfaction and productivity increased. O’Connell (1968) changed the responsibilities and behavioral patterns of first-level supervisors in an insurance company. Even though the supervisors became bogged down in paperwork to a greater extent than was expected, sales improved and insurance lapse rates declined to some degree. Meltzer (1956) reported that scientists are most productive when they have freedom to control their research. Pelz and Andrews (1966a, 1966b) studied scientists and engineers in several laboratories. They found that the most effective scientists were self-directed and valued freedom, but that these scientists still welcomed coordination and guidance from other members of the organization. Similar results were reported by Weschler, Kahane, and Tannenbaum (1952) and by Tannenbaum, Weschler, and Massarik (1961) for two divisions of a research laboratory. Indik (1965b) studied 96 organizations of three types and found that workers’ freedom to set their own pace of work was associated with productivity and satisfaction with their jobs. Trow (1957) reported that experimental groups with high degrees of autonomy provided greater satisfaction to members than groups in which members were dependent on a centralized structure. March (1955) analyzed patterns of interpersonal control in 15 primitive communities and found that productivity was related to the degree of the groups’ autonomy. In A. K. Rice’s (1953) study of a weaving shed in India, a type of reorganization that gave workers greater autonomy resulted in increased efficiency and decreased damage.
Effective Autonomy. Laissez-faire leadership does not imply effective autonomy for subordinates. Laissez-faire leadership is detrimental to the performance of subordinates, yet the autonomy of subordinates enhances the subordinates’ performance. The reconciliation comes in considering what subordinates need to do their job well. If the subordinates are skilled, professional, or self-starting salespeople, they may need consultation, participation, or delegation, with the directive boundary conditions specified by the leader, the organization, or even the task itself. Within these boundaries, the leader should permit the already competent and motivated subordinates to complete their work in the manner they think best. This kind of leadership, paradoxically, requires that the leader exercise authority to permit such freedom of action (Bass, 1960). Active follow-up by the leader is also important because it provides evidence that the subordinates’ performance is as expected and shows the subordinates that the leader cares about what they are doing. This type of leadership is not related in any way to laissez-faire leadership, in which the leader does nothing unless asked by colleagues and even then may procrastinate or fail to respond. The laissez-faire leader is inactive, rather than reactive or proactive. He or she does not provide clear boundary conditions; may work alongside subordinates; may withdraw into paperwork; and avoids, rather than shares, decision making. Under this type of leadership, subordinates do not feel free to carry out their jobs as they see fit; instead, they feel uncertain about their own authority, responsibilities, and duties. Results reported by Farris (1972) support this distinction between working under laissez-faire leadership and being provided with freedom. In a study of 21 research teams, Farris found that the provision of freedom to subordinates was highly related to innovation when the leaders preceded their decision making consult with their subordinates. But when supervisors made little use of consultation beforehand, their provision of freedom was uncorrelated with innovation by their subordinates.
Further indirect support comes from a review of lead-erless groups by Desmond and Seligman (1977). In the 28 studies that were reviewed, groups with more intelligent participants obtained positive results and were likely to be more highly structured by specially prepared audio-tapes, preprinted instruction, and instrumented feedback of group opinion, which substituted for the missing leaders. That is, the freedom of the leaderless group could result in productivity if the participants had the competence and information to deal with the situation and obtained the necessary instructions to clarify the boundary conditions within which they could carry on.
What About Delegation, Management by Exception, and Participation? The contrary consequences on the effectiveness of subordinates of the subordinates’ freedom and autonomy on the one hand and the ineffectiveness of laissez-faire leadership on the other hand reside to some extent in the confusion of laissez-faire leadership with the practice of delegation, management by exception, and participative leadership. Although delegation and active management by exception are not as satisfying or effective as more active leadership, they nevertheless may contribute to the effectiveness of subordinates in some kinds of organizations, such as the military. This is unlike passive management by exception, which is more like laissez-faire leadership in its effects, and forms a factor of passive leadership with the latter (Bass & Avolio, 1997).
The inactive laissez-faire leader, unlike a leader who delegates, does not delineate the problem that needs to be solved or the requirements that must be met. The inactive laissez-faire leader, unlike a leader who practices management by exception, does not search for deviations from standards or intervene when deviations are found. The inactive laissez-faire leader, unlike a participative leader, does not engage in extended discussions with subordinates to achieve a consensual decision.
The inactivity of laissez-faire leaders—their inability or reluctance to accept responsibility, give directions, and provide support—has been consistently negatively related to productivity, satisfaction, and cohesiveness. Sheer energization, drive, motivation to succeed, and activity are likely to be correlated with successful leadership and influence.
This chapter began by looking at how some personality traits, such as energy level and assertiveness, contribute to one’s attempts to lead, participate, interact, and emerge as a leader. In turn, the emergence of a leader is sustained by its positive consequences. Members of a group who possess information that enables them to contribute more than other members to the solution of the group’s task tend to emerge as leaders. However, a would-be leader who is overloaded with information may become handicapped.
Observational studies have identified several patterns of leader behavior that were not anticipated by the trait theorists. Emergent leaders in experimental and in natural groups tend to be valued because their spontaneity is contagious and they stimulate spontaneity in others. They widen the field of participation for others and expand the area of the group’s freedom to make decisions and to act. They protect the weak and underchosen, encourage participation by less capable members, are tolerant of those who deviate, and accept a wide range of personalities of members.
Leaders and managers need to empower themselves to shape their work environment. The simple fact that active, energetic, assertive people are more likely than the “silent majority” to influence the course of events around them makes it difficult to accept the notion that leadership is a phantom of our imagination. The data are compelling. Leaders and managers need to be active, not passive. But merely being active is only a small part of the total explanation of who emerges and succeeds as a leader. Managers’ successful advancement depends on the motivation to manage, but it needs to be assessed differently in hierarchical and professional organizations. Theory and evidence were presented that contained the seeds of two propositions: (1) to emerge as a leader, one must be active in attempting to lead, and (2) to succeed and remain acceptable to others as a leader, the leader must exhibit competence. This chapter concentrated on the first proposition and indicated how it needs to be qualified.
Uniformly, laissez-faire leaders are downgraded by their subordinates. Productivity, cohesiveness, and satisfaction suffer under such leadership. But laissez-faire leadership should not be confused with delegation, empowerment, or granting autonomy to subordinates. Effective autonomy can enhance subordinates’ performance. Freedom of action is usually conducive to innovation by subordinates. In contrast to laissez-faire leadership, active and responsible assertiveness among subordinates may be required. Whether leaders are active or passive may depend on the issues and circumstances, not just their own personal predilections. For example, a sharp increase in laissez-faire leadership may occur when leaders are notified that their positions are being eliminated or that they are to be transferred in the near future. These situational issues, as they affect leadership and management, will be addressed in Chapters 26 through 30. The antecedents and consequences of authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, and power orientation in the personality of the emergent leader will be considered next, in Chapter 7.