Key Behaviors in Effective Leadership
Behavioral Approaches
The inability to define effective leadership based solely on traits led to an interest in looking
at the behavior of leaders and how it might contribute to leadership success or failure. Two
basic leadership behaviors identified as important for leadership are attention to tasks and
attention to people.
Task Versus People
Two types of behavior that have been identified as applicable to effective leadership in
a variety of situations and time periods are task-oriented behavior and people-oriented
behavior.39 Although they are not the only important leadership behaviors, concern
for tasks and concern for people must be shown at some reasonable level. Thus, many
approaches to understanding leadership use these metacategories, or broadly defined
behavior categories, as a basis for study and comparison.
Important early research programs on leadership were conducted at The
Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.40 Ohio State researchers
identified two major behaviors they called consideration and initiating structure.
Consideration falls in the category of people-oriented behavior and is the extent
to which the leader is mindful of subordinates, respects their ideas and feelings,
and establishes mutual trust. Initiating structure is the degree of task behavior;
that is, the extent to which the leader is task-oriented and directs subordinate
work activities toward goal attainment. Studies suggest that effective leaders may
be high on consideration and low on initiating structure or low on consideration
and high on initiating structure, depending on the situation.41
Research at the University of Michigan at about the same time also considered taskand
people-oriented behaviors by comparing the behavior of effective and ineffectivesupervisors.42 The most effective supervisors
were those who established high performance
goals and displayed supportive
behavior toward subordinates. These were
referred to as employee-centered leaders. The
less effective leaders were called job-centered
leaders; they tended to be less concerned
with goal achievement and human needs in
favor of meeting schedules, keeping costs
low, and achieving production efficiency.
The Leadership Grid
Building on the work of the Ohio
State and Michigan studies, Robert
R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton of the
University of Texas proposed a twodimensional
theory called the Managerial
Grid®, which was later restated
by Robert R. Blake and Anne Adams
McCanse as the Leadership Grid®.43
The model and five of its major management
styles are depicted in Exhibit 15.6.
Each axis on the grid is a nine-point
scale, with 1 meaning low concern and
9 meaning high concern.Team management (9, 9) often is considered the most effective style and is recommended
for leaders because organization members work together to accomplish tasks. Country club
management (1, 9) occurs when the primary emphasis is given to people rather than to work
outputs. Authority-compliance management (9, 1) occurs when efficiency in operations is the
dominant orientation. Middle-of-the-road management (5, 5) reflects a moderate amount of
concern for both people and production. Impoverished management (1, 1) means the absence
of a management philosophy; managers exert little effort toward interpersonal relationships
or work accomplishment
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